Epilogue.
Dan and his friends walked that day and avoided the kill house which had cost a traitor’s torment and life to find out about. They walked even more afterwards, until one dawn, when they were forced to conceal themselves at a T-junction where a minor provincial road and a farm road met. Dan was uncomfortable, but there was no other place to hide. He slept like shit, waking up from time to time, while his ragged companions slept like the dead. It was in one of those moments that he heard an approaching diesel pickup truck approach from the farm, and saw its lights a few hundred meters away, coming closer. Without saying anything, he got up, kneeled behind the bush, his R4 with a 500ml soft drink bottle stuffed with half a T-shirt and taped to the muzzle as a makeshift suppressor. As soon as the pickup came to the intersection, Dan aimed his rifle at the driver’s side, stood up and shouted “Halt! Get the fuck out of the car now, now, NOW!” His friends woke up instantly and went for their weapons. The driver panicked and tried to turn left, hitting the gas big time. Dan let him begin to make the turn, then fired a three round burst through the open window, hitting the elderly black man in the right shoulder, neck and jaw. The vehicle kept turning left but it seemed the driver’s foot had slipped off the pedal and ran into the small berm which flanked both sides of the farm road’s entrance, then stalled and stopped. Keeping his rifle on the driver, Dan moved forward to the driver’s door and fired two security shots in the black man’s head from 2 meters away. He turned to his companions and shouted “Grab your shit and get in! Let’s get the fuck out of here!” They grabbed the packs, including his, and everybody piled in the double cab Ford bakkie, not even sparing a glance for the dead guy on the ground.
Blood or no fucking blood, Dan didn’t care. He put the car in neutral, hit the clutch and turned the key. The pickup started immediately and Dan headed for the border. He saw the tank was three quarters full and knew they were 300 or 350 kilometers from Namibia. They were going to make it. Thinking back, he said softly “Finally, there’s a black victim of a farm murder…” and put his foot down. He hit 120, then 140 km/h and kept going. They blew through little towns where blacks looked at them, but nobody did anything. He thought that was weird, but as he’d often said “I’m not about to play proctologist with the gift horse” and drove on. Neither Dan nor his friends knew it then, but the NATO fleets had done their work and white South Africans were crossing the Namibian border under air cover and with support from logistics guys who brought in fuel bladders and electrical pumps hooked to generators. Four hours later, they were in the desert about 25 kilometers south of the Nakop border post and crossed into Namibia. About 30 minutes after that, they began to see lights in the distance and stopped. Dan made everybody dump their military weapons and camouflage jackets, then the four stinkers moved to join the long stream of cars. It took hours more, but in the end they reached the outskirts of Windhoek, having stopped once to refuel by the roadside. Once they got to the refugee camp, Dan unloaded his passengers, wished them well and said he was going to the American embassy to ask for asylum, because he had relatives in America who would vouch for him. It was a half-lie. He went to the Romanian embassy instead, where he showed them his expired passport and ID along with birth certificate. Together with his fluent Romanian and a phone call to relatives back home, it was enough to convince the embassy staff to issue him with a diplomatic passport for a one-way trip to Romania.
As agreed by the powers that be, the refugees were shared equally between all the countries which had helped thus far. Families were kept together, but they were not told where they’d be going until the plane took off or cargo ship left the harbor, so as not to encourage attempts to bribe guards and bureaucrats. The refugee lists were kept highly classified and the guards who called out the names had no idea where their charges would be going beyond the bus they were to embark. Some of them, over 15.000, ended up in Romania. Dan spoke fluent English and Romanian along with a pretty good smattering of Afrikaans, and when the ministry of education started language programs, he joined up as a teacher and gave private lessons in his spare time. The South Africans who dealt with him considered themselves lucky. He understood them, was patient and had all sorts of useful tips to survive as an immigrant. Over the years, he got to know quite a lot of his clients and their families. One of them, a red-headed half Scottish, half Afrikaner single mother whose husband died trying to save his family’s lives in South Africa, grew particularly fond of him and eventually he invited her and the kids to move into the apartment he’d inherited from his mother.
They never married and Daniel always told her he loved her, but while he was fond of Jolene Erasmus in his detached way, he never felt anything deeper than that. All that he’d been through, all that he was, had killed any capacity for emotion and every smile was a well calculated lie for her benefit. His priority was preparing her two boys for the future, and he dedicated himself to that task with a vengeance. The now-teenaged guys always had an interesting lecture over beers or “brandewyn en Coke” (brandy and Coke in English) in the evening, and a ton of books on military history, philosophy, tactics and strategy among many other subjects. They were going to be tough. More than that, they were going to be smart and ruthless strategic planners, fearsome war machines hidden beneath a veneer of civilization that would never be at anybody’s mercy again. At least once a month, Daniel would wake up his ersatz family and drag them off to Bucharest’s Gara de Nord (Northern Train Station, kind of like the Parisian Gare du Nord) for a trip to Brasov, Sinaia or Busteni in the Carpathian Mountains. There they’d climb on foot and Dan was known as a terrible taskmaster who tolerated no weakness. They all got tough and used to tramping the wild, more civilized than the hell he’d been through in South Africa to be sure, but still nothing to sneeze at.
A week before his 55th birthday, he bought a bottle of Bushmills, then two days before his birthday, while his “wife” was unsuccessfully (to his trained eyes) trying to hide a surprise party, Dan woke up at 4 AM, grabbed the backpack he habitually carried and left while everybody else was sleeping. He made his way to the bus station, where he woke up a cab driver whom he told to take him to Gara de Nord. They got there in half an hour, and Dan waited for the ticket booths to open. He bought a return ticket for Busteni, then climbed on the train when it pulled into the terminal and settled down for a nap. He woke up in Busteni a couple of hours later, where he left the train station and headed for a pizzeria. There he bought a big one with all the trimmings, which he had the still groggy cashier slice properly, then left. Outside, he pulled out a plastic container and placed the still-hot slices in there, one on top of the other, then made his way to the outskirts of town, heading for Pasul Cerbului, the Deer’s Pass. It was no longer in use. Even after 40 years, the government hadn’t come around to repairing the dangerous cliff-side path, so nobody went that way except suicidal mountain goats.
He climbed for a while then found a good vantage point off the track, where he sat down, pulled out the pizza and ate it all. He then cracked open the bottle of Bushmills, poured two fingers’ worth in one glass, and some Coke in another. Dan took a sip of his favorite whiskey, felt it burn and let it go down his throat. He then sipped some Coke to wash off the taste. Another sip of the whiskey, followed by a sip of the Coke, and repeat. He did that until he finished three quarters of the bottle. Dan closed the bottle, put it and the glasses back in his pack, and now thoroughly plastered, took out a very sharp camping knife. He held it in his left hand, looked at the scars on the back of that palm and others up to just above the elbow, inside of his arm, and decided that one had had enough. With a look of dull concentration and no regrets, he put the tip three inches above the outside of the back of his right wrist, pushed in and dragged down, then settled back to watch the scenery. Within ten minutes, he got cold, his heart began to beat frantically, a need to run kicked in. For the second time in 31 years, Dan sat still and got his fear under iron control, looking ahead. Eventually, he was looking at a body from above and knew it was his. He felt an upwards pull, looked up and rose without looking back. Dan was exactly 55 years old when he died, just like he’d promised once. Hey, a promise is a promise. A week later, some lost British hikers found his body, but his soul was at peace, a peace he hadn’t known in the 41 years since he’d climbed on the only plane to take off on a cold and foggy November’s day, ultimately destined for South Africa. When they found out, those he’d left behind lit candles in the window, thinking back to what he told them more than once: “The darkness in a man’s soul keeps the candle makers in business.”
The End.
Author’s note:
The Omega Exodus series is a work of fiction. It is partly based on real events, people and places in order to give it a grounding in reality, but with the exception of James Mattis, Jacob Zuma, Julius Malema, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa, the characters and events are figments of my imagination based on calculations of the past, present and future of South Africa and its people. There’s no South African group called the Exodus Consortium, or lieutenant-colonel Armand van Reenen. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no general van As, Henk van Jaarsveld or Johan “Arsonist” Aarsen either. Likewise, Daniel Iancu and his friends don’t exist, not really. Not so dear SANDF Military Intelligence, SAPS Crime Intelligence and South African State Security Agency- don’t bother to waste taxpayers’ money trying to find them- you have been warned, it will be a waste of time because THESE PEOPLE DO NOT EXIST. This is pretty much how I see South Africa’s future, although I see the killing happening faster and help arriving slower, if ever. The vast majority of those with whom I’ve spoken are in denial though, and Daniel Iancu’s friends who were murdered in their own home are just two of the fictionalized real people who live in denial now so they can die in reality later, at least in my opinion. Dear reader, I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, but now it’s time for me to hit a half-jack of brandy and put scenes of death and destruction far worse than you’ve read out of my mind.
Best wishes,
Mircea “Mitch” Negres
Port Elizabeth
South Africa
Leave a Reply