An Empty Coast

by Tony Park

  ‘The locals all drink Tafel,’ Alex said.

  ‘Well, when in Rome,’ she said.

  The barman served them cold Tafel lagers in brown bottles and Alex led Emma outside to an unmarked doorway next to the gents’ toilets.

  ‘Where on earth are you taking me?’ she asked in mock horror.

  ‘I spent plenty of holidays here so there’s one thing I know about this fort that you don’t.’

  She followed him up several flights of a long, narrow concrete staircase until they emerged at the top of the fort’s high tower.

  ‘Wow.’ She looked around at the 360-degree panorama of the wide, flat expanses of Etosha National Park. Beyond the waterhole on the camp’s perimeter a line of zebra snaked its way towards the life-giving source.

  ‘I wonder if they were scared,’ Alex said, after they’d admired the view. ‘Those seven guys, fighting off hundreds of men who wanted to kill them.’

  ‘My mother said once that she never had time to be scared when people were shooting at her. It was only later she was scared, when thinking how close she’d come to being killed.’

  Alex leaned against the parapet and took a sip of beer. ‘We were taught as kids that the Schutztruppen were heroes, and that the Germans brought civilisation to primitive people. Nowadays we’re all seen as war criminals, no better than the Nazis.’

  She leaned next to him. ‘I’m guessing that like all men, like all soldiers through history, there were good guys and bad guys.’ Her mind went back to their own missing soldier, or whatever he was. ‘I wonder who he is.’

  ‘Your dead guy?’

  She nodded and took a sip of beer. ‘Yes, my dead guy,’ she said. ‘Professor Sutton thinks the body could be twenty or thirty years old.’

  ‘That surprises me,’ Alex said. ‘There’s so much skin on him, and he still has his hair. I thought he must have only been dead a couple of years or so.’

  ‘No, we learned at university that different climates and soil types play as much of a part in decomposition as time. It’s so dry out here, with so little rainfall and moisture in the ground that he’s been sort of mummified. Also that accounts for how his uniform, if that’s what it is, is in such good condition. Professor Sutton wants to take him to the university in Windhoek and do an autopsy on him, but we’ll have to call in the local police as well and that might complicate things.’

  ‘The guy could have been murdered, no matter how long ago it was. Unlike the war during the colonial times most of the action in the seventies and eighties was up here in Owamboland. That was where SWAPO had their support and the South African Army and the local security forces were here in force.’

  ‘But how did he end up here alone in an unmarked grave?’ Emma asked rhetorically. She looked at the screen of her phone and selected the picture gallery. She flicked through the pictures she’d taken of the body, and the close-ups of his clothing and the faded patches on his outfit.

  ‘Well, he can’t have just fallen out of the sky.’

  Emma looked up from her phone. ‘Wait a minute . . .’

  ‘What?’ Alex sipped some more beer and gave a look like he’d just swallowed a mouthful of lemon juice.

  ‘I think you might have solved part of our puzzle.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He was wearing a one-piece outfit, like a flying suit, maybe?’

  Alex mulled over his inadvertent discovery. ‘Ja, but if he fell out of an aeroplane his body would have been pulverised.’

  ‘Maybe he crashed his plane,’ Emma said, ‘and walked till he starved to death or died of thirst.’

  ‘Well, there was a big air force base not far from here, at Ondangwa.’ Alex rubbed his chin. ‘Where you found him is not that far away from civilisation, but I suppose if you were injured or disoriented you could wander around the plains until you passed out or died of thirst. So do you think we should look for a crashed plane now as well?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Emma said. ‘Hey, you know a lot of the local farmers in the area, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I visit them all regularly to ask them about cheetah sightings.’

  ‘Maybe some of their elders would remember a plane crash in the area, from the old days.’

  Alex nodded. ‘I’ll ask at the kraals next time I’m doing my rounds,’ he said.

  Emma finished her beer, and thought more about the dead man, trying to piece together the clues in some way that made sense. ‘But if the man was a pilot who had crashed his plane, then surely the locals would have reported finding it to the police.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Alex said. ‘If your professor’s right and the man died between twenty and thirty years ago, then you have to remember this country was at war. He could have been killed by SWAPO guerrillas or sympathisers.’

  ‘I’m going to try and email the pictures to my mother. She’ll know what some of his badges mean. I’m supposed to be meeting her in a few days in any case. She’s flying to South Africa and we’re going to spend some time together.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘We hadn’t decided. My mother likes to be mysterious about when and where she’ll appear,’ Emma replied with a distinct roll of her eyes. She glanced at her watch. ‘Hey, I should be getting back to the dig site.’

  Alex took her empty bottle from her and led her back down the staircase. ‘There are a couple of villages on the way back, not far off the main road,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Why don’t we call in and ask if any of the old folks remember a plane crash?’

  Professor Sutton would be annoyed if she returned later than she’d told him, but Emma didn’t care. They walked back to Alex’s truck and he took it to the camp filling station to top up with diesel. As she sat in the cab Emma looked up at the fort and, as Alex had, tried to imagine what it would have been like being stationed in such a remote and hostile outpost. She also wondered how it was that her victim of a more recent war could have ended up separated from his comrades and buried in an unmarked grave.

  She was confident that someone, somewhere in this sparsely populated country would remember the missing flyer – if that was what he was – and, besides, Alex wanted to spend more time with her, and that was just fine by Emma.

  Chapter 5

  Hudson Brand felt like he was going to throw up. It was intensely unfair, he mused as he lay in bed, to have drunk as much as he had the night before, then slept several hours, and still be on the verge of nausea. He opened his eyes, but the act of blinking just made his head hurt more.

  A spurfowl was screeching its demented rooster-like wake-up call from the bush outside the house in the Hippo Rock wildlife estate on the banks of the Sabie River. Across the river was the Kruger National Park, and Brand and the Australians he’d been drinking with the night before had been treated to a close chorus of lions calling from the reserve as they’d worked their way through a cooler box of Windhoek Lager and several bottles of Zandvliet Shiraz.

  Brand sat up in bed and his head started to spin. He swung his legs over the edge, stood shakily, took a deep breath and for a second thought he was going to be OK. Instead, though, the bile rose up, almost gagging him. He strode to the en suite and got to the toilet just in time.

  When he was finished, his head still pounding, he found that the house owner, his friend Cameron, had two Panado in the cupboard under the sink. Brand couldn’t thank his absentee landlord enough. Cameron and his Australian wife, Kylie, were living in Sydney, and Brand was housesitting Cameron’s place at Hippo Rock. The Australians he’d been drinking with were miners who were in South Africa attending a conference, and Brand had hosted them in Cameron’s house for the night. They’d left already, in God knew what sort of state, for an early morning game drive in the park. Brand took the pills, wiped his mouth and brushed his teeth.

  He used the outside shower, the piping-hot water
from the large head warding off the morning chill, and was treated to the sight of a lone bull elephant munching his way through the reeds in the bed of the Sabie as he washed.

  Brand lived a bachelor’s life, and the two slices of bread and half a carton of milk past its use-by date that he found in the fridge would not come close to aiding his recovery. Grease was needed, and lots of it.

  He dressed in his khaki bush shirt and shorts, pulled on his Rocky sandals and put on his Texas Longhorns cap. There was little of him that was rooted in the country of his birth, but the Longhorns would always be his team, and the hat had survived several near-death experiences and had become a talisman for him.

  As he drove his old Land Rover along the winding dirt road to the estate gate he tried to recall which nightmare he’d had the previous evening. Sometimes the drink warded off the memories, but the cognac he’d taken with a cigar at about two in the morning had brought the horrors back into sharp focus.

  Brand signed out of the estate, handing the clipboard back to the security guard, Lawrence, who smiled, perhaps at the bloodshot eyes or the alcohol fumes on Brand’s breath. It was a bright sunny morning. Brand turned right onto the R536 and drove past the old Lisbon citrus estate and Sabiepark, another housing estate, and crossed the bridge over the Sabie to the Paul Kruger Gate entrance of the national park.

  ‘Avuxeni, Abbey,’ he said, bidding the national park security guard on duty good morning in Xitsonga.

  ‘Ayeh imjani,’ Abbey replied.

  ‘Kona,’ Brand said, completing the ritual by lying that he was fine. He went into the gate office and filled out the form to gain entry to Kruger, once more exchanging pleasantries, this time with Precious, the woman on duty. Finally, with his park permit in hand he went back to his truck and Abbey let him through the boom. A pair of frisky impala rams chased each other across the road in front of him.

  A few kilometres into the park he turned left towards his destination, the Skukuza Golf Club. The club was set on a nine-hole course adjoining the staff village that serviced Skukuza, the park’s headquarters and largest tourist rest camp. In the bad old days of apartheid the golf course had been restricted to white national parks staff members only, but in the Mandela era it, like so many of the country’s assets, had been opened to all comers. It was still a bit of a secret and the course and its bar and restaurant – the best in the park – was mostly the hangout of locals and seasoned Kruger visitors.

  Brand liked the idea of golf, but not enough to actually pick up a club. There was a competition of some sort on today and the car park was full. Brand walked to the serving counter and ordered his breakfast by ticking the relevant boxes on a form; it was one of the clubhouse’s little idiosyncrasies, but it ensured you got what you asked for, mostly. Inside the clubhouse, which was open-sided where it looked onto the ninth green, an official was wrapping up a briefing on the day’s tournament and Brand was able to grab a table on the lawn in the sun as a trio of golfers headed for their buggy.

  ‘Hudson, howzit? Man, you look like kak.’

  Brand turned and squinted. He looked up and saw the imposing bulk of Captain Fanie Theron. Theron was a detective who specialised in wildlife crimes – poaching, smuggling and the sale of living and dead animals, birds and reptiles. He’d been seconded to the operations centre that had been set up at the Skukuza Airport to coordinate the fight against rhino poaching – though it was more like a war than a fight given the current body count.

  ‘I feel how I look, Fanie. How are you?’

  ‘Fine, fine, fine. You should give up the drink, like I did.’ Theron was dressed in shorts and a pink polo shirt.

  Brand resented the man’s jollity; ‘I liked you more when you were a hungover drunk. At least you dressed better.’

  Theron laughed and sat down.

  ‘What’s the news from the front line?’ Brand asked. Just talking was an effort, but Theron was a good guy, and a good contact. He was the intelligence officer for the operations centre and had an overview of everything happening in the field. Brand had tipped him off a couple of times about suspicious characters in the nearby town of Hazyview, and his information had led to the break-up of a poaching gang.

  Hudson Brand’s day job and passion in life was working as a safari guide. His trips into the Kruger National Park and his occasional work as a walking trails guide in the adjoining Timbavati Private Game Reserve were all that kept him sane and alive these days, but he moonlighted as a private investigator, specialising in suspect life insurance claims for a law firm in England. He kept a close ear to the ground in the Lowveld, and had a few paid informers who kept him up to date on the local crime scene and in particular which policemen, doctors, undertakers and churchmen were desperate enough for cash to falsify police reports, death certificates and burial certificates for people who wanted to fake their own deaths and have a relative claim on their policy.

  ‘Tran Van Ngo was assassinated, gangland style, in his home in Ho Chi Minh City yesterday,’ Theron said.

  A waiter brought a plunger pot of coffee. ‘Can we have another cup, please,’ Brand said. Theron nodded his thanks. Brand recalled the name: ‘The Vietnamese kingpin named in the media a couple of months ago?’

  ‘That’s the one. And here’s the other news; Ross Coonan – the journalist who made the allegations against Tran, the one who wrote that book you were in – was found dead in an alleyway nearby around the same time Tran was killed. Coonan had been tortured.’

  ‘Shit,’ Brand said. He remembered Coonan well. The young Australian had written an in-depth exposé on the rhino horn trade and had not pulled any punches. He’d interviewed Brand about his experiences in Angola. A retired South African Defence Force general had tipped off Coonan that Brand had some information about the smuggling of elephant ivory and rhino horn out of Angola near the end of South Africa’s border war in the country. Brand’s story had rated a few paragraphs in Coonan’s book.

  The waiter returned with a cup for Theron and Brand poured for both of them. A pair of warthogs snuffled in the grass on their knees a few metres away, near the green. ‘What’s the theory on Tran?’

  Theron stirred in milk and sugar. ‘Tran was a major player in the rhino horn market, of that Coonan was one hundred per cent correct. He was up to his neck in a failing property development in his home country, but he was still bankrolling several poaching gangs working out of Massingir in Mozambique. The word is that he was stockpiling horn; as we get better at catching and killing poachers the street price is going up. Tran is – or was – a gangster, so he had his enemies, but he was in the business of being nice to his business partners, not pissing them off. The hit was professional – there were two other KIAs found in the garden, Tran’s bodyguard and his personal secretary.’

  ‘Well, whoever he was,’ Brand sipped his coffee, revelling in it, ‘he gets a high five from me.’

  ‘You need to move with the times, Hudson.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Brand asked.

  ‘Our liaison man in Vietnam says the local police there are looking for a woman, blonde hair, possible German or South African accent. She went to Tran’s purporting to be a hooker, but she nailed the John.’

  ‘Any thoughts on who it might be?’ Brand asked. The waiter brought his bacon, eggs, beans and cheese griller sausages, and he could already feel the cholesterol going to work on his hangover as he breathed it in.

  ‘Nothing so far,’ Theron said. ‘What do you think? Know any boere meisies looking for some payback?’

  Brand tucked into his breakfast. As a matter of fact, he did have an idea who might have had the motivation, the skillset and the guts to carry out a hit half a world away. ‘Only person I can think of was last seen in America, so it’s probably not her.’ Brand set his cup down. ‘Probably not. At least, I wouldn’t want to try and arrest her.’

  *

  Sonja’s f
light from Bangkok arrived on time at 7.30 am and she cleared immigration and customs at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport without a problem. While she waited for her rucksack to emerge on the carousel she took out her phone and turned it on. A few seconds later it beeped, first with the message welcoming her to the phone provider in South Africa, and then with an SMS from Emma.

  ‘Hi Mum, where are you? I need your help.’

  ‘Fok,’ she said aloud in Afrikaans, startling the elderly woman next to her, who moved her trolley further along the carousel. Sonja tried her daughter’s number, but it went straight through to voicemail. ‘Howzit, it’s me, I’m in South Africa,’ she said. ‘Call me or SMS me. And next time, don’t just send a message that says “I need your help”. Bye.’

  She had not wanted to sound angry or panicked, but knew she had failed. Sonja told herself Emma was fine. The girl was in Namibia, not Afghanistan. The country of her birth had been through several periods of terrible violence, but these days it was quiet, peaceful and stable. The crime rate was low and the people friendly, and Emma was in the middle of nowhere.

  Was that part of the problem? Sonja wondered. Had Emma or someone on her team suffered some terrible accident, or been bitten by a snake? Did they need Sonja’s bush knowledge? For once she regretted not giving Emma a specific date and place to meet up. Years of subterfuge and not knowing how long missions would take had led to her always keeping arrangements on a need-to-know basis.

  Her bag popped out and she hoisted it onto her shoulder, not bothering with a trolley. Sonja was supposed to be catching up with some friends in Johannesburg, but she quickly sent them a message saying she would have to take a raincheck as something had come up. She decided to head straight for Namibia. Sonja went out into the arrivals hall and walked to the Parkade complex where the rental car offices were located.

  Sonja had drunk herself to sleep on the flight and managed to catch a few hours of rest. She did the car rental paperwork, found her Nissan X-Trail in the garage and tossed her bag on the back seat. She headed out onto the R24; her planned route would take her around Johannesburg’s northern and western suburbs, then onto the N14.