Authors: Deon Meyer
I could see them.
They were sitting on my veranda, two of them. One had been driving the jeep at the hospital, the other was the man behind the Galil, the big blond one who had shot Emma.
Blondie sat on a kitchen chair, legs stretched out and his heels propped on the veranda wall. He wore the same baseball cap on his head. Jeep man was just sitting. They were talking, but I was too far away to hear what they were saying.
They were waiting for me. There would be others too. One or two watching the road, surely.
Would that be all of them?
Jacobus continued crawling in the direction of the scream, until he could see them and smell the odour of Pego’s burning flesh. Four men had tied Pego to a tree. One pressed a red glowing object against his chest and said, ‘Talk to me,
kaffertjie.’
Pego screamed again and then said, ‘It’s the truth,
baas
, it’s the truth.’
The man turned around. He was in civilian clothes, broad and strong with a bushy moustache and hair just covering his ears and collar. He said to the others, ‘I believe him and that means we’ve got big
kak.’
‘Ask him what his name is,’ the other one said, older, leaner, with a slight pot belly and gold-rimmed spectacles.
‘You heard the boss. What’s his name?’ The man with the moustache brought the glowing iron closer.
‘Jacobus.’
‘Jacobus?’
‘Jacobus le Roux.’
The strong man turned to the older one and said, ‘I’ll have to find out. I think they work out of the recce base. We must stay sharp, he might be out there in the dark somewhere.’
‘I swear it was him on the radio just now,’ another man said.
The older man held up a hand. ‘Listen, it’s manageable. Let’s make sure first, then we’ll take it from there.’
They walked away, back to the fire, and left Pego hanging against the tree, alone.
In mid-afternoon, I lay four metres from the babbling stream, among verdant green ferns, knowing that I would have to wait until it was dark. At least it gave me time to work out a plan, observe them and find out how many there were.
I had the upper hand. They couldn’t surprise me now. They would have to sit and wait, hide and worry whether I would come, from which direction and when?
I turned carefully and retreated a few metres. I wanted to make myself comfortable. Rest and relax.
That’s when I spotted the skull. It lay between two big round river rocks. It was overgrown with moss, stained brown and weathered. The jawbone was missing. I picked it up and turned it over. The eye sockets stared back at me like an omen.
Jacobus crept up from behind and first whispered in Pego’s ear to be quiet before cutting him loose and catching him before he dropped to the ground. Then he dragged his friend into the shadows and pressed his lips to Pego’s ear and said, ‘Can you crawl? They’ve got alarms; that’s how they caught you. We’ll have to crawl. Can you do it?’
‘Yes.’
With his hand he showed Pego the way to go and whispered, ‘You go first, I’ll look out behind.’ They struggled along like that, Pego needing frequent rests, because the bullet had broken his right leg and he was tired and weak. Eventually, they reached the river and he got Pego up and supported him on his shoulder. They half ran like that, limping, and suddenly there were shots fired and
flares cleaved the sky. They stumbled into the river and lay down in the shallow water under the protection of the bank.
Time is forgotten when you are afraid. They lay quietly and after a while they heard footsteps and voices, people who were not at home in the veld and who made too much noise. Then it was quiet again.
Jacobus gave Pego water from his canteen and said they had to get going again, to the Nwaswitsontso canyon near the border. They would be safe there; there was a place to hide and only one easy access below the upper dam.
Pego nodded. ‘My leg.
Go etsela.
It’s asleep.’
‘I’ll carry you.’
He did, the last kilometre and a bit. They followed the Nwaswitsontso, but near the dams he veered away with Pego on his shoulder to avoid the crocodiles.
I fell asleep in the deep hollow between rocks. I woke with a start when the sun was behind the mountain and a small neon-green frog sat centimetres from my nose, staring at me with cold, red eyes.
They found a hiding place in the Nwaswitsontso gorge where ancient waters had carved out an overhang just big enough for the two of them.
‘What are we going to do?’ Pego asked.
‘I don’t know.’
He inspected Pego’s wound. It looked ugly, but had stopped bleeding. He asked his friend what the men had asked him and Pego said, ‘They thought I was a terrorist. They didn’t want to believe I was ESU. They said they would have to kill us both, Jacobus, I heard them.’
Pego was quiet for a long time and then he said, ‘Why would the boere do that?’ but Jacobus didn’t know how to answer him.
They lay there and Pego slept like a sick man; his breathing was quick and his body jerked involuntarily. The maPulane groaned in his fever, and muttered strange words. Jacobus lay awake thinking
until he couldn’t think any more. What were those people doing here?
In the early hours he heard someone. There were footsteps barely six metres above them on the edge of the gorge. He held his hand over Pego’s mouth and saw his friend’s eyes open and slowly register the action overhead. His head nodded slowly. He understood.
A voice spoke in Afrikaans above them. ‘Shit! I nearly didn’t see the fucking cliff here.’
‘It’s not a fucking cliff.’
‘What do you call it? Look. It’s fifty foot, easy.’
‘How the fuck can you tell? It’s pitch dark, man.’
‘Well, you tell me how far down that is.’
‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll have to go around.’
‘Fuck that. They could never get down here. Look, do you see any way down?’
‘We’ll have to find a spot. We can’t keep walking for ever. They’re doing the radio call at four o’clock. We have to be ready with that thing.’
‘OK. That way. If they came past here, they would have gone that way.’
‘I don’t think they can be this far. They say the kaffir’s leg is shot to hell’
‘Why did they have to come and fuck around here tonight?’
‘I haven’t even eaten yet.’
‘Me neither. The civvies did. Fucking impala steaks.’
One of them kicked a stone into the canyon.
‘Hear that. It’s deep.’
Silence.
‘Would you be able to shoot the white one?’
The other one didn’t answer immediately. Boots shifted. ‘In the dark it won’t matter. You won’t be able to see which is which. What the fuck, first I want to see how they get a guy’s position just because he’s talking on the radio. Come on, let’s get this mast up.’
They walked away.
* * *
I sat watching the house as it grew dark, but there was no one on the veranda now. The big blond man came out and walked towards the river, not straight towards me, but at an angle. He was carrying the Galil.
He was heading for a tongue of trees. He could cover the whole yard on this side of the house from there. Clever spot. As long as no one saw you.
Make yourself at home, big fellow. Dig yourself in. Lemmer of Loxton sees you. And Lemmer of Brandvlei Maximum Security learned in prison how to wait.
See you later.
At four in the morning they called over the radio.
He heard it quietly on his hip. He picked up the radio and pressed it against his ear. ‘Jacobus le Roux, Jacobus le Roux, come in.’
It was the same unknown voice.
Knowing what their game was, he did nothing.
‘Jacobus le Roux, Jacobus le Roux, come in.’
Over and over, incessantly, every few minutes the same patient words.
Then: ‘I know you can hear me, Jacobus. We’re very sorry about Vincent. We didn’t know you worked for ESU.’ The voice was sympathetic and friendly. ‘We know he needs medical attention. Bring him in, we can help. Are you there, Papa Juliet, come in.’
For the next half hour that was their approach, soothing promises, but Jacobus was not listening any more. He thought about what he had to do in an hour or two when the sun came up. He must find help for Pego. They must get away, or they were dead men.
What could he do? They were about seven kilometres from the H10, the tar road that the tourists used, but he would have to make a big detour to get away from these people. It wasn’t going to work.
They could lay low, because tomorrow they would have to be back at base and the ESU would start looking for them. But with Pego’s leg, he wouldn’t be able to wait that long.
The voice over the radio went quiet for five minutes. When it came back it was different, hard and angry. ‘Listen carefully to me. Forty-Seven Dale Brooke Crescent, does that sound familiar? Forty-Seven Dale Brooke Crescent in Linden, Johannesburg.’
His parents’ address.
‘You have ten minutes to reply. Or I will send people. People who don’t give a shit. People who will slit a woman’s throat for fucking fun. Ten minutes. Then I’m phoning.’
Jacobus le Roux used the ten minutes to make up his mind. He left the radio under the overhang, woke Pego and they climbed down the canyon in the pitch dark before dawn with great difficulty.
Then they stumbled east beside the Nwaswitsontso, over four kilometres to the Mozambique border.
He had no other choice. If he answered them, they would shoot him and Pego. But he didn’t take the threat to his family seriously. His father was Somebody, his father knew Ministers, his father was a Supplier, and therefore an essential Cog in the Great Machine.
All they could do was disappear. Until these people had gone, until this affair was over.
They didn’t reach the border before the sun came up.
They heard helicopters just after the sky began to change colour. The far-off rhythm of their rotors was ever closer and louder. Jacobus found shelter and through the mopane leaves he watched two planes flying back and forth in a grid pattern on their side of the Ka-Nwamuri koppie. White planes, like yesterday’s Cessna, without letters or marks.
The helicopters searched for over an hour and then disappeared to the south.
Now Jacobus and Pego had to get past the Shishengedzim lookout post, and in broad daylight. The border post had a view over the canyon, but it had to be done. Pego was feverish and weak. And Jacobus was dead tired from supporting him.
He staggered the four hundred metres past the rangers’ lookout post and waited for the shots. He could feel them, even though none was fired. Two or three times he looked up at the building, but there was no sign of life, nobody there, no game wardens, just
the people back at Ka-Nwamuri with their cables on the slope and their electronic eyes in the veld.
He cut the border fence and they were through to Mozambique. All down the river, there was no sign of life, no animals, no people, just the searing heat and his fatigue. Six hours later, they saw women washing laundry in the river.
Pego could speak their language. He could tell them, ‘Don’t fear the white man, he saved my life, they are hunting him too, we just want to rest a while.’
They slept that night in the nameless hamlet. The grizzled headman called himself Rico and told them through Pego that his country was burning, Mozambique was aflame, the war was destroying everything. The locals never left their village. Now and then the elephant poachers would pass through and leave them something, money or food or clothing, in exchange for a place to rest. But look, there were no young men; they had all gone away to war, just to stay alive.
On Sunday, 19 October, Jacobus and Pego heard a dreadful noise, the night sky ripped apart from north to south, very close by, thundering and deafening. Jacobus ran out of the hut and saw a flickering red light low on the horizon.
The following day at three o’clock in the afternoon, they got the news.
Samora Machel, President of Mozambique, was dead. His aeroplane had crashed the previous night near Mbuzini, just a hundred and thirty kilometres away.
Jacobus hadn’t immediately put two and two together, because the women had begun wailing and the wrinkled Rico shook his head and said,
‘Uma coisa má, urna coisa má,’
over and over. Then he told Pego that the white man must go; there was big trouble coming. The white man must go.
The Mozambicans gave him clothes and a bundle of food and water and said they would take his rifle in exchange. They explained to him where to go to reach Swaziland, where he would be safe.
Pego threw his arms around his friend and said, ‘Thank you, my brother, I will see you again,’ and so he left, travelling first down the river to the south-east, looking for a dusty road. As he walked he slowly but surely pieced it all together.
The two-hundred-kilometre trek took him nearly a week. He walked only at night, hiding every time there were people or vehicles or aeroplanes around.
He crossed the mountain into Swaziland eight kilometres east of the Lomahasha border post. At the little Catholic church at Ngwenya Peak he washed and ate properly for the first time. The priests gave him a bed and he slept for two days. They gave him clothes because the ones he was wearing were in rags. They told him he wasn’t the first white South African to arrive there. They had had two others, conscientious objectors who didn’t want to do compulsory military service. There were people in Manzini who could help. He had to wait for the lorry that came on Thursdays. They couldn’t give him much. They gave him SZL 20, twenty lilangeni. Go with God.
In Manzini he saw the newspapers a week after the death of Samora Machel. Fingers were pointed at the South African government. Africa and the Russians were incensed.
He phoned his father’s office from a telephone booth and the switchboard put him through to his father’s secretary, who caught her breath when he said, ‘Hello, Alta,’ and she said, ‘Jacobus?’
Then the line went dead.
He tried to phone again, but it wouldn’t ring. He took his coins and walked off, but the phone rang. He stopped. Looked around. There was nobody near by.