The Prey

by Tony Park

  ‘That’s just what I thought. She is alive, you know where she is, and you’re going to bargain your way out. That suits us just fine.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Finish zipping your skirt and put your Jimmy Choos on, Cinderella. Time for you to go to the fucking ball.’

  Kylie Hamilton draped a towel over her gun and dug it into the small of Sindisiwe’s back. Sindisiwe heard the resolve in the Australian woman’s voice and doubted she would be able to talk her into handing over the gun. It was ignominious, being taken like this, but she could negotiate with them. As much as she had enjoyed the money and the sex that Wellington provided, it looked like it was time to cut her losses.

  Cybele was set in a sprawling forest of eucalypt trees. The Australian motioned towards a Corolla sedan. The rear door was opened from inside and when she climbed in she saw Cameron McMurtrie, dressed in miner’s overalls.

  ‘Colonel.’

  ‘Cameron.’

  ‘It’s time for you to start talking, Sindisiwe, or we’re going into the woods and you’re not coming back.’

  ‘So I’ve been told.’

  ‘What happened to Wellington?’

  ‘He escaped from custody.’

  ‘That happens a lot from your holding cells.’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘You won’t escape once I have you arrested and charged.’

  ‘Spare me the defiance and the righteous indignation. Is my daughter alive?’

  Sindisiwe looked into the mine manager’s eyes and she shivered. ‘You daughter’s killer confessed in a note before taking his own life.’

  ‘Bullshit. I knew Timothy well. He was crooked, but he was no killer or rapist. Wellington set him up,’ Cameron said.

  For all Sindisiwe knew, Wellington had reneged on his part of the deal and raped and killed the girl himself. She loved his strength and his impetuosity, but she had no doubt about the evil he was capable of.

  ‘Give me the gun,’ Cameron said.

  Kylie passed the weapon to him and Sindisiwe, a trained interrogator, saw the change in the woman’s expression. It went from cocksure to horrified surprise. The Australian was reading Cameron’s face and both women saw the same thing in his eyes as he raised the pistol and rested the end of the barrel against Sindisiwe’s right temple. ‘Get out of the car, Kylie. You don’t want her blood and brains all over you.’

  ‘Cameron, no …’ Kylie said.

  ‘Get out of the car. We can’t let her live; she’ll have us arrested and locked up. I’ll make it look like a suicide, just as Wellington must have done with Timothy.’

  Kylie opened the car door, hesitated a moment and got out.

  ‘Wait,’ Sindisiwe said. ‘She was alive, last I heard.’

  Kylie slid back into the seat beside Sindisiwe, and she allowed herself a couple of breaths.

  ‘What did you have planned for her?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘I had nothing planned. I have a confidential informant who told me that Wellington is holding the girl somewhere in the mine. He has given orders that she is not to be touched or harmed in any way. Perhaps … perhaps he has someone interested in her.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Kylie said.

  ‘That’s all bullshit, about the informant,’ Cameron said. Sindisiwe felt the gun dig into her skin.

  ‘So what,’ she said, looking sideways at his crazy eyes. ‘Do you want to try and get your daughter back or not?’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘She’s in the mine. That is all I know. You’ll have to find her. I’m not sending any of my men down there.’

  ‘You don’t have to. You’re coming with us.’

  *

  Jan opened the doors of the cage when the lift stopped at level fourteen. He raised his R5 assault rifle and started moving down the tunnel. Candles flickered in alcoves in the wall. He heard zama zamas talking further down and smelled marijuana smoke.

  Already, he could see, the criminal miners had been blasting out the support pillars. They had turned this viable working into a deathtrap. Even if Eureka was reopened to the legitimate mining company it would never be safe to work this area.

  Jan turned off to the right down a side tunnel and it became darker the further he moved away from the illegal workings. He was a world away from his corner office on the thirtieth floor overlooking Sydney Harbour. He was back in his native Africa where the strong survived by killing the weak. It was time for Wellington Shumba to die.

  A wave of air washed over him, nearly knocking him down, followed a split second later by a deafening boom. Dust rushed up the tunnel behind him. Jan coughed and spat. The fools were blasting too close to where they were still trying to work. It was no wonder so many of them died. Jan carried on through the fog of grit and smoke.

  Ahead of him he saw a light flaying across the side wall. He flattened himself against the rock and raised the R5 to his shoulder. A zama zama walked around a bend, an AK-47 held loose in his right hand. Jan knew that an armed man would be a guard or a sentry, not a worker, and this told him he had taken the right turn. Wellington would be close.

  Jan stepped into the middle of the tunnel and levelled his rifle at the man. ‘Make a noise and I’ll kill you,’ he whispered.

  The man laid down his AK and followed Jan’s gesticulations with his rifle to kneel. ‘Put your hands on your head.’ Standing behind him, Jan slung his rifle over his shoulder and took a Leatherman from its pouch on his belt. He unfolded the serrated blade, reached around the man, put his hand over his mouth and cut his throat.

  He held the man as the life thrashed from him, then silently lowered the body to the ground. Jan wiped his hands on his camouflage fatigues and moved on into the darkness. I haven’t felt this alive for decades, he thought.

  *

  Cameron stopped the Corolla on the road between Komatipoort and Malelane at the place he and Luis had discussed.

  ‘You must let me go,’ Sindisiwe Radebe said again. ‘I have no idea where the girl is underground.’

  ‘Shut up or I’ll gag you,’ Cameron said.

  Luis emerged from the bush at the side of the road, looked left and right and climbed into the car, in the front passenger seat. His eyes widened when he greeted Kylie and Cameron and saw Kylie pointing a gun at the Barberton police commander.

  ‘Thank you for coming back, Luis,’ Cameron said.

  ‘When I heard about your daughter, I had to come. This man has caused too much sorrow and it is time to end it for good.’

  Cameron nodded and turned the car around and drove back towards Barberton and Eureka. They said little on the drive, though after fifteen minutes Luis said: ‘If it is all right, Dr Hamilton, there is something I would like to discuss with you, once this business is done.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kylie said, ‘you know we can’t offer you a job here in South Africa. I checked the company’s share price today and to tell you the truth, the way it’s heading, we’ll be lucky to keep most of our people on the payroll.’

  ‘I understand. This is not about me asking you for work,’ Luis said.

  Luis directed them to turn off onto a dirt road about five kilometres short of the mine. Cameron followed the track, which looked like a fire trail. They started to climb into the hills that rose behind Eureka and rolled back to Swaziland and the Mozambican border. This was wild country.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ Sindisiwe asked from the back seat.

  ‘Relax,’ said Cameron. ‘We’re going to a disused mine shaft the zama zamas sometimes use to enter and leave the mine. You’ve got some exercise ahead of you.’

  On Luis’s instructions Cameron stopped the car and they got out. Kylie opened the boot and took out a pair of overalls, boots and helmet with a miner’s lamp and gave them to Sindisiwe. ‘Change into these. Your stilettos won’t cut it underground.’ Reluctantly, the police colonel pulled on the trousers then slid off her skirt and swapped her expensive shoes for the boots.

  Cameron had stopped by his empty
house before kidnapping Sindisiwe from the spa and had once again loaded his shotgun and combat vest. He shrugged on his gear and chambered a round in the shotgun. He handed Luis his spare pistol and ammunition. The Mozambican checked and loaded the weapon with practised ease. Cameron respected the man. He was recovering from a gunshot wound from their last encounter with Wellington and he had lost his wife. But the coldness in Luis’s eyes told Cameron they were both on the same frequency for this mission.

  As Luis led them through the bush and into the hole, which had been hacked into the side of the mountain perhaps a hundred years ago or more, the earth beneath them shimmied with the muffled report of an explosion far underground.

  Luis started climbing down a rope ladder and Kylie motioned for Colonel Radebe to follow him.

  *

  Jan stepped into the arc of light cast by a paraffin lantern and Wellington Shumba looked up from his laptop. The glow from the computer’s screen was reflected in round reading glasses, which the pirate miner took off.

  ‘Mr Stein. Welcome to my mine.’ Wellington laughed at his rhyme. ‘We meet at last.’

  Jan held the R5 tight into his shoulder and kept his aim steady on Wellington’s heart. ‘Your security could be better.’

  Wellington nodded. ‘If you killed the man who should have been watching the entrance to this tunnel, then I am better off without him. I wondered how long it would take you to come down here. You sit in your office in Australia dictating orders and you send a woman to do your dirty work; I wondered if you would ever visit my mine.’

  It irked him, the way the Zimbabwean referred to Eureka as ‘his’. ‘Where is the girl? You shouldn’t have taken McMurtrie’s daughter. Global Resources is finished; you have control of the workings, and there are bodies from here to Zambia except for Jessica McMurtrie’s. I couldn’t leave South Africa knowing she might be alive. Where is she?’

  ‘Read the newspapers. She was raped and killed by one of your workers, who took his own life because he couldn’t live with the shame.’

  ‘Rubbish, man. If you’d killed her you would have left her body with the dominee’s, or somewhere else where it would be found, so that no one would come looking for you. I’ve come for her.’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  Jan shrugged. ‘Fine. Then we have nothing more to talk about.’ Jan curled his finger around the rifle’s trigger and started to squeeze.

  36

  The explosions were happening more frequently, but they didn’t scare Jessica nearly as much as the waking and sleeping nightmares she had of the future life Wellington had tormented her with. She would rather die than let him sell her to some old pervert.

  It if was true, that her mother and father were dead, then there was no one looking for her. But she couldn’t believe that was the case. She twisted her wrist in the cable ties and felt blood. Still she tried. Every time the ground shook beneath her she rattled on the metal-framed bed, trying to shake something loose, but when she stopped to rest she always seemed as tightly restrained as when he had first put her here.

  There was a rumbling noise, unlike the far explosives going off. This came from deep within the rock around her and reminded Jessica of the low growlings she had heard elephants use to communicate with each other in the Kruger Park. It was as though the earth was not happy with the people who drilled and blasted and tortured her, and she was venting her feelings.

  A crack appeared above the bed where Jess lay. She screamed. From somewhere outside along the tunnel there was a report of a gunshot, then the roof groaned and lumps of rock as big as television sets started raining down.

  *

  Jan cursed. The roof of the tunnel had started to collapse a split second before he pulled the trigger. Wellington was lost in a cloud of dust that rolled back over Jan. A rock pillar had collapsed, just as he expected. Wellington’s greed had, hopefully, cost the pirate miner his life.

  Jan moved back out into the tunnel, which was half-filled with rock debris. ‘Jessica?’ He coughed and spluttered and in the dying echoes of the rockfall he heard the girl’s scream again.

  ‘Help!’ came the return voice.

  Jan set down the R5 and started shifting rocks by hand, pausing every few seconds to listen for her voice. ‘Come get me. I’m in the refuge chamber,’ he heard her call.

  Jan moved the fallen ore as quickly as he could, but he kept peering through the curtain of dust that hung in the air in case Wellington Shumba, the Lion, had survived and was waiting somewhere further up the tunnel to kill him. More likely, Jan thought, if Wellington had survived the fall he would be on his way to the nearest escape route.

  ‘Help me! Who’s there?’ the girl called.

  ‘It’s Jan Stein,’ he called. ‘Remember me?’

  There was a moment’s hesitation. ‘Oom Jan. Yes, I remember you.’

  He smiled at her calling him uncle. They had only met a couple of times and she’d still been in pigtails the last time he had seen her. ‘I’m coming, Jessica,’ he called back. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes … I think so.’

  Jan could hear voices behind him and in front of him, on the other side of the rockfall. He heard orders barked in an African language; Swazi he thought. His grasp of it wasn’t good. He continued toiling. He had to get to Cameron’s daughter.

  *

  Cameron saw through the green glow of the night-vision goggles a figure moving towards them through the dust. He recognised the broad shoulders and the bald, unhelmeted head. He raised his shotgun to his shoulder and fired.

  The blast echoed down the tunnel and was answered with a burst of AK-47 fire. Damn it, Cameron said to himself. He had missed. He should have waited, but he was seething with rage at the sight of the man who had tried to wipe out his family and had killed so many others.

  ‘Come on,’ Cameron said to the others behind him, not caring about the danger. Wellington had turned back and they heard his footsteps echoing back from the way he had come.

  ‘You’re going to get us all killed,’ Sindisiwe Radebe spat.

  ‘The way he’s heading, the only way for him to get out of here is back up through the main shaft,’ Luis said. ‘We have him bottled up, Cameron.’

  ‘Listen to him, Cameron,’ Kylie said. ‘He’s like a cornered rat now. He’ll be even more dangerous, but he won’t get away this time.’

  Cameron took a breath, but he couldn’t calm himself. ‘Jess is here somewhere. We have to get to her before that bastard does.’ He looked at the police colonel. ‘You, go ahead.’

  Sindisiwe shook her head. ‘Me? No way, white man. This is your crusade.’

  He pointed the shotgun at her. ‘It’s my daughter or you. If we find her and she’s … she’s not alive, then I’m going to kill you.’

  ‘You’re bluffing.’

  ‘He’s not,’ Kylie interjected. ‘You know this man Wellington, don’t you?’

  The colonel said nothing. ‘Reach out to him,’ Kylie said. ‘Tell him the game’s up. Reason with him. We won’t drag you down if you help us.’

  ‘Pah. You make offers you cannot deliver. And you don’t know this man. He is ruthless.’

  ‘Then help us kill him.’ Cameron raised his free hand to stop Kylie from interrupting. ‘If we take him alive he’ll implicate you. All I want now is two things: my daughter, and Wellington. Dead or alive. It’s up to you.’

  Sindisiwe looked to Kylie, but she was stone-faced in the glare of the miner’s lamp. Cameron silently thanked her, but also felt a pang of guilt for what he’d put her through, and how her high-minded morals had been dashed against the hard rock of Africa.

  Sindisiwe glared at Cameron with undisguised hatred, then moved forward, the beam of her miner’s lamp playing on the walls. Cameron switched off his night-vision goggles. He felt no sympathy for her. She was a disgrace to her uniform, and if she wasn’t complicit in Jessica’s kidnapping, she had helped cover it up by doing nothing.

  ‘Wellington,’ she
called into the darkness as she moved gingerly forward. ‘Wellington, it is Sindisiwe. You must give yourself up.’

  *

  Wellington was trapped, with Jan Stein between him and the main shaft and McMurtrie and the others blocking his way to his emergency exit. There was no way he would be able to escape via the cage up the shaft, even if he could kill Stein. Stein or McMurtrie would have shut the hoist down.

  He crouched behind a mound of fallen rock, put down his AK-47 and drew his pistol.

  Sindisiwe reached the pile of ore and gingerly began making her way around the obstruction. ‘Wellington? Are you there?’ As she passed him he reached up and wrapped his hand over her mouth and drew her to him.

  ‘Hush. You will help me get out of this. We’ll run away together,’ he whispered.

  She tried to mumble something in reply but he just clamped his hand harder then stepped out from behind the rocks. The light on Sindisiwe’s helmet illuminated the others; there was McMurtrie, Kylie Hamilton and that traitorous bastard Correia. Wellington fumed; Sindisiwe struggled in his grasp but he held her tight.

  McMurtrie pointed his shotgun at him. If the former mine manager had brought a pistol or an assault rifle, then at this range he might have got off a shot into Wellington’s head and perhaps saved Sindisiwe, but McMurtrie would be realising now that if he pulled the trigger on his shotgun Sindisiwe would be peppered with pellets, whether or not he hit his intended target.

  ‘Move against the side wall. All of you. I’m coming through,’ Wellington said. He smiled at the frustration on McMurtrie’s face. ‘Lower your weapons as I pass, unless you want the colonel to end up like your environmental man, Loubser. She and I are leaving.’

  McMurtrie moved to shelter the woman with his body. Very noble, Wellington thought. He couldn’t believe they had survived the aircraft crash, but here they were. He wanted to put a bullet through McMurtrie’s forehead, and Correia’s, but the Mozambican had a pistol levelled at him. He might get one of them, but the other would finish him off. It was time to cut his losses, but Wellington hated that he was leaving the mine, and Stein, McMurtrie and Hamilton were all back here. This was his kingdom. He would find a way to reclaim it.