by Holly Watt
Staring out of the window, Casey tried to make out where they were. She thought she recognised the ruined country club, and a few minutes later, Henke pulled off the main road. Now they were bouncing down a dirt track, the potholes deep and wide. Henke barely slowed, and Casey almost hit her head on the roof of the car.
After a couple of miles of dirt track, Henke slammed on the brakes, bringing the car to an abrupt halt. He switched off the headlights, and for a moment, they sat in the dark. Slowly, their eyes acclimatised and Casey started to make out trees, shrubs, a chain-link fence.
‘That’s the fence around Njana,’ grunted Henke. ‘Are you sure you want to do this? It could be … ’
A shape on the floor.
‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure.’
Henke started the car again, headlights still off, and headed further down the track. The fence was eight feet tall and topped with barbed wire. The brush had been cleared for ten yards on either side of the barrier. A mile later, the chain-link fence disappeared to the right, up a small hill, while the track continued to the left. Henke drove a few hundred yards further, then pulled into a small thicket.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘We go.’
He pulled a rucksack out of the back of the pickup, and began walking back towards the fence without another word.
By the time Casey and Zac caught up, Henke was at the fence. He had pulled a pair of wire cutters from his rucksack, and was clipping a neat hole in the fence.
‘Won’t they see that?’
‘This fence runs for miles,’ Henke muttered. ‘They check it maybe once a week. We’d be very unlucky.’
A few seconds later, he was pulling back the wire. As soon as they had climbed through, the fence sprang back into place behind them, the sound loud in the dark. Henke twisted a few pieces of wire together.
‘Don’t want all the animals making a break for it.’ Almost a smile as he headed off across the grass.
It was strange walking through the moonlit darkness of the reserve, falling in behind Henke. Casey sensed rather than saw the animals hidden in the dark. There was an occasional slither in the grass, a hiss in the distance, a black shape whipping away faster than sight.
Following in Henke’s silent footsteps, Casey felt crashing, obvious. Henke moved fast across this country, his pace barely changing whether he was walking up a hill or pushing through a boggy patch. Now and again, Casey had to break into a jog to keep up with him. She could smell leaf mould, damp dirt, the occasional tang where an animal had marked its territory. Once, she saw a gleam in the corner of her eye, and turned sharply.
‘Hyena,’ Henke murmured. ‘They won’t hurt us.’
But a moment later, he came to a sharp halt, his hand directing them urgently to the left.
‘What is it?’ Casey gasped, after they had scrambled down a small dip.
‘Nothing important. A kill.’
A few minutes later, she found she was walking on gravel – oddly civilised – and a small house loomed up in front of them.
‘Wait here.’
Henke dissolved into the dark. Casey and Zac crouched by the side of the road, Casey abruptly aware: what if he didn’t come back? But he returned within minutes, unseen until he began speaking.
‘That’s one of the guest houses that van de Berg had built on the property,’ Henke muttered. ‘There’s a man sleeping in the main bedroom, and another in a second bedroom. But I couldn’t see a laboratory in this house, nothing like that.’
‘How many of those guest houses are there across the whole estate?’
Henke counted. ‘Six, I think. We’re about a mile from the main house now.’
‘Six? We’ll never be able to check them all in one night,’ hissed Zac. ‘Not on foot.’
‘Probably not,’ said Henke, with all the patience of the hunter. ‘We’d have to come back tomorrow evening.’
‘Let’s keep going for now,’ Casey said hastily. ‘Where do you think they would be most likely to do any testing? Is there anywhere on the reserve where it would make sense?’
In the moonlight, she could just make out Henke considering the question.
‘There is a big enclosure for the rhino about a mile away from here,’ Henke said at last. ‘It’s not far from the main house, or the airstrip. The animals in this reserve aren’t completely wild, you know? They get fed, if it’s a bad year. And if something like a giraffe has an illness or an accident, they might bring in a vet. The rhino in particular are kept fenced in. They have a big enclosure, sure, but it is fenced. It’s just above the dam.’
‘And are there any buildings in that area?’
‘That’s why I’m suggesting it, isn’t it?’ Henke sounded annoyed. ‘A couple of years ago, they put up a building there. Just shipping containers, all knocked together from what I could see. But that building wasn’t there back in van de Berg’s day.’
‘OK,’ said Casey quietly, trying not to think about why Henke might have been surveying the rhino enclosure. ‘Let’s try that.’
‘This way,’ Henke said. But as they turned, Casey heard an odd, dry coughing noise in the distance.
‘What is that?’ she asked, just as the lion’s roar ripped through the air.
42
‘He’s at least a mile away,’ Henke shrugged.
‘Oh, excellent,’ said Zac. ‘Perfect. Wonderful.’
‘Come on,’ said Casey.
They hurried along. ‘Our problem,’ Henke warned as they walked up a rise, ‘is that there is a team patrolling the rhino enclosure and those guards are some tough bastards, let me tell you.’
‘Good,’ said Casey briskly. ‘They keep the poachers out, don’t they? And it means that if there was something you wanted to keep safe in Njana, you would put it there. It might even have been why Bailey bought this place. Somewhere hard to access, with built-in security.’ She saw the corners of Henke’s mouth turn down, as he nodded thoughtfully.
In the end, they had to walk further than a mile, skirting a small herd of buffalo. ‘We don’t want to annoy those buggers,’ Henke said firmly. ‘They can be pretty nasty.’
But finally, he indicated they should drop to the ground, and they crawled forward silently. The ground was still warm from the sun, the grasses dry. Casey could sense insects rustling away as she crept forward on hands and knees.
‘This enclosure is only about a hundred acres,’ whispered Henke. ‘The rhino get fed every evening. In the old days, van de Berg used to bring visitors down to watch. There’s a big tree house, where everyone would have a nice gin and tonic while the sun goes down. I don’t know if Bailey does that any more. Probably not.’
‘Sounds delightful,’ said Zac.
‘The rest of the time, the guards use the tree house as a lookout post,’ said Henke. ‘They have a little guardhouse too. And right next to that is the new building.’
‘OK,’ said Casey. ‘Let’s go.’
Henke looked at her. ‘If the guards spot us, they will shoot first and not ask many questions later, ja? And these boys shoot to kill. No one will mourn a few poachers.’
‘I understand,’ said Casey.
‘And the rhino themselves can be vicious,’ Henke went on. ‘Don’t be taken in by their size; they move faster than you can believe. I’ve seen one attack a Land Rover once. He threw it right over, again and again. Gored in all the windows. The people inside ended up in hospital, and they were in a very bad state. If one comes over to us, you stay very still. You’re not going to outrun him, you understand?’
‘OK.’
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Henke asked again.
‘I’m sure.’
An elaborate sigh from Zac.
Casey couldn’t see Henke’s expression in the dark. ‘Follow me,’ he whispered.
The rhino fence was less of a barrier than the main Njana fence, Casey saw. It was only designed to keep rhino in, rather than everything else out. Tall and solid, it was constructed out of pieces of timbe
r the size of telegraph poles. They crawled under it easily.
Henke led the way, slithering effortlessly along the ground. Casey could feel her knees beginning to bruise, her arms aching. It was very dark, the Milky Way glowing overhead. Zac was last, and Casey could hear him swear as he scraped over a rock.
‘Quiet,’ hissed Henke.
They scrambled on, and as they emerged from another patch of scrub, Casey realised she could make out the glimmer of water.
‘The rhino fence runs all the way down to the reservoir,’ whispered Henke, turning back towards her. ‘The guardhouse is over to the left.’
‘How far?’
‘Couple of hundred yards?’
‘Fine.’
Henke turned to move forward, and froze. A few yards away, a huge black shape was shifting in the dark. Casey heard the animal inhale loudly, scenting out the intruders. The rhino started to scuff the ground, letting out a rumble that sounded as if it came from the middle of the earth. Casey could only make out the animal’s outline as it pawed the ground: its massive shape, the spike of its horn just visible in the dark. Now it was edging closer, lowering its head, getting ready to charge.
Casey felt the fear surge through her body. Lying on the ground felt impossibly vulnerable, pathetically exposed. You’re not going to outrun him. But she couldn’t stay still. Couldn’t. She would be crushed, mangled, disembowelled.
There was another blast of noise and the vast bulk moved even nearer, tossing its head and tearing at the ground. She could see the rhino quite clearly now, in all its awkward, almost alien shape. A few more steps, another bellow, and she was bracing herself for the attack when the animal abruptly turned away, trotting into the bush with a surprising nimbleness.
‘One of the young ones.’ Henke seemed casual, ‘They’re more curious.’
Casey let her head slump forward, forcing herself to breathe evenly.
‘Won’t the guards have heard all that?’ asked Zac from somewhere behind her.
‘Oh, the rhino square up to each other all day, all night,’ said Henke. ‘That amount of noise won’t worry the guards. They’d be listening for a rifle shot.’
Slowly, Casey felt her heart rate ease back to normal.
‘How many rhino are there in here?’
‘Fifteen? Maybe twenty? Let’s keep moving.’
Across a stretch of grass, Casey could make out a large tree house with a wide balcony, high up above the ground. A couple of human shapes sat on the deck, and a cigarette glowed in the night. The guardhouse was off to one side, and beyond – about quarter of a mile away – Casey could make out an ungainly mass of shipping containers.
Henke gestured and they began to crawl in a wide arc around the guard shack, keeping far away from the tree house.
Finally, they were creeping up to the shipping containers. There were four of them, Casey could see, welded together. The main door had a padlock on it, but Henke was going for his rucksack again, pulling out a bolt cutter. It took him only moments to hack through the lock.
‘I guess this location is normally security enough,’ he murmured, and he was through the door.
Zac pulled the door closed behind them before Henke flicked on a torch. And there it was: a laboratory gleaming, all steel and shining glass.
‘Fuck.’ Zac took it all in. ‘What the hell are they up to?’
43
The laboratory was both sophisticated – with glistening rows of machines – and basic. The tables had been knocked together out of rough boards and scaffolding poles bolted tight, while gleaming equipment lined the sides of the room. Big bottles of chemicals were neat on shelves.
Casey could see test tubes, agar plates, beakers. The smell reminded her of an office block in Colindale, a lifetime ago. That public health facility, and Professor Brennan’s face changing as he spoke on the phone. For a moment, she was in another place, another world.
‘They’ve brought in a lot of kit, hey?’ Henke’s words snapped her back to the present. ‘Must have flown it in bit by bit. What does it all do?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Zac was prowling around the shipping containers. He and Casey pulled out small torches.
The containers had been opened up to form one big room. There were long tables down the middle of the space and biosafety cabinets around the edge. At one end of the room, someone had installed a wall of wooden cupboards that looked as if they had been ripped out of a kitchen during an upgrade. A stack of grey files rested on the cheap plywood countertops. There was another row of cupboards at eye level. Zac prodded an empty flask thoughtfully.
‘We need to hurry,’ said Henke. He had taken up a position by the door, peering through a crack.
‘Here.’ Zac had stopped by one of the cabinets. ‘Look at this, Casey. They’re definitely working on antibiotic resistance.’
Casey moved to where he was pointing and saw several rows of agar plates, with grey-green smears of bacteria growing patchily. On each plate, someone had placed a series of small discs, the circles carefully numbered.
‘What are those?’
‘Each disc will be soaked in a different antibiotic,’ explained Zac. ‘Look. Right there. You can see the bacteria has stopped growing in that disc. That means that this antibiotic can kill, or at least slow, that particular bacteria.’
Casey peered at the discs.
‘Most of these antibiotics seem to be doing pretty badly.’
‘Yup.’
‘But how do we know which is which?’ Out of habit, Casey started photographing the agar plates, before taking a series of shots of the whole room.
Zac switched on a laptop that was lying on a table. ‘I don’t know. Everything on this computer is password-protected,’ he said. ‘Can you do anything with it?’
But Casey had picked up a file lying on the end of one of the long tables.
‘Look,’ she said.
It was a long list of medical terms. Zac joined her, reading over her shoulder.
‘That’s referring to pseudomonas,’ he said. ‘Acinetobacter. Klebsiella. C. diff. MRSA.’
‘All the greatest hits,’ said Casey. ‘Presumably those are all samples from the hospital?’
‘Presumably. But we don’t know for sure.’
‘But which antibiotic is which? Could one of them be Corax?’
Zac’s eyes gleamed with annoyance. ‘No, none of them is Corax, Casey.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because in every single tray, the bacteria is showing some resistance to the discs. That means none of them is Corax.’
Even in the gloom of the laboratory, Casey felt the burn of frustration.
‘Why won’t you just—’
‘Not now, Casey.’
‘But—’
‘I said not now,’ Zac’s voice rose.
‘Shut up.’ Henke’s whisper was urgent. ‘You bloody idiots.’
‘Could we grab some of the agar plates?’ Casey forced herself to be calm. ‘And get them tested somewhere else to try and work out which antibiotics they are researching?’
‘You want to shove a few samples of MRSA in your backpack?’ asked Zac, incredulous. Then he softened. ‘I don’t think it would survive the trip back to Harare and then God knows where we would get it tested.’
‘Damn.’ Casey was leafing through the file, but it was pages and pages of closely typed words. She looked closer, almost forgetting where she was.
‘Switch off your torches,’ Henke hissed. ‘There’s somebody coming.’
Zac and Casey raced to the door, clumsy in the sudden darkness. Casey was still carrying the file, and Zac slapped the laptop closed as he passed.
Henke pointed silently through the crack in the door. Casey could hear men calling to each other. The shapes on the tree house balcony had gone. The two men were somewhere between there and the laboratory, she realised. They were coming.
‘Quick,’ murmured Henke. He hurried down the laboratory to the bank of kitchen cupboards at t
he end of the room. ‘Get in.’
Casey yanked open the first cupboard. It was crammed full of box files, and came only to waist height. She pulled open the second: it was full of random pieces of equipment. But the next cupboard was empty, and Zac pushed her roughly inside. She crouched down in the dark, and Henke closed the door.
As she squatted in the dark, the back of her head bumping against the top of the cupboard, Casey could hear other cupboard doors opening and closing quietly. Please find a place to hide. Please. The room fell silent. Huddled down, Casey felt her legs start to hurt.
Stay still. Be quiet. Don’t move.
There were loud shouts from the guards as the door of the laboratory crashed open. The neon ceiling lights flickered sharply then settled to brightness. Doubled over, Casey could see a glow all the way round the cupboard door, the light like an assault. Pressed against the top of the cupboard, she felt her throat close up, the claustrophobia a hand over her mouth.
They’re coming, ready or not.
She was trapped like a rat.
They’re coming. They’re coming. They’re coming.
Casey tried to make herself breathe smoothly, her ragged gasps too loud. Shivers ran over her scalp. The back of her neck felt fatally defenceless, a bowed head waiting for the axe.
Footsteps.
One man had made his way into the shipping container, and was pacing beside the tables. The footsteps stopped. Casey listened frantically, trying to deduce his position, her thoughts pinballing chaotically. The guard moved again and then stopped: he must be listening, peering around, searching. Huddled over, Casey’s legs burned, and started to shake.
A flurry of words she didn’t understand.
Casey could hear the man breathing now. She tried to force her legs to stillness. The man took a few more steps, and he must be right beside the cupboard now, just a few inches away from her, nothing but a layer of plywood between them. She held her breath, waiting for the door to be flung open. Waiting to be dragged out, kicking and screaming and desperate. Waiting for the bullet …
Another flood of words.
A different man – further away, by the door maybe? – was speaking now. This voice was calmer. But the man in the room became more jittery. She could hear him moving from foot to foot, almost bouncing, and her legs were shaking again and surely he could hear? Surely he would sense her presence, smell the fear?