weapon being cocked. He waited for the challenging shout. He walked towards the corner of the wall, along the road and towards the bend where it followed the side wall down the hill.
There was a yapping chorus.
There was a white bundle flying through the open gates from a large garden. There was a Pekingese dog circling his ankles. He saw the garden shielded an elegant bungalow. A large elderly woman in a housecoat and bedroom slippers was in pursuit of the dog.
Jack's heart hammered.
The woman saw a young man who carried a long circular length of metal and a bag and a firearm. She lived in the heart of the Pretoria Central complex, she was the wife of the major general who was Deputy Commissioner of Prisons (security). Her bosom lurched forward as she bent to catch the collar of the darting beast. She yanked it off the ground.
The woman spoke to Jack in Afrikaans, and he smiled and nodded and she chastised the dog and Jack nodded again and the dog yapped at him and earned itself a volley of reproach and Jack took one step away and then two and then the woman was lecturing the beast in earnest and making for her garden and Jack was away free.
The sentry in the watchtower saw the wife of the deputy commissioner talking at her front gate to a man. The sentry knew the dog. It was rumoured that ferret dog had killed the Siamese cat of the daughter of the Assistant Commissioner of Prisons (personnel). He thought the man must have had business at the Deputy Commissioner's house, come there before he had come on duty forty minutes earlier. He thought the dog must have chased the man down the drive. He thought it was a pity the old cow had come out so fast, a pity the man didn't have a chance to put his boot firmly into the ferret dog's arse.
He walked on. He felt the nakedness of his back. The wall rose beside him. The lights showed him thin, knife-edge cracks in the wall between the faced brickwork. Thiroko had told him that Beverly Hills was built on a rubbish tip.
Heart hammering. He wondered if that helped him, helped his twelve pounds of explosive, the tip. Wailing siren, very faint. No. Must be singing. So bloody frightened…
•* •
There was for Jeez a sort of warmth in the singing. Listening to the singing he had put off his undressing and changing into his coarse cotton pyjamas. He knew that once they had started they would not finish. They would sing until the rope strangled the breath out of their throats. And a warmth, too, from the wheezed bronchitic breathing of old Oosthuizen.
He wondered what the other two Whites in C section 2 thought about sharing their block with Black terrorist Commies, what they thought about Jeez being amongst friends.
He was at the corner. He was at the furthest point from the sentry tower, and when he was round the corner he would be at the furthest point from the remote camera on the wall above the airlock entrance. ..
Ros drove fast down from the motorway and onto Potgieterstraat. Jan had his window down, and the grenades and the pistols in his lap.
He heard the men singing, a murmur in the night as with leaves in a gentle wind…
The colonel swayed back in his chair. The words, telex typed, bounced at him from the page. James Carew had written to Mrs Hilda Perry. Mrs Hilda Perry lived at Churchill Close, Leatherhead, Surrey. Jack Curwen lived at Churchill Close, Leatherhead, Surrey. He swept open the drawer of his desk. He needed the telephone directory of the Department of Prisons.
He glanced at his watch. He was on the countdown. He started to mouth away the final seconds…
Jan ripped the lever of the first R.G.-42 high explosive grenade, tossed it through the window. The Beetle was coming slowly now past the wall of Local, at the junction with Soetdoringstraat. His finger was in the loop of the lever of the next grenade as they approached the gates of S.A.D. F headquarters.
He could see the camera rotating patiently towards him. He was fifty yards from the corner behind him, seventy-five yards from the camera ahead.
Jack twisted, ducked towards the wall. He heard the crack thump of the first grenade…
God, I love you, little bastard kids.
… The tube down on the ground, a foot from the wall, paying out the Cordtex equivalent and the length of safety fuse, looking for the camera and the camera moving at steady, inexorable pace towards him, about to include him in the vision arc. The second grenade explosion, the metal box thump of the grenade going. He looked again for the camera. He saw the camera swinging away from him, aiming for the main approach road that came from the direction of the grenade blasts. Struggling in his pocket for the lighter, and his fingers floundering with the car keys.
The third grenade explosion…
Brilliant bloody kids, because you've pulled the camera off.
… Pistol shots in the night, soft fire crackers half a mile away. The lighter in his hand. The flame cupped. The flame held round the cut edge of the safety fuse. Jack ran back.
He flung himself down onto the hard road. He pressed his face down onto the road surface. A moment of desperate stillness.
He felt the blast bludgeon over him. He felt the pain roaring in his ears. He felt the fine draught of the debris hurtling back past him.
He crawled on his knees and elbows into the grey dust cloud. He groped until he found the hole. His hands were in the hole and scraping to find the reinforcing steel cords.
Coughing dust, spitting fragments. Cutters from his pocket.
Finding the steel cords, fastening the cutters on them, heaving with his hands at the arms of the cutters, squeezing the arms of the cutters until there was the snap and the tension break. He was in the hole, choking, hacking. His shoulders were in the hole. If his shoulders were in then the hole was large enough. He wanted to scream, he wanted to shout that he had won. He was crawling through the hole and pulling his bag and lifting his shotgun. He wanted to shout because he thought that he had won something.
He came through. He crawled into a lit garden. Ahead of him was another wall, and the ground between him and the other wall was lit as by sunlight. He saw to his right the white flood brightness high on the stanchion poles.
He was charging forward.
It was 22 seconds after the exploding of the shaped charge.
He fired six shots from the pump action to blow away the lights. Not darkness, there were the distant lights above the watch tower on the back wall, but shadows thrown by trees and shrubs and bushes that were the gardens around the hanging gaol.
A charge now. Only speed mattered. He saw ahead the pointed roofs of C section I, and C section 2, and C section 3. The gaps between the roofs were the exercise yards, covered by the grilles.
He ran towards the gap that marked the exercise yard of C section 2, and his fingers were in his bag, reaching for the rope that was lashed to the length of bent iron.
