Koos Smit

Beach Front Boy

Chapter 13-16

Chapter Thirteen

We had been in Richards Bay for a few days when Andre, the wealthy Durban boylover who wanted to sponsor Skobbejak boys in return for certain favours, came to speak to the boys of Skobbejak's permanent crew about his proposal. These boys were really the main stakeholders in Skobbejak, the ship being both their permanent home and their livelihood. The paying students were excluded (even those whose parents had asked that they be treated as part of the crew such as Jul, Stefan and Ian). Derek and Rikus were also excluded, since they were with us effectively under penal servitude, having been sent to us by the juvenile criminal justice system.

Not long after buying Skobbejak I had placed the ship into a trust, together with those of my investments that were not already earmarked for my son, Dirk, and my adopted son, Joshua. All the boys who were permanent members of the Skobbejak family, including Dirk and Joshua, were beneficiaries of the Skobbejak trust. I hoped in this way to provide for the virtual orphans who had come into my care once I was no longer around to take care of them. Because of this I treated them effectively as shareholders in the ship and its business operations and let them participate by vote in all major decisions affecting these operations.

I had explained this to Andre and I had also explained that the vote had to be unanimous. Because of this he had put a lot of effort into his presentation. The boys, however, were not easily persuaded.

"So tell me," Dirk had asked, "What are we gonna get out of it? Why would we organise fuck cruises and let you and your mates fuck any of us that you want just because you paid the fees for Derek and Rikus?"

"Well, first of all," Andre had answered, "It will not be just Derek and Rikus… the idea is that after this trip we will take and pay for all the berths that the students are occupying now… we'll pay for them in full even if we don't use them! We will source boys that we'll place in those berths for a while until they are ready to move on."

"I thought they would be with us permanently?" I interjected.

"Yes, that was my thinking before, but now I'm thinking we should make the experience available to many more boys. So the idea is that they will be with you for just a short while, say a month in and around Durban while you train them up and then end with a trip to Maputo where you deliver them to my beach villa on Inhaca Island."

"And what will they do there?" I asked.

"Well, they would stay at the beach villa learning some hospitality skills for about six months and then we will have opportunities for them to go into hospitality with various establishments overseas."

'Sounds like a wonderful opportunity for disadvantaged boys!" I said.

"Sure," said Andre, "Maybe you could send some of your own boys there?"

"Perhaps," I replied, "We can certainly look at it."

"Fair enough, but," Johan persisted, "You didn't paid nothing yet… and Derek and Rikus is already covered by the fees of the boys that buggered off."

"Well, that is true…." Andre replied, "But yesterday I transferred the money to cover their fees for the next six months into your bank account, so that the fees forfeited by the other two boys will be pure profit."

The boys looked at me for confirmation.

"Yes, that's true," I said, "The money was paid."

The boys were silent for a while as they digested this information. Finally they said they would think about it and let Andre know their decision once they had made it.

Clearly exasperated at this further delay to finalising his plans, Andre looked at me for help.

"Jonathan?" he queried, "You're in charge here… Can't you get this thing moving?"

I shrugged my shoulders:

"That's not the way we operate, Andre," I said. 'You will just have to be patient!"

"Okay," he replied grudgingly, "But just remember I have made a payment in good faith. If we don't conclude a deal that money comes back!"

"Of course," I said, "Don't worry about it!"

Andre then repeated the offer that he had made me before we left Durban to spend some time at his Inhaca Island beach villa when we reached Maputo. He suggested that the boys give him their final answer then and they agreed to do that.

Before he left he took me aside and asked if I would be prepared to do a short run to the Limpopo River mouth while we were at Inhaca. He wanted us to pick up some cargo and bring it back to Inhaca.

"It's only about 120 sea miles there and back… it's an overnight trip… you'll only need a skeleton crew ," he said, "And of course I'll pay you handsomely!"

"Isn't that in the war zone?" I asked.

"Well, it's in rebel hands, but there's a truce on at the moment and I do a bit of trade there."

"What's the cargo?' I asked.

"That's a bit need-to-know at the moment, but I'll talk to you about it when you get to Inhaca," he said vaguely.

"Then I'll let you know when I know more about it," I replied.

"Okay, fair enough!" he said

Then, a couple of days later, as we were making last minute preparations to leave Richards Bay harbour the next day, Andre arrived with three boys in tow, waving a bank deposit slip that showed he had paid their fees for berths on Skobbejak for six months forward.

"But Andre!" I said, exasperated, "You can't just arrive and drop off three more boys and expect me to take them! Apart from the fact that we're actually full up, what about passports and paperwork? I have already handed in our crew manifest to the port authorities. I've been cleared by customs already, for crying out aloud!"

"I'm sorry Jonathan, but these boys only became available at the last minute and I thought you would welcome the income!" he replied.

'Extra money is always welcome," I said, "but there are procedures and legal requirements! Not to mention I don't have food for them… or beds for that matter!"

"Extra food we can organise very quickly… as for berths, they can sleep anywhere. From what I know of your boys half of them are sharing beds with the other half anyway, so there should be plenty of beds available!" he chuckled.

"What about the paperwork?"

"This is sleepy Richards Bay," Andre smiled, "No-one's going to come check who you have or don't have on board. Don't say anything to the authorities and when I meet up with you at Inhaca I will have organised passports for them."

I shook my head as I stared at Andre in silence for a while. Then I looked over the three boys. Blonde, blue-eyed and well-muscled: they were clearly brothers very close in age - I guessed somewhere between 12 and 14. They were dressed exactly alike in faded blue too-small rugby shorts and well-worn once-green school gym vests. Their broad, high arched feet looked like they had never felt the inside of a pair of shoes, and the kids had that deeply tanned, feral look of boys who spent most of their lives engaged in strenuous physical activity outdoors. My guess was that they were farm boys. One by one their deep blue eyes caught mine and their broad, handsome faces lit up with an engaging smile. I smiled back. They were like puppies at a rescue centre, but I hardened my heart.

"Andre, I just can't do this.' I said eventually. 'It's not the way I operate and I think it's actually helluva presumptuous of you to expect me to put my boat and our livelihood at risk in this way"

"I understand," said Andre, "You have every right to be pissed off about this but… this really came up suddenly and… look, can we go discuss this in private?"

"Sure, we can go to the wheelhouse," I offered.

Andre turned to the three boys:

"Bly net hier solank, bulle," he told them, "Ek wil net gou met die oom gaan gesels. (Just stay here for a while boys, I just want to have a quick word with the uncle)."

"Ja Oom Andre (yes Uncle Andre)' they replied and we left them standing at the rail with their threadbare backpacks on the deck at their feet.

In the wheelhouse Andre told me that the boys were related to him. They were the sons of a distant cousin who had owned a farm in the Empangeni area on which he had struggled for years to make a living from sugar cane. The cousin had himself been born and raised on the farm, which he had inherited on his father's death. Unfortunately, he had also inherited a crippling debt to the Landbank for an accumulation of production loans taken out by his father over the years. The cousin had battled to both service the debt and put food on the family table. Things got worse when the boys' mother succumbed to a deadly strain of cerebral malaria. Recently a catastrophic crop failure owing to a pest infestation had dropped the bottom out of the family's world and a month before the cousin had died in a bizarre shooting accident. The boys were the beneficiaries of a massive insurance policy that the cousin had taken out about a month before his death, but the insurers had declined to pay because they believed the cousin had committed suicide. The boys were left destitute on the farm which was being sold in execution. A neighbour had tracked down the boys' only living relative, Andre, and he had fetched them from the farm. His lifestyle was not geared to looking after children and he had no alternative but to surrender them to the tender mercies of the State's childcare system or place them in a boarding school or something like that. He felt that Skobbejak would be the best solution and he begged me to take the boys into my care.

"After all, we're going to be in business together and they're family, for goodness sake!" he pleaded, "I really need you to help me out here, Jonathan, please man, I'd do the same for you!" he pleaded.

Well, what could I do but agree? And so it was that Heinke (13), Wikus (12) and Marnus (11) joined our band of brothers aboard the good ship Skobbejak.

Andre's parting shot to me was:

"Oh, by the way, two things: One; the boys basically speak only Afrikaans. They know very little English. I know that won't be a problem for any of you but the second thing could be a problem: The boys won't let anyone touch them. Anywhere within the tan lines is absolutely taboo apparently… I think they've had a very puritan upbringing. They probably think any sex is a sin… let alone sex between boys and men. Which is actually quite surprising, because when I spent holidays on the farm with their dad growing up, he and his dad, the boys' grandfather, were the ones who taught me about man sex! I thought they might have taken after their dad and their granddad but, believe me, I've just spent a very frustrating few days with them! No doubt they'll tell you what a pervert their uncle is!"

"Thanks for the heads-up' I said, "We'll take it slow… but in my experience there's a slut inside every boy and most of them pop out once they have tasted of the sins of the flesh!"

"Well, good luck to you… I didn't get anywhere near their flesh, never mind the sins. With the hullabaloo they raised I thought we'd get thrown out of the hotel!" he replied.

"The trick is you must put the cream out for them and leave it to them to decide when they want to lap it up," I said, "You can't force the pace."

"I don't have time for that," he replied, "Luckily you do have a few days. You've got to turn them into sluts by the time you get to Inhaca!"

"That's in only about three or four days, depending on the wind!" I said, "Not much time if your nephews are as prudish as you say they are!" I said.

"You managed to get Rikus enthusiastic about it in just a day!" he replied, "He was a virgin before that."

"Rikus was different. Yes, he was a virgin, but he was pretty interested to start with!" I replied.

"Well, you must do whatever it takes!" Andre said, rather more intensely than I thought the circumstances required, "I've got plans for those boys and I need them to be fucking like rabbits and loving it by the time you get to Inhaca. I don't care if you have to line up the whole crew to gang-bang them all day!"

I gave Andre a searching look.

"What on earth is the hurry?" I asked, "You'll have much more fulfilling sex with them if they are introduced to it in a loving and caring way."

"Yes of course… but that's not… uh… Oh never mind," he said, "I'll explain when you get to Inhaca."

I watched Andre saying goodbye to his nephews at the rail. Each of the boys hugged their uncle dutifully before he left, but I noticed that it was perfunctory and without much enthusiasm. I guessed they were grateful that he had rescued them from destitution but it was obvious there was no affection there.

I sent for Johan and then called the boys over. I introduced them to Johan and then said, in Afrikaans:

"Johan, these boys are joining us as crew members today. I want them split up so that there is one in each watch. Take them below and get them settled in. I know there aren't any spare berths but you will just have to run a "hot bunk" system for them"

"What's a hot bunk system, Uncle Jonathan?' Johan asked.

"You know, like on the submarines? Remember the French submarine I took you to when they visited Durban?"

"Oh, right!" he remembered, "Where the oke (guy) going off watch gets into the bed of the oke going on watch?"

"Exactly!" I replied.

"Also…' I added, "Get them kitted out with Skobbejak uniform from the clothing store. We weren't expecting them so I hope we have enough."

"Why not just give 'em sarongs like we're all wearing, Uncle Jonathan?' said Johan, "We won't be going ashore now so they won't need shorts and T-shirts again until we get back to Durban in six months' time. From here on its sarongs or kaalgat (naked) for 6 months!"

"Yes, that makes sense, Johan, I knew there was a reason I made you chief mate!"

Johan smiled and led the boys below. An hour later they emerged on deck, a little self-conscious, wearing just the colourful short, nearly see-through sarongs that the Skobbejak crew wore whenever a measure of modesty was required.

"Those okies are bit moeilik (difficult) Uncle Jonathan!" Johan laughed, his arms draped around their shoulders, "They said they not girls… they not gonna wear skirts! I told 'em we all wear sarongs, even the captain. They said we must all be girls then!"

"But I see they're wearing them now," I noted.

"Yes, Uncle Jonathan," he said, cuffing Heinke playfully against the side of his head, "I saw it was this big bulletjie (bull calf) that was leading them on, so I challenged him to fight. Of course I moered (beat) him… now he's mak (tame) and he knows who's boss! Not so, Heinke?"

I saw that Heinke sported a few reddish bruises, now turning purple, on his well-muscled upper body, a purpling eye and a cracked and swollen lip that someone… probably Johan… had already dabbed mercurochrome on.

Heinke smiled sheepishly and looked worshipfully at his new hero. Like all highly physical boys he admired strength, toughness and physical power and never resented having to submit to a stronger rival. That did not mean that he would not occasionally test his strength against that rival and challenge his domination from time to time, but for now he recognised that Johan was his master. Of course, once the leader of the pack was subdued the other boys meekly followed suit. They had the same spirit as their elder brother though, and as they grew bigger and stronger, they too would challenge others for domination. For now, though, their pack had a new leader… Johan… and they would follow him to the death.

I listened as Johan went carefully through the safety briefing with them and then outlined the most important shipboard rules.

"Discipline is very simple on this boat," I heard him say, "You break the rules… you get a whipping! We don't do time-outs, we don't make you write out lines, we don't take away your privileges, we don't ground you or send you to your room. Remember that glass case I showed you in the crew's quarters with The Snake and the strap and the cane?"

The boys nodded.

"That's what you'll get… on your bare arse or your bare back or both! Understand?"

"We used to that," the youngest, Marnus, growled in a husky voice, "Our pa used to whip us kaalgat (naked) with a leather milking strop in the cow shed."

He teared up as he remembered this, rubbing at his eyes with the leathery palm of his hand as if rubbing an itch.

Heinke put an arm round Marnus' neck and pulled him closer to comfort him.

"It's okay Marnus," he said gently as he stroked the boy's untidy yellow thatch with his other hand.

"But Heinie, what we gonna do without Pa?" Marnus sniffled, "He's never gonna whip us in that cowshed again! And we never gonna…"

"Okay, shush now, Marnus," Heinke interjected hurriedly, "You musn't speak of the cowshed again… remember what Pa said about not washing your underpants in public!"

"Well, anyway," Johan interjected, embarrassed by the emotion and trying to distract the brothers, "Let's talk about the other rules!"

When he got to Skobbejak's sex rules the boys listened intently and seemed completely unfazed to hear that boys were allowed to have sex with each other without restriction at any time other than when on watch.

"Do you guys wank?" he asked them.

Wikus and Marnus smiled and blushed, nodding shyly. Heinke just looked embarrassed.

"Do you suck cock?" he asked.

The two younger boys blushed even more, but they nodded again. Heinke blushed furiously and glared at his toes.

"Do you fuck arse?' Johan asked with a chuckle.

Wikus and Marnus giggled and elbowed each other conspiratorially.

"He does it to us," Wikus eventually said with a giggle, pointing to Heinke, "But he won't let us do it to him!"

Heinke scowled at his younger brothers.

"Fok my, julle kan strond praat as julle wil! (Fuck me, you can talk shit when you want to!)," he snarled.

The two younger brothers looked at each awkwardly, as if realising that they had overstepped a mark.

"Jammer Heinie! (Sorry Heinie!)' they said to him in a placatory tone.

Their interchange seemed completely at odds with what their uncle, Andre, had told me. It was obvious that, whatever their inhibitions might have been about sharing their bodies with Andre, they had no such inhibitions about having sex with each other.

Then, when Johan mentioned the rule that required any Skobbejak boy to have sex with any other Skobbejak boy if asked, unless they were 'boyfriends," Heinke immediately put his hand up.

"Sorry, Johan, we don't do that," he said firmly.

Johan looked at him in surprise.

"Rules is rules, Heinke, you can't have your own rules!"

Heinke said nothing in return, but the set of his jaw and the tightness of his lips told me that there would be a clash of wills over this yet.

After the briefing Johan handed the boys over to their respective watch leaders, who introduced them to the boys of their watch and allocated each one to a 'buddy' who would be his mentor.

When they had left I put my arm around Johan's shoulders as we leaned on the rail.

"Listen Johan, just take it a little bit easy on them, okay, they just lost their dad and the farm they grew up on and this will all be a little strange for them' I said.

"No problem, Uncle Jonathan, I understand," he replied.

"And let's give them some space with the sex on demand rule for a while, okay? I want them to open up because they want to, not because they are made to."

"Okay, Uncle Jonathan," he smiled, "No problem"

I kissed him on the forehead.

"Love you lots!" I said.

"Love you too, Uncle Jonathan!" he replied.

We spent the night in harbour and left the following morning just before sun-up.

Joshua was on the helm and Johan and I stood behind him, leaning against the chart table as we motored up the channel leading to the open sea. All watches were on deck ready to hoist sail once we were out in the bay. In the meantime they stood lining the rail on either side, facing outward, not at attention, but standing still with their hands by their sides. I had instituted this drill, not for appearances, but to ensure that the boys were alert and ready to receive and carry out their orders. If they were milling about the deck, chatting and laughing as they would normally naturally do, they could become distracted and fail to react promptly to orders, always a danger at sea.

Johan pointed out young Marnus nearby, standing next to Erik and looking sideways at the older boy with hero worship in his eyes.

"There's Erik's latest fan," he chuckled, "Didn't take Marnus long to forget he wasn't supposed to have sex with other boys. He spent half the night with Erik when they were off watch. Erik told me Marnus is a great fuck!"

"You see, that is why I split them up.' I said, "So they are not under each other's influence. If they're going to be with us any length of time we can't afford to have groups and cliques pulling against each other. It disrupts the team spirit. There is only one team on this boat and that's all of us."

"Well, I can tell you Wikus has also decided to spread his wings," said Joshua, "When we went off watch together last night he asked if it's true that boys can ask anyone to have sex with them and they have to do it. When I said "yes", he said "then can I ask you to have sex with me?""

Johan and I laughed.

"So I take it you complied?" I asked.

"Of course!" Joshua replied, "Have you seen that kid's bod? Who wouldn't?"

Johan nodded

"Those kids are fucken sexy! Don't know what Heinke's problem is though! He was the only one on his own last night! Dunno when last I saw that on this boat. Can't wait to slip my pole inside that arse!"

"Just remember what I said," I cautioned Johan.

"Ja, I know… I'm gonna give him a few days like you said… but after that…," he left the sentence unfinished.

"An' I know he wants it!" Johan added, "I can see he's always checking out my bod and his eyes got that hungry look. An' I never seen anyone before who's got such a big fucken "hout" (boner) so much of the time. He must be desperate to shoot his wad an' I wanna help him with that!"

"That's my Johan!" I laughed, "Pure altruistic notions"

"Al true what?" Johan asked.

"Means you just want what's best for Heinke!" I replied.

"Fuck that!" said Johan, "I want what's best for me… an' I hope he enjoys the ride!"

Soon we were out in the bay. In anticipation of the heavy physical work to come the boys had all yanked off their skimpy sarongs and knotted them around their necks like scarves. As we turned onto a heading north-north-east Johan stepped out of the wheelhouse to direct the organised chaos of hoisting our two big fore-and-aft gaff-rigged sails and the three foresails.

Lines of naked boys heaved rhythmically on thick ropes like tug-o-war teams, hard bare feet thudded on wooden decking and muscles bunched and rippled under sun-browned skin as they wrestled the canvas aloft. Quickly and efficiently the job was done and Skobbejak leapt joyfully forward as the sails filled to the correct trim. A few minutes later I ordered the engine cut. As the big diesel shuddered into silence we were suddenly one with the wind and the sea and the joy of it filled our hearts.

At once a line of sweating boys, chests still heaving from their exertions, formed at the seawater deck shower on the foredeck to cool themselves down in the prickly Natal Coast heat and humidity.

The three brothers were easy to pick out in the line as they stood one behind the other. Although they were deeply tanned on the rest of their bodies, all three were startling white around their middle where they normally wore shorts. They were obviously not used to going about completely naked and they seemed a little self-conscious about their lily white middles, especially since several of the other boys were good-naturedly ribbing them about it.

One of the ribbers was the gentle giant, Stefan, the brawny amateur MMA fighter and young muscle god. Heinke took offence at the ribbing and took a swing at Stefan. Stefan responded and immediately the two boys were embroiled in an all-out fist-slugging fight. Johan and Dirk sprang in and separated them, hosed them down with cold seawater, and sent them to opposite ends of the ship to cool down.

Half an hour later the two miscreants were brought before me to account for their behaviour.

"He was mocking me and my brothers. No one mocks us and gets away with it, so I slugged him!" Heinke said unapologetically.

"I was just joking with him, Uncle Jonathan. He had no right to hit me for that. I was just defending myself," Stefan said indignantly.

"The rule is no fighting!" I said, "Heinke, you had no call to hit Stefan just because he was teasing you."

"Exactly!" said Stefan, vindicated.

"And you, Stefan, you were wrong to hit back!" I said, "You should have just reported Heinke for hitting you… then Heinke would have been the only one standing before me now!"

"Sorry, Uncle Jonathan," Stefan said, "But you know I can't do that. I fight my own battles."

"That's cool, Stefan, I respect that," I said, "but you know there's a consequence, don't you."

"Yes, Uncle Jonathan, I'm ready!" said Stefan.

"As for you, Heinke," I said, "I know you've had a lot of problems and bad things happen to you and your family, and I know you have a lot of anger inside you because of that, but you have to find a way to let the anger go! Otherwise it's going to destroy you!"

"I don't want any pity or mercy because of what's happened to me!" Heinke said angrily, "I know I broke your stupid rules and I'm ready to take my straf (punishment) for that!"

"Well, I respect that too, my boy, and I'm glad you're ready, because I certainly wasn't planning to let you off. All I'm saying is that you're going to be a very unhappy young boy until you find a way to let go your anger."

At Johan's bidding, Ben had already scurried off to fetch The Snake from its glass case in the crew's quarters and he arrived, almost breathless with excitement and anticipation as he handed the dreaded implement to his brother.

Johan held the black braided leather whip coiled in his hand and looked at me enquiringly.

"Ten lashes each!" I said.

Johan pointed to the main mast and Stefan moved to take up the customary position for whipping, hugging the mast with both arms wrapped around it, hands clasped on the far side. Honour had evolved a custom on Skobbejak that the boys were not tied to the mast. It would have been the height of shame for any of them to twist or shy away or in any way try to avoid their whippings.

Just before he got there, Tiaan stepped up the mast in his place.

"I'll take one for Stefan!" he called out.

I was not at all surprised. This happened occasionally when the boys' sense of fairness and solidarity moved them to share a friend's pain. I was always both moved and pleased when it happened. I never discouraged it because I believed it was evidence of a spirit of comradeship that was capable of carrying the boys through nearly any hardship.

The Snake fluted through the air and bit into the knotted muscles of Tiaan's back with a report like a pistol shot. He grunted with pain as a fiery red weal appeared instantly across his back.

As Tiaan stepped away, Johan handed him the whip and took Tiaan's place. Tiaan swept the lash up and sideways and brought it down to crack against Johan's back.

One by one every crew member took a lash for Stefan. Even Wikus and Marnus, caught up in the spirit of things, took a sizzling stroke across their muscled brown backs for Stefan. Finally, Stefan took one himself. This meant, of course, that more lashes were delivered than were ordered, but no one minded.

Then it was Heinke's turn to be whipped.

Heinke stepped up to the mast knowing that he was an outsider and that no one but his brothers, possibly, were going to put themselves out for him. His eyes brimmed with tears, not from fear of the whipping, for he was genuinely fearless, but from a deep feeling of loneliness, anger and despair at the unfairness of it all.

"Fuck them all!" he thought as he palmed his eyes dry, "I'll take all ten myself and I'm not going to give them the satisfaction of crying!"

Just as he was about wrap his arms around the mast, Stefan stepped up and gently eased him aside, moving into Heinke's place himself and wrapping his arms around the mast.

"I'll take one for Heinke!" he called out.

Johan nodded, dabbing at his own eyes as if a piece of grit had gotten in there.

Once again The Snake darted through the air and left a second fiery trail across Stefan's brawny back.

Next up was Tiaan and then Johan, and one by one all the boys of the crew took another lash for their newest comrade.

Finally, tears streaming down his cheeks at the magnanimous gesture these strangers had just shown him, Heinke stepped up to take his lash. Immediately after the braided leather had scored a red ridged welt across the golden brown skin of his beautifully muscled back, Heinke called out in a hoarse voice, tight with pain:

"I'll take another lash for Stefan!"

Johan obliged and then it was over.

Stefan and Heinke shook hands and hugged each other like old buddies, Heinke weeping openly in a purging catharsis of all the bitterness and anger that had been poisoning his otherwise good nature, and the soft-hearted Stefan weeping in empathy.

Once again I was blown away by the revelation that, in the right circumstances, the whip could be an instrument not only of punishment and torture, but of redemption and healing. I realised at the same time that there was no way that such an outcome could be planned or directed… it happened entirely spontaneously as a result of the specific circumstances that prevailed.

Heinke did indeed seem to be another person after that… more engaging… less hostile… more trusting… less guarded.

When the boys came in one by one to have salve applied to their whip marks, Heinke spontaneously threw his arms around me.

"I'm sorry I was such a doos (cunt), Uncle Jonathan, I know you're only looking out for me and my boeties (little brothers)."

"That's okay, Heinke, just remember that nobody here wishes any harm on you or your brothers… I think the boys proved that today. This is your family now and we're not going to let any harm come to you."

"I know that now, Uncle Jonathan, thank you."

As my fingers gently applied the salve, tracing the purpling weals across the ridges and valleys of his well-defined back muscles, I felt my cock lengthening and stiffening until it stood up straight between me and Heinke's lower back. As I moved, the hard, swollen bulk of my pole bounced gently against his back and he twisted around to see what it was. His deep blue eyes widened slightly and he looked up at me quickly with a smile.

"Fok! Daai tril is moers, Oom! (Fuck! That cock is big, Uncle!)' he said before turning away.

"Dankie (Thank you)," I said with a chuckle.

I examined the marble white skin between the tan lines of his middle. Although the sun had been up barely an hour, the smooth white skin was already reddening.

"I'm going to put some sun block on this untanned skin, or you will be covered with blisters before the day is out," I said.

"Ag it's nothing, Uncle Jonathan, me and my brothers never use sun cream," he said.

"Yes, on the rest of your body, which is beautifully tanned and doesn't need it… but this white skin here has never seen the sun!" I replied.

"Our mother always said this was the only way she could pick out her sons from the Zulu boys on the farm!" Heinke laughed, and I laughed at the joke with him.

I applied the sun block liberally to the whole of his middle. When I lingered on his beautiful cock and balls and on the perfectly round, firm orbs of his buttocks and the moist crack between them, he smiled at me quizzically, but made no objection and did not attempt to pull away... not even when his cock erected rapidly… though his face flushed slightly, but whether from pleasure or embarrassment I could not tell.

"Come back after three hours so I can put on some more," I instructed.

"Yes, Uncle Jonathan' he replied and went out.

Next was Wikus and after him came Marnus.

By the time Marnus came in my cock was prodigiously erected and leaking precum copiously. Marnus giggled when he spotted it and, to my surprise, immediately reached out a finger to scoop up the silvery dribble and licked it up.

"Tastes like Pa!" was the startling revelation from Marnus, "Heinie tastes different!"

"That's because Heinie is still young and sweet!" I said, my voice tight with lust.

When I finished with Marnus I left the rest of the salve smearing to Dirk and I went below to my cabin for a cold shower.

I had just towelled myself dry and was sitting on the edge of my bed when there was an uncertain knock on the door.

"Come in!" I called

The door opened to reveal Heinke.

He stepped in gingerly, glancing around the cabin quickly.

"It's nice here," he remarked.

"Thank you, yes it is," I replied and looked at him in enquiry.

"Is there something I can do for you my boy?" I asked.

"Well… Uncle Jonathan… I wanted to ask… the rule about… you know… if… if an oke asks another oke to have sex… he must do it?"

"Yes?" I asked.

"Does it apply to you too?"

I looked at him in bewilderment.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I mean… if I ask you… do you have to?"

"I see," I said, as my eyes travelled slowly over the muscular perfection of his 13 year old body until they came to rest on the long, thick, smooth and hairless tube bobbing gently against the hard ridges of his belly.

"Do you want to ask me?"

"Yes, Uncle Jonathan," he said, closing the door and flipping the latch before moving closer to stand up against the edge of the bed between my knees, "I really, really want you to fuck me… it's been so long since my Pa wanted to do it with me… he was so sad for so long… and I never done it with another man. My boeties try, but they can't fill me like my Pa did."

Heinke's eyes pleaded for release as he reached out and closed the strong, work-hardened fingers of his big plate of a hand around my shaft.

"Please Uncle Jonathan," he begged, "I know you want to… I seen your cock go hard when you look at me… and just now when you rubbed sun cream on my cock and my butt… I know that hardon was for me and I know it means you love me… My Pa told me that. And I really want to feel you love me deep inside… like my Pa in the cowshed… please?"

As I reached out to put my hands on his shoulders he dropped to his knees and took my cockhead between his wide, moist, warm lips.

"Aah, Heinie, that's fantastic," I breathed as his tongue expertly urged the first surges of pleasure from the tip of my cock.

***

The sun rose early over the Bay of Maputo, adding a sharp edge to the warm mugginess of the early morning air. We had arrived in the late afternoon of the previous day and were now anchored off a white sand beach on the northwest corner of Inhaca Island. The sea was flat and glassy. In fact, we had motored most of the previous afternoon in a dead calm. The heat and humidity had driven everyone up to sleep on deck that night. Sleepy naked boys were now stirring in their hammocks all over the upper deck. Some of them dived off the rail into the clear blue water to cool off.

I climbed up onto the rail myself and held onto one of the shroud lines as I watched them. Then I dropped off the rail, feet first, into the water and joined the swimming boys for a while. I swam to the head of the ship and held onto the anchor chain as I gazed over the short stretch of water at the sprawling magnificence of the beach villa (more like an upmarket village!) preening among the luxuriant tropical vegetation fringing the silver beach.

I climbed back on board via the rope and board ladder that hung down into the water and dripped dry against the rail as I looked across the bay. Twenty miles to the west lay Maputo, the capital city of Mozambique, still fairly scruffy and war-worn in those days. Although the war was largely over, there was still some fighting going on between rival factions in the inhospitable tsetse and malaria-infested interior, which seemed more about control of diamond mining than about political aspirations. The area around Maputo, however, was relatively stable and along the coast a lot of effort was being made to restore the beach and island resorts to attract tourist dollars.

As the boys roused themselves and stumbled off to shower, a large motor yacht could be seen powering its way towards us from the direction of Maputo. I expected that this would be Andre, the owner of the beach villa where we would be staying for a while.

No sooner had the motor yacht dropped anchor when a rigid inflatable, a 'rubber duck," roared over the intervening water, bringing Andre and some men who turned out to be investors that Andre was wooing.

'You were absolutely right, Andre," one of them purred, unable to tear his gaze from the naked boys padding about them on the deck and eyeing the strangers curiously, "This is boy paradise!"

"Okay, Andre, I've decided already, I want in!, said another with a broad smile.

"Patience, gentlemen!" Andre laughed, "Patience."

Then he turned to me:

"How are my nephews coming along?" he asked.

"They've been doing great!" I said, "They've fitted right in… made friends… the other boys like them… they seem very happy."

Andre slitted his eyes at me.

"That is not what I meant, as I believe you know," he said.

I chuckled.

"Yes I know. I'm just yanking your chain!" I replied. 'Actually, it turned out that all three of them have been sexually active since they were toddlers. Seems your cousin didn't stop at helping his father to seduce you, he carried on with all of his sons… fucked them for years in the cowshed… where his city-bred wife would never set foot because she considered it too dirty and smelly."

"So what was their problem with me?" he asked, offended, "I'm much better looking than their father was!"

I laughed.

"It wasn't about that… Seems he had drummed it into them that they must never do it with strangers or the world would fall apart. But they're over that now, I am happy to report!"

As we made arrangements to transfer all the boys ashore, a motor launch from the island was already ferrying Andre's other guests from the motor yacht to the wooden jetty that reached out from the green fringe over the white beach and some distance into the calm water.

"Are you expecting my boys to entertain all those guests?" I asked Andre.

"Not this time' Andre replied, "For now they are guests just as you are. I hope they will join in the fun, but it's up to them. If and when we become partners I would expect them to participate in providing the services that our guests come here to enjoy."

"What do you mean?' I asked.

"Well… I'm a businessman," he replied, "and this villa is here to make money. My people market the villa by word of mouth only to wealthy boylovers around the world who are prepared to pay outrageous sums of money to indulge their fantasies on a remote island free from any legal constraints!"

"So who provides those services?" I asked.

'Actually' he replied, "I do have my own boys at the villa!"

I looked at him quizzically.

"I get boys from all over," he explained, "The boys I have right now were orphaned in the war in Mozambique. About half are Portuguese kids whose parents were farmers or officials in the interior when the Portuguese government pulled out of the country. The rest are Rhodesian and South African kids… actually one of them is German. Their parents were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I got them from a rebel warlord I was doing business with. He used them for slave labour on an alluvial diamond mine that he controls. The boys spent their nights servicing the sexual needs of long queues of bored and drunken rebel troops."

"What business did you have with a rebel warlord?" I asked.

Andre looked at me sharply.

"No business of yours!" he snapped sharply.

"No offence," I said, "just curious."

"Okay… sorry," he said, "I'm being over-sensitive… after all, we are nearly partners now!"

For some reason I felt a little uneasy about that comment.

"Truth is," he said, "I buy diamonds from him"

"Blood diamonds?"

"Well… yes, I suppose… although I don't like that term… if you want to get involved yourself let me know."

"I'll let you know," I smiled.

"So, how long have those boys been with you?" I asked.

"Just a few months," he replied.

"Have you tried to reunite them with their families?" I asked.

A shadow passed over his face and he gave me a hard stare.

"Why would I do that?" he asked.

"I don't know… I just thought it would be the thing to do," I replied.

"Look," he replied, "The thing is… you know… I don't buy them to "rescue" them. It's a business transaction. I buy these boys to make money out of them. I put them to work here at the villa… they make my guests happy and earn me a shithouse full of dollars.

"Are you not worried about the authorities… the police… taking an interest in what you are doing?' I asked.

Andre laughed.

"This is Mozambique!" he said, "The only law that prevails here is the law of the gun and of the mighty dollar… and I got plenty of both! That's exactly why I sited this operation here."

"And the boys?' I asked, "Do they not try to escape?"

"The boys are relatively happy.' he replied, "They're treated pretty well and this place is like heaven compared with where they were before. Anyway, they have been slaves for just long enough that it's become a habit - doesn't take long with kids."

He added with a chuckle: 'And, truth be told, it is an island after all… long way to swim if you don't have a boat!"

"Of course, sometimes they do act up or cause trouble… they are boys, after all," he laughed, "Not that we have a problem with that. The only crime that we take seriously here is disobedience. And, of course, trying to escape, but we've had very few of those. When that happens we sort them out pretty quickly."

"I would be interested to know how you "sort out" boys who have been slaves in such brutal conditions for so long. I mean, "time-outs", "demerits" and "groundings" would hardly hold any terrors for them?' I said.

"Oh no," he replied, "One has to be realistic! You could never discipline boys like these in that way! Three or four years of slavery has taught them to respond to only two things: Pleasure and Pain! Carrot and Stick! The carrot is being allowed to live in this secure and comfortable paradise, but when they start taking that for granted and they stiffen their necks, we have to apply the stick!"

"Of course, in their experience pain and sex has been so closely associated for so long that I am not always sure that whipping is really a punishment for some of them!"

"How did you get the warlord to part with them?" I asked.

"Well, let's just say I made him a good offer!" he said.

"Fair enough!" I said, "One has no idea of what goes on in some of the darker parts of this continent!"

"Oh, I could tell you some stories!" he replied.

"Well, you've certainly aroused my curiosity. I look forward to meeting them," I said.

"You will, soon," he replied.

"Their English is a little primitive, mind you," he added, "Even the boys who were born into English-speaking families have gotten a bit rusty. But they understand the language of sex!"

Dirk drew the short straw to stay aboard Skobbejak on anchor watch for the first 24 hours and Jul, naturally, volunteered to stay with him. They seemed not nearly as disappointed as I thought they might have been. When I realised why I cautioned them:

"Just make sure you two lovers don't get so caught up with each other that you forget why you are here!"

"We won't Dad!" said Dirk, irritated.

At Andre's suggestion we were going ashore with nothing but our sarongs. He assured us that life at the villa was completely informal and that most of the guests would not even bother to wear a sarong. He also told us to take no luggage at all, not even toothbrushes, as he said that everything would be provided.

While waiting for the launch from the beach villa some of the boys became impatient and decided to swim ashore. They tied their skimpy sarongs around their necks like scarves, climbed up onto the rail and dived into the calm water. Heinke, Wikus and Marnus were among them. I looked at the three brothers as they lined up on the rail and held hands before jumping in. Their tan lines had gone completely and they now looked like old Skobbejak hands with their all-over tans, acquired in just four days of blistering Indian Ocean sun and the liberal application of sun block.

Finally the launch came alongside and we climbed aboard, excited to be going ashore for a welcome beach break on this idyllic island.

Chapter Fourteen

The big launch came alongside at the wooden jetty and we stepped ashore. At the point where the jetty met the beach the boys who had swum ashore were waiting for us, their wet sarongs now knotted around their waists. They joined us, chattering and laughing happily as we set off along the path to the villa.

The path wound around many beautifully designed thatched bungalows set in lush landscaped gardens before coming to the main complex: a large double volume thatched building that housed various dining and entertainment facilities and overlooked a giant shallow swimming pool with a large island bar built into the centre.

Here and there as we walked along I noticed big, tough-looking, men with crew-cuts and shouldered assault rifles, wearing sun-shades and hunting jackets, hanging about unobtrusively but alertly in shady corners. I realised these must be some of the 'guns' that Andre had spoken of.

Lined up on the wooden deck to greet us were eight handsome young boys wearing nothing but the African equivalent of the sarong, the colourful kikoy. They were all deeply tanned, and had the lithe leanness that comes with healthy diet and hard physical exercise… or labour… in a tropical climate. Four of them had the dark complexion, hair and eyes typical of the Portuguese. Of the rest, one had sandy hair, two were blonde and one brawny youngster was a fiery ginger. Their eyes were various shades of blue or grey. It was obvious that these were the slave boys that Andre had spoken of.

As we came up to them I could see that their perfect bodies bore many long-healed surface scars; the indelible imprint of their years as the slaves of a savage warlord. As is often the case, the scars seemed to enhance their attractiveness, perhaps because the boys seemed to wear them with pride, rather like badges attesting to their toughness and courage.

"Bem-vindos a nossa casa! (Welcome to our home)," the biggest boy said, stepping forward and offering his hand, a broad white-toothed smile lighting up his handsome face.

"Obrigado (Thank you)," I replied, with one of the few Portuguese words I had picked up from Pedro back in Durban.

I saw that the boy had the word 'Aleixo' tattoed on his left breast. He noticed my glance and tapped it with a finger:

"Nome meu… uh… me… name… Aleixo," he explained. He pronounced it 'Alaysho."

I then noticed that all of the boys had their names tattooed on the left breast,

Andre laughed:

"I tried name tags around the neck but they kept getting lost, so the boys had the idea of tattooing their names: problem solved!"

Aleixo and another boy with 'Marco' tattooed on his breast each took me by a hand and led me off to a bungalow edging onto the beach that had been allocated to me. Their hands were strong and hard, like their bodies, which had barely an ounce of fat to separate skin and muscle. I realised that the sexual gratification of the guests was not their only function at the beach villa. This was confirmed when I later learned that the boys also worked hard at keeping the gardens in good shape and at growing vegetables in the cultivated fields that backed onto the villa.

The Skobbejak boys were led off by the rest of the Inhaca boys to the long bunkhouse between the villa and the vegetable fields where they themselves lived when they were not sharing the beds of the guests.

The two boys showed me over the air-conditioned bungalow, explaining where everything was and how things worked in a mixture of Portuguese, broken English and hand gestures. Marco started running water into the big round sunken Jacuzzi that served for a bath, nodding smilingly as I indicated that I did not want to bath right now. Aleixo unknotted my sarong and tossed it into the laundry basket, fetching a fresh kikoy from a drawer and draping it over a chair. As it seemed I was not getting through to them, I decided to just go with the flow. Later I realised that they understood perfectly well but pretended they did not whenever they wanted to get their way.

I sat naked on a comfortable chair on the veranda, looking out over the bay and at Skobbejak, wandering what Dirk and Jul were up to as I sipped at a drink that Aleixo had rustled up and waited for the tub to fill.

After a while Aleixo and Marco both came out and gestured for me to come inside. The boys had removed their kikoys and the perfection of their now completely naked bodies took my breath away.

Both boys had rich brown eyes and shiny black hair shaved on the sides and longer on the top and back, rather like a pony's mane. Their skin was smooth and hairless, tanned a deep glowing mahogany all over and, but for the many and various scars, would have been flawless. They were both well-developed physically and their 13 year-old cocks were already half-erected in anticipation.

They led me to the bubbling tub, now filled to the brim with warm foamy water scented with bath salts. They watched as I stepped in, settled down into the built in seat and relaxed in the burbling water. I lay back and closed my eyes. In a minute or two I became aware of Aleixo perching himself on the rim of the tub behind my head, with his legs in the water on either side of me as he poured shampoo on the top of my head and began to work it through my hair, massaging my scalp with his strong fingers as he did so. The feeling of relaxation was indescribable as every vestige of tension drained out of my body at the gentle but firm probing of the boy's fingers. Then, with my eyes still closed I became aware of Marco slipping into the water and, kneeling on the bottom of the tub, lifting my one foot up to his chest. He squirted liquid soap over my foot and leg and started massaging it into a lather. Once he had washed my feet, he took my toes one by one into his mouth and worked them with his lips and his tongue while massaging the ball, instep and heel with his strong hard fingers.

As I surrendered myself to the pampering of the two boys I was overcome with a kind of paralysis of pleasure that I did not want to stop.

Soon Aleixo had finished shampooing my hair and his hands moved down the back of my neck and then onto my shoulders and chest, soaping and kneading tired and knotted muscles as they went. At the same time Marco had moved onto my calves and was slowly soaping and massaging his way up my legs. By the time he reached my thighs my cock was standing up straight and hard under the water.

Now Aleixo motioned for me to stand up and as I did so he slipped into the water behind me. I felt his bone-hard cock bouncing a line down my back as he did so. He immediately started soaping my back, working down slowly onto my buttocks and into my crack. Marco was by now soaping my cock and balls, sliding his slippery hands up, down and around my straining shaft and then down onto my balls in a rapid, fluid, series of motions.

Soon I felt Aleixo's hard soapy finger probing at my butthole. I noticed that his other hand held a brass nozzle at the end of a rubber hose attached to a bath mixer. I relaxed my sphincter to ease his access. He probed around sensuously for a while and then withdrew his finger to replace it immediately with the rounded head of the nozzle. He turned the tap and a gentle stream of tepid water flushed into my channel.

When Aleixo had sluiced me thoroughly, he turned his attention to cleaning out first his own and then Marco's channel.

Then the boys towelled me dry and liberally sprayed me, and themselves, with eau de cologne. The three of us stood and looked each other over. We were all fully erected and I was pleased to see that both Aleixo and Marco were very well-equipped for their profession. I reached out to cup my fingers under their pendulous ball bags and bounced them up and down playfully. The boys giggled delightedly and Aleixo returned the favour.

I put an arm around the neck of each boy and drew them in to me, bending to kiss first one and then the other. Each one instantly opened his lips and engaged my tongue with his as he wrapped his strong young arms around me and pressed his hard young body against mine. They had the fresh subtle taste of oyster and my cock hardened even more at the electric touch of their tongues.

An hour later, having plumbed the moist, warm and welcoming depths of both ends of both boys, the three of us were in the shower together, rinsing off the sweat and detritus of the most passionate and energetic boy sex that I had enjoyed in a few days. Afterwards we walked naked, my arms around their necks, across the lawn down to the white sand of the beach where we found the Skobbejak boys romping in the calm waters together with some of the guests and some of the boys of the villa, all of them also naked.

Johan and Ben spotted me and came running up. They stopped in front of us with feet apart and fists on hips, left foot leading in a stance of naked aggression.

"Hallo Uncle Jonathan," Johan said, unsmiling, his jaw set and his blue eyes hard and slitted as he glared at first one and then the other of my two companions. Ben just glared.

It suddenly struck me that the Skobbejak boys probably regarded me as pretty much their exclusive, though collective, property, and might quite likely object to sharing me with strangers. I was also aware that Johan and Ben in particular, as the very first boys I had ever had sex with, felt they had a special proprietary claim to my affections. And there was indeed a special relationship between us for that reason.

I felt a sudden warm glow for my two favourite Afrikaner boys. There was a compelling beauty in their muscular machismo, young as they were, their aggressive possessiveness and their bristling hostility toward perceived rivals that I found deeply arousing.

"Hallo, boys," I said, unwinding my arms from the Portuguese boys' necks and stepping forward to hug Johan and Ben to me.

"These are Aleixo and Marco," I said to them, and to the Portuguese boys I said: 'These are two of my many sons: Johan and Ben."

The Portuguese boys eyed Johan and Ben up and down in frank admiration. Their eyes sparkled with a hint of lust and Aleixo actually licked his lips as his gaze wandered down Johan's muscular body, and became fixed on, Johan's prodigious cock and balls.

Knowing that Johan and Ben always responded best to honesty, I explained:

"We've just been having a fuck in my bungalow"

"Hmm!" said Johan, and then:

"They any good?"

"Very good!" I said.

Johan slitted his eyes.

"Not as good as you and Ben though!" I said softly between frozen lips, rather like a ventriloquist (I was not sure how much Aleixo and Marco might understand of what I was saying).

The blonde pair brightened up immediately. Both of them stepped forward and extended a hand to the Portuguese boys.

"Why don't you take Aleixo and Marco to my bungalow and have some fun with them yourselves?" I said to Johan and Ben.

"Will they do it?' asked Johan.

"Yes, of course," I said, "You guys are guests here like me… they must do whatever you want."

"Cool!" said Johan, "Anything?"

"Sure!" I replied.

"What if they won't?" Ben piped up.

Andre strolled up at that moment and answered Ben's question:

"Then you make them!" he said.

"How?" Johan asked.

Andre chuckled.

"Hanging up behind the bedroom door you will find a selection of things that you can use to punish them until they do what you want them to do."

"You mean we allowed to whip them?" asked Johan.

"Yes indeed," Andre replied.

Johan looked over the Portuguese boys with new interest. His cock began to swell and harden and I felt momentarily sorry for the Portuguese boys. Johan was definitely going to find a reason to whip them.

Johan and Ben each took the hand of one of the Portuguese boys and led them back over the lawn to my bungalow, chattering to them in a mixture of English and Afrikaans.

The last thing I heard before they moved beyond earshot was Johan saying emphatically to Aleixo:

"No, Aleixo! Ben 'n me gonna fuck you and Marco now, okay?

"Okay," Aleixo replied meekly.

"If I know Johan," I said to Andre, "Aleixo and Marco are going to get a brisk whipping before the morning is out!"

"Likes the BDSM, does he?" chuckled Andre, "Boy after my own heart!"

"Yes… though, actually he likes getting it almost as much as he likes dishing it out!" I said.

"Excellent, he looks a nice strong lad… I'll have a job for him later this week! And I really wouldn't worry too much about Aleixo and Marco… they're pretty much into it themselves. Wouldn't surprize me if they actually provoke Johan into giving them a whipping!" said Andre.

"What sort of a job?' I asked.

"Once a week we have Whipping Day, when all the boys who have broken the rules that week are whipped one by one in our little Roman-style amphitheatre. It's usually on Friday. When we have guests it forms part of the entertainment we lay on for them… bit of dancing… bit of fighting… bit of sex… and the whippings. Otherwise it's just a punishment routine. I'd like Johan to do the whippings," he explained.

"He'd love that," I said, "I'm sure some of my boys would like to feature in the sex show. And… one of my boys is actually a Mixed Martial Arts champion… I'm sure he'd love to fight."

"Great!" said Andre, "Sounds like we'll have a cracking show this week."

"I look forward to it," I replied.

At dinner that evening I was seated at a table together with an athletic blonde Ukrainian named Kirill, a short podgy Turk named Haluk and a sallow thin-lipped Venezuelan named Ramos. They looked like hard, no-nonsense men. I got the feeling they might not be using their own names and they seemed a little guarded in making conversation with me, although they obviously knew each other.

"I have not seen you here before," said Haluk, who seemed to be the chattier of the three, "Is this your first time?"

"Yes," I replied.

"I never miss them," said Haluk, "I have been coming for three years now and always the quality is excellent!"

The other two nodded their agreement.

"You never miss what?" I asked, but Kirill interrupted, leaning forward to ask:

"You say you are from South Africa? Are you from the ship with the South African boys?"

"Yes, indeed I am' I replied

"South African boys are best quality," said Kirill, "Especially white Afrikaner boys. Beautiful bodies. Hard and strong. Very physical. Very sexual. And they take the whip so well! Not like the Latino boys… excuse me if I say so Ramos, I mean no insult… but thirty lashes across a Latino boy's back and he screams like a girl and wants to go lie in the infirmary for a few days. My Afrikaner boys do not scream and they go bleeding straight back to work!"

"No offence taken," Ramos said, "What you say is true! The Nordic boys are a strong-backed race. I wish they were not so scarce."

"Yes, and they are very easy to control.," said Kirill, "They are well-disciplined and respectful. Although they can be very hard-necked and independent, they have been brought up to submit to authority. Like my own people. And like the Germans. The trick is to get them to see you as the paterfamilias rather than as the master. Once you do that they forget they are slaves and they will do anything for you! And you must use their physicality… they love to compete with their bodies… that is why they excel at sports like rugby: always trying to show they are the strongest, the fastest and the toughest… if you use that properly you have them competing about who can work the hardest or the longest hours, who can take the severest whipping, who can take the most cocks and the hardest fucking. They're having so much fun competing that they forget they are not free to do anything else. Actually, they don't want to do anything else.

"Indeed," Haluk affirmed, "I have just one, and he is very much in demand! I paid Andre a lot of money for him 6 months ago but already he has made back my investment ten times over… and I am talking about the landed cost, including shipping and documentation costs!"

"What documentation?' asked Kirill, "You should never get your boys documented! No passport, no identity, no travel, no escape!"

"Yes, yes! I know that Kirill!" Haluk replied, "By "documentation costs" I mean what it cost me to get him into the country without documentation! Do you think me an idiot?"

As I was wondering what on earth they were talking about, Johan came up behind me and leaned his folded arms on my shoulders with his chin resting on his arms. Then he dropped his arms over my shoulders onto my chest and slid his hard brown hands over my abdomen to probe absently down the front of my kikoy. All the while his steady blue eyes studied the other men at the table.

"Hallo Johan," I said, "Did you and Ben have a good time with Aleixo and Marco?"

"Yes thank you, Uncle Jonathan, I had to give them both a good whipping but after that they did what they was told!"

I felt his big cock hardening at the memory where it poked through the open back of the chair against my bare back.

"You had to, hey?." I chuckled

The other three men stared almost open-mouthed at Johan's smooth, hairless, muscular perfection.

"Is this yours?" asked Kirill, his eyes glinting with lust.

"Yes," I replied.

"This is exactly what I was just talking about," said Kirill, his sarong tenting in his lap, "A perfect Afrikaner boy!"

Johan practically purred with pleasure and pride, both at the compliment and the attention he was getting. He straightened up and moved to stand next me, leaning into me, one elbow on my shoulder and the other hanging down by his side as he flaunted his prodigiously erected cock for my companions to admire.

"Come here, boy!" Kirill ordered, "Come stand next to me, I want to get a better look at you."

Johan looked at me. I nodded permission and he went round the table to stand next to Kirill.

Kirill pushed his chair out and sat looking over Johan's body with naked lust for a while before reaching out to slide his hands over and around Johan's muscled thighs, down the back of his legs onto his bulging calves and then up again over his buttocks, onto the ripped ridges of his back and then onto his chest before sliding down Johan's belly to take hold of his swollen, bobbing fuck pole. Johan closed his eyes and shuddered with pleasure as he surrendered to Kirill's touch. Kirill drew Johan toward him. Johan went up onto his toes, yanked Kirill's sarong open and then climbed onto Kirill's lap. Johan faced up at Kirill, one big hand cupped around the back of Kirill's neck. Johan pulled himself up to clamp his open mouth over Kirill's, and began to tongue the Ukrainian vigorously. He reached his other hand down to pull at Kirill's straining cock. Then, sensing Kirill's desires with the intuition of a practised rent boy, Johan slipped his tongue out of Kirill's mouth, bent his head down and spat a thick gob of saliva into his hand. He slathered it over Kirill's cockhead before raising himself on Kirill's thighs and reaching behind him to guide Kirill's cockhead into his fuckhole. Soon he was bouncing vigorously on Kirill's lap, every muscle in his back, buttocks and legs bunching and writhing as he fucked himself on the Ukrainian's thick shaft.

Every eye in the crowded dining room was fixed enviously on the brawny blonde boy fucking his heart out on the muscular Ukrainian's long shaft. The air was electric with sexual energy and every single cock in the room was hard and leaking precum.

Then suddenly Johan's body stiffened and went into spasm as he reached orgasm. His deliciously throbbing cock jetted thick spurts of hot white cum against Kirill's chest and neck. His spasming anus and clenching buttocks propelled Kirill over the top. Kirill bellowed as he ejaculated deep inside Johan's cum trap.

The whole dining room burst into applause at the performance. Johan beamed, red-faced from both pride and exertion, as he revelled in the admiration, even raising a hand in acknowledgement with Kirill's erected cock still inside him. As he stood up, Kirill's cock slurped out of Johan's hole and flopped wetly against Kirill's hard flat belly as a stream of Kirill's cum ran out of Johan's still gaping hole and trickled down the inside of a muscled thigh.

"That was fucking amazing, boy," Kirill said to Johan as Johan bent over to slurp the cum off Kirill's twitching cock, "And such good manners to clean your client's cock without being told!"

All over the room food was going cold on unattended plates as men were calling out for Johan to come and fuck them. Flushed with pride and success Johan went from table to table to pleasure his newest and most ardent fans as the rest of the company either fingered their cocks and hoped to be favoured next or grabbed the nearest boy to service their needs.

Encouraged by Johan's example, the other Skobbejak boys were also getting in on the act and soon dinner had turned into a general orgy.

Kirill turned to me:

"You have trained your boy well.' he said, "What is his name… Johan, I think you said?"

"Yes, his name is Johan, but I am afraid I cannot take the credit for training him. He was a rent boy when he came to me and he was already very proficient. To tell the truth, I learned much from him!" I replied.

"Well, I want him! Name your price!" said Kirill.

"He is not for sale," I laughed.

"Ah… I understand… you expect him to do well on the auction," Kirill said, "No matter, I will wait for it… but I intend to have him!"

"What do you mean? What auction?"

The three men looked at me, puzzled.

"Did you not come for the auction?" asked Ramos. Then, turning to his companions with a worried look, "I understood there would be only dealers here?"

"What auction?" I repeated.

Kirill looked at me suspiciously:

"Why are you here?" he demanded.

"I was invited by Andre," I replied, puzzled at the reactions of my dinner companions, "We are negotiating a business deal"

"Ah!" said Kirill, relaxing visibly, "You must be the man Andre was telling us about!"

"Oh yes!" said Ramos, "The man with the sailing ship who is bringing boys for the slave auction!"

I tried to stifle the feeling of rising panic that threatened to expel what I had just eaten onto my lap. Once again I wondered what I gotten ourselves into with Andre. I suddenly realised I knew nothing about him and that I may be in over my head with these people. I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and tried to think of a deflecting answer.

But my three companions had already turned their attention to the orgy that was in full swing in the dining room. I mumbled an excuse about having to go somewhere that none of them even heard and I quickly went looking for Andre.

I found him in the pub, talking to the men he had introduced as potential investors.

"Ah Jonathan!" he called out, "Come join us!"

"Actually, I just need to have a quick chat with you in private, if you don't mind!" I said.

He looked at me a moment and, realising that I was serious, got off his stool and said to his companions:

"You guys continue enjoying yourselves, I'll be back in a minute."

He led me to a private office behind the reception desk and closed the door.

"What's up, Jonathan?' he asked, "It looks serious!"

"It is!" I replied, "What the hell is going on here? I've just been told by some shady-looking foreigners in there that you're having a slave auction here, and that I supposedly shipped some of the merchandise here on Skobbejak!"

"Okay, okay, I apologise!" said Andre, "I should have been more open with you… but you know I hardly know you and I wasn't sure I could trust you!"

"Well, coincidentally, I have just been thinking exactly the same thing about you!" I replied, "You better fill me in right now on what's going on here!"

"Look," he said, "I'm a businessman, as I already told you. I source boys cheaply who are destitute and alone… sometimes in really desperate circumstances… and I bring them here for about six months. I heal them, look after them and train them to provide a service that is in great demand all over the world. Every six months or so I have an auction here at the villa and I sell the boys on for a fat profit to patrons from… South America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe… everywhere. The boys they buy go to upmarket boy brothels in Moscow, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Cairo or Ankara, to name a few. Or they become porn stars, or they become the personal toyboys of Arab sheikhs or Russian billionaires. Yes, they are slaves, but they are infinitely better off than they were. Must I feel guilty that I make a lot of money out of it?"

I looked at Andre, astonished.

'And yes," he added, "There will be an auction while you're here. The villa boys have all been here six months now and it's time for them to move on or the holding cost becomes too high. All the other guests are actually here specifically for the auction. They are regulars who come once or twice a year to buy new stock. They spend the week having a bit of fun trying the boys out so they know exactly who they want when they bid at the auction."

"So this is the "hospitality training" and the "overseas opportunities" you were talking about in Richards Bay?' I said.

"Oh yes indeed," he replied.

"And you had the gall to offer those "opportunities" to my boys!"

"Certainly!" he replied, unapologetically, "Obviously it's not for everyone, but I know that you have pulled some of your boys out of the gutter, and maybe they would welcome the opportunity of going overseas and becoming the personal fuck toy of some multi-millionaire!"

I looked at him in silence for a moment as I digested this information. Actually, he had a point. The boys I had rescued from the gutter had an interesting and comfortable, though hardly luxurious, life at sea. They had a 'family' that cared for them, they were safe, they ate well and they slept warm and dry. But perhaps they could do far better with some of Andre's clients.

"Look at Derek and Rikus, for example. When their probation is up they will just go back on the streets. Don't you think they might prefer a chance at something better?"

"Perhaps," I said, "But that is a bridge I will cross when the time comes!"

"Well, not necessarily," Andre said, "You could put them on the auction now. They will fetch a very good price, you know, South African boys are in great demand!"

"So I hear!" I replied, "But even if I wanted to, I have a responsibility to return them to the State in due course."

"Don't you know how it works? My goodness, you have a lot to learn!" said Andre, "Our mutual friends, Magistrate Carter and Sergeant Scholtz, have already made them disappear off the system. No one expects them back, I promise you! In fact, if you actually took them back it would cause absolute consternation. I promise you that the boys would then genuinely disappear, just to avoid the embarrassing enquiries that would result! That's exactly how I get a lot of my boys. I'm afraid you are either stuck with them for good or you are going to have to rid of them at some stage."

"So… are Derek and Rikus the South African boys you told Kirill and his buddies I was bringing to the auction?" I asked.

"Well, not actually, although I was going to offer you the opportunity anyway' he said. 'I was actually referring to my nephews."

If he had hit me with a mallet on the temple I could not have been more stunned than by this casual revelation. I thought I had heard wrong.

"You know, I thought I heard you say you were referring to your nephews?" I managed to say.

Andre looked at me in surprise.

"That's exactly what I did say," he said.

"But Andre! Your nephews, for crying out aloud! How can you sell your own family into slavery? And such beautiful boys at that!"

"Well, they're perfect candidates for it, as I mentioned just now," he said, ticking off the criteria on his fingers, "They're destitute… they're completely alone in the world… and they're dirt cheap!"

"But they're not alone in the world… they have you… their uncle!"

"Yes, well I am not interested in taking responsibility for them, and I think it would actually be cruel to dump them in a school or an institution. I just don't have the time or the interest to take care of them. If that makes me a bad person, then so be it! If I sell them they get the chance to go off and make themselves useful to someone who will appreciate them and I get to make a handsome profit off them."

"Then let me take them," I said, "I am prepared to have them on Skobbejak at my own cost. I will even repay the money you have paid me to berth them for the next six months."

"You are more than welcome to take them!" Andre said expansively, "Since we are about to become partners I will even take them off the auction and let you have them for the reserve price."

"What is the reserve price?" I asked.

Andre picked up catalogue and slid it across the desk to me. I felt my stomach lurch when I saw the price.

"Is that for all three?" I asked, forcing a laugh.

"No, that is per boy," he replied.

My stomach began to cramp as I remembered the promise I had made to Heinke that I would take care of them and that I would not let anyone harm them.

"Well, that's a bit steep for me right now," I said, trying to sound off-hand.

Andre looked at me.

"Perhaps we can work something out," he said slowly, "Let me give it some thought.

I realised that it was not wise to let him know how badly I wanted to take the three boys.

"Ag, Andre, I don't know," I replied, "We can talk about it tomorrow. Maybe they're better off with some sheikh after all."

Andre gave me a searching look.

"You seemed pretty keen on them a moment ago," he probed.

"Ja, well… I was a bit pissed off that you used me and didn't take me into your confidence back in Richards Bay," I said.

"Sorry, man, it wasn't personal," he replied.

"Yes, well, if we're going to be partners, you have to be transparent with me," I said, "And now I'm not so sure that it's going to work, to be perfectly honest."

"Don't be like that," said Andre anxiously, "Don't make any hasty decisions… I promise full disclosure from now on!"

"Well, I'll sleep on it tonight and we'll talk about it in the morning," I replied.

"Sure," said Andre, "But in the interest of full disclosure can we quickly talk about that cargo run to the Limpopo River mouth that I need you to do for me?"

"Let's not jump the gun on that," I said, "We don't know if it's going to happen yet. Let's first work out if we're going to have a working relationship at all."

"Jeez, Jonathan!" he said, "I didn't know you were that pissed off about this. Listen… take my nephews… they're a gift from me. And you can keep the money I already paid you for them. But can you please just do this cargo run? I need you to leave by tomorrow lunchtime at the latest! Please, it's really important to me!"

I decided right then and there that I would accept his offer of the three boys and that I would do the cargo run, however dangerous it might be. I felt it was worth it to be able to keep my promise to the boys. But I thought I would let him stew on it for the night.

"I don't know, Andre," I said, "I'll think about it overnight and I'll let you know my decision in the morning."

"Fuck, are you really going to make me sweat over this?" Andre asked.

"Yes' I replied shortly, "Have a good night."

As I walked out the front door to the reception area I collided with the brawny ginger-haired German boy who was entering with Stefan on one side of him and Heinke on the other. They were holding hands and giggling, their eyes on each other's outrageous erections rather than on where they were going. They also seemed a little glassy eyed and I smelt the whiff of alcohol on their breaths.

"Sorry, Sir, Sorry!" said the ginger in a cutely thick German accent. There was genuine fright in his eyes, which were darting about to see who may have noticed his clumsiness, and his erection had almost instantly deflated.

"Sorry, Uncle Jonathan," the other two giggled, rather more relaxed about it.

"Well… Rudi…' I smiled, reading the name tattooed on the boy's bulging chest, "I think you three must come to my bungalow and let me punish your arses severely for this clumsiness."

Rudi grinned his relief and I noticed that his cock was already rapidly returning to the perpendicular.

I put my arms around their shoulders to pull them together and then steered the mildly tiddled and exaggeratedly happy Nordic threesome down the path to my bungalow.

Rather than detracting from their sexual performance, the alcohol seemed to heighten it. A playful swatting of their arses for their 'misdemeanour' seemed to propel them into a sexual frenzy that lasted well past midnight and left all four of us completely exhausted when finally we passed out together on the huge bed. I remember thinking at one stage that I should perhaps consider introducing the old Royal Navy tradition of issuing a daily rum ration to the crew on Skobbejak!

I woke next morning with all three boys' heads grouped tightly around my morning erection as they sucked and licked my cock together.

"Aah," I groaned softly with pleasure, "That's how you boys must wake me every day from now on!"

Stefan pulled his mouth off my cockhead long enough to say: 'Aye-aye Cap'n, we'll write it up in the log!" before slurping it into his warm wet mouth again.

I blew my load down Stefan's throat before returning the favour while Rudi and Heinke rocked the bed with a '69' evolution on steroids.

After an equally pleasurable shower that went on so long it emptied the bungalow's hot water tank, the four of us sauntered naked down the pathway to the dining room. Everyone seemed to have the same idea about dress the second day into our holiday, as there was not a sarong or kikoy in sight.

The moment I stepped into the dining room, Andre came scurrying in to greet me. He had obviously instructed the staff to alert him.

"I hope you had a good night?" he asked solicitously.

"We did, thank you", I said, winking at the three boys who had spent it with me, "And you?"

"You know what kind of a night I had!" Andre said testily, "Have you come to a decision?"

"I have indeed," I replied.

"Well?" he asked.

He seemed desperate.

"Well, I've decided that right now I'm going to have breakfast, but as soon as I have finished I will see you in the office and let you know."

Andre looked as if he wanted to say something but, after a long hesitation, turned on his heel and stalked out of the dining room.

I got the Skobbejak boys to push together a bunch of tables so we could all breakfast together. Rudi, Aleixo and Marco seemed to have taken a shine to our group and joined us for breakfast. It was obvious that they got on well with my boys.

After breakfast I told the boys to remain in the dining room and wait for me to return as I had something important to tell them.

Then I went to see Andre in the office. He looked up at me nervously as I entered.

"Right, Andre, I've thought about it and I am prepared both to continue a business relationship of some sort with you and to do the cargo run to the Limpopo River."

Andre was visibly relieved, shutting his eyes and letting out a long sigh of relief as he put a hand to his forehead and lay back in his chair.

"But there are conditions, and they are not negotiable!" I said.

"Name them! Name them!" Andre said, waving his hands in his customary expansive style.

"First, you have to promise to be completely open with me in future. We have to be able to trust each other if we are to work together."

"I promise!" he said emphatically.

"Second, you sign over your nephews to me officially as their guardian… for nothing… and I keep the money you paid me already.

"Sure!" he said, "That's what I promised last night and I stick with that!"

He jumped up and offered me his hand.

"We have a deal, partner!" he said.

"Not quite yet… there's more. You give me Rudi, Aleixo and Marco too!"

Andre slumped in his seat.

"That's plain robbery!" he complained, "That's not what I offered!"

"I haven't finished," I said, "You keep the three of them here at the villa for now… I don't have space for them anyway… and you use them to help train the next batch of "hosts". Plus… you get your chef to train them in catering until I come get them. And you organise South African passports for them from your buddies in the passport office."

Andre stared at me for a long while.

"Sorry, Jonathan, that's just a bridge too far," he said finally, "I can't do that!"

"Well then there's nothing else to discuss," I said, turning on my heel, "Have a good day!"

"No wait!" he called out, "Okay you called it, I fold."

"Excellent," I said, turning back.

"Okay, you got a deal, partner," he said, a new respect in his voice.

"Can I at least sell the other slaves?' he asked, mock sarcastically.

"I think you'd better… I don't want you being taken out by the Russian mob or anything unpleasant like that!" I replied.

"Can I sell Derek and Wikus?" he asked, flippantly, not expecting me to agree.

"I'm not making any promises,' I said, "but I may actually let you do that!… I need to think about it more, though. I'll let you know before the auction."

"Cool!" he said, "Now let's talk about the cargo run."

***

Just before lunchtime Skobbejak weighed anchor in the windless calm that had persisted from before we had arrived at Inhaca. Hugging the coastline, we motored northeast on a course that would put us a few miles south of the Limpop River mouth by dawn. With me were Johan, Dirk, Tiaan, Joshua, Jul and Stefan, whom I had chosen both for their physical strength and their competence as sailors. We also carried two of the villa's armed guards ('just in case…' according to Andre).

We rigged a makeshift crane amidships and used this to bring two of the villa's 'rubber ducks' on board. We would be arriving at midnight and would have to negotiate the sand bars at the entrance before anchoring a short distance up the river. The rubber ducks would be used to move the cargo from shore to ship. There was a simple system of light signals that would identify the parties.

The cargo, as I had suspected, was to be a new gang of slave boys and a parcel of rough diamonds.

"Don't tell me we have to deal with your warlord friend face to face and hand over cash for this stuff!" I had said to Andre.

"No," he laughed, "Nothing like that! My agent has already selected both the diamonds and the boys. They are paid for. He has taken delivery. You just have to hook up with him and bring the goods home!"

After he handed me a scale and briefed me about the diamonds, I asked:

"How many boys am I picking up?"

"Well… ten is what I paid for' he said, "They send more because they travel a long way through the most awful country and some are lost along the way. Sometimes there are less than ten."

"What if there are more than ten?' I asked.

"There won't be," he said, "But if there are, you can take them for yourself as part payment for the job."

"Okay' I said.

"So tell me,' I asked, "If that area is so safe, why are we sneaking around there in the dark and taking armed guards with us? And remember that we are in a new era of transparency in our relationship!"

"Well, the reality is that the situation is very fluid. Right now there is a truce, we are told, but there is no guarantee that the truce is still holding by the time you get there. We just need to limit the risks."

"In that case," I said, "You'd better give me some weapons for me and my boys too!"

"Of course! I would've suggested it myself but I didn't want to alarm you."

"You're alarming me now!" I laughed.

That afternoon, as we motored parallel to the coast, we all practised loading and firing the assault rifles over the rail. The boys thought this great fun.

Half an hour before midnight we were approaching the Limpopo River mouth. We were moving as slowly as we could without actually putting the engine in neutral. There were no shore lights to navigate by so we were relying on a chart, a depth-sounder and my tidal calculations. Fortunately there was a full moon that aided visibility somewhat. We had switched off our own navigational lights and all other lights, doing our chart work by the dim red light of an army torch. We negotiated the main channel through the sand bars without incident and then proceeded about a kilometre up the river until we came to a point on specified bearings between two flickering oil lamps set up on shore. We dropped anchor and made contact through the agreed light signals. We put the rubber ducks in the water and waited.

After a while a slim dark shape glided up out of the dark. It was a dugout canoe bearing the agent and two paddlers. The agent, a black Mozambican, came aboard and handed over a bag of uncut diamonds. We weighed them on the scale Andre had given us. The weight was approximately correct… Andre had told us not to be too picky about any discrepancy as long as it was not above a gram or two.

Then we went ashore in the rubber ducks to pick up the boys. I drove the one and Johan drove the other. I left Andre's guards on the ship as space in the boats was limited. I took the lead with the agent in my boat and Johan followed. We took our rifles with us, cocked with round in chamber but with safety on. We wore shorts but no shirt and, as always, we were barefoot. As our engines purred quietly a thought suddenly struck me.

"Are there crocodiles?' I asked the agent.

His white teeth flashed in a broad smile as he leaned toward me.

"No," he said.

I was relieved to hear this.

Then he leaned toward me again.

"Sometimes sharks!" the white teeth said.

Soon we came to the point where a huddle of small figures were sitting on their haunches at the edge of the water. A few had filthy non-descript rags around their waists but most were naked. Behind them stood three handlers with rifles over their shoulders and long rhino-hide whips in their hands. I picked up my rifle and cautiously got out of the boat, standing in the water beside it in case I had to launch out quickly.

The agent gave instructions to the handlers in a low voice. The handlers snarled orders at the boys and immediately started slashing at them indiscriminately, almost mechanically, with their whips The boys jumped up and started to move quickly toward the boats, ducking and weaving automatically to try and avoid the flailing whips. Although I heard rhino-hide smacking meatily against boys' backs, buttocks and thighs, no-one uttered more than a strangled yelp or a muffled grunt, as if to confirm that the almost frenetic scything was routine.

There were fifteen boys in the group. Since each boat was meant to take five passengers, this presented a problem.

"Why fifteen?' I asked the agent, "I was expecting ten!"

"We take fifteen because they come many many miles and some die' said the agent. 'Sometimes not even ten. This time boys very strong. No one die. I keep five if you no want?"

"No, I'll take them all' I said.

The five extra boys represented a windfall for me.

Not wanting to make a second trip I squeezed all the boys into both boats and, very low in the water, we set out very slowly for Skobbejak. We made it without incident, transferred the boys to the ship, hoisted the boats aboard, and weighed anchor.

As we nosed our way down the channel to the open sea, Tiaan, Joshua, Dirk and Jul took the boys below and fed them with the pasta and bolognaise that they had prepared in the galley for them. Cowed and bewildered, not really understanding what was happening to them, they were absurdly grateful for the simple meal and the orange juice they were given to wash it down with.

Finally we exited the river mouth and headed for the open sea. As soon as we were out of rifle range we switched on our lights and opened the throttle on the engine, there being no wind at all to ruffle the glassy sea.

With Johan on the helm and Stefan keeping watch I went below to take a look at the slave boys. I do not believe I have ever seen such a filthy bunch of boys. Andre had told me that he had specifically ordered only blonde, blue eyed, European boys to meet a specific demand, but it was impossible to identify the colour of their hair, nor indeed any distinguishing feature other than the colour of their eyes, which all happened to be various shades of blue or grey.

"Does anyone speak English?' I asked.

Nearly all of them put up their hands, some tentatively.

"Thank goodness for that!" I said.

They had all finished eating by this time, so I ordered them all up on deck. They scrambled to obey, glancing fearfully over their shoulders for the men with the whips.

With the deck lights turning night into day, I got those who had any semblance of clothing to strip it off and drop it on the deck. Jul and Joshua went about picking it up distastefully, holding it at arm's length as they carried it.

"Phew! This stuff stinks!" Tiaan said."

I told them to throw it all over the side.

"Poor fish!" Jul remarked.

In the meantime Tiaan, Joshua and Dirk brought up the five zinc tubs we had stacked in the crew's quarters and started filling them with the seawater deck pump.

When the baths were full the slave boys were made to get in one at a time. My boys handed them thick blocks of saltwater soap and scrubbing brushes and supervised the bathing process. It had clearly been so long since any of them had had a bath that they were almost uncertain how to do it. Eventually my boys had to soap and scrub the slave boys themselves. It was exhausting work and the slave boys were so filthy that each tub had to be refilled after just two of them had bathed in it.

Two hours later I went to inspect the results of my boys' labours: What a transformation they had wrought!

Fifteen boys of European descent greeted my sight. Lithe and hard-muscled, every one of them was tanned all over a dark mahogany brown, almost concealing the scores of whip marks, scars, lacerations and bruises that covered their bodies. They were all around the age of 11 to 14. Their eyes were various shades of blue or grey and their hair colour ranged from dirty yellow to white-blonde. Most had no body hair at all. Some had glistening gold down on their forearms and legs. A couple of the older boys had small curls of blonde pubic hairs nestling above the base of the cock shaft.

It had slowly begun to dawn on them that their circumstances had changed. Whether for better or worse most of them had not quite worked out yet, though the good meal and the bath had woken some early associations in the memory of some of them.

One of them dropped to his knees and touched his forehead to the deck in front of me before holding me around my ankles and kissing my bare toes. He looked to be about eleven or twelve. Then he sat back on his haunches with his palms pressed against each other in front of his chest, as if praying, and asked:

"Are we going home now Baba?"

(Interestingly, 'Baba' means both 'Father' and 'Lord')

"Where is your home?' I asked him.

The boy shook his head sadly.

"I don't know Baba," he said

"What is your name?' I asked him gently.

"I am John, Baba," he replied.

I went down on my haunches in front of him and reached out to stroke his straw-coloured thatch.

He nuzzled into my hand and purred at my touch. I saw his cock harden quickly into a respectable size for an eleven-year-old and it reminded me that he was a seasoned prostitute as well as being a mine labourer. The only time any man would have touched him gently for the last three or four years would have been when he was going to get fucked. His responsiveness was a promising sign, given the career he was destined for, and my cock stiffened. He reached out a hard brown hand and placed it over the swelling front of my shorts, looking up and catching my eye with an impish smile on his face and a naughty glint in his blue eyes.

Suddenly I found myself lusting for this lean and wiry young slave boy's hard brown body, covered as it was with the weals and scars of abuse and slavery. I stood up slowly, easing him up with me, and held him by the hand as I directed Dirk, Tiaan, Joshua and Jul to take the slave boys down to the crew's quarters and make a complete inventory of them.

"I want name, description (hair and eye colour as well as a list of the permanent scars), language, nationality… if they know it… and as much as you can find out about their background," I called out.

Then I called them closer and added, confidentially, so that Andre's guards would not hear:

"I want you also to rate each of them for sexual performance. There are fifteen of them and five of us, which means you must each fuck three of them and rate those three "1", "2" or "3", with "1" being the best. Understand?"

"Cool, Uncle Jonathan," said Tiaan, "Can we start with the sex test? I really need a fuck after bathing all these okes. They're all so fucken horny they try to hump your hand when you wash their cocks… and now they made me horny too."

"Ja, me too," chorused the other three boys.

"I don't mind where you start," I replied, "But remember to keep that part our secret for now… I want to choose the five best boys for ourselves and we have ten hours to make the decision."

Eager to get physical with the slave boys, Tiaan ordered them to hurry below.

Once again the slave boys almost fell over each in their rush to be first, desperately trying not to be the boys at the back who caught the lashes. It would take them a while to realise that there were no handlers about to herd and move them about like cattle with their darting rhino-hide whips.

John sidled into me and put an arm around my thighs, looking up at me with blue eyes as he fingered the tip of his long, thin, eagerly erected young cock.

Then, with my hand cupping the back of his slender neck, I led him below to my cabin.

Chapter Fifteen

Some time before dawn the wind came up and it quickly freshened to a steady 15 knots, prompting Johan to get the sails up.

Both the off-watch Skobbejak boys and the slave boys were woken and called up on deck to haul on the thick halyards that lifted the sails aloft.

I was still soundly asleep in my cabin at the time, but woke to the altered motion of the ship and the rhythmic thudding of hard bare heels on the deck planks overhead as the boys hauled up the heavy canvas sails. They heaved rhythmically to a cadence that Dirk called out, marking the rhythm playfully with stinging snaps of a rope's end against the straining backs of both crew and slave.

The light was still on in my cabin and, as I surfaced slowly from the depths of unconsciousness, I became aware of John's warm body lying beside mine, with his tousled blonde head nuzzled against my chest, one arm lying across my belly and one leg hooked over my thigh, his knee in my crotch, as he slept the deep, nearly comatose sleep of the utterly exhausted.

We had been sleeping for barely an hour or so and my mind was still foggy, but the touch of the boy's smooth naked skin on mine triggered an instant recollection of the two high energy hours of hard sex and mind-numbing pleasure that we had shared before we both passed out next to each other, tired, happy and sated.

My cock stirred at the memory, swelling and stretching up my belly like a filling hosepipe until it lay hard and bobbing against my navel.

I pulled his thigh further up so that it was lying over my lower belly and my swollen cock. Then I slid my hand down over his well-rounded calf muscles until I was able to cup his hard leathery heel in my palm. I massaged and played with his foot for a while, loving the rough feel of the thickly callused skin on the sole of his foot and toes.

I felt a small depression on the top of his foot and looked down at it to find a small round scar, like a puncture wound. I twisted his foot over to look at the sole and found another similar scar which seemed to confirm that something sharp had punctured his foot all the way through. Could it be a bullet wound? I wondered.

I slid my hand slowly up and down his supple young back, enjoying the feel of the hard bulges of muscle under his deeply tanned skin. I felt the thin ridges of several scars scored into the otherwise smooth skin of his back by the lash of the rhino hide sambok favoured by the slave handlers of the diamond diggings. I looked down as I ran a finger along the length of one of the scars where it traced a clear lighter coloured line across the deep brown of his skin, crossing over several others.

I felt a surge of compassion for the boy and I hugged him closer to me as I thought of the continual terror he would have felt, often for his very life, day and night over the last several years. I thought, too, of the back-breaking, muscle ripping labour he would have been forced to do over that time and the unimaginable pain he would have had to endure when the sambok sliced the searing and bloody furrows through his flesh that had healed into the scars I was now stroking.

Even as I cuddled him, though, my thoughts of his sufferings stirred not only compassion for the boy and a desire to protect him; they also stirred those deeper urges that got the tip pf my cock throbbing.

Far from disfiguring the boy in my eyes, the latticework of whip scars that permanently marked his beautiful young body seemed actually to emphasize the musculature of his back and buttocks and greatly enhance his sexiness, in the same way that tattoos can often add immeasurably to the sex appeal of the body.

After a while I ran my fingers lightly down the long valley formed by the thick muscles on either side of his spine until I reached his firm round buttocks. My long middle finger slipped naturally into the cleft between the mounds, still slick with cum and lubricant. I probed until the tip of my finger found the eager elastic opening to his well-used fuck channel. Smoothly my finger entered his yielding bumhole, eliciting a satisfied sleepy murmur from its owner as I explored that warm and slippery place.

John stirred and his head swivelled against my chest until he was looking up at me, a sleepy smile of pleasure on his face.

I fucked his compliant hole with my fingers until John began to croon softly with pleasure and I felt his little cock harden where he was humping it slowly against my thigh. After a while John rolled his body over on top of mine and then wriggled himself up until he could take my tongue into his open mouth. We tasted each other's lips and mouths vigorously for a long while until John suddenly broke contact and sat up, straddling my belly with his knees planted on the bed either side of me. He pushed up on his knees and reached behind him to grip my straining cock and guide its tip into his succulent channel. The breath rushed out of me as he lowered himself onto on my bone-hard cock, taking the whole of it all the way inside him with the practised ease of a seasoned professional.

By the time I came up on deck with John in tow, still dribbling cum down the inside of his thighs, Skobbejak was gently heeled over under full sail, cruising comfortably at 6 knots about ten miles off the Mozambique coastline. The slave boys were squatting on deck, enjoying their breakfast of 'pap en vleis (a thick maize porridge and meat)' under the watchful eyes of Andre's armed guards. The Skobbejak boys were having theirs in and around the wheelhouse while Dirk was on the helm.

"You can put John down as a definite "1" on the list for me," I told Tiaan, "He's a great find… I will put my cock on the block there's no one better!"

"They all good fucks, Uncle Jonathan!" Tiaan replied, "But we also found a coupla outstanding ones!. Just a few more to try out!"

"Well, you have another six hours to do it in," I said, "We should reach Inhaca about noon if the wind holds."

"Cool," he replied, "That's plenty time."

"You know, Dad," Dirk said, more than a tinge of jealousy in his voice, "These guys been doing it since they were little! You 'n me 'n Josh are rookies compared with them!"

'Sure," I said, "But just think what else they have gone through in the years they've been prisoners of the rebels… You have a lot to be grateful for!"

"I feel sorry for them, Uncle Jonathan.' said Stefan, "It's not really fair what's happened to them."

I ruffled his crew-cut blonde hair.

"I know, Stefan, I know," I replied, "Unfortunately, there's a lot about life that isn't fair. Life doesn't care. Life just happens. It wasn't fair that they were taken as slaves by a warlord who probably murdered their parents… it wasn't because of anything that the boys did! Now they've been rescued from that terrible life… but that wasn't because of anything that they did either! There are many other young boys are still being worked to death on those diamond fields right now… and that's not fair either. We have to just make the best of whatever hand we are dealt!"

"Yes, Uncle Jonathan," Stefan said, "But they still slaves, just like the boys at the beach villa. An' then later they gonna be sold to other people… just like the boys at the beach villa gonna be sold at the auction soon."

"Oh, so you know about that?' I said.

"Sure, Dad," said Dirk, "They told us."

"What do the boys think about?" I asked, curiously.

"They think it's cool," Dirk replied.

"And what do you think about it?" I asked.

Dirk thought a moment.

"I think it can maybe be cool for them,' he replied, "Much better than where they were, anyway."

"If you think about it' Johan added, "They not much different from us."

"Why, Johan," I asked, "Do you feel like you are a slave?"

"No, Uncle Jonathan," he laughed, "I mean they kinda "lost boys" just like us… They got rescued by Andre, just like you rescued us… They have to work at the villa to earn their keep, just like we have to work on Skobbejak… If they misbehave they get whipped, just like us… They get to have a lotta sex, just like us. Only difference is they are owned and can get sold"

"Who says I can't sell you?" I chuckled.

"Well, I s'pose you bought us from Henk, so maybe you can sell us too!" Johan chuckled back.

"Ja," said Stefan, "When you explain it like that I suppose there's not much difference… while you still a kid anyway!"

By now the slave boys had finished their breakfast and were washing their utensils in one of the zinc tubs that they had bathed in last night. When that was done, Johan picked up the rope's end that Dirk had been using earlier to spur the boys hauling on lines to greater effort.

"Might as well keep 'em busy," he said, snapping the rope's end through the air as he went forward to organise the slave boys into groups to scrub the wooden deck planking.

From the smiles and laughter among the slave boys I gathered that scrubbing the decks with soapy water was a lot more like play than work for boys accustomed to humping sixty kilogram baskets of gravel from dawn to dusk in the blazing African sun. Johan's playful efforts at instilling some order with the rope's end simply elicited more mirth and splashing. The sting of the rope's end probably felt like mosquito bites to backs and bottoms accustomed to the skin-slicing slash of the sambok. Laughing, Johan gave up and played along, soon to be joined by the other Skobbejak boys, leaving me to take the helm.

Eventually the rough-housing settled down and all the boys, crew and slave, bent their backs to getting the decks scrubbed.

It struck me as I watched them that at a little distance there was not much to distinguish between the boys of the two groups as they mingled together, soaping, scrubbing and mopping the decks. The Skobbejak boys, because of their good diet and relatively easy, though active, lives, were a little bigger, heavier and more 'meaty' than the slave boys, whose poor diet and gruelling physical labour made them leaner and more wiry, though hard-muscled and extraordinarily strong. But beyond that, both groups were naked, tough-footed, tanned all over, muscular and sexy as hell.

The decks cleaned and drying rapidly under the hot sun, Dirk, Tiaan, Joshua and Jul carried on their task of interviewing and cataloguing all the slave boys, calling them down to the saloon one by one for the purpose. Johan, who hadn't had any sex in twenty-four hours, eagerly went after them to assist with the sexual performance assessment but, seized of a sudden idea, I called him back and handed over the helm to him while I pulled out a larger scale chart of the coastline between Limpopo River mouth and Limpopo than the one we had been using and pored over it, consulting the Sailing Directions and doing some calculations. Then I pondered for a while and made a decision.

I worked out a course change and gave the course change to Johan. He looked at me curiously.

"Where we going?" he asked.

"Sao Martinho Lagoon," I replied.

"Oh, I saw that on the chart," he replied, "It's not so far from us. Is it safe?"

"Well, it's closer to Maputo and has been in the hands of the revolutionary government for some time, so it should be relatively safe.' I replied.

"What we gonna do there?" he asked.

"We're going to give our young passengers the first beach holiday they've had in years… maybe ever!" I replied.

A wide grin stretched across his broad, handsome face.

"That's cool!" he said.

Then he added:

"I remember the mouth looked a bit dodgy, though. Will we get in?"

"I think so… I hope so… with the rains they've been having it should be open. We'll heave to offshore and you can take the rubber duck in to check it out.

"Cool!" he said, with another big grin and a sparkle in his blue eyes.

Then I got on the radio to let Andre know that we would be delayed a while.

"What do you mean "delayed"?' the radio crackled.

"Nothing to worry about," I replied, "We're just exploring the coast a bit."

"So how long will this take?' he demanded, testily.

"As long as it takes!" I replied, unhelpfully, "I'll let you know my ETA when I know!"

"No, Jonathan, I'd much rather you…' was all that came through before I switched back to the listening channel. I chuckled as I pictured him swearing at the set in a minute or two when he realised communication had been cut.

With some time on our hands before we would arrive at Sao Martinho, I chatted to the two security contractors who had accompanied us.

They were tough, hard men of mixed race, who appeared to be highly proficient at their profession. They had seen service during the colonial war as members of the Mozambique Commando Companies, part of the Portuguese Special Forces who had been recruited from among both white and black Mozambicans. Under the new dispensation their past service for Mozambique's colonial rulers had made them persona non grata, and they now operated as contractors for a private military company (PMC) that hired out trained operatives to anyone who could pay for them.

I asked one of them, Jose, what he thought of the enslavement by rebel forces of the white colonial children whom they had previously worked so hard to protect.

A shadow passed over his face as he replied:

"The Portuguese abandoned us at the end. They did not care what happened to us or our children… why should we care what happened to their children?"

His bitterness was almost palpable. I was silent as I digested the import of his words: Here was a man who had given his all for a white colonial regime that had abandoned him and his family to the tender mercies of their enemies when they pulled out of the country. It was hard to imagine a greater betrayal. The fact that these particular boys appeared to be mostly South African or Rhodesian rather than Portuguese would have made no difference to Jose.

A few hours later we arrived off the mouth to the lagoon. There was a line of breakers some distance off the mouth but we could see what looked like an opening into the lagoon on the other side of the surf line. We dropped the sails and held a position under power in the deeper water while we lowered a rubber duck over the side. Johan and Dirk jumped into the water from the rail and then pulled themselves into the duck. A minute later they were roaring off toward the surf line. After circling about for a while, assessing the break, we watched the boat breach the line and head into the swelling water of the gap.

Half an hour later they were back to report that the channel was wide enough and just deep enough to admit Skobbejak into the lagoon. I knew that once we were in the lagoon there would be no problem as the depth reached 50 metres according to the sailing directions. As the tide was low and rising, they recommended that we wait a few hours to make absolutely certain, given the rise and fall of the water in the gap as a result of the wave action. So we headed a little further out and dropped anchor to wait. I set the two security contractors to watch for sharks with their rifles at the ready and then allowed the boys to jump over the side for a cooling swim. I was concerned that some of the slave boys might not have had the opportunity to learn how to swim, but it appeared that they were all able to swim quite well… this would probably turn out to be another clue to their origin and background, I thought.

Later, Dirk and I took over the shark watch and allowed the very grateful security contractors to strip off and dive into the sea as well.

By late morning we had taken Skobbejak on a rollicking ride through the surf and through the twisting channel into Sao Martinho Lagoon, with Johan and Dirk escorting us in the rubber duck and then nosing ahead of us like scouts until we dropped anchor in the clear still water of the lagoon about 100 metres off the inside beach.

Then, leaving Tiaan and Stefan on board with the security contractors to maintain an anchor watch, we ferried everyone else ashore with the rubber ducks, together with sleeping bags, food, fishing rods, bats, balls and everything else needed to have fun and camp on the beach under the stars.

The boys spent the rest of the day just having fun. They took the rubber ducks and explored part of the lagoon; they went body-surfing in the waves on the seaward side of the mouth; they fished off the beach and from the boats; they wrestled and romped; they played soccer and volleyball. In the evening we fed them all with meat and pap cooked on the braai (barbecue) and cold drinks brought ashore in cooler boxes. Then they all sat around the fire, joking and telling each other stories until, one by one they went off to flop onto their sleeping bags to settle in for the night.

My plan was to return to the ship to sleep in comfort rather than sleeping under the stars on a sandy beach. Before I did so, I walked around to check that the boys were all fine. I found that, despite their highly active day, almost none of the boys, Skobbejak crew or slave, was doing much sleeping. They had nearly all thrown their sleeping bags together in twos, threes and fours, and were deeply engrossed in various stages of enjoying sex with each other.

Only one seemed to be on his own, sitting up on his sleeping bag with his knees raised and his arms wrapped around his knees. He watched me as I moved through the dark towards him, picking my way through the groups of rutting boys. As I came up to him I saw it was John.

"All on your own, John?" I queried.

"I was waiting for you, Baba," he said softly, standing up and wrapping his strong arms around my waist.

I felt his hard little cock prodding at my thighs and I put my arms around him.

"Thank you for thinking of me, John," I said and we stood like that for a while.

"Okay, then, you come back to the ship with me," I said, closing my hand around the back of his neck and leading him down to the water's edge.

We walked a few steps and then he darted back to pick up his sleeping bag, rolling it up quickly and stuffing it under his arm.

Back on board Skobbejak, we passed through the saloon on the way to my cabin. Bent over the saloon table was the brawny MMA fighter, Stefan, with the equally muscular gymnast, Tiaan, behind him, both of them grunting and sweating profusely as the black-haired Tiaan vigorously pistoned his big cock into the blonde boy's arse. Both of them grinned broadly. John's little cock, which had deflated somewhat on the way over, suddenly stiffened into erection again with excitement and expectation.

I paused behind Tiaan and laid the palm of my one hand on his upper back, enjoying the feel of his back muscles knotting and releasing rhythmically under his smooth, sweat-drenched skin as he rocked in and out of Stefan. I reached down between his smooth thighs with my other hand and slid it up into the sweaty cleft between his pumping buttocks. He was slick with running cum and I realised that Stefan must have just shot his load in Tiaan's arse. My middle finger found his slippery, clenching pucker and gained immediate entry. Tiaan looked back and grinned at me over his shoulder as I finger-fucked his arse in rhythm with his fucking Stefan.

I did this for a while until I became aware of John plucking at my arm, trying to get me to move toward my cabin. I gave Tiaan a playful slap on his hard round arse and followed John out of the saloon.

The moment we entered my cabin, John scampered up onto my bed, rolled over onto his back and pulled his knees up to his shoulders, his forearms resting on his thighs as his hard brown hands pulled his butt cheeks apart to expose his pinkish brown, well-used pucker, already flexing wide open in anticipation of being entered. Then I saw that he had the small round puncture scar that I had noticed earlier, not only on both feet but also on both hands. I was intrigued but thought I would leave it to another time to ask about them.

Instead of getting up onto on the bed right away, I walked around to the bedside cabinet and pulled out a tube of lubricant jelly. John watched me curiously as I smeared it all over my shaft and then got onto the bed to lubricate his bumhole with it.

"What's that, Baba?" he asked.

"It's lubricating jelly… so my cock can slide into your arse easier," I replied.

"Oh," he said, "In the bordello we jus' use spit."

"I noticed that last night… it's okay… but this is better… you'll see!" I replied.

Then I stretched out on the bed with my head between his legs and took his quaveringly erect little cock into my mouth. The boy gasped with pure pleasure, initially almost embarrassedly trying to lift my head off his cock. When I persisted he dropped his head back on the pillow and left his hands resting on my shoulders.

"No Baba ever done that for me before," he said huskily.

After a while, when I felt from his hard fingers digging into my shoulders that he was about to climax, I stopped sucking and pulled my lips off his cock. He grabbed at my head to try and hold me there, but he was not strong enough.

I got up onto my knees and shuffled forward, holding my straining cock ready to shove into John's welcoming hole. I lifted up his pelvis and pushed a couple of pillows under him to lift him up to the right height. I bent over him, supporting my body on one arm as I used my other hand to guide my cock head into the deep concave leading to his pucker. Eagerly, John grabbed my cock with a hard, work-roughened hand and guided my cock in himself. Firm, but elastic and compliant, his fuck-hole seemed almost to suck me instantly all the way in.

Once again the practised eleven year-old fucked my cock hard and well, inventively prolonging the pleasure while all the time steadily building it to an exquisite explosion of ecstasy that had me bellowing in delight.

John's staying power was exceptional, as was his power of recovery. He evidently had the stamina to keep going all night and this was the second night in a row. It seemed that he quite literally could not get enough cock up his arse or down his throat.

After a couple of hours of the most outstanding, but also the most exhausting sex I had had in months, I was lying back on my bed, trying to get my breath back as John's head energetically bounced up and down my shaft. Suddenly, the cabin door opened and both Tiaan and Stefan scurried in and jumped onto the bed. They had been sitting about in the saloon for the last hour, listening to what was going on in my cabin and, unable to stand it any longer, came to join in.

Truth to tell, I was actually glad to have them shoulder some of the pressure. As for John, their arrival seemed to give him even more energy, if that could be imagined, and the four of us fucked and sucked well into the night until we all passed out one by one in the master cabin's big bed.

I woke at dawn and went on deck, leaving the three boys still fast asleep. As I was standing at the rail, looking out over the still lagoon and enjoying the fresh morning air, I heard the other rubber duck approaching at speed and I walked idly over to that side of the ship to see who it was. I looked down on Dirk, who was alone in the boat as it came alongside, bouncing gently against the hull. He beckoned agitatedly when he spotted me.

"You gotta come quickly, Dad!" he called, "Two of the boys have run away!"

"Oh crap!" I thought, but to Dirk I said:

"Okay, calm down, I'm coming."

I woke the security contractors where they were sleeping in a hammock on the foredeck and told them what had happened. They rushed below and appeared a short while later kitted out as if they were going on a combat patrol.

"Do you really need rifles?" I asked them, "They're just a couple of young boys!"

"It's not for the boys," said one, "We never know what we may run into here!"

On the way in Dirk explained that, when he had woken up to start a breakfast fire he had noticed that two sleeping bags lying side by side were empty. At first he had assumed they had gone into the treeline to relieve themselves. Later he and Johan had gone looking for them but, when they could not find them, they realised they must have run away. Johan had sent him to call me while Johan and Jul searched for tracks.

Johan met us at the water's edge. He told us that they had found two sets of footprints exiting the treeline almost at the bluff on the western side of the lagoon mouth and that the tracks headed west along the beach. He led us to the point where he and Jul had turned back, realising that it was going to take a more sustained effort to find the missing boys.

The security contractors left a mobile radio with us and set off after the runaways at a trot, their tracks being easy to follow on the sandy beach. We watched them go until they were specks in the distance and then returned to make sure the others all got breakfast and carried on as if nothing had changed.

We found all the slave boys huddled together and in a very sombre mood.

"What's the matter with you lot?" I asked.

My query was met with silence and averted eyes. I looked from face to face until I caught the steady grey-blue eyes of one of the older boys, a ginger blonde who held my gaze, almost defiantly. Here was a boy with some spirit, I thought. I called him out and led him a short distance away.

"Why are you guys so glum?' I asked him, my hand on his shoulder, "Those men will find your friends and bring them back… you don't have to worry about them.

He stared at me incredulously for a moment and then answered:

"We not worried about them! We worried about us! They arseholes to put us in such trouble!"

"What do you mean, put you in such trouble?' I asked, puzzled.

He stared at me again as if I was an idiot.

"When anyone runs away, the ones that stays behind always gets punished real bad! You gonna whip us all, right?' he said angrily.

"Of course not!" I replied, "You did nothing wrong… Why on earth would I whip you?"

"We never did nothing wrong before but we all got whipped when a boy ran away at the mine!" he replied.

"Well, this is not the mine," I said, "No one is going to whip you if you do nothing wrong!"

He looked at me in amazement.

Something then occurred to me.

"If they whipped you when you didn't run away, how did they punish the ones that did?"

"Dunno," said the boy, "They didn't never came back. The soldiers always said they killed them when they caught them and left them for the hyenas to eat. That's why those guys got guns, right?"

"No, no, no… the guns are to protect themselves," I replied.

"From what?' the boy asked cheekily.

My heart skipped a beat as I pondered the possibilities and I began to wonder if we would see the missing boys again.

"Don't worry about it," I said to the boy, "Go back to the others and have your breakfast."

Obediently, the boy turned to trot back to the others.

"Wait a moment," I said, "What's your name?"

"Red," he replied.

When I cocked my head quizzically at him, he explained.

"For my red hair."

"Okay" I smiled.

"Can I go now, Baba?' he asked, bowing slightly with palms together at his chin.

"Yes, you may go," I replied, and then, "No, wait a moment… what are the runaways' names?"

"The one is "Smiley"… for the scar on his cheek… and the other is "Ballas"," he replied.

"For his big balls?" I asked.

"Yes," he chuckled, "And 'cause he got a lot of guts!"

I remembered the boy with the thick white scar that extended onto his cheek from the corner of his mouth, making him look as if he was smirking permanently. When I had asked him about the scar he had told me that a drunken soldier had cut him with a knife one night in the bordello.

I went for a walk down to the lagoon mouth. When I got back the slave boys seem to have recovered their spirits, no doubt aided by the news that they were not going to be whipped for their comrades' sins.

Towards evening the two security contractors came into view, with the two runaways in tow, literally: Each of them led a boy by a rope looped around the boy's neck. Their wrists were bound behind their backs.

We all stood and watched them coming. The boys were clearly exhausted and staggered up to collapse onto the sand at our feet. The contractors untied them, surprisingly gently I thought, and called for some water. Johan ran up with a couple of water bottles and the contractors knelt beside the dehydrated boys to sprinkle water gently on their faces and dribble small quantities of it through their fingers onto the boys' lips.

"If we had left them they would have died on that beach in a few days… no water and too stupid to find food!" said Jose, "We surprised them sleeping under a rocky overhang. They were so terrified they couldn't even get up. They thought we were going to shoot them. They just sat on the sand and pissed themselves."

In an hour the runaways had recovered somewhat from their ordeal and they hungrily wolfed down some food, not having eaten since the night before.

As we would be leaving early the next morning, we broke camp and ferried everyone back on board the ship. The two runaways were locked in the rope locker for the night, just be on the safe side.

Soon after dawn the next morning saw Skobbejak at sea once more. I left Johan to set course for Inhaca and sent Dirk to release the runaways from the rope locker while I called Andre up on the radio.

Andre was mightily relieved to hear we were on the way. When I told him about the two runaways, the radio was silent for a while.

"Andre? You still there?" I asked eventually.

"Yes, I'm here," the radio hissed, "So what happened?"

"Your security guys tracked them and brought them back," I replied.

"Shit!" he said, "Those runaway kids are always trouble… you should have left them there!"

"They would've died, Andre!" I replied.

"Teach them a lesson!" he said.

"I think they learned their lesson," I replied.

"I don't care if those little shits learned their lesson; it's about making sure the rest of them learn that running away is not an option."

"I understand," I replied.

"Okay, but remember… this wouldn't have happened if you didn't go on your little jolly… so you get to keep those two as part of your cut… I sure don't want them!"

"That's fine," I replied.

I stepped out of the wheelhouse. The runaways were sitting disconsolately on the deck with their backs against the front of the wheelhouse. As I stood in front of them they scrambled up onto their knees and then bent over forward to touch their foreheads to the deck before sitting back and putting their hands together at their chin, their eyes cast down at the deck.

I looked at them in silence until they nervously twisted their heads and looked up at me sideways, their eyes blinking nervously as if expecting to be struck.

"Are you going to kill us, Baba?" Smiley asked, a tremor in his voice.

I almost laughed, the question seemed so absurd. But then I remembered where they had been the last several years and I realised that, to him, the possibility of being executed for running away was all too real. It gave me a terrifying glimpse into the horrors of their lives as mine slaves.

"No, I am not going to kill you!" I said gently.

My assurance had precisely the opposite effect of that which I had expected: Both boys began to wail pitifully.

"Please, Baba, don't cut off our hands and feet! Please, please, Baba, rather kill us than that!" Smiley howled, "We will be good slaves, Baba, we will never run away again! Please Baba! Please!"

Ballas just glared at me defiantly.

Shocked to the core, I could only stare at Smiley as he sobbed and pleaded for mercy.

"For goodness sake!" I eventually said, "I'm not going to cut off any of your body parts! Where on earth did you get that idea?"

Jose, who had been watching from the rail, came closer.

"Cutting off hands or feet, or both, is a common punishment for these mine slaves," he explained, "It is a sentence of death, but a slow one and painful, as they cannot work, either on the mine or the bordellos, and they have to rely on charity to live, and there is not much charity there. They do not survive long"

"Good grief!" I said, "What absolute savages those people are!"

"They learned from their colonial masters," he replied.

"Get up, both of you!" I said to the boys.

They quickly jumped to their feet.

"You will both be punished with a very severe whipping!" I said.

They looked as if I had given them ice cream.

"Is that all, Baba?" asked Ballas, incredulously.

"Yes," I replied, a little uncertainly, "But understand it will be a very hard beating!"

They both dropped to their knees and threw their arms around my calves.

"Thank you Baba! Thank you!" they repeated over and over until Jose came over and gently pulled them to their feet.

"Thank you, Jose," I said, "Might as well get this over with now!"

I called Johan and Dirk.

"I want you boys to take these two forward and give them each a sound flogging with The Snake. Make sure you tie them tightly to the mast… these are not Skobbejak boys who are going to stand still and take it!"

"Cool!" said Johan excitedly.

I chuckled when I noticed how his prodigiously long thick cock was already filling and expanding with expectation.

"How many lashes?' he asked.

"Thirty lashes each. Try not to break the skin, but I want to hear them scream!" I said

'Cool!" he said again, his extending cock already standing out horizontally.

'I'll try not to make 'em bleed too much but I promise they gonna scream!" he added with a grin.

I saw the look of dismay on the runaways' faces at the sight of Johan's erecting cock. They obviously had experience of men who get aroused when inflicting pain and they had evidently just realised they had drawn the short straw as far as that was concerned.

Dirk and Johan led their two trembling charges forward, eager to get on with the whipping.

There was no need to make any formal announcement of the punishment. Boys the world over are naturally cruel and have an innate lust for blood. However angelic they may appear, they can be savage at heart and many, probably most, are irresistibly drawn to the spectacle of human pain and suffering. The moment it became known that the two runaways were being strung up for a whipping, all the boys on board, including my own, scurried forward to enjoy the thrill of watching one of their number squirm under the lash. Even the slave boys, for whom the sight of one of them being whipped must have been a daily occurrence, scrambled forward eagerly, elbowing one other out of the way to get a good view, their stiffening cocks signalling the pleasure they anticipated to derive from the coming entertainment.

For the next hour the deck echoed to the screams of the boys being whipped, punctuated with the sharp meaty crack of The Snake against the bunched muscles of their backs. When the second boy eventually stopped screaming I left Jul on the helm and went forward to see what was going on.

I found Smiley, the first boy to be flogged, lying on his belly on the deck, his upper body raised up onto his elbows with his forearms stretched out in front of him, his hands palm down on the deck. His head was raised and he stared unseeing straight in front of him, his blue eyes awash with tears of pain. He was snivelling and moaning softly, his body covered from shoulders to buttocks with thirty livid red welts, some of them lightly smeared with drying blood. His legs were spread apart and a little puddle had formed where Johan's and the other boys' cum had dribbled out of his bumhole onto the wooden deck planking. I took a closer look at his back and buttocks and was pleased to see that, although many of the whip welts oozed tiny droplets of blood, Johan had broken skin only at two or three places where the welts crossed.

The freshly whipped Ballas, with back and arse similarly lightly bloodied, was now bent over with his legs spread apart and his muscled arms clasped around the mast. He was grunting loudly in between sobs as Dirk roughly punished his arse with his thick log of a cock. Tiaan and Stefan were lined up behind him, expectant grins on their faces and cocks quiveringly erect as they waited their turn to fuck the boy. Standing to one side was Johan, a deeply satisfied smile on his face, his sated cock just beginning to droop after having rogered both boys. Their cocks were all slippery with cum and shit, and their groins and bellies lightly smeared with blood where they had come in contact with the lacerated back and buttocks of the whipped boys. Behind them most of the slave boys were fingering their erections enviously.

By now my own cock was hard and erect. Johan grinned as he spotted it.

"Can I take care of that for you, Uncle Jonathan?' he asked.

Without waiting for an answer he bent down in front of me and took my swollen cock into his mouth.

As if this were some kind of signal for a general orgy, every boy on that foredeck was either fucking or being fucked seconds later. John the slave boy, who, like a lost puppy, seemed to have adopted me, scurried over and wriggled himself between my legs to take Johan's freshly enlivened cock down his throat.

Once Tiaan and Stefan had both given Ballas a hard rogering, the boy was allowed to go and lie on his belly next to his partner in crime and recover from his punishment. With the resilience that seems characteristic of boys their age, no doubt aided by the stimulus of the frenetic sexual activity going on around them, they recovered quickly. By the time that I was done with Johan, Smiley and Ballas were both sitting up on their haunches and were observing the activity with great interest, their cocks already erected and hard. Smiley's cock was a quite remarkably long thin tube that stood out at a 45 degree angle, rather like a flagpole. His foreskin had retracted to reveal a perfectly proportioned acorn-shaped cockhead, glowing a healthy pinkish purple. His testicles, a beautifully symmetrical pair, were the size and shape of walnuts and hung down low, almost touching the deck where he squatted. Ballas's cock was almost as long but was exceptionally, almost absurdly, thick and plump. It was surmounted with a large plum-shaped head, now swollen purple and shiny from engorgement and only half emerged from a fleshy foreskin. His testicles, which were responsible for his nickname, Afrikaans slang for 'balls," were absolutely prodigious for his age and size. They would not have disgraced a breeding bull. They hung down between his thighs like a pair of apples, the one hanging slightly lower than the other. Just as well, I thought, or he would not have been able to walk properly.

The runaways immediately aroused my own interest and, leaving Johan and John to continue their enjoyment of each other's bodies, I motioned the two of them to get up. They jumped to their feet and looked at me nervously, biting their lips anxiously as their worried eyes flickered from my face to my hugely swollen cock and back.

"Come with me!" I told them.

The two boys walked with me to my cabin, obviously fearful of what further terrors may await them. I noticed, however, that their nervousness seemed to have no effect on their erections, which remained unwaveringly hard. From the way they kept eyeing my erected cock, I suspected that they had deduced that they were going to get fucked. The fact that they appeared to relish the prospect was very promising, I thought.

I got them to lie across my bed side by side on their bellies. They kept looking at me anxiously over their shoulders, their faces tight with despair and every muscle in their bodies knotted and taut. I realized that they thought they were about to receive another whipping. I left them wondering as I fetched a first aid kit out of a cupboard. I found a large tube of wound salve and I knelt on the bed between them as I squeezed out the ointment and gently applied it to the burning welts that criss-crossed their back and buttocks.

Each of them jerked violently at the first touch of the cooling cream, and I guessed that this must be the first time that either of them had received any kind of treatment or care for the hundreds of whip stripes they had received over the several years they had spent in captivity as mine slaves. Soon, however, they were both wincing and purring with pleasure as my fingers gently traced their whip welts and rubbed the soothing salve into the tortured flesh.

By the time I had finished treating both boys, however, my own growing lust for their hard-muscled, whip-wealed young bodies had completely eclipsed my compassion for their pain. Unable to restrain myself any longer, I mounted Smiley as he lay on his belly and roughly rode his beautiful arse hard and long.

Taken by surprize, Smiley gave vent to ear-splitting screams as I first entered him. I felt his strong young body squirming and thrashing desperately under me as my cock rammed repeatedly into his fuck hole. Seasoned young whore boy that he was, though, his arse quickly accommodated to the exceptional length and girth of my cock and his screams soon turned to moans and grunts of satisfaction and pleasure.

Ballas had more time to prepare himself and he used the time wisely, working globs of saliva into his bum hole and finger-fucking himself with one, two and then four fingers in an effort to get his sphincter ready to take my cock. By the time I was ready for him, the boy was lying on his back with his knees drawn back to his shoulders as he energetically fisted himself, such was the degree of stretch that the little slut was capable of.

I took my straining cock in hand and shuffled over on my knees to insert it into his hole. He reached down to his arse with both hands and pulled his butt cheeks apart as hard as he could while flexing his hole open wide enough that I could have inserted my thumb without touching the sides. I noticed that his hands had the same small round puncture scars that John had. Out of curiosity I quickly checked his feet and they also had the small round scars. My raging lust immediately drowned my curiosity, however, and I gave it no more thought.

Despite the boy's preparations, I watched Ballas's eyes widen in shock as I rammed my cock down his fuck channel. Then he shut his eyes and opened his mouth wide in pain, although no more than a long drawn-out groan welled up out of his throat. Soon, though, he too was whimpering in pleasure, rocking and rolling his bum around my cock and trying his best to draw me deeper into him.

Finally, with a bellow of ecstasy, I shot my load deep inside the boy and rolled over onto my back, panting. Like a flash both boys were onto my still erected cock, hungrily sucking and licking me clean, their heads bumping in their eagerness to satisfy. When finished they sat up on the knees on either side of me, fingering their quivering erections and darting expectant glances at me and at each other. I guessed that they were awaiting permission to have their own sexual release and I nodded.

"Go ahead!" I said.

For the next half hour I watched the two strong, hard-bodied young boys engage in rough, even ferocious sex until finally, sated and exhausted, they flopped down to lie on either side of me, their still swollen cocks slimy with cum, saliva and the detritus of less than pristine boy's bumholes, their chests heaving and their bodies glistening with sweat. I put an arm around each one's brawny shoulder and pulled them in against me, cuddling them and enjoying the wiry hardness of their bodies against mine as we relaxed together.

It was dark by the time we anchored off the beach villa on Inhaca Island a few hours later, and I decided we would all sleep on board until morning before going ashore.

After checking that all was well and organising the boys into an anchor watch for the night, I went back down to my cabin to join the two sleeping boys. While they slept I checked their feet and hands and saw that they both had the small puncture scars that I had first observed on John.

Burning with curiosity by now, I climbed onto the bed and wriggled myself between them. They showed no signs of waking from their deep sleep, so I tried to waken Smiley by tickling the soles of his feet. The skin of his soles was so thick, stiff and leathery, however, that he must have lost all sensitivity of touch there and my attempt to waken him in that way was unsuccessful.

I then tried to wake him by playing with his long thin cock, now slack and hanging down with its tip touching the bed as he lay on his side. I was soon rewarded as his cock sprang to life, stiffening and swinging up parallel to the bed as it lengthened to bob against the ridged muscles of his lower belly with the quickening pulse of his blood. Soon a smile crept onto his face and his eyes flickered open as he awoke. He rolled over against me and lifted his leg over mine, slowly humping his now bone hard cock against my thigh as he reached over to clamp his work-roughened fingers around my own thickening shaft. I turned my attention to wakening Ballas in the same way that I had wakened Smiley.

After another hour of great sex we lay together on my bed, myself in the middle and the boys on either side of me. I reached down and took Smiley's hand in mine, bringing it up in front of my face to look at it. I touched the small round scar in the middle of his palm with the forefinger of my other hand and asked him:

"What is this from? I see you both have these marks on your hands and feet?"

Smiley scowled and yanked his hand out of mine, putting it behind his back. Immediately a look of terror crossed his face. He quickly thrust his hand back in mine.

"I'm sorry, Baba, forgive me, I forgot my place! Please forgive me, Baba!"

I stroked his hand placatingly, and then I hugged him close to me.

"That's okay, that's okay," I said gently, "You don't have to tell me about it if it causes you pain."

He flung his arm over my middle and hugged me tightly, nuzzling his shaggy blonde head against my chest, saying nothing.

After a long while he released me and rolled back slightly. He raised his head. His deep blue eyes peered through his ragged blonde fringe and looked me earnestly in the eye.

"I will tell you our story, Baba," he said.

He sat up on the bed next to me on crossed legs and, as Ballas lay on the other side of me with his chin on my chest and one hand absently fiddling with my cock and balls, began to tell me the story.

Chapter Sixteen

"We was at this boarding school in Umtali in Rhodesia.' Smiley began, "That's me an' Ballas an' John and some of the others here."

"All the boys at that school was bad kids… or they got bad parents… or they got no parents… orphans… like me and John. We all got sent there by the magistrate. Me 'n John's dads got killed in the bush war when we was little. We didn't have moms, so we got sent to Umtali. My best buddy Ballas here got sent there because he was a bad kid!" he paused to giggle, "He kept stealing stuff because his dad spent all his money on booze and there was nothing left for food… so the magistrate took him away from his dad and sent him to the Brothers so he could learn to be good!"

Ballas grinned wickedly at this:

"Ja… Brother Mac taught me to be good, all right… a good fuck!"

Smiley giggled.

"Ja, Brother Mac taught us both!" he said.

Ballas grinned mischievously and pumped his fist exaggeratedly on his thick young cock, which had rapidly hardened again even as he spoke about Brother Mac.

"But I taught him first' said Ballas

Smiley pointed at Ballas's impressively swollen maleness.

"It's true," Smiley said, "That fucken big pole of his was the first cock that ever went up my arse… 'course it wasn't that big when we was eight, but it was fucken big for a eight year old all the same."

Ballas beamed with pride.

"I still got the biggest cock in the school!"

"Ja… only there's no more school!" said Smiley.

"You know what I mean!" said Ballas.

The school was apparently basically a boy's home run by a charitable order rather than one of the elite private schools that one of the educational orders ran for the sons of the wealthy. With no fee income the school had to depend on charitable donations, on the funding provided by the order and on government grants. There was no money for anything but the essentials. The Brothers saved money wherever they could, especially in such relatively non-essential items as uniforms and clothing. The hot climate, for example, permitted the boys to wear short-sleeved open-necked khaki shirts and khaki shorts the whole year round. Each boy was issued with one pullover for the very rare occasions that the weather turned cold but most of the boys had never actually had occasion to wear it. It went without saying that the boys were not provided with shoes or underwear either. Not that any of them would have considered this a hardship anyway. Rhodesian boys were a hardy breed, of sturdy British and Afrikaner settler stock. Most of them, like their South African cousins, went barefoot all year round and would have considered wearing underwear downright unmanly and, in the sweaty African heat, an intolerable discomfort.

"Anyway," Smiley went on, absently fingering the curved scar on his cheek, "We was all in the school choir that went to Vila Pery in Mozambique for that Easter week."

Smiley and Ballas told me how the choir travelled the short distance from Umtali in Rhodesia to Vila Pery in Mozambique in very high spirits. It was an annual event that the Umtali boys always looked forward to and the Portuguese school community in Vila Pery were very gracious and generous hosts.

Not their words, but I gathered that the choirboys weres regarded as an elite among the boys of the school. They were apparently hand-picked by Brother Mac from among the best athletes in the school. It seemed that, while singing ability was an obvious requisite, Brother Mac's further selection criteria were: the boys had to be good-looking or at least cute; they had to have athletic, well-developed bodies; and, most important, they had to like sex and be willing to enjoy it with the good Brother and also with each other.

The choir was apparently pretty good. They were also a pleasure to behold. Who could fail to be charmed by a choir of 20 cute young country boys with their suntanned faces and rosy cheeks, singing like angels in their red cassocks, white surplices and bare feet? As a result they were much in demand in the entertainment starved country towns and occasionally, as on this occasion, in the neighbouring Diocese, which happened to be just across the border in Mozambique.

As the delighted townsfolk everywhere had their hearts melted by the boys' angelic singing and cherubic beauty, none could have guessed that there was not a boy on the stage who had not had the choirmaster's cock up his arse or down his throat many times. None knew that it was not just the boys' feet that were bare under the cassocks or that those shining eyes were lit more by lustful thoughts of what the boys would be doing in their hotel rooms later that night than by any heavenly inspiration.

"When we asked why we had to wear those long red girly dresses in the choir instead of normal clothes, Brother Mac said it's so no one can see when we got a boner," Smiley said.

"Which was most of the time!" Ballas added with a guffaw.

"Yes… and remember that time in the cathedral in Bulawayo when Brother Mac lifted your cassock at the back and finger-fucked your bum hole while you was singing a solo!" Smiley laughed.

"Or when John pulled up his cassock and sat on Brother Mac's cock in the choir stall and Mac fucked him quietly while the priest was giving the sermon," Ballas snickered.

"Ja… an' we was all giggling behind our music sheets… an' every time John grunted or moaned we had to pretend we was all coughing… an' when we walked down the aisle afterward John was dropping Mac's cum out his slack arse on the tiles and we was slipping in it with our bare feet!" Smiley remembered.

"Those was great times!" said Ballas, "But go on with your story now!"

"Oh ja!" said Smiley, "We always liked going on outings with Brother Mac 'cause we always had lotsa sex an' no one to tell us no!"

Outings such as this were an opportunity for both Brother Mac and 'his boys' to give free expression to the lusts that they could only exercise furtively while at school. The boys looked forward to these flights of freedom immensely. Brother Mac drove the bus and was the only adult who accompanied them on these trips. With his active encouragement the boys turned every outing into one long orgy from the moment the bus left the town limits until it returned the next day or a few days later, interrupted only by the necessity of actually doing a public performance on some town hall stage.

On one or two memorable occasions the bus ran unexpectedly into a BSAP (British South Africa Police) checkpoint between towns and the boys had just enough time to disengage their cocks from each other's mouths or bums and pull on their shorts before the bus came to a stop. Anywhere but in Africa a bus load of young boys wearing nothing but bum-hugging shorts might have attracted comment, but in the heat and humidity of central Rhodesia a bunch of barefoot and shirtless young boys on a school trip was regarded as completely unremarkable. In each case the police sergeant did not venture any further than the step well at the front of the bus before waving a dismissive hand and wishing everyone a pleasant journey further. He was looking for terrorists after all and not white schoolboys. Had he walked down the aisle and gotten a look at the many erection-tented shorts or the cum splattered floor and seats at the back of the bus where the 13 year-olds sat, there might perhaps have been some awkward questions. Or perhaps not: Boys will be boys, after all, and in these remote outposts one learned not to scratch where it didn't itch.

Although he protected 'his boys' fiercely and secured many privileges for them, Brother Mac apparently did not mollycoddle them. He believed that the cane was the only effective instrument of correction for young boys and he used it even for the most minor infractions. He caned their bare bottoms frequently and hard. Canings were not private events. Boys would be caned in front of their mates so that the others could also benefit from the example. Every boy was caned at least once a week. If by the close of the day on Friday any boy had not been caned that week for some offence that he had actually committed, he would be caned in the choir room that evening on the basis that he must be guilty of some undetected crime. There were invariably five or six of these boys; usually the same five or six, and the choir looked forward to watching their mates being beaten almost as much as Brother Mac looked forward to beating them.

Not that Brother Mac flogged his boys with any trace of malice. Quite the opposite. He loved his boys dearly and genuinely believed that he was administering doses of virtue that would serve them well in later life. The fact that he derived sexual pleasure from doing so was to him merely a confirmation of his love for them and that was what he taught them:

"Brother Mac used to say «If you get a boner when you watch your mate being flogged, it's because you love him»," Smiley told me.

"Ja," added Ballas earnestly, "That's how we knew Brother Mac loved us all… he always had a big boner when he whipped us."

"Well… I dunno," said Smiley, "I always got a hard-on even when I didn't like the guy getting jacked… so I think it's more about sex than love!"

"Ja, true hey!" Ballas responded, "Maybe you right."

Brother Mac had apparently encouraged the boys to masturbate if their cocks erected while watching or even receiving a caning. In this way their impressionable young psyches quickly came to associate pain with sexual pleasure and every caning became a prelude to sexual gratification.

Smiley resumed his story: The boys had looked forward to the annual outing to Vila Pery in Mozambique as it promised to be a whole week of unbridled sex interrupted only by a few choral performances at various venues in the town. The war in Mozambique was increasing in intensity, but so far it had not reached the eastern part of the country and the area was considered safe.

The outing lived up to its promise and the boys had a marvellous week in Vila Pery. They were accommodated, as usual, at a private guest house just outside the town whose Portuguese owner was an old friend of Brother Mac and, needless to say, shared his sexual preferences and joined in the fun.

On Good Friday the boys were taken to a Catholic mission school in the countryside some distance away from Vila Pery. There they were to take part in a traditional ceremony commemorating how some early missionary saint was crucified by the local tribespeople on Good Friday a hundred or more years earlier, more or less as a cruel joke, but which somehow later led to the conversion of the whole tribe to Christianity.

The ceremony took place in the open air and part of it involved three local volunteers being 'crucified' on wooden crosses that had been made for the purpose, although, unlike similar ceremonies in the Philippines, they were not actually nailed to the cross but merely tied to it. They did not actually hang on the crosses either. The crosses were made short enough to allow the 'victims' to have their feet on the ground while their arms were spread sideways and tied to the cross bar. However, before being 'crucified' in this way they were stripped naked and made to face the cross and hold onto the cross bar while they were 'scourged' with multi-stranded whips that had been dipped into goats blood. This created a spectacle of sufficient gore and violence to give everyone that thrill of delicious horror that otherwise civilized people seek when they go to watch muscular men beat each other to bloody pulp in a boxing match.

Once again, of course, the boys were grateful for the fact that their voluminous cassocks concealed their erections at the sight of the muscular naked tribesmen being 'scourged' and 'crucified."

After the ceremony the congregation seemed to melt away very rapidly, until just Brother Mac and the boys were left with the priest, helping to carry chairs and other things into the church hall. While Smiley, Ballas and John were in the hall, stacking chairs and bemoaning the fact that they could not remove their cassocks because they were naked underneath and had not brought shorts with them on the bus, they heard a commotion outside.

There were raised voices and squeaky yells of alarm from some of the boys. They heard the local priest angrily remonstrating with someone. As he did so a shot rang out and the priest's voice fell silent.

The three boys in the hall scampered over to the nearest window and looked outside. There were a number of armed men in non-descript camouflage clothing who had herded the choir boys together around Brother Mac, who was holding his arms out as if trying to protect them all. Face down on the ground in front of the steps in the hall was the local priest, a pool of dark blood forming in the dust beneath his torso. Some of the boys were crying. They watched as two of the armed men moved toward Brother Mac and dragged him away from the boys. Many of the boys held onto his black cassock but the armed men brutally beat them back with the butts of their rifles. They took Brother Mac into the church hall.

"Then they came into the hall and pulled us three out to join the others. They laughed to see I pissed the front of my cassock wet. We had to walk through that blood in the sand with our bare feet! It was gross! John vomited right there. When we got to the other boys I saw I wasn't the only one pissed myself. Some of the boys was crying. Some was vomiting. Some was just standing staring like they seen a ghost"

"We was so scared waiting outside there. We didn't know what they was gonna do with us. A couple of them was arguing with each other… I think about what to do with us. Then they came to us. They made us all take off our choir clothes and throw them on the ground. We was all standing there naked and they was laughing at us… they was laughing 'cause we was brown all over from the sun except the white bit around our middle where we weared our Speedos. They said we looked funny. I s'pose we did. We wasn't laughing though."

"Then they made us form a single file with our hands tied together behind our backs. They joined a rope… like… from my hands at my back to the neck of the boy behind me. When we was all tied together like this in a long chain they made us start walking into the bush."

"We walked all day like that for many days… I dunno how many… it was a few weeks maybe. I dunno where they took us. We kept moving day and night to get away from the soldiers. For the first few days they made us run most of the time. They chased us with samboks. They wouldn't untie our hands even though it slowed us down. We got no food those first few days… just some water now and then… now and then we would stop and rest for an hour maybe. We would just stop on the track and we would just fall down right there and go to sleep."

"Then we came to an area where they said the soldiers wouldn't go and we went slower and only walked in the day. They untied our hands an' just tied the ropes to our necks. They stopped at night and made fires and cooked food an' we got some little food too."

"Then while we's lying there with the ropes round our necks, some of the men comes and chooses one of us to go sleep with him. He unties your rope and then he takes you away into the bush where he's gonna sleep… then he fucks your arse with his huge dong the whole night so you can hardly walk the next day!"

"Ja!" added Ballas, "Brother Mac had a man-size cock but he had nothing on those okes! We never seen such big cocks before then… never mind had one up our bums! Fuckit, that was sore!"

"And 'specially that first week or two when we got so sunburnt on our bums from walking naked in the sun all day," said Smiley, "That made it even more sore!"

"Those guys didn't give a damn about that," said Ballas, "An' if we screamed or cried out loud they beat us… we learnt to scream into our hands that time!"

The boys related how, after a seemingly endless trudge through the tsetse-infested bushveld of what I deduced was probably Northern Mozambique, they finally arrived at a more or less permanent camp, where they were kept for about a month or two.

One of their guards on the forced march through the bush had taken a particular shine to Smiley. Apparently he really appreciated Smiley's sexual eagerness and inventiveness, something which made Smiley a popular fuck among all the guards on that march. This guard informed Smiley at some point that Brother Mac had been spared in order to take back a ransom demand to be given to the Rhodesian government. This particular faction of the insurrection in Mozambique had high hopes that the Rhodesians (either the government, or the boys' parents, or both) would pay a large sum of money for the return of their beautiful boys, quite obviously the flower of Rhodesian colonial youth.

For the next month or two the boys therefore lived in high hopes of the Rhodesian government coming to their rescue and securing their return to Umtali.

It was not to be, however. These were not the sons of the rich and powerful. Quite the opposite, in fact, and the Rhodesian government had better things to do with the millions of dollars being demanded. So they fell back on the convenient but understandable old 'We don't negotiate with terrorists' line, and abandoned Smiley and his mates to their fate. They went further and hushed the whole thing up so it did not even get into the newspapers at the time. A bunch of orphans and delinquent misfits without parents to clamour for action or information would not be missed. A handsome donation of funds for a project of the Brothers' choosing and the suggestion that it was in the interest of State Security that the thing be kept quiet 'for now' ensured the silence of the Brothers. The Brothers were told that negotiations were in a sensitive stage and that breaking silence about the matter might actually jeopardize what slim chance there was to secure the boys' safe return.

Back in the camp of the 'freedom fighters," of course, the news was not well received. There was heated debate about what to do with the boys: Some favoured keeping them as slaves to do the menial work around the camp and, more importantly, continue to provide the sexual services that they had been doing. Others thought they should be tortured and killed and their mutilated bodies dumped at the Rhodesian border post to show the world that they should be taken seriously in future.

The terrified boys' worst fears seemed to be on the point of being realised when they were paraded one morning in front of the whole camp and it was announced that the District Revolutionary Judicial Council had decreed that they were to be tortured and executed to atone for the oppression of the indigenous peoples by the white imperialist colonialist dogs who happened to be their forebears.

The boys, mostly between the ages of 9 and 11 at this time, had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. They stood dumbly, wondering what was happening, as three heavy old wooden doors were brought out and laid on the ground in front of the crumbling mud brick wall of the old Colonial building at the centre of the camp. The hinges and doorknobs had been removed and the very solid old doors lay flat on the ground.

Smiley, Ballas and John, who happened to be the first three boys in line, were pushed forward and made to stand at the foot of a door each. These three boys, among others, had been made gifts of colourful kikoys by fighters who had enjoyed their sexual services on a more or less frequent basis. They were now stripped of their kikoys and each was made to lie face down on one of the doors.

With one man to each limb, the boys were spread-eagled against the doors and held firmly in that position.

"I thought we was gonna be fucked by maybe the whole camp, Baba, while the men held us down!" said Smiley, "My cock was already rock hard under me an' I was grinning like I was getting ice cream!"

Smiley was sufficiently unconcerned to notice that there was a man with a camera who was taking photographs of every step of the proceedings. He even grinned up at the man.

So sexually excited were the boys that they did not even realise at first that the men restraining them were hammering large nails through their hands and feet to secure them to the heavy wooden doors.

"The nails was nearly all in before I even started feeling the pain," said Smiley.

"Ja… ' added Ballas, "Even then it wasn't too bad while the doors was still flat on the ground… I still had my boner on then!"

"Ja, me too," said Smiley, "But when they lifted the door to lean against the wall… fuck, that was sore! My cock just went soft right away and we was all screaming with the pain… I mean our bodies was hanging on the nails through our hands and feet!"

"Then they started whipping us with the samboks!" Ballas said, "Now that was sore! We screamed until we couldn't scream no more. I couldn't count how many lashes but afterward our mates counted over fifty stripes. The blood was running down our backs and our arses onto our legs! I still got some marks from that time!"

"Ja, I thought we was gonna die!" Smiley added, "Then after a while I wished I would die just to stop the pain!"

"Poor little John was only 9… he kept fainting and then they had to chuck water on him to wake him up again!" said Ballas, "They didn't want him to miss anything!"

When finally the whipping stopped the doors were lowered to the ground again. Thinking their ordeal was over, the three boys sobbed in relief.

But their relief did not last. They lifted their heads to see a man arrive clutching three thick wooden stakes, about a metre long, which had been roughly whittled to a sharp point at one end. They recognised the man as the chief of the camp. Another man came behind him carrying what looked like a thick wooden baton. The man with the stakes stopped next to Smiley, dropped his stakes on the ground and went down on his knees beside the boy. Smiley watched the man tearfully over his shoulder, his hands and feet still firmly nailed to the door though the pain was almost eclipsed by the searing agony of the fifty or more welts overlaying his back and buttocks like red hot poker strokes. Then the camp chief picked up one of the stakes and bent over Smiley as he roughly inserted two fingers into Smiley's anus and moved them in and out and around, stretching his anal ring to make an opening for the sharp point of the stake. Smiley's cock instinctively hardened although the rough-hewn point hurt somewhat as the man jiggled it into place.

Then, holding the pointed end just inside Smiley's anus, the man reached to the butt of the stake with his other hand and gave it a couple of hard bangs with the palm of his hand. Smiley gasped with the pain as the rough wood tore at the flesh of his anus.

Satisfied that the stake was firmly in place the chief got slowly to his feet while Smiley moaned softly in pain. He reached out to take the baton from his assistant. He planted his booted feet on either side of Smiley's waist, facing down the boy's spread-apart legs. Then he reached down and gave the butt of the stake a firm tap with the baton that he was using as a mallet. Smiley shrieked in pain as the stake gouged its way deeper into his arse. The chief handed the baton back to his assistant and lit up a cigarette while Smiley's screams died to a whimper. The aim was evidently to draw out the agony and make the execution by impalement last as long as possible.

Just then there was a ripple of excitement among the assembled men as a big important-looking man in crisp uniform strode purposefully up accompanied by what looked like his body guard.

The camp chief tossed his cigarette aside, drew himself up and gave the newcomer what passed for a salute.

"Good morning, General!" he said obsequiously.

"So it is true!" the general spat out. 'I did not believe the report so I came to see for myself! Who authorised this madness?"

"It… it…was a decision of the… the… Judicial Council, General," the camp chief stuttered.

"To hell with them!" the general shouted, "This is a matter for me to decide!"

"I… I… don't think… uh…," the camp chief stammered.

"Get out of my sight, you useless piece of shit!" the general yelled, "How dare you argue with me! Someone release these boys! If you have damaged this one so much that I have to shoot him I am going to shoot you as well!"

It turned out that the general owned an alluvial diamond mine and had decided that, since he could not get a ransom for the boys he would send them to work on the mine as slave labour alongside the captured sons of Portuguese colonials that he had working there already. At night they would swell the ranks of the boy prostitutes in the bordello that he ran as a side business. In any event he was himself growing tired of rogering the same boys' bottoms every night and was eager for fresh meat. He was incensed that the camp chief may have permanently spoiled the boy and annoyed that he may have to put Smiley down if the stake could not be extracted without causing permanent damage.

Luckily the stake had not gone too deeply into Smiley's well-used anus and could be dislodged after a lot of agonizing jiggling and much lubrication. The rough wood had left his sphincter somewhat grazed and bleeding, but the damage was considered to be roughly equivalent to what a novice bum boy might endure on first penetration and he was adjudged sufficiently healthy to depart with the rest of the boys later on the same day for the general's mine.

"Lucky it wasn't far," Ballas added, "'cause our feet was still sore from the nail holes in them!."

I looked from one boy to the other and then put my arms around them both and pulled them in close to me.

"I'm so, so sorry, boys… my goodness, that must have been terrible! To have to undergo such a horrifying experience at such a young age…! But you're safe now and no one is going to harm you again while I have any say in it!"

They submitted to my hug wordlessly. They even put their arms around me and gave me a half-hearted hug in return. There was no emotion in it and their faces were deadpan… like they had heard it all before.

I suddenly realised that many of the hundreds of men whose sexual needs they would have serviced in the mine camp bordellos over the years would also have hugged them and murmured empty words of sympathy and even of love to them. They had indeed heard it all before… why would I turn out to be any different, they would be thinking!

I sighed to myself, knowing it was going to take time to win their trust. Andre had made it clear that these two boys were going to be part of my share and I had already decided I was taking John. I would let Dirk and Johan choose the other two.

But I had come to a new decision concerning the boys I had now acquired from Andre. I was going to take the whole lot of them with us on Skobbejak. I counted off the new boys on my fingers: There were Andre's orphaned nephews: Heinke, Wikus and Marnus. There were the three slave boys from the villa: Rudi, Aleixo and Marco. And now the five who were my share of the fifteen boys I had just picked up from Limpopo River mouth. An extra eleven boys to bunk and feed on our voyage to Madagascar!

I had some planning to do.

But for now, there were other things to think about: Ballas had rolled over to lie on his belly between my outstretched legs and was sucking my balls one by one into his wide mouth while Smiley was on his knees next to me with both hands around my erected shaft, lapping at my swollen cockhead with his cute pink tongue…

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