An Empty Coast

by Tony Park

  Benjie looked down at his arms, only just seeming to realise that he was bleeding. The lioness had shredded both his forearms in her dying moments and blood was welling up from the deep lacerations. ‘There’s a first-aid kit in my pack.’

  ‘See to him, Yuri,’ Irina said, and started to walk away.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Benjie asked, his voice croaky. She looked at him. His face was pale, but Yuri was already dousing the wounds with saline and had a dressing out.

  ‘You said yourself, the lioness probably had cubs.’

  Mikhail had been connected to a medical air evacuation service and was giving them directions to the lodge on the game farm.

  ‘Leave them,’ Benjie said.

  Mikhail ended the call. ‘We must get him into the vehicle and to the lodge, Irina Petrovna. A helicopter is on its way.’

  Irina turned to face the three men. ‘What I must do, Mikhail, not that it is any business of yours, is to rescue this lioness’s cubs. They’ll die without my care. Don’t you understand that?’

  Irina turned and set off back into the bush.

  She picked up the spoor of the lioness in the powdery dust between the thornbushes. It was easy to follow, and she traced the path the lioness had taken when it had come out to investigate them. She heard a soft squeak, a repetitive ow, ow, ow. She walked a little further then stopped and listened once more. She heard the noise again and moved towards it.

  In a thicket of long grass she found them, three tiny cubs, their fur spotted and their fluffy ears seemingly too big for their bodies.

  ‘Hello, my babies,’ Irina said.

  The cubs called still for their mother, but were too small to know that humans could pose a threat to them. Irina slung her rifle over her shoulder and, after a bit of running and chasing around the grass, managed to coral and then scoop up all three cubs.

  Irina held the cubs close to her, nuzzling them as she walked back. ‘There you are, let Mother look after you.’ Two of the cubs, she noticed, were female. She would hand-raise the girls, find someone to care for them when she was in Russia and, eventually, she would buy a male lion to service them and begin her breeding program.

  ‘And you,’ she whispered to the tiny male cub, ‘you will grow into a fine, big black-maned lion. You’ll make a lovely trophy for a hunter one day.’

  Chapter 23

  Brand marvelled at the change in Sonja Kurtz.

  She looked calm and collected as she reassembled the folding-stock variant of the AK-47 assault rifle that she had just finished cleaning and oiling. She was sitting cross-legged on the polished concrete floor of the family cottage he, she and Allchurch were sharing in Namutoni Camp, in Etosha National Park.

  Strewn around them were the supplies they had gathered that day in Ondangwa. Joao, the Portuguese baker-cum-arms dealer, had met them in the car park of a shopping centre and transferred several bundles wrapped in blankets from the back of his truck into Sonja’s Land Rover which, though badly damaged on the side where it had rolled over, was still moving. They had replaced a shattered windscreen on the Land Rover, but they had abandoned the Isuzu at the King Nehale entrance to Etosha when its radiator had given out. Joao had been less than impressed, but Matthew had promised to pay for all his repairs, or buy him a new vehicle.

  It had been a busy day, starting with nearly being killed, and they were all exhausted, yet Sonja had given her orders and they would be wheels-rolling at six the next morning. Brand checked his watch. It was just after ten at night. Despite his tiredness he was still wired from the day’s events. Allchurch was in bed, asleep, leaving the last of the packing to the two ex-military people. ‘Want another beer?’

  Sonja worked the cocking handle of the rifle backwards and forwards a few times then dry-fired the action before looking up at him. ‘No thanks, I’m good.’

  She had taken a nap in the afternoon, seemingly having no trouble sleeping on her own command, and she looked clear-eyed and alert. She had also showered, washed her hair, and taken her clothes to the camp laundry. Brand had cast an appreciative eye over her as she’d walked to the laundry clad only in a bikini top and a printed wrap she had bought from a roadside curio stall on the way back from Ondangwa.

  The previous night Sonja had passed out, drunk, but tonight she had limited herself to two beers and no spirits. She stood, wrapped the weapon in its blanket again, and sat at the small dining table opposite Brand. She checked her phone. ‘Bingo.’

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s the lion research people. They’ve finally sent through the GPS coordinates for where the dead desert lion is believed to be. We’re officially in business.’

  They had caught a lucky break, hopefully. After they had survived the attack at the dig site they had driven to Ondangwa, reasoning that the helicopter had most likely taken off from the nearest airport. They had driven to the general aviation section of the airport and asked in the terminal for the contact details of anyone who chartered helicopters. It turned out there was only one operator and it was the man who had been flying the machine that Sonja had downed.

  It was one thing to know that they had been right about the helicopter departing from Ondangwa, but it brought them no closer to the people who had bankrolled the hit on their lives.

  ‘Did you see that bakkie outside in the car park, the one kitted out with the roof tent and all that camping gear?’ Sonja had asked him in the terminal.

  Brand recalled the vehicle. ‘It had Desert Lion Researcher or something like that on the side.’

  Sonja had nodded. ‘Emma said she had met a boy, a Namibian German, who was working with predators, both cheetahs and the desert lions.’

  She had asked the woman at reception if she knew who the owner of the vehicle was. The woman had replied that while she didn’t, the young man driving it had asked her to have security keep an eye on the truck while he was away on a charter flight.

  ‘How many other people were on that flight?’ Sonja had asked.

  The numbers had matched the tracks of the people at the dig site, and when Sonja had shown the woman behind the counter a picture of her daughter on her phone, the woman had confirmed that Emma had been on the charter, which had left two days earlier, but had not yet returned.

  ‘Was the aircraft South African?’ Allchurch had interrupted. ‘Owned by an Andre Horsman?’

  The woman said she could not reveal the name of the owner.

  ‘We could try and get the flight plan from the authorities,’ Brand had said to Sonja. ‘Might help if you had any contacts in the police.’

  Sonja had moved away from the receptionist and the counter. ‘That’ll take too long. Get ready to see what she’s hiding behind that counter of hers.’

  Sonja had left them and gone into the ladies room in the terminal. A few minutes later a piercing alarm had sounded. The receptionist had rushed from her station to the toilets. Sonja later revealed that she had held her cigarette lighter up to the smoke detector. The ruse had given Brand time to do as Sonja had ordered: he had moved behind the counter where the receptionist was based and checked her computer. It took him just a minute to find a log of departures for the past week. Two days earlier Andre Horsman, his aircraft, and five passengers, including Emma Kurtz, had taken off. The destination was listed as Rundu, in the far north of the country, but Brand reckoned that was the last place they were headed.

  Sonja had got online on her phone and found the contact details for the Namibian Predator Project and called their office in Swakopmund. The coordinator there told them that their researcher, Alex Bahler, had sent an SMS from his satellite phone advising that he was leaving his vehicle at Ondangwa to go on a charter flight which was searching for a downed aircraft, and, at the same time, would allow him to search for the male lion that had been reported as dead. The coordinator asked Sonja to ask Alex to get in touch with the
office if she located him, as they were beginning to become concerned about his whereabouts.

  Brand watched Sonja checking their inventory of food, drinks, medical supplies and other equipment from a list she had drawn up. She was focused, meticulous and professional, the epitome of a good soldier. She tucked a stray strand of blonde hair behind her ear. She was also damned attractive. He found it hard to reconcile those little feminine touches, like fixing her hair, with the person he had seen execute a wounded foe. He wondered if this was part of his attraction to her, in some slightly disturbing way. He hadn’t wanted to talk to any of his previous girlfriends about his time in the war and in Angola, and none had shown any particular interest. He felt that with Sonja neither of them needed to outdo each other with war stories, but there was a shared connection between them. Brand had had his fair share of nightmares and, like Sonja the night before, had tried to keep them at bay and still the shake in his hands with booze.

  ‘Can I help?’ he asked her.

  She was packing foodstuffs in cardboard cartons. ‘No, thanks.’ She gave him the briefest of smiles and it seemed so out of character for her that he felt a jolt in his heart. ‘I’m all good. It’s keeping me from worrying about my daughter.’

  He understood. ‘I need some fresh air. I think I’ll take a walk to the waterhole.’

  ‘OK, see you just now.’

  Brand let himself out of the chalet and took the wooden walkway that connected the accommodation to the floodlit waterhole just outside Namutoni’s perimeter fence. He paused. Somewhere far off a lion called. As always he found that the sounds and smells of the African night helped soothe him. They were heading for danger, there was no doubt about it. Sonja Kurtz had saved his life and Matthew’s, and he and the mild-mannered retired lawyer had narrowly escaped death on the road as well. In the morning he would give Allchurch one more chance to fly home. Brand doubted Matthew would turn back, but one thing he was sure of was that Sonja would march through hell’s fires to find her daughter.

  He took a seat on a bench under the thatch-roofed lapa and watched a lone bull elephant drinking from the waterhole. The massive pachyderm shone a ghostly white in the glare of the floodlight, his skin coated in a fine layer of Etosha’s white talcum-powder dust.

  He tried not to think about Sonja. Instead, he put his mind to understanding what was going on somewhere out there in the wilds of Namibia, and what his enemies were up to. The archaeology team’s departure with Allchurch’s contact, Andre Horsman, was linked to the attempt on their lives, of that Brand had no doubt. Horsman had been at Ondangwa during the war. Brand hadn’t met him, but from the description Matthew had given him, Brand wondered if Horsman was the fair-haired man who had tried to kill him on the Dakota all those years ago. But if so, how had he survived the crash of the Dakota, and why didn’t he know where the plane had landed?

  Brand had the coordinates of where the cargo on the Dakota was to be dropped that night; he had taken them from the map in Venter’s flight suit pocket after he had killed him. Brand had been surprised to see that the cargo was to be dispatched at a point in the Atlantic Ocean. He remembered running his hands over the loads and wondering why they were wrapped in plastic. This, clearly, was to allow them to float. That meant that a ship would be waiting to collect the contraband.

  Horsman had told Allchurch that his son’s mission was to drop supplies to a special forces unit operating in small boats off the coast of South West Africa near the Angolan border. Brand thought this was ludicrous. There was nothing on that coast that would warrant a raid by the South African recce-commandos. Allchurch, too, had questioned the mission, and had wondered if his son was instead flying a load of SWAPO guerrillas who were to be thrown to their deaths. Brand had been able to assure Allchurch that was most certainly not the case.

  Brand came back to his theory that Horsman had not been the worried commanding officer back at base but the gunman on the flight, and that he’d somehow survived the crash. That also explained why someone was trying to kill him and Allchurch now. Horsman would have used Allchurch over the years to scout for leads to the whereabouts of the missing aircraft. Now that Horsman had the information he needed, Allchurch was surplus to his requirements, and the last thing Horsman needed was for Allchurch to be present at the discovery of the Dakota and its cargo.

  But if that theory was correct, why, Brand wondered again, did Horsman not know where the plane had crash-landed? Who rescued him, and why didn’t they go searching for the Dakota back then?

  ‘Beautiful animal.’

  Brand was startled. Sonja had come to the hide overlooking the waterhole without making a sound. ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘I grew up around wildlife, in the Okavango Delta, but I never really appreciated the animals and birds. I was restless; I wanted to see the world and the British Army seemed to offer me the best way to do it. Crazy, hey?’

  ‘No, I was the same,’ Brand replied. ‘My mom had lived in Angola and thought America would offer us a better life, but all I wanted to do when I was growing up was come to Africa – that and join the army.’

  ‘We are alike, you and I,’ she said.

  He glanced at her, but she was looking at the elephant. She had made a statement of fact, not one of endearment. ‘We should all just walk away from this.’

  ‘For you and your travelling companion this is about finding a plane, or cargo, or a body; I’m going to find my daughter.’

  ‘You’re convinced that Horsman’s up to no good?’ Brand asked.

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  He nodded again. They were thinking along the same lines, not trusting anyone. ‘I don’t believe in coincidences, like your daughter and her fellow archaeologists suddenly disappearing without any ability to get a message to you, and then the dig site being strafed by a helicopter gunship. Nice work with the chopper, by the way.’

  ‘Why thank you. That’s possibly the nicest thing that’s been said to me in a long time.’ She looked as though she was about to smile again, but frowned instead. ‘That is, apart from “sorry for your loss”.’

  Brand winced, remembering that he’d said the same thing to her. However, he resisted the urge to say something comforting. It would be wasted on her. Better, he thought, to stay silent and let Sonja talk if she wanted to.

  They watched the waterhole without speaking for a while, then Sonja said, ‘I loved Sam. I don’t know if I’ve ever actually loved anyone other than my daughter. When he died it was like having a piece of me amputated.’ She looked at him, straight in the eyes. ‘You know what that’s like?’

  ‘Yes.’ He did, and it still hurt, all these years later. It was in Angola and, like Sonja, the woman he’d lost there was probably the only one he’d ever really loved.

  The elephant moved off and was followed, ten minutes later, by a black rhino. Hudson saw it first as it emerged from behind a stand of tall reeds growing at one end of the waterhole, and pointed it out, silently, to Sonja, who nodded and smiled when she saw it. The rhino approached the waterhole cautiously, a few steps at a time, its head raised, listening for signs of danger. Eventually it reached the edge of the water and drank. Its reflection was mirror-sharp in the still, floodlit water. They watched the rhino for twenty minutes, until it turned and headed back into the bush.

  ‘Thank you,’ Sonja said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For not saying anything. Some people never stop talking; they seem to think that if they keep speaking, mouthing platitudes, that they’ll make me better, like some stupid wizard muttering an incantation.’

  He nodded.

  ‘You can talk now.’

  That made him smile. ‘I’m an investigator. A tip a police officer friend taught me a long time ago is that if you want someone to talk, sometimes it’s better to say nothing. People will eventually fill the silence.’

  Sonja chuckled. ‘So you were
playing me?’

  ‘No, no,’ he assured her. ‘I’ve felt your pain. There’s nothing I can say that will make you feel better. I can tell you that killing more people, or drinking or smoking yourself to death won’t ease the pain. You just got to take it.’

  ‘You just got to take it?’ She seemed to mull the words over, as if she were tasting them, savouring them. ‘I like that, Brand. I kind of wish I’d brought a cooler box with some beers now.’ She checked her watch. ‘We’ve got to be up before dawn. I want to get out of Namutoni as soon as the gates open.’

  ‘Agreed,’ he said, though she made no move to stand. A hyena gave its mournful woo-hoop call, close by. ‘Tell me about this friend of yours who works in the Palmwag Conservancy, the one who’s going to help us.’

  Sonja pursed her lips and Brand thought she was going to clam up again. All she’d told him and Allchurch, before going outside from the chalet to make a long call that afternoon, was that she had a friend who worked in the conservancy, which lay to the south-west, between where they were now and the Skeleton Coast. Sonja had told them, after the call, that her friend would be able to guide them to the place where the lion was killed, and that he would know if there was any suspicious activity on the Palmwag Conservancy or any of the adjoining wildlife reserves.

  ‘Name’s Stirling Smith,’ she said at last, almost sighing as she spoke the words, as if it was a reluctant duty. ‘We were childhood sweethearts, I guess you’d say. I left him, in Botswana, to see the world. I hurt him. He’s involved with desert rhino monitoring and research, but he knows the lion people. He’ll be able to guide us to the coordinates of where the male lion was killed.’

  ‘The name sounds familiar,’ Brand said. He had a feeling he’d seen or heard of the man, in connection with rhinos.

  ‘He was in the news this week, commenting about those Chinese guys who were arrested at the airport in possession of fourteen rhino horns.’