An Empty Coast

by Tony Park

  Sonja steadied the knife, but tightened her grip on him for good measure. She took pleasure in his flinch. ‘What do you export?’

  ‘Diamonds, stolen from the mines here or blood diamonds from Angola – they’re easier to get. The Russians have contacts in Asia so they take lion bones, ivory and rhino horn when we can get it.’

  The mention of rhino horn started Sonja seething. ‘You kill rhinos?’

  ‘No,’ Cobus squeaked. ‘I’d never kill a rhino. I love those things. Besides, it’s too hard here in Namibia; the distances are too big. We move some horn out of South Africa occasionally, and stuff stolen from stockpiles.’

  ‘And this Miro took out a contract on us?’

  Cobus nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  Brand stood over him. ‘Your other guys followed us from Windhoek’s airport. How did you and the pilot know we’d be heading here?’

  Cobus shrugged. ‘We were given the GPS coordinates from Miro. We were told to come here and waste anyone we found at the archaeological dig site.’

  Sonja inhaled sharply. She stood up, grinding her foot into Cobus’s arm. He screamed, but she didn’t care. She left his flaccid penis, oozing blood, hanging outside his shorts. She turned to look down at him. ‘Anyone?’

  Cobus squinted up at her; she’d put the sun behind her head. He looked like a rat caught in its nest, blinking up at the unaccustomed light. This piece of filth would have killed her daughter if Emma had been there.

  ‘What are you going to do to me? I need a doctor. I’ll tell you anything else you want to know.’

  Sonja shook her head in disgust at this whining, cowardly creature. ‘So, I don’t suppose you know who Miro is working with here in Namibia, who would want a harmless archaeological team wiped out?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t,’ Cobus said.

  Sonja drew her pistol and pointed it between his eyes. At that moment she heard another vehicle engine and scanned around her. It was Matthew Allchurch, in the Isuzu, its front end crumpled in, steam hissing from under its bonnet. He drove towards them. She looked down at Cobus once more. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘No! I promise you, I’m telling the truth.’

  ‘Kurtz? Sonja?’ Brand said from behind her, but his voice sounded far away. ‘I think he’s telling the truth, Sonja.’

  Sonja looked around at Brand. ‘Ja, I think you’re right.’ She turned back to Cobus, raised her pistol again and shot him in the head, twice.

  Matthew Allchurch stopped the bakkie and got out. He walked over to join Sonja and Brand. He looked down at the body, retched and threw up. ‘My God.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand when he had finished and said shakily, ‘Who are you?’

  Sonja looked at him, the pistol hanging loose, comfortable, in her right hand, like a natural extension of her body. She felt calm now that it was over. She blinked twice at the lawyer. He and his generation had sent countless thousands of young men off to war, on the border of South Africa and hundreds of other shitholes around the world, happy to be fighting the good fight against international communism or whatever ideology or religion their governments told them was wrong today, but they rarely saw for themselves the consequences of armed conflict. ‘Who am I?’ It was a good question. ‘I’m a mother trying to find her daughter before someone kills her.’

  Brand put a hand on her shoulder and she flinched. She snapped her head around and glared at him. ‘You don’t think maybe we could have got some more info out of that guy Cobus?’ he said.

  ‘I think you were right, that he was telling the truth and didn’t know anything else. What would you have done with him?’

  Brand shrugged, but she held his eye. She wanted to see what kind of man he was. ‘He was in a bad way, internal bleeding and all. You could see it. Even if we could have got him to a hospital within an hour – pretty well impossible since you killed the only helicopter probably within a hundred miles – he wouldn’t have made it. I heard you tell him that he’d be OK, that he just had a through-and-through wound. You gave him hope to get him talking.’

  She scoffed at him. ‘So what would you have done, made him comfortable while we waited for an ambulance to get here?’

  ‘Can’t say I know for sure. Maybe the “mercenary’s gift”, the quick way out, was the best thing for him.’

  ‘You think I was being kind to him? Pah. He would have killed Emma if he’d found her here – you heard what he said – and for that he deserved to die. No one fucks with my family, Brand.’

  PART 3

  REVENGE

  The desert lioness stood in the cave, her body tensed, her ears twitching, always on the alert for danger.

  She pushed. The first tiny cub left her womb, landing in the darkness and the dust. The lioness turned, inspected the little one, gnawed the umbilical cord in two and licked her baby clean of fluid. Twice more she went through the same timeless ritual before allowing herself to rest.

  Her work was just beginning. The little bundles around her would be blind for some weeks yet, totally dependent on her milk. It was up to her now to keep them safe from predators and to hunt and eat enough for herself to keep the nourishment flowing for her babies.

  The odds were against them all. The father of these cubs was dead, shot while raiding a kraal and killing a donkey. Here in the Etendeka Mountains, though, she had a chance. This was a protected area where no human should hound her.

  She and her kind had been driven out of their homelands, persecuted for decades, but here in the cave was their future, their revenge.

  Chapter 21

  They had been driving for three hours through the heat of the day and not even the air conditioning in Benjie’s Land Cruiser could outdo the heat of the sun’s rays slanting in through the window.

  Emma stared out at the red rock of the flat-topped mountains in the distance. Namibia’s landscapes changed quickly and dramatically. They were beautiful, turning from red to purple with the movement of the sun, but Emma couldn’t really appreciate the spectacle. Benjie’s satellite communications system had still been down when they’d flown back to the farm. She had been unable to get a message to her mother. Benjie, who had lent two vehicles to Andre Horsman but had elected to stay behind, promised he would get word to Sonja as soon as the system came back online.

  Sonja, Emma knew, would be officially pissed at her right now.

  Alex seemed similarly annoyed. He looked back at her from his position in the front passenger seat. Sebastian was driving the Land Cruiser and Natangwe was beside her. ‘I really should have gone back to Ondangwa and got my vehicle,’ Alex said.

  Emma sighed. This whole trip had, literally, been on the fly. It had seemed exciting at first, but now Emma couldn’t help but feel they’d been kidnapped by two overly enthusiastic old men. She would never have picked Sutton for the adventurous kind, but who knew, perhaps in every professor there lurked an inner Indiana Jones. Emma just thought they were being damned irresponsible now. They didn’t even have a satellite phone among them any more, since Alex’s had been stolen – Sutton had one, but when Emma pleaded with him to let her use it to message her mother he discovered it had run out of credit and he had no way to recharge it. Absent-minded old fool, Emma said to herself.

  Professor Sutton and Andre were in the other vehicle, a double cab Hilux bakkie. Sebastian was hanging back about a kilometre behind the others, to stay out of their dust cloud. Alex looked forlornly out of his window and Natangwe had his head back, snoring gently. Sebastian took his eyes off the road for a couple of seconds to glance back at her and wink. Emma felt herself blush.

  As the day wore on Emma dozed on and off, and more often than not when she woke she could see Sebastian’s dark eyes in the rear view mirror, watching her.

  ‘It’s getting late,’ Sebastian said eventually. ‘But we’re nearly there.’

  A
lex was holding his hand-held GPS up to the windscreen, to acquire enough satellites to give him a reading. ‘About four hundred metres to the north, though the reading may not have been accurate given the speed we were flying at.’

  Sebastian nodded. ‘Understood. The prof and Andre are stopping up ahead.’

  They pulled up and the two older men were already out, a map spread across the bonnet of their bakkie. Sutton came over to them, rubbing his hands. ‘Right. We’ve still got an hour of light left, maybe two, so let’s get cracking.’

  ‘Professor, once we have located the wreckage I can borrow a vehicle to go look for the lionesses, and the carcass of the male, yes?’ Alex asked Sutton.

  Sutton grimaced. ‘Yes, yes, very well. That was the deal we made. Once we find the Dakota we’ll need to set up camp and start mapping the site, so we won’t need both vehicles all the time. We’ll make camp here for this evening, whatever happens.’

  ‘Then let us go,’ Alex said. ‘The quicker we do this the quicker I can find my lions.’

  Alex climbed up on the roof of the Land Cruiser and began tossing down tools, tents, canvas-covered camping mattresses, a bundle of firewood, and a couple of tarpaulins.

  ‘Alex, you stay here, sort things out, will you?’ Sutton called up to him. ‘And toss me your GPS, I’ll follow it to the bearing you took.’

  Alex nodded, dropped to his knees on the roof-rack and passed the GPS to Sutton. He stood again, picked up a shovel and waved it at Emma.

  Emma held out her hands, and when Alex tossed the tool to her she caught it, then reached into the back of the four-by-four for a litre bottle of water.

  Sutton consulted the GPS then pointed towards a steep slope to their left, a mix of sand and rock. He set off, with Andre at his heels. It looked like a daunting first leg.

  Sebastian took another spade and a pick and fell in beside Emma. ‘I can’t believe Alex is still going on about his lions, as though he owns them. Guy’s obsessed.’

  Emma nodded, but even in doing so she felt like she was being unfair to Alex, somehow betraying him.

  ‘Yes, but if we have a tent to sleep in tonight it will be Alex who puts it up for us.’

  ‘Fair dues,’ Sebastian said, then lowered his voice. ‘Hey, I wonder if the prof will let us share a tent.’

  The thought made her heart beat faster. ‘As if.’

  ‘I’ll come and visit you, tonight,’ he said quietly, then louder, ‘OK, let’s go find this aeroplane.’

  He strode ahead of her, lean, fit, sure footed. He was like a male lion; no, she thought, reconsidering, more like a leopard. He was sleek, muscled, but sly and cunning as well. She shivered again, despite the heat from the mix of sand and rock beneath her feet, thinking of what they might do later on.

  Emma was perspiring within a few metres, and realised just how unfit she was.

  Sebastian turned round, grinning, not huffing or puffing in the slightest. ‘Need a hand?’

  ‘Bugger off.’ He could be condescending sometimes.

  The view from the top of the bank was spectacular and, at the same time, awesomely scary. Emma paused, catching her breath, and looked over thousands of square kilometres of nothing. In the far distance, to the west, beyond what at first appeared to be endless lines of dunes was a low-lying band of cloud that hugged the horizon. That was the Skeleton Coast.

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Sebastian had turned so that the sun setting over the Atlantic burnished his face orange-gold. He looked so incredibly rugged and handsome.

  ‘It is. It’s like we’re the only people on earth.’

  Sebastian lowered his voice again and whispered into her ear: ‘Right now we are,’ and lightly kissed her cheek before he strode down the hill.

  Emma set off after Sebastian, the professor and Natangwe. Andre, carrying a shovel, had taken the lead, and Sutton was calling out changes in direction to him, unable to keep up. For some reason Emma had begun to be suspicious of Horsman. She couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was about the South African that she didn’t trust, but it was there, niggling away in the back of her mind.

  Was the desire to find the men in his command who had been missing for so long the only thing driving him? Andre had been a military man, and from what Emma knew of such people, principally through her mother, they didn’t even go to the supermarket without a plan. Sonja would make lists for a weekend away with Sam, of things to take, places to go, and sights to see. ‘Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted,’ she would say to him, quoting Sun Tzu. Emma and Sam had discreetly rolled their eyes at each other behind her mother’s back every time she came out with one of those military dictums.

  No, there was more to Andre than the commanding officer not wanting to leave his men behind. This operation had been planned in haste, as if Andre feared that someone else might get to the aircraft before them. So what if that happened? Why would Andre want to be there first, and why was he not worried at all about their inability to contact anyone outside of Benjie the farmer?

  ‘Here!’ Andre yelled. He waved his shovel in the air, then seemed to almost disappear as he jumped off a rise, or perhaps into a hole the others couldn’t see. Professor Sutton started running, madly gesticulating towards an object that Emma, squinting into the setting sun, now saw was definitely not part of the natural landscape. It was angular, jutting out of the sand. She broke into a jog, and savoured the charge of adrenaline that coursed from her heart.

  Sebastian slowed to wait for her, then took her hand. Instinctively, she pulled back, but he held tight to her. ‘It’s uneven here. Let me help you.’

  She relented. ‘OK.’ His touch was electric.

  ‘That looks like the first thing we saw from the air. It’d make sense as it’s still rocky here, that’s why it’s visible.’

  Sebastian had to catch a breath. His excitement was infectious. Ahead of them Sutton had reached the object and was standing with his hands on his hips, silhouetted in front of the red ball of the setting sun.

  They walked to him. ‘What does it look like, Dorset?’ Sebastian asked the professor.

  The older man turned to them. ‘It’s not part of an aircraft, that’s for sure.’

  Emma wondered for a moment where Andre had disappeared to, but when she reached Sutton she saw Horsman’s head and torso appear. He was waist deep in a hole in the sand that looked to be about three metres by three metres square. Around the edge of the hole were timber crates and what looked like faded cotton webbing straps. A piece of black plastic sheeting, half buried, snapped in the breeze.

  ‘No, not part of an aircraft, but definitely from an aircraft.’ Horsman was smiling and his eyes were wide.

  ‘How do you know?’ Emma asked him.

  Andre bent into the hole again and when he stood straight he was holding a shroud of ripped and faded green or khaki nylon in one hand. ‘Because of this. It’s a parachute.’

  ‘Is there another person in there, like Harry?’ Emma asked.

  ‘No, not a person,’ Andre said. ‘Have a look at the boxes scattered around here. They’re military ammunition boxes, stencilled with the identification marks of the South African army. The Dakota was on a mission to drop cargo to a recce-commando patrol.’

  ‘So the patrol was here?’ Natangwe asked.

  Andre shook his head. ‘No, the patrol was actually offshore, operating in small boats. That’s why all the ammunition and supplies were wrapped in plastic.’

  ‘So why do you think the box ended up here?’ Sutton asked.

  Andre looked at him and shrugged. ‘Jettisoned, perhaps? Maybe the Dakota had engine or fuel trouble and they wanted to lighten their load.’

  ‘What happened to the cargo?’ Emma asked.

  ‘Locals must have found it some time ago, looted it,’ Sebastian said.

  Natangwe snorted. He dropped to one knee
to inspect the stencilling on the side of one of the opened green boxes. ‘People out here are poor, but what would they want with seventy-six-millimetre high explosive anti-tank rounds?’

  ‘Come to think of it,’ said Emma, ‘what would a bunch of guys floating in little boats at sea want with tank shells?’

  Andre coughed. ‘Well, odd things happen in war. I know for a fact that sometimes these artillery boxes were used to carry other cargo; there were always plenty of empty crates around and they’re sturdy, good for carrying stuff that needed to survive a parachute drop.’

  ‘It still doesn’t find us an aircraft,’ Natangwe said.

  ‘No,’ Sutton agreed, stroking his white beard and looking up into the sky, ‘but it tells us the Dakota passed directly over us. We’re on the right track.’

  Chapter 22

  Irina Aleksandrova continued reading the printed dossier her head of security, Mikhail, had prepared for her as the Air Namibia flight from Frankfurt began its descent into Hosea Kutako International Airport.

  Mikhail was based in Moscow, which was lucky for him. If he’d been in Ho Chi Minh City when the mad woman had kidnapped her and murdered Tran, then she would have killed Mikhail herself. As it was, she had learned a lesson. He had wanted to come with her to Vietnam, but she had assured him that she would need no close personal protection there. She had assumed she would be safe there, and that had been one of the few poor decisions she had made in her life.

  She finished her champagne and the flight attendant moved swiftly to her side – it was first class after all – and took the glass away. Mikhail was behind her in business class, and it made her feel a little more relaxed to know he and Yuri would be with her. Irina liked operating covertly, alone, but there were some missions where force and numbers were needed. In Vietnam she had successfully set up a trading network with Tran and had done nothing to quell the rumours that she and he were an item or, worse, that she was a prostitute.