Zambezi

by Tony Park

  ‘No thanks,’ Luke had tried politely. It had been hot and sticky and Stone Town, the island’s historic Arab trading capital, loomed ahead of him, a daunting maze of narrow alleys and decaying once-grandiose buildings.

  ‘Please, you let me take you to a hotel and I get some bread, man.’ The tout was still pestering him.

  Luke smiled at the out-of-date hippy slang. ‘I’m not looking for a hotel and I don’t need your help, thanks,’ he said, more firmly this time.

  ‘Stupid fucking tourist,’ the African said.

  Luke stopped and turned. ‘Now you’re insulting me? That’s no way to make money, my friend.’

  ‘I’m not your friend. You people, you start wars and invade other countries. Go back to where you came from, you stupid tourist.’

  Luke looked around. The boy was lean and hard and his dark face bore more than one scar. Other people had stopped to watch the exchange, including two Arab women dressed from head to foot in black kangas. Luke shook his head and walked on. He lost the tout by walking into a shop on the waterfront advertising scuba diving. Although rattled by the man’s quick aggression, Luke now had a lead-in for his story.

  At the dive shop he booked a seat on the next minibus shuttle to Nungwi. The drive took him through swampland and crowded villages, and past dense groves of palms. The vibrant greenery assaulted his eyes after the lifeless browns of Afghanistan, but the conservative dress of the island’s African and Arab inhabitants and the village mosques reminded him he was still in the world of Islam, even on the east coast of equatorial Africa. It was not until he climbed out of the minibus at Nungwi and stretched his cramped muscles that he realised just how beautiful the beach and water were. He peeled off twenty-five grimy dollars for a bungalow and dumped his backpack inside the door without bothering to inspect the room.

  Luke had been born in Sydney and grown up in the northern beaches suburb of Avalon. The ocean had been part of his life since before he could walk and he headed for the water with the same ingrained need as a hatchling sea turtle. He peeled off his T-shirt and kicked off his sandals on sand as fine and white as icing sugar. The water was blue and inviting and he lost himself in it, diving and corkscrewing like a dolphin as he shook the last imaginary grains of dust of the windswept Shomali Plain from his locks.

  Two English girls, lobster-red from their first day of sun, giggled at his abandon as they silently appraised his lithe body and unruly curly hair. They chatted to him when he eventually returned to land, and arranged to meet for drinks at the resort bar later in the evening.

  The bar was perched on a wide deck of bleached, rough-hewn timber shaded with a steep-pitched thatch roof. The music was a mixture of rap and Bob Marley Luke didn’t mind either but, as he knew from his time in the Jo’burg Bureau of International News, Africans tended to have only one setting on their stereo volume controls – max. He dragged his chair out to the balcony away from the booming speakers, the water visible under his feet through gaps between the planks. As the sun dived for the horizon the English girls joined him, along with a mixed bag of South African divers, Italian honeymooners and German backpackers.

  They’d chatted, as travellers do, about prices and hotels and ferry timetables, trying to outdo each other with how little they’d paid and how much they’d seen. Luke stayed silent for most of it, his mind still in the foothills of the Hindu Kush though the delicious smells wafting from the bar’s kitchen reminded him he was a world away from war-ravaged Afghanistan. There he’d eaten courtesy of the US Army – reconstituted eggs, powdered potatoes and chunked steak. The cooked meals were prepared four thousand kilometres away at a base in Germany, frozen and then flown by C-17 to Bagram, where they were reheated and slopped onto polystyrene plates. The meals did not travel well. For lunch he’d eaten Army MREs, which officially stood for ‘Meal, Ready to Eat’. The brown plastic packets of brown plastic food were referred to by the troops as Meal, Rarely Edible or Meal, Rejected by Ethiopians.

  That night Luke gorged on grilled Zanzibar rock lobster and fried fresh calamari, washed down by ice-cold Safari and Kilimanjaro lager. After dinner, as a DJ pumped up the volume in a bid to get people dancing, the talk turned to politics.

  ‘Fucking Americans. They want to rule the goddamned world. They think they can bomb civilians and invade any country they want to,’ one of the South African divers, tanned and muscled with his blond hair plaited in incongruous dreadlocks, said.

  ‘Ja,’ a German guy agreed. ‘They are all, how you say, Rambos. All they do is kill, kill, kill. It makes me sick.’

  ‘One saved my life,’ Luke said, only half aware he’d spoken. The Safaris had dulled his senses and he was losing himself in the alcohol’s ministrations and the bright white smile of one of the English girls.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  He told her about Jed Banks and the helicopter being fired on, and the Arab he’d seen gunned down in front of him. He said it in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice that belied the terror and the nightmares, and the rest of them sat in stunned silence.

  Afterwards, he’d been embarrassed, and had walked down the stairs from the wooden deck onto the sand at the first opportunity. The girl in the lime-green bikini had followed him to the beach and, later, to his bungalow.

  Now, the next morning, Luke walked back out onto the bar’s terrace. He lit a cigarette and thought about what he must do. A fisherman in an outrigger canoe, his chiselled black body impervious to the sun’s rays, paddled effortlessly past the resort on his way to work. Luke, too, had work to do, and it scared as much as excited him. Here, on this island paradise, Afghanistan was still very much on his mind. Rather than running away from the horror he’d experienced, he would be chasing it, holding onto the beast’s tail and shaking it for all it was worth.

  He walked back to the bungalow to see if the English girl was awake yet. She stirred and opened her eyes at the squeaking of the door. She smiled. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse from the cigarettes and vodka. Sexy as hell. ‘Leaving already?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. It was great. Thanks. I mean …’ She did not look angry or disappointed, he thought.

  ‘What time’s the minibus?’ she croaked.

  ‘Ten.’

  She checked her Swatch. ‘It’s only eight-thirty. That gives us an hour and twenty-five minutes.’

  He smiled. ‘An hour and twenty-five?’

  ‘You’ll have to comb your hair and dress, won’t you?’

  She lifted the mosquito net and threw back the sheet. Luke climbed in.

  *

  Beneath him, Stone Town snoozed the afternoon away, but Luke was hard at work, his mobile phone clamped to his ear.

  ‘Zanzibar, not Zimbabwe. I’m in Zanzibar, Stone Town.’ The signal was weak and he was almost shouting. He was on the top floor of a small, cheap hotel behind the Beit el Ajaib, the House of Wonders – a former sultan’s palace so named because it was the first building on the island to have electricity and an elevator. Through the gap between the palace and the whitewashed mosque next door he glimpsed a silvery slice of the Indian Ocean, as still as a pond.

  It was four in the afternoon and most other people on the island were taking a nap. Luke cupped his free hand over the mouthpiece so as not to wake the entire building.

  ‘How long are you going to be there and how much is it going to cost?’ Bernie, the International Press chief of staff in London, asked down the line.

  ‘Bloody hell, Bernie, I’m onto a ball-tearer of a story and all you care about is the bloody bucks.

  Give me a break. I nearly fucking died in Afghanistan – you should be giving me this trip as a holiday!’

  Bernie laughed. ‘Spare me your Aussie wit and tell me again what you’re doing there. I’ve got the afternoon news conference soon, so make it good.’

  ‘It’s a follow-up to my last story, the one out of Afghanistan about the Al Qaeda guy that was killed on the patrol I was on.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Not e
xactly Osama bin Laden, was he?’

  ‘No, but he was from here – Zanzibar, remember? Iqbal bin Zayid. Plus, there was that bomb in Dar es Salaam yesterday.’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve got that. Judy in Dar filed last night. Also, they’ve evacuated the US embassy today, following a bomb threat.’

  ‘Shit, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Check the website, the story’s up now. Do you think you can get some more colour for us? Find out if terrified backpackers are leaving Zanzibar in droves, crippling the local tourism industry, that sort of crap.’

  Luke paused to sip on his bottle of Safari. ‘Sure, I’ll get you something, but I want to chase down the dead terrorist’s family, find out more about him and if there are more like him at home.’

  ‘All right, but keep your eye on the ball, Luke. Look, this isn’t getting personal, is it? The guy did try to kill you after all.’

  ‘No, it’s not bloody personal.’

  ‘Right. But seriously, take a few days on the beach when you finish there before you go back to Jo’burg. You’ve probably earned it.’

  Luke snorted. ‘OK, and I’m going back via Zimbabwe.’

  ‘Zimbabwe? What is it about you and all these bloody “Z” countries?’

  ‘There’s someone I want to catch up with. The bloke who saved my life in Afghanistan. You know, the father of the girl who was killed by a lion. I heard from his ex-wife that he’s over there, though God knows what he expects to find. Thought I’d see where the investigation into her death is at, what the fallout is.’

  ‘That was a hell of a good story, Luke. US Special Forces soldier kills a wanted terrorist, saves a dumb journo’s life and then finds out his only child has been killed by a wild animal. Talk about the mother of all human fucking interest stories!’ Bernie laughed.

  Luke shook his head. Everyone in the game knew journalists became desensitised to tragedy Like most of his colleagues, he coped with the day-to-day exposure to death and sorrow with a mix of black humour and alcohol, but Bernie was talking about someone he knew personally – someone who had indeed saved his life.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Luke said. ‘Anyway, this line’s crap. I’ll be in touch soon, Bernie. I’ll file a couple hundred words on the post-bomb tourism situation tonight. See ya.’

  ‘Cheers then. Find yourself a Swedish backpacker and a beer, you’ll be OK.’

  ‘Who needs Swedish girls when there are pommies around?’ Luke replied, smiling at the memory of the morning’s hot, sweaty sex.

  ‘You colonial cad. Don’t tell me you’ve been deflowering some innocent English rose?’

  ‘Rosy all right, but not too innocent,’ he said.

  Luke finished his beer as he looked across the roofs of Stone Town. The ocean beyond the city’s crumbling edifices reflected the changing colours of the fading sun. A mix of medieval dhows and state-of-the-art luxury cruisers sat motionless at anchor in the breathless afternoon. He wanted another beer, but he knew he should stay clear-headed for this evening’s business.

  He closed his eyes. In an instant he was back there. They happened a lot, the flashbacks. At the oddest times, and most nights in his nightmares, he could see himself there, hear the bullets, see the wounded helicopter crewman, feel himself falling from the Chinook. My God, he thought. I was going to die. They would have left me if Jed Banks hadn’t jumped to the ground, rescued me and killed the man he now knew as Iqbal bin Zayid.

  Luke placed a hand on his left side. His cracked ribs still hurt whenever he took a deep breath.

  The doctor said it would be weeks before they healed completely. The scab on his shoulder where he had cut himself had fallen off during his time on the beach. The skin was pink and puckered, a reminder that all of this had taken place less than two weeks ago. Despite the protests of the US Army medics Luke had filed the story of the firefight as soon as he returned to base. His fellow reporters had toasted him with cans of British beer, smuggled past the puritanical American military police, as he’d sat at his laptop, blood oozing from his shoulder, hair matted, face dirty and his side afire with pain. Afterwards, he had stumbled up Disney Parade, checked into the American field hospital and passed out.

  The next day the camp was abuzz with news of the raid on the compound and the battalion-sized sweep that followed it. The sky was browned-out with dust from wave after wave of Chinooks and Apaches. Luke didn’t even try to get on a flight – he spent the next four days in hospital. As soon as he was discharged he set off to find Jed Banks and thank him. Freshly bandaged, he reported to the front gate of the Coalition Joint Special Operations Task Force compound and asked for the master sergeant. The ranger on guard duty spoke into his radio and asked Luke to wait. That wasn’t unusual, as reporters were not allowed into the compound. He hoped Jed would take the time to meet with him. In the end, it was the task force chaplain who came to the gate and explained to Luke that Jed had left because of a family emergency.

  The following day International Press’s regular Afghanistan correspondent returned from her two weeks’ leave in Turkey, annoyed to hear that Luke had encountered the first serious action in months and that IP had scooped the world with the story of the firefight. Luke gratefully said his goodbyes and hitched a ride out on a USAF C-17 transport to Qatar where, the next day, he caught a connecting civilian flight to Dubai and made an onward booking for Johannesburg.

  Luke had planned a week’s leave at Durban on the South African east coast to recuperate from his time in Afghanistan. However, while in Dubai airport he had seen a newspaper report about a young female American wildlife researcher who had been killed by a lion in Zimbabwe, in the Zambezi Valley. He had spilled his coffee on the table of the cafe in his haste to find his mobile phone in his daypack. The story said the woman’s name had not yet been released. How many American women were researching wildlife in the Zambezi Valley? It had to be Miranda. That was the personal tragedy that had taken Jed Banks out of Afghanistan. It was all coming together.

  Luke recalled that Miranda had lived with her mother before going to Africa. He dug out the grubby, sweat- and dust-stained notebook he had used in Afghanistan and flicked through the pages.

  Patti was Miranda’s mother’s name – probably short for Patricia. Luke got out his laptop and connected to the internet using the infra-red connection on his mobile phone and international roaming software that gave him a dial-in number in Dubai. Within a few minutes he was checking telephone listings in Boston. He found dozens of entries. The phone bill would be horrendous, but the company would pay. On the twenty-second call a woman answered the phone and Luke said, ‘Good morning, ma’am, my name is Luke Scarborough, I’m a friend of your ex-husband, Jed, and I was just calling to express my deepest condolences about what happened to Miranda …’

  The first twenty-one Lewises who picked up the phone had thought him a madman or a prankster.

  This woman was silent for a moment, then said, ‘Um, thank you. How do you know my ex-husband, and how did you find out about Miranda? Her name wasn’t going to be made public until tomorrow.’

  ‘I was with your husband in Afghanistan, Mrs Lewis. Jed saved my life over there. He was telling me about Miranda’s work in Africa the night he rescued me. He loved her very much. I’m on my way to Zimbabwe now, and -’

  Miranda’s mother cut him short. ‘Are you going to see Jed over there? Will you meet up with him?’

  Yes! Luke mouthed silently.

  The call proved a gold mine of information. Before Patti went on too much longer Luke identified himself as a reporter, fearing as he did so that she would hang up the phone. In his experience, people who had just lost a family member under tragic circumstances responded in one of two ways. Some would tell a reporter to go away, in language as strong as they could muster, while others, the majority in his experience, would want to talk at length about their loved one’s life, from cradle to grave. To be honest, Luke preferred the former reaction, so that he could go back to his bosses and say he had
tried to get a comment or a picture of the deceased, but the family would not cooperate.

  The alternative was heart-wrenching, and sometimes exceedingly boring, as teary relatives poured their hearts out.

  Patti Lewis was still in shock, neither unfriendly nor effusive. She answered Luke’s questions about Miranda’s life and her work and gave him enough colourful quotes for a good story. She was resigned to talking to him, on the basis that the State Department would release Miranda’s name the next day, and she partially bought his line that there would be fewer callers from the media once his story was on the wire. On top of all that he now knew that Jed was heading to Zimbabwe, to investigate the circumstances of Miranda’s disappearance. He had to get down there and see him. It would make a sensational colour piece. And, the story aside, he wanted to thank Jed and maybe talk through a few things.

  He telephoned the IP central newsroom in London and briefed Bernie on his conversation with Patti Lewis. It was Bernie who gave him the news that the US had released the name of the Zanzibari Al Qaeda terrorist who had been killed in Afghanistan during the firefight Luke had been involved in.

  The man was a middle-ranking commander who had fought in Chechnya, where he was believed to have been responsible for the downing of a Russian army helicopter which had resulted in the deaths of nearly sixty soldiers.

  The many threads of the story had coalesced magically in Luke’s mind. As he’d typed he had smiled to himself as the string of heroic and tragic events filled the page – the brave US Army hero who kills the wanted terrorist, only to find his beloved daughter has been killed in a freak accident.

  Patti Lewis’s quotes had rounded it out nicely.

  Below him now, somewhere in the winding alleys of Stone Town, was the missing piece of the story.

  Luke walked downstairs to his room and took a cold shower. There was no hot water, even if he’d wanted it. The room was cheap but functional, about a quarter of a star above fleapit status, but his daily expense allowance didn’t allow for much better. He dried off with a threadbare towel that smelled as though it had been washed with hand soap, and put on a navy long-sleeved cotton shirt and a pair of lightweight khaki trousers and sandals for his foray into the labyrinthine alleys of Stone Town. He was looking for leads about the life of an Islamic fundamentalist and was culturally aware enough to know that shorts and a singlet top would not endear him to the man’s family or friends. He shouldered his camera bag, which contained a professional Canon digital body with a twenty-eightto fifty-millimetre lens attached, and a three hundred for long-range shots. He also checked he had his notebook and two pens, and that there was still life in the batteries of his mini cassette recorder.