Far Horizon

by Tony Park

  ‘Mike, this is Sarah,’ she said. ‘Hess and Orlov are coming after you! They haven’t left the country. If you get this message call me on . . .’ Sarah scanned the information plate mounted above the payphone and then read the number into the mouthpiece.

  Dejected, she walked over to a table in the bar area where Jane and Julie Muir had ordered fresh drinks to still their frayed nerves.

  ‘No answer?’ Jane asked.

  Sarah shook her head.

  ‘Mobile phone reception’s crap in this country,’ Julie said. ‘I haven’t had a signal on mine since we left Zimbabwe.’

  Sarah tried calling Mike five more times in the ensuing hour, exchanging barely more than a few sentences with the other two women in between calls.

  A series of musical chimes from speakers in the ceiling heralded an announcement. ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. British Airways would like to welcome all passengers travelling to London Heathrow this evening.’

  The female announcer droned on with more information about first and business class passengers and mothers with small children, but Sarah wasn’t listening. The time had come for her to make her decision.

  She tried Mike’s mobile phone once more, but only received the frustrating recorded message. She knew that by tomorrow he would be well and truly out of range of the Lusaka phone towers. The remaining passengers were called to board, and Jane and Julie Muir stood holding their daypacks and shopping bags crammed with duty-free cigarettes and alcohol.

  ‘You’re not coming, are you,’ said Jane. It was a statement, not a question.

  Sarah looked at the boarding pass in her hand and then screwed it up. She shook her head.

  ‘Is he worth it?’ Jane asked.

  ‘They’ll kill him, and maybe all the others if I can’t warn them first,’ Sarah said, but she knew what Jane was really asking.

  ‘I can’t stay, Sarah. I’m not made for it.’

  ‘Mum, isn’t there something we can do to help?’ Julie pleaded, switching her gaze from Sarah to her mother.

  ‘No, love, there isn’t, I’m afraid. I said it before, I can’t put you at risk. Mike knew what he was in for when he agreed to spy on these men. Are you all right for money, Sarah?’

  Sarah nodded.

  ‘Right then, we’ve got to go. Good luck,’ Jane said. Two women in the red, white and blue of British Airways were impatiently watching the trio from a desk near the door at the end of the departure lounge.

  No hugs or kisses were exchanged, and Sarah gave a little wave. ‘Jane,’ she said, as the pair were about to disappear through the door which led to a staircase and the airport apron below.

  Jane turned around. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think he is . . . Worth it, I mean,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Me too. Take care of him, girl,’ Jane said, then hurried through the door to catch up with her daughter.

  28

  After leaving the airport, Mike made a quick stop at a big supermarket just outside Lusaka for provisions and then headed eastwards. Sam sat up front next to him, in Sarah’s old seat, and made small talk as the hours droned on. The diesel engine whined and the temperature gauge red-lined as Mike floored the accelerator. He knew he should have stopped somewhere just out of Lusaka, but he wanted to put as much distance between them and the airport as he could.

  The tarred road out of Lusaka was in good condition as far as the bridge over the Luangwa River, about two hundred and fifty kilometres to the east, and it was there that they would camp for the night. Mike pulled off the main road and drove down a gravel track to a small camping ground run by a company that organised canoe trips down the Luangwa River to the Zambezi. It was after nine o’clock at night. The passengers were exhausted and subdued now that the excitement of the previous evening had worn off.

  Mike was tired too, bone tired. As soon as the tents were up he crawled into his sleeping bag in the back of the truck. He dreamed of Sarah, and of pulling old Patrick from under the nose of the sniper. In his dream he saw the wild flashes of light from Sarah’s camera and heard the rattle of Samson’s AK-47 as he dragged the wounded ranger through the dust. The dream was vivid and he awoke with a start to see flashes of light illuminating the truck windows. A gunshot echoed outside and he looked around, confused. It took him a couple of seconds to realise he was safe and that a violent electrical storm was raging in the night sky above. There was no rain as yet, just peals of thunder and garish streaks of lightning.

  The next morning they set off for the town of Petauke on a steadily deteriorating road.

  ‘The first pothole always takes you by surprise,’ Mike said to Sam after the truck jumped like a 747 hitting severe turbulence. ‘You slow down a little, getting cautious, but when you haven’t seen a pothole for twenty or thirty kilometres you press a little harder on the accelerator, shift up into top again and then, bang, another pothole.’

  In some places the road was so bad that drivers had started a track along the dirt verge. Many of these little detours were also potholed, so there was no escape from the suspension-pounding dips.

  They were heading into real Zambia now. Away from the bustle of Lusaka and the big commercial farms that lined the road between the capital and Livingstone, there was little sign of wealth or prosperity on the long drive eastwards. Out here people still lived in mud huts with thatched roofs, their only visible wealth a flock of troublesome goats or maybe a few scrawny cattle. The vehicles, when they saw one, tended to be thirty- and forty-year-old Land Rovers held together with fencing wire and prayer.

  ‘Mostly, people get from point A to point B on foot and wherever you drive in this part of the country, at whatever time of day, you are guaranteed of seeing people walking on the side of the road,’ Mike said. He pointed out a woman on the roadside with a twenty-litre water container balanced on her turbaned head and three tiny children in tow. ‘It’s a damned nuisance when you need to stop and find somewhere private to go to the toilet.’ On several occasions he swerved violently to miss goats and cows, but after a while he was driving like a local, honking the horn, planting his foot and praying the livestock scattered.

  Petauke itself was a ramshackle collection of markets and trading stores, old colonial administration buildings, a couple of banks and a service station or two. Mike thought the town was simply there because it had to be there. A traveller could only go so many hundreds of kilometres before he or she needed somewhere to shop, to barter, to drink, to screw or to be screwed by bureaucrats. There were patches of colour here and there. Local women on their big shopping day out clad in bright floral wraps, and a travelling theatre troupe performing a noisy musical play on the back of a truck.

  ‘What’s the play about?’ George asked.

  Mike answered, ‘Toothpaste. Although most people out here don’t have a radio, let alone television or even electricity, advertising companies will always find a way to get their message across.’

  They stopped for Cokes at a shop that seemed to sell nothing but soft drinks and oversized skin-toned bras that only a grandmother would wear. The grizzled old grey-haired storekeeper insisted they consume their soft drinks on the spot because he didn’t want to risk losing his empty bottles. Mike’s bottle had been cleaned and reused and shipped so many times the glass was frosted with scratches, but the Coke tasted good.

  Mike sat on the concrete step of the shop and lit a cigarette. He wished again that Sarah was there to share the trip with him. At least Hess and Orlov were off their tail, he told himself, and while that should have been a relief to him he still felt strangely uneasy.

  Kylie and Mel wandered off towards the market, cameras in hand, but Mike wasn’t interested. From his experience of Zambian markets he knew they wouldn’t find much more than a few undersized tomatoes, bald tyres and more enormous bras. The rest of the group gathered around him as he laid a map out on the step.

  ‘The highway continues east to the border with Malawi,’ he said, tracing the line of the route they h
ad been following from Lusaka. ‘I’m sorry to say, the road doesn’t get any better along the way.’

  Linda groaned and said, ‘Those potholes are murder on my bum. I think I’ve done myself serious spinal damage!’

  ‘Massage?’ Terry queried.

  ‘Bite me,’ Linda replied.

  ‘What I suggest is that we take this short cut,’ Mike said, pointing to the unsealed road that branched off from where they were, running north-east to South Luangwa National Park. ‘It won’t be a comfortable ride, and it won’t be a fast one, but it should be fun.’

  ‘Fun?’ said Mel, her eyes bright and white in her dark face. ‘Fun, as in the other night, with blokes shooting at us and all?’

  ‘The Petauke Road is not much more than a dirt track over bad terrain, through thick bush. I’ve only ever heard of one other overland truck making it through, and that was a Bedford, just like ours,’ he said, looking for a reaction from the group.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said George. ‘Like trailblazers – sort of.’

  ‘Sort of. The views when we get to the other side of this ridgeline and start our descent into the Luangwa valley again are superb, and we might see some game on the way. It’s a part of Africa more primitive and inaccessible than any other we’re likely to see on the trip.’

  ‘I’m up for it,’ said Terry.

  ‘Me too,’ said Mel, hesitantly.

  ‘Have we got enough fuel, enough supplies?’ asked Kylie.

  ‘Yes. Nigel, what do you think?’ Mike asked.

  ‘I didn’t come here for air-conditioned comfort,’ Nigel said with a breaking grin.

  ‘Go for it,’ Sam said.

  The rain started as soon as they boarded the truck and Mike almost turned around then and there. The sky had been dark all morning and they had heard thunder in the distance, but Mike had expected a few more days of rainless electrical storms before the deluge began in earnest. He was wrong. The rain engulfed them like a hot, wet blanket. In the back, the crew rolled down the furled clear plastic windows and lashed them shut. This made the rear cab hotter than ever. Mike knew it would not be pleasant when they started to bump and slide up and down the coming hills.

  Nelson’s tiny windscreen wipers were next to useless at shifting the waves of water from the glass in front of him. Mike rolled down his window to stop the windscreen fogging up, and his right side became drenched as a result.

  The first stretch of road wasn’t too bad, as they started the long climb from Petauke up into the mountains. The road surface was good: wide, graded dirt, with only a few potholes. However, it steadily deteriorated. The surface became rutted and the corrugations deepened to rivulets with the sudden onset of the storm.

  As they got farther from the town, the foliage on either side of the road started to thicken and they saw fewer goats, cows and people. Soon it seemed as if the bush was gradually closing its bristling green jaws around them, swallowing their vehicle. Leaves and twigs brushed the sides and top of the high rear cab. Mike didn’t tell his crew, but he’d heard that the passengers in the other Bedford that had made this same trip had to get out and cut the bush away on the sides of the road in order to pass.

  He felt the wheel spin in slick mud a couple of times as they chugged up steep slopes or rounded tight bends. Mike had the Bedford in four-wheel drive, however, and he was reasonably confident they wouldn’t get bogged if he could keep the momentum up.

  They crested a high ridge in first gear, so high and steep, in fact, that someone had actually laid a hundred metres or so of concrete in two narrow, parallel ribbons over the peak on both sides. The concrete gave them the traction they needed to struggle over the top of the hill, but once on the other side the truck started to slide left and right as the strip road ran out. Mike wrestled with the steering wheel and Sam gripped the dashboard in front of him.

  ‘Put your seatbelt on!’ Mike barked as he wiped furiously at the fogged windscreen. ‘Everybody hang on!’ he yelled into the back of the cab as they fishtailed down the hill. He tried hard not to overcorrect, but at times the steering wheel was spinning so hard and fast it would have snapped his wrist if his hand had been caught inside it.

  As the slope started to bottom out Mike regained some control. His arms ached with the effort of steering, but they were not even halfway through the trying journey. He wiped the windscreen again. ‘Shit,’ he said, as the bubbling mass of dirty brown water came into view. At the bottom of the valley, a dry riverbed had come alive in a flash flood. The Bedford was picking up speed now and he knew that if he slammed on the brakes, they could end up sliding sideways into the river.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he said to himself, and put his foot down. The truck ploughed into the river. Someone yelped in the back as twin rooster-tails of water gushed up alongside them.

  ‘All right! You can do it. Gun it, man!’ Sam said, thumping the dashboard.

  The water nearly reached the top of the truck’s wheels and Mike could feel the force of it trying to push them sideways. He shifted down and revved the engine hard and Nelson forged ahead, fighting the force of the water, its wheels occasionally slipping on wet rock or sand.

  ‘Look out – tree!’ Sam shouted, and Mike glanced to the left. A broken branch, maybe five metres long and as thick as a man’s leg, was careening down the river towards them. Momentum is everything in a river crossing, he knew. He could have hit the brakes, but if he did they might get bogged mid-river or even swept away.

  Mike kept the pressure on the accelerator and gripped the wheel hard, bracing his arms for the impact. The branch slammed hard into the left front mudguard, just in front of Sam’s door, and then bounced along the side of the truck as they continued on. Mike heard a screeching noise and felt the steering wobble.

  At last they forded the river and rolled up onto the far stony bank, water gushing from a hundred pockets under the chassis. ‘Everyone all right?’ Mike called into the back.

  There was a chorus of exultant hoots and people were laughing with relief. Mike knew, however, that there would probably be more close calls. Instead of rising again, the track stayed flat as they crossed a narrow flood plain that in all likelihood would soon be flooded. Rushes and thickets of tall grass brushed the side of the truck and Mike could feel the wheels starting to slip again.

  They began to slow down, though not because he had eased his foot from the accelerator. ‘No, baby, no!’ he said to the truck. They were slowly sinking as the big wheels tore twin gashes deeper and deeper into the sludge of the flood plain. Instinctively, stupidly, he floored the accelerator, but that only lessened what little traction they were getting and, eventually, they stopped.

  ‘Unscheduled pit stop, folks,’ Mike called into the back cab. The cheers of a few moments before turned into groans.

  The rain had eased, but it was still falling steadily. Mike opened the door and jumped down from the cab. His feet immediately sank past the ankles into a molasses of cloying, wet black-cotton soil. His shirt was drenched within moments and he wiped running rainwater from his eyes.

  The situation was bad. The truck was stuck fast in the evil-smelling muck, right up to the axles. Nelson creaked and rocked as the passengers jumped down for a look. Mike trudged slowly around to the passenger side of the driver’s cab, the mud sucking at his sandals and almost pulling them off with each step. The left-hand panel around the wheel arch had taken a direct hit from the floating log and the buckled metal was now rubbing against the tyre. The rubber was scored where the metal had come into contact with it and Mike knew the tyre would blow if they didn’t fix the damage soon. But first they had to get out of the mud.

  Mike took off his mud-caked sandals and tossed them inside the cab. He walked to the back of the truck and opened the tool stowage area. ‘Any volunteers?’ he asked. All of them said yes or nodded, which pleased him. He handed out his store of tools.

  ‘Nigel, take the bow saw and the axe up there to the tree line, and cut as many logs and branches as you can, not
too big, but no twigs, OK?’ The trees started about a hundred and fifty metres away, where the land started to rise out of the flood plain.

  ‘Terry, George, you two and I have got some digging to do – around the wheels and in front of them, where we’ll lay the wood for traction. Sam, you can spell us on the shovels, and in the meantime get a crowbar on that bent panel and see if you can bend it back off the tyre. Right, let’s get to work!’

  ‘What about us?’ Linda asked, hands on hips and green eyes glaring as she stepped in front of Mike to block his path. Behind her were Mel and Kylie.

  ‘Mel, go with Nigel and carry back the wood he cuts.’ It would be heavy work and hot, even with the rain, but Nigel would be dog-tired and blistered after an hour’s wood chopping.

  ‘I’ll take that, shall I?’ Linda said as she snatched a shovel from Terry and plunged the head hard into the mud in front of a rear tyre. Her green tank top was plastered to her skin and her hair hung in a wet ponytail on her back. The muscles in her slender arms stood out as she heaved a clod of earth up and over her shoulder.

  Mike realised Linda was in excellent physical shape – much better shape than the overweight Englishman he had assigned the job to.

  ‘Terry, get the gas cooker out of the back and get a brew going, please,’ Mike said.

  ‘What about me?’ Kylie asked.

  ‘You’re our doc, Kylie. Get the first aid kit out and keep it somewhere handy and dry. I want everyone to take it easy, and be careful and keep their wits about them. Also, Kylie, I’d like you to sit up on the roof and keep a lookout over that adrenaline grass,’ Mike said, gesturing at the high brown grass that stretched away on either side of the truck. ‘Take an umbrella up with you.’

  ‘Why do you call it “adrenaline grass”?’ Kylie asked.

  ‘Because there are lots of things that hide in there that get your adrenaline going if you bump into them.’ They were still a good seventy kilometres from South Luangwa National Park, but there was no fence around the park and animals don’t recognise lines on a map. The grass could have been hiding elephants, buffalos, maybe even grazing hippos or the odd big cat. ‘Let’s get to work, people!’