Zambezi

by Tony Park

  He walked into the hotel’s men’s room. In a cubicle he unzipped the pack and set the timer on the digital alarm clock as the travel agent had instructed him. He flushed the toilet, part of the charade, walked out, set down the pack and gripped the washbasin. His heart pounded in his chest. He splashed water on his face to wash away the sweat, to calm his nerves, then walked out. A man and a woman in matching polo shirts and baggy shorts were piling their bags onto a trolley Hassan waited a few paces behind them and, when they left, added his pack to the pile. The bellboy took no notice of him. He walked out into the sunshine, hailed a taxi and left. It had been as simple as that. The first radio reports of the carnage had reached him in a room at the beachside resort. The travel agent had shaken his hand.

  Next the travel agent had briefed him on the two missions that were to have been undertaken by the martyred Arabs. The first was a bomb to be planted in a nightclub at Nungwi. That would be Hassan’s next task. The second would be closer to Hassan’s home, on his doorstep, in fact, in the Zambezi Valley.

  After Hassan overflew the grubby scar on the open landscape that was Mbeya he deviated west of the main road to avoid being seen by anyone at the border post at Tunduma. He doubted the sight of a light plane would arouse suspicions, but his registration letters were clearly visible under the wings and he didn’t want anyone remembering them if questions were asked later.

  Hassan’s plan was to remain alive at the completion of his mission, but he knew his chances were slim. He wondered what paradise was really like. If it was sumptuous feasts on the shores of azure waters, surrounded by beautiful houris, then it would be just like Zanzibar. He was sure Iqbal was enjoying himself, but Hassan could have all that without dying.

  Below him the empty plains and bushland of Zambia stretched forever. The English even had a phrase for it – MMBA, miles and miles of bloody Africa. Development, such as it was, was concentrated along the main road. People walked, cycled and drove in an endless parade below him.

  The sight reminded him of a line of tireless, unstoppable Safari ants. Soon those people down there would be talking about his deeds. The war was about to come to this struggling African nation. And why should it not? The one advantage he and his newfound colleagues still possessed, despite the array of technology and weaponry the Americans had brought to bear against them, had always been the most crucial of all – surprise. The crusaders, as Iqbal and the travel agent called them, would always be on the back foot. What he was about to do was primarily for Iqbal. He had taken up his brother’s fight. Glancing back again at Miranda in her coffin he recalled the time they discussed the day Osama bin Laden had become a household name. It had been in the lodge, in Zambia, sitting in the deep-cushioned wicker armchairs after dinner, listening to the Zambezi’s nocturnal chorus.

  ‘What did you think about nine-eleven?’ she had asked him without preamble.

  They had been discussing the politics of Zimbabwe. It was before they first slept together and he wondered, later, if it was part of a quiz he had to complete correctly before she awarded him first prize – herself. However, at the time, he had answered immediately, and from the heart.

  ‘It was a horror. It was a cowardly, senseless attack which brought discredit to the whole Arab world. I am ashamed of it.’

  He had believed his words then, and still did. The attack had polarised the world. People like him, the moderates who had been cocooned from armed struggle, had been forced to take a side, and there were only extremes left in the war between Islam and America and her allies.

  ‘Do you think we can all ever live side by side, in peace?’ Miranda had asked him.

  He had found her naivety appealing, her innocence refreshing. Until he found out the truth about her, of course.

  In the distance Lusaka rose in all its ugliness from the dry brown plains. Hassan turned the aircraft’s nose to the west. Soon he could see the mighty Zambezi below and he started his descent. In an ideal world, he thought, he and Miranda Banks-Lewis could have lived side by side. He was sure a psychiatrist would have told him his fixation with blonde Caucasian women had something to do with his mother, but he didn’t really care. No matter how many western women he bedded, how much alcohol he drank, how much money he made, or how much of Africa he owned, he would never truly find paradise on earth. Here, in this life, man was destined for war, not peace, and he, Hassan bin Zayid, had been brought into the fray, courtesy of the father of the woman he had loved. Also, she had deceived him, cynically and maliciously.

  It was time, as the Americans would say, for some payback.

  Chapter 19

  It was a rutted, bone-rattling dirt track, but it was still the closest thing to a main road in this part of the Zambezi Valley. That was why the tree across the left-hand lane aroused Jed’s suspicion immediately.

  He didn’t want to slow down, but he was travelling at close to seventy kilometres an hour, the maximum he dared try on the loose surface. He changed from fourth down to third. Jed scanned the thick dry bush on either side of the road as the speedometer wound back to thirty. As he slowed he looked at the base of the tree. The stump was close to the edge of the road and he could tell from the bright orange-red of the wood it was still wet.

  ‘Motherfucker,’ he spat, and planted his foot as he rounded the tree.

  The rear of the Land Rover swung out sharply to the right and Jed swore again as he heard one of the tyres blow. He fought the steering wheel and kept the vehicle on the road. A less experienced driver would have overcorrected, but that was dangerous in a four-by-four like this one. With its high centre of gravity, a wrong turn of the wheel at speed on a gravel road would send the vehicle into a roll.

  There were two types of ambush drill. In a vehicle, you just kept on going. On foot, you turned and faced the bullets and charged through them in the hope of taking your enemy by surprise. That kind of gutsy move was OK if you had a gun in your hand. Jed figured the roadblock had been placed to force him to run over whatever it was that had punctured his tyre. He was then, according to the thinking of whoever had cut down the tree, supposed to stop, get out, kick the tyre and then try to remember where the jack was.

  Fortunately, it felt like the rear tyre was only punctured, and not a complete blow-out. Although there was no air in the tube there was still enough rubber to give him some traction. He knew, however, that the metal rim of the wheel would soon cut through the tread. Jed turned and looked back over his shoulder. The rear window disappeared in a spray of crystalline glass and he ducked as the air parted on the left side of his head. The aluminium roof of the Land Rover clanged as though someone had hit it with a sledgehammer.

  He lay as low as he could while still watching the road and steering, resting the left side of his torso on the cubby box between the two front seats. The truck shuddered and bounced and he smelled burning rubber as the wheel rim chewed and burned through the last ply of the tyre. The vehicle slowed as the hot, sharp metal edges of the wheel ploughed the dirt road.

  The Land Rover came to a halt, its engine still ticking over. Jed turned off the ignition and pocketed the keys. The bastards wouldn’t get this prize so easily. He popped the hood, found the fuel filter and, using the Leatherman tool on his belt, undid the drain plug underneath it. Hot diesel fuel spilled over his hand and then onto the dusty ground below. The fuel system would need to be primed manually before the vehicle would start again.

  Jed grabbed his water bottle and jogged into the bush to his left. He ran through the trees about forty metres, then stopped. He began to walk backwards, slowly, carefully retracing his steps until he was almost back at the road. On his first sprint into the bush he had spied a toppled power pole lying rotting in the bush, parallel to the road. He walked along it now, as though on a balancing beam, and then leaped as far as he could off the other end. Now he ran alongside the road, just a couple of metres off it, for near on a hundred metres.

  The Land Rover was still in sight. He watched the road for
a couple of seconds and, satisfied no one was in sight, darted across to the other side. He looked around for a weapon and found a stout section of deadfall about a metre long. It wasn’t much against a rifle, but it would do. He crouched low and watched his stranded vehicle. Jed wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. He was sweating from the run but his heart rate was fine. He realised he was almost enjoying this. He had evaded an ambush and was now turning the tables on his attacker. Some two-bit Zambian carjacker was about to get an ass-kicking, US Army style.

  He thought about Hassan bin Zayid’s hard-faced game manager and his truckload of weapons and ammunition. Someone had just shot at him – the missing rear window and hole in the roof of his rental vehicle were proof of that – but Jed had no reason to think the man, no matter how surly, would be out to kill or rob him. More likely it was one or more of the poachers the man had spoken of. Men who were desperate enough to hunt game in woods patrolled by heavily armed landowners would probably think hijacking a shiny new rental car was an easy way to make a year’s pay He reckoned he had been observed driving into the reserve and, as there were so few ways into and out of the place, it was a pretty safe bet he would be coming out on the same road.

  No one walked down the road to the Land Rover. That figured. He put himself in the criminal’s shoes. He would approach the vehicle through the bush, then give it a quick check to assess the damage. Next, he would try to find the driver. Jed would have killed for a pair of binoculars. He thought he saw a tree move on the right-hand side of the road, near the vehicle. That meant the man, or men, had approached on the same side that Jed had exited. He hoped the would-be thief would pick up his false trail. He gave his pursuer a few minutes. The man did not emerge from the bush.

  Presumably that meant he was following the blundering, obvious path Jed had made through the undergrowth.

  Jed moved quickly, quietly, back down the other side of the road, towards the Land Rover. If it was only one man, he would take him. He would wait until he was checking the wheel or trying to start the engine and then hit him with the tree branch. If there were two or more he would lie low and wait until they left. He was brave but he wasn’t stupid. The truck was insured and he was not going to get himself killed for sport.

  Juma scanned the road, the bush and the ground in front of him. He moved carefully but rapidly. He was disappointed the ambush had failed. The mopani trees in this area were too short to block the whole road – they were young regrowth after last year’s fire – but he was pleased he had had the presence of mind to bring the home-made caltrops. The devices were simple – three six-inch nails hammered at odd angles into offcut lumps of soft wood from the workshop. He and Hassan had used them to ambush a poaching gang’s car six months earlier. Juma had covered the gap between the fallen tree and the far side of the road with the pointed booby traps and they had done their job once again.

  However, since the man had not stopped immediately to repair his punctured tyre, Juma would now have to track him down to finish off the job. He knew the girl’s father was a soldier, but Juma had no doubt who would come off the better in this game of wits. It was imperative that he kill the American. Back at the lodge the man had been too nosy for his own good.

  Juma saw the Land Rover. He smelled the hot, burned rubber where the metal rim of the wheel had sliced through the tyre. He crouched and watched. The vehicle was empty. The man was not there, attempting to change the wheel, as he had hoped. He waited, in case Banks was hiding in the bushes nearby. Nothing happened. Juma edged forwards, quietly and carefully. He watched where he placed each footfall, avoiding dead branches and piles of dried leaves that would crackle a warning to his prey He kept looking back at the Land Rover and scanned the ground for spoor – footprints and other telltale signs of his two-legged quarry.

  There it was. As clear as a white line down the centre of a road. The man had careened through the bush, probably in panic. Branches were broken or bent at waist and chest height on the mopani trees.

  The ground was scuffed and, where the floor of the forest was free of dead leaves, his boot prints showed clearly. A woodpecker tapped away incessantly somewhere. Juma stopped and listened for other sounds. There were none. He followed the trail, slipping off the safety catch on the right of the assault rifle. The weapon’s barrel was still hot from the bullet he had fired earlier, and he was disappointed there was no blood spattering the well-defined tracks in front of him. He raised the butt of the rifle into his shoulder, ready to squeeze off a shot at the first sign of the target.

  Juma stopped. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. He licked his lips and stared hard down at the ground again. The spoor had stopped. He scanned around him, three hundred and sixty degrees.

  Nothing. The man was smarter than he had guessed – and that worried him. He turned around, back towards the road, and moved to the last clear print. How had he missed it? The slight overlapping of the imprint was as clear as a newspaper headline to him now. The news was that Juma had made a cardinal error. If the American had been armed, and Juma fervently hoped he was not, then the hunter would have become the prey by now. His quarry had retraced his steps. Juma heard a noise and froze.

  He eased the safety on the AK-47 to automatic, curled his finger around the trigger and prepared to fire.

  On the other side of the road, beyond the Land Rover, Jed lay on his stomach in a thicket of long grass and watched the back of the man who was tracking him disappear into the bush, following the false trail. The man had a dark-green shirt on. A pretty common item of clothing in the bush, Jed supposed.

  He was a black African. A lighter green bush hat prevented him from seeing if the man was bald or how he wore his hair.

  Jed’s knuckles showed white as he gripped his primitive club. He knew there would be a wheel brace somewhere in the truck, but he didn’t want to lose his advantage by clanging away inside the vehicle. He rose to his feet and ran, bent at the waist, to the side of the Land Rover. He paused briefly in the shadow cast by the vehicle, then peered up over the hood and scanned the bush on the other side. There was no sign of the man. He moved again, finding a shady tree on one side of the pathway he had made earlier. He would ambush the African on his return.

  Far off, down the road in the direction he had been travelling, Jed heard the noise of a motor. The sound grew and he recognised it as the rumbling of a diesel. Soon the vehicle came into sight. It was a police Land Rover. Jed was almost disappointed.

  He was a citizen of the United States, alone in an African country, stalking a local resident with the intent of doing him grievous bodily harm. He assumed the man he was now tracking was the one who had laid the ambush and fired on him. But what if he wasn’t? He realised his instincts and training had taken over from his commonsense. Perhaps it had something to do with the helplessness he felt over Miranda’s death. He wanted to do something, to take some action to get him out of the funk he was in.

  Was killing a suspected carjacker the right thing to do?

  He stepped out into the middle of the road and waved the branch over his head, flagging down the policeman. The white truck had already slowed, the driver no doubt curious about the similar vehicle stopped dead in the centre of the road.

  ‘Good afternoon. What seems to be the problem?’ the lone Zambian constable asked as he wound down his window.

  ‘Flat tyre, but that’s the least of my troubles,’ Jed said, then explained about the ambush.

  The policeman got out of his truck and inspected the bullet hole in the roof of Jed’s hire car and the shattered rear window. ‘Please, get into my vehicle. I will radio for assistance. These people are very well armed – they may be poachers. I don’t think they will try to take on the police, but you never can tell.’

  Juma stared down the barrel of the assault rifle and placed the foresight on the centre of the policeman’s back as the man bent inside the Land Rover’s cab to inspect the bullet hole in the roof.

  The American w
as on the far side of the vehicle, out of Juma’s line of sight. He took up the slack in the trigger. The sight rose slightly as he inhaled, then returned to the original aiming point as he released his breath.

  Juma cursed. It was not worth the risk. He could kill the policeman, but then the American soldier would take immediate evasive action. The policeman was armed with an automatic pistol, and who knew what else was in the Land Rover. He released the pressure on the trigger, lowered the rifle and reapplied the safety catch. The American had been lucky. That was all. Better, in any case, that he lived and carried the wound of his daughter’s death for many more years. Juma did not know if the boss had anything special in mind for the American – now or in the future. He decided he would say nothing of the ambush to Hassan. Bin Zayid was not a man who liked to learn of failure. ‘Bring me solutions, not problems, Juma,’ he was fond of saying.

  The Zambian policeman drove west, back towards Chirundu, at a speed fast enough to scare Jed half to death. At times all four wheels of the police vehicle were off the ground as they sailed over ruts and wash-outs.

  A nerve-jarring half-hour later, still on the eastern side of the Kafue, they met up with the reinforcements Jed’s saviour had radioed for – a Land Rover crammed with eight officers in riot gear.

  They were dressed in dull blue-grey fatigues and carrying a mixture of weapons, including AK-47s, shotguns and even a bolt-action Lee Enfield rifle. With them was a snarling German shepherd.

  Jed’s police companion turned the vehicle around and led them back to the disabled Land Rover, which still sat forlornly in the middle of the road.

  ‘It is strange that they did not try to change the tyre and drive away once we left,’ the policeman said. ‘I was sure the vehicle would be gone.’