Silent Predator

by Tony Park

  The obvious answer meant Tom had no time to lose. ‘I’m going after them.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  Tom walked out of Greeves’s room onto the walkway. Sannie followed him, opening her mouth to protest.

  ‘Hey, what’s all the commotion?’ Carla, her hair in disarray and buttoning her safari shirt, walked out of Tom’s suite. She was barefoot and her green skirt was askew, a rear pocket facing the front.

  Sannie shook her head in disgust. ‘You tell her,’ she said to Tom. ‘I’ve got more calls to make and you, Tom, are going nowhere. This is now a South African Police Service matter and I have jurisdiction until a more senior officer arrives. Get yourself cleaned up, Carla. There’s bloody work to be done.’

  Tom turned and walked back through reception, past the South African minister and his advisor, out front to where the Land Cruisers were still parked in preparation for the morning game drive.

  ‘Duncan, get your rifle; we’re walking!’ On the dashboard of Duncan’s Cruiser was a Czech-made Brno hunting rifle, which the guide carried in case he took his tourists for a game walk in the Tinga concession.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll explain as we walk.’ And Tom did. ‘Ignore them,’ he said as they moved through reception. It seemed everyone had a cell phone pressed to his or her ear and all were talking at the same time.

  Tom led Duncan back into Greeves’s unit and then to Joyce’s, explaining what had happened. Duncan climbed over the balcony railing outside Bernard’s suite and dropped the metre to the long grass below. He started moving in an arc, around the front of the suite, to the far side of Greeves’s and then back to a central spot between the two. ‘This way,’ he said.

  Tom jumped down into the grass. He would have liked to have changed into trousers and a stouter pair of shoes, but shorts would have to do as there was no time to waste.

  Duncan pointed back towards Bernard’s suite. ‘That man put up more of a fight. Is he the young one?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tom said. It figured. Joyce was ex-navy, physically fit and well built. Over dinner last night, he’d lamented the lack of a gym, saying he visited his local in Westminster daily when in London. Greeves didn’t carry any excess weight, but as a politician his life consisted of being driven from one free meal to another. It was not surprising the older man had been easier to subdue. Tom was already impressed with Duncan’s skills.

  ‘Six men moving through the bush, here. Two plus one, and two plus one,’ he said, pointing to each unit, and Tom understood what he was saying. Two pairs of assailants had made the abductions. Duncan moved now, head down, walking bent at the waist, looking for flattened grass. He broke off a yellowish stalk and held it up. Tom saw the dried brown stain. He didn’t need to be told it was blood. Greeves, it seemed, had been injured somehow in his room. There were no bloodstains in Bernard’s room. ‘One man, the younger one, I think, is being dragged now. See here, his heel marks in the dirt. They have made him unconscious, I think.’

  Tom tried to imagine the kidnappings. Perhaps the assailants knocked on their doors, masquerading as Tinga staff; perhaps they were in the victims’ rooms already, waiting. All staff would have to be interviewed later, as a matter of course. If it was an inside job they’d soon be able to spot the accomplice or accomplices through some rigorous interviews. ‘How old are these tracks?’

  Duncan paused and dropped to one knee, brushing some stalks of grass aside. ‘A mouse has crossed the path, here, and a small cat, a genet or wild cat, has stopped to sniff the blood on this grass. The blood is dry. The grass that was flattened has recovered. These tracks may be three or four hours old.’

  Duncan led him under the boardwalk, then over one of the knee-high electric fences. ‘They stopped here, to lift the two men over the live wire.’

  That made sense, Tom thought. They couldn’t have risked Greeves making a noise, or maybe coming to, if the fence zapped him, although presumably by this stage in the escape he would have been gagged. Tom picked at a branch studded with thorns, which had snagged on his shorts. His arms were already latticed with scratches from the short walk.

  ‘Four men lay here. Look, you can see where the grass is flattened.’ Tom looked to where Duncan was pointing at what must have been the lying-up point prior to the attack. The attackers had waited here, in deep bush behind the elevated walkway, at the base of a thickly leafed tree. They could look up, through the foliage, and out over the boardwalk, but anyone on the walkway would have been hard-pressed spotting them, especially in the dark. ‘Look.’

  Tom was about to move on, when Duncan held up a box of matches to the morning light. Tom wished he hadn’t touched it, as it might contain a DNA trace or even partial fingerprint. Still, the niceties were already out the window on this investigation. Time was all important. It was careless of one of the men to leave behind evidence, let alone to be smoking while waiting to get the jump on someone.

  ‘Mozambican,’ Duncan said, handing the matchbox to Tom. The label was yellow and carried the words Pala Pala, Fosforeira De Mocambique above a picture of a curved-horned sable antelope on the front. Tom turned it over. On the back was a map of Mozambique, and a drawing of a compass.

  ‘Can you buy these in South Africa?’

  Duncan shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen them.’

  The Kruger Park occupied a long, narrow swathe of land running north-south along the border between South Africa and Mozambique. Were the kidnappers from the former Portuguese colony, and was that where they had taken Greeves and Joyce? Dropping the matchbox and possibly smoking while waiting told him the men were not professional. Another piece of the puzzle and a small point in their favour, but only if they moved quickly.

  Duncan led him along the wooden fence that separated the accommodation units from the staff quarters, which were housed in the buildings of the old national parks camp which had survived the floods in 2000. From there, once they passed the last hut on the extreme left, the trail hooked back around to the entrance road, over another low-level electric fence. Tom cursed. The concept of letting animals move to and from the river through the lodge’s grounds had created an opening for the kidnappers.

  Tom was sweating by the time they made it to the dirt track. Duncan moved fast, and the rising sun burned the top of Tom’s hatless head and stung his bare arms, which were also becoming scratched by thorny branches. He guessed they were about three hundred metres from the Tinga entrance gates – far enough for a vehicle to have been started up without attracting anyone’s attention. ‘Did they have a vehicle parked here?’

  Duncan circled the area where the footprints met the road, holding up a hand, silently telling Tom to stay back from the track. He retraced his steps, careful to stay in his own footprints. He knelt on the edge of the road and beckoned Tom over. He was smiling broadly as he nodded to himself.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Oil.’

  ‘So?’ Tom had already deduced the kidnappers had rendezvoused with a vehicle.

  Duncan dipped a finger in the liquid and, just as he did, Tom registered the significance of what he was seeing. ‘It hasn’t sunk into the dirt yet!’

  ‘Even better,’ Duncan said, his eyes echoing Tom’s excited look. ‘Feel.’

  Tom reached out and touched Duncan’s fingers. ‘It’s still bloody warm!’ It was the best news he’d had since waking. The vehicle had been there a very short time ago. ‘Follow the tracks to the tar road, Duncan. I’ll call for some help.’

  Tom had his mobile phone out as he jogged down the dirt road towards the entrance gate. He scrolled through his address list and called Sannie’s mobile number.

  ‘Van Rensburg.’

  ‘Sannie, meet me at the entrance gate – now. We’ve found the tracks of the getaway vehicle. They only left half an hour or so ago.’ He didn’t stay on the line long enough for her to object.

  She was frowning when he met her at the gate. ‘Tom, I’ve called the detectives at Nelspruit. They’l
l be here soon.’

  ‘Christ, Sannie, we can’t wait. They must have hidden in the bush waiting for sun-up, though I don’t know why.’

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Private citizens can’t drive in the park after dark. If they were seen by a ranger they would have attracted attention to themselves immediately. More likely they hid up in the bush nearby and, when the kidnappers had your guys, radioed for a pick-up. The rest camp gates open at five-thirty and Skukuza’s close by. Tinga’s game drives don’t get onto the public roads until about six-thirty.’

  Tom checked his watch. It was six-twenty. ‘So what you’re saying is they could have left some time in the last forty-five minutes or so and not aroused suspicion?’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Then we’ve got to act now.’

  She looked back over her shoulder towards the lodge. He could understand her conflicted loyalties. On one hand she, like him, would want to get on the trail of the abductors as soon as possible, but at the same time her prime job was to protect the South African defence minister. Also, she had to wait at Tinga for Isaac Tshabalala to arrive, as well as the detectives from Nelspruit. ‘Tom, you’ve got no jurisdiction here.’

  ‘I’ve also lost the two men I was supposed to be protecting. There’s nothing more I can do here, Sannie. Can’t you see?’ He told her about the number of men, and the discovery of the Mozambican matchbox. He handed it to her.

  Duncan trotted down the road towards them, his rifle held loose in his right hand. His tight, short green shorts, cut high above the knee, and his brown ankle boots emphasised his well-developed thigh and calf muscles. He was barely perspiring, while Tom was wiping his brow with the back of his shirt sleeve. ‘They went left onto the tar road, heading north-east. That’s all I can tell you about the vehicle right now. I can’t track it on the sealed road. Also, I had another look at the point where they met the vehicle. There were two spots of oil. The front drops were from the engine – it was black sump oil, very thin. The rear stains were gear oil, from the diff.’

  Tom nodded. ‘An old vehicle, you think?’

  Duncan nodded too. ‘There was one more set of footprints – the driver. There were drag marks and footprints at the back of the vehicle, and footprints only on the sides of the vehicle where they got in.’

  Tom was already building a mental picture of the getaway car. ‘That’s five suspects, plus the two victims. Drag marks at the back, you say? That means Joyce might still be unconscious. Were they loading him into the rear of a vehicle?’

  ‘Yes, a bakkie, I think.’

  ‘A what?’

  Sannie interjected, ‘What you would call a pick-up or a utility vehicle. Sounds like a double cab. Two men in the front, two or three in the back. Maybe one guy in the load-carrying area to keep a gun on the two victims.’

  ‘That makes more sense. The rear area could be enclosed with a canopy, probably with tinted windows. That narrows down the possible range of vehicles.’

  Sannie shook her head. ‘A double-cab bakkie with a canopy on the back, old enough to be dripping oil from the engine and the rear diff? Tom, that describes about every second vehicle in South Africa!’

  ‘It’s something, damn it. Not every holiday car in this park is going to have five or six men crammed into it.’

  Sannie was already on the phone to Isaac, giving a description of the likely vehicle and number of occupants, along with a suggestion – she couldn’t issue orders – that the description be radioed to all police officers in the park and all entry and exit gates. ‘There are security guards at every gate,’ she explained to Tom after hanging up. ‘They check vehicles on the way out for plant and animal products that people might have illegally picked up.’

  ‘I need a map.’

  ‘There’s one in the Cruiser. I’ll go and get the vehicle,’ Duncan said, sprinting off.

  Sannie looked as though things were rapidly moving out of her control, but she was not quick enough to stop Duncan. It was incredibly frustrating for Tom to think that he had possibly missed Greeves and Joyce by mere minutes. ‘I’ve got to get rolling, Sannie. There’s mobile phone reception in most of this part of the park – you told me that – so you can keep in touch with me and I can keep in touch with London. If I do catch them – and that’ll be a miracle – I’ll call for back-up.’

  ‘Okay.’ Sannie pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers and closed her eyes for two seconds. She took a deep breath. ‘You know it’s the wrong thing to do in this situation, but it also makes the most sense.’

  Duncan pulled up and jumped from the Land Cruiser but left the engine idling. He opened his Kruger map book to the pages that showed the south-west corner of the park and laid it on the vehicle’s bonnet.

  Sannie pointed to Tinga Legends Lodge, just north of Skukuza, near the border of the park in a section that bubbled out to the west, like the toe of a long boot. Otherwise, the park was roughly a long, narrow rectangle stretching north along the Mozambican border. She traced the route out from the lodge to the tar road, which was shown in red on the map. ‘Okay. They’re heading north-east, possibly towards Mozambique, though we’re basing that on a discarded matchbox. From here there are two official border crossings within a day’s drive. They could head south-east,’ Sannie’s finger moved off the map at the bottom right-hand corner, ‘and leave the park via the Crocodile Bridge Gate and cross into Mozambique at Komatipoort. That’s the main crossing for people travelling from South Africa and very busy.’

  ‘Would that make it harder or easier to smuggle through two guys bound and gagged in the back of your vehicle?’ Tom said.

  ‘Harder. The customs guys are thorough on the other side. They hate South African holiday-makers taking their own drinks and groceries into Mozambique instead of buying locally, so they always check the boot looking to make you pay duty on something. The other crossing is up here,’ she flipped over a couple of pages of the map book and traced a route to the north-east, ‘about midway up the park, through the new Giriyondo border post. This one was created to allow access into the new transfrontier national park which has been set up opposite Kruger. It’s quieter and the customs guys might be more relaxed, but I can’t imagine kidnappers risking using the official crossings.’

  ‘Could they just drive through the bush?’

  ‘Not drive all the way, but maybe walk.’

  Tom was surprised as Sannie briefly described how many Mozambicans illegally crossed into South Africa via the wilds of the Kruger Park, in search of work and a new life. ‘Some are killed by lions and other game on the way, but enough of them think it’s worth the risk.’

  ‘So they could cross anywhere, if they abandoned their vehicle?’

  ‘Sure,’ Sannie agreed, ‘but there aren’t many roads on the Mozambican side and they wouldn’t want to be on foot with two prisoners for several days.’

  Duncan leaned in to study the map. ‘I know this area. My parents were from Mozambique originally. The nearest towns on the other side are Machatunine, Macaene and Mapulanguene.’

  Sannie peered closer at the map. ‘There’s a tar road south of Kruger’s Satara rest camp that ends very close to the border, near the Singita private lodge – the old N’wanetsi National Park camp. That last village you mentioned is not far across the border from there.’

  ‘Mapulanguene,’ Duncan repeated, nodding. ‘No more than twenty kilometres.’

  ‘Ja. The N’wanetsi River cuts through the Lebombo Mountains there, but it’s overlooked by Singita and a public national park picnic site, isn’t it?’

  Tom looked at the map to where they were pointing. ‘What about this dirt road, just to the north?’ The parallel route, called the S100, was a little south of Satara camp.

  Duncan rubbed his chin. ‘Yes. Perhaps they could take the dirt road, cross the border into the bush, and cut down to the N’wanetsi, out of sight of the tourists.’

  Tom asked Sannie if she could task police or national
parks patrols to cover the three points in the park where there were roads and villages within striking distance on the other side of the border in Mozambique.

  ‘I’ll do what I can, Tom. It’s the closest thing we’ve got to a plan. Of course, if we’re wrong about the Mozambican connection, we could be heading in the wrong direction.’

  ‘Right now, I just want to be heading somewhere.’

  ‘Tom, be careful. These men must know the bush, particularly if their plan is to set off on foot through the park. They’ll be armed, and that area is lion country.’

  ‘I’ll look after him,’ Duncan said, climbing into the Land Cruiser as Tom got into the passenger seat.

  ‘You should probably be staying here, Duncan, but I didn’t see a thing.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Tom said.

  ‘Tom, wait.’ Sannie placed a hand on the sill of the vehicle’s cut-down door. ‘Good luck.’

  Sannie walked back down the driveway to Tinga’s reception area. Carla was in the foyer. ‘I need somewhere to set up a command post. It needs to be private, have telephone access, a TV with DSTV, and somewhere to set up a computer.’

  Carla had found time to do her hair and makeup. ‘The function centre’s booked for a seminar all day today. It’s one of the banks from Jo’burg. I can’t put them anywhere else, and the delegates are taking up all our spare rooms tonight. Why don’t you use Tom’s room? He’s going to want to be in on the action whenever he gets back from wherever he’s gone.’

  ‘Okay. I’m going there now to set up. Call me when Captain Tshabalala arrives.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Carla said, giving her a mock salute.

  Sannie was in no mood for humour, or Carla. She strode down the walkway and let herself into Tom’s room. When she got there, she couldn’t ignore the rumpled bed, or the smell of perfume. She grimaced. As sorry as she felt for Tom, she was still annoyed at him for trying to smooth-talk her all day and then bedding that tramp Carla without a second thought. She left the front door ajar and slid open the glass sliding doors to get a draught going through the room to expel the odours.