by Tony Park
Sonja hadn’t been to this part of her home country before. The lodge looked well set up, with a sign to a swimming pool and bar beyond the reception area. In the car park, near where she pulled up, was a Volkswagen Amarok four-by-four bakkie with a rhino conservation charity logo and the names of various corporate sponsors plastered on its sides. Stirling Smith walked out of the reception building, a map in one hand, and Sonja took a breath to still herself.
His clothes were dusty and sweat stained, his eyes soft and blue. He walked to her.
‘Sonn.’
He always called her that. He didn’t seem to know if he should hug her so she extended her hand between them. ‘This is Hudson Brand, Matthew Allchurch.’
The men all shook hands and Stirling suggested they go into the lodge. They passed through reception and followed a path to the bar and swimming pool, where plump tourists were turning their pale European skin pink on sunbeds. Stirling led them to a table under a thatched umbrella-shaped lapa, and a waiter came over and took their order for a mix of Cokes and coffees.
‘Thanks for seeing us at short notice, Stirling.’ Sonja was determined to keep this businesslike. They had lost their virginity to each other, but that hadn’t been enough to keep them together forever.
‘No problem at all,’ Stirling answered.
‘As I told you on the phone, we’re looking for some men who might be flying over this part of Namibia.’
He nodded vigorously. ‘I’ll stop you there, Sonn. I think I’ve got some news for you.’ He unfolded a map of northwestern Namibia on the table. When the waiter arrived with their drinks they set them down on the stone pavers beneath them and Stirling arranged the map so they could all see.
‘Our scouts and the conservancy’s rangers are always on the lookout for suspicious activity, because of the presence of the rhinos. Here in the northwest of the conservancy,’ he said, stabbing the map with his forefinger, ‘our guys have seen an aircraft flying over the last couple of days, west, then east again, then back to the west.’
‘What’s up there?’ Matthew asked.
‘Not much,’ Stirling said. ‘Few tourists venture into that part of Palmwag. It’s wild country, rocky desert, sand, dry riverbeds. The Hoanib River runs along the northern border of the conservancy and that’s popular with four-by-four enthusiasts – mostly South Africans – and tour operators as it’s a main thoroughfare for the desert elephants. However, people mostly access the Hoanib from Sesfontein or Purros to the north, using the main roads around the conservancy. Like I said, not many people drive through the Palmwag area itself.’
‘To the west is the Skeleton Coast National Park,’ Sonja observed.
‘Yes, more endless tracts of nothingness. If your people are looking for a missing aeroplane they’ve got a lot of ground to search.’
Sonja knew, however, that their enemies were following the same track as they were. Brand stood to get a better look at the map and she knew he was mentally transposing the supposed route of the lost Dakota, from where the body of Venter had been found north of Namutoni to the drop point just off the coast in the Atlantic Ocean. He traced a line with his fingers.
‘That’d be right,’ Brand said, running a finger along the line that marked the northern border of the conservancy. ‘They would have overflown that area.’
‘You know where these people would be flying?’ Stirling asked.
‘More or less,’ Sonja said. ‘What’s the quickest way to get there, and then on to the Skeleton Coast?’
‘Straight line.’ Stirling traced a path through the conservancy, from the lodge where they were now up to the northwestern corner of the reserve. ‘The roads are pretty good for the most part. You could go on the outside roads to Khowarib and cut into the Hoanib at Sesfontein, but that’s further by distance.’
‘And can we cross into the Skeleton Coast Park up there?’ Sonja asked.
Stirling shook his head. ‘No. The nearest gate into the national park is a hundred and thirty kilometres southwest of here.’
‘That won’t do,’ Sonja said.
‘There’s a track to the coast that follows the Hoanib River, but that passes through a private concession. Access through there is forbidden,’ Stirling said. ‘I can’t be a party to helping you break the law.’
That was his problem, she thought. He was such a stickler for the rules that he cared more about not crossing lines on a map than he did for the safety of her daughter. It was pointless trying to argue with him, but at least it meant he would not try and accompany them, like a lost puppy. On paper he was the perfect partner – handsome, intelligent, clearly still in love with her, but when push came to shove he always backed away and played it safe.
‘Of course not, Stirling, and rest assured we have no intention of breaking any rules.’ Sonja glanced at Brand and noted his raised eyebrows.
‘It’s been unusually busy up in the Wilfriedstein and Sesfontein areas recently,’ Stirling said, keen to turn the conversation away from illegal activities.
‘How so?’ Brand asked, sipping his Coke.
‘Well, the desert lion people just had one of their animals shot up that way. Our guys thought that the aircraft flying overhead might be looking for the lion.’
‘We believe there may have been a lion researcher on that aircraft; a Namibian by the name of Alex Bahler.’
‘Ah, Alex,’ Stirling said. ‘I know him. Good kid, super dedicated. You say your daughter’s on the plane too, Sonn?’
She wished he wouldn’t use the diminutive of her name around strangers, but she didn’t want to make a thing of it in front of Brand. ‘Yes. She’s with a team of archaeologists and they’re looking for the aircraft that went down during the border war.’
Stirling rubbed his chin. ‘Yes, so you said on the phone. Long way south of the border.’
‘Long story,’ Brand said.
Stirling nodded. Sonja thought he wouldn’t want to know more, in case it embroiled him in yet more wrongdoing. ‘And you think she’s in trouble?’
Sonja didn’t know how much to tell him, but she couldn’t hide the fact that she had traipsed halfway across Namibia to get here. ‘Yes. It’s all too suspicious. We think there’s valuable cargo on the missing plane and that the man flying that aircraft will stop at nothing to find it. If he does, he won’t want to have witnesses around.’
‘Wow. Sonja, if there’s anything I can do, I’m here for you.’
Here being the operative word, Sonja thought, tucked away in his lodge or his research camp, sheltered from the real world of crime and death. ‘You’re doing more than enough to help us right now, by giving us intelligence. We don’t want to put you or your men in harm’s way.’
‘In harm’s way?’ He sounded offended. ‘My men and I caught two poachers last week and they were armed with rifles.’
Sonja was not easily impressed, and arresting a couple of poachers wasn’t enough to make her fall at his feet, but at least it showed Stirling was not afraid to get into the field occasionally and get his hands dirty. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you, Stirling. What else has been going on lately?’
He seemed to relax a little in his chair. He blew on his coffee and drank some of it before replying. ‘Well, we think those two poachers were spurred on by a big seizure of rhino horn that happened at the airport in Windhoek recently.’
‘I read about that,’ Brand interrupted. ‘Where did that rhino horn come from?’
Stirling became animated, and Sonja could tell he was in his element talking rhinos. ‘Well, the interesting thing, Hudson, is that we think it came from our area, but not from rhinos that were killed by poachers – we’ve only lost two in the last few years.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Matthew said. ‘Where did they get fourteen horns from?’
Stirling referred them back to the map. ‘The two Chinese guys ar
rested were junior engineers on a road gang, working north-west of us, on the salt road. The only rhinos in this area are in the Palmwag Conservancy, around here, so the police asked me if I’d help them find out where the horns were from. We have DNA samples from all the rhinos we monitor, so it’s reasonably easy to tell if the horns were from rhinos related to our ones.’
‘And?’ Hudson asked.
‘They weren’t. In fact, there are DNA samples from all the viable populations across Namibia and the horns seized at the airport didn’t match any of them. The other thing was they looked very old, not fresh at all. My opinion was that they’d come from a stockpile somewhere, but when the police checked there were no reported thefts from the Namibian national parks stockpiles.’
‘South Africa?’ Allchurch said.
‘No,’ said Stirling. ‘The last heist of stockpiled horn in SA was from the Mpumalanga parks board’s strongroom, but these horns didn’t match any DNA samples from the recorded horns over there either.’
Sonja listened, her mind processing the information. She looked at the map again. The tiny towns of Sesfontein and Wilfriedstein were very close to the projected flight path of the Dakota that Hudson had showed her on their map.
‘So,’ Brand said, ‘no matches with rhino populations in Namibia and South Africa, and the horn was old. Close to thirty years old?’
Stirling shrugged. ‘Hard to say, but it was all very odd. It was like these two Chinese guys had stumbled upon some hoard of buried treasure. I mean, fourteen rhino horns – that’s worth more than a million, maybe two million dollars in today’s money.’
‘Hudson?’ Sonja gestured to Brand with a nod. ‘Please excuse us, Stirling.’
‘Sure,’ said Stirling.
She stood and walked away from the table. Brand followed her to the edge of the pool. ‘Tell me, what was on that Dakota?’
Brand looked back at Stirling. ‘You heard the scientist – those horns weren’t from South Africa or Namibia. I always thought the cargo on the Dakota was ivory, which was the big commodity back in the late eighties.’
‘But it could have been rhino horn.’ Sonja felt her anger rising. This stupid pursuit of horns made of keratin, the same substance as human fingernails, had left a trail of death and sorrow throughout Africa, and cost the life of her soulmate. It seemed destined to plague her life.
‘Yes,’ said Brand. He ran a hand through his thick hair. ‘It’s possible. There were rhino in Angola, as with the rest of southern Africa, but most of them had been taken out by the end of the war. It’s possible UNITA had a stockpile and they were offloading them to raise money for arms, or for the senior guys to line their own pockets once they knew Savimbi was finished.’
Sonja thought through the economics, and overlaid it with her knowledge of the time. ‘Horns are smaller, lighter than tusks, and worth a lot of money, but the markets weren’t as accessible.’
‘You’re right,’ Brand agreed. ‘China was locked off from the west back then, and the Vietnamese didn’t have the cash-flush economy they do now.’
Sonja thought about the coordinates Brand had showed her, the ship waiting off the coast of South West Africa, just inside international waters. ‘Russians?’
‘Could be,’ Brand said. ‘When I worked for the Company, the CIA, we did what we did to further America’s aims. Sometimes it was illegal, like the guys who used to run drugs out of the Golden Triangle – Laos, Burma and Thailand – to fund anti-communist rebels, or Savimbi selling ivory and diamonds to buy guns, but the deal I was investigating stank worse than that.’
‘How so?’ she asked.
‘It was like, uber-secret,’ Brand said. ‘My CIA boss in Angola and Venter, the loadmaster on the aircraft, were running an operation that wasn’t just black, it was criminal. We all pushed the boundaries, but I cultivated Venter because I thought that what was going on with those flights out of Angola was about people lining their own pockets by dealing with the commies.’
Sonja remembered something her father had said when she was a child about the Russians and the Chinese wanting to take over South West Africa and South Africa. ‘My father used to say the Russians were supplying FAPLA, the Angolan Army, and that half the Russian Navy was anchored in the port of Luanda. He used to say the South Africans should bomb them.’
‘Maybe not half the navy,’ Brand said, ‘but the Russians and Cubans were backing the Angolans. Question is, if there were some dirty CIA guys and South Africans selling rhino horn to a Russian contact, why would they have to drop the stuff in the Atlantic off the coast of modern-day Namibia?’
Sonja thought it through. ‘I think you just answered your own question. Not only were your people crooked, but the Russians on the receiving end were as well, and the Angolans who supplied them. The cargo couldn’t go through Luanda, as it was coming from the opposition, UNITA, and that Dakota couldn’t have overflown South West Africa to a safe drop zone off the coast without someone clearing the way inside this country.’
‘Andre Horsman,’ Brand said.
‘Who was an officer in the South African Air Force, with the seniority to recruit an air crew who had flown Dakotas on maritime patrols and to clear flight paths, on the pretext of dropping supplies to supposedly secret recce-commando missions offshore.’
‘Black OPs,’ Brand said.
‘Exactly. No one would question what Horsman was up to.’ Brand was silent, looking as though he was searching his memory. ‘What are you thinking?’
He looked up, then at her. ‘I’m thinking what six bundles, each weighing about two hundred and fifty pounds – about a hundred and twenty kilograms apiece – of Angolan rhino horn might be worth on today’s market in Vietnam.’
Sonja did the calculation in her head. She whistled through her teeth. ‘Sheesh, depending on which estimate you use, just over seven hundred kilograms of horn could be worth around nine million US dollars.’
‘Worth killing for,’ Brand said.
Sonja went back to Stirling, with Brand in tow. ‘Stirling,’ she asked, ‘do you have any theories about where those fourteen rhino horns might have come from?’
‘I’ve thought about that,’ Stirling said. ‘According to the police the men arrested weren’t associated with the local Chinese running trading shops, and they’d only been in the area a short time, just a matter of weeks.’
‘So,’ Sonja said, her mind turning over, ‘they must have been outsiders who saw the opportunity for a quick buck. Maybe they only just recently discovered the horn themselves.’
‘Yes,’ Stirling said. ‘We work in well with the local Damara and Himba people and they value the presence of rhinos as an income-generating prospect. They’re not into poaching, and if they catch any of their own people trying to hunt rhinos or elephants, they turn them in and deal with them via traditional justice. However, that’s not to say they wouldn’t try and sell some horns if they just happened to find them.’
People living in poverty could be tempted, Sonja thought. ‘Where were the road builders working?’
‘Inside the Skeleton Coast National Park,’ Stirling said. He pointed to a spot halfway between Terrace Bay and Möwe Bay, the northernmost outpost in the park.
‘What does “Möwe” mean?’ Brand wondered aloud.
‘Seagull, in German,’ Sonja said.
Brand nodded. ‘Looks remote.’
‘Very,’ Stirling agreed.
‘Have you spoken to the police? Have these Chinese guys given up anything?’ Brand asked.
‘Negative,’ Stirling replied. ‘I did talk to the cops – they got me in to try to trace the horns’ origins – but the detectives in charge said the road builders had clammed up. They claimed not to speak English and when an interpreter was brought in they refused to give any names or say when, where or how they got the horns.’
Brand looked at Sonja. ‘Wh
at do you think?’
Sonja mentally sifted the pieces of information they had. ‘We have a rough flight path, but searching the whole route by land would be impossible. We don’t have access to an aircraft, but we do know where the Chinese guys were working. We can get to the Skeleton Coast and see if we can pick up the road gang and try and do some tracking. It is a remote area, but that means strangers, or tracks, will stick out more.’
‘Still a hell of a job,’ Brand said.
She put her hands on her hips. Stirling had given them some valuable information, but it was time to get moving again. She couldn’t sit still. If the rhino horn had come from the downed aircraft then it meant someone had beaten both them and Andre Horsman to the Dakota. The haul of precious cargo might already be all gone – perhaps previous shipments had even been successfully spirited out of Namibia and these two road workers were the unlucky ones who’d got caught. It didn’t matter – Horsman would find the aircraft and he had her daughter with him. Sonja was worried that once he was finished using Emma and the others as cheap labour, or if he realised his prize was gone and he didn’t need the archaeologists any more, he would kill her on the spot and bury her somewhere in the deserts of the Skeleton Coast. ‘Got any better ideas, Brand?’
The guide shook his head, and looked to his client. ‘What do you think, Matthew?’
Allchurch had brightened, having rested well in the Land Rover. ‘I don’t care about any rhino horn or whatever else is in that aircraft, I just want to find my son. I say we get moving.’
‘Thanks, Stirling, we can take it from here,’ Sonja said. ‘Let’s saddle up.’
‘You’ve only got a couple of hours of daylight left and you can’t drive through the conservancy at night,’ Stirling said. ‘Plus, your Land Rover looked to me like it’s taken a battering. You’re crazy to be driving out there with one damaged vehicle in the first place; most people go in a convoy of at least two in case something happens.’
‘We’ll get as far as we need to,’ she said. She didn’t like the way he always seemed to find an excuse not to do something and his petty rules annoyed her. She knew, however, that it would not be wise to drive at night in the bush as the chances of hitting a wild animal were high, and the conservancy’s security staff might stop an unknown vehicle after dusk. Also, he had a point about the mechanical state of the pastor’s Land Rover.
