Captive_A High-octane And Gripping African Thriller

by Tony Park

  ‘Remember? No one told me that.’

  ‘You’ll be fine, just keep an eye out.’

  The sun was climbing fast and the sky was clear. With the ground wet from the day before the heat was turning this lowlying stretch of grassy plain into an open-air sauna already. Kerry went to the stunted remains of a mopane tree and, after having a quick look for snakes and her surrounds for lions, started rocking a branch to snap one off. Eventually she had four reasonable-sized branches, which she dragged through the wet grass back to Graham. Her sandals were now filthy and her lower legs were spattered with black goo. She was sweating from the effort and had to constantly wave away tiny little flies that tried to get into her eyes, nose and ears.

  Graham was swearing loudly. He had managed to tramp a large rock into the mud next to the left rear wheel, to support the jack. He had taken his shirt off, and Kerry saw the muscles in his back rippling as he worked the jack’s long handle. The rock was pushed down into the mud, but, slowly, the vehicle started to rise. Once the tyre had started to come free of the ground’s clutches, Graham got to work with the spade. It was clearly hard going, but he managed to make a space under the wheel and in front of it.

  ‘OK, I need those branches. Hurry!’

  ‘I’m hurrying.’ Kerry handed him the branches, and watched as Graham carefully slid them under the left rear tyre.

  ‘The problem we have . . .’

  ‘Another problem?’

  He glared up at her. ‘The problem we have is that there’s nowhere on the other side of the body of the vehicle that will support the jack. There’s no foot railing, and if I use the jack on the bodywork it will just crumple it. These vehicles are made for transporting tourists on the open roads, not for bush bashing.’

  Kerry resisted the urge to scream, Then why did you take us into the bush? ‘OK, so you’re hoping you’ll get enough traction from this left-hand side to free the right.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it, yes.’

  The next problem occurred when Graham tried to lower the high-lift jack. ‘Bloody thing’s stuck.’

  He took out his Leatherman tool from the pouch on his belt and started prodding and poking around the pins and springs on the jack’s mechanism.

  ‘My dad took us on a couple of trips into the outback when we were kids,’ Kerry said. ‘He told us those jacks were incredibly dangerous and . . .’

  Something gave way with a loud crack and the vehicle dropped with a clunk. The handle Graham had been pumping earlier shot up, narrowly missing Graham’s head. He fell back with a plop, on his bottom, in the mud.

  ‘Clearly,’ Graham said.

  He tinkered a bit more, carefully, and as he’d suspected the problem was the bent pin in the mechanism, which was slipping out of place every time he tried to lower the jack. Graham gave Kerry the job of holding the pin in place, with the tip of the Leatherman’s pliers, as he raised and lowered the handle. When it worked, which was one time in every three attempts, the Land Cruiser fell another notch down the main shaft of the jack, to Kerry’s terror.

  Finally, the vehicle was sitting on the logs.

  ‘OK, here goes nothing,’ Graham said.

  Kerry checked her watch as he climbed in and started the engine. They had already spent an hour trying to prop up just this one side of the vehicle.

  Kerry crossed her fingers and toes as Graham put the vehicle in gear and started to accelerate. She saw the tyre on the side they had just worked on trying to gain traction on the mopane branches, but it was spinning. Her heart dropped. She stomped through the mud to the other side of the truck.

  The wheel was running free, spinning fast in the mud and kicking up a mist of black sludge.

  Graham depressed the accelerator fully.

  Both wheels spun and the right side dug down even further into the mud. Graham turned off the engine and got out. Kerry snuck another look at her watch. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they didn’t have connecting flights through to Cape Town from Johannesburg later that evening. She resisted the urge to vent her frustration, as Graham was doing now, kicking the truck with his bare foot and screaming at the pain caused to his toes. He clutched his hair with both hands and walked around in circles.

  ‘Shit.’ He tried to compose himself. ‘Well, that was pointless.’

  ‘Graham, we just need to jack up the driver’s side.’

  ‘That’s easier said than done.’

  Graham explained that with nowhere to hook the lip of the high-lift jack on the right side of the truck they would have to dig down under the rear axle instead, excavating a hole big enough to take the large rock he had used as a jacking base, and then fit the tiny bottle jack under the axle and try to lift the stuck vehicle that way.

  Kerry was impressed with his practicality, but the reality of getting the job done was not so simple. The extra spinning of the wheels had dug the vehicle down deeper, and the two rear springs and the bottom of the axle were encased in sticky black clay.

  ‘Should we walk and look for help?’

  ‘I thought of that,’ Graham said. ‘If we don’t get eaten by lions then it’s six kilometres either way to the gate or Robins Camp. If we make it we’ve then got to try and organise a tractor, and you saw where their one tractor was yesterday – forty klicks away.’

  ‘Then let’s get digging,’ said Kerry grimly.

  Graham attacked the earth like it had insulted him. The shovel was next to useless in the cloying clay, and in the end they took it in shifts, digging at the mud with their hands and with a large salad serving spoon Kerry had found in the car, excavating a hole not only deep enough to fit the bottle jack, but also the large rock that they needed to place underneath.

  Finally they had the rock and the little jack in position. Graham groaned and lay on his back, like a starfish, arms and legs out. Kerry sprawled beside him, her muscles protesting. There was mud in her hair, on her hands, all over her clothes, and on her face. The sun had burned her legs below the hem of her shorts and she had long since kicked off her sandals after tiring of the mud sucking at them.

  They allowed themselves a moment’s rest, but the hard labour wasn’t over. Turning the crank handle was an effort as the black earth was not ready to release the vehicle’s springs and axle from its grasp. Graham would turn the handle three or four revolutions then collapse in the sun, from exhaustion. Kerry stepped in, but was lucky if she was able to complete a single turn.

  When Graham was turning the handle, Kerry got back in the truck and clawed at the mud and clay on her body with her bare hands. She didn’t dare check her watch, which she had taken off and placed in the truck to protect it. Then she lugged a twenty-litre jerry can of water from the back of the vehicle and poured for them both. She splashed water on Graham to try and cool him down, and it sluiced over his body, accentuating his abdominal muscles and biceps. They belonged on a younger, man-scaped body, she mused in a rare flash of good humour.

  Graham took another drink of water and groaned and yelled as he gave the jack a few more turns. Then he grabbed the right rear wheel with two hands and it moved when he tried to turn it. ‘Yes!’

  Graham began to dig around and under the freed wheel while Kerry jogged off to collect more branches from the nearby mopane trees. Within another half-hour they had the branches packed under the wheel and were ready to try again.

  Graham looked at her. He was covered in mud, dressed only in a pair of filthy shorts. His few bare patches of skin had been turned red by the merciless sun. She must look the same, she thought.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kerry. I won’t let you down again.’

  ‘Just get in the truck and drive.’ She smiled at him.

  ‘If this doesn’t work I’ll take the shovel and walk.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ she said. A shovel would be no protection against lions and they both knew it.

  Graham got into the driver’s seat again and started the engine.

  Kerry got behind the Cruiser
and readied herself to push, not that she thought it would do much good. She took a deep breath as she heard him put the truck into gear.

  ‘Ready?’ he called.

  ‘Ready.’

  Slowly Graham let out the clutch and Kerry looked down. Mud was shooting back as both rear wheels spun, the tyres failing to get a grip on the branches they had packed under them.

  ‘Shit,’ Graham yelled as he got out and slammed the door. He walked back to Kerry, his face sagging with defeat.

  ‘Just try again, Graham. One more time, please. We can’t give up.’

  He blinked at her, as if not hearing, but then repeated, ‘Can’t give up.’

  ‘Give it a go.’

  He gave a small nod then got back behind the wheel.

  She heard the engine rev, high and loud, and then Graham must have dropped the clutch. Kerry heaved against the rear of the truck and, after a brief squeal and hiss of rubber on wood, the Land Cruiser leapt free of the mud like a champagne cork escaping the bottle.

  So quick was the departure that Kerry, who had been pushing against the vehicle, fell flat on her face in the mud. She picked herself up and ran after Graham, waving her arms and yelling with sheer delight.

  ‘Go, Graham, go!’

  Chapter 22

  The band finished its set on stage in the packed room of the Cape Town International Convention Centre.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ said the lead singer as she put her hands up to try and still the crowd. ‘We really appreciate it.’

  There was more applause and yelling. Sarah Hoyland surveyed the audience from her prime seat. Eli Johnston’s organisers had had to turn people away, but had gladly taken the money most of them would have paid for a ticket as a donation.

  By contrast she had two hundred people lined up for her fundraiser the following night at the Table Bay Hotel at the nearby Victoria and Alfred Waterfront. Her event was black tie, corporate types and high–net worth individuals, mostly middle-aged. The screaming fans here, though, were aged seventeen to thirty. Not as much disposable income, but they were passionate, and they were young.

  If the ovation for the band had been noisy – they were good and had a single at number eight in the charts – it was tumultuous when the lead singer called Eli Johnston from the wings.

  ‘But here’s the man you’ve really all come to see. Former US Navy SEAL and man candy supreme, Mr Eli Johnston.’

  Sarah watched the audience. Most of them, maybe seventy per cent, were female, and it was these young women who went wild as Eli strode out. The boyfriends and single men in the audience, Sarah noted, applauded with muted respect.

  ‘Thank you all,’ Eli began, and waited for the screaming and applause to die down. ‘You might have read in the news media or seen on TV that some friends and I got into a little trouble recently, in Mozambique.’

  He waited for the laughter to abate. His timing was good, Sarah thought.

  ‘I’ve been in combat.’ That settled the fans. The silence left Sarah’s ears ringing. ‘I’ve seen friends of mine killed. I’ve seen people die for religion, for oil, for their country, for a cause, or to save the life of someone else.’

  Eli paused and looked around the audience. Sarah saw that every eye was on the handsome American. He hadn’t raised his voice; his tone was almost intimate, reaching out to each and every heart and soul in the theatre.

  ‘It’s all bad. It’s all sad, but let me tell you there is nothing more frustrating, nothing that makes me want to throw back my head and scream at the heavens until I lose my voice than to witness the death of an innocent animal or a lion-hearted anti-poaching ranger for something as trivial, as base, as meaningless or as evil as money. That’s what this war is about, my friends.

  ‘It’s tangible, this evil, I see it every day in the carcasses of rhinos and, increasingly, elephants, left to rot under the African sun. It’s the smell of death, it’s the sight of vultures, poisoned so they can’t give away the poachers’ positions to the good guys; it’s tears on the face of a good woman whose ranger husband has been killed or wounded in the line of duty.

  ‘You can hear the evil. It’s the high-pitched squealing,’ he held up a fist, ‘the crying of a four-week-old baby rhino as it runs around the body of its dead mother, trying to wake her, searching in blind panic for something, someone, to look after it and to bring its mom back to life.’

  Sarah saw tears streaming down faces, young men’s Adam’s apples bobbing.

  ‘The illegal trade in wildlife products, to make money for greedy people, is worldwide, and it’s scary big, guys. Its root cause is a demand for stuff, the body parts of dead animals, birds and reptiles – rhino horn, elephant tusks, the scales of pangolins, the heads of vultures, the coats of leopards. I could go on. We need to stop that demand, and there are good people working on how to do that. But reducing demand and changing people’s mindsets can take a generation or two, and Africa’s wildlife doesn’t have that time. Rhinos aren’t safe anywhere in the world, not even in captivity outside of Africa. Just think of that rhino, Vince, that was killed in the zoo in France. This is a world war.’

  He paused.

  ‘What we need to do is to fight back!’

  The crowd wiped its collective nose and eyes and roared back. ‘Yes!’

  ‘I have men and women on the ground who will put their lives on the line, pick up a gun, go out into the African night and fight for wildlife. Will. You. Support. Them?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Eli put a hand to one ear. ‘I can’t hear you, troops, was that a “Hell, yeah”?’

  ‘HELL, YEAH!’

  Sarah smiled and fondled the necklace she was wearing. This guy was good. Very good. She’d heard of Eli Johnston, read everything about him she could get her hands on, watched every YouTube video, but she’d never seen him in the flesh, never heard him speak live. He was often in the news media and his fundraising events were legendary in the NGO world for the numbers and youthfulness of the crowds he attracted thanks to his own good looks and passionate deliveries, combined with the presence of big name music groups. Sarah knew, right then as she watched him, that she wanted him. She felt the shiver through her body.

  When Eli had finished, the applause had died down and the lights came up, Sarah found her way to the back of the stage and showed the access-all-areas pass on her lanyard to the burly security guard, who stepped aside and let her into a corridor that led to the dressing rooms.

  She stepped aside to let the band members pass her, then found a door with Eli’s name on it.

  He opened the door when she knocked. ‘Sarah, I’m guessing?’

  ‘Yes, hi. Nice to meet you, Eli. Thanks for agreeing to see me, and for the backstage pass.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Eli, peeling off some sticky tape that was holding the hands-free microphone he’d used on stage to his ear and neck. ‘Like I told you via email, my schedule is packed and I don’t have much time. I’ve got to go out to meet our donors.’

  She noticed he didn’t say ‘press the flesh’ or use some other dismissive term such as ‘stalkers’ when referring to his fans. He was too clean-cut to be true, and even more handsome in real life than his photos on his website and Facebook page. ‘I won’t take up too much of your time.’

  ‘Well, I’m happy to talk, and your email sounded intriguing, especially the bit about boosting my fundraising.’

  Sarah noted the quick once-over he gave her as he spoke, his eyes travelling up from her stiletto heels and sheer stockings along the lines of her little black dress and plunging neckline to her glossy lips. She had dressed to impress.

  Sarah pushed a stray curl of dark hair out of her eyes. ‘I’ll only be a minute, promise. As I mentioned in my email, while I’m a fundraising consultant I’m not here to sell you my services.’

  ‘Then what can I do for you?’

  She kept twirling her hair. ‘It’s more what
I can do for you. I wanted to thank you, first, though, for helping to save Kerry Maxwell in Mozambique. She actually signed up as a volunteer via one of the fundraising websites that I operate. I hardly need to tell you what it would have done for Animals Without Borders if, God forbid, something had happened to her.’

  ‘Well, Graham was the one who rescued her, twice. I just got my dumb ass shot. We were lucky we didn’t lose anyone in the operation. You should thank him.’

  ‘Oh, I will. Eli, I want to talk to you about how I might be able to help you, financially, to provide more resources for your work in Africa.’

  ‘I’m not really looking for a partner.’ Eli took his phone from his back pocket, turned it on and checked a message while she stood there.

  He was playing it very cool. He sat down in a chair at the dressing table and plugged his phone into a charger. He didn’t invite her to sit and Sarah didn’t take the spare seat. Instead, she perched on the table, very near to him, but looking down. She’d manoeuvred him into a position where she was dominating him.

  ‘We both know there are too many players in the NGO space in Africa, especially raising money for elephants and rhinos and projects like Animals Without Borders, repatriating animals and moving them out of harm’s way. We need to work together more.’

  He brought his hands together, fingertips to his chin. ‘As a collective sector, yes, I agree.’

  ‘The pot of donor money in Africa and abroad is only so big, and competition’s getting fiercer all the time,’ she said.

  ‘Also noted. My donors are out there expecting to see me, even as we speak.’

  She smiled. ‘I know. They’re literally panting with excitement. You’ve got the same demographic as a boy band, Eli.’

  He shrugged. ‘Yes, but these people want to change the world.’