by Tony Park
‘Sorry,’ he said, and placed his hands palms down on the table. ‘All I meant was that Sam’s death did bring the rhino problem into sharper focus and sparked a huge outpouring of support, financial as well as moral, for people putting their lives on the line to save the rhino.’
‘It still wasn’t worth it,’ she said.
‘You’d die for Emma, right?’
Sonja exhaled. ‘Of course.’
‘There you go, some things are worth fighting for.’
It was still a stupid argument, she thought. An increase in donations from well-meaning animal lovers in America and other countries where Sam’s documentaries were shown on TV was not worth the loss of his life and the knife that had been stuck in her heart. Stirling was probably right, though: if Sam had truly known the risks associated with filming a night anti-poaching patrol, instead of blithely ignoring them as he had, he still would have gone.
But that was not reality. In the real world, in Sonja’s world, people went to war for stupid reasons and they got shot and killed and at the end of the day it made no difference at all. Yes, she would put herself in front of a bullet or a speeding car or a charging lion to save her daughter, but beyond that there was nothing on this earth ‘worth’ dying for.
‘What are your plans while you’re in Namibia?’
She tried to focus on the question instead of on Sam’s smile and the smell of that cologne with the gay-sounding name he’d insisted on wearing. ‘Plans? I don’t have any plans, Stirling. I’m not a tourist. I’m going to see my daughter sometime in the next few days.’
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card which he slid across the table to her side. ‘I’m sure she’ll be happy to see you. Here, take this, call me if you’re heading to the Palmwag area. It’s spectacularly beautiful country and I’d love to show you some of it.’
Sonja was almost going to throw the card back at him. She decided she’d been churlish enough, but she still didn’t want to play nice.
‘Maybe. I’m leaving. See you round.’ Sonja got up.
‘Sonja?’
She didn’t turn; she walked into the courtyard of Joe’s and then out of the crowded bar full of happy, laughing people.
PART 2
DEATH
His kind had survived war and drought, and miraculously they still roamed the desert.
He had been kicked out of his small family as soon as he reached maturity, when his golden hair had bristled into a mohawk, but now he carried a full mane, a luscious deep russet with black hair lining his chest. He was a male in his prime.
He had mated, and now he was hungry. The prides were small here, just two females, sisters. If they had cubs already, they had hidden them somewhere so that he wouldn’t kill any young ones he hadn’t sired. It was brutal, but it was their way of keeping their blood lines pure, of surviving.
Ahead, on the wind, he heard the clanking of goat bells, smelled the little creatures.
The last thing he should do was risk his life for the tiny meal of a goat. Nonetheless his hunter’s instinct carried him on, listening for the bell and the bleating.
He came to them on dusk and watched the goats and the small boys who tended them. It was dangerous, but to not eat out here was to die. He was in luck. Beyond the goats, he made out the braying bulk of a donkey.
Around his neck was an orange collar. He shook his head and felt its ever-present, slightly annoying weight. At least it gave him a neck rub.
He eyed the fence and picked the best place to jump it. He crouched, then darted to the fence and cleared it in one bound. The goats scattered in panicked terror as he cornered the donkey. He went for its throat and clamped his jaws. Blood spurted.
Before he could feast, though, he heard the roar of an engine and the night was suddenly lit up. A vehicle arrived and caught him in its headlights.
Too late, he realised, the kraal and the boys were a trap. A man in the back of the vehicle pulled the trigger. Darkness descended.
Chapter 13
Emma scratched at the dry earth with a trowel while Alex, who had just arrived back at the dig site, stood watching her. ‘Who is this guy your professor has gone to collect, anyway?’ Alex asked.
Emma straightened her back, took off her hat and wiped the sweat from her brow. ‘I don’t know. His name is Andre Horsman or something, but all the prof would say beyond that was that he’s a retired South African Air Force guy who contacted Sutton saying he knew who Harry was.’
‘Interesting,’ Alex conceded. ‘But how did he get in touch with your professor out here in the middle of nowhere?’
Emma had asked the same question of Professor Sutton. ‘Turns out he’s a major shareholder in the mining company that we’re all contracted to, for the archaeological survey. He pulled some strings and the mining company sent someone out to the dig site to tell Sutton he’d better talk to this guy.’
Alex nodded to the portable gazebo, under which Natangwe sat, reading a book. ‘How come you’re the only one working?’
Emma shrugged. ‘Crazy, I guess. Sutton said that as long as I didn’t disturb the crime scene, where Harry was found, I could poke around a bit more if I wanted to. Natangwe’s sulking.’
‘Is he still in trouble for letting out the news about Harry?’
‘Yes,’ Emma said. ‘Sutton was furious with him. He even confiscated Natangwe’s phone so he couldn’t tell anyone else. Not that there’s even a signal here. Natangwe called Sutton a racist, and Sutton threatened to have him expelled from university. Natangwe’s always spoiling for an argument and Sutton’s a stubborn old man.’
Alex plucked a stray spear of yellow grass and chewed on the end of it. Emma went back to digging. It was pointless, she thought, but as tortuous as the work was she had found she had become addicted to it. The excitement of discovering Harry did not make her want to rest on her laurels, it made her want to keep scraping and sifting at the dirt to see what other treasures or sorrows the African earth might reveal.
‘I can’t stay, Emma. I have to head west, towards the Skeleton Coast. Something has come up. When I sent your message to your mother from Okaukuejo, I received some bad news.’
Emma stood and saw the concern creasing his face. ‘How bad?’
‘XLR 501 has stopped moving.’
‘That sounds like a car or a spaceship or something,’ she said.
Her lame attempt at lightening his mood failed. ‘XLR 501 is one of our collared desert lions. He’s the dominant male of a couple of small prides. When his GPS collar does not record a change of position after twenty-four hours I get an SMS. It usually means an animal is dead. There are no other males in his area, so I’m worried he’s been shot by a farmer. This could be a disaster for the desert lions.’
‘Oh my God, Alex, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to joke about it.’
He ran a hand through his thick blond hair. ‘It’s not your fault, Emma. I’m sorry, but I must go.’
She’d heard it said, on campus, that the zoology students who went into the field to research wildlife often looked like the animals they were studying. Alex was leonine, in a way, with his wavy hair, but his body was lithe and wiry, like a cheetah’s. Alex got into his truck, started the engine and roared off, leaving a cloud of dust in his wake. Emma walked over to where Natangwe was sitting. She had left her water bottle next to Alex’s in the shade to stop it heating up, and took a long swig.
‘We’re not going to find the remains of any Ndonga here,’ Natangwe said, putting his book down on his knees.
‘How do you know, if we don’t look?’
He shrugged. ‘It just doesn’t make sense that there would have been a village here, even back in the 1900s.’
‘The professor thought it was worth looking,’ Emma said. She thought it odd to be fighting the irascible academic’s corner, but she liked
a good debate and was happy that Natangwe was at least talking.
‘The Owambo, of which the Ndonga are part of, aren’t nomadic people. They settle where there’s water and pasture. There’s no evidence of a permanent river for miles around here. Sutton was relying on some half-remembered oral histories, or maybe he decided to do the dig here precisely so we wouldn’t find anything.’
Emma thought Sutton was many things, but corruptible wasn’t one of them. ‘Seriously, you think he’d take money to turn up a nil result?’
Natangwe shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m being too hard on him. All I know is that the sooner I can get off this dig and onto something of real significance, the better. So where did your boyfriend go in such a big hurry?’
‘He’s not my boyfriend. It’s terrible; he just heard that one of the desert lions he’s been researching has possibly been shot by a farmer. How could someone do something so thoughtless?’
Natangwe closed his book. ‘That’s a typical western response to human–wildlife conflict. You’re automatically assuming the farmer has done something wrong.’
‘Well, if he’s killed an endangered lion then that’s wrong.’
‘What about the farmer’s cattle, or sheep or goats? They’re worth money.’
‘You can’t compare the worth of a goat to a lion,’ Emma said. ‘And by the way, Alex isn’t my boyfriend.’
‘Your people, the Germans, cleared the lions and other big game from the fertile plains of Herero land, yet you cry foul when an African farmer tries to protect his flocks, or even his family, by killing a predator.’
‘Do you believe all the lions should be shot at then?’
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying,’ Natangwe said, ‘just that you have to see both sides of the story. It’s cool that the desert lions are coming back from the brink of extinction, but the very thing that nearly caused them to be wiped out in the first place is happening again; the reason they were all shot in the past was that they were raiding cattle – white people’s cattle in most cases. Now when an African farmer kills a lion you western liberals think he’s evil or backward or uneducated.’
Emma sat down in an empty camping chair in the shade. She was hot and tired and wondered whether it had been a good idea to strike up a conversation with Natangwe after all.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘isn’t that why we’re here, to try and shed light on conflicts of the past and hopefully learn from them?’
‘I guess,’ said Emma.
They both heard a far-off engine at the same time and looked up to find an approaching cloud of dust. It was Professor Sutton’s Land Cruiser. They got up to meet him when the vehicle pulled up. There was another man with him of about the same age, perhaps late fifties or early sixties, and a much younger guy, who smiled at her as soon as he climbed out of the vehicle. Emma felt suddenly self-conscious, all sweaty and covered in dust. The man who had caught her eye had dark hair, thick but cut short, finely chiselled features and she could see from the way his T-shirt clung to his body that he was ripped to shreds. He wore an elephant-hair bracelet and what looked like a very expensive diving watch.
‘Emma, Natangwe, this is Mr Andre Horsman, from Cape Town, and his nephew . . . sorry . . .’
‘No problem, Professor,’ said the man, looking straight at Emma, ‘Sebastian Lord.’
‘Sorry, yes, Sebastian,’ Dorset said. ‘He and Andre just flew into Ondangwa today on Andre’s private plane.’
‘Howzit,’ Horsman said to both of them, and shook their hands.
‘Andre’s got some information about our mystery man and how he got to be here. I’ll put the kettle on while he explains.’ Sutton opened the back of his vehicle and took out a gas bottle and cooker and a battered black kettle.
Horsman cleared his throat. ‘I served in the air force, near here at Ondangwa, during the war. The man you found was on board a transport aircraft, a DC-3 Dakota, that went missing on a resupply mission in 1987. We don’t know exactly what happened on the flight but finding the body here gives us another piece of the puzzle. From what Professor Sutton’s told me about the state of the body you found we’ve surmised that the man was able to parachute out, which would seem to indicate some sort of problem on board – either that, or he accidentally fell out, which seems less likely. While he probably survived the jump, given what the professor told me about the state of the body, we think he was then killed – stabbed, according to Professor Sutton – by insurgents.’
‘Freedom fighters, you mean,’ Natangwe said.
‘Have you told the police all this?’ Emma asked.
Dorset poured boiling water into three mugs. ‘We went to see the police at Ondangwa. They’re going to get their own forensic people to examine Harry, but they seem to think Mr Horsman’s theory is sound.’
‘Please, call me Andre,’ Horsman said, and thanked Sutton for his coffee. ‘I was in charge of the search and rescue operation that looked for our missing aircraft and it’s pained me ever since that we didn’t find any trace of the Dakota or the men on board her. You finding this body, and now learning what happened to him, makes my sense of failure even more acute. If we’d tried harder or, more importantly, if we’d been looking in the right place, we might have found him in time to save him, and found the aircraft, even if it was wreckage.’
‘What do you mean “if you’d been looking in the right place”?’ Natangwe asked.
Horsman nodded. ‘The flight plan for the Dakota’s last mission would have seen it heading northwest of Ondangwa, towards Angola, yet here we are south of the airbase, on the edge of Etosha National Park, which is very strange.’
‘We’ve found out that some local people reported seeing what looked like an aircraft on fire, heading west from here, back in 1987,’ Emma said.
‘Yes, your professor told me,’ Horsman said, ‘which is precisely why I’m here. I want to start the search for the missing aircraft again, now that we have a starting point – here where Hudson Brand met his fate.’
‘You’d need an aeroplane to do that,’ Emma said.
‘Well, as Dorset pointed out, I’ve got one,’ Horsman replied. ‘I flew to Ondangwa myself, in my twin-engine Beechcraft. I’m ready to start looking now, as soon as my aircraft’s refuelled.’
‘Would there be anything left of an aircraft after thirty years?’ Natangwe asked.
Emma interjected. ‘Yes, quite possibly. We studied the discovery and recovery of the Lady Be Good at university.’
‘What’s that?’ said Natangwe.
‘An American B-24 Liberator bomber,’ Dorset said. ‘It got lost in a sandstorm over Libya during the Second World War. The crew bailed out when it ran out of fuel and the bomber flew on for a little further and crash-landed. It was remarkably well preserved by the desert conditions, not dissimilar to those in Namibia, if Andre’s Dakota crashed between here and the Skeleton Coast. The machine guns on the Lady Be Good were still serviceable and when the wreckage was inspected, decades after the crash, a thermos was found on board and the tea inside it was still drinkable.’
‘Surely it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack,’ Emma said. ‘You’ve only got a vague report that it flew west of here.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ Horsman conceded.
‘But that’s where you – we – come in,’ Professor Sutton said. ‘Mr Horsman – Andre – needs some extra eyes to help with his search. He wants us to fly with him and Sebastian, to help scan the desert for the missing aircraft.’
‘Wow.’ Emma turned to Natangwe. ‘Isn’t that awesome?’
Natangwe frowned. ‘Professor, are we not supposed to be looking for victims of the genocide?’
Dorset folded his arms and regarded Natangwe. ‘It looked to me, Mr Heita, as though you were sitting in the shade reading, rather than looking for heroes past.’
‘I was
waiting for some direction from you,’ Natangwe said defiantly.
‘Well, now that we have found a body from recent times we should stop digging and wait for the police to investigate. In any case, our time here was only ever going to be brief, as our budget was limited. You look surprised, Natangwe. Are you?’
‘So this was just about window dressing for a mining company,’ Natangwe said.
Emma felt a little cheated, although she countered her lesson in real-world cynicism with the knowledge that they – she, in fact – had unearthed a modern-day archaeological mystery and what seemed like a valuable clue in the puzzle that might just locate a missing aircraft. She couldn’t understand why Natangwe wasn’t as excited as she.
‘I think it might be better if we went back to the university,’ Natangwe said.
‘Speak for yourself,’ Emma countered. ‘Sure, I’m disappointed we didn’t find what we came for, but isn’t unearthing the remains of a man missing for decades and giving his family some closure just as important?’
‘Natangwe,’ Professor Sutton said, ‘I intend on taking Andre up on this new project. If we find this missing aircraft it will be worldwide news – well, at least Africa-wide – and it could very well turn out to be one of the most important archaeological finds in Namibia. If you’d rather go back to varsity then I’m sure we can drop you somewhere on the main road and you can hitchhike or get a bus back to Windhoek. Emma, are you coming with us?’
‘Absolutely! One thing, though, Prof, I’ll need to call my mother as soon as we get signal to let her know where we’re going. She’s on her way here.’
‘Who knows where our search might take us?’ Horsman said. ‘However, why don’t you just tell your mother to meet you at, say, Namutoni Camp in Etosha in a few days? I can drop you there at the appointed time. If we haven’t found the aircraft then you can decide at that point whether to leave with your mother, or stay with the search. She might even want to join us.’
‘Cool,’ Emma said, then looked at Natangwe again. ‘Please, Natangwe, stay with us. It’ll be awesome.’