The Cull

by Tony Park

  ‘How so?’

  ‘What’s your interest in this, Hudson? Is Anna paying you to investigate her son’s death?’

  ‘A load of free washing.’

  ‘Eish, maybe I should become a private investigator. Let the police do their job, Hudson.’

  He put his hands up in self-defence. ‘I’m not saying they won’t, but I’d feel a whole lot better, and I’m sure Anna would too, if you could maybe take a look at this. You know Anna, you know her son.’

  ‘That’s not quite true, Hudson.’ Shadrack was a good worker around Hippo Rock.

  Hudson leaned forward. ‘Can you give me something, anything, to maybe let Anna down gently? If this is a slam dunk I don’t want to waste your time or mine, even if it means I get my jockey shorts starched.’

  Sannie smiled. Hudson was a friend, but she had to keep their relationship professional when it came to investigations. On the other hand, she felt for Anna. She was a lovely woman, now in mourning and grappling for answers as to why her son had taken up arms and gone on the run with his cousin. She could see the bind that Hudson was in.

  ‘All right,’ Sannie said. ‘Here’s what I can tell you, but it will be no comfort to Anna. I spoke to the detectives investigating the shooting of Shadrack and the other guy – his cousin as it happens. The cousin shot and killed a police officer in Huntington and wounded his partner. He and Shadrack then gapped it. Shadrack had been fingered by an anti-poaching patrol member.’

  Hudson pulled out a notebook. ‘Mind if I take notes?’

  ‘No problem,’ Sannie said. ‘The patrol member was sharp, she noticed Shadrack had a cut on his back and his shirt was ripped and when she followed him up the street to his house – she was his next-door neighbour – she noticed a slit on the sole of one of his boots in the tracks he left on the ground. The wound on his back and the distinctive boot prints matched those of a suspect the patrol tracked out of the Sabi Sand. We took casts of the prints from the game reserve and they’ll be compared to Shadrack’s today.’

  Hudson looked up from his notebook. ‘The anti-poaching unit operator – you said “she”?’

  Sannie nodded. ‘Tema Matsebula, a member of the Leopards, the all-female unit. The one your friend Sonja was heading up. She’s one tough cookie. Used to be a maid in Hippo Rock, but now she’s handy with a gun as well as a mop.’

  ‘You said it’s not good news for Anna,’ Hudson said, ‘and I agree it looks bad for Shadrack, but so far all you’ve got is some evidence indicating he was inside the Sabi Sand. Anna told me her husband was a bushmeat poacher. Shadrack could have been inside the game reserve setting snares to catch impala.’

  Sannie paused. She had already given Hudson more information than she should have, but the truth would come out eventually. ‘Hudson, the crossover between the shooting of Shadrack and his cousin and my cases leads back to the Sabi Sand reserve, where Sonja’s tracker picked up Shadrack’s spoor. If Shadrack wasn’t dead I’d be charging him with the murder of Goodness Mdluli. She ran away from the contact with the Leopards and it looks like Shadrack tracked her down and killed her.’

  Hudson gave a low whistle and closed his notebook. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sannie said. ‘Poachers who stumble into contacts with the security forces sometimes stand and fight, but usually they try to run from us. These guys opened fire first on the Leopards and after the contact was over at least one of them went looking for, or found, Goodness, and shot her in the back.’

  ‘Murder?’

  ‘Could be,’ Sannie said. ‘They were both local, the girl and Shadrack. Maybe there was more to this than a chance gunfight in the bush.’

  ‘Anna’s convinced Shadrack had nothing to do with poaching. I just think we should do a little more digging.’

  Sannie shrugged. ‘Of course, we’ll have to see if the boot print is a definite match, and the postmortem being done on Shadrack will tell us more, but I’m afraid it looks like Anna’s son was just another poorly paid young man who was corrupted by the poaching syndicates. When you look at the money even a foot-soldier stands to make from killing a rhino you can understand why they take the risks.’

  Hudson put his book and pen in the pocket of his khaki safari shirt. ‘How’s Tom doing?’

  Sannie and her husband Skyped most days, unless either of them was busy with work, but she missed the physical presence of him; if anything it was his touch, just holding him, that was hardest to do without. ‘He’s fine. I think he’s enjoying being back at work as a protection officer. He liked being on the farm, but I think he was always a bit envious of me going back to police work.’

  ‘It’s like an itch, isn’t it,’ Hudson said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. And something more. When I was having the kids, and before I went back into the service, I always felt like I should be doing something, that there were people I should be helping.’

  Hudson pushed back his chair and stood. ‘I know exactly how you feel.’

  She looked him in the eyes. He was a good-looking man and she enjoyed his company, but she had no desire to cheat on Tom. ‘Hudson, please, leave this investigation to the police.’

  He nodded. ‘I will, I promise.’

  Sannie led him out past the charge desk and into the sunshine. She wanted to make sure he was not going to interfere with the investigation. ‘I think I’ll finish my tea out here, it’s such a beautiful day, and it’s too cold inside. Stay for a cup?’

  ‘I might.’ Hudson’s phone beeped and he looked at the screen. ‘Sorry, I’ll have to take a raincheck on that cup of tea. Tracey Mahoney’s got an urgent job she needs doing.’

  ‘I understand.’ Tracey and her husband Greg ran a safari company from their home in Hazyview. Sannie had interviewed her in the past in relation to a case, checking on Hudson Brand’s movements as it happened. She was a feisty Englishwoman and Sannie knew most of Hudson’s work came from her.

  ‘Got to pick up some rich dude from Mozambique from the airport. He’s asked for me by name.’

  Sannie smiled. ‘Price of fame. You will leave the investigation to me, right?’

  ‘Yep. Especially as my day job just intervened. I can’t say no to cold hard cash.’

  Hudson walked towards his Land Rover. Sannie sighed. She knew Hudson had the itch, and as soon as he’d transferred the client to wherever he was going Brand would be sniffing around like a bloodhound. ‘Hudson?’

  He turned to her. ‘Yup?’

  ‘I’ll talk to the investigating detectives at Hazyview.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He smiled and touched the peak of his baseball cap. ‘Appreciate it.’

  *

  ‘I’m in heaven,’ Mario Machado said, as he walked slowly around the private dining room in the wine cellar at Khaya Ngala Lodge and reverently slid a bottle of Rust en Vrede from a rack.

  ‘Keep your mind on the job, Mario,’ Sonja said. ‘Take a seat.’

  Mario reluctantly, gently, replaced the bottle and sat at the table next to Ezekial Lekganyane, who he had just met. On the other side of Mario was Tema – Sonja didn’t want Tema and Ezekial distracting each other during the briefing.

  Not that Tema and Ezekial were gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes right now. Instead, Ezekial was holding a set of state-of-the-art night vision goggles up to his eyes and Tema was fiddling with a laser-guided directional microphone. There was a host of other brand-new surveillance tools laid out on the heavy leadwood-topped dining room table.

  ‘Tema, Ezekial, put down the toys for now.’ Sonja pressed a switch on the wall and a white screen was lowered from the ceiling at one end of the room. She used the remote in her hand to turn on a hidden data projector. The same image of the men she had seen on James’s laptop appeared on the screen.

  ‘The man on the right, if you don’t know, is the President of Mozambique. The other is our
target, Antonio Cuna, the commander of what is probably the largest rhino and elephant poaching syndicate in Mozambique. I use the word commander rather than kingpin or crime tsar or any other name that might somehow glorify what he does. What we are about to embark on is a military operation. He is the commander of the enemy forces we’re facing.’ She looked around the table, making eye contact with each of them. ‘We are taking the war on poaching to the enemy, across the border, and even though we are just gathering intelligence, some of what we are doing could be construed as illegal. There is no doubt it will be dangerous. If any of you wants to leave, now is the time to do so.’

  Tema and Ezekial exchanged glances. Mario’s dark eyes were solely, intently fixed on the face of the man they were after. Tema and Ezekial shook their heads.

  ‘Then it begins. I’ll take questions at the end of my briefing.’

  Sonja used a series of slides, some she had taken from James Paterson, others she had found herself, to illustrate, firstly, the situation they faced. Cuna was, she explained to her team, a prominent businessman and provincial-level politician in Mozambique. He enjoyed high-level patronage in the government and the local police were on his payroll. He used intimidation, violence, bribery, and, on occasion, murder, to grow and protect his poaching empire. He had been identified as the operator of the largest force of poachers in Mozambique. South African military and police intelligence estimated that he personally bankrolled fifteen separate poaching teams, each made up of a skilled tracker, a shooter armed with a heavy-bore hunting rifle, and one or two bearers who doubled as a protection party, usually armed with AK-47s.

  ‘As Tema and I found out recently,’ Sonja went on, ‘the poaching teams have access to increasingly more sophisticated weaponry, including machine guns, hand grenades and night vision devices. These men are motivated and they’re trained. We have reports of former, possibly serving, members of China’s People’s Liberation Army being paid to offer specialist military training and advice to these men.’

  She looked at their faces again. Mario had raised his eyebrows at the mention of heavy weapons, but it was nothing he hadn’t faced in the past.

  Sonja’s next slide was of a dead rhino, its horn hacked off, down to the white bone. A group of rangers in green and crime scene officers in white forensics suits worked on and around the carcass. ‘This is what we’re fighting for. As you know, around one thousand rhinos are killed each year in South Africa. Their horn is not used as an aphrodisiac as some people still believe, but rather as a hangover preventative, or simply as a status symbol to show that the owner has money and power. The primary market for horn is not China, but Vietnam.’

  ‘You’ve been there, I believe,’ Mario said.

  She frowned at him. ‘Our mission: conduct a close target reconnaissance of the villa where Antonio Cuna lives and the rural property where his poaching teams rest up and train.’ As per military doctrine she repeated the mission so that they all understood it.

  ‘That’s it?’ Ezekial asked.

  ‘I said I’d take questions at the end, Ezekial. That’s the way we conduct briefings from now on. But, yes, for your benefit, that is it for the moment. We are not an assassination squad and we are not the police. We’re going to get up close and personal with this man and the people he works for and we’re going to work out exactly when his teams leave, and where they cross the border into South Africa. We’ll feed that information back to the security forces here, and they will hopefully act. We’re going to see who he meets, where and why, and get enough dirt on him to bring him down. From the little I know of him so far,’ Sonja paused as she flicked through two more slides to one that showed an older photo, a scan of a black-and-white image from a book, ‘Cuna was also a soldier in Frelimo’s army during the Mozambican civil war. As a commander he had a reputation for fearlessness, and unlike many other senior officers, Colonel Cuna liked to put himself in the front line, alongside his men. He had a taste for battle and risk and his men respected him for it.’

  ‘You think he might make a mistake,’ Mario said.

  ‘Yes. The execution of this mission will take place in three phases, the first –’

  The door of the private dining room opened and James Paterson entered. ‘Sorry to interrupt.’

  ‘I’m in the middle of a briefing,’ Sonja said. There was nothing in her tone that masked her displeasure.

  ‘Normally I’d never interrupt, Sonja, but I’ve got breaking news about our target.’

  ‘What?’ She was over her annoyance in an instant.

  ‘Cuna is in South Africa, right now. He flew into Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport near Nelspruit, from Vilanculos, today.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Sonja asked.

  ‘I have a source at the airport. I pay, he tells me when certain people fly into or out of Mozambique.’

  ‘Where will Cuna go?’

  ‘He’s a golfer. He likes the course at the Sabie River Club, near Hazyview. He stays there sometimes. He has some legitimate business interests in the area, but the police suspect he also controls some local crime and poaching gangs made up of expatriate Mozambicans, mostly illegal immigrants, living in Hazyview.’

  ‘Will the cops be tailing him?’ Sonja asked.

  James shook his head. ‘Not enough resources; plus he’s a foreign national and he’s not wanted for any specific crime here in South Africa. Otherwise they would have stopped him or picked him up at the airport.’

  Sonja knew that one of the keys to success in battle was to be flexible and adaptable. All the same, as her briefing would have outlined, she wanted to give her new team some training in close target reconnaissance and surveillance. Mario would have some of these skills and Tema had sat through a lecture on the subjects, but Ezekial, as far as she knew, was more used to following animals in the bush than people on a golf course.

  There was another knock on the door of the dining room and Julianne let herself in.

  ‘I hope I’m not interrupting. I was on a Skype call to the UK, but I just got James’s SMS. It’s terribly exciting, isn’t it?’

  Sonja frowned. Julianne’s face was lit with almost childish glee, just as it had been when they’d chased down the two poachers in her helicopter. ‘It’s dangerous, that’s what it is.’

  ‘Can I borrow your laptop, please, Sonja?’ Ezekial asked.

  She didn’t know what the tracker would want it for, but she slid it across the desk to him.

  Paterson looked to Sonja. ‘I agree with you, it’s a less than ideal situation, and if you’d rather not send the team in then I’ll respect your decision. However, we do have an opportunity to tail Cuna while he’s here, in our country, not forty kilometres from us, instead of mounting a cross-border operation.’

  Sonja had the feeling he meant what he said, that he would not railroad her. But Paterson was right – the chance was too good to pass up. The fact was, a surveillance operation on home ground, in a public place, would be a better way to put her team through its paces, and for them to learn something, than in a different country where they would have a hard time explaining themselves if something went wrong. In South Africa, for better or worse, they were all licensed to carry firearms and there was no law against playing golf. ‘All right, James, but we do this on my terms.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Cuna’s going to a golf course, but he’s not likely to have flown to South Africa just to play eighteen holes. This gives us an opportunity to see who he meets and, if we can get close enough to him, find out why he’s really here.’

  ‘Julianne,’ Sonja said, ‘do you have a set of golf clubs?’

  The billionaire grinned. ‘Yes. Can I come too?’

  ‘No,’ Sonja said. ‘You’ll attract too much attention.’

  ‘Of course, I understand. But take the chopper, you’ll be there in no time. I’ll get my assistant Audrey to call
the Club and tell them we’ve got some VIP guests flying in to play a round.’

  Ezekial looked up from the laptop. ‘Sonja?’

  ‘Yes?’

  He swung the computer so she could see the screen. ‘Here’s a satellite image of the course. I’ve just sent it, and a golfer’s guide to playing it, to the printer. We can study the layout in the helicopter.’

  Sonja was impressed. ‘Good work.’

  He laughed. ‘It’s just Google Earth.’

  Sonja pushed back her chair and stood. ‘All right. Saddle up. Dress is smart casual, everyone carries a sidearm and spare magazines, concealed radios from the stack on the dining table here, and I’ll bring an LM5. I’ll give my revised orders on the helicopter. We leave in ten minutes.’

  They all looked at her.

  ‘Move!’

  They filed out of the briefing room and Sonja walked briskly back to her accommodation, a tastefully fitted-out detached chalet that was normally reserved for visiting pilots who had to stay overnight after dropping off guests. Sometimes pilots escorted well-heeled guests on flying safaris around Africa.

  Sonja unbuttoned her camouflage shirt and shrugged it off. She replaced it with a khaki bush shirt, which would not look out of place with her green and brown trousers. She traded her combat boots for trainers. She took her LM5 from the locked cupboard and stuffed two spare magazines into the side pockets of her trousers.

  Her phone buzzed and she answered it as she closed the door and strode out to the helipad. She was pleased to see the others emerging from their rooms.

  ‘Kurtz.’

  ‘Sonja, howzit, it’s me, Hudson.’

  ‘Sorry, can’t talk right now, Brand.’

  ‘Brand? I’m not one of your soldiers, you know.’

  ‘I know. I’ve got to be somewhere, in a hurry.’

  ‘Sonja, we need to talk.’

  She had a mental image of them sitting on the deck of his house at Hippo Rock, holding hands under a full moon, a bottle of wine in the ice bucket between them, elephants splashing across the river. It had been the first time she’d been happy in a long time, and then things had changed. People had been killed; he’d cheated on her.