after that it did not matter. Three days would be enough.
He had infected his own jaw, running a needle poisoned with his excreta
deeply into the gum. They had taken him to the dental clinic as he had
planned. The guard had been easily handled, and the dentist had
cooperated with a scalpel held to his throat.
Once clear of the prison, Akkers had used the scalpel, vaguely surprised
by the volume of blood that could issue from a human throat. He had
left the dentist slumped over his steering-wheel on a plot of waste
ground and, with his white laboratory gown over his prison suit, he had
waited at a set of traffic lights.
The shiny new Chevy had pulled up for a red light and Akkers had opened
the passenger door and slid in beside the driver.
He had been a smaller man than Akkers, plump and Prosperous-looking,
with a smooth pale face and soft little hairless hands on the
steering-wheel. He had obeyed meekly Akkers instruction to drive on.
Akkers had rolled his soft white body, clad only in vest and shorts,
into a clump of thick grass beside a disused secondary road and pulled
the grass closed over him, then he had beaten the first road block out
of the city area by forty minutes.
He stayed on the side roads, picking his way slowly eastwards. The
infection in his jaw had ached intolerably despite the shot of
antibiotics the dentist had given him, and his crippled claw of a hand
had been awkward and clumsy on the gear lever, for the severed nerves
and sinews had never knitted again. The hand was a dead and insensate
thing.
Using the caution of a natural predator and helped by the newsflashes on
the radio, he had groped his way carefully through the net that was
spread for him, and now he was on Jabulani and he could restrain himself
no longer.
He hit the mud hole at forty and the Chevy whipped and spun, slewing her
back end deep into the mud and high-centring her belly on the soft ooze.
He left her there and went on swiftly through the rain, loping on long
legs. Once he giggled and sucked at his teeth, but then he was silent
again.
It was dark by the time he climbed the kopie behind Jabulani homestead.
He lay there for two hours peering down into the driving rain, waiting
for the darkness.
Once night fell, he could see no lights, and he began to worry, there
should have been lights burning.
He left the kopje and moved cautiously through the darkness down the
hill. He avoided the servants quarters, and went through the trees to
the landing-strip.
He ran into the side of the hanger in the dark and followed the wall to
the side doorway.
Frantically he spread his arms and felt for the aircraft that should be
here, and when he realized that it was not he let out a groan of
frustration.
They were gone. He had planned and schemed in vain, all his desperate
striving was in vain.
