The Delta

by Tony Park

  SEVENTEEN

  Rickards was, literally, in the child’s face. The lens was just a few centimetres from the little boy’s nose, close enough to see the flies crawling in and out of his nostrils and eyes.

  Sonja turned away from the gratuitous intrusion. The bureaucrat from the Namibian power company had not been at the site office when they returned from their tour of the construction works. He had been delayed by car trouble. Deiter Roberts had phoned the woman from the dam consortium. She was not due to meet with the TV crew for another two hours, but she offered to meet them at a nearby village. The plan had been for her to brief them at the site office first, and for them to end their first day with a trip to the village, but if they reversed the order they could film around the community first and she would meet them there. Cheryl-Ann had been quietly fuming, but to Sonja this was just another day in Africa, where things rarely went according to plan.

  Sonja’s mobile phone vibrated in her pocket and when she took it out she recognised the number. She let it buzz silently in her hand for a few seconds while she walked away from the camera crew.

  She pressed the green button. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s not a very polite way to answer a telephone,’ Martin Steele said.

  ‘They’re filming,’ she said in a low voice.

  ‘Can they hear us?’

  ‘No, they’re busy getting shots of children with distended bellies and mothers carrying plastic containers of water on their heads.’

  Steele laughed, but Sonja didn’t find any of it amusing. ‘Martin, they may as well be making a bloody propaganda movie for the dam consortium, defending what they’re doing up here. It’s disgusting.’

  ‘I don’t know that you or I are in any position to make moral judgements on anyone, my dear, but does it make you hate them even more than before?’

  ‘Yes.’ He could still put a smile on her face.

  ‘Good. Tell me what you’ve got.’

  She looked back at the crew, who were still busy recording misery. ‘Here, now?’

  ‘I doubt anyone’s tapping you up there in the middle of nowhere. Yes, what have you seen so far?’

  ‘Why the rush?’

  He paused. ‘Timing’s been brought forward.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I told them we could put something together in six weeks – and that would give the other element time to train up some new people.’

  ‘Ja at least.’ Sonja knew he was talking about the remnants of the CLA, hiding somewhere in Botswana. Gideon had told her there was no shortage of recruits willing to fight for Caprivian independence, but Martin was right: it would take at least six weeks to get men with no military experience ready to go to war.

  ‘Our paymaster spoke to me today. He says a couple of the others are getting cold feet – your ex-boyfriend included. He’s pushing to go within two weeks, before they have time to back out of their deal. They’ve got an update meeting planned for a fortnight’s time.’

  Sonja looked back at the camera crew. Via an interpreter, Rickards was organising a procession of village women to walk down a path with plastic water containers on their heads. ‘Shit, Martin. Why don’t you just walk away from this one?’

  ‘You know why. We’re going to be short fifty per cent of what was promised for your last job.’

  She smarted from the implication that the doublecross in Zimbabwe was somehow her fault. ‘It’s too risky.’

  ‘We need the money, Sonja. Simple as that. So, what’s your assessment?’

  She drew a breath then exhaled. ‘There’s a company plus dug in here, with armoured support – at least one BTR 60 that I can see, probably a couple more in the bush somewhere if you assume they’ve allocated a troop. They’ve also got mortars. Using standard odds you wouldn’t get through to the wall with less than a battalion, supported by heavy weapons.’ One of the basic ratios that all military planners worked on was that an attacking force taking on a prepared enemy position needed a numerical advantage of at least three to one.

  ‘Hmmm. What about a small team, infiltrated onsite covertly?’

  Sonja had already thought about that option. ‘Their civvy security is sharp – better than the local police and military checkpoints further out. No one, not even the bosses, gets onsite without a thorough check of their ID. The perimeter is covered by cameras, vehicle patrols and dog teams. It’s mostly for show, I guess, but if the perimeter is breached the army guys inside will be ready for action. You’d have to know someone to get inside here.’

  Steele paused for a couple of seconds and Sonja, realising her mistake, knew what he was going to say next.

  ‘Then get to know someone.’

  ‘No. I’m not going to do that. Not ever again. No matter how much you pay me.’

  ‘I didn’t say fuck someone, Sonja. I just said get to know someone. Someone senior, in case you need to come back one day soon.’

  ‘I thought I was only doing a CTR.’ She felt a tightness in her chest and then her heart started beating fast, pumping a hot shot of adrenaline all the way out to the tips of her fingers and toes. Steele was playing her, and she knew she should call a halt to this game right now.

  ‘We don’t have a battalion, Sonja – not even a battalion minus. You’ll see that when you meet them. I’m trying to work a miracle and you’re the angel on my shoulder.’

  She scoffed at his poor attempt at poetry and flattery.

  ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘If you can get back inside you can get a small team in there and do the job. Of course, if you think doing a dam is too big a job for a … for you …’

  The clever, charming bastard was playing every angle and pushing every single button – and he was using a sledgehammer instead of his finger. Klaxons were going off in her brain and she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she should hang up, walk away from the dam and the Americans and Martin Steele and disappear into Africa.

  ‘It’s a ticket out. For you and Emma. Your share will go up, of course, with the added responsibility. If you can handle it.’

  ‘Damn right it’ll go up. A recce is one thing but what you’re talking about is the main game, Martin.’ She took a deep breath and knew she shouldn’t ask the question. ‘How much.’

  ‘A mill.’

  ‘Pounds or dollars?’

  ‘Dollars. England no longer rules the world.’

  ‘Make it three then.’

  ‘One and a half, and that’s as high as I can go,’ he said.

  ‘Bullshit. I know you, Martin. Two or I’m hanging up.’

  ‘Sonja, be reasonable, that’s—’

  ‘Bye, Martin.’

  ‘Wait, wait. OK. Two it is.’

  ‘Half now.’

  ‘All right. You drive a hard bargain – that’ll eat up most of my advance and operating expenses. The money will be in your account tonight.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. She smiled to herself. He liked playing her and she liked him paying her.

  ‘Instead of coming back to Maun the way you came, I want you to head down the Caprivi Strip to Katima Mulilo. Check things out there and cross back into Botswana. Have you heard of a place called Dukwe?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘On the road between Nata and Francistown?’

  ‘That’s the place. I’ll see you there in five days’ time.’

  She did the distance calculations in her head. ‘Where in Dukwe?’

  ‘I’ll find you. Oh, and Sonja?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Be careful.’

  He’d never said anything like that to her in the past. ‘Of what?’

  ‘Don’t forget the Zimbabwean CIO is still looking for blood over the supposed assassination attempt. I’m watching my back and you should watch yours. They need a body, and they don’t want people around who might tell the truth to the international media.’

  She was confused. ‘Are you saying we should come clean and tell the world the assassination attempt was a fake?’

&
nbsp; ‘No, no, no. Christ, Sonja, the last thing I want to do is implicate you – or me – in trying to take down elected leaders, no matter how corrupt they are. Maybe after this current job is over we can leak something. I don’t want the CIO to think they can get away with using us like that and the world should know the truth.’

  ‘In time.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘in time. When you’re living the life of a rich, gorgeous single mum retiree.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Perhaps I can drop by and see you on your private island off the coast of Mozambique, or your luxury private game lodge in the free-flowing waters of the Okavango Delta?’

  She laughed. ‘Fuck off, Martin.’

  ‘Love you too, babe.’

  The consortium that had partnered with the Namibian government to develop the dam was called GrowPower, one word, with a capital in the middle. Sam was no pedant when it came to the English language but he didn’t appreciate people messing with the natural order of letters and capitals, any more than he particularly liked them messing with the environment.

  He wasn’t thrilled by Microsoft PowerPoint presentations either. He was an outdoorsman and had never enjoyed being cooped up inside watching images on a wall and listening to someone drone on. All the same, Selma Tjongarero, GrowPower’s Manager, Corporate Communications, was not difficult to look at. He guessed she was aged in her late twenties and she’d arrived like a visitor from another planet at the village. She was dressed in a well-cut business suit with a blood red silk blouse that matched her fingernails. She planted her patent leather high heels carefully in the dust as she eased herself out of her low-slung BMW ZX4 sports car and pulled her D&G sunglasses down off her tightly braided hair to shield herself from the midday glare.

  Selma had suggested they head straight back to the construction site office where she could brief them on the consortium and its development plans for the area. When they arrived at the site they filed into a cabin furnished for meetings. There was a drop-down screen on one wall and a podium sporting a laptop that was connected to a data projector slung from the ceiling. Selma looked at the projected image of the computer’s desktop and clicked on a PowerPoint file titled ‘presentation vers 2’.

  ‘It’s great that you’ve already seen the hardship under which the rural people live in this part of Namibia,’ she said, flicking mercifully quickly through some slides that showed the scenes the crew had already captured, including more women with water containers on their heads, and children with distended bellies. ‘We can skip these.’

  Sam glanced over at Sonja, but she was looking out the window of the airconditioned cabin, over the construction site. She was interested in neither the presentation, nor him. He already knew she had a dislike of small talk, but she seemed to have become even more withdrawn.

  ‘GrowPower,’ Selma said, raising her voice as if to make sure they were all still awake, ‘is going to change the lives of rural people in the Caprivi Strip and north-western Namibia. The Okavango Dam project will supply water for irrigation which will open up hundreds of thousands of hectares of currently barren land for commercial farming.’ She paused to advance her slide presentation. The next image showed large swathes of the country turning from brown to green with a single click.

  Selma’s English was precise with a trace of a German accent. GrowPower, she had explained at the beginning of the presentation, was a consortium whose shareholders included the Namibian government and its power authority, although the majority partner was a German agricultural company, AG Schwarz. Its president, Klaus Schwarz, Selma said, was currently in Windhoek involved in meetings with the president of the republic and had sent his apologies for not being able to meet the American TV crew in person.

  Schwarz did, however, make an electronic appearance, via an MPEG video that Selma clicked on next, and then stood deferentially aside from the screen as her boss picked up the commentary, in heavily accented English.

  ‘Thank you Selma,’ he smiled, and turned his head awkwardly to the right, and nodded. Selma grinned back adoringly at the little piece of computer-generated trickery. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sure Selma has passed on my sincere apologies at not being able to meet you in person during your trip to this beautiful country of Namibia. Beautiful, but barren.’

  Sam thought from the wooden performance that Schwarz was reading from an autocue, and it seemed like it was the first time he’d read the words.

  ‘Beautiful, but barren. GrowPower is going to change all of that. We are going to turn this dry, underutilised corner of Africa into a fertile, verdant Garden of Eden where the quality of life for everyone living in the region will be improved appreciably. Northern Namibia, including the Caprivi region, will become the new breadbasket of Africa, growing and exporting crops and grain and beef and dairy products throughout the continent.’

  Sam wondered how many more clichés the guy could fit in before having to draw a breath.

  ‘As well as supplying clean water for drinking and irrigation for agriculture, the new water storage facility will also bring,’ he coughed to clear his throat, ‘how you say, power to the people. Demand for electricity is growing throughout Africa, but power generation and distribution infrastructure is struggling to cope with existing requirements. One only has to look at South Africa to see how disastrous the situation is. The Okavango project will generate enough megawatts to supply the whole of north-eastern Namibia well into the future, and to feed excess power back into the national grid.

  ‘Our company, AG Schwarz, has committed in excess of the equivalent of one hundred million US dollars towards this project, to help finance construction of the new water reservoir, and the development of other infrastructure essential for the development of intensive agricultural practices in the region. We expect some three hundred people will be involved during construction, and the same number, at least, in our agricultural precincts.’

  Sam gave a low whistle. It was a lot of money, and the private sector was in on the project in a much bigger way than he had realised.

  ‘Much has been said and written about the environmental effects of construction of this new reservoir. I would like to assure you all that AG Schwarz has a proud record of environmental compliance at all of our sites around the world. This project is being constructed under the tightest environmental safeguards ever seen in Namibia and will operate under the same tough environmental regulations. The impact on flows downstream has been assessed by independent environmental experts as negligible. The wildlife of the Okavango Delta ecosystem will continue to flourish but, more importantly, the people of Namibia will have clean water for their children, food for their bellies and valuable dollars for their economy through a major expansion of the country’s agriculture production and export capability.

  ‘Ladies and gentleman, again, my apologies for not being there in person, but I wish you a pleasant and informative stay in Namibia and, if Selma might assist me with one other matter,’ Schwarz turned stiffly once more to the right, ‘perhaps you would ask Mr Chapman if he would be kind enough to autograph one of his DVDs for my ten-year-old daughter, Liesl?’

  Selma turned the lights on in the cabin and held up a copy of Outback Survival, grinning broadly.

  ‘Fascinating, thank you, Selma,’ Cheryl-Ann said.

  ‘What?’ Rickards’s head snapped up and he looked around him, wiping a tendril of drool from the corner of his mouth.

  Selma walked around the data projector to Sam. ‘I’m so sorry you couldn’t meet Mr Schwarz. He’s a great guy. Would you be willing to sign the DVD for his daughter?’

  ‘Of course. My pleasure.’

  ‘What did you think of the presentation?’

  Sam handed the DVD back to her. ‘Very informative.’ In fact, Schwarz’s use of weasel words such as ‘water storage reservoir’ instead of dam rankled.

  ‘That was great, Selma,’ Cheryl-Ann said, coming between them.

  Sam smarted. He wondered if, in
the wake of what had gone on with Tracey, Cheryl-Ann had now appointed herself as his chaperone for the duration of the trip. He would have liked more time to quiz Selma – not because of her beauty, but because of some nagging doubts he had about the dam project. The more he saw and heard about the consortium, the less comfortable he was feeling about making the documentary. Still, he knew there was no way to back out of the contract at this late stage.

  ‘Selma, let’s get you miked up so we can film your part of the video now. You’ve rehearsed your script?’

  Sam heard the unspoken ‘not like your boss’ in Cheryl-Ann’s tone.

  Selma nodded. ‘I’m a little nervous though. I can speak to an audience, but the camera is quite intimidating.’

  Cheryl-Ann patted her on the arm. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  And she was. Sam stood off to one side and watched as Selma delivered her prepared spiel about the benefits of the ‘water storage facility’ and the associated ‘intensive agricultural precincts’ to the good people of Namibia in one perfect take. She was beautiful, black and a woman, exactly the sort of spokesperson the project needed. Watching her glistening, sensual mouth and seeing her bright, animated eyes, and her smile – interspersed at all the right places – made him want to believe the dam was every bit as good as she said it was. The balding, middle-aged white German with slightly crooked teeth hadn’t convinced him, but Selma Tjongarero almost did.

  Mathias Shivute, the regional head of the Nampower corporation arrived just as Selma was removing her microphone.

  He was sweating profusely and had loosened his tie and rolled the sleeves of his white shirt, which was stained with a grease mark. His black suit pants were shiny with wear and the knees scuffed with white dust. He wiped his hand on his belly and introduced himself around the room.

  ‘Sorry I’m late. Two punctures – can you believe it?’ he said. ‘I can be ready in half an hour to begin my presentation.’

  Sam heard Rickards groan behind the camera. Cheryl-Ann took Mathias aside and politely suggested that as they were running late it might be better if they simply interviewed him for his piece to camera in the corporate documentary. That way, she said, they would gain an understanding of Nampower’s involvement in the project and have his comments on the record at the same time. He looked a little put out, but agreed.