It was fifty yards to the slope of dead ground under the eastern windows of the brick building, and Fergus could see the rifle barrels of the defenders poked through the gaps in the sand-bags.
He pulled the silver whistle from his back pocket by its lanyard, and came up on his knees like a sprinter on the blocks.
He drew a deep breath and blew a long shrill ringing blast on the whistle. Immediately a storm of rifle fire crashed out from the hedges and ditches that surrounded the station.
The blue lamp shattered into flying fragments, and red brick dust popped off the walls like dyed cotton pods.
‘Fergus came out of the ditch at a run. A bullet kicked dust and stone chips stung his ankles, and another jerked like an impatient hand at the tail of his coat, then he was into the dead ground and out of their field of fire.
He still ran doubled over, however, until he reached the police station. Then he flattened himself against the wall between two of the sand-bagged windows while he struggled with his breathing.
A rifle barrel protruded from the left-hand window as it blazed away up the slope of the kopje. Fergus opened the rucksack and took out a grenade with his left hand. He pulled the pin with his teeth, while he groped for the Webley .455 revolver stuck into the belt of his trousers.
He locked one arm over the barrel of the police rifle, dragging it harmlessly aside, then he stepped into the window, and, still holding the rifle, looked through the narrow hole in the sand-bags.
A young, beardless face stared back at him, the eyes wide with amazement, the mouth hanging open slightly and the police helmet pulled down low over his eyes.
Fergus shot him in the bridge of the nose, between the startled staring eyes, and the head was smashed backwards out of view.
Fergus hurled the grenade through the gap and ducked down. The explosion in the confined space was vicious and ear-numbing. Fergus bobbed up and tossed in another grenade.
Glass and smoke blew from the windows, and from within there were the screams and cries of the trapped police constables, the groans and gasping wails of the wounded.
Fergus threw in a third grenade, and screamed, ‘Chew on that, you bloody strike-breakers.’ The bomb exploded, shattering out a panel from the front door, and smoke billowed from all windows.
Inside a single voice started screaming. ‘Stop it! Oh God, stop it! We surrender!’
‘Come out with your hands in the air, you bastards!’
A police sergeant staggered out of the shattered doorway. He held one hand above his head, the other hung at his side in a torn and blood-soaked sleeve.
The last call that went out from Newlands Police Station before the strikers cut the lines was a call for help. The relieving column coming over the ridge from Johannesburg in a convoy of three trucks got as far as the Hotel in Main Street where it was halted by rifle fire, and the moment it stopped, strikers ran out into the roadway behind it and set all the trucks ablaze with petrol bombs.
The police abandoned their vehicles and raced for cover in a cottage beside the road. It was a strong defensive position and they looked set to hold out against even the most determined attacks, but they left three dead constables lying in the road beside the burning trucks, and another two of their number lying near them, so badly wounded they could only cry out for succour.
A white flag waved from across the road, and the police commander stepped out on to the veranda of the cottage.
‘What do you want?’ he called across.
Fergus MacDonald walked out into the road, still waving the flag, a slight unwarlike figure in shabby suit and cloth cap.
‘You can’t leave these men out here,’ he shouted back, pointing at the bodies.
The commander came out with twenty unarmed police into the road to carry away the dead and wounded, and while they worked, strikers under Fergus’ orders slipped in through the back of the cottages.
Suddenly Fergus whipped the Webley out from under his coat and pressed it to the commander’s head.
‘Tell your men to put their hands up – or I’ll blow your bloody brains all over the road.’
In the cottage, Fergus’ men knocked the weapons out of the hands of the police, and in the roadway armed strikers were among them.
‘You were under a flag of truce,’ protested the commander bitterly.
‘We aren’t playing games, you bloody black-leg,’ snarled Fergus. ‘We’re fighting for a new world.’ The commander opened his mouth to protest again and Fergus swung the revolver sideways, slashing the barrel into his face, snapping out the front teeth from his upper jaw, and crushing the lip into a red wet smear. The man dropped to his knees, and Fergus strode among his men.
‘We’ll siege the Brixton ridge now – and after that Johannesburg. By tonight, we’ll have the red flag flying on every public building in town. Onward, comrades, nothing will stop us now.’
The Transvaal Scottish detrained at Dunswart Station that same morning to march in and seize the mining town of Benoni, which was under full control of the Action Committee’s commandos, but the strikers were waiting for them.
The advancing troops were caught in flank and rear by the cross-fire from hundreds of prepared positions, and fought hard all that day to extricate themselves, but it was late afternoon when, still under sniping fire, they were able to retrain at Dunswart.
They carried with them three dead officers and nine dead other rankers. Another thirty were suffering from gunshot wounds, from which many would later die.
From one end to the other of the Witwatersrand, the strikers were on the rampage. The Action Committee controlled that great complex of mining towns and mining properties that follows the sweep of the gold-bearing reef across the bleak African veld, sixty miles from Krugersdorp to Ventersdorp, with the city of Johannesburg at its centre.
It is the richest gold-bearing formation yet discovered by man, a glittering treasure house, the foundation stone of the prosperity of a nation – and now the strikers carried the red flag across it at will, and at every point the force of law and order reeled back.
Every police commander was loath to initiate fire, and every constable loath to act upon the order when it did come. They were firing upon friends, countrymen, brothers.
In the cellars of the Fordsburg Trade Union Hall they were holding a kangaroo court; a traitor was on trial for his life.
Harry Fisher’s huge bulk was clad now in a military style bushjacket, with buttoned patch-pockets, over which he wore a bandolier of ammunition. On his right arm was a plain band of red cloth, but his unkempt black hair was uncovered, and his eyes were fierce.
His desk was a packing case, and Helena MacDonald stood behind his stool. She had cropped her hair as short as a man’s, and she wore breeches tucked into her boots, and the red armband on her tunic. Her face was pale and gaunt, her eyes in deep plum-coloured sockets were invisible in the bad light, but her body was tensed with the nervous energy of a leashed greyhound with the smell of the hare in its nostrils.
The accused was a storekeeper of the town, with pale watery eyes behind the steel-rimmed spectacles which he blinked rapidly as he watched his accuser.
‘He asked to be connected with police headquarters in Marshall Square.’
‘Just a minute,’ Helena interrupted. ‘You are on the local telephone exchange, is that right?’
‘Yes, that’s right. I am Exchange Supervisor.’ The woman looked like a schoolteacher, iron-haired, neatly dressed, unsmiling.
‘Go on.’
‘I thought I’d better listen in, you know, see what he was up to.’
The storekeeper was wringing white bony hands, and chewing nervously on his lower lip. He looked at least sixty years old with the pale silver fluff of hair standing up comically from his bald pink pate.
‘Well, when he started giving them the details of what was happening here, broke the connection.’
‘What exactly did he say?’ Fisher demanded.
‘He said that
there was a machine gun here.’
‘He said that?’ Fisher’s expression was thunderous. He transferred his glare to the storekeeper, and the man quailed.
‘My boy is in the police – he’s my only boy,’ he whispered, and then blinked back the tears from the pale eyes.
‘That’s as good as a confession,’ said Helena coldly, and Fisher glanced over his shoulder at her and nodded.
‘Take him out and shoot him,’ he said.
The light delivery van bumped along the overgrown track and stopped beside the old abandoned No. 1 shaft on the Crown Mine’s property. It had not been used for twelve years, and concrete machinery slabs and the collar of the shaft were thick with rank grass that grew out of the cracks in the concrete and covered the rusted machinery.
Two men dragged the storekeeper to the dilapidated barbed-wire fence that protected the dark black hole of the shaft. No. 1 shaft was fifteen hundred feet deep, but had flooded back to the five-hundred-foot level. The warning notices on the barbed-wire fence were embellished with the skull and cross-bones device.
Helena MacDonald stayed at the wheel of the delivery van. She lit a cigarette and stared ahead, waiting without visible emotion for the executioner’s shot.
The minutes passed, while the cigarette burned down between her fingers, and she snapped impatiently when one of the armed strikers came to the side window of the van.
‘What’s keeping your
‘Begging your pardon, missus, neither of us can do it.’
‘What do you mean?’ Helena demanded.
‘Well,’ the man dropped his eyes. ‘Old Cohen’s been selling me my groceries for ten years now. He always gives the kids a candy bar when they go in – ’
With an impatient exclamation, Helena opened the van door and stepped out.
‘Give me your revolver,’ she said, and as she strode to where the second striker guarded the old storekeeper she checked the load and spun the chamber of the pistol.
Cohen started to smile, a mild ingratiating smile as he peered at her face myopically, then he saw her expression and the pistol in her hand.
He dropped to his knees, and he began to urinate in terrified spurts down the front of his baggy grey flannel trousers.
When Helena parked the van in the street behind the market buildings, she was aware immediately of a new charge of excitement in the air. The men at the sandbagged windows called out to her, ‘Your old man’s back, missus. He’s down in the cellar with the boss!’
Fergus looked up from the large-scale map of the East Rand over which he and Harry Fisher were poring. She hardly recognized him.
He was sooty and grimed as a chimney sweep, and his eyelashes had been burned away, giving him a bland startled look. His eyes were bloodshot and there were little wet beads of dirty mucus in the corners.
‘Hello, luv,’ he grinned wearily at her.
‘What are you doing here, comrade?’ she demanded. ‘You are supposed to be at Brixton ridge.’
Harry Fisher intervened, ‘Fergus has taken the ridge. He’s done fine work, really fine work. But now we have been granted a stroke of really good fortune.’
‘What is it?’ Helena demanded.
‘Slim Jannie Smuts is on his way from Cape Town.’
‘That’s bad news,’ Helena contradicted coolly.
‘He’s coming by road — and he’s got no escort with him,’ Harry Fisher explained.
‘Like a lover – right into our arms,’ grinned Fergus, and spread his own arms wide. There were dark splotches of dried blood on his sleeves.
The Prime Minister’s aide-de-camp had spelled Mark at the wheel of the Rolls on the long stretch northwards from Bloemfontein. Mark had been able to sleep, hunched up on the front seat, oblivious of the lurching and shaking over the bad stretches of road, so that he woke refreshed when Sean Courtney stopped the little convoy on a deserted hilltop fifteen miles south of the built-up complex of mines and towns of the Witwatersrand.
It was late afternoon and the lowering sun turned the banks of low false cloud in the north to a sombre purple hue. It was not cloud but the discharge from the hundreds of chimneys of the power stations and refineries, of the coal-burning locomotives and the open fires of tens of thousands of African labourers in their locations, and of burning buildings and vehicles.
Mark wrinkled his nose as he smelled the acrid taint of the city fouling the clean dry air of the highveld.
The entire party took the opportunity to stretch cramped muscles and to relieve other physical needs. Mark noted wryly that nice social distinctions were observed when those members of the party who had general officer’s rank and Cabinet Minister’s status used the screened side of the parked cars, while the lesser members stood out in the open road.
While they went about their business, there was an argument in progress. Sean was advocating caution and a roundabout approach through the suburbs and outlying areas of Johannesburg.
‘We should cut across to Standerton and come in on the Natal road – the rebels are holding all the southern suburbs.’
‘They’ll not be expecting us, old Sean. We’ll go through fast and be at Marshall Square before they know what’s happened,’ Jannie Smuts decided. ‘I can’t afford the extra two hours it will take us to circle around.’
And Sean growled at him, ‘You always were too damned hot-headed, Jannie. Good God, you were the one who rode into the Cape with a hundred and fifty men in your commando to capture Cape Town from the whole British army.’
‘Gave them the fright of their lives,’ the Prime Minister chuckled as he came around the back of the Rolls, buttoning his trousers, and Sean, following him, went on with relish, ‘That’s right, but when you tried the same tricks on Lettow von Vorbeck in German East Africa, you were the one who got the fright. He roasted your arse for you.’
Mark winced at Sean’s choice of words, and the Prime Minister’s party looked to heaven and earth, anywhere except at their master’s suddenly unsmiling countenance.
‘We are going into Johannesburg on the Booysens Road,’ said Jannie Smuts coldly.
‘You’ll be no damned good to us dead,’ grumbled Sean.
‘That’s enough, old Sean. We’ll do it my way.’
‘All right,’ Sean agreed lugubriously. ‘But you’ll ride in the second car. The Cadillac will lead with your pennant flying.’ He turned to the Prime Minister’s driver, ‘Flat out, you understand, stop for nothing.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Have you gentlemen got your music with you?’ he demanded, and all of them showed him the sidearms they carried.
‘Mark,’ Sean turned to him. ‘Get the Mannlicher off the roof.’ Mark unstrapped the leather case from the luggage rack and assembled the 9.3 mm sporting rifle, the only effective weapon they had been able to find at short notice in Somerset House before leaving. He loaded the magazine and handed the weapon to Sean, then slipped two yellow packets of Eley Kynoch ammunition into his own pockets.
‘Good boy,’ Sean grunted, and peered at him closely. ‘How are you feeling? Did you get some sleep?’
‘I’m fine, sir.’
‘Take the wheel.’
Darkness fell swiftly, smearing the silhouettes of the blue gum trees along the low crests of the rolling open ground, crowding in the circle of their vision.
There were the flickering pinpoints of open cooking fires from a few of the native shacks among the hills, but these were the only signs of life. The road was deserted, and even when they began to speed past the first brick-built buildings, there were no lights, and the stillness was unnatural and disquieting.
‘The main power station has shut down. The coalminers were limiting supply to fifty tons a day for essential services, but now they’ve stopped even that,’ the Prime Minister mused aloud, and neither of them answered him. Mark followed the twinkling red rear lights of the Cadillac, and the darkness pressed closer. He switched on the main beams of his headlights, and suddenly they were into th
e narrow streets of Booysens, the southernmost suburb of Johannesburg.
The miners’ cottages crowded the road like living and menacing presences. On the left, against the last faint glimmer of the day, Mark could make out the skeletal shape of the steel headgear at Crown Mines’ main haulage, and ahead, the low table-like hillocks of the mine dumps gave him a nostalgic twinge.
He thought suddenly of Fergus MacDonald, and Helena, and glanced once again to his left, lifting his eyes from the road for a moment.
Just beyond the Crown Deep headgear, not more than a mile away, was the cottage on Lover’s Walk where she had taught him he was a man.
The memory was too wrapped around with pain and guilt, and he thrust it aside and turned his full attention back to the road just as the first rifle shots sparkled from the darkened cottage windows on the right side of the road ahead.
Instantly, he was judging the angle and field of the enemy fire, noticing how they had chosen the curve of the road where the vehicles must slow. ‘Good,’ he thought dispassionately, applauding the choice, and he hit the gear lever of the Rolls, double declutching into a lower gear to build up revolutions for the turn.
‘Get down!’ he shouted at his illustrious passengers.
Ahead the Cadillac swerved wildly at the volley and then recovered, and went roaring into the turn.
‘Six or seven rifles,’ Mark estimated, and then saw the high hedge and the open pavement below the cottage windows. He would give them a changing closing target, he decided, and used the power and rush of the Rolls to broadside up on to the pavement, under the cover of the hedge.
Foliage brushed with a light rushing whisper against the side of the roaring vehicle and behind him a service revolver banged lustily as Sean Courtney fired through the open window.