me again that you understand.’
‘I understand.’
‘Very good. I see that you’re in Manzini. If you stay there I will send some people to talk to you. We can work this thing out.’
He realised that the man wanted to keep him on the line. Maybe there were already people here looking for him. He stopped listening.
He put down the phone and walked away, quickly, from his life.
The first one was easy because I knew where he was and I knew that he was the one who had shot Emma.
I waited until nine o’clock that night. I crept across the river in the night shadows. I approached him from behind. He lay on his stomach, quite comfortably, with the Galil on the tripod in front of him. Now and then he peered through the night sight.
Beside him lay a rucksack. There would be food and drink in it. I needed that.
It’s impossible to be totally silent in the bush, never mind how careful you are. There was a distance of three metres between us when the tiny, invisible twig cracked under my foot. I saw him instinctively turn his head first, and then his upper body jerked around, but I was on my feet with the knife in my right hand. He stood up hurriedly. He did what most people would do – he tried to use his weapon, the sniper rifle. He swung it at me.
Too slow. Too late. I thumped the long blade into his heart and said to him, ‘That’s for Emma.’
I don’t think he heard me.
I stepped back and let him fall. I dragged him to one side, picked up the rifle and lay down where he had been. I used his night scope to scan the area.
There was the Jeep Grand Cherokee, half hidden behind the house beside a Toyota Prado. Big vehicles. Enough to transport a large team. How many were there? The house seemed deserted. I swung the telescope slowly across the whole area. Then I spotted him on the veranda behind the wall. Only the top of his head protruded.
Number two.
If I were in their place, I would have deployed the others near the gate.
We would see.
I heard a voice faintly whispering. Behind me.
I plucked out the Glock and swung around.
Nothing.
Still I heard the voice. It was a man’s voice. Impossible, since there was only dense bush behind me.
I realised that the sound must have come from a radio.
I crawled over to Blondie’s corpse and felt in his pockets. Nothing. I turned him over and felt along his belt. Nothing again.
The voice was more audible now. Close to him, or somewhere on him. Up top.
I felt along his body, since I couldn’t see in this dark, and held my ear close to his head. I heard it clearly. ‘Vannie, come in.’ It was a soft, impatient whisper.
The thing was in his ear. There was a fine wire looping down. I should have known that they’d have technology. I took it off carefully. His skin was still warm. I put it in my ear. It didn’t fit very well. It might have been tailor made for him.
‘Vannie, don’t tell me your vack isn’t working.’
What was a vack?
‘Frans, can you see Vannie?’
‘Negative.’
‘Fuck.’
Numbers three and four.
‘Want me to go and see?’
‘Yes, it’s still early. Take him one of the spare vacks, there are some more in the back of the Jeep, in the blue box.’
‘OK.’
I lay down. Vacks? I looked through the scope. The man behind the wall stood up. Frans. He jogged down the steps to the vehicles and opened the back of the Jeep.
‘I can’t see the box.’
‘It says Voice Activated Comms.’
I got it. Vack. VAC. VACs.
‘It’s not here.’
‘It must be there.’
‘I’m telling you it’s not here.’
‘It’s in the back of the Prado, Eric. I moved it.’ A new voice. Number five.
‘Thanks.’
Frans shut the back of the Jeep and went over to the Prado, opened it and rummaged inside.
‘OK, I’ve got it. Fuck, Vannie, just don’t shoot me now.’
‘He can’t hear you, Frans.’
‘I’m just saying.’
He came jogging across the lawn to me. I took the knife and stood up.
Jacobus le Roux found work as a labourer at the Mlawula game reserve in Swaziland. He was an oddity to the black game wardens, the white Afrikaner deserter who wanted to do the work of a black man. The quiet boy who never laughed.
With great effort and patience he pieced together the bits of news and rumour. Samora Machel’s plane had been off course. Somewhere there was a false beacon, a VOR, the
He knew where the VOR had been. He knew who had put it there.
The newspapers said the South African government wanted Machel dead. They said he had been a thorn in their sides since 1964, when he led the first attack against the Portuguese as a guerrilla fighter for the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, or FRELIMO. A former nurse, Machel had seen his family’s land confiscated, he had seen his parents starve under Portuguese rule, he had seen his brother die in a South African gold mine, and had experienced the wide gap between medical care for whites and blacks at first hand.
And because his grandparents and great-grandparents had fought Portuguese rule in the nineteenth century, the diminutive nurse took up the struggle himself. By 1970, he had become the commander-in-chief of Frelimo, and by 1975 he was the first President of an independent Mozambique.
And, said the newspapers, he had signed his owned death warrant soon after – by allowing guerrilla forces fighting against oppression in South Africa and Rhodesia to use his country as a springboard for attacks. The two neighbouring countries retaliated by forming a rebel group called RENAMO under the auspices of fighting the Marxist Machel government, and a bitter civil war was born.
By 1986, Mozambique had reached breaking point. Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia had succumbed to boere pressure and ordered RENAMO out of his country. RENAMO’s great onslaught against Machel had begun and everything was on a knife-edge, at the top of the precipice. Killing Machel was supposed to finally break the deadlock.
But Pretoria denied everything. Even the minister whose face he had seen in the little plane. Especially that minister.
That was what frightened Jacobus the most. He knew that they were lying and he knew what they were prepared to do to preserve the lie.
After five months at the Mlawula reserve, they tracked him down.
He came in from the veld and big fat Job Lindani, the Swazi manager with the ready smile, said to him, ‘Don’t go home. There are white men waiting for you. Boere.’
He fled again.
