The Prey

by Tony Park

  ‘Sorry for the delay,’ he mumbled.

  ‘No, not at all. Protocols are protocols. But how can a zama zama even get onto the site?’

  Cameron drove the short distance to the mine office, gesturing to the perimeter fence. ‘Take a look. It’s a big area to secure and it’s not a prison. Those big hills you can see behind the mine are covered in bush and stretch all the way to Swaziland. I’ve got armed response security patrols and two dog teams, but there are too many tracks leading to the mine to patrol. We concentrate on the perimeter but as fast as we find and repair cuts in the fences or burrows underneath them, the zama zamas find a new way onto the mine. If you want to double or quadruple my security budget I can put up searchlights and machine-gun towers.’

  ‘I’ll review it.’

  ‘I was joking,’ he said as he pulled into the manager’s parking spot, adjacent to the single-storey administration building. ‘You know, we could make this place like Polsmoor Prison but that wouldn’t stop the zama zamas, it would only slow them down.’

  ‘Why is that?’ She got out of the car and he answered her as they walked to his office.

  ‘Even if we stop them getting in and out of the mine site via the perimeter fence, they can still come and go underground. There are mines everywhere here, some dating back a century. Many of the mines are interconnected underground, sometimes because you had one mine taking over a neighbour and deliberately breaking through, and sometimes it just happens – we’ll accidentally stumble on an old mine we didn’t know about. You can walk for kilometres underground. We bulldoze old shafts shut if we can find them, but there’s always a way into and out of a mine. Sometimes the guys use old escape ladders, and sometimes just ropes knotted together.’

  ‘You’re saying you can’t do anything – that the situation’s hopeless and we just have to live with the theft?’

  He opened the door for her and the airconditioning beckoned them inside. Cameron said hello to the receptionist, Ilse, and introduced her to Kylie, which saved him from having to answer her barbed question, at least until after they’d asked for their drinks – black coffee for him, green tea for her. Cameron saw the perplexed look cross Ilse’s face and wondered how long it would take her to get someone to drive to town to get green tea. If such a thing even existed in Barberton.

  Cameron introduced Kylie to Hannelie, then showed her into his office and shut the door. He sat down behind his desk and she took a seat opposite him. He put his elbows on the blotter and clasped his hands together. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes? Just like that, you’ve admitted defeat?’

  He sat back in his chair. ‘We know the gold stolen from mines in South Africa finds its way overseas to Dubai and Athens mostly. You know how much gold is worth these days. We estimate Eureka alone is losing about half a million US dollars’ worth of gold every month. We can’t afford to pay our security guys and our miners who are supplying the zama zamas as much as the criminals can.’

  ‘Yes, I read that some of your employees are involved as well. It’s hard to believe.’

  Cameron felt his face flush, but simply shook his head. ‘Not really. Some of them are related to the criminal miners. Because we’re going deeper with the new shaft our workings aren’t as accessible from old mines, so the illegals are bribing our guys to take supplies down to them.’

  ‘So what, we just accept it?’ She looked incredulous.

  Cameron sighed. ‘We do what we can. We carry out spot checks; we run undercover operations like the one I’d organised with Paulo Barrica; and we used to send armed security down into the mine when we located a zama zama work site, until you risk-averse people in Australia halted our operations. Like I said, we close illegal access points when we find them, but as long as there’s a demand there’s going to be men who will take the risk to work down there.’

  She folded her arms and looked at him, then around his office, her gaze stopping at an old painting Jessica had done when she was a little kid, which he’d framed.

  ‘Cameron, we definitely need to review your security, but there’s something else I need to talk to you about first.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Jan wanted me to tell you in person – you’re being promoted.’

  He nodded. ‘For having two men killed on my watch and another disappear, and for not being able to control security at my mine, as you’ve just inferred.’

  She frowned and he knew she was probably thinking the same thing. ‘We want to make you head of special projects for southern Africa. You’ll be overseeing planning for all the new mines, and you’ll be based in Johannesburg.’

  Shuffling papers. He had known it was coming when Jan had asked him to oversee planning for the coalmine at Lion Plains and he’d told himself he was ready for it, but still it felt like a kick in his ribs while he was down after a punch that had nearly knocked him out. He’d probably have a secretary, he thought, but no staff. The environmental work and the real planning and development was done by others, and by consultants. His job would be to report to Jan – via this Kylie woman – on the progress of others. He would become a mail man. No, worse than that, a mailroom boy, putting things in electronic envelopes and posting them to others. There would be travel – to tsetse fly-ridden wastelands such as Kafue, and trips back to the lowveld to address public meetings full of irate farmers and game-park owners who hated everything he and Global Resources stood for.

  ‘It’s because of Tania, my wife,’ he said.

  Kylie shook her head. ‘Cameron, your personal life is none of our business. This is –’

  He held up a hand to silence her. He was beyond arguing with her, but it needed to be said, so that she knew the truth behind Jan’s decision. ‘Whether he’s told you or not, Jan is right. He knows how the workers and the middle managers here are talking: they think my mind hasn’t been on the job since my wife walked out on me They blame me for the deaths, and rightly so. Maybe you are right, with your outsider’s simplistic view of things. Maybe there was more I could have done to stop the zama zamas and maybe I shouldn’t have sent Paulo down the mine with those men.’

  She folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them.

  He didn’t need to hear it from her. He’d been humiliated by a disembodied American on a computer who’d typed the words his wife wanted to hear in a cesspit of a chatroom. The man wouldn’t have had to promise Tania much to get her to leave. She was sick of Barberton and sick of him. All he knew was mining. He had tried not to think about it, but he thought she had slept around. Not with people on his staff: probably men in town. Cameron clenched his fist.

  ‘It is a promotion,’ Kylie said, breaking into his thoughts. ‘More money, a new start for you and your daughter. How old is she?’

  He glared at her, then looked up at the ceiling. He didn’t want her pity. He hated that he couldn’t tell her and Jan to go fuck themselves, to stick their desk job up their arses. All he’d wanted from his career, since the day he’d started work underground, was to be the boss of a successful goldmine. He’d made it, and instead of bringing him happiness it had cost him his marriage.

  Cameron looked out the window at the headgear of the mine, the tall concrete and steel tower that shielded the winder and the cables that lowered his workers down and brought ore up. He thought of the men as part of his family. And two had been killed and one was missing.

  He looked at her again and saw she was smart enough not to push it further with him. He knew he’d sounded churlish and childish. He was losing all that made him who he was, but Cameron suddenly knew what he had to do, before he left Barberton for the new desk job. He could never come back, but he could leave it a better place.

  ‘You come over here and you can’t understand how I can turn a blind eye to the theft that goes on here,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not saying that.’

  ‘No, but you’re thinking that, and you’re not all wrong. I’ve done what I can to improve security, but I’ve also walked
a tightrope. I’ve compromised to try to keep the peace and save the company money. You think we’re a bunch of vigilantes, but the truth is I could have done more. I could have sent more armed security guys down to the madala side workings, but there would have been more bloodshed – our people and theirs. I probably would have had a revolt of my own workers, as well. Plenty of them have a stake in the zama zamas’ operations.’

  She nodded. ‘Well, it’ll be someone else’s problem now that you’re being promoted.’

  That cut him more than anything else she could have said. ‘Someone else’s problem’ – like he was walking away from the years of theft and the deaths of good men, turning his back on them.

  *

  Chris forced himself to concentrate on his notes to keep his fear at bay.

  He worked by the light of a torch whose batteries were nearly dead. He’d asked for his hard hat and lamp, which had been confiscated from him when he’d been taken captive, but Wellington had laughed, saying he didn’t want him being able to find his way out. Chris wondered if he could have found his way out. He’d been led to more than half-a-dozen different work sites, sometimes with the terror-inducing sack tied over his head again.

  Chris was now working for Wellington, whether he liked it or not, and it seemed his life depended on what he was able to come up with. The chief pirate wanted to know what was poisoning so many of his men. It could have been a number of things, Chris thought. The men were going into the unmonitored stopes before the toxic gases had cleared, and those processing the ore were exposed to dangerous levels of mercury, but Chris already knew what had killed the men in the last three weeks: cholera and carbon monoxide poisoning. While he was here, though, he would conduct as many tests as he could to find out where the areas of greatest risk were for carbon monoxide, and how sanitation and dirty water supplies could be improved to halt the cholera outbreak. The work kept his fear at bay – just.

  He was currently in a stope with Phineas and the Mozambican metallurgist they called ‘the Professor’. He’d been given back the daypack he’d gone underground with, once it had been thoroughly searched. He knew it had been gone through, not only because everything he’d packed neatly had been rudely stuffed back in, but also because the spare Leatherman tool he kept in the front pocket was missing. He had no weapon to fight back with or to use in an escape bid. What was the point, anyway; these rats would be on him before he found his way back to the shaft.

  ‘Luis?’ Chris called out.

  The Professor moved from the darkness into the cone of Chris’s torch. ‘Sim? Yes?’

  Chris followed Luis, who seemed at ease moving in the half-light and the shadows cast by Phineas’s lamp behind them. Chris tried to calm himself by taking note of their progress – which way they turned when they came to junctions, and to make note of landmarks. These were precious few, but he noticed bits of abandoned machinery and tools lying where they had last functioned.

  ‘Do you want to be down here?’ he whispered to Luis.

  Luis half glanced over his shoulder and shook his head.

  ‘Hey, keep quiet. No talking unless I tell you,’ Phineas barked.

  There were two soft beeps. Luis held his watch, a cheap digital, close to his face and pressed a button which made it beep again, and the tiny screen lit up. ‘Chris, cover your ears and open your mouth.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Blasting,’ Luis said.

  Chris was about to ask what was going on when the whole tunnel around them shook. A wall of dust raced up the working and the following shockwave knocked Chris to his knees. His ears rang and he felt like he’d been punched in the chest. When he took a breath he sucked in a lungful of dust, then coughed. ‘Jislaik!

  Chris felt a hand under his arm, lifting him.

  He was vaguely aware of someone whispering at him. Luis moved so he was face to face with Chris and mouthed the word ‘blasting’. Chris got to his feet and patted his overalls. Clouds of dust erupted from his clothes and hung in the air. Luis held his watch up so Chris could see it and pressed the light button again.

  It was the end of a shift of legitimate miners and the charges had just been detonated. Chris spat grit from his mouth and took out a multi-gas meter and a dust monitoring pump from his pack. The meter measured oxygen, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and methane, and the pump was normally worn by a random sample of miners during a legal operation’s eight-hour shift. He knew already his instruments would confirm just how unsafe the air was around them.

  Phineas put down his AK-47 and rested it against the side wall. He took out a box of matches and Chris drew a sharp breath and winced at the flare as Phineas struck a light and lit the ring on a gas cooktop attached to a Cadac bottle. Chris exhaled; it was almost suicidal to light a match so soon after a blast and so close to its origin. Phineas put a battered saucepan of water on the blue flame.

  ‘Tea,’ he said.

  Chris shook his head. Work hadn’t stopped because of him. It was to be expected. He wondered if that meant they thought he was dead. In all reality, the way these guys worked he probably would be before long.

  8

  Kylie adjusted the plastic strap at the back of her hard hat, then tested and attached her lamp. She had brought her own overalls and work boots, but not her hat as it was too bulky for her luggage. ‘All set,’ she said to Cameron.

  He stared at her a moment and she thought she detected the slightest shake of his head. Fuck him, she thought. There were plenty of women working underground these days, even in South Africa. This was no longer a man’s game.

  They joined a line of mine workers shuffling through the gate into the steel cage. Below them were two more decks, with six men in each. It would take them four and a half minutes to descend the fourteen hundred metres to the lower workings of the Eureka goldmine.

  All the men she passed nodded or said, ‘Good afternoon, madam’, which she thought was nice but faintly ridiculous. She wanted to say, ‘Call me Kylie, that’s what all the blokes on the mines do back home’, but she thought it might be insulting in some way. In fact, when she rode a cage down into an Australian mine, most of the time the workers didn’t even acknowledge her presence, such was the inverse snobbery of the workplace culture in Australia when someone from ‘head office’ visited a mine. Kylie missed the days when she, like Cameron, had run a mine of her own and the workers really were happy to see her and greet her on her regular underground visits.

  She and Cameron moved to the edge of the cage and filed in with four other men. The miners seemed more slight and wiry than big and burly. Some looked painfully thin and she wondered how many of the Global Resources employees around her were HIV positive. From her briefing papers she had learned the infection rate in the general population in South Africa was around ten per cent. Among the mining workforce, in the fifteen to forty-nine year old demographic, it was estimated at double that. The company encouraged its employees in South Africa to get tested and to know their HIV status. Cameron, she knew, had instituted an incentive program whereby employees received a ticket in an internal lottery every time they had an AIDs test, and stood to win cellphones, televisions and cash prizes. At the end of each year one lucky worker won a pickup truck; lucky, that is, if he or she also tested negative.

  The cage closed and Kylie felt the oddly familiar crush of muscled bodies against her. The banksman sent a signal to the hoist driver and the brakes were released. The floor dropped and Kylie experienced the same mix of excitement, trepidation and contentment she did every time she went underground. She loved it down here, as she watched the cut rock wall of the shaft flash past her eyes. She reckoned that if she hadn’t been accepted into university to study engineering she might have been just as happy being an electrician or a welder or any other job that could have taken her to work in a mine. She had noticed four females getting into the cage. Yes, it could be a boorish, blokey, sexist and bigoted working environment, and it was hot and dusty and dangerous, but there
was something cocooning, she thought – comforting even – about being in the embrace of the earth. And she liked the fact she had cut it in this hard world of men and machines.

  The cage stopped abruptly, sending Kylie’s tummy jarring up against her rib cage. Her flinch was instinctive; they were nowhere near deep enough yet. There was movement in the darkness all around her. Men were fidgeting and bending in the darkness. ‘Hey!’ An elbow dug into her back and she felt someone’s bony butt press into her thigh. ‘What’s going on?’

  Cameron snorted. ‘You’ll see.’

  She didn’t like surprises, or someone lauding it over her with knowledge of something. When she asked a subordinate a question she expected an answer, not ‘You’ll see’. There was the clang of things dropping on the steel floor of the cage. Men whispered to each other rapidly from the other cages below them. There was more movement and bustling in the blackness. A motor whirred and the cage jerked and started to rise.

  ‘We’re going back to the surface?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Kylie wanted to know what was going on but she couldn’t demand an answer of Cameron with all these workers pressed around them. She didn’t want him to lose their respect by being bullied by her, and she didn’t want to display her own ignorance of procedures any more than she already had.

  Kylie felt an elbow in her ribs as a man fussed next to her in the dark. ‘Hey, watch out.’ There was a muttered apology and more whispering as more men in the cage appeared to be fidgeting. When they returned to daylight Kylie was amazed to see glimpses of dark skin as the man two across from her zipped up his overall shirt. He looked away from her. A man next to her was trying, without much success, to fight the crush of bodies to bend down and put his boots back on. What the hell was going on here?