by Tony Park
Luiz said nothing. Julio moved past him, taking the lead and, for the first time since they had crossed the border from Mozambique, the youth brought his AK-47 up into his shoulder and looked alert. Luiz would see how long the young pup could maintain his concentration before he lapsed into his lazy ways. Such a boy would not have lasted a day in combat against RENAMO.
Luiz took up a position in the middle of the group of men, where he could better exercise command and control once the shooting began. He raised his nose and smelled the kill. The hyena called again.
‘They frighten me,’ said the boy behind him.
Luiz turned to him. ‘Nothing to worry about, especially if the animal is calling. It is telling you, and any other creatures in the night, that it is here.’
‘Is it true that witches ride on their backs?’
‘Yes, that is true, Armando, but that AK in your hands is more than a match for any witch.’ Luiz clapped Armando on the arm. He was a good boy, who should have been at university, but his parents were dead, both killed by the virus.
Luiz clicked his fingers. Julio turned back to him.
What now? the whelp mouthed.
‘Slowly, slowly,’ Luiz whispered back.
Julio scoffed at him and carried on, head high.
Luiz had seen the lone figure in the distance, turning off the exterior lights at the camp then retiring to his accommodation. The light was still on in the room.
‘Approach from the rear, Julio, circle around the koppies,’ he said.
Julio looked back again. ‘Of course we will go in from behind. I am not so stupid as to advance over the open ground at the front where the waterhole is lit and the man will be watching for game. That would be too obvious.’
Luiz nodded. Yes, far too obvious.
*
Dave Corlett was reading a paperback by the light of a desk lamp in the Mission Area Joint Operations Command at Skukuza Airport, far to the south of Boulders Camp. The MAJOC was the headquarters for the combined South African National Parks, police and military effort against rhino poaching in the park.
Dave was performing one of his honorary ranger duties by spending a Saturday night manning the telephones in the nerve centre. Honorary rangers needed to do a certain number of duties per year to stay current. These could range from such necessarily mundane activities as picking up rubbish in the Kruger Park or checking visitors’ permits and bookings to clearing snares in the bush or even taking paying guests on guided walks in big five country. Pulling a night shift in the MAJOC might have sounded glamorous to some, but in reality it was hours of boredom punctuated by the odd moment of excitement. He yawned and contemplated making a third cup of coffee.
The phone rang.
‘Poaching hotline, hello.’
‘Good evening. I will dispense with the pleasantries as I am calling about a crime that I believe is about to be committed.’
‘Go on.’ Dave slid the message pad across the desk and clicked his ballpoint pen.
‘My name is Fidel Costa. I am a concerned citizen and elected representative of the people in the town of Massingir in Mozambique. I am in South Africa on important business relating to my charity work. I wish to report a possible armed incursion of poachers from my country into yours.’
Dave wrote down the name. It was familiar. He’d read it somewhere, just recently, maybe on Facebook.
‘Yes, Mr Costa, I’m listening.’
‘One of my constituents, a woman, came to me just now and said she believes her son is part of a gang inside the Kruger Park who are planning to attack and rob one of the park’s camps, as well as hunting rhinos.’
Dave licked his lips. ‘Which camp?’
‘The Boulder, or something like that; she was not sure of the name, and while I am an ardent conservationist and concerned for the plight of rhinos, I do not know all of the camps in the Kruger.’
‘Boulders?’
‘Yes, that was it,’ the voice, Costa, said. ‘The gang – they are all armed – left yesterday, according to the woman. They could be at your camp by now. She is most concerned about her son.’
‘Thank you, Mr Costa. Now, if I can just get some more details please, I need –’
‘Hello? Hello? The signal here is not good. I cannot hear you.’
‘Hello?’ Dave said. The call ended.
Dave was worried. With the war on rhino poaching having been fought for several years now, the unspoken fear of the security forces and national parks was that innocent civilians – tourists – might one day get caught up in the armed conflict between poachers and anti-poaching forces. Now it seemed even worse – a gang of armed poachers deliberately setting out to hit a national parks camp.
Dave sounded the alarm.
Within minutes the operations room had been stood up, with high-ranking rangers, police and military people roused from their beds. Outside, in the dark, came the whine of a jet turbine engine as a national parks helicopter’s blades began to turn. A rapid reaction force of armed rangers was running for the aircraft.
Dave said a silent prayer that he hadn’t set all this in motion for nothing, and that if the threat was real the reaction force would get to Boulders, in the far north of the park, before anyone was hurt.
Phones were ringing around him. He was given a job by his superior, to call Mopani Camp, the nearest rest camp to Boulders, and find out the number and names of all guests and staff staying at Boulders Camp. Already another parks ranger was on the radio, trying to raise the camp itself.
‘Baird, you say? Bravo-Alpha-India-Romeo-Delta?’ Dave asked the duty manager at Mopani Rest Camp.
‘Yes,’ the sleepy-sounding woman said, ‘first name, Graham.’
‘I know him. Thanks.’
Dave hung up and reported to the senior person on duty, an army colonel.
‘There’s only one guest staying at Boulders Camp, and it turns out I know him. He’s a neighbour of sorts, a vet from Hoedspruit. I’ve got his number.’
‘Then try him,’ the colonel ordered. ‘Phone signal in that part of the park is kak, but if you can get hold of him, tell him there’s a load of shit heading his way.’
Dave took out his mobile phone and found Graham’s number. As he tried to get through he said a silent prayer for his sometime golfing friend, and for the team that was flying into battle.
Chapter 31
The genet stayed close to Graham, hiding in the rocks, but occasionally raised its face above the parapet and sniffed the air, wondering if the human had another morsel of food he was willing to share.
After returning to his room and loudly closing the door, Graham had climbed down over the balcony railing onto the rocks below, and lowered himself to the ground. He had picked his way quietly, carefully, between the boulders and made his way up into the koppies behind the camp to a position where he could look down on the buildings and the walkway that linked them.
Graham heard a noise, rapid footfalls on wooden decking. He raised the nine-millimetre pistol and swung his aim to the path between the first and second accommodation units.
He drew a breath.
Then exhaled. ‘Nsele.’
It was the honey badger he had released on the first day he had arrived at Boulders. It was back.
When he first opened the travel cage there had been an explosion of black and white fur and a maniacal growling and hissing as the honey badger, angry and frustrated at being cooped up so long, had erupted from its tiny prison. For a moment Graham had thought the wee but ferocious beastie was going to turn on him, and had jumped out of the way and up onto a nearby outcrop to escape the teeth and claws. But Nsele had shaken his head imperiously and scampered off, not to be seen again until now.
Graham watched the way he trotted along the walkway, head up, not caring about the noise he made. Honey badgers had the attitude of a black rhino in heat trapped in a body the size of a spaniel.
Nsele turned off the path and leapt up the steps to the fire pit
and braai area. He jumped up onto the brickwork beside the barbeque and leaned over until he could lick the braai grid. Even though it still would have been too hot to touch, Nsele cleaned the remnants of sausage fat off the grid. Unsatisfied, he jumped back down and took to the walkway again in search of more food.
Beside him the genet took fright at the sight of one of nature’s most aggressive little carnivores and bounded up higher and further into the fortified safety of the rocky hilltop.
‘Go away,’ Graham hissed at the badger.
Nsele raised his face to him, his downturned mouth looking confused. The poor thing had been around humans all its life – and spent a good part of that trying to escape from its enforced prison – and now here it was, still dependent on people. Graham felt sorry for it, and ashamed that he had fed the genet. He despaired of a world in which people killed each other and magnificent animals for something as stupid as rhino horn.
Nsele growled and hopped, all four paws off the ground as he turned within his own body length. The hairs on his back rose up, as did his tail. He was instantly alert over something. He trotted away from Graham, along the walkway.
Graham looked past Nsele and saw the first of the armed men heading, predictably, around the koppies on the ground below him, towards the one rear-facing suite.
He moved, as slowly and quietly as he could, until he could better see all seven of the men moving beneath, through a passage between two clusters of boulders. There was enough light from the moon for him to get a look at them.
The first man looked alert enough, youngish, wide-eyed, his AK-47 raised and ready. The second was older, with a tight cap of grey curls. His head never stopped moving, eyes scanning left and right, up and down. Graham melded his silhouette closer to the rocks in response. The third man was the opposite; he watched his feet, perhaps fearful of tripping over. The others trudged on, even less alert.
Graham switched his gaze back to the older man. He recognised him, his hair and his lean, muscled gait. It was the man who had fled from the scene of the chopper crash and who had later beaten him up in the prison cell in Massingir, just before Capitão Alfredo had intervened. Luiz was what the captain had called him. He would be the ringleader of this little circus, an experienced killer.
The role of the last of the seven was to cover their rear and he was doing a reasonable job of it. Every few steps he would stop and survey the trail in the direction they had just come, swinging his assault rifle in a one hundred and eighty degree arc. Graham watched and waited. The man bringing up the rear was excited, perhaps, by the promise of imminent action, because the delays between checking behind him were getting longer; he was too interested in what was ahead.
Graham clambered down from the rocks, timing his climb to arrive at ground level just as the small column of poachers passed him by. These men, he told himself, were here for one reason and one reason only: to kill him. He slid between two smooth granite monoliths and held his breath as the first and second men walked by.
The third man was picking his nose with his free hand; the rifle in his other was pointed down. He was close to the older man. Four, five and six were bunched together in a tight group, but seven, sweeping the rear, was a few lengths back from the others.
The young man had just completed a check behind him when he came abreast of Graham, who looked skywards, composed the briefest of prayers for forgiveness, and stepped out from between the rocks. He clamped his left hand around the man’s mouth, hard and fast, drew him back into the crevice and slid the bone-handled hunting knife up under the man’s ribcage and into his heart. He held the shuddering body, felt the hot wetness flood down over his hand and forearm, and kept the man silent until he died.
Shaking, Graham tried to calm the tremor that passed through his own body. Peeking around the edge of the boulder, he watched as the poachers moved on and the next man in line, who had been second from last in the group, failed to look back and check on the tail end man, as he should have.
Graham took the dead man’s AK-47 and searched his body. He removed a satchel bag containing two spare magazines of ammunition for the rifle and a loaf of pão, Portuguese bread, from around the man’s neck and looped it over his own. In the side pocket of the poacher’s cargo pants was a hand grenade. Graham transferred that to his own pocket and climbed back up into his eyrie.
Below him the poachers kept moving. None of them had noticed that the man at the rear was missing, but they would, eventually.
Graham moved up and over the rocks, back towards the lodge, and could see the lead man approaching the rear-facing unit. He thought back to his military service. Like all conscripts he had gone through basic infantry training.
He now had an assault rifle, which could be fired on full automatic, like a machine gun. He needed to be able to employ it as an automatic weapon, to maximum effect, if he was going to stand any chance.
Graham paused, just as his quarries stopped, to assess the situation.
He had just told himself that he wanted to stand a chance.
Graham had come to Boulders, deliberately taunting Costa, because he fully expected to die. There had been times over the years since his wife, Carla, had died, that he’d felt like he wanted to disappear from this life, to end it all. He had felt that way on the flight back from Cape Town.
On the drive to the camp, however, he’d had mixed emotions. He had taken in the colours around him, the elephant’s eyes, the simple beauty of the impala, because he thought it was the last time he would see them, but the truth was that these, too, were the things he lived for. Despite his cynicism and disgust at so much of what he saw around him on a day-to-day basis, he lived to care for the animals, birds and reptiles that could not save themselves. He existed for the love of nature.
The men who knelt in the darkness lived for the promise of money, and that cash came from destroying all that Graham held sacred.
He might – probably would – die tonight, but he would take as many of these bastards with him as he could. Graham removed the magazine from the rifle, checked it was full and that there was a round already chambered, and prepared for battle.
*
Nsele jumped down from the braai grid. It was his second attempt at finding food on the hot metal grill and it had failed. He was not happy.
He raised his face to the night sky and sniffed the air. He caught new scents on the soft breeze. Men.
Nsele tramped along the wooden walkway, squeezed through a couple of railings and jumped down onto a smooth boulder to investigate. He paused, looking, listening and sniffing.
There they were.
He saw them, crouched in the shadows cast by the moon. He sensed danger, remembered it from long ago. Just as he had all those years ago, when he had been little more than a cub, he recognised the weapons in their hands, remembered the boom of gunshots, the pain of the dart.
He needed to get away from these humans – and he still needed more food. Nsele looked around and saw that there was one room with a light on. The solid wooden door to the room was open, with just a screen door barring his way in. He could open that, easy.
Nsele growled.
*
‘What was that?’ Julio whispered. ‘A lion?’
Luiz cocked his head. ‘No, don’t be stupid. Have you ever even heard a lion?’
Julio looked at him defiantly for a couple of seconds then, realising he could not hold the bluff, turned his face away. ‘Once. In the zoo, in Maputo.’
Luiz shook his head. ‘That was something small, maybe a honey badger.’
‘Just a badger? Nothing to worry about then,’ Julio said.
‘Ha.’ Luiz grinned to himself. He hoped the boy never had to confront one of those feisty little animals. ‘You will learn. If you live that long.’
‘Enough talking, old man, I say we go now, find the white man and kill him, dead. I’m going to bust a cap in his arse.’
Why, Luiz wondered, would this youth want to talk like Am
erican rappers and gangsters? ‘We wait, and we listen.’
Julio flexed his fingers around the pistol grip of the AK-47. He was, Luiz saw, keyed up and ready for action.
Julio looked over Luiz’s shoulder, back at the others. ‘Are you ready, men?’ he hissed. ‘Or would you rather sit here sleeping like old men?’
One of the three looked to his two comrades. There were halfhearted nods. ‘We are ready.’
‘What about Batista and Alexo?’ Julio asked.
Luiz looked beyond the three men he could still see. Batista was a lazy fool, half asleep or stoned on dagga most of the time, and Alexo was the youngest of the group. In Alexo’s favour, the boy, just turned eighteen, was keen, alert and willing to learn, which was why Luiz had given him the important job of watching their rear, in case they were being followed by a clandestine patrol of rangers of the South African Army’s elite Recce Commandos, who were also engaged in the war on poaching.
‘Batista, wake up,’ one of the trio said.
Luiz got up, slowly, so as not to dislodge any rocks, and picked his way towards the rear of their little column.
Batista yawned.
‘Where is Alexo?’ Luiz whispered.
Batista looked around him. ‘I don’t know.’
Luiz fumed. ‘You were supposed to keep looking back to check on him.’
‘I thought that was Alexo’s job, to watch behind us, not mine.’
If he wasn’t worried about the noise he would make or the yelp of pain it would elicit, Luiz would have punched Batista in the face on the spot. ‘You idiot. Come with me, watch your step and stay silent.’
Luiz moved silently and as swiftly as he could, retracing their steps, eyes scanning the rocks and crevices around them. He heard a movement up ahead, and another growl, but this was deeper, from a bigger animal than a badger.
Whoo-oop!
The hyena’s cry was deafening this close, and echoed off the rocks. Luiz raised his rifle and glanced behind him. Batista was turning, his eyes wide with fear. ‘Stay still.’
Luiz climbed the nearest rock, then hopped to the next boulder. Batista struggled up behind him. Luiz saw the slope-backed silhouette of one hyena, and another emerged from the gap between the rocks and looked up at him. The moonlight caught the white teeth, dripping silver strands of saliva. Their faces were wet. Luiz looked down. They were feeding.
