The Devil's breath dz-1

by David Gilman

  The shadows from the flames danced across the walls of the cave, illuminating rock paintings: swathes of ochre-painted animals, hunters and their stories. It was the place of the ancestors, the place of the spirits of the dead.

  The prophecy.

  8

  The walls showed the story of the First People. It was their beginning told in pictures, an unfolding tableau of the creation of the Bushman and the hunt for the mighty eland whose horns, even in its death throes, could impale a man. The reverence for the eland, the biggest of all antelopes, was at the heart of the Bushmen’s existence-and their survival. It was the subject of their dance, their music and their paintings. One of the Bushmen’s creation stories was that the insect-god Mantis created the world, and it was the eland he chose first to inhabit it: eland, the most noble of antelope with the strength of a giant, tender with its family, caressing them with lips and tongue, confirming and reassuring, like a mother with a child.

  As Max followed the story,!Koga was at his shoulder, holding the burning sticks, pointing to the drawings, explaining in his own language what the pictures meant. And although Max could not understand the words, the soft incantation of the story lulled him, allowing the drawings to take on a life of their own. The shadows gave them energy, making the tableaux move along the wall. Lion and giraffe, antelope and baboon, hyena and snake: the family of the wilderness was there.

  The ghostlike hunters ran, killing the eland which would give them life; they danced in praise and thanks. Through!Koga’s lilt Max could almost hear them chanting. Figures twisted and turned, some lay down, ochre-colored blood coming from their noses, in the trance dances that emphasized the supernatural link between Bushman and eland.!Koga was telling him all of this with small gestures and rolling eyes. He curled his fist in front of his stomach, twisted it, showing it like a knot of energy that crept up out of the body. The pictures and the mime made simple sense.

  Bushman mothers suckled their children; more men, themselves like stick insects, gave chase after another antelope. Max heard the words Gauwa and Gao!na; images explained their meaning-the setting and rising sun.

  The embers flickered, the shadows drew a curtain across the scene. Max caught a glimpse of something at the back of the cave, a drawing that did not belong with the others. It was of Anubis, the Egyptian jackal god of the underworld; but this time the figure was more in keeping with the others on the wall-like the Bushman drawings. The jackal’s body pointed to the left, deliberately directing the viewer to look deeper into the darkness.

  “Max,”!Koga whispered. As if his name was a statement, a matter of simple fact. There was still enough light to see the drawing of the boy, a white boy, shown in white pigment, with yellow hair.!Koga pointed at the drawing and at Max. “Max,” he said again. Like the images of the ancient hunters, he was shown running. To where? The frieze went on-carefully etched drawings, painted and shaded on the granite, became another story. A crocodile’s jaws, blood-tipped-these were the mountains Max had seen. A stumbling figure-no spear-wielding hunter this, but a ghostlike man, leaning on a staff. At the end of the man’s pointing finger was a multipointed star, highlighted in charcoal and chalk. As Max traced the figures on the rock wall, a flurry of scratches symbolized a tangle of thorn trees, brittle and stark, but they sheltered what looked like a dove, its wings extended, lying on the ground. The next drawing showed him a gaping hole, swirling like a whirlpool, and what seemed to be a cloud hovering over it. Now Max was confused. The simplicity was lost on him. But he understood the final figure. Its image stabbed pain into his chest as he reached out and touched it. The figure of the man with the shining star at the edge of his hand now lay on the ground, an etched line of red drawn from his leg. With awful certainty Max knew this was his father and that he had been injured. Was he lying out there, helpless? “Oh, Dad,” he whispered, “where are you?”

  The burning branch!Koga held dimmed as the flames died down. He touched Max’s arm, wary of disturbing his thoughts.!Koga gestured to the final scene depicted on the rock face. The fair-haired white boy’s wraithlike figure seemed to leap across the void, and with him came a dozen or more Bushmen with women and children. It looked as though they were leaving a group of others, who lay prone. Its meaning seemed clear: Max was leading Bushmen survivors away from some kind of great danger, and clearly something Max’s father knew about.

  Max had often watched his father unfold a field book and sketch his surroundings, then use a small box of watercolors to capture birds on the page. It was not that unusual for field scientists to be proficient artists, sketching flora and fauna, and Max was convinced that this is what had happened here. This was no prophecy, daubed hundreds or thousands of years ago, this was painted by his dad only weeks earlier.

  !Koga smiled and nodded. To him, the drawings were the prophecy.

  He gestured that they should return to the light and warmth of the fire and eat. Max nodded, hoping!Koga could not see the tears in his eyes. He signaled!Koga to go back and, as the boy’s shadow blocked the fire’s flames, Max hunched down in the darkness, and silently wept. Not since his mother had died had he felt such helplessness and despair. He lingered inside his own dark place for a few moments, then gritted his teeth until he felt his jawbone ache. This wasn’t grief, he told himself. It was self-pity-either get rid of it or go home. Turn around. Get!Koga to lead you all the way back, climb on a plane, return to friends at Dartmoor High, tell the police about Peterson and then leave it to them. If that was the option, he would have no part of it.

  The meat had cooked in the embers and, despite the charcoal taste, which reminded Max of one of his dad’s barbecues, the food nourished them. “Did my father send you here?” Max finally asked.

  !Koga shook his head. “My father.”

  “Your father told you to come to this place?”

  “Yes. I did not know it was here. My father came to us, he had been gone a long time, and he gave me that thing which I took to the farm.”

  “The skin? With the field notes?”

  “The writings, yes. My father is old and he was tired because he had run for many days. And there were others before him. They brought the writings to my father and he put them in my hands. There was no food and no time for him to hunt. He ran all the time. He was very tired, and sick, but still he ran.”

  Max tried to put the pieces together. His dad needed him to come to this cave, to tell him where to go, so he had sent word through the Bushmen, and eventually!Koga became the messenger and Max’s guide. Like a whale’s song in the ocean, the message had reverberated across the wilderness, and the Bushmen had understood and carried it onwards until finally Max had arrived. He watched!Koga eating, quick to avert his eyes when the boy looked up. He knew so little about!Koga. All Max’s attention had been on himself, his father, his problems, the how-tos and whys and wherefores. Somewhere out there,!Koga’s family roamed while their son honored his father and did his duty in bringing an unknown boy towards his own father, who had drawn these pictures which seemed to have convinced the Bushmen that he would help them somehow.

  The day’s exertions finally claimed them and, before the last of the meat was eaten, they curled up next to the warm stones around the fire and slept.

  A deafening crash snatched Max from his scattered dreams as a lightning strike hit the mountainside opposite. The boys were on their feet in seconds, alert for any danger, but, realizing it was only a violent storm, they moved to the mouth of the cave for a better look. A flurry of wind scattered the fire’s cold ashes; the moonlight shaped and reshaped the black rolling clouds, and the air was heavy with the threat of rain. As another lightning strike illuminated the mountain across the valley, Max could see a swarm of shadows scurrying in terror.

  “He-who-sits-on-his-hands,”!Koga said.

  Max didn’t understand, and then looked more closely. The lightning’s brief and intense floodlighting showed him more than a hundred baboons scurrying for shelter. Baboons!!Koga meant
baboons. However, before he could watch them any longer a cloud tumbled down the mountain behind the boys and smothered them in a gray fog. The air chilled quickly as the wind tugged at the cloud, tearing it from the cliff face. Max held out a hand, feeling the damp air, wanting the rain, but none came; only a dewlike residue clung to the rocks. And then the brief swirling assault ended. The rolling storm passed and they were left with the crystal night sky and the first edging of dawn. The baboons had fled into the crocodile-toothed mountains.

  Once again the vastness was silent.

  Max gazed out into the night. The never-ending land crept into the darkness, beckoning him, daring him to enter.

  An enemy in waiting.

  The stench of disinfectant almost made Kallie gag. Used as she was to the unsullied air of the desert, the impact of the confined police station, with its claustrophobic corridors, noisy holding areas and humanity shoved together in close proximity, made her skin itch. This was a world she never saw in the wilderness. She tried to keep her eyes averted from arrested men shouting abuse at their captors or women screaming through their drunkenness; cage doors rattled closed, a cleaner mopped the floor and Mike Kapuo finally guided her through this maze into the sanctuary of his office.

  Mike Kapuo was a bruiser who liked his food. He was a tall man whose belly hung over his trousers; his sausage-size fingers made the big handgun he carried look like a child’s toy. Despite his bulk, though, he could move fast when occasion demanded, and he had boxed for the police service until he was nearly forty years old, a record for a heavyweight. That was where he first met Ferdie van Reenen; they were opponents in the ring, and Kallie’s father was the man who had stopped him from becoming the champion by knocking him out in the fourth round. They had been good friends ever since. Nowadays Kapuo left the more physical demands, such as villain-chasing on foot, to younger men.

  At fifty-seven years of age he should already have retired, but he loved the job and his staff loved him, even though he could be a hard taskmaster. Only the criminals were distressed by his staying on in the CID. Kapuo cared about people being hurt by the callous and self-serving attitudes of others.

  “You shouldn’t be down here at this time of night,” he told her.

  “Where else would I find you?”

  He smiled. This was one determined girl; if he had been out on one of his deep-sea fishing trips, she’d probably have swum out to reach him if there was an important enough reason. And for her to be here, it had to be important.

  “You weren’t just passing by, then?” he teased.

  He poured her a cup of coffee which resembled river mud but was hot and tasted sweet, which was exactly what she needed.

  “Your dad OK?” he asked. It wouldn’t be the first time Kapuo would have had to help Ferdie van Reenen. The last time Kallie’s father had tackled a gang of poachers-he went after them with a vengeance and a shotgun-he had got himself badly hurt. If Kallie hadn’t got to Kapuo and he in turn had not reached van Reenen, the poachers would have got a lot worse than the few years in jail they’d received.

  “He’s fine. He’s up at Kunene with some birders.”

  “Uh-huh.” Kapuo waited. She was sipping the coffee, first looking at him, then letting her eyes gaze away around the untidy room-not that Kapuo thought it was untidy. He knew where everything was.

  “I think I’ve got a problem,” she finally said.

  “More of a problem than my lousy coffee?”

  “Worse.”

  She hesitated. He waited.

  “I think someone is trying to kill a boy I know,” she said carefully.

  He looked at her. Kallie van Reenen was her father’s daughter and, like him, would never say anything just for effect. “And why would you think that?”

  “Because I think they’ve just tried to kill me as well.”

  Lucius Slye was an orderly man. He insisted on making his own bed in the morning because the servants did not fold the sheets correctly at the corners. His toothbrush, razor, hairbrush, toothpaste tube and hair gel were all neatly laid out next to his spotlessly clean washbasin. Neatness, tidiness, orderliness, cleanliness and attention to detail were exactly what Slye needed in order to function. He did not have the emotional resources of Shaka Chang which enabled him to adapt to any changing situation with animal cunning. No, Mr. Slye needed a controlled environment in which to function at maximum efficiency. Which was why he hated loose ends. And ever since the Gordon boy had been in Africa, loose ends were squirming like a basketful of snakes, not that he had ever seen a basketful of snakes-he would probably scream and faint if he did. Like many cruel-minded men, Slye was a coward at heart.

  He had suggested that Shaka Chang might just consider following up the failed attempt on Max’s life at the airport with an attack on the van Reenen farm. But Chang had said no to that. It would attract far too much attention. At least the airport violence could be thought of as a personal attack, a mugging that had got out of hand. Chang did not want to complicate matters by causing harm to outsiders. “Let events unfold, Mr. Slye,” Chang had told him. “The wilderness or our men will finish off the boy.”

  But they hadn’t yet, had they? Mr. Slye was a good employee and he knew he needed to relieve some of his master’s burden-because Chang was his master; he held the power of life and death over him. Chang had enough to worry about. There was the massive hydroelectric scheme that would generate billions of dollars; there were the illegal drug shipments coming in from all over the world through Walvis Bay, and then there was the not-inconsequential matter of the destruction of the natural habitat and the thousands of people who would probably die as a result of Chang’s plan. And that was why Mr. Slye had taken it upon himself to remove one of the loose ends-Kallie van Reenen.

  She had taken the boy from Windhoek Airport and equipped him for his journey. Slye had tracked her northwards to the remote airfield where she met her father. He had left with a safari party so he was not involved, but his informers had told him of the girl’s flight plan filed for Walvis Bay. That was a long way from home. She had information she should not have, that was Mr. Slye’s conclusion. It had not taken much to ensure that one of his local men fixed her plane, guaranteeing it would crash.

  Most satisfyingly, he had heard her Mayday call over Skeleton Rock’s radio transmitters.

  Even more gratifying was the sound of an explosion and the girl’s scream. Mr. Slye was convinced that Kallie van Reenen must have crashed in the middle of nowhere. In the unlikely event of the crash site ever being found, an investigation would conclude that her old plane was simply not reliable enough. In the meantime, hyenas and jackals would dispose of her remains.

  He flipped open his PDA and ticked off one item on his list of things to do. It read: Kill Kallie van Reenen.

  Kallie had done her preflight checks as always, but when she took off she thought the engine sounded ragged. She had pushed in the throttle, gained takeoff speed and hauled the plane into the sky.

  Within an hour she knew she was in trouble. There was the unmistakable smell of avgas; the engine shook violently in its mountings, followed almost immediately by a loss of power. The aviation fuel was flooding the engine compartment at just about the same time as her brain flooded with fear at falling out of the sky. Fire was her immediate concern, so there was no point in trying to restart the engine. The Cessna 185 was known among pilots as a tail-dragger, difficult at takeoff and landing; if she managed to land without power, she was going to need all her skill to come out of it in one piece. The plane’s nose dropped; the propeller whirled of its own volition, nothing more than a windmill. Her training kicked in. Calmly but urgently, she banked the plane into the start of a sweeping arc, away from the rocky hills piercing the dunes ahead, all the time looking for a suitable landing site. She flicked the radio dial to the emergency frequency: 121.5 megacycles. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” she called. The international distress signal sounded unreal, coming from her own lips. It was somethi
ng she had never expected to say. “This is Victor Five, Bravo Mike November … Mayday, Mayday, Mayday …”

  And then there was a bang and she was spattered with fluid. She yelled in fright, wiped her eyes clear and brought the plane back under control as best she could. No more time for Mayday signals, she had to get the plane down.

  Without the comfort of any response from her radio message-there was a real chance that there was no one close enough to hear her cry for help-she gave one last shout for help, giving her location as best she could, and felt her stomach churn as the plane dropped in a swallowlike curve towards the ground.

  The wind whistled through the cockpit, the death of the engine eerily shrouding her in its silence. She was losing altitude rapidly now, the plane was shaking and the vibration shuddered into her arms through the controls. She got her airspeed down to eighty knots, which was near perfect for gliding. A needle-thin strip of track drew a line in the sand in the far distance, and another led for several kilometers to a remote farmhouse. She swooped and curved through the sky, using the configuration to bring the plane lower and lower, trying to get it into the correct landing position. It was tricky and dangerous; she needed to apply the plane’s flaps in the moments before landing, and if she misjudged her rate of descent and final approach she would end up careering off the track. Once the flaps were down, she would be totally committed to the landing. If it was deep sand down there, it would suck in the wheels and cartwheel the plane-and that would probably kill her. She side-slipped the aircraft, allowing it to remain at a reasonable speed, and by watching the relative motion of the intended point of touchdown through the windscreen she fine-tuned the rate of descent. Whatever the outcome, she knew she would be alive or dead in less than a minute.