Chapter 48

A siren sounded from the base, and the jeeps began moving like a line of ants away from the base and up the steep mountain pass. Stefan held out his hand and I took it and shook it. Then he turned and walked towards the building without collecting a single item of his belongings. When a virtual stranger is the only person you have to say goodbye to, and you have nothing of any worth to take with you, then you are alone, and space in its infinite desolation doesn’t seem as lonely as the rest of us might imagine. Stefan had been drifting alone in space for a long time.

He stopped about ten metres from me, as though he’d forgotten something, then he thought better of it and continued on, across the tarmac of the runway and through a door. And he was finally gone.

My best guess as to what he was considering, as he stopped there on the runway, was something like, Will you take the woman with you? But it might just as easily have been that he was weighing the benefits of leaving me alive. He was not a man who liked connections. Or loose ends.

I walked back into the shack and, fearing the worst, shook the body in the bed. It stirred.

“You must come with me,” I said, shaking her again.

She turned her head, looked at me, and then peeled back the covers and swung her legs off the bed. She was naked and unashamed and she dressed slowly. I turned my back to her to give her some privacy, although she didn’t seem to care, and took the opportunity to look around.

I poked around in the boxes of food on the floor and opened the drawer in the only table. In it was a single handwritten sheet of paper. I folded it up without reading it and put it in my pocket. Then I turned to see the woman finish dressing, buttoning one of Stefan’s jackets over her clothes. She was pretty, her hair tangled and knotted and her eyes puffy from sleep. I gestured for her to follow me out.

Henri was waiting anxiously at the car. He didn’t ask about the woman with me or greet her. He simply helped us both in, and took off up the road in pursuit of the jeeps.

“Where are we going?” I asked, and this time he answered.

“Up there, up there on the road there is a viewing platform. My orders are to take you and drop you there. I’m going much further away than that.”

We snaked up the pass, the last cockroach in the convoy, and the airbase became abstract once more, just toy buildings on a valley floor. Stefan was in there somewhere, getting strapped into his potjie pot, and no doubt swearing at anything that moved.

The viewing platform was a magnificent piece of architecture. It balanced on the mountain side, just a long thin room, wide enough for a single row of chairs that faced a wall of reinforced glass. It was clean and elegant, offering views of the entire valley from its floor below to the mountain top opposite and upwards into the grey sky. Henri dropped me there with my luggage and returned my laptop, phone and Kindle, and continued over the mountain with the woman, following the jeeps. Neither he nor the woman said goodbye.

At the door I was ushered to my seat. It was marked with the familiar Gregory Fokken Hall. The room was filling with French dignitaries all dressed up in suits. I didn’t try to make conversation while I waited. I just stared out over the valley, at this magnificent and privileged view of history. On each seat was a pair of binoculars, and I zoomed mine in on that tiny airbase. The frantic evacuation was done, and it was eerily still down there. Just the wisp of smoke from Stefan’s shack, rising out of the chimney and floating off in the breeze. When I put the binoculars down, the room had filled up and there was a cup of coffee on the table in front of me.

It must have been longer, but it felt like only a minute or two after that that a voice spoke from an intercom, beginning the countdown to launch. Just like at Vastrap, the airbase building below us slid to one side revealing the nose of the craft. The room fell silent. It was only now, in this quiet anticipation, that I wondered whether this glass box could withstand the aftershock of a nuclear blast. But it was too late for those thoughts. I had to trust whoever had built it.

Quatre, trois, deux, un ...

In the quiet of the room we all witnessed the valley floor lift up in a ripple, moving outward in a circle from the nose of the ship. Stefan’s shack was thrown into the air and came down in a pile of rubble. Then fire erupted up the sides of the ship from the hole in which it was built, and the craft began to rise out of the earth. Perched high up on the mountainside in our little window box, everything was still quiet. All the while, the initial shock of the blast was moving up the other side of the valley, up the opposite mountain – and I knew, though I couldn’t see it, that it was moving equally quickly up our side too. And then the explosion hit us, shaking people off their chairs and throwing cups of hot coffee everywhere. The viewing glass cracked and the sound shook the organs inside my body; it felt as though my kidneys had come loose and were rattling around behind my liver. I covered my ears too late and they ached and rang from the thunder crack. I felt as though someone were pushing their thumbs into my eye sockets and tickling my nose from the inside.

The craft emerged from the billowing fire, blazing a solid pillar of smoke and vapour behind it like a bony finger that pointed, through the eruption of nuclear flame, to the exact spot from where it had been borne to the skies. Then, unexpectedly, just as people were scrambling to their feet, there was a second smaller blast, and it accelerated the airborne rocket and blew a gaping hole in the cloud cover. Sunlight bathed the dull valley as the ship grew smaller and smaller in the sky and suddenly was gone. I looked down now at the valley floor. It was unrecognisable but familiar to me, an inverted cone of dirt and ash. People in the room were cheering, one or two were holding their ears and wailing, and an elderly man lay at the foot of his chair, either unconscious or dead.

I still can’t decide why Stefan told me about the launch. There was nothing in it for him really. What did he care about what people thought of him, or the story I had written? Perhaps it was a courtesy – a thank you for saving his life. Or perhaps it really was the fruit of that glint of narcissism I’d noticed in his eyes that day we last met in Pretoria; but I don’t think so. I think he just wanted to show off what he’d managed to achieve, to the only person who’d appreciate the magnitude of his accomplishments. And I did appreciate them. Stefan didn’t see the world as I did. He was bigger than any obstacle that was stupid or unfortunate enough to land up in his path. He acted above the law and outside of any realistic sense of morals. He was the ultimate go-getter – and, in a way, I had to admire him. Though, I admit, it is much easier to admire him from a distance of several million kilometres.