'Get that lot under cover, and get your hat on. One minute.'
Jack bellowed back to the watchers and heard a police sergeant repeat the instruction by megaphone.
'You're a bloody vandal, Mr Hawkins.'
'Get your nose up, so's you see. Twenty seconds.'
Jack had a hard hat rammed down on the top of his head.
He peered across the open ground to the pillbox.
'You all right, Jack? You're quiet today. Ten seconds.'
'Fine.'
He thought that if it had been put to the test the pillbox could have held up an infantry battalion for half a day.
Graceless, strong and seemingly indestructible.
'Here we go.'
Jack saw the flashes, then the debris moving upwards and outwards, then the smoke. He heard the echoing rumble of the detonations. He felt the blast of air on his face. He ducked his head.
'Bloody good,' George growled.
Jack looked up. George was hunched beside him. The fortification was a rubble of concrete loosely held together by twisted wire.
There was a long thirty minutes before the blaster would allow the men forward who would cut through the wire with their torches.
When they stood at the edge of the rubble Jack marvelled at what Hawkins had achieved.
'That was pretty professional, Mr Hawkins.'
'Explosives'll get you through anything, Jack boy, if you know how to use them.'
4
On Tuesday and Thursday mornings Frikkie de Kok dressed in the bungalow's living room.
His alarm warbled quietly at three on those mornings. He dressed in the living room so as not to disturb Hermione.
On those Tuesday and Thursday mornings he liked to dress well, to be at his best.
His wife knew why Frikkie rose early on those mornings, his sons did not. In a fashion she pretended that she did not know. Where he went and what he did as the dawn was rising on Pretoria, sometimes once a week, sometimes once a month, was never talked about between them. She knew, and in her own way she supported him. There were only small ways that she could help him at those times. She never troubled him with family difficulties or nagged at him to pay bills when she knew he had set the alarm for his early rising.
He was sure that the boys, aged seventeen and fifteen, knew nothing of their father's work. The boys were the apples of Frikkie de Kok's eyes, especially Dawie, the elder.
He dressed in a white shirt, a tie that was the darkest blue, shoulder holster, a grey, almost charcoal suit and black shoes. He brushed his teeth brutally to try to erase the taste of yesterday's cigarettes. He took a glass of orange juice from the fridge. His wife wanted a new fridge and he could see from the packed shelves that the present one was inade-quately small. Hermione had last mentioned the need for the new fridge on Sunday, she had not mentioned it on Monday. She'd be back again, he thought, tomorrow.
From behind the sofa he picked up his small case. He went to the front window, drew back the curtain and looked out. There were two cars waiting.
He left his home in the Waterkloof suburb of Pretoria at 3.40 on those Tuesday and Thursday mornings. He let the cars wait for two more minutes, then emerged from his porch at 3.39. The cars would be moving off at 3.40. His was an exact science, and he had nurtured exactness in most aspects of his life.
At the front door he paused. He could hear the faint sounds of his sons, asleep. They shouldn't have had to share a room, but all government salaries were falling behind the private sector. Costs were steepling and taxes too, and there was no chance of a larger bungalow so that the boys could each have a room of their own. Great boys, doing well at school, and they'd do well when they went into the army.
The boys would be a credit to their father and mother because their parents had scrimped to give them an education that had not been possible for the young Frikkie de Kok.
The boys thought that he worked as an instructor in the carpentry shops. Time enough to tell them what he did when they had finished their schooling and perhaps not even then. He closed the door gently behind him. There was no tightness in his legs, no nervousness as he walked. If Frikkie de Kok showed either emotion or hesitation then the effect on the men around him would be catastrophic.
He saw the glow of two cigarettes in the second car. On those mornings he always had an escort of two plain clothes policemen. His work was classified as secret. When he went to the prison before dawn he always had the armed men in support, and he carried his own hand gun in the shoulder holster.
The first car was driven by his assistant. A fine young man, heavily built, bull-necked, hands that could pick up a blown football, one in the right and one in the left. The assistant had been a policeman and had served in the Koevoet unit in the Owambo area of South West Africa. The 'Crow-bar' men were an elite inside the South African police confronting the S. W. A. P. O. insurgency campaign. The assistant was equally at home with the F.N. rifle, the M79 greanade launcher, 6omm mortars, and. 50 cal machine guns.
There was nothing squeamish about the assistant's attitude to his civilian work. Frikkie de Kok thought him the best of young South Africans. If Frikkie had had a daughter then he'd have been pleased for her to become his assistant's wife.
He climbed in beside his assistant and closed the door noiselessly.
The cars pulled away. Waterkloof was a fine suburb for Hermione to live in. They weren't in one of the better avenues, but it was a good district. They lived alongside good clean-living people. Just hellish expensive for a man who worked with his hands for the government.
The capital city of the Republic slept.
They came fast down Koningen Wilhelminoweg and past the bird sanctuary.
Frikkie loved birds, all of them from the big predators to the little songsters. When he retired he hoped to buy a small farm in the north east of the Transvaal, not that he would do much farming but he would be able to study the birds.
All dependent on bastard politics. Farms were already selling cheap if they were up in the north east of the Transvaal because the farmers were quitting, and those that were slaying were buying rifles and German Shepherds and spending their thin profits on high wire fences. Just like Rhodesia.
Hut if he bought a farm he'd take some shifting. Take a big, big fire to burn out Frikkie de Kok if he'd put his life savings into a farm house and some acres and some stock.
In the centre of the city they came on the first of the corporation's street cleaners. No other sign of life. The city slept, and it didn't know and didn't care that in the state's name Frikkie de Kok and his assistant were going to work.
They drove through the empty streets, past the great buildings of commerce and government power. He had lived 35 years in the capital, he was proud to be a part of it. No way that the communists and the terrorists and the agitators were going to undermine the authority of Pretoria. Over Frikkie de kok's dead body… They turned onto Potgieterstraat. Nearly there. He noticed that the breath came faster from his assistant. He'd learn. Frikkie de Kok had been like that, panting, tightening when he was the assistant to his uncle, and he'd conquered it.
They went under the railway bridge.
The floodlights of Pretoria Central were in front of them.
The assistant was changing down, slipping his clutch, shaking the var before the right turn in front of Local.
Frikkie de Kok never criticised his assistant. On from Local and past the high walls of the White politicals gaol. They came to the checkpoint. From his hut the armed prisons man stepped into the middle of the road. The lowered bar was behind him. The assistant dipped his lights. The prisons man cradled an F.N. More than a hundred times a year this car and Frikkie de Kok and his assistant came up this side road, Soetdoringstraat, to the road
