by Tony Park
Sergeant Mpofu was overwhelmed by the information the woman had just told him. If it was true, the arrest would be the highlight of his career. Promotion and a posting to Maputo. Alternatively, he wondered how much the ivory would be worth on the black market, his mind exploring all possible avenues. First, he decided, he needed to inspect the helicopter to verify the woman’s claims. ‘Tell him I want to have a look at the helicopter,’ he said to the doctor.
‘No! He will be suspicious. Why don’t you just arrest him now?’ she replied testily, still in Portuguese.
Hess did not like the look on the woman’s face as she spoke to the policeman, who was himself starting to look agitated. While the pair babbled away in their foreign tongue, Hess slowly reached around his back and felt for the Glock in his waistband.
Mpofu was not going to be dictated to by a woman, attractive or otherwise, and he pointed towards the helicopter, indicating to the white man that he should accompany him. As he did so, he began to unsling his assault rifle.
As fast as a striking cobra, Hess pulled the pistol from his waistband and rammed the short barrel into the policeman’s temple. ‘Tell him to lay down his rifle, slowly,’ he hissed at Isabella, all trace of his American accent now gone. ‘I’ll trust you to at least get that sentence correct.’
She did as he asked, then added, in English, ‘You won’t get away!’
‘Wanna bet?’ he said with a smile, slipping back into the phoney drawl.
The tense silence was shattered by the boom of a shotgun. Isabella felt the whip of pellets slicing through the air, uncomfortably close to her shoulder. She spun around and saw Joseph, the nightwatchman, standing at the corner of the clinic. He had circled around the vignette unfolding in the square and timed his shot perfectly.
Hess flinched as a few lead pellets ripped through the fabric of his shirt and into his upper right arm. Although the wound was not serious, the force of the hit was enough to make him drop his pistol in the dust.
Joseph raised the ancient double-barrelled shotgun to his shoulder again and started walking towards the people in the courtyard.
‘Joseph, look out!’ Isabella cried, too late.
Klaus was on his feet now, the blanket falling to the ground as he raised his own weapon. He fired the AK-47 twice and the accurate hammer blows of the bullets punched Joseph backwards. Blood welled from the twin holes in his chest as he lay motionless in the dust.
Isabella dropped to her knees and reached for Hess’s fallen pistol, but the hunter, still on his feet, kicked her hard in the stomach and she doubled up in agony. Hess heard the whine of turbine engines starting behind him, and knew he would live to fight again. The African policeman had instinctively dropped to the ground as the gunfire began, his rifle still awkwardly slung over his back. Now he writhed in the dust as he reached up over his shoulder for the barrel. Hess stooped, the movement almost leisurely, and retrieved his pistol. He raised it, took a step towards the struggling policeman, and shot him between the eyes.
‘Enough killing! Stop it, damn you! Go. Just go,’ Isabella cried between painful gasping breaths.
Klaus was at Hess’s side now, awaiting orders. ‘Kill the other patients, Klaus. Oh, and them, too.’ Hess pointed languidly with his pistol to the two nuns who were running across the square, heedless of their own safety. ‘Take whatever valuables and drugs you can find. Make it look like a robbery.’
Tears started to well in Isabella’s eyes as she thought about Mike. Where was he? She wanted him here, by her side, so badly. She raised herself up onto her knees and looked up into the pitiless blue eyes of the man standing above her. She hawked from the back of her throat with all her might and then spat, full into his face.
Jan Viljoen busied himself checking the dials and gauges of his instrument panel. The engines were coming up to full power as he glanced across at the square. From the clinic building he heard the sound of rifle fire, above the engine’s roar. In the square he saw Hess standing over the kneeling form of the pretty female doctor. The Namibian had his arm outstretched, his pistol centimetres from the woman’s face.
Viljoen screwed his eyes tight, knowing what would happen next and not wanting to be a part of it. He flinched as he heard the single shot.
Theron and Sergeant Ndlovhu had to go to Mapai to pay a call on the local police commander there. Mike told them he needed to get to the town and Jake raised no objections when the policemen offered a lift. Theron wanted Mike to talk through his story once more. Mike and Jake shook hands, the briefest of farewells passing between them. The National Parks officers took copious photos of the now deceased national treasure and also left for Maputo.
As he walked to the police vehicle, Mike noticed a wide brown leather strap lying in the back of the National Parks bakkie.
‘It will take us a good two or three hours to reach Mapai. We’ll be lucky to make it by nightfall. Take the back seat and have a rest, Tobias,’ Theron said to Sergeant Ndlovhu.
The detective climbed in behind the wheel of the Land Rover and opened the passenger door from the inside for Mike. As the vehicle moved off, Mike rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. It was good to clear the stench of rotting flesh from his nostrils.
‘Did that collar in the back of the Parks truck come off the elephant?’ he asked Theron.
‘Ja. Those Parks okes are pretty embarrassed about it,’ he said, using the common Afrikaans slang term for ‘men’. ‘That was a radio collar on the old boy. They monitor their locations regularly and he shouldn’t have been allowed to get that far across the border.’
‘Surely they do, though? There’s no fence now to stop them from crossing into Mozambique and I thought that was the general idea, to let the animals go back to migrating across international borders.’
‘Not for a special elephant like old Skukuza – they wouldn’t let those tusks wander into Mozambique. The National Parks Board has helicopters and when they noticed him getting too close to the border they would have used their chopper to shepherd him back to safety.’
‘So what happened this time?’
Theron took a long drag on his cigarette and swerved to miss a pothole. He did not answer straightaway and Mike had the feeling he was weighing up whether to confide in him or not.
‘Sabotage. But keep that to yourself, eh?’ he said, jabbing his cigarette in Mike’s direction to emphasise his point. ‘Their helicopter was down for two days before this hit, and it took them that long to work out it was no accident.’
‘What makes you think there were two whites involved?’ Mike asked.
‘More, maybe, if you include their helicopter pilot. This was a hunting trip, not a bunch of ragtag Mozambican poachers. A big, expensive, illegal hunting trip. There are African helicopter pilots in Africa, and black professional hunters, but these are two areas where affirmative action has yet to make serious inroads,’ he said with a wink.
‘Go on,’ Mike urged him.
‘OK. You get a helicopter, you charter it, maybe even buy it – I don’t know for sure. Your helicopter pilot tells you how you can sabotage the National Parks helicopter and you buy someone to do that for you. You take your helicopter and you use it to drive one of the biggest elephants left in Africa across the border, away from where he is protected by men with guns, into a godforsaken part of one of the world’s poorest countries, where you know you won’t find any police or rangers for hundreds of kilometres. You shoot your elephant, or try and shoot it, but you stumble on to some people who shouldn’t be there – you,’ he said, nodding to Mike. ‘One of them points a rifle at you so you kill him. You don’t want any witnesses. You kill your elephant, your blacks cut out the ivory and you hover over the dead elephant while they load in the ivory. Then they climb aboard.’
‘Sounds expensive,’ Mike said.
‘It is. More than even those tusks are worth. Assuming you could find a buyer.’
‘Why not shoot the elephant from the helicopter and be done with it?’
Mike asked. He lurched forward and grabbed the dashboard as Theron geared down suddenly and swerved to miss a fallen branch that had partially blocked the road.
‘This comes back to my theory, that this is a hunt. For a trophy – a bloody big trophy, man. It’s not about money, it’s about men on foot tracking big game – with some help from a helicopter, of course. Have you ever hunted, Major?’
‘Call me Mike. No. I’ve seen enough killing in my time.’
Theron nodded. ‘Me too. But I used to hunt when I was a boy, with my father. Small buck, impala mostly, but there was nothing like that thrill. Primitive, you know.’
‘Why two white men, plus maybe the helicopter pilot?’
‘The professional hunter and his rich client. In this case, the very rich client.’
‘American?’ Mike guessed.
‘Maybe. Or German, or Italian.’
‘But you’ve got your suspicions about the hunter. You think you know who he is?’
‘Ah, now that would be wrong of me to accuse a man without any proof. Let us just say that we know of a few hunters who have bent the rules from time to time, yes?’
Bending the rules. Letting a client shoot a couple more buffalo or kudu than their permit allowed them was one thing, but to chase a protected animal out of a national park across an international border, kill it and murder a Mozambican ranger in the process was not bending the rules – that was obliterating them. Mike wondered briefly what sort of man would pay so much for the pleasure of killing one creature, but gave up. He had stopped really trying to fathom mankind after Rwanda. They left the theories there and filled the rest of the bumpy road trip with the stories of their lives.
‘I also was in the army. I was in Angola, but I had enough after that. Mind you, I’ve seen more than my share of action in the police since then.’
Theron explained that his love of wildlife and the bush had led him to the Animal Protection Unit. The unit was high profile, and specialised in infiltrating and busting poaching and smuggling rings.
‘Must be pretty nerve-racking, working under cover,’ Mike suggested.
‘Sometimes. We pose as sellers or buyers of wildlife. On one trip I went to the Netherlands. We were targeting a ring that was smuggling reptiles from South Africa to Europe. I was supposed to be a snake collector and I hate the goddamned things! I actually had to hold a rock python and pretend I was in love with it. Man, I nearly shit myself!’ His whole body shook as he laughed out loud. ‘So, why am I taking you to Mapai, to a clinic in this godforsaken part of the country?’ he asked.
Mike told him about Isabella.
‘Sounds like you’re serious about her?’ Theron ventured.
‘It’s looking that way.’
‘Good for you, man,’ he said. ‘I’m married. Three teenage daughters. You can’t beat a family – they’ll lock you up if you do!’ He laughed again.
From Isabella’s description of the clinic Mike knew that it was part of a mission station, run by a Catholic priest, a kilometre before Mapai on the road they were travelling. He checked the map and gave Theron the directions, telling him to look out for a right turn.
‘Jesus, what a mess,’ Theron said, pointing to the side of the road.
An ancient bus was interlocked with the prime mover of a long-distance lorry. The trailer was nowhere to be seen. The two vehicles were meshed as one, obviously having hit head on at some considerable speed. Most of the bus’s windows had either shattered on impact, or been smashed so that survivors could be extracted. The faded blue sides were now painted dark brown with streaks of dried blood.
‘Isabella was held up here because of this bus accident.’ Mike wondered if by tomorrow he would be describing Isabella as his fiancée.
As they neared the town, the bush was thinning out, felled for building and cooking fires by the residents of the unseen settlement ahead of them. When they crested a small rise, Mike looked across to his left and saw the setting sun was the colour of blood.
6
‘Theron needs to speak to you.’
The policeman’s name reverberated around Mike’s head as he drove through the gates of the Punda Maria rest camp in the north of Kruger National Park and stopped the yellow overland truck in the camping ground.
Jane Muir leaned into the front cab of the truck from her seat behind him. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, placing a hand on his forearm. ‘You look a little pale, and you’ve been very quiet since you took that call. Do you want to talk?’
Sarah, the journalist, gave the pair a brief glance, then opened her door on the passenger side of the cab and climbed out.
‘Sure. Later. We’ve got to get dinner on soon, though. I have got to go to the bathroom. Back in five,’ he said. Mike walked across to the thatch-roofed ablution block. Inside, he stopped at one of the sinks and turned on the cold tap. He splashed water on his face and stared at his reflection. Long hair, stubbled cheeks flanking his goatee beard, face a little fuller. His old friends from the army wouldn’t recognise him now.
He was desperate to know what Theron had found out – why he wanted to meet him after nearly a year had gone by. At the same time, he dreaded the meeting.
Punda Maria was higher, altitude-wise, than any other camp in the Kruger park, cooler and wetter than the bushveldt and grasslands to the south. As night encroached, the temperature dropped and he felt goosebumps on his bare arms. A chill coursed through his body as he recalled the drive to Mapai with Fanie Theron.
They were met by a policeman at the gate to the mission. A nervy, jumpy policeman who kept his right hand on the pistol grip of his rifle. Sergeant Ndlovhu tried a few words of Tswana, the common African patois that originated in the gold and diamond mines of southern Africa.
‘He understands,’ the sergeant said to Theron and Mike. ‘Worked in Jo’burg for a few years. He says people have been killed here, including a policeman.’
‘In the bus accident?’ Mike asked.
The sergeant and his Mozambican counterpart exchanged a few words. Ndlovhu looked at Theron, then at Mike. ‘No. Something else.’
Mike’s heart beat faster. ‘What does that mean?’
‘He says we should go up there, to the mission buildings. His superior is there. He speaks English.’
‘Thank him, Tobias, and let’s go have a look,’ Theron said.
Mike had known Isabella was dead as soon as they were stopped by the policeman at the mission gate. He knew it before they saw the bullet holes in the buildings, the bloodstained floor of the clinic, and the patch of sand in the mission square where Isabella had died.
They spoke to the PRM in charge of the investigation and the look on the officer’s face confirmed Mike’s fears as soon as they asked about the fate of the female doctor who had worked at the mission.
‘You identify body?’ the policeman asked Mike.
Hands clenched in rage and swallowing hard to keep from throwing up, Mike had wanted to hit someone. There was obviously not much scope for sympathy and condolences from someone for whom English was his third language.
The bodies had been taken to a butcher’s shop in Mapai, the only place with a coldroom big enough to store them all. There was no morgue like the ones Mike had seen on television cop shows. No shiny white tiles, no body laid respectfully on a polished steel table, no crisp white sheet lowered just enough for a grieving relative to give a little nod from the other side of a window in an air-conditioned viewing room. Just Isabella, his Isabella, laid out on a trestle table in a refrigerated shipping container with a hole in the centre of her forehead. No smooth pale skin for him to lay a hand on, no white cheek to kiss farewell and complete the mourning process, just a mask of dried, flaking blood. He choked, staggered from the room and vomited in the street.
‘Come with me, Mike,’ Theron said, wrapping a meaty arm around Mike’s shoulders.
Theron took him to the local police station, found a telephone and called the Portuguese embassy in Maputo, something the l
ocal police hadn’t got around to doing.
‘Spend the night here with us, Mike. We’ll drop you back at Maputo tomorrow. There’s nothing more we can do here.’
Numb and in shock, Mike accepted. ‘Thanks, Fanie,’ he said.
‘I want to go back to the mission, see what else I can pick up,’ Theron said, not minding they were both on a first-name basis. As well as sympathy for him, he felt a kind of kinship with the Australian soldier.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Mike said.
‘No. Tobias will stay here with you. You’ll gain nothing by going back there, and I’ve got official police business. You’ll do me a favour by staying out of the way.’ His words sounded dismissive, but his eyes were kind.
‘Come, I think you need a drink,’ Sergeant Ndlovhu said.
They went to a shebeen, an African bar. Concrete floor, loud music and cheap booze. The sergeant stayed by Mike’s side through long periods of silent staring, until the tears finally welled up from deep within him. Theron was there too, later in the night, when Mike wanted to get into a fight, and by his side when he was sick in the gutter. In the early hours of the morning the two policemen half carried him up the street to his cheap hotel.
‘Sleep now. She is gone, but that does not mean you will ever forget her,’ Ndlovhu said as they stared down at the unconscious form on the bed.
They left Mapai early, Theron driving. Breakfast was pao in the truck, plus a beer from the cold box for Mike to help ease the pain in his head.
‘OK, tell me what you found at the mission yesterday,’ he said.
‘Those Mozambican clowns didn’t want me there, man, I tell you. Said it was a robbery, simple as that. I told them what I had been doing, what had happened to you, Mike, but they couldn’t see a connection,’ he said, pausing to take a long pull from a can of Coke. Sergeant Ndlovhu snored in the back seat while his captain drove.