Red Earth

by Tony Park

  ‘This is where the gunshots were reported,’ the ranger said.

  The bakkie’s lights were shining on the car now, and Themba saw it was a late model BMW sedan.

  The solo man walked away from his car, into the cone of light cast by a lamppost in the camping ground. He had striking white hair, the same as the man in the helicopter that had been searching for them in iMfolozi.

  Themba felt Lerato’s hand clutch hard at his arm. ‘The number plate,’ she said, ‘that’s my dad’s car.’

  Chapter 20

  Mike and Nia drove through the night. She had collected him at the Nyalazi Gate to Hluhluwe–iMfolozi Park and he had driven from there.

  Mike had spent a frustrating afternoon at the gate, on the periphery of the action. Jed’s South African police liaison contact in Durban had arranged for the CIA men to ride along in a South African police vehicle, but there had been no room for Mike. In the gate office he had monitored the progress of the search as best he could by listening in on the national parks’ radio system. It was in desperation that he’d asked Nia to fetch his truck, rather than hitchhiking back to Durban.

  He felt bad, now, dragging her back into this nightmare, but at the same time pleased he was back in the hunt. No sooner had he taken over the wheel than she had fallen asleep in the passenger seat of the Defender. She was cut and bruised, and while he had seen her injuries and helped attend to them at the scene of her helicopter crash, he could see as soon as he looked into her eyes that she was carrying more wounds than just the physical ones.

  Mike had wondered if it was a delayed reaction, a deeper level of shock seeping into her. He glanced at her now. Occasionally she jerked in her sleep, as if having a bad dream. She had been what he had come to know as her normal feisty self when she had walked away from her crash, but the woman who had greeted him at the Nyalazi Gate had looked more than tired or battered: she’d looked sad.

  He had thought, for a moment, as she got out of his Land Rover and greeted him, that she’d been almost about to cry. Again, it was an understandable reaction, but when he had thanked her for collecting his car and asked if there was anything she needed, she had fobbed him off with a curt, ‘Sleep.’

  Her whole body was racked by a spasm, as though she’d imagined falling over in a dream, and she sat upright in the passenger seat. ‘Where …’

  ‘We’re on the way to Mkhuze. Not far now.’

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  ‘There were reports of shots fired in the camping ground there, and the gate attendant reported seeing a shot-up caravan being towed by a Discovery. I called Jed while I was waiting for you and he’s waiting for another helicopter. The South African police seem to be trying to keep him out of the action.’

  ‘Great,’ Nia said, ‘more gunfire.’

  ‘There are rangers out looking for the kids. Hopefully we’ll have them soon. You looked like you were having a bad dream.’

  She peered out of the side window, then back at him. ‘It was no dream. It was reality.’

  ‘What was?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing. None of your business, anyway.’

  ‘OK.’

  He drove on. She was fully awake now, but silent. Her phone beeped and she looked at a message, then tapped the screen. ‘I’m forwarding Angus Greiner’s contact details to you.’

  Mike felt his phone vibrate in his pocket as the message came through. He recalled that the cocky young security guard, her boyfriend, had introduced himself by his nickname, Banger, and that Nia had used that name when referring to him as well. He wondered what had changed.

  ‘He must be worried about you,’ he probed.

  ‘Huh.’ She flicked her head and brushed a persistent strand of black hair out of her eye.

  ‘Fight?’

  She stared at him until he looked back to the road ahead. ‘I get it, none of my business.’

  ‘Exactly.’ She yawned and rubbed her face. ‘You’re old to be a wildlife researcher.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She smiled again. ‘I’m just stating a fact. Have you always worked with vultures, like, since varsity?’

  He normally avoided talking about his past, for example when research students from overseas started asking questions around the campfire, over drinks. But he was pleased Nia was at least talking, and he wanted to know more about her, so it was only fair.

  ‘No. Like most guys my age I went into the army after school. I was born in Rhodesia – Zimbabwe – but my parents moved south in the seventies so I did my national service in the South African Army.’

  ‘Were you in the war?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, in South West Africa, Namibia. I did seven years in military intelligence, on the border, in the Caprivi Strip.’

  ‘I thought you guys only had to do a couple of years of something. My parents went overseas, to Australia. I was a baby.’

  ‘But you came back?’

  ‘I was born here. I’m African, but hey, I am asking the questions here.’

  He lifted one hand off the wheel in a gesture of submission. ‘OK, OK. We could elect to serve longer, fulltime, and therefore avoid having to go back year after year to do our annual call-ups. The work was interesting.’

  ‘Did you kill anyone?’

  ‘Most people are too polite to ask that question.’

  ‘That’s not a category I fit into.’

  He could see that. ‘No. Not then, anyway.’

  ‘Ooh, more mystery. You killed people later? What were you, a mercenary or something before you became a fulltime twitcher?’

  ‘I was disillusioned, that’s what I was. There were people all around me in the army making money out of the illegal trade in wildlife. The defence force was a party to the slaughter of rhino and elephants in Angola and parts of Namibia, and shipping out the horn and ivory in military convoys.’

  Nia swivelled in her seat and rested her arm on the console box between them. It looked like she wanted a diversion from whatever was on her mind. He really didn’t like talking about this part of his life, but he didn’t want to see her go back to staring out the side window, looking like she was about to cry. ‘What did you do about it?’

  ‘You’re assuming I did anything at all.’

  ‘You don’t strike me as the sort of man who’d turn his back or put his head in the sand if he came across people doing the wrong thing. Nor are you the sort who’d be cheating.’

  The last comment was strange, and he wondered where it came from, but he drew a breath and told his story.

  ‘I tried to raise awareness of the illegal trade through official channels, but it was covered up. Senior officers promised investigations, but they either never happened or they were whitewashes. In frustration, I went to the press, but because everything was censored in those days nothing really changed. All that happened was that I got a name as a troublemaker.’

  ‘Did you get in trouble?’

  ‘I was passed over for promotion. I was never going to progress far, but speaking out put the brakes on any career I might have had in the army. I didn’t care, as by that time I’d had enough and I’d lost faith in what we were fighting for.’

  ‘What did you do after the army?’

  ‘I joined the Natal Parks Board and worked in conservation and eventually I went to university and studied zoology. I did my PhD in birds of prey – martial eagles. It could have been a dream job, but it turned into a nightmare.’

  ‘I’m intrigued.’

  Her eyes widened with anticipatory glee. Those eyes were, he saw as he allowed himself to be distracted from the road for another instant, quite beautiful, almond shaped, with dark pupils. ‘I wanted to do more than just research or study birds and wildlife. I wanted to stop the trade in endangered animals. I joined the investigations branch of the parks board.’

  �
��Like wildlife cops?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ he said. ‘Rhinos and elephants were still in desperate trouble, mainly outside South Africa at the time, in the neighbouring countries, which were becoming independent, though in some cases still in a mess.’

  ‘But what could you do about it from inside apartheid South Africa?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of Operation Lock?’

  She shook her head. She would have been a toddler at the time, he realised.

  ‘Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands came to Africa in 1987 and was appalled at the plight of our wildlife. He was the head of what’s now known as the World Wide Fund for Nature, the old WWF, but he wanted to do more. He bankrolled a secret program to target poaching gangs in Africa and in the countries where the rhino horn and elephant ivory were destined for – Operation Lock. The WWF denied any involvement.

  ‘A mercenary firm made up of ex Special Air Service operatives was recruited to do a lot of the dirty work. They also engaged some local South Africans who knew how the wildlife trade worked on the ground.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes, I was one of them.’ The events of those two years rolled through his mind as he stared ahead at the road.

  ‘And?’

  She wasn’t going to let up now that he had opened the door on his past. ‘It was a war, but this time I ended up on the front line. I began by gathering intelligence, running a network of informers, but after a while I was spending more and more time in the field, going undercover and posing as a rhino horn seller. I felt like I was finally achieving something, but our methods …’

  Nia didn’t say anything now. He drew a breath, then continued. ‘Our methods weren’t always legal. At the time I justified my actions by telling myself that what we were doing was saving animals from extinction.’

  ‘Everyone knows it’s a dirty business, poaching, and there’s no shortage of people on Facebook every day calling for poachers to be shot on sight, like they do in Zimbabwe, or have their testicles cut off and so forth.’

  He’d seen what she was talking about. He used Facebook and Twitter to keep his organisation’s supporters up to date with his vulture research, but too much of the commentary on social media was driven by armchair conservationists who didn’t really know what they were talking about. It was one thing to call for poachers in national parks to be shot on sight – and he wasn’t against that – but it was another thing to be the one pulling the trigger.

  ‘What are you thinking about? You’ve got a faraway look in your eyes. Are you OK?’

  He blinked, and focused again on the road. He couldn’t look at her as he spoke in a soft monotone. ‘Operation Lock was canned – the press found out about it and wild rumours started circulating that we were working for South African intelligence, trying to destabilise African countries. That was nonsense, but we were out of business. I wanted to do more, to stop poaching, so I moved back to my home country, now Zimbabwe, and got a job in anti-poaching on privately owned land near Gonarezhou National Park in the southeast. There was a war going on there, with animals being slaughtered and I wanted to take the lessons I’d learned in Operation Lock and apply them there. I started running a network of informers again. One of my assets – a person, I mean – delivered some good intelligence on a poaching gang in Mozambique, across the border from Gonarezhou. I was part of a covert team that crossed into Mozambique, illegally. My man was a Shangaan schoolteacher, and a poaching syndicate operated from his village. They were his neighbours, and he taught some of their children.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘My team went in and, using information from the schoolteacher – Abraham was his name – we ambushed the poaching gang and took them out.’

  ‘Killed them.’

  He swallowed. ‘All four of them. They were armed with a couple of AK-47s, tomahawks to cut off rhino horns, knives.’

  ‘Did they fire on you first?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Two guns, you said.’

  He nodded. ‘We set an ambush. The poachers were moving right to left, along a track in front of us. I was on the right of the line. The guys with the AKs were in the front, and when they had gone past our guys to the left we opened fire. There was so much noise, and light from the muzzle flashes, all you did was look for a target and fire. When it was done we got up and checked them.’

  In his nightmares he saw the bodies, riddled with holes, he and his men standing over them, photographing them.

  ‘Go on,’ she said, filling the void.

  ‘The two on the right, the ones in front of me and my partner, were just kids, sixteen and eighteen as it turned out. The youngest was at the end of the line, where I was firing. I killed a child, Nia, an unarmed teenager.’

  ‘You weren’t to know in the dark that the other two didn’t have guns. Besides, if the Zimbabwean national parks guys had come across them in Gonarezhou they would have done the same thing. It’s happening in South Africa’s national parks all the time these days.’

  He’d used the same justifications himself many times over the years. Mike clung to the steering wheel as if it were a lifeline.

  ‘That wasn’t the only time I was involved in a contact,’ he said, ‘but it’s the dead eyes of that sixteen-year-old boy that will stay with me forever.’

  ‘Did you stop your undercover operations after that?’

  ‘No.’ That shamed him as well. The remorse had come later, delayed, in the form of nightmares. He’d always been a drinker, but had sought more and more refuge in whisky to try and self-medicate. At the time, he had felt elated, the adrenaline high of participating in and surviving combat.

  ‘You did good work, Mike. Hard, dirty work, but you said it yourself, it’s a war, this fight against poachers, and the guys on the other side have no qualms about killing. How did you end up back in South Africa?’

  ‘Eventually I had to leave Zimbabwe. A local politician had me in his sights after I killed a poacher relative of his. I came back down south and went back to work with the parks board, in game capture. I tried to put the killings behind me. I married a lovely girl I knew from school, Tracy, and we had a beautiful daughter, but I couldn’t let go of the past. I drank too much, had too many nightmares. I was unsettled and spent too much time away from Tracy and Debbie. I lost my job thanks to affirmative action, like a lot of people, but I lost my family because I pushed them out of my life. Tracy tried to help me, but I kept running away to the bush to try and heal myself. In the end it didn’t work and she found someone else.’

  ‘Wow, I’m sorry to hear that. How did you get into your current job?’

  ‘An old friend working for the NGO bumped into me in a bar and offered me a job.’ The man had probably save his life. ‘I found that working in the field, alone but with a purpose instead of just hiding, was what I needed to get my head right again.’

  ‘What happened to the schoolteacher? Abraham, was it?’

  Mike took another deep breath. He wanted to lie to her, or tell her it wasn’t his fault.

  ‘Mike?’

  He felt the nausea rising up in him, the stinging pricks of tears threatening to surface. He didn’t want to cry in front of Nia. ‘They cut Abraham’s head off.’

  ‘What? Who did?’

  ‘No arrests were ever made, but the word was that it was the two brothers of one of the poachers, uncles of the dead sixteen-year-old.’ He looked to her, quickly, then back to the road after he saw the shock on her face. ‘We killed a father and son, and their relatives hacked off Abraham’s head with a machete.’

  ‘My God, that’s horrible. Who would do such a thing?’

  ‘The same sort of person who would shoot a sixteen-year-old in cold blood.’

  She had no reply to that. He should never have told her. What was done was done, and he was stupid to have thought that talking to a virtual
stranger about it would be of any help. If he’d wanted to open up to her to get her talking, perhaps build some rapport with her, the opposite seemed to have just happened.

  Nia stayed silent as he drove on through the night.

  ‘That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? A lost boy,’ she said eventually.

  *

  Themba looked for the Southern Cross in the stars and worked out that they were still heading east, deeper into Mkhuze Game Reserve, away from the campsite and the eMshopi entrance gate.

  He could tell Lerato felt deflated, and it wasn’t just from the trauma of the day and the exhaustion of picking her way through the dense bush. She also looked like someone who had lost all hope.

  ‘We have to keep moving,’ Themba said gently.

  Lerato started to cry and that set the baby off. Themba went to her and wrapped his arms around both of them. ‘Please don’t cry.’

  ‘I can’t help it. I’m worried about my dad and I’m terrified, Themba. I can’t go on. I just want this to end. Maybe there’s some rational explanation why that guy’s driving my dad’s car.’ Lerato kept sobbing. ‘Or maybe he killed my father.’

  Themba held her tighter. He was scared too, and clinging to her helped.

  A wood owl made its who, who, who are you call and Themba checked the stars again. He broke away from Lerato and took out his torch and checked the map. The kwaMalibaba hide was closest to them, but it would be logical for searchers to check it. If they carried on a few more kilometres, heading east, they would reach the tar road that ran south from the main Mantuma Camp. The ground rose up to the Lebombo lookout and the climb would be hard on Lerato, but after that they could descend to the kuMasinga hide. It would be a safe place for them to sleep, and there were toilets.

  After two hours Themba was feeling like every step was the hardest physical action he’d taken in his life. Lerato offered to take the baby back from him. She, too, was slowing down, but she insisted. They made it to the tar road and Themba turned left. His plan was to walk north until they came to the Lebombo viewing point then carry on a further thousand paces. From there, if he turned right, once more heading east and downhill, he calculated they would eventually cross the access road that led to kuMasinga. There were no helicopters in the air, and no sounds of vehicles driving up and down the road. No tourists would be out at this time of night, but there might be national parks rangers on patrol after hours.