Pontiac into the fast lane and went flat, keeping his foot pressed down
hard.
She peaked out at a hundred and thirty miles an hour, and she sat so
solid upon the road that he hardly needed to drive her. His mind was
free to play with horror stories, and to remember Johan Akkers face as
he stood in the dock glaring across the Court Room at them. The
deep-set muddy eyes, and the mouth working as though he were about to
spit. As the warders had led him to the stairs down to the cells he had
pulled free and shouted back.
I'm going to get you, Scarface, he giggled. If I have to wait
twenty-nine years, I'm going to get you, and they took him away.
After Witbank the road narrowed. There was heavy traffic and the bends
had dangerous camber and deceptive gradients.
David was able to concentrate on keeping the big car on the road, and to
drive the phantoms from his mind.
He took the Lyndenburg turn off, cutting the corner of the triangle, and
the traffic thinned out to an occasional truck. He was able to go flat
out again, and race along the edge of the high escarpment. Then
suddenly the road turned and began its plunge down into the low veld.
When he emerged from the Erasmus tunnel David ran into the rain. it was
a solid grey bank of water that filled the air and buffeted the body of
the Pontiac. It flooded the road, so David had difficulty following its
verge beneath the standing sheets of water, and it swamped the
windshield, so that the efforts of the wipers to clear it were defeated.
David switched on his headlights and drove as fast as he dared, craning
forward in his seat to peer into the impenetrable blue-grey curtains of
rain.
Darkness came early in the rain, beneath the lowering black clouds, and
the wet road dazzled him with the reflections of his own headlights,
while the fat falling drops seemed as big as hailstones. He was forced
to moderate his speed a little more, creeping down the highway towards
Bandolier Hill.
In the darkness he almost missed the turning, and he reversed back to
it, swinging on to the unmade surface.
It was slushy with mud, puddled and swampy, slippery as grease.
Again he was forced to lower his speed.
Once he lost it, and slid broadside into the drainage ditch. By packing
loose stones under the wheels and racing the engine he pulled the
Pontiac out and drove on.
By the time he reached the bridge over the Luzane stream, he had been
six hours at the wheel of the Pontiac, and it was a few minutes after
eight o'clock in the evening.
As he reached the bridge the rain stopped abruptly, a freak hole in the
weather. Directly overhead the stars showed mistily, while around them
the cloud banks swirled, turning slowly, as though upon the axis of a
great wheel.
David's headlights cut through the darkness, out across the mad brown
waters to the far bank a hundred yards away. The bridge was submerged
under fifteen feet of flood water, and the water was moving so swiftly
that its waves and whirlpools seemed sculptured in polished brown
