The Prey (7 page)

Things were good for a while. As well as sending money home to his wife and two-year-old son in Inhambane, Luis managed to save enough to buy himself some sheets of plywood and corrugated iron to start building his own shack.

In 2008 trouble began brewing in the settlement. No one could remember what started it, but it spread like a bushfire through their community and others across the country. In what became known as the xenophobia riots, South Africans living in the informal settlements turned on their neighbours from other countries. Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Malawians and other Africans who had lived peacefully alongside the locals for so long suddenly found themselves the targets of mob violence. Some were beaten, others stabbed and burned in a spontaneous orgy of hatred that claimed the lives of more than sixty migrants across the country.

Luis’s shack was burned to the ground, along with his meagre possessions, and his friend’s home was likewise razed. The mob had caught up with him as he’d tried to salvage his suitcase – they had dragged him into the dusty laneway and kicked him and beat him with sticks.

As Luis listened to the screams of the environmental manager, he felt again the thud of boots on flesh. Wellington Shumba, the man they called ‘the Lion’ after his surname and his predatory nature, was the devil who ruled this underground hell, but he had given Luis a job when the mine in Benoni had made him redundant for exceeding his sick leave entitlement. It didn’t matter that Luis had spent weeks recovering from a broken arm and ribs and septicaemia in a church-run clinic and had been unable to get a sick note from a doctor sent to the mine. The mining company had heeded the call of the unions and the streets to employ fewer foreigners and more South Africans – even if they couldn’t do the jobs they were paid to do.

Luis had used the last of his money to catch a bus to Barberton, and there he’d walked straight into the devil’s arms.

K
ylie declined the complimentary champagne as she arranged herself in her business class seat on the Qantas Boeing. She put on her headphones and selected the news channel.

She’d had barely enough time to get back to her flat and pack and make it to Sydney Airport in time, but flying to Perth tonight and connecting to the overnight SAA flight to Johannesburg would give her an extra working day in South Africa and a chance to get a handle on the situation with Loubser before the rest of her itinerary kicked in.

She had plenty of work to do on the flight. On her lap was a folder of printouts of press clippings, extracts from reports, and the executive summary of the environmental impact statement for the proposed new coalmine near the Kruger National Park.

Even though Global Resources had several interests in Africa, this was her first visit to the continent. It was also her first business trip in her new role. She wanted to hit the ground running.

She had received the standard email from the company’s head of security about risks and dangers in Africa. Johannesburg seemed to have a justifiably bad reputation for violent crime and a couple of the South Africans in the office had put the frighteners on her
by recounting tales of home invasions, carjackings, shootings and murders of friends of friends. Kylie wasn’t scared by the stories, but nor was she particularly looking forward to this trip.

As well as getting to meet the people in the South African office who would now be reporting to her, she was going to get a full briefing on Global Resources’ operations and a visit to the site of the proposed new coalmine. The Eureka mine in the historic gold-mining town of Barberton in Mpumalanga Province would have been a one-day stopover, but Jan had told her to spend as much time there as she felt necessary, particularly if the situation with the missing environmental manager wasn’t resolved before she arrived. Jan wanted the men and women at the mine to know head office was concerned about their losses and the missing man.

Kylie had dealt with death in the past. When she was managing the coalmine in the Hunter Valley, two miners had been crushed to death when the hanging wall had collapsed. She’d had to front the local media to give a statement and deal with the workplace safety investigators and police. Most difficult of all, she’d had to contact the wives of the two men who’d been killed. Kylie had gone home that night and cried her eyes out and polished off a bottle of wine, but the next day she’d visited the widows in person and later helped organise a fundraising dinner with the mine employees and the local community to ensure there was enough money for the children of both families to get the education their mothers expected.

Mining was dangerous. Every man and woman who went underground knew that, and Kylie thought it wasn’t a bad thing if every man and woman in head office at least once in their life had to look into the crying eyes of a grieving spouse or parent or child of a dead miner. It made the risks real and meant decisions were taken less lightly.

Kylie flicked through her folder to the latest figures on workplace accidents, injuries and fatalities in South Africa. She’d seen the figures before, but still exhaled through her teeth when she read them again. Numbers like this would be front page news in the
West Australian
or the
Sydney Morning Herald
, but the explanatory paragraph beneath
the figures in the report pointed out that Global Resources had the lowest number and ratio of workplace fatalities per days worked of any mining company in South Africa. She wondered if the two deaths at Barberton two nights earlier would change that.

Whatever. It wasn’t good enough being the best of a bad bunch. Kylie had her sights set on the top job and she wanted Global Resources to be a company where no one had to make the call to tell someone a loved one would not be coming home.

Kylie flipped back to the itinerary her personal assistant, Sandy Hyland, had prepared for her. She circled a couple of things. The schedule had been prepared long before the latest disaster and still had her spending a night at the Lion Plains Lodge. The plan was that she and Cameron, and Chris Loubser if he hadn’t gone missing, would meet with the incumbent but strictly former owner, Tertia Venter.

From what she recalled of the press clippings from the South African newspapers Kylie doubted they would be able to silence the woman, but it might be worth a try. As important as the new mine was, however, she knew that her first priority, and Cameron’s, would be the fate of Loubser; she didn’t want to be taking happy snaps of lions and elephants while there was a man down. There was a note in the file from Sandy saying that when they got to the reserve they would also probably meet Tumi Mabunda, the cousin of Musa the corporate communications man. Ironically, Tumi was head ranger at the lodge; the briefing said female black rangers were still a rarity in the male-dominated safari business and much had been made of Tertia Venter’s promotion of a woman from the local community to the head ranger position. Kylie didn’t consider herself an animal person at all and wondered what it would be like driving around all day looking for wildlife for a job.
Musa advises his cousin is very much anti the GR mine proposal
, her PA had further noted.

Kylie shook her head as she leafed through the press clippings again. ‘Great,’ she said to herself, ‘so is most of the country.’

Also in her folder was a printout of an email from Cameron McMurtrie that gave the latest on the investigation into the deaths of the security guard and trainee environmental officer, and efforts that had been made to find Chris Loubser. The police had been in attendance, but Cameron noted:
As with previous incidents involving
zama zamas
the police have not been of great assistance. Most arrests of illegal miners in Eureka – and the rest of South Africa – are effected by mine security personnel, not police. The police lack the experience and will to venture into an unfamiliar environment. Permission is again sought to launch a rescue operation of our own
.

No way
, Kylie thought. She would have a word to the police officer in charge when she got to Barberton. She had met plenty of men and a few women like Cameron before. They were miners through and through who had been ambitious and smart enough to make it into senior positions in mine management, yet they still harboured an us-and-them attitude when it came to head office. Things were no doubt compounded by the fact that Eureka was one of a trio of mines which had been owned by a smallish South African mining company that had recently been bought out by Global Resources. Cameron would have been beholden to the old owners and probably chaffed at having to report to foreigners – especially Australians. He would be tired and stressed at the loss of his men, which was understandable; but on other occasions when she’d faced Cameron in video conference meetings, or exchanged emails with him, she had detected an undercurrent of surliness and, she thought, misogyny.

A flight attendant stopped and asked her if she wanted a drink and Kylie ordered an orange juice. Despite her gut feeling about Cameron, she would have to get used to working with him and he with her. She’d faced off with sexists before, and she wasn’t afraid to do it again. Also, he was about to move up a corporate rung himself. By the time she arrived at Barberton Jan would have contacted Cameron to tell him he was being promoted to South African director of new projects. One of his first duties would be to oversee
the implementation of the new coalmine, and he would be working even closer with Kylie on that project.

Kylie flipped through the file again to an article she wanted to read in full, an investigative piece on illegal mining from
Mining Monthly
. As controversial as her industry sometimes was in her native Australia she was learning the stakes in Africa were as high as the risks. She wanted more responsibility from Jan, but she had an uneasy feeling that the maelstrom she was about to walk into in South Africa could break her as easily as it could make her. She had fought all her working life to get to where she was and she savoured a challenge, but how many mining execs in Australia, she wondered, had ever had to deal with the fallout of lethal underground gun battles and a new mine in – on the verge of, she corrected herself – a national park? None, she reckoned. She would show them.

*

Luis sat with his back to the rock wall of the tunnel and sacrificed some of the precious power in the batteries in his cheap plastic torch to re-read the letter from his wife, Miriam. He wished he could call her, but he couldn’t risk escaping to the surface. There was too much work for him to do.

He wanted to reach out to her, to touch her, and to tell her to stay right where she was.

I miss you, Luis
. The words made him bring a knuckle to his mouth and he bit down on the blackened, dirt-encrusted skin, tasting the chemicals of his trade in the dust on his hand. He knew he was killing himself through exposure to dangerous substances and dust, poor nutrition and slavishly hard work; he was trying to make a life for his family, but what sort of a life was this?

I cannot bear not knowing where you are, or if you are safe. We read of accidents, of people killed in the work you are doing
. She didn’t know he was a
zama zama
now.
Why can’t you tell me the name of the mine you are working on? At least then I could call the shift boss, or email you
.

He was too ashamed to tell his wife, who might one day tell his son, that he was a criminal. Luis knew he was running out of excuses. It was implausible that a man with an honest job in a real mine could supply his wife with nothing better than a nondescript Barberton post office box as a form of contact. If he was a legitimate metallurgist at Eureka he would have an email account, a cellphone, a shared room in a dorm, or even a small house in the village or a shack in an informal settlement. Instead, he lived like a rat in a hole in the ground for months on end. It was ninety-seven days since he’d last seen daylight.

I want to bring Jose to South Africa and be with you. Unless I hear from you by the end of this month, we are coming. All my love, Miriam
.

No! He turned off the torch and put it in the pocket of his raggedy overalls. In the dark he folded the letter and brought it to his lips and kissed it. No! It would be madness for her to join the
mahambane
and walk to South Africa. If the thieves did not rob or rape her, then the lions might devour her and his son.

Luis rested his chin on his chest, the bristles soaking up a little of the sweat that slicked his skin. He tried to keep himself clean as best as he could with the limited water they could tap off from the mine’s underground lines, but still the sour smell of his body offended him. Luis was trapped in this hot, stinking hell, and he only hoped he could live long enough to see his wife and child again.

Men were dying underground. Fatalities weren’t unusual among the
zama zamas
, but the current numbers were. This past week six men had died of illness; Luis had helped carry the bodies of two of them to the shaft between shifts so that the legal miners would find them and get rid of them. Last week it was four and three before that. The victims he had seen had all been fouled with copious smelly diarrhoea; the eyes were sunken and the skin on their fingers had wrinkled as though they had reached old age within just a few days.

Luis had overheard Wellington scheming with his lieutenant to kidnap an environmental officer, the man they now held, to inspect
the areas where the pirate miners worked and slept, and to test the air in case they were being poisoned. Luis thought the men might be suffering from cholera; a Zimbabwean he worked with claimed he had seen similar symptoms in outbreaks in his country. The man was too nervous to approach the boss with his suspicion; when Luis had tried, Wellington had dismissed him and told him to go back to his work and mind his own business. As a precaution, though, Luis had started boiling water to drink and had ordered his underlings to do the same.

Whatever was killing the
zama zamas
, Luis hoped the unfortunate man Wellington had taken could help them find a cause and a treatment, and that no more blood would be shed. Word had already spread that two men from above ground had been killed in the gunfight and that would surely bring retribution.