The Prey (6 page)

‘Child,’ the woman interrupted.

‘No, Mrs Van der Post. Just one more thing.’

‘What is it?’ Cameron asked.

‘The men who did this to Themba, to the father of my baby – you will kill them?’

There had been armed raids against the
zama zamas
in the past and lives had been lost in underground combat, and this had drawn the ire of the board of Global Resources over in safe, law-abiding Australia. He had been ordered not to take matters into his own hands and send in armed security to rescue Chris and avenge Themba and Paulo. Cameron himself had not fired a weapon at anyone since he left the army more than twenty years ago.

‘Yes, I will.’

*

Chris Loubser wanted to scream into the hessian bag that covered his head, but he knew if he did so his mind would unravel like a ball of string. It was bad enough being underground, stripped of his headlamp and his rescue pack – which contained an emergency oxygen supply – but the weave of the hessian made the claustrophobia almost unbearable.

The man who was leading him through the darkness pushed him in the back with the barrel of his rifle and Chris stumbled and fell yet again. His knees were wet with blood and his ankle throbbed in pain. ‘I can’t
fokken
see, you
poes
,’ he yelled into the hood.

The man obviously spoke Afrikaans because calling him a cunt earned Chris a rifle butt in his kidneys as he tried to stand. He groaned and staggered to his feet. His hands were unbound, but there was no point trying to disarm the man, as he would need to remove his head covering first and he doubted the man would have any hesitation about pulling the trigger, given that he’d just killed Paulo Barrica and Themba Tshabalala. Chris felt nauseous when he remembered the gore oozing from the back of Themba’s head. Why had he agreed to come underground again?

He tried to picture where they were heading. He knew the
madala
side in this part of the mine stretched for a kilometre before it ended at the disused face. The
zama zamas
could be working the old face or they could be using this tunnel as a base.

Chris had read hundreds of reports about the shady activities of the
zama zamas
in this mine and others. Sometimes they reopened old workings, blasting with their own explosives when they could get them, but more often than not they piggybacked on a mine’s legitimate operations.

During a shift in the legal mine the miners would drill holes in the stope face, where the gold was found, and charge them with up to two hundred kilograms of explosives. At the end of the shift, a fuse was lit and it burned slow enough to allow the workers time to return safely to the surface. The next shift would not start work to retrieve the dislodged ore until the workplace was clear of deadly gases, such as carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, ammonia and methane.

The
zama zamas
, who cared nothing for safety, would either leave their underground hideouts to cut the fuses and steal the explosives for their own use, or wait for the blast and then go to the stope and steal chunks of ore with high-grade visible gold. As well as disregarding their own wellbeing, the
zama zamas
would also blast away pillars of rock that the legal miners would leave in place to stop the roof caving in, thus making the workings too dangerous ever to mine again.

Chris heard noises ahead of them, voices and the clang of tools striking ore. He smelled excrement and urine as he passed a hole in the rock the illegal miners used as a latrine. He gagged on the stench of it. The man behind him laughed and prodded him again. Chris could only imagine the litany of environmental health and safety breaches he would uncover in ten minutes, if he could see, and if he could stop his hands from shaking.

‘Move,’ the man said, and jabbed him again.

There were voices around him now and he heard shuffling feet. The language was a mix of Portuguese and Fanagolo, the lingua franca of the mines. Most of the legal miners at Eureka were South African Swazis from the local area, which bordered the Kingdom of Swaziland, an independent country bordering South Africa and Mozambique. The ranks of the
zama zamas
were filled with illegal immigrants from the poorer neighbouring countries of Zimbabwe and Mozambique, as well as local criminals.

‘Boss?’ the man behind Chris said.

‘
Lapa
,’ said a voice in front of him.

He was being taken to a boss of some kind. Chris knew the
zama zamas
operated an organisational structure similar to that of the legal mining world. There would be shift bosses and miners, and working crews, but no environmental safety people like himself. The risks were high for these pirate miners, but the rewards were great.

The hessian in front of his mouth was getting moist from his breath and he felt sweat running down his face in rivulets. His breathing was rapid and shallow and his legs started to feel like jelly. ‘I need to sit down,’ he said into the hood.

The man prodded him in the back again.

‘I. Need. To. Sit. Down.’

The man loosed a stream of invective and turned the rifle broadside and pushed it into his back. Chris fell again. An order was barked in front of him and Chris heard his guard take a step back. Words were exchanged in Portuguese.

‘Here, let me help you.’

Chris flinched as he felt fingers at his neck. The man who had just spoken English was untying the string that bound the hood to his neck. Chris forced himself to kneel still as the hessian was drawn up, the coarse weave scratching his nose so that he wanted to sneeze. He looked up, blinking. It was almost totally dark, but a candle was set in a carved-out alcove on the side wall. The man who had freed him from the bag was silhouetted, his face hidden in the darkness.

‘Welcome to my mine.’ The man laughed, then slapped Chris on the shoulder with a big hand and enough force to almost knock him sideways.

‘The others, you …’

The man held up a hand. ‘You were stupid to come into our mine with an armed guard who chose to shoot first and ask questions later. The body of Fernando should have been enough of a warning to you to come no further.’

Chris spat fibres from his mouth. ‘You should have left him out by the shaft or somewhere where we could have found him.’

The man nodded, conceding the point. ‘We would have moved him in time for the arrival of the next shift. You caught us by surprise; we knew you were coming, but not what time.’

‘You knew? Themba Tshabalala, the man your pirate killed, wanted to finish work in time to go with his wife to the church, to organise his baby’s christening. That’s why we chose the early shift.’

The man nodded. ‘Regrettable, but unavoidable, I am afraid. But I am being rude. I have not introduced myself. You may call me Wellington Shumba. Down here, I am the mine boss – not your Mister Cameron McMurtrie. And you are Christiaan Loubser, manager of environmental services.’

Chris blinked again. He didn’t know how this man knew his name and his job. Chris looked around but could see no more than a few metres. He saw shadows moving and caught the occasional sweat-glistened arm or torso passing by. He smelled sweat and burning gas and heard the clang of tools on rock and the squeaking and grinding of ore being processed by hand.

He’d heard about how the
zama zamas
processed ore underground but had never witnessed it. As his eyes began to adjust to the dark, he could make out a man sitting in front of a homemade miniature ball mill. It was made from a steel camping gas cylinder that had a hole cut into it and a trap door fitted to the opening. The bottle was laid on its side and fitted with welded rods at either end that were then laid in a cradle. To one end was added a crank so that the operator could wind the cylinder, allowing heavy steel balls inside to crush the ore dropped into the cylinder. The ball mill above ground acted exactly the same way, except it was massive and driven by a motor. The man turning the mill glanced at Chris, the boredom plain on his face and his escape from it visible from his red eyes. The hot air was laden with the smell of marijuana.

‘Keep working,’ Wellington barked at the man operating the mill, before walking away a few metres, further down the tunnel. Chris squinted and saw Wellington had sat down behind what looked like a camping table. He was almost completely swallowed by the darkness now, just a voice. ‘Stay where you are, Christiaan. But you may sit instead of kneeling if you wish. Make yourself comfortable.’

‘What are you going to do with me?’ Chris asked. He moved so he was sitting with his knees hugged to his chest. The man said nothing in reply and Chris’s imagination filled the void with a dozen hellish scenarios. He thought of Themba and Paulo again – the blood and the brains. The silence stretched out; Chris could hear his own heart beating.

‘I need your expertise,’ the mine boss’s voice reached through the quiet. ‘I’m losing men – more than usual – and I want to find out why. You’ll work for me until I negotiate with Global Resources to pay a ransom for your life.’

‘As simple as that,’ Chris said.

‘As simple as that. I want you to work your magic with your monitors and your pumps, to find out what is making my men ill.’

‘Since when have
zama zamas
cared about health and safety?’

‘Since Cameron McMurtrie started bulldozing closed some of the old shafts we used to come and go by. I need to get the most out of my workforce. I can’t afford to keep replacing men ad infinitum. As this mine goes deeper and my methods of ingress and egress are increasingly curtailed, I need to keep my men down here for longer periods than I have in the past. When Eureka was less deep we could come and go through old workings, but the new shaft is deeper than these. I need my men to stay fit to mine.’

Wellington’s English was better than Chris’s, whose mother tongue was Afrikaans. The man’s diction was precise, which made his voice sound somehow crueller. Here was an educated man who was working men to death, but was greedy and rational enough to know that even in the world of the pirate mine he had to wring a few more months or years out of his labourers. Chris realised he’d been the target of a planned ambush and that, ironically, this Wellington wanted him to carry out a task similar to the one he and Themba had set out to do. ‘Did you have to kill the others?’

‘No.’ A match flared and the man’s face was illuminated for the briefest moment. The brow frowned for an instant, the head nodded a little. ‘That was not part of the plan. If the guard had not opened fire first then we would have tried to take you all alive.’

‘I … I can’t stay down here.’ Chris gripped his knees tighter to try to stop the shaking, but the harder he squeezed, the faster and harder he shuddered. ‘Please …’

‘Quiet. You will be fed. There is drink and some
dagga
if you wish it. You’re not going anywhere for the time being; not until you have finished what I need you to do.’

‘I … can’t.’

‘You can stay, and you will, Christiaan. I have plans for you, and you will help me make my mine safer and then you can go.’

Chris closed his eyes and tried to fight back the tide of panic. He couldn’t stay down here. He would die. He opened his eyes again and saw the glowing orange tip of Wellington’s cigarette. He needed to find a way out. He needed to outsmart this underground mine boss.
‘You … you can start by putting out that cigarette. I was already picking up elevated traces of methane when we came through the safety door. You … you’ll blow us all up if you and your men keep smoking this far into the site. We need to move closer to the main shaft where ventilation is better.’

The man laughed in the dark and drew again on the cigarette. He stood and walked to the alcove where the candle glowed weakly. He picked it up and blew it out. Chris was in total blackness again. He heard the man’s footsteps. He wondered if he was going to reach out and help him to his feet. ‘Don’t try and outsmart me, Christiaan. I know there is no methane in this mine.’ The steel-capped toe of his boot lashed out and drove the air from Chris’s lungs.

*

Luis Domingues Correia worked by touch in the darkness while he listened to the Afrikaner being beaten. He had been bullied by white South African miners when he’d worked in legal mines, and he had been beaten by people of his own colour when he’d lived in the informal settlement on the outskirts of Barberton.

It had been this way for generations. His father and grandfather had worked for the mines, recruited from their beachside village near Inhambane on the Indian Ocean coast. In the old days, under the apartheid regime, the men of his country and others as far north as Zambia had been recruited by WENELA, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, to work in the mines in South Africa. They had been allowed into South Africa to provide cheap labour and at the same time they had followed their own dreams of wealth and peace at a time when their home country was poverty-stricken and war-ravaged.

Luis had ostensibly benefitted from the peace in Mozambique that followed the end of the civil war in 1992. He’d been educated in metallurgy and engineering in East Germany, but WENELA no longer trawled the villages of Mozambique and Zimbabwe looking for labour. The catchcry after Mandela came to power was South African jobs for South Africans. But there were still opportunities
for those prepared to work hard and the minimum wage in South Africa was still a relative fortune in Mozambique.

So Luis had walked south and then west and crossed the Limpopo River and joined the
mahambane
, ‘the walkers’, who braved the wild dangerous expanse of the Kruger National Park to cross into South Africa and put their skills to use in a country that, despite its job creation rhetoric, had a pressing need for them. Others from his village had disappeared on the journey to
e-goli
, the place of gold. Some had been killed by lions in the national park, others became lost and died of thirst or starvation, while still more fell prey to criminals who stole what little they carried in their suitcases.

Luis, though, had made it to Johannesburg, where he had met a man from his village working on a mine near Benoni. It was a small mine, and not as diligent as the bigger companies at sticking to the letter of the law when it came to hiring policies. Luis had soon proved his worth to the shift boss as a labourer, and his metallurgy qualification meant he had hope of a job above ground. Luis moved in with his friend from the village, taking a corner of a jerry-built shack in an informal settlement, the new South Africa’s euphemism for a shanty town.