Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

"Draw me the shaped charge."

It was dusk when Jack left. He was in his car, the window wound down. George was bent to talk to him.

"I'll miss you, lad."

Jack grinned. "I won't be gone more than three weeks."

"I'm a bloody fool to have talked to you."

"Could it work, Mr Hawkins?"

" 'Course it can work. If you remember everything I've told you, and if you remember everything you've seen over the last two years, and if you do everything like you've seen me do it, then it'll work. Forget one thing, a little small thing, and you're gone."

"I'll come on down and tell you how it worked."

George snorted. He turned away quickly, so Jack shouldn't see his face. He went back through his front door.

He didn't look over his shoulder as Jack drove away.

When he was clear of the lane, out of sight of the bungalow, he stabbed the engine into life. The excitement gripped him. The same excitement as when his final school exam results had come through, and his university admission, and his first girl, and his winning of the job at D amp; C Ltd.

Brilliant flowing excitement, like the first time George had let him do a blast. If he remembered every last little thing, then he could do it. He could take his father out.

"We're to meet tomorrow with the Prime Minister to talk damage limitation."

"I don't think there'll be damage," the Director General said. "I have learnt many things from our man's records.

One of them is his tried and tested loyalty to the Service.

He won't talk."

"Then he'll hang with his secrets." The P.U.S. rocked his glass slowly, willing the juice from the slice of lemon into further circulation.

"Our secrets."

"The Prime Minister would look unkindly on the least embarrassment."

"It won't come to that. I'd bet money on Carew's silence."

He paused. "The fact is, I should like very much to save this man. I quite accept that it is politically unacceptable to go cap in hand and ask for his freedom, tell them who he is. We have looked at the odds against a team of men lifting him out of this gaol, and they are high."

"Too high, I don't doubt, and the Prime Minister wouldn't countenance the risk of failure. For heaven's sake don't let's have any old-fashioned stunts. The saving of Mr Carew's life just doesn't warrant the risking of anyone else's, not when you add the political risk."

Neither in London nor Lusaka did Jacob Thiroko have to consult with colleagues.

That night, alone, he would take the decision on whether the military wing of the African National Congress would back the venture proposed by Jack Curwen.

Amongst the senior officers of the Umkonto we Sizwe there were some who saw Whites, even if they were prepared to make the same sacrifices, as having no place in the Movement. Those Blacks of the military wing treated all Whites associating themselves with the A.N.C. with suspicion. They believed all of those Whites were communists first, true to the South African Communist Party, and loyal to the African National Congress, second.

Thiroko was not a communist. He had been to Moscow.

He believed the Soviets, for all their aid in weapons and money, to be more racist than the Italians or the English or the Dutch or the Swedes.

If he were to have admitted to those senior officers of the military wing that a White had come to him with a plan of action and that he had supported him without consulting them then there would be questions circulated about his fitness to lead. Nevertheless, it would be his decision alone.

He sat in his room in the "safe house" in a quiet road in North Finchley. He drank coffee.

Better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.

Sentimental rubbish.

Revolutionary warfare was about victory. He was no advo-cate of glorious failure martyrdom. If a cadre of the Umkonto we Sizwe were to attack the maximum security section of Pretoria Central then they must succeed, they must free their condemned comrades. The agony of the decision lay in a particular area. It was the area that had stuck with him, caused him to drink his fourth and fifth and sixth cups of coffee, stayed with him through half a packet of cigarettes.

The physician had told him to smoke as much as pleased him. The pain was more frequent. Was the Movement better served by saving Happy Zikala and Charlie Schoba and Percy Ngoye and Tom Mweshtu and James Carew from the gallows? Did the Movement gain more from the martyrdom of the Pritchard Five?

Which?

Better for the Movement to have at freedom five men who had bungled an attack, or better to have five heroes buried while the world screamed anger at Pretoria?

Which?

"Have you made your decision?"

Jack had come early to the "safe house". When the door had been opened to his ring he had smelled the aroma of sweet spices from the kitchen. She had been a tall woman with the dark skin of the Bengali and had two children clinging to her sari. She had shown no surprise, only taken him to the foot of the stairs and pointed upwards to the closed door.

"So direct. Should you not give me time to offer you coffee, to ask you to sit?"

He thought Jacob Thiroko had slept less than he had.

The coffee mug stood amongst stain rings on the table.

Beside it was an ashtray and the empty matchbox that had been used when the ashtray had spilled over. Thiroko sat at the table. The haze of smoke filled a strata of the room, morning mist over a damp meadow. Thiroko sat at the table. There was no other chair, only the unmade bed for Jack.

"I just need your decision. I want explosives, I want to prove myself to you, then I want help."

Jack saw the sadness on Thiroko's face. He knew it was the sadness of a military commander who sent young men onto the dirty battleground of revolutionary warfare.

"I'm going, Mr Thiroko, with your help or without it.

With your help I'll make a better job of it."

Thiroko stood and pulled out his shirt from his trousers.

He lifted the back shirt tail, and then his vest up to his shoulders. Jack saw the thin welt of the scar, pink on the dark skin, running diagonally across the length of his back.

"Sjambok, rhino hide whip. It is the way the police break up demonstrations. They use the sjambok when they do not think it necessary to shoot. I was a politician before they whipped me, I was a soldier afterwards… "

Jack had his answer, his elation shone.

"I take a gamble on you, a small gamble. A few pounds of explosive. Nothing more until you have proved yourself."

They clasped hands.

Jack said he would fly within two days. Thiroko told him where he should stay, to wait for a contact, and thereafter, since he would be travelling in his own name, to keep on the move.

"Where will you be, Mr Thiroko?"

"I will be in Lusaka."

"You won't have long to wait." Jack was smiling.

Thiroko's face clouded with anger. "You are all children.

You think it is a game. Last night I shamed myself with my thoughts. I thought whether it was better for our Movement if those five should hang. I considered whether five men dead was of more advantage to us than those five men free. I know the answer and I prayed for forgiveness on my knees… What will be your target for your explosives?"

Jack could smell the sweat on the sheets. "I don't know."

Thiroko laughed with amusement. "You are clever to be cautious."

"I don't know what the target will be, honestly."

Thiroko seemed not to have heard him. "We say that we trust each other, and we are strangers. There are men and women whom I have worked with for many years, and I do not know whether I can trust them. It was sensible of you not to have gone to our offices."