by Tony Park
‘Good, then you go with Bongani,’ Sannie said.
Sara looked crestfallen, as if she wanted to take back her words. ‘But I am also a soldier. I want to get that bastard poacher. He’s responsible for this, somehow.’
‘You’re still recovering,’ Sannie said, pointing to the dressing on Sara’s shoulder, ‘and Bongani could die if you don’t go with him. Get on the bloody helicopter.’
As Sara reluctantly obeyed, Mia leaned into the helicopter and kissed Bongani on the cheek.
‘Famba kahle, madala,’ she said to him. She squeezed his hand and his lips began moving, as if he was trying to form a word. ‘It’s all right,’ Mia said, smoothing his brow with her hand.
In the silence left by the departing helicopter Sannie looked around her. ‘So where did this poacher go?’
Jeff shrugged. ‘I’m no tracker, but I thought I caught a glimpse of someone moving through the bush, over past the big termite mound. I went to have a look, but I couldn’t see anything. Maybe Mia can.’
‘I know this place,’ Sannie said, looking around in a circle.
‘Yes,’ Mia said, going to Jeff and taking her rifle out of his hand, ‘it’s the spot where Laura disappeared.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Sannie said.
‘Coincidence?’ Jeff asked.
‘As a detective I don’t believe in coincidences. What do you think, Mia?’
Mia pointed to the west: ‘That way’s the shortest route to the fence and Killarney. He must have been heading from there, when Bongani picked him up.’
‘It’s odd for him to be travelling in broad daylight,’ Sannie said. ‘Poachers are most often active at night, during full moon. Do you have a map of the reserve, Mia?’
‘Yes.’ Mia went to the Land Rover and took a plastic laminated map from the cubby hole between the two front seats. She handed it to Sannie. ‘Maybe this guy heard or knew about what was happening in Killarney and thought all the authorities would be tied up there. This might have just been an opportunistic mission for him.’
They started to walk towards the mound and Mia checked the ground. There were some tracks, but they were Jeff’s. Out of habit she had mentally registered the tread pattern of his boots.
Something caught her eye.
‘What is it?’ Sannie asked, following her.
Mia walked close to the earthen mound and bent at the waist. ‘There are too many tracks here.’
‘What about those over there?’ Sannie pointed to another set.
‘Yes, that’s the poacher.’ Mia left the area immediately around the termite mound and picked up the other tracks. She followed them into the bush. ‘Blood here. And it looks like he was following a crash of rhinos.’
‘More than one?’
Mia nodded. ‘Three. A cow and her calf and a bull – we saw them on the Vulture system earlier. That was his target.’
‘And he was tipped off?’
‘We guess so, yes, maybe by Julianne’s pilot.’
‘Why the blood, here, when there’s no carcass? Is that from the poacher?’
Mia shook her head. ‘No, the rhino. Here, see, the poacher hamstrung it, cut its rear leg. We’ll find it just now.’
They walked on.
Sannie looked over her shoulder. ‘Where’s your friend, Jeff?’
Mia glanced behind her and rolled her eyes. ‘Off playing Rambo again, maybe. Men.’
She heard a low mooing noise and stopped.
‘What is it?’ Sannie asked.
Mia held up a hand. ‘Buffalo. Now we’re in kak, if we bump into some dagga boys. They’re . . .’
‘I know about buffalo,’ Sannie said, ‘you don’t need to tell me the old males are the most dangerous.’
There was a whooshing sound from the tree canopy above them and Mia saw a white-backed vulture gliding past. It was a bad sign, she thought. The vulture was descending, coming in to land to their front. Mia carried on, rifle at the ready. As soon as the birds became aware of her approach they took off, or aborted their landings.
Mia saw the rhino. She knew instantly when she saw the size of the body that it was the big old bull, the one that had been following the calf and its mother. There was some tiny consolation that at least the other two had escaped. Moving closer, she saw the grisly truth, that this majestic animal had been hacked to death.
Sannie joined her, hands on hips, surveying the horrible scene. She had, Mia guessed, given up asking why. Sannie took out her phone and held it up, looking at the screen. ‘I need to call this in, but there’s no service here.’
Mia nodded, not even bothering to check her phone. ‘Yes, it comes and goes here, but we don’t do anything to improve it, to avoid aiding poachers.’
‘Understood,’ Sannie said, taking a picture of the crime scene instead, then putting her phone away. ‘I need to get somewhere to make a call.’
‘OK.’
‘Hey!’
Both of them turned, each raising their weapon then lowering it when they saw Jeff walking back, through the bush.
‘You could have got yourself killed,’ Mia called out to him. ‘Did you find anything?’
‘Some tracks, I think.’
Sannie was checking her phone again. ‘I really need signal, Mia.’
‘Jeff, we can check the tracks just now. The captain needs to get back to the Land Rover first. We need to get to Little Serengeti so she can use her phone. We found the dead rhino.’
Giving up, for the moment, on trying to make a call, Sannie took another look at the map Mia had given her. ‘Mia?’
She went to the captain, who shared the map with her. ‘Show me where Killarney is, approximately where the new school is located.’
Mia checked the map and placed her finger in the white border outside the coloured area, which as well as showing roads, waterholes and prominent features, was adorned with sketches of the big five.
‘Now show me where you’ve lost the tracks of poachers in the past, including this area, please.’
Mia ran her right index finger along the laminated surface. ‘Here, by the Manzini Spruit, where there’s a small waterhole in the dry stream bed, and here, where we are now. And this is roughly where the termite mound is, where we lost Laura.’ She thought about what Bongani had said to her about his cousin, Alfred. ‘And here is a spot where another anti-poaching patrol claimed a poacher disappeared.’
Mia looked up from the map and into Captain van Rensburg’s blue eyes.
‘You see what that was, on the map, all these spots?’ Sannie said, retracing the route Mia’s finger had just taken.
The realisation hit Mia. ‘A straight line. That doesn’t happen in nature.’
‘Nor crime. Criminals are rarely as organised as films and TV make them out to be, but –’
‘My goodness.’ Mia put a hand over her mouth. ‘That’s how –’
‘Guys,’ Jeff called to them from where he had stopped. ‘I really think you’re going to want to take a look at this. Hurry.’
Mia looked to Sannie, who rolled her eyes in reply.
They were retracing their steps, but Jeff had moved off the game trail they had been following, about twenty metres deeper into the bush. Out of habit, Mia checked the ground to see what might have led him there, and then she saw it. ‘Tracks.’
‘Yep. I found them, like I said,’ Jeff said proudly. ‘There’s some muthi lying about as well. You’re just about to cross it.’
Mia looked down, and sure enough she saw the plaited grass twine, the same sign that had freaked Bongani out just before their contact with the poachers in which she had killed the man. She shuddered again at the memory. It seemed so long ago.
Jeff had carried on. He looked over his shoulder. ‘There’s more, Mia.’
‘More tracks?’
‘Magic.’
‘Stop talking in riddles. We have serious business to attend to,’ Sannie said.
‘No jokes, no riddles, no games,’ Jeff said. ‘I’m talking about real life, honest to goodness magic. Watch.’
Mia paused, catching her breath. She was finding the constant surges of adrenaline through her body very draining, and she was operating on too little sleep. ‘Jeff . . .’
He smiled at her, bent, grabbed a handful of dirt, brought it up to his mouth and blew on it. The cloud of dust billowed out towards Mia and Sannie, and Jeff disappeared.
Chapter 25
Sannie and Mia stood at the spot where Jeff had just disappeared and looked into the hole in the ground. Jeff grinned up at them.
‘A tunnel.’ Mia shook her head in wonderment, although, having seen the straight line that Sannie had just pointed out on the map, she had herself just come to the conclusion that the only way the poachers could have kept entering and leaving the reserve undetected was underground.
‘Exactly.’ Sannie looked around them and down at the ground around the entrance that Jeff had discovered. She knelt beside a circular steel cover, its concave surface filled with a mix of sand, leaves and twigs. It was like an expertly camouflaged manhole cover, lying in the grass by the hole in which Jeff stood, looking up.
‘The ground was disturbed, and the cover wasn’t fully concealed,’ Jeff said. ‘I guess the guy jumped in here in a hurry after I saw him and didn’t have time to replace it completely.’
‘How could he hide all signs of it, though,’ Mia asked, ‘if he was already in there, pulling the cover back in place?’
‘Sipho,’ Sannie said.
‘Who?’ Jeff asked.
‘He was the young guy who Mia and Bongani chased through the bush yesterday.’
‘Of course,’ Mia said. ‘Yes, there’s a pattern here. Now I can see it. Whenever a rhino was killed there was always a decoy poacher for us to chase.’
‘Or something to throw us off the trail, like Laura’s jacket being left by the termite mound,’ Sannie said, ‘and her beanie being found later. That meant the dog handlers rewarded their animals for finding something, meaning they wouldn’t keep looking and maybe find a tunnel entrance.’
‘Yes,’ Mia said, ‘and like Sipho, the two guys with the impala were also decoys. Laura must have seen them or the tunnel opening and then they or another guy forced her underground, covered up the entrance and lured us away. The decoys’ job must have also been to make sure the tunnel entrances were covered up properly. Sipho was, like, cannon fodder, to protect the old guy. But why would he have risked it?’
Sannie had the answer. ‘When we caught Sipho he had a pangolin, and he was known for going into the park to catch snakes. He – and the syndicate he was part of – would have known that he would get off with only a slap on the wrist, a fine or a month or two in prison. They would have promised to pay him.’
‘Then who killed him and why?’ Mia asked.
Sannie shrugged. ‘Good question. Maybe they thought they could no longer trust him to stand up to interrogation, or maybe taking the teenage girls wasn’t part of the deal he had with them. We know at least one of the girls was close to him – maybe Sipho was worried for the girl and the bad guys found out he was sweet on her. When they saw we were about to take him into custody . . .’
‘Makes sense,’ Mia said. ‘Poor kid. He knew he was at risk.’
‘This is a hell of a logistical effort to go to,’ Jeff said, looking up at them.
‘Yes,’ Sannie said, ‘but the stakes are high. How many rhinos have you lost in this area lately, Mia? Fourteen?’
‘Fifteen, all big ones. It’s been our worst few months in years.’
‘How big was each horn?’
‘Hard to say, exactly,’ Mia said, ‘but maybe two kilograms on average.’
Sannie did the mental arithmetic. ‘On the street, in Vietnam, that’s getting close to two million US dollars. That’s a hell of a big incentive to dig a tunnel, particularly if you’ve got machinery and workers sitting idle.’
‘Like during a government-imposed lockdown,’ Jeff said.
‘Exactly,’ Mia said, ‘but if this thing goes all the way to the fence line, to Killarney, then it’s crime on an industrial scale.’
Sannie nodded. ‘It’s a hell of an investment and it would have needed some serious muscle or machinery to excavate. The school and tourism project . . .’
‘Is right by the fence,’ Mia said, continuing her thought.
‘They had labourers coming in from outside and the local community was warned to keep well away from it. I’ve got to call this in.’
Jeff disappeared into the tunnel.
‘Where are you going?’ Mia asked.
‘Not far,’ came his muffled reply. ‘Just having a look.’
‘OK,’ Mia said to Sannie. ‘We can guard this end. If anyone comes out, we’ll take care of them.’
Sannie stood and started to turn when Jeff called out from underground. ‘Come quick, I can hear something. Maybe voices!’
*
Laura Barker sat on the bare wooden slats of her bed, knees drawn up against her chest. She knew, now, that she was underground, having been led from the cement-walled cell where she had been kept so far to a pit and forced to scramble down a ladder.
With the hood over her head she had been unable to see where she was putting her feet and she had fallen the last two metres, banging her knee on the floor. She had been led to a crude room, carved from the earth and lined with rough wooden boards. It smelled of fresh earth and human waste, perhaps from whomever had dug it.
Above her she had heard gunfire and, soon after, the ground had shaken from the effects of an explosion. Clods of dirt had rained down on her and for a moment she had thought she would be buried alive.
Left alone, Laura had screamed for help until she was hoarse, thinking the shooting was the prelude to a rescue mission, like in the movies when someone was kidnapped.
The steel door clanged as someone fiddled with a latch or lock on the other side.
‘In here! Help me!’
When the door opened, however, a voice said: ‘Come with me.’
The person who entered did not bring news that they were here to help. The hand that grabbed her was that of the woman. Her heart sank.
‘Where are you taking me?’ Laura blurted out.
‘Do you want to live, girl?’
Tears rolled down her cheeks under the hood, but she gave a small nod.
The woman dug her fingers into Laura’s forearm and dragged her off the bed and out of the makeshift cell and into a tunnel.
*
Mia and Sannie climbed down the shaft into the tunnel below. Jeff had jumped, when he did his disappearing act, but it was about three metres down, so they used steel rungs set into the wall, which had been roughly plastered with cement.
At the bottom, Sannie saw that the tunnel extended in two directions. Jeff had headed off to the west, towards Killarney. ‘Jeff, come back here, now.’
‘But . . .’ He came back towards them.
‘If you did hear voices, Jeff, we need to be extra careful. We move together as a group. First we need to find out where this thing goes, and we need to organise backup. There has been one explosion already today so we have to assume that whoever dug or developed this thing knows explosives – they may have wired all the entrances to blow if they’re discovered.’
‘The nearest phone signal is this way,’ Mia said, pointing east. ‘The border of the next property, Leopard Springs, is only about a hundred metres away, across the road, and the signal starts deeper into their reserve.’
‘We need to establish where the other entrances or exits are,’ Sannie said, ‘so we’re not ambushed. Let’s head east.’
‘OK,’ Jeff said.
Sannie led the way and used a torch app on her phone to see in the dark. She ran her hands along the walls of the tunnel as she went. The structure was perfectly cylindrical and as her fingers trailed over a seam – a machined tight fit – she realised that the interior of the tunnel was made of pre-cast concrete sections of pipe. She reckoned the tube they were walking along was two metres in diameter.
‘How did they do this?’ Mia asked aloud.
‘A machine,’ Sannie said. ‘A tunnel-boring machine. Tommy, my youngest, he’s always watching that Discovery Channel. He watched this one show about how they dig those massive railway tunnels under cities. The machine is circular, with cutting heads, and it first drills underground, and then sections of pre-formed tunnel are dropped down a hole and pushed along by big jacks, one piece at a time, to fill the void behind the machine, like a concrete sleeve.’
‘Amazing,’ Jeff said.
Sannie had only walked for a few minutes, pistol out and at the ready, when she came to a dead end. The others came up behind her as she ran her hand over a smooth concrete wall in front of them.
‘What the hell is that all about?’ Jeff asked.
Mia snapped her fingers. ‘I know where we are. We’re under the next property and they’ve been building a new hide and a waterhole. Julianne was furious about the whole project – it’s more like a dam.’
‘So, is that a dam wall we’re looking at?’ Jeff asked.
Mia shook her head. ‘No. The worst-kept secret in the Sabi Sand is that our neighbours at Leopard Springs have been building a big underground hide. They’re becoming more popular – guests sit below ground level so they can view animals coming to drink at water level; it’s better for photography.’
Sannie looked around them. ‘Makes sense for the entry/exit point to be at the big termite mound, where we entered. If there was an entrance here then there would be too much risk of people visiting the hide seeing poachers coming or going.’
‘Then why bother digging the tunnel all the way to this hide or dam or whatever’s on the other side of that wall?’
Sannie already had the answer, thanks to her son’s enquiring mind. ‘Because that’s where the tunnel-boring machine was extracted from underground.’
