The Top Prisoner of C-Max Read online

  A single blow of his head against the edge of the concrete slab had destroyed the four middle teeth in his upper jaw. They had been less efficient working the lower jaw. It had taken three blows to get the effect Kruger desired. Some of the teeth had come out with the battering, but others had broken off. A trusty in the medical facility had removed the roots of the broken teeth without anaesthetic.

  Kruger observed the little man with some annoyance. You would think the little queer was dying the way he carried on. ‘Come here and show me what you got now,’ he told April.

  ‘Mr Enslin must know I’m still bleeding.’

  ‘I don’ care about no blood. Come.’

  ‘Can’t I let it stop bleeding first?’

  ‘You can fucking come here. I tol’ you I don’ wan’ to feel your teeth. You wouldn’ listen. Now come.’

  April wiped away a last strand of bloody saliva and crossed, sinking to his knees in front of the old man.

  In the Scarborough bungalow an altogether naked Beloved Childe was seated in the armchair in her bedroom. The sleeping eighteen-year-old boy in her bed was a volunteer at the Freedom Foundation who had had sexual intercourse with her five hours earlier. Behind the curtains in the room’s only window the first grey signs of dawn had been visible before she switched on the light.

  The boy, whose name was Albert, was breathing deeply, enjoying what is generally thought of as the sleep of the just. Beloved thought of it as the sleep of the recently fucked.

  Her first evening at the foundation had been a success. Amy Morgan, middle-aged with greying hair dyed an almost-luminous blonde, had spent an hour telling the group of ten former inmates how to approach a prospective employer. When she finished, Beloved took over, telling them that great things were possible for all of them. She told them not to believe that they could do anything, but to find what they could do well, then do that with all their might and will, and that then they would find new meaning in their lives. When she finished, every one of them waited in the hall to thank her and ask if she would be coming to talk to them again. As she was leaving, Amy Morgan took both Beloved’s hands in hers. ‘That was so beautiful. You brought tears to my eyes.’

  As a committed Christian, young Albert took seriously the Biblical injunction to ‘store up treasure in heaven’. He felt that by working to help the sinners that were the clients of the Freedom Foundation, he was doing exactly that. But sitting next to Beloved it had been hard to avoid sinful thoughts. When she offered him a lift, he had accepted readily. But when she brought him to the Scarborough bungalow, he was inclined to believe that he was receiving his reward right here on earth.

  Watching him sleep, Beloved thought about Yudel. He was one of the few men who really interested her and that had nothing to do with the fact that they were of opposite genders. She saw in him a man who really had a worthwhile purpose in life and, in her view, she had not met many of those. He was also one of the few men she had met who might be able to challenge her intellectually and she had met still fewer of those.

  But like other men, especially older men, Yudel was a fool for an innocent face, long blonde hair, a good figure and a virginal way of dressing. She believed correctly that in their few meetings she had learnt more about him than he had about her. Blinded as he was by her appearance, there was much about her he could not even guess at.

  One of the characteristics that Yudel would not have anticipated was the power of her sex drive. Since, at the age of thirteen, she had explored that territory with an eighteen-year-old neighbourhood boy, she had been a victim of an insistent need that had to be satisfied at least weekly, sometimes daily. If Beloved went through a week without an orgasm, she suffered a growing torment until it was dealt with. Masturbation helped, but it was no more than a holding device to keep her going until she had access to the real thing.

  Without moving from the chair, she reached out a foot and prodded the sleeping boy. He woke immediately, looking startled. At the moment his eyes fixed on her perfect body, he drew back. ‘I suppose you want me to go now?’ Before he had fallen asleep, she had made it plain that his performance had been substandard.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought you said I’m not big enough for you.’

  ‘You don’t listen, Albert. I said you were not enough for me. The equipment will do. The problem lies with the execution. The skill level needs drastic improvement.’

  It was shattering news. He looked at her without speaking.

  ‘So, I’m going to educate you.’

  ‘Now?’ Had a clumsy lover ever been so lucky?

  ‘Right now.’

  When the lesson was over, almost an hour later, Beloved had enjoyed an altogether satisfactory orgasm and Albert felt that he had died and been born into a new and far more stimulating world.

  ‘Now it’s time for you to go,’ Beloved told him.

  ‘Can I come back tonight?’ he asked.

  A boy like you? she thought. Not with Oliver Hall on the way. ‘It’s over, Albert. You can’t come back tonight or ever.’

  ‘But I thought this time it was good.’

  ‘You better go now. My husband’s already on his way.’ She smiled in her most winning way. ‘And, in any event, you’re a much improved product now. Once the word gets round, you’ll have a problem accommodating all the girls.’

  TWENTY

  THE MEN who usually worked the morning shift on the X-ray machine at C-Max were not the best the department had to offer. Director Nkabinde used them there because it was an uncomplicated job requiring no initiative and demanding no decision-making.

  Alfred Dongwana was counting on their relative weakness to get him into the prison. In recent months the director had tightened up on security. If any member was seen letting in one of his colleagues without applying full scrutiny, he was in serious trouble.

  The two Dongwana was relying on did what they had been ordered to do, but they did it badly. Objects in bags and satchels, that came up on the screen and that he would have examined more closely, were allowed to pass unchecked. And then there was the fact that he was senior to both of them. They would not expect him to be carrying anything that was not allowed. They would also be eager not to offend him.

  He had prepared the parcel well. The lunch box the messengers brought him had originally been a small tool box. By the standards of lunch boxes it was big, but not ridiculously so. Tripled layers of foil lined the lower part of the box, enclosing two revolvers and twenty rounds. Both guns were three-eights and filled about a third of the box’s depth. He had packed cotton wool around them to prevent any movement, covered them with another layer of foil and packed sliced bread and fruit on top of that. The box would pass an X-ray examination and a physical inspection, as long as neither was conducted too carefully. It would be all right. It had to be. Enslin Kruger would get what he wanted.

  Dongwana had taken another precaution. He was wearing his service revolver. Carrying a large piece of metal on his body would help to mask the contents of the lunch box, as long as he was not separated from it. Wearing service revolvers was rare for prison officers, but giving a plausible reason should not be difficult.

  Leaving his car in the parking area, Dongwana took the lunch box from the boot and carried it by the handle. It was too heavy for its contents to consist only of fruit and sandwiches, but the men at the gate would not know that unless they took it away from him.

  He was still some distance from the gate when he realised that the X-ray machine must be down. The men at the gate were using hand-held metal detectors that showed no image on a screen. They simply alerted the user to the presence of metal.

  That was only part of the problem. The staff at the gate had been changed. Of the two men who were present today, one was a youngster who had only been in the service for a year, but the other was an older man, just months away from retirement and one of those who was suspicious of everyone. He seemed to think he was the only warder in the prison who knew the busin
ess and did his job properly.

  It was too late to turn back now. Dongwana was within ten paces of the gate and much more than that from the car.

  A group of three warders was ahead of him. He hung back until he was sure the older man was occupied. The young warder slid the metal detector down his left side, just as he had been taught, and found nothing, then down the right, where Dongwana was holding the lunch box against his revolver. The metal detector buzzed, but the young warder showed no further interest.

  He had taken a step past the gate when the older man spoke. ‘A lot of sandwiches.’ His expression was entirely friendly.

  ‘I get hungry,’ Dongwana said.

  ‘Me too, very hungry.’ He had moved to block Dongwana’s path. ‘I had nothing to eat this morning. Do me a favour and let me have one.’

  Could this really be what he wanted? Dongwana hesitated too long.

  ‘Come on, Alfred. I’m hungry, man. Just one.’

  The handle of the lunch box was part of the lid. Dongwana had to hold the lunch box against his side with his right hand while with the left he loosened the clasp. The other man leant forward to see inside. Then he reached for a slice of bread. ‘Jesus, no meat, no cheese, not even butter. You eat your bread like this.’

  ‘On my salary …’ Dongwana let the rest of the sentence hang.

  The old warder was still looking into the lunch box when Dongwana snapped the lid shut. It may have been that the plastic was twisted by the extra weight in the box or perhaps it was just the awkwardness of his position, but the clasp did not snap shut. The pressure of the lunch box on his side eased for just a moment, but it was long enough for it to slip to the ground, spilling out sliced bread, two apples, a banana, one revolver and three rounds. A moment later Dongwana had been pushed against a wall and his service revolver removed by the old warder. ‘Fucking bastard,’ he heard the old warder grunt.

  Near Baviaanspoort Correctional Facility – 1 508 kilometres from the Freedom Foundation

  Not far from Baviaanspoort Prison, the road dips and curves left. At that point, heavy brush skirts the road on both sides. In early morning the sun is in the eyes of a driver approaching the bend from the Pretoria side while the underbrush is in deep shadow.

  The members of Elia Dlomo’s gang who were still free knew all this. It was for this reason that they had selected the spot. Five of them had avoided capture so far. They still had the RPG rocket launcher, more AK-47s than they needed and enough ammunition to run a small war. Recruiting an extra four young men had not been difficult. None of them had ever been employed and all felt that the new South Africa was treating them too much like the old one had. All were angry with an anger generated by a world that seemed neither to need nor want them.

  The method the gang would use would be just what Dlomo had taught them: hit the truck head on with the RPG, then come at the guards, if they were still alive, with enough firepower to ensure that resistance would be brief.

  Dlomo knew where they would strike and he knew how. He also knew that he might die in the explosion, but he was long past being worried about that possibility. He was going to deal with Oliver Hall, Enslin Kruger and all the Twenty-Eights or he was going to die. Life had been no picnic anyway.

  With Dlomo in the back of the truck were four other prisoners who knew nothing about what was planned for them. In front he could see the driver and two other guards, whose repeating rifles were held between their legs, facing upwards and away from them. If the aim was good, the RPG would take out all three. Dlomo knew the two men who would be firing it and he doubted the national defence force had anyone who could fire an RPG better. In this place, with the vehicle coming down the straight on an almost-flat stretch of road, it was the nearest thing to aiming at a stationary object.

  The message had got through to Dlomo that the flat stretch came right after a large farm dam on the right and a barn on the left. The dam should be easy to spot and would give him a few seconds before the RPG was fired.

  Smallholdings on either side of the road gave way to bigger farms. A few horses were grazing on a pasture that was green with the late-summer rains. Beyond it a tractor was ploughing a small field, dragging behind it a small plume of dust. Dlomo saw the dam in enough time to get down on the floor. There was also enough time for the other prisoners to follow, the whites of their eyes bright in their brown faces. There was not enough time for the guards to notice that anything unusual had happened.

  In the thicket ahead, the man supporting the barrel of the RPG moved as the projectile was launched. He was standing on a slope and had wedged one foot between a stunted thorn tree and the sloping ground. His shoulder moved no more than a centimetre, but it was enough to send the rocket left and low. It ricocheted off the road surface and into a dirt bank, exploding on impact and showering dirt onto the road.

  The driver had spent a few years in the army and he recognised what he had just seen. He braked hard and had started to swing the truck round when the second rocket was fired. The aim was again low, but not as low as the first time and the direction was much better. The truck was now at an angle of some forty-five degrees to the direction they had been travelling in. The projectile smashed into the left passenger door, destroying that side of the cab, the head and left side of the man who was seated there and the left shoulder of the man next to him.

  By the time the members of Dlomo’s gang reached the truck, the guard nearest the door was already dead and the one next to him was unconscious and dying. The driver had both hands in the air and was shouting ‘not armed, not armed’. The first gang member to reach the door, one of the new men, killed him with a single shot from his AK-47.

  The back door had burst and Dlomo forced his way through a ragged hole in the bodywork, the others following. Wilfred Seremane, who had organised the raid, was pointing to the scrub with his AK and shouting at the other prisoners, ‘Fuck off, all of you. Fuck off.’ None of them could hear what he was saying, but the gesture was enough. They all ran for the scrub.

  For a moment, Dlomo, drunk with the shock that came from his proximity to the explosion, leant against what remained of the truck’s left side, but Seremane had him by the arm and was pulling him towards one of two cars that had been parked down a narrow farm track. ‘Come, Chief,’ he said. ‘We got to fuck off too.’ Like the others, Dlomo had been deafened by the explosion. On unsteady legs, he followed Seremane.

  Despite his condition, a fierce and angry joy had risen within him. He was free to carry out his plan.

  TWENTY-ONE

  BECAUSE the Dongwana matter was criminal, the CID had been called and they were conducting the interrogation, with Director Nkabinde observing. The director’s brown face was overlain with grey. He had just received the news of Dlomo’s escape and the fact that all three men in the truck had been killed. Later that evening he would tell his wife that this had been the worst day of his career.

  Yudel had asked to be allowed into the interrogation of Dongwana, but had been told that his presence was not necessary. When he objected, the director had said, ‘Please, Yudel, for a change just do your own work.’

  Dongwana had been escorted into the interrogation room, looking like a dog that had been whipped. Before Yudel returned to his office, the director asked him, ‘Where were the guns going, do you think?’

  ‘Kruger.’

  ‘I know you hate him, Yudel. That doesn’t mean he’s guilty of everything.’

  ‘I think he’s the only one who could have forced Dongwana to do it.’

  ‘You think he had to be forced?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe the police will get him to talk.’ He was moving towards the door of the interrogation room.

  ‘They won’t.’

  Nkabinde stopped and turned back. ‘Why not?’

  ‘He doesn’t want bad things to be done to Penny again. I know Alfred. He’d die rather than say anything if it’s going to endanger Penny again.’

  The dire
ctor looked thoughtfully at Yudel. ‘What the hell’s going on here? Dlomo’s escape and this in one morning? Why don’t you walk through and tell me what you think. Maybe we need to lock the place down, at least for the day.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll walk through.’

  ‘Talk to me later.’

  ‘I will.’

  Yudel went from Nkabinde through one cell block after the other, walking slowly, observing what he could, employing all the senses recognised by physical science and at least one that had not yet achieved that recognition. Yudel believed in intuition, but not in a broad, objective way. He believed in his own intuition. He did not know if other people possessed it, but he knew he did.

  He walked corridor after corridor, through workshops, the laundry, exercise yard and even the sickbay. Prisoners were doing the things they did every day. There were perhaps more who looked searchingly at him for longer than usual, but he was aware that this may be his imagination. Outwardly, nothing had changed. And yet a fever that was not present on other days permeated the prison and descended on him from every side.

  The news of Dlomo’s escape and Dongwana’s arrest would have spread through the prison in minutes. That was the nature of the fever. It was expectancy. Something was happening to break the dull, repetitive pace of prison life. The brown boer and his boys had not been able to hold Dlomo and one of their own men had tried to bring guns through the main gate. A change had taken place and every man in the prison wondered if maybe there was something in it for him. Every man knew that it was possible to break out. C-Max was not impregnable, no prison was, except perhaps Kokstad.

  He was barely back in his office when the phone rang. It was Brigadier Sibiya. ‘He’s gone,’ the brigadier told Yudel.