Authors: Deon Meyer
Jacobus was lean and muscular and a stranger to the area. Pego Mashego was small, scrawny and tough, and he knew the Lowveld terrain like the back of his hand. The Afrikaner was there because he wanted to be, the man of the maPulana through financial necessity. But they had one thing in common: a deep love of and interest in nature.
Their friendship was not spontaneous; their differences in background, class and personality were too great. But over the six weeks of hardship a bond of mutual respect began to develop. What lay ahead of them would make the bond unbreakable.
The strategy of the ESU was to deploy two-man teams to patrol an area for a week on foot. The areas were determined by timetables and grid references. The white man in each team was the leader and carried the radio. The black man carried the rations and was the tracker. Both were armed with a rifle and they holed up in thickets and rock clefts during the day so they could hunt their prey at night, since ivory poachers were nocturnal predators.
The strategy was simple: find the poachers and radio for support. If you could not do otherwise, however, shoot them before they melted away into the bush. Shoot to kill. Let them know that it was war, because Africa could not afford to lose a
thousand elephants a week. At the rate they were killed in the eighties, the elephant would have been extinct by 2010.
Team Juliet Papa, the call sign for Jacobus and Pego, was deployed in November 1985, initially in the ‘safer’ western parts of Kruger, where they could find their feet. Only in February 1986 were they sent farther east – and experienced the relenüessness of the ivory poacher.
Twenty years on, Jacobus le Roux was still filled with loathing when he described it to me. They came upon three dead elephants for the first time. The cow had been shot because she was too close and dangerous. The half-grown calf had been shot just for fun. The bull’s head was a bloody, unrecognisable mess where the poachers had chopped the tusks out with axes and pangas. Rubbish was strewn around, the fireplace left uncovered. The disrespect was blatant and deliberate. But the offenders were long gone, back across the border to Mozambique.
Three weeks later they were involved in their first skirmish, exchanging fire with a gang of poachers in the night. They followed the blood spoor of one to the border. Scarcely a week later, Jacobus le Roux shot and killed his first man.
They had seen the thieves’ fire burning at night in the dry river bed of the Nkulumbedi river, only a few kilometres from the Langtoon Dam in the north-east of the park. Whispering over the radio, Jacobus tried to call in reinforcements because the group of poachers was twelve or fourteen strong, but as usual the signal was too weak. They crept closer and saw the butchery in the flickering light of the flames. Two giant elephant bulls were plundered while the gang laughed and chatted in muted voices.
They took aim. Jacobus set his sights on a man in a torn red shirt who stood to one side giving orders. That first time, he trembled slightly, although his revulsion at the slaughter was great. His brain was reluctant to send the command to the trigger finger. Only when Pego pressed him softly in the side with an elbow did he close his eyes and fire. He opened his eyes and saw the man drop. There was no dramatic convulsing as they do in movies, just a sinking, a slow, pathetic, lifeless collapse.
Beside him Pego fired shot after shot at the fleeing chaos of men, but Jacobus only lay staring at the red shirt until everything was silent.
I stopped at the Wimpy to eat breakfast and make some calls. The waitress wrinkled her nose at me because I was dirty and smelly and after the night’s work I had a streak of blood down my neck.
Before the food arrived I phoned B. J. Fikter. He said that Dr Eleanor Taljaard was not yet on duty, but as far as he knew there was no change in Emma’s condition.
After I’d eaten, I washed my face in the Wimpy’s spotlessly clean restrooms. I had to clean the grime off the basin with toilet paper before I left.
I looked for a telephone booth and called Jeanette. It was the one call I didn’t want overheard.
‘I was worried about you.’ Because there was an SMS from her on my phone that I hadn’t answered.
‘I was a little busy.’
‘Progress?’
‘A lot. I might finish up today.’
‘Do you need help?’
That was a good question; one I had spent time pondering during the past few hours. ‘Only one thing. I want to exchange the Audi for something else.’
‘Why?’
‘They knew exactly where Emma and I were, without seeing us. I think it might have been electronic. I don’t know how, but I’m sure they bugged the BMW.’
‘When do you want the other car?’
‘As soon as possible. Within the hour?’
‘You’ll have to go to the airport at Nelspruit.’
‘I’m near by.’
‘It’s done. Are you looking for something specific?’
‘A pick-up, if possible.’
‘I’ll see what I can do. Go to Budget Rent-a-Car.’
‘Thanks.’
She was quiet. Then she said, ‘The bullet casing. You have interesting friends.’
‘Oh?’
‘Ever heard of a Galil?’
‘Vaguely.’
‘It’s the Israeli combat rifle, 5.56mm, based on the AK, quite scarce. But the one that shot at you is even more rare. It’s the Galil sniper rifle. Same design, very reliable, quite accurate, but it takes a 7.62 NATO round.’
‘What does it look like?’ The unidentified strangeness of the rifle bothered me.
‘There’s a picture on the Internet. Quite small for a sniper’s weapon. Folding butt. The funny thing is, the tripod is just in front of the trigger guard, but the telescope isn’t above it, it’s to the side.’
The light went on. ‘That’s right. That’s what I saw.’
‘My source says that it’s the first time in his life that he’s heard of an incident with this rifle in South Africa. The question is: what is it doing here?’
‘I have a strong suspicion.’
‘Do you?’
‘It’s a long story. I’ll tell you when I get back.’
‘You sound tired, Lemmer.’
‘I’m just not a morning person.’
‘You’re lying to me.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Don’t get macho with me. I’ll kick your butt.’ Jeanette Louw. Always compassionate.
‘Macho? Me? When I’m so in touch with my female side?’
She didn’t laugh. She sounded concerned when she said, ‘If you want help, ask.’
I didn’t want help. ‘I will. I swear.’
‘That’s a new one,’ she said.
‘Local habit. Jeanette, one more thing. Not urgent. There’s a man by the name of Stef Moller, owner of the Heuningklip private nature reserve. Fifty-plus, very rich, but nobody knows where his money came from. Can you find out?’
‘Stef with an “f” or a “p-h”.’
‘I have no idea.’
She sighed. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Before I drove to the airport, I found a gun shop. There were three in town, but only one was open on 2 January. It stocked an odd combination of camping gear, menswear and weapons.
The hunting knives were on display in a glass cabinet near the till. The little guy behind the counter looked as though he were still at school. Maybe he was. I pointed out the one I wanted.
‘It’s seven hundred rand,’ he said haughtily, as though I wouldn’t be able to afford it.
I merely nodded.
‘How will you pay?’
‘Cash.’
He took out the knife, but waited until I handed over the money before giving it to me.
I drove to the airport.
The young black woman at Budget inspected my driver’s licence twice before giving me the keys and the form. We are such visual beings. She and the Wimpy waitress and the schoolboy saw a man who had sat on the ground waiting, who had spent a long night kicking and fighting, sweating and struggling, who had washed hastily, not brushed his teeth.
Stripped of all false fronts, maybe I looked like the man I really was.
‘You’re taking the insurance?’ the Budget woman asked hopefully.
‘Yes,’ I said.
She gave me a white Nissan double-cab, a three-litre diesel 4×4. More extravagant than I would have liked, but it would do the job and be considerably less noticeable than the Audi.
‘Do you have a map of the area?’
She brought me one. I studied it and saw it would be no help – it showed only the tar roads of the Lowveld.
‘Thank you,’ I said, and took it anyway.
There was a small bookshop in the foyer of the airport. I went in and asked for maps. I bought one of those that are so intricately folded that you can never get them back to their original state. At least it showed the fine network of gravel roads with an invitation to Explore the Lowveld.
I went to sit in the Nissan and consider my options. I wanted to get on to Mariepskop without passing the turn-off to my farmhouse, but I saw that it was impossible. There was only one road and it ran past Motlasedi’s gate.
In the first ten months of 1986 Jacobus le Roux became a man. To be passionate about the wonder world of nature, to be inspired and captivated by the million fine gears of God’s Timepiece, to innocently and with fixed determination believe that you could protect it all, these were the things of a child.
In practice, it was an adult world of unpleasant reality: night patrols on foot in an environment where the natural predators were just as dangerous as the predators of the human species; exhausting days of lying up under cover while the mercury climbed to 45 degrees Celsius, sleep evading you, the taste of your own half-cooked food and the tepid brackish liquid in your water bottle lingering in your mouth. After five days in the veld, you and your camp fellow stank of campfire smoke, sweat and excreta. You lived in a lonely, limited, dangerous world far removed from the ease and security of your wealthy suburb.
You killed people. You told yourself it was war and you fought on the side of good, but in the searing heat of noon, as you tossed and turned on your groundsheet, searching for sleep, you saw them fall, you remembered your terrible, stunned numbness when you knelt beside the body after the firefight. You realised that you were not a natural soldier, and that something died inside you with each enemy, although it did get a little easier every time.
When Jacobus was telling his story, I became aware of the difference between us. But there was no time or desire to linger over it. But now, driving down the plantation roads below the escarpment with the air conditioning on, the prosecutor in my head was eager to point an accusatory finger. I had beaten a man to death and my greatest anguish was how I could be capable of that.
Jacobus le Roux, brother of Emma, born of the Afrikaner elite – however humble their background might be – agonised over why he could not do it.
None of this was relevant.
He told me that he was certain that he had shot dead seven people in the reserve in 1986.
In July of that year he got a fourteen-day pass and went home. For the first week he could not sleep on his soft bed and the big plates of food his mother dished up made him nauseous. His father noticed how much quieter he was, but he couldn’t talk about it. His sister detected nothing amiss; she worshipped him, as always.
Physically he was in the city, but his psyche was somewhere else. His mother introduced him to a girl, Petro. She was studying Communications at RAU. She was pretty in a summer dress and he would remember her pink lipstick. She talked of things he knew nothing about. The campus, music and politics. He nodded but he wasn’t listening. ‘What do you do in the game reserve?’ she asked, as if his mother hadn’t already told her everything.
‘We patrol,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do when you’ve finished swotting?’
She talked about her dreams, but he wasn’t really listening, the things in his head distracted him. Like a man in a torn red shirt lying dead and somewhere people waited for him to come home.
His father took a photo of him and Emma in the sitting room of their house in Linden. They were sitting side by side, his sister had her arms around his neck and her head half bent to his chest. The lens caught them perfectly – his face was blank, she laughed in joy. His father had mailed the photo to him and he carried it with him in the little army Bible in his breast pocket. Through all that lay ahead, through all those years, until one day he put it into a photo album and hid it in the ceiling of his Mogale house where he could take it out and look at it from time to time. To remind himself that it was real.
But in those fourteen days the world his family lived in felt unreal. Literally. Like a dream. He felt like a stranger in his family home. He knew why, but there was nothing he could do. Month
and years later he would blame himself for not trying harder, for not bursting the bubble and embracing them.
Because soon, his family would be destroyed.
On the back roads and through the plantations it was easier to spot anyone following. I drove past unfamiliar names on the map, Dunottar, Versailles and Tswafeng, nothing more than a few huts or a farm shop. At the Boelang tribal lands I turned left. The road deteriorated and the plantations were densely forested. There were no signboards at the road forks. I took one wrong turn and couldn’t make the U, the pine trees stood right up to the road. I had to reverse for a kilometre. At eleven I finally arrived. Heat waves rose up from the plain to the right and made the horizon shimmer.
I turned left here, up the mountain to the Mariepskop forestry station. I drove past the entrance to my rented property. The gate was closed. All was quiet. They were there, somewhere in the forest or the house.
There were two officers on duty at the forestry station. They wouldn’t allow me to continue without a permit. There was a radar station on top and I needed permission.
Where could I get permission?
In Polokwane or Pretoria.
I just wanted to walk. Down the mountain.
I needed a permit for that too.
Could I buy one here?
Maybe.
What would it cost?
About three hundred rand, but they had no receipt book.
‘No, it’s four hundred,’ said the other one. ‘Three hundred was last year. It’s the second of January today.’