“Dinner will be ready soon,” she said, turning and finishing over her shoulder as she walked back into the house, wiping her hands on her apron, “if I can keep that nahua girl from ruining it—she throws chilies into everything if you don’t watch her like a hawk. Lamb sosaties and rice today.”
Piet smacked his lips; that meant cubes of lamb marinated in wine and vinegar, spiced with coriander, pepper, turmeric and tamarind, strung on skewers with apricots and peppers, and grilled over a clear wood fire—chaparral scrub oak did wonders.
He and his companion sipped their coffee, ate the doughnutlike sweet pastries and watched the Botha children playing in the garden; the plantings were three years old and it was already well along, trees sprouting amid the flowers with Californian speed, some of the blue gum eucalyptus already thirty feet high. A grove of native oaks gave an illusion of age offset by the half-built buildings in a clump to the east; storage sheds, stables, barn, garage, all in a litter of beams and planks and stacks of adobe brick. A pump chugged in the background, pulling water from a reservoir fed by mountain springs for the house and the automated-drip irrigation system.
“Much better,” Botha said, after a spell of companionable silence. “Man, talk about luck! I’m glad I listened to Oom Versfeld, I’ll tell you that! They don’t call him Slim Hendrik, Clever Hendrik, for nothing.”
Schalk van der Merwe scowled. “He should have held out for the real Cape,” he said. “Not just land here. If not for our own land, what were we fighting for?”
“We fought for South Africa,” Botha said, his slow deep voice giving an extra gravity to the guttural sounds of Afrikaans. “We lost. What do Boers do when we lose? We trek, man, we go somewhere else.”
The moaning rhythmic grunt of a lion’s roar sounded in the distance, as the first stars appeared overhead. A loose scattering of house lights stood miles apart along the foot of the mountains, and a few headlights crawled along the north-south road that ended at San Diego.
Botha chuckled. “This is about as else as you can get. Being beaten once was bad enough. I don’t want to start the same fight over again right away.”
“Hell,” Schalk said, waving his doughnut; a little syrup dropped onto his khaki shirt. “The bushmen and the blacks in South Africa—on this side of the Gate—they’re bare-arsed savages. Just like the ones our ancestors beat at Blood River; and we’d have machine guns and armor and aircraft, not ox-wagons and flintlock roers.”
“And just where would we get the armored cars, and the ammunition, and the fuel, if we were on the other side of the world from here?” Botha said.
He pointed southwest, toward Long Beach. “Kerel, eighty kilometers that way is the only oil well in the world. And the only refinery.” He pointed over his shoulder, northward toward Rolfeston and the Gate. “And up there’s the only place with access to modern weapons or anything else. We’d be back to ox-wagons and flintlocks bliddy soon, if we tried leaving for Africa! Even if the Commission would allow it—which they won’t.”
“We could set up our own factories, in time,” Schalk said stubbornly. “We’d have our own country with our own language and customs, where we wouldn’t be scattered among damned foreigners the way we are here. A Boerstaat for ons volk.”
“Oh, all three thousand of us could man the factories, while we were conquering and settling the country?” Botha said. “Or the Commission would allow a mass migration from FirstSide—and explain to the world why all the Boers were leaving, and where they were going?”
He paused, stroked his jaw as if in thought, then spoke: “I have it, man! Even if there are only a few thousand of us, we could use the kaffirs in our factories. Of course, we’d have to teach them to read, wouldn’t we, to make them useful? Hand out Bibles, hey? And we’d give them modern medicine so all their children survived….”
Botha spoke with heavy sarcasm: “Haven’t I seen this film before, someplace, jong? You know, it started well, but I didn’t like the ending!”
Schalk flushed. “It would be different this time. We could keep the kaffirs in order without any outsiders telling us—”
“Ja, it would be different—for a while. Maybe a long while. Maybe not. Schalk, if you really want to do something for the volk, you should find a girl, get married and have a dozen children. That would help.”
The door behind them opened.
“It’s ready; come in to dinner,” Botha’s wife said, and then called to the children. When they had been sent off to wash their hands, she went on: “And stop talking foolishness about going back, on either side of the Gate, Schalk. If I never see one of them again, it’ll be too soon.”
CHAPTER NINE
Perkins went out on a stretcher; the bodies of the dead were dumped unceremoniously into a big metal crate. Men were scrubbing at red stains on the gallery floor outside, presumably where the departing Vietnamese had departed much more permanently than they anticipated. Industrial-strength cleaning machines foamed and whirred—and their users wore overalls with the name of a well-known janitorial company. Others moved about scanning with eyes and instruments for any sign of the firefight. He saw one group extract a bullet from the plaster of a wall and begin repairs immediately, grouting and plaster and quick-drying paint. The heavy smell of the cleansing chemicals overrode the feces-and-blood stinks of violent death; in half an hour, even a forensics team would have trouble proving anything untoward had happened here.
“That’s the cleanup squad, I presume?” Tully said. “Impressive.”
Adrienne started slightly, brought out of a brown study. “Yes. We’ve managed to keep one of the biggest secrets in human history for sixty-three years now. We didn’t do it by being incompetent.”
“Impressive,” Tully said again, his voice full of enthusiasm. “Say, you don’t really need to keep the cuffs on us—”
Adrienne looked at him, snorted, and walked faster.
Tom whispered to his partner: “Brilliant. Short, but brilliant.”
An ambulance was parked outside, and a Ford Windstar van, as well as a truck with the logo of the cleaning company supposedly at work within—or for all he knew, RM and M actually did own the firm. It would certainly be a good way to hide a cleanup squad. As he watched, two men got into Christiansen’s own vehicle across the street and drove away. The pseudo-paramedics loaded Perkins into the ambulance and did likewise. The big metal box with the bodies came down on a dolly and went up on a hydraulic lift into the truck with the company name.
Bet all the other evidence goes the same way, he thought. Then, with a hint of eeriness: And it’ll all also go where we’re going—somewhere literally out of this world. Maybe it isn’t quite so crazy that they’ve been able to keep the secret. When you can throw evidence away and know it’ll never come back…