by Tony Park
The pilot, dressed in navy shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt that somehow remained crisp and clean in the heat and dust, introduced himself as Dougal Geddes and said he was ready to go as soon as they were.
Sonja had to coax the producer from her cocoon in the Land Rover while the others waited by a twin-engine aircraft which had the green stem and single-leaf logo of GrowPower emblazoned on its tail. Sonja supported Cheryl-Ann with an arm around her waist as she walked her across to the aeroplane, and emerged from inside the aircraft a short time later.
‘She’s buckled in. Make sure she has some water to drink on the flight and get her to a doctor as soon as you get to Windhoek,’ she said to Sam.
He nodded. ‘And what about you?’
‘I have to get the Land Rover back to Botswana, remember? The sooner I get going, the better. It’s a long drive.’
‘Right.’
She stood with her hands on her hips, not reaching for him or offering her cheek for an air kiss. What was the protocol, he wondered, for farewelling a partner-in-murder in the middle of the African bush?
‘Well, goodbye then,’ Sam said.
She nodded, turned, and started walking towards the Land Rover, past the mountain of camera gear and backpacks still to be loaded onto the aircraft. When she reached the vehicle she opened the door, but paused for a moment.
Sam wondered if she was going to look back at him and say something, after all they’d been through. Instead, she climbed up into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and drove off.
TWENTY
Sonja slowed behind a cement mixer as she approached the checkpoint on the B8, near the bridge over the Okavango River.
She’d dragged a good, innocent man into her world of war and killing and now she would never see him again. If she’d been a normal person with a normal life she would have been mad not to reciprocate the attention Sam had showed her. He’d been brave enough to come back for her when he’d thought she was in trouble, and strong enough to kill the man who had a gun pointed at her. Despite their polar opposite backgrounds she’d begun to find him attractive – admirable even – and not just in a sexual way. Why did she always have to push away men who wanted to get close to her? Sonja felt the lump rise in the back of her throat and she sniffed and rolled down the window.
‘Good afternoon, madam,’ the policeman said. ‘How far are you going today?’
‘Livingstone, Zambia,’ she lied.
‘Have a safe journey.’
Sonja noted the machine-gun emplacement at the end of the bridge over the Okavango that she had spied the other day. Beneath the cover of the dashboard she selected the camera function on her mobile phone and held it to her ear as she accelerated slowly past the sandbagged bunker. She snapped off a few frames, blindly, as she passed the bored-looking soldiers.
The O on the Okavango River sign on the bridge had been scratched out. The Lozi-speaking peoples who made up the United Democratic Party and its military arm, the CLA, spelled the river Kavango. It was a reminder of the job ahead of her, now that the immediate threat from the Zimbabweans had been neutralised. Even though she had killed again, not to mention dragging Sam into the bloody mess, she still had a job to do. She thought about the dam and its inevitable impact on this beautiful part of Africa she’d once called home – and she thought about the money, and her daughter. She needed to get herself focused again, and stay in the zone. It was her way of coping.
She breathed a little easier, knowing there was nothing but open road now until she reached the Kwando River, at Kongola, where she would have to pass another checkpoint. She was grateful to the policeman for forcing her to get her emotions in check.
Her phone rang. ‘Yes.’
‘Laidlaw and Regan picked Emma up an hour ago,’ said Steele. She’s en route to Heathrow and she’ll be on the evening flight. Business class, British Airways, I might add.’
‘Good. Thank you.’
‘Are you OK?’ he asked.
‘Fine.’
‘Good. Don’t forget our next RV.’
‘I won’t.’
‘I’m worried about you.’
‘That’s very sensitive of you, Martin.’
‘I’m serious. After this, well … after this one is all over and the money’s in the bank, I was wondering if you wanted to get away for a while. With me. And Emma, of course.’
She said nothing. She couldn’t think of the right words. She hated being off guard; losing the initiative.
‘Martin, I don’t know what to say …’
‘Think about it. I know I’ve been a bit of a prick in the past, but we had some good times, didn’t we, Sonn?’
He hadn’t called her that in a long time.
‘Remember that private game reserve near the Kruger National Park?’
She remembered. There was so much beauty, following almost too soon after the horror in Sierra Leone. She could never forget their time at the game lodge. It was sensory overload and even now the memories, the visions, good and bad, flashed across her brain like a high-speed video cut to the deep bass pounding of American rap – the chosen music of their enemy.
After the killing of Danny Byrne in Northern Ireland, Steele and Sonja had been flown to Aldershot military base in England to face a board of inquiry into the deaths of the IRA quartermaster and his bomb-making brother.
Steele sought her out, and while they couldn’t socialise on base, he took her to a pub in town where they corroborated their stories about the Byrne brothers pulling guns on the SAS men during an impromptu operation. Sonja was numb over Danny’s death and lied to the inquiry about her relationship with him. She felt torn, as though she had betrayed both Danny and her country, by sleeping with the enemy in the first place. Martin plied her with booze in the evenings and eventually, inevitably, she ended up in the bed of the only man she could talk to about the nightmares and the pain.
The British press, with the help of some spin-doctoring from Downing Street, hailed the killings as the unfortunate endgame of a well-planned operation by security forces to capture the men responsible for the heinous school bus bombing. There were no tears for the Byrne brothers. Even the republican cause had largely disowned them. Behind the scenes, however, the army was looking for explanations as to how and why Steele and the Det had staged a rogue operation. The end, it seemed, did not always justify the means.
Steele was urged to resign his commission, which he did, after being promoted to major. Sonja was transferred to a signals unit in the north of England. She’d gone from the frontline in the war against the IRA to operating a bank of fax and telex machines in a room with no windows. There was no psychological debrief, as what she had done was classified top secret and no one in her new unit knew anything of her work in Northern Ireland.
Having worked undercover in civilian clothes for so long, Sonja was bored by the mundaneness of barracks life and the pettiness of the NCOs and their inspections. When a female sergeant abused her on the parade ground for having nonexistent mud on her boots, Sonja told the woman to fuck off in front of the other soldiers. The sergeant grabbed her arm when Sonja tried to walk off the parade ground, but Sonja turned and slapped her. She was arrested by the military police, court-martialled and kicked out of the army. She’d lost contact with Martin Steele after her transfer and the last she’d heard of him, from a former SAS man she met one day in a pub in London, was that Steele was working as a mercenary in Africa.
Emma was born nine months after the end of Sonja’s disastrous tour in Northern Ireland. Sonja lived with her mother in a flat in London and, with no business or professional qualifications, worked as a waitress in a curry house. It was a difficult time and nothing in her military training had prepared her for raising a child. For a long while she hated the army, and Martin Steele, and what they had done to her. But after the killing she’d seen in Northern Ireland she wouldn’t countenance terminating the life growing inside her. She was numb, traumatised by her time i
n the province, yet she couldn’t hate the beautiful child she had brought into the world.
Her work was boring, but it allowed her to give something back to her mother and, in time, as scars started to form over her wounds, she started to think about what she would do with the rest of her life. She knew she needed something outdoorsy and action-oriented, but her dishonourable discharge ruled out enlistment in the police or other security services. An application to join the fire brigade looked promising for a while, but failed. Depression loomed large in her life, but when Emma was three Martin Steele called, out of the blue, and offered her a job in Sierra Leone, working as a signaller.
‘Why me?’ she’d asked over the phone. ‘There are a thousand sigs you could choose from.’
‘Yes,’ he’d replied, ‘but there’s only one you.’
‘I’m not going to sleep with you again, Martin.’
‘It’s not part of the job description.’
Martin had set up his own private military contracting firm – the new name for mercenary outfits – and had secured a contract to fight the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, rebels and help train the army of the government of Sierra Leone. The money he was offering was astronomical compared to what she earned as a waitress and the job would return her to the only two things, apart from her daughter, that had ever mattered to her – Africa and military life.
Sierra Leone was chaos incarnate. Freetown, where Sonja was first based, was a besieged, seething mass of people driven to terror and barbarity by years of civil war between the Sierra Leone Army – the SLA – and the RUF. The countryside, mostly subjugated by the RUF under a reign of unimaginable terror, was jungle – as dark-hearted and unforgiving as the rebels they were fighting.
Initially, Sonja spent her days sweltering in a tin-roofed hangar at Freetown airport, manning the communications centre, or comcent, a suite of HF and VHF radios. Martin was true to his word and made no sexual advances towards her. However, after a couple of weeks it became clear that he didn’t only want her skills as a radio operator. Martin encouraged Sonja to go into Freetown in civilian clothes to visit the bars and clubs on the waterfront and mix with the diplomats, aid workers, journalists, bureaucrats and politicians who partied while the country crumbled. She became a spy, gleaning valuable information about government intentions, potential new contracts and other covert operations going on in and around Sierra Leone. She missed her daughter, but she loved her work.
Not content just to work the cocktail circuit and the comcent, Sonja pestered Martin until he reluctantly agreed to allow her to see more of the country by riding along with a security detail Corporate Solutions had provided to protect an aid convoy heading for Kenema, near the Liberian border.
The convoy was ambushed outside the town of Bo and the driver of the aid truck Sonja was riding in was killed. Sonja climbed down from the lorry and, firing her AK-47 on the run, rushed straight into the jungle, in the direction from which the RUF fire was coming. It seemed to defy logic, but it was the drill she’d been taught in the army to deal with an ambush. Giddy with adrenaline, she’d found herself alone and deep in the jungle, but out of the firing line. She’d hooked back around and snuck up behind an RUF machine-gun crew of two men, who were raking the burning convoy of vehicles. Sonja took up a position behind a tree and shot both men in the back of the head. With their machine-gun out of action, the RUF rebels melted away.
Back at Freetown airport, Martin had given her a tin mug of Scotch and, in the privacy of his tent, held her to him for a full minute, then sent her back out to her radios. She’d won the confidence of the last of the men in the mercenary force who doubted her abilities as a soldier and, over time, they had seen she wasn’t there as the commanding officer’s camp follower. Martin maintained their professional relationship through the remainder of the tour, but by the end of their three-month contract she knew she would miss him if he disappeared from her life again.
The government of Sierra Leone bowed to pressure from the UN to cease its contracts with private military companies. On the flight out of the country to South Africa Martin said he might have more work for Sonja, perhaps involving what he called ‘direct action’ jobs.
‘Killing?’ she asked.
‘Perhaps. Are you interested?’
‘I am,’ she said.
‘Good. We should talk about it. How would you like to come to a private safari camp near the Kruger National Park with me for the next three days?’
She looked at him. ‘Separate tents, I hope?’
‘It’s the high season. I’ve booked the last double. It’s a very big tent, though. I could sleep on the sofa. Are you interested?’
He’d been a gentleman and a professional these last three months. There’d been no allusions to their brief affair after the business in Northern Ireland and no suggestion that he wanted her in Sierra Leone for anything other than the tasks he’d assigned her. She was smart enough to know that he was a master manipulator; he was also handsome, a born leader, financially well off and, to the best of her knowledge, single.
When they arrived at their destination she looked around the tent. Unlike the rustic ethnic African theme of Xakanaxa the decor here was British colonial kitsch, but the decorator had stopped just short of the wind-up gramophone, and it was tastefully done. Sonja was aroused with anticipation, but mostly she was nervous.
Martin laid her bags on the night stand. ‘As you know, I’m not particularly good at small talk.’
‘Neither am I.’
‘We’re alike, you and me.’
She nodded.
‘I sensed from the moment I met you in Northern Ireland that you were a doer, not a talker …’
Suddenly emboldened by his confidence in her, she placed a finger on his lips and he reached around her. He undid the zipper at the back of her cotton sundress and it was on the floor before they’d finished their first kiss.
‘Sonn? Are you still there?’ Martin said into the satellite phone.
The tarred black surface of the B8, the main road through the Caprivi Strip, stretched to shimmering infinity in front of her. It was a lonely road, with not much traffic in the scorching heat of early afternoon.
‘Yes I’m still here,’ she said.
To her left, the north, was the Zambezi River, then warravaged Angola and the darker, troubled heart of Africa. To her right were Botswana and the Okavango Delta, the jewel of the Kalahari, whose lustre was dying by the day thanks to the twin evils of the dam and the drought. Ahead of her, at the end of this drive, was a date with a man whose business was war and death. Behind her were three more burning bodies. She was alone in Africa, surrounded by despair. Her only child, somewhere in the air, had become a stranger to her. Emma relied on her for nothing more than money now. In a year she would be at university, out on her own. Sonja feared she might never reconnect with her daughter, but at the same time Emma provided her with hope – a belief that she had lived her life in this way for a reason, and not just because she was good at killing. Sonja shivered at the thought of what she had done to pay for Emma’s future, and how she had relished every second of some of those deeds.
‘I asked,’ Martin repeated, ‘are you interested in spending some time together, after this show is all over?’
‘I don’t think so, Martin. I want to be free after this one.’
TWENTY-ONE
Half a dozen eland took fright at the growl of the approaching Land Rover’s diesel, but Sonja had a good look at them as she passed, and they bounded off into the safety of the tree line.
It was an encouraging sign, she thought, seeing the big, muscular antelope, which were considered quite rare in other parts of the continent. The wildlife in the Caprivi Strip had suffered in recent decades from the effects of poaching by hungry locals and refugees from the civil war just across the border in Angola. A wide grassy stretch of cleared land flanked the black top on either side, which meant she could keep her speed up and still have time to
brake if an animal strayed out of the trees. The European Union had constructed the B8 and it was in good condition. Unlike when she was a child, one didn’t need a four-wheel drive to traverse the Caprivi Strip, but if you deviated off the main road, even a few metres, it was easy to become bogged in the soft sand of the natural floodplain.
The sun was low in her rear-view mirror as she neared Kongola. She was emotionally and physically spent now that the adrenaline from the contact with the Zimbabwean assassins had joined the other horrors of her past, and she didn’t want to press on at night in case she fell asleep at the wheel or hit an elephant in the dark. There were plenty of tales of weary travellers running into one of the giant grey ghosts in the night. If the impact didn’t kill you, then the angry wounded elephant would make sure you didn’t get out of the car alive.
Just before the bridge over the Kwando River she indicated right and turned onto a sandy track. A small metal sign, dented and faded said, simply: Nambwa km 4x4 only. The number of kilometres had been scratched out. She’d heard about this place from a South African contractor she’d met in Kabul. The lack of information confirmed what the man had told her, that the camp was something of an off-roader’s secret. She couldn’t recall how far it was off the main road, and the sign didn’t help.
The bush here was thick, and the screen of mopane leaves and trunks glowed golden brown in the failing light. There were mounds of elephant droppings, some old and dry, though one fresh and still covered with tiny flies, and the wrinkled tracks of their big feet – round for the front ones and oval shaped for the rear. There was little risk of her surprising or running into an elephant at the crawling pace she was travelling, but nevertheless she scanned the bush left and right out of habit.