by Tony Park
Tate didn't think twice. He lifted the AK, aimed quickly and fired two rounds at the corrupt minister. Emmerson ducked and turned around. He loosed off a burst of fire, but Tate was already running down the hill. Emmerson leaned on the roof of the four-by-four, steadying his rifle. Tate kept running. He had to get to Natalie. He readied himself for the tearing impact of the bullet. There was no turning away now, no running, no hiding. He would save her or he would die trying.
Tate looked at Emmerson and fancied he could see the hate in his expression from a hundred metres. Then something caught his eye.
From the bush, on the side of the track, came a blur of grey tailed by a cloud of disrupted leaves, twigs and dirt as the rhino burst from the bush. The creature lowered his head and charged into the open door of the Hummer. As it slammed closed it crushed Emmerson Ngwenya and the rifle fell from his hand. He screamed in agony, but the rhino kept its head against the door, scrabbling for purchase in the dirt with its big front feet.
When the rhino finally eased off and took a step back, Emmerson fell to the ground, his organs pulverised. The rhino lowered its head to the bleeding man and hooked him with its long, wickedly sharp front horn. The rhino lifted Emmerson off the ground then tossed him aside.
Tate kept running. He could see police in field uniforms disembarking from a Land Rover, and a woman in a business suit was following in their wake. As Tate ran closer he saw the rhino clearly. It was a big, old male, his hide scarred and ear mauled from past battles and his ribs starting to show. This was not one of the Bryants' sleek, pampered, overfed animals. This was the same bull he'd seen, the one whose presence had led them here from the other side of the country.
‘Tate!’ Natalie called.
He saw her now as she awkwardly made it to her feet and stumbled towards the rear of the Hummer. Tate sprinted towards her, but the rhino, which had started to amble back into the bush after losing interest in Emmerson Ngwenya's body, suddenly turned.
‘Get in the truck!’ Tate yelled.
Natalie paused, then looked back over her shoulder. She saw the rhino, its head up and full of the arrogance that comes with victory. Natalie backed along the vehicle and reached for the rear door handle. ‘It's locked!’ She started to run, towards Tate and away from the rhino.
Makuti lowered his head for another charge.
‘Into the trees!’ Tate shouted. But even as he said the words he knew it was impossible for Natalie to outrun or out-dodge a black rhino in full charge, and totally impossible for her to get up off the ground to a safe height without the use of her hands. As these thoughts came to him he was raising the rifle to his shoulder.
‘Tate!’ Natalie screamed, looking over her shoulder at the charging tonne of muscle, hide and bone, his horn lowered like a knight's lance.
Tate drew a breath and pulled the trigger. Makuti had turned and was just coming on broadside to Tate. At less than a hundred metres he couldn't miss. He held the pressure and raked the grand old animal's side. Tiny puffs of dust and flowering dark holes told him at least half-a-dozen of the rounds had found their mark, ripping through the tough skin and shredding the rhino's vital organs. It was the way the poachers did it. No finesse, no precision, no care.
Tate sprinted again, even as he saw the rhino's faltering steps. Natalie tripped and fell in the animal's path and Tate dropped the rifle, the magazine now empty, and reached for her. Makuti hit the ground, raising a cloud, and blew blood and dying breath out of his wide nostrils as his momentum ploughed grass and dirt.
Tate wrapped his arms around Natalie. The rhino had come to rest with its lower jaw almost on her heels. With his last ounce of strength Makuti gave a final dismissive toss of his head that would have skewered Natalie if Tate hadn't picked her up off the ground and crushed her to his chest.
Natalie buried her head in Tate's bush shirt, her breath coming in racking sobs, as he fumbled for the tape on her wrists and unwrapped them. Tate looked down at the dead rhino as Natalie shook her hands free of the remnants of her bindings. She placed her hands around his neck, looked up into his eyes and kissed him.
From the distance, back up the hill, where the other rhinos were still in their crates, they heard gunfire.
Epilogue
Charara Safari Area, Zimbabwe, 2011
Braedan's grave was in the cemetery in Bulawayo, in the company of friends who'd died during the war, so they hadn't erected a memorial on the hill in the middle of the bush, in sight of Lake Kariba.
On their second annual visit to the cemetery, George and Thandi also took the time to visit the grave of Sergeant Winston Ndlovu. They stayed a while, pulling the weeds out and tidying it as best they could. Afterwards they walked hand in hand back to the car and went for a cup of tea in town at a nice new café full of business-people and tourists.
George surprised Thandi in the café by asking her to marry him. George's divorce from Susannah had come through, and they'd been lovers, again, for more than a year, but as a high-profile government minister Thandi couldn't live openly with a married man.
‘Thandi,’ he said nervously, ‘I can understand if you don't want to … for political reasons. But I've decided to stay on in Zimbabwe. It's where I'm from and I want to see if I can help and …’
She reached out across the table and took his hand. ‘Of course I want to, George. Yes.’ She leaned across and they kissed, and George ordered champagne. He could tell people in the café recognised Thandi – she was being tipped as a possible future prime minister of Zimbabwe – and the whispers turned to murmurs, but he didn't care.
When he told his mother that evening over dinner she was delighted, but a little sad too. ‘I just wish your father could have been here for the wedding,’ she said. ‘All we ever wanted for you and Hope was a happy life in a peaceful country.’ She raised her glass. ‘To happiness and peace.’
George thought of all the sorrow in their lives, and their country, and he wondered if peace and happiness could ever really be possible. Thandi smiled at him, and he thought they just might be.
Two days later he, Thandi and Philippa drove to Makuti. Tate was waiting for them on the main road, with a white Land Rover Defender that had been a gift from a rhino-conservation charity overseas. When George pulled over he helped his mother get out of the car and into the passenger seat of the Land Rover. George and Thandi, both of them dismissing Tate's offer of a hand, climbed into the rear of the pickup and sat on the wheel wells as Tate negotiated the rough track to the top of the hill.
George's father had never really recovered from the stroke he'd suffered on the day of the gunfight with Emmerson Ngwenya and his cronies, and he'd passed away, peacefully, in hospital a month later. In some ways, George thought, it was probably for the best. Kiabejane was gone and Paul and Philippa Bryant had done well not to face prosecution for illegally moving so many of the state's rhinos from one part of Zimbabwe to another, and losing two – one dead and one illegally released – in the process.
Without Thandi Ngwenya's evidence, against her brother and in favour of the participants in Paul's audacious scheme, they probably all would have been locked up. The late Emmerson Ngwenya had been abandoned by his influential government friends, including the President, in the days after the shootout, and other witnesses, a chauffeur and a young boy, had come forward to corroborate Thandi's suspicions that Emmerson had murdered their father.
Thandi had saved George's life.
The police had put a dressing on George's gunshot wound and loaded him into Thandi's BMW. It was only thanks to her negotiating the winding road to Kariba at high speed that George had made it to hospital before he bled out. A doctor stabilised him and George was rushed to the airport for a flight to Johannesburg and the emergency surgery that had saved his life. Thandi had begged to travel with him to South Africa, but without her passport she hadn't been allowed. She'd caught a commercial flight and rushed to his bedside as soon as she could extricate herself from the investigation that follo
wed the killings at Makuti.
Thandi had also been instrumental in helping Philippa explain to the parks and wildlife authorities that the Bryants had only shipped their rhinos across the country illegally because they feared Emmerson would have killed them all. The surviving animals had been fed and watered, checked by a vet, and then turned around and driven back to Kiabejane.
Tate had changed for the better, George thought, in the past year. He looked fit and tanned and the mane of wavy professorial hair had been trimmed into an edgier, more rugged cut. He was also a more personable human being, though still quite reserved around people he didn't know. Tate smiled as he chatted to Philippa in the cab, and George was pleased to see his mother return the grin, plus a wink and a hand laid on Tate's as he changed gears. George had wondered if the trip to Kariba might be too taxing for her, emotionally and physically, but he reminded himself that she was probably tougher than the lot of them. Nothing had been said of Philippa's involvement in the illegal dehorning of the rhino and the investigators had assumed that Elias had been reporting directly to Emmerson Ngwenya.
While the Bryants' name had been cleared, there was no stopping the handover of Kiabejane to the local community. What was confirmed, however, as soon as the dust from the investigations had settled, was the appointment of Minister Thandi Ngwenya as chairperson of the Kiabejane management trust in the place of her late father.
Pip had decided to move into a retirement home in Bulawayo, much to George's relief, although she regularly organised bus trips for her fellow residents to travel out to the ranch, where she would sit for hours, while the other elderly people went on game drives, talking to and stroking the rhinos in the boma and then tending to Paul's grave on a hill overlooking their favourite dam on the property.
The climb to the top of the hill was slow and bouncy, but George felt good being out in the bush again, with the sun on his back. He squeezed Thandi's hand. Natalie knew about the divorce proceedings, and had met Thandi socially several times. She'd seen her parents drift apart into their separate worlds, but she was mature enough not to take sides. George hoped she'd be happy with his news. He got on well with Thandi's daughters, who seemed only to have bad memories of their late father.
Halfway up, at the spot none of them could forget, Tate stopped the truck and helped Pip out while George and Thandi climbed down from the back. They followed Tate, single file, a short way into the bush to the boulder with the view that looked out over the hills to the lake. George had been in the back of Thandi's BMW, being driven down the narrow winding road to Kariba, when Tate and a party of policemen had cautiously advanced up the hill.
The first of Ngwenya's henchmen they had come across was lying on his back with his throat cut. Braedan had evidently ambushed him and killed him first, but something had gone wrong for him afterwards. The police investigators theorised that he had begun sneaking up on the second gunman, having successfully outflanked him, but before he was close enough to get a clear shot at him, the man had spotted Braedan and opened fire on him, hitting him in the gut. The blood trails, the detectives said, showed Braedan had advanced on the man, courageous to the last, and taken another two shots to his arm and leg, but had managed to fire back and hit the other man in the shoulder. The two men were locked together in an obscene, bloody embrace, and in the process Braedan appeared to have killed the final gunman with his bare hands, strangling him before dying himself.
They paused by the rock and Tate looked at George. ‘You wanted to say something?’
George nodded. He felt a little self-conscious, not being given to public displays of emotion, but he also knew he needed to say this. ‘I didn't like Braedan Quilter-Phipps, for a long time. In fact, I hated him. I channelled my hatred for the war, and for my friend Winston's death, into my feelings for your brother.’
George swallowed hard, and Thandi moved next to him and took his hand. ‘It was small of me to see Winston's death as anything other than a tragic accident of war, but perhaps I was envious of the glory that was bestowed upon a young man who, for all he knew, had saved the life of my child. I was wrong.
‘Braedan was as much a victim of the war and its aftermath as any of us, yet he had the courage to carry on, despite what life threw at him. Others, me included, were happier to complain and turn our backs.’ George looked at his mother and she nodded to him. ‘Braedan saved our lives that day. No, more than that. He laid down his life for us.’
There was a movement behind them and George turned.
‘Sorry,’ Natalie said. ‘I wasn't going to come, but I decided in the end I should come back here, for his sake.’
‘Grandpa!’ said the fair-haired little boy in her arms. Natalie dropped him down and Tate smiled as his son ran to George's leg and tugged on his trousers. Natalie followed the boy and greeted George, Thandi and her grandmother, and kissed each of them in turn. In his hand the boy held a photo, printed on plain paper. ‘Rhino, Grandpa … rhino.’
George bent and scooped his grandson up into his arms. ‘Hello, my boy, what's this you've got here?’ George took the picture in his free hand and held it away so he could see it without his glasses. Thandi tickled the little boy while she craned her head around him to see the image.
‘Tate took it two days ago, Dad, just before dawn,’ Natalie said. ‘We've been dying to tell you and Grandma, but Tate made me wait.’
‘Let me see,’ Pip said, moving closer. George showed her the photo and she peered at it, moving his hand so it was just a few centimetres from her eyes. ‘My goodness, that looks like Chengetai.’ She placed a hand over her mouth.
‘You're right, it is her,’ Tate said. ‘And the calf behind her looks to be about one year old. It has to be Makuti's. They must have mated just before I had to kill him.’
George looked at Tate and saw the grin. The autopsy done on Makuti had shown that the old rhino was almost dead from the wounds inflicted by Emmerson Ngwenya before Tate delivered the coup de grâce to him, saving Natalie's life in the process. ‘What's going to happen to them now that you've finally found her? Does this mean my daughter won't have to live the life of a poor researcher in a tent any more?’
‘I'd miss the bush if we had to leave, Dad,’ Natalie said, hooking her arm through Tate's.
‘Parks and wildlife have decided to leave Chengetai and her calf here, and possibly release another male and female here from Kiabejane. If that happens we'll probably get funding to stay on, monitoring them all,’ Tate said.
‘Well, if it makes you happy, then good for you,’ George said.
‘I'm sorry, Dad,’ Natalie said, ‘I interrupted you before.’
George shook his head, then looked at his grandson in his arms. ‘No, there's nothing more to be said. Just make sure Braedan here knows his uncle died a hero.’
Acknowledgements
As I write this, the future of the rhino in Zimbabwe is by no means certain. The same goes for democracy. However, while travelling in Zimbabwe, researching and writing this book and some of the previous ones, the thing that has struck me time and again, through the years of privation and ruin, is the underlying conviction of the people of that country that things will change for the better one day. There is no lack of will, but sadly no lack of obstructions either.
Several people inside and outside of Zimbabwe helped me a great deal with this book and I'd like to thank: Rowan Calder of Sirtrack Tracking Solutions for his information on radio tracking devices; Neville Rosenfeld and Georgina Winch for information about the Bulawayo/Plumtree area; Dr Peter Buss, Senior Manager of the Kruger National Park Veterinary Unit in South Africa, for telling and showing me how to dart animals; Peter Petter-Bowyer, author of Winds of Destruction, a history of the Rhodesian Air Force, for details of helicopter call signs and airfield locations; Dave Munro and Ian Puller for information about the Rhodesian African Rifles; Wally van Welie of Aviation Adventures in Hazyview, South Africa, for taking me up in a microlight; and Michele Hofmeyr, manager of the Krug
er National Park plant nursery, for facts about endangered plants, and for once again finding people for me to interview.
Taku Scrutton, Ross and Margie Milne, Julia Salnicki, Neil Johns, Tracey Hawthorne, Jim Welsh and Elizabeth Reese all read all or part of the manuscript and provided invaluable feedback and corrections on places, language and culture in Zimbabwe and the former Rhodesia. I thank you all for your time.
My friends inside Zimbabwe – Dennis, Liz, Don, Vicky, Sally, Scotty, Doug, Helen, and Colin – all make travelling and staying in that country a pleasure, even when times are tough. I hope we'll all see happier times there soon.
Two civilian Air Rhodesia Viscount passenger aircraft en-route from Kariba to Salisbury (now Harare) were downed during the Rhodesian Bush War by ZIPRA forces armed with Soviet-made SA-7 surface to air missiles. The Viscount Hunyani was downed in September 1978 and the Umniati in February 1979. Although I've changed the date, I drew heavily on the details of the Hunyani tragedy when writing the scene of the Viscount crash in this book. Of the fifty-six crew and passengers on board the Hunyani, eighteen survived the forced landing in a cotton field, although ten of these passengers, including seven women and two children, were subsequently murdered by ZIPRA forces that arrived shortly after the crash. All fifty-nine people on board the Viscount Umniati died when their aircraft crashed. I drew much of my information on this section from Rob Rickards's memorial website, Viscounts in Africa – The Air Rhodesia Story.
My prime research source for background on the Selous Scouts was the book Pamwe Chete by the unit's former commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ron Reid-Daly. Friendly-fire incidents, where scouts dressed as enemy combatants were mistakenly killed by Rhodesian Security Forces, did happen.
I've probably distorted history a bit by having Braedan's Rhodesian Light Infantry Fire Force stick in Matabeleland in 1979, but other than that I've tried to stay as true as possible to the military tactics, techniques and procedures of the time.
