The Prey (46 page)

‘A day, perhaps two.’

‘Two would be better,’ Luis said.

‘Two it is, then, cousin. Please let me know if you see this drill rig. The people of the village do need their water.’

‘They will have it soon.’

Luis ended the call as they reached the tarmac road. After the bumping of corrugations on the gravel road the smooth black surface of the national highway was soothing. Luis told the driver to watch his speed when they came to each village, as he knew there was a good chance they would pass traffic policemen and their speed cameras. ‘You will not be harmed if you do as I say,’ he reassured his two press-ganged workers.

As they cruised north, making good time on the tar road, Luis’s thoughts drifted back twenty-six years earlier, to the day when he had fled from the advancing Renamo rebels and failed to kill the man with the crucifix.

*

When Luis came to he blinked at the strong sunlight.

The glare was momentarily blocked by a face. Around the man’s neck was the silver cross. It was the Renamo soldier whose life Luis had spared. Luis tried to speak, but his mouth was parched.

The man with the cross shot out a hand and slapped Luis hard across the face. Luis put his hand to his cheek and it came away wet and sticky. His head throbbed and as he gingerly touched his scalp he felt a furrow creased along his temple. His neck and the collar of his shirt were also soaked in blood. The young man, eyes wide with bravado now, yelled out to a colleague. ‘Come, I have shot the dog who was fleeing.’

Whistles were blowing in the bush around him. An armed party of four men strode up to them. Luis could tell by the age and bearing of the shortest of the men that he was a leader. ‘Good work, but why were you so far behind the assault line?’ he asked the man with the cross.

‘I heard this man running and I doubled back, sir.’

There were occasional gunshots, but Luis could tell the battle was over. It seemed the commander was deliberating what to do with
him. ‘Tie his hands, bring him. He can march with the civilians he was trying to defend.’

The command party walked off, and as the young man rolled Luis over and tied his wrists with twine, Luis heard a new sound, like the mooing of a herd of cattle. But he knew, immediately, they were not beasts. When his captor pulled him to his feet, by his collar, Luis saw the head of the forlorn column. They were the women, children, babies and old people of the village of Homoine, the people he and his hopelessly outnumbered colleagues had been detailed to protect. The noise he heard was the wailing of the womenfolk, the screaming of the infants. He had failed them, and now Renamo were taking them away from their homes, though to where he had no idea.

‘Where are we going?’

The young man with the cross prodded him in the back with the muzzle of his AK-47. ‘Shut up, dog. That is not for you to know.’

‘I saved your life, boy,’ Luis hissed.

‘Then you are a fool.’

Now and then a Renamo soldier would fire a shot into the air to keep the ragged parade moving deeper into the bush. Some carried hastily gathered bundles on their heads; a basket or woven bags. Most had nothing but the clothes on their backs. A woman with a baby in her arms, its mouth fastened to her bare breast, glared at him as she walked past. He turned away from the accusation of failure. The Frelimo command had thought the village of Homoine was safe. Most of the Renamo offensive of July 1987 had been taking place in the north, in Manica and Sofala provinces. The attack at Homoine, instead of the coastal town of Inhambane and much further south of the action, was, Luis thought, either a diversion designed to siphon off Frelimo troops from the main battles in the north, or the opening of a new front. Either way, they had been taken by surprise.

Luis had seen his share of fighting further north and his commander had rewarded his numerous instances of bravery with a redeployment closer to his home in Inhambane. He had taken a
chapa
every couple of days from the coastal capital to Homoine, commuting to and from his military post. It was almost like having a regular job, and until that day’s attack there had been no action. His new girlfriend, Miriam, would be worried when rumours of the attack reached her. He supposed they were being taken deep into the west, into a Renamo bush camp, where he would be kept as a prisoner, perhaps in a work gang. He feared more for the civilians, especially the young women and girls. Why the rebels were taking the old as well, he had no idea.

‘What do you want with the old people?’

‘I said,
shut up
,’ the soldier said, and prodded him along again.

He doesn’t know, Luis thought. The Christian soldier obviously regarded Luis as his personal prize, as he kept him close by, walking him in parallel to the throng of civilians. The heat of the day took its toll on the villagers, many of whom carried wounds of some kind from the assault on Homoine. An elderly woman was being supported by two girls, her arms across their shoulders. Luis wanted to help, but the boy refused to untie his hands.

It was hard to tell how many noncombatants there were in the march, but Luis thought it must be at least four hundred. Bound as he was, he could not brush the branches of thorn trees out his path as they moved through the bush. His face and chest were scored with scratches and wait-a-minute bushes snagged at his blood-soaked uniform and exposed skin. His head still ached and he guessed he had suffered a concussion from the bullet that had, luckily, only grazed the side of his head. How fortunate he was, though, remained to be seen.

They came to a grassy vlei and the bright sun burned them as the soldiers halted the crowd and condensed them into the centre of the open floodplain. Men with RPDs, light machine guns fitted with drum magazines containing belts of bullets, were posted around the group, but only on two sides. Other soldiers lined the same two sides of what was becoming a rough open square.

Luis forgot the pain in his head and his raging thirst. He felt his heart start to pound faster as more troops were brought to the
flanks. This was far more men than was needed to guard a gaggle of unarmed civilians. The commander he had seen before called for his men’s attention. Those soldiers whose weapons weren’t already cocked readied them for action. Instinctively some of the civilians, mostly the old men, started jostling deeper into the crowd for protection.

‘No!’ Luis said.

‘Get on your knees,’ whispered the young soldier behind him.

‘They’re going to kill them all,’ Luis said, reluctantly easing himself to his knees and bracing himself for what was to come.

And then the commander gave the order to open fire. The volleys were ragged at first, but as more of the villagers screamed and some of the soldiers emptied their first magazines, so the madness took hold. All of the Renamo men were firing, some of them laughing as terrified civilians climbed over each other to get away from the storm of lead. Some civilians, predictably, ran from the open sides of the square towards the tree line on the far side of the vlei.

But the commander had chosen his killing field well. As the first of the youngest and fittest of the villagers reached the bush the explosions began. Landmines planted at the edge of the clearing blasted feet and limbs from children, yet still others ran blindly into the garden of death the rebels had sown.

Luis watched, horrified and hopeless as the lines of soldiers, on an order from the commander, advanced through the vlei and finished off those who were screaming and crying. Occasionally a villager who had played dead or hidden under a body got up and started to run. The soldiers joked with each other and competed to put the fleeing human down.

‘Kill him,’ yelled the commander, pointing to Luis.

Luis glanced back over his shoulder. The young soldier’s mouth was slack and his eyes glistened with tears.

‘I said kill him!’

‘May God have mercy on your soul,’ Luis said, and turned his eyes to the ground in front of him.

Luis gave a start as the bullet from the AK-47 exploded from the barrel just inches behind his head. He felt the projectile whizz past his left ear, close enough for the displaced air to buffet his head slightly. He saw, clearly, the bullet bury itself in the ground in front of him. Amazingly, though, he was still alive. The boy could not have missed at this range and Luis pitched himself forward, face-first in the grass, and lay as still as he could.

Above and behind him he heard a sniff and a stifled sob, and the swish of the young soldier’s footsteps through the grass as he walked away.

Luis lay in silence, trying to ignore the ants that crawled over him and the flies that buzzed and ferreted at the graze wound on the side of his head. He had deliberately twisted his head as he fell so that he could play his part in the boy’s ruse, and that a casual observer would see the blood and assume he was dead. He heard more voices and movement. Among the noise he identified the deep voice of the short commander who had ordered the killing.

‘Dry your eyes, boy. You are a coward. This is the way we will beat these communists, by striking fear into their hearts. None will dare support Frelimo when word of what happened here gets out.’

Luis was amazed by the commander’s cruelty and stupidity. The words stopped, however, at the sound of an approaching helicopter. The
whop
of the blades and the whine of the engines increased and Luis was aware of a shadow passing over him. The helicopter landed and Luis was blasted with grit and grass from the downwash.

‘Go help them unload,’ the commander said, presumably to the young soldier.

Luis held his breath as he heard footsteps getting close to him. Around the clearing sporadic shots told of the last of the civilians being given the coup de grâce. Further away explosions began occurring. Luis wondered if they were tossing grenades in among the bodies to make identification harder.

Luis had his eyes slitted and could tell when the shadow of a man settled over him. ‘No, that one is dead,’ said the commander. The
commander walked away and called a greeting in Portuguese: ‘
Ola, Captitao
Lotz.’

‘
Ola
, you have followed your orders well,’ replied another man. ‘When news of this reaches Frelimo they will divert hundreds of troops from the north to find you and your men. You must disappear now, deep into the bush.’ The voice was not Mozambican, and the Portuguese was spoken in a guttural accent. The man who spoke it, Luis was sure, was white and probably an Afrikaner. It might have been kept secret in South Africa, but it was well known in Mozambique that Renamo was covertly supported with arms and ammunition and advisers from the apartheid regime across the border and this Lotz must be one of them.

The commander stepped over Luis, who dared not move a muscle, apparently taking the visitor from the helicopter on a tour of the scene of the massacre.

When they were thirty or more metres away, in the clearing amid the bodies, Luis widened his eyes a little. The man was white, and he wore the uniform of the South African military. He was tall and dark-haired, broad-shouldered with a sun-tanned face and forearms. His nose was crooked, as though it been broken at some time. The man laughed at something the commander said and slapped the shorter African on the back.

Luis smelled the acrid smoke of the explosives, from the landmines and the grenades. The white man dropped to his knees and scooped a handful of dirt and inspected it. He let the black powder filter through his fingers, then wiped his hand on the side of his fatigues. Luis saw how the man’s hand and trousers remained stained, and he knew what it was, in the ground.

*

Luis was jolted back to reality as the driver braked. A portly traffic policeman strode out into the middle of the EN 1 and was waving at them to pull over.

Luis grabbed a jacket of the one of the workers and draped it over his gun hand. ‘Nice and cool and no one gets killed, all right?’

‘Yes,
baba
,’ said the driver. The other worker looked terrified.

‘Driver’s licence,’ the policeman said.

The man fumbled in his back pocket for his wallet. ‘
Bom dia
, how are you?’ Luis asked the policeman.

‘Fine. Where are you going?’

‘Inhassoro, sir, to drill for water at the holiday home of a government minister.’

‘Ah,’ the policeman’s eyes widened in understanding. He took a cursory look at the licence and decided he did not want to raise the ire of a wealthy politician. ‘You may proceed.’

The driver whistled through his teeth as he put the truck in gear and drove off, careful to stick to the speed limit. Just past the turnoff to Inhambane, they took a left following the sign for the R43, to Homoine. As they came to the village Luis saw the spot where he and Joao had failed to stop the Renamo advance in 1987, and where Joao had been killed and Luis had made his suicidal dash through the enemy lines into the bush. Beyond the palm trees, deep in the thorns, was the clearing where four hundred and twenty-four people had been murdered.

‘Turn left here.’

He had been back to this place, after Renamo had been beaten back, to show the cadres from Frelimo the decomposing bodies, mangled by the hand grenades. Later, he had returned again to help with the burial of the bodies. After that he had turned his back on his shattered, eviscerated homeland and gone in search of money in South Africa. Politics meant nothing to him any more, such was his disillusionment over the civil war.

‘Turn on to this gravel road, into the vlei,’ he told the driver. ‘Stop here.’

Luis got out of the truck, lost in his memories, not even bothering to keep the two workers covered with the pistol that he held loose by his side. He lifted the Tokarev and looked at it. How he wished he hadn’t ever had to hold such a thing again in his life; how he cursed the men who made such things and turned Africa’s soil redder still
in the name of their irrelevant, long-dead ideologies; how he wished he would never have to kill again.

He heard the springs on the drill rig truck creak, and turned towards it. The workers were getting down, not running, but moving tentatively through the long grass to where he stood.