Deon Meyer - Blood Safari

Too slow. Too late. I thumped the long blade into his heart and said to him, ‘That’s for Emma.’

I don’t think he heard me.

I stepped back and let him fall. I dragged him to one side, picked up the rifle and lay down where he had been. I used his night scope to scan the area.

There was the Jeep Grand Cherokee, half hidden behind the house beside a Toyota Prado. Big vehicles. Enough to transport a large team. How many were there? The house seemed deserted. I swung the telescope slowly across the whole area. Then I spotted him on the veranda behind the wall. Only the top of his head protruded.

Number two.

If I were in their place, I would have deployed the others near the gate.

We would see.

I heard a voice faintly whispering. Behind me.

I plucked out the Glock and swung around.

Nothing.

Still I heard the voice. It was a man’s voice. Impossible, since there was only dense bush behind me.

I realised that the sound must have come from a radio.

I crawled over to Blondie’s corpse and felt in his pockets. Nothing. I turned him over and felt along his belt. Nothing again.

The voice was more audible now. Close to him, or somewhere on him. Up top.

I felt along his body, since I couldn’t see in this dark, and held my ear close to his head. I heard it clearly. ‘Vannie, come in.’ It was a soft, impatient whisper.

The thing was in his ear. There was a fine wire looping down. I should have known that they’d have technology. I took it off carefully. His skin was still warm. I put it in my ear. It didn’t fit very well. It might have been tailor made for him.

‘Vannie, don’t tell me your vack isn’t working.’

What was a vack?

‘Frans, can you see Vannie?’

‘Negative.’

‘Fuck.’

Numbers three and four.

‘Want me to go and see?’

‘Yes, it’s still early. Take him one of the spare vacks, there are some more in the back of the Jeep, in the blue box.’

‘OK.’

I lay down. Vacks? I looked through the scope. The man behind the wall stood up. Frans. He jogged down the steps to the vehicles and opened the back of the Jeep.

‘I can’t see the box.’

‘It says Voice Activated Comms.’

I got it. Vack. VAC. VACs.

‘It’s not here.’

‘It must be there.’

‘I’m telling you it’s not here.’

‘It’s in the back of the Prado, Eric. I moved it.’ A new voice. Number five.

‘Thanks.’

Frans shut the back of the Jeep and went over to the Prado, opened it and rummaged inside.

‘OK, I’ve got it. Fuck, Vannie, just don’t shoot me now.’

‘He can’t hear you, Frans.’

‘I’m just saying.’

He came jogging across the lawn to me. I took the knife and stood up.

Jacobus le Roux found work as a labourer at the Mlawula game reserve in Swaziland. He was an oddity to the black game wardens, the white Afrikaner deserter who wanted to do the work of a black man. The quiet boy who never laughed.

With great effort and patience he pieced together the bits of news and rumour. Samora Machel’s plane had been off course. Somewhere there was a false beacon, a VOR, the Times of Swaziland speculated, along with the Russian experts.

He knew where the VOR had been. He knew who had put it there.

The newspapers said the South African government wanted Machel dead. They said he had been a thorn in their sides since 1964, when he led the first attack against the Portuguese as a guerrilla fighter for the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, or FRELIMO. A former nurse, Machel had seen his family’s land confiscated, he had seen his parents starve under Portuguese rule, he had seen his brother die in a South African gold mine, and had experienced the wide gap between medical care for whites and blacks at first hand.

And because his grandparents and great-grandparents had fought Portuguese rule in the nineteenth century, the diminutive nurse took up the struggle himself. By 1970, he had become the commander-in-chief of Frelimo, and by 1975 he was the first President of an independent Mozambique.

And, said the newspapers, he had signed his owned death warrant soon after – by allowing guerrilla forces fighting against oppression in South Africa and Rhodesia to use his country as a springboard for attacks. The two neighbouring countries retaliated by forming a rebel group called RENAMO under the auspices of fighting the Marxist Machel government, and a bitter civil war was born.

By 1986, Mozambique had reached breaking point. Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia had succumbed to boere pressure and ordered RENAMO out of his country. RENAMO’s great onslaught against Machel had begun and everything was on a knife-edge, at the top of the precipice. Killing Machel was supposed to finally break the deadlock.

But Pretoria denied everything. Even the minister whose face he had seen in the little plane. Especially that minister.

That was what frightened Jacobus the most. He knew that they were lying and he knew what they were prepared to do to preserve the lie.

After five months at the Mlawula reserve, they tracked him down.

He came in from the veld and big fat Job Lindani, the Swazi manager with the ready smile, said to him, ‘Don’t go home. There are white men waiting for you. Boere.’

He fled again.

* * *

Frans had been the one driving the Jeep in the hospital parking lot. I laid his lifeless body down beside big Vannie, crushed his VAC on the ground under my foot, picked up Vannie’s rucksack and the Galil and jogged through the dark to the house.

There were at least another three outside, but I suspected there were more. If there were only five they need not have come with two vehicles. I guessed at six. That meant another four. At least.

‘Vannie, can you hear me now?’

In the dark house I opened the rucksack. Bottled water. Sandwiches. They smelled like chicken.

‘Frans, what are you doing?’

I looked for my Twinkies. Found only the empty carton. They would pay for that too.

‘Frans, come in, Frans.’

I ate and drank in a hurry. Just enough to still the hunger.

‘I don’t believe it.’

I picked up the Galil and went out the back door, past the vehicles, south to the dense bush where I had lain in wait the night before.

‘Eric, I think we’ve got trouble.’

‘Fuck.’

‘He’ll have the rifle too.’

Eric ruminated on this wisdom.

‘And the VAC too, maybe,’ said Eric. ‘Lie dead still and shoot anything that moves.’

44

He worked in the Swazi mines, on remote farms and once on a plantation. Sometimes he just hid away in the mountains and stole to stay alive. Twice he went back to Mozambique, but there were no jobs, no means of survival. He lived in fear every day for eight years. He never stopped looking over his shoulder and developed an instinct for who would betray him, and when. He didn’t blame them. If you are poor and hungry, and you have a wife and five children somewhere in a Swazi village who want more, always more, then you take every cent you can get. When you walk into the shebeen in Mbabane and meet someone asking questions, then you tell him about the strange white man who works beside you in the mine shaft, the one who speaks your language and never laughs.

In 1992 the Swazi papers were full of the Great Change in South Africa.

He found hope.

He waited another two years, until March 1994, and then took the money he had saved and bought himself a new face from a surgeon in Mbabane. He bought a Nissan 1400 pick-up and a false passport in Bulembu and drove over the border and down the mountain to Barberton.

He found a public telephone booth in the town centre and dialled his parents’ home number, but before it could ring fear overtook him and he put the receiver down.