The Prey

by Tony Park

  The man nodded, conceding the point. ‘We would have moved him in time for the arrival of the next shift. You caught us by surprise; we knew you were coming, but not what time.’

  ‘You knew? Themba Tshabalala, the man your pirate killed, wanted to finish work in time to go with his wife to the church, to organise his baby’s christening. That’s why we chose the early shift.’

  The man nodded. ‘Regrettable, but unavoidable, I am afraid. But I am being rude. I have not introduced myself. You may call me Wellington Shumba. Down here, I am the mine boss – not your Mister Cameron McMurtrie. And you are Christiaan Loubser, manager of environmental services.’

  Chris blinked again. He didn’t know how this man knew his name and his job. Chris looked around but could see no more than a few metres. He saw shadows moving and caught the occasional sweat-glistened arm or torso passing by. He smelled sweat and burning gas and heard the clang of tools on rock and the squeaking and grinding of ore being processed by hand.

  He’d heard about how the zama zamas processed ore underground but had never witnessed it. As his eyes began to adjust to the dark, he could make out a man sitting in front of a homemade miniature ball mill. It was made from a steel camping gas cylinder that had a hole cut into it and a trap door fitted to the opening. The bottle was laid on its side and fitted with welded rods at either end that were then laid in a cradle. To one end was added a crank so that the operator could wind the cylinder, allowing heavy steel balls inside to crush the ore dropped into the cylinder. The ball mill above ground acted exactly the same way, except it was massive and driven by a motor. The man turning the mill glanced at Chris, the boredom plain on his face and his escape from it visible from his red eyes. The hot air was laden with the smell of marijuana.

  ‘Keep working,’ Wellington barked at the man operating the mill, before walking away a few metres, further down the tunnel. Chris squinted and saw Wellington had sat down behind what looked like a camping table. He was almost completely swallowed by the darkness now, just a voice. ‘Stay where you are, Christiaan. But you may sit instead of kneeling if you wish. Make yourself comfortable.’

  ‘What are you going to do with me?’ Chris asked. He moved so he was sitting with his knees hugged to his chest. The man said nothing in reply and Chris’s imagination filled the void with a dozen hellish scenarios. He thought of Themba and Paulo again – the blood and the brains. The silence stretched out; Chris could hear his own heart beating.

  ‘I need your expertise,’ the mine boss’s voice reached through the quiet. ‘I’m losing men – more than usual – and I want to find out why. You’ll work for me until I negotiate with Global Resources to pay a ransom for your life.’

  ‘As simple as that,’ Chris said.

  ‘As simple as that. I want you to work your magic with your monitors and your pumps, to find out what is making my men ill.’

  ‘Since when have zama zamas cared about health and safety?’

  ‘Since Cameron McMurtrie started bulldozing closed some of the old shafts we used to come and go by. I need to get the most out of my workforce. I can’t afford to keep replacing men ad infinitum. As this mine goes deeper and my methods of ingress and egress are increasingly curtailed, I need to keep my men down here for longer periods than I have in the past. When Eureka was less deep we could come and go through old workings, but the new shaft is deeper than these. I need my men to stay fit to mine.’

  Wellington’s English was better than Chris’s, whose mother tongue was Afrikaans. The man’s diction was precise, which made his voice sound somehow crueller. Here was an educated man who was working men to death, but was greedy and rational enough to know that even in the world of the pirate mine he had to wring a few more months or years out of his labourers. Chris realised he’d been the target of a planned ambush and that, ironically, this Wellington wanted him to carry out a task similar to the one he and Themba had set out to do. ‘Did you have to kill the others?’

  ‘No.’ A match flared and the man’s face was illuminated for the briefest moment. The brow frowned for an instant, the head nodded a little. ‘That was not part of the plan. If the guard had not opened fire first then we would have tried to take you all alive.’

  ‘I … I can’t stay down here.’ Chris gripped his knees tighter to try to stop the shaking, but the harder he squeezed, the faster and harder he shuddered. ‘Please …’

  ‘Quiet. You will be fed. There is drink and some dagga if you wish it. You’re not going anywhere for the time being; not until you have finished what I need you to do.’

  ‘I … can’t.’

  ‘You can stay, and you will, Christiaan. I have plans for you, and you will help me make my mine safer and then you can go.’

  Chris closed his eyes and tried to fight back the tide of panic. He couldn’t stay down here. He would die. He opened his eyes again and saw the glowing orange tip of Wellington’s cigarette. He needed to find a way out. He needed to outsmart this underground mine boss. ‘You … you can start by putting out that cigarette. I was already picking up elevated traces of methane when we came through the safety door. You … you’ll blow us all up if you and your men keep smoking this far into the site. We need to move closer to the main shaft where ventilation is better.’

  The man laughed in the dark and drew again on the cigarette. He stood and walked to the alcove where the candle glowed weakly. He picked it up and blew it out. Chris was in total blackness again. He heard the man’s footsteps. He wondered if he was going to reach out and help him to his feet. ‘Don’t try and outsmart me, Christiaan. I know there is no methane in this mine.’ The steel-capped toe of his boot lashed out and drove the air from Chris’s lungs.

  *

  Luis Domingues Correia worked by touch in the darkness while he listened to the Afrikaner being beaten. He had been bullied by white South African miners when he’d worked in legal mines, and he had been beaten by people of his own colour when he’d lived in the informal settlement on the outskirts of Barberton.

  It had been this way for generations. His father and grandfather had worked for the mines, recruited from their beachside village near Inhambane on the Indian Ocean coast. In the old days, under the apartheid regime, the men of his country and others as far north as Zambia had been recruited by WENELA, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, to work in the mines in South Africa. They had been allowed into South Africa to provide cheap labour and at the same time they had followed their own dreams of wealth and peace at a time when their home country was poverty-stricken and war-ravaged.

  Luis had ostensibly benefitted from the peace in Mozambique that followed the end of the civil war in 1992. He’d been educated in metallurgy and engineering in East Germany, but WENELA no longer trawled the villages of Mozambique and Zimbabwe looking for labour. The catchcry after Mandela came to power was South African jobs for South Africans. But there were still opportunities for those prepared to work hard and the minimum wage in South Africa was still a relative fortune in Mozambique.

  So Luis had walked south and then west and crossed the Limpopo River and joined the mahambane, ‘the walkers’, who braved the wild dangerous expanse of the Kruger National Park to cross into South Africa and put their skills to use in a country that, despite its job creation rhetoric, had a pressing need for them. Others from his village had disappeared on the journey to e-goli, the place of gold. Some had been killed by lions in the national park, others became lost and died of thirst or starvation, while still more fell prey to criminals who stole what little they carried in their suitcases.

  Luis, though, had made it to Johannesburg, where he had met a man from his village working on a mine near Benoni. It was a small mine, and not as diligent as the bigger companies at sticking to the letter of the law when it came to hiring policies. Luis had soon proved his worth to the shift boss as a labourer, and his metallurgy qualification meant he had hope of a job above ground. Luis moved in with his friend from the village, taking a c
orner of a jerry-built shack in an informal settlement, the new South Africa’s euphemism for a shanty town.

  Things were good for a while. As well as sending money home to his wife and two-year-old son in Inhambane, Luis managed to save enough to buy himself some sheets of plywood and corrugated iron to start building his own shack.

  In 2008 trouble began brewing in the settlement. No one could remember what started it, but it spread like a bushfire through their community and others across the country. In what became known as the xenophobia riots, South Africans living in the informal settlements turned on their neighbours from other countries. Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Malawians and other Africans who had lived peacefully alongside the locals for so long suddenly found themselves the targets of mob violence. Some were beaten, others stabbed and burned in a spontaneous orgy of hatred that claimed the lives of more than sixty migrants across the country.

  Luis’s shack was burned to the ground, along with his meagre possessions, and his friend’s home was likewise razed. The mob had caught up with him as he’d tried to salvage his suitcase – they had dragged him into the dusty laneway and kicked him and beat him with sticks.

  As Luis listened to the screams of the environmental manager, he felt again the thud of boots on flesh. Wellington Shumba, the man they called ‘the Lion’ after his surname and his predatory nature, was the devil who ruled this underground hell, but he had given Luis a job when the mine in Benoni had made him redundant for exceeding his sick leave entitlement. It didn’t matter that Luis had spent weeks recovering from a broken arm and ribs and septicaemia in a church-run clinic and had been unable to get a sick note from a doctor sent to the mine. The mining company had heeded the call of the unions and the streets to employ fewer foreigners and more South Africans – even if they couldn’t do the jobs they were paid to do.

  Luis had used the last of his money to catch a bus to Barberton, and there he’d walked straight into the devil’s arms.

  5

  Kylie declined the complimentary champagne as she arranged herself in her business class seat on the Qantas Boeing. She put on her headphones and selected the news channel.

  She’d had barely enough time to get back to her flat and pack and make it to Sydney Airport in time, but flying to Perth tonight and connecting to the overnight SAA flight to Johannesburg would give her an extra working day in South Africa and a chance to get a handle on the situation with Loubser before the rest of her itinerary kicked in.

  She had plenty of work to do on the flight. On her lap was a folder of printouts of press clippings, extracts from reports, and the executive summary of the environmental impact statement for the proposed new coalmine near the Kruger National Park.

  Even though Global Resources had several interests in Africa, this was her first visit to the continent. It was also her first business trip in her new role. She wanted to hit the ground running.

  She had received the standard email from the company’s head of security about risks and dangers in Africa. Johannesburg seemed to have a justifiably bad reputation for violent crime and a couple of the South Africans in the office had put the frighteners on her by recounting tales of home invasions, carjackings, shootings and murders of friends of friends. Kylie wasn’t scared by the stories, but nor was she particularly looking forward to this trip.

  As well as getting to meet the people in the South African office who would now be reporting to her, she was going to get a full briefing on Global Resources’ operations and a visit to the site of the proposed new coalmine. The Eureka mine in the historic gold-mining town of Barberton in Mpumalanga Province would have been a one-day stopover, but Jan had told her to spend as much time there as she felt necessary, particularly if the situation with the missing environmental manager wasn’t resolved before she arrived. Jan wanted the men and women at the mine to know head office was concerned about their losses and the missing man.

  Kylie had dealt with death in the past. When she was managing the coalmine in the Hunter Valley, two miners had been crushed to death when the hanging wall had collapsed. She’d had to front the local media to give a statement and deal with the workplace safety investigators and police. Most difficult of all, she’d had to contact the wives of the two men who’d been killed. Kylie had gone home that night and cried her eyes out and polished off a bottle of wine, but the next day she’d visited the widows in person and later helped organise a fundraising dinner with the mine employees and the local community to ensure there was enough money for the children of both families to get the education their mothers expected.

  Mining was dangerous. Every man and woman who went underground knew that, and Kylie thought it wasn’t a bad thing if every man and woman in head office at least once in their life had to look into the crying eyes of a grieving spouse or parent or child of a dead miner. It made the risks real and meant decisions were taken less lightly.

  Kylie flicked through her folder to the latest figures on workplace accidents, injuries and fatalities in South Africa. She’d seen the figures before, but still exhaled through her teeth when she read them again. Numbers like this would be front page news in the West Australian or the Sydney Morning Herald, but the explanatory paragraph beneath the figures in the report pointed out that Global Resources had the lowest number and ratio of workplace fatalities per days worked of any mining company in South Africa. She wondered if the two deaths at Barberton two nights earlier would change that.

  Whatever. It wasn’t good enough being the best of a bad bunch. Kylie had her sights set on the top job and she wanted Global Resources to be a company where no one had to make the call to tell someone a loved one would not be coming home.

  Kylie flipped back to the itinerary her personal assistant, Sandy Hyland, had prepared for her. She circled a couple of things. The schedule had been prepared long before the latest disaster and still had her spending a night at the Lion Plains Lodge. The plan was that she and Cameron, and Chris Loubser if he hadn’t gone missing, would meet with the incumbent but strictly former owner, Tertia Venter.

  From what she recalled of the press clippings from the South African newspapers Kylie doubted they would be able to silence the woman, but it might be worth a try. As important as the new mine was, however, she knew that her first priority, and Cameron’s, would be the fate of Loubser; she didn’t want to be taking happy snaps of lions and elephants while there was a man down. There was a note in the file from Sandy saying that when they got to the reserve they would also probably meet Tumi Mabunda, the cousin of Musa the corporate communications man. Ironically, Tumi was head ranger at the lodge; the briefing said female black rangers were still a rarity in the male-dominated safari business and much had been made of Tertia Venter’s promotion of a woman from the local community to the head ranger position. Kylie didn’t consider herself an animal person at all and wondered what it would be like driving around all day looking for wildlife for a job. Musa advises his cousin is very much anti the GR mine proposal, her PA had further noted.

  Kylie shook her head as she leafed through the press clippings again. ‘Great,’ she said to herself, ‘so is most of the country.’

  Also in her folder was a printout of an email from Cameron McMurtrie that gave the latest on the investigation into the deaths of the security guard and trainee environmental officer, and efforts that had been made to find Chris Loubser. The police had been in attendance, but Cameron noted: As with previous incidents involving zama zamas the police have not been of great assistance. Most arrests of illegal miners in Eureka – and the rest of South Africa – are effected by mine security personnel, not police. The police lack the experience and will to venture into an unfamiliar environment. Permission is again sought to launch a rescue operation of our own.

  No way, Kylie thought. She would have a word to the police officer in charge when she got to Barberton. She had met plenty of men and a few women like Cameron before. They were miners through and through who had been ambitious and smart eno
ugh to make it into senior positions in mine management, yet they still harboured an us-and-them attitude when it came to head office. Things were no doubt compounded by the fact that Eureka was one of a trio of mines which had been owned by a smallish South African mining company that had recently been bought out by Global Resources. Cameron would have been beholden to the old owners and probably chaffed at having to report to foreigners – especially Australians. He would be tired and stressed at the loss of his men, which was understandable; but on other occasions when she’d faced Cameron in video conference meetings, or exchanged emails with him, she had detected an undercurrent of surliness and, she thought, misogyny.

  A flight attendant stopped and asked her if she wanted a drink and Kylie ordered an orange juice. Despite her gut feeling about Cameron, she would have to get used to working with him and he with her. She’d faced off with sexists before, and she wasn’t afraid to do it again. Also, he was about to move up a corporate rung himself. By the time she arrived at Barberton Jan would have contacted Cameron to tell him he was being promoted to South African director of new projects. One of his first duties would be to oversee the implementation of the new coalmine, and he would be working even closer with Kylie on that project.

  Kylie flipped through the file again to an article she wanted to read in full, an investigative piece on illegal mining from Mining Monthly. As controversial as her industry sometimes was in her native Australia she was learning the stakes in Africa were as high as the risks. She wanted more responsibility from Jan, but she had an uneasy feeling that the maelstrom she was about to walk into in South Africa could break her as easily as it could make her. She had fought all her working life to get to where she was and she savoured a challenge, but how many mining execs in Australia, she wondered, had ever had to deal with the fallout of lethal underground gun battles and a new mine in – on the verge of, she corrected herself – a national park? None, she reckoned. She would show them.