The Prey (16 page)

‘My hands.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t trust you, but take me to where I can find McMurtrie, and if you’re telling the truth, then I’ll see you get your job back and maybe even a reward.’

‘All right. I will show you the way.’

C
hris Loubser sat at Wellington’s feet. The claustrophobia attacks were fewer and milder now, perhaps because he was so engrossed in his work.

So much of what he did for Global Resources was quality control – ensuring that the monitoring systems were employed correctly, and having water and air quality samples analysed to confirm what he usually already knew, that the company was in all cases sticking to the letter of the law in terms of environmental compliance and, in many cases, doing better than the legislation required. It was important work, but it was somewhat predictable and dull.

Occasionally he would pick up an errant reading and work with the operations people to find out how the contaminants had risen in the air in the mine or the water, and a plan would be made to fix whatever had caused the problem. Global Resources prided itself on its record of compliance, and its safety record.

But down here with the
zama zamas
it was different. Sure, they were criminals, but they were also human beings.

‘I know what’s killing your men,’ Chris said, tilting his head up to Wellington, who sat as his desk, a fold-out camping table. Chris’s
back was against the side wall of the tunnel. He had also grown less afraid of Wellington, the Lion. He realised he was here for a reason, and as long as he did his job then Wellington would keep him alive. The realisation gave him a small measure of power.

‘Then tell me, what is it?’

‘Two things. The first is the silent killer, carbon monoxide. It’s colourless, odourless and is a by-product of the blasting operations in the stopes. The simple fact is that your men go into the stopes too soon after the blasting’s been done, and the unlucky ones are poisoned.’

Wellington nodded. ‘I know about carbon monoxide. I suspect it’s the same in the
madala
sides where I do my own blasting.’

Chris didn’t want to think what safety breaches he would find if he watched the
zama zamas
working with explosives. ‘You need to improve your ventilation to the
madala
side and to stop raiding the working stopes’ faces.’

‘It is an equation, Christiaan. I must balance the value of a worker with a guaranteed but risky haul from the working stopes, or putting more time into a safer operation in a disused working. Which would you choose?’

Chris rubbed his chin, wiping a trickle of sweat. He was acutely aware of his own body odour. Wellington, however, seemed not to smell. From the glimpses he caught in flickering candlelight or the occasional beam of a near-flat torch, Wellington’s overalls appeared as clean as could be expected underground, a crease running up each sleeve. He wondered if Wellington had a boy to do his laundry here underground. Chris shivered. ‘You know which I would choose.’

‘Human life means far more above ground, you think.’

‘I do.’

‘Well, you’re naive. It’s all about money in the end, here or up there.’

‘It won’t be about money if I don’t return to the surface. They will come looking for you. McMurtrie will take it personally.’

‘Hah! I’m not afraid of McMurtrie. He is a clawless lion.’

Chris reckoned differently. Koos, who worked in accounts, said Cameron had been in the recce commandos during the war in Angola. Chris sensed a strength and perhaps an anger in him that was cloaked in the niceties of modern management practices. In the old days, Chris thought, Cameron might have been the type of boss who ruled with his fists as well as his words.

‘What’s the second killer?’ Wellington asked.

‘You have a cholera outbreak on your hands. Your men live in their own filth and your drinking water must be contaminated. You could all die down here unless you clean up your act, literally.’

*

Cameron smelled sickly sweet tendrils of marijuana smoke. It reminded him of matric; his life before the army, sex with Tania in the cramped back seat of his Cortina. Fun.

He used the night-vision goggles to defuse the booby trap. This reminded him of the war, dicing with death. Carefully he eased the hand grenade from the old tinned mango can, his other hand ready to keep the pressure on the arming lever as it emerged. Holding the explosive, he took the short length of wire he had snipped from a discarded length he had found on the footwall and slid it into the holes where the pin had once been. The grenade now safe, he placed it in one of the pouches on his vest. It was just like closing on a SWAPO camp in Angola: every sense was alert, nerves stretched to snapping point, trying not to think about home.

He and Tania had to marry when she fell pregnant, and he had gone off to the border war and left her. When he had returned he had taken her and Jess to live in a mining village. He remembered Tania saying she would have liked to have studied journalism. How much, he wondered, had she hated her life, and for how long? It was too late to worry about such things.

The tip of the marijuana cigarette glowed like a lime green firefly in the washed-out world of the night-vision goggles. Cameron saw the face, momentarily illuminated and temporarily transported
from the hellish life of the
zama zama
by the weed. The man was sitting, smiling, with his back against the side wall of the tunnel and Cameron also saw the flash suppressor of an AK-47. Through the smoke he smelled the man’s sweat. He crept forward.

Cameron slung his shotgun slowly and carefully across his back, and slid the hunting knife from the sheath tied upside down to the front of his combat vest. It was a long time since he’d drawn it. He knew he should have sharpened it before he left home, but hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

He guessed men such as this one, who spent their lives in the darkness, had more highly developed senses of hearing and smell. If this one was a good sentry he would hear Cameron coming long before he could use the knife.

Cameron knelt, carefully, and picked up a small rock half the size of a golf ball. He threw it so that it passed the man and landed on the far side.

Instantly the joint was dropped in a mini shower of sparks. He heard the man reach for the AK-47, then the metallic click of the selector being moved. With no ambient light Cameron switched on the infra-red beam on the goggles. He saw the man’s back. He was looking down the tunnel.

Cameron picked up another rock and tossed it. It clattered in the area the man was looking.

‘Who’s there?’ he asked in Portuguese.

Cameron continued to kneel, his right hand tight around the hilt of the knife. After a few taut seconds the sentry’s shoulders relaxed and he lowered his AK a touch. The man turned back to where he had been waiting and started searching the ground, presumably for the cigarette he had abandoned.

Cameron moved in, as swift and silent as a predatory big cat. He reached around with his left hand, smothered the man’s mouth and brought the blade to his neck.

‘Lower your rifle, slowly, or I will gut you,’ Cameron whispered in Portuguese. He had learned to speak the language prior to deploying
to Angola which, like Mozambique where this
zama zama
probably came from, was a former Portuguese colony.

The man tried to speak and Cameron clamped harder, and pressed the blade tight enough to draw blood. The man lowered his weapon. ‘Speak and it will be the last sound you make.’

‘Please don’t kill me,’ the man whimpered as Cameron removed his hand from his mouth to take the AK-47 from him.

‘I said be quiet. Down on your face.’

Cameron kneeled on the man’s back and cable-tied his hands behind him. He kicked the man’s legs apart and knelt between them. He brought his knife up to the man’s genitals, pressing them through the sweaty fabric of his pants, and leaned close to the sentry’s ear. ‘Where is Wellington?’

‘Please …’

Cameron pushed the knife harder.

‘He has his office in an old refuge chamber.’

‘Where?’

‘Go two hundred paces then turn right. Then one hundred and turn left.’

‘Any more sentries?’

‘No.’

Cameron pushed harder.

‘No!’ he hissed.

‘All right.’

‘Where is the white man, Chris Loubser? Is he alive?’

‘He is. He is often with the Lion. They talk,’ the sentry said.

Cameron brought the man’s ankles back together then cable-tied them. He reached into a pouch and brought out a roll of duct tape. He tore off a strip with his teeth and lifted the man’s head.

‘Wait.’

‘What is it?’ Cameron asked.

‘If you find Wellington, kill him, please,
senhor
. Otherwise the Lion will kill me, and my family, for failing in my duty.’

Cameron gagged the man with tape and removed the magazine
from the AK-47 and put it in one of his pouches. He cocked the weapon and let the round in the chamber fly into the blackness. He couldn’t carry two weapons so thirty metres along the tunnel he laid the rifle down and continued on. He thought about Jess, and what the sentry had just said.

*

Luis supervised a team of four
zama zamas
who were each cranking empty gas bottles that had been turned into mini ball mills, grinding gold-bearing ore that had already been crushed to a workable size with heavy hammers and an old lorry axle.

Luis thought about his wife, Miriam, and how he must find a way to get word to her, to stop her crossing the Kruger Park with their son Jose. He’d had a nightmare during his last period of sleep – he had no concept of day or night any more, only exhaustion and restless, hallucinatory snatches of semiconsciousness. She had been running to him, through long yellow grass, Jose at her heels. He had taken a step or two towards her, his arms wide to receive her and his child. There was a deep, guttural growl that resonated in his chest and in the next instant Miriam and Jose vanished from sight.

He knew that many of the
mahambane
never made it to South Africa. But as hard as Luis tried, he could see no way out of his predicament. If he was able to convince Wellington to let him go, just for a week or two, to visit his wife, then he knew she would never let him return to his criminal existence. Wellington would miss him, but he doubted the Lion would pursue him to Inhambane on the Indian Ocean. He might escape the man’s wrath, but he would be back where he started, with no job and no money. If he stayed underground Miriam would risk her life and the life of his child to come and find him. Even if she did survive the journey, what would become of her once she was here?

Luis sighed, then coughed. Wellington would never let him go. He was the only qualified metallurgist below ground and the mine boss depended on him completely. He coughed again.

This place was killing him. Luis was the son of a Machope tribal chief but instead of sitting in the shade of a palm tree drinking beer, or casting a fishing net, he had pursued an education and it had all been for nothing. He would die underground in Barberton and he would never see his wife again. His life was like a mournful Portuguese
Fado
folk song: short and sad.

Behind him, something moved. Luis’s ears had become sensitive to the slightest noise. Wellington had a habit of sneaking up on his workers in the dark to check on them.

Luis left his workers and took a few steps down the tunnel away from their candlelit workplace. He switched on his torch and stabbed the darkness. It was a man.

The man froze and looked at him. He was dressed in dark clothing and his face was black, but Luis could tell immediately he was not Swazi. Luis played the weak beam of his torch down over his body and stopped when he saw the barrel of the shotgun pointed at him. Luis switched off the torch and heard the man come towards him.

‘Wait,’ Luis whispered in English. ‘You are heading in the right direction. Loubser is with the Lion. Be careful.’

A thought crossed Luis’s mind. If this man killed Wellington in the process of rescuing Chris Loubser, then the
zama zamas
would be without a leader. Phineas Ncube was Wellington’s second-in-command, but Phineas was little more than Wellington’s enforcer and would never be a threat to Wellington’s leadership. He had neither the brains nor the experience to run a mining operation. Luis had killed during his time in the civil war, and he wondered if he could kill Ncube.

No, he said to himself.

‘Are you still there?’ Luis whispered into the darkness.

There was no answer. The white man had carried on. Luis went back to his men. ‘All of you, listen. Stop working. Go to the old stope face and wait there.’

‘Why?’ a Zimbabwean asked.

‘Because I said so.’

‘Yes, boss.’

Luis liked the sound of the man addressing him that way, but he knew he didn’t really have it in him to take over this criminal enterprise. He just needed the impetus to get out and to try to go straight again, but he couldn’t do that while Wellington was still alive. Luis crossed himself in the dark and said a silent prayer for the blackened ghost who had just left him.
Please God, let him kill Wellington
.

*

Cameron’s heart was still thumping as he forced himself to move slower and with more care down the tunnel. He had been watching the workers cranking their rudimentary mills and not his footing and had dislodged a rock. He hadn’t realised there was a fourth man, almost in his path. The man had let him pass, but he hoped he was not walking into a trap. Despite that risk, Cameron could do nothing other than continue moving.

All Cameron’s senses were on high alert now as he made out the twists and turns ahead using his night-vision goggles. He silently covered another one hundred metres or so.

‘What you need to do is tap into Eureka’s ventilation system without them knowing about it.’

Cameron froze. It was Chris Loubser’s voice, coming from around a bend in the tunnel. He reached into his left-hand ammunition pouch and pulled out a thunder flash, saved from his days in the army. It was a simulated explosive device that let out a hell of a flash and a loud bang.