The pavement narrowed, its width cut by high wooden boards, filled with advertising, that masked a building site.

They were jostled by Whites and Blacks alike hurrying against their flow.

The one with his hands clenched went first, a ram against the tide. He was followed by the one who held in his overcoat pocket a Makharov automatic pistol. Next was the one whose fingers were coiled round the smooth metal of an R.G.-42 fragmentation grenade. Last was the one with the duffel bag. They were past the building site, and the pavement opened out and in front of them were the tended lawns and the mock Gothic mass of the Rand Supreme Court.

They had all stopped. One thing to walk past the court when they were clean, carried nothing. Different now because three of them were the escort and the fourth carried a duffel bag that held a 5-litre can of petrol that was strapped with adhesive tape to nine sticks of explosive each weighing 250 grammes, and taped to the can and wired to the explosive was a battery for the electrical timing device manufactured to provide a 30 second fuse. They all waited on one of the others to take a step forward.

The courthouse was an attractive building, wide steps and a dominating portico, entered through double doors. The front part of the building housed the court rooms. Behind and towering was the eight storey administration block, the work place for the clerks and their records. Two years earlier comrades of these four young Blacks had smuggled a limpet mine into the administration. It had been defused before it exploded, but it remained something of a symbol. Not enough of a symbol for the men who had sent this cadre back for a second attack. Inside the courthouse the sentences were handed down on the comrades, on the captured cadres, in the broken cells. One year's imprisonment for playing a audio tape distributed by the African National Congress.