by Tony Park
Sannie shrugged. ‘The Hazyview guys were going to come out to Hippo Rock to talk to Shadrack’s colleagues and check up on his last known movements. I told them that as I lived there I’d ask around.’
Sannie hadn’t forgotten her original question. ‘And your friend Sonja? Where does she fit into all of this, and why did she take a job with Julianne Clyde-Smith after the Leopards’ operations were suspended?’
Hudson looked out over the fairway, and Sannie thought he was mulling over the same questions as she was, and possibly coming to the same conclusion.
‘I’ll answer the question for you,’ Sannie said at last.
He looked at her and raised his eyebrows.
‘She got a better offer.’
‘How so?’
Sannie watched a couple of uniformed officers combing the bush around where Sonja’s team had been when the gunfire started. They were looking for bullet casings. ‘Hear me out. What if Julianne Clyde-Smith has put together some sort of elite team, maybe to take the fight to the enemy in the way that we – police, national parks and the army – can’t?’
‘Sounds a little far-fetched.’
‘What else were they doing here? I bet they got wind that Cuna and King Jim were going to be here, perhaps even a heads-up that something was going to go down. An assassination attempt’s a good cover for one more extrajudicial killing.’
Hudson rubbed his chin. ‘You said yourself, King Jim’s people were too scared to share information with outsiders.’
Sannie knew that was the weakness of her argument. Also, her professional pride didn’t want to acknowledge that someone in the private sector might have access to better intelligence than she and her colleagues did. ‘Yes, I agree with that, but someone, somewhere, knew something about this meeting.’
‘What do you know about the Scorpions?’ Hudson asked.
The question took Sannie by surprise. ‘I take it you’re not talking about the old name for the Hawks, the serious and violent crimes unit?’
‘No,’ Hudson replied. ‘I thought the name was slightly ironic as well – a crime gang with the same name as South Africa’s former elite police unit. Cuna said something to Sonja about them when she had a gun pointed at his head, just as you were arriving.’
‘Your friend can be most persuasive.’
‘The Scorpions?’ he tried again.
‘Between us?’ she said.
He nodded.
She decided she could trust him as, like it or not, he was a party to the current round of investigations into the bloodshed in her patch of South Africa. ‘We’re not sure about the Scorpions. There has been talk of them in the past; depending on who you speak to they’re run by the Chinese, the Vietnamese, South Africans, Mozambicans, or Russians. Our best guess is they’re international, controlled by one man whose identity we don’t know, and they’re bigger than just rhino horn.’
‘Ivory?’ Hudson asked.
‘Yes, and drugs, guns, abalone, pangolins – anything of high value. If even half of the myths about the Scorpions are true then we’re dealing with a serious organised crime syndicate. Their interests are said to stretch from here across to Namibia and north and east as far as Tanzania and Kenya.’
‘How do you fight an organisation like that?’
Just talking about the scale of the problem threatened to leave Sannie disheartened. ‘The best we can do is gather intelligence and work to keep our wildlife in South Africa safe. We can share information with our neighbouring countries and try to encourage them, but in the end, as with most things in this country, we’re hamstrung by politics and money.’
Hudson drained his cup. ‘Two things that probably don’t concern Julianne Clyde-Smith too much at all.’
*
Julianne never tired of the view from her house at Khaya Ngala. Like the lodge’s suites it was set up high and built among the smooth red granite boulders that made up the koppie, although her African home was out of sight and earshot of the guests.
Through the full-length glass wall of her office she looked out over the same waterhole that could be seen from the deck and dining room. A herd of perhaps two or three hundred buffalo were milling around, and through the open balcony door she could hear their low bovine grunts and moos, and their musty odours were carried in on a warm gentle breeze.
Julianne heard the squeak of rubber-soled boots on the polished screed concrete floor. She looked over her shoulder and saw James walking down the hallway.
‘They’re on their way to Zimbabwe,’ he said.
Julianne turned away from the view. The buffalo were moving on and she wondered if the predators were out there resting up before going on the hunt later, just like Sonja would, presumably, once the sun went down. James stood in front of her desk. ‘What happened today?’ she asked.
‘Cuna killed King Jim. His men were eliminated. Kurtz almost terminated Cuna.’
‘Almost?’
‘She had a pistol in his mouth, literally, and was questioning him when the police arrived,’ James said.
A herd of eight zebra was slowly approaching the waterhole, in single file. The lead animal stopped short, head raised, alert for danger.
‘I’m scared, James. I’d never admit that to anyone else. It’s high risk, bringing in Sonja and her people. We’ve upped the ante.’
James walked around the desk until he was behind her. ‘It’s like this, in combat, sending soldiers into battle. It’s exciting, heady, but there’s always the risk some of them won’t come back. Take solace in the fact that people like Sonja, her man Machado, they live for this sort of thing. The younger ones want to prove themselves. It’s age old, timeless.’
Julianne shivered involuntarily as she felt James’s fingers on her shoulders. She swivelled her head as he began to knead the muscles. The next sound she uttered was a low mmm as his fingers moved higher, along her neck, to the base of her skull.
‘You’re tense.’
‘I am. There’s a lot at stake – the acquisition of Lion Plains, the other properties in Zambia and Tanzania; not to mention the team’s first surveillance mission turning into a pitched battle.’
‘You need to blow off some steam, Jules,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
The fingers of his left hand moved higher still, digging harder and harder into her scalp, just how she liked it. He reached around her with his right and started deftly undoing the little buttons of her crisp white shirt. Fingertips brushed over her nipples, making them strain against the lace of her bra.
Abruptly, his hands left her and she felt her nerve endings yearning for his touch. ‘Keep touching me.’
‘No.’
She turned and looked him in the eye. ‘Do as I tell you.’
‘I’m sorry, no, it’s not right,’ he said, casting his eyes down.
Her eyes followed his and she could see where he was looking, his arousal in plain view. ‘If you want to keep your job, you’ll do as I tell you.’
He looked up at her now, and she saw how the left side of his upper lip curled to an insolent sneer. He began unbuttoning his own shirt.
‘What do you think you’re doing? Stop that.’
He ignored her and shrugged off his shirt and dropped it on the floor. His hand moved to his belt buckle.
‘You’re being highly inappropriate, Colonel Paterson. As a military man you should know how to follow orders.’
He came to her, put a hand behind her neck and kissed her hard. Her whole body responded, even more so when she put a palm on his chest and shoved him away.
James took a step back and glared at her. He lowered his hand inside his pants.
‘Stop. Now,’ she commanded.
He shook his head and continued, his eyes feasting on her cleavage, her expensive French lingerie. She knew, exactly, how the contrast of
the pastel tones, the pale skin of her belly and the blue of her jeans aroused him.
Julianne’s right hand struck fast and hard, delivering a hard, satisfyingly loud slap to James’s cheek.
He folded his six-foot-three frame to his knees and Julianne wrapped her hands in his hair and gripped him, hard.
*
The Cessna bucked as it hit an air pocket and Sonja was shaken awake. She lifted her head from the warm Perspex window, blinked and was greeted by the stunning sight of the Zambezi River below and the bitter smell of vomit.
She looked over her shoulder and saw Ezekial holding a paper bag up to his mouth. Tema was rubbing his back, comforting him. Sonja glanced at Mario, beside her, who grinned.
Sonja had little to smile about, but at least she’d been able to snatch twenty minutes’ sleep. The sun was turning red as it entered the band of dust. The river glowed like lava. The pilot, a young woman who looked barely out of school, banked and lined up on the dirt strip.
On Sonja’s lap were some printouts James Paterson had handed her when they’d boarded Julianne Clyde-Smith’s private jet at Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport, after their passports were stamped by South African Home Affairs immigration officers. They had then flown to Harare, Zimbabwe, where they had cleared customs and boarded the smaller aircraft for the ninety-minute hop to the Zambezi Valley.
James had been almost apologetic when he had briefed her on board the helicopter from Hazyview. At Julianne’s behest he had asked Sonja and her team to act as a fire force, an old military term in this part of Africa that referred to a quick reaction unit, deployed to put out the insurgency equivalent of bushfires. This was a world away from running an undercover surveillance operation and gathering evidence for law enforcement agencies. In any war there was a phenomenon known as ‘mission creep’, which was to be avoided – it meant setting out to do one job and then being dragged into doing something completely different. Sonja hadn’t agreed to work for Julianne to be a hired gun, and while she would have liked more time to plan and discuss the mission with her team the fact was that there were people like them in trouble in Zimbabwe, and they needed reinforcements. It wasn’t what she signed up for, but the soldier in her couldn’t say no.
Sonja raised her voice over the noise of the engine as she orientated her team. ‘Below us is Zimbabwe, on the south side of the Zambezi River; Zambia is over there, to the north, where you can see the mountains rising. That camp you can see in the distance is Nyamepi, the main public campsite for Mana Pools National Park on the Zimbabwean side.’
Ezekial wiped his mouth and tried to focus. Mario laughed and Sonja elbowed him hard.
‘Julianne Clyde-Smith has set up a new camp, in a hunting area on the border of Mana Pools, but her concession is devoted solely to photographic safaris. Paterson thinks that the absence of hunters from her area made poachers think her concession would be a soft target. Two weeks ago one of the major pools away from the river was laced with cyanide and thirty elephants were poisoned and their tusks taken.’
‘My gosh,’ Tema said.
‘Yes, terrible,’ Sonja said. ‘As well as the elephants a number of lions, hyena, a leopard and about a hundred vultures were also found dead from feasting on the poisoned carcasses.’
The aircraft lurched again and Ezekial grabbed on to Sonja’s seat back to steady himself. ‘Last night, another pool was poisoned. Julianne’s manager here, Ian Barton, sent his anti-poaching squad out as soon as a game viewer came across another ten dead elephants, half of them with their tusks removed.
‘The patrol picked up spoor of the poachers and started tracking them, but the bastards stopped moving and set up an ambush, perhaps because they were burdened with ivory and knew they couldn’t outrun the anti-poaching guys. They killed two of the five-man stick. Another, the patrol’s leader, an ex-professional hunter originally from Germany, was shot dead by a national parks ranger when the survivors stumbled into a parks patrol that had been called on to provide support.’
‘What a disaster,’ Mario said.
‘Exactly,’ Sonja agreed, ‘which is why we’ve been called in.’
The Cessna’s wheels touched the ground, bounced once, then settled and they juddered their way down the dirt strip. The pilot turned at the end and then taxied up to a thatch-roofed open-sided lapa.
‘Here, at last,’ said the pilot.
Sonja opened her door, and while the air outside was hot and heavy it was a relief from the stench inside. A tall man with grey hair and arms and legs tanned mahogany came to greet her. He didn’t smile as he extended a hand. ‘Ian Barton.’
‘Sonja Kurtz.’
He introduced himself to Tema and Mario and waited for Ezekial, who was retching on the ground at the rear of the aircraft.
‘Are you going to be all right?’ Barton asked Ezekial.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Sonja answered. ‘Sorry to hear about your men.’
Barton cast an eye over all of them. ‘You’re my reinforcements? The men I lost were hardened professionals, all with experience hunting and killing poachers.’
‘We know what we’re doing, Mr Barton,’ Sonja said.
‘Ian.’
He had the look of a man in shock, Sonja thought, though he was still arrogant and misogynistic enough to give a small shake of his head when his eyes moved from her to Tema.
‘You’ll want to freshen up,’ he said to her as he led them to an open-topped Land Rover.
‘Hurry, get your gear on board,’ Sonja said to the others. She looked at Barton as she climbed into the passenger seat next to him. ‘No, we don’t need to powder our noses, we need to get to the scene of the poisoning.’
‘You think the poachers would be brazen enough to come back for the remaining ivory?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’ she asked.
‘Parks and wildlife have told us to stay away from the waterhole. They’re watching it.’
‘Will they stay out overnight?’
‘Maybe not. They rarely get their basic pay, let alone overtime.’
‘Just get us there, please, Ian. But first we need weapons and gear, whatever you have. We couldn’t bring our own guns into Zimbabwe.’
He drove fast to the lodge, an impressive new construction on a sandy bank of the Zambezi, looking across the wide river towards Zambia. Sonja noticed that Ezekial was looking better now he was back on terra firma as they followed Ian across a wide teak-timbered deck, through a deserted bar and dining area, to the staff accommodation and back-of-house section of the lodge.
‘Our guests flew out today,’ Ian said as he unlocked the door of a brick building. ‘They cut short their visit, rattled by the news of the contact. The first poisoning attracted worldwide attention and condemnation, and it also brought a slump in our bookings. Julianne’s worried the shootings, so close to where our guests were at the time, will bring down our business before it even gets off the ground.’
‘I guess that’s why we’re here,’ Mario said.
Ian switched on a light, illuminating a gun rack that ran the length of the storeroom. Military kit was piled on three trestle tables.
‘Find yourselves uniforms and weapons,’ Sonja ordered. Not wanting to advertise the real purpose of their trip to the customs officers at Harare Airport, they had all travelled in civilian clothes. She picked up an AK-47, and when she placed her hand on the grip it felt sticky. When she inspected her fingers she saw the flakes of dried blood.
‘We were able to retrieve the weapons from our dead operators,’ Ian said.
Sonja wiped her palm on her pants. ‘Tema, if you can’t find trousers to fit you, just put on a camouflage shirt.’
‘I could have handled these local poachers on my own, you know,’ Barton said.
‘Not with two men down you couldn’t. If I was in your situation I would have asked for reinforcements.�
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He put his hands on his hips. ‘Well, I didn’t ask for you. When I sent my sitrep to Julianne she called and told me you were on your way, whether I liked it or not.’
‘We’re here to help, nothing more.’ Sonja selected a camouflage shirt and buttoned it on. The Zimbabwean police and customs officers, under the instructions of their despotic regime, were paranoid about foreign military incursions into the country, so Sonja had not even been able to bring her load-bearing webbing gear to carry ammunition, food and water. She selected a belt, adjusted it to fit, and clipped on two canteens. A simple green canvas satchel would do as a makeshift carrier for the six full banana-shaped magazines she found for her AK-47.
When they were all changed and ready they went back to Ian’s game-viewing Land Rover and climbed in.
‘What are our orders, Sonja?’ Tema asked, raising her voice over the rush of wind as Ian raced along a dirt road over the dry, dusty floodplain that ran parallel to the river. A baboon barked an ominous warning call from the high branches of a Natal mahogany tree.
Sonja saw the anxious look in the young woman’s eyes. ‘When we get to the ambush site Ezekial will cast about for spoor and lead off. Mario, you’ll be behind him, then me, then you, Tema. Make sure you keep checking our six – our rear.’
‘Yes, Sonja.’
‘I’m coming as well,’ Ian said, from the driver’s seat beside her.
She looked at him. Her initial reaction was to challenge him, but she thought better of it. His pride had been hurt and she knew how childish men could be when it came to their fragile egos. Also, he knew the local area and they didn’t.
‘My men were killed,’ he continued. ‘You know what that’s like, to lose someone you were responsible for?’