The Rwandan Hostage

by Christopher Lowery

  Now she had their attention. The other men looked at her with admiration. They would be on television, celebrities. This could be the start of a massive nationwide surge in support for their ideals. They were hooked.

  “How’d you organise that?” Jan was clumsily trying to grasp the implications of the idea. The rewards were clear, it could be a personal triumph for him, for Julian, for their whole campaign against these filthy niggers, but he was trying to weigh up the risks. Was this really possible? Could she get what she said? Was it a realistic idea?

  “The Sun has a permanent link into the South African Broadcasting Corporation. This would be a perfect piece for SABC2. You could make your statement in English and Afrikaans to get the maximum impact. It would probably be rebroadcast all over the world, on prime time television. I can even help you write the script if you want.”

  “How do we do it?” Jan was becoming more and more seduced by the idea. He could see himself on the screen, telling the world the truth about their group, about the need to cleanse the nation of the corrupt black government and to put a white man back in his proper position as President. A return to white supremacy with the blacks back in the chains they had weasled their way out of through the machinations of that lying bastard, Mandela. And Julian Sumerschmidt sitting in the Houses of Parliament in Cape Town.

  “We can do it with a mobile phone. Mine has a video app on it. It’s a cinch. We can post it on Youtube and Facebook. It’s a great idea.” The skinny young man was walking excitedly around the desk.

  Karen gave him a disdainful look. “That’s not such a great idea. Have you seen the crazy stuff that gets posted on social media? That’s the kind of amateur thing the Boeremag would do. You’ll be taken for just another band of maniacs like them. I thought you wanted to be taken seriously?” She spoke convincingly, desperately trying to persuade Jan to do it her way, otherwise there would be no escape.

  “Shut up both of you!” Jan shouted. “I’m in charge here.” Standing right in front of her, he said. “I know your plan, lady.”

  Karen’s heart sank. She looked at him anxiously, trying to ignore his peculiar stare.

  “You want to do this just to get a story on TV, don’t you? You want to use us to get an exclusive. Just to get your face on TV.”

  She breathed a silent sigh of relief. “You’re dead right. If we do this properly we’ll both become big names. Now I have two agendas; to save my life and to become even more well-known. Is that a problem for you? You get your agenda at the same time, even better than you planned. In any case, what have you got to lose? You’ve still got the guns and the hostages.” She faced him down, putting on a show of strength that she didn’t feel. “And there’s another thing we have to consider,” she added, hoping it wouldn’t backfire on her.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why did you kill the three blacks? You’re going to have to address that. Your supporters might approve but there’s an awful lot of people who won’t.”

  “It was just an accident. This kid, Rich, he just lost his rag and blasted them when they came round the corner.”

  “I thought we were being attacked. I just saw people running at us. I was protecting our group is all.”

  Jan lit up another cigarette. “We came in the back way expecting to find people like your group trying to escape. The whole plan was to take hostages, so you were our lucky charm, walking into our arms like that. And a white woman to up the stakes. That’s a bonus. I don’t give a shit about the dead niggers, but it was a mistake, I know it.”

  “Well, you’ve got to find a convincing explanation for that so it doesn’t get in the way of your petition for Julian.”

  “I need to think about this.” His eye twitched several times and he turned away to call the other men around him, all of them furiously offering their opinions in hushed tones.

  After a couple of minutes, he sent them back to their seats and their guard posts. “So, what’s your plan? Remember, any tricks and this place goes up in flames and you’re all dead meat.”

  “You’ll have to let me speak to the police chief who called you. I’ll probably know him or one of his bosses. I told you, I know lots of people.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “One of my friends is a cameraman at SABC2. If he’s in Joburg I can get the police to ask for him and a sound technician to come immediately.”

  “Nobody except the cameraman. No assistants, no security, no other equipment, nothing. One guy with only a camera, that’s all. And we frisk him before we let him in.”

  “Whatever you say. If he’ll do it, I’m OK with that.”

  “I want you to write down what you’re going to say and you’d better stick to that, word for word. Any tricks and you know what’ll happen.”

  Coetzee never told Karen exactly what happened behind the scenes. When she recommended Marius Coetzee as her preferred cameraman, it took a while for the local police and the Sun to put two and two together. The police refused to back an intervention by an operative who was married to one of the hostages, but when he was apprised of the situation Coetzee fought tooth and nail to be permitted to save his wife. In the end his arguments and reputation won the day. But this would be a one man mission with no support. If it failed, the police would storm the school and God only knew what mayhem would ensue.

  “Search him, head to toe.” It was two hours later and Coetzee was standing at the classroom door, holding a JVC TV camera over his shoulder. He was wearing sunglasses, a tight-fitting shirt and jeans and sneakers and his unruly curly hair was slicked down with lotion. Not his chosen attire, but carefully advised by Karen’s boss at the paper. She had also given him some quick instructions about the equipment but he didn’t need much. He had to be able to do just one thing.

  Jan had ordered the adult hostages to move the corpses along the corridor, so they couldn’t be seen from the classroom. The members of his group wouldn’t touch the black bodies, but they threw some water over the floor to make the blood stains less visible. Now everybody was back in position and he was rehearsing his speech in his head, hoping to be able to brush off that minor incident without jeopardising his TV performance. Karen had made several suggestions and he had taken notes.

  Coetzee let Rich search him thoroughly and check his camera over then he sauntered into the classroom, as he imagined a media personality would do. He laid the camera on the desk, ignored the black families, and smiled at his wife. “How you doing?”

  “I’m OK.” She said casually and pointed at the boss man. “This is Jan. He’s with the Wit Heerskappy Vegters. We’re going to film him making an appeal for Julian Sumerschmidt.”

  Coetzee shrugged. “Whatever. Have you got a speech ready?” Jan nodded. “How long?”

  “Five minutes or so.”

  “Where do you want to set up?”

  “I think I should be standing in front of my guys and the hostages. In charge. What do you think, Karen?”

  “Sounds good. Maximum effect, minimum explanations.”

  Coetzee stood behind the desk with his back to the wall while the others took their places. Karen was prominent in front of the hostages, and the militants stood to Jan’s other side, toting their guns and trying to look tough. Jan was holding his crib sheet and his pistol was in its holster.

  He hoisted the camera off the desk and pointed it towards Jan. It was a JVC HDV professional model, the microphone sitting on top of the lens. When he saw they were ready, he counted down from five, as he’d been told, then pressed the trigger. Nothing happened. “Sorry,” he said. “Bad battery contact. It happens a lot. One second.”

  He opened up the battery compartment at the back of the JVC and removed something, then laid the camera on the desk again.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” Jan reached for his pistol.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I was you.” Coetzee was holding a small object in his hand, about the size of a golf ball. He pulled a metal loop from it and h
eld the ball firmly in his left hand. “This is a Dutch V40 fragmentation grenade and I just took the pin out,” he announced calmly. “As long as I keep hold of the security grip nothing happens. If I let go, we all get blown to tiny pieces.”

  There was a long moment’s pause while everyone registered what he had said then the hostages started wailing, crying and hugging each other again. If this was man was a rescuer, he was more lethal than the terrorists.

  Jan raised his pistol. “If you do that you’ll kill yourself and all the hostages and this white woman!”

  “What do you care?” Asked Coetzee. “You’ll all be dead as well. Do you really want to get blown apart for the sake of Julian Sumerschmidt?”

  Jan looked round at Karen, a crazed expression on his face, his eye flickering madly. “You fucking bitch! You’ve set us up. Who is this guy?”

  Karen ran to the desk and stood beside Coetzee. “He’s my husband and he’s a Special Forces Officer.”

  After the terrorists were led away by the police Karen sat with the remaining hostages, talking, praying and comforting them. Now they realised that her deceptive act had been to save them they cried even more than before, but now, tears of joy and relief. Coetzee had left with the police to do his debriefing so she had time to get to know them. She spent a long time talking to Abigail Wantusi, whose parents were killed in the first shooting. The ten year old was inexplicably calm, seeming not to have registered their deaths, not fully understanding that she had survived the tragedy only to become an orphan.

  Finally Karen left them and went out to her car. She knew there would be no counselling for them, no compensation, no apologies from anyone, nothing to assuage their trauma. They would just have to get back on with their mean existence and be thankful they had survived, sometimes wishing they had not. She drove back to the Sun’s offices in Johannesburg slowly, in a pensive mood, trying to put the incident into perspective, looking for a rational explanation for an otherwise meaningless attack which had taken three innocent lives, wondering if it would change anything. But deep inside she knew it wouldn’t make any difference.

  At the Sun, it seemed that every member of the staff wanted to greet and embrace her, voicing congratulations for her mental fortitude and the quick thinking that had resulted in the rescue of sixteen innocent blacks. In tomorrow’s headlines she would become a celebrity, but even as she sat at her desk writing the article that would project her into the limelight, she was wondering if she really wanted to continue in this job. Trying to change things that couldn’t be changed, trying to make sense of a state of affairs which could never be justified, trying to understand a status quo which could cause such chaos and human misery in such a brief moment of time.

  Karen wrote her article then went home to prepare dinner for Marius. They both deserved to enjoy a quiet evening after today’s events.

  DELMAS

  MPUMALANGA, SOUTH AFRICA, 2010

  FIFTY

  Delmas, Mpumalanga, South Africa

  Sitting on the floor of the living room alongside her daughter, Karen reflected that the episode in Alexandra was the catalyst that started the inevitable breakdown of her marriage.

  That evening both she and Marius were in a sober mood. Although he was in a violent job she knew he didn’t enjoy the violence and never spoke about the incidents he dealt with on an all too regular basis. He wasn’t a man who shared his secrets or his life very easily. He had kissed and held her with relief after the gunmen had been disarmed, but had said no more about the matter when he returned home in the evening, apart from one remark.

  When she asked him what he had felt when he was holding the grenade, with everyone’s life in his hands, he laughed and said, “You didn’t think it was armed, did you? I’m not that crazy. That grenade is about twenty years old and it’s a bloody tricky little weapon. The fuse is only four seconds and the security grip is crap. It would probably have blown us all to kingdom come if it had been armed.”

  That was the night her nightmares began, recalling parts of the ordeal through her unconscious mind and senses, like scenes from a fragmented movie. The burst of gunfire out of nowhere, the dead bodies lying in a pool of blood in the corridor, the smell of sheer terror emanating from the hostages, the unbearable suspense of being at the mercy of a gang of bloodthirsty extremists. She relived the indescribably joyous feeling of confidence and relief at the sight of her husband, their rescuer and protector. Only to be assailed again by the sensations that returned to invade her senses, the stench of cordite, blood, urine and worse pervading her nostrils until she woke up feeling frightened and physically sick.

  Somehow she couldn’t separate Marius from these scenes of brutality. His insouciance in front of six armed murderers wasn’t normal. He had taken a gamble with seventeen innocent lives, including his wife’s and it had paid off, but what if he had been challenged? She realised that to him it was just another day in the life. That was what he did, perhaps that was what he was, deep down inside. She began to see her husband in a very different light. The terrorists hadn’t harmed her physically but they had triggered a change in her mental attitude. A change that would lead to many more important and not necessarily good events.

  The next morning Marius had to leave for Durban, to coordinate security measures in preparation of a signatory meeting for an international protocol on maritime terrorism, with the presence of many government leaders. He would be gone for several weeks. Karen called her boss at the Sun and obtained a month’s sick leave on compassionate grounds. He readily agreed, on one condition; the article she had written after being released had boosted sales and sparked off a TV campaign which they would benefit from for quite a while, now he wanted a series of follow-up articles which she could write from home.

  Karen accepted the assignment and over the next few weeks, she regularly drove out to Alexandra to visit Abigail at her aunt’s home, a tiny, crowded shack, where she and her two younger brothers were now staying, sharing a bedroom, a bed, a cot and the floor with their two cousins. She took them out for walks and drives, gently helping them to push away the memories of the awful episode they had suffered. When she saw that the children couldn’t yet cope with returning to school, she stayed in the evenings, tutoring them and coaxing them back to normality. She slept with Abby on the cot, alongside her brothers stretched out on a rug on the floor. After a while she started to bring the girl back to their flat in Kensington. It had a spare bedroom that they had always assumed would one day be occupied by their own child. Now it was sometimes Abby’s.

  Little by little, she was becoming the child Karen had never had, or rather had never had time to have. Coetzee had been twenty-seven and she twenty-five when they were married, still plenty of time to have kids, once she’d accomplished something worthwhile in her career. And she had accomplished a lot. She was now Senior Current Affairs journalist at the Sun, the largest daily newspaper in the Joburg area. A top job which gave her immense satisfaction, but at a price. Marius had never tried to persuade her to change her priorities, he respected her work and her success and was happy to see that she was happy. He had also been immensely successful in his army career. At age thirty-five he was promoted to Major in the Special Forces unit, requiring him to travel a lot, sometimes for weeks at a time. They were both immersed in their work but relished the time they could spend together when they were in Joburg for a while, quality time, just the two of them, happy and in love with the life they shared.

  Somehow the time slipped by as she kept putting off becoming pregnant another year, another promotion, another step up the ladder. Then suddenly she was forty and they were still childless and when she finally decided to let it happen, it wouldn’t. She had waited too long and her body clock had ticked away until it was no longer able to conceive a child. After two years of trying and then taking fertility drugs, she was still unable to conceive. She and Marius discussed in vitro fertilisation, but there had recently been a number of high profile ‘accident
s’ involving such drugs, which Karen had actually reported on for her paper. For once, Coetzee put his foot down and refused to let her risk her health. They had each other and they were very involved in their respective careers and that was enough, in his opinion. If children were no longer an option then they would manage without them.

  Marius was gone for more than a month after the events in Alexandra and she made the most of it, devoting herself to improving life for the victims and especially for Abby. She also fulfilled her promise to her employer, turning in a series of top-selling articles on the reality of post-apartheid life for the black community.

  When Coetzee returned, they had both reached decisions that would change their lives forever, but neither was ready to discuss them. He had decided to leave the force and set up his own security company; she had decided that Abigail needed parents and they should adopt her. A year later they were divorced and she still couldn’t understand why.

  The day he had agreed to adopt Abby, as they now knew her, was probably the day she decided to divorce him. At the Sun, where she was plucking up her courage to call time on her journalistic career, one of her colleagues excitedly called her over. “Congratulations, Karen, that’s a fabulous honour for Marius.”

  “What do you mean? What’s happened?”

  “You mean you don’t know? He didn’t tell you?” The woman pushed a draft text towards her. “It just came from the daily news desk.”

  Karen looked at the article in amazement. It read;

  Honoris Crux Decoration for Special Services Major.

  Capetown September 15th2007

  This morning in the Houses of Parliament, on behalf of the President, the Minister of Home Affairs bestowed one of the nation’s most prestigious decorations on Major Marius Coetzee of the SA Special Forces Regiment. As reported in this newspaper on March 17th this year, Major Coetzee overcame a gang of eight members of the White Supremacy Fighters to save the lives of twelve children and four parents at the Alexandra Junior School. Major Coetzee’s wife, Karen, was also saved by his single handed intervention, without any back up from police forces. The white extremists are presently in jail awaiting trial for murder, abduction and plotting against the African National Congress government.