Zambezi

by Tony Park

  ‘What?’ asked the young man.

  ‘Nothing, nothing. Just say, “Yes, it is done.”’ The young man did as ordered and Luke held the phone back to his ear.

  ‘Good. I will have someone else call the police. They will be at his hotel in ten minutes from now. The drugs will make it look as though he died as the result of a deal gone wrong. Did you plant some of the stuff on him?’

  ‘As ordered,’ the young African man said at Luke’s behest, bewildered at the game he was playing.

  ‘Good. You will be paid the usual way.’

  The phone went dead.

  ‘What was all that about, man? Are you in trouble?’ the young man asked.

  Luke fished in the traveller’s wallet hanging around his neck for a twenty-dollar bill. When he went to hand over the money he saw the young man was staring at his right hand and arm, which were covered in the dried blood of the dead man. The man started to back away from him.

  ‘Here, take the money’ Luke said.

  ‘I don’t want no part of no trouble, man.’

  ‘Don’t worry, no trouble. I got into a fight with some other guys before. No problem. Want to make another twenty?’

  The young man took the bill with the tips of his thumb and forefingers, careful not to touch Luke’s skin.

  ‘I’ve got to meet a girl. I need a shirt and don’t want to go into a shop looking like this. How about selling me yours?’

  The man thought about the odd request for a couple of seconds, then said, ‘Thirty.’

  ‘Shit. OK.’ Luke peeled off three tens. The young man took off his Bob Marley T-shirt and handed it over. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Can I go now?’

  ‘Sure. You’ve been a big help.’

  Luke hurried back into the alleyway. He took off his own blood-stained T-shirt and wrapped it around the hilt of the diving knife in the dead man’s chest. If he was going to be framed for drug possession he didn’t want to compound his troubles by having the police thinking he was a murderer as well. He yanked on the knife but was surprised at how firmly it was stuck in the dead body. He placed a foot on the corpse’s chest, grabbed the knife and leaned back. Slowly, the knife came free with a sickening sucking sound and another gasp of putrid air. He had planned to leave the gun on the man’s body, but now that he realised the extent of the plot against him he decided that he might need to even the odds. He pulled the pistol from the man’s jeans and stuffed it in his own pants. He put on the African man’s T-shirt and bundled the knife and bloodied shirt into the day-pack, which he had to carry in his arms because of the tear. The camera gear, too, might incriminate him, so he scooped up the shattered body and lenses and dropped the mess into his camera bag. He jogged back into the main laneway and headed towards the busy waterfront.

  In a small square he found a hand-operated water pump and a stone trough beneath the spout, half full of water. He rinsed the blood from his arms as best as he could and then winced in pain as he scooped warm water up to his throbbing nose. He stared at the mix of his own blood and that of the dead man’s swirling in the water in the trough. From what the man on the phone had said, the police would beat him to his hotel room. If he fronted them he would be arrested, charged and locked in a Zanzibari jail until he could organise a lawyer. He had some numbers from a dead man’s cell phone but, beyond that, nothing firm to connect the drugs planted in his room or the attempt on his life with Hassan bin Zayid. He was shocked at the reaction his simple request for an interview had provoked, although from the destruction of his camera gear it was also clear that bin Zayid knew he had been photographed. So what? Hassan was a native of Zanzibar, obviously well known within the tourism industry, who led a flashy lifestyle that included an ostentatious boat and a parade of western girlfriends. Why would he send someone to kill him for taking his picture?

  ‘The woman,’ Luke said aloud. He still had images of her stored on the first memory card, but he now had no camera on which to view them, and his laptop computer was in his hotel room.

  He took a circuitous route back towards his hotel, on the off-chance that he might be able to beat the police. He was out of luck. As he peered around the corner of a decaying stone building he saw an African policeman holding an AK-47 assault rifle leaning against the wall of the hotel, smoking a cigarette and scanning up and down the laneway. Luke turned and walked quickly back into the bowels of Stone Town. He made his way back towards the dhow harbour. He needed a boat off the island – tonight, if possible. There were no embassies on Zanzibar, so he had to get himself to the mainland, to Dar es Salaam. There he would seek asylum in the Australian embassy and explain the extraordinary events that had led to him being framed on drugs charges. He would call International Press and ask them to arrange legal representation for him, and then file a story about the whole sorry mess. He knew he was taking a risk by evading the police on the island – if they caught him his attempted escape would brand him as guilty, no matter what story he came up with.

  On his way to the docks he found a small convenience store and bought some bananas, a couple of big bottles of water and some cold chapatis from the Indian proprietor. He also picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune. He would go mad on a boat trip without something to read.

  It was late when he arrived at the harbour and most of the dhows were in darkness. He walked along the dock and stopped. On the night air he heard voices, and followed the sound. Further along he saw the pale glow of a hurricane lantern hanging from the mast of one of the wooden boats. Below it, three men were sitting on the deck around a pot balanced on a charcoal brazier. Luke’s stomach rumbled with hunger at the smell of the spicy curry.

  ‘Jambo,’ the eldest of the three men said when he saw Luke on the wharf.

  ‘Habari,’ Luke replied, using the extent of his Swahili in returning the greeting. ‘Do you speak English?’

  ‘Of course,’ the old man said. ‘How can we help you?’

  ‘I need a boat to the mainland, to Dar.’

  ‘We carry cargo, not tourists.’

  ‘That doesn’t worry me.’

  ‘It worries me. Tourists want the world but don’t like to pay for it. I don’t like the port formalities at the other end. I spend too much time leading westerners through immigration and customs.’

  Luke stepped on board the boat, uninvited. ‘What if you had a tourist who would pay you three times the going rate and who didn’t want to bother you with customs and immigration?’

  The old man put down his plate and narrowed his eyes as he regarded Luke. ‘I would lose my boat if I was caught helping you avoid the authorities.’

  ‘Which is why I am offering three times the normal fee.’

  ‘Five times,’ the old man said.

  ‘Four.’

  The man smiled. ‘Very well. Cash up-front.’

  ‘Half up-front, half when we get to Dar. I don’t want to end up at the bottom of the channel halfway across.’

  A younger member of the trio, an African about Luke’s age, piped up. ‘What’s to stop that happening anyway?’

  Luke yawned and lifted his arms high, slowly, as if stretching. The movement caused his T-shirt to rise up and all three men caught a glimpse of the pistol.

  ‘I want no trouble on this boat,’ said the old captain, addressing his two crewmen as much as Luke.

  ‘The deal is done. I hope you do not mind, but there is no room on the boat for you to sleep tonight. We will leave in the hour before dawn. Meet us here then.’

  Luke had wanted to leave immediately, but he guessed the sailors were reluctant to make the crossing in the dead of night without any navigational aids. He headed back towards town. He would try to find somewhere quiet to lie down, or maybe a bar where he could buy a couple of beers to ease the pain in his face. He left the dock and stopped when he came to a bench seat under a streetlight.

  The adrenaline had well and truly worn off and he was more tired than he could ever remember being.

&nb
sp; He pulled the newspaper from the plastic shopping bag and idly leafed through it. On the fifth page was a story that caught his eye. The headline read: MAN-EATING LION KILLED IN ZIMBABWE –

  HUMAN REMAINS FOUND. Luke shook his head and rubbed his tired eyes. It was a follow-up story about Miranda Banks’s disappearance. According to the report the remains of a Caucasian female had been found in Mana Pools National Park. Police in Kariba were speculating that the remains were probably those of the missing American woman, although further tests still had to be carried out.

  There was a quote from an American embassy spokesman, who had officially released Miranda’s name to the press.

  Beside it was a photograph.

  He wore a black wetsuit and boot polish on his face and hands as camouflage.

  He finned slowly, so as not to leave a visible wake. It was a long swim, more than half a kilometre, but he was fit and as at home in the water as a dolphin. The lights of Nungwi’s beach bungalows twinkled ahead of him.

  This would be the final nail in the coffin for the local tourism industry, but he cared nothing for the tens of thousands of US dollars it would cost him. Money was no longer important. Family and God were all that mattered, and his family was now all gone. He had been selfish, greedy, weak for so many years. It had taken Iqbal’s death to teach him that. God had spared him for a reason.

  Hassan bin Zayid took a deep breath and duck-dived as he neared the shore, coming into the steeply shelved shore underwater. Even two metres down he heard and felt the beat of the bass from the disco’s speakers reverberate through his body. The tide was high and he surfaced under the overhanging rock that supported part of the terrace above him. The music was deafening now, assaulting his senses, insulting his reawakened religious sensibilities with its calls for the barely clad youngsters above him to gyrate against each other. He’d been seduced, too, danced to their tune for years, but he was turning his back on the west now, for good. He felt ashamed of his past weakness, for falling the same way as his father. But he would have revenge enough for both of them.

  Hassan turned his head in surprise at a noise behind him. He followed the trickling stream with his eyes. A young white man was hanging his penis over the edge of the balcony and urinating. He was disgusted, and the thoughtless laziness of the boy steeled his reserve further. Even others on the island, like him, who had made their fortunes from the tourist industry, would not mourn the passing of people like these.

  Avoiding the ripples caused by the cascading urine, he finned his way around the rock and under the bare wooden floorboards. Sand showered him and the water’s surface as dozens of bare feet stomped above him in response to the primitive rhythm from the speakers. Hassan slung his spear gun over his shoulder and grabbed one of the deck’s wooden supports. The pole was slick and he slid back into the water on his first attempt. On his next try he managed to hook one arm over a timber support and haul himself up. His face was only a few centimetres from the floorboards now and he peeked up through a crack. He smiled at the sight. A girl was standing astride the gap. She wore a red G-string under a printed Zambian and her legs were long and smooth. The whore would get more than she bargained for this night.

  He sat on the cross-member and unslung the waterproof bag from his shoulder. From inside he withdrew the bomb and roll of wide black duct tape. The Semtex had come as part of the delivery he had taken from the man in Dar. The timing mechanism was a cheap digital travel clock. As he had to swim with the device, he had been limited in the amount of shrapnel he could place in it. The fifty or so nails packed along one side of the soft plastique hardly seemed enough. He wanted to wipe this cancerous growth off the pristine beach it sullied.

  Further along the shore an inflatable boat was tied to the wooden handrail of a flight of steps that led into the water at high tide. On his way in he had given a wide berth to a gleaming white catamaran flying the French tricolour. He assumed the dinghy belonged to the cat. It gave him an idea about improving the bomb’s effectiveness. He placed the explosives and tape back in the bag and wedged it into the gap between pillar and cross-member, then slid back into the water. Beneath the surface the music once more subsided to a dull throb. He swam to the moored boat and ducked under it, emerging on the far side, out of sight of any casual observer leaning over the railing of the deck above. He placed his hands on the rubber side of the craft and lifted himself up. As he’d hoped, the plastic fuel tank was sitting on the floor of the boat and it was not chained to anything. He reached into the water, drew the stainless-steel dive knife from its scabbard and slashed the fuel hose. He lifted the tank over the edge, clamped off the cut end of the hose with his fingers, and swam on the surface, the fuel container floating in front of him.

  It was a delicate balancing act, getting the container up onto the wooden struts under the deck, and he spilled gasoline onto the water’s surface in the process. It wouldn’t matter. In his mind’s eye he saw half-naked backpackers leaping into the water to escape the fire and carnage above, only to land in water ablaze with fuel. He hosed some more of it onto the greasy surface below him.

  With the tape he fixed the bomb securely to one of the cross-members and, using the rubber hose, tied the plastic fuel tank through its carrying handle to a support post, above and to one side of the explosives. He set the clock for thirty minutes and slid back into the water, which now smelled strongly of gasoline. He dived deep for cleaner water and finned his way silently back out to sea, the sickening thump of the music getting softer with every powerful stroke of his legs. Sadly, the boat was out of sight of the shoreline when the red numerals on the clock reached midnight.

  The resort, with its sun-bleached wooden decking and ageing thatched roof, was consumed by flames in a matter of seconds.

  A German tourist, who had always wanted to make his living as a freelance news photographer, was in his bedroom when the bomb went off. He snatched up his digital camera and ran towards the inferno. He threw up after taking his first ten frames. What made him retch, and rethink his career options, was the sight of the badly burned torso of a girl, the charred remnants of a lime-green bikini top stuck to her body.

  The media reports the next day listed the death toll as nine western tourists from nearly as many countries. Another nineteen were in hospital with severe burns. An African bartender, a Muslim Zanzibari dive instructor and a teenage girl who painted henna tattoos on the white hands and feet of tourists were also burned to death.

  Chapter 13

  Jed stood on the upstairs verandah of the lodge in Mana Pools National Park watching a herd of buffalo through his binoculars. He was dressed for the bush. He wore a pair of dun-coloured fatigue trousers with baggy side pockets, a brown T-shirt and sandy suede desert boots. All of his gear had been issued to him for service in Afghanistan but it suited the dry African bush just as well.

  Jed heard the rattle of a diesel engine as a vehicle pulled up behind the lodge, out of sight. The buffalo, sixteen of them by his count, were meandering slowly along the length of the narrow island in the middle of the river, munching away on the grass like big black cows.

  ‘They call them black death, you know.’

  Jed put the glasses down and saw Moses below him. He waved. Moses had brought Jed’s hired Land Rover back with him from the staff village. The sun was not long up, still low over the hills at his back. The sharp-eyed tracker had seen where Jed was looking and had identified the buffalo immediately, even though Jed found it almost impossible to pick them up again without the binoculars.

  ‘Why is that?’ Jed asked, although he knew he would be told the answer in any case.

  ‘The buffalo is the animal most feared by big-game hunters. They are unpredictable and will charge with no notice if you are on foot. If you wound a buffalo when hunting, then you had better put it down with your very next shot or run up the nearest tree, because if you don’t, he will kill you.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember all that.’

  ‘G
ood. The ones to fear most are the dagga boys, the muddy old male buffalos who are not part of a herd any more. Be especially wary of a lonely buffalo.’

  Jed headed downstairs to let Moses in. Chris was at work on Miranda’s laptop computer, which she had set up on the dining table.

  ‘Coffee, Chris?’

  She looked up. ‘Pardon me? Oh, sorry, Jed, I was just reading something. No, I’m fine, thanks.’

  She had already been awake and at the computer when Jed had woken at five, half an hour before the dawn.

  ‘Good morning, Professor,’ Moses said as he entered the lodge.

  ‘Morning, Moses. I hope you got some sleep last night. Not too much partying?’

  He smiled sheepishly. ‘Of course not, Professor. I was on my best behaviour.’

  ‘That’s good, because we don’t want to rescue you from any jealous husbands. What’s the good word around the village?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, there is some news from the staff. There is another person missing.’

  ‘Really?’ Jed asked, sitting on the carved wooden arm of a sturdy lounge chair.

  ‘Yes. A young woman – a maid from one of these lodges.’

  ‘What do they think happened to her?’ Chris looked up from the computer screen.

  ‘They are not sure. She went missing about the same time as Miss Miranda. This girl was bad sometimes – she used to visit a man in one of the hunting camps outside the park, so for some days they thought she had taken leave without telling anyone.’

  ‘Which would explain why Ncube wasn’t told about it, I guess.’ Chris looked at Jed.

  Moses continued. ‘The warden checked the neighbouring camps when she did not return and she was not there. Some people think she may have been taken by a lion as well.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Chris nodded. ‘The one I shot was stalking a female Parks employee.’