Chapter 13

There was silence in the car for a long time – just the bottom-numbing vibrations of the Corolla on the corrugated road. Finally Charlotte spoke, her sense of curiosity overwhelming the shock she was trying to deal with.

She swore now, though she hardly ever did, overwhelmed by the gravity of the whole situation. “What the fuck just happened?” she said.

“Can you tone down the language,” he replied. “For God’s sake, there’s a tornado of souls erupting into the sky behind us – good people, innocent people leaving this world. Have some decency.”

He stared ahead as he said this, still expressionless. His words were strangely poetic – as though this moment, which was as good as any, Charlotte supposed, had become 3.30 on a Sunday afternoon in a cemetery. A time to remember the dead in elegant, metered prose.

Charlotte leant in close to the passenger side mirror, and looked back at the invisible, spiralling column of souls – somewhere over the crest of the hill behind them. She imagined the dead ghostly faces of men (she didn’t imagine women, but there were women among them) in white hazard suits glancing down at the hangar roofs of Vastrap in utter surprise – and then, upon accepting their new weightless form, racing upward into the huge open sky. To heaven – because whether you believe in heaven or not during the week, you believe in heaven in the midst of a genocide, or whatever you’d call this slaughter.

“How many people were there?” she asked, still hunched over with her nose almost pressed against the window, peering into the mirror through the dust.

“Ten per floor and there were three floors, plus the launch team. Three more. So thirty-three, minus me. They’re going to count the bodies and realise I’m missing, and also whoever was driving the mysterious Corolla. And they’re going to come after us. The next fifteen to twenty minutes of your life is the last you’re going to feel like a human. After that you’re a bull impala in hunting season.”

Charlotte barely heard the threats to her life. She was fixated on one word the man had just said. She forgot about the side mirror and turned to the man.

“A launch team? What are they launching? Nuclear missiles?”

“I shouldn’t say. Though I suppose confidentiality agreements don’t mean a hell of a lot when the people you signed them for are trying to kill you.” The man glanced down at the petrol gauge for the first time and swore, ignoring his own request for piety.

“Fokken no petrol. You really didn’t have any sort of plan at all, did you?”

“There’ll be enough to get to the Engen station on the road back to Upington. I planned that much. So are there nuclear missiles at Vastrap?” she asked.

“So you figured out it was Vastrap? Clever,” said the man. Charlotte couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic. He went on, “When Vastrap was disarmed in 1991, the International Atomic Energy Agency were shown only two of the three nukes housed there. The third was well hidden in a lead chamber underneath the second weapon. It was part of the plan. The IAEA would come, shut down two weapons, give South Africa a certificate and leave us alone. We had carte blanche after that. The Russian satellites that spotted Vastrap in the first place turned their cameras onto the Middle East. We could’ve had a parade through Johannesburg with the third nuke on a float and no one would’ve noticed.”

“So who were we ... Who were you ...”

“They,” added the man.

“Who were they going to bomb?”

“No one. That’s not what it was for – the third one wasn’t a weapon at all. The Afrikaans people were never bloodthirsty. We were pioneers first, way back when Jan van Riebeeck landed on these shores. It’s not like we were Australians or Americans. We didn’t wipe out the native population; we tried to find a way of co-existing.”

“Is that what apartheid was all about?”

“When you look at it objectively, that’s what most colonists do – they land and then find a way of wiping out their competition. In America it was blankets covered with smallpox and in Australia it was permits to hunt aborigines. If you wipe a whole people from the face of the earth, then there’s no one to point fingers at you. It’s just their spirits that haunt you and spirits can’t do shit. We were never going to nuke the blacks, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It wasn’t,” said Charlotte, shocked by the mention of the idea. “So what was it if it wasn’t a weapon?”

“A nuclear-powered engine. It was the engine that would drive the first and only African space programme.”

Charlotte laughed. Though it sounded derisive, it was really just a laugh of surprise.

“So you’ve been working on sending people into space?”

“I’m not saying anything more if you’re going to laugh. We’re the sharp and shiny point of humankind’s technology, unbound by international regulations. Like Chris Barnard.”

“I won’t laugh.”

The man paused in his reply, sensing Charlotte’s curiosity – and let it stew for just a second longer.

“We aren’t just sending people into space. We’re colonising a moon.”

Charlotte’s mouth hung open slightly and her forehead tensed into a frown. The man turned his head a degree to the left and saw her expression.

“Doesn’t it make sense? The apartheid government just handed over control of South Africa to the ANC. They just handed it over, as though it was the key to some stinky bathroom at the petrol station. You didn’t think that was a bit strange? Did you think that a nation of pioneers who’d worked so hard to build this country for over three hundred years would just give up like that? The people at the top had a plan. We’re all Voortrekkers at heart, remember. And it’s not 1652 anymore. We’re well into the space age.”

They were approaching the end of the dirt road and the sun was now behind the horizon, though it still illuminated a bank of pink and orange clouds. It wasn’t dark yet, but it would be soon. Bateared foxes sniffed the evening air from the safety of their burrow foyers as the old Corolla hummed along the track.

It was then that a few metres in front of the car, a plume of dust exploded into the air. It billowed up, then dispersed, raining fine gravel on the bonnet. Both the man and Charlotte stared at it for a second, their minds whirring to place such an occurrence. Why would dirt jump into the air like that? Then another plume jumped up beside Charlotte’s window.

Only after the second puff of sand did they hear the noise – like thunder rolling across the vastness of the Karoo. The almighty crack of a vehicle-mounted sniper rifle fired kilometres away on the crest of the hill they’d just come from. A pair of dikkops took to the air in fright, forgoing their magnificent camouflage and abandoning their speckled egg in their momentary panic.

“They’re shooting at us,” screeched Charlotte as the second gunshot rang out, spreading slowly across the landscape like ripples in a pond. Or like panic through a crowd.

The man began swerving the car from side to side erratically, flinging Charlotte, an old map book and the water bottle around the car.

“It’ll be fine,” he shouted over Charlotte’s panic. “We’re at the edge of their range and we’re obscured by dust. Another fifty metres further and they’ll give up – they’re just chancing ...”

A bullet thudded into the boot lid.

“Faster,” screamed Charlotte as another peal echoed around the car, driving the foxes back into the recesses of their burrows to comfort their shivering kits.

The man didn’t slow down for the cattle grid; he launched the Corolla over it, slammed on the brakes and pulled the steering wheel to the right. The car, though old and worn, responded well. It slid sideways onto the empty highway. The man jammed the car into second gear and floored it, changing to third only at 6 000 rpm, as the car accelerated along the tarmac. The last rays of light were gone now, but the man dared not turn on the headlights. It’d give their pursuers a target, and he’d underestimated the range of their weapons once already.