The Prey

by Tony Park

  Kylie smiled at him. Jan had been put on the spot, and he’d done what he always did best – set everyone back on their butts and reminded them why he was the boss.

  Kylie’s BlackBerry was sitting on the boardroom table. It vibrated. From the corner of her eye she saw Jan and Musa both reach into their shirt pockets. She and Jan exchanged a glance. Group messages usually meant one thing. Trouble.

  Jan scrolled through the message and looked at Kylie. She’d already read it. ‘Two dead, one missing,’ she said.

  ‘This is the last thing we need right now in South Africa,’ Musa said.

  ‘It’s the last thing we need any time, anywhere, Musa,’ Jan said.

  ‘Of course.’ He looked chastised.

  ‘You’re right, though,’ Jan nodded, ‘it couldn’t have come at a worse time with the South African press baying for our blood over the new mine.’

  ‘Should we take a break now?’ the trainer asked.

  ‘No.’ Jan fixed him with his grey eyes. ‘You can really earn your money now by preparing Kylie and Musa to face the media on a realtime critical issue. We’ve just had a security guard and a graduate trainee environmental officer killed in a gunfight underground in our goldmine in South Africa. A third man is missing. The people responsible are what we call zama zamas – illegal miners, sometimes referred to as pirates. They’ve taken hostages before, so it’s possible they’ll ransom the missing man, Chris Loubser.’

  ‘Shit, it doesn’t get more critical than that,’ the trainer said.

  Musa looked at the ceiling. ‘Welcome to my world.’

  Jan picked up the phone on the boardroom table and called his personal assistant, Margaret Lamont. ‘Mags, I need you to set up a video call with Cameron McMurtrie in South Africa.’

  Jan hung up. ‘So, Kylie, given you’re halfway through your first media training session and only a few weeks into the job, what do we say to the media about this one?’

  She’d been making notes while Jan had been on the phone. She’d flicked through the trainer’s handbook and checked some other notes she’d taken while he’d been speaking. She took a deep breath. ‘We need to give the immutable facts of the incident – who, what, where and when, if not why. We don’t know why the zama zamas would have killed these guys. I’m assuming the security guard would have been armed, but if our environmental manager and his sidekick were down there it doesn’t sound like our guys were looking for a fight. We need to express remorse for the loss of our people and condolences to their families and position Global Resources as the innocent victim of criminal activity. Our number one priority is getting this guy, Chris –’

  ‘Loubser,’ Musa prompted.

  ‘Right, getting Chris Loubser back alive and making sure these pirates are brought to justice.’

  Jan leaned back in his swivel chair again while he thought for three seconds. ‘Mister media expert, what do you think?’

  ‘I think Kylie’s been paying attention during her training today,’ the trainer said.

  ‘I felt I had to after you humiliated me at the beginning of the session,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t blame him,’ Jan said. ‘The real media are going to be a lot tougher on you, and it won’t end with this terrible incident. Next, you’re going to have to sell South Africa on the idea of a new mine being opened on the doorstep of the country’s favourite national park.’

  There was a knock on the door and Margaret came in. She nodded greetings to them all. Mags was twenty-five and looked a picture of innocence with her blonde curls, but Kylie knew from personal experience she guarded Jan and his diary like a Rottweiler.

  Mags turned on the widescreen plasma TV monitor mounted on the wall and sat at the table and dialled on a desktop console.

  The screen came to life and they saw a utilitarian meeting room. The decoration on the miners’ wall consisted of whiteboards covered in targets and plans. The only man in the room sat at a circular timber laminate table and was leaning forward, fiddling with the monitor he was looking into.

  ‘Howzit, boss,’ Cameron McMurtrie said. He wore overalls with the Global Resources logo embroidered above the breast pocket.

  ‘Fine thanks, Cameron. Sorry to be talking to you for this reason, and sorry for the loss of your men.’

  ‘Thanks boss.’ Cameron held out a personnel file at arm’s length so he could read something and Kylie recognised the sign of someone who would soon need reading glasses. Men could be quite vain about such things, she knew. ‘Themba Tshabalala was a new guy and I didn’t know him well, but old Paulo Barrica was a good oke and straight as can be.’

  Kylie had never met Cameron McMurtrie in person but had seen him in a couple of video conferences. His eyes were red-rimmed and his face and shirt were smeared with dirt. She guessed he’d already been down to the scene of the killings and hadn’t yet taken the time to shower.

  ‘Do you think that was a factor in what happened?’

  ‘Barrica’s honesty?’ Cameron shrugged. ‘Maybe. If I had more security guards like Paulo, these bloody zama zamas would find it a lot harder to stay in business. The truth is that some of my guards are directly involved in letting the pirates in and out, or getting food down the mine and gold out, and others would probably turn a blind eye to the smuggling. Barrica had the guts to come to me a couple of times and tell me when stuff was being moved down the mine, and we were able to confiscate a lot of contraband – food, drugs, booze, tools, the sorts of thing the pirates need to stay in business. He would have made some enemies so, yes, I guess it could have been a set-up to kill him, but I didn’t think the zama zamas would be stupid enough to try and take out two environmental guys at the same time.’

  Jan nodded, and looked at Kylie.

  She’d made some more notes, and she looked up from them to the camera mounted at the top of the screen they were watching. ‘Cameron, what do you know about Chris Loubser?’

  Cameron rubbed his chin. ‘Howzit, Kylie. He’s very good at his job; sometimes too good. He’ll get me to stop operations if he sees something or his monitoring tells him something’s not right. He’s a stickler for the regulations and safety, which is how it should be, even if he can be a pain in the arse, you know?’

  She nodded, although she wanted to tell him that safety really was a priority and not a pain the arse. She held her tongue, though, as an argument was not what any of them needed right now.

  ‘Also, between us, Chris doesn’t like being underground. He’s never said anything but I’ve been down with him and I can tell when a man doesn’t want to be there. It’s not for everyone and it doesn’t stop him doing his job, but I’m worried about him if he’s alive and maybe hurt down there with those bastards.’

  ‘So we need to act quickly,’ Jan said.

  ‘The guys are pissed off by this attack, boss.’ Cameron’s hands, visible on the tabletop, balled into fists. Kylie saw his eyes harden as he leaned closer to the camera. ‘I’m putting together a team to go down there and get Chris out.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you wait for the police?’ Kylie asked.

  ‘I don’t know what state Chris is in – there was blood all through the madala side. Besides, my guys know the mine and the zama zamas better than the police do. They’re ready to moer the bastards.’

  Kylie guessed moer meant something bad. ‘I’m worried about more of our employees getting injured. Have you called the police?’

  Cameron shook his head. ‘Kylie, with respect, this is Africa. The police don’t want to get involved because they’re not experienced in working underground. Plus, we think the local commander is being paid off by the illegal miners. We have to do our own dirty work.’

  ‘Global Resources can’t be a party to vigilante action and –’

  ‘Boss,’ Cameron pointedly turned away from Kylie, ‘you know what needs to be done and you know we can sort this out ourselves.’

  Jan leaned back in his chair, bringing his hands together and to his lips as he always did when
he was thinking. He nodded, but said: ‘Kylie’s right on this one, on both counts, Cameron. This isn’t the old days. There’s a crime scene underground and the police are going to have to be called in. I also agree that the last thing we want now is any more of our people hurt as a result of this thing. Let’s all take a deep breath.’

  Cameron rubbed his forehead with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. ‘Ja, all right, boss, but the guys won’t like us doing nothing. The union’s going to bliksem us over this as well. COSATU’s already gone on record as opposing the new coalmine in the game reserve, and there’s the ongoing agitation over workplace deaths in the mines.’

  ‘But it’s not a game reserve,’ Kylie said. ‘If we’re using incorrect terminology in private it will spill out into the open arena. That land is privately owned by the local people, it’s no longer part of the Sabi Sand Game Reserve.’

  Cameron snorted. ‘Tell that to the animals that live there, Kylie.’

  ‘Enough, Cameron,’ Jan said. ‘Kylie’s right. We need to stick to the facts. Our priority now is to get this mess sorted, and that man out alive. Kylie, when are you due to fly out?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning, boss. On the Sydney–Joburg direct flight.’

  ‘You’re still coming over here?’ Cameron eyeballed her.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ Kylie said, quicker than she’d meant.

  ‘You’ll be walking into a shit storm,’ Cameron said. ‘If you thought pitching the new mine was going to be tough, then it just got a lot worse.’

  ‘I’m not the sort of person who backs down from a challenge,’ Kylie spat back.

  ‘OK,’ Jan placed his palms down on the table with enough force to silence Cameron and Kylie. ‘Enough. Two of our men are dead and their families must be cared for, and another of our colleagues is missing. Kylie, change of plans – get Mags to book you on tonight’s flight via Perth. That will put you on the ground a working day earlier. Use the time between now and when you arrive in South Africa to thoroughly ground yourself in our operations and business there. Cameron, if you lead some maverick rescue operation without my approval I’ll have your balls as a paperweight. The South African media went into a frenzy last time a mine security contractor slotted a bunch of zama zamas. We don’t need any more bad press. Understood?’

  ‘All right, boss.’ Cameron looked at his watch. ‘If there’s nothing more to discuss, I have to contact the dead men’s families and call Chris Loubser’s parents again.’

  ‘Good luck,’ Jan said, and indicated to Mags to terminate the video conference. He turned to the media trainer. ‘Give Kylie the toughest time imaginable – it’s going to be far worse for her in Africa.’

  4

  Tertia Venter zipped up her green polar fleece with the lion’s head logo embroidered above the left breast. It was going to be another perfect sunny September day in the lowveld, but the mornings were still nippy.

  ‘Morning, my boy,’ she said to the old bull elephant they called Marula, who was peeling the bark from a tree with his left tusk, his remaining good one, fifty metres from her house. Tertia got into the old open-topped Land Rover Defender and turned the key. The vehicle, Old Smokey, was like her – not a creature of the morning. Eventually it started.

  She drove along her gravel driveway out onto the rutted road that led from the deliveries gate to the back of the main lodge. It wasn’t far, not even a kilometre, but hunting lions had been seen between her house and the lodge the night before, according to her head guide, Tumi Mabunda.

  Tertia shifted down to first gear as she drove down the bank of the dry riverbed, then selected diff lock as she hit the sand. She gunned the diesel engine and looked left and right in case the resident leopard was in one of his favourite trees. No luck. It was cold in the riverbed, a few skerricks of early morning mist still visible in the air, but the temperature rose as soon as she climbed out of the low-lying area.

  The grass on the plain that gave the lodge its name – Lion Plains – was golden yellow and she scanned it for the tuft of Big Boy’s tail, but the old pride male was not out marking his territory this morning. Perhaps his lionesses had killed in the night and he was there now, muscling in for the good bits while his ladies and his cubs waited none too patiently. She hoped something was going right for someone or something this morning. Her time was running out.

  She’d done this drive almost every day for the past eleven years. It had been her dream come true; hers and her ex-husband, Karl’s.

  Staying on had been worth it; she’d wanted to live here since she was a child. The property, now called Lion Plains, had been bought by her grandparents as marginal cattle-farming land, infested with remnant wildlife, in the forties. They had hunted game on the property, known then as Sunnydale, and their children and grandchildren had spent family holidays on this wild tract of bushveld and golden grass. In the early sixties, her grandparents had joined with other local landowners to create the Sabi Sand Game Reserve, dropping fences between their properties to allow wildlife the freedom to move. Unlike on many of the other farms, there hadn’t been enough money in their family to develop a lodge or luxury camp for tourists or hunters. Tertia’s grandfather had been a better farmer than he was investor and a series of his get-rich-quick schemes had gone belly up. When he died from a heart attack, Tertia’s grandmother and parents had wanted to sell Sunnydale.

  Tertia, however, had an eye on the future. It was the early nineties and change was coming to South Africa. Many whites feared a bloodbath if Nelson Mandela and the ANC eventually took power, but Tertia predicted – correctly, as it turned out – that Mandela would oversee a peaceful transition and that the foreign tourists who had boycotted her country during the years of apartheid, would one day be drawn to reserves such as Sabi Sand in droves.

  Her father was doubtful and her siblings more interested in studying subjects that would lead to careers abroad, but Tertia’s mother encouraged her to look further into the viability of the idea of building a luxury tented camp on Sunnydale.

  She met Karl when she was at university and fell in love with him. When she graduated, her father begrudgingly agreed to invest in Tertia’s plan to breathe new life into Sunnydale, which Tertia immediately renamed Lion Plains. Karl’s work kept them apart in the first year, but he always maintained a strong interest in the game farm.

  When Karl managed to get time off and make it to the farm, they had the place to themselves, living in a safari tent, with a caretaker to keep the donkey boiler stoked to provide hot water, and the man’s wife to wash the clothes.

  By the time change came to her troubled South Africa, with Nelson Mandela’s election as president in 1994, Tertia found herself in an empty house, with no husband. Karl had left her for a new life in a new country.

  After both her parents were killed in a car accident, she and her siblings sold the family home in upmarket Rosebank and Tertia invested her share of the inheritance in building the accommodation units on the farm and renovating the old farmhouse as the main lodge and dining and entertainment area. With her parents taken from her in tragic circumstances and her husband gone, Tertia had poured her fortune, her tears and her wounded heart into the lodge.

  The building gleamed the colour of an elephant’s ivory, newly washed in an African stream. Tertia pulled up to the office, located behind the souvenir shop, and got out of the Land Rover.

  Tertia had had Lion Plains up and running in time to catch a wave of overseas tourist interest in South Africa. She’d put her business degree and her brains to their best use and created a camp that had won accolades in premier travel magazines around the world. The rich and the famous had stayed in her camp. It was her life’s work, her legacy and she couldn’t be more proud.

  She let herself into the office and turned on the computer and the television. Portia, one of the waitresses from the dining room, knocked on the doorframe and entered with a tray of plunger coffee, low-fat milk, and two health rusks. Tertia bade her good morn
ing and asked if she was well, and how her three year old was doing. When Portia left, Tertia sipped her coffee and reached for the remote. She was turning up the volume when she saw the crawler message on the bottom of the screen: TWO DEAD, ONE MISSING IN GOLDMINE BATTLE.

  The phone rang.

  ‘Kak,’ she swore as she pressed mute. It was just after seven in the morning and the receptionist wouldn’t be at work until eight. She wanted to watch the television news – anything about mining was of interest to her these days. ‘Good morning, Lion Plains Lodge, Tertia speaking. How can I help?’

  It was a New Zealander, a man with no concept of time differences, enquiring if they had a vacancy in three months’ time. ‘Just let me check, sir.’

  Tertia minimised the window in which she had open a Global Resources media release – more spin and lies about their damned new mining project that would put her out of business – and clicked on the diary. She had a vacancy, and told the man on the phone, leaving out the fact that he might find his stay at Lion Plains, a ‘tranquil, exclusive private game reserve’, interrupted by the boom of explosives and the dust of an open-cut coalmine wafting over his luxury safari tent. He asked for a price and she gave him the standard rate. He said he’d get back to her.

  Tertia hung up the phone and released the mute button on the television. The story on the mining incident was coming to an end. The reporter was doing a voice-over on some vision from an old story which included a shot of the entrance to the mine. It was Global Resources’ Eureka mine at Barberton.