Rage - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗

Cape Town was ablaze with lights. The mountain was floodlit, a great ghostly silver hulk under the stars, while behind them the lights on Robben Island twinkled low on the black sea. Raleigh judged that they were about half-way between the city and the island.

The skipper was waiting for him on deck.

'We must move fast now,' he said.

Robert and Changi climbed into the Zodiac. Their wet suits were black, the rubber sides of the boat were black and the engine cover of the Evinrude was black. They would be almost invisible on the black waters.

'Thank you, comrade,' Raleigh said and offered the skipper his hand.

'Amandla!" said the skipper as he gripped it. 'Power!" and Raleigh took his place in the bows of the Zodiac.

The winch clattered and the Zodiac rose swaying, swung out over the side, and then fell swiftly to the surface of the water.

'Start up,' Raleigh instructed, and Robert whipped the starter cord and the engine fired and caught with the first pull.

'Cast off,' Raleigh ordered, and Changi unhooked the line from the boom, while Robert manoeuvred the Zodiac alongside the trawler and tied on to the light line from the rail. He let the engine idle for five minutes to warm it thoroughly and then cut it.

The two vessels lay silently linked together and the minutes passed torturously.

Suddenly the skipper called down. 'I have them in sight." 'Are you certain?" Raleigh cupped his hands around his mouth to reply.

'I've seen that ferry every day of my life." The skipper was leaning over the rail. 'Start your motor and cast off." The Evinrude roared into life and the Zodiac dropped back astern of the trawler. Now Raleigh could make out the ferry. It was coming almost directly towards them, both the green and red navigational lights showed.

The trawler moved forward, a wash of white water churning out from under her stern. She was still completely blacked out, and her speed built up rapidly. The skipper had assured Raleigh that she was capable of fourteen knots. She turned in a wide arc across the black surface and headed straight for the approaching ferry at speed.

Robert ran the Zodiac out to one side, and dropped back slightly, shearing off two hundred feet from the larger vessel.

The ferry held its course. Clearly it hadn't spotted the darkened ship bearing down out of the night. Raleigh stood up in the bows of the Zodiac steadying himself with two turns of the painter around his wrist and he watched the two vessels come together. The ferry was half the length of the steel-hulled trawler and it lay much lower in the water.

At the very last moment somebody on board the ferry shouted and then the bows of the trawler crashed into her, taking her just forward of the beam. Raleigh had warned the skipper not to damage the cabin and risk harming the occupants.

The trawler checked and the bows rose high as she trod the smaller vessel down, and then the ferry rolled over in a flurry of foam and breaking water. The trawler drove over her, broke free of her swamped hull, and went dashing away into the darkness. Within a hundred yards she had disappeared.

'The chains will pull him under,' Raleigh shouted. 'Work quickly!" He fitted his face plate over his mouth and nose.

Robert sent the Zodiac roaring alongside the sinking ferry. She had turned turtle and her bottom was painted with orange antifouling. Her lights were still burning beneath the water and there were three or four swimming warders thrashing around, trying to get a grip on the sides.

Raleigh and Changi, each carrying a short jemmy bar, slid over the side and dived under the trawler's submerged transom.

Raleigh jammed the point of the jemmy into the lock of the cabin door and with a single heave tore it away. The door slid back and a burst of trapped air exploded in silver bubbles around his head.

The cabin was flooded, but the lights were still burning, lighting the interior like a goldfish bowl, and a confusion of bodies, clad in the serge uniform of the prison service, were struggling and kicking and swirling around the cabin. Amongst them Raleigh picked out the khaki cotton drill tunic of a prisoner. He seized a handful of it and pulled Moses Gama clear.

Changi took Moses Gama's other arm and they swam him between them out from under the heaving transom and up to the surface. It had taken less than sixty seconds since the trawler had rammed, and Robert gunned the Zodiac up to them the moment they surfaced. He reached down and caught hold of Moses Gama's arm, the two men in the water heaved from under him and he rolled over the side of the Zodiac on to the floor boards.

Raleigh and Changi seized the loops of rope on the Zodiac's side to pull themselves up and the moment they were on board Robert gunned the Evinrude and they shot away from the foundering vessel.

The splashing and cries of distress faded behind them as Robert turned the Zodiac back towards the shore. The long deserted stretch of Woodstock beach showed as a pale line of sand and surf in the starlight ahead.

Raleigh stripped off his face plate and leaned solicitously over the figure on the deck. He lifted him into a sitting position, and Moses Gama coughed painfully.

'I see you, my uncle,' Raleigh said softly.

'Raleigh?" Moses' voice was rough with the salt water he had swallowed. 'Is it you, Raleigh?" 'We will be ashore in ten minutes, my uncle." Raleigh tucked one of the thermal blankets around Moses' shoulders. 'All the plans for your escape have been carefully laid. Everything's ready for you, my uncle. Soon now you will be where nobody can touch you." Robert ran the rubber inflatable in through the surf at full throttle and they shot up the sand, clear of the water. As they came to a standstill, they lifted Moses Gama out of the Zodiac and ran with him up the beach, carrying him between them so his chained feet barely touched the sand.

There was a small closed van parked amongst the dunes and , Raleigh jerked the rear doors open and they lifted Moses into the back and laid him on the mattress that covered the floorboards.

Changi jumped in beside him and Raleigh slammed the rear doors closed. Robert would take the Zodiac out and sink it.

Raleigh stripped off the jacket of his wet suit. The key to the van was on a loop of nylon line around his neck. He opened the driver's door and slid behind the wheel. The van was facing back along the track. The track joined the road that skirted the industrial area of Paarden Eiland and Raleigh drove sedately along it, towards the black township of Longa.

The official Cape Town residence of the minister of police was one of those clustered around the prime minister's residence at Groote Schuur. The cumbersome physical division of the legislative and excutive arms of government between the cities of Cape Town and Pretoria made for costly duplications. During the annual session of parliament in Cape Town all the ministers and the entire diplomatic corps were forced to move down from Pretoria a thousand miles to the north, and official residences had to be maintained in both cities at enormous expense.

Manfred De La Rey's ministerial residence was an elegant Edwardian mansion set in acres of its own private lawns and gardens.

As RoeIf Stander parked his shabby little secondhand Morris in front of this imposing building, it seemed oddly out of place.

Sarah Stander had been desperately trying to arrange a private 'meeting with Manfred ever since her son had been convicted and sentenced to death. However, Manfred had been in Pretoria, or at his ranch in the Free State or opening a memorial to the women who had died in the British concentration camps during the Boer war, or addressing the National Party caucus, and therefore unable to see her.