by Tony Park
The pilot, Jan Viljoen, a former South African Air Force lieutenant, finally acknowledged the call. Hess took out his GPS and read off the coordinates for the pick-up spot, where Orlov lay wounded.
‘You’ll need to lower the winch when you get there, I have one man down and the bush is too thick for you to land, over,’ Hess said. Off to his left, some distance away, he heard the sound of a vehicle engine starting. His unseen adversary was getting away, but Hess was relaxed. I didn’t see his face, so I know he didn’t see mine, he told himself confidently.
‘Ja, got it,’ Viljoen replied. He had been circling twenty kilometres away out of sight and earshot of the hunt after dropping Hess and the Russian off in the bush. He was near the border of the Kruger park, staying low and following a herd of buffalo that had strayed across the newly unfenced border into Mozambique. Now, thanks to him, the buffalo were stampeding back to the comparative safety of the South African national park. ‘Watch out for the lions, now, boys,’ he said aloud to himself.
Viljoen felt a pang of regret for the elephant. He had enough love for the bush to know that what they had done was very wrong. However, he, like his former brother-in-arms Karl Hess, was now a soldier of fortune, a mercenary, and money always claimed his first allegiance. His second love was flying, and the Bell 412EP they were letting him play with was a delight.
He dipped the nose and watched the airspeed needle climb as the russet-brown bush whizzed past a scant sixty feet beneath him. He had removed the two front doors from their hinges before take-off to give him better visibility for the close-in work of infiltrating and extracting the team, and the modification also made for a cooler, more exhilarating flight. Viljoen, alone in the machine now, glanced across his shoulder and confirmed that the first aid kit was clipped to the bulkhead where it should be. Hess had a man down, although he didn’t say who, and the old bastard had sounded as calm as you please, as though he was asking Viljoen to pick up some more beer on his way. He wondered who was injured as he punched the coordinates for the pick-up point into his own GPS and set a course for the rendezvous point.
He tested the winch by flicking the appropriate switch and watching the yellow jungle penetrator drop a foot or so on its cable. The device, developed by the Americans in Vietnam, was about the size and shape of a small bomb, suspended by its blunt end from a winch cable. Its pointed nose and weight allowed it to fall easily through branches and leaves, avoiding entanglement. Once on the ground, the men who needed to be picked up unfolded the long sides of the ‘bomb’, which then became seats that two men at a time could straddle.
Orlov’s skin was paler than when Hess had left him, but the Russian was still conscious. Hess checked his client’s pulse. It was strong, which was good, but he seemed to be in a lot more pain. Hess began to lift the blood-soaked pad of the field dressing and Orlov screamed.
Hess was worried. Orlov was ex-special forces and had hardly made a noise when he was shot. Why was he in such pain now? The Russian was biting down on his lower lip and forcing himself to regain his composure. Hess reached out again and lifted the pad. Orlov shuddered and Hess noticed a thin tear escape from the hardened soldier’s tight-shut eyes.
‘It is bad, the pain?’ Hess asked.
Orlov took a deep breath before answering. ‘Worse than it should be.’
Again, Hess lifted the dressing. He shut his ears to the Russian’s yelp and shook his head as he inspected the lower leg. It was swollen to nearly twice its normal diameter, the skin stretched taut as a drum. Hess assumed the wound was bleeding internally.
‘You will be lucky to keep this leg,’ he said matter-of-factly.
Above him he heard the low thump of the helicopter’s four blades. Hess shrugged off his rucksack and rummaged inside it. He stood, holding a Day-Glo orange marker panel about three feet long by one foot wide. He held the vinyl panel above his head with two hands, his arms outstretched, and made a high clapping motion.
Hovering above the point fixed in his GPS, Jan Viljoen noticed the flicker of orange below him and slewed the big helicopter to his right for a better view. Below him, he saw Hess. He stabbed the winch switch and the jungle penetrator sailed downwards, whining as the cable unwound freely.
Hess stepped back and waited until the blunt yellow cone of the penetrator thudded into the dust and leaves at his feet. He stuffed the marker panel into the half-open front of his bush shirt and shrugged on his rucksack. Before he tended to Orlov he walked a few paces to the point where he had fired at the ranger and, after a few seconds of looking, found the spent brass cartridge case from the bullet. He slipped it into his top pocket.
‘Come on, come on, you bastard,’ Viljoen muttered as he fought to keep the helicopter hovering in one place. A stiff breeze had picked up and it was rocking in the thermal up-drafts of hot air rising from the heated earth.
Hess grabbed Orlov under the armpits without ceremony or care for his wound and hoisted him onto one of the splayed legs of the jungle penetrator. He unfolded the opposite side and took his own seat, facing the Russian. He gave Viljoen an unsmiling thumbs-up, and wrapped his long, muscular arms around Orlov’s neck. With the casualty now obviously secure, Viljoen flicked the winch switch and the pair rose slowly through the mopani leaves, locked in their lovers’ embrace.
Ideally, there would have been a crewman on board to operate the winch from a second set of controls in the cargo compartment of the chopper, and to pull in anyone who needed to be winched aboard once they were level with the cargo doors. The doors weren’t a problem, as Viljoen had removed these as well as the crew doors, but Hess had to start a pendulum motion in order to get a leg onto the left skid so that he could then pull the injured Orlov inside. Hess made the tricky manoeuvre look easy, despite Orlov’s reluctance to ease his grip on the hunter to allow him to do his work. Eventually, Hess had Orlov seated on a canvas webbing troop seat. He fastened a seatbelt around the Russian’s waist, in case he passed out and slumped to the floor or, worse, out the door.
Hess grabbed the back of the co-pilot’s seat and peered out the plexiglass windows of the front cockpit. He pointed Viljoen in the direction of the elephant and noted that the pilot had been sweating, presumably with the effort of keeping the machine in one spot for so long. Hess had an infantryman’s resentment of aviators and their world of comparative luxury, but now, as on several occasions in his life, he thanked the good Lord for flying machines.
Viljoen was about to earn his pay all over again. ‘You are not to touch down, understood?’ Hess barked in the pilot’s ear as he brought the 412EP down towards the elephant carcass. Viljoen acknowledged the order with a curt nod – there wasn’t enough room in the tiny natural clearing to touch down even if he had wanted to.
The two men, Klaus and the tracker, stood on top of the carcass, their faces streaked a dirty grey where the dust being kicked up by the rotors was sticking to rivulets of sweat. Viljoen eased the big machine down through the buffeting turbulence until the front tip of his left skid was nearly touching the top of the elephant’s protruding backbone, at the point where it met the skull. The two men on the beast’s back crouched and stepped back, holding their hands to their eyes in a vain attempt to keep the stinging dust at bay.
Hess put a foot on the skid then nimbly stepped onto the huge, grey, wrinkled back. He reached down and grabbed the Mozambican tracker by the neck of his tattered T-shirt. Unable to speak the man’s language, he simply pointed at the two great shafts of ivory and then to the inside of the helicopter. Klaus had seen and felt his master’s wrath before and was already hefting an end of one of the tusks.
Viljoen sweated some more as he waged a continuous battle to keep the aircraft trimmed level as weight was alternately placed on and off the helicopter. Hess climbed back aboard the hovering helicopter to drag on one end of the first tusk, then pounced off again, like a leopard leaving a branch, to chivvy the two other men from the back of the elephant. It needed all three of them to lift each huge
curved tusk and to wriggle them, centimetre by difficult centimetre, in through the open sides of the helicopter and along the non-slip floor of the cargo compartment. Hess guessed the tusks weighed between sixty-five and seventy kilograms each, worth every American dollar of the fortune he would exact from the Russian.
Hess pushed on the bloodied end of the second tusk, marvelling at its huge diameter – probably more than fifty centimetres. It was the biggest elephant he had ever shot and no doubt one of the biggest left in southern Africa, if not the whole continent. He climbed aboard again and shifted the huge shaft of ivory next to its mate. In doing so he bumped against Orlov’s injured leg. The Russian’s scream of pain was lost in the roar of the turbine engines overhead. Klaus followed Hess into the chopper and held out a hand for the tracker, who very nearly slipped from the skid as the helicopter, now heavily laden with its full cargo of men and ivory, climbed away from the desecrated body below.
Hess turned to the Russian and saw that his head was now slumped on his chest. He checked his pulse. The man was still alive, but had passed out with the pain of his wound. Hess spat out of the open door, into the slipstream, then squeezed his way into the co-pilot’s seat.
‘Give me your map!’ he yelled into Viljoen’s ear.
2
‘Fuck,’ Mike said aloud as he rounded a bend and saw the red warning triangles on the road ahead. In the distance he could make out two men in grey shirts. He recognised the uniform – PRMs, Republic of Mozambique Police. One of them was armed with the ubiquitous AK-47, the other had a holstered pistol, probably a Russian Makarov, he thought.
He’d come to accept roadblocks as a fact of life in Africa – police, customs, quarantine, tsetse-fly control points – anything the officials could think of to slow traffic and raise revenue. Mostly he got through with a smile and the flash of his driver’s licence or vehicle insurance certificate. Occasionally, he’d needed to smooth his way through with a packet of cigarettes, a few crumpled notes or a ballpoint pen or other trinket. He had no tarpaulin or sheet to cover the bodies and they were plain to see, along with the settling cloud of flies, as soon as he pulled up near the policemen.
Mike had called his headquarters in Maputo on the sat-phone as soon as he thought he was far enough from whoever had shot Fernando and caused Carlos’s death. He’d waited on hold for a frustrating few minutes and was eventually put through to Jake, his American boss.
‘Carlos is dead, Jake, and so is Fernando,’ Mike said, pausing to drag on a cigarette to steady his nerves.
‘Carlos? Dead? Who’s Fernando?’
‘Never mind, just get me some backup, Jake, and call the cops.’ Mike ran through what had happened and it sounded incredible even to him in the telling, though he had just lived through it.
‘Wait there,’ Jake said.
‘For Christ’s sake, Jake, there are men with guns here and I’ve got two dead men in my vehicle. Get someone out and I’ll meet you on the road.’
Carlos had once asked Mike what exactly it was he didn’t like about the retired US Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who was their supervisor.
‘It’s hard to put a finger on it,’ Mike had replied. ‘Jake doesn’t drink alcohol. Call me a politically incorrect old dinosaur, but I don’t trust military people who don’t drink, unless they’re reformed alcoholics. He doesn’t mix. He thinks the job’s more important than people.’ However, right then Mike had never wanted to see anybody so badly in his life – except maybe Isabella. But the police met him first.
Mike was tired and angry, and needed alcohol and sleep. He decided he was happy to wait in police custody for the two hours it would probably take for the other vehicle from headquarters to reach the roadblock. As he pulled up at the roadblock, the policeman with the pistol spoke rapidly in Portuguese.
‘Fala ingles?’ Mike asked, and pointed to the blue and white UN roundel on his uniform sleeve.
The PRM shrugged and motioned to his colleague, who ambled slowly over, making a show of checking the Nissan’s headlights and tyres on the way. When he was alongside the driver’s window Mike asked him the same question, if he spoke English.
‘A little. What you carry in back?’ he asked.
‘Two dead bodies,’ Mike said.
The policeman’s eyes widened in shock as he glanced in the back.
The first PRM unholstered his pistol and pointed it at Mike’s head as he dragged him from the four-wheel drive. While the man with the rifle covered their prisoner, the other searched and then handcuffed him. Despite Mike’s protests, the policeman confiscated his satellite phone.
Mike considered demanding that they call the Australian consul general in Maputo if the treatment got any rougher. He was an army officer serving the country under the auspices of the UN. However, he stayed as calm as he could. Better to wait a while for Jake and do the explaining then, rather than risk a fight with the cops.
The policemen bundled him into a stifling-hot tin shed by the side of the road. The ground was stained with bird droppings from roosting doves and the place smelled of urine. The English-speaking PRM, the one with the rifle, stood guard outside and checked on his prisoner every quarter of an hour. On one inspection he held a scratched plastic litre-bottle of warm water to Mike’s lips and, on the next, lit a cigarette for him and placed it between his lips. Mike had half expected a beating, so the water and smoke were a pleasant surprise.
Sitting there waiting for Jake gave him time to think. He thought about Carlos, about Isabella and about himself. Carlos had saved his life. Again and again Mike saw him fall slowly to his death. He screwed his eyes tightly shut to rid himself of the image and tried to focus on Isabella. He had to get word to her back at Mapai somehow. He dreaded the coming days of inevitable debriefings, investigations and interviews, and wondered when and how he would contact her.
He had decided, that morning over breakfast, to leave the army when his tour in Mozambique finished in a few weeks. Nothing that happened after breakfast had changed his mind. Mike had been to several former war zones in nearly twenty years’ service with the Australian Army, but he had never, until today, fired a weapon in anger. He had seen dead bodies before, but never had someone die in front of him or in his arms. His enemy or enemies had not shown themselves, which left him with a feeling of impotent rage after the firefight. He had held them off, though, and now he was starting to feel the guilt of the survivor who has seen his friends die at the hands of others.
What he wanted most of all now as he squatted in the rank-smelling, stifling makeshift cell was to see his woman. He wanted to tell her he loved her and that he had decided to give up his job to be with her. He couldn’t extend his tour in Africa once his time was up and he doubted Isabella would give up her work at the hospital to come to Australia as an army wife. In truth, despite the death and suffering he had seen in Africa, he didn’t want to leave either.
‘Jesus H. Christ, Williams, you’re a mess,’ Jake said, when he arrived at the roadblock a couple of hours later and pushed his way into the shed.
Mike squinted as he was led out into the bright sunshine and bundled into the blissful cool of Jake’s air-conditioned Patrol. A senior PRM in a starched grey shirt was on hand to placate the local cop, who at first seemed reluctant to hand over his white desperado. Jake gestured to a cold box in the luggage area of the four-wheel drive and Mike opened the lid. Inside were half a dozen Manica beers, covered in ice, along with a bottle of Perrier, which Mike took to be Jake’s.
‘I could kiss you.’
‘Go easy, Williams, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do,’ Jake said in his Southern drawl.
Mike explained. Over and over again, all the rest of that day and all day Saturday and Sunday. He told his story to Jake, the Mozambican police, the Mozambican army, the Australian consul general in Maputo, the head of Army Engineers at Victoria Barracks in Sydney via telephone, and in person to the Australian military attaché from South Africa.
The militar
y attaché was a lieutenant colonel who had flown in from Pretoria on the Sunday, and Mike sensed the man was pissed off that he had to give up his golf or tennis or bridge, or whatever it was military attachés did on their weekends.
‘When’s your tour here up?’ the grey-haired colonel asked him. He was an infantryman, five or six years older than Mike. Too young for Vietnam, too old for the conflicts the engineer officer had been to. He stared hard at Mike, his cold blue eyes focused on a point in the middle of Mike’s forehead.
They were in Mike’s office, on the upper level of a two-storey converted warehouse on the Avenida da Angola, in a light industrial area in downtown Maputo. It was Sunday, so the street outside was free of the usual honking traffic.
‘One month of work, plus I’ve got about a month’s leave owing,’ Mike said.
The lieutenant colonel said nothing, just kept staring at Mike’s forehead.
‘Sir,’ Mike added.
The office building was a rabbit warren of glass-partitioned offices, each with its own air-conditioner. Mike’s air-conditioner was broken, again, and the office was like a sauna beneath the iron-clad roof. He glanced over at Carlos’s desk. It was clear and neat, in contrast to the stacks of paper that littered his. The glass wall behind where Carlos had once sat was covered with the UN mine-awareness posters he had diligently pinned up. Mike remembered Carlos posing for a photo with a group of laughing children in a village school, holding up one of those posters; the picture was on the cork noticeboard. Mike stared at Carlos’s beaming face.
‘You’re a problem, Williams,’ the lieutenant colonel said, with a finality that suggested Mike should not challenge his omnipotence. He flicked open the buff-coloured personnel folder in front of him, and took a pair of reading glasses from his pocket. Mike shifted his gaze again, and looked past the other man, out the window over the roof of the neighbouring building.
