The Prey by Tony Park Read Free Book Online Page B

– and I want to find out why. You’ll work for me until I negotiate with Global Resources to pay a ransom for your life.’
    ‘As simple as that,’ Chris said.
    ‘As simple as that. I want you to work your magic with your monitors and your pumps, to find out what is making my men ill.’
    ‘Since when have
zama zamas
cared about health and safety?’
    ‘Since Cameron McMurtrie started bulldozing closed some of the old shafts we used to come and go by. I need to get the most out of my workforce. I can’t afford to keep replacing men ad infinitum. As this mine goes deeper and my methods of ingress and egress are increasingly curtailed, I need to keep my men down here for longer periods than I have in the past. When Eureka was less deep we could come and go through old workings, but the new shaft is deeper than these. I need my men to stay fit to mine.’
    Wellington’s English was better than Chris’s, whose mother tongue was Afrikaans. The man’s diction was precise, which made his voice sound somehow crueller. Here was an educated man who was working men to death, but was greedy and rational enough to know that even in the world of the pirate mine he had to wring a few more months or years out of his labourers. Chris realised he’d been the target of a planned ambush and that, ironically, this Wellington wanted him to carry out a task similar to the one he and Themba had set out to do. ‘Did you have to kill the others?’
    ‘No.’ A match flared and the man’s face was illuminated for the briefest moment. The brow frowned for an instant, the head nodded a little. ‘That was not part of the plan. If the guard had not opened fire first then we would have tried to take you all alive.’
    ‘I … I can’t stay down here.’ Chris gripped his knees tighter to try to stop the shaking, but the harder he squeezed, the faster and harder he shuddered. ‘Please …’
    ‘Quiet. You will be fed. There is drink and some
dagga
if you wish it. You’re not going anywhere for the time being; not until you have finished what I need you to do.’
    ‘I … can’t.’
    ‘You can stay, and you will, Christiaan. I have plans for you, and you will help me make my mine safer and then you can go.’
    Chris closed his eyes and tried to fight back the tide of panic. He couldn’t stay down here. He would die. He opened his eyes again and saw the glowing orange tip of Wellington’s cigarette. He needed to find a way out. He needed to outsmart this underground mine boss.‘You … you can start by putting out that cigarette. I was already picking up elevated traces of methane when we came through the safety door. You … you’ll blow us all up if you and your men keep smoking this far into the site. We need to move closer to the main shaft where ventilation is better.’
    The man laughed in the dark and drew again on the cigarette. He stood and walked to the alcove where the candle glowed weakly. He picked it up and blew it out. Chris was in total blackness again. He heard the man’s footsteps. He wondered if he was going to reach out and help him to his feet. ‘Don’t try and outsmart me, Christiaan. I know there is no methane in this mine.’ The steel-capped toe of his boot lashed out and drove the air from Chris’s lungs.
    *
    Luis Domingues Correia worked by touch in the darkness while he listened to the Afrikaner being beaten. He had been bullied by white South African miners when he’d worked in legal mines, and he had been beaten by people of his own colour when he’d lived in the informal settlement on the outskirts of Barberton.
    It had been this way for generations. His father and grandfather had worked for the mines, recruited from their beachside village near Inhambane on the Indian Ocean coast. In the old days, under the apartheid regime, the men of his country and others as far north as Zambia had been recruited by WENELA, the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, to work in the mines in South Africa.