Red Earth

by Tony Park

  Banger moistened his lips with his tongue. She could see he was flexing his fingers, the rage building inside him. As well as being impetuous he had a temper, but he could control it when he had to. When he made love to her it was with a barely constrained passion, a kind of animalistic savagery.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she repeated.

  ‘All right, then, I guess I’ll be on my way,’ Banger said.

  ‘You’d better be quick then, cowboy,’ she said. Angus liked to pretend he was a cowboy, sometimes, when they were fooling around at home. He would practise drawing his pistol from his holster in front of the mirror, and he’d tell her he was the quickest draw on the wild east coast. His terrible American accent always made her laugh.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, with the slightest of drawls. He had got her message; now was the time for him to be quick on the draw for real.

  Banger turned, as if to leave, and Nia saw his right hand go up. They had only one chance. The man in the back of the helicopter was going to kill her, if not now, then later. He wouldn’t be the kind to want witnesses around. She still had no idea what, if any, connection he had with the stolen Fortuner, but it was becoming clear this was more than just an ordinary car hijacking.

  Nia dived to the ground and rolled left, under the nose of the helicopter. Even as she started to fall she heard the first shots from behind her, a deafening double bang, and felt the displacement of air close by her as a bullet passed her, missing her by millimetres.

  Angus was firing as well and Nia heard the thunk of his rounds passing through the skin of her chopper. She kept rolling, staying low so as not to get hit. Banger yelled and she screamed.

  Nia scrambled away on her hands and knees then pulled herself to her feet. There was nothing she could do. She had no weapon and she would have to cross open ground to get to the Land Rover. She screamed in frustration, but when she finished she stood there, in the dry grass, alone. Around her was silence, then a few seconds later a groan of pain.

  She jogged back to the helicopter and gingerly peered around the nose. A brown hand protruded from the gap where the rear door had been left open. Blood dripped from the fingers. Nia drew a deep breath, summoning the last of her reserves of courage and composure, and pulled open the door. She had to step back as Ibrahim’s body tumbled to the ground.

  Seeing the danger was gone she went to Angus, who was lying on his back, and crumpled to her knees beside him. Nia cradled his head on one arm and with her other hand searched him for the wound that had felled him.

  Banger coughed and Nia feared she would see blood coming from his mouth, but there was none.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘Banger, where are you hit?’

  He coughed, then started to laugh. ‘Took one in the vest. Damn, I fell backwards and winded myself and landed on my arse bone.’

  He was alive. She wiped away a tear and collapsed into him. At long last she heard the wail of a police siren.

  Chapter 10

  Mike Dunn dropped to the grass as he approached the crest of the next hill. This was open country and he would be easily spotted if he allowed himself to be silhouetted against the sky.

  He crawled forward and pulled a pair of compact Zeiss binoculars from the pocket of his bush shirt. He rested himself on his elbows and scanned the valley ahead. About four hundred metres distant were the two men he had been tracking, one African, one brown.

  He put the binoculars back and took out his cell phone. He checked its screen; no signal. Who are these guys?

  They had made short work of Joseph the car thief, and if they were police, then at least one of them would have been left behind, or reinforcements would already have arrived. They were heading towards the game reserve and if it was, in fact, Themba driving the car with the schoolgirl and the baby on board, that might make sense. The young man would see Hluhluwe–iMfolozi as a kind of sanctuary. Mike knew this because he’d described the national park in exactly those terms to Themba.

  He ran his hand through his hair. He was tired, but he could carry on. The question was, however, what to do when he caught up with the men. He checked his watch. Angus, the security man, would have had plenty of time to get back to the chopper by now, pick up Nia and get back to him. But there was no sound of his Land Rover’s engine.

  Mike stood and was about to carry on his pursuit of the two men, in the hope he could get closer to them while staying out of their sight, when he heard faint gunshots coming from the direction in which the helicopter was parked.

  He stopped. Mike was worried about Themba and the other kids, but this was a job for the police. Concerned that the missing wounded man had got the drop on Angus and Nia, he turned and started jogging back the way he’d come.

  Mike thought about Themba as he ran. He hoped the boy would be safe. Mike had seen too many young kids from bad backgrounds fail in their attempts to lift themselves out of the gutter, but he just couldn’t believe he was wrong about Themba. Life wasn’t fair. Africa wasn’t fair, but Themba had a strength that had been lacking in too many of the young men Mike had tried to help.

  From a distance he could see flashing blue lights at the spot where Joseph had been killed. As Mike approached the police car he held his rifle up high above his head.

  The two uniformed police officers, a man and a woman, pulled their guns as soon as they saw him.

  ‘Coming in,’ he called out to them. ‘Don’t shoot.’

  When he came closer to them he recognised the woman. ‘Sergeant Khumalo.’ That was a relief. She was based in Mtubatuba and they had worked together in the past. Mike had supplied her with information about muti deals in the past and, unlike some of her colleagues in other towns and villages, Lindiwe had come through and busted a few sellers.

  Lindiwe and her partner lowered their weapons. ‘Hey, Mister Vulture Man, how are you? What are you doing here?’

  Mike gestured to Joseph’s body. ‘I’m fine, Lindiwe. I heard gunshots.’

  The male police officer pointed back down the hill to where the helicopter had landed. ‘Shootout between a security guy and one of the occupants of this Audi.’

  ‘Are they OK?’

  ‘The pilot and the security man, yes,’ Lindiwe Khumalo said. ‘Who are these people, Mike?’

  ‘No idea, but they’re packing R5s and dressed like gangsters. I’ve just been following two of them.’

  ‘Umlungu?’

  ‘No, I didn’t see a white man, just one African and one coloured or Indian. However, there was a shootout at the Mona market earlier today and a white man was one of the perpetrators. He was dropped at the market by a black Audi Q5.’

  ‘I heard about that gunfight on the radio,’ she said. ‘You’ve had a busy day. We all have. You didn’t see the registration of the Audi at Mona?’

  Mike shook his head. ‘No, but the guy who was dropped off was supposed to be selling rhino horn, to none other than Bandile Dlamini.’

  ‘Yebo,’ Lindiwe said. ‘He’s in hospital, but no one that side is telling me what’s happening with him.’

  ‘Those men I was following,’ Mike said. ‘They were with your other dead man in the Audi, and he was wounded before Banger – the security man – shot him. Grenade fragments.’

  Lindiwe narrowed her eyes. ‘How did you know that?’

  Mike gestured to the scorched earth. ‘Crater’s over there, and you’ll see the Audi has been peppered with shrapnel.’

  ‘These guys are armed like rhino poachers. I’m calling for back-up before we go after them.’

  Mike nodded. ‘Good idea.’

  ‘What is going on here?’ the sergeant asked no one in particular.

  ‘Good question,’ Mike said. ‘There are plenty of 5.56-millimetre casings here, also some 7.62-millimetre from an AK.’

  Lindiwe narrowed her eyes. ‘For a man who researches vul
tures you know a lot about weapons.’

  ‘I come across a lot of poaching carcasses and work with the crime scene teams sometimes.’ He didn’t want to go into more detail about how he knew about assault rifles.

  ‘Call for back-up, Elphes,’ she told her partner. The policeman headed back to the car. ‘What is this, I wonder? A business deal gone wrong? And what are these people doing with hand grenades?’

  Mike had wondered the same things. ‘I’ve heard of rhino poachers with grenades; they’ve been known to pull the pin on one and leave it under a dead rhino so when the police or rangers get there and try to move the carcass the grenade goes off.’

  Lindiwe tutted and shook her head. She called to her partner: ‘Hey, ask base what information they have about this missing Fortuner.’

  Mike thought out loud. ‘So we’ve got two, formerly three, guys trying to get back a stolen Toyota that’s now transporting a baby, two teenagers and an AK-47.’

  Lindiwe pulled out her notebook, flipped over a couple of pages and made some new jottings. When she was done she looked up. ‘I knew this dead man, Joseph. He was small-time, not even a good thief. According to the report the car-tracking service received, the woman driver almost got the better of him. She killed his partner.’

  ‘Really? How is she?’ Mike asked. ‘If she’s the baby’s mother she must be going crazy.’

  Lindiwe clicked her tongue a few times and drew a breath. ‘There is the problem. I can’t find a record of this woman making a call to the police.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘For sure it’s been a crazy day, with the bomb in Durban, and the emergency number was almost overloaded with the number of calls that came in afterwards, but according to Nia Carras and the tracking service, they got the call about the stolen Fortuner half an hour before the bomb exploded. I checked with the call centre – no hijackings or car thefts reported in the Durban area this morning.’

  ‘So she called her car-tracking service direct before, or instead of, calling the cops?’

  Lindiwe nodded. ‘I don’t like to say it, but you’re probably thinking what that woman was thinking: that it would be quicker for her to find her child by using a private security company with a helicopter on call.’

  The thought had crossed Mike’s mind. ‘But surely she would have followed it up with a call to the police.’

  ‘The guy who took the call from the tracking company says he told the woman to call the police emergency number as well.’

  ‘You get a number for her?’

  Lindiwe rocked her head from side to side. ‘I’ve probably talked enough about this case with you, Mike.’

  He liked her, and he hoped she felt the same way about him. Lindiwe was intelligent and honest.

  She hesitated, but then continued anyway. ‘Yebo, I got her cell number off the car-tracking company, but it’s out of service. I’m getting a trace done to find out what number she called the company from, but as you can imagine there are lots of people tracing calls today and a car theft is way down the list of priorities compared to a major terrorist attack.’

  ‘Even though there’s a baby missing?’

  ‘A baby who’s missing, but whose mom hasn’t bothered reporting it to the police yet.’

  ‘The road the Fortuner was on leads to the border with Mozambique, or Swaziland. Maybe Mom was heading for the border and Dad didn’t know?’ Mike thought about his own daughter. Debbie was sixteen and he’d taken her to Mauritius for a week last year. He’d been surprised when his ex-wife, Tracy, had told him about the rigmarole he would have to go through. The government was trying to cut down on child trafficking by tightening the rules allowing children to leave the country with only one parent. He’d needed to get a certified copy of Debbie’s unabridged birth certificate and a letter of permission from Tracy.

  ‘I’d already thought about that,’ Lindiwe said quickly. ‘And, for your information, there’s some evidence to back up that theory. The helicopter pilot saw the younger guy, the one in the school uniform, pulling out all sorts of stuff from the back of the Fortuner to make room for him and the girl, apparently. I took a look at what was lying around – blankets, pots, pans, an iron, a couple of bags of clothes – it looks like she was moving house, or maybe running away.’

  ‘So who are our three killers who showed up looking for the car?’

  Lindiwe sighed. ‘That’s what I intend on finding out when my back-up arrives. Maybe they’re friends or relatives of the mom and she trusts them, over us, to get her kid and her car back?’

  ‘Or maybe it goes further than Mom running away from the father – if she doesn’t want to involve the police, maybe she’s on the wrong side of the law herself,’ Mike said.

  Lindiwe nodded. ‘I’m way ahead of you. I got the location of where the hijack went down, from the tracking company; it’s out of my jurisdiction, closer to Durbs, and I think I’m going to have a hell of a time trying to get some detectives to go and check it out.’

  ‘What about the guys following the kids?’

  She called to her partner and asked for an update.

  ‘No helicopter available,’ Elphes said. ‘Any spare manpower’s been called to Durban or put on roadblocks to catch the people who blew up the ambassador. It’s chaos, Sergeant. They say we might have to wait a few hours.’

  Mike looked to the sun. ‘Getting late. It’ll be dark before your back-up arrives. You sure you don’t want me to drive you up into the hills in my Land Rover?’

  Lindiwe seemed to consider his offer. ‘No, this is a police matter now, Mike. Thank you for your help today, but I think you should go see how the pilot and the security man are, and if you can help them. He took a bullet in his body armour vest.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but let me know if I can help.’

  ‘I will. The way things are going, I may well need you again in some capacity,’ she said. ‘Before you go, is there anything you can tell me about this business with Bandile Dlamini today?’

  ‘Dlamini and one of his men claimed they were there on police business, part of a sting to catch a rhino horn trader. Did you know about it?’

  She shook her head. ‘Aikona. Not any of our people. Could be the Hawks, from Durban, or the rhino task force, but if so, no one bothered to tell me about it. I’ll send my one spare man to the hospital, though, to interview Dlamini, to see if he got the registration number of the Audi that dropped off the white guy.’

  ‘This shootout here, these armed men chasing the Fortuner, it smacks of organised crime,’ Mike said.

  ‘I agree. But it’s time for you to get back to Durban and back to your vultures, Mike.’

  He would have liked to turn his back on this day of killing, but Mike got the feeling that was wishful thinking.

  *

  When John Buttenshaw arrived with a bakkie loaded with jerry cans of fuel, Nia sent Banger on his way back to Durban. She and John refilled her chopper, and she flew back to Virginia Airport in the dark.

  She wasn’t home much before Banger as she had to secure the helicopter by herself. John was driving back to Durban; it had been a long day for all of them.

  In her flat she took off her hiking boots and socks, poured herself a gin and tonic and turned on the television. The assassination of the ambassador and speculation of who was behind it and what it signified was all over BBC and CNN.

  Banger opened the door and she stood and went to him. He enfolded her in his big arms and squeezed her in a bear hug. Tears welled up and he kissed them away.

  ‘I’m here. I’m always here for you, babes,’ he said. ‘You were amazing today, so strong.’

  She kissed him again, tenderness melting into passion. ‘I need you. Turn me on, please,’ she whispered into his ear.

  He dropped to his knees in front of her and slowly unzipped her flight suit. He kissed his way d
own between her breasts to her belly.

  ‘I stink.’

  ‘I love the smell of you,’ he whispered, and kissed her soft, springy hair through the fabric of her pants.

  Banger helped her out of her flight suit and quickly shed his body armour and weapons. He went to the bathroom and ran the bath while she took off her underwear. He picked her up, in his arms, as though carrying her across the threshold, and she giggled.

  While they waited for the bath to fill he sat her on the vanity unit. It was cold on her bum, but that made her hotter, as did his kisses. She could feel him through his uniform trousers and he pressed against her, still dressed, rubbing slowly.

  He motioned for her to get into the bath while he undressed. Nia added bubble bath before turning off the tap and climbing in. She sank down in the water, letting the steam and the scent and the hot water relax her while, at the same time, the sight of his body made her heart beat a little faster. Banger knelt by the bath, took a flannel and soap and started to wash her. She loved it when he did that. The angry purple bruise on his chest, where the bullet had struck his vest, reminded her of the day’s horrors.

  He slipped one hand under the water and Nia closed her eyes and arched her back as he touched her the way she liked it. When she was breathing faster he got to his feet beside the tub and she sat up and ran her soapy, slick hand up and down the length of him. Then it was his turn to close his eyes and she grabbed him more forcefully. He needed no encouraging.

  Banger got into the bath with her and they moved so that he was on his back and she was lying with her spine along his chest. He played with her some more and she lifted her hips out of the water. When she almost couldn’t take any more she moved again, foamy water slopping over the edge onto the tiles as she presented herself to him, knees in the water, hands on the edge.

  He positioned himself behind her and slowly entered her. She loved that moment, the first push as she closed around him, gripping him, feeling his need to tease and his desire to be part of her, completely.

  They moved slowly, in unison, both getting closer, savouring the moment that felt like it could, should, last forever. They were well suited when it came to lovemaking, each seeking the right mix of tenderness and force.