A Just Defiance. Peter Harris

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ give my name. Say I am an attorney on a legal visit to Jabu Masina, Ting Ting Masango, Neo Potsane and Joseph Makhura.

      Silence.

      ‘Hello?’

      Silence.

      I swear, unable to contain myself. I know they are listening. I can hear sniggering through the crackly intercom.

      I turn around. There must be other ways of doing this. What the hell am I doing here anyway? How can this childishness amuse them? They are bored and I am angry, not a good cocktail. In the glare of midday, the dry heat bounces off the tar, and cooks my brain as my anger rises.

      A voice says, ‘You didn’t make an appointment.’

      ‘Yes, I did.’

      Silence. I had once tried to break the impasse by being nice, asked how they were, were they having a good day? They stayed mute, stared at me, as I probably would if I worked in Pretoria Central and someone asked me the same question. Ever since, I’ve understood that mutual enmity is the natural order. Suits me. Sometimes I like being disliked, which concerns me. But today it is all too much. A friend, Karel Tipp, with whom I worked some years ago once told me, when he was in the middle of a huge and complex case, that all he really wanted to do was to work on one of those old tugboats that never leave Durban harbour, look out to sea and polish the brass. At times like these, I slowly polish the brass, the rolling sea clear and pure.

      Suddenly with a whoosh of hydraulics, the great black steel door in front of me opens. Warder van Rensburg beckons me in.

       THE BOMB

      The commander of the technical division of the Security Branch is Colonel W A L du Toit, known as Waal to his friends. Colonel du Toit is highly regarded within the police and respected for an uncanny creativity when it comes to the construction of killing instruments. As one of his former colleagues once put it, ‘Waal made the most beautiful little devices.’

      Colonel Waal du Toit has given his blessing for the bomb to be made in the mechanical department. Influential people in the police have asked that a bomb be specifically constructed for a critical target. As Japie Kok is one of Colonel du Toit’s most innovative technicians, he has been assigned the job.

      Japie has been briefed on the concept of the bomb. Consequently, he has spent a considerable amount of time thinking about the specifics of its design and construction. This bomb has to last a long time and survive much wear and tear. The target of the bomb is an individual.

       4

      Jabu and Ting Ting moved from house to house in Mamelodi. Jabu, from Soweto and less likely to be recognised in Mamelodi, occasionally went out during the day to meet their contacts. Ting Ting stayed indoors, only venturing out at night. The two men hadn’t been in the country long and were nervous of being identified.

      First they stayed at the home of Dr Fabian Ribeiro. Dr Ribeiro was their initial contact and he spent time briefing them on the situation in the country and in Mamelodi. While still in Botswana preparing for their mission, they had decided that they would carry out their first action in Mamelodi. They had chosen Mamelodi for a reason. Six months earlier, in November 1985, police had fired on a crowd in the township, killing thirteen people and wounding nearly eighty. As trained soldiers, they felt acutely the unfairness of police firing on an unarmed crowd in the very place where Ting Ting had grown up and which was now under army occupation. Driven by a hot rage, they decided that this would change. Whatever the cost, their first attack would be on the security forces occupying Mamelodi.

      The township was crawling with police and soldiers, as Mamelodi was regarded as a flashpoint. It had become an occupied zone. There were roadblocks daily. Once a week, a section of the township was cordoned off and every house searched. The police and soldiers showed little regard for the occupants, smashing doors and windows and breaking crockery and ornaments. Young girls and women were pulled out of bed in the middle of the night in their nightdresses and made to stand with the men and shivering children in the small sitting rooms of the matchbox houses under the scrutiny of soldiers with R4 combat rifles, while the rest of the search and seizure team moved from room to room tipping out drawers.

      Jabu and Ting Ting knew that they couldn’t stay long in the area. They also had a strong chance of being caught in their first few weeks and were determined to carry out an ‘action’ before that happened. They could not wait for the other members of the unit to arrive; it was time for the mission to start.

      The two men buried most of their weapons beneath a pile of rubble and stones close to a dumping ground, not far from the house of an ANC contact, Harold Sefula. They each kept a 9 mm Makarov pistol and a Russian F-1 defensive hand grenade. These were easy to conceal and provided an element of reassurance should they run into trouble.

      Jabu and Ting Ting made contact with an activist called Moss Morudi who supplied information about a military observation post on a hill overlooking the township and the regularity of patrols. He also told of a dirt road leading to the hill station. The two MK soldiers decided to mine this road.

      On the night of 15 February 1986, Jabu and Ting Ting retrieved a TM-57 landmine (designed to trigger beneath heavy vehicles) and its detonator from their cache. This they carried back to Morudi’s house in a sports bag which in turn they hid in a bedroom cupboard. The two comrades had dinner with Moss and his family.

      The next afternoon, wearing overalls similar to those worn by municipal road workers, they set out with the bag and a spade. They were both armed with a pistol and a grenade. The operation was risky. There was a strong possibility of being apprehended. But they were both convinced they needed to make a move.

      At the designated spot, Jabu stood watch while Ting Ting dug. The ground was hard and compacted and the spade bounced off the surface. Fortunately, at that time of the afternoon, the army’s movements were infrequent. Ting Ting laboured quickly, a hole opening up. When it was deep enough, Jabu laid the mine and Ting Ting inserted and tightened the small MVZ-57 detonator cap. The mine was armed. Jabu covered the device with gravel and they both sprinkled white surface dirt over the area they’d disturbed. The tip of the detonator was invisible among the stones.

      The two men walked slowly away, the spade slung casually over Ting Ting’s shoulder.

      Back among the houses, they wiped the spade clean of prints and left it standing up against a house wall, knowing it would not be there for long. The whole operation had taken ten minutes.

      Jabu and Ting Ting moved from Morudi’s home to another safe house in the township.

      At six thirty the mine was detonated by a Casspir. By then it was dark. Moss Morudi heard the explosion and left his house to visit the site. Soon the area was swarming with soldiers taking up defensive positions. The shouts of the men were interrupted by the sound of a helicopter coming in low overhead. In the darkness, he saw the great swirls of dust, murky in the white searchlight of the chopper as it briefly landed within the cordon of soldiers before clattering off over the township. Later that night Morudi saw a heavy-duty army truck towing a long trailer. On the trailer was a large vehicle covered by a brown tarpaulin. The convoy of vehicles slowly left Mamelodi.

      In the weeks that followed, the landmine attack was the main topic of conversation in the Pretoria townships. Surely an MK unit was operating in the area?

      As far as Jabu and Ting Ting were concerned, their message to the authorities was СКАЧАТЬ