‘No, no, no,’ screamed Cobie de Villiers.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ I told him, and dragged the madman with his hands bound and head bent behind me by the hair.
Halfway to the gate, with day breaking over the eastern horizon, Jacobus le Roux said in his rabid voice, ‘I’ll talk.’
I ignored him and pulled harder on his hair.
‘I’ll talk.’ Half an octave higher.
‘You’re lying, Jacobus.’
‘No. I swear.’
‘Because it’s just you and me.’
‘You’re going to tell Emma.’
‘No, please, not in front of Emma.’
‘Why not?’
He made a sound, a heart-rending bark that stopped me in my tracks.
‘Why not in front of Emma, Jacobus?’
‘Because it was my fault.’
‘What was?’
‘Ma and Pa. My fault.’
I let go of his hair. He staggered backwards and fell on his backside. His head drooped. In the morning half- light his face was bloodied and swollen from my blows. His shoulders heaved.
Cobie de Villiers wept. The sobs were soft but gradually grew louder until the veld resounded, raw and wrung out. I just stood there with the Glock in my hand and watched him, weary and suddenly sorry for this forlorn wreck.
Maybe it would do him good to cry. Perhaps it would temper his madness. The sounds rose in a crescendo and then diminished. His tears dripped dark dots into the dust.
I stood in front of him and shoved the Glock into my belt. I held his shoulder as Stef had done, and said, ‘Easy now, Jacobus, take it easy.’
Around us the Bushveld awoke. Cobie looked up at me slowly. He didn’t look good, but his eyes were less wild.
‘Can you really stop them?’
‘Not “can”, Jacobus. I will. No doubt.’
I could see that he didn’t believe me, but it didn’t matter to him any more. I untied his hands and rubbed his wrists. He gulped and breathed deeply a few times.
‘I am Jacobus le Roux,’ he said with terrible emotion, as if he had waited twenty years for this chance.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘And I miss Emma so terribly.’
Jacobus le Roux’s story did not come easily.
It took nearly three hours in the telling. Jerkily, struggling, sometimes disjointed so that I had to interrupt him. Every now and then emotion would silence him and I would wait until his shoulders stopped heaving. Every time he wandered off the point to irrelevancies, I would have to draw him back to his story with extreme patience. Later, when the sun was up and the heat rapidly becoming unbearable, I took him to the cool of a shady tree. We needed water. And sleep. But now he had the urge to get it off his chest and I had the thirst to hear it, to have the whole thing make sense.
When he was completely finished, when I had asked my last question and he’d answered it with a now hoarse and exhausted voice, we just sat there in the shade of the thorn tree like two punch-drunk boxers. We stared at the veld and saw nothing.
As those lingering minutes ticked away slowly I wondered what Jacobus le Roux felt. Relief? Relief that he was no longer the only one to know. Fear of what he had unleashed? Hope, that it could end now, this nightmare of twenty years? Or despair that it would never go away.
I looked at him, at the wounds on his face, the lines of tears down his cheeks, the drooping shoulders of someone who has borne too much for too long, and I recalled the picture of the young Jacobus le Roux. A great feeling of pity washed over me and I put out my hand and rested it on his shoulder. So he would know that he wasn’t alone any more.
Then I allowed the red-grey mist of rage to slowly build up, anger at the people who had done this to him and Emma. I had to control it, because I would need a cool head, but I let it flood through me, so it could drive out the exhaustion.
Before I stood up to leave, I said to Jacobus, ‘I’m going to make it right.’
He looked into my eyes. I saw he was empty. There was no madness, but also no hope.
I reversed the Audi out of the long grass beside the road and drove away. There were things I had to do. Eventually, I must go back to Motlasedi – my rented farmhouse below the mountain, beside the river, the ‘place of the great battle’, and I knew that they would be waiting there for me.
They would have heard the cell phone conversations; they had the technology for that. They would have stalked my temporary abode in the darkest hour with their sniper rifles and their balaclavas. They would have found nothing, but they would be waiting there to kill me.
Then they would wait for Emma, until they got to her in some way or another. They would stop at nothing.
I understood most of it now. I couldn’t quite grasp the precise reasons for preserving their great secret with such relenuessness twenty years on, but I would find out.
Today.
40
The awful irony of Jacobus le Roux’s tale was that his father’s military influence was the start of it.
After basic training in 1985, only three national servicemen were transferred to the newly formed Nature and Environmental Conservation Unit of the army, which in total consisted of just over twenty soldiers. Jacobus was one of the chosen because Johannes Petrus le Roux, managing director of the Armscor supplier, Le Roux Engineering Works, had a word with the right general.
He hadn’t felt guilty about it. That was the way life worked. It was whom your father knew that counted. It was better that someone who felt so strongly about the environment should go rather than some dumb private loafing in the bush. So Jacobus le Roux had the opportunity to live his passion at the General De Wet Training Camp at De Brug outside Bloemfontein. More than ten thousand springbuck grazed on the 17,000-hectare property.
He was a self-assured young man, intelligent, passionate, dedicated and in his element. He impressed his superiors with his knowledge and work ethic. The next offer in September 1985 was made on merit.
The colonel came down from Pretoria to inspect De Brug and over a cup of tea in a prefab building he told him about the two army units in the Kruger Park. One was a contingent of 7 SAI, an infantry battalion from Phalaborwa, which patrolled the park’s border with Mozambique. The other was the more obscure ESU, or Environmental Services Unit, initially formed under the influence of the legendary former special forces Major Jack Greeff, but under the control of the Nature and Environmental Conservation Unit. The purpose of the ESU was to halt the epidemic proportions of ivory poaching and smuggling in Kruger.
Would Jacobus be interested in joining them?
He had said ‘yes’ long before his cup of tea was empty. Fourteen days later he reported for six weeks’ intensive training at the 5 Recce Battalion base in the Lowveld. That was where he met Vincent Mashego for the first time, his tracker, partner and future comrade.
