I’ll have to kill her, he thought. There can’t be any witnesses.
He drew his pistol and pointed it at her. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He dropped his hand, raced back to the car and drove away.
He knew he would have the cops after him now. They would start looking for a black man with a mutilated hand. The girl he hadn’t killed would start talking. He gave himself four hours at most before he would be forced to change cars.
He stopped at an unmanned gas station and filled his tank. He had noticed a signpost for Stockholm earlier on, and this time he made a point of remembering how to retrace his steps.
He suddenly felt very weary. Somewhere along the way he would have to stop and sleep.
He hoped he would manage to find another lake with still, black water.
He found one on the great plain, just south of Linkoping. He had already changed cars by then. Near Huskvarna he turned into a motel and managed to crack the door lock and short-circuit the ignition of another Mercedes. He continued driving until his strength ran out. Shortly before Linkoping he turned off onto a minor road, then onto a still smaller one, and eventually came to a lake stretched out before him. It was just turned midnight. He curled up on the back seat and fell asleep.
He awoke with a start just before five in the morning.
Outside the car he could hear a bird singing in a way he had never heard before.
Then he continued his journey northward.
Shortly before eleven in the morning he came to Stockholm.
It was Wednesday, April 29, the day before Walpurgis Eve, 1992.
Chapter Thirteen
Three masked men turned up just as dessert was being served. In the space of two minutes they fired 300 shots from their automatic weapons and disappeared into a waiting car.
Afterwards there was a brief moment of silence. Then came the screams from the wounded and shocked.
It had been the annual meeting of the venerable wine-tasting club in Durban. The dining committee had carefully considered security before deciding to hold the banquet after the meeting at the golf club restaurant in Pinetown, not far from Durban. So far Pinetown had escaped the violence now becoming increasingly common and widespread in Natal. Moreover, the restaurant manager had promised to increase security for the evening.
But the guards were struck down before they could raise the alarm. The fence surrounding the restaurant had been cut through with wire cutters. The attackers had also managed to throttle a German shepherd.
There were fifty people altogether in the restaurant when the three men burst in, guns in hand. All the members of the wine-tasting club were white. There were five black waiters, four men and a woman. The black chefs and kitchen hands fled the restaurant through the back door with the Portuguese master chef as soon as the shooting started.
When it was all over, nine people lay dead among the upturned tables and chairs, broken crockery, and fallen chandeliers. Seventeen were more or less seriously wounded, and all the rest were in shock, including an elderly lady who would die later from a heart attack.
More than two hundred bottles of red wine had been shot to pieces. The police who arrived at the scene after the massacre had a hard time distinguishing blood from red wine.
Chief Inspector Samuel de Beer from the Durban homicide squad was one of the first to reach the restaurant. He had with him Inspector Harry Sibande, who was black. Although de Beer was a cop who made no attempt to conceal his racial prejudice, Harry Sibande had learnt to tolerate his contempt for blacks. This was due not least to the fact that Sibande realized long ago he was a much better cop than de Beer could ever be.
They surveyed the devastation, and watched the wounded being carried to the stream of ambulances bound for various Durban hospitals.
The badly shocked witnesses to whom they had access did not have much to say. There were three men, all of them masked. But their hands were black.
De Beer knew this was one of the most serious raids carried out by any of the black army factions in Natal so far this year. That evening, April 30, 1992, open civil war between blacks and whites in Natal had come a step closer.
De Beer called Intelligence in Pretoria immediately. They promised to send him assistance first thing in the morning. The army’s special unit for political assassinations and terrorist actions would place an experienced investigator at his disposal.
President de Klerk was informed about the incident shortly before midnight. His Foreign Secretary, Pik Botha, called the presidential residence on the presidential hot line.
The Foreign Secretary could hear de Klerk was annoyed at being disturbed.
“Innocent people get murdered every day,” he said. “What’s so special about this incident?”
“The scale,” the Foreign Secretary replied. “It’s all too big, too crude, too brutal. There’ll be a violent reaction within the party unless you make a very firm statement tomorrow morning. I’m convinced the ANC leadership, presumably Mandela himself, will condemn what’s happened. It won’t look good if you have nothing to say.”
Botha was one of the few who had President de Klerk’s ear. The president generally acted on advice he received from his Foreign Secretary.
“I’ll do as you suggest,” said de Klerk. “Put something together by tomorrow. See I get it by seven o’clock.”
Later that evening another telephone conversation took place between Johannesburg and Pretoria concerning the Pinetown incident. A colonel in the army’s special and extremely secret security service, Franz Malan, took a call from his colleague in BOSS, Jan Kleyn. Both of them had been informed of what happened a few hours earlier at the restaurant in Pinetown. Both reacted with dismay and disgust. They played their roles like the old hands they were. Both Jan Kleyn and Franz Malan were hovering in the background when the Pinetown massacre was planned. It was part of a strategy to raise the level of insecurity across the country. At the end of it all, the final link in a chain of increasingly frequent and serious attacks and murders, was the liquidation Victor Mabasha was to be responsible for.
Jan Kleyn called Franz Malan about an entirely different matter, however. He had discovered earlier in the day that someone had hacked into his private computer files at work. After a few hours of pondering and a process of elimination, he had figured out who it must be that was keeping them under scrutiny. He also realized the discovery was a threat to the vital operation they were currently planning.
They never used their names when they telephoned each other. They recognized each other’s voices. If they ever got a bad line, they had a special code to identify themselves.
“We have to meet,” said Jan Kleyn. “You know where I’m going tomorrow?”
“Yes,” replied Franz Malan.
“Make sure you do the same,” said Jan Kleyn.
Franz Malan had been told a captain by the name of Breytenbach would represent his own secret unit in the investigation of the massacre. But he also knew he only needed to call Breytenbach in order to ensure that he could take over himself. Malan had a special dispensation to alter any particular assignment he found advisable, without needing to consult his superiors.
“I’ll be there,” he said.
That was the end of the conversation. Franz Malan called Captain Breytenbach and announced that he would be flying over to Durban himself the next day. Then he wondered what could be bugging Jan Kleyn. He suspected it had something to do with the major operation. He just hoped their plans were not collapsing.
At four in the morning on the first of May, Jan Kleyn put Pretoria behind him. He skirted Johannesburg and was soon driving along the E3 freeway to Durban. He expected to get there by eight.
Jan Kleyn enjoyed driving. If he wanted, he could have had a helicopter take him to Durban. But the journey would have been over too quickly. Alone in the car, with the countryside flashing past, he would have time to reflect.
