by Tony Park
After a few minutes Gideon stopped and Cameron crept up behind him, the shotgun raised in case the other man was about to try something. ‘It is here. In this old refuge chamber. This is where I drop the stuff off.’
‘And pick up the gold?’
‘I never smuggle gold.’
‘Whatever,’ Cameron said.
‘No, it is the truth. They say Wellington trusts no one but himself. He used to use donkeys, fit young men, to carry out the gold, but one of them tried to rob the Lion by swallowing some gold in a condom. Wellington caught the boy and slit open his stomach. They say he pulled the gold from him while he was still alive, then let him bleed to death.’
Cameron nodded in the dark. If Gideon was telling the truth it was good intelligence. With luck he might stumble across this Wellington. He would try to take him alive, but if not, this whole underground operation might fold because of the paranoia of its leader.
‘Who is there?’ a voice from the darkness said in Swazi, then added in English: ‘Freeze motherfucker.’
Cameron dropped to a crouch and backed up the tunnel. He melded his body with the side wall and hoped that if the man who had spoken turned on a lamp or a torch then his black clothing and blackened face would disguise him. He trained the shotgun on the sound of the voice.
‘It is me, Gideon.’
A light appeared as a green sun in Cameron’s field of vision, though it wasn’t as bright as Gideon’s miner’s lamp; perhaps a torch with failing batteries, Cameron thought. The light played briefly on Gideon’s face as the man confirmed his identity. ‘You are late. What happened?’
‘The mine boss, that white cunt McMurtrie, stopped the shift on the way down and searched everyone.’
Cameron smiled in the darkness.
‘Then why are you here? Why were you not caught?’
‘I had a doctor’s appointment and I was only working a half-shift today. I came down with one of the artisans, an electrician, and they did not search us.’
‘Hmm. What have you brought me?’
Gideon held out the SCSR container and the zama zama darted into the light of Gideon’s headlamp, then back out again. It was as if, Cameron thought, he was scared of the light, or perhaps blinded by it after having lived so long in the dark. The glimpse had been brief, but long enough for Cameron to make out the distinctive banana-shaped magazine of an AK-47 in the man’s hands. Cameron licked his lips.
The man checked the contents of the pack with the shielded light of his torch. The sound of his fingers greedily sifting through the contraband sounded like a rat’s nocturnal foraging. ‘This is all? What am I going to tell the Lion?’
Cameron strained to hear the conversation.
‘Perhaps, my brother,’ Gideon said after a pause, ‘you tell him nothing. Word will filter to him eventually of the search of the shift. No doubt you have the money from all of the zama zamas to pay for the whole shipment of stuff the miners were smuggling down before they got caught. Maybe you can give me your little bit of money that you contributed for your share and you can keep what I have brought.’
Cameron smiled again. He had to give Gideon credit. He was a fast and devious thinker and he’d walk out of the mine with some bucks in his pocket.
‘Maybe five hundred rand?’ Gideon said, filling the silence while the other man considered betraying his boss.
‘Maybe I’ll take you to Wellington now and explain to the Lion how you suggested cheating him.’
‘Four hundred?’ Gideon replied.
‘Three.’
‘Three-fifty,’ Gideon countered.
‘All right.’
Cameron listened as the notes were peeled off and the deal sealed. Gideon and the man exchanged muted goodbyes and Cameron backed further down the tunnel as he saw the beam of Gideon’s headlamp sweep towards him. Cameron stayed low as he moved, in case the zama zama decided to put a bullet in Gideon’s back and retrieve his three hundred and fifty rand.
Cameron retreated ahead of Gideon until they were back at the shaft. ‘Put your hands behind your back.’
‘Why?’ Gideon asked. ‘I’m not going anywhere. You told me I could wait here until you were finished, or until the security guys come looking for you.’
‘For some strange reason I just don’t trust you, Gideon.’ He brought the other man’s hands together and bound them with a cable tie he pulled from a pouch on his vest. He told Gideon to sit down and then zip-tied his ankles.
‘I’ll be back,’ Cameron said.
‘I doubt it, Schwarzenegger.’
*
The cage juddered to a halt. Kylie switched on her lamp and opened the door and got out. Something moved in the shadows and she caught her breath. She saw the man sitting with his back against the rock wall. ‘You’re Gideon.’
He glared back at her, then raised his feet so that she could see they were bound.
‘What happened?’
‘Ah, he has gone mad, that one.’
‘McMurtrie?’
‘Yes. He threatened to kill me because I said I would go to the police and tell them he is the middleman in the gold-smuggling operation.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Kylie said, even though the thought that Cameron might somehow be involved with the pirate miners had crossed her mind.
‘He fired me because I was going to expose him.’
Kylie wasn’t convinced. ‘If he’s involved with the zama zamas as you say, why did he bring you underground?’
‘He is the big man above ground – he doesn’t dirty himself with the work underground and he doesn’t know how to get to where the zama zamas are working; he needed me as a guide. Wellington takes the gold up to him and McMurtrie negotiates with the Arabs, and the one they call Mohammed. People like me are the ones who keep the zama zamas supplied with all they need. You know how big the problem is. Why do you think Global Resources loses so much money from this mine? McMurtrie will tell you it happens everywhere, but no mine is as lucrative for the zama zamas as Eureka.’
Kylie didn’t know what to believe. She still thought Gideon was lying to save his own skin, but what was Cameron up to, and why had he ignored her? He was acting like a guilty man. ‘Where is he now?’
‘Meeting with Wellington and discussing what they will do to me. McMurtrie wants to kill me, but he knows the Lion can use me underground as well. Either way I will be dead too soon. The zama zamas are dying down here in high numbers.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Gideon shrugged. ‘What are you going to do now?’
‘I’m going to find McMurtrie and hear him out.’
‘You’ll never find him without a guide, or the zama zamas will find you first. We haven’t been able to smuggle a whore down here for three months. Tobias stopped that traffic when the zama zamas moved too deep for them to be marched in via the old workings. You are in danger of being raped.’
She wondered if he was just playing her, making her think everything McMurtrie had told her was a fiction. But the suspicions still nagged at her. One thing Gideon was right about, however, was that she had no idea where this abandoned tunnel led to, or how to find Cameron. If Cameron was involved with the pirate miners she could bring down the syndicate if she could catch him colluding with this Wellington.
On the other hand, if Cameron was off on some one-man vigilante mission to bring down Wellington and rescue Chris Loubser, then he had deliberately ignored her wishes, and Jan’s, and gone behind her back. He had signed his own dismissal letter. What concerned her, however, was that if this was the case then she felt as though she had goaded him into it.
Kylie unbuttoned the pouch of the Leatherman Wave multi-tool she always wore on her belt. It was a useful gadget. She had heard of miners who had been trapped in rockfalls and had had to amputate their own hand or foot to free themselves and escape. She dropped to one knee, unfolded the blade and sliced through the cable tie around Gideon’s ankles. She grabbed his shirt by the collar and h
elped him get to his feet.
‘My hands.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t trust you, but take me to where I can find McMurtrie, and if you’re telling the truth, then I’ll see you get your job back and maybe even a reward.’
‘All right. I will show you the way.’
11
Chris Loubser sat at Wellington’s feet. The claustrophobia attacks were fewer and milder now, perhaps because he was so engrossed in his work.
So much of what he did for Global Resources was quality control – ensuring that the monitoring systems were employed correctly, and having water and air quality samples analysed to confirm what he usually already knew, that the company was in all cases sticking to the letter of the law in terms of environmental compliance and, in many cases, doing better than the legislation required. It was important work, but it was somewhat predictable and dull.
Occasionally he would pick up an errant reading and work with the operations people to find out how the contaminants had risen in the air in the mine or the water, and a plan would be made to fix whatever had caused the problem. Global Resources prided itself on its record of compliance, and its safety record.
But down here with the zama zamas it was different. Sure, they were criminals, but they were also human beings.
‘I know what’s killing your men,’ Chris said, tilting his head up to Wellington, who sat as his desk, a fold-out camping table. Chris’s back was against the side wall of the tunnel. He had also grown less afraid of Wellington, the Lion. He realised he was here for a reason, and as long as he did his job then Wellington would keep him alive. The realisation gave him a small measure of power.
‘Then tell me, what is it?’
‘Two things. The first is the silent killer, carbon monoxide. It’s colourless, odourless and is a by-product of the blasting operations in the stopes. The simple fact is that your men go into the stopes too soon after the blasting’s been done, and the unlucky ones are poisoned.’
Wellington nodded. ‘I know about carbon monoxide. I suspect it’s the same in the madala sides where I do my own blasting.’
Chris didn’t want to think what safety breaches he would find if he watched the zama zamas working with explosives. ‘You need to improve your ventilation to the madala side and to stop raiding the working stopes’ faces.’
‘It is an equation, Christiaan. I must balance the value of a worker with a guaranteed but risky haul from the working stopes, or putting more time into a safer operation in a disused working. Which would you choose?’
Chris rubbed his chin, wiping a trickle of sweat. He was acutely aware of his own body odour. Wellington, however, seemed not to smell. From the glimpses he caught in flickering candlelight or the occasional beam of a near-flat torch, Wellington’s overalls appeared as clean as could be expected underground, a crease running up each sleeve. He wondered if Wellington had a boy to do his laundry here underground. Chris shivered. ‘You know which I would choose.’
‘Human life means far more above ground, you think.’
‘I do.’
‘Well, you’re naive. It’s all about money in the end, here or up there.’
‘It won’t be about money if I don’t return to the surface. They will come looking for you. McMurtrie will take it personally.’
‘Hah! I’m not afraid of McMurtrie. He is a clawless lion.’
Chris reckoned differently. Koos, who worked in accounts, said Cameron had been in the recce commandos during the war in Angola. Chris sensed a strength and perhaps an anger in him that was cloaked in the niceties of modern management practices. In the old days, Chris thought, Cameron might have been the type of boss who ruled with his fists as well as his words.
‘What’s the second killer?’ Wellington asked.
‘You have a cholera outbreak on your hands. Your men live in their own filth and your drinking water must be contaminated. You could all die down here unless you clean up your act, literally.’
*
Cameron smelled sickly sweet tendrils of marijuana smoke. It reminded him of matric; his life before the army, sex with Tania in the cramped back seat of his Cortina. Fun.
He used the night-vision goggles to defuse the booby trap. This reminded him of the war, dicing with death. Carefully he eased the hand grenade from the old tinned mango can, his other hand ready to keep the pressure on the arming lever as it emerged. Holding the explosive, he took the short length of wire he had snipped from a discarded length he had found on the footwall and slid it into the holes where the pin had once been. The grenade now safe, he placed it in one of the pouches on his vest. It was just like closing on a SWAPO camp in Angola: every sense was alert, nerves stretched to snapping point, trying not to think about home.
He and Tania had to marry when she fell pregnant, and he had gone off to the border war and left her. When he had returned he had taken her and Jess to live in a mining village. He remembered Tania saying she would have liked to have studied journalism. How much, he wondered, had she hated her life, and for how long? It was too late to worry about such things.
The tip of the marijuana cigarette glowed like a lime green firefly in the washed-out world of the night-vision goggles. Cameron saw the face, momentarily illuminated and temporarily transported from the hellish life of the zama zama by the weed. The man was sitting, smiling, with his back against the side wall of the tunnel and Cameron also saw the flash suppressor of an AK-47. Through the smoke he smelled the man’s sweat. He crept forward.
Cameron slung his shotgun slowly and carefully across his back, and slid the hunting knife from the sheath tied upside down to the front of his combat vest. It was a long time since he’d drawn it. He knew he should have sharpened it before he left home, but hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.
He guessed men such as this one, who spent their lives in the darkness, had more highly developed senses of hearing and smell. If this one was a good sentry he would hear Cameron coming long before he could use the knife.
Cameron knelt, carefully, and picked up a small rock half the size of a golf ball. He threw it so that it passed the man and landed on the far side.
Instantly the joint was dropped in a mini shower of sparks. He heard the man reach for the AK-47, then the metallic click of the selector being moved. With no ambient light Cameron switched on the infra-red beam on the goggles. He saw the man’s back. He was looking down the tunnel.
Cameron picked up another rock and tossed it. It clattered in the area the man was looking.
‘Who’s there?’ he asked in Portuguese.
Cameron continued to kneel, his right hand tight around the hilt of the knife. After a few taut seconds the sentry’s shoulders relaxed and he lowered his AK a touch. The man turned back to where he had been waiting and started searching the ground, presumably for the cigarette he had abandoned.
Cameron moved in, as swift and silent as a predatory big cat. He reached around with his left hand, smothered the man’s mouth and brought the blade to his neck.
‘Lower your rifle, slowly, or I will gut you,’ Cameron whispered in Portuguese. He had learned to speak the language prior to deploying to Angola which, like Mozambique where this zama zama probably came from, was a former Portuguese colony.
The man tried to speak and Cameron clamped harder, and pressed the blade tight enough to draw blood. The man lowered his weapon. ‘Speak and it will be the last sound you make.’
‘Please don’t kill me,’ the man whimpered as Cameron removed his hand from his mouth to take the AK-47 from him.
‘I said be quiet. Down on your face.’
Cameron kneeled on the man’s back and cable-tied his hands behind him. He kicked the man’s legs apart and knelt between them. He brought his knife up to the man’s genitals, pressing them through the sweaty fabric of his pants, and leaned close to the sentry’s ear. ‘Where is Wellington?’
‘Please …’
Cameron pushed the knife harder.
‘He ha
s his office in an old refuge chamber.’
‘Where?’
‘Go two hundred paces then turn right. Then one hundred and turn left.’
‘Any more sentries?’
‘No.’
Cameron pushed harder.
‘No!’ he hissed.
‘All right.’
‘Where is the white man, Chris Loubser? Is he alive?’
‘He is. He is often with the Lion. They talk,’ the sentry said.
Cameron brought the man’s ankles back together then cable-tied them. He reached into a pouch and brought out a roll of duct tape. He tore off a strip with his teeth and lifted the man’s head.
‘Wait.’
‘What is it?’ Cameron asked.
‘If you find Wellington, kill him, please, senhor. Otherwise the Lion will kill me, and my family, for failing in my duty.’
Cameron gagged the man with tape and removed the magazine from the AK-47 and put it in one of his pouches. He cocked the weapon and let the round in the chamber fly into the blackness. He couldn’t carry two weapons so thirty metres along the tunnel he laid the rifle down and continued on. He thought about Jess, and what the sentry had just said.
*
Luis supervised a team of four zama zamas who were each cranking empty gas bottles that had been turned into mini ball mills, grinding gold-bearing ore that had already been crushed to a workable size with heavy hammers and an old lorry axle.
Luis thought about his wife, Miriam, and how he must find a way to get word to her, to stop her crossing the Kruger Park with their son Jose. He’d had a nightmare during his last period of sleep – he had no concept of day or night any more, only exhaustion and restless, hallucinatory snatches of semiconsciousness. She had been running to him, through long yellow grass, Jose at her heels. He had taken a step or two towards her, his arms wide to receive her and his child. There was a deep, guttural growl that resonated in his chest and in the next instant Miriam and Jose vanished from sight.
He knew that many of the mahambane never made it to South Africa. But as hard as Luis tried, he could see no way out of his predicament. If he was able to convince Wellington to let him go, just for a week or two, to visit his wife, then he knew she would never let him return to his criminal existence. Wellington would miss him, but he doubted the Lion would pursue him to Inhambane on the Indian Ocean. He might escape the man’s wrath, but he would be back where he started, with no job and no money. If he stayed underground Miriam would risk her life and the life of his child to come and find him. Even if she did survive the journey, what would become of her once she was here?
