“Get Piet, Hendrik and Kenneth,” I said. “Go behind the crates.”
Roelof glanced at me with wide eyes. He looked back towards the lights; the sound of two doors opening reached us. A moment later, two silhouetted figures stepped in front of the lights. Despite the gloom, the heavy rain and the backlight, their black military uniforms identified them as members of Breytenbach’s private army. The Van Rensburg clan would probably not realise that, but nobody missed the Vektor R5s they both carried.
“Now,” I hissed urgently at Roelof. “Take them back now. We’ll deal with this.”
I reached out to Hendrik, grabbed his arm and pulled. But Hendrik shook me off angrily.
“What the fuck?” he said. “I’m carrying.” He opened his jacket and pulled his Beretta out from its holster. “You’re not,” he said. “Step aside, Freddy.” I should have told him it wasn’t true I was not armed, but he didn’t hang around to discuss it. He pointed his Beretta at the silhouettes. Roelof ushered Piet and Kenneth back into the shadows.
“Where is it?” called one of the men.
“Where is what?” Chandler replied. He tossed his cigar away and held his hands out so they could see them. “Is there a problem?”
“We’re here to take it back,” said the man. “It belongs to us.”
“Nothing here is yours,” said Chandler. “Just a couple of wild animals.”
The man stepped closer and glanced anxiously at the lion which had started pacing back and forth, disturbed no doubt by the tension in the air.
“We tracked the vehicle,” said the man.
“The vehicle?”
“The jeep you stole. We tracked it.”
Chandler hesitated. We had only one jeep, and it was a black one that matched the vehicles of Breytenbach’s army. We hadn’t stolen it, except for the number plates.
“The two of you tracked it?” he asked. “Just the two of you?”
“There are more of us,” said the man, shifting his R5 in our direction. But his voice betrayed him. They were alone. Two men from a private South African security outfit in a foreign country. The lion gave a sudden angry snort, and the man glanced at it again.
That was when Hendrik stepped forward and pointed his Beretta at the man’s face. He had clearly not understood what these men wanted. The man turned back from the lion and looked at Hendrik in surprise. He raised his Vektor R5 and pointed it at Hendrik. The second man took a step back and raised his own R5.
“You’re not fucking taking my guns,” shouted Hendrik in a voice that was too loud.
“We’re here to take it back.”
“No, you fucking won’t,” screamed Hendrik.
The man opened his mouth to say something, but Hendrik didn’t give him the chance. Hendrik’s face had turned a dark red and his breathing was coming fast, as if he had been running. A rage had come from nowhere and was overwhelming him. He looked as if he was about to explode.
It takes a particular kind of man to squeeze a trigger when pointing a gun at another man’s face. An abnormal man, someone whose empathy responses are damaged.
Hendrik was such a man. He squeezed the trigger of his Beretta.
The bullet struck the man in his face, and his body crumpled to the ground. The Vektor R5 clattered loudly into the echoing silence that followed the shot.
The second man looked down at his comrade with horror. He turned back to Hendrik, his Vektor raised. But Chandler cried out sharply, and the man’s eyes turned to find he was pointing a Glock at him. His eyes flickered back to Hendrik, and then to me. I was pointing my Glock at him as well. He wavered.
“Put it down,” shouted Chandler at the top of his voice, and the man lowered his weapon.
Hendrik was gazing in stupefied shock at the body of the man he had shot. I took hold of his Beretta, and removed it from his limp grasp. Fat-Boy stifled a moan with the back of his hand. Piet uttered a choking sob.
“What have you done, boy?” Piet gasped.
Chandler stepped up to the second man and took his Vektor from him.
“Get out of here,” he said to the man. “Tell your boss we have nothing that belongs to him.”
The man backed away from Chandler and climbed into the car. His eyes still on Chandler, he engaged reverse gear, and the car backed away from us, the doors still hanging open. He accelerated, then braked suddenly and the two doors slammed shut. Then he shoved the car into first gear and crushed the accelerator. The wheels spun with a shriek; the man executed a tight turn, and the car bounced over the uneven surface of the quay as he made his escape.
“You let him go,” protested Roelof.
“What did you want to do?” said Chandler. “Shoot him too?”
“You killed a police officer, boy,” said Piet, his face pale, and he swayed as if his knees were about to collapse. Kenneth reached out to support him.
“They weren’t police,” said Chandler.
“Who were they?” asked Roelof.
“Private racketeers. Now get the hell out of here, all of you.”
“We haven’t seen all the weapons,” said Roelof.
“If you wanted to see all the weapons, you shouldn’t have provided this retard with real bullets,” said Chandler. “Get your boss and his son back to your hotel. We’ll clear up the mess you’ve made.”
I removed the magazine from Hendrik’s Beretta and racked the slide to eject the round in the chamber. I handed the empty pistol to Kenneth.
“But …” said Roelof.
Chandler stepped up to him and placed his face an inch in front of Roelof’s. His voice was barely above a whisper when he spoke.
“You have one minute,” he said, “or we throw you all into the sea with the man you killed.”
Roelof closed his mouth. Hendrik was still staring down at the body of the man he had shot. Roelof grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away. He reached out his other arm for Piet, who grasped at it like it was a lifesaving ring. He didn’t let go of Kenneth with the other hand, and the four of them shuffled back into the city of crates like a wounded eight-legged creature.
Fat-Boy gave a muffled sob and stared at the body of the man sprawled between us.
“You were right about that one,” said Chandler after a minute of silence. “Something very wrong with him.”
“Something very wrong with all of them,” I said.
Chandler nodded. He looked down at the lifeless body of the man from BB’s private army.
“Were they looking for the gold?” asked Fat-Boy, looking up finally from the dead body.
“No,” said Chandler. “They didn’t know we had the gold. You heard him. They tracked the vehicle. But it wasn’t the vehicle, it was the number plate. Why didn’t I think of that? That number-plate scanner wasn’t checking the numbers, there’s a tracking device in it.”
“What do we do?” asked Fat-Boy.
“The two of you make sure the Van Rensburgs have cleared out. Then take the damned jeep up the coast. Find a stretch of beach and abandon it. Call us, we’ll pick you up.”
“What are you and the Angel going to do?” asked Fat-Boy.
“What do you think?” said Chandler. “You want to try to revive this man?”
Fat-Boy took another look at the dead body, and then the two of them walked down the quay to where he’d parked the jeep.
“I shouldn’t have let him use that damn jeep,” said Chandler, and he shook his head with irritation. “I’m getting complacent.”
“We had no way of knowing they were tracking it – why didn’t they come for it earlier?”
“I’d guess they only noticed we’d switched the plates when the other jeep tried driving through those gates. If Fat-Boy hadn’t taken it to go lie in his hot tub, they’d be driving it back to SA. Poor bastard.” He looked back down at the dead man. “Another of Breytenbach’s employees lies dead.”
“Not by our hand,” I said. “Not this time.”
“You sure about that?”
We look
ed at each other.
“Let’s put the poor sod in the sea,” said Chandler. “Then we figure out what other mistakes we’ve made.”
Twenty-One
The Van Rensburgs were a huddled collection of lost sheep in the business lounge of Maputo airport the next morning, waiting for a dog to herd them to their private jet. Hendrik was feeling righteous in a new rugby shirt and shorts a size too small. Piet was putting a fresh linen suit through its paces and Melissa had slept on her new hair-do and her eyes were puffy. She cried when I told them we had sorted everything out, and I wondered what she had been told about the previous night. Roelof had the morning Beira Post open on the page with the English version of the article about the discovery of a dead body floating in the harbour.
“Who were they?” asked Roelof. “Those two men.”
“We don’t know. Probably local scumbags taking a chance.”
“That man’s accent was South African; he wasn’t Mozambican.”
“South African scumbags then.”
Hendrik gave a scoffing laugh. There was no indication that he was feeling the least contrite.
“They were looking for a stolen vehicle,” said Roelof, and his circular spectacles glinted. It occurred to me that Hendrik and Roelof had spent the night working out how to shift the blame. And now he was shifting it.
“That was just their sales pitch,” I said. “They knew we were up to something and wanted a slice of the pie.”
“You set it up, didn’t you?” said Roelof.
“Set what up?”
“They were your people. You set it up so we wouldn’t see that there are no weapons under those crates.”
“You saw a box of weapons,” I pointed out.
“One box,” said Roelof. “That’s all there is, isn’t it? I knew there was something about you I didn’t trust.” He turned to Piet, who was looking confused. “Didn’t I tell you, boss? That man Freddy is not to be trusted, I said. I knew it, from the beginning.”
“I knew it too,” blurted Hendrik. “I knew he couldn’t be trusted. I always knew it.”
“Nevertheless,” I said. “Your lions sailed this morning. Along with your weapons, even if there is only one box. They will arrive as planned. We have the offloading in Cape Town arranged. Everything will go ahead.”
“We will do the offloading,” said Roelof. “Our business with you is done.”
Before I could say anything, a voice spoke from behind me. The voice of my dead friend Brian.
“If you’re ready,” the voice said, “we’re full of fuel and raring to go, sir.”
I didn’t turn around to face the jet pilot from Knaresborough. If he recognised me from my visit to the Van Rensburg farm, he could provide the final seal on their distrust. I kept my back to the pilot and my eyes forward. The Van Rensburgs gathered their bags and pushed past me. Beyond the double-glazed windows of the lounge an airbus provided a distraction as it came to a halt at the gate. The pilot cut the engines, deepening the silence.
But the Van Rensburgs had not left the room. Piet’s voice called out from the door of the lounge.
“Mr Moss,” he called. “If you have deceived us in any way, you will pay the price.”
I left it as long as I dared, but then turned to face them.
Piet continued, “We are a proud people. What others do to us comes back tenfold. You should know that. What you have done will come back to harm you and those you care about.”
I considered that to be excellent advice that he should have given his son, but was beginning to understand the twisted way the Van Rensburg family operated. Blame was diverted, and it was by no means a superficial reallocation of blame. There was a deep conviction to it.
Their pilot was still standing with them at the door. I saw the moment of recognition in his eyes, and a frown appeared on his face. It seemed very likely that he would provide the closing arguments in the case against me.
Piet turned and walked out of the room before I had the chance to respond to his wisdom. The others followed in single file.
“Who is that?” the pilot asked.
“Nobody,” said Roelof. “He’s nobody.”
Robyn drove us down the coast to the White Pearl resort. She drove as she always did: too fast, but with the quiet confidence of complete control.
“What do you mean by timing?” she asked.
“That pilot saw me a few days after the church killings, before our first meeting with the Van Rensburgs.”
“When you were snooping around for your bureaucrats?”
“I knew it would come back and bite me. Chandler is right, we’re just a bunch of amateurs.”
“Stop blaming yourself,” she said. “It’s indulgent, you know it is.”
We continued in silence for a few minutes and I marvelled at the return of the strong, confident woman I loved. Robyn had not had a drink in four days. Perhaps this time we could break the cycle.
“The army might work on the basis of assigning blame,” said Robyn suddenly. “Accepting responsibility and punishing the culprit, but we don’t. We all make mistakes, but we don’t sit around crying about it. We get back on our feet and try again.”
“It might be hard to get back on our feet if that pilot speaks. Our gold will have a reception committee waiting for it in Cape Town.”
“Would that be such a bad thing?”
“We’d lose it. Of course that would be a bad thing.”
Robyn turned to me again, her dark eyes alive.
“Would it?” she said. “You know what I think, Ben? Losing the gold might just be the best thing that could happen to us. That gold is cursed. That’s what I think.”
Chandler took the news of the jet pilot who might have recognised me with calm stoicism. He nodded three times and then turned to look at the sea as if he could find an answer there. We were sitting on the balcony of our private bungalow at the White Pearl. Through the glass panel railing we could see the deserted stretch of white sandy beach. Chandler gazed out to sea for several minutes, mesmerised by the beauty of it. Robyn had taken a long walk on the beach and Fat-Boy had removed his shoes and was standing at the water’s edge, also gazing out to sea.
“They saw some of their weapons,” said Chandler. “Didn’t they?”
“We opened a box,” I said.
“Whet their appetites. They will be there, we can be sure of that. That overgrown Afrikaans boy will bring his army, and they’ll give those lions an armed escort, won’t they?”
“Probably. They think the weapons are fake, or there aren’t any. But they’ll be there. Just in case they turn out to be real.”
“So we need to get the gold out before those lions clear customs.”
“How? You want to board the boat?”
Chandler shook his head and gazed some more at the sea.
“That ship will take four days to get there,” he said, “is that right?”
“Four days and eight hours.”
“Plenty of time,” said Chandler. “We’ll figure it out.”
“If you say so, colonel.”
“We’ll even have a bit time for R and R. This is a truly magnificent spot.”
“You can see why the Portuguese fought so hard for it,” I said.
“Yes indeed. It’s the tragedy of this continent, isn’t it? Everybody wants a piece of it.”
Twenty-Two
Fat-Boy looked good in his grease-stained overalls, like a genuine dockworker, and I told him so.
“They don’t fit,” he complained, and indeed a large portion of his belly pushed the dirty, white T-shirt through the front of the overalls where the buttons had popped.
“You look the part though,” I said. “None of these dockworkers fit into their overalls.”
“Part!” he scoffed and crunched the forklift into forward gear without engaging the clutch. The engine whined as it built up a head of steam and we started crawling back along the quay towards the crane. “That’s what this is to you,
isn’t it, Angel?” said Fat-Boy. “Just a big game.”
“Of course it is. Are you doing this for the career-building opportunities it offers?”
Fat-Boy turned to face me and his lazy eye drooped scornfully.
“Who needs a career when there are seven million, eight hundred and twenty thousand little American soldiers floating into harbour tonight?”
“I thought it was seven million, seven hundred and something.”
“You need to check the prices, Angel. The banksters run it up and down all the time. It’s been moving in our favour this week, we’re up sixty thousand dollars on last Monday.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“Good?” said Fat-Boy. “What the fuck do you mean, good? When last did you make sixty thousand American dollars in a week? That’s sixty thousand dollars each, for me, you, the colonel and sex bomb. Each.”
“Wow,” I said, but Fat-Boy glowered at me. Keeping his eyes on the path ahead was unnecessary given the slow walking pace at which we were proceeding, so he turned the bulk of his body to face me.
“What’s your problem, Angel? This whole time you’ve been fucking up. It’s like you’re trying to fuck it up for all of us. Because of you doing that government work, we’re not gonna be driving our gold into our warehouse tonight. We’ve gotta sneak it out before big Blondie arrives, and hope to hell he doesn’t come looking for it.”
“Is this the fastest this thing goes?” I asked.
“It’s a forklift,” he said. “Not a fucking sports vehicle. I had three hours to arrange it, and this is what we got.”
“Why don’t I get out and walk?” I suggested. “I’d have time for a cigarette before you get there.”
Fat-Boy turned forward again to consider the crippled crane a couple of hundred metres ahead, its arm leaning out over the water like a disobedient soldier mocking all the other cranes standing to attention. Beneath the crane an operator was enjoying one of my cigarettes, while he kicked at the broken concrete counterweights lying scattered around its base.
“You think he’s noticed those blocks didn’t break by themselves?” asked Fat-Boy.
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