With Jan and Ros he had eaten a quiet meal in the hotel's dining room. He'd gone for a stringy t-bone and shared what he couldn't eat with the hotel cat. It had been a quiet meal because the brother and sister had been arguing in her room, and they hadn't anything to say to each other in front of Jack. He thought she might have been crying before she'd come down to dinner. Her eyes had been reddened and her upper cheeks puffed out. It could have just been the strain of the drive, but he thought she'd been crying. He'd left them after the meal and gone into the bar. One of those God awful entrances. The talking had stopped. A warble of noise when he had opened the door, silence when he had come forward to be served, as he was looked at and stripped for information. They would have known he was English from the moment he opened his mouth to ask for a Castle. He'd been lucky because the old soak who propped himself in the corner of the bar had a grandson in England, at an agricul-tural college in the West. Jack had listened and laughed aloud at the alcoholic's jokes, and he'd been included in a round, and stood his own for half the bar. They were huge lads, the young farmers. He knew they thought he was all right because each one of them through the long evening had come to him to try out their English. There wasn't much politics talked, a bit towards the end. Jack had thought they were all as confused as hell. What the hell was their government doing? What was all this crap talk about reform?
Was the State President in the business of giving the country over to the kaffirs? Funny for Jack, because back home the State President was seen as the high priest of conservatism.
In the bar at Brown's, the State President was the missionary of liberalism. He quite liked the young farmers, and it was a good evening, and it cost him three visits to the lavatory along the open veranda from his room.
Jack and Ros turned off the main road.
Ros pointed out to him the weather worn red stones of trekkers' nineteenth century graves. They walked into a network of straight avenues bounded by bungalows and glorious gardens. Flowering shrubs, cut lawns, beds in bloom, and the drone of mowers and the hiss of stand pipes.
'Jan's right,' Jack said. 'He's taken sides and he's right, because it can't last.'
'What's he right about?'
'That it can't last, that it's going to collapse. It's beautiful and it's doomed because nobody outside White South Africa cares a damn for you. Not the Europeans, not the Americans, not the Australians. Nobody's going to lift a finger for you when it all goes wrong.'
She looked at him. She had a small and pretty mouth. A strand of hair was across her face.
'I don't want a lecture, Jack, and I know what I want from my country. But my way of getting there doesn't include old ladies being pulled out of their cars and being knifed and being burned.'
He thought she walked beautifully. He thought there was a sweet loose swing in her hips. She had her arms folded across her chest, her breasts were lifted to push hard against the crumpled cotton of her blouse. She wore the same clothes as the day before.
'Do people care about hanging here?' Jack asked.
He saw a frown puckering and her eyebrows rising. They were a couple walking in a flower filled suburb, with a blue mountain ridge in distant sight, and he had asked her to talk about a court sentence that man should hang by the neck until he was dead.
'It's not an issue. It's accepted that the penalty for murder is death by hanging. You've seen what they're like, our Blacks. Hanging protects us, the Whites. There's overwhelming support for hanging.'
'If it wasn't my father… '
'And if it wasn't my brother.'
'… then I'd probably think the same.'
'If it wasn't my brother that's involved then I wouldn't cross the road for you, not if you were bleeding in the gutter.'
He ducked his head. He walked faster. As surely as he had involved her brother, he had involved her. Just as he had involved Sandham and Duggie.
'What would you do for your brother, Ros?'
'I'd do for him what you're doing for your father.'
'And after today?'
'We drop you this afternoon, we turn round, we drive like hell back to Johannesburg. I give Jan my ultimatum, big word for a big speech, I tell him that he quits or I inform on him. I don't have to go to the security police, I tell my father. He'll do as my father tells him, or my father will turn him in. That's what's happening today and after today. I'm not going to spend the next weeks and months wondering how close some pig-eyed policeman is inching to Jan, and I'm damned if I'm going to spend the next few years traipsing to White Political at Pretoria Central.'
They turned back. He couldn't think of anything to say to her. He ought to have been able to talk to her because she wasn't an activist, neither was he. They were near to the hotel when she stopped, dead, swung to face him. They were in the glare of the sun, on a wide pavement, they were dusted by the lorries passing on the road.
'Please, if you're trapped then get yourself killed.'
Jack squinted at her. 'Great.'
'If you're held they'll make you talk. If you talk, Jan's implicated.'
'And you're implicated, if I talk.'
'So just get yourself killed.' She was angry because he laughed. 'I'm in deadly earnest. The decent thing for you to do if you're trapped is to get yourself killed.'
Jack straightened. There was a mock solemnity in his voice. 'Goodbye, Miss van Niekerk, it has been a most pleasurable acquaintance.'
'You're pretty ordinary, you know that?'
'Meaning what?'
'So ordinary that you're quite interesting… If you were a mercenary or if you had some political hang-up about fighting racism, God you'd be boring. You're an ordinary person, ordinary attitudes, ordinary life. As I read you, there's nothing that ever happened in your life that wasn't just ordinary. Then you took a plane, then you burned the back off a police station, then you planned to explode your way into a hanging gaol. But that doesn't change you, doesn't stop you being just ordinary.'
He took her hand. She didn't try to pull away.
'Thank you for what you have done for me.'
'God damn you if you get yourself captured.'
They went into the hotel. They went upstairs to pack their bags. Later they would pay the bill, check out, and drive together to the rendezvous that Jan had been given.
Jack could picture it. The car would stop. He would get out. The car would drive away. He would be met at the rendezvous. He would never see the car again, nor the boy with the crippled foot, nor the pretty girl who couldn't be bothered to make herself beautiful. In his room, before throwing yesterday's socks and yesterday's shirt into his case, he looked over the plans of Pretoria Central. By the time they met, later that day, he would have the germ of a strategy to put to Thiroko.
* **
The Bushman and the dog had led the troops to the road junction outside Monte Christo.
Through night binoculars they had observed the five men who waited for their pick up. They had seen them eat and urinate. They had heard the murmur of their voices. They had called in by radio for the necessary support. It had been a fine moonlit night. An ideal night for the operation. They had seen the collection of Thiroko and his comrades. Over the radio link had been passed a description of the vehicle and its registration plate.
A motorcycle, travelling without lights, had picked up the vehicle at Ellisrus, south of Monte Christo. It was the only route the vehicle could have taken. Moving behind the motorcycle was an unmarked saloon car carrying four more members of Recce Commando. The vehicle had been trailed through the night as it came south through the Waterberge mountains towards Warmbaths.
The Puma had come again and made a night landing in the play area of the school at Monte Christo, and
