by Tony Park
‘The offer of your money, yes, with gratitude, but nothing more, Fletcher.’
He nodded.
‘Though we can be friends, as well as researcher and benefactor, can’t we?’
He smiled. ‘I never thought of myself as a benefactor. This do-gooding stuff is new to me. Friends, of course. I never assumed anything more.’
‘I know you didn’t.’
A lion started its low, wheezy roar somewhere across the vlei. While the other elephants slurped noisily from the waterhole, the matriarch of the herd, an old cow as tall as a house, lifted her head and raised her trunk from the water. She sniffed the air for danger.
‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Michelle railed as she pounded the steering wheel. The Landcruiser’s suspension groaned and she left her seat as she bounced out of the unseen pothole. The condition of the road back into Hwange National Park was the last thing on her mind.
She’d been sitting next to him, almost close enough for their legs to be touching, her bare skin warmed by the fire, her insides deliciously cosy from the liquor, thinking of how she might spend the research money, when he had touched her!
The hide of the man, she had instantly thought. On one hand, she was offended that he had thought he could buy her body with fifty grand and a nice dinner; while on the other, she knew she had caught herself more than once over dinner being quietly hypnotised by those deep blue eyes and handsome, weathered face. Her cheeks burned as she remembered how, as he poured her wine, she had momentarily wondered what it might be like to feel the coarse skin of his fingertips on her flesh. She realised she had been out of the dating game for way too long. It had been a roller-coaster ride of a day, from dawn to after dark. A scrub hare darted into her headlights and she had to brake hard to avoid running it down. The stupid little creature continued to bound along the road in the glare of the lamps. She slowed and switched her lights on and off to confuse it back into the grass. Eventually it hopped away.
She had felt trapped, like the hare, frozen in his sights. Had he planned the whole evening, right down to the fireside drinks and that move with the hand?
The thatched gate that marked the northern entrance to the national park loomed into view at the top of a hill and she honked her horn to rouse the gate guard. The old man shuffled sleepily from his tin hut and squinted in the lights. He recognised her vehicle, then smiled and swung the gates open for her. She waved and juddered down the hill towards Robins.
One of three main rest camps in Hwange, Robins was named after a farmer who had donated his lands to the government of Rhodesia in the 1930s. His property had become part of what was then known as Wankie Game Reserve. The park’s name had been re-Africanised to Hwange after Zimbabwe gained independence and majority black rule in 1980.
As a researcher, Michelle had a permit to drive in the national park beyond the normal sunset curfew and it was after nine when she coasted into Robins. The place was empty of tourists, as usual.
Michelle usually lived in a cottage in the staff area of Main Camp, a hundred and fifty kilometres to the south-east, but Rembrandt’s pack had migrated slowly north and west, towards Victoria Falls and the Botswana border, which were only a hundred kilometres and forty kilometres from Robins respectively, so it had been logical for her to relocate temporarily to the park’s northernmost outpost. The move had also brought her into increasing contact with Fletcher Reynolds. ‘Damn him,’ she said aloud.
She forced herself to analyse scientifically the evening with Fletcher, her reactions and emotions, as she opened the door to her spartan National Parks lodge. So what if Fletcher had set up the whole dinner and held back his news about the donation until late in the evening in order to seduce her? When was the last time anyone had bothered to try? Perhaps she should be flattered.
It had been more than a year since Michelle had had an orgasm with anyone else present in the bed. There had been a graduate student, from Germany. Tall, blond, long-haired, muscled, intelligent, and ten years her junior. The boy was like a puppy – cute, eager to please, full of energy, but tired quickly. He’d technically been present for the climax of the evening, but unfortunately he’d also been fast asleep by then. She smiled as she slid out of her dress and eased herself between freshly starched white sheets stencilled with the words Government of Zimbabwe in red.
She would show Mister Fletcher Reynolds that she couldn’t be bought, or led into a baited trap like some leopard he was hunting. She needed more time to work out what his motives were.
Once she’d sorted all that out, she might just allow herself to think about those eyes again.
4
Head turning, eyes scanning. Always looking. To daydream, just to look straight ahead, like any other passenger in any other car, was to fail, and the consequence of failure in this hunt was a fast trip home, in a body bag.
They were the tail car. The UN woman was in the armoured BMW, in the middle, and a Range Rover with the other four members of the team was in front. Geezer was driving, honking his horn like an Iraqi every now and then to keep up the charade. He wore a kefiyeh, the traditional male headdress, to hide his fair hair and skin. A Saddam Hussein double in a Mercedes tried to cut in on them, but the Englishman sped up and gave him the finger. Baghdad must have been a deadly town to drive in even during peacetime, Shane mused.
He was in the front passenger seat – the prime set of eyes. At the end of a day such as this his shoulders and neck would ache from the swivelling, from the tension. ‘Two-one, two-two,’ he said into the mouthpiece of the MBITR clipped to his chest webbing strap under his flimsy disguise shirt.
‘Two-one,’ drawled the ex-US Navy Seal in the passenger seat of the lead vehicle.
‘Stationary white Japanese sedan two hundred metres to your front, two-one,’ Shane said. ‘I just saw him pull over as we came round the bend, over.’ He hoped the lead vehicle had seen it already. They should have.
‘Ah, roger that, buddy,’ the Texan said. ‘We’ve seen it already. Woman driver, looks okay. She’s getting out to check under the hood, though we won’t be stopping to assist,’ the voice laughed. ‘How about you concentrate on your end of the . . .’
The explosion slammed the Range Rover sideways before the shock wave flipped it over on its side. The sedan was just a plume of smoke rising from a twisted, burning hulk. The woman, who had presumably activated the bomb via remote or from a switch in the engine compartment, had been vaporised.
Geezer floored the accelerator. ‘Drive past it,’ Shane said into his microphone.
There was no answer from the BMW, which slewed to the right, then back to the left before its driver’s side fender clipped the smoking Range Rover. The car spun three hundred and sixty degrees and stopped.
‘Out, out!’ Geezer yelled. The road was blocked. They all knew what was coming next.
Shane opened the door and dropped to one knee on the road. He scanned the streetscape as he flicked the selector switch on his M4 to semi-automatic. Geezer was on the other side and the two men in the back, a Scot and a Fijian, both ex-British SAS, fanned out further on either side.
‘RPG!’ Shane called. He’d heard the rocket-propelled grenade’s motor engage then seen the trail of white smoke streak from the gutted supermarket on the right, the building a victim of a past car bombing or mortar attack. The round was low. It glanced off the road, slid under the BMW and ricocheted up into the underside of the tossed Range Rover. It pierced the floor of the big four-by-four like it was paper, and erupted inside. If the car bomb and roll hadn’t killed callsign two-one, then the explosive warhead at the tip of the projectile had.
No one needed to give the command to fire. Shane pumped four rounds into the window from which the rocket had come, and the Fijian let off a twenty-round burst from his M249 light machine-gun.
‘Contact left, Shane . . .’ Geezer was cut down as he called the warning. Shane swung his torso, leaning across the Cruiser’s bonnet, and saw the distinctive long dark barrel of a Dr
agunov sniper rifle. His first round glanced off the Arab’s weapon, forcing the man to drop it. The second and third shots tore holes in his chest. The man toppled from the window. Shane was on his feet, moving forward, before the body hit the pavement.
The Fijian sprayed the supermarket, but the RPG firer had moved. Another grenade whooshed down the street towards Shane. He rolled to the ground, just twenty metres short of the Beemer. Behind him he heard the Landcruiser being rammed into gear. The RPG round slammed into the right-hand rear door of the black limo and detonated.
Shane’s ears rang and his body felt as though a giant’s open palm had slapped him from head to toe with one blow. Part of him wanted to lie curled in the foetal position in the gutter until it was all over, but his training took over. It was like SAS selection, back in the rugged hills of Western Australia. A man could be physically strong enough to endure the constant marching and running with packs as heavy as a dead body, but it took mental strength, determination and willpower to get up and keep going after the false peaks and the mind games the cadre staff played to make trainees feel like he did now, that he couldn’t possibly get up again.
The adrenaline kicked in and he rolled over and sat up. The noise of machine-gun bullets was reduced to a dull thud somewhere in the background, and his vision was blurry. He blinked, and forced himself to observe and think. The armour-plated car was still intact. Money well spent, he thought. He ground the knuckles of his right hand into the bitumen and pushed himself up. He stumbled forward, loosing two rounds from the hip at a flitter of movement in the alleyway between the gutted market and the tailor’s store.
The windows of the sedan were black-tinted. He rapped on one and pushed his face to the glass. The driver was slumped over the steering wheel; the passenger beside him – the German member of their team – was pinned behind an airbag, blood running down his face, no movement. The woman in the back was open-mouthed, screaming something, but Shane couldn’t hear a thing now. He pulled on the door handle, the metal still hot from the explosion, but it was locked. Fucking reliable European engineering. He groped his way along the driver’s side, reached in through the holed window, past the dead man, and opened the door. All of the locks popped.
Shane reached into the back and grabbed the woman by the elbow. She struggled, but he wrenched her out, so hard she fell to the road. He hooked an arm under hers and lifted her. The Landcruiser was reversing back towards them. The Fijian was grinning like a madman, walking down the street, firing burst after burst into the shops, laying down covering fire.
Shane heard sirens, and the wailing was getting louder, which told him his hearing was returning. He had to work hard to focus his eyes. He fell to the ground, the woman slipping from his grasp to land beside him. He put his left hand down to lever himself up and winced with white-hot pain. Blood streamed down his bicep, soaking the business shirt. The Fijian’s face was grimly set now. He had a target. Shane watched him bring the machine-gun from his waist up to his shoulder and take careful aim at an Arab holding an AK 47. The terrorist was bold or crazy enough to have stepped out into the street.
The woman was screaming and crying. Shane looked at the bullet wound in his arm, then dragged her and himself to standing again. He shoved her into the open rear door of the Landcruiser. Plenty of these Arabs wanted a one-way ticket to paradise, but why step out in the middle of the road when everything seemed to be going their way? The Landcruiser wasn’t armoured enough to stop an RPG, so they could easily . . .
His thoughts coalesced. The AK man was a decoy. Shane couldn’t fire the M4 effectively with one arm so he tossed it into the back of the Cruiser. It clattered over the UN lady, who was an incoherent mess on the floor. Geezer, he saw, was in the rear of the four-by-four, his face deathly white, blood pumping from a wound in his shoulder. He tried to raise an arm to point, but Shane already knew what was going on.
The man with the AK 47 crumpled to the ground, his torso nearly severed from his legs by the Fijian’s burst, intestines slithering into the gutter like a snake let out of a bag. The Fijian backed up to the front passenger door and called, ‘Shane, come on bro!’
Shane drew the .45 from its holster.
The RPG firer poked his head and his weapon around the corner of a fire-bombed restaurant, one shop further on from the tailor’s. He had scurried through a back alley. That put him further away from the vehicles, but the launcher was still well within range of the idling Landcruiser. It would be a long shot for the pistol. Shane steadied himself, legs apart, and brought the weapon up, one armed. His left still dangled uselessly.
He squeezed off two shots, the heavy pistol leaping high in the air from the recoil of each of the .45 rounds. One slug knocked a splinter from the masonry beside the Arab’s head, the second sailed high. Shane heard the squeal of rubber on a roadway slick with blood. The Scot had done what he would have done. The first priority was always the package – in this case the UN lady. The RPG firer still had a clean shot.
The man stared at Shane, unafraid of dying. That, Shane realised, was what made this whole thing so crazy, so unwinnable. The Arab stepped out from behind the wall and peered into the optical sights atop the grenade launcher. Shane was an excellent marksman, but at a hundred and fifty metres pistol shooting is more luck than skill.
He ran, his legs pumping faster until he was sprinting. He fired twice more on the go.
The RPG man looked up, wide-eyed with surprise, from his sights. Shane was obscuring his view.
Shane slowed and stood in the path of the anti-tank weapon. He fired again. The first round carved a bloody furrow along the right side of the man’s exposed neck, above his body armour. He staggered, but didn’t drop, and Shane cursed. A hit anywhere on the body, even on the man’s flak jacket, would have knocked him over. As the Arab squeezed the trigger on the RPG launcher, Shane’s second round pierced the man’s right forearm, but it was too late to stop the rocket motor from firing. The grenade warhead leapt from its tube.
However, the wound had forced the firer to jink at the last second. Instead of flying past Shane, the accelerating missile was now coming straight for him. He threw himself face down on the unforgiving roadway, arms out. He felt the heat of the missile’s exhaust on his back, through his shirt and flak jacket.
Shane rolled over and risked raising his head. The Landcruiser rounded a bend and the grenade sailed through the plate glass of a bank branch and detonated inside. Fortunately the place was closed for business.
Another shriek of rubber on road made Shane look up. A red pickup truck hurtled down the street from the direction they had initially been travelling. The RPG man rolled painfully over the side wall of the vehicle and landed hard in the back. The driver turned as he reversed and, with a handbrake-induced skid, ended up facing back the way he had come. Shane stood and raised his good arm to fire again.
Another Arab had been hiding in the back of the pick-up. He sat up and laid the barrel of a Russian-made PKM machine-gun on the side of the truck. Dozens of projectiles lashed the road on either side of Shane, who dropped again and rolled. He was in the open, at the gunner’s mercy as the vehicle drove forward. He thought of wide-open vleis teaming with wildlife, under a clear blue African sky, and waited to die as he blindly squeezed off his last bullet.
A deep-throated engine roar heralded the arrival of a US Army quick-reaction force – an RG-31 mine-protected four-wheel drive supported by two Humvees. Shane heard the deep clunk-clunk-clunk of a .50 calibre machine-gun cranking into action. Music to his ears, as long as one of the finger-sized bullets didn’t head his way.
The red pick-up veered and smashed into a power pole. Steam hissed noisily from its radiator, which had been shattered by a lead slug. The man with the machine-gun knelt in the tray, trying to climb out, hampered by the loss of an arm. A glowing tracer round found the fuel tank and the truck erupted in a roiling orange-black ball.
Shane stood, his good arm raised, and staggered, half-dazed, towar
ds the truck and the oncoming Americans. Instinctively, he ejected the empty magazine from his pistol, took a fresh one from the black nylon pouch on his thigh, and reloaded the .45.
‘Hold it there,’ a Southern voice called from the armoured gun mount high atop the RG-31. Nicely ironic, Shane thought, that he had been saved by a South African-manufactured armoured vehicle. He might yet live to see the continent of his birth again.
‘Australian!’ he called. ‘Contract security.’ He gave the name of his company, which was well known around the city.
‘Stay there. We’ll come to you,’ the acne-scarred young sergeant called from his turret.
‘What about them?’ Shane asked. The driver, the machine-gunner and the RPG man in the pick-up were all alight. One of the two in the back – Shane couldn’t tell which now – tried to stand, his body engulfed in flames. The man screamed like a dying buffalo.
‘Fuck ’em, Let ’em burn,’ was the pronouncement from the sergeant on high.
Shane stood back from the heat of the burning car. After a year in Iraq on contract and three years fighting these people in the war on terrorism, he had less of an idea now about what motivated them than ever. But they had fought bravely for their cause, whatever that was.
He cocked the .45 and raised his arm.
‘Hey,’ called the American. ‘Put that down, buddy.’
Shane pulled the trigger twice. The screaming stopped.
Shane awoke the next morning between cool sheets in a room smelling strongly of disinfectant and slightly of urine. The painkillers had been too good. He blinked at the white overhead lights.
An American flag hung from the ceiling.
The nurse was in US Army desert camouflage fatigues and was holding a clipboard. ‘Good morning. Open wide for me.’ She smiled at him and slid a thermometer into his mouth. She had dark hair, pulled back in a ponytail, and her eyes were almond-shaped, exotic.