by Tony Park
He rubbed his eyes. Chris was right. Miranda had done her job. Chris had done hers, and he had done his. Even the reporter, Luke, had only been doing what he’d been paid to. ‘There were some things at bin Zayid’s place that didn’t add up. Now they’re starting to.’
‘What? You went to bin Zayid’s game reserve?’ Chris asked.
‘Yeah. They said he wasn’t home, but he had a henchman who seemed to be hiding something. The guy had a Land Rover packed with enough guns and ammo to take out an infantry company. There were two of everything – packs and weapons – but only one goon. Maybe he was waiting for his boss to return. Also, someone tried to carjack me on the way out of Zambia – maybe they thought I’d seen too much. If bin Zayid’s turned, then it could have been because of his brother’s death. There was enough information in the media to link me – and Miranda — to the killing.’
Chris nodded. ‘Where are these pictures of Miranda, Jed?’
‘They’re on a photo memory card. I looked at them on Miranda’s laptop, but I don’t want to arouse Luke’s suspicions by viewing them again.’
‘Luke?’
‘The reporter. He tracked me down halfway across Africa, from Zanzibar.’
‘Gutsy.’
‘I told him it wasn’t Miranda, but it was, no doubt about it. I’m not sure he bought it, though.’
‘Why lie to him?’ Chris asked.
‘I don’t want any more publicity about this at the moment.’
‘And I don’t want him finding out about the plane crash yet either.’
‘So, why was Miranda with this bin Zayid guy on his boat? Did she run off with her boyfriend and forget to tell anyone, or has he made the connection between her and the Company?’
Chris pondered the question, chewing on her lower lip. ‘I got our people in the US embassy in South Africa to trace his movements, and Miranda’s. They had records of him leaving Zambia and arriving in Tanzania – in Zanzibar. But there are no records of Miranda leaving Zimbabwe or Zambia, or crossing any other borders, for that matter.’
‘So he got her to Tanzania illegally. The confusing thing is that in the pictures it doesn’t look like she’s being held against her will, and Luke said he saw the two of them kissing.’
Chris spoke her mind. ‘Maybe he wanted her out of the way – out of the Zambezi Valley He didn’t want her dead, but he wanted it to look like she’d been killed by a lion. By presenting himself at customs and immigration he left a paper trail that showed he was in Zanzibar – legally A good alibi.’
‘An alibi? For what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘OK, then how come there are records of him crossing all the borders, but not Miranda? How do you smuggle someone against their will? How do you get in and out of an airport unseen these days?’
‘He has a private plane and a luxury boat. If she’s on board all he needs to do is get her to give him her passport so he can look after the formalities. It happens all the time over here. Tour operators take in a dozen passports at a time, for all their clients, and the immigration guys just stamp away. It’s not like the States, Jed – there’s no retinal scans or electronic fingerprint checks.’
‘Yeah, so I’ve noticed. So, he’s got her, illegally, out of the country, and made it look like she’s dead. That doesn’t sound good to me.’ The pieces started to fall into place in Jed’s mind. ‘This plane crash … who was on board?’
‘I’ve got to go, Jed,’ Chris pushed past him. ‘Time’s wasting.’
He grabbed her again, by the shoulders. ‘Chris, I’m in this up to my neck already. Miranda’s alive and you’re talking about alibis. Level with me. What happened with this plane crash and who was on board?’
‘Please, Jed. Just give me the pistol.’
‘Why? Worried about crocodiles?’
‘I don’t have time for smart-ass remarks.’
He dropped his hands to his side and looked into her eyes. ‘Neither do I. I’m coming with you if it’s dangerous enough for you to need a pistol. I don’t want to see anything happen to you. Not now I’ve found you.’
He couldn’t blame Chris for lying to him – he’d have done the same in her situation. His feelings for her were too deep for him to let her go now.
Chris took a deep breath. ‘Lieutenant General Donald Calvert was on board that aircraft. It was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. There’s a CIA pick-up team – hard asses from Special Operations Group – flying from South Africa to Lusaka by Lear jet as we speak. The Zambian army has scrambled a helicopter to bring them down here. I’ve been ordered to cross the border by boat and see if I can work out what’s going on.’
‘Holy shit.’
‘Exactly.’
And you think bin Zayid’s involved? He’s kidnapped Miranda as insurance and made it look like he’s in Zanzibar.’
She nodded. ‘I can’t be a hundred per cent sure, Jed, but the last thing I heard, when I got the news about the missile hit, was that bin Zayid was on the move again, in his boat.’
‘On his way to where?’
‘This morning he docked at Dar es Salaam from Zanzibar. From Miranda’s early reports we know he’s got a ranch with a private airstrip just out of Dar. He could have flown there.’
‘Was he alone on the boat? Luke saw Miranda with him on his cruiser.’
Chris took another deep breath and put a hand on his arm. As I said, there’s no record of Miranda crossing any borders. Tanzanian customs have a record of bin Zayid entering the country alone, except for …’
‘Except for what, Chris?’
‘Two coffins.’
Jed turned, shaking her hand off him, and stared out towards the river. A row of lights glowed on the Zambian shore. The light of the explosion further upriver had died away. He felt nauseated. ‘Who was in them?’
‘The paperwork said two African males. I’d be surprised if the customs guys inspected the bodies.
There’s a plague in this part of the world, called AIDS.’
He was helpless. His daughter had disappeared again. Maybe she was dead for real this time. He couldn’t stand around all night tormenting himself with myriad gruesome scenarios. What he needed now was to do something. Anything.
‘One thing at a time,’ he said. ‘Let’s go see if we can find Calvert. After that I’m going back to bin Zayid’s safari camp. This time I’m going to get answers.’
‘OK.’ Chris hurried into the lodge to collect the rest of her gear.
Jed followed her. He heard the shower running and was pleased that Luke Scarborough was out of their hair for a while. The last thing they needed now was a reporter nosing about.
Jed, Chris and Moses had assembled in the lodge’s downstairs living room. Jed, who had changed into black jeans, combat boots and a dark-green T-shirt, outlined his simple plan, quickly and quietly, worried that the reporter would catch them. His strategy had more holes than a poster of Saddam Hussein after the fall of Baghdad. Jed had briefed Moses on the crash and told him it was the work of terrorists. He’d also let on that Chris was a part-time US government employee, as well as a wildlife researcher. The tracker had nodded his understanding.
‘Moses, I’ll give you a chance to back out. You know we can use your help, but we can’t order you to break a dozen local and international laws,’ Jed said to the tracker.
‘You are going to look for your daughter. You don’t want to be eaten by a lion or killed by a hippo on the way Without a trained guide you will be blind in the African bush.’
‘OK, you’re in, Moses. Let’s do it,’ Jed said.
They filed out of the lounge room and Jed and Chris paused by the concrete barbecue outside. Jed fished a half-burned stick from the ashes and rubbed black charcoal up and down his bare arms. He smeared more on his face, then anointed Chris with the rudimentary camouflage.
‘I’ll pass,’ Moses said, and they all laughed. It did a little to ease their nerves.
They had decided the quickest way to the crash site
was by boat. Moses had told them of a canoe safari operation that was currently set up at Nyamepi Camp, the main camping ground near Park headquarters. The safari clients were not due for another two days and Moses was sure the operators would be in bed early.
Jed checked his watch, and the rising moon. As well as a boat he needed a weapon. Chris had tried to protest and Moses had looked doubtful, but he was not crossing an international border in search of terrorists armed with surface-to-air missiles while they had one pistol between the three of them.
A dull light glowed in the window of the headquarters building. Moses led them in a dogleg behind the building, close to the river, and they came to a wire fence, holed and sagging from past incursions by elephants. They followed the fence until they found a gap large enough for all of them to climb through without rattling the strands.
‘We are in the staff compound,’ Moses whispered.
Jed had a basic memory of the layout of the settlement. He recognised the low tin-roofed workshop building, with two partly disassembled Land Rovers resting on axle stands outside. Moses led them through a thicket of trees to the grey-painted storeroom where Miranda’s possessions had been kept.
‘Well, here goes the first crime of the night,’ Jed whispered to Chris.
‘Second. We’re not even supposed to be out of the lodge after dark,’ she corrected him.
Jed advanced, armed with a long-bladed screwdriver from the Land Rover’s tool kit. He had told them that he alone would break into the storeroom. If he was discovered, then Chris and Moses could at least carry on undetected, while he faced the warden’s wrath. He moved forward at a crouch, pausing behind a low shrub to look and listen. There was the faint sound of tinny music from a battery-powered radio in one of the staff houses. Paraffin lanterns burned warm and orange from a few windows. Chickens clucked somewhere nearby. He smelled wood smoke from a cooking fire and human excrement from the communal toilet block.
Jed sprinted for the storeroom building and, once he reached it, pressed his back flat against the asbestos sheet wall. He edged around the corner of the building to the door and scanned the courtyard and vegetable gardens between the housing blocks. There was no sign of movement. He moved to the door and placed the screwdriver under the padlocked hasp and staple. The lock itself looked secure, but the wooden door and frame were fringed with cracks from a mixture of damp and termite attack.
He levered the screwdriver up in a sharp motion and felt the screws securing the lock start to wriggle free from the decaying doorframe. He put his weight under the screwdriver and the fitting popped out and clattered against the padlock. He looked again, wondering if anyone had heard the noise, and retrieved one of the dislodged screws from the ground and put it in his pocket. No one emerged from the houses. Jed pushed open the door, wincing as it squeaked on rusty hinges, entered the darkened building and closed the door behind him.
On his head was a harness of nylon webbing supporting a night-vision monocle. He reached up and flipped the black metal tube down and switched the device on. It was pitch-black inside the building, so he also turned on the infra-red illuminator, which cast an invisible beam the image intensifier could pick up. The interior was lit up for him in a wash of pale-green light. From outside, an observer would see nothing.
He turned his head from side to side, sweeping the walls until he found the gun rack. A chain ran through the trigger guards of all five rifles and around the solid wooden rack itself, the free ends joined with a heavy padlock. Jed had remembered the rudimentary but effective security and planned for it. From his belt he took his Leatherman and unfolded a small flat-head screwdriver. Years previously he had taken part in a NATO exercise in Arctic warfare with British Royal Marines and Norwegian Special Forces. A British soldier had shown him how the Belgian-designed Fabrique Nationale Self-Loading Rifle, known as the SLR, could be modified for a firer wearing thick snow gloves. The trigger guard was easily removed with a small screwdriver and Jed found the screws in an identical rifle in the rack. He removed them and the metal guard and this freed the rifle from the chain. He did the same with a second SLR.
Further along the wall he found a cardboard box full of assorted magazines for the SLRs and the AK-47s also used by the Parks service. He located only six of the metal, twenty-round magazines for the SLRs. The long-barrelled weapon was more accurate than an AK but, unlike the Russian assault rifle, could not be fired on full automatic. Jed and Moses would be a long way short of the firepower carried by their enemies, but it would have to do. Near the magazines was an already open wooden box of 7.62-millimetre ammunition. Jed knelt on the rough wooden floorboards, placed a magazine between his legs and filled it with twenty of the brass and copper-jacketed rounds. He repeated the exercise for all six magazines.
In another cardboard box was a pile of web gear which smelled of mould and damp. It was probably reject equipment, damaged or superseded by newer issues. For himself he found a chest rig with a broken buckle, but fixed that by knotting the shoulder strap to the waistband, and a belt and two ammunition pouches for Moses. Chris had agreed that she would carry only her pistol.
Jed shrugged on the chest webbing and put all six rifle magazines in the pouches. He fastened the belt for Moses around his waist, slung one of the rifles over his shoulder and carried the other at the ready position. He moved back to the door and switched off Christine’s night-vision device to conserve its battery Outside he paused to reaffix the hasp to the doorframe with the screw he had saved. The screw was loose in its hole and the whole lock would fall off the door again at the slightest touch, but to a casual observer it would look as though the building was still secure.
Jed stepped back out into the yard and a rooster crowed nearby. He dropped to one knee behind a rusted two-hundred-litre drum. The bird continued its alarmed call and a shaft of lamplight shot from one of the staff houses as a door was opened.
A man wandered out into the beam and called out something in an African tongue. Jed heard his heart beating in his chest. The rooster settled and the ranger took a couple of paces from his home, scanned the yard, then returned indoors. Jed sprinted back to the thicket by the fence where he had left Moses and Chris.
He handed one of the rifles, the belt and pouches, and three magazines to Moses. The African silently, expertly, cocked the weapon, checked to see if it was clear, fired the action and fitted a full magazine. Jed did the same. Moses nodded and they moved on.
Moses led them back out of the fence and around the staff village to the Nyamepi camping ground on the other side. Fortunately the ground was nearly empty. A party of two South African four-wheeldrive Toyotas was parked at one riverside spot, the occupants already asleep in foldout rooftop tents on each vehicle. The three of them crept inland, around the ablution blocks, to stay out of sight of a second campsite, where a Zimbabwean family had erected a nylon dome tent beside their truck. A man and a woman sat silhouetted against the moonlit Zambezi, savouring the last of their drinks beside a dying fire.
‘The canoe operators set up at the far end of the camp, out of sight of the other campers,’ Moses whispered. ‘Watch out for buffalo. They favour these open flat areas beside the river.’
They skirted a green canvas dome tent and heard a man snoring inside. Jed smelled the cooling embers of a cooking fire. The canoes were lined up on the sandy bank of the Zambezi, tethered by ropes to hefty iron pegs to stop them drifting away if the water level rose unexpectedly during the night. The Zambezi was not tidal, but its level and speed were affected by the periodic release of water from the mighty Kariba dam upstream. Each canoe was about five metres long. They were painted dark-green and had the same shape as Native American canoes familiar to Chris and Jed from the Western movies of their childhood.
Moses launched a canoe into the river and jumped into the bow. Jed motioned Chris to sit in the middle, between him and Moses. He passed his rifle to her and pushed off from the bank. Moses was already paddling as Jed found his oar in the bo
ttom of the craft.
‘What about me?’ Chris whispered.
Jed took the SLR back from her, grasped the fold-out cocking handle on the left side and yanked it back. He let the handle fly forwards again, chambering a round. ‘Take this,’ he said to her. ‘You never know what we’ll bump into out here.’
She checked the safety catch was still on, and rested the long gun across her lap. ‘The last reported position of the aircraft was near the western border of the Lower Zambezi National Park,’ she said, leaning forwards so Moses could hear her.
The guide nodded. ‘Not far. Less than a kilometre from here, but the going will be hard.’
They rounded the grassy island in front of the Mana Pools campsite and struck out into the main channel of the river. Here the faster flowing water snatched the long canoe and tried to turn it side-on to the direction they were heading. Jed dug the paddle in deep and hard, attacking the current like it was a living thing. Droplets of water splashed Chris’s face as Moses’s arms dipped and rose like pistons.
They approached another island and its width acted as a brake against the current, allowing Moses and Jed to ease their efforts for a few moments. Moses lifted his paddle out of the water altogether and Jed mimicked him, unsure why the tracker was stopping. Moses tapped three times on the side of the canoe with the blade of his paddle.
Chris leaned back and looked over her shoulder to explain. ‘He’s seen some hippos up ahead.
Tapping on the boat lets them know we’re coming and gives them time to move out of the way. We don’t want to surprise them.’
Jed nodded. There would be enough danger in store for them without having to contend with a two-tonne territorial beast capable of biting their fragile craft in half. They left the shelter of the island, the hippos visible to Jed now as dark humps in the water. A few more had already waddled up onto shore to start their evening feeding, huge heads lowered and jaws chomping rhythmically.
The paddling was hard again back in the channel. After half an hour of more back-straining work Moses pointed ahead. ‘Smell the smoke?’
