Read Online The Prey by Tony Park - Free Book Online

Africa were as high as the risks. She wanted more responsibility from Jan, but she had an uneasy feeling that the maelstrom she was about to walk into in South Africa could break her as easily as it could make her. She had fought all her working life to get to where she was and she savoured a challenge, but how many mining execs in Australia, she wondered, had ever had to deal with the fallout of lethal underground gun battles and a new mine in – on the verge of, she corrected herself – a national park? None, she reckoned. She would show them.
    *
    Luis sat with his back to the rock wall of the tunnel and sacrificed some of the precious power in the batteries in his cheap plastic torch to re-read the letter from his wife, Miriam. He wished he could call her, but he couldn’t risk escaping to the surface. There was too much work for him to do.
    He wanted to reach out to her, to touch her, and to tell her to stay right where she was.
    I miss you, Luis
. The words made him bring a knuckle to his mouth and he bit down on the blackened, dirt-encrusted skin, tasting the chemicals of his trade in the dust on his hand. He knew he was killing himself through exposure to dangerous substances and dust, poor nutrition and slavishly hard work; he was trying to make a life for his family, but what sort of a life was this?
    I cannot bear not knowing where you are, or if you are safe. We read of accidents, of people killed in the work you are doing
. She didn’t know he was a
zama zama
now.
Why can’t you tell me the name of the mine you are working on? At least then I could call the shift boss, or email you
.
    He was too ashamed to tell his wife, who might one day tell his son, that he was a criminal. Luis knew he was running out of excuses. It was implausible that a man with an honest job in a real mine could supply his wife with nothing better than a nondescript Barberton post office box as a form of contact. If he was a legitimate metallurgist at Eureka he would have an email account, a cellphone, a shared room in a dorm, or even a small house in the village or a shack in an informal settlement. Instead, he lived like a rat in a hole in the ground for months on end. It was ninety-seven days since he’d last seen daylight.
    I want to bring Jose to South Africa and be with you. Unless I hear from you by the end of this month, we are coming. All my love, Miriam
.
    No! He turned off the torch and put it in the pocket of his raggedy overalls. In the dark he folded the letter and brought it to his lips and kissed it. No! It would be madness for her to join the
mahambane
and walk to South Africa. If the thieves did not rob or rape her, then the lions might devour her and his son.
    Luis rested his chin on his chest, the bristles soaking up a little of the sweat that slicked his skin. He tried to keep himself clean as best as he could with the limited water they could tap off from the mine’s underground lines, but still the sour smell of his body offended him. Luis was trapped in this hot, stinking hell, and he only hoped he could live long enough to see his wife and child again.
    Men were dying underground. Fatalities weren’t unusual among the
zama zamas
, but the current numbers were. This past week six men had died of illness; Luis had helped carry the bodies of two of them to the shaft between shifts so that the legal miners would find them and get rid of them. Last week it was four and three before that. The victims he had seen had all been fouled with copious smelly diarrhoea; the eyes were sunken and the skin on their fingers had wrinkled as though they had reached old age within just a few days.
    Luis had overheard Wellington scheming with his lieutenant to kidnap an environmental officer, the man they now held, to inspectthe areas where the pirate miners worked and slept, and to test the air in case they were being poisoned. Luis thought the men might be suffering from cholera; a Zimbabwean he worked with claimed he had seen