And then he’d made his mistake. Nothing big. Nothing that would have mattered much in a less ego-intensive business.
He’d been invited to appear on a PBS panel show called “Bias in the Media.”
One of the network’s top anchormen had also been there. Ian could still remember the scene with painful clarity. The anchor, asked about evidence of bias in nightly news shows, had answered with a long-winded, pompous dissertation about his own impartiality.
That was when Ian had screwed up. Prompted by the moderator, he’d practically sunk his teeth in the anchor-citing case after case when the man’s own well-known political opinions had shown up in the way stories were reported. It had been an effective performance, one that earned him a rousing ovation from the studio audience and a withering glare from the anchor,
He hadn’t thought any more about it for weeks. Not until his promised promotion to Capitol Hill vanished, replaced by a sudden assignment as a foreign correspondent based in Cape Town.
That was when he realized just how badly he’d pissed off the network brass. South Africa was widely regarded as a graveyard for ambitious journalists. When the country was quiet, you didn’t have anything to report. And when things heated up, the South African security services often clamped down-making it almost impossible to get any dramatic footage out of the country. Even worse, the current government seemed to be following a policy of unusual restraint. That meant no pictures of police whipping anti apartheid demonstrators or firing shotguns at black labor-union activists. The result: practically zero airtime for reporters trying to work in South Africa. And airtime, the number of minutes or seconds you occupied on America’s television screens, was the scale on which TV reporters were judged.
Ian knew how far he’d slipped on that scale. Since arriving in Cape Town nearly six months ago, he’d filed dozens of stories over the satellite links to New York. And he’d shown up in America’s living rooms for a grand total of precisely four minutes and twenty-three seconds. That was oblivion, TV-style.
“Hey, Sheffield! You alive in there, boyo? You ready to go?”
Ian looked up, startled out of his depressing reverie by Knowles’s voice.
With pieces of camera gear and sound equipment strapped to his back or dangling from both hands, his technician looked more like a pack mule than a man.
“Ready and willing, though not very able, Sam.” Ian reached over and plucked a couple of carrying cases out of Knowles’s overloaded hands.
“Let me take those. I might need you without a hernia sometime.”
The two men started walking back to their car, a dented Ford station wagon. It had been another wasted trip on another wasted day. Ian moodily kicked a piece of loose gravel out of his path, sending it skittering down the avenue past the highly polished shoes of an unsmiling, gray-jacketed policeman.
“Oh, shit,” Knowles muttered under his breath.
The policeman stared coldly at the two Americans as they came closet and held out his left hand.
“Papers!”
Both Ian and his cameraman awkwardly set their gear down and fished through crowded pockets for passports and work permits. Then they stood waiting as the South African idly leafed through their documents, a sneer plastered across his narrow face.
At last he looked up at them.
“You are journalists’?”
Ian could hear the contempt in the man’s voice and felt his own temper rising. He kept his words clipped.
“That’s right. American journalists.
Is there some kind of problem?”
The policeman glared at him for several seconds.
“No, Meneer Sheffield, there is no problem. You are free to go. For the moment. But I suggest you show more respect in the future.”
Ian reached for their passports and permits and saw them flutter to the ground as the South African let them fall beyond his fingers. Months of petty slights and mounting frustration came to a boil in a single instant. For a split second he saw the policeman’s body as a succession of targets. First the solar plexus. Next that arrogant, perfectly shaped nose. Ian’s hands curled, ready to strike. He’d demonstrate what he’d learned in two years of self-defense classes back in the States.
Then he noticed a triumphant gleam in the other man’s eyes. Strange.
Why’d he look so happy? Rational thought returned, overriding anger. The bastard wanted to provoke a fight. And granting him his wish would mean trouble. Big trouble.
Instead, Ian knelt without a word and picked up their scattered papers.
Getting deported was not the way he wanted to leave this country.
As they unlocked the station wagon, Knowles risked a glance back over his shoulder.
“That son of a bitch is still watching us. “
Without looking, Ian slid behind the Fiesta’s wheel.
“Penis envy, probably. “
His cameraman laughed softly and shut the door.
“Cheer up, Ian. If the government ever lets thugs like Little Boy
Nazi there oft’ the leash again, you’ll have plenty of blood and gore to report on.”
As he pulled away from the curb, Ian studied the rigid, uniformed figure still staring after them. Knowles might just be right. For some reason that didn’t make him feel much better.
MAY 29-THE MINISTRY OF LAW AND ORDER, PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA
Karl Vorster’s private office matched his personality. A scarred hardwood floor and plain white walls uncluttered by portraits or pictures enclosed a small room empty except for a desk and a single chair. The low background hum of a ventilating system marked Vorster’s sole apparent concession to the modern age.
It was a concession he made unwillingly, because, like many Afrikaners,
Karl Vorster preferred the past. A myth filled past of constant sacrifice, hardship, and heroic death that colored every part of his life.
Three hundred years before, his ancestors had braved the terrible dangers of the sea to settle on Africa’s southernmost point, the Cape of Good
Hope-enticed from their native Holland with thousands of others by an offer of free farmland. Over the next decades, they’d conquered the local tribes while carving vast homesteads out of the arid wilderness. These cattle farmers, or Boers, saw themselves as direct spiritual descendants of the Hebrew patriarchs, leading their flocks and followers to better lands under God’s good guidance.
Nearly a century and a half later, the Vorster clan joined the Great Trek outward from the Cape. They drove their cattle and their servants first into Natal and then over the Drakensberg Mountains to the high open lands of the Transvaal, determined to escape both British colonial rule and interfering abolitionist missionaries.
God granted them victory over the warlike Zulus, but He did not shelter them from the British, always just a step behind. It wasn’t long before
London’s colonial administrators and soldiers cast their covetous eyes northward, toward the rich gold mines of the Afrikaner-ruled Transvaal.
When war broke out at the dawn of the twentieth century, Vorster’s grandfather fought as a member of the local commandos riding rings round the British troops occupying his conquer cd land. After leading a series of daring raids he’d finally been captured and executed. His wife, penned in a British “concentration camp,” died of typhoid fever and starvation, along with twenty-six thousand other Afrikaner women and children.
Vorster’s father, a dominie in the Dutch Reformed Church, never forgot or forgave the British. And when the Second World War broke out, the dominie joined the tens of thousands of Afrikaners who’d both prayed openly and acted secretly for a Nazi victory. Disappointed by Germany’s defeat, he’d gloried in the 1948 election victory that brought the