roused the village as it picked up the troops. By a relayed radio link the pilot was able to keep in contact with the car that followed the motorcycle that followed Thiroko's vehicle. The Puma, with its range of 570 kilometres, had had no difficulty in holding the contact before the last message was passed to the cockpit from some four kilometres north of Warmbaths.
A morning of rare excitement for the colonel.
The fire bomb investigation in the hallway ten floors below was no longer priority. His plan personally to interrogate the Methodist priest, White and elderly and stitched for subversion, was shelved. Set aside, too, was the case file that would convict two and possibly three of the F.O.S.A.T.U. leadership.
One file on the colonel's desk. The heavily stencilled title was JACOB THIROKO. At the top of the file was a wire print of the photograph taken at Gaberone airport. The picture showed a slight, insignificant man walking on the tarmac, and there was something in his expression that told the colonel of pain, as if the wind were caught in his bowels.
The file was three quarters of an inch thick. Intelligence material collected over the years from Gaberone, Maputo, Luanda, Lusaka and London, and for embellishment there were the statements of the men from the 'suicide squads' who had allowed themselves to be captured… It always amused the colonel that the A.N.C. cadres liked to call themselves 'suicide squads' and then chuck away their weapons and emerge from their bolt holes with their hands held high… He knew Jacob Thiroko well, as well as he knew an old friend. He thought he had evidence enough to put him away for twenty-five years. He was less certain that he would be able to stick upon Thiroko a charge of murder without extenuating circumstances.
It would be good to hang the man, it would be a disappointment only to lock him away. Whether Thiroko hanged, or whether he was imprisoned, would depend on what information the bastard gave his interrogators. If he talked he would hang. Clear cut. The colonel would be responsible for the interrogation, responsible for making him talk. The photograph pleased the colonel. If Thiroko was in pain, if he had pain in his gut, then that would make easier the job of lifting the bastard onto the gallows trap.
The latest report was that Thiroko and four other Black males had crossed the border and were now resting up, that his resting place was surrounded by the Recce Commando.
The soldiers were ordered to hold off until it was clear whether a further rendezvous was to take place. He had been told that the military would move in by mid-afternoon, that directly after his arrest Thiroko would be flown by helicopter to Johannesburg.
The colonel was wondering at the risk of it, why a man of Thiroko's prominence in Umkonto we Sizwe would dare to travel back inside South Africa, when his telephone rang.
It was the direct line, with the unlisted number. He reached for it. He heard his wife's voice.
Had he read the morning paper? About Aunt Annie?
No, my dear, he had not.
So he did not know that yesterday afternoon Aunt Annie, his brother-in-law's sister, had been killed by a Black mob on the Pretoria road?
To his wife and himself she was always Aunt Annie, though only a few years older than they were. A dour old lady, and she had given them, as a wedding present, a silver tea pot which they always used in the afternoons when he was at home.
He consoled his sobbing wife. He said he would not be able to come home before the small hours, persuaded her to go at once and spend the day with her brother, probably best to stay overnight too. He rang off.
Land mines, bombs, murders, riots, and the hacking and burning of Aunt Annie. And the statistics of revolt spiralling.
As if a roof had sprung leaks, and as fast as a leak was blocked there were more water springs soaking through. It was the bastards like Thiroko who pick-axed the roof, made the leaks, slaughtered old Aunt Annie who came to tea on each of their wedding anniversaries, and who poured from the silver pot.
Thiroko lay on his back. His bed was loose straw, wrenched from a string tied bale. He was the only one awake. The boys were sleeping, snoring at the roof of the cow shed.
They had arrived in the dark, and stumbled from the road across rough ground to the cow shed. The place stank of the animals. The shed was used by the farmer for storage and for when he had a difficult calving and the cow needed attention. They had dug against the back wall of the shed to uncover the weapons cache. Each of the A.K. 47 assault rifles was well sealed in plastic bags, each was dry and oiled.
They had taken five of the rifles stored in the shed. They had taken also 50 kilos of plastic explosive, and detonators and firing wire. What they had not needed they had buried again under the soil and manure.
When it was first light he had crawled to a place where the overlapping metal walls of the shed had been prised apart by the winter storms. The cow shed was on rising ground. He could see where the road ran close by, where they had been dropped after the drive down from Monte Christo, and he could see in the far distance the grain silos of Warmbaths.
He had tried to sleep. The pain ate inside him. It might have been the long flight from London, and then the flight from Lusaka to Gaberone that had welled the pain. It might have been the bone-shaking drive from Monte Christo. It might have been the twenty-four hours without food. It might have been fear. The pain was sharp in his stomach.
Travelling with the boys, he had learned much. Each of them had looked good enough in the training camps, and the instructors from the German Democratic Republic had said they were as good as any, and Thiroko had thought they were good until he had walked with them. Now he thought they were crap, because they had talked rubbish to him of a welcoming uprising. No inkling of the danger of coming as a stranger into their own land. They were going to have to shape up and learn fast and much between here and the gaol.
He lay on his back, in his pain, and he thought of the Englishman. An anxiety simmered in him, of business not yet talked through. Happy and Charlie and Percy and Tom were held in cells on the opposite side of Beverly Hills to Jeez Carew, and they would have to be reached before the assault on C section… He thought Jack Curwen would understand that four men must come before one.
Thiroko pushed himself awkwardly to his feet. The motion hurt him. He went out through the open door. He breathed in the cool clean air of his mother country. Down from this height was the sprawled town and beyond it the hazed flat veld. It was right that he should have come back, that before he died he should smell the air of his home.
He squatted beside a bush. His bowels were water, and he had no paper to wipe himself. When he stood and pulled up his trousers he saw that there was blood mucous in his mess.
He saw no movement except the birds skimming the long grass, he heard no sounds except their shrill calling.
* * *
The soldiers who watched the cow shed were the elite of the South African Defence Force. They were used to sterner tasks than this. In total and motionless silence they lay up in cover, at the nearest point a hundred metres from the rusted metal building, watching the four walls from behind machine guns and automatic rifles. They had seen Thiroko come out of the shed. It had been noted that he had no paper.
Six hundred metres away, where the road curved, hidden by a coppice of eucalyptus and scrub, was parked the car that had travelled after Thiroko from Ellisrus. The four men who sat in the car, or squatted outside it, wore civilian clothes, slacks and sweaters. Their hair was not cut short in the style of the military, two were bearded. They were unremarkable.
Crouched down in the coppice were the dog handler, his labrador, and the Bushman.
