The Prey

by Tony Park

  *

  Luis sat with his back to the rock wall of the tunnel and sacrificed some of the precious power in the batteries in his cheap plastic torch to re-read the letter from his wife, Miriam. He wished he could call her, but he couldn’t risk escaping to the surface. There was too much work for him to do.

  He wanted to reach out to her, to touch her, and to tell her to stay right where she was.

  I miss you, Luis. The words made him bring a knuckle to his mouth and he bit down on the blackened, dirt-encrusted skin, tasting the chemicals of his trade in the dust on his hand. He knew he was killing himself through exposure to dangerous substances and dust, poor nutrition and slavishly hard work; he was trying to make a life for his family, but what sort of a life was this?

  I cannot bear not knowing where you are, or if you are safe. We read of accidents, of people killed in the work you are doing. She didn’t know he was a zama zama now. Why can’t you tell me the name of the mine you are working on? At least then I could call the shift boss, or email you.

  He was too ashamed to tell his wife, who might one day tell his son, that he was a criminal. Luis knew he was running out of excuses. It was implausible that a man with an honest job in a real mine could supply his wife with nothing better than a nondescript Barberton post office box as a form of contact. If he was a legitimate metallurgist at Eureka he would have an email account, a cellphone, a shared room in a dorm, or even a small house in the village or a shack in an informal settlement. Instead, he lived like a rat in a hole in the ground for months on end. It was ninety-seven days since he’d last seen daylight.

  I want to bring Jose to South Africa and be with you. Unless I hear from you by the end of this month, we are coming. All my love, Miriam.

  No! He turned off the torch and put it in the pocket of his raggedy overalls. In the dark he folded the letter and brought it to his lips and kissed it. No! It would be madness for her to join the mahambane and walk to South Africa. If the thieves did not rob or rape her, then the lions might devour her and his son.

  Luis rested his chin on his chest, the bristles soaking up a little of the sweat that slicked his skin. He tried to keep himself clean as best as he could with the limited water they could tap off from the mine’s underground lines, but still the sour smell of his body offended him. Luis was trapped in this hot, stinking hell, and he only hoped he could live long enough to see his wife and child again.

  Men were dying underground. Fatalities weren’t unusual among the zama zamas, but the current numbers were. This past week six men had died of illness; Luis had helped carry the bodies of two of them to the shaft between shifts so that the legal miners would find them and get rid of them. Last week it was four and three before that. The victims he had seen had all been fouled with copious smelly diarrhoea; the eyes were sunken and the skin on their fingers had wrinkled as though they had reached old age within just a few days.

  Luis had overheard Wellington scheming with his lieutenant to kidnap an environmental officer, the man they now held, to inspect the areas where the pirate miners worked and slept, and to test the air in case they were being poisoned. Luis thought the men might be suffering from cholera; a Zimbabwean he worked with claimed he had seen similar symptoms in outbreaks in his country. The man was too nervous to approach the boss with his suspicion; when Luis had tried, Wellington had dismissed him and told him to go back to his work and mind his own business. As a precaution, though, Luis had started boiling water to drink and had ordered his underlings to do the same.

  Whatever was killing the zama zamas, Luis hoped the unfortunate man Wellington had taken could help them find a cause and a treatment, and that no more blood would be shed. Word had already spread that two men from above ground had been killed in the gunfight and that would surely bring retribution.

  *

  Cameron went back to the mine after seeing Beauty Tshabalala. There was no news from below ground and no ransom demand for Chris’s life. The longer they went without hearing anything, the more worried Cameron became for the man’s life.

  The frustration grew within him like a fast-spreading tumour as he tried to busy himself with the day-to-day paperwork and a host of problems that were inconsequential compared to the deaths of two men and the life of a missing one. It was dark outside as he finished writing a proposal for funding for a contract marketing manager for the Imvoti Jewellery project, which he would hand to Kylie when she arrived from Australia; he would talk her into hiring Beauty. He tried snatching an hour or two’s sleep when Casper, still pleading to be allowed to mount a rescue mission, relieved his vigil. At midnight he sent Casper and Roelf home, knowing there was nothing they could do, and that in the unlikely event he dozed off, the phone would wake him. At seven in the morning, when his deputy, Hein Coetzee, arrived, Cameron told him there had been no word from below ground overnight.

  ‘I’m going home for an hour or two, Hein, to make breakfast for Jessica, and pack her lunch before she leaves for school.’

  ‘Take a few hours, get some sleep, boss,’ Hein said. ‘I’ve got things under control here.’

  ‘I’ll be back at nine.’

  He could have escaped the chores – Petty, their maid, could have made breakfast and Jessica would have happily told him that at seventeen she was perfectly capable of looking after herself – but Cameron knew his daughter needed something approaching stability in her life.

  He parked his Hilux in the driveway, not bothering with the garage remote. He wouldn’t be home long. He got out and unlaced his boots on the stoep. He didn’t know why he was bothering. Tania, his wife, was gone and he didn’t give a fuck if he traipsed dirt through the hallway. Petty would clean it up. Force of habit, he guessed.

  ‘Dad, is that you?’ his daughter called from the study down the hallway.

  ‘Howzit, my girl, what are you doing up out of bed so early?’

  He walked into the study just in time to see her closing the laptop. ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘Nothing much? Were you online?’

  ‘Dad, it was only Facebook. Just some friends from school is all.’

  ‘Facebook.’ He knew of it, of course, but wasn’t on it. Anything to do with the internet made him want to punch a hole in the wall.

  Jessica shrugged. ‘You can’t hate it if you don’t know how it works, Dad.’

  ‘I’m not interested in the bloody internet. I get enough of computers at work,’ he snapped, and instantly felt bad for doing so.

  She glared at him, as though she was going to throw something smart back at him. She was a clever kid – took after her mother. And Cameron could see Tania in her face: the fierce set of the mouth, the cute turned-up nose; the eyes. He couldn’t read his daughter any better than he’d been able to read his wife. Jessica seemed angry at him often and he couldn’t blame her, though he was doing his best to be strong for them both.

  Jessica got up off the chair, came to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, burying her face in his dusty uniform shirt. ‘Dad, do I have to go to school today? I feel … sick.’

  He held her out. ‘Yes, my girl, I’m afraid you do. You can’t hide from the world.’ He felt himself choke up, so he coughed. ‘Now, now, look at this. You’ve got mine dirt all over your pyjamas.’ Maybe she wasn’t angry, just sad. He didn’t know.

  ‘I don’t care about my pyjamas. Why did she leave us, Dad? What did we do wrong?’

  He looked her in the eyes. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong, Jessie. It was me. It was between me and your mother.’

  Jessica nodded and looked down.

  They’d been through this, or variations of it, countless times over the past two months since Tania had left. He knew it was tough on Jessica – dammit, he knew only too well how tough it was – but he had to lead by example, show her that she had to keep on getting on with life and couldn’t wallow.

  He drew her into him and held her tight. He couldn’t imagine life without her, which was why he found it so hard to
understand what Tania had done. He had seen a few marriages and relationships on the mine break up – plenty in fact. Usually, but not always, it was the man screwing around with some young poppie, or some other oke’s wife. Or sometimes a miner’s lonely wife or girlfriend looking for some action with someone from a different shift. It took two to tango, so they said, but normally the woman took the children in a split. Plenty of other men only saw their kids every second weekend, but Tania wouldn’t even get that – she was in bloody America.

  America.

  It was almost inconceivable, but it had happened. Tania’s timing, of course, had been impeccably terrible – he really didn’t need to be dealing with all of this now, not with Loubser missing and the families in mourning and the unions clamouring for his head.

  ‘Dad?’

  He said nothing. He eyeballed the laptop, as though it was a murder weapon. It was small. An inconsequential jumble of processors and plastic and cheap components soldered and stuck together in some Asian sweatshop. They’d paid a small fortune for it three years ago and now it was probably worthless: obsolete, slow to process data, memory too full. Just like him.

  To think such a small item could have been the cause of all of these problems. That it led to Tania getting on an aeroplane – the ticket paid for by that man – and flying away from her husband and her only daughter.

  ‘I need more,’ was all she’d said to him.

  He felt Jess tug at his arms and he released her from his hold. ‘Okay, Dad … I’ll go to school.’

  She was being reasonable and mature. It made him proud.

  ‘That’s the way, my girl.’ He attempted a smile. ‘It’s probably about time we got a new one of those, eh?’ He gestured towards the laptop.

  She smiled up at him. ‘It’s a vrot old one. I wish she’d taken it with her when she left.’

  He ran a hand through his hair, felt the grit from the mine. He needed to shower and change. Bloody Kylie Hamilton was arriving on the Seagull express in a few hours. ‘I have to go to Nelspruit today to pick up someone from the airport. Things are a bit busy at work.’

  ‘I know.’ She laid a hand on his arm. ‘I saw the news.’

  He put his arm around her.

  She looked up at him again. She was growing up so quickly, but she would always be his little girl. ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Even if we fight, like me and mum did,’ she cuffed away a tear, ‘please don’t leave, OK?’

  He squeezed her shoulder. ‘Never, kiddo. Never.’

  He led her to the doorway and watched as she disappeared up the corridor towards her room. He circled back to the desk and felt suddenly very angry. He brought a huge fist down onto the laptop and then swept it roughly across the desk, sending it crashing to the floor. He kicked it once, for good measure.

  He looked up to see Petty in the doorway, looking at him apprehensively. She looked down at the computer on the floor. ‘Eish, can we fix it, boss?’

  He shook his head. It wasn’t the computer’s fault his wife had left him, and Jessica’s mother had abandoned her. He thought he’d been a good husband; he’d never cheated. Jess and Tania had fought like cats, but it wasn’t the kid’s fault and nor was Tania the only one to blame. Tania hated their life. The mine provided them a good wage, a good house, stability, a cocoon from some of the bigger problems people in South Africa had to face. And maybe that was the problem. It was another world, living and working on the mine, and it just wasn’t for Tania.

  ‘No, it’s finished, Petty.’

  6

  Wellington looked down at the dishevelled figure at his feet. He felt no pity for the Afrikaner.

  Wellington Shumba had worked the mines since he was seventeen and had risen to the position of shift boss in his native Zimbabwe, until the mine he worked for at Bindura closed. The owners had been negotiating to sell the mine to a Canadian company, but the imbecilic government had become greedy and insisted that all overseas companies wanting to invest in Zimbabwe had to be fifty-one per cent locally owned. The Canadians had got cold feet and walked away from the deal. The owners had had to sell their gold through the government’s foreign exchange bureau and had been paid so little for it that the mine had stopped being viable. Wellington and hundreds of other miners had been laid off and he’d made his way south, joining the three million-strong Zimbabwean diaspora.

  ‘On your feet,’ Wellington barked at Loubser.

  The man looked up at him and Wellington, who wore a miner’s lantern, saw the streaks of tears that cut the grit on the man’s face. Pathetic, he thought. He wouldn’t last a week here as a zama zama. Wellington nodded to Phineas, his trusted lieutenant and, like Wellington, a Shona from Zimbabwe. ‘Keep an eye on this mukiwa while we walk. It’s time for the scared little white boy to go to work.’

  Wellington had expected more of the man. The Afrikaners he knew were tough men. This one, however, had the look of a frightened girl the moment before she was taken. Wellington reached out to pull Loubser to his feet. The man recoiled in terror. Wellington laughed, deep and loud. ‘Come with me and I’ll introduce you to the Professor.’

  Wellington led, shining a path for them through his underground kingdom with the lamp on his hard hat. He may have been a shift boss when he’d still had a job in Zimbabwe, and a lowly miner again when he’d crossed the Limpopo illegally into South Africa from his homeland, but down here he was the mine captain, the ruler of this netherworld.

  And he loved it.

  He made more money in a month, leading his workforce of two hundred and twenty-three zama zamas, than he could in a year if he was working for Global Resources, or Anglo Gold Ashanti or Harmony. Above ground he kept a house and a shiny black BMW Z4 at a house in Emjindini township, near Barberton. When he travelled across the border to Mozambique to sell his gold he stayed at the best hotels in Maputo. He drank VSOP cognac when he partied and had women waiting for him in different countries whenever he surfaced.

  He was due back in the daylight within the next few days, but he could not leave while they still held the Afrikaner captive. Loubser would have to prove his worth to them, and if he refused to play along, or if he had some kind of nervous breakdown, then Wellington would be faced with the choice of ransoming him sooner than expected, or killing him and dumping his body at the shaft before mine security came looking for him.

  The deaths of the other two mine employees concerned him. They should not have happened, but he was ready to deal with the retaliation if and when it came.

  ‘Phineas, have you prepared the defences?’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Phineas said as they walked. He prodded Loubser with the barrel of his AK-47.

  ‘Good.’ Wellington had ordered booby traps set at the entrance to the old tunnel where the two mine employees had been killed. He’d had Phineas place hand grenades, with their pins removed, in old fruit cans to stop their detonation levers springing open. Trip wires had been tied around the ends of the grenades and then anchored to bolts in the side walls opposite the cans. Anyone walking into a wire would pull the grenade from its can, freeing the spring-loaded lever and detonating the explosives. As an added precaution they were moving their main operation. It was time for him to find a new location in any case as this one was fouled with waste and men were sick and dying. He had scores, if not hundreds of kilometres of abandoned workings to choose from, and he moved regularly to keep the mine security people confused.

  ‘What are you going to do with me?’ Loubser asked, but when he turned to look for an answer Phineas jabbed him harder.

  ‘Eyes front,’ Phineas said.

  ‘That’s a good question. It really depends on how much use you are to me. If you help me sort out some of my environmental problems I will let you live, let you return to the surface. Of course, I may extract a price from Global Resources for the privilege of having you back again. I know they’ll pay.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ Loubser said. ‘The Australians are ru
nning us now.’

  Wellington laughed. ‘It’s good you can joke. That means you are feeling more comfortable, yes?’

  Loubser shrugged.

  ‘Give me the rifle,’ Wellington said to Phineas.

  Wellington took the AK and slid back the cocking handle a little with his left hand, checking there was a round chambered. ‘Keep walking,’ he said to Loubser.

  Phineas called ahead of them into the gloom.

  ‘Mangwanani Baba,’ came a voice from the darkness.

  ‘Professor, bom dia. At least I think it’s dia, no?’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s day or night, boss.’

  ‘Luis, my professor, this is Christiaan Loubser, environmental manager for Global Resources, up where the sun still shines, or perhaps it’s the moon at this time of day.’

  Wellington played the light of his headlamp over both men and they gave small nods to each other. Wellington saw how the professor flinched when he’d used his real name. ‘Luis Domingues Correia doesn’t like me using his real name, Chris – you don’t mind if I call you Chris, do you? Luis is worried that if you are released you will reveal his identity to the mine security people. However, I want you to remember his name, and to feel free to tell the authorities above ground when you get there who you’ve met working down here. I want Luis, Phineas and the rest of my happy band of brothers to be too scared to surface again for good. I want them to know that this is where they belong; this is the only place they can work from now on.’

  Luis looked down at his scuffed boots. Wellington had learned a lot about men, working on the mines, both legally and illegally. He knew Luis hated being here, hated the fact that he’d had to become a criminal to survive. It would have gone against the grain of everything his Catholic, Portuguese-speaking parents had drummed into him. Wellington used that shame – compounded it – to keep Luis here. And, to be fair, he paid him well to keep him loyal. He knew that Luis, if pushed too far, might just find a way out of the mine for good, and walk back to the beach in Mozambique where he came from. Wellington couldn’t afford that. Like a legitimate mine boss he had superiors, and he had production quotas to meet. He wouldn’t have a hope of delivering what was required without the Professor’s technical and scientific know-how.