Lona had searched him out and found him in the gutter yesterday, covered with dirt, sweat, and blood. His brother was dead and there was no family left to him, so he'd bought eight cartons of Bantu beer and tried to obliterate reality. Lona and Nabaktu had offered him another way-a warrior's way- that would strike back at the killers of his brother.
The drugs she'd given him had done something to his body. He'd never felt like this before. He could barely feel the bumps as the truck negotiated the thin road leading to the back entrance to the mine, but he could acutely feel Lona's hand on his arm. He wanted to avoid her dark eyes staring intently at him and not hear the words she mouthed. He ran his eyes around the enclosed interior, taking in the large crate squatting in the center, but again his eyes flickered back up to hers and his ears listened as if he had no control.
"Soon you will be the greatest warrior. Your name will be spoken of across the land with the deepest respect. You are a man-not an animal. You must die a man's death, not lie in the street like a dog. You must avenge your brother."
A small part of Tommy's brain wanted to think, but it would require too much energy. The truck came to a halt with a squeal of brakes. The tarp covering the tailgate was thrown back and a large figure dressed in traditional robes appeared, silhouetted against the night sky. "It is time to go." Lona leaned over and placed something in front of Tommy's face. He snorted reflexively and felt the power kick in.
Tommy looked from Lona to Nabaktu. Their eyes were locked on him, willing for him to move. He stood and stepped out of the truck.
Security was oriented inward at the entrance and that was logical. The powers-that-be were concerned with what could be taken out of the mine, not with what could be taken in. The long line of dust-covered workers emerging like moles from their twelve-hour shift below the surface was subjected to strip searches by guards with cold hands and blank eyes. At random, a few men were having their bodily cavities invaded by gloved fingers, probing and searching. Behind the initial row of security, personnel looking for the gold were other guards watching the searchers. And above the second rank were video cameras, overseeing the watchers. And all that redundancy was logical, too, as this toothless opening less than eighty miles southwest of Johannesburg led to great coiled intestines of gold and uranium-laced rock.
Tommy had been working here for eight years, six days a week, in twelve-hour shifts-long enough that any other existence before the mine was forgotten. He smothered his hatred and tried to avoid looking at the guards as he went past. That most of them were black also didn't matter. Some of these same guards had beaten his brother to death two days ago after finding a piece of rock in his pant cuff. No matter that it could have gotten there by accident. No matter that it contained no gold. The rule was that nothing came out that hadn't come in. When done they'd thrown his brother's body into the putrid shaft of an abandoned mine where all the other bodies had been dumped over the years. That the guards who had beaten his brother to death were Xhosa did matter very much to Tommy-they were the favorite of the ANC and the change in power had brought little change to the mines-and the Sothos, of which Tommy was a member, migrant workers from Lesotho, still suffered at the hands of the overseers.
Night or day mattered naught in the black holes of the mines. The caged electric lights strung along the rock roof cast a dingy glow on the dark, perspiring bodies below as the line of arrivals trudged forward. Their shift started at three, but they weren't paid for the time spent getting there-only the toil of their hands started the clock.
Tommy Meduba was pouring sweat also as he drove the small electric cart at a walking pace down the right side of the double set of rails. He was on the ground level leading to the massive elevator that would carry the cart and forty workers down into the depths. Tommy was sweating not so much from the thick air and scorching heat, though. Large beads of perspiration beaded his skin, forming rivers that gravity dragged down his body, because this was to be his last night alive and he hadn't assimilated that concept.
No guard spared him or his cart more than a glance as he rumbled onto the wrought-iron floor of the elevator. With a slight start, and then a steady stuttering, the platform descended. Dank rock walls on four sides guided them straight down. For twenty-four minutes, at a steady pace of more than four hundred and seventy feet per minute, they went down. They had to switch elevators twice and use horizontal tunnels that pushed them more to the southwest. More than two and a quarter miles into the earth. Straight to the heart of the richest vein of gold and uranium in the world: the Red Streak, a treasure trove that angles under the mystifying geological feature known as Vredefort Dome, so many kilometers directly above.
Never before had a mine been dug so deep and so directly under the Dome itself. But the upper regions had been plundered for more than a hundred years, forcing the engineers to probe and invade the earth farther down into the dark nether regions in search of their mineral gods. The Red Streak had been touched less than three years previously and had already produced two thousand tons of gold bullion and a classified amount of uranium.
Gold and uranium were the fuel that ran the South African economy, and Tommy was the cutting edge of a plan bent on stopping that engine and gaining the notice of the ruling ANC. He glanced over his shoulder with deadened eyes at the bulky metal container perched on the small flatbed. The casing was stenciled with English, Bantu, and Afrikaaner words indicating: DRILLING EQUIPMENT.
It was so easy that even Tommy's drug-infused brain felt a certain euphoria at having gotten in. Nabaktu had said it would be easy. Dear, sweet Lona had whispered it in his ear as she took his body and mind. And they had been right.
As the platform came to a final halt, Tommy fought the hysterical urge to laugh at the dulled men on either side of him as he slipped the cart's stick shift into drive and slowly rolled off the platform. A rock foyer beckoned with three dark openings less than twenty meters away. Wealth that would make most Third World nations weep with envy slithered back out of those holes and up the cables to the surface every day.
Tommy stopped the cart as the other workers disappeared into the various tunnels. He walked around to the rear of the vehicle and flipped open a panel. Nabaktu had made it as simple as possible, but still Tommy hesitated. A worm of fear pierced the core of his being as his hand hovered over the red button. Through the drugs and the scent of sex a part of his mind rebelled.
Twelve miles away, on the slope leading to the edge of the Witwatersrand Basin, Kamil Nabaktu swiveled his pitch-black irises from the fluorescent dial of a cheap Mickey Mouse wristwatch to Lona. "He's down by now."
The two were crouched in a thicket of scraggly, stunted trees that had never known enough water, just as Nabaktu's people had never known enough freedom since April 1652, when the first white men had set foot to stay on the southern end of the Dark Continent. They had hoped it would change in April and May of 1994, when the whites had amazingly given up power, but from their perspective, huddled in the shacks among the other tribal minorities, little had changed. In reality, the fact that the face now in charge in Pretoria was black made it all so much more galling.
"He is a weak man," Lona said. "You should have let me take it."
"No women in the mines," Nabaktu replied patiently. They'd had the argument hundreds of times. He checked his watch again. At the very least he hoped Tommy had gone down. If not, things were going to get very ugly, very soon.