Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

He yelled, not into his radio, not into his telephone, out into the night air.

"BOMB!"

The presentable young constable ran from his box. The outgoing car careered from a side-on collision towards him.

He was blinded by the lights. He ran for his life, and behind him his sentry box was taken down by the impact of the outgoing car's radiator and engine weight, squashed away through the shrubs, flattened against the low wall and the high railings.

There was the thud of running feet. He saw the figure come down the driveway, skip past the incoming car.

He had the flap off his holster now. He had the pistol butt in his hand, lifting. The figure gone, out into the street. The pistol was in his hand, his thumb had taken across the safety.

He had the running figure, seen between the railings, over the end of his barrel. Steady, squeeze…

The constable was bowled over by the blast that erupted from behind the plate glass of the hallway area. And with the driven wind came the glass shards, and then the crimson and orange billowing of the flames. Before he lost conscious ness he was aware of the glass splinters fragmenting around him, and of the heat of the spreading fire.

Jack ran two hundred yards. He had pulled the handkerchief off his face, tugged the anorak hood down from his head. Up Main, cars overtaking him, up Market, into the narrow side street off Becker, no-one in sight, off with the anorak, dump it, a distant siren, along the lanes off Diagonal, two men sitting, their backs against the wall, neither moved, past the closed Stock Exchange, onto Bree. He was walking when he reached Bree. He controlled his speed, harder to control his breathing. He tried to window shop, to appear to be strolling away the evening.

Two police trucks racing, sirens wailing, and the whine in the streets around him of approaching fire engines.

From the far side of Bree he looked back towards John Vorster Square… a bloody lunatic plan… He saw the orange glow reaching for the night sky. He saw the dark climbing column of smoke. Can you see that, Mr Thiroko?

He walked along Bree towards the Landdrost Hotel. He straightened his tie in a window, he casually wiped the sweat off his forehead. He knelt to wipe the earth from the gardens of John Vorster Square off his shoes. The last hundred yards, forcing himself not to look back. He steadied himself, and went inside. He stood in the lift with his back to a cluster of tourists. He went down his corridor, into his room.

He went first to the cupboard. He saw that the packaged pile of explosives was undisturbed. Of the three slabs that had been delivered in the Checkers bags, two were still inside his suitcase. He might have failed. But now he thought he had enough dynamite still to blow his way into the hanging gaol.

Jack dived onto his bed. His face was buried in his pillow, his legs shook without control.

God, what had he done? For his father, what had he done?

Just before eight o'clock, Jack joined the office workers and the labourers and the vagrants at the junction of Market and Main and Commissioner to see the damage. Police with dogs and soldiers in full combat kit kept the watchers far back from the fire darkened building. There was little to see, but that was no discouragement to the crowd.

Jack had already seen his morning Citizen with the special colour front page. The main photograph showed the orange flame ball alive inside the ground and first floor, billowing up the stairwell. He had read of the "miraculous escape" of the policeman on desk duty inside the door, how the heavy steel-panelled furniture had protected him from the immediate force of the fire and explosive blast. He had read that the offices above the hallway had been unoccupied, that had they not been the officers who worked there would have been killed when the floor above the hallway caved in. He had read that the steel and concrete construction of the block had prevented the spread of the fire, and that within 48 minutes the fire service had brought the blaze under control.

He had read that a single man was believed responsible, that there were reports that the man was a White, that the police were "keeping an open mind". The smell of a water-soaked fire is unlike any other. It was a familiar odour for Jack to sniff at as he stood with the crowd, and he thought of George Hawkins, pictured him beside him, remembered the demolition of a fire wrecked office in Guildford, and seemed to hear George's growl of approval. The newspaper said it had been the most dramatic attack against the country's security system since the car bombing of the Air Force headquarters in Pretoria and the rocket firing at the Voor trekkerhoogte base of the South African Defence Forces All down to you, Mr Hawkins.

He listened to the talk around him, mostly in English, a little in the Afrikaans language that he could not understand, all of it angry.

He took a last look at his work, and at the fire engines far up the street, and the police wagons. It was the controlled anger on the policemen's faces that would stay with him.

"You know what I heard?" A man with a loud voice said a florid face and a butcher's apron. "I heard that last the bandiete in the cells over there were shouting and singing, all the bastard politicals, cheering they were. Pity the scum didn't roast."

John Vorster Square still stood, foursquare. But he had shown them, he had singed its beard.

He walked down Commissioner to the junction of Harrison. Another thought as he walked. There had been Blacks among the sightseers, and he had not heard them Speak above a whisper. He had heard the vengeful fury of the Whites, but he knew nothing of the Blacks, whether cheered his attack, whether they feared the reprisals that would follow the violence he had directed against the principal police station in the city. He thought that in the world of Jack Curwen the Black man's opinion was irrelevant-Their fight was not his fight. His fight was family.

He took a taxi to the railway station.

•**

The colonel sat in on the conference. He was not himself responsible for the direct gathering of intelligence. Many times Intelligence knew of an impending attack. Not the exact location, nor the timing, but Intelligence generally knew of a major infiltration, of the movement of explosives, of an order from Gaberone or Lusaka. Intelligence had sources. There were covert watchers, small teams of Recce Commando operating deep inside Angola, observing the Umkonto we Sizwe camps, listening to their radios, hooked into remote telephone lines that served those camps. There were deep sleepers in the overseas offices of the African National Congress. There were traitors, arrested in great secrecy, interrogated, frightened, turned, released. There were men and women inside South Africa who were under constant surveillance, their names having been first revealed to Intelligence by the S.A.D.F. capture of documents from A.N.C. offices in Gaberone. A treasure chest.

Intelligence had this time had no word.

The conference was boring the colonel.

For a while he endured in silence, then intervened.

"Was it a White or was it not a White?"

He could not be given an answer. The vehicle drivers had said they had seen the shape of a man, momentarily in the lights, nothing else. The gate sentry had been the only continuous eyewitness to the attack. The gate sentry had been concussed, was still sedated. The colonel was told that the gate sentry had rambled a description between reviving from concussion and being given sedation. A hood, a mask, eyes in shadow, always moving too fast.

"I think he was a White," the colonel said. "If he had been Black then there would have been a fire support team.

I think it was a White working alone. He ran away. There is no report of a pick-up vehicle. If this had been A.N.C. then there would most certainly have been a pick-up. This one man, one White man, is at best no more than on the fringe of the A.N.C. It is now more than thirteen hours since the explosion, and Lusaka has said nothing. How many times do they wait thirteen hours? By the news agencies they would have known of the explosion within thirteen minutes, and they have still said nothing. I believe they have made no claim because they do not know who is responsible. I suggest this is the work of an individual, not of a cadre of Umkonto we Sizwe. Gentlemen, we have a White, we have a male. He ran forward fast, he threw a bag or sack weighing perhaps five kilos, he threw a fist-sized stone accurately through a windscreen. In my submission, we have a White male who is athletic, reasonable to assume that he is aged between 18 years and 30 years. We should meet again when we have the forensics."