Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

"You're getting to be a real creep, Jan."

They went forward, Jan limping and ahead, and Ros trailing him.

He turned when he heard the voice. The voice spoke his name.

Jack saw the boy. He saw the shallow body and the thin face. He saw the way the shoulder drooped. He saw that the boy was crippled. The boy was behind the bench, trying to smile a greeting.

He looked the other way. The girl was standing back two more paces than the boy. A nice looking girl, and older than the boy, and she wore a summer skirt and a blouse buttoned to the throat. He could see the lines at her mouth, tension lines.

"I'm Jack Curwen."

"I was ordered to contact you. You followed the instructions, thank you."

They stared at each other. As if neither had quite believed the ordinariness of the other.

Jack smiled, the boy grinned. Jack wondered why the girl didn't smile.

"I'm Jan, this is my sister. You don't need any more names."

Strangely formal. Jack shook hands with them.

A shyness in Jan's voice. "What you did at John Vorster Square was incredible."

Again the silence. None of them knowing what to say.

Out of earshot the schoolchildren were spidering over the hulk of the museum's largest tank.

Jan drew the envelope from his pocket. He passed it to Jack. Jack ripped open the fold. He saw the diagrams. He leafed quickly through the sheets of paper, the frown settling sharp cut on his forehead. He knew the girl's eyes never left his. The school teacher's voice carried gently to him. She had raised her voice because she was describing to her class the cyclic rate of fire of a heavy machine gun from the Great War. He saw that the diagrams were detail of Pretoria Central. He saw the positioning of Beverly Hills, he understood why he had not seen the walls when he had walked on Potgieterstraat.

"What happens now?"

Jan said, "I have to take you into the north of the Transvaal. There is a rendezvous there for you, close to a town called Warmbaths. It is a spa town about a hundred kilometres from Pretoria. You should go back to your hotel, and you should check out of your hotel, then we drive to Warmbaths."

"Do you know why I have come to South Africa?"

"No."

Ros snapped, "And he doesn't need to know."

Jack saw the anger on the boy's face.

Jan said, "I'm just a courier. I am ordered to deliver you to a rendezvous. I do what I am told, just as I brought you the envelope today, just as I brought you the package of explosives."

"You don't know why we are hitting the gaol?"

"As he said, he's just a courier."

Ros twisted away, swirled her skirt. Jack stood up and walked behind her and Jan hobbled after them. Jack caught up with her.

"You're not a part of it," she said bitterly.

Her eyes were on her sandals, striding out.

Jack bored on. "I'm not a part of it, it's true. In England, my home, I'm not an activist, I'm not political. I don't give a damn for this war. I have to be here, probably like you have to be here."

She tossed her head back, rippled her hair, gestured at her brother behind her. She said, "It's lunatic for him to be involved."

"Lunatic for all of us."

"So why did you honour us with your presence?"

"A week today they're going to hang my father."

She looked away. He saw her close her eyes, squeeze them tight shut. They stood together and waited for Jan to catch them.

•**

There were eighteen detectives from the plain clothes branch of the security police who had taken the desks and tables in the large room set aside for the investigation. The detectives worked with their telephones and notebooks eight floors above the back hall of John Vorster Square.

Ten of the detectives worked on tracing the grip bag.

Eight worked on finding the source of the petrol can.

In front of each man was a commercial telephone directory of the greater Johannesburg area. By the middle of the morning it was believed that a manufacturer had been identified for the bag, a factory employing similar synthetic fibres to those retrieved by forensic. The detectives then took sections of the directories to ring each and every number where the bag could have been sold. The information given to the detectives pointed towards a White attacker. It was therefore probable that the bag and the petrol can, if bought in Johannesburg, had been bought either in the city centre or in a White suburb. The outlets through which the bag might have been sold were fewer than the outlets for petrol cans. It was thought that the bag, rather than the can, would prove decisive.

Twice that morning the colonel had come down the two flights of stairs to the incident room.

He was not directly involved, not yet. His involvement was two stages away in the process of the investigation.

First the source of the sales must be identified, second the purchaser must be described.

• •*

Jacob Thiroko and his group travelled apart, but on the same aircraft.

He carried a Tanzanian passport. He had never used that passport before. It described him as an engineer. He carried letters of introduction from the Botswana Enterprises Development Unit, and also from the Botswana Meat Corporation for whom, he could tell immigration, he was designing a new abattoir. The younger men were on a variety of Black African passports, and each was equipped with the cover to talk his way through immigration at the international airport at Gaberone.

With more time for planning and for taking advice, he might have attempted to travel overland from Angola, or overland from Mozambique, both difficult but both possible.

The fast way to South Africa was through Gaberone, not the safe way.

It was eighteen months since the Recce Commando squads had been helicoptered into Gaberone at night to kill twelve of Thiroko's comrades, to blow up their offices, to bring home what was described as a treasure trove of intelligence material. Since the raid, the Botswana government had ceded areas of their sovereign independence to permit covert members of the National Intelligence Service to operate in various guises from their territory.

Thiroko walked from the aircraft across the tarmac towards the single storey building housing lounges and offices. He walked almost in the shadow of the squat, square built, air traffic control tower. He was concerned with the immigration officers. He should have been concerned with a White air traffic control supervisor. His photograph was taken. It would not be a good likeness, but it would serve as confirmation of this supervisor's opinion, made instantly, that he had sighted Jacob Thiroko.

By the time that Thiroko and his four men had collected their baggage, queued for immigration, gathered together to be met by their contact driver, there were two vehicles waiting to follow them out of the airport car park. There was a land rover with the markings of a locally based safari holiday company driven by a White with a Black passenger, and there was a Peugeot 504 estate carrying three Blacks.

Inside the car, when it was speeding on the Palapye road, Thiroko told his companions that they would cross the border that night in the wide area between Martin's Drift and Oranjefontein, that they would be moved south by lorry, that they would meet with a sixth man at a place where weapons and explosives were stored. He saw they were cool to what he said. Not excited. They were all in their middle twenties. They had all left South Africa as children, they were coming home as men.

The Peugeot 504 was eight hundred metres behind. It did not have to be closer. If the car ahead turned off the metalled road it would have to give up tarmac for dirt. A billowing grit storm would telegraph a detour from the Palaype road.

Jack paid cash for the two lengths of steel tube.