Somala walked among the dead, staring numbly at the faces forever frozen in shock and confusion. The raiders had ruthlessly killed nearly all the workers and their families in the compound. No more than a handful could have escaped into the bush. The feed in the barn and the equipment housed in the shed had been set on fire, and flames were already flickering orange fingers from the upstairs window of the Fawkes house.

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How strange, Somala thought. The raiders policed the battleground and retrieved their own dead as quietly as ghosts. The movements had been efficient and deliberate. There was no hint of panic at the distant sound of the approaching helicopter units of the South African Defence Forces. The raiders simply melted into the surrounding brush as stealthily as they came.

Somala returned to the baobab tree for his gear and began trotting toward the township. His only thoughts were focused on rounding up the men of his section and reporting back to their camp across the Mozambique border. He did not look back at the dead strewn about the form. He did not see the gathering vultures. Nor did he hear the shot from the gun whose bullet tore into the flesh of his back.

16

The drive from Pembroke back to Umkono was a total blank to Patrick Fawkes. His hands turned the wheel and his feet worked the pedals in stiff mechanical movements. His eyes were unblinking and glazed as he assaulted the steep grades and on blind instinct hurled the four-wheel-drive around the hairpin curves.

He had been in a small chemist’s shop, buying Jenny’s bath oil, when a sergeant from the Pembroke constabulary tracked him down and stammered out a sketchy outline of the tragedy. At first Fawkes refused to believe it. Only after he reached Shawn Francis, the Irish-born constable of Umkono, over the Bushmaster’s mobile radio did he come to accept the worst.

“You’d better come home, Patrick,” Francis’s strained voice crackled over the speaker. The constable spared Fawkes the details, and Fawkes did not demand them.

The sun was still high when Fawkes came within sight of his farm. Little remained of the house. Only the fireplace and a section of the veranda still stood. The rest was no more than a pile of cinders. Across the yard, rubber tires on the tractors smoldered on their steel rims and emitted thick black smoke. The farm workers still lay where they’d fallen in the compound. Vultures were picking at the carcasses of his prize cattle.

Shawn Francis and several Defence Force soldiers were huddled

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around three forms lying under blankets when Fawkes braked to a stop in the yard. Francis came over to him as he leaped out of the mud-streaked Bushmaster. The constable’s face was pale granite.