Safari

by Tony Park

  He had only one shot left.

  Anthony, the fat, lazy gangster, had already lowered his rifle. He would have been the slowest to react.

  Chuck was sliding over the log on his butt, already bringing his rifle back up into his shoulder. Fletcher stared down at Michelle with a look that bordered on one indicating a complete and utter breakdown. Geezer fancied he could even see a slight tremor in the hands that held the stock of his ancient, scarred hunting rifle.

  He thought, if he did say so himself, that he had done a particularly good job with the moulage – fake wounds – given his lack of props, although there had been no shortage of real blood to play with. It was the same way Shane had fooled Fletcher into believing they had killed a poacher the day before. They had made Caesar take off his shirt and lie down in the grass while Geezer had expertly applied the latex skin of the fake wounds to his face and chest, along with the theatrical blood. As well as being a peer of the realm and one-time special forces soldier, Geezer was a qualified combat medic. As part of the training he delivered for recruits to the security firm where he and Shane had worked, he had become adept at simulating the look of gunshot wounds. His work would put a Hollywood special effects artist to shame. It helped, he often said, having seen the real thing plenty of times.

  Michelle’s blood – and she was the star performer who would make or break this little drama – was her own, brave girl. Using his Leatherman, Shane had unscrewed the fold-out bayonet – a nifty Russian invention from the old days – from under the barrel of the AK 47 and, at her insistence, cut his new girlfriend a nasty gash across her forehead. Head wounds always bled profusely, but also healed quickly. She would be fine, if Fletcher didn’t deliver the coup de grâce to her in the next few seconds.

  Geezer shifted his aim from Chuck, to Fletcher, then back to Chuck. Their second-last bullet, again at Michelle’s suggestion – he envied Shane that girl – had been used to sever the handcuffs that had linked him and Caesar together. Caesar was lying there, face up, feigning death.

  It was one of the easiest shots of his life, but if he picked the wrong target, and it all went pear-shaped, then his only regret would be that he wouldn’t have a bullet left to turn on himself. Geezer squeezed the trigger.

  Shane heard the shot and was rolling, pushing Michelle underneath him, into the water, before she could cry out, or before he knew which target Geezer had picked. The Englishman had taken his time – Shane had started to feel the first signs of dizziness from holding his breath for too long.

  He burst from the water and screamed a primal war cry as he searched, bayonet in hand, for a target. From the corner of his eye he saw Chuck flung backwards over the log.

  Geezer was yelling behind him, unseen, erupting from his muddy lair, with his useless rifle held high, no doubt.

  Directly in front of him, across the slimy log, Shane saw the disbelieving face of Anthony the gangster. He was the closest target. Shane lunged, arm held stiff out in front of him, and thrust the bayonet into his throat. Anthony opened his mouth, but not even a scream emerged, just a gurgling sound, followed by his own blood. Shane had to lean back, using his whole body weight to pull the blade free from the sucking flesh.

  *

  Fletcher’s instincts took over. He looked for the prime source of danger, and saw the man with the AK 47, standing on the bank of the stream, pointing the barrel at him. He was aware, too, of a fountain of blood to his left, and Shane screaming like a madman. He brought the rifle up into his shoulder and aimed at the mud-spattered Englishman.

  ‘Drop your rifle, you bastard!’ Geezer boomed, his voice stilling the madness around them. Michelle was crouching in the water, coughing and sputtering, Shane was beside her, their wrists still linked, though he was out of reach of Fletcher.

  Geezer held his aim, but didn’t fire. ‘Drop it!’

  Fletcher shook his head, smiled, and swung the rifle downwards, quickly, until the barrel was pointing at Michelle. She recoiled in the water, throwing herself to one side, falling at Shane’s feet. Shane was no more than three metres from Fletcher, but it could have been three hundred for all the good he could do.

  ‘You can’t kill all of us,’ Shane said. ‘That’s a bolt-action rifle. If you shoot her, so help me God, I’ll cut your fucking limbs off one at a time while you’re still alive.’

  ‘I loved Michelle, Shane. I can’t kill her, no matter what the bitch did to me.’ He swung the rifle away from her and pointed it at Shane’s chest.

  ‘No, Fletcher. Don’t do it. Just leave us be . . .’ Michelle pleaded, as she stood.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Fletcher called across to the Englishman, who checked his stride, his filthy face echoing the hate in Shane’s.

  Fletcher turned his malevolent stare back to Shane. ‘I saved your worthless career, Castle. I got you back to Africa, paid you well, and you repaid me by fucking my woman. For that alone, I’m going to kill you.’

  ‘No!’ Michelle cried. Fletcher trained the barrel back on her.

  Shane grabbed her wrist and moved her behind him, and Fletcher’s aim followed his movements.

  Beside them, still floating on his back in the water, was Caesar. Shane wondered if the young man had, in fact, been killed by a stray shot. He didn’t dare glance down, but he felt a finger brush his ankle, beneath the muddy water’s surface, deliberately pushing him away from Fletcher, towards the bank.

  Fletcher, wild-eyed, raised the rifle to his shoulder. ‘You’re going to die a traitor’s death, Castle.’

  Caesar pushed himself up and out of the water, and Geezer took his cue to rush forward as well. Shane’s first concern was for Michelle, and he elbowed her to the side, away from him so that if Fletcher’s bullet found its mark it would not hit her if it passed through his body.

  ‘Geezer!’ Shane called. As the Englishman splashed through the water, Shane tossed the AK 47 bayonet to him and he caught it.

  Fletcher turned to face the new danger, the African in front of him, and pulled the trigger. The shot was so close that it punched Caesar backwards, straight into Geezer’s path, knocking him backwards in the water.

  Shane tried to rush back towards Fletcher, but was slowed by Michelle, even though she fought to keep up with him. Fletcher backed off two paces, working the bolt action of his rifle at the same time and chambering another round. He raised the rifle again to his shoulder and aimed at Shane. In the water, Geezer held a hand to the wound in Caesar’s side, trying to staunch the blood.

  ‘I love you,’ Michelle whispered in Shane’s ear. She wrapped her arms around him, blocking Fletcher’s shot, and Shane tried to move her aside. ‘No. I don’t want to live without you, Shane.’

  ‘I love you, Michelle.’ Shane kissed her.

  ‘The pair of you can have each other for fucking eternity.’ Fletcher’s finger curled around the trigger and he squeezed.

  Marie Delacroix sobbed until she could cry no more. She had found the gorilla family, higher up the mountain, and edged as close as she dared while they were in their highly panicked state.

  The baby was safe, and the female, though still bleeding, was walking and managed to breastfeed the little one. The silverback prowled protectively around his troop, looking for someone to kill.

  She retraced her tracks to the stream where the atrocity had happened. She had seen it with her own eyes, and she had wept, not only for the evil that had been done to her gorillas, but for her own stupidity.

  Marie had danced with the devil – worse, gone hunting with him.

  And she had killed. She felt ashamed now, of her joy in it, of the savage glee she had felt at taking the poacher’s life. But, she realised with grim determination, at least she knew she could do it. She could pull the trigger, or plant the bomb, instead of just ordering someone else to. If the cause was just and if the target deserved killing.

  She had seen him, tall and silver haired, standing among his fat, rich clients, firing his rifle even as the female gorilla was
wounded and the baby nearly stolen. She could never forgive him for that.

  Marie had no idea what poor wretch, or wretches, Fletcher and his goons were hunting today – they were on the far side of a big fallen log, and his body shielded the nearest from her view.

  She centred the cross-hairs of the telescopic sights on the rear of his head, took a breath, as he had taught her, then exhaled half the air from her lungs. Then she squeezed the trigger.

  Epilogue

  ‘Okay, we’re rolling,’ Jim Rickards said. He focused the camera tight on Sarah’s face and shoulders, so as to keep the microphone she was holding out of shot as she delivered her piece to camera.

  ‘This part of Africa is no stranger to war, ethnic cleansing and human tragedy, but the last twenty-four hours have seen some of the bloodiest fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo in years, and the loss of hundreds of lives, including those of several Europeans.

  ‘The body of controversial French zoologist Marie Delacroix was discovered by Indian soldiers from the UN peacekeeping force in the Congo this morning. According to UN sources, Ms Delacroix, who will be remembered as much for her hardline stance as an animal rights activist as for her work with researching mountain gorillas, was caught in crossfire between Congolese Army forces and Rwandan militiamen.

  ‘Information about the success or otherwise of the Congolese Army’s push to remove the Rwandan Interahamwe rebels from their country is sketchy, as the military’s senior area commander was also killed in a fire fight.

  ‘Added to the European death toll are a white Zimbabwean man and five United States citizens, whose names are yet to be released. The US diplomatic mission here in the Congo is sending a team to investigate the deaths of the men, who were believed to have been on a hunting trip. In the meantime, a tide of humanity is surging out of this troubled border area between the DRC and Uganda.’ Sarah paused as Rickards pulled back the focus to take in the dirt road down the hill and behind her, which was choked with a column of refugees.

  Women carried their possessions in bundles on their heads, and their babies on their backs. A man wheeled a wooden scooter laden with unripe bananas, while another pushed a creaking wheelbarrow with a fly-blown haunch of meat in it. The column stretched back out of the shot, as far as the cameraman could see.

  ‘That’s great, Sarah. Got it all,’ Rickards said.

  ‘It’s crap and you know it,’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘We can get a run with the French woman’s death, and the Yanks, but we won’t have the real story until Shane and Michelle and the others get down off the mountain. God knows how long that’ll be, or even if they’ll make it. We need something more than the audio grabs we took off the sat phone conversation with Shane. The sound quality was rubbish. I’m worried about them, Jim. We put them in this situation – all for a bloody news story.’

  ‘They’ll be fine. That Castle’s a hard-arse and you’ve told the UN commander the reports about them being involved in gorilla hunting are ridiculous.’

  ‘I know. The UN had their suspicions about this dead Colonel Gizenga fellow.’

  Rickards kept the camera rolling and panned right to take in some long shots of the other end of the pathetic column of refugees. ‘Hey!’

  ‘What?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Take a look,’ Rickards grinned as he zoomed in.

  Sarah put down her microphone and walked around behind the tripod-mounted digital video camera. She looked into the viewfinder and saw a monochrome image of the parade of displaced Africans. ‘Whites!’

  In the distance she could make out the growing features of three Europeans, trudging along in the phalanx of Congolese villagers. There was a tall, mud-spattered man carrying another – a black African with a bandaged torso – piggyback style.

  The other two were a man and a woman, and Sarah recognised them immediately. Shane had an arm wrapped around Michelle’s shoulders as they walked. He tilted his head to one side so it was touching hers, then turned his face and kissed her.

  When they broke the kiss, Michelle reached over and wiped Shane’s eyes, as though he were crying, which set Sarah off as well.

  Acknowledgements

  I was camped by a remote waterhole in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe, in October 2006, some time after the first draft of this book was written, when the commander of a nearby anti-poaching patrol came up to me and told me a black rhino had just been killed.

  Like the fictitious Lovemore and his men in Safari, the parks and wildlife service ranger in charge was keen to get to the carcass which, while only some thirty kilometres away, may as well have been on the dark side of the moon, as there was no vehicle – and no fuel, in any case – to move him and his men to the site in time.

  My wife and I offered them a lift (though they would have had to have ridden on the roof as my little Land Rover only has two seats), but he was told to stay put as the police were on their way. They arrived some twenty-four hours later, and by then the poachers were long gone.

  We had time to chat, and the patrol commander told me of gun battles he and his men had been involved in – of rangers wounded and Zambian poachers killed in action. These men are in a war to save their country’s wildlife. Underpaid, underfed and under-recognised, they are short of everything, except courage. I have the utmost respect for them.

  For the record, I am neither anti-hunting, nor pro-hunting. Some of the most passionate conservationists I have met in Africa are also hunters.

  All the camps mentioned in this book in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe, do exist and while there is a Matetsi Safari Area on the north-west boundary of the park, near the Botswana border, there is no Isilwane Safari Lodge and certainly no Fletcher Reynolds.

  Chewore, the black rhino mentioned in the book, is real (rhinos don’t sue, so I’m sure she won’t mind me using her name), and did have a bad habit of wandering into Botswana. At the time of writing, she hadn’t been seen for a couple of years. I hope she is alive somewhere out there in the wilds of Zimbabwe, but I’m not holding my breath.

  Mubare, the silverback gorilla, and his family do exist (at least I hope they still do), in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, across the border from the DRC. Tracking mountain gorillas is a challenging and expensive business, but if you are interested in wildlife, summon all your reserves of energy and cash and do it. It’s worth it.

  I am grateful to Matt Kay for his recollections of life in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and to Oskar and Linda Rothen and Kerryn Smith for their accounts of visits to the Virunga National Park and its surrounds. Annette Lanjouw worked on gorilla and chimpanzee conservation projects in the Virunga from 1987 to 2005. She answered pages of questions I had on the region, and I owe her a great debt of thanks. Likewise, my thanks go to Lulu Mitshabu, from the Catholic charity Caritas, who shared with me memories and pictures of a recent trip to Goma.

  David Drakes read the manuscript from a Zimbabwean-born person’s perspective, while Donna Bozowsky gave valuable feedback on Michelle Parker’s Canadian background.

  My friend in the US, Are Berentsen, helped with the descriptions of Larry Monroe’s home in Logan, near Salt Lake City, Utah, and gave advice on African animal research projects, based on his own experiences in Africa.

  In Zimbabwe, a number of people helped with suggestions and anecdotes, while our good friends Dennis, Liz, Don, Vicki, Sal and Scotty continue to keep us on the road and fuelled and fed – no mean feat these days – during our annual trips to Africa.

  Thanks, also, to the relatives of young Matthew Towns and Dougal Geddes, who made donations to the Abbotsford Long Day Care Centre and Inner City Child Care respectively, in return for their names being used as characters in Safari.

  As usual, my profound thanks go to my wife Nicola, mother Kathy, and mother-in-law Sheila, who continue to do a sensational, unpaid job as proofreaders. Without Nicola, there would be no five months of the year for me in Africa, and no books.

  They say life begins at
forty and for me it did, when my first book, Far Horizon, was published. For my new life, I have a number of friends at Pan Macmillan Australia to thank – Deputy Publishing Director Cate Paterson, Fiction Publicity Manager Jane Novak, Senior Editor Sarina Rowell, Publishing Director James Fraser, and copy editor Julia Stiles.

  And thank you.