by Tony Park
The wash bag.
When he had reached into his suit bag last night it had taken him a few moments to find his toiletries. He was a disciplined soldier, a creature of habit, and, like it or not, a slave to order, precision and routine. He always placed his wash bag in last, on the top right of his bag. It had not been in its usual spot after the intruder had left.
Jed unpacked his suit bag and then turned it upside down. He sorted through his underclothes, his shirts and spare pair of trousers. He upended each of his combat boots and his running shoes, but nothing fell out. He checked the zippered pockets of the bag and then ran his hands over the lining, feeling for any irregularities. He took his camera out of its case and examined it. He hadn’t loaded it with film and it was still empty. As he shifted one of his running shoes the camera case dropped from the bed onto the carpeted floor. It landed with an audible thud.
Jed was surprised by the noise. He picked up the empty case; it was heavier than usual. He took a closer look inside and found a removable divider in the bottom of the pouch, fastened to the interior with strips of Velcro. He took out the padded piece of material and turned the case upside down. A black pistol magazine filled with snub-nosed bullets slid into his hand. He examined the mag and thumbed the rounds onto the unmade bed. There were thirteen of them. The magazine was made of metal and bore no markings, but he recognised it instantly as belonging to a Browning nine-millimetre pistol.
‘Bastard,’ he said.
He scooped up the rounds and reloaded the magazine. He searched his gear again and then emptied his Alice pack on the floor. He checked and rechecked every piece of kit and every item of clothing.
Then he re-examined both the pack and the travel bag to make sure there was nothing else in there that didn’t belong to him.
The magazine was small enough to be easily concealed but there was no way it would not be discovered by an airport metal detector. It was in his carry-on bag, as well. The intruder had not planted a pistol, just the ammunition.
Jed had been set up. He would have been stopped by airport security on his way to check in for his flight to Zimbabwe, and probably taken away for questioning. The security men would have discovered from the identification card he carried that he was US Army. The fact that there was no pistol in his possession would eventually be discovered, after they had searched both his bags and his person. He could imagine the process taking a long time, maybe hours. Would he have been charged with a criminal offence? Possibly: he didn’t know. Would he have missed his flight? Definitely.
And who was the intruder? If not a thief, who did he work for? Jed had been clearly visible over the roofline when the man’s accomplice had opened fire. He had been shot at with a pistol – not an accurate weapon over any great distance, but even so the rounds had sailed harmlessly high over his head. Had the man pulling the trigger simply been trying to scare him off?
Jed had carried his passport and tickets with him down to the bar. Still, the intruder had somehow known that he would be catching another flight the next day Then there was the mysterious woman who had been asking about him. It was all too weird for words.
*
Inside the crowded airport terminal Jed took the lift to the departures floor, and joined a queue of people waiting to put their bags onto the conveyor belt of a large X-ray scanning machine. The machine was big enough to take suitcases, and the departing passengers were being told to place all their luggage, not just their carry-on bags, onto the wide rubber belt for inspection.
As Jed approached the machine, a European man in jeans and a spray jacket walked over and stood beside the seated security officer. It was close to a hundred degrees outside and warm and sticky inside the terminal, despite the airconditioning. Jed guessed the man wore a jacket to conceal a shoulder holster. He peered intently at the screen as Jed dropped his suit bag and then his pack onto the conveyor. As he walked through the metal detector, the beeping alarm sounded.
The man in the civilian clothes looked up and stared at Jed as a second uniformed security officer, an African woman, ran a metal-detecting wand over his body. The wand made a buzzing noise as it passed over Jed’s pants pocket. The woman asked him to empty his pockets. Jed noticed out of the corner of his eye that the conveyor belt had stopped. The man was alternating his gaze between the machine’s monitor and Jed.
Jed reached into his pocket and pulled out his mobile phone. The female security guard made him walk through the detector again and, when the alarm did not go off, she handed him back his phone.
The conveyor belt started once more and Jed’s bags emerged. As he picked up his pack, the man in civilian clothes whispered something to the male security guard, who called a third colleague.
‘Please empty the contents of your bag on that table, sir,’ the standing security guard said.
‘Why?’ Jed asked.
‘We need to check something, sir. Now, if you don’t mind …’
‘What if I do mind? What are you looking for?’
‘We’re not sure until we inspect your bags, sir.’
‘Both bags?’
The security guard looked over at the man in civilian clothes, who nodded.
Jed emptied his pack and then his bag, keeping his eyes locked on the European man the whole time. The man held his gaze, but did not come closer or take part in the thorough examination of the bags’ contents.
Amongst his civilian clothes were a few items of military-issue gear he thought would come in handy in Africa. He had a web belt with a couple of water bottles in their carriers, an ammo pouch, his green mosquito net, and a pair of tan battle dress utility trousers and matching bush hat. His pack had originally been drab olive-green, but he had lightened the colouring with liberal splashes of sandcoloured paint for his time in Afghanistan.
‘You are in the military?’ the security guard asked.
‘No, I’m in real estate.’
The guard looked confused. He held up the fatigue pants. ‘Why do you have these then?’
‘Because it would be embarrassing walking around in my boxer shorts.’
‘And this hat?’
‘Prevents skin cancer.’
The security guard gave up. He turned to the man in civilian clothes and shrugged.
Jed repacked his bags, without any help from the guard. As he shouldered his pack he said, ‘Whatever you’re looking for, I don’t have it.’
The man took a mobile phone out of his jacket pocket, punched in a number and started speaking, his free hand covering his mouth. Jed picked up the suit bag and left.
He found a coffee shop on the departure side and ordered himself a cup of black coffee. He pulled out his wallet. In it was a picture of Miranda, taken during her summer vacation the year before. She was wearing a cropped green T-shirt and khaki walking shorts, her blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. She was smiling wide, hands on her hips. She had grown into a beautiful young woman and he had missed so much of her life.
The picture had been taken at a campsite on the Appalachian Trail. They had spent a week together, just the two of them, hiking a demanding stretch of the route through steep valleys and dense woods.
‘On nights like this I can see why you joined the Army,’ she had said the night after the picture was taken.
‘How do you mean?’
‘You must spend so many nights out under the stars, away from it all. The peace, the freedom, it must be such a blast.’
‘Sometimes more of a blast than you might think. It’s not all camping out, you know.’
‘Hey, I know it’s dangerous, but tell me you don’t love being out in the field, away from the rat race.’
‘I’d be lying if I said I didn’t,’ Jed admitted. ‘Though it sounds like you’ll get your fair share of nights under the stars in Africa.’
‘Yeah, that’s part of the attraction. Also, I want to make a difference.’
‘You will – hell, you’ll end up saving some endangered tiger or something.�
�
Miranda had laughed.
‘There aren’t any tigers in Africa?’
‘Stop kidding.’ Then her tone was serious again. ‘I want to make a difference. Like you do.’
‘I don’t know that I make a difference. I’m just a small part of a big machine.’
‘Don’t give me that simple soldier crap, Dad. I thought about military service myself, you know, after nine-eleven.’
His heart skipped a couple of beats. ‘You haven’t done anything stupid, have you?’
‘Relax. I thought about the reserve, but I think I’m better off channelling my energies into other areas.’
‘Like your studies, right?’
‘Sure. But serving your country is not something to downplay, Dad. You know how proud I am of you, don’t you?’
Miranda had gone to Africa to study man-eaters. Her mentor, this damned Professor Wallis, had sent her into the Zambezi Valley – to look for animals that ate people. How could Jed have let this happen? How could this goddamned academic have consigned his daughter to an early death?
Most other fathers in America would hire a lawyer and sue the ass off Professor Wallis. If the professor had been a man, Jed would have killed him. At least, that was how he felt now. In fact, his plan was to track her down as soon as he had finished his business in Zimbabwe – although exactly what that business would be he still did not know. He needed to talk to the police and the National Parks staff, Miranda’s fellow researchers, and the people from the US State Department who had so far been handling the matter of his daughter’s disappearance.
After all that was done, Jed wanted to look Wallis in the eye and ask her to account for her actions.
Jed knew Miranda was a wilful young woman, passionately committed to wildlife conservation, but he wanted to make sure she had been fully aware of the risks she would face.
Part of him knew that she would have gone into her assignment with her eyes wide open. She was a smart girl, a straight-A student, yet had a practical side to her and was at home in the outdoors. He had seen her change a tyre on his SUV – just to prove to him that she could – replace the oil and fuel filters on her own car; start a fire in the wilderness; hike all day; and climb a vertical cliff face unaided.
What he feared, though, was that she had taken unnecessary risks. She had backpacked around Australia and New Zealand in the year after she graduated from college and he knew she had used the trip to feed a growing hunger for adventure sports. Highspeed downhill mountain biking, whitewater rafting, bungee jumping, heli-skiing, skydiving, hang-gliding and para-sailing, she had tried them all.
Patti had blamed him for Miranda’s wild streak. He took risks for a living, but, if he was honest with himself, he had the same passion for danger and addiction to risk as his headstrong daughter.
Miranda had chosen to go to a politically unstable continent to study dangerous animals. In Mana Pools National Park, Miranda had boasted in one of her emails, she slept in a tent in the middle of the bush without a fence of any kind to keep wild animals at bay. How had it happened? he wondered.
Had she been careless, and simply left the door of her tent open? Had she left the tent to answer the call of nature? Had the lion, or lions, been brazen enough to rip through the flimsy nylon walls? He chided himself. He was already accepting the official version of events – that Miranda had been taken by one of the animals she was so intent on saving. He wanted so much to believe that she was still alive. He forced the morbid thoughts of her death from his mind.
Chapter 4
He was the heir to one of the last remaining natural paradises on earth. He lived in harmony with the animals around him, but there was no disputing that he was the boss, and that the environment in which he lived, as beautiful as it was, was there solely for his pleasure and sustenance. It was, if not in name or on paper, his kingdom, and he was, if not by decree or charter, the king.
Mashumba was a warrior. An old man, as was plain to see, but still a fighter and, when opportunity arose, a lover of note. He had sired more offspring than he cared to remember and had been in more fights than there were butterfly-shaped leaves on a mopani tree in the height of summer.
He rested by the river now, for the sun was high above the valley and the sands that flanked the shimmering blue ribbon were so bright with reflected light it hurt the eye to look at them. And so, with a yawn, he shifted his position to get back into the shade and, as was his norm at this time of day, drifted off into sleep.
In his dreams he saw the herd of zebra grazing on the grass of the floodplain, the stallion raising his head and sniffing the breeze. He saw the fleet-footed impala leaping through the bush, the docile water-buck grazing in the marshes. He saw the cantankerous old bull buffalo, the most dangerous prey a hunter could face. He remembered glorious feasts he had presided over, and saw again his offspring and wives and his dear departed brothers.
His family was gone now. It belonged to others. He and his brother had been kicked out of their own extended clan, replaced by younger, fitter contenders for their fickle wives’ affections. Such was the way of his tribe.
His world was changing, little by little every year, but he had learned long ago to cope with change. He had learned to live with the white man and his strange ways, and to make little adjustments in his day-to-day life so that he could exist side by side with him. There was room in his valley for everyone, even the whites and their noisy machines. As long as they respected him, he would allow them to visit his home.
Of his brother there was no sign. He had seen him in the night, but lost sight of him before dawn.
He too was probably sleeping away the hottest part of the day. They would see each other for a drink in the evening, if not before.
A fish eagle landed in the tree above him. Its mournful, whining call woke him. He opened one eye and looked at the bird. It was the definitive sound of the valley, but it never ceased to annoy him when he was trying to take a midday nap, or hunt. If he could have reached the bird, he would have killed it.
Mashumba yawned again and thought about dinner. The thing he missed most about his ex-wives, even more than the coupling, was the way they fed him and his brother. How sweet it was at the end of a hard day or a long night to find a feast waiting for him. It was the natural order of things. He and his brother took care of them – in every sense of the word – and, likewise, they were fed. That was what he missed most.
He stood, for the sun had caught up with him yet again, scratched himself and then pissed on the opposite side of the tree to where he intended to sleep for the rest of the afternoon. He was very particular about some things. As he was settling down for the remainder of his nap a flicker of movement caught his eye. It was down on the riverbank, on the sand.
The people in the village knew about old Mashumba and his brother. They told stories about the two old men of the bush and how they now lived as bachelors. The children of the village knew to stay clear of them, not to wander too far down the river, past the bend, into the area that was their home.
Occasionally he would roam down the road, close to the village, but the women and the children stayed inside, or close to their green-painted houses inside the compound, when Mashumba was about, because since his wives had left him he had become a danger to them. The first occasion Mashumba had been tempted by a young woman from the village had taught him a lot. She had been walking to her work in the National Parks compound and he had seen her, across the floodplain, near the firewood stacks. She had screamed and Mashumba, realising he had been spotted, had run off into the bushes. Some of the men from the village had come looking for him, but he had hidden up in some reeds and watched and waited until night had fallen and the rattling, smoke-belching Land Rovers had gone. He had returned to his part of the valley, where he still reigned supreme, but he had remembered the sight of the woman. How easy it would have been to have her; how defenceless she had been.
The second one had been different. He had
stalked her, carefully, through the bush, and watched her movements for a full day The next day he had waited for her, lying in the shadows of a big Natal mahogany tree. She had almost walked right up to him. She had been fair-skinned, not like the village women, but colour meant nothing to him. A white woman was as good as a black one as far as he was concerned. He felt no guilt about it at all, for the hunt and the capture came naturally. It was a necessity, since his wives had left him. It had been satisfying enough but, in a strange way, also mildly disappointing. It had been so easy to overpower her; there had been no great skill needed to catch the woman, no thrill of the hunt, no intense physical exertion.
The men had come looking for him again, as he knew they would, but he had melted further into the bush, and then cut back down to the river. He had continued to lie low, away from the roads, for many more days and, eventually, they had stopped looking for him.
And here was another one, down by the river. He felt the old desires coming back.
Precious Mpofu carried a fishing rod over her shoulder and a plastic bag full of tigerfish in her hand.
The prize catch of the Zambezi River, so named because of the yellow and black stripes down his shiny flank, was as good to eat as he was hard to catch. Precious and her family would eat well that night. Two tigers, maybe six kilos all up, and a couple of chessa as well.
It would have been safer to walk back along the riverbank, she had strayed too far as it was, but the afternoon sun was setting fast and the dirt road provided a quicker, more direct route back to the village. Precious decided the sooner she got the fish on the fire, the happier her ranger husband and two hungry children would be.
Precious had finished her morning’s work cleaning the big two-storey lodge she looked after. She had swept the floors, emptied the garbage bins into the incinerator and made the beds. The warden had said a new guest was arriving that day – a woman, by herself. The woman was from America, like the young one, Miranda, who had been killed by the lion. Precious liked Americans because they tipped in US dollars, although she had never received a cent from Miranda – one of the other maids washed and ironed her clothes and washed up her dirty dishes. Precious and the other maids were jealous of their colleague, whose name was Violet. Precious was sad that Miranda was gone – she was a nice person, even if she didn’t share the work around. However, Precious was not sad that Violet had gone. No one knew where she was, but everyone presumed she had hitchhiked out of the park to Kariba to change the US dollars Miranda had given her. With her benefactor dead, maybe Violet had decided to take her money and have a holiday.
