"You know, since I started out on this I've never even thought that it might not work. Right, there are times when I don't know what the next stage is, how we're going to crack the next barricade, but it's going to happen. When I went up to Pretoria, then it looked impossible, like everyone had told me it would be. After I'd seen Local and Defence H.Q. I could have packed it in, gone off for the airport. I sorted myself out. Doesn't matter how difficult it is, it has to be done. I mean, there isn't any way out of it, not for me.
My father's going to hang, that's the beginning and the middle and the end of it, and something has to be done…"
"Even if it is, actually, impossible?" Her gaze was straight ahead.
"Has to be tried, because he's my father."
Jan shouted. "Roadblock."
Jack hadn't seen it, nor Ros.
They were on the N I, a little past the turn off for Rand jies-fontein.
There were two police vans, primrose yellow, drawn across the road. There was a short queue of cars. Ros was going down through her gears. Jack winced. Only he knew of the explosives in his suitcase. Hadn't told Jan, nor his sister, that he had squirrelled away fifteen pounds of explosives. And the prison plans… The pain was immediate, and then gone. None of the cars was being searched. They were the seventh car in the line. A police sergeant came towards them, stopping by each driver. He wondered how Ros would be, couldn't tell. No-one spoke in the car as the sergeant approached. Beyond the vans was parked a high armoured personnel carrier, off the road. Jack saw policemen standing and sitting in the open top, displaying automatic shot guns and F.N. rifles.
"We're running escorted convoys down the next ten kilometres, Miss."
"What's happened?" Ros asked, small voice.
"A gang of Blacks stoned a car, a kilometre down. White woman, elderly. Car went off the road. The bastards got to her, dragged her out. They had rocks and knives, Miss.
They set light to her, she was an old lady. We've a big search op in there, but it's a wilderness. Supposed to be a helicopter coming. She wouldn't have had a chance."
Jack saw the pallor on Ros's face.
There was a klaxon blast from the A.P.C. and exhaust fumes fanned from its tail. More cars were behind them, the sergeant had moved on. The A.P.C. set off down the road, they followed in a twenty mile an hour crawl.
Ros didn't speak. Jack didn't have to scratch his mind to remember the crowd coming down the shabby street in Soweto, and the din of the stones on the coachwork and the rocking of the vehicle and the screaming of the woman from Washington state. Not hard to imagine the last moments in an elderly woman's life as the stones started to fly and the windows were caving in, and the mob was materialising out of the long grass that flanked the road. Not hard to see the fingers ripping at the doors of a crashed car, and the fists raised and the clawing nails and the knives and the sharp edged rocks. He shuddered. He prayed that she had been unconscious when they had poured the petrol on her, thrown the match. They passed the burned car. There were skid marks on the tarmac, then the wheel tracks through the grass and then the blackened surround where the earth had been scorched near the car and under the body of the woman.
Ros retched. Jack looked away. Jan was breathing hard.
She snarled, "Great bloody day for the freedom fighters."
Jan rose to her. "Of course they're brutalised. What else could they be given the regime they live under?"
"That's xhe work of the people you're so bloody fond of."
"I don't condone that, and the A.N.C. doesn't condone that, but when you treat people like filth then they'll behave like filth."
"Pathetic excuses."
"It's the price the Whites are going to have to pay for half a century of naked racism."
"Childish slogans."
"Think of all the Black children that have been shot by the police."
She let him have the last word. Ros drove on towards Pretoria. All her life she had let her brother have the last word. It was why she was driving her car north, it was why she had entered a state of madness. The tie of family had captured her. She understood the young man sitting bowed in the front seat beside her. She believed herself to be as captured by her brother as he was by his father.
* * *
The White from the safari land rover watched as the Blacks kicked the resistance out of the driver of the pick up car.
They had tracked the pick up car after it had turned off the Palapye road, when it had headed south towards the border hamlets of Sherwood Ranch and Selika. Through field glasses they had watched Jacob Thiroko and the four other men get out and unload their bags. When the car had come back up the road it had been blocked.
The driver was a loyal member of the Movement, but the beating and the kicking were ferocious. The driver told his captors that the older man in his car had been addressed as Comrade Jacob. He told them that this Comrade Jacob had spoken of striking a great blow for the Movement. He told them that the old man had spoken of Warmbaths.
When he had nothing more that he could tell them, the driver was kicked to death. Boots in the stomach and the head killed him. The kicking was without mercy. When he was dead he was dragged to his own car and thrown inside.
It was intended that he should be found.
It surprised the White that the Blacks under his command kicked the victim of their own colour with such enthusiasm.
The White worked to trail out fifty feet of radio aerial from the short wave transmitter in the land rover to a branch high in a thorn tree.
His coded broadcast was picked up in the offices of the security police at Potgietersrus 160 kilometres away.
Jacob Thiroko and his cadre were to hike across country to a road junction outside Monte Christo, ten kilometres. At midnight they were to be met at the road junction and driven by lorry to a rendezvous north of Warmbaths. He believed they could cover that distance before the breaking of the morning light. At the rendezvous they would find a cache of weapons and explosives, buried there more than two years before.
They moved by compass bearing.
It was difficult for Thiroko to keep his attention on the animal track in front of him, and on the dried grass that cracked under foot, and on the wind scattered branches that snapped under his tread. He had come home, he was back in his own place. The scent of the scrub as familiar to him as his mother's body had been when he was a child. The smells of home, and the whirr of the insects, and the fear of snakes, and the bright light of a clear sun shining on his homeland. Nowhere else in Africa had he tasted the same smells, sounds, shining sun as he found on the hike towards Monte Christo, going back inside his country, his fighting ground.
* **
Inside the operations room at the Hoedspruit base, home of 31 Squadron (helicopters), they followed a familiar routine.
The Puma was tasked to take off in the late afternoon, and to reach the point of the border incursion before dusk. The quarry was to be given time to move away from the frontier and so to be unaware of the military movement behind them.
The Puma was a good old workhorse, with improvised replacement parts it had flown for eighteen years in South Africa's colours.