by Alex Archer
Crane’s one good eye trembled in its socket as he mumbled something.
“I’m sorry, what was that?” Porter asked.
The doctor sighed, as if accepting what was to come, and said, “Your father specifically told me not to.”
Porter said, “I see.”
He stood there a moment, considering. He wanted more than anything to put a bullet through Crane’s simpering face for that remark about his father, but he knew doing so would take away the only advantage he had right now. Crane had clearly discussed the map, and the search for the Lost City, with Creed and more than likely knew where she was going. He could follow behind her, let her do all the work and then swoop in at the end and take the prize from her.
Then, when he had what he wanted, he could kill both of them and no one would be any wiser.
Porter nodded, satisfied that he’d come up with the right solution, and then turned to Bryant.
“Tie him up and toss him in the back of the truck. We’re going to need him later.”
17
Annja waited fifteen minutes after Henry left the compound, giving him time to draw off anyone who might be watching for her departure, before starting the aged Toyota minibus that he had swapped for her SUV. She left the headlights off, using the lights from the nearby buildings to help her navigate as she drove slowly through the compound, headed for the opposite gate facing south.
Switching vehicles had been Henry’s idea. Annja wasn’t convinced it was entirely necessary, but in the end she’d agreed to do it simply to get Henry and Lenny to stop nagging her. Annja was convinced that the bullet that struck Lenny earlier had been fired from a poacher’s rifle; the two men, on the other hand, were not. If Porter was still on their tail, it wouldn’t hurt to use sleight of hand to throw him off it, they had reasoned. Annja’s counterargument that they’d be putting Henry in danger had been brushed aside.
“Porter won’t harm me,” Henry had argued. “I’m tied too tightly to the local community for him to risk it. Trust me.”
In the end, Annja had decided to do just that. The Nissan had been driven inside the long, barnlike structure that served as the compound’s garage and there it had been stripped of all the gear Annja and Lenny had brought with them. The truck was returned to its parking spot outside while the gear itself had been transferred to the minibus.
The way the procedure was handled by Henry’s men suggested they’d done something similar more than once before. Annja knew Henry had been active in trying to help the local people reclaim their ancestral land when the Botswanan government had forced them out of the Kalahari reserve a few years back and she found herself wondering just what it was his people had been smuggling into the interior. Food and water, perhaps? Maybe medicine? She knew it couldn’t have been weapons. The San tribesmen, not to mention Henry himself, weren’t prone to violence.
A man stood by the gate, waiting for her. When she was close enough he pushed it open and waited for her to drive through before pulling it shut and securing it behind her. Now she was on her own.
The Toyota was an older model and had seen more than its fair share of use. It didn’t handle as well as the Nissan she’d left behind, but it should be up to the task before her.
She hoped.
Annja drove slowly away from the compound a good distance before turning on the headlights and heading out into the African night, away from safety and toward the mystery that lay before her. For the first time in days, Annja felt she was right where she was supposed to be.
The road wasn’t much more than a dirt track, but the minibus took it without complaint. According to Crane, she was to follow this road due south for about eighty miles. From there, she would turn west and make her way deeper into the Kalahari, until she reached the White Valley. The villagers she was looking for never stayed in one place long, so at that point she would have to hunt them down by trial and error.
The directions weren’t detailed, but they were good enough. She’d find the village; she had little doubt of that. The hard part, she suspected, would be convincing the tribe to help her in her quest to discover what happened to Humphrey during that final, fateful expedition. Especially if realizing her quest meant finding the Lost City and it turned out the San people couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help her.
Let’s just hope they’re in a sharing mood.
The first part of the trip passed without incident. Twice she was forced to wait while large groups of wildebeests crossed the road, and later she caught a glimpse of a lioness dragging a zebra carcass behind her and disappearing into the brush along the side of the trail.
The latter nearly proved to be Annja’s downfall. While she was craning her head trying to get another look at the magnificent creature, she inadvertently swerved off the side of the road. She took the bus crashing through a series of camel thorn bushes, bumping over several newly formed termite mounds before regaining control and getting back on track.
After that, she did her best to keep her eyes on the road.
The sun came up, signaling the start of a new day to the animals that made the Kalahari their own, and Annja began to see more and more wildlife the deeper into the reserve she went. Along with the zebras and wildebeests she’d noted earlier, she caught sight of herds of springbucks and oryx, a colony of meerkats, two packs of hyenas and even a pride of lions basking in the sun.
By midmorning the temperature had risen to somewhere in the low nineties and Annja was grateful for the minibus’s noisy air-conditioning. She even left the vehicle running when she stopped to forage for something to eat in her backpack, not wanting to forfeit the steady stream of cool air coming out of the vents by turning the ignition off. Two cans of peaches and a bottle of water later, Annja was ready to continue.
Annja turned off the dirt track and headed west at the eighty-mile mark, just as she’d been instructed. If her rate of travel on the so-called road had been slow, it was positively glacial as she drove carefully through the knee-high scrub grass, on the lookout for hidden obstacles. An hour after turning off she glanced down at the odometer and saw that she’d only traveled another five miles!
Drumming the wheel impatiently, she continued onward. She hadn’t gone much farther when a series of loud knocks began issuing from beneath the hood of the minibus. They came quickly, one after another, and grew louder with each passing moment. Annja wasn’t a mechanical whiz, by any stretch of the imagination, but even she knew that wasn’t a good sign. A glance at the dashboard showed the minibus’s temperature gauge way up in the red. Concerned, she slowed the vehicle and came to a stop.
By then, however, the damage was done.
Steam billowed out along the edges of the bus’s hood, evidence that it had overheated. Annja wouldn’t be going anywhere until the vehicle cooled. But as she stepped out of the minibus and glanced back along the dirt track she’d been following for the past several hours, she noticed the real problem.
A thin black line stretched back the way she had come, glistening in the late-morning light.
Annja squatted down beside it. She reached out and dipped a finger in the substance, then brought it up to her face for a closer look.
Oil.
“Damn.” She hurried over to take a look beneath the vehicle at a point just behind the front tire.
All it took was one glance to confirm her fears.
Oil was slowly dripping from a hole she’d somehow managed to tear through the bottom of the oil pan. That meant the knocking she’d heard must have been the pistons firing without any oil in the engine.
A simple engine overheat she could handle. But a hole in the oil pan? Not so much. Sure, she carried an extra pint or two of oil in the truck; you didn’t travel in the outback without being prepared. But no way did she have enough to fill the engine, even if she was able to get the hole in the oil pan plugged up.
The minibus wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
She swore again and then kicked the tire a few times
in frustration.
Of all the luck.
If Crane’s directions were right, the White Valley was at least another eight, maybe as much as ten, miles ahead of her. Not to mention whatever distance she’d need to cover to find the San village she was looking for once she reached the valley itself. Annja knew she could do three miles an hour on foot, which meant it was going to take her until midafternoon to reach the valley. What other choice did she have? It might be days, even weeks, before another vehicle came this way, if ever. It wasn’t like she was on the main highway headed southwest out of Maun. This was the middle of the Kalahari.
Certainly no sense in staying here.
Once she made up her mind to continue on foot, Annja set to making preparations with her usual level of focus and attention. She filled her backpack with several days’ worth of MREs—Meals Ready to Eat—that she’d bought back in Maun and as much water as she could carry. She added a flashlight, batteries, matches, water purification tablets and a few more odds and ends she thought she might need. She kept a careful watch on how heavy the pack got; she didn’t want to overburden herself and wind up exhausted before she’d reached the valley. At the same time, she didn’t want to end up in the middle of the Kalahari with nothing to drink.
The vultures wouldn’t be far behind.
When she was ready, she slung the pack onto her back, tugged her Yankees baseball cap squarely down on her head and set off westward, into one of the last great wildernesses on the planet.
Annja could feel her heart pounding with excitement.
18
The terrain, mostly flat plains and knee-high grasses, was easy to navigate and Annja was able to keep a steady pace without much difficulty, which was a good thing because she didn’t want to stay out here any longer than necessary. The sun beat down mercilessly from high overhead and she was soon thankful for both her baseball cap and her long-sleeve shirt despite the one-hundred-plus-degree temperature. Without them, she would have roasted alive. As it was she was able to keep her body temperature down to a reasonable level by periodically soaking her shirt with some of the precious water she was carrying.
She saw more wildlife now that she was on foot than she had driving. It was as if the animals had decided to put on a display for her and her alone. Giraffes, wildebeests, warthogs, gemsbok and jackals. The numbers and variety of the animals she cautiously passed were astounding. Above her head soared a cacophony of birdlife, from goshawks and kites, to kestrels and martial eagles. Twice she passed massive weaver nests suspended in the branches of low-hanging trees, the colonies stretching nearly fifteen feet in length and inhabited by more than a hundred of the yellow-breasted birds. Annja felt like a little girl on her first trip to the zoo, and every new sighting brought a wide smile to her face and an eagerness to see more. For a while she stopped worrying about finding the San village she was headed toward and just basked in the beauty that nature laid out for her to enjoy.
Eventually, though, her thoughts returned to the warning Lenny had given her that the poachers might not have been poachers. When she’d been safely behind the wheel of Crane’s old minibus, putting distance between herself and the compound as rapidly as possible, she hadn’t been concerned. By the time Porter figured out where she had gone—if it was Porter and if he even did figure out where she’d gone—her lead would have been so large she doubted he would have been able to catch up with her.
Now, however, stuck crossing the Kalahari on foot, she wasn’t feeling so confident. If Lenny had been right, if it had been Porter and not some random poachers that had left that elephant carcass for them to find and had subsequently fired on them, it was clear he was far more dangerous than she’d given him credit for being. Theft was one thing. But his willingness to use violence, and deadly violence at that, took his confrontation to a new level.
Not that she couldn’t handle that, too, if it proved necessary. Better men than Porter had tried to eliminate her in the past and had quickly discovered that she was not one to back down at the first sign of trouble. In fact, she was often the one who ended what others had started. She wasn’t exactly comfortable with violence, but she didn’t shy away from doing what needed to be done if and when the situation called for it. If Porter pushed things beyond the pale, she’d deal with him.
Annja banished Porter from her thoughts and turned her attention back to the task at hand. As far as she could tell, she’d been traveling at a steady pace of about three miles per hour, just as she’d anticipated back at the beginning of her hike. Given that she’d been walking for almost three hours now, she should be reaching the White Valley soon. At that point it was just a matter of locating the San village, which she didn’t expect to be difficult.
As it turned out, she was right. It wasn’t that difficult, because rather than having to try to locate the village, the village came to her.
Annja was taking advantage of the cooler air in the shadow of a large boulder to squat for a moment and take a few sips from her water bottle when she felt eyes upon her.
She gave no indication that she sensed a presence and just continued letting the cool liquid slide down her throat. She didn’t see anything at first and was starting to wonder if it had just been a momentary interest from a passing animal when she finally spotted what she was looking for. A pair of brown eyes set in a dark face stared out at her from behind a nearby bush.
She let her gaze slide over him, not wanting to give away that she’d seen him yet in the hopes of observing him in turn for a moment or two. She had to give him credit. The boy was good; if she hadn’t stopped to take a drink she probably never would have noticed that she was being followed. As it was she could barely make out his form, hidden by the vegetation he was crouched behind.
But she had a hunch she knew how to draw him out.
Annja dug into her backpack and removed a couple of the chocolate-flavored protein bars she carried. Unwrapping one of them, she made a big show of taking and enjoying a bite of it.
“Mmm, that’s good,” she said, before taking another.
She kept it up until she’d finished the entire bar. Then, unwrapping the second one, she held it out toward the bush where the boy was hiding.
“Here,” she said, “you try some.”
He didn’t move.
“Come on. I won’t bite.” She smiled at him, doing her best to appear nonthreatening.
Given the number of safaris that operated in this part of the world, Annja was betting the boy had encountered strangers before and it turned out she was right. He slowly stuck his head out from behind the bush and watched her for a moment. Then, having apparently decided she wasn’t a major threat to life, limb or liberty, he walked over and squatted in front of her.
“Go on,” Annja said, holding the protein bar out to him. “Take a bite.”
She didn’t think he could understand her, at least not verbally, but that didn’t stop him from taking the bar from her hand and sniffing at it. Tentatively he took a bite...and promptly spit it back out again.
“Yeah, can’t say I disagree with you, kid,” Annja said, laughing.
The boy appeared startled for a moment and then laughed along with her.
From the bushes came a chorus of laughter and before Annja knew it she was surrounded by children of different ages, all laughing and reaching for the protein bar to try it for themselves. She even dug out two more so that there would be enough to go around. The children chattered excitedly at her in their own language, melodious-sounding words mixed in with a collection of clicks, whistles and hoots that sounded more like bird calls than any speech she knew. When they were finished with the protein bars, they took her hands, drew her up from the ground and led her into the bush.
It wasn’t long before the children introduced her to the village proper. A couple dozen grass-and-wood huts had been erected in a clearing, the doors all facing inward toward the communal cooking and eating area in the center. There were perhaps fifty or so people here.
The men and women alike dressed in simple, loose clothing made of animal skins, many with their upper torsos bare. Their skin was dark, with a leathery appearance from all the time they spent in the sun, making it hard for her to guess their ages.
The women were all hard at work on one task or another. She spotted one group making jewelry from what looked to be ostrich eggs while another group a short distance away was butchering a pair of gemsbok antelope, no doubt for dinner that evening. The men squatted in a group on the other side of the camp, laughing and talking among themselves. They glanced at Annja as she and the children passed, but kept at their activities and made no move to interact with her.
Annja knew the San were a nomadic people, setting up camp in an area for an indeterminate period and then moving on again when food or water became scarce. At least, that’s what her anthropology class had taught her. Something about this village spoke of a greater permanence, however. The huts seemed to be built of sturdy materials and didn’t appear to be the type of structure that could be taken down with any ease or speed.
One other thing stuck out to her and that was the high percentage of implements, tools and other items made from bone. Annja knew that the San believed in using every available part of the game they killed, so she expected some items to have been crafted from bone, but there seemed to be a disproportionate volume of bones here, as if these people had access to a larger supply than usual.
A thrill ran through her. It was tenuous, yes, but it was the first evidence she had that she was on track.
The children led her toward a young man sitting beneath a monkey thorn tree talking to several children. He looked roughly her age and what little he wore showed off his powerful physique. As Annja and the children approached, he rose to his feet and smiled warmly.
“Welcome to our village,” he said.
Annja hadn’t been expecting anyone to speak such excellent English. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m Annja.”