Dictator sc-4

by Tom Cain

  ‘I don’t think she’s plain at all.’

  ‘Of course not, you’re her father.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m sure it’s just a phase. She’s trying to work out who she really is. It’s natural for her to rebel a little bit, all children do it.’

  ‘Andrew didn’t.’

  Stratten gave her a quizzical, not to say sceptical look. ‘Maybe you just didn’t see it. In any case, you are famously the most beautiful and best-dressed woman in the whole of southern Africa’ – Jacqui Stratten glowed in the warm light of her husband’s compliment – ‘so she’s rebelling against you by pretending to take no interest at all in how she looks. The second she finds a boy she really likes that will all change, just you wait.’

  Jacqui mused on the problem as she watched Zalika take a few more paces across the grass. As the plane drew closer she started waving her arms above her head. The girl’s frantic gestures were answered by a waggle of the plane’s wings. She squealed with delight then ran away again across the grass, calling out as she went, ‘I’ll go and meet them at the strip!’

  Zalika disappeared out of sight of the veranda. Not long afterwards came the sound of an engine starting up and the arid scrunch of tyres on dusty gravel.

  Jacqui’s thoughts turned to the boys her daughter was rushing to meet. Her son Andy – how handsome he was becoming, she mused proudly – and his lifelong friend Moses Mabeki, the son of the family’s estate manager. Moses was Andy’s equal in looks, with a finely sculpted bone structure made all the more apparent by a shaven head, and full lips framed by a close-cropped beard. But as the horn-rimmed spectacles round his liquid brown eyes suggested, he took a much more earnest approach to his studies. Moses had attended the University of Malemba before being offered a graduate place at the London School of Economics’ Department of Government. As the first member of his family ever to receive a college education, he had no intention whatever of wasting it on girls and parties.

  Dick Stratten had insisted on paying the young man’s tuition fees and living expenses. ‘Moses is like a son to me too,’ Stratten had told the boy’s father, Isaac Mabeki, as they shared one of the bottles of thirty-year-old Glenfiddich they polished off from time to time, talking not as master and loyal servant but as one man to another. ‘I know he will do great things for this country one day. With your permission, it would be my pleasure and an honour to help him on his way.’

  Moses had spent the past three years in London, returning to Malemba only for occasional visits. Now, with his masters degree completed, he was coming home for good.

  The roar of the Cessna’s engines as it passed low over the house and made its final approach to the landing strip roused Jacqui Stratten from her reverie. She blinked, gave a little shake of the head and thought for a second. Yes, there would be time. Then she smiled at a servant who was hovering a few feet from the table. ‘Coffee, please, Mary,’ she said. ‘Mr Stratten and I will have a cup while we wait for the boys to arrive.’

  4

  The seventy-four-year-old man sitting behind his mahogany desk in a lavishly appointed office in Sindele had begun his career as a village schoolteacher, working in the same modest school where he had been given his own early education by Anglican missionaries. Had his life followed its expected course, Henderson Gushungo would now be retired, a respected member of his little community, spending his days sitting under a shade-tree, talking to the other old men, grousing about the way the world had changed and indulging his grandchildren.

  Gushungo, however, had had other, more radical ideas. He’d joined the resistance movement against the white minority who ruled his country as though it were still a colony of the British Empire. Like Nelson Mandela in South Africa, he’d burnished his reputation among his people and radicals around the world by going to prison for his beliefs. Unlike Mandela, he’d emerged from jail filled with a lust for revenge, not reconciliation. For years he had fought a war on two fronts: publicly against the whites, and privately against his competitors within the liberation movement. Now he held the entire country’s destiny in his hands. Having been Prime Minister, he had promoted himself to President, never submitting himself to any election whose result was not certain before a single vote had been cast.

  Gushungo liked to call himself the Father of the Nation. But he was a very stern and cruel parent.

  His soldiers were fighting in the jungles of the Congo. His henchmen were forcing white farmers off their properties and forcibly cleansing hundreds of thousands of black Malembans from areas where, in his increasingly paranoid imagination, they might constitute a serious opposition to his continued rule. His demoralized opponents, unable to remove him themselves, prayed that God would do the job for them. But the old man had no intention of meeting his maker any time soon. His hair was still thick and black, his face remarkably unlined, his posture erect. His mother had lived past one hundred. He still had a long way to go.

  One of the phones arranged to the right of his desk trilled.

  ‘It has begun,’ said the voice on the other end of the line.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Henderson Gushungo. ‘Let me know when the operation has been completed.’

  5

  When he met Moses Mabeki at Buweku airport, Andy Stratten had greeted him with the words ‘Sawubona, mambo!’ In Ndebele, the Zulu dialect widely spoken in southern Malemba, it meant ‘Greetings, king!’

  Moses had grinned as they bumped their clenched right fists against each other, then held them up to their hearts. Yet there was a serious truth behind Andy’s lighthearted greeting. To the vast majority of the Malembans who lived and worked on the Stratten lands, Andy was not the true aristocrat, Moses was. He could trace his bloodline back to Mzilikazi, founder of the Ndebele tribe, a man who combined a genocidal craving for the slaughter of his enemies with a statesman’s gift for leadership. The land over which they’d flown on the journey down to the Stratten family compound was territory Mzilikazi himself had conquered, a hundred and sixty years earlier. So it had surprised no one that Moses studied the art of government during his years in London. As Andy often told his friend, ‘One day, I will run the Stratten estates. But you will run the whole damn country.’

  It had taken a little over half an hour for the Cessna to reach its destination.

  ‘Just look at that, hey,’ Andy had said when he spotted the girl frantically waving on the lawn. ‘I tell you, man, my sister’s the craziest chick in the whole of Malemba.’

  Moses had laughed. ‘Don’t be cruel. Zalika has a good heart.’

  Stratten brought the Cessna in to land with practised ease. By the time he was slowly taxiing to a halt, Zalika was arriving, trailed by a plume of dust, just a few yards away. She’d barely stopped the open-topped, olive-green Land Rover before she’d flung the handset down on to the passenger seat and was scampering towards the two young men emerging from the plane.

  ‘Moses!’ she shrieked delightedly, flinging herself at him and wrapping her arms round him. ‘It’s so great to see you again!’

  ‘You too,’ he said, patting her on the shoulder and smiling at her puppy-like enthusiasm.

  ‘Don’t I get a hug too?’ asked Andy.

  ‘Of course not,’ his sister replied, ‘I saw you at breakfast. You’ll have to be away for much longer than a few hours if you want a cuddle from me.’

  Andy looked at his friend. ‘Like I told you, the girl’s crazy.’

  ‘And my brother,’ said Zalika, ‘is an arrogant, self-opinionated pig!’

  The insult might have been more effective had not happiness been radiating from the girl like the warmth from an open fire.

  They climbed into the Land Rover, Zalika slammed it into gear, and as the young men clung on for dear life she raced back up to the house.

  6

  The southeastern quadrant of Africa, from the equator to the Cape of Good Hope, contains some of the world’s most spectacular landscapes. But between those highlights lie countless miles of open sa
vannah, which is a technical way of saying ‘an awful lot of dry grass, interrupted by the odd bush or tree’ – a harsh but not entirely unjustified description for much of the land on the Stratten Reserve. The glory of it lay in its animal inhabitants. And on days when the Big Five animals – lion, leopard, rhino, elephant and Cape buffalo – declined to make themselves visible, prosperous middle-aged tourists soon became hot, sweaty and disgruntled.

  That was the situation facing a guide called Jannie Smuts as he drove his tourist-filled truck on a so-far fruitless safari. His customers had seen warthogs by the score, a few unimpressive varieties of deer and one listless giraffe. But that hardly amounted to value for the very large sums of money they’d paid for their African holiday. Smuts himself was endlessly fascinated by the marvels of the African sky: so dazzling with stars at night; so lurid at sunrise and sunset; so capricious in its ability to switch from limitlessly clear blue to massed ranks of mountainous thunderclouds, seemingly in an instant. He could see, however, that ‘Why don’t you folks look at the sky?’ wouldn’t go down too well, particularly since the truck’s canvas sunshade prevented them from actually seeing it.

  He could feel the disappointment starting to mount behind him on the passenger seats. But as he pulled to a halt half a kilometre shy of the acacia grove and stood up and turned to face his customers, he felt confident he could turn things round.

  ‘I’ve got something pretty special for you now, folks,’ he said, his voice lowered, almost whispering, to create an air of tension and expectancy. ‘Just round the corner there’s a special spot where rhino like to gather to feed and drink. With any luck they’ll be there right now, and let me tell you, this is a sight worth seeing. And about time too, eh guys?’

  There was a ripple of relieved laughter. Smuts grinned back, then sat back down in the driver’s seat and got the truck underway again.

  They were still a couple of hundred metres from the grove when Smuts caught sight of jackals feasting on a giant grey carcass. He cursed under his breath and prayed that none of his customers had spotted what was going on. He braked again, hopped down to the ground and grabbed his rifle.

  ‘Just a minute, folks. I just want to see if any of our rhino buddies are in the area. Just don’t leave the truck, hey? Don’t want anyone getting lost.’

  The laughter was a little more nervous this time, the tourists sensing there was something not quite right here.

  Smuts was gone barely a minute. When he returned to the vehicle his face had lost all its good humour. He did not say a word to his passengers. Instead he picked up his radio and spoke in Afrikaans, not wanting anyone else in the truck to understand as he reported the presence of poachers.

  Then he started up the engine again, pulled the truck into a three-point turn and headed back the way they had come.

  ‘Sorry about that, folks!’ Smuts shouted as he drove away. ‘Looks like our rhino buddies aren’t available. But don’t worry, this is a big reserve. And sooner or later we’ll find where its animals are hiding!’

  7

  When the news came through that poachers had killed Sinikwe and Fairchild, Dick Stratten’s first instinct was to go and investigate the incident himself. The younger men, however, were having none of it.

  ‘Come on, Dad, let me do it,’ Andy pleaded. ‘I could use some excitement.’

  ‘That’s what worries me,’ growled his father. ‘I don’t want any excitement, just someone to go and see what’s happened. If there’s going to be any action, any poachers getting scrubbed, I want some police right there so it’s all above board.’

  ‘Please, Mr Stratten, do not concern yourself,’ said Moses. ‘I am sure that no one will come to any harm.’

  ‘But Moses, dear,’ said Jacqui, ‘you must be tired after such a long flight from London. Wouldn’t you rather rest?’

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Stratten, I’ll be fine. I slept very well on the plane. This will make me feel as though I have properly come home. Besides, you have been very generous to me. I would like the chance to be useful to you, to show my appreciation for all that you have done.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Dick Stratten conceded. ‘Take a couple of the boys with you. I want all four of you armed. But you are only to fire in self-defence. Do you understand me? I don’t want you arsing about, trying to act like John Wayne.’

  ‘John who?’ Andy said with a grin.

  ‘You know exactly what I mean, young man. Be careful out there.’

  ‘Please, darling,’ said Jacqui, ‘do what your father says. And come back safe.’

  Andy Stratten kissed his mother’s head as he passed her. ‘We will, Mum, no worries,’ he said, and then, to Moses, ‘Hey, boet, let’s cut!’

  The two friends bantered back and forth as they drove out to the site where the shootings had been reported. But the conversation stopped when they came upon the mutilated corpses of the two rhinos.

  ‘Bastards!’ hissed Andy. He turned to Moses. ‘Welcome back to Africa. Not a lot has changed.’

  ‘Not yet, no,’ Moses agreed. ‘Come, let us see what happened here, and where the killers went.’

  The four men began examining the crime scene, tracking every footprint across the grove, noting the patterns of cartridge shells as carefully as police forensics officers. Tracking spoor was a skill Andy had learned from his first footsteps. To the Ndebele it was a heritage that stretched back through countless generations to the very dawn of humankind.

  Moses spoke to the two other black Africans, then addressed Andy. ‘So, we are agreed: eight men, armed with AK-47s, but only seven of them fired. The eighth man stood here, watching the whole scene.’

  ‘The leader,’ said Andy, ‘giving orders.’

  ‘I would think so, yes.’

  ‘OK, so let’s see where they went. I know we promised the old man there’d be no heavy stuff, but if I find the bastard who ordered this, he’s a dead man.’

  ‘Yes, and then what will happen?’ Moses asked. ‘Nothing good for you, that is for sure. So you must calm that hot Stratten blood. We will follow these men. We will find them, observe them, call in their position and wait for the police. Then, maybe, you can have your revenge. But for now we just follow the spoor.’

  The poachers had made an attempt to cover their tracks and set false trails, but the failure of their deceits merely added to the confidence of the men following them. It was not long before they found the spot where the Hilux had been left. The tyre-tracks clearly showed how the poachers had turned off the road and left their vehicle screened by mopane scrub. They had not turned back on to the road, though, when they left the scene. Instead, they’d kept going away from it, deeper into the scrubland.

  ‘They headed for the river,’ said Andy. ‘They must be nuts.’

  ‘Perhaps they thought they could cross it,’ Moses suggested.

  ‘There are fords, but not here. They can’t be that stupid, can they?’

  Moses shrugged. ‘Not stupid, perhaps, but desperate. We should be careful. Maybe we should stop here. There are eight of them, remember.’

  ‘Stop? No way. I will have these fuckers, mark my words.’

  Moses said nothing. But his knuckles whitened around his gun and his eyes darted nervously around as they made their way through the mopane bushes that rose as high as ten feet to either side of the path forced through the undergrowth by the heavily laden pick-up.

  No one was talking now. The air was still and close, heavy with the resinous, turpentine smell of mopane seeds, and the men’s shirts were gummed to their backs with sweat. The visibility was poor in every direction, every sightline blocked by trunks, branches and foliage. The men bowed their heads low, looking ahead of them at ground level, below the foliage, hoping to catch sight of a poacher’s feet or his shadow.

  Even Andy Stratten’s demeanour lost its bullish confidence. His father had fought in the vicious civil war that led to the transformation of the white-ruled former colony of British Mashonaland into a
n independent Malemba governed by its own people, but his son had been spared that pitiless conflict. For all his talk of revenge he had never gone after human prey, nor been a target himself. Fear was gripping him by the throat and twisting his bowel and guts.

  Then, with barely a warning, they were through the scrub and standing by the banks of the river. There, sure enough, was the Hilux, its front wheels and bonnet half underwater, its cab tilting down towards the river, only its rear wheels still finding some purchase on the damp red soil of the bank.

  ‘Fuck!’ Andy Stratten exclaimed. ‘I hope those dumb munts can swim.’

  His relief had made him forget himself: he’d used the white Malemban slang for a black man. No sooner had he said it than he realized his offence.

  He was starting to stammer an apology to Moses when the sound of his voice was drowned by two sharp bursts of gunfire. The two estate workers had no time to cry out, still less raise or fire their weapons as the bullets from the AK-47s dropped them where they stood.

  The poachers emerged from the mopane scrub, just a few paces away, screaming and gesturing at Andy and Moses to drop their weapons. Then their leader stepped on to the open ground on the riverbank. His eyes hidden behind a pair of fake designer shades, he walked up to Andy Stratten and jabbed a finger hard at his chest.

  ‘Now who’s the dumb munt?’ he said.

  Then he stepped back and got out of the line of fire as the order rang out and the guns started chattering again.

  8

  They called themselves war veterans, men who had served in the endless string of conflicts, at home and abroad, that plagued Malemba along with so many other African countries. They were psychologically scarred by their experiences, filled with rage and convinced of their entitlement to land and money in compensation for their services to the state.