?Where, Tiger? Where??
?Somewhere near Pe??
?I can?t hear you.? She was practically shouting.
?Petrusburg.?
Petrusburg? She had no idea where that was.
?I?m going back to the Ops Room, Tiger. We will try the radio.?
?? get him ??
?What??
The signal was gone.
?What?s that about Petrusburg, Ma?? asked Lien.
?It?s work, sweetie, I?ve got to go.?
The tension he felt going into the petrol station had resurrected a memory, brought it back from the past, the same trembling in his hands and perspiration on his face during that first time, that first assassination. He was in Munich with the SVD in his hands, the long sharpshooter?s weapon, the latest model with the synthetic nonfolding stock, a weapon whose deadly reach was 3,800 meters. The cross hairs looked for Klemperer, the double agent who should come out a door a kilometer away.
He felt as if Evgeniy Fedorovich Dragunov were lying beside him, the legendary modest Russian weapons developer. He had met him briefly in East Germany when he and the other students of the Stasi sharpshooters school were helping test an experimental SVDS. Comrade Evgeniy Fedorovich was fascinated by the black student with the impossible groupings. At two thousand meters with a cross wind of seventeen kilometers per hour and the poor light of an overcast winter?s day, Thobela Mpayipheli had shot a Rioo factor of less than 400 mm. The stocky aging Russian had said something in his mother tongue and pushed up his black-framed eyeglasses onto his forehead before reaching out and gripping the Xhosa?s shoulder, to feel if he was real, perhaps.
He wanted to dedicate this one to Dragunov but, dear God, his heart bounced so in his ribs on this, his first blooding, his fingers and palms were wet with sweat. On the practice range it was the testosterone of competition, but this was real, a man of flesh and blood, a bald middle-aged West German who was feeding on both sides of the fence. The KGB had earmarked him for elimination, and it was time for the ANC?s exchange student to earn his keep. There was steam on the telescopic lens; he dared not take his eye from the door. It opened.
Miriam sat on the chair, staring at the door, trying to recall the route they had followed bringing her here. Was there another way out? It was so quiet in the building, just the soft sound of the air conditioner and now and then the creak of metal expanding or contracting. She could not wait much longer.
?I don'?t want to be on the record,? said Dr. Zatopek van Heerden. ?That is the condition.?
?I will show my story to you first.? She hoped for a compromise, but he shook his head.
?I am not anti-media,? he said. ?I believe every country gets the media it deserves. But Thobela is my friend.?
Allison had to make a decision, and eventually she said, ?It?s a deal.? Then Van Heerden began to speak, his eyes never leaving her face.
Tiger held the light of the little flashlight to the map before him. The fucking problem was that the R48 forked beyond Koffie-fontein, the R705 went to Jacobsdal, the R48 going on to Petrus-burg. He had ordered four Rooivalks south to Jacobsdal, the other four with the two Oryx to the more likely east, but the problem was that the damn traffic officer had alerted them too late. By Mazibuko?s reckoning, the fugitive could be past Petrusburg but where? Where the fuck? Because the roadblocks, two bloody roadblocks, said a horde of BMWs had gone through, but not one had a black guy, and the possibilities were legion. Where are you going, you dog? Dealesville or Boshof? His finger traced the routes farther, and he gambled on Mafikeng and the Botswana border. That made it Boshof. But had he crossed the Modder river yet? The Rooivalks would each have to follow a dirt road; there were too many alternatives.
?He is not a complex man, but that is precisely where you can make a mistake,? said Van Heerden. ?Too many people equate uncomplicated with simple or a lack of intelligence. Thobela?s noncomplexity lies in his decision- making abilities, he is a man of action, he examines the facts, he accepts or rejects, he does not worry or agonize over it. If Miriam told you he was helping a friend by taking something to Lusaka, then he made the decision that his loyalty lay with his friend, regardless of the consequences.
Finished and
Only part of his attention was on the long lit path that the double lamps of the GS shone through the growing dark. The dirt road was a good one, reddish brown and hard-surfaced. He kept his speed down to sixty or seventy. That fall in the Karoo storm still bothered him. The rest of his mind was in Munich, on his first assassination. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was aware that during the past twenty-four hours he was reliving the past, as if he was somehow reactivated. He let it flow, let it out, perhaps it was part of a healing process, a changeover, a closure so that he could shake it off, a period at the end of a paragraph in his metamorphosis.
The door had opened and his finger had curled around the trigger, the SVD became an extension of his being. In his mind?s eye he could see the bullet waiting for metal to hit the percussion cap, the 9.8 gram steel of the 7.62 mm bullet waiting to be spun through the grooved tunnel of the 24 cm barrel, through the silencer, and then in a curved trajectory, irrevocably on its way. Pressure on the trigger increased, a woman and child appeared in the lens, freezing him, the cross rested on her forehead, right below the band of the blue wool cap, he saw the smoothness of her face, the bright healthy skin, laugh lines at her eyes, and he blew out his breath and the tempo of his heart accelerated some more.
Tiger Mazibuko screamed orders into the microphone. There were three routes to Boshof: from Paardeberg, Poplar Grove, and Wolwespruit. Two Rooivalks on the first, his primary choice, one each on the other two, flying north? he wanted them to start searching from Seretse.
?I am putting the TDATS on infrared,? said the pilot over the radio, and Mazibuko had no idea what he was talking about. ?That means we will see him even if his lights are off.?
29.
