Rage (33 page)

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Authors: Wilbur Smith

BOOK: Rage
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They were screaming and pushing, fighting their way out into the street again, leaving their fallen comrades crumpled on the platform in seeping puddles of blood, or crawling desperately after them dragging bullet-shattered limbs.
And the little group of policemen were running to help each other to their feet, bruised and bloodied in tom uniforms. They gathered up the engine-driver and his fireman and, staggering, supporting each other, drawn revolvers still in their hands, they crossed the platform stepping over the bodies and the puddles of blood and hurried down the steps to the two parked vans.
Across the road the crowd had reassembled and they screamed and shook their fists and chanted as the policemen scrambled into the vehicles and drove away at speed, and then the crowd swarmed into the roadway and hurled stones and abuse at the departing vans.
Tara had watched it all from the parked Packard, and now she sat paralysed with horror, listening to the animal
growl of the crowd penetrated by the cries and groans of the wounded.
Moses Gama ran to her and shouted into the open window, ‘Go and fetch Sister Nunziata. Tell her we need all the help we can get.'
Tara nodded dumbly and started the engine. Across the road she could see Kitty and Hank still filming. Hank was kneeling beside a wounded man, shooting into his tortured face, panning down onto the pool of blood in which he lay.
Tara pulled away, and the crowd in the road tried to stop her. Black faces, swollen with anger, mouthed at her through the Packard's windows and they beat with their fists on the roof, but she sounded her horn and kept driving.
‘I have to get a doctor,' she shouted at them. ‘Let me pass, let me through.'
She got through them, and when she looked in the rear-view mirror, she saw that in frustration and fury they were stoning the railway station, ripping up the pavement and hurling the heavy slabs through the windows. She saw a white face at one of the windows, and felt a pang for the station-master and his staff. They had barricaded themselves in the ticket office.
The crowd outside the building was solid, and as she drove towards the mission she passed a flood of black men and women rushing to join it. The women were ululating wildly, a sound that maddened their menfolk. Some of them ran into the road to try and stop Tara, but she jammed her palm down on the horn ring and swerved around them. She glanced up into her driving-mirror and one of them picked up a rock from the side of the road and hurled it after the car. The rock crashed against the metal of the cab and bounced away.
At the mission hospital they had heard the sound of
gunfire and the roar of the mob. Sister Nunziata, the white doctor, and her helpers were anxiously waiting on the verandah and Tara shouted up at her.
‘You must come quickly to the station, Sister, the police have shot and wounded people – I think some of them are dead.'
They must have been expecting the call, for they had their medical bags on the verandah with them. While Tara backed and turned the Packard, Sister Nunziata and the doctor ran down the steps, carrying their black bags. They clambered into the cab of the mission's small blue Ford pick-up and turned towards the gate, cutting in front of Tara's Packard. Tara followed them, but by the time she had turned the Packard and driven out through the gates, the little blue pick-up was a hundred yards ahead of her. It turned the corner into the station road and even above the engine-beat Tara heard the roar of the mob.
When she swung through the corner the Ford was stopped only fifty paces ahead of her. It was completely surrounded by the crowd. The road from side to side was packed with screaming black men and women. Tara could not hear the words, there was no sense to their fury, it was incoherent and deafening. They were concentrating on the Ford, and took no notice of Tara in the Packard.
Those nearest to the Ford were beating on the metal cab, and rocking the vehicle on its suspension. The side door opened and Sister Nunziata stood on the running board, a little higher than the heads of the howling mob that pushed closely around her. She was trying to speak to them, holding up her hands and pleading with them to let her through to take care of the wounded.
Suddenly a stone was thrown. It arced up out of the crowd and hit the nun on the side of her head. She reeled as she stood, and there was a bright flash of blood on her white veil. Stunned, she raised her hand to her cheek and it came away bloody.
The sight of blood enraged them. A forest of black arms reached up to Sister Nunziata and dragged her down from the vehicle. For a while they fought over her, dragging her in the road and worrying her like a pack of hounds with the fox. Then suddenly Tara saw the flash of a knife, and sitting in the Packard she screamed and thrust her fingers into her mouth to silence herself.
The old crone who wielded the knife was a
sangoma
, a witchdoctor, and around her neck she wore the necklace of bones and feathers and animal skulls that were her insignia. The knife in her right hand had a handle of rhino hom and the hand-forged blade was nine inches long and wickedly curved. Four men caught the nun and threw her across the engine bonnet of the Ford while the old woman hopped up beside her. The men held Sister Nunziata pinioned, face up, while the crowd began to chant wildly, and the
sangoma
stooped over her.
With a single stroke of the curved blade she cut through the nun's grey habit and split her belly open from groin to rib cage. While Sister Nunziata writhed in the grip of the men who held her, the crone thrust her hand and naked arm into the wound. Tara watched in disbelief as she brought out something wet and glistening and purple, a soft amorphous thing. It was done so swiftly, so expertly, that for seconds Tara did not realize that it was Sister Nunziata's liver that the crone held in her bloody hands.
With a slash of the curved blade, the
sangoma
cut a lump from the still living organ and hopped to her feet. Balancing on the curved bonnet of the Ford she faced the crowd.
‘I eat our white enemy,' she screeched; ‘and thus I take his strength.' And the mob roared, a terrible sound, as the old woman thrust the purple lump into her toothless mouth and chewed upon it. She hacked another piece off the liver, and still chewing with open mouth, she threw it to the crowd below her.
‘Eat your enemy!' she shrilled, and they fought for the bloody scraps like dogs.
‘Be strong! Eat the liver of the hated ones!'
She threw them more and Tara covered her eyes and heaved convulsively. Acid vomit shot up her throat and she swallowed it down painfully.
Abruptly the driver's door of the Packard beside her was jerked open and rough hands seized Tara. She was dragged out into the road. The blood roar of the crowd deafened her, but terror armed her with superhuman strength, and she tore herself free of the clutching hands.
She was at the edge of the mob, and the attention of most of them was entirely on the ghastly drama around the Ford. The crowd had set the vehicle alight. Sister Nunziata's mutilated body lay on the bonnet like a sacrifice on a burning altar, while, trapped in the cab, the doctor thrashed around and beat at the flames with his bare hands, and the crowd chanted and danced around him like children around the bonfire on Guy Fawkes' night.
For that instant Tara was free, but there were men around her, shouting and reaching for her, their faces bestial, their eyes glazed and insensate. No longer human, they were driven into that killing madness in which there was no reason nor mercy. Swift as a bird Tara ducked under the outstretched arms and darted away. She found that she had broken out of the mob, and in front of her was a plot of wasteland strewn with old rusted car bodies and rubbish. She fled across it and behind her she heard her pursuers baying like a pack of hunting dogs.
At the end of the open land a sagging barbed-wire fence blocked her way, and she glanced back over her shoulder. A group of men still followed her, and two of them had outdistanced the others. They were both big and powerful-looking, running strongly on bare feet, their faces contorted in a cruel rictus of excitement. They came on silently.
Tara stooped into the space between the strands of the
wire. She was almost through when she felt the barbs catch in the flesh of her back, and pain arrested her. For a moment she struggled desperately, feeling her skin tear as she fought to free herself and blood trickled down her flanks – and then they seized her.
Now they shouted with wild laughter as they dragged her back through the fence, the barbs ripping at her clothing and her flesh. Her legs collapsed under her, and she pleaded with them.
‘Please don't hurt me. I'm going to have a baby—'
They dragged her back across the waste plot, half on her knees, twisting and pleading in their grip – and then she saw the
sangoma
coming to meet them, hopping and capering like an ancient baboon, cackling through her toothless mouth, her bones and beads rattling around her scrawny neck and the curved knife in her blood-caked fingers.
Tara began to scream, and she felt her urine squirt uncontrollably down her legs. ‘Please! Please don't!' she raved and terror was an icy blackness of her mind and body that crushed her to earth, and she closed her eyes and steeled herself to the stinging kiss of the blade.
Then in the mindless animal roar of the crowd, above the old crone's shrill laughter, there was another voice, a great lion's roar of anger and command that stilled all other sound. Tara opened her eyes and Moses Gama stood over her, a towering colossus, and his voice alone stopped them and drove them back. He lifted her in his arms and held her like a child. The crowd around the Packard opened before him as he carried her to it and placed her on the front seat and then slid behind the wheel.
As he started the engine and swung the Packard away in a hard U-tum the black smoke from the burning van poured over them and obscured the windscreen for a moment, and Tara smelled Sister Nunziata's flesh roasting.
This time she could not control herself and she flopped
forward, her head between her knees, and vomited on the floor of the Packard.
M
anfred De La Rey had taken the chair at the top of the long table in the operations room in the basement of Marshall Square. He had come across from his own office suite in the Union Buildings in Pretoria to police headquarters at the centre of the storm, where he could be at hand to consider, with his senior officers, each fresh dispatch as it came in from the police provincial HQs around the country.
The entire wall facing Manfred's seat was a large-scale map of the subcontinent. Working in front of it were two junior police officers. They were placing magnetic markers on the map. Each of the small black discs had a name printed upon it and represented one of the almost five hundred ANC officials and organizers that had been so far identified by the Intelligence Department.
The discs were clustered most thickly along the great crescent of the Witwatersrand in the centre of the continent, although others were scattered across the entire map as the physical whereabouts of each person was confirmed by the police reports that were coming in every few seconds.
Amongst the rash of black markers were a very few red discs, less than fifty in all. These represented the known members of the Central Committee of the African National Congress.
Some of the names were those of Europeans; Harris, Marks, Fischer, and some were Asians like Naicker and Nana Sita, but the majority were African. Tambo and Sisulu and Mandela – they were all there. Mandela's red disc was placed on the city of Johannesburg, while Moroka was in the Eastern Cape and Albert Luthuli was in Zululand.
Manfred De La Rey was stony-faced as he stared at the map, and the senior police officers seated around him studiously avoided catching his eye or even looking directly at him. Manfred had a reputation of being the strongman of the cabinet. His colleagues privately referred to him as ‘Panga Man' after the heavy chopping knife that was used in the cane fields and was the favourite weapon of the Mau Mau in Kenya.
Manfred looked the part. He was a big man. The hands that lay on the table before him were still, there was no fidgeting of nervousness or uncertainty, and they were big hard hands. His face was becoming craggy now, and his jowls and thick neck heightened the sense of power that emanated from him. His men were afraid of him.
‘How many more?' he asked suddenly, and the colonel sitting opposite him, a man with the medal ribbons of valour on his chest, started like a schoolboy and quickly consulted his list.
‘Four more to find – Mbeki, Mtolo, Mhlaba and Gama.' He read out the names on his list that remained unticked, and Manfred De La Rey relapsed into silence.
Despite his brooding stillness and forbidding expression, Manfred was pleased with the day's work. It was not yet noon on the first day and already they had pinpointed the whereabouts of most of the ringleaders. Altogether the ANC had planned the entire campaign with quite extraordinary precision and had exhibited unusual thoroughness and foresight in its execution, Manfred reflected. He had not expected them to be so efficient, the African was notoriously lackadaisical and happy-go-lucky – but then they had the advice and assistance of their white Communist comrades. The protests and demonstrations and strikes were widespread and effective. Manfred grunted aloud and the officers at the table looked up apprehensively, but dropped their eyes hurriedly when he frowned.
Manfred returned to his thoughts. No, not bad for a
bunch of kaffirs, even with a few white men to help them. Yet their naïvety and amateurishness showed in their almost total lack of security and secrecy. They had blabbed as though they were at a beer-drink. Full of their own importance they had boasted of their plans and made little effort to conceal the identities of the leaders and cover their movements. The police informers had had little difficulty in picking up the information.
There were, of course, exceptions and Manfred scowled as he considered the lists of leaders still unaccounted for. One name pricked like a burr, Moses Gama. He had made a study of the man's file. After Mandela, he was probably the most dangerous of them all.
‘We must have him,' he told himself. ‘We must get those two, Mandela and Gama.' And now he spoke aloud, barking the question: ‘Where is Mandela?'
‘At the moment he is addressing a meeting in the community hall at Drake's Farm township,' the colonel answered promptly, glancing up at the red marker on the map. ‘He will be followed when he leaves, until we are ready to make the arrests.'
‘No word of Gama yet?' Manfred asked impatiently, and the officer shook his head.
‘Not yet, Minister, he was last seen here on the Witwatersrand nine days ago. He might have gone underground. We may have to move without him.'
‘No,' Manfred snapped. ‘I want him. I want Moses Gama.'
Manfred relapsed into silence, brooding and intense. He knew that he was caught in the cross-currents of history. He could feel the good winds blowing at his back, set fair to carry him away on his course. He knew also that at any moment those winds might drop, and the ebb of his tide might set in. It was dangerous – mortally dangerous but still he waited. His father and his ancestors had all been huntsmen. They had hunted the elephant and lion and he
had heard them speak of the patience and the waiting that was part of the hunt. Now Manfred was a hunter as they had been, but his quarry, though every bit as dangerous, was infinitely more cunning.
He had set his snares with all the skill at his command. The banning orders, five hundred of them, were already made out. The men and women to whom they were addressed would be driven out from society into the wilderness. Prohibited from attending a gathering of more than three persons, physically confined to a single magisterial district, prohibited also from publishing a single written word and prevented from having their spoken word published by anyone else, their treacherous and treasonable voices would be effectively gagged. That was how he would deal with the lesser enemy, the smaller game of this hunt.
For the others, the fifty big game, the dangerous ones, he had other weapons ready. The warrants of arrest had been drawn up and the charges framed. Amongst them were high treason and furthering the aims of international Communism, conspiracy to overthrow the government by violent revolution, incitement to public violence – and these, if proven, led directly to the gallows tree. Complete success was there, almost within his grasp, but at any moment it could be snatched away.
At that moment a voice was raised so loudly in the operations room beyond the cubicle windows that they all looked up. Even Manfred swung his head towards the sound and narrowed his pale eyes. The officer who had spoken was sitting with his back to the window holding the telephone receiver to his ear, and scribbling on the notepad on the desk in front of him. Now he slammed the receiver back on to its bracket, ripped the top sheet off the pad and hurried into the map room.
‘What is it?' demanded the super.
‘We've got him, sir.' The man's voice was shrill with excitement. ‘We've got Moses Gama. He is in Port
Elizabeth. Less than two hours ago he was at the head of a riot at the New Brighton railway station. The police were attacked, and were forced to open fire in self-defence. At least seven people have been killed, one of them a nun. She was horribly mutilated – there is even an unconfirmed report that she was cannibalized – and her body has been burned.'
‘Are they sure it was him?' Manfred asked.
‘No doubt, Minister. He was positively identified by an informer who knows him personally and the police captain has identified him by file and photograph.'
‘All right,' Manfred De La Rey said. ‘Now we can move.' He looked down at the Commissioner of Police at the far end of the long table. ‘Do it, please, Commissioner,' he said, and picked up his dark fedora hat from the table. ‘Report to me the moment you have them all locked up.'
He rode up in the lift to ground level and his chauffeur-driven limousine was waiting to take him back to his office in the Union Buildings. As he settled back against the leather-padded rear seat and the limousine pulled away, he smiled for the first time that morning.
‘A nun,' he said aloud. ‘And they ate her!' He shook his head with satisfaction. ‘Let the bleeding hearts of the world read that and know what kind of savages we are dealing with.'
He felt the good winds of his fortune freshen, bearing him away towards those places which only recently he had allowed himself to dream of.

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