by Tony Park
Hess had told Flynn to choose a boat based on the need for speed rather than comfort, and the old guide had done well. The roar of the twin outboards and the slapping of the aluminium hull made conversation difficult, if not impossible, as they bounced across the small swell out on the lake. Hess appreciated the lack of distractions and enjoyed the feel of the warm sun on his back. There were five of them in the boat – himself, Orlov, Flynn, Klaus and a young African man who would set up and maintain their campsite in the national park for as long as it was needed.
The waters of the vast inland sea seemed to stretch to eternity around them, the empty vista broken only occasionally by another vessel. Orlov pointed at what looked like a barge with a crane jutting out from the top. ‘Kapenta rig,’ Flynn shouted above the noise of the motors. ‘Little fish. The Africans catch ’em by the tonne and dry them. Very tasty!’
Hess pulled on aviator sunglasses to ward off the glare from the lake’s surface and cast an idle glance at an ungainly, angular houseboat chugging along on the port side. He smiled as he noticed Orlov unashamedly ogling a trio of women in skimpy bikinis sunbaking on the roof of the craft. They waved at the speeding boat and Orlov waved back.
‘Should we take a closer look, Mr Orlov?’ Flynn called out, looking back over his shoulder from his place at the helm and flashing the Russian a wide yellow-toothed grin.
‘No,’ Hess said, shaking his head to make sure he was understood.
‘Karl is the dull boy. All work and no play,’ Orlov called back cheerfully.
The journey took a little under an hour. As they neared land they passed an ever-increasing number of dead trees jutting out of the water, their trunks and branches stark and white. Fish eagles and cormorants perched on the branches, their droppings turning the dead branches whiter still. These were all that remained of the forests that once carpeted the hills flanking the floor of the Zambezi valley.
Flynn cut the engines when they were twenty metres or so from a long, narrow grey sandy beach. ‘I’d be obliged if you’d keep an eye out for sticks just below the surface,’ he said to his passengers as the boat glided noiselessly into shore. They encountered no obstacles and the boat beached with a soft shush. ‘It’s sandy here, so you shouldn’t have any problem with bilharzia. The little snails that carry the bug usually only live in reeds and weed – but take a big jump for terra firma, just in case.’
Tashinga was an attractive camping ground located right on the water’s edge. It was also the headquarters for Matusadona National Park. ‘The park office is just up the road a bit. I’ll go and pay and fetch our guide. Matthew, set up camp and put the kettle on for the gentlemen, please,’ Flynn said to his young African assistant.
‘Yes, boss,’ the boy said.
‘Forget the tea, Flynn, we’ve got work to do,’ Hess said.
Flynn nodded and set off up a dirt road. Matthew carried plastic crates full of camping gear and canvas tent bags to a nearby campsite, which consisted of two simple A-frame shelters set onto concrete slabs. The shelters would make handy storage areas and were also big enough to pitch a tent under, for those visitors who wanted to feel a little more secure.
‘The camping ground is unfenced here,’ Hess said to Orlov. ‘I’ve seen elephant, buffalo and even lion once, wandering through on their way to drink at the lake.’
Flynn returned twenty minutes later with a Zimbabwean ranger in a dark green field uniform. The man, whom Flynn introduced as Samson, carried an AK-47. The Russian assault rifle was old but well maintained, and its once-black metal parts were burnished bright silver.
Samson led them out of the main camp along a dusty road, past a grass airstrip where a herd of impala grazed peacefully.
‘Here is the boma where we keep the rhinos,’ he said, pointing up a short track to a cluster of rough wooden pens, ‘but they are not there now.’
‘Where are they?’ Orlov asked. ‘I thought you kept them locked up all the time?’
‘No, they eat for most of the day and then we return them to the boma at night-time. Follow me.’ He left the dirt road now and turned off into the bush, his eyes scanning the ground for fresh spoor that would lead him to the animals. He picked up the trail after less than a minute and they set off into the thick scrub, pausing every now and then to disentangle themselves from thorn bushes or to negotiate dense thickets of bush.
They saw another armed ranger before they saw the rhinos. Samson waved and greeted the man in Shona. Hess studied the man keenly. He was more interested in the men guarding the rhinos than in the animals themselves.
The ranger scrutinised the party just as carefully, Hess noticing that he was alert and looking for signs of anything irregular. He was armed with an FN rifle, designed by Fabrique Nationale of Belgium. Hess knew the weapon well, as he had carried one during the bush war in Rhodesia. Twenty-round magazine, 7.62-millimetre ammunition. The rifle was painted with green and brown camouflage, and was probably ex-army stock. Though an old weapon, it was more than a match for the AK-47s Klaus and the poachers would be carrying, in terms of stopping power and accuracy, but not capable of pouring out large volumes of lead in a firefight. Unlike their guide, the man was dressed in a khaki dress uniform of short-sleeved shirt and pressed trousers with a yellow and green sable belt. This told Hess that the orphan rhinos did not venture far into the bush each day, or the man would have been wearing the more utilitarian green uniform.
They passed the sentry and suddenly found themselves in the midst of a herd of six snuffling and snorting young rhinos. There were two other men with the rhinos, both dressed in green overalls.
‘These men look after the rhinos when they are in the bush. They show them how to feed and what is good to eat,’ Samson said.
‘She likes this,’ one of the men in overalls said as he scratched a young rhino behind the ear. Orlov dutifully snapped off a few pictures and the rhino snorted in apparent pleasure.
‘How old are they?’ Orlov asked.
‘They are mostly two and three years old,’ the same man replied. ‘But that one, she is now six.’
Hess studied the larger rhino. He noticed that she was, indeed, a female and knew it must be her the bull was sniffing around for. He also noted that none of the animals had very large horns yet, although he knew that even the stumps that these ones carried would each be worth a small fortune. Too short to be carved into dagger handles for rich Yemeni men, they would nonetheless fetch a pretty price in Asia, where ground rhino horn was a sought-after treatment for fever.
They wandered among the feeding rhinos, watching them grasp thorn bushes and leaves with their dexterous hooked upper lips and munch contentedly away. Hess knew the Zambian poachers would dearly love to slaughter these animals as well as the big bull, but he would not allow it. Not for the love of an endangered species, but because one day there would be another Orlov, perhaps from America or Germany or Italy, who would be willing to pay to bag a unique trophy.
After half an hour, Flynn asked, ‘Got enough pictures, Mr Orlov?’
‘Indeed I have, Flynn. Now, can we look for the bull?’
Samson briefed them on safety for the walk. ‘Please stay behind me and Mr O’Flynn at all times. If we see the rhino, keep very still and quiet. Do not use the flash on your camera, please. If he is going to charge, you must climb the nearest tree immediately. As we walk, always keep looking for the tree that you will climb.’
Samson wandered over to the armed guard and spoke to him briefly before turning and addressing the party. ‘This man says he saw the bull yesterday, in the distance. We may still be able to pick up his trail.’
They set off in the general direction in which the male rhino had last been seen. The sun was at its peak now and they sweated profusely in the humid air. Hess guessed the temperature was close to forty degrees centigrade, if not higher.
After a little more than half an hour Samson signalled them with an open hand to stop, then motioned them forward to inspect the tree he was
standing next to. ‘He has been here. See how the bark of the leadwood is rubbed away. He has been scratching himself. See his tracks in the dirt. We are not far from him now.’
They followed the three-toed tracks and the path of broken twigs and gnawed thorn bushes until the sun was nearing the tops of the tallest trees. But not once did they see their quarry.
Orlov sat down heavily on a fallen tree trunk and wiped his brow. He drank greedily from his canteen until it was empty, and tipped it upside down, letting the last drops dribble into his mouth.
‘Water’s low. We’re all bushed,’ said Flynn. ‘Let’s call it a day, Karl.’ Reluctantly, Hess agreed, and Samson led them back to the camping ground.
‘Ah, but I think there is good news today,’ Samson said when he met them on the road out of the camping ground at dawn the following morning. ‘I have been to the boma already and the night guard says he heard the bull in the evening. He was very close.’
In the lake behind them hippos honked and grunted, like fat men laughing hard at bad jokes. A gaggle of white-speckled guinea fowl crossed the road in front of them and cackled nervously when they spotted the humans.
Hess carefully framed his question. ‘Are you sure the man knows what he heard? Have you asked the other guards?’
‘Oh, no need, sir. There is only the one guard. He is an old man who knows the bush well. He would make no mistake, sir,’ Samson said.
Hess nodded, pleased with the answer. He now knew that there would only be one sentry for them to worry about, but that the man was experienced and alert.
Flynn walked behind the armed ranger, followed by Orlov, Hess and Klaus. Hess wanted Klaus to become as familiar with the path the rhino had followed as he would be. Hess felt naked in the bush without a weapon and he imagined Klaus felt the same.
They picked up the spoor of the big bull rhino again about two hundred metres from the boma. Flynn pointed excitedly to the broad three-toed prints in the red-brown dust. ‘Last night, only a few hours ago,’ he whispered.
Every now and then Flynn would stop and pull a small plastic puffer bottle from his pocket. The bottle had originally contained lens cleaning fluid for a camera, but Flynn had filled it with ash from a leadwood fire. The ash was as white and fine as talcum powder, but without the telltale odour. A squirt of ash from the bottle would show them the direction of the faintest puff of wind. ‘The beast is as blind as a bat, but he’ll smell us a mile off, so we’ve got to stay downwind of him,’ he said in explanation. ‘Rhinos have good hearing too, so be dead quiet from now on, and remember to pick your tree in case he gets spooked and charges us.’
It was another hour before they sighted the bull and Hess could not help but be impressed by Flynn’s keen eyesight when they did. He had stopped and raised a hand. The ranger peered into the dense thorn bush that blocked their path twenty metres ahead and then nodded in recognition. He turned to Orlov and Hess and motioned them to come forward, placing a finger on his lips at the same time.
The guide bent close to Hess’s face to whisper and Hess recoiled slightly at the sour smell of last night’s whisky. ‘Ear,’ breathed Flynn. He pointed into the deep shadows at the base of the thorny thicket.
Hess pulled a small pair of expensive binoculars from the pocket of his bush shirt and scanned the shadows. A few seconds later he nodded, then handed the binoculars to Orlov. Flynn was right, an ear was all that was visible, although they could make out the faint outline of the rhino as a slightly paler form in the shadows. He was lying on his stomach, asleep. Occasionally his ear would twitch involuntarily to ward off a pesky fly and it was this tiny movement that had betrayed his carefully chosen hide.
‘Come on, let’s get a bit closer,’ Flynn whispered and motioned to the ranger, signalling they were ready to move.
‘No, let’s go,’ said Hess, and he placed a hand on Flynn’s arm to stop him moving.
That’s odd, Flynn thought to himself. Hess’s client had come halfway around the world to see a black rhino in the wild and no doubt paid a pretty penny to do so. Why would Hess want to leave now just when they had found one of the most elusive creatures in Africa? Flynn reckoned they could creep at least a few metres closer. Even if the animal was startled, his first instinct would probably be to scarper and that would give the tourist a chance to shoot a few more pictures. Alternatively, they could lie up where they were for an hour or so and see if the animal woke and moved of its own accord. Flynn looked at Orlov for confirmation, but he just nodded his agreement with Hess’s decision.
Flynn shrugged. It was nothing to him and he assumed he would still get payment in full. There really was no figuring foreigners, he told himself, and he included Namibian Germans in that broad-sweeping categorisation. He tapped the ranger on the shoulder and motioned back the way they had come with his thumb. Samson looked as surprised as Flynn at the tourists’ desire to leave.
When the order of march had been reversed, and Flynn and Samson were once again at the head of the small column, Hess pulled the GPS unit from the black pouch on his belt. The unit was on, as it had been during the previous day’s trek, and he checked the screen to make sure it was tracking enough satellites to compute their exact position. He pushed the mark button and recorded their position, naming it simply ‘1’. He rarely made mistakes and when he did, he never repeated them.
When they returned to the main dirt road, Hess said to Flynn, ‘Have your man strike camp immediately. Don’t worry about breakfast. We have to get back to Kariba as soon as possible.’
A feeling of uneasiness had been festering inside Flynn all that morning, ever since Hess had abruptly broken contact with the rhino. Hess was no ‘bunny-hugger’, and by the cold glint in his grey eyes neither was his client. Flynn had watched the way the Russian handled himself in the bush. He lacked the ease that he, Flynn, and Hess had, which came from spending a lifetime in the African veldt, but nonetheless the man was no blundering, loud-mouthed tourist. He was a hunter and he’d acted like a man on the hunt.
Flynn helped Matthew lift the cool box into the boat, and then slid into his seat behind the wheel as the young African pushed off from shore and nimbly jumped onto the bow. As the engines roared to life and the boat surged back into the lake, Gerald O’Flynn was overcome by a feeling that he had just done something terribly wrong.
20
‘What is this, some kind of midlife crisis in reverse?’ Sam asked as clumps of grey and brown hair dropped from Mel’s nimble fingers.
‘You’re supposed to grow a ponytail when you reach fifty, not cut it off,’ Terry said with a belch as he crushed yet another empty Zambezi beer can.
Mike was sitting on a fold-out chair on the foredeck of the houseboat, wearing nothing but sunglasses and a pair of knee-length blue-and-white flowered board shorts while Mel snipped away a year’s worth of his hair. Having a hairdresser on the trip was handy, he thought. The ponytail would have come off even if Mel wasn’t around, but she was doing a better job than he would have. ‘Try that fifty line again and you’re going swimming without the crocodile cage, bro,’ Mike said, turning to face Terry.
‘Keep still,’ Mel said, positioning his head with expert fingers. ‘I don’t know, Mike, I think long hair’s dead sexy on a man. You’re gonna end up looking more like a stockbroker than a safari guide when I finish with you.’
‘I’m thinking of all the money I’m going to save on shampoo,’ Mike said. Hess and Orlov were close, too close for comfort, and he knew both of them would recognise Sarah and himself by their most distinguishing features. He had suggested that Sarah do something to change her appearance, in case they ran into the hunters around the national park, or on the road. The roads in Zambia were as few as they were bad, and it was likely they would pass them, or vice versa.
‘Yeah, I agree,’ Sarah said on cue, looking up from a glossy South African women’s magazine she had bought in Kariba. ‘Can you give me a trim and put a little colour through mine when you’ve finished with
Mike?’
Sarah was wearing her black bikini top and a pair of denim shorts. Sometime during the previous day on the houseboat she had found time to paint her toenails cherry red. She and Mike were speaking again, since he had relayed his conversation with Flynn to her. The animosity that she had harboured towards him seemed to disappear instantly and they had discussed several scenarios about how they might deliberately get closer to the hunters to spy on them. Mike had discounted all her wild schemes, but she was still adamant that they should find a way to discover more about Hess’s plans and to thwart them.
Mike played it straight, however, and phoned in his new information to Fanie Theron. He was annoyed to get the detective’s voice mail again, and left a long, detailed message. Mike had no idea whether Theron was getting the messages, let alone acting on them. He hoped the police appreciated the effort they had gone to, not to mention the pain he had suffered, and the importance of the information they were gathering.
‘There’s nothing more we can do,’ he had told Sarah when they boarded the houseboat. Secretly, now that he was sure Orlov and Hess were the men who had killed Isabella, he hoped he would have the chance to confront them. The Browning pistol was at the bottom of the daypack he carried on to the boat, just in case.
‘That’s them!’ Sarah had said on the first day out from Kariba, when a fast-moving speedboat overtook their sluggish floating gin palace.
Mike joined her at the railing and she handed him her binoculars.
‘That’s who?’ Kylie had asked.
‘Oh, no one,’ Mike had said, pulling the baseball cap down more firmly on his head. He doubted they would recognise him from this distance, although Sarah and he had recognised them easily enough. ‘Just a couple of blokes we bumped into in Vic Falls.’
That was what spurred them on to changing their appearances the very next day, along with the fact that they would be anchoring just off Tashinga for their second and final night on the houseboat. There was a good chance the hunters might be able to scan the boat from the shore with their binoculars.
