‘Merda.’ Brigade pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car behind an old baobab that had somehow survived all these years on the road verge.
‘Word got out fast,’ said Clay, slumping down in his seat.
About three hundred metres ahead, a small column of vehicles was drawn up at the outskirts of a smoky early-morning village. Uniformed policemen moved among the vehicles. A Buffel armoured car watched over the scene, its hulk protruding from behind a corrugated-iron shack. Whether the roadblock was for them, he had no way of knowing. It was wartime. South Africa was under attack. Terrorist infiltrators were everywhere. Roadside checkpoints and random inspections were common.
‘We can go around,’ said Brigade.
‘How far are we from the park?’
‘Ten kilometres, for a bird.’
‘We’re not birds.’
‘I don’t know the roads.’
‘We can’t chance the roadblock. We walk.’
Brigade nodded. ‘South first. We go around Phalabowra.’
Clay opened his door, stood in the red laterite of the roadside, this blood earth of his native land. He thought of Vivian lying cold in this same ground not so far from where he stood now. That same hollowness opened up inside him, and for a moment he stood staring into it and it was Vivian’s grave, the one he had dug and then refilled. So much easier to fill than dig.
The sound of the car boot opening, a hinged cry, and the grave was gone, closed over.
Brigade slung a canvas pack onto his shoulder, handed Clay a steel water bottle, shouldered the sawn-off shotgun and started into the bush. Clay scanned the road ahead and back a moment then crouched, unfastened the car’s rear registration plate and pulled it off. Then he removed the front plate and followed Brigade into the bush.
A hundred and fifty kilometres to the border, through some of the world’s wildest country. No head start. A canteen, a handgun with nine rounds, a single diamond. Evidence that would rock the nation to its foundations. And if they did manage to reach Mozambique, then what? He had no passport, no identification, no money. By all accounts, the country was a shambles, riven by civil war. The usual scenario: one side supported by the Russians, the other by South Africa, and until just a couple of years ago, Rhodesia. He’d heard the stories of draft dodgers and deserters seeking refuge in Mozambique, they all had. Whether they were just stories, he had no idea. But he had no doubt that BOSS would pursue him wherever he went. One thing was sure: whatever happened, he would have to disappear, for a long time. Crowbar had been right.
They moved through the day, taking it in turns to carry the pack Brigade had managed to assemble before leaving the township. It contained some food, a couple of water bottles, a machete, and half a box of shells for the shotgun. Keeping to the footpaths and bush trails, they skirted villages and avoided roads, guided by Brigade’s unerring sense of direction. By early afternoon they were striking resolutely east, the main Phalabowra corridor far enough to the north now, through a country of low scrub bushwillow and copper-leafed mopane, the long grasses dry and brittle here, the occasional jackalberry towering over them, its branches reaching arms of shade across the landscape, summer nearing its end, the promise of the first rains in the air, the smell of woodsmoke drifting on the breeze, the twittering of birds. And in this walking he was for a time detached, transported. Long minutes passed when he did not think of Eben or Vivian or the war or any of it. But then a sound would jar him from his reverie – a distant cry, a dog’s bark – and he was back on patrol, and each footstep was a descent into uncertainty, and he longed for the familiar weight of his R4, the turgid potency of its long, curved magazine, that feeling that, with this instrument, he was, for the first and only time in his life, somehow in control.
Sometime later, when the sun had reached its zenith and started its slow decline towards another meridian, the distant buzz of an aircraft engine sent them running for the cover of a thicket of buffalo thorn. They crouched at the base of one of the trees, looking up through the branches as the sound grew louder. And then there it was, close enough, perhaps a thousand feet up, a tiny single-engine plane, sideslipping across the high, blue, cloud-strewn African sky.
‘Bosbok,’ said Clay. ‘Military.’
Brigade nodded, watched the thing circle lazily and then disappear below the tree line.
They kept walking.
Later they skirted a small kraal. Three thatched rondavels clustered inside a circle of stacked thornbush. A woman with a baby at her breast stood watching them through an opening in the palisade. They nodded to her and moved on.
Evening came, the sun slanting long and yellow behind them, casting long shadows across the dry grass clearings, two ghosts warping over the landscape. As the light faded a herd of springbok emerged from the bush and crossed their path. They stopped and watched the animals pass, over a hundred and fifty of them, small and lithe, quick footed.
‘Hungry?’ said Brigade.
Clay nodded, took out his Z88 and downed one of the stragglers from thirty metres. The gun’s retort sent the herd scattering for the safety of the tree line. Soon they were alone again.
They stood over the carcass.
It was a beautiful animal, young, its fawn skin soft and supple. The bullet had blown open its neck. The flesh glistened in the evening sun. They carried it to the edge of the trees. Brigade worked with deft strokes of his bush knife, slicing out the choicest cuts of meat, skewering them on sharpened mopane sticks. Soon they had a fire going. Stars appeared, shining through the bare dry-season boughs of the trees like some distant reminder. They drank, checked their weapons; habit. The fire burned down to coals. They roasted the meat in silence, the lean flesh sizzling as night and all of its fiery beacons ascended around them.
The park boundary was close. Brigade reckoned a couple of kilometres at most. They would eat, catch a few hours of sleep, wait for the moon to rise, and then slip through the game fence soon after midnight. By the time the sun rose again they would be halfway to Mozambique.
Sleep came quickly.
But it did not last. The events of the past days, the revelations complete and partial, the unanswered questions, trampled through Clay’s mind. Pain gnawed at his side. He shifted on the cold ground, moving closer to the fire. As a boy, on the nights he could not sleep, he would lie in his bed under the eaves and listen to the wind rattle the casement windows and count to himself. He couldn’t remember ever getting past twenty. Innocence sleeps. Now, by one hundred and fifty he was still wide awake, covered in sweat.
Three hours later, Brigade’s boot sole rolled over Clay’s shoulder. As he turned and raised himself up, a sharp pain creased his side. He reached for his ribs. His hand came away wet.
‘Okay?’ came Brigade’s disembodied voice.
‘Lekker,’ said Clay, getting to his feet. There was no point inspecting the wound in the dark. They buried the coals and the car’s registration plates and moved off in silence.
Less than an hour later they reached the park boundary. A single three-metre wire fence ran compass straight for as far as they could see through in both directions. On each side of the fence the bush had been hacked away to create a firebreak. They waited a while, shivering in the cold, watching. But the country here was bereft of men. Brigade cut the wire with a pair of pliers and they slipped through into the park.
A three-quarter moon rising low and oversized above the trees sent living shadows skittering across the landscape. Gone were the colours of the day, the russets and sky blues, the waxed tawn of the grasses and the grey naked limbs of trees. They moved through the black and moon-silvered territory like cats, navigating by the stars and planets, aware that they had entered a different world, one where they were no longer the masters, despite the weapons they carried and the skills they’d learned. Predators watched them, moonlight glinting from their dilated pupils. Big cats circled, wary, then moved on. A group of spotted hyenas, bolder, more dogged, caught their scent and started tracking them. Clay could feel them, pacing behind, keeping distance, could smell their powerful soapy secretions. Every time he turned to face them they would halt, watching him, noses twitching, eyes aflame, only to continue their shadowing as soon as he turned away.
By now, Clay knew that the wound in his side had opened up again. He could feel the blood spreading cold and wet down his side. With every step the pain worsened. He clamped his elbow down hard against his ribs and tried to keep up, but Brigade was setting a determined pace. As Clay fell back, the hyenas, emboldened, got closer. He could hear them, close behind now, moving through the bush, chattering, sniffing the air, tracking him. Again he stopped, turned to face them, brandished the Beretta as if this would have some meaning for them, that they might associate this small black object with danger. They were close, ten metres away, half a dozen of them, spread in a loose semi-circle, hunched low, close enough that he could see their cold eyes, the hunger, the anticipation, the complete lack of fear. Coarse hair bristled across their muscled shoulders. Moonlight glinted from big, exposed canines and bone-crushing carnassials. Tongues lolled. Noses twitched. Clay charged at them, shouting, waving the gun. They bolted into the night.
Brigade appeared. ‘What are you doing?’ he whispered. ‘You must be quiet.’
‘Hyenas,’ Clay said. Moonlight drifted over them.
Brigade glanced at Clay’s side. ‘You are hurt.’
Clay said nothing.
Brigade inspected the ragged bandages then pulled Clay’s shirt back down. ‘Why did you not say?’
‘Would it have changed anything?’
Brigade shook his head. ‘We must keep going while it is dark.’
Clay nodded.
They continued on. Brigade slowed his pace now, stayed with Clay.
It wasn’t long before the hyenas were back, wary of Brigade, standing off, circling.
‘They can smell the blood,’ said Brigade. ‘Kom ons gaan.’ Let’s go.
The hyenas were still with them as the moon rose and the sky cleared. And then, sometime deep into the night, they broke off and did not return, and for a while they were alone, sliding like upright phantoms through the pale and darkened bushland. And in the pale light of the constellations and the wan brightness of the moon, there was no dissemblance between them.
They kept to the open country when they could. The thicker bush made slow going. Thorns tore at their clothes and skin. Dry branches caught at their limbs and raked their faces. Above, the stars turned. And as had happened sometimes on the long night patrols he’d done in Angola, particularly during his second tour, a feeling came to him that this wilderness that he travelled through was a place of prehistory, a relic, at odds with the new reality of human ascendency, of wars and politics and the manifold machines of death. To him the wild had always been a place of dreams, of a past when humans were few and their hold on life precarious, when time was ruled still by the seasons and the rains, the triggers that launched the great continental migrations, when the herds were not constrained or channelled by fences but wandered a timeless Africa. But it was also a dream of his childhood, of long days spent wandering the bushland behind his uncle’s summer house in Cape Province, of the rocks and trees and all of the creatures of that place, of walking with his parents in the rock-strewn alpine of the Cedarburg mountains, the dark crags of the Draakensburg. But all of these things were gone now, existing only within that elusive and unreliable dimension of memory.
Sometime during the night they turned north, crossed the Olifants River and the main east-west park road that followed it and then swung east towards the Lembobo Mountains, the long, rifted volcanic margin that marked the border with Mozambique. Brigade kept a painted dog’s unrelenting pace, which Clay struggled to match, his body unused to the exertion after weeks of convalescence, the pain in his side growing. With every step he could feel his strength draining away. He put his head down, bit into the pain and kept walking.
As the sky lightened from starlit black to deep-ocean blue, shallowing over sand as the first hint of dawn touched the horizon, the mountains rose up dark and jagged before them. By the time they reached the base of the first broad talus slope, it was morning. The steep cliffs threw kilometre-long shadows across the slope and the bushveldt beyond. They found a cleft in the boulders, shaded by a clutch of acacia, where they could rest out of sight.
Brigade removed Clay’s blood-soaked dressing and inspected his wound.
‘At Rito?’ he said, as he poured water across the place where the FAPLA shrapnel had torn through Clay’s side.
Clay grunted an affirmative.
‘Some of the stitches have come out,’ said Brigade. ‘Not all.’
‘Do you have a needle?’
Brigade shook his head. ‘Only this.’ He held up a military field compress.
‘Put it on and tie it tight,’ said Clay.
After Brigade has applied the bandage, Clay stood, ran his hand along his side. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, for now. ‘Let’s ontrek,’ he said. And then, looking into Brigade’s eyes: ‘Thank you.’
It took them more than two hours to reach the cliffs. Still in shadow, they stopped to rest and drink. They were almost out of water. Clay looked back the way they had come. All of the veldt lay below him, the mountain’s black shadow retreating over the parched shrubland as the sun rose. And away past the farthest western horizon, still in darkness, the Okavango, the Caprivi Strip, and Angola, where the war was.
Monkeys watched them from rocky crags and the branches of ancient trees rooted into dark clefts in the cliffside. A Verreaux’s Eagle, messenger of the Shona ancestors, circled high in the distance. And then, coming on the wind, the faint drone of an aircraft. They searched the sky. There, to the west, a speck on the horizon, a Bosbok spotter plane. They watched it for a while, then turned east and kept going.
The climbing was difficult. Clay sweated over blocky volcanic tuffs and sharp cuesta ridges, working from one handhold to the next, from ledge to rock face, up splayed gullies, climbing steadily despite the pain that pulsed through him each time he stretched or twisted his torso. And yet, he was alive. Without Vivian’s efforts, he would have died. A graveside emptiness swept through him. Ice shivered through his vertebrae, skull to tail. Vivian.
A couple of hours later they stood at the apex of a rocky ridge. Half a kilometre below, Africa spread away flat and blue and hazy.
Brigade pulled the pack from his shoulder, handed it to Clay. ‘The border,’ he said, scuffing the ground with his boot heel. ‘No fence. No line you can see. But it is here. You are in Mozambique.’
Clay looked out along the ridge.
Brigade reached into the pocket of his trousers and handed Clay an American twenty-dollar bill.
‘What’s this?’ said Clay.
‘All I could get.’
Clay shook his head, not understanding.
‘I leave you here,’ said Brigade.
Clay swallowed. He’d assumed Brigade would stay with him, that they would escape to Mozambique together. ‘Where will you go?’ he said.
‘I will try to free those people. And then, if I am lucky, I will go back to my family.’
Clay caught his breath, wiped the sweat from his eyes, looked into Brigade’s dark retinae. He towered over the other man, outweighed him by at least thirty kilos, but he felt suddenly very small in his presence. ‘I run, you fight,’ he said. He felt like a coward.
‘No,’ said Brigade. ‘Now, our fighting is different. Please, take the money.’
Clay pushed the bill away. ‘Keep it, broer,’ he said.
Brigade resisted a moment, then relented, pocketed the note.
‘They will be looking for you,’ said Clay.
Brigade smiled, ran his hand across the coiled stubble of his chin. ‘I have a disguise,’ he said.
‘I should go back with you,’ Clay said. Part of him believed it.
‘No,’ said Brigade. ‘You must tell the British and Americans what is happening here. If they know, they must do something.’
‘Do you think they will?’
Brigade reached into his pocket and placed something in Clay’s palm. It was an undeveloped canister of 35 mm film. ‘From Doctor Vivian’s camera,’ he said. ‘You must go. And you must put it in the newspapers.’
He wanted to tell Brigade how inadequate he felt for this task. Instead he nodded, closed his fist around the canister.
‘You will do it?’ Brigade said. ‘You will tell them?’
‘I will try,’ said Clay, looking out over the rumpled green ridges to the darker blue of the Limpopo plain. He had never felt so alone.
‘Take the shotgun,’ said Brigade.
Clay pushed the weapon away. ‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘You’ll need it.’
‘You must go to Maputo,’ said Brigade, swinging the shotgun over his shoulder. ‘There is a British Embassy there.’
Clay nodded.
Brigade put his hand on Clay’s shoulder. ‘Be careful. They will be hunting you. Even there.’
Clay looked into Brigade’s eyes and offered his hand. Brigade took it, held it a long time. And then, without another word, Brigade turned away and started back down the mountain.
Clay stood and watched him move away through the steep ridged country, picking his way through the rocks, descending quickly. Soon he was gone, disappeared into the bush. After a while Clay caught sight of him again, farther down, very small now as he traversed another ridge, but soon he vanished again, this time for ever.
And he realised that it had been two days since he’d thought of this man as anything other than a fellow human being.