Shadow was his security. He stayed with the shadows as he moved away across the top plateau of the hill, towards a line of trees. He crossed paths, he ducked past buildings.
He froze against a wall when a uniformed man came belching out of a doorway to urinate on the edge of a lawn.
High trees coated the skyline ahead of him, and above the trees was an umbrella of hazed white light.
The tube was an agony on the muscles of his left arm. His feet were leaden heavy, but the white light above the trees was a talisman for him, pulling him forward. He came into the trees. Going slowly, because under the conifers' canopy he could see only the white knuckles of his fingers that were tight on the stock of the shotgun.
He broke from the trees.
His path was crossed by a tarmac road. He could see darkened buildings and more trees ahead of him, and the light above the trees were fiercer. He looked right and he looked left. He stood still and he listened. He heard dogs barking. He ran across the road and sagged against the back fence of a garden. He thought, from his map, that he had reached the line of senior officers' homes that were set on the hillside above Beverly Hills. The moon helped him. He saw a narrow track leading between two garden fences, not wide enough for a vehicle. There was another road crossing the far end of the track and he could see street lights. Ahead of him was a great cascade of light, fit to blind him.
He felt the energy surging through him. He was going forward.
A voice… A man talking as to a child. A voice and footsteps. .. A caressing voice as if to quieten a child.
Down flat, squeezing his face, side down, into the dirt of the track. He was in darkness, short of the light thrown from the road ahead. He saw a dog handler with a German Shepherd. The dog handler was cooing soft nonsense to his animal. Jack saw that the dog handler had an automatic rifle resting on the elbow of his right arm. He heard the voice drift away. He waited thirty seconds before he slowly rose to his feet and went on down the track to where the darkness merged with the light. He laid down his tube and his bag and his shotgun. He crawled forward.
He saw the high concrete wall in front of him.
He saw the sentry tower rising above the wall, and above the sentry tower was the bank of floodlights. He could sec low tilted roofs beyond the high concrete wall. He was separated from the wall by a narrow paved road and by a strip of lawn.
Jack Curwen had come a hell of a long way.
He gazed at the outer wall of Beverly Hills, the outer wall of the hanging gaol. If he had shouted then, his father would have heard him. He looked down at the luminous hands of his watch. He had six minutes before the diversion. The wall was brilliantly lit in the wash of light from the close set bulbs ahead of him. The sentry in the tower had his back to him. Jack could see the hunch of his shoulders.
He went back for his metal tube and his bag and his shotgun. He crouched down. He was shaking. He had to will himself to control his fingers. He checked the safety fuse length that was knotted to the Cordtex equivalent.
He checked that the Cordtex equivalent was firm where it disappeared into the readymix block in the metal tube. He opened his bag and ran his fingers, stuttering, over the charge that contained the detonator and over the charge that did not. He felt for the lengths of loose Cordtex equivalent and of safety fuse. He found the rope that was lashed to the cold bent iron. He eased the safety catch off the shotgun, he had eight cartridges in the magazine. He emptied the remaining cartridges from the carton into his pocket. He touched the smooth weight of the wire cutters.
It was all a matter of belief… and arrogance.
The wall that he faced was of no use to him. The wall fronted onto B section and onto the hanging shed. He had to be against the wall that fell away down the hillside to his right, down towards the glitter lights of Pretoria.
Arrogance and now courage.
He rose to his feet.
There was a softness in his knees, there was a wetness in his belly, because he must now walk in the light along the paved road, in front of the homes of the senior officers, under the watch tower, walk for a hundred yards to the corner of the wall.
Cheek, too, because he must walk as though he belonged.
He looked at his watch. He had a minute and a half. He had the metal tube under his arm, and the bag on his back.
He cocked the shot gun. He must walk. No running, no stopping.
He came off the track.
He ducked his head as the light found him, so that the smear marks of mud on his forehead and cheeks could not be seen from the watchtower. In the middle of the road he walked at a steady pace. He waited for the rasp of a weapon being cocked. He waited for the challenging shout. He walked towards the corner of the wall, along the road and towards the bend where it followed the side wall down the hill.
There was a yapping chorus.
There was a white bundle flying through the open gates from a large garden. There was a Pekingese dog circling his ankles. He saw the garden shielded an elegant bungalow. A large elderly woman in a housecoat and bedroom slippers was in pursuit of the dog.
Jack's heart hammered.
The woman saw a young man who carried a long circular length of metal and a bag and a firearm. She lived in the heart of the Pretoria Central complex, she was the wife of the major general who was Deputy Commissioner of Prisons (security). Her bosom lurched forward as she bent to catch the collar of the darting beast. She yanked it off the ground.
The woman spoke to Jack in Afrikaans, and he smiled and nodded and she chastised the dog and Jack nodded again and the dog yapped at him and earned itself a volley of reproach and Jack took one step away and then two and then the woman was lecturing the beast in earnest and making for her garden and Jack was away free.
The sentry in the watchtower saw the wife of the deputy commissioner talking at her front gate to a man. The sentry knew the dog. It was rumoured that ferret dog had killed the Siamese cat of the daughter of the Assistant Commissioner of Prisons (personnel). He thought the man must have had business at the Deputy Commissioner's house, come there before he had come on duty forty minutes earlier. He thought the dog must have chased the man down the drive. He thought it was a pity the old cow had come out so fast, a pity the man didn't have a chance to put his boot firmly into the ferret dog's arse.
He walked on. He felt the nakedness of his back. The wall rose beside him. The lights showed him thin, knife-edge cracks in the wall between the faced brickwork. Thiroko had told him that Beverly Hills was built on a rubbish tip.
Heart hammering. He wondered if that helped him, helped his twelve pounds of explosive, the tip. Wailing siren, very faint. No. Must be singing. So bloody frightened…
•* •
There was for Jeez a sort of warmth in the singing. Listening to the singing he had put off his undressing and changing into his coarse cotton pyjamas. He knew that once they had started they would not finish. They would sing until the rope strangled the breath out of their throats. And a warmth, too, from the wheezed bronchitic breathing of old Oosthuizen.
He wondered what the other two Whites in C section 2 thought about sharing their block with Black terrorist Commies, what they thought about Jeez being amongst friends.
He was at the corner. He was at the furthest point from the sentry tower, and when he was round the corner he would be at the furthest point from the remote camera on the wall above the airlock entrance. ..
Ros drove fast down from the motorway and onto Potgieterstraat. Jan had his window down, and the grenades and the pistols in his lap.