by Tony Park
‘Could you see a connection?’ Mike asked. His head hurt, but his mind and heart were moving on from sorrow in another, more dangerous direction. Revenge.
‘Well,’ Theron said, weighing up how much he should tell the other man, ‘there were some things that didn’t add up.’
‘Like?’
‘Like the weapons used. The local boys found a lot of brass from an AK – in the clinic and near where they . . . where they shot the nuns.’
Mike could tell Theron was trying to spare his feelings, but he also sensed the detective needed to get his theory out in the open, to talk it through with someone. ‘But not near where Isabella was shot?’
‘No, not near her. Look, I understand if you don’t want to talk about this . . .’
‘It’s OK. I want to know as much about the bastards who did this as you do. Probably more.’
‘She wasn’t shot with a Kalashnikov, Mike,’ the policeman said.
‘What then?’ Mike asked. All he could remember was the ruined face, once so beautiful.
‘I went back . . . to see her again. I checked the wound. It was a pistol shot, up close.’
‘An execution?’ Mike asked, closing his eyes at the thought.
‘I’ve seen that type of wound before. Anyway, so I’m asking myself, who would rob that place, a church-run clinic? It doesn’t make sense. I spoke to the priest – he was in a bad way. But he said they had hardly any drugs, no money. The injured bus passengers – they were the people killed in the clinic – had nothing but the clothes they were wearing. It doesn’t make sense.’ He shook his head.
‘People kill for a lot less on this continent,’ Mike said, playing devil’s advocate.
‘Ja, I know that, but people kill over here for another reason. To cover their tracks. You cross a border, you do something you shouldn’t, meet someone you shouldn’t. You don’t want any witnesses. Besides, there was more I saw there, before those local boys got rid of me.’
‘What?’
‘Two things. One, dust and sand in the clinic, and –’
‘Have you ever seen a Mozambican hospital?’ Mike interrupted, remembering the less than sanitary conditions Isabella had worked in.
‘This was a new building. The rest of it, the treatment room, the priest’s house, were spotless. It looked like a big wind had blown dust in through the flywire windows, all over the bodies in the clinic. A big wind . . . you remember?’
Mike recalled the elephant’s carcass, the windblown tracks. Had a helicopter landed at the mission station? ‘Why would they have flown there?’
Theron swallowed hard. ‘Mike, the other thing I found there, in the treatment room, was lying in the top of a dustbin. The local police wouldn’t have recognised it, or known what to do about it. Besides, they hustled me out before I had a chance to tell them what I’d found.’
‘What was it?’
‘A field dressing. You know what a field dressing is?’
‘I know,’ Mike said, remembering the green-wrapped shell dressings they practised with in the army during first aid lessons. He had never had to use one for real until Carlos threw himself on the landmine.
‘There was one in the dustbin. Lot of blood on it. It was a South African Defence Force dressing. I could tell by the written instructions printed on the back. There was only one and the priest told me that he didn’t keep any ex-military first aid stuff at the clinic.’
‘So one of the poachers was wounded,’ Mike said, and the realisation of what that meant hit him like a fist square in the middle of his face. He felt as though he was going to throw up again. He wound down the window, but the oven-hot African air did nothing to revive him.
‘Don’t blame yourself, Mike. You did the right thing and so did the doctor,’ he said.
Theron’s words could do nothing to calm the rising tide of anger, hurt and sorrow that threatened to blow Mike’s mind and soul into a million pieces. He realised he had wounded one of the poachers with his wild burst of firing from Fernando’s rifle. They had flown to the nearest clinic. Isabella had treated the injured man, and then they had killed her and everyone at the mission.
‘I killed her,’ Mike said softly.
Theron protested. ‘It was someone else, Mike. A criminal pulled the trigger, not you. I won’t stop until I’ve found these bastards. Believe me.’
Mike knew there was nothing more he could do or tell the police, and nothing more that Fanie Theron was allowed to do in Mozambique. He withdrew into himself for the rest of the trip.
They stopped at the Portuguese embassy at Maputo and an officious bureaucrat in a white suit told them that Dr Nunes’s parents had been informed of the tragedy and were on their way to Maputo to collect her remains. Mike had no idea if Isabella had ever told her parents he existed, and he had no wish to make his introductions in these circumstances. Fanie offered him a lift to Johannesburg, and he accepted.
Theron dropped Mike at Rian and Susie’s place the next day.
‘If you ever need to get hold of me, these people will know where I am,’ Mike told Theron. ‘Thank you, again, for everything.’
Theron wrote Rian’s name and address in his notebook, then shook hands with Mike, holding his hand longer than custom dictated. ‘Policemen aren’t in the business of making promises, but I promise you we will find these men. As soon as I have a new lead I’ll be in touch. Don’t blame yourself, Mike.’
In the backyard of their fashionable Sandton home, the de Witts’ three kids laughed and shrieked as they played in their swimming pool. Theron was going home to his family. Mike was going home to nothing.
Theron’s words had sounded hollow. Mike doubted the police would find the murderers and, even if they did, no one would be able to identify them by sight. Mike prayed that somehow, somewhere, he would find them first.
Mike had flown back to Australia and completed the formalities of ending twenty years’ service with the army. Funnily enough, he didn’t find it an emotional experience. There were no old friends to farewell him, no party, no presentation. He signed the official forms at Victoria Barracks in Sydney, and handed in his pack, his webbing, uniforms, identity card – the chattels that had defined who he was for half his life.
He walked out through the big sandstone gates into noisy, exhaust-choked Oxford Street. He was alone and adrift, but in a sense he had been this way for many years, until Isabella, so it didn’t feel too strange. There was nothing left for him in Australia – no job and no prospects.
A bell chimed as he opened the door of the travel agency, the first one he had come to after leaving the barracks.
‘Good morning, how can I help you?’ the woman behind the desk asked.
‘I’d like a ticket to South Africa. One way. Leaving as soon as possible.’
He needed a new home, money and a job. Rian provided all of these. When Mike arrived back in Jo’burg, Rian was in trouble. He had just lost one of the regular drivers of his overland trucks – Piet, a white South African. Mike remembered him as a friendly, confident young man. Piet had evidently worked his charm on a female English passenger on a previous trip and he was now off to England to marry her, in a hurry. He had apparently broken Rian’s cardinal rule that all drivers had to swear to obey, on pain of death and or dismissal.
‘Rule number one: no sex with the tourists,’ Rian said.
Piet was going to be a father in a few months, so even if Rian had decided to bend the cardinal rule and let him stay on in his job, the young man wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of his reprieve.
‘I’d do the next trip myself, except Susie would kill me,’ Rian explained.
Rian, too, was going to become a father, yet again. Susie was heavily pregnant with their fourth child and was due to give birth the week after Mike’s arrival. Rian’s problem was that he had a group of twelve tourists arriving from all points of the globe in two days’ time and, with Piet’s sudden departure, no one to drive them on their overland adventure.
‘My relief driver is on holidays in Zambia, and there’s no way I can go. It’ll be easy, Mike. It’s a short trip. Jo’burg, Kruger, cross the border into Zimbabwe at Beitbridge, Bulawayo, Vic Falls, down the Caprivi Strip into Namibia, Etosha, then finish in Cape Town. You know the way, you’re a qualified guide and you can drive a truck. What are you waiting for?’
‘I’ll give it a go,’ Mike said.
Susie went into early labour the very next day, shortening Rian’s briefing to Mike on the trip and Susie (the overland truck) to all of ten minutes. ‘You’ll find everything and get sorted as you go,’ he said with a wave as he sped off to the hospital. All the camping sites along the route had been booked, which was one less thing for Mike to worry about, and he had a list of names and flight times for the arriving tourists. That was it.
He was straight from the army, still with a crewcut and a soldier’s high expectations of planning and preparation for any endeavour. His first load of passengers was a shock to him and he supposed they felt the same way. He hadn’t mixed with young people for quite some time, and those who he did meet were usually fresh out of recruit training with haircuts like his and no body jewellery. This lot were pierced and tattooed, tie-dyed and dreadlocked. He pretty soon worked out that he was not what they were expecting. Other overland tour trucks he saw on that first trip all seemed to be driven by tanned young men with long hair, sideburns, assorted bracelets and, at the very least, an earring. Mike had none of these.
He managed to collect them all from the airport, but that was where things stopped going to plan. The old Bedford overland truck broke down on the way to Kruger, on the first day. The clutch fluid pipe sprang a leak and they had to wait four hours in Witbank while a backyard mechanic made a new pipe. That’s the good thing about African mechanics, he learned – if they don’t have a part in stock they’ll make one. The bad thing about tourists was, no matter how young, hip and laid-back they pretended to be, when it came to unexpected delays they tended to get mad with their tour guide.
When they finally made it into the national park, just on closing time, his passengers were surprised to learn that he had no idea where anything was and the tents, kitchen utensils and gas bottles all had to be searched for. Around the campfire, after a makeshift dinner of potatoes, tomatoes and bananas, he came clean and explained he was not the African Crocodile Dundee they had been led to believe would be guiding them through the dark continent. A couple of the Brits seethed and he later overheard them mumbling something about the amount of money they’d paid to be stuck with a learner driver, but most of the crew could see the position he was in and pitched in to help him find his way.
‘Overlanding is like that,’ he said as he recounted the story to his second load of passengers. ‘It’s about people working through their problems and learning to pull together as a team. In some ways what we’re doing is like any other organised tour – me, the tour guide driving a bunch of tourists around in a bus. I’m expected to know where we’re going, what we’re going to be doing next, how much things cost, exchange rates, international dialling codes, and everything you ever wanted to know about the country we’re currently in and its people and wildlife. But, in other ways, it’s much more than that. Here, everyone’s expected to pitch in and help with the day-to-day running of the trip. There are meals to prepare and cook, dishes to wash, shopping to be done, and problems to solve. If someone’s not pulling their weight, it’s up to the group to pull them into line.’
The people on the first tour had helped pull him into line. None of them knew the tragedies he had endured, but he thought they had guessed he needed some sorting out. The sheer volume of work that had to be done getting three meals a day on the table for a big group, as well as taking them on game drives and sightseeing expeditions, left him little time to dwell on his personal situation. In the end, tourists and guide parted as friends. The passengers had worked well as a team and Mike found he had learned a lot about people twenty years younger than himself.
He found they were not like him in so many ways. They didn’t drink a lot of alcohol, but they did smoke dope, something he hadn’t done since he had joined the army. He liked music – they liked a strange thumping sound. They liked long hair and flared trousers – he had been very glad to turn his back on both decades ago. The men didn’t shave – he had short hair and scraped his face religiously every day.
Soon they found some common ground, however, as any group of people thrust together always does, and they learned from each other. They started rolling their sleeping bags and zipping up their little canvas bell tents after he caught a mopani snake – a harmless, pencil-thin little thing – that had slithered into one of the girl’s tents and nearly given her a heart attack. He learned to like Pearl Jam and discovered that a couple of tokes of Malawi Gold can ease a tension headache and give you a new perspective on world politics.
Susie broke down two more times on that first trip and he later told Rian he could find another driver if he didn’t find Mike another truck. Rian was chuffed with his new baby son and did not fancy going back on the road again himself. He assigned Susie to Dave, a diesel mechanic from Sheffield in England, who was his other regular driver. Dave loved mucking around with cantankerous engines, so it was a match made in heaven. On Mike’s second trip, and every one thereafter, he put his faith in Nelson Mandela, and the truck did not let him down.
In the months that followed, Nelson and Mike took scores of young Britons, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, Americans, Danes, Swedes, Germans and Swiss tourists to some of the most beautiful places on earth. In those days the longest trips they did were from the Cape to Uganda. Rian had taken his trucks all the way to Cairo when he first started the business, but the perennial wars in the Sudan and Ethiopia were hotting up again, and the fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo meant it was just about impossible to reach Egypt anymore. Still, they were epic trips, taking in places like Victoria Falls, the Zambezi Valley, the Masai Mara and Serengeti in Kenya and Tanzania, Zanzibar and the Virunga Mountains, where Mike had seen the mountain gorillas on the Rwandan side many years before.
The new job was changing his life, and he hoped it was for the better. He let his hair grow long and was soon sporting a goatee beard. Except for the odd strand of long grey hair and some wrinkles, there was now not too much difference in appearance between him and the other guys driving scores of overland trucks up and down the African continent.
The army had given him an AIDS test when he left, and he had passed with a clean bill of health, despite his futile attempts to save Carlos’s life. He was a single, healthy, heterosexual male, but he found it easy to stick to Rian’s golden rule of tour-guiding despite the occasional offer. The groups were technically aimed at the eighteen to thirty-five age bracket, although some people a little closer to his age slipped through the net, and they were usually women. Single women. At the end of each trip they always had a party, a big night with plenty of booze and sometimes, depending on the crew, plenty of dope. It was here that most of those offers arose. Some of the women were very attractive and it was not only always the older ones who wanted more than a group T-shirt as a souvenir of their trip.
But Mike still found himself thinking of Isabella and none of the women he met on those early tours could compete with the memory of her. The daily routine of driving and organising meals and tours, crossing borders and changing money kept him busy. At nights, in his tent or just under a mosquito net looking up at the stars, he still thought of her and the life they might have had.
7
Mike didn’t know if it was the typically chilly Punda Maria air or the shock of Theron’s message that caused his shivering. He had retired to bed early, avoiding Sarah’s questions about his conversation with Rian.
Mike knew from the moment he met her that Sarah Thatcher would be trouble. From the outset, his latest tour had started to shape up as his most difficult. For the first time he had a non-payi
ng passenger on board – a journalist on a junket – Sarah Thatcher. He feared she would not fit in with the rest of the group. He thought she did not like him, and he knew she did not really want to be riding around southern Africa in the back of a bright yellow ex-army truck.
As usual, the day before the tour started the tourists had arrived on their various flights, mostly from London, and assembled at the Holiday Inn at Jo’burg airport. He had stopped by their rooms, introduced himself, checked each of them off his manifest, and then given them all a basic briefing over crisps and Guinness in the hotel’s imitation Irish pub that night.
‘You all know the route and the itinerary from your brochures – from Jo’burg to the Kruger National Park, then north through Zimbabwe to Hwange National Park and Victoria Falls. We’ll transit through Zambia and back into the other side of Zimbabwe at Lake Kariba for a trip on a houseboat, then head back into Zambia to South Luangwa National Park. After that we’ll cross into Mozambique and then follow the coast south until we cross back into South Africa from Maputo,’ he explained.
‘We’ll get to know each other better during the trip. That, I promise you. The only thing I’ve got to add to that,’ he said, winding up, ‘is you’ve all got to remember that this is Africa and things don’t always go according to plan, so stay flexible, stay happy and we’ll all have a great time.’
Sarah had sat slightly apart from the group, jotting in her reporter’s notebook, which made Mike feel uneasy. He didn’t know how she wanted to play this game, so he’d let her introduce herself and explain what she was doing in her own time. A couple of the other passengers eyed her suspiciously as well.
The next day they boarded Nelson and set off for Kruger.
‘Ooh, look. Two rhinos. Fantastic. Aren’t they gorgeous?’ cooed Linda, one of the English girls.
She was a redhead, attractive and slim. Too young for Mike and not his type. No one seemed to be his type these days, he reflected. That was the problem. Maybe it was being back in the Kruger National Park again. Maybe it was the light. Maybe it was the rhinos. Maybe it was the attractive girl. All of it made him think of Isabella.
