but then nobody he knew would be crazy enough to drive into a death trap like the Big Dipper.
'I'll drill and charge a matt of explosive into the hanging wall of the drive. I'll get the Delange boys on to it right away. Then at any time I choose I can blast the whole bloody roof in and seal off the tunnel.' Rod was surprised at the strength of the relief that flooded over him. He knew then how it had been worrying him. He went back to the bedroom and straightened out his bedclothes. However, sleep would not come easily to him. His imagination was overheated, and a series of events and ideas kept playing through his mind, until abruptly he was presented with the image of Terry Steyner.
He had not seen her for almost two weeks, not since their meeting just after Manfred Steyner's return from Europe.
He had spoken to her twice on the telephone, hasty, confused conversations that left him feeling dissatisfied. He was increasingly aware that he was missing her. His one attempt to find solace elsewhere had been a miserable failure. He had lost interest halfway through the approach manoeuvres and had returned the young lady to the bosom of her family at the unheard-of hour of eleven o'clock on a Saturday night.
Only the unremitting demands of his new job had prevented him from slipping away to Johannesburg and taking a risk.
'You know, Ironsides, you'd better start bracing up a little, don't lose your head over this woman. Remember our vow Never Again!' He punched the pillow into shape and settled into it.
Terry lay quietly, waiting for it. It was after one o'clock in the morning. It was one of those nights. He would come soon now. As never before she was filled with dread. A cold slimy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Yet she had been fortunate. He had not been near her since his return from Paris. Over two weeks, but it could not last. Tonight.
She heard the sound of the car coming up the drive and she felt physically ill. I can't do it, she decided, not any more, not ever again. It wasn't meant to be like this, I know that now. It's not dirty and furtive and horrible, it's like... like... it's the way Rod makes it.
She heard him in his bedroom, suddenly she sat up in bed. She felt desperate, hunted.
The door of her room opened softly.
'Manfred?'she asked sharply.
'It's me. Don't worry.' He came briskly towards her bed, a dark impersonal- shape and he was undoing the cord of his dressing-gown.
'Manfred,' Terry blurted. 'I'm early this month, I'm sorry.' He stopped. She saw his hands fall back to his sides, and he stood completely still.
'Oh!' he said at last, and she heard him shuffle his feet into the thick pile of the carpet. 'I just came to tell you,' he hesitated, seeking an excuse for his visit, 'that... that I'll be going away for five days. Leaving on Friday. I have to go to Durban and Cape Town.'
'I'll pack for you,' she said.
'What? Oh, yes thank you.' He shuffled his feet again.
'Well, then.' He hesitated, then stooped quickly and brushed her cheek with his lips. 'Good night, Theresa.'
'Good night, Manfred.' Five days. She lay alone in the darkness and gloated. Five whole days alone with Rod.
Inspector Hannes Grobbelaar of the detective South African Criminal Investigation Department sat on the edge of the office chair with his hat tipped onto the back of his head and spoke into the telephone, which he held in a handkerchief-covered hand.
He was a tall man with a long sad face and a mournful looking mustache that was streaked with grey.
'Gold buying,' he said into the receiver, and then in reply to the obvious question, 'There's gold dust spilled all over the place and a jeweller's scale, and a.45 automatic with a full magazine and the safety-catch still on, dead mans prints on it.' He listened. 'Ja.
Ja.
All right, ja. Broken neck, looks like.' Inspector Grobbelaar swivelled his chair and looked down at the corpse that lay on the floor beside him. 'Bit of blood on his lip, but nothing else.' One of the finger-print men came to the desk and Grobbelaar stood up to give him room to work, the receiver still held to his ear.
'Prints?' he asked in disgust. 'There are finger prints on everything, we have isolated at least forty separate sets so far.' He listened a few seconds. 'No, we will get him, all right. It must be a Bantu mine worker and we have got all the finger prints of the men from outside the Republic. It's just a matter of checking them all out and then questioning.
Ja, we'll have him within a month, that's for sure! I'll be back at John Vorster Square about five o'clock, just as soon as we finish up here.' He hung up the receiver, and stood looking down at the murdered man.
'Ugly bastard,' said Sergeant Hugo beside him. 'Asked for it, buying gold. It's as bad as diamonds.' He drew attention to the large envelope he carried in his hand. 'I've got a whole lot of glass fragments. Looks like the container the gold was in. The murderer tried to clean up, but he didn't make a very good job. These were under the desk.'
'Prints?'
'Only one piece big enough. It's got a smeary print on it.
Might be of use.'
'Good,' Grobbelaar nodded. 'Get cracking on that, then.' There was a feminine wail from somewhere in the interior of the building, and Hugo grimaced.
'There she starts again. Hell, I thought she'd exhausted herself Bloody Portuguese women are the end.'
'You should hear. them having a baby,' grunted Grobbelaar.
'Where did you hear one?'
'There was one in the ward next door to my old girl at the maternity home. She nearly brought the bloody roof down.' Grobbelaar's mustache took on a more melancholy droop as he thought about the work that lay ahead. Hours, days, weeks of questioning and checking and cross-checking, with a succession of sullen and uncooperative suspects.
He sighed and jerked a thumb at the corpse. 'All right, we've finished with him. Tell the butcher boys to come and fetch him.
It had taken Rod almost two days to design his drop blast matt. The angle and depth of the shot holes were carefully placed to achieve maximum disruption of the hanging wall. In addition he had decided to drill and charge the side walls of the drive with charges timed to explode after the hanging wall had collapsed. This would kick in on the rubble filling the tunnel and jam it solid.
Rod was fully aware of the power of water under pressures of 2,000 pounds per square inch and more and he had decided it was necessary to block at least 300 feet of the tunnel.
His matt blast was designed to do so, and yet he knew that this would not seal off the water completely. It would, however, reduce the flow sufficiently to allow cementation crews to get in and plug the drive solid.
The Delange brothers did not share Rod's enthusiasm for the project.
'Hey man, that's going to take three or four days to drill and charge,' Johnny protested when Rod showed him his carefully drawn plan.
'Like hell it will,' Rod growled at him. 'I want it done properly. It will take at least a week.' 'You said ultra-fast. You didn't say nothing about drilling the hanging wall with more holes than a cheese!' 'Well, I'm saying it now,' Rod told him grimly. 'And I'm also saying that you will drill, but you won't charge the holes until I come down and make sure that you've gone in as deep as I want them.' He didn't trust either Johnny or Davy to spend time drilling in twenty feet, when he could go in six feet, charge up and nobody would know the difference. Not until it was too late.
Davy Delange spoke for the first time.
'Will you credit us bonus fat homage while we fiddle around with this?' he asked.
'Four fathoms a shift.' Rod agreed to pay them for the removal of fictitious rock.
'Eight?' said Davy.
'Hell, no!' Rod exclaimed. That was robbery.
'I don't know,' Davy murmured, watching Rod with sly ferrety little eyes. 'Maybe I should talk to Brother Duivenhage, you know, ask his advice.' Duivenhage was No. 1 shaft shop steward for the Mine Workers' Union. He had driven Frank Lemmer to the edge of a nervous breakdown and was now starting on Rodney Ironsides. Rod was pleading with Head Office to offer Duivenhage a fat job in management to get him out of the way. The last thing in the world that Rod wanted was Brother Duivenhage snooping around his drive on the Big Dipper.
'Six,' he said.
Well. Davy hesitated.
'Six is fair, Davy,' Johnny interrupted, and Davy glared at him.
Johnny had snatched complete victory from his grasp.
'Good, that's agreed.' Quickly Rod closed the negotiations. 'You'll start drilling the matt right away.' Rod's design demanded Nearly 1,200 shot holes to be filled with two and a half tons of explosive. It was 1,000 feet down the drive from the main haulage on 66 level to where the matt began.
The drive now was a spacious, well lit and freshly ventilated tunnel, with the vent piping, the compressed air pipe, and the electrical cable bolted into the hanging wall, and a set of steel railway tracks laid along the floor.
All work on the face ceased while the Delange brothers set about drilling the matt. It was light work that demanded little from the men. As each hole was drilled, Davy would insert his charging rod to check the depth and then plug the entrance
