by Deon Meyer
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.’
43
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.
He walked back and picked up the phone. ‘Hello?’
‘You’re in Swaziland. We’re going to get you. But listen …’
He was frozen. It was a new voice, not the one on the radio.
‘If you try to phone your father again, if you make contact with anyone, we will cut their throats. We will know. I want you to understand that.’
He was dumb.
‘I want to hear you say you understand that.’
‘I understand.’
‘Your father drives a white Mercedes Benz, TT 100765. Every afternoon he drives the same route from the office. Accidents happen so easily. Your mother goes to the afternoon prayer meeting at the Dutch Reformed Church every Wednesday. She leaves the house alone at twenty to seven in her Honda Ballade, registration TJ 128361. She’s a soft target. Your sister walks home from school every afternoon. I think you get the message. Tell me again that you understand.’
‘I understand.’
‘Very good. I see that you’re in Manzini. If you stay there I will send some people to talk to you. We can work this thing out.’
He realised that the man wanted to keep him on the line. Maybe there were already people here looking for him. He stopped li
stening.
He put down the phone and walked away, quickly, from his life.
The first one was easy because I knew where he was and I knew that he was the one who had shot Emma.
I waited until nine o’clock that night. I crept across the river in the night shadows. I approached him from behind. He lay on his stomach, quite comfortably, with the Galil on the tripod in front of him. Now and then he peered through the night sight.
Beside him lay a rucksack. There would be food and drink in it. I needed that.
It’s impossible to be totally silent in the bush, never mind how careful you are. There was a distance of three metres between us when the tiny, invisible twig cracked under my foot. I saw him instinctively turn his head first, and then his upper body jerked around, but I was on my feet with the knife in my right hand. He stood up hurriedly. He did what most people would do – he tried to use his weapon, the sniper rifle. He swung it at me.
Too slow. Too late. I thumped the long blade into his heart and said to him, ‘That’s for Emma.’
I don’t think he heard me.
I stepped back and let him fall. I dragged him to one side, picked up the rifle and lay down where he had been. I used his night scope to scan the area.
There was the Jeep Grand Cherokee, half hidden behind the house beside a Toyota Prado. Big vehicles. Enough to transport a large team. How many were there? The house seemed deserted. I swung the telescope slowly across the whole area. Then I spotted him on the veranda behind the wall. Only the top of his head protruded.
Number two.
If I were in their place, I would have deployed the others near the gate.
We would see.
I heard a voice faintly whispering. Behind me.
I plucked out the Glock and swung around.
Nothing.
Still I heard the voice. It was a man’s voice. Impossible, since there was only dense bush behind me.
I realised that the sound must have come from a radio.
I crawled over to Blondie’s corpse and felt in his pockets. Nothing. I turned him over and felt along his belt. Nothing again.
The voice was more audible now. Close to him, or somewhere on him. Up top.
I felt along his body, since I couldn’t see in this dark, and held my ear close to his head. I heard it clearly. ‘Vannie, come in.’ It was a soft, impatient whisper.
The thing was in his ear. There was a fine wire looping down. I should have known that they’d have technology. I took it off carefully. His skin was still warm. I put it in my ear. It didn’t fit very well. It might have been tailor made for him.
‘Vannie, don’t tell me your vack isn’t working.’
What was a vack?
‘Frans, can you see Vannie?’
‘Negative.’
‘Fuck.’
Numbers three and four.
‘Want me to go and see?’
‘Yes, it’s still early. Take him one of the spare vacks, there are some more in the back of the Jeep, in the blue box.’
‘OK.’
I lay down. Vacks? I looked through the scope. The man behind the wall stood up. Frans. He jogged down the steps to the vehicles and opened the back of the Jeep.
‘I can’t see the box.’
‘It says Voice Activated Comms.’
I got it. Vack. VAC. VACs.
‘It’s not here.’
‘It must be there.’
‘I’m telling you it’s not here.’
‘It’s in the back of the Prado, Eric. I moved it.’ A new voice. Number five.
‘Thanks.’
Frans shut the back of the Jeep and went over to the Prado, opened it and rummaged inside.
‘OK, I’ve got it. Fuck, Vannie, just don’t shoot me now.’
‘He can’t hear you, Frans.’
‘I’m just saying.’
He came jogging across the lawn to me. I took the knife and stood up.
Jacobus le Roux found work as a labourer at the Mlawula game reserve in Swaziland. He was an oddity to the black game wardens, the white Afrikaner deserter who wanted to do the work of a black man. The quiet boy who never laughed.
With great effort and patience he pieced together the bits of news and rumour. Samora Machel’s plane had been off course. Somewhere there was a false beacon, a VOR, the Times of Swaziland speculated, along with the Russian experts.
He knew where the VOR had been. He knew who had put it there.
The newspapers said the South African government wanted Machel dead. They said he had been a thorn in their sides since 1964, when he led the first attack against the Portuguese as a guerrilla fighter for the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, or FRELIMO. A former nurse, Machel had seen his family’s land confiscated, he had seen his parents starve under Portuguese rule, he had seen his brother die in a South African gold mine, and had experienced the wide gap between medical care for whites and blacks at first hand.
And because his grandparents and great-grandparents had fought Portuguese rule in the nineteenth century, the diminutive nurse took up the struggle himself. By 1970, he had become the commander-in-chief of Frelimo, and by 1975 he was the first President of an independent Mozambique.
And, said the newspapers, he had signed his owned death warrant soon after – by allowing guerrilla forces fighting against oppression in South Africa and Rhodesia to use his country as a springboard for attacks. The two neighbouring countries retaliated by forming a rebel group called RENAMO under the auspices of fighting the Marxist Machel government, and a bitter civil war was born.
By 1986, Mozambique had reached breaking point. Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia had succumbed to boere pressure and ordered RENAMO out of his country. RENAMO’s great onslaught against Machel had begun and everything was on a knife-edge, at the top of the precipice. Killing Machel was supposed to finally break the deadlock.
But Pretoria denied everything. Even the minister whose face he had seen in the little plane. Especially that minister.
That was what frightened Jacobus the most. He knew that they were lying and he knew what they were prepared to do to preserve the lie.
After five months at the Mlawula reserve, they tracked him down.
He came in from the veld and big fat Job Lindani, the Swazi manager with the ready smile, said to him, ‘Don’t go home. There are white men waiting for you. Boere.’
He fled again.
* * *
Frans had been the one driving the Jeep in the hospital parking lot. I laid his lifeless body down beside big Vannie, crushed his VAC on the ground under my foot, picked up Vannie’s rucksack and the Galil and jogged through the dark to the house.
There were at least another three outside, but I suspected there were more. If there were only five they need not have come with two vehicles. I guessed at six. That meant another four. At least.
‘Vannie, can you hear me now?’
In the dark house I opened the rucksack. Bottled water. Sandwiches. They smelled like chicken.
‘Frans, what are you doing?’
I looked for my Twinkies. Found only the empty carton. They would pay for that too.
‘Frans, come in, Frans.’
I ate and drank in a hurry. Just enough to still the hunger.
‘I don’t believe it.’
I picked up the Galil and went out the back door, past the vehicles, south to the dense bush where I had lain in wait the night before.
‘Eric, I think we’ve got trouble.’
‘Fuck.’
‘He’ll have the rifle too.’
Eric ruminated on this wisdom.
‘And the VAC too, maybe,’ said Eric. ‘Lie dead still and shoot anything that moves.’
44
He worked in the Swazi mines, on remote farms and once on a plantation. Sometimes he just hid away in the mountains and stole to stay alive. Twice he went back to Mozambique, but there were no jobs, no means of survival. He lived in fear every day for eight years. He never stopp
ed looking over his shoulder and developed an instinct for who would betray him, and when. He didn’t blame them. If you are poor and hungry, and you have a wife and five children somewhere in a Swazi village who want more, always more, then you take every cent you can get. When you walk into the shebeen in Mbabane and meet someone asking questions, then you tell him about the strange white man who works beside you in the mine shaft, the one who speaks your language and never laughs.
In 1992 the Swazi papers were full of the Great Change in South Africa.
He found hope.
He waited another two years, until March 1994, and then took the money he had saved and bought himself a new face from a surgeon in Mbabane. He bought a Nissan 1400 pick-up and a false passport in Bulembu and drove over the border and down the mountain to Barberton.
He found a public telephone booth in the town centre and dialled his parents’ home number, but before it could ring fear overtook him and he put the receiver down.
What if …
Wait for the elections to be over. Wait. He had waited eight years, what were a few more months.
A week later he heard about Stef Moller in a bar and drove out to Heuningklip. It was only when he wanted to marry Melanie Lottering that he knew the time was right, it was safe enough to see his family again.
I knew where they would have to hide to see the gate and the access road. I knew from which direction they would expect me.
They would be in pairs, because that made everything easier.
For me too.
I approached from the west, because they would be focused on the north, with one of the team looking south. Through the night sight I saw two of them within fifty metres of my own nest, where I had waited for Donnie Branca and Stef Moller.
I was not familiar with the Galil. I didn’t know for what distance the scope was calibrated. I crawled to within two hundred metres of them and settled down. With very slow deliberate movements, I found enough shelter and took aim.
No wind. I halted the cross-hairs on the shoulder of the one looking south, took a deep breath, let it escape slowly and silently, and pulled the trigger.
