by Tony Park
‘I didn’t know it had already been in the media, Oom.’
‘There’s a thing called the internet, Alex.’ He laughed. ‘Like I say, I envy you being stuck in the bush out of contact with the world.’
‘OK, well, Oom, I’ve been trying to help the archaeologist. I asked around a couple of the local villages outside the park to see if anyone remembered an aircraft crash during the war, or a plane going missing, northeast of Namutoni, but no one remembers anything.’
Otto picked up his sandwich and took a bite. ‘I was going to call the police later today, after I saw the article online this morning. Back in ’87, at least I think that was the year, I was head warden and I got a call from the air force base at Ondangwa. A South African named Horsman told me that a DC-3 Dakota had gone missing and that the air force would be flying search missions over the park. I asked him why the aircraft had been flying over Etosha and where it was heading, and he told me it was none of my business.’ Otto took a pipe out of the pocket of his sleeveless photographer’s vest and began filling it.
‘Would it have been unusual for the aircraft to be flying over the park?’
Otto shrugged, put a lighter to the bowl of the pipe and puffed on it. ‘Nothing was “usual” in those days, boy. The South Africans did what they liked here. The word was that they were killing buffalo, elephant and rhino up in the Caprivi Strip and in Angola, and I was very particular about keeping the military out of the park as much as I could.’
‘Did you check with the villagers outside the park?’
Otto exhaled and nodded. ‘This Horsman asked me to check with what he called the natives around the park to find out if they had seen anything. I found a headman, dead now, who did see a burning light in the sky on the night in question, and I reported this back to the air force straight away, naturally. From what Matthias, the headman, said, it seemed the aircraft was heading west, but when I told Horsman this he still refused to say what the Dakota’s destination was and whether this was on course or off course. I also got the feeling he didn’t know for sure. I was told not to say anything to anyone, especially the newspapers, about this missing aircraft. I found it all very strange, but as I say, my boy, they were unusual times. It was a war, after all.’
‘What do you think happened, Oom? Did some SWAPO guys shoot down the plane?’
Otto seemed to mull over the question as he drew on his pipe. ‘I suppose it’s possible, but we never had them operating with surface to air missiles in our area. It could be that it just developed engine troubles or something of that nature. We had a couple of days of air force helicopters and fixed wing aircraft flying over the park, concentrating on the western section, but they never found anything – at least not in Etosha or the immediate surrounds or I would have heard about it.’
‘It could even have crashed further to the west of the park,’ Alex said, thinking out loud.
‘It could have gone anywhere, my boy. And if the pilot kept flying west there’s nothing but a hell of a lot of nowhere out there, through Kaokoveld, the Palmwag Conservancy, all the way through to the Skeleton Coast National Park and the Atlantic beyond. If their Dakota had crashed anywhere along that route they might never find it, and no human being might ever pass within sight of it.’
‘What if the plane crashed near where the body was found – maybe he was the only survivor and he walked off to look for help and somehow died of thirst or his injuries?’
Oom Otto seemed to consider the proposition, but in the end shook his head. ‘If the aircraft crashed within a hundred kilometres of where those people are digging I would have known about it. We patrolled the park constantly and there were plenty of people living outside Etosha, farming, even during the war. We communicated with them all the time.’
‘Maybe he parachuted out as a way of escaping the fire that Matthias says he saw?’ Alex said.
‘Or maybe he just fell out?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Alex said. ‘I had a look at him and he looked intact. He must have had a parachute. Also he’d been laid out on his back, with his hands across his chest, like in a Christian burial, so it wasn’t as if the dirt and dust just covered him where he’d died.’
‘Hyena or jackal would have finished him well before the earth swallowed him,’ Otto said. ‘Something, or someone, killed him, and someone buried him.’
A herd of zebra was cautiously approaching the waterhole, the stallion way out in front of the mares and two foals. The nervy animals would pause every few steps to listen, look and sniff the wind. It was hard, Alex thought, to imagine his homeland at war, with burning aircraft lighting up the night sky and men being left in unmarked graves. It had happened, although he’d been too young to remember anything more than the presence of uniformed soldiers and armoured vehicles on the roads on his way to and from school.
Otto stood, tapped out the remnants of his pipe tobacco on the stone wall and put a hand on the small of his back. ‘But now I must go and find some lions for my tourists.’
Alex stood and shook his hand. ‘Baie dankie, Oom.’
‘Pleasure. I hope I can be of some help. But may I ask why you’re so keen to help these researchers?’
Alex waved his hand. ‘It is nothing. Just helping out some fellow students.’
Otto winked. ‘You sure it’s nothing to do with that pretty girl you were seen with at Namutoni yesterday?’
Alex laughed. ‘You really do know everything, don’t you?’
Otto’s reference to Emma jogged his memory. After the older man had gone, Alex took his field notebook out of his top pocket and opened it to the page where Emma had written her mother’s satellite phone number. Emma had asked Alex to send a message to her mother and had written it down for him. He took out his phone and typed the message: Hello, this is from Emma via a friend’s phone. Emma says she is fine and needs some help with identifying the uniform found on a dead man she has discovered on her archaeological dig. She is sorry for not getting in touch sooner, but phone signal here is bad. She sends her love and will text a picture of the man’s uniform when she can. Alex pressed send.
*
Emma was sheltering in the shade of one of the gazebos as they recorded and tagged the artefacts they had found on and with Harry’s body. They had placed each of the articles in a tray as they had recovered them from the body, and Emma and Natangwe were now recording them and securing them in plastic snap-lock bags.
Professor Sutton watched over them with arms folded and a serious look on his face. ‘Be careful, Emma, some of these finds can literally fall apart in your hands.’
‘Yes, Prof,’ she said, trying not to sound resentful. She couldn’t have handled them more gently or with more reverence if she’d tried. ‘One man’s Seiko diving watch. Time, 11.20. Do you think that’s when he died, maybe when he hit the ground if his parachute didn’t open properly?’
Natangwe wrote the site location, date, Emma’s initials, and an item number on a bag, then slipped the watch into it and sealed it.
They had all been madly theorising about how Harry might have come to be here and how he died. Sutton stroked his beard. ‘Hard to say. More likely that the watch just ran out of battery life. Also, what happened to his parachute?’
‘The material might have come in handy for poor people in the area,’ Natangwe said. ‘If it was silk or nylon it could have been used as blankets or to waterproof a shack or a mud and cow dung hut.’
‘Maybe, Natangwe,’ Professor Sutton said.
‘One man’s wallet, empty,’ Emma said, delicately slipping the wallet into a bag. ‘I can’t believe that it’s survived so well.’
‘Leather sandals from ancient Rome have been found at Hadrian’s Wall, Kurtz, so it’s not surprising his wallet has survived nearly thirty years.’
Emma bit back a retort. Older people all thought her generation believed they were entitle
d to instant respect and that they couldn’t be taught anything – she’d heard such ranting before. Sutton was probably deliberately goading her, but she would not rise to it. ‘Yes, Professor. I should have thought of that.’
‘Hmph,’ was all he uttered.
‘One photo, found in Harry’s left breast pocket. This is so sad.’ Emma looked at the girl in the bikini. The photo was cracked with age, but not faded at all. She was blonde, a little on the chubby side, but she had a beautiful smile. There was nothing written on the back, but Emma supposed it was Harry’s sweetheart.
Professor Sutton blinked and looked away, but made no comment on her observation. Perhaps there was a heart in there somewhere, she thought. He had removed the finds from the body and left it to the students to catalogue them. He’d told them not to go near Harry since he had finished excavating around him. The other gazebo was over the body now, and Sutton had cable-tied green shade cloth to the poles to form a screen around Harry. Emma guessed it was out of respect, but she desperately wanted to have another look at him, as heart-wrenching as that experience could be.
Emma held up another item found next to the body.
‘One, what is this, a vest of some sort?’
‘It’s a webbing vest,’ Natangwe said confidently, ‘the kind soldiers carry their ammunition in.’
‘More likely, Natangwe, it’s an aircrew survival vest, given that we now believe Harry came to us from the sky,’ Sutton said. ‘Contents?’ he asked Emma.
Emma looked at the items that had been removed from the nylon webbing vest. ‘One first-aid bandage, called a field dressing according to the lettering on it.’ She placed the wrapped package in a plastic bag. ‘One length of nylon cord; one mirror.’
‘That would have been used for signalling,’ Sutton said.
Emma nodded. ‘And that’s about it. If it’s a survival vest there’s not much in there that you could survive with. Why wouldn’t they have something like, I don’t know, maybe a compass or a map or some high-protein food, something like that? What’s missing is more interesting than what’s here.’
‘Indeed,’ Sutton said. He pointed over to the enclosed gazebo. ‘I would have expected to find a map, water, a compass, perhaps a signal flare or a hand-held radio, but there is none of that. It seemed Harry was robbed not only of what cash he had in his wallet, but of things that someone else might need to survive out here in the wilds.’
‘But who would have taken those things, and left the other bits and pieces?’
‘In case you’re wondering why I cordoned off Harry’s body, it’s because this morning I found two stab wounds in his torso, under his sternum. I’m going to contact the police.’
‘Wow,’ Emma said.
‘I have to contact the police anyway because of the estimated age of the body. If Harry was a wartime flier he should have had all the things Emma mentioned, and probably a sidearm – a pistol,’ Sutton said. ‘I believe that whoever took all that paraphernalia from Harry could very well have been the man who killed him. What we have here, now, is no longer a dig, it’s a crime scene.’
Chapter 10
Sonja heard the far-off growl of a vehicle engine. She stopped, shrugged off her daypack and took out her binoculars.
She had been following the course of the Auob River since illegally crossing the border the day before, staying off the road to avoid leaving tracks, sticking to the high ground on the southern side of the dry riverbed. She focused the binoculars and made out a white Land Rover Defender, not the type of vehicle that the Namibian police or immigration officers would have been driving – they used Toyotas.
Dodging tufts of hardy desert grass, Sonja jogged down the red sandy hill and waited by the side of the road. She stuck out her hand and waved it up and down, hitching for a lift, African style. The cloud of dust behind her was preceded by the Defender; her sort of vehicle, she mused with a smile, tough, no-nonsense, and prone to the occasional breakdown.
The driver showed no indication of slowing until he came close to her, then he put on his brakes and came to a halt fifty metres past her. Sonja waved away the cloud of red dust that enveloped her and saw the driver’s reverse light come on.
The electric passenger side window was wound down and Sonja saw a man with spiky grey hair and flabby jowls behind the wheel. He greeted her in Afrikaans, then switched to English. ‘Can I help?’
Sonja beefed up her German accent and pointed in the direction she had come from with her thumb. ‘Hello. I am hitchhiking across Africa. Can you take me to Windhoek, perhaps?’
The man laughed. ‘You’ll die of thirst out here in the desert, and while Namibia is a safe country I wouldn’t recommend hitchhiking anywhere these days.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Well, I’m not going as far as Windhoek, but I’m going as far as Mariental. I was just visiting a parishioner on a farm here, her husband passed away recently.’
‘You are a minister?’
‘A pastor. Lutheran.’
‘Then I think this is my lucky day, to be picked up by a church man and not a murderer.’
He laughed again and reached over and opened the passenger door for her. ‘I’m Herman Lotz.’
‘Ursula,’ she lied, once again.
Lotz had a cooler box on the back seat of the Land Rover and he invited her to take a drink, either a bottle of water or a beer. ‘I’ll have a Tafel. Can I get you one?’
‘I’ll have the same.’
Sonja opened the beers for both of them and handed one to the pastor. The air conditioning was a welcome relief from the dry heat outside. Sonja could have survived in the desert for days on end, but she was in a hurry to get to Etosha and find Emma. She had slept in the desert the night before, covering herself first in her nylon sleeping bag liner and then with a layer of sand to further insulate her from the bitter cold of the evening.
Sonja had eaten some of the biltong she’d bought at the farm shop on the Namibian side of the border and drained one of her water bottles, which she’d replenished by digging a hole in the sand at a bend in the dry riverbed. When the subterranean water had started welling up to the surface she’d waited for it to clear then patiently filled her empty bottle.
Pastor Lotz asked her about her travels so far, and she made up a route from Maputo on Mozambique’s Indian Ocean coast, across South Africa and into Namibia.
‘An attractive woman like you must be careful, though, about accepting lifts from strangers.’
Sonja noticed the way his eyes kept travelling via her breasts and legs after each exchange in their conversation. A thought crossed her mind; she would have to find another lift in Mariental, and that could take time. ‘Sometimes strangers can be fun, intriguing.’
She saw his Adam’s apple bob. He licked his lips with a darting tongue like a snake’s, and then looked across at her. ‘You like strangers, eh?’
‘Some. Big, strong ones.’
They approached a bend in the gravel road and when the pastor changed gears he let his hand slip off the stick and onto her knee. She made no attempt to move it, instead she shifted her knee closer to him. He licked his lips again.
‘I’ve never done it with a church man.’
He swallowed and looked straight ahead. His face was beginning to colour. ‘You like the thought of that?’
She finished her beer and dropped the bottle in the footwell, then covered his hand with hers. ‘Very much. Inside every saint there’s a sinner.’
He glanced at her. ‘I shouldn’t. I am married.’ Yet he kept his hand where it was.
Pastor Lotz slid his hand from her knee back along her thigh, towards the hem of her shorts. Sonja sighed, in reality out of perverse disappointment that he had succumbed so easily. So predictable.
Before he got too carried away she called: ‘Stop.’
He looked at her, eyes wide. ‘What do you mean?�
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‘No, silly. I don’t want you to stop, I just don’t want you to crash the truck and kill us both. Pull over.’
‘OK.’ He took his hand off her and slowed the vehicle, bringing it to a halt under the shade of a tree.
‘Get out, get ready for me. I want you in my mouth, then you can do me from behind over the engine.’
Lotz nearly fell out of the truck in his eagerness. Sonja shook her head and quickly checked the centre console box between the seats. In it she found some of his business cards. She got out her side of the Land Rover and as she walked around the front of the truck she took out the nine-millimetre pistol from her waistband with her right hand and her iPhone from her pocket with her left.
The pastor had his pants down and his semi-erect skinny white penis in one hand, furiously tugging himself to full arousal. Sonja kept the pistol behind her back but raised the phone and took his picture.
‘Hey, what are you doing? I don’t care what kind of kinks you’re into, but you can’t take my picture. I’m a public figure.’ He shuffled towards her, his feet hobbled by his shorts around his ankles, but stopped reaching for the phone when she levelled the pistol at him.
‘My God!’
‘You should have thought about Him before you started groping me. I took one of your cards; it seems your church has a Facebook page. How very modern of you.’
‘Please, please don’t put my picture on there. My wife, my congregation . . .’
‘Move away from the truck.’
He shook his head. ‘No! You can’t leave me here in the middle of nowhere.’
She raised her aim to between his eyes and he backed away from the edge of the road, into the sand. ‘I’m borrowing your Land Rover for a while. You’ll get it back, or I’ll send you a message on Facebook telling you where to collect it. Now pull your pants up; you’ll get sunburn otherwise.’
Red-faced he raised his shorts and buckled his belt. ‘What will I tell my wife?’ he whined.
