Evolution of Fear Read Online Free PDF Page A

pouring. ‘Maybe you can just wait her out.’
    ‘You’re not listening, Koevoet.’
    ‘She’ll be dead in six months, by all accounts. Some degenerative liver disease. One failed transplant after another. She’s now convinced that the only thing that can save her is this lost icon thing she’s searching for.’
    ‘Icon?’ he said.
    ‘The Patmos Illumination, some twelfth-century Eastern Orthodox trinket. They say it was carved out of wood from the cross.’
    ‘Which cross?’
    ‘ The cross, for fok ’s sake, Straker. They say Christ’s blood soaked in, that you can still see the hole where they drove in the spike for his hand.’
    ‘Koevoet…’
    ‘They say it has the power to heal. You know, make the blind see, all that kak, ja .’
    ‘Koevoet.’
    ‘They say that it vanished, years ago. Wonder if it could help me.’
    ‘God damn it, Koevoet.’
    ‘Never been the same since I took that FAPLA bullet.’
    ‘I don’t have six months, Koevoet. I’m leaving. With your help or without it.’
    ‘Okay, seun . Go back to the cottage. Now. Stay put a while longer.’
    ‘I’ve got to get off this island, Koevoet. The weather’s killing me.’
    Crowbar laughed, the rasp of his cigarette lungs. ‘Look, Straker, it’ll take a while to organise, a week maybe.’
    ‘A week? No way, broer .’
    ‘For fok ’s sake, Straker,’ growled Crowbar through the line. ‘For once in your life can you just do what you’re told?’
    He had trusted this man with his life so many times. Never had he known anyone cooler under pressure. Clay could see him there now, R4 gripped in one burly hand, massive golden-haired forearms bare in the Ovamboland sun, those blue eyes shining their battle light through the dust and the smoke, striding along the line as if he were on manoeuvres, the rest of them all scared shitless, staring up at him from the bottom of their holes, the metal ripping through the air all around like arcing electricity, him urging them up – return fire lads, steady now – like some old-time Regimental Sergeant Major. If you hadn’t seen it you would never have believed it, understood what courage that took, to expose yourself to that horrible mutilating reality, to see other men fall with shattered limbs and holed, jellied skulls, to will yourself into that cathedral of horrors. And Koevoet had done it repeatedly, routinely, until the men in the platoon came to look upon him as invulnerable, a talisman of sorts, immortal even, as others more careful were killed and maimed all around him.
    ‘Look, oom , I’m serious.’ Clay let the Afrikaans word of respect sink in. Uncle. ‘If they’re after me, they’re after Rania, too. I need to ontrek .’
    ‘Okay, Straker. Two days. Just get back to the safe house. Sit tight, ja . I’ll set it up.’
    ‘Air?’
    ‘No way, broer . You wouldn’t get past check-in. The airports are still being watched.’
    ‘How then?’
    ‘I’ll come down to get you. Tell you then.’
    ‘I’ll set another place for dinner. We can discuss Shakespeare.’
    Koevoet grunted. ‘How you liking the place?’
    In truth, the solitude of the little cottage had done Clay good. He missed Rania more intensely than he had ever thought possible, none of his defences, the thousand mile deserts, the numb Atlantics of disavowal, the sheer fucking hate , able to resist her. And after a while he’d stopped trying to fight it, started to live with it, this thing lodged inside him like some exquisitely jagged trajectile. Thus armed, each day without her became a second chance. He started drinking less, suffering at first, pushing through. He took long walks along the coast, avoiding towns and villages, covering twenty or thirty miles a day over chevron bluffs and shingle beaches, watching the gulls whirling in the breeze, the sun strobing through shot-holed cumulus onto a sheet-metal sea, getting strong again, daring to think about the future. Evenings he pushed makeshift weights, did