Muscles strained under the overcoats, veins swelling from under the woollen caps. They were together, they were as one.
The country boy took a great gulp of air into his lungs and his hand loosened the mouth of the duffel bag and slid down inside it.
They walked along the pavement, beside the low wall that bordered the court's lawns. They saw the Blacks who lay on the grass on their backs, servants of the court and outside because it was the lunchtime recess. They saw a barrister trotting towards the doorway with his gown folded like a raincoat over his arm. They saw the Japanese cars parked at the kerb immediately in front of the doors and their high radio aerials which showed they were driven by the security police and the crime squad detectives. They saw a White youngster kiss his White girl. They saw a Black man wobble and swerve on his bicycle when he was cut up by a shining Mercedes. They saw the dark open doorway of the court.
The country boy wondered if the White in the Combi would really wait for them after the blast and the fire…
The country boy led.
On the skin strip between the collar of his overcoat and the wool of his cap he could feel the separate breath of the one with the Makharov and the one with the R.G.-42. He knew what the bomb would do. At the training camp he had seen the scattering flame of the bomb. He liked what he had seen. What he did not like was the order that the timing of the attack should be for the lunch hour. There had been a fierce argument between those who would carry the bomb and those who gave order for its use. Those who gave the order had said they wanted only damage to the buildings, not casualties. Those who carried the bomb had insisted on damage to the buildings and also to the Whites who were the apparatus of the state and the Blacks who were the accomplices of the state, The compromise had been the lunch hour… He led up the path between the lawns. His right forefinger rested on the switch inside the duffel bag, when he pressed the switch they had half a minute. The two doors were open. The lunch hour, so they said, was the likeliest chance that the lobby of the court would be empty.
The country boy thought it was a wrong decision. A heavy wooden bench was placed across the doorway leaving only a small entrance through which the court's visitors could be filtered by the police when the adjournment was over, when the friends and relations of the accused would be admitted.
On the first floor judges were clustered round the table in the chamber of the most senior of them, talking not of law but of bloodstock form. In the Whites' canteen, waitress service, barristers briefed by the state sat with their poorer Pro Deo colleagues who would make the defence case, seldom successfully, for their clients, and chewed over disinvestment and the slide of the rand and the collapse of residential property prices. In the basement cells a White businessman charged with fraudulent conversion ate the fried chicken sent in by his mistress, and in their separate cells there were Blacks who squatted against the cold concrete walls and bowed their heads over bowls of porridge.
The country boy was on the the bottom step. The doorway yawned in front of him. His finger was rigid on the switch.
They were panting behind him. He pressed the switch.
Again the draught of air sank in his throat.
'It's closed.'
The Boer's voice. The enemy's voice. His hand snaked back out of the bag. The arm that was to hurl the bag into the lobby of the court frozen useless.
'You can't go in there for another eighteen minutes.'
He spun his head. He saw the one with the Makharov and the one with the R.G.-42 and the one who had nothing at all gawping back down onto the path. The uniformed warrant officer stood in the centre of the pathway, his arms were clasped behind his back on a short leather-coated swagger stick. An immaculate police tunic, knife- edge trousers, shoes that a servant had polished.
'Seventeen minutes actually.' The warrant officer grinned cheerfully. 'For now, get yourselves away.'
The country boy flexed his arm, turned and threw the bag into and inside the doorway.
He ran.
He cannoned into the one with the Makharov, felt the bite of the barrel into his thigh, and he ran. Across the grass.
Jumping the wall. All of them charging together. None of them hearing the shout of the warrant officer. None of them seeing him stagger from the shoulder charge of the one who had nothing, and then go as if from instinctive duty through the doorway, none of them seeing him grope for the duffel bag under a table deep in the lobby and take it in his arms and twist again for the bright sunlight of the doorway. All of them sprinting. None of them seeing the fast sweep of understanding chisel the face of the plain clothes policeman with the personal radio.
They were past the building site. They were running, swerving, sidestepping, jumping into the traffic on Van Wielligh, going chicken with a bus driver and having him brake when the bomb exploded.
A bomb detonated in the centre of a safe city, in the middle of a safe lunch hour.
A bomb that spewed fire, showered glass, ripped at plaster and concrete and brick work.
All four would dearly have loved to have seen the explosion. Only the country boy had an exact idea of the scale of the flame blown outwards in a blazing spray. They would dearly have loved to have seen the warrant officer disintegrate when he was a yard from the door, when he was at the moment of throwing the bomb away from him and onto the grass. In the few seconds that the warrant officer had screamed of the danger of the bomb he had attracted enough attention for there to be seven civilians and two policemen in the court lobby. They would dearly have loved to see those nine persons bowled over by the blast and the smoke cloud and the fire draught. They saw nothing of the devastation, and nothing of the policeman chasing after them, the radio in one hand and a revolver in the other.
They reached the Combi van.
They flung open the door and scrambled inside in a confusion of knees and elbows and shouts, and the van was accelerating into the wide spaces of Pritchard before they'd managed to close the doors. The last thing the country boy saw before the doors were shut was the policeman on the pavement, panting, heaving, yelling into his radio.
Jeez drove like he hadn't a tomorrow.
And he didn't reckon he had, a tomorrow.
Shit, and he'd heard the explosion. Couldn't have missed it. Half choked on his cigarette, and the windows around him had rattled fit to break and he'd seen the heads on the pavement spinning to stare up the street. He'd been facing away from the explosion, he'd had only the shock wave, none of the sights… left into End, up past the Kerk junction, left onto Jeppe… Jeez going hard, and with the frown slashed on the old weather-stained skin of his forehead. He was going hard because he'd heard the bang and a bang like that at mid-day in central Jo'burg meant a bloody big show.
Nobody had said anything other than that he was to be parked in a Combi van on the corner of Pritchard and Delvers, north side, looking east, back doors unfastened.
Done as he was told, because that's what they all did in the Movement, Blacks and Whites. Shit, nobody had said it was a bloody headline grabber they'd be running from… Right off Jeppe and into Rissik. He was burning the tyres, hitting the turns. Way ahead, up Rissik, was the railway station, that's where he'd been told he had to get. Four kids to catch a train that's all. He had been told that if there was a police block then a White in a commercial van would sail through.
But this was an arsehole.
Because of his initials James Carew had always been Jeez.
He rather fancied it. He used that name on the telephone, used it to anyone who knew him marginally. He'd had the name since the time he left school, since he was in the army.
The name was his possession, his style, like kids who had a ring in their ear, or a tattoo. He was Jeez, had been for more than years.
He heard the siren.
Shit… Jeez saw the traffic in front of him swerving for the slow lane, and that told him that the bells and the whining were behind, and his ears told him the bastards were closing.
Nobody had told him who he would be driving. Hadn't said it was a getaway. Just that four kids who were a bit hot needed picking up on the corner of Pritchard and Delvers and needed dropping off at the station. When he'd
