Thomas was bored. He was down on his stomach and elbows in a shallow ditch scooped from the side of a dune, his R4 rifle aimed at the border. He was supposed to be watching for terrorists but his eyes were on the only cloud in the sky, a little cotton swab high over the heat and sand of South-West Africa.

‘Hey, bru?’ he said, without looking away from his cloud. ‘Want to smoke a joint?’

‘Shut up, surfer boy. You’re not on Miami Beach.’

Thomas turned and squinted up to the lip of the dune. There, silhouetted against the sun like the periscope of some buried U-Boat, was the head, shoulders and rifle of one Pieter ‘Skeletor’ Venter. He was in the same nutria-brown uniform as Thomas and topped with the same standard-issue bush hat, but his uniform was free of creases and all the floppiness had been starched from his hat.

‘You sure?’ Thomas had been brought up to be polite. ‘It’s Durban Poison.’

Skeletor said nothing. He was obviously too busy looking for something to kill.

Rolling onto his right side, Thomas reached into his webbing. He produced a soft-cover NG Kerk Bible that he thumbed open to a random page, bent back against the spine to keep from closing and wedged under his thigh so that half of it stuck out. He dug in the pouch on his waist, the one that should have held spare ammo, and pulled out a bundle of newspaper that he unfolded and shook as though it were a spice bottle. A line of Durban’s finest poison settled in the spine of the Bible. Gently, Thomas coaxed the heads to form an orderly queue on the far side of the left-hand page. The stalks he brushed away. He rolled the page into a tight cone and tore it from the book. With a lick of the translucent paper, his work was done and he popped the joint into his mouth. The whole time, his right hand never strayed from his rifle.