Ros had rented it, using Jack's money, paid over the odds in deposit and said she'd be back to sign the papers the next day.
He had the tube on the floor. From a sheet of light aluminium he had cut a triangular shape that he had bent into a cone, a squat witch's hat. With pliers he had fastened steel wire at intervals along the cone and then secured the wire with heavy adhesive tape. George Hawkins had told him that the speed of the detonation would be 6,000 metres per second. The wire and the sticky tape would hold and do their job for the mini-fraction of time before the aluminium cone fused in white heat to become the boring projectile travelling ahead of the explosive force.
He placed the cone into the metal tube, the open end leading, pushing it gently forward till his arm was lost in the tube. Cautiously he took the slabs of explosive and worked them, putty-like, down the long length of the tube, squeezing them with his finger tips first into the angle between the cone and the tube's sides, and then back to the central point of the cone… He knew that explosive without a firing agent was harmless, but it took some faith to believe it… The explosive was packed round the cone. He had used three and a half pounds. Working on with care, not hurrying, because the Hawkins method was care and never hurry. He packed a further eight and a half pounds of explosive, weighed meticulously, into the tube and behind the point of the cone. George had been very specific. The packing must be even, and firm.
Jack worked long and hard at the packing, sweat sheening his forehead.
George's lessons kept flickering into his head: three and three quarter pounds of explosive will punch 31 inches into sandstone with an entry hole a maximum of 12 inches wide.
He had a tube that was nine inches in diameter. He had twelve pounds of explosive to use. Nine inches of diameter and twelve pounds of explosive were the only facts that mattered a damn to him.
And he had no primer, no priming charge.
George had talked to him of six ounces of priming charge to lie between the detonator and the Polar Ammon Gelignite for the high velocity trigger into the explosive. He didn't have a priming charge. Forget the bloody priming charge.
He had three detonators.
He taped two together. With his finger he worked a slim hole into the packed explosive in the tube. The two taped detonators into the slim hole, the beginning of the arming of the shaped charge bomb. With a sharp knife from the kitchen he cut a yard off the length of Cordtex equivalent.
Very slowly, maximum care, he had eased the Cordtex equivalent into the protruding socket of one of the detonators. Making it live, powerful enough to explode him through the walls of the flat, to devastate that corner of the block. With pliers he crimped the socket of the detonator to the Cordtex equivalent. Had to be two detonators because he had no priming charge.
He made a sludge of ready mix concrete. He kneaded it against the explosive and around the detonators and around the length of Cordtex equivalent. Set concrete to make the block at one end of the tube to drive the explosive force forward, undiluted, against the cone at the other end of the tube.
Later he would tie a length of safety fuse to the Cordtex, knot it and bind it.
Jack had completed the shaped charge when they came hack.
When they came through the door he was assembling the last of his explosive in a three pound charge linked by his last detonator to Cordtex equivalent and safety fuse.
All clear in his mind. Where he would use the shaped charge, and where the smaller explosive charge, and where the Cordtex equivalent on the grilles because George had told him that Cordtex would blow away the grille bolts, slice them.
He was on his knees on the carpet when they came back, and writing on a torn scrap of paper. He had written 'rope' and 'bent metal'.
'We took a car,' Ros said.
Jan said, 'She didn't know it was so easy, to open a car up and drive it away.'
The two stared down at Jack's handiwork.
A breathlessness in Ros's voice. 'Is it going to do the job?'
'If it doesn't I'll be giving hell to an old guy in England when I get back.' Jack grinned.
'How so?'
Jack said, 'This is the first time I've ever built anything like it.'
'The first time?'
'But you're supposed to be…'
'It's the first time,' Jack said.
Ros turned away. She was shaking her head, broad sweeps, and the red ribbon in her hair flowing. A crack in her voice. 'And you haven't even thought how you'll get away in the car, where you'll go.'
'My father'll know.'
'I think it's pathetic.'
'I don't have the time, Ros It's way past midnight. I've only today, I don't have time time to go running around the getaway routes. And I'm bloody tired, and I don't need lecturing. If you want to give a lecture then bugger off out through the door first…'
'I'll make a cup of tea,' she said.
Jan levered himself down onto the floor beside Jack. They studied the plan of Pretoria Central and Magazine Hill. Jan pointed to the place where the car would be waiting, shrugged away the distance between Pretoria Central and the car. Jack led Jan through the map points where the grenades would be thrown, where the pistol shots would be fired.
'… And then you'll get the hell out. You have to give that promise. You do what you're going to do and you get clear. You don't stay about to see the show. You go home and you get into your beds, and you go to the university in the morning, and Ros goes to work. It never happened, you were never involved.'
He saw the struggle working at the face of Jan van Niekerk.
Jack said, 'I have to know that you're clear. That'll be a strength to me. You have to make me that promise.'
He saw the way that the crippled boy's fingers stroked the heavy arms of the wire cutter. Light, delicate fingers. He thought the boy should never have been there.
Ros stood in the doorway. She held two mugs of tea.
'To give you strength, we promise.'
'Never hesitate, turn your backs on me.'
'I promise,' Jan said.
Ros leaned forward with the mug of tea for Jack. Her eyes were misted. He thought she was at the limit.
'When are you going to sleep, Jack?'
He smiled. 'I'll catnap when the old man's driving.
Bloody old taxi driver can drive all n i g h t… '
The smile swiped off his face.
'Oh, Christ… ' Furious concentrated anger spreading over him.
'I missed a window,' Jack hissed. The mug rocked in his hands. 'I have the outer wall. I have the wall onto the exercise yard. I have the window onto the catwalk. I have the grille down into the cell.. . I've all of that accounted for… I don't have the window between the catwalk and the grille over the cell… '
'You're going to kill yourself,' Ros said.
He didn't seem to have heard. He was ripping at the adhesive wrapping he had made around the three pound charge.
'What are you going to do?'
'Just hope that a pound and a half on each will do the two windows, and one without a detonator.'
They left him. They couldn't help him. They left him on the floor with the sweet almond smell of gelignite. They would sleep together on the one bed, dressed and in each other's arms. They would hold each other to shut out the certainty of their fear.
