An Empty Coast

by Tony Park

  ‘Yes. You’re fine. You’re safe.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Yes.’ He had an overwhelming urge to hug her and tell her she would be fine, that one day the wound would close over with only the scar remaining. Instead, he said: ‘Get some more sleep now. It’ll be light in a couple of hours and we’ll go find your daughter.’

  Brand waited until she lay back down and closed her eyes. He lingered a moment, looking down at her. He smelled the fresh scent of her, now that she was clean, then turned off the light and closed the bedroom door.

  Chapter 19

  Benjie, the farmer, said that he would put the word out among his employees to try to find who had stolen Alex’s camera, iPad and satellite phone. Emma could see, as they boarded Andre’s aircraft on the grassy farm airstrip, that Alex was still fuming.

  ‘I never got to tell my mum where we were,’ Emma said.

  Alex buckled his seatbelt as Andre started the engines. ‘It’s not the phone I miss, it’s my camera and iPad. I had some important pictures of lions on the camera, and my whole database on the tablet.’

  ‘Surely you’ve got back-ups somewhere else.’

  ‘Yes, on my laptop back at Ondangwa, but my last three weeks of work were all on the iPad.’

  The theft had put something of a dampener on their braai the evening before, and the novelty of the prospect of flying over endless expanses of rocky desert was fast wearing off, at least as far as Emma, Alex and Natangwe were concerned. Emma had expressed her worry that her mother would not be able to find her when she arrived at the dig site, probably tomorrow, but Sutton had assured her they would be back at Ondangwa by tomorrow midday at the latest, perhaps even earlier.

  ‘Unless, of course,’ he had said to her that morning over breakfast, ‘we find the missing Dakota and there happens to be somewhere close by where Andre can land. Then, I think you’d agree, we would be mad not to set down and inspect the crash site.’

  ‘Sure,’ she’d replied half-heartedly.

  Dorset Sutton was seated in the co-pilot’s seat, a map spread across his knees. Sebastian was just behind them. She and Sebastian had been the last to turn in, sitting around the fire drinking yet another bottle of wine. Eventually, Dorset had opened the door to his rondavel and asked them to keep their voices down as he was trying to sleep. Emma had put a hand over her mouth to try to stop herself from laughing, but Sebastian had suggested they call it a night.

  ‘I’ll walk with you,’ Sebastian had said to her.

  She was sleeping in the farthest hut from the fire, and had told Sebastian she was fine, but she didn’t stop him accompanying her.

  ‘I’ve really enjoyed chatting to you,’ Sebastian had said as he’d lingered by her door.

  Emma had looked up into his eyes. ‘Me too. You’re very tall, you know that?’ He was very tall, six-three he had told her, compared to her five-seven.

  ‘Not quite freakishly, but not far off it.’

  ‘No, not freakish at all.’ She had giggled. ‘In fact, I really like tall men.’

  ‘What a coincidence,’ he had said with a grin, ‘I really like girls who like tall men.’

  Emma had thought, then, that he might kiss her, but instead he just smiled his perfect smile again and said goodnight. She had turned in, listening for a knock at the door, her heart pounding in anticipation of what she might do if she heard it. In the end, the alcohol overtook her and Emma had slept well, though she’d awoken with a thick head and a dry mouth.

  She wondered what would happen next, if they didn’t find the missing aircraft. Would they go back to the dig site? Would Sebastian fly back to Cape Town and out of her life?

  ‘Wake our friend up,’ Dorset said into the intercom. ‘We’re just coming up to the limit of our search yesterday.’

  Emma reached across and shook Natangwe. ‘Hey, wake up.’ She pointed to the headset in his lap and motioned for him to put it on. Groggily, Natangwe responded.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Time to put those super eyes to work again.’

  He nodded.

  Emma turned to Alex and he gave her a thumbs-up to acknowledge he had heard Sutton’s message. He returned his gaze out of his window.

  Below them, the landscape was changing. From their briefing from Andre that morning, just before they boarded, Emma knew they would be flying over the northern part of the Palmwag Conservancy. This, they had been told, was old cattle land, arid and marginal, that had been given back over to wildlife. It had become progressively drier and more desert-like the further west they headed. It stretched almost all the way to the Skeleton Coast National Park, which ended at the Atlantic Ocean. The landscape transitioned from rugged red sandstone and granite hills to a mix of sand and rock. To the south, on their left, Andre pointed out the wide green corridor of the Hoanib River whose flow to the sea had been blocked by a line of dunes.

  ‘Gosh, it’s like a real desert down there now,’ Emma said to no one in particular.

  ‘What were you expecting, tropical rainforest all of a sudden?’ Dorset said from the front into the intercom, without looking back at her. ‘Eyes peeled, everyone.’

  She wondered why the professor had to be so arrogant. People said he was a brilliant archaeologist and a great mentor, but more and more she thought him just a bully. ‘What time do you think we’ll be back at Ondangwa, Andre?’

  ‘Should be early this afternoon,’ he replied. ‘We’ll have gone as far as we can by then while still leaving enough time to get back to refuel.’

  ‘Down there, three o’clock!’ Natangwe cried.

  ‘What is it?’ Sutton called back through their headphones.

  ‘Something that doesn’t belong down there in the middle of nowhere. Manmade.’

  Andre banked the Beechcraft. ‘Circling around.’

  Emma was on the port side of the aircraft, so she craned over to Natangwe’s side. He pointed out the window. ‘Down there, see?’

  She scanned the desert for anxious moments, not seeing anything, and then it jumped out at her. ‘A big lump of something, but what is it?’

  Natangwe shrugged. ‘Don’t know, but it doesn’t look like an aeroplane.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Andre, who sounded disproportionally excited by the obscure find. ‘Some debris as well. What’s that doing out here in the middle of nowhere? It could be something that’s fallen off an aircraft.’

  ‘There’s no road down there, though those marks look like tyre tracks,’ Sutton observed. ‘Someone’s been into the dunes there.’

  ‘I’m GPSing it,’ Alex said. The thieves had either overlooked his hand-held GPS, or thought it not worth stealing.

  ‘I’ve plugged it into the on-board sat nav system as well,’ Andre said. ‘Let’s get back on course and I’ll take her down even lower. Everyone on full alert from now on.’

  It seemed Andre had throttled back, and that the landscape passed more slowly below them. Sutton, Emma saw, was now looking through a pair of binoculars. She looked at the golden sand below and saw the twin furrows where a vehicle had been.

  ‘There’s something down there, where the tracks end,’ Sutton said. ‘Go around again, Andre.’

  They circled the area and Emma could see what the professor had spotted. It was like looking at a geophysics survey of a dig. Undulations and irregularities in the land that indicated past dwellings or excavations couldn’t be seen at ground level, and usually not from the air; only sophisticated ground location radar machines, rolled across a site like lawnmowers, could pick up such irregularities. But here, because the surface was sand, the still-low morning sun was casting shadows over berms and other unusual shapes.

  ‘There’s something irregular there for sure,’ Sutton said. He sounded, Emma thought, positive but not jubilant. For all his faults he was a man of science and would need proof before he broke out
the champagne.

  ‘It could be that the plane bounced and began to break up on impact,’ Andre said as he banked around for one more turn. ‘That would account for the wreckage being spread over a bigger area. That certainly doesn’t look like a whole aircraft down there. Let’s have another look, Natangwe.’

  Natangwe raised a hand and Emma fist-bumped him. Alex looked back at them and then out of the window again.

  ‘What do you think, Andre, is there anywhere we can put down there?’

  Andre looked around, through the cockpit windows. ‘No, I’m afraid not, Dorset. We’ve got some fuel left, so we can go back to Benjie’s farm now and maybe look at organising some vehicles. We’re only about a hundred and fifty kilometres from his place.’

  Emma had a mixed reaction to the news. On the one hand she wanted to be part of the expedition to discover the downed Dakota, if this was, indeed, what they were looking at, but on the other hand her mother was due to arrive at the dig site tomorrow and she’d so far had no way of telling her where she was.

  ‘This is amazing,’ Natangwe said.

  ‘Ah, Andre,’ interjected Alex.

  ‘Ja?’

  ‘Any chance we can go all the way back to Ondangwa? I need to get to my vehicle so I can go to where that lion was killed.’

  Sutton replied: ‘Alex, you heard what Andre just said. We’re going to try and get some vehicles from Benjie. We’ll pass right by where your lion was killed. I’m sure we can stop off there on the way.’

  Emma thought the older men were acting impetuously. Surely the best course of action would have been to return to Ondangwa and organise a proper expedition from there. There was no denying that their excitement was infectious, though.

  ‘I guess so,’ Alex replied.

  Emma sighed. She hoped that by the time they got back to the farm Benjie would be in contact with the outside world again and she could get a message to her mother. She just hoped Sonja wouldn’t do anything crazy if she got to the original dig site and found that Emma wasn’t there.

  *

  ‘Sonja?’ a strange voice called. ‘Sonja?’

  She tried to open her eyes but it was as though they were glued shut. When she did pry one apart, then the other, the morning light coming in through the chink in the curtains stabbed her like twin stilettos through the eyeballs.

  ‘Who is it?’ she managed to croak. She rolled over; her nose twitched and she started to gag. By the side of the bed was a plastic bucket with a layer of vomit in the bottom. Sonja dry-retched. What happened? she asked herself.

  ‘It’s Hudson Brand. Wake up. I’ve got coffee. Can I come in?’

  Sonja pulled down the sheet and looked at herself. She wore a man’s green T-shirt with a stain dribbled down the front. She slapped a hand to her forehead. Below the T-shirt a towel was wrapped around her. It had fallen open. If he did anything I’ll kill him.

  ‘Wait.’ She coughed. There was a glass a third full with scotch.

  Sonja looked around the room, which was suffused with golden early morning light. On a luggage rack were the clothes that she now remembered washing. She went to them, unsteadily hopping on one foot as she pulled on pants and shorts. The shorts were still damp, but at least they were clean. ‘Come in.’

  He opened the door and grinned at her. She wanted to punch him, but her mood softened a little when she smelled the steaming mug he held out to her. She took it. ‘How come you’re smiling?’

  ‘Well,’ he drawled, ‘I didn’t start drinking before midday yesterday.’

  She sipped the coffee, burning her tongue in her haste to get the drug into her. Smart arse. She hated sober people and their supercilious judgemental ways. Still, she mused, Brand had matched her drink for drink once she had arrived at the chalet. Not many men could drink her under the table, and if she hadn’t, as he had correctly pointed out, had a head start, she bet it would have been him feeling like she did now, and her doing the grinning.

  ‘What time is it?’ Sonja blew on the coffee.

  ‘Seven. You said last night you wanted an early start.’

  The events of the previous evening – most of them – slowly came back to her. ‘How did I get to bed?’

  ‘I carried you.’

  She regarded him through slitted eyes. If he had tried something . . .

  ‘Relax,’ he continued, holding up his hands, palms out to her. ‘Nothing happened. One minute we were having a conversation – about what I can’t remember – and the next you were on the floor.’

  She looked to the bucket by the bed. ‘You?’

  He shrugged. ‘You were having a nightmare. When you finally snapped out of it you started to be sick. I took you to the bathroom, got the bucket for afterwards.’

  Sonja looked down into the cup. ‘I should say thank you.’

  ‘I’m guessing you don’t do a lot of that.’

  She looked up at him. ‘Don’t patronise me. Thank you. That was kind of you.’

  ‘If you want to go back to bed I can put Allchurch off another hour or so. Understandably, however, he’s keen to get on the trail of his missing son’s aircraft.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I’ll be ready to go in five minutes. A hangover’s a self-inflicted wound, no excuses. We’ll stick to the timings. Get out while I change out of your shirt. I’ll clean it later.’

  He touched the brim of his baseball cap and backed out of the door.

  Sonja took off Brand’s T-shirt. For the first time since she’d met him, the first time she’d been sober, she noticed his smell. The shirt had been clean, but there was a lingering smell of man about it, wood smoke, gun oil and leather boots. She bunched it in a ball and tossed it on the bed then put on her own shirt. She went to the bathroom and pulled her hair back in a ponytail, fixing it with the elastic she had miraculously found in the pocket of her shorts. She went back to the bed and got Brand’s shirt, then held it under the running tap and washed away the sick stain with hand soap as best she could before wringing it out.

  She regarded herself in the mirror. Her eyes were clear, well mostly clear, and her clothes were wrinkled but at least not stinking any more.

  Sonja took Brand’s shirt and went back out into the small living room of the chalet. Brand’s client, Matthew Allchurch, was there. He looked well rested and not as pale as the previous day. His bandage was clean, with no blood spotting through. ‘You look better,’ she said.

  ‘So do you. Good morning.’

  Sonja walked past him and out to the pastor’s Land Rover. She got in as Brand was loading his and Allchurch’s bags into their bakkie. Sonja turned the key and noticed the fuel warning light had come on. She got out and, reluctantly, went to Brand. He was in the driver’s seat now and put down the electric window.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I need cash.’

  He pursed his lips. ‘Are you asking me nicely for a loan?’

  ‘Yes. This is me being polite.’

  Brand undid the flap on the breast pocket of his safari shirt. He pulled out three hundred rand. ‘That’s all I’ve got.’

  She took it from him. ‘That will do, for now.’

  ‘Yes, don’t worry, I’ll get some more at the next ATM in case you run out.’

  He deserved a smile for that reply. She turned and went back to the Land Rover. She felt his eyes on her as she walked and she let the smile linger a little longer. Back in the Landy she started the engine and turned on the air conditioning. They drove to Okaukuejo camp’s fuel station. While the attendant was filling the Land Rover Brand spread a map across the bonnet. Sonja and Matthew joined him.

  He traced a line north-east from where they were. ‘Namutoni’s the nearest camp to the dig site, so we’ll head that way, through the park, then out through the King Nehale Gate. The dig’s east of there.’

  With the refuelling done t
hey headed past the stone tower, out the gates and into the wilds of Etosha National Park.

  On paper the drive to Namutoni was about a hundred and fifty kilometres, but the maximum speed on Etosha’s dusty internal road network was sixty. Added to that, they would inevitably be delayed by animals crossing the road and tourists pulling up in the middle of the road to watch them.

  Sonja didn’t mind. She was looking forward to seeing Emma, and for a while at least she could pretend she was ten again, driving these same roads, her nose pressed against the window of her parents’ old Ford, eyes straining to spot a lion or, her personal favourite, a cheetah.

  Etosha was starkly beautiful, its open golden grassy plains and swathes of bare earth studded with limestone rocks a complete contrast to the lush bush and web of waterways that made up the Okavango Delta in Botswana, where Sonja and her family had lived after Namibia gained independence. Her father, by then an alcoholic, had taken them into self-imposed exile, fearing that the brutal things he had done during the war against the now-rulers of his homeland would come back to bite him.

  Off to her left, as she hung back to stay out of the bakkie’s dust cloud, she caught glimpses of a band of white nothingness on the horizon, partly masked by a curtain of shimmering heat haze. This, she knew, was Etosha Pan, the vast salt lake, dry at this time of the year, from which the park took its name. This was hard, barren country, yet an amazing number of animals, birds and other creatures survived here. Natural springs and manmade waterholes supported big herds of braying zebra and the clown-faced gemsbok, which the English called the oryx. Lions had it good during the dry season, reclining lazily by a waterhole and waiting for the herbivores to come and drink. They passed the Rietfontein Waterhole and, judging by the cluster of a dozen or more rented four-by-fours, Sonja guessed there were cats in residence.

  But she and her travelling companions in the lead vehicle were not here as game-viewing sightseers, so they pushed on. Sonja consoled herself with the thought that when she did meet up with Emma, and when her daughter was done with the dig, they would travel back through this wondrous place, enjoying the wildlife and each other’s company at a slow, enjoyable pace.