by Tony Park
‘This war of words is futile,’ Fidel said. ‘Baird is a liability. He needs to be struck off your balance sheet.’
‘Just wait until the cyber media world finds out what a philandering old drunken bum he really is. I know where plenty of his skeletons are locked.’
‘Yes, just as you know some of my skeletons, I imagine,’ Fidel said.
She looked at him. ‘I know your background, Fidel, and I’m taking you at your word that you’re going to give up poaching, that you’ve been converted.’
He met her eyes. ‘The loss of my brother still weighs heavily on my heart.’
‘I want to believe you’re sincere. But the fact is that you have the clout to get the rhino breeding facility off the ground in Mozambique, and a reputation fierce enough to make sure no other poachers try to get their hands on our rhinos once people know they are under your care.’
He brought his hands together as if in prayer. ‘I am no saint.’
‘Oh, I know that, but if you stick with me I’ll use Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to make you one, Fidel.’ She paused. ‘What do we do about Graham Baird?’
Fidel tapped his fingers together. ‘He is one stupid, washed-out old man. However, he is a threat to our venture. People, the media and politicians, listen to veterinarians. He has the potential to cause us harm, but equally important to me is that he deserves to die for what he did to my family. He has advertised to us and the world that he is alone in the middle of the Kruger Park. Of course, he could be setting a trap. You know him; what do you think?’
Sarah wasn’t sure what to think, but what she knew was that there was no way she was going to let Graham Baird scuttle this deal. The planned Mozambican rhino sanctuary was worth millions of dollars, over its life, to Animals Without Borders and that equated to hundreds of thousands for her.
But it wasn’t just about money. She genuinely wanted to protect the rhinos. Also, Sarah secretly believed the rhinos could be a sustainable source of income for all them – the charity, her and Fidel – if and when the international trade in rhino horn was legalised. In the conservation-based NGO circles she moved in those in the pro-trade lobby, who wanted the sale and export of rhino horn to be legalised, were the enemy. Sarah couldn’t wear her beliefs on her sleeve, but it was her view that giving rhino horn a legitimate market value was the only way to ensure the species’ survival.
She was under no illusion that Fidel had experienced some kind of epiphany and was doing this for the right reasons. She knew she was doing a deal with the devil, but she also believed she could control Costa. He knew of her views on trade and she had obliquely hinted that until the market was legalised there would still be back-door routes for harvesting rhino horn and getting it out of Mozambique. That had played to Costa’s lust for money and she was well aware of his other desires. It was plain he wanted to sleep with her. She would use any weapon at her disposal to hold him to this deal and keep him following her agenda.
What she hadn’t factored on, in all her behind the scenes negotiations, was Graham becoming embroiled in all this by killing Costa’s brother.
‘I think Graham really is there by himself. He’s a romantic at heart and I think he wants to take you on, man to man. It was a mistake for you to target Kerry, her father and Johnston.’
‘Who said I did?’
She smiled, but let it rest. ‘All I’m saying is that Graham is probably advertising where he is in the hope that you will do something to get rid of him, and perhaps consider the ledger wiped clean as far as the others go.’
Costa made no reply, but she knew he was mulling over the proposition. She did not want Graham dead, but nor could she afford his bleating.
‘It is like he has a death wish,’ Costa said.
‘Graham’s messed up because he’s carrying too much grief in his life. His wife died ten years ago and he never got over it. I think he’s sick of his guilt, tired of living.’
‘Well,’ Costa smoothed his moustache, ‘maybe I can help him.’
Sarah closed her eyes and settled into the soft leather of the luxurious seat. She was pretending to be tired, but in reality her heart was thumping as the reality of what she was setting in motion pumped through her body like a dose of venom.
Chapter 30
Luiz, Fidel Costa’s master tracker, stopped and tilted his head, listening to the sounds of the night.
A tiny Scops owl chirped to its mate, and somewhere far off a lion gave a low and wheezy call. One did not have to roar loudly to scare.
The team of seven men behind him were young, keen and inexperienced. More and more men from the villages around Massingir where Fidel had drawn his recruits were failing to return from the cross-border forays into South Africa. Sometimes the men were arrested and sent to prison, but more often than not their bodies were returned to Mozambique for burial. Fidel’s recruits, like his late brother, were getting younger and less experienced by the day.
This was a big group, many more men than Fidel would have sent to hunt rhino. Perhaps it was because he knew these troops were so inexperienced that Fidel wanted to send a small army to take out one man.
Luiz had heard from Fidel how he would be changing his money-making strategy. Now he would rob in a different way, taking money donated by people from as far afield as America, Europe, Australia and even Asia, to put rhinos in a compound and breed them, like cattle.
He tutted, once more ridiculing the idea.
Luiz was a hunter, not a farmer, and it irked him that his boss had taken to acting like a woman or a peasant, feeding and watering animals instead of tracking them down and killing them.
Oh, there was money to be made, of that Luiz was sure. For if there was one thing Fidel loved more than stalking and shooting, or running a pack of dogs, it was making money. The ideals of the revolution counted for nothing. Fidel had been Luiz’s commander during the war, when their quarry had been the capitalist dogs of RENAMO. The hated opposition were the puppets of the South Africans and, before them, the Rhodesians. The whites in turn were in thrall to the American imperialists.
Luiz hadn’t really believed all the Cold War rhetoric. Communism, capitalism, socialism, they were all the same to him. They were ideas used to dress up or to camouflage the real business of life – hunting, killing, surviving. Luiz was a survivor. It was no accident that he was alive and so many young men from the villages were dead.
Luiz knew not only how to hunt, but how to hide. He could tie on his old shoes so that his feet were on top of the shoes, but facing back to front so that when he left the scene of a hunt it looked like he had been walking towards it. When hunting elephant he had hacked off the spongy footpads of one of the big beasts and, together with a shooter, they had tramped away from the scene of their crime, one in front of the other, moving their legs as an elephant would have. His feet had squished sickeningly in the blood and fat, but he had survived.
The men behind him made too much noise, with their incessant whispered bravado, and he smelled their tobacco, their dagga and their soap. They were chirping like guinea fowl, which the Shangaan called ‘cackling women’.
‘Be quiet,’ he hissed to them. For a moment the youngsters were silent, but it would not be for long.
They had to be extra careful tonight, for their quarry was a man. Hunting humans, Luiz knew from his time in the civil war, was the most difficult of all tasks. An animal was predictable; Luiz knew where a rhino would go to drink or wallow, and what it would do if it detected its pursuers, most often by sound rather than sight.
A lion would flee, if it saw you first, but if you cornered it the cat would charge. Elephants rested in the shade of tall trees during the heat of the day, and would move more at night. A tracker could use these predictable traits to his advantage. But hunting men was different.
A man had a brain, and that made him unpredictable. Fidel had told them that the veterinarian, Baird, who had murdered Costa’s brother, was holed up in the Kruger Park in the cam
p they called Boulders. He was alone in that big, rambling modernistic lodge that Luiz had seen once, while tracking a rhino that was heading for the camp’s pumped waterhole.
That made no sense.
Baird had advertised his presence and Fidel had ordered Luiz and his team to go into the Kruger and kill the South African.
‘Comandante, this is an ambush,’ Luiz had said to Fidel.
‘No,’ his boss had replied, ‘this is assisted suicide. Baird is taunting me, asking me to come and kill him, and I am complying. You know I have eyes and ears inside the national park?’
‘Sim.’ Luiz had nodded. It was true. There was a traffic policeman – the South African National Parks actually employed such people to set up speed traps and police the speed limits in the game reserve – who had been entertained in Maputo by Fidel on a number of occasions. The man had family and a mistress in Mozambique and, Luiz guessed, a growing bank account waiting for him when he chose to retire with his girlfriend.
‘Baird travelled alone. There are no military or national parks patrols in the area around Boulders. No one is waiting for you. Go. Kill him. You will be rewarded, Luiz.’
And so Luiz had crossed the border, as he had done a hundred times before, but this time he was not in search of a rhino horn, but rather the head of a man.
Fidel had told Luiz the money would continue to flow, even after he set up his rhino breeding program with the woman from Australia and her benefactors’ funding. But for that to happen Baird needed to go. The man threatened the whole project and, of course, there was the debt of blood to be paid.
‘We are going to stop hunting wild rhino,’ Fidel had said to him, ‘for a little while, at least.’
Luiz had been surprised. ‘You are going straight?’
Fidel had laughed. ‘No, but I need to make it look like it. I cannot have any men, like yourself, who are so closely linked to me, caught poaching. In time, this rhino breeding centre will make us money, Luiz. We can drip-feed horns that we harvest to the Vietnamese. One day international trade in horns may be legal, but in the meantime we can corner the market.’
Luiz had shaken his head. ‘I have bills to pay, women who rely on my money as much as my manhood. You are wealthy, Comandante, I am a soldier. I can’t afford to wait for this scheme to start paying.’
‘Are you disobeying an order, Luiz? You have been like an uncle to me.’
‘I think this plan is a mistake,’ Luiz had said.
They had left it at that. Fidel was clearly not happy that Luiz had not simply rolled over, like a dog, and accepted a change in their way of life. He would do this task for Fidel, kill the South African, Baird, but he was not ready to hang up his rifle just yet, not even for Fidel.
Luiz came to a koppie, a giant child’s pyramid of smooth red granite marbles balanced precariously on top of each other. Luiz told his young clucking chickens to wait while he climbed to the top. He felt the effort in his old heart and stiff limbs, but kept a watch in the moonlight for the adder or the mamba that might live in the rocks, still a little warm to the touch from the day’s sun.
Once at the top, careful not to be silhouetted against the moonlit sky, he looked around. He saw the floodlight that illuminated the waterhole in front of Boulders Camp. A bull elephant was reflected in the silvery surface and Luiz heard it guzzling water. A fire flickered in the braai area.
Luiz felt his heart quicken at the prospect of the hunt, yet at the same time the blood that pumped forth chilled him to his core. He took out the satellite phone Fidel had given him, flipped up the antenna and waited for it to acquire a signal. When it did he sent an SMS to the only number Fidel had programmed into the phone.
Ready.
*
Graham fed the genet, even though it was against national park regulations.
The sleek, spotted cat-like creature had been his only companion for the past two evenings. Graham had politely, but firmly, told the attendant on duty at Boulders Bush Lodge – there were normally two but one was on leave – that he did not want to see him during his stay. He told the man he would do his own dishes, make his own bed and tidy up around the lodge. He reinforced his requirement for privacy with a two-hundred-rand tip in advance.
Graham could normally not abide people who fed wild animals. When monkeys, baboons, hyenas and even birds became dependent on humans for food they turned into problem animals. More often than not the creatures’ scavenging habits led to them being shot.
The genet wolfed down the morsel of cooked boerewors that Graham had sliced off for it. He took half of the rest of the sausage from the braai grid and slid it onto his plate.
Graham wondered if Costa’s men would come.
He doubted the gangster would come in person to finish him off. Costa had a reputation as a man of action during the Mozambican civil war – at least that was what his politician’s backstory maintained – but he was no fool. It was one thing for him to come to Hoedspruit to oversee Graham’s demise, but another for him to go wandering about the Kruger Park in the middle of the night.
It was quiet, save for the sizzle of the remnants of wors fat on the coals and a Scops owl calling nearby. The big bull elephant had finished his last slurp of water and had disappeared noiselessly into the mopane trees. It never ceased to amaze Graham how quiet these giant creatures could be when moving through the bush.
He ate from the plate on his lap, washing down the strong farmer’s sausage with rationed mouthfuls of one of the two beers he had allowed himself for this evening.
It was eerie being in the camp alone. Boulders was a relatively new camp for the Kruger Park, having been built in the 1980s with funds from big business. As its name inferred it was built in among a series of granite koppies, elevated a few metres above ground level.
The camp had the air of a businessman’s retreat; its finishes and design were more contemporary and luxurious than standard national parks accommodation in other rest camps, and the communal dining area was dominated by a long wooden-topped bar. Graham could picture nefarious negotiations and big deals being sealed during the apartheid era over brandies and Cokes at that bar.
In the well-appointed kitchen off the dining room were two fridges and an oven. The camp ran on solar power, which generated enough electricity to keep the lights going all night, including the floodlight out at the waterhole.
A timbered walkway linked the dining-cum-kitchen area with the four single-room accommodation units and one with two bedrooms, all strung out in a line amid the rocky outcrops, discreetly spaced apart. Four of the units looked out over the floodlit waterhole in the centre of a natural depression surrounded by mopane trees. One unit faced rearwards.
Where Graham sat, between the communal area and the first sleeping unit, there was an outdoor fireplace and braai, also lit by a solar-powered floodlight. Barred steel doors isolated the elevated walkway and units from the car park underneath the raised dining area. Graham had found a padlock and secured the door so that if anyone did try and storm the stairs from below they would be locked out. It wasn’t much of a defence – the walkway and accommodation units could be reached by someone scaling the boulders – but it might give him some slim advantage.
Graham finished eating, swigged some more beer and looked up at the night sky. It was breathtaking, as had been the sunset off to his left, which he’d viewed from the dining area deck.
Darkness had brought a change in the wind direction and on the light, slightly chilly breeze came the scent of death from out near the big baobab tree that sat atop an island of red rocks.
A spotted hyena whooped long and low from the same direction. Graham had spied vultures in the baobab and other trees out that way, before sunset, so he assumed a kill had been made some time in the last few days.
Perhaps he had misjudged Costa, but he didn’t think so.
To his right, in the east, were the Lebombo Hills that marked the border between South Africa and Mozambique. Most of the rhinos in th
e Kruger Park were located in the southern and central sections of the reserve, so Graham was betting on Costa’s gang being able to make it across the border there without being detected.
He was sick of running.
Graham took the nine-millimetre pistol from the waistband of his shorts and set it on the table beside him. He had snipped off the security wire and seal that the woman had placed on his pistol at Phalaborwa Gate and unloaded, cleaned and reloaded the weapon several times, more for reassurance than anything else. If he left the park and the firearm was checked he would be in serious trouble and liable for prosecution. That, however, was all academic to him, as he had no reason to think he would be leaving the Kruger Park alive.
As well as the pistol he had taken a machete from the back of his Land Rover, and he had a hunting knife that had been left in the cubby box.
Graham finished his beer and left the dinner plate out for the genet to lick clean. He walked along the boardwalk to the first accommodation unit, opened the front door and the internal screen door and turned on the lights inside, then walked back to the communal area and turned off all the other outside lights.
Anyone watching would expect him to go to his unit, perhaps read for a while or have another drink before going to sleep. Graham walked back to the room, opened the front door and left it ajar, but slammed the screen door closed.
*
‘I said be quiet,’ Luiz whispered to the men behind them.
‘Relax, old man,’ said Julio, one of the gunmen, whose chunky gold necklace glittered in the moonlight. ‘It is just one man we are hunting, right? And he is almost as ancient as you.’
Another snickered.
‘If you are so certain of yourself, Julio, then you take the lead. There is no need for me to track any more, you can see the camp, see the floodlight. Are you man enough to take the point, and to go into battle first?’
The youth puffed his chest out and stared Luiz in the eye. ‘Of course I am, especially if you, the great Luiz, have lost your nerve after all these years.’