The Prey (10 page)

‘You’ve brought in the police?’

He clenched the wheel harder. That tone. It was like Tania criticising him for having to respond to a call-out at the mine and missing Jessica’s piano recital or her dance or whatever. He took a deep breath. ‘Yes.’

‘And?’

The hell with it. ‘And like I tried to tell you on the video conference the other day, the buggers are completely bloody useless. They’re too scared to even investigate. Look, there’s a reason most
zama zamas
are arrested by mine security and that’s because the police don’t want any part of it. Hell, they’re probably being paid off by the gold dealers to look the other way as well.’

She stared at him. If there was a veneer of civilisation between them it had already begun to split and peel like the laminate on his kitchen cupboards. ‘Yes, and there’s also a reason people are killed in battles with illegal miners – because mine security in this country shoots first and asks questions later.’

‘That’s rubbish,’ he said, glancing at her. He was tired and he knew he shouldn’t be getting into a fight with her. He should just let her do her seagull thing – fly in and shit all over them and fly home – and then go back to running his mine and trying to run his life. But he couldn’t keep quiet in the face of her know-it-all pontificating.

‘Is it?’ she said. ‘Explain to me why the
zama zamas
would kill two of your people and, presumably, capture one of them. I’ve read plenty of reports about clashes between mine security and your
zama zamas
, and the casualties happen when security goes looking for a fight.’

Her eyes challenged him. They were a vivid emerald, something he hadn’t noticed on the TV screen in the video conferences. The word was she was a machine, and had no man and no personal life whatsoever. ‘So now you’re saying we should do nothing about them – not go after them in case someone gets killed or wounded?’

‘I’m saying that perhaps your security guard, Paulo Barrica, went looking for a fight when he should have been protecting your environmental officers.’

Cameron indicated right and turned onto the mine access road, but pulled over onto the dusty verge before they reached the perimeter gates.

‘What? Why are we stopping?’

He pointed his finger at her. ‘Paulo Barrica was a good man – one of the best security men I’ve ever employed. He never took a cent from the
zama zamas
and was helping me with an operation to catch some corrupt security guards at the mine. He was as honest as the day is long and, yes, he was a hard man, but if you’re going to point the finger at him for what happened you can get out of this car and walk, because until we know what happened I’m not going to be blaming anyone except myself for the death of those two men, and whatever’s happened to Chris.’

Even as he said the words he knew he was digging his own grave, although part of him didn’t really care. Paulo was a hard man, which was why her words and her tone rankled so much – because she could be right. Ironically, if he’d sent Chris and Themba down with one of the lazier guards, one of the ones he and Paulo suspected of being corrupt, it was likely no one would have been killed or captured. A crooked guard would have avoided confrontation and perhaps even had a message delivered in advance to let the
zama zamas
know which
madala
side the environmental team would be visiting that day.

Christ, Cameron thought, he was tired.

‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ she said in a softer voice, ‘you look like you could use some sleep.’

He started the car again and pulled back onto the access road. ‘Could you sleep if you were me? If one of your men was still down there?’

She looked at him, lips pursed. ‘No. I suppose not.’

They drove to the checkpoint and the guard made Kylie get out of the car and sign in. Cameron could have just had the guard wave them through, but he’d made a point of telling the man on duty, on his way out to the airport to collect Kylie, to stop them on the way back in and have the white woman sign in. He wanted her to see that they took security seriously.

‘Sorry for the delay,’ he mumbled.

‘No, not at all. Protocols are protocols. But how can a
zama zama
even get onto the site?’

Cameron drove the short distance to the mine office, gesturing to the perimeter fence. ‘Take a look. It’s a big area to secure and it’s not a prison. Those big hills you can see behind the mine are covered in bush and stretch all the way to Swaziland. I’ve got armed response security patrols and two dog teams, but there are too many tracks leading to the mine to patrol. We concentrate on the perimeter but as fast as we find and repair cuts in the fences or burrows underneath them, the
zama zamas
find a new way onto the mine. If you want to double or quadruple my security budget I can put up searchlights and machine-gun towers.’

‘I’ll review it.’

‘I was joking,’ he said as he pulled into the manager’s parking spot, adjacent to the single-storey administration building. ‘You know, we could make this place like Polsmoor Prison but that wouldn’t stop the
zama zamas
, it would only slow them down.’

‘Why is that?’ She got out of the car and he answered her as they walked to his office.

‘Even if we stop them getting in and out of the mine site via the perimeter fence, they can still come and go underground. There are mines everywhere here, some dating back a century. Many of the mines are interconnected underground, sometimes because you
had one mine taking over a neighbour and deliberately breaking through, and sometimes it just happens – we’ll accidentally stumble on an old mine we didn’t know about. You can walk for kilometres underground. We bulldoze old shafts shut if we can find them, but there’s always a way into and out of a mine. Sometimes the guys use old escape ladders, and sometimes just ropes knotted together.’

‘You’re saying you can’t do anything – that the situation’s hopeless and we just have to live with the theft?’

He opened the door for her and the airconditioning beckoned them inside. Cameron said hello to the receptionist, Ilse, and introduced her to Kylie, which saved him from having to answer her barbed question, at least until after they’d asked for their drinks – black coffee for him, green tea for her. Cameron saw the perplexed look cross Ilse’s face and wondered how long it would take her to get someone to drive to town to get green tea. If such a thing even existed in Barberton.

Cameron introduced Kylie to Hannelie, then showed her into his office and shut the door. He sat down behind his desk and she took a seat opposite him. He put his elbows on the blotter and clasped his hands together. ‘Yes.’

‘Yes? Just like that, you’ve admitted defeat?’

He sat back in his chair. ‘We know the gold stolen from mines in South Africa finds its way overseas to Dubai and Athens mostly. You know how much gold is worth these days. We estimate Eureka alone is losing about half a million US dollars’ worth of gold every
month
. We can’t afford to pay our security guys and our miners who are supplying the
zama zamas
as much as the criminals can.’

‘Yes, I read that some of your employees are involved as well. It’s hard to believe.’

Cameron felt his face flush, but simply shook his head. ‘Not really. Some of them are related to the criminal miners. Because we’re going deeper with the new shaft our workings aren’t as accessible from old mines, so the illegals are bribing our guys to take supplies down to them.’

‘So what, we just accept it?’ She looked incredulous.

Cameron sighed. ‘We do what we can. We carry out spot checks; we run undercover operations like the one I’d organised with Paulo Barrica; and we used to send armed security down into the mine when we located a
zama zama
work site, until you risk-averse people in Australia halted our operations. Like I said, we close illegal access points when we find them, but as long as there’s a demand there’s going to be men who will take the risk to work down there.’

She folded her arms and looked at him, then around his office, her gaze stopping at an old painting Jessica had done when she was a little kid, which he’d framed.

‘Cameron, we definitely need to review your security, but there’s something else I need to talk to you about first.’

‘Yes?’

‘Jan wanted me to tell you in person – you’re being promoted.’

He nodded. ‘For having two men killed on my watch and another disappear, and for not being able to control security at my mine, as you’ve just inferred.’

She frowned and he knew she was probably thinking the same thing. ‘We want to make you head of special projects for southern Africa. You’ll be overseeing planning for all the new mines, and you’ll be based in Johannesburg.’

Shuffling papers. He had known it was coming when Jan had asked him to oversee planning for the coalmine at Lion Plains and he’d told himself he was ready for it, but still it felt like a kick in his ribs while he was down after a punch that had nearly knocked him out. He’d probably have a secretary, he thought, but no staff. The environmental work and the real planning and development was done by others, and by consultants. His job would be to report to Jan – via this Kylie woman – on the progress of others. He would become a mail man. No, worse than that, a mailroom boy, putting things in electronic envelopes and posting them to others. There would be travel – to tsetse fly-ridden wastelands such as Kafue, and trips back to the lowveld to address public meetings full of irate farmers and game-park owners who hated everything he and Global Resources stood for.

‘It’s because of Tania, my wife,’ he said.

Kylie shook her head. ‘Cameron, your personal life is none of our business. This is –’

He held up a hand to silence her. He was beyond arguing with her, but it needed to be said, so that she knew the truth behind Jan’s decision. ‘Whether he’s told you or not, Jan is right. He knows how the workers and the middle managers here are talking: they think my mind hasn’t been on the job since my wife walked out on me They blame me for the deaths, and rightly so. Maybe you are right, with your outsider’s simplistic view of things. Maybe there was more I could have done to stop the
zama zamas
and maybe I shouldn’t have sent Paulo down the mine with those men.’

She folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them.

He didn’t need to hear it from her. He’d been humiliated by a disembodied American on a computer who’d typed the words his wife wanted to hear in a cesspit of a chatroom. The man wouldn’t have had to promise Tania much to get her to leave. She was sick of Barberton and sick of him. All he knew was mining. He had tried not to think about it, but he thought she had slept around. Not with people on his staff: probably men in town. Cameron clenched his fist.

‘It
is
a promotion,’ Kylie said, breaking into his thoughts. ‘More money, a new start for you and your daughter. How old is she?’

He glared at her, then looked up at the ceiling. He didn’t want her pity. He hated that he couldn’t tell her and Jan to go fuck themselves, to stick their desk job up their arses. All he’d wanted from his career, since the day he’d started work underground, was to be the boss of a successful goldmine. He’d made it, and instead of bringing him happiness it had cost him his marriage.

Cameron looked out the window at the headgear of the mine, the tall concrete and steel tower that shielded the winder and the cables that lowered his workers down and brought ore up. He thought of the men as part of his family. And two had been killed and one was missing.

He looked at her again and saw she was smart enough not to push it further with him. He knew he’d sounded churlish and
childish. He was losing all that made him who he was, but Cameron suddenly knew what he had to do, before he left Barberton for the new desk job. He could never come back, but he could leave it a better place.

‘You come over here and you can’t understand how I can turn a blind eye to the theft that goes on here,’ he said.

‘I’m not saying that.’

‘No, but you’re thinking that, and you’re not all wrong. I’ve done what I can to improve security, but I’ve also walked a tightrope. I’ve compromised to try to keep the peace and save the company money. You think we’re a bunch of vigilantes, but the truth is I could have done more. I could have sent more armed security guys down to the
madala
side workings, but there would have been more bloodshed – our people and theirs. I probably would have had a revolt of my own workers, as well. Plenty of them have a stake in the
zama zamas’
operations.’

She nodded. ‘Well, it’ll be someone else’s problem now that you’re being promoted.’

That cut him more than anything else she could have said. ‘Someone else’s problem’ – like he was walking away from the years of theft and the deaths of good men, turning his back on them.

*

Chris forced himself to concentrate on his notes to keep his fear at bay.

He worked by the light of a torch whose batteries were nearly dead. He’d asked for his hard hat and lamp, which had been confiscated from him when he’d been taken captive, but Wellington had laughed, saying he didn’t want him being able to find his way out. Chris wondered if he could have found his way out. He’d been led to more than half-a-dozen different work sites, sometimes with the terror-inducing sack tied over his head again.

Chris was now working for Wellington, whether he liked it or not, and it seemed his life depended on what he was able to come up with.
The chief pirate wanted to know what was poisoning so many of his men. It could have been a number of things, Chris thought. The men were going into the unmonitored stopes before the toxic gases had cleared, and those processing the ore were exposed to dangerous levels of mercury, but Chris already knew what had killed the men in the last three weeks: cholera and carbon monoxide poisoning. While he was here, though, he would conduct as many tests as he could to find out where the areas of greatest risk were for carbon monoxide, and how sanitation and dirty water supplies could be improved to halt the cholera outbreak. The work kept his fear at bay – just.