by Tony Park
Sarah threw back her head and laughed out loud. ‘Whoa! Yes! We did it!’
Her rush was infectious and Mike laughed too. ‘What were you doing up there with Orlov? I nearly shat myself when I got your message.’
‘I told him I wanted to fuck him,’ she said, wiping a tear of laughter from her eye. The driver looked up at his rear-view mirror.
‘Eyes on the road, shamwari,’ Mike said, using the Shona word for friend. ‘You what?’
‘Hess left the table ten minutes after you’d gone. He said he left his wallet in his room,’ she explained, gasping as she brought her breathing under control. ‘I knew I’d have to warn you so I told Orlov I had to make an urgent call, to cancel some plans for the evening. He was well confused by now. Anyway, when I called and you didn’t answer I thought the only way was to get upstairs before Hess found you.’
‘So Orlov all of a sudden got lucky,’ Mike said, marvelling at her audacity and quick thinking.
‘You should have seen the pig,’ she said, shaking her head and letting out another laugh of released nervous tension. ‘He nearly lost it there and then. Boy, was I bad! Anyway, as we got to the stairs I pretended to start dry-heaving. I asked him his room number and, when he told me, I started running as fast as I could, saying I needed to be sick. We bumped into Hess and I saw you had just made it out of the room in time. Great fun, wasn’t it?’
He ignored her last, flippant, remark. ‘Hess wasn’t looking for his wallet – or if he was, it wasn’t in his room.’
‘Shit. Do you think he was on to us?’ she asked. The cab swung into the gates of the camping ground and stopped. Mike paid the driver, and they climbed out. He was keen to continue their conversation, but away from prying ears.
‘I’m not sure. But Hess is a man who travels very light. The only things he didn’t have on him of value were his pistol and his GPS. I think he was going back for one or the other, or both.’
‘A GPS?’ she said, as they walked towards Nelson. Mike could see a few of the gang were gathered around, sitting on camp chairs or lounging in the back of the truck.
‘Global Positioning –’
‘I know what a GPS is,’ she snapped. ‘What’s so important about his toy?’
‘It may give us some leads about where they’re really going and what they’re planning. I think it also contains some incriminating evidence about where they’ve been. I took down one of his stored coordinates.’ Mike fished the sheet of notepaper out of his top pocket and showed it to her.
‘‘‘O”? What does that mean?’
‘I want to find out. Once I’ve checked out the coordinates I’ll call Theron, the cop who’s pulling my string.’
Linda stood up as soon as she saw them approaching. Mike could see that she was dressed for a night out. She had on a lime-green mini dress made of layers of some sort of see-through material.
‘Oi, here they are,’ she called to the rest of the group. ‘Where have you two been? And, more to the point, what have you been up to?’
‘High tea at the Victoria Falls Hotel, if you must know. I was taking some more photos for my story,’ Sarah added.
‘Really know how to have a good time, don’t you,’ Linda said, then lightened her tone. ‘Here, it’s George’s twenty-first birthday today. Terry just told us. He’s in the shower and reckons he didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but Terry wants to wind him up big time.’
Terry chimed in, ‘Yeah. He’s just being a twat. So I reckon it’s party time for George. Linda’s found a club up the road. Are you in, Mike?’
Mike had work to do, but he realised his passengers still had to be his first priority. After all, it was his job to look after them. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said, trying to sound enthusiastic. ‘Give me ten minutes to sort some stuff out.’
‘OK,’ Terry said, ‘but you’ve got to be here in ten for the presentation of George’s birthday present. I’ve brought it all the way from England and he hasn’t a clue. I told him I wouldn’t make a fuss on his birthday. Bollocks to that.’
‘Mike,’ Sarah said, ‘weren’t you going to show me that promotional blurb about the company?’
‘Oh, right. Yes. I’ve got it in the cab. Come and take a look now, if you like,’ he said, catching on.
Sarah sat beside Mike in the cab and he switched on the interior light, as it was nearly dark outside. He took out the canvas satchel containing his maps from behind the driver’s seat. They were an odd assortment, ranging from highly detailed charts prepared by government offices to tourist maps that were little better than those in a junior school atlas. The map of Mozambique wasn’t bad and at least it had lines of latitude and longitude on it. Mike unfolded it and checked the margins.
From the first glance he could tell the longitude of the point listed simply as ‘O’ was somewhere in Mozambique. He found the Tropic of Capricorn and traced his finger across the page, getting a rough approximation of where the coordinates of degrees, minutes and seconds intersected the line of latitude.
‘Oh Christ,’ he said, meaning it for once. He squeezed the thumb and forefinger of his left hand to his eyes to try to shut out the kaleidoscope of images that the list of numbers on a piece of paper had conjured up.
‘Mike, what is it?’ Sarah asked.
‘It’s them.’
‘Who’s them?’
‘This spot. Point “O”. It’s where the elephant was killed last year. I know this area. It’s where I was working.’ He opened his eyes and saw little pinpoints of silver light flashing in from the peripheries of his vision. He felt weak and clammy, like he was going to pass out, but the weakness disappeared as quickly as it had taken hold. He clenched his right hand into a fist, balling the map with it.
‘Then “O”, presumably, is for Orlov,’ she said triumphantly.
But this wasn’t a game for Mike. ‘Yes. That’s probably the spot where I shot him. Hess would have had to have given a precise location to the chopper pilot to pick them up.’
Sarah at last saw the quiet anger that was gripping him. ‘Mike,’ she said softly, ‘I know you blame yourself for . . . for what happened afterwards. But you mustn’t. You were under fire and you did the only thing you could have. The important thing is that we’ve got enough evidence now to nail the pair of them.’
‘Have we?’ He doubted it would be enough for a court. But he was certain, now, that Hess and Orlov were the men he was looking for. And if the police couldn’t catch them, then he would.
‘What did you make of that?’ Hess asked Orlov as the Englishwoman and the Australian man disappeared quickly down the stairs.
‘Make of it? Nothing. A drunken whore. A whore of good breeding, for sure, but nothing more,’ Orlov replied, though the beads of sweat on his forehead belied his nervousness.
‘What about their questions, and that remark about the rhino? What had you been talking about before I arrived?’ Hess asked.
Orlov’s face coloured with anger and he lowered his voice. ‘Listen, my friend, do not be accusing me of having a loose tongue. Remember, it is I who pay the bills and I who stand to lose the most in this venture.’
‘Of course, Vassily,’ Karl said, rubbing his hand through his blond hair. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest you had done wrong, but we must be careful.’
‘I realise this, of course. We were talking about the big five, and the difficulty of shooting a rhino these days. Harmless banter, nothing more. As for the woman, a man of my standing, my wealth . . . well, let us just say that I never have to try hard to win the ladies.’ Orlov forced a laugh.
Hess didn’t doubt what Orlov said. He was sure that back in Moscow, where he would be known by reputation, and where he probably wore his wealth like a cheap tart wears her perfume, the Russian would be surrounded by dozens of gold-digging women. But here in the hotel, Orlov looked like just another tourist and, thanks to his early morning hunt, like a bedraggled tourist at that.
‘The other thing that concerned me wa
s how quickly she slipped from seductress to drunkard,’ Hess said.
‘I’ve seen it happen,’ Orlov countered. ‘Perhaps she was taking drugs as well. Ecstasy or cocaine, maybe?’
‘It’s possible,’ Hess conceded. Indeed, it was possible that the woman was just an innocent philanderer. However, Hess had not survived more than twenty years in the African bush in war and peace by ignoring his instincts. Those instincts told him their armour had been pierced and their secrets compromised. ‘Please wait for me, Vassily, I want to check my room.’
Hess left Orlov in the corridor and worked the key card in the lock of his door. At first glance everything in the room seemed to be as he remembered it. He crossed to the bed and unzipped the holdall. The pistol was still there. The weapon was what he had been coming back to the room to collect, his urge to have the gun on him driven by nothing more than his instincts.
He took the pistol from the holster and pulled the slide partially backwards. Then he checked in the chamber, to confirm the weapon was still loaded, and eased the slide forward again. He replaced the weapon in its holster, shrugged his arms into the shoulder rig and continued his checking.
Hess was about to zip the bag closed again when his eye was drawn to his leather-bound personal organiser. Particular about most things, Hess was obsessive regarding zippers. He had seen comrades who should have known better discover venomous puff adders in their sleeping bags because they were too lazy to zip and roll them. He had heard his hunting clients cry out in alarm when they discovered a scorpion or spider in a tent because they had ignored his exhortations to keep their tents zipped at all times. The shiny brass teeth of the half-open zip on his organiser grinned incongruously at him. He unzipped the casing all the way and flicked through his diary. He was not stupid enough to have left any incriminating information in the pages of the diary, and he next leafed through the notebook.
There, again, was another inconsistency. If Hess tore pages from the notebook he did so slowly and carefully. The last fresh page of the book was preceded by a ragged tear where a page had been hastily torn. There was a pencil in the centre of the organiser, next to the gold pen, and he slipped it from its elastic holder.
Hess switched on a bedside lamp and held the notebook near the light. He tilted the fresh page of the notebook until the light caught the faint indentations on its surface. Quickly he rubbed the pencil across the surface and swore silently when the figures and letters appeared, as if by magic, in white amid the dark rubbings.
‘Vassily! Come here, quick,’ he called from the room.
He beckoned the Russian in and closed the door. Orlov did not want to believe the evidence he had uncovered, but Hess even turned on the GPS and showed him the coordinates.
‘Someone has been in this room. I can only assume it was the man, the Australian, and that the woman was a decoy to keep us distracted,’ Hess concluded.
‘You kept the coordinates from Mozambique?’ Orlov was unable to hide his incredulity.
‘I have coordinates in that thing from three years ago,’ Hess replied. ‘The important thing, Vassily, is not what this man found, but that he knew what he was looking for.’
‘But you said you had my position, where I was wounded in Mozambique, listed only under the letter O, yes?’
‘That’s correct,’ Hess said irritably. He knew he had made a mistake, a rare enough occurrence, and he was as angry with himself as he was with the Russian for reminding him again.
‘Why would this man attach significance to a coordinate with a single letter for identification?’ Orlov pondered aloud.
There was only one answer. ‘He must have recognised the coordinates as being in Mozambique.’
Orlov nodded, recalling the pain of his wound. How he had wanted to kill the man who did that to him.
‘Then they – whoever they are – now have proof of where we have been. And they may have worked out where we are going,’ Hess said in summation.
‘They have no proof,’ Orlov countered. ‘Delete the coordinates. Karl, I did not get where I am by turning back whenever I met resistance. I came here to hunt, and I mean to complete my hunting. This problem can be resolved, one way or another.’
Hess nodded, fully aware of the path Orlov was heading down. If they were police, then they were not South African Police. Interpol, perhaps? That meant the authorities already had a lead on him and Orlov, though how they had got this far he could not deduce. They had to find out who the couple were, who they were working for and how much they already knew. Orlov would get his hunt, and it would start immediately.
‘The man said he was taking her back to the wedding reception downstairs. That much we can check,’ Hess said. He strode across the room to his suit bag and selected a lightweight tan sports jacket. He put on the coat in order to conceal the pistol in its holster.
Hess closed the door behind them and they walked briskly down the corridor to the stairs. They crossed the open foyer to the reception desk where a young woman was just saying her farewells to her similarly uniformed colleague.
‘See you tomorrow,’ the woman said.
‘Excuse me, miss,’ Hess said to the woman who was coming on duty. ‘I’m looking for two friends of mine who are attending the wedding function. Can you tell me where in the hotel it is being held, please?’
The woman checked a diary on the desk in front of her, but the departing receptionist, who was now on the same side of the counter as the two men, stopped and turned. ‘Hello. Mr Hess and Mr Orlov, isn’t it?’
‘That is correct,’ Orlov said.
‘The reception’s in the main banquet room, just down the hallway there on your left. You can’t miss it,’ she said brightly. It had been a long day and she needed a drink and a long bath to soak her sore feet, but service was the name of the game in the hotel industry and she wanted to go far.
‘Thank you, my dear,’ Orlov said. ‘Come, Karl.’
‘Pleasure,’ said the girl. ‘Your friends did find you, didn’t they?’
Orlov and Hess both stopped and turned to face the girl.
‘They were waiting for you this afternoon. Quite keen to catch up with you when you arrived,’ she continued.
‘Yes, they found us all right,’ Orlov said, trying to suppress the mix of fear and anger boiling inside him. He fought to keep his voice steady and forced a benign smile. ‘Have you seen them just now?’
The woman paused a moment. In the hotel business there was a fine line between being helpful and being indiscreet. She couldn’t lie to a guest, though. ‘Um, yes, they left a little while ago, in a cab.’
‘Ah,’ Orlov said with a knowing smile. ‘Our Sarah, she likes a drink, I can tell you. Maybe Michael took her back to the hotel where they are staying.’
The woman was relieved that the two men obviously knew what was what. ‘Well, she was a bit excited. I don’t know about a hotel, but I did overhear the man asking the concierge to hail a cab to take them to the Municipal Campground.’
‘Thank you for your help, my dear,’ said Orlov, reaching for his wallet. He selected a crisp American ten-dollar bill and palmed it to the woman as he reached to shake her hand.
16
Sarah had managed to convince Mike that Orlov and Hess had no idea what they were up to and, after his fourth tequila slammer, even the memory of Hess’s eyes was dimming. Her ebullience was rubbing off on him. She had stayed close by his side all night. Their shared risk-taking earlier in the day at least gave them something to talk about. He found himself not minding her constant presence, and that surprised him a little.
The party went from bad to debauched. They had started drinking at the camping ground and by the time Terry got around to presenting George with his birthday present, an inflatable sex doll, everyone was wasted enough to appreciate Terry’s schoolboy antics. The doll, christened Britney by Linda, seemed to be enjoying the party as much as everyone else. George and Terry had snuck their new friend into the nightclub, deflated, and
re-inflated her once inside.
The club was dark and noisy and smelled of spilled beer, as well as a faint trace of urine and a big dose of sweat. The sound system pumped an eclectic mix of upbeat Shona music and the occasional thump of western techno. None of it made any sense to Mike. He had called Theron from the camping ground. The number he had for him was for a mobile phone and all he got was the detective’s voice mail. Mike left a long message outlining what they had and hadn’t discovered.
Sarah mouthed something, but Mike couldn’t hear her over the music’s din. The thumping bass of the techno was like someone tap-dancing on his temples.
‘What?’ he screamed.
‘Next! What are we going to do next?’ She had to move close to him so that he could hear.
Mike caught the heady mix of her perfume and perspiration, and tried to concentrate on his answer to her question. ‘Not much. We can’t contact them here again – not anywhere. They’d be too suspicious, even assuming they bought that Hollywood performance of yours.’
She laughed. ‘I thought I was pretty good.’
‘You were, you were,’ he said. He signalled to a passing waiter and ordered a beer. Sarah nodded and Mike ordered one for her as well. It had, in fact, been a hell of a performance. She had quite probably saved his life, and risked her own in the process. He thought, however, that she still underestimated what these men were capable of.
‘We’ve told the cops all we can at the moment, and that’s a lot more than they knew before they sent us on this wild goose chase,’ Mike continued. ‘From what you got out of Orlov, it’s possible we might bump into them again at Kariba. If they want to go to Tashinga they’ll probably do it by boat from Kariba.’
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Can’t they drive into the national park?’
‘They can, but it’s a lousy road and there’s no fuel or supplies in the park. They’d have to lug everything in with them. Besides, the best way to see game in that part of the country is by boat, when the animals come down to the lake shore to drink.’ He wondered again what it was that had drawn Hess’s interest to the remote national park.