these machines? And they can?t fly through rain.?
Quinn waited.
?Tell them to turn around. Tell them to make sure he doesn'?t go back.?
Her cell phone rang in her pocket. She looked over the bank of televisions, where the country?s channels were flickering: early-morning cartoons, local news, sports, CNN, the voices and music whispering. On TV2 the newsreader was talking. Behind him was a graphic of a man on a motorbike.
The cell phone rang.
Rahjev Rajkumar touched a panel, and the sound filled the room:
She felt like swearing. She picked up her phone.
?Mentz,? she said grimly.
?Ma, Lien says I?m fat,? said her daughter in a whiny tone.
He crept forward at fifty kilometers per hour, the leather gloves were sodden, his hands cold although he had turned on the electric heaters in the handgrips. His biggest problem was seeing the road ahead, the inside of his helmet was steamed up and rain poured down the outside, the road was slippery. How to see the traffic ahead in time. The urge for speed and distance gnawing at him. At least the helicopters were quiet, but he knew they were out there somewhere. He had to get away.
They must want him very badly to use that sort of technology.
They had waited for daylight, patient and easy, like a cat for a mouse, waited for the early morning, knowing he would be tired, knowing that the helicopters were excessive, that they would intimidate and conquer.
They were not fools.
The helicopters had stayed behind him.
Like dogs herding a sheep.
Into the pen.
They were waiting for him. Somewhere up ahead they were waiting.
Allison Healy?s finger ran down the pages of the phone book, found ?Nzululwazi,? found ?M. Nzululwazi, 21 Govan Mbeki Avenue.? She scribbled the number down in her notebook, pulled the phone closer, and dialed. It rang.
A war veteran. A family man. A good man.
Still ringing.
What was going on here? Why were they after him?
Ring, ring, ring. There was nobody home.
Time to ring Laingsburg again. Perhaps there was news.
17.
Seventeen kilometers south of the Three Sisters roadblock the gravel road turns west off the Ni, an insignificant branch going nowhere, merely a connection that ends in a T junction at the normally dusty route between the forgotten villages of Sneeukraal and Wagenaarskraal.
Two soldiers were standing nearly three hundred meters from the paved road where the police van had dropped them off in the bend of the first turn. Little Joe Moroka and Koos Weyers were dry under their plastic raincoats, but the cold had seeped through their camouflage uniforms. Their faces were wet; water ran down the barrels of the R .6 assault rifles and from there streamed down to the ground.
In the hour before dawn they had talked about sunrise and the light that would bring relief, but the rain still poured down. The only improvement was the visibility extending another forty or fifty meters to expose the low thorn trees and Karoo veld, the stony ridges and pools of mud.
It had been twenty-four hours since they slept, if you could even count that restless dozing on the Oryx. Their exhaustion was showing in the feebleness of their legs and the red scratchiness of their eyes, in the dull throbbing in their temples. They were hungry. Conversation ran to a fantasy of hot, sweet coffee, sausage, eggs and bacon, and toast with melting butter. They could not agree on the necessity for fried mushrooms. Moroka said fungus was snail food; Weyers responded that when taste was at issue, 60 million Frenchies couldn'?t be wrong.
They did not hear the motorbike.
The rain was a soundproof blanket. The exhaust of the GS fluttered softly at the low revs needed for the muddy road. The soldier?s senses were dulled by weariness and tedium, and their voices drowned out the last chance of warning.
Later, when Little Joe Moroka gave his full report in the face of the spitting fury of Captain Tiger Mazibuko, he would attempt to break down and reconstruct each moment: They should not have stood so close to each other. They should not have been talking, should have been more alert.
But there are some things you cannot plan for, such as the fact that the fugitive had lost control. The straight just before the bend had a good surface where the bike would have accelerated; the turn would have been sudden and unexpectedly sharp. And just in front of them it was muddy, thick snotty porridge where a boot would sink twenty centimeters deep. The rider had followed the contour of the road formed by the regular traffic, but in the mud the front wheel had lost its grip at the critical moment.
They saw him? saw the light over the predatory beak of the monster machine and heard the engine when it was right in front of them, an apparition. Moments, fractions of moments, within which the senses register, signals are sent, the brain interprets and searches via a network of tired synapses for the right reaction in the memory banks of endless training.
