?The guy who put out the press release about how bad the biker really is.?
?Check,? said the news editor.
?And I need someone to call that Kimberley number and ask them to confirm or deny that Thobela Mpayipheli has been trapped near Petrusburg.?
?Good girl,? said the news editor.
The phone still rang.
?And I need someone to try and find a list of child day-care centers in Guguletu and start calling. We need to know if a Pakamile Nzululwazi has been picked up by his mom today.?
?It?s eight-thirty?
?It?s Guguletu, Chief. Not some cozy white suburb where everybody goes home at five o?clock. We might get lucky. Please.?
The phone rang and rang.
Tiger Mazibuko sat in the copilot?s seat of the Oryx. It had landed beside the R.64, halfway between Dealesville and Boshof.
He had the radio headset on, listening to the Rooivalk pilots calling in from each sector they had searched as clear. He marked them off on a chart.
Could the dog be through already, beyond Boshof?
He shook his head.
Impossible. He couldn'?t ride that fast.
They would get him. Even if he got lucky, there was a last resort. Beyond Mafikeng there were only two roads over the Botswana border. Just two. And he would close them off.
But it would probably not be necessary.
At first there was relief. The Oryx had not landed here because they had spotted him. Now there was the frustration of being trapped.
He lay beside the GS under the bridge and dared not move, he dared not make a sound, they were too close, the four romping young soldiers. The copilot had come down, too, and now they were skipping flat stones over the water. The one with the most skips before the stone sank would be the champion.
He had recognized one of the soldiers, the young black fellow. This morning he had held a rifle to his head.
He saw himself in them. Twenty years ago. Young, so very young, boys in men?s bodies, competitI've, idealistic, and so ready to play soldier.
It was always so, through the ages, the children went to war. Van Heerden said it was the age to show off what you had, to make your mark so you could take your place in the hierarchy.
He was even younger when he had left home, seventeen. He could remember it well, in his uncle Senzeni?s car, the nighttime journey, Queenstown, East London, Umtata; they had talked endlessly, without stopping, about the long road that lay ahead. Senzeni had repeated over and over that it was his right and his privilege, that the ancestors would smile on him, the revolution was coming, injustice would be swept away. He remembered, but as he lay here now, he could not recall the fire that burned in his soul. He searched for that zeal, that Sturm und Drang that he had felt, he knew it had been there, but as he tried to taste it, it was only cold ash. He had caught the bus in Umtata; Senzeni had hugged him long and hard and there were tears in his uncle?s eyes and his farewell was ?Mayibuye.? It was the last time he had seen him? had Senzeni known? Had he known his own battle would be the more dangerous, working inside the lion?s den, with so much greater risk? Was the desperation of Senzeni?s embrace because of a foreboding that he would die in the war on the home front?
The bus ride to Durban, to Empangeni, was a journey into the unknown; in the earliest hours before dawn, the enormity of that journey ahead became a worm in his heart that brought with it the corruption of insecurity.
Seventeen.
Old enough to go to war, young enough to lie awake in the night and fear, to long for the bed in his room and the reassurance of his father in the rectory, young enough to wonder if he would ever feel his mother?s arms again.
But the sun rose and burned away the fears, it brought bravado, and when he got off at Pongola he was fine. The next night they smuggled him over the border to Swaziland, and the following night he was in Mozambique and his life was irrevocably changed.
And here he was now, using a skill the East Germans had taught him. To lie still, that was the art of the assassin and sniper, to lie motionless and invisible for hours, but he had been a younger man? this one was forty years old, and his body complained. One leg was asleep, the stones under the other hip were sharp and unbearably uncomfortable, the fire in his belly was quenched and his zeal was gone. It was fifteen hundred kilometers south in a small house on the Cape Flats beside the peaceful sleeping body of a tall slim woman, and he smiled to himself in the dark, despite his discomfort, he smiled at the way things change, nothing ever stays the same and it was good, life goes on.
And with the smile came the realization, the suspicion, that this journey would change his life, too. He was on the way to more than Lusaka.
Where would it take him?
How could anyone know?
She worked on the lead story, knowing it was going to be a difficult job tonight.
A squadron of Rooivalk attack helicopters cornered the fugitive motorcyclist Thobela Mpayipheli near the Free State town of Petrusburg late last night amid conflicting reports from the military and unofficial sources.
