15
Ros took charge.
Someone had to. Her brother couldn't speak, was utterly drained. Jack was black in his mood, brooding. While her brother and Jack floundered, Ros assumed the decision taking. Into the car. Away down the long road and back towards Pretoria and Johannesburg. She wondered whether they were already compromised, all three of them. She anticipated that the security police would be waiting for the van Niekerk kids when they reached their home city, the Beetle having been traced. She didn't air her fears.
She asked clipped questions of Jack. She ignored her brother.
"Do you want to fly out tonight?"
"No."
"There's a British Airways every night after the S.A.A.
flight, there's Lufthansa and Alitalia. What's the point in staying?"
"I'm not flying."
"You don't have a group, you're one person. Do you have any other contacts to get help?"
"I don't."
"It's idiocy to think of anything but getting yourself out.
Don't you see that?"
"I've no choice."
"Then you've got a death wish."
He told her about Sandham. He told her about Duggie.
"I've debts that have to be paid off. They helped me and they were both killed. They were murdered because I involved them. Do you think, because it's getting hot, I can just pack up and go home? 'Sorry you got chopped, chaps, but it's getting too difficult for me, I'm not going to risk my skin . . .' Ros, it can't be done."
"Suicide."
"I'll tell you about suicide. The old one amongst the bodies was called Jacob Thiroko. I don't know what was in his mind about coming here, but he hadn't been in South Africa for more than twenty years. And inside his own country the last thing he did was to blow his own brains away.
That was suicide. That was so he couldn't be made to talk.
And before he blew his mind out he burned his papers. He stayed alive long enough to burn his papers and then he killed himself. He can't tell them my name, or any name, or what was the target. That's a hell of a debt to be paid off. I can't walk away, not from them, and not from my father."
"On your own you won't even get to see the gaol."
"Then in Beverly Hills they'll all hear the gunfire. The plans told me that they'll hear it. They have high windows into the catwalks, and up in the catwalk space there are more windows that look down into the cells. Those windows are always open. My father will hear the gunfire. Everyone in that bastard place will know that someone came, someone tried."
She couldn't look at him. She didn't dare to see his face.
"It's madness."
"If I walked away I'd have to live with next Thursday morning. I could be back in London. I could be sitting and filling my gut with booze, and I could take all the tablets that get you to sleep. Wouldn't matter. I'd be in that cell, wondering whether he was scared, what he was thinking.
I'd hear them come for him. I'd see them walk him along the corridors. What do you want me to bloody well do, Ros, go to sleep, set the alarm for five in the morning, wake up to know that my father's being pitched off a trap? What do I do then? Turn over and go back to sleep?"
Jan had leaned forward. Pushing his head between the high seat backs.
"It's to break out one person?"
Jack said, "Yes."
"It is to save one of them?"
"Yes."
"There are five that are going to hang."
"The one is my father."
"And you don't give a shit for the other four?"
Jack dropped his head. "Jan, believe me, I'm not interested in five, I'm going to break out one."
"He's like every other White," Jan shouted. "He's a racist."
Ros snapped, "Grow up, for Christ's sake, he doesn't give a fuck for your grubby little Movement."
"To leave four Blacks to hang, and to try to save one White, that's racism."
"They're killers, those four murdering swine."
"You're a racist, too, Ros."
They were both yelling. Jack's hands went up, palms open, on either side of his head.
"I'm not proud of what I've decided but it's my decision, alone."
"It's all horseshit about you being alone," Jan said.
"If you were alone you wouldn't be in my bloody car,"
Ros said.
Jack leaned across and kissed her on the cheek, and she didn't pull away. He took Jan's hand and shook it fervently.
Christ, what a bloody awful army.
Ros said she was going to Hillbrow. She said there was a studio flat there that belonged to a friend from school. Her friend always gave her the keys when she took her small son back to Durban and her parents. Ros said that there wasn't a husband, nor a live-in man. Ros said that her friend liked to know that someone came to keep an eye on the flat when she was away. Ros said that Hillbrow was the home of the drifters in Johannesburg, where Blacks and Asians and Coloureds and Whites lived alongside each other in tower blocks without being constantly harrassed by the police for violating the residential codes. Ros said he wouldn't be noticed in Hillbrow.
It was dark when they reached Johannesburg.
And he needed to think, because the days were slipping away, Thursday was rushing to him.
The studio flat, fifth floor, was an untidy mess.
They'd come in the back way. The car parked at the rear, so that they could all climb the five flights of the concrete steps of the fire escape. Heavy going for Jan, and Ros and Jack had their hands full. Ros had the key, took a bit of finding in her handbag.
Just one dismal room for living. All there. Bed, cooker, shelves, cupboards, prints on the wall of views of the English Lakes.
He went to the one window. He reckoned he was less than a mile from the Landdrost, but this was a different world.
A crowded pavement below him. He could see Blacks and Whites strolling, and there was a cafe opposite with chairs and tables in the open where he could see the colour mix.
Music from radio stations and records merged, deafening, from the street, from alongside, from above. A prefabricated block, and he thought he heard the bed springs going upstairs and he didn't like to look at Ros. A fight below, same side of the street as the block, and he had to crane to see two guys, White, kicking hell out of a third guy, White, and a girl watching, Black or Coloured or some mix. People walking round them, letting them get on with it.
Jan told him that they had to go home, Ros nodding. Jack understood the risks they took. He had the airport, they had nowhere to run for. Ros had her mouth clenched as Jan said that he would ring at eight and at ten and at midnight. Jack should let the phone ring, but not pick it up. If there were a trace on their home telephone then it would only operate when the phone was lifted at the receiver's end. The ringing phone would tell Jack that all was well with Jan and Ros
. . . Jack didn't ask what he should do if the phone didn't ring. It was for Jack Curwen to make decisions, not to ask what he should do. His responsibility, all on his shoulders.
Jan said he would come back to the flat in the morning. Ros didn't say when she might see him again. He thought he was alone because he could not imagine how a crippled student and an insurance office desk worker could help him work the break out from the maximum security cells of Beverly Hills. Hard put to see how he could help himself.
He hadn't eaten since breakfast.
He looked in the fridge. There was yoghurt, and some cream cheese, and the remains of a bowl of salad, and some salami slices. He reckoned the girl who lived in the studio flat must be a virtual skeleton. He cleaned out the fridge.
He quartered the large room. It was a compulsion, to see how the single parent lived, what she read, what she wore.
He couldn't have answered for this violation of her privacy other than by saying it was a symptom of his aloneness.
He found the building bricks.
They were the same as he had had when he was a kid.
They were the same as Will had back at Churchill Close.
Lego bricks, product of Denmark, there was a bread bin of them.
Jack sat on the floor and laid out his plans of Beverly Hills, and built the gaol in plastic bricks of blue and red and yellow and white. He built technicolor perimeter walls.
He made C section from red bricks, and administration in yellow, and A and B sections in white. He made the exercise yard of C section 2 in blue. He made a watchtower behind the gallows block, and he built towers where the flood light stanchions were set.
He was a child at play.
There were no roofs for his buildings. He could look down into each cubicle he made, into the cells, into the corridors, into the exercise yards. He put a door between C section's corridor and C section 2's corridor. He put a door on a cell.
He could count the number of the doors, he could count the number of the walls.
With the bricks that remained he located Pretoria Local and Pretoria Central and the White Politicals and the Women's. He scattered the prison staff homes, and the self service store, and the recreation and swimming areas, all on the north slope below Beverly Hills. Level with the gaol, on the west side, he put the Commissioner of Prison's residence.
He laid out a sheet of paper for the rifle range on the east side. He made a broken line with the last of the bricks to make the outer ring of wire fences on Magazine Hill to the south.
He sat cross-legged, his back against the bed, and gazed down at the gaol. A long time he sat, unmoving, searching for the plan, worrying for the route. He sat in the half light, only the light beside the bed on. Searching and worrying.
Jack stood. He went to the kitchenette area of the room and rifled the drawers and cupboards until he found a set of cooking scales. From his suitcase he lifted out the package of explosives. He didn't think the wrapping would weigh much, not enough to confuse his calculations. He weighed the explosives.
He had fifteen pounds and four ounces of plaster gelignite.
He replaced the gelignite in the suitcase, laid it beside the wrapped detonators and the firing wire.
There was a telephone beside the bed.
It was an impulse, born of aloneness. It was eight minutes to three in the morning, Sunday morning.
Below the flat, Hillbrow slept. The streets had at last quietened.
He wondered if his father slept.
Jack knew that if he did not make the call then he might just as well take a taxi to the airport in a dozen hours' time and book a flight and fly out.
He found a book with the code and dialled. He had made up his mind.
* * *
The ringing of the telephone scattered the cats.
The bell drove them from the newspaper covering the kitchen table, and from the cushioned chair beside the stove, sent them scurrying to the dark corners.
George Hawkins blundered into the kitchen, groping for the light switch, reaching for the telephone. He heard the distant voice. No rambling small talk, no crap about the weather, nor about the time in the morning.
The wall was twenty feet high, it was eighteen inches thick. What was the minimum explosive required with a conical shaped charge of nine inches in diameter to knock a man-sized hole at ground level?
"Bugger . . . "
George needed paper and pencil. Couldn't find them.
Didn't know where he'd last put them. Had to do the calculation in his head. And he was half asleep.
"Shit . . ."
And the boy was talking about minimums. If he was on about minimums, then the boy was in trouble, deep bloody trouble.
"Twelve pounds is absolute bloody minimum. Problem with the minimum is that the concrete on the far side of the reinforcing mesh may not be broken clear. Ideal would be fifteen to eighteen."
The minimum?
"That's twelve pounds."
How could the reverse end of the firing tube be blocked?
"Concrete mix."
Could the conical shaping be lightweight, aluminium?
"Not important that it's heavy. It's good if it's lightweight."
How much stand off should there be from the firing end of the metal tubing to the wall?
"For a man-sized hole you should have six to nine inches
. . . Twelve pounds of explosive, that's the absolute bloody bottom line . . . "
The telephone purred in his ear.
For a full minute George Hawkins held the receiver against his face, shivered in his pyjamas. He put the telephone down and went and sat in his chair and he called for the cats and rubbed the warmth into his bare skinny feet. George Hawkins shook his head, slowly, sadly. He had been asked for the minimum. He had answered the question. Twelve pounds was the bloody border line. The boy was in trouble.
He sat for an hour with his cats on his lap before he eased them off and went back to his cold bed.
* * *
As the city slept late on Sunday the colonel worked at his desk.
He had excused himself from taking tea with Aunt Annie's relations after church. He had told his wife to offer his apologies to the minister.
He read the reports that had come in late the previous evening. He couldn't have waited for them the previous evening, because the loss of Thiroko had been too great a blow. It should never have been left in the hands of Recce Commando, that he was certain of. He had been sure of it all through the late hours at home as he had listened to his wife, sniffling and talking of Aunt Annie.
Another day, another opportunity.
He gutted the reports.
A White male. Age between middle twenties and thirty years. Grey trousers and a green sports shirt and a mauve sweater. Common to both sales.
An English accent.
The reports were specific. Not an English accent that was South African. Not the accent of a long term English immigrant . . . and they were pigs who should never have been let into the country, hanging on to their British passports, shovelling money out of the country, sending their kids away to avoid army service, sneering at the Afrikaners who had made the country . . . The accent of an English Englishman.
The purchases had been made within one hour of each other on the day the bomb exploded.
Under the reports he had two photo-fit portraits. They had been built as mosaics from the descriptions of the two shopkeepers. The hair style, the deep set eyes, the strong nose, the jutting chin.
It was the colonel's belief that he stared at the two faces of one man. They were the faces of the man who had destroyed the back hallway of John Vorster Square. And his mind could wander. If he had been consulted he would have argued strongly against the use of Recce Commando in the tracking and failed capture of Jacob Thiroko. He had not been consulted and as a result he had been denied the chance of extracting information from one of the best sources he'd ever been close to. He had scarcely slept for rage.
He went down the stairs to the incident room. He let it be known, that in his opinion, from the weight of his experience, the bomb was not the work of Umkonto we Sizwe.
"I believe it was thrown by an individual who arrived recently from England, otherwise more care would have been taken in the purchase of the materials. It should be assumed that he came to South Africa very shortly before the attack. The airports should be checked. You should look for a flight from Europe because the shop men have given him a pale complexion, he hasn't been in the sun. You should also check every one of the city's hotels. That is my suggestion."
He knew his suggestion would be taken as an order.
• * *
"You'slept on it?" Jan asked.
"My decision, yes."
"No flight?"
"No," Jack said.
A pointless question. Jan could see beside the unmade bed the toy building that was Pretoria Central.
"I don't want to . . ."
Jack cut in. "You don't want to get shot."
"I don't want to start something that is impossible."
"It
's an over-used word."
"You don't have explosives and you don't have weapons."
Jack waved him quiet. He told Jan about the fifteen pounds of gelignite, saved from the John Vorster Square bomb. He told him about the detonators and the firing fuse.
He saw the surprise growing on the boy's face.
"Didn't you trust us?"
"Nor myself."
"Each one of us, the activists of Umkonto we Sizwe, each of us has an implicit trust in our Movement."
"It was sensible to be careful, it's nothing to do with trust.
Jan, I have to have more explosives or grenades, and I have to have firearms. I have to have them."
"I'm just a courier," the boy said, and the nerves showed.
"I have to have them, Jan."
"By when?"
"Tonight."
"That's impossible."
"Over-used word, Jan."
Jack started to make the bed. Jan paced the floor, there was the rhythm of the shuffle and the thud of his feet. Jack smoothed down the coverlet. He thought he would never understand this boy. He could understand a man such as Thiroko, and the young men who had died with Thiroko.
Blacks fighting for what Blacks thought was theirs. Couldn't place this crippled boy in the game, a White fighting for what Blacks thought was theirs. He thought it was all to do with the foot. He thought the misshapen foot had alienated the boy from the White society around him. He thought the boy must find a satisfaction from his hidden betrayal of his own people.
The boy stopped, turned. He faced Jack squarely.
"I'll be back in an hour for you."
After Jan had gone, Jack sat again on the floor beside the model. He was drawn to an approach to Beverly Hills from the south side, over Magazine Hill. He knew why that approach appealed to him. Defence H.Q. was to the north.
The east approach was through Pretoria Local and Pretoria Central. From the west he would have to cross beside the police dog training school, and the secure mental hospital.
A SONG IN THE MORNING Page 25
