Those nearest to the Ford were beating on the metal cab, and rocking the vehicle on its suspension. The side door opened and Sister Nunziata stood on the running board, a little higher than the heads of the howling mob that pushed closely around her. She was trying to speak to them, holding up her hands and pleading with them to let her through to take care of the wounded.
Suddenly a stone was thrown. It arced up out of the crowd and hit the nun on the side of her head. She reeled as she stood, and there was a bright flash of blood on her white veil. Stunned, she raised her hand to her cheek and it came away bloody.
The sight of blood enraged them. A forest of black arms reached up to Sister Nunziata and dragged her down from the vehicle. For a while they fought over her, dragging her in the road and worrying her like a pack of hounds with the fox. Then suddenly Tara saw the flash of a knife, and sitting in the Packard she screamed and thrust her fingers into her mouth to silence herself.
The old crone who wielded the knife was a sangoma, a witchdoctor, and around her neck she wore the necklace of bones and feathers and animal skulls that were her insignia. The knife in her right hand had a handle of rhino horn and the hand-forged blade was nine inches long and wickedly curved. Four men caught the nun and threw her across the engine bonnet of the Ford while the old woman hopped up beside her. The men held Sister Nunziata pinioned, face up, while the crowd began to chant wildly, and the sangoma stooped over her.
With a single stroke of the curved blade she cut through the nun's grey habit and split her belly open from groin to rib cage. While Sister Nunziata writhed in the grip of the men who held her, the crone thrust her hand and naked arm into the wound. Tara watched in disbelief as she brought out something wet and glistening and purple, a soft amorphous thing. It was done so swiftly, so expertly, that for seconds Tara did not realize that it was Sister Nunziata's liver that the crone held in her bloody hands.
With a slash of the curved blade, the sangoma cut a lump from the still living organ and hopped to her feet. Balancing on the curved bonnet of the Ford she faced the crowd.
'I eat our white enemy,' she screeched, 'and thus I take his strength.' And the mob roared, a terrible sound, as the old woman thrust the purple lump into her toothless mouth and chewed upon it.
She hacked another piece off thee liver, and still chewing with open mouth, she threw it to the crowd below her.
'Eat your enemy!' she shrilled, and they fought for the bloody scraps like dogs.
'Be strong! Eat the liver of the hated ones!' She threw them more and Tara covered her eyes and heaved convulsively. Acid vomit shot up her throat and she swallowed it down painfully.
Abruptly the driver's door of the Packard beside her was jerked open and rough hands seized Tara. She was dragged out into the road. The blood roar of the crowd deafened her, but terror armed her with superhuman strength, and she tore herself free of the clutching hands.
She was at the edge of the mob, and the attention of most of them was entirely on the ghastly drama around the Ford. The crowd had set the vehicle alight. Sister Nunziata's mutilated body lay on the bonnet like a sacrifice on a burning altar, while trapped in the cab, the doctor thrashed around and beat at the flames with his bare hands, and the crowd chanted and danced around him like children around the bonfire on Guy Fawkes night.
For that instant Tara was free, but there were men around her, shouting and reaching for her, their faces bestial, their eyes glazed and insensate. No longer human, they were driven into that killing madness in which there was no reason nor mercy. Swift as a bird Tara ducked under the outstretched arms and darted away. She found that she had broken out of the mob, and in front of her was a plot of wasteland strewn with old rusted car bodies and rubbish. She fled across it and behind her she heard her pursuers baying like a pack of hunting dogs.
At the end of the open land a sagging barbed-wire fence blocked her way, and she glanced back over her shoulder. A group of men still followed her, and two of them had outdistanced the others. They were both big and powerful-looking, running strongly on bare feet, their faces contorted in a cruel rictus of excitement. They came on silently.
Tara stooped into the space between the strands of the wire. She was almost through when she felt the barbs catch in the flesh of her back, and pain arrested her. For a moment she struggled desperately, feeling her skin tear as she fought to free herself and blood trickled down her flanks - and then they seized her.
Now they shouted with wild laughter as they dragged her back through the fence, the barbs ripping at her clothing and her flesh.
Her legs collapsed under her, and she pleaded with them. 'Please don't hurt me. I'm going to have a baby--' They dragged her back across the waste plot, half on her knees, twisting and pleading in their grip - and then she saw the sangoma coming to meet them, hopping and capering like an ancient baboon, cackling through her toothless mouth, her bones and beads rattling around her scrawny neck and the curved knife in her blood-caked fingers.
Tara began to scream, and she felt her urine squirt uncontrollably down her legs. 'Please! Please don't!' she raved and terror was an icy blackness of her mind and body that crushed her to earth, and she closed her eyes and steeled herself to the stinging kiss of the blade.
Then in the mindless animal roar of the crowd, above the old crone's shrill laughter, there was another voice, a great lion's roar of anger and command that stilled all other sound. Tara opened her eyes and Moses Gama stood over her, a towering colossus, and voice alone stopped them and drove them back. He lifted her in arms and held her like a child. The crowd around the Packard open before him as he carried her to it and placed her on the front sc and then slid behind the wheel.
As he started the engine and swung the Packard away in a ha U-turn, the black smoke from the burning van poured over the and obscured the windscreen for a moment, and Tara smelled Sist Nunziata's flesh roasting.
This time she could not control herself and she flopped forwar, her head 'between her knees, and vomited on the floor of the Pa, kard.
,Ic , , Manfred De La Rey had taken the chair at the top of the long tabl in the operations rooms in the basement of Marshall Square. He ha.
come across from his own office suite in the Union Buildings iJ Pretoria to police headquarters at the centre of the storm, where hid.
could be at hand to consider, with his senior officers, each fresl despatch as it came in from the police provincial HQs around the country.
The entire wall facing Manfred's seat was a large-scale map of the sub-continent. Working in front of it were
