She was at the edge of the mob, and the attention of most of them was entirely on the ghastly drama around the Ford. The crowd had set the vehicle alight. Sister Nunziata's mutilated body lay on the bonnet like a sacrifice on a burning altar, while trapped in the cab, the doctor thrashed around and beat at the flames with his bare hands, and the crowd chanted and danced around him like children around the bonfire on Guy Fawkes night.
For that instant Tara was free, but there were men around her, shouting and reaching for her, their faces bestial, their eyes glazed and insensate. No longer human, they were driven into that killing madness in which there was no reason nor mercy. Swift as a bird Tara ducked under the outstretched arms and darted away. She found that she had broken out of the mob, and in front of her was a plot of wasteland strewn with old rusted car bodies and rubbish. She fled across it and behind her she heard her pursuers baying like a pack of hunting dogs.
At the end of the open land a sagging barbed-wire fence blocked her way, and she glanced back over her shoulder. A group of men still followed her, and two of them had outdistanced the others. They were both big and powerful-looking, running strongly on bare feet, their faces contorted in a cruel rictus of excitement. They came on silently.
Tara stooped into the space between the strands of the wire. She was almost through when she felt the barbs catch in the flesh of her back, and pain arrested her. For a moment she struggled desperately, feeling her skin tear as she fought to free herself and blood trickled down her flanks - and then they seized her.
Now they shouted with wild laughter as they dragged her back through the fence, the barbs ripping at her clothing and her flesh.
Her legs collapsed under her, and she pleaded with them. 'Please don't hurt me. I'm going to have a baby--' They dragged her back across the waste plot, half on her knees, twisting and pleading in their grip - and then she saw the sangoma coming to meet them, hopping and capering like an ancient baboon, cackling through her toothless mouth, her bones and beads rattling around her scrawny neck and the curved knife in her blood-caked fingers.
Tara began to scream, and she felt her urine squirt uncontrollably down her legs. 'Please! Please don't!" she raved and terror was an icy blackness of her mind and body that crushed her to earth, and she closed her eyes and steeled herself to the stinging kiss of the blade.
Then in the mindless animal roar of the crowd, above the old crone's shrill laughter, there was another voice, a great lion's roar of anger and command that stilled all other sound. Tara opened her eyes and Moses Gama stood over her, a towering colossus, and voice alone stopped them and drove them back. He lifted her in arms and held her like a child. The crowd around the Packard open before him as he carried her to it and placed her on the front sc and then slid behind the wheel.
As he started the engine and swung the Packard away in a ha U-turn, the black smoke from the burning van poured over the and obscured the windscreen for a moment, and Tara smelled Sist Nunziata's flesh roasting.
This time she could not control herself and she flopped forwar, her head 'between her knees, and vomited on the floor of the Pa, kard.
,Ic , , Manfred De La Rey had taken the chair at the top of the long tabl in the operations rooms in the basement of Marshall Square. He ha.
come across from his own office suite in the Union Buildings iJ Pretoria to police headquarters at the centre of the storm, where hid.
could be at hand to consider, with his senior officers, each fresl despatch as it came in from the police provincial HQs around the country.
The entire wall facing Manfred's seat was a large-scale map of the sub-continent. Working in front of it were two junior police officers.
They were placing magnetic markers on the map. Each of the small black discs had a name printed upon it and represented one of the almost five hundred ANC officials and organizers that had been so far identified by the intelligence department.
The discs were clustered most thickly along the great crescent of the Witwatersrand in the centre of the continent, although others were scattered across the entire map as the physical whereabouts of each person was confirmed by the police reports that were coming in every few seconds.
Amongst the rash of black markers were a very few red discs, less than fifty in all. These represented the known members of the central committee of the African National Congress.
Some of the names were those of Europeans: Harris, Marks, Fischer, and some were Asians like Naicker and Nana Sita, but the majority were African. Tambo and Sisulu and Mandela - they were all there. Mandela's red disc was placed on the city of Johannesburg, while Moroka was in the Eastern Cape and Albert Luthuli was in Zululand.
Manfred De La Rey was stony-faced as he stared at the map, and the senior police officers seated around him studiously avoided catching his eye or even looking directly at him. Manfred had a reputation of being the strongman of the cabinet. His colleagues privately referred to him as 'Panga Man' after the heavy chopping knife that was used in the cane fields, and was the favourite weapon of the Mau Mau in Kenya.
Manfred looked the part. He was a big man. The hands that lay on the table before him were still, there was no fidgeting of nervousness or uncertainty, and they were big hard hands. His face was becoming craggy now, and his, jowls and thick neck heightened the sense of power that emanated from him. His men were afraid of him.
'How many more?" he asked suddenly, and the colonel sitting opposite him, a man with the medal ribbons of valour on his chest, started like a schoolboy and quickly consulted his list.
'Four more to find - Mbeki, Mtolo, Mhlaba and Gama." He read out the names on his list that remained unticked, and Manfred De La Rey relapsed into silence.
Despite his brooding stillness and forbidding expression, Manfred was pleased with the day's work. It was not yet noon on the first day and already they had pinpointed the whereabouts of most of the ringleaders. Altogether the ANC had planned the entire campaign with quite extraordinary precision and had exhibited unusual thoroughness and foresight in its execution, Manfred reflected. He had not expected them to be so efficient, the African was notoriously lackadaisical and happy-go-lucky - but then they had the advice and assistance of their white communist comrades. The protests and demonstrations and strikes were widespread and effective. Manfred grunted aloud and the officers at the table looked up apprehensively, but dropped their eyes hurriedly when he frowned.
Manfred returned to his thoughts. No, not bad for a bunch of kaffirs, even with a few white men to help them. Yet their naivety and amateurishness showed in their almost total lack of security and secrecy. They had blabbed as though they were at a beer-drink. Full of their own importance they had boasted of their plans and made little effort to conceal the identities of the leaders and cover their movements. The police informers had had little difficult in picking up the information.
There were, of course, exceptions and Manfred scowled as he considered the lists of leaders still unaccounted for. One name pricked like a burr, Moses Gama. He had made a study of the man's file.
After Mandela, he was probably the most dangerous of them all.
'We must have him,' he told himself. 'We must get those two, Mandela and Gama." And now he spoke aloud, barking the question: 'Where is Mandela?" 'At the moment he is addressing a meeting in the community hal at Drake's Farm township,' the colonel answered promptly, glancinl up at the red marker on the map. 'He will be followed when hid leaves, until we are ready to make the arrests." 'No word of Gama yet?" Manfred asked impatiently, and th officer shook his head.
'Not yet, Minister, he was last seen here on the Witwatersrant nine days ago. He might have gone underground. We may have t( move without him." 'No,' Manfred snapped. 'I want him. I want Moses Gama." Manfred relapsed into silence, brooding and intense. He knew thai he was caught in the cross-currents of history. He could feel the good winds blowing at his back, set fair to carry him away on hL, course. He knew also that at any moment those winds might drop, and the ebb of his tide might set in. It was dangerous - mortally dangerous but still he waited. His father and his ancestors had all been huntsmen. They had hunted the elephant and lion and he had heard them speak of the patience and the waiting that was part of the hunt. Now Manfred was a hunter as they had been, but his quarry, though every bit as dangerous, was infinitely more cunning.