An Empty Coast

by Tony Park

  Emma had learned, though, that things were not black and white, and that her mother was not some mindless killing machine. Sonja had told her of progress made by the coalition forces in Afghanistan, and of the horrors the Taliban and Al Qaeda had perpetrated against their own people, particularly women and girls. Even in the safety of Los Angeles, living in a mansion with staff to cook and clean for them and nothing to worry about, Emma had awoken more than once to the sound of her mother screaming herself through to the tortured end of another nightmare.

  Her bloody mother. She was gone, again, and Emma had been angry when she’d received a short message with a satellite phone number, in case of emergency, and no answer to her emailed questions about where her mother was going or what she was doing.

  ‘It’s called conflict archaeology, Mum,’ Emma had said at the airport. ‘It’s more than just digging up old battlefields; there’s also an anthropological dimension, finding out how and why people became involved in conflict and how they acted.’

  ‘Ag, rubbish, man,’ her mother had replied, waving a hand in front of her face. ‘People have always killed each other, always will. That stuff is better left buried in the ground, but I’m happy you’re just studying war, and not doing something stupid like I did and joining the army.’

  Professor Sutton shuffled off. The dig site was an old cattle farm that had been acquired by the government and now leased to a mining corporation. Although the company had the land, it couldn’t commence mining until an archaeological survey had been done on several locations that had been judged most likely to contain evidence of early settlement. They were digging on a low rise, near a seasonal stream that ran through the plain. They had removed the topsoil of the area pegged out by Dorset Sutton and were doing the backbreaking work of searching for finds.

  Dorset had published an article in the Journal of Conflict Archaeology at Glasgow University about his discovery of an old German Schutztruppe camp in the south of Namibia, on the edge of the Namib-Naukluft National Park, and Emma had summoned the courage to write to him, explaining her family’s connection to the country. He’d been affable, charming and welcoming in his reply, and told her he’d be happy to have her on a dig in the future.

  True to his word, Sutton had agreed to her request to join him on this dig, and here they were. She would gain credits towards her degree at Glasgow and, just as importantly for Emma, she would have the chance to connect with the land that had been part of her family’s troubled life for more than a century. But things were not turning out as she had expected.

  ‘I think the baas gets off on making life hell for his underlings,’ Natangwe said out of the side of his mouth.

  Still kneeling, Emma straightened her back, took off her hat and wiped her grimy brow. ‘At least he’s an equal opportunity abuser.’

  Natangwe snorted. He was handsome but also opinionated, and he walked with the swagger of a young man who had a sense of entitlement. His father was a veteran of the liberation war and a staunch SWAPO party supporter, Emma had learned on the drive to the dig from the capital. She wasn’t shy, but her mother had told her that in the army, or in any group of strangers, it was sometimes best to keep a low profile, to go about one’s work quietly and professionally, so she hadn’t been as forthcoming about her own background. Her grandfather had served in the old South West African police special unit, Koevoet, which meant ‘crowbar’, a force infamous for its ruthless efficiency in the war, and this would not have endeared her to the likes of Natangwe.

  ‘You don’t sound German, Emma Kurtz,’ Natangwe had said as he laboured beside her. ‘Where are you from originally? Your accent isn’t Scottish either.’

  Emma put her hat back on. ‘All over, really. I went to school in England, lived in the States for a while, and now I’m at Glasgow for the next couple of years.’

  ‘But your father, was he German?’

  ‘Kurtz is my mum’s name. She was a single mother; I never knew my father. But she was born here, in Namibia.’

  Natangwe nodded and that seemed to be the end of the conversation. He went back to his digging. She wondered if he thought less of her because of the little she’d revealed about her heritage. Emma herself didn’t really know how she felt about her family’s connection with this starkly beautiful country, but she was here to confront the Kurtz family’s history, even if it might be painful or, like now, awkward. It was hard to imagine Namibia at war, but it had been from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s as SWAPO fought for independence from South Africa, which regarded the old South West Africa as one of its provinces.

  Emma scratched at the dry, sandy earth. She had thought she would be ready for her first dig; her lecturers had all taken great pains, often, to remind the students that archaeology, working on a real dig, was backbreaking work. She couldn’t have imagined, though, that she would be as close to tears as she had been last night when she’d lain her weary body into the squeaky camp stretcher. Emma paused to swig lukewarm water from her bottle.

  ‘Come on, Miss Kurtz,’ Professor Sutton called from the other end of the trench, ‘history’s not going to reveal itself, you know.’

  ‘Bastard,’ she whispered.

  ‘How will you feel,’ Natangwe said, not looking over at her, ‘if we do find a mass grave?’

  Excited, Emma wanted to say, but she held her tongue. She knew what Natangwe was getting at. One of the reasons for the dig was that the local people’s oral traditions held that dozens, perhaps a hundred or more, people had been massacred in this area, captured rebels who had been summarily executed by a detachment of Schutztruppen in 1904. Conflict archaeology, by its nature, revealed the worst of human nature as well as the best. Acts of bravery and barbarity featured in all wars, but Emma knew from her reading that the German colonialists and their army had brutally suppressed several rebellions in South West Africa. That was all in the history books, but if they were lucky – such an odd word to contemplate in this instance – they might find forensic evidence of a war crime.

  ‘How long had your mother’s family been in Namibia?’ Natangwe pressed her as she kept on scraping. ‘What don’t you want to tell me?’

  Emma sighed. His arrogance annoyed her, but on reflection she told herself she had nothing to hide. ‘All right. My great-great-grandfather served in the Schutztruppe.’

  ‘I wonder if he executed prisoners, or poisoned wells, or raped women, or imprisoned and worked them to death in concentration camps like Shark Island,’ Natangwe hissed.

  Emma looked over at him, but Natangwe kept his eyes on the ground, meticulously brushing away the sand, though he now worked with an urgency that Emma hadn’t seen in him before. Emma had been honest with him, and this was what she got: a lecture and suppositions. ‘He was a soldier, that’s all I know for sure.’ She was doubly glad now, though, that she hadn’t mentioned her grandfather’s role in the more recent war, and nor would she.

  He looked up at her, his eyes boring into hers. ‘So, what, it’s OK to commit war crimes if you were only following orders?’

  Emma sighed. She had feared that this type of exchange would come up at some time. Her mother was right; it was better to stay in the background, to be the grey person who didn’t attract too much attention. What little she knew about her grandfather, Hans, came from his embittered ex-wife, her grandmother, and it did not give her grounds for much hope that her forebear had been a noble soldier with a conscience who would refuse an immoral order. Hans, Gran had let slip once after too many gins, was a murderer; he’d beaten a captive SWAPO guerrilla to death during an interrogation.

  She took a breath. ‘Natangwe, I don’t think I’d be here if I thought for one moment that everything about the colonial era in this country was good or morally correct. I think what we’re doing here is confronting the past, not leaving it buried, where some people want it to stay. The Germans only ruled Namibia as a colony from 1884 to 1915,
but they left a lasting legacy here. It’s in their architecture, their roads, their language and their food, but even their own government admits their wrongdoings. Don’t hate me because I’m trying to find out more about where I come from.’

  Natangwe stopped his brushing and scraping. ‘An apology won’t bring back the sixty thousand Herero killed by the Germans, most of them worked to death in concentration camps, let alone the tens of thousands of my people killed in the liberation struggle.’

  Emma felt dejected, but went back to work with the trowel, scraping at the dirt without much enthusiasm. She heard a vehicle engine in the distance and when she looked up and saw it was Alex’s Land Rover, she smiled.

  They had all been introduced to Alex Bahler yesterday, when they’d arrived at the dig site. He was a wildlife researcher, involved with a carnivore research program to help conserve and protect the cheetah and the endangered desert lion.

  Desert lions had once roamed up and down the Atlantic coast from the water’s edge to far inland, Bahler had told them, but they had almost been wiped out by humans – farmers who viewed them as a threat to their livestock, and trophy hunters. By the 1990s, when intensive research began, there were thought to be just twenty left, but their numbers were slowly coming back. Alex’s role was to monitor the movements of collared lions at the far eastern extreme of their home range, where they occasionally came close to Etosha National Park. Cheetahs, Alex had explained, lived a similarly perilous existence; those outside of protected areas were frequently shot and poisoned by sheep and cattle farmers.

  Alex was working with a number of farmers in the area on a project to trap and relocate cheetahs and lions. He was Namibian German, aged in his mid-twenties, just a few years older than Emma, and he was, she thought, quite gorgeous. Dorset Sutton shot Emma a stern look as Alex pulled up near the dig, clearly telling her to get back to work.

  Despite it going against her training Emma stabbed the sand, hard, with her trowel. She wanted to pierce the heart of this barren, inhospitable place. She scraped the dirt away but then something unusual happened; the trowel snagged.

  At first Emma thought she’d caught the blade on a root, but looking around she realised that wasn’t possible on this open plain. Gently, she extracted the point of the trowel, placed it down, and picked up a paintbrush. She carefully brushed the grit from around the object, then lowered her face and blew at the sand covering whatever it was underneath. It was fabric.

  She glanced to the side; Natangwe was ignoring her. Professor Sutton was deep in conversation with Alex Bahler, the pair of them poring over a map spread across the bonnet of Alex’s Land Rover.

  Emma took off her leather gardening gloves and used her fingertips and the brush to uncover more. It was fabric, all right. Her heart started beating faster. Was this a rebel prisoner, shot in the head by someone her great-great-grandfather may have known? Her fingers touched something hard. She blew and brushed.

  It was metal, and as the dust parted under her breath she saw, surprisingly, a rusting zip.

  A zip? Such a thing wouldn’t have been around in the early twentieth century. She knew she should call Professor Sutton over, but she wanted this find for herself. Screw her mother, she did not want to be the grey man or grey woman or whatever the military called the quiet achiever. She wanted her professor’s praise, and she wanted to show Natangwe that it was worth her being here, and that she would uncover whatever secrets this grave had to offer. She picked up the trowel again, now carefully using it to scrape away more sand. The pointed tip hit something hard.

  Emma gasped. It was a bone.

  Chapter 3

  There were a dozen people in Tran Van Ngo’s large formal lounge room already. The men were middle-aged and up, the women looked in their twenties, mostly. The dress was elegant. It was clear to Sonja that this was a gathering at which to flaunt trophies and chattels, not wives.

  Sonja took a glass of champagne and passed on the food. She was the only westerner in the room, but she didn’t feel as though she was attracting any more stares from the younger girls than might be expected. Her face might have been new, but Tran’s predilections were clearly not.

  Tran introduced her to a couple standing near them by her assumed name of Ursula Schmidt – it was actually her aunt’s – but then began to speak to the man in Vietnamese. The man’s partner, a pretty girl who was introduced to her as Cherry, stepped aside from the men. ‘You’re new,’ she said.

  ‘I actually feel very old compared to you and the other women here,’ Sonja replied.

  Cherry tittered and put a hand in front of her mouth. ‘Ngo likes his women . . . sorry.’

  ‘Old?’

  ‘I was going to say, white,’ Cherry said. ‘Where is Irina?’

  ‘She’s not well. I’m a friend.’

  Cherry lowered her voice. ‘I hope she warned you about Tran. Be careful. Irina told me Tran can be violent, especially if business is not going his way.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘I think maybe this is why Irina decided to be sick tonight. Maybe she thinks he will be kinder to a stranger, not take it out on her. If you are lucky, all he will want is sex, and not to hurt you.’

  Sonja sipped her champagne. ‘Thanks for the warning.’ With this new information her revenge would be even more satisfying. Sonja had hit her own father, just before she’d left home, after seeing him beat her mother. Much later she’d reconciled with the old man, who had done his utmost to atone for his earlier sins, but the day she had knocked him to the floor and walked out on him had been one of the best of her life until they’d made amends.

  Tran and the other man came over to them. ‘Forgive me,’ Tran said in English, ‘some boring business to attend to. I hope you ladies are enjoying yourselves.’

  ‘Of course,’ Sonja said.

  A young man threaded his way through the small party of guests and stood beside Tran, who eventually acknowledged his presence. Tran said something to the man, who nodded.

  ‘My personal secretary,’ Tran said to Sonja. ‘I have a small presentation to make to our esteemed guests. Afterwards, we celebrate.’

  Tran called for everyone’s attention and Sonja and Cherry drifted to the fringe of the group. The young Vietnamese girl translated, quietly, as Tran held court.

  ‘He’s thanking all the men here for their support during this challenging time for him, developing his new hotel and apartment complex.’

  Tran concluded his speech then nodded to the young man Sonja had seen him speaking to before. The young man went to a table at the edge of the lounge room and began ferrying gift-wrapped packages to each of the men in the room.

  Sonja finished her champagne and set her glass down on a side table as the first of the gifts was unwrapped. There were soft murmurs of surprise as each of the elongated boxes was opened. From the first box, and then the others, the owners each held aloft a pointed horn.

  ‘Rhino,’ Sonja said softly.

  ‘It’s the only income stream he’s got these days,’ Cherry whispered. ‘The Americans are shutting down his drug shipments and his property development is failing due to oversupply. These gifts are worth a fortune; they say he’s been stockpiling rhino horn.’

  Sonja had to put a hand on a wing-backed armchair to steady herself. It was not like her to let emotions affect the execution of a mission. She had prepared for this moment, mentally and physically. Hours and hours spent in the gym had helped her to shed the few extra kilos an easy life in LA had brought on, and she’d closely examined the chain of events that had led her here as well as researching the trade in rhino horn. In between she had fired hundreds of rounds at the pistol range to blow off steam. She was ready, completely, for what had to be done.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Cherry asked.

  ‘Fine. I don’t usually drink champagne.’

  The six hor
ns being fondled, passed from businessman to concubine and back again, had a combined value of close to a million dollars. It was just a commodity to them.

  Sonja gravitated to the edge of the room. She thought of the blood spilled in Africa to make this moment happen, animals and humans slaughtered in a war over something with no medicinal properties at all. Just as it sickened her, it steeled her.

  She needed fresh air. Sonja walked briskly to the front door and down the stairs. She rested her hand on the balustrade and willed herself to stay calm. She was in control of her feelings. It was what made her good at her job. Sonja despised weakness – in others, yes, but most of all in herself.

  ‘Miss Kurtz?’

  Sonja forced herself to stay still, to not turn.

  ‘That is your name, isn’t it? Or do you prefer Ursula when you’re working undercover?’

  She looked around then and Tran’s chauffeur was there, an iPhone in his left hand, held up. He snapped a picture of her. ‘What are you doing? My name is Ursula Schmidt, not Kurtz.’

  The man’s other hand moved inside the left lapel of his suit jacket and drew out a small-calibre semi-automatic pistol, a .32 by the look of it, with a silencer attached to the end.

  The man’s face was impassive, his tone deadly. ‘I don’t like a change in the routine. I went to Irina’s villa complex. She’s not there, not home ill as she told Madam Nhu. I spoke to the security man on the gate; Irina went out for her normal Tuesday appointments this morning and never returned. He was concerned.’

  Sonja held her hands up, palms out. ‘All right, the truth. She’s sick of Tran, tired of the way he beats her. He’s not worth the money but she was too scared to confront him. She has another lover. I am Ursula Schmidt.’

  ‘Your name is Sonja Kurtz. You are here in Vietnam to assassinate Mr Tran.’

  ‘Rubbish. Where would you get such a ridiculous story?’

  The man used his thumb to select the gallery icon on his phone’s camera. He tossed the iPhone to her and Sonja caught it. ‘Have a look.’