by Tony Park
‘No.’
Damn it, Sannie thought. She should never have let Carla leave the lodge. There were too many things to do at once. ‘When she comes back – if she comes back, tell her Captain Tshabalala needs to talk to her. It’s very important.’
Tom was showered and changed into long pants and a blue cotton shirt when she reached his room. He was already packed. She warned him about the press photographer hanging around reception. He nodded and told her that an ambulance had come and gone, taking the Afrikaner safari guide to the hospital at Nelspruit. ‘He deserves a medal.’
‘Well, there’ll be no medals for us if we don’t get your man back. Only jail time, more like it. Let’s go.’
The photographer was still in reception when they strode through. Tom paused, standing in front of the man as he snapped off picture after picture. Sannie sighed. They really didn’t have time for this.
‘You’re the bodyguard, aren’t you?’ Coetzee said over the whir of his digital SLR camera. ‘How does it feel to have lost the man you were protecting?’
‘How does it feel? Something like how it’s going to feel when the doctor tries to extract that lens from where I’m about to shove it. Who are you working for?’
‘Eugene Coetzee, Independent News Agency. And you are?’
‘No, I mean who are you stringing for, Eugene. Don’t tell me you just hang around trying to get pictures of British politicians for the hell of it.’
Coetzee shrugged, as if there was no point in trying to hide who was paying his bills. ‘One of your English tabloids, the World. Journalist there by the name of Michael –’
‘– Fisher?’
‘Yes, that’s the guy. Do you know him?’
Tom shook his head. ‘Bye.’
‘Hey, I was the one who was supposed to be asking the questions.’
As they got into the Chico Sannie ignored the photographer, despite the fact that he kept his lens pressed to the driver’s window, walking alongside them as she reversed, turned and then drove up Tinga’s driveway. In her rear-view mirror she saw Duncan laying a hand on Coetzee’s shoulder. ‘What was all that about?’
Tom shrugged. ‘Nothing. I don’t know. Greeves was being hounded by that reporter, Fisher, before we left London.
‘Is Greeves in trouble back in England?’
‘No, far from it. From what I’ve seen of him so far he’s a clean skin – no faults that I’ve read about. A few eyebrows raised about the number of overseas trips he takes, particularly to Africa, but that’s about it.’
‘Perhaps that’s why your tabloids are taking an interest in him – trying to find some dirt on a clean politician is their style, from what I know of them.’
‘Yeah. Impressive vehicle, by the way. Are we seriously going to be driving through the jungles of Mozambique in this?’
‘Don’t be smart. It was all they had. We’ll probably strike some bad roads, but a lot of money’s being spent in that country trying to fix things up. Shame – they were just starting to get themselves sorted out after the end of the civil war in 1992 when a cyclone came along in 2000 and flattened a whole heap of bridges and coastal resorts. Still, the country’s bouncing back again.’
Sannie had called her mother on the drive from Skukuza to Tinga and told her what had happened – it was all over the news now. She would collect her grandchildren and they would stay at her place until Sannie returned, though she was unable to say exactly when that would be. Her mother had seemed annoyed down the phone line, though Sannie knew she was really just worried about her safety. So she wasn’t the only one.
They followed the same route Tom and Duncan had taken earlier in the morning in pursuit of the terrorists. Sannie stuck to the main sealed road to make better time, though she refused to go faster than fifty kilometres per hour. ‘We want to get there in one piece, Tom,’ she had protested. ‘It’s no good if we hit something.’
The countryside became more open and drier the further north they headed on the H1-3 towards Satara camp. This was lion country, with open, rolling grasslands that provided good grazing for plains game such as zebra and wildebeest.
‘Why, Sannie?’
‘Why what?’ she replied as she slowed to negotiate her way through a traffic jam of cars and game-viewing vehicles – though not as bad as the one Tom had forced his way through on the bridge. As they passed, a man in a Kombi said, ‘There’s a leopard somewhere in the bush in there,’ but Sannie and Tom had no time to stop.
‘Why are you helping me?’
‘I have asked myself the same question many times already. It’s a combination of reasons, I suppose. I feel like our system was not good enough this morning, that we’ve let you down. Also, I can imagine myself in your situation. I know that you shouldn’t be doing any of this, and neither should I, but I can’t just sit around and hope it all works out for the best. We’re following the best lead available – someone has to.’
She thought about Carla and the smell of her perfume in his room. She continued to be angry at him, on a personal level, and there would be no going back to what might have been, but she still felt for him professionally.
They drove in silence, passing a herd of about two hundred buffalo, and Sannie explained to him that if they were encountered on foot, the huge black bovines were among the most dangerous and unpredictable animals in Africa.
It was a hundred and sixty kilometres from Skukuza to Letaba camp and another thirty-four beyond that to the Giriyondo border post and the crossing into Mozambique. At the rate they were driving, it would be close to four pm by the time they crossed and she was worried about driving the tiny car along the bush roads on the other side of the border at night.
He studied a map of Mozambique as she drove. He had found a southern African road atlas in the Tinga Legends library while she had gone to collect the rental car and he traced the route they had discussed. ‘If they’re terrorists, what do they want, what do they need?’
They had only a rough plan of where they would head at this stage – basically eastwards, to the coast, as soon as possible after they crossed the border. Sannie chewed her lower lip. ‘Privacy. Somewhere to hide.’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But that could be a remote camp in the middle of the Mozambican bush, or in a city where strangers wouldn’t stick out.’
‘They need a getaway, in case we find them again.’
‘Right.’ Tom moved his finger through the green swathes of wilderness on the map. ‘But if you’re about to be surrounded by police and you’re in the middle of the bush, then your only way out is on foot or by four-wheel drive.’
‘We’re assuming they picked up another vehicle across the border, but they won’t want to use it for long. Travelling those back roads they will have been noticed, and if there are police roadblocks they’ll be remembered.’
‘So they’ll want to ditch the vehicle soon and maybe get a new one, possibly steal one, but if they’ve got the money and connections for special forces weapons and white phosphorus hand grenades, then they can also afford to buy a couple of cars and have them pre-positioned.’
‘Which is easier to do in a larger town,’ she said, following on from where his reasoning was taking them, inexorably towards the coast.
His finger, she saw out of the corner of her eye as she geared down and waited for a herd of a dozen elephant to cross the tar road, had reached the blue waters of the Indian Ocean. ‘Where you also have a means of escape via the sea, through an established port or marina, and an airstrip if your budget extends to an aircraft.’
‘Xai Xai?’ she said. Following a straight line from where the gang had illegally crossed the border, the coastal town of Xai Xai – she pronounced it ‘Shy-Shy’ – fitted the criteria they had set for the terrorist group’s hideout. She wondered, however, if they had come to that conclusion simply because it gave them somewhere to go. ‘Or anywhere else on the two and a half thousand kilometre coastline.’
‘Yeah,’ he sighe
d.
The little Volkswagen town car had no airconditioning and Tom’s saturated shirt was plastered to his back. He was as relieved as Sannie to get out and stretch his legs when they entered Kruger Park’s Letaba rest camp.
He’d noted on the map of the park that the camp was nestled on the banks of a river of the same name. The foliage inside the perimeter was lush and green, typical of what he’d noticed along the other permanent rivers in the park. It was a welcome change from the dry, dusty browns they’d been driving through all afternoon.
While Sannie filled the Chico’s petrol tank she gave him directions to the camp shop, along with instructions to use his debit card to draw out some rand from the cash teller machine he would find at the store. As he walked he mused yet again how different from his expectations Africa was turning out to be. Here was a continent where people died by the million from malaria because they didn’t have mosquito nets, yet a game reserve had a cash teller machine in the middle of the bush. Bizarre.
On his way he was surprised to see delicate brown antelope wandering between the permanent safari tents and huts that made up the camp’s fixed accommodation. After withdrawing the equivalent of three hundred British pounds – the most his bank would let him take out in foreign currency in one transaction – he went into the shop. It was well stocked with frozen meat, soft drinks and alcohol, souvenirs, curios and all the little camping bits and pieces that a holidaying family might forget to pack. He grabbed a basket and selected a collapsible cooler bag, some cans of soft drink, a five-litre plastic bottle of drinking water, a six-pack of Castle beer, two frozen steaks, a bag of ice cubes, some potatoes, a cooking pan, salt and pepper, margarine and some canned peaches. It wouldn’t be a feast, but Sannie had told him to buy food for at least one night. He was paying by credit card when Sannie entered.
‘Got everything?’
‘Hardly seems like enough for a safari into the wilds of Africa.’
Sannie checked her watch. ‘Let’s go. Better move if we want to make the crossing before the border closes at four. Also, this will probably be the last place you can get cell phone coverage for quite a while.’
As she drove out the camp gate, Tom took a deep breath and dialled Shuttleworth’s phone. When the Scot answered he told Tom he was at Gatwick, waiting for his flight to Johannesburg. ‘Where should I meet you tomorrow morning?’ his boss asked him.
‘I’ll be in Mozambique.’
‘What?’ Shuttleworth was not a man given to emotional outbursts, so Tom wasn’t ready for the tirade that followed. He was told, in no uncertain terms, and with expletives used in lieu of punctuation, to get his arse back to Tinga Lodge immediately. Tom held the phone away from his ear and rolled his eyes theatrically. Sannie smiled back at him.
‘There’s no point in going back to Tinga,’ Tom said to Shuttleworth.
‘What the hell do you mean, no point?’ Shuttleworth yelled.
Sannie whispered to him, asking if he wanted her to pull over so he could finish the conversation. She had turned right at a four-way stop outside the camp and was now driving down a steep hill to the wide, mostly sandy expanse of the Letaba River.
Tom shook his head. ‘I’ve typed up my notes and printed them out on the Tinga computer. It’s all there waiting for you. I’m crossing the border tonight and I’ll try to pick up their trail tomorrow. We probably haven’t got a hope in hell, but there’s nothing for me to do at Tinga except sit around and wait to lose my job officially. The South Africans already tried to arrest me this morning.’ Tom smiled at Sannie, again holding the phone away so they could both hear Shuttleworth yelling until the phone signal dropped out.
‘Now we’re really on our own,’ she said.
Away from the park’s traffic Sannie pushed the accelerator pedal harder and the hatchback juddered along a corrugated-dirt ochre-coloured road flanked by dry yellow grasslands towards the Giriyondo border post, which sat on a navigable hill on the pass through the Lebombo mountain range.
The mountains, which to Tom’s eye weren’t much more than a string of low, hazy blue hills, marked the natural and actual border between South Africa and Mozambique.
Bristling with lightning rods, radio antennae and satellite television dishes, Giriyondo border post was a relatively new addition to the Kruger National Park, set up to provide access to an old hunting reserve on the Mozambican side which had been incorporated into the new Greater Limpopo Transfrontier National Park.
The new park had been designed to re-establish traditional animal migration routes and to help impoverished Mozambique cash in on some of the tourist dollars that came South Africa’s way via Kruger. It was still in its infancy, but already proving popular with local and foreign visitors looking for a different bush experience, or a short cut from Kruger to Mozambique’s beaches. The reserve’s wildlife, Sannie explained as she drove through the post’s gates and parked outside a new tan-coloured thatched building, had been decimated by poaching during Mozambique’s civil war. They were unlikely to see as many animals as they had in Kruger once they crossed the border.
The South African authorities were trying to restock the park, particularly with elephant, whose numbers had grown in Kruger since the government buckled to international pressure and ended the practice of culling. ‘The bunny-huggers overseas stopped us culling our elephants, so now there are too many of them in the park, and they’re causing damage to the environment. The parks guys moved some across the border, but elephants are smart and they knew that Mozambique was a dangerous place. Many of them simply walked back across the border into South Africa.’
They got out and closed the car doors and Tom braced himself for a test of African bureaucracy. Once inside, however, Sannie switched continuously from Afrikaans to the local dialect, and soon had the immigration and customs officers on the South African side smiling and charmed. She used her police credentials to satisfy the national parks staff member on duty that they did not need exit permits as they were travelling on official business.
Things slowed, however, after they walked next door to an identical building, across a white line on the ground which marked the crossing from South Africa to Mozambique.
‘Bom Dia,’ the blue-uniformed immigration official smiled as they entered, though his pleasant demeanour disappeared once they submitted their passports and completed entry forms.
‘No visa?’ he said to Tom, passing back his passport across the counter.
‘I need one?’ he asked Sannie. She spoke to the man in Tsonga Shangaan, the Mozambican version of the tribal language, and he raised his eyebrows at her knowledge of it.
‘He says South Africans are granted visas here, at the border, but you’ll need to go to the high commission in Nelspruit or the embassy in Pretoria to get yours.’
Tom felt his face flush as the anger surged up inside him. ‘What the fuck does he mean by that? They’re hundreds of kilometres away. Tell him there’s a man’s life at stake and –’
She put a hand on his arm and he looked down at it. The touch calmed him. ‘Shush,’ she chided. ‘I told you before, the best way to deal with bureaucracy in this part of the world is to remain calm and be patient and you’ve blown that already.’
‘Yes, but –’
‘Yes, but leave it to me.’
The official sat back, crossed his arms in front of his chest and continued to shake his head as he spoke. Sannie switched her attention to the customs official, sitting next to the immigration man, who had been taking an active interest in the conversation.
The immigration officer and his colleague conversed with each other, switching from Tsonga Shangaan to Portuguese. Tom figured they wanted to keep that conversation private from Sannie. She looked over her shoulder at him and winked. ‘It’s okay,’ she mouthed.
‘Come,’ the immigration officer said, standing and beckoning Tom.
Tom looked at Sannie for an explanation. ‘Whatever he asks for, just pay him. We don’t have time to bargai
n, and the law’s on their side,’ she said.
It was the height of irony, Tom thought as he followed the immigration man into an adjoining private interview room, that the poster on the wall read, Mozambique says no to corruption.
Inside he sat down at a desk opposite the man, who took out a blank entry form and wrote on the back R1000. ‘Bloody hell,’ Tom said out loud, reluctantly reaching for his wallet. The amount was close to a hundred pounds. He counted out the notes and threw them down on the table. The immigration man looked left and right, though the room was empty except for the two of them, then slid the money off the table-top and into his pocket.
Sannie nodded grimly to him when he emerged. ‘The customs guy will want his cut as well.’
She was right. Outside the airconditioned building the man made a show of checking the car’s interior and boot, saying he was looking for alcohol and groceries. The customs officer then demanded a further five hundred rand in import duties, though he didn’t specify on what the taxes were to be levied. Sannie nodded to Tom’s pants pocket and he peeled off more of the blue hundred-rand notes.
Tom swallowed his indignation and paid the bribe, thankful at last to be waved through the gate. ‘Do you want me to drive?’ he asked.
‘I’m happy to keep going until we hit the tar road. I learned to drive on dirt roads in Africa, Tom. I’d be lost in the traffic in London, though.’
Tom studied a map given to them when they paid their entry fee to the national park, which on the Mozambican side was called the Parque Nacional Do Limpopo. The park’s emblem was the curved-horn sable antelope, the same animal Tom had seen on the box of matches left behind by one of Greeves’s abductors.
‘We’re not likely to run into any speed traps here in the bush, nor many animals,’ she said when she noticed him glancing at the speedometer. ‘I want to get as close as we can to the coast before nightfall. The road’s better there.’
