by Tony Park
After breezing through the laid-back Zimbabwean border formalities, Mike drove uphill from the dam and took a right turn down towards Andorra Harbour.
‘Welcome to Kariba, the Zimbabwean Riviera,’ Mike said to the crew.
‘Looks more like a ghetto to me,’ said Nigel, unimpressed.
‘Kariba’s a frontier town. It’s got a Wild-West feel about it, a hangover from the days when the only Europeans who lived in the Zambezi valley were crocodile hunters and the roughnecks who came to build the dam,’ Mike explained. ‘It’s also the closest thing that Zimbabwe has to a seaside. Boating and drinking are the main pastimes here. There are marinas, hotels, camp grounds, even a casino at Caribbea Bay.’
‘Hey! Buffalo,’ said Sam as he scrambled in his pack for his camera.
The entrance to the camping ground Mike had stopped outside was blocked by four scarred, mean-looking black buffalo bulls. ‘Buffalo are known in Africa as “black death”. That’s the name big-game hunters gave them because of their tendency to charge when wounded or startled,’ Mike said. ‘Stay in the truck.’
After a few blasts of the horn the old males eventually ambled down the road towards a sign pointing to the Kariba Yacht Club.
Mike smiled and waved at the security guard as they drove in, past a sign welcoming them to the MOTH campsite.
‘What’s a MOTH?’ Terry asked.
‘Large flying insect, I expect,’ said George.
‘It’s an acronym,’ Mike said. ‘It stands for “Men of the Tin Hat Society”. The “tin hats” was the nickname for Rhodesia’s old soldiers, veterans of the First and Second world wars. The campsite and chalets were set up as a fundraising venture by the society.’
The campsite was well laid out, with electricity boxes and garden furniture to make life a little more comfy for campers. They were right on the edge of the lake, although thick vegetation on the other side of the camp fence obscured any view of the water. A deep drainage ditch bisected the camping ground and ran into a small inlet of stagnant lake water.
Huge acacias shaded them from the afternoon sun as the group set up camp, but Mike was still sweating freely in the moisture-laden air by the time they finished. He needed a swim and a beer.
‘OK,’ he said to the crew, who clustered around him in the middle of the circle of green dome tents, ‘we leave for the houseboat at ten tomorrow morning. Before that, I’ll do a quick run up to the supermarket for any last-minute munchies or necessities that people need. Make sure you put your mozzie repellent on, the bugs are bad here. Also, if you do walk outside the camp, beware of animals.’ As if in confirmation a hippo honked from not far away. Everyone laughed – some a little nervously.
‘I’m heading for the yacht club. They do a mean steak there and excellent fish and chips. Otherwise, you know where the gas cooker is,’ Mike said.
About half of the crew, including Sarah, followed him out through the gates to the right and up a small hill towards the yacht club. The remainder, including Jane Muir, stayed around the camping ground, writing postcards or snoozing in their tents. A few opted for a walk. Nigel was playing solitaire at a picnic table and drinking a Coke.
The yacht club was an asbestos sheet and tin building which Mike thought must have looked slightly less tacky when it was built during the 1960s. ‘What it lacks in style it makes up for in location,’ he said as they walked through the car park at the rear of the clubhouse.
The long single-storey building was perched on a steep rise overlooking Lake Kariba and the far-off, purple-hued mountain range of Matusadona National Park. An elevated walkway jutted out from the bar to the bridge, a covered patio from where sailing races and sunsets alike could be appreciated. There was an air horn on the bridge, which Mike guessed was sounded to start and stop the races.
Mike bought the first round after paying a nominal day membership fee and distributed lagers, lemonades and Cokes. He smiled at Sarah when he handed her a gin and tonic but she didn’t smile back. As he waited for his change he glanced at the memorabilia behind the bar. Rhodesian army beer steins sat comfortably below a portrait of the whites’ one-time enemy who now ruled the country. A brass ship’s bell was screwed to the wall.
Sam walked into the bar, puffing from the exertion of the short walk in the afternoon heat. He was wearing his floppy bush hat and Mike knew there would be trouble when the thin, darkly tanned man who was sitting at the bar reached out for the cord on the bell’s ringer.
‘Decided to catch up with you guys after all –’ Sam started, but he was cut short by the loud clanging of the bell. ‘Hey, what was that? Beer time?’
‘Certainly is, and it’s your round, my boy!’ said the man, with a glint of joy in his blue eyes.
‘What do you mean?’ Sam asked indignantly.
‘Hat, hat, hat, my boy. Against club rules, don’t you know? No hats inside!’ he said with mock anger. He was thin but muscled, and had the look of a man who had spent his life on the water or in the bush, or both. He wore khaki shorts and a two-tone green and beige bush shirt. On his feet were ankle-length suede boots with no socks. By the amount of grey in his ginger hair Mike judged the man to be in his fifties, although his skin was deeply lined from years in the sun. His tan was mottled with darker spots that Mike guessed might one day turn to skin cancer.
‘No, I didn’t know,’ Sam said, quickly removing his hat.
‘Well, you do now. Ignorance of the law is no excuse,’ the man said.
‘Don’t sweat it,’ Mike chimed in. ‘Will you allow me to cover his debt?’ He was the only other customer in the bar, so it was going to be a cheap round anyway.
The older man scratched his chin thoughtfully and paused for a moment before conceding. ‘Highly irregular, you understand. I’ll accept your kind offer, but just this once. Also, if the boy were to oblige me with a small tot in the next round we might consider this delicate matter closed. Fair enough?’
‘Fair enough. Sam, can you take the rest of these drinks outside for me, please? What’ll it be, Mr . . . ?’
‘Gerald O’Flynn, but call me Flynn, everybody else does. Whisky, straight, plus a Castle chaser, if you please.’ They shook hands and Mike introduced himself.
Mike ordered the drinks and asked Flynn what he did for a living.
‘This, that and everything in between. Hunter, safari guide, heartbreaker and soldier of fortune,’ he said with a smile. ‘I came up here to Kariba during the war – our little war – and never left. That would have been around ’67, or ’68.’
The broken blood vessels in Flynn’s nose told Mike a fair amount of the man’s time in Kariba had probably been spent right where he was, on a bar stool in the yacht club.
‘So what are you doing now? Breaking hearts?’
Flynn laughed and said, ‘Maybe this evening. No, I’ve got a little job in a day or so. On standby, as it were. Couple of chaps coming up from down south who want to go for a walk in the bush.’
Down south, Mike knew, referred to South Africa.
‘Where are you taking them?’ Mike asked, savouring the first draught of cold liquid from the frosted beer glass. The yacht club was clearly as much about drinking as it was about sailing.
‘Across the water, to the Matusadona. I’m qualified to lead walking trips in the park.’
The untamed thick bush of Matusadona National Park rose up from the lake shore to the steep rocky cliffs of a low mountain range. The day was clear and the range was visible as a long, thin purplish smear on the far horizon. One of the girls shrieked as she jumped into the water of the club’s green-tinged swimming pool, which was set into a grassy terrace below where Flynn and Mike sat in the bar.
‘A few attractive girlies in your push, eh?’ Flynn said with a lascivious wink.
‘One or two,’ Mike said, looking down at Sarah, who had removed her tank top to expose a simple but sexy black bikini.
‘Am I right in thinking you’re the shepherd of this flock, Mike?’
; ‘For my sins. We’re off an overland truck, an old Bedford. I’m the driver, tour guide and father confessor.’
Flynn laughed. ‘You’d have to be paying me money to ride through Africa in the back of one of those things. Come to think of it, even when someone did pay me money to ride around in an army Bedford I still didn’t like it. Particularly when we hit that landmine in ’72!’
A phone rang behind the bar and the barman, who had been polishing glasses with a tea towel, answered it. ‘For you, Mr O’Flynn,’ he said. Neither the barman nor Flynn looked surprised. Mike imagined the guide took calls in the bar quite often.
‘Karl, good to hear from you, my boy.’ Flynn spoke loudly. ‘Speak up, I can hardly hear you. You’re on a what? A satellite phone? Bloody useless new technology, give me the drums any day, eh.’
Mike’s ears pricked up at the mention of the caller’s first name and he listened closely, straining to hear the voice on the other end of the phone.
‘OK. So you’re arriving when, now? What, tomorrow? That doesn’t leave me a lot of time to get the boat ready, but we’ll make a plan here and get everything organised for you. Just the three of you, still? Good.’
Flynn waved at the bar tender and pantomimed writing. The barman handed him a pen and Flynn turned over a cardboard beer coaster. Mike craned his head to see what the man was writing. He coughed as the beer suddenly slid down his throat the wrong way, and held up a hand to his mouth. Fortunately, Flynn was too busy winding up the conversation to notice the other man’s surprise at the words he had just written.
On the beer mat, in a bad but unmistakable hand, were the words: ‘Hess, 10am Friday’.
Flynn handed the receiver back to the barman. ‘Bloody German,’ he said with annoyance. ‘That’s my weekend stuffed.’
Mike tried to sound nonchalant. ‘You’ve got German tourists coming?’
‘No. He’s a Namibian, actually. But those Krauts are all the same, eh? Let me buy you a drink.’
‘No, please, this one’s on me. The last was just my friend’s penalty.’ Mike ordered two more beers and another whisky from the barman.
‘Cheers,’ Flynn said. ‘Where was I? Ah, yes, Karl Hess. I know him from way back. He served up here with the SAS – the Rhodesian Special Air Service – in the last couple of years of the war. Pretty boy, you know, but he was no softie, and that’s for sure.’
The drinks were loosening Flynn’s tongue, not that Mike sensed it needed too much to get him talking. The way the bartender studiously returned to polishing his glasses made Mike think the man was grateful there was someone else in the bar for the old hunter to bore.
‘What do you mean, “no softie”?’ Mike asked.
Flynn scratched the bristly salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin and stared out over the lake, which shimmered like liquid silver in the low afternoon light.
‘It was a dirty little war, that’s for sure, and we were none of us angels.’
The barman had finished with the glasses and was checking the fridge in preparation for the evening crowd. He walked out through a doorway at the back of the bar, presumably to a storeroom. Flynn waited until he was gone before continuing.
‘Karl was only a youngster then, in his twenties. Not in my patrol, but word travelled, you know. I heard a story once, don’t know if it’s true, that he beheaded a captured gook – that’s what we used to call the terrs, the terrorists, before they became known as freedom fighters. Apparently he did it in front of the man’s family to make them give up the location of some arms and the whereabouts of the rest of the man’s cell. Then, so the story goes, he put the man’s head in his pack and took it back to the Special Branch police, who were keen to make positive identification of any terrorists we killed.’
Mike sipped his beer. A man who was capable of an atrocity such as that would have had no qualms about executing Isabella and the other witnesses at the mission clinic. ‘No softie at all,’ he agreed.
‘None of that happened in my push, though. I’ll tell you that now. Still, Hess got results and he made it to sergeant before the end. Went back to his own army, down in South West Africa after that, and spent some time with the koevoets, a special police anti-terrorist unit, in Angola. Quite a few hard bastards in that little lot too, from what I heard. He’s been up here a few times over the years, bringing hunting clients with him. Europeans, mostly.’
‘So are these the people you’re taking across to Matusadona?’ Mike asked.
‘Indeed they are,’ Flynn said, then drained his whisky in one go. He chased it down with cold beer from a dew-encrusted glass. ‘Mother’s milk,’ he added appreciatively.
‘But surely they won’t be hunting over there?’ Mike said, gesturing across the water.
‘Good lord, no. National park over there. No, we’re only going for a walk, or a few walks, every day until we find what we want. There’s nothing to shoot over there, and he’d take a rifle into the park over my dead body. No, no. The rangers over there don’t muck about. It’s shoot to kill if they see you with a weapon in the parks up here.’
‘So I’ve heard.’ Mike was genuinely puzzled about why Hess and Orlov would have cut short their safari in the legal hunting concessions between Victoria Falls and Kariba to go sightseeing in a national park. ‘So what’s there that’s so special?’
‘We’re going in search of the rarest and one of the most unpredictable animals in the Zambezi valley,’ Flynn said, lowering his voice theatrically.
‘What’s that?’
‘Rhino, my boy. Black rhino. There’s half-a-dozen young orphan animals under armed guard over there that the rangers are getting ready to release back into the wild. The word from the Parks staff is that one of the few remaining wild bulls has been sniffing around the wee ones lately and that we’d have a very good chance of seeing him on foot.’
‘Where do they keep the orphans?’ Mike asked, although he could now guess what Flynn was going to say.
‘Tashinga.’
19
‘You worry too much, Karl. I have no lion and one undersized buffalo trophy to take home. We should have stuck to the original schedule,’ Orlov said as Hess parked the Land Cruiser at the end of the rutted dirt road that led down to the Cutty Sark Marina on the edge of Lake Kariba.
Hess had heard the complaint too many times in the last two days. Orlov was a man used to getting what he wanted, and a man not afraid of the law. That was OK in countries where half the police force was in your pocket, but Hess knew just how diligent the South Africans could be when it came to hunting down poachers. Indeed, many of the men he had served with on koevoet operations in South West Africa and Angola were now working for the police on anti-poaching patrols.
‘You want the rhino, don’t you?’ Hess said testily as he fetched his bags out of the back of the vehicle.
‘Of course, Karl. You know I do,’ Orlov replied. The argument had gone round and round in this manner a number of times.
‘As I have said before, we must assume the police are looking for us. The sooner we get the rhino, the sooner we can get to safety. You can bag a lion or a bigger buffalo any day of the week in South Africa.’
‘Very well, Karl,’ Orlov said in a resigned tone.
Hess saw Gerald O’Flynn standing on a wooden jetty, hands on hips, supervising the last-minute loading of two long, low aluminium-hulled speedboats.
‘Karl, good to see you. My chaps will carry your bags aboard,’ Flynn called.
Hess mentally reviewed the plan once again. It was a simple one, the best kind. Flynn would take them across to Tashinga in his boats and they would go through the motions of visiting the boma where the orphan rhino were kept. Orlov would take, or pretend to take, rolls of photos of the beasts. Once that was over, Flynn would guide them into the bush on foot in search of the bull rhino that had reportedly been visiting the small herd of orphans.
Diceros bicornis, otherwise known as the black rhino, is normally a solitary animal, and adult males
and females are generally only found together when the female comes into oestrus. Hess guessed that one of the orphans must be a female of at least six years old, the age when females reach sexual maturity. It would be she the lone male would be searching for.
They would be accompanied on the treks at all times by an armed park ranger, as was normal practice when walking in most of Zimbabwe’s national parks. Once they sighted the animal, or at least sighted fresh spoor, Hess would call off the sightseeing expedition. They would return to Kariba immediately and cross the border into Zambia as soon as possible. From Siavonga, on the Zambian side of Lake Kariba, they would return the very next night in their own boat, with their rifles, and pick up the spoor they had located during the day.
Hess believed that Orlov underestimated the amount of planning and preparation that had gone into making such a simple plan a reality. Hess had visited Flynn and the park on a reconnaissance trip and sent Klaus across the border to recruit some local help. Klaus had found three supposedly retired poachers in the shebeens around the Zambian border town. They, along with Klaus, would provide the muscle to carry the rhino’s massive skull out of the bush, as well as additional firepower in case they ran into an anti-poaching patrol.
‘Good to see you again, Flynn,’ Hess said warmly as he shook his hand and introduced Orlov. In truth, Hess had his reservations about Gerald O’Flynn. The man drank to excess, as was evidenced by his red nose and redder eyes, and had a tendency to talk too much when he was drunk. With the police possibly already on their trail he was worried about Flynn blabbing. However, Hess had limited his participation in the operation to strictly legal activities. They would play the innocent tourists for the duration of their stay with the guide.
Flynn was probably the best bushman available in Kariba. Hess remembered him from the war as not only a good officer, but an honourable and idealistic one. In Hess’s book, idealism and honour had no place in war. He doubted whether Flynn would have assisted them at all if he had any inkling of what they were really up to. Indeed, he would probably have immediately reported them to the police.