Blood Trail

by Tony Park

  Sannie was staring at the wall, perspiring with the effort of holding the weight of the other two. ‘What can you see, Lilly?’

  ‘I . . . I . . . can’t reach the top.’

  Sannie felt a tremor through the sangoma’s legs and Lilly squealed as their shaky human pyramid collapsed in a tangle of arms, legs and screams.

  When they had caught their breath Sannie asked if they should try again.

  Lilly wiped her eyes. ‘It was no good. I still couldn’t reach the top and there was nowhere for me to put my hands or feet to grab hold. I’m sorry, Captain.’

  ‘Don’t cry, Lilly,’ Sannie said, giving her a hug. ‘You did your best.’

  She left the other two and went to the wall closest to Killarney. She put her hands against it. The last time she had checked she’d thought she detected vibrations, but had convinced herself she was just imagining it. Not so now. The other two came closer and they could all see particles of cement dust cascading down the face of the roughly rendered wall.

  Virtuous had painfully lowered herself to her knees and invited Lilly to join her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Sannie asked.

  ‘Praying.’

  Sannie felt a helpless rage within, trying to overtake her. She knew it would do her no good. Perhaps the sangoma was right. She eased herself to her knees and joined hands with Virtuous and Lilly while the woman led them in prayer.

  Sean groaned. Sannie opened her eyes and looked over at him. She excused herself from the others and went to him. He was coming to. She had removed his gag and other restraints as soon as she jumped into the pit. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Sean.’

  ‘Sean what?’

  ‘Sean.’

  He was not looking good.

  ‘Benny . . .’ Sean said.

  Sannie cradled Sean’s head, which was badly cut and bruised from his fall. ‘Benny’s fine, Sean. He’s OK.’

  The cement on the wall was shedding more powder now and Sannie could feel the vibration in the ground. If the machine was about the same size in diameter as the tunnels, then she realised there would not be enough room for any of them, not even thin little Lilly, to escape to one side of it as it smashed through the wall and continued its unstoppable journey into the recovery pit.

  Virtuous and Lilly kept on praying.

  Sannie started at the sound of an engine, thinking the machine was about to break through, then she heard a different noise and looked up. Standing at the rim of the pit was Benny, and he was barking. The motor noise behind him was switched off. She realised Benny must have followed Sean’s Land Rover all the way to Leopard’s Rest Dam, but who, she wondered, had just pulled up in a vehicle? Was it Piet, come back to check on his grisly work?

  ‘Good boy, Benny,’ said a female voice, and then Mia’s face appeared over the edge of the precipice. ‘So that’s where you all are!’

  Sannie’s heart leapt. ‘No time for jokes, Mia,’ she called up. ‘The tunnel-boring machine’s about to break through and mince us.’

  ‘Shit. I’ve got a long towing strap,’ said Mia, as she turned and sprinted away from the edge.

  ‘Hallelujah,’ Sannie said.

  Virtuous and Lilly hugged.

  *

  Mia opened the tailgate of her Land Rover and pulled out the canvas bag containing her recovery gear. She knew exactly what was in it. Graham knelt down and looked into the pit.

  ‘I’m Graham Foster,’ he told the occupants. ‘Mia’s rigging a tow strap to the back of the Land Rover and we’re going to pull you up one at a time. Do you need help down there? How’s Sean?’

  ‘Yes please, Graham,’ Sannie said. ‘I don’t think we can get Sean onto the rope by ourselves. He hit his head when he fell. Hurry, this wall is starting to crack.’

  ‘Roger that,’ Graham said.

  Mia finished doing up the bolt on the shackle at the end of the tow strap, fastening it to one of the Land Rover’s two rear spring hanger brackets. She tossed the other end to Graham.

  ‘Reverse, Jeff,’ she called.

  The vehicle backed up and Graham took a firm grip of the end of the strap and lowered himself over the edge. As the Land Rover reversed, Graham was lowered down into the hole.

  Mia watched on from above as Sannie directed Graham to help her fasten the strap around Sean.

  ‘No!’ Sean, perhaps concussed, was trying to push them away. ‘The kid first, then the woman.’

  ‘No, Sean, you’re injured,’ Sannie said.

  Above them, Mia shook her head. Bloody men.

  Jeff had hopped out of the car and was standing beside her. ‘You don’t have another strap, do you?’

  ‘Yes, I do, a recovery strap. Good idea.’ Mia went to her bag again, found the second strap and shackle and fixed it to the Land Rover’s other spring hanger.

  Sannie and Graham were making slow work of getting the tow strap around Sean and Mia realised that the sangoma and Lilly would both probably need assistance. With the Land Rover now parked at the edge of the drop-off she grabbed the recovery strap, climbed over the precipice and lowered herself down using muscle power. She grinned up at Jeff. ‘Get ready to haul ass, literally.’

  He gave her a thumbs up. ‘Good to go.’

  Mia eased herself down.

  ‘Mia?’ Jeff called down to her.

  She looked up, impatient to get on with it. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m sorry, if I came between you and Graham. I didn’t mean to.’

  Graham also looked up at the mention of his name. He grinned up at Jeff. ‘All good, bru. Just get behind the wheel.’

  Jeff ducked out of sight, but Benny returned to the pit to watch all the activity below. He barked, presumably to get Sean’s attention. Mia touched the ground at the bottom of the pit and ushered Virtuous over. She also protested, saying Lilly should go first.

  ‘No, Mama,’ Lilly said firmly. Lilly helped Mia get the strap around Virtuous and secure it under her arms with a shackle.

  ‘You’ll need to hold on, as well,’ Mia said, ‘so the strap doesn’t tighten too much around you and squeeze you.’

  The sangoma nodded. ‘I understand.’

  ‘The wall,’ Sannie said. ‘Hurry.’

  Mia looked over and saw fine, but long, vertical cracks beginning to appear in the cement. Sannie and Graham had managed to get Sean on his feet and ready to go, with a strap around him. Jeff would have his work cut out for him, helping these two over the lip, Mia thought.

  ‘OK, Jeff!’ Mia called. ‘Go for it.’

  They all looked up as Jeff started the Land Rover. He revved the engine and they heard him start to drive away. But when both Sean and Virtuous tugged on their straps, ready to be lifted, the heavy metal shackles on the ends that had been attached to the vehicle slid through the grass and over the lip of the pit, and they all ducked to avoid being hit by them as they crashed down.

  Benny was barking furiously.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ Sannie said. ‘He’s leaving us!’

  For a moment they all looked at each other, aghast.

  Jeff had disconnected the straps. Lilly started to cry. The sound of the Land Rover disappeared on the warm afternoon breeze as the wall started to open up behind them.

  Chapter 31

  Sara had taken one of the filming vehicles, a short-wheelbase, older-model Land Rover with just enough room for the driver in front and a camera operator in the back. She was parked on a rise which, although low, had a marvellous view over the open plain of the Little Serengeti.

  She checked her watch. It was coming up to two in the afternoon, the time when the second Stayhome Safari of the day was normally broadcast.

  In this sector of Julianne’s reserve they had phone signal, which was why most of their webcast game drives were held around here, where they could gu
arantee transmission. She took out her phone and called the producer, Janine.

  ‘Hi, Janine, it’s Sara, the camera operator at Lion Plains.’

  ‘Sara!’ Janine said. ‘What’s with you guys, you’ve been offline since all that drama with Mia and the poacher. Is everything all right? We’ve been flooded with comments from people on Facebook and Twitter wanting to know what’s happening there.’

  ‘Long, long story. There was a gunfight – it’s probably all subject to a police investigation now, so I’d better leave that to Mia. I’m by myself, but I can look around and maybe go on camera myself.’

  ‘Sure, we’re desperate for content from Lion Plains after yesterday. This is your big break.’

  ‘Thanks!’ Sara ended the call then climbed into the back and switched on the camera. It would be difficult, as without an operator she would have to point the Land Rover at whatever she was trying to film, although there was a remote she could use to stop and start and zoom and she could see a feed of what she was filming via an app on her phone.

  Sara took out her binoculars and scanned the view in front of her. ‘Yes!’ she said to herself when she spotted a pair of rhinos, a mother and a tiny calf. She started her engine. Off to her right she saw a dust plume. She took out her binoculars and picked up two vehicles. One was Sean Bourke’s camouflaged double-cab anti-poaching vehicle, and the other was a game viewer, with one person on board.

  Sara focused the binoculars and realised it was Jeff, the cute Canadian researcher guy, driving. He was shirtless, probably working on his tan. That must be Mia’s vehicle, she thought. She wondered if Mia and Graham had hitched a lift on the chopper with Oscar. It had been like a regular shuttle service between Lion Plains and the hospital in Nelspruit. She wondered how much of the story she could or should tell online when she went live.

  *

  Jeff caught up to the anti-poaching Land Rover and flashed his lights. Piet Oosthuizen, driving the other vehicle, pulled over.

  Jeff stopped and got out and went to the other vehicle. Piet opened his door, went to Jeff and the pair embraced.

  ‘My boy,’ Piet said.

  Jeff swallowed hard, fighting back tears. ‘Dad.’

  ‘The girl? The anti-poaching rangers?’ Piet asked.

  Jeff took a breath to steady himself. ‘Mia and Graham went . . . went into the pit. I didn’t even have to force them. It was their idea. They climbed down to help the others. The wounded ranger’s still in my vehicle.’

  Piet smiled. ‘If anyone ever finds any evidence – which they won’t once that machine has done its work – people will most likely think it was a terrible accident. Think of it that way, my boy. Someone fell in and your friends went in to save them. It will be over quickly. Trust me, I’ve seen people die worse deaths. What’s the condition of the wounded guy . . .?’

  Jeff looked over at the man still lying in the Land Rover. ‘Oscar. He’ll die if he doesn’t get urgent attention. He’s barely conscious – I doubt he knows what’s going on. We could drop him at a clinic and –’

  ‘Now’s not the time to go soft, Jeff. Look, you probably should have left him in the pit as well. But what we can do is slot a rhino and leave this guy at the scene, let him die there. We’ll tell the authorities we came across him doing some freelance poaching. We can say that some accomplice got away with the horn.’

  Soft was one thing his father could never be accused of, Jeff thought. He had killed Sipho and one of his workers with a hunting rifle from long range in Killarney, concerned that they would not stand up to police interrogation and would reveal the existence of the tunnels. Piet had also exhumed and dismembered a worker who had died in a cave-in while digging one of the cross tunnels, and planted his arm in the sangoma’s freezer. Jeff feared his father just as much as he craved his approval. He felt he needed to explain what had happened.

  ‘I had to get Mia and the police officer into the tunnel, Dad, to trap them and stop them calling it in. They had just worked out how we were doing it. I had to blow the shafts on the Tom tunnel, and –’

  Piet held up a hand. ‘Enough, now. You have done what had to be done, as has Samantha. We can all put this behind us now.’

  Jeff looked around his father and into the cab of the Land Rover. An armed man kept his gun trained on Laura, the British girl, who slumped in the back seat, her eyes red from crying. His father’s new girlfriend, Samantha, was in the front passenger seat, her face pale and sweaty. She raised a hand weakly. ‘Good work, Jeff.’

  Piet clapped him on the arm. ‘I would have been proud to have you by my side in Angola.’

  Jeff’s father had served in the border war between South Africa and the communist-backed forces in Angola during the apartheid era. While he would talk about his time in the army often, usually funny stories, Jeff had often wondered what it was his father had seen or done that caused him to wake, shouting, in the middle of the night. In civilian life Piet had worked as a mining engineer after the war. He blamed the loss of his job at a goldmine in the late 1990s on the company’s push to employ more black African engineers, but Jeff suspected his father’s love of drinking and gambling had more to do with his career limitations than political correctness.

  Piet and his first wife, Maria, had moved from South Africa to Canada when Jeff was still very young. Jeff had only known a life of privilege, as an only child growing up Canadian. When asked by friends in Canada about how the immigrant family had done so well for themselves, Piet would talk of an inheritance or an investment windfall that had helped set him up in his adopted country. It was only when his mother Maria was dying of breast cancer that Jeff had learned the truth: that his father had been part of a gang that had tunnelled underground from a vacant shop in Krugersdorp, on Johannesburg’s West Rand, to the nearby Standard Bank and broken through to the vault. Their haul was worth a fortune at the time and no arrests were ever made.

  Just before he learned the news about his father’s criminal past, Jeff had also been in trouble with the law, suspended from university for dealing drugs. He’d started using grass in his mid-teens and had moved on to ecstasy, MDMA and a little coke – dealing to his fellow students had been a good source of income while studying. His father had hit him when he found out. Jeff had tried to stop his own use, but had re-offended, and ended up doing six months in prison. Funnily enough, in prison he’d been able to restart his university studies and continue them when he got out, majoring in anthropology. With his family ties to Africa he’d been truly fascinated with the world of traditional beliefs and medicine.

  After Maria had died, Piet had been drawn back to Africa, expanding his Canadian construction and engineering business abroad. On a business trip he had met Elizabeth, several years his junior, and eventually married her. While he put up a smooth and professional business front, Jeff’s father, ever the gambler, had, in fact, been overextending himself. He’d gone into partnership with Elizabeth’s friend, Samantha, her husband John and their local African partner to build the hotel and install a new water and sewage plant and drainage system, as well as the new school, and it had all fallen over as soon as COVID hit.

  Jeff had been in South Africa researching his thesis for his masters. That part of his cover story was true, though he’d adopted a fake surname, Beaton, when his father coopted him into his plan, in case Julianne Clyde-Smith or any of her people connected him with the guy doing all the construction work in Killarney, and on the neighbouring Leopard Springs property. As Piet’s undercover man inside the Sabi Sand Game Reserve, Jeff, the earnest young Canadian researcher, had ample opportunity to pick up on intelligence about rhino sightings and to help seed the fear that poachers were using umuthi that actually worked. In fact, he’d proven very useful in this capacity, partly by using his own knowledge of illicit pharmaceuticals to slip first tranquillisers and later, poison, into the muthi packs carried by Bongani and some of the other African
staff – and into Pretty’s smoked salmon bagels, for good measure.

  ‘Elizabeth didn’t see you?’ Piet asked.

  Jeff shook his head. ‘Samantha made sure to let me know their movements, so I could stay out of their way.’

  Piet smiled at Samantha. ‘Good work, both of you.’

  Jeff exhaled. This ride was the most intense high he’d ever been on. He’d sought his father’s approval all his life and now, he realised, he’d finally earned it by becoming complicit in murder. Jeff could see how war had made his father who he was. He felt he had crossed a line, in his father’s eyes and in his own. He thought about Mia, for a moment. It was a shame she had to die – he’d wanted to get her in the sack. He smiled to himself; maybe he was more like his dad than he’d ever dared to dream.

  Piet seemed to have spotted something in the distance. He reached into the cab of the anti-poaching Land Rover and took a pair of binoculars from the dashboard. ‘Bingo. Rhinos. Two of them. Easy money.’

  ‘Dad . . .’

  ‘No one’s manning the Vulture system – you said so yourself. Samantha called Julianne to check on Sue Barker and found out that Audrey and Alison are there busy looking after the distraught mom. There’s another hundred thousand US dollars sitting over there in the open, waiting to be plucked. Charles, Shadrack?’

  ‘Yebo,’ the two men with AK-47s in the back of the vehicle answered. They and their companion had been workers in Piet’s construction business and they had turned to poaching in order to keep their jobs. They climbed out.

  Piet pointed to the rhino. ‘Go. Take that one. I’ll bring the Landy around the other side of it. Let the calf live.’

  ‘All right,’ Charles said.

  ‘Julius,’ Piet said to the third worker in the truck, ‘you stay in the truck, watch the girl.’

  ‘Dad, don’t you think we should make a clean break?’ Jeff said. ‘You told me you’d made enough to keep the bank off your back. We should get Samantha to a doctor, lie low for a while. The country’s about to reopen for tourism, so we can get the hotel up and running soon. We’ve been lucky so far.’