Jan rose to her. 'Of course they're brutalised. What else could they be given the regime they live under?'
'That's xhe work of the people you're so bloody fond of.'
'I don't condone that, and the A.N.C. doesn't condone that, but when you treat people like filth then they'll behave like filth.'
'Pathetic excuses.'
'It's the price the Whites are going to have to pay for half a century of naked racism.'
'Childish slogans.'
'Think of all the Black children that have been shot by the police.'
She let him have the last word. Ros drove on towards Pretoria. All her life she had let her brother have the last word. It was why she was driving her car north, it was why she had entered a state of madness. The tie of family had captured her. She understood the young man sitting bowed in the front seat beside her. She believed herself to be as captured by her brother as he was by his father.
* * *
The White from the safari land rover watched as the Blacks kicked the resistance out of the driver of the pick up car.
They had tracked the pick up car after it had turned off the Palapye road, when it had headed south towards the border hamlets of Sherwood Ranch and Selika. Through field glasses they had watched Jacob Thiroko and the four other men get out and unload their bags. When the car had come back up the road it had been blocked.
The driver was a loyal member of the Movement, but the beating and the kicking were ferocious. The driver told his captors that the older man in his car had been addressed as Comrade Jacob. He told them that this Comrade Jacob had spoken of striking a great blow for the Movement. He told them that the old man had spoken of Warmbaths.
When he had nothing more that he could tell them, the driver was kicked to death. Boots in the stomach and the head killed him. The kicking was without mercy. When he was dead he was dragged to his own car and thrown inside.
It was intended that he should be found.
It surprised the White that the Blacks under his command kicked the victim of their own colour with such enthusiasm.
The White worked to trail out fifty feet of radio aerial from the short wave transmitter in the land rover to a branch high in a thorn tree.
His coded broadcast was picked up in the offices of the security police at Potgietersrus 160 kilometres away.
Jacob Thiroko and his cadre were to hike across country to a road junction outside Monte Christo, ten kilometres. At midnight they were to be met at the road junction and driven by lorry to a rendezvous north of Warmbaths. He believed they could cover that distance before the breaking of the morning light. At the rendezvous they would find a cache of weapons and explosives, buried there more than two years before.
They moved by compass bearing.
It was difficult for Thiroko to keep his attention on the animal track in front of him, and on the dried grass that cracked under foot, and on the wind scattered branches that snapped under his tread. He had come home, he was back in his own place. The scent of the scrub as familiar to him as his mother's body had been when he was a child. The smells of home, and the whirr of the insects, and the fear of snakes, and the bright light of a clear sun shining on his homeland. Nowhere else in Africa had he tasted the same smells, sounds, shining sun as he found on the hike towards Monte Christo, going back inside his country, his fighting ground.
* **
Inside the operations room at the Hoedspruit base, home of 31 Squadron (helicopters), they followed a familiar routine.
The Puma was tasked to take off in the late afternoon, and to reach the point of the border incursion before dusk. The quarry was to be given time to move away from the frontier and so to be unaware of the military movement behind them.
The Puma was a good old workhorse, with improvised replacement parts it had flown for eighteen years in South Africa's colours.
In the thrash of the rotors it took off into the low slanted sun. Behind the two pilots were eight White soldiers of the Recce Commando, a dog handler with his golden labrador, and a skeletal Bushman. The Bushman wore only shorts, his shock of black hair was ringed by a green tennis sweat band. He spoke his own language only, that of the Kavango region of South West Africa.
The officer commanding the hunting team had been given an exact reference for the border incursion.
As they were coming in to land, as they looked ahead into Botswana, the pilots could see a car parked on a dirt track, and pulling away from it were a land rover and an estate car.
It took the Bushman only a few minutes to be sure of his starting point. When it became too dark for him the dog would take over the tracking.
It was not a difficult trail to follow.
Ros drove into the poorly lit one street of Warmbaths.
They checked into a hotel. They took single rooms.
At the reception desk, as they wrote false names and false addresses in the book, Ros remarked to the owner that they were breaking the journey north west to the Ebenezer Dam where her brother and his friend would be fishing.
14
'If they knew what Jan was into, my Mom and my Dad, they'd die.'
'I told my mother that I was coming here to bring my father home – it must have sounded so daft that she didn't bother to argue with me.'
'Being daft isn't being a traitor.'
'You have to live your own life, for yourself, you can't live your life for your parents.'
'Try telling them… ' Ros laughed.
Jan was at the hotel.
Jack and Ros walked along the pavement of the street that sliced through Warmbaths. A desultory conversation, and blotted out when the big lorries and their trailers passed.
The road through Warmbaths was the principal route from Johannesburg and Pretoria to Potgietersrus and Pietersburg and Louis Trichardt and on to the Zimbabwe border. The road rumbled under the lorries. Jack liked this small town, it was an escape from the threat of the cities. Agricultural country.
He had met the farmers the previous evening.
