“I am serious,” JJ insisted. “Your community needs at least a phone between you. I will talk with Baas Bauer and ensure that this is done.”
Karel conceded that it might be a good idea. He had a good eye for trade and he’d seen how cleverly Dawie had used the device to make some money and begun to arrange improvements in their lot. So Karel agreed to identify the next best individual to whom JJ could entrust the valuable asset.
“I only ask for one thing.” The nurse had finished her fussing and gone. Karel looked drained from acting so deathly sick. “That I can lie on the sand again.” Afraid that in his weakened condition, JJ might deny this extreme wish to him, he quickly played out a trump card. “I want to see the sun one more time, because I don’t have much time Baasie. I have already seen my people here at my bed, come to fetch me.”
The way he said it, JJ instantly knew what he meant. He’d already established that the old man had received only a few visitors who’d managed the trek in from the farm. “You have seen people?”
“Ja, coming into the room to look at me,” the old man confirmed.
“Do you recognize them? Are they ancestors?” he asked gently.
“I think so, Baasie. I know you will say they’re not really here, but they do look friendly and I’m not afraid. They want me home.”
“I’m arranging it already, Oom. As soon as our new ambulance is back from the emergency it is at, they’ll get you straight home,” he assured Karel.
Another small interruption and he stepped to the door, admitting to Marsha that the worst was true. “I think he’s slipping faster than I thought, I hope we can beat the clock. His brain’s shutting down; I’ve seen it before.”
“I know, I can hear,” she said, “and it’s heart-breaking. I’ve never met him, yet it feels like losing an old friend.”
“He is an old friend, an old friend in an instant, because he’s a piece of us deep within that we can all recall.”
She wiped at the tears that welled and fell from her eye.
JJ stepped back inside. “The visiting time is almost up, and everything is in place. I must go buy your phone now.”
“That would make me very pleased, Baasie.” Karel wasn’t laughing; it was the first time JJ had seen him so earnest.
JJ went out to ask the doctors to make all haste with preparations, then returned to say that it would all happen within the hour.
They said their goodbyes and as JJ went out the door, he heard the old man say something, so he stepped back inside.
“I am very proud to know you,” Karel told him.
JJ’s throat locked up and his mind shut down; he could only repeat the same sentiment to Karel. “I am proud to have known you too, my old Oom.”
He quickly left before the old man could see him cry.
Before JJ could reach the phone shop, his mobile rang; it was the hospital.
“He is going fast Meneer, and I’m afraid we didn’t manage to let him see he was unplugged from the machines as you’d asked before he slipped...”
By the time they doubled back and hurried into the ward, Oom Karel looked peaceful. The drips and monitors were gone, and serenity had returned to his shell, lying neatly covered by the light sheet he’d earlier kept pushing aside.
The look he wore on his face said he had seen the sun after all and that he had returned with it to the wild bushland of Africa.
Chapter 38
Months had passed since the funeral of the old man and the subsequent fiery debate in the NG church between the warring parties. Broad had flown away, and people had gone back to their small lives in a big place.
Oom Karel had been interred into a simple grave, the way he had wanted to go. Not in a cemetery with a marble headstone and bouquets, but out in the deep bush with living shrubs and wildlife for company.
Even Dominee Gert had evolved. His sermons now trumpeted how God Himself had privately disclosed that this technology, revealing the magnificence of His Creation in their very town, marked them out as his favourite flock in all the world.
And it was then, in the settled dust of a town once more at peace with itself, that the need to lodge a heritage claim had found its belated way into Bennie Pieterson’s cluttered office. In the weeks since it was whispered to him that Oom Karel had this important matter on his mind just before he died, Bennie began to weigh the situation. The more he thought about it, the better the idea became. It was just the kind of social victory he needed in order to claw his way back into active politics.
By the time the idea had reached him, the broken telephone of rumour had dissolved all connections between the initiative and the Dominee, its architect. The initiative had also become much more ambitious, taking aim way beyond heritage and seeking a full land claim.
Armed with this ignorance, he began his inquiries that very day.
A few days later, the threatening call had come. A Texan drawl startled him awake just after midnight, the caller suggesting that he drop all ideas relating to claims of any kind. The voice was laced with menace and cancerous in its details—intricate and deadly details of both his private life and, more corrosively, the situation that had hoofed him off into the political wilderness that could never be allowed to reach the media.
Pieterson tossed and turned through the long night. Eventually he gave up on sleep and trudged under the burden of peril and decisions to be made out along his favourite pre-dawn beat. The meandering through deserted streets took him down to the grove of willow on the banks of the town’s dry reservoir. There he stood under that timeless smoky cover of the Milky Way stretched far overhead, weighing the odds and the threat. The wind was up, and the tendrils of the trees lashed furiously in the pale glow of a streetlight, tinted to yellow by a decade and more of dead insects that lined its glass bowl.
The longer he stood, the more the gusts of the wind became a mournful dirge through the branches. Its sound slid deep within him, probing… seeking… ferreting out the ancestral parts of him; the Khoisan that coursed through his veins, the legacy of the Bushmen that was in his coloured heritage, and their eons of shuffling and chanting around fires, begging the ancestors to protect them. Chants rising like this windsong under these stars and in this place, over a million nights that had gone before, now echoing back through the wind.
He listened to the song, trying to discern its voice and meaning, straining for its advice, but the tangle of too many saying too much drowned it out.
Then, woven into the wind’s haunting lament, came a long low rumble of discontent in the tinder-dry reeds where the water had receded, and Bennie’s skin crawled. It said nothing, but it had the cavernous drone and throaty rumble of the long dead constable interred in the graveyard not far away. It was a trick of his mind, Bennie knew, but it was enough to snap him out of the hypnotic stupor of exhaustion and worry, and he turned his back on it and trudged home again.
Later that day, the haunting intonation, so like Andre’s voice, nagged and rolled relentlessly onward in his mind, repeating itself until he reached for his phone and out to the son of the departed man.
“Bennie?” JJ’s voice betrayed the puzzlement he felt when he saw the name appear on his ringing mobile phone. He’d had limited dealings with Pieterson early on during the planning phase of the clinic and had forgotten that his number was still saved.
They spoke some pleasantries before Bennie came to his point. “This Broad character, my broer… I heard you keep tabs on him. He’s a Texan, hey?”
JJ answered all that Bennie asked, and added, “I know he’s in the country at the moment,” with a tone of deep concern in his voice. “Don’t screw with this guy, Bennie. He’s really bad news.”
Bennie made his inquiries and learned that Broad’s jet was due at Carnarvon’s airstrip the next morning. Further inquiries revealed that a helicopter was already standing by to take the jet’s occupants on a sightseeing adventure over the dull and nondescript desert scrub.
The next day, Benn
ie sat in his car out on the national road and watched the chopper with a metal box contraption and radar-style dish slung below its belly as it clattered its way out and off into the distance.
He watched till the machine was a dot and then nothing in the achingly blue sky. The wind was still up, singing a pennywhistle note in the key of the ancestors on the barbed wire fence that divided the newly resurfaced road from the ancient land.
From the distant horizon, Bennie’s keen vision picked up the tall thunderheads, like a phalanx of foreign invaders in centuries past, beginning to march once more abreast, steadily forward. His keen Bushman ears could already pick up the echoing reports; salvos of thunder beginning to reverberate off the distant mountains.
Bennie turned the engine over and drove slowly back to town, pondering who precisely the occupants had been, what the heavy load of technology slung below the beast might be, and what their persistent business was.
The next morning’s front page news report only hinted at the answers: “FATAL KAROO CRASH: Chopper Struck by Lightning—Oil Tycoon Dies.”
> THE END <
* The Debate? See Epilogue…
Epilogue
Thank you for taking the time to share this journey.
In draft copies of this novel, there were two additional chapters inserted after Chapter 38. These dealt with the debate on ethics announced by Dominee Gert at the funeral of Constable Andre Kruger.
In editing, it was decided to remove this debate as it interfered with the literary flow of the story.
However, if you are interested in reviewing the debate, you are encouraged and most welcome to visit the novel’s home page at www.SKA-at-Carnarvon.com. Navigate to the very bottom of the page and click the very last item in the list entitled “Removed Chapters”.
If you enjoyed what you read, please share your thoughts at:
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Of course, reviews at Amazon.com and GoodReads.com will help bring this story to the attention of others—please visit:
Please do stay in touch:
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facebook.com/MichaelSmorenburg
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www.MichaelSmorenburg.com
[email protected]
About the Author
Michael Smorenburg
Born in 1964, I grew up in a fabulously stable family with incredible siblings and an embracing community. I also landed with my derrière firmly in the proverbial butter in another way. Home was a piece of paradise; the beach community of Clifton, Cape Town, South Africa.
Today, Clifton is world renowned as a playground of the super-rich, but back then it was all a boy could want. A wild and bounteous Southern Ocean on the doorstep flanked by towering mountains on all sides, and precious few rules in between.
It was there that I fell in love with adventure and nature, and these, in turn, prompted my endless questions about what made everything tick. It set me on a course to understand science.
In my mid-20s, the travel bug bit; and when my head cleared, it was the millennium and I found myself living in San Diego, California, founding an online marketing company. But Africa has a heavy gravity, and I was drawn back home, where I have happily remained.
Humans are, of course, the universe finding out about itself. We are of nature. We are matter… the stuff of stars, all too briefly made conscious and self-aware. Each of us is privileged to add our small voice to the symphony of life.
“A Trojan Affair – The S.K.A. at Carnarvon” (along with my other books) is my small contribution to that great chorus.
Wherever you may be in time and place, it’s been a very great privilege to entertain and chat with you.
Please do keep the conversation moving.
Other Titles by Michael Smorenburg
LifeGames Corporation
When Catherine Kaplan lands a contract with LifeGames Corporation, she doesn't grasp the sinister reality steadily drawing her into a web of deceit, conspiracy and mortal danger.
LifeGames Corporation operates Immersive Virtual Reality simulation systems that are run by Artificial Intelligence. Governments, militaries and business have become reliant on LifeGames to train their executives. Candidates who undergo simulations are first hypnotised by an automated sequence to believe that their experience will be real--not a simulation. The consequence is that their reactions reveal with absolute certainty their aptitude to endure stress. The innovation has made founder, Kenneth Torrington among the world's most wealthy men.
When her ad agency lands a contract with Life Games Corporation, Catherine has no inkling that the real price for that lucrative honor will be her soul. But soon Ken plays his hand; he has a sexual fantasy about Roman orgies and a means to deliver them.
It plunges both Ken and Catherine into a maelstrom of mutual destruction that threatens to pull more than just the company down on itself.
Pick up LifeGames Corporation now to learn about the superstitious underpinnings of human psychology, the hacking of brain architecture and the cost it has on humanity.
Ragnarok
A secret NASA experiment gone wrong, the chaos that erupts, and one reporter seeking the truth who chases leads where she shouldn't.
On a flight from Paris to Los Angeles Tegan Mulholland is intrigued & charmed by Pete, the mysterious stranger sitting beside her. But when their plane almost falls from the sky and other jets in her vicinity wink from the radar, the official explanations that follow reek to Tegan's retired investigative journalist mind of cover up.
What is not declared:
A secret NASA experiment has warped a column of time instead of space, plucking with it the planes out of our era, and a band of Norse warriors from the Vinland colony millennia ago into our epoch.
Rowing eastward and back to Iceland, the contrail of Tegan's plane appearing after the strange aurora and moving westward high above, the Norsemen conclude are Odin's order to return to Vinland and unknowingly toward the modern day Canadian coast, where, just days--yet a thousand years before--the skraeling Indians had driven them out.
As news reports flood Tegan's living room of bloodshed and massacre, speculating about which gang of roughly dressed bearded marauders are responsible for mass-murder around the quiet Canadian coast, Tegan develops a hunch that there is more to the story than it seems. She quits her Hollywood Exec job and embarks on an odyssey that leads inexorably ever closer toward the Norsemen's hidden lair.
Only Pete, the Lockheed consultant she had steadily fallen in love with during the harrowing flight and since, has any hope of saving her.
If you enjoy intrigue, conspiracy and romantic suspense, Ragnarok will grip your imagination and not let go.
The Praying Nun
An uncharted shipwreck, the mysteries she hides, and the brutalized souls who suffered her holds.
In 1985 two divers discovered an ancient uncharted shipwreck off South Africa's Cape of Storms. Salvaging the wreck only inflames the enigma with the trail of secrets compounding and the wreck refusing to yield her identity. Countless vessels, some crammed with bullion, have joined this ship graveyard over the centuries, but what sort of galleon was this, leaving only cannon, cannon balls and scant few clues behind? Three decades pass before the Smithsonian of Washington solves the riddle.
It's 1794 on the fevered coast of Mozambique. Chikunda and his wife Mkiwa, stripped naked and shackled, are heaved aboard the São José de Africa. Only a miracle may save them from the horrors below deck where more than 400 fellow slaves are crammed. But nobody can guess what fate has in store.
If you're a Wilbur Smith or Clive Cussler fan, you will be riveted by this fact-inspired fictionalized tale by Michael Smorenburg, based as it is by personal experience, extensive research and the legacy of artifacts salvaged from the São José de Africa. Pick it up now to go on the adventure of a lifetime..
The Reckoning
(Sequel to The Praying Nun)
A slave
evades re-capture after his slave ship is wrecked at the treacherous Cape of Good Hope, only to face handing himself over when his wife goes missing with the man who rescued them. A tale of hope, fear and most of all, the yearning for freedom.
It's 1794 and the slave trade is at its ugly peak. When the Portuguese slave ship Sao Jose Paquete de Africa shipwrecks at the Cape of Good Hope, only two hundred of the four hundred slaves aboard survive.
Chikunda and his pregnant wife evade re-capture only to be faced the impassable cliffs of Table Mountain. With the wild South Atlantic at their backs, Cape Town's gallows and whipping post to the north, the British garrison blocking escape to the south, and dangers of an untamed African coast to the the east of a vast mountain range, escape seems impossible.
When Chikunda's wife goes missing, he has a monumental choice to make. Pick up The Reckoning now and lose yourself in a world you never could have imagined, a world where freedom slips ever more out of a man's grasp.
____
The third book to this “Slave Ship Saga” trilogy will launch in the 3rd Quarter 2018.
LifeGames & Ragnarok sequel—Coming Soon…
The Manhattan Event—Worlds Collide LifeGames Technology spreads its wings.
With Ken gone from the helm and the company’s key technology mothballed, what becomes of LifeGames?
Of course—exciting things!
More than that, those who read my other novel, “Ragnarok—Worlds Collide”, will be equally inquisitive as to the fate of “the missing planes”.
Well… both of these matters are resolved in my new book to be published in early 2018.
Strangely, it is a novel that brings together the two plots (LifeGames & Ragnarok) into a single tale of deception, intrigue and mind control at the highest levels.
Email me to get an early copy: [email protected]
A Trojan Affair Page 35
