Dictator (10 page)

Carver burst out of the smoke and saw a knot of men ahead of him, apparently unharmed by the grenade. They were shouting, bringing their guns to bear on him. Behind them he could just make out the grenade-tipped barrel of the RPG, and beyond that the outline of the helicopter coming in low and flat over a copse of trees.

He did not stop running, shooting as he went. He was beyond any rational thought, entirely caught up in the frenzy of battle. He was dimly aware that he’d taken a hit in his left arm, though there was no pain there as yet.

He saw two of the men in front of him go down.

He sensed rather than heard the click as the firing pin of his gun came down on an empty chamber.

He felt the cracking of broken bones as he smashed the stock of the MP5 into the face of the last man standing between him and the grenade-launcher.

And then he was throwing himself with an inarticulate scream of rage at the man crouching on one knee holding the RPG, and a jet of flame was shooting from the rear end of its barrel, scorching Carver’s skin as he hit the man and his weapon. He knocked them both to the ground, smashing his own head against the metal body of the launcher and sending the RPG shooting low across the football field before it hit the modest little stand and blew it to smithereens.

Over the next few seconds, Carver lay dazed and winded on the ground, battered by the downdraft that told him the helicopter was landing. He was aware of the RPG operator wriggling out from under him and running away as fast as his legs would carry him. He did not, however, see Killaman emerge from the tangle of bodies behind him, drag himself upright, pull out the flick-knife and stagger towards his unprotected back.

23

Before the skids of the helicopter’s undercarriage had hit the ground, Justus was racing across the open ground towards it, urging Zalika to keep pace with him as he went. He tried to keep his body between hers and anyone who might still be out there, but only a few wild, aimless shots were fired in their direction. The downdraft had cleared away the smoke from the flare and it looked as though whoever had been attacking them had lost the will to fight.

Flattie Morrison was standing in the open doorway of the helicopter firing bursts at the retreating figures to speed them on their way. He stopped shooting and reached one hand down to help Zalika up into the passenger compartment.

Justus was next in line. He turned his head to look back across the football pitch.

‘Get in!’ Morrison shouted.

Justus ignored him. Instead he sprinted away from the chopper, back towards the remaining whispers of smoke.

Morrison made Zalika comfortable, then, still standing, turned back to follow Justus’s progress.

Now he knew what his old comrade had seen. Right in the middle of the pitch a black-clad body Morrison instantly recognized as Carver’s was lying face-down, moving slightly, as though retching or gasping for air.

Behind the body, another man was staggering towards it with a knife.

Two more steps and the knife would be plunged into Carver’s defenceless back. Justus stopped some forty or fifty metres away from the knifeman, raised his shotgun, took aim and fired; pumped more rounds into his chamber; pulled the trigger until his magazine was empty and his target blown away.

Morrison gave a wry smile. His wartime lessons had clearly left their mark: fire till the last round is gone. And only then ask questions.

Justus jogged up to the knifeman’s dead body, gave it a quick look, then bent down and helped Carver to his feet. He draped Carver’s right arm across his shoulder and the two of them staggered back across the field.

Morrison raised his gun and swept it from side to side, looking for any possible threats to the two men, but none came. The field behind them was empty, save for the bodies of the dead and those too wounded to walk, crawl or drag themselves away.

Now Justus and Carver were by the helicopter door, and Morrison was taking Carver and hauling him aboard.

So he only had one hand on his gun. And his eyes were focused on Carver, not the field.

He did not see the man lying not far from the changing-room building – the man Carver had hit and wounded barely a minute earlier – summon up the last of his strength, raise himself to his elbows, point his gun and fire.

‘Fuck,’ said Flattie Morrison, almost in surprise.

Then he keeled forward, half in and half out of the helicopter, blood seeping across the back of his shirt.

Justus raised his gun, holding it like a pistol, but there was no need to fire. The wounded man had already slumped back to the ground.

Justus dropped the shotgun and grabbed hold of Morrison’s body. By the time he had dragged it inside the cabin, the pilot had already taken off and was heading for the hills and the safe embrace of the Zambezi river gorge.

Carver looked round the cabin. Zalika was strapped into one of the seats, still disoriented but physically unharmed. Morrison was either dead, or about to be. Justus looked exhausted, caught by the comedown that hits a fighting man when the adrenalin has drained away. He raised a hand and smiled weakly when Carver caught his eye.

‘Nice work,’ said Carver.

Then he, too, slumped back, mentally and physically spent but – the only thing that mattered – still alive.

24

The first light of dawn was glowing on the eastern flanks of Table Mountain as the executive jet began its approach into Cape Town. The doctor Wendell Klerk had sent with it had formally pronounced Flattie Morrison dead before they took off from Tete. In the first hour of the flight he had administered sedatives to Zalika Stratten and done what he could to stitch up the wound in Carver’s left bicep, and ease the pain in his ribs.

Before the sedatives had sent her under, Zalika had asked to speak to Carver.

In the cramped aisle of the passenger compartment, he crouched down beside the head of the settee on which she had been laid out.

‘I just wanted to say thank you,’ she began.

‘That’s all right. I’m sorry it turned out the way it did. You shouldn’t have had to go through something like that. But we didn’t have a choice. We had to move in when we did.’

She reached up and gripped Carver’s wrist. Her voice was an urgent whisper and there was an anxious, pleading look in her sapphire eyes. ‘I understand. But please, I’m begging you, please don’t tell my uncle, you know, that Moses took his clothes off and … you know. It’s just, well, it’s not something I want to talk about.’ Carver said nothing. He thought of the report he was due to write, accounting for all of his actions. He’d attacked ahead of schedule, and that would be hard to explain if he didn’t mention that Mabeki had been about to sexually assault Zalika. But surely she had the right to some privacy. If she didn’t want people to know, why should he make an issue of it?

‘Don’t worry,’ Carver said, ‘I won’t tell a soul. Ever. That’s a promise.’

She looked at him with sleepy eyes and nodded, as if satisfied he was telling the truth. Then she sank back down on to the settee. Her eyelids slowly fell shut. And as she drifted off to sleep, Carver was sure that he could detect, for the very first time, the faintest hint of contentment on Zalika Stratten’s face.

When Carver arrived in Cape Town, the news of Zalika Stratten’s rescue had not yet hit the South African media. But the
Cape Times
was running a story from Sindele. A Malemban government spokesman had announced that all the Stratten family properties in Malemba had been appropriated by the state, including their many farms and the Stratten Reserve. The farmlands would, the spokesman said, be divided between thousands of war veterans and their families. The reserve, however, would continue to operate as a tourist attraction and a valuable source of foreign currency. ‘In honour of its importance to the economy, and the great value that he places upon our country’s natural heritage, President Gushungo, the Father of the Nation himself, will personally supervise the transfer of the reserve into the people’s hands. He will be using the Strattens’ former estate house, and the land around it, as his personal headquarters during this process.’ When questioned, the spokesman assured reporters that the President’s occupation of what had been, arguably, the most beautiful private home in Malemba was a purely temporary issue. In time, it too would be handed over for the benefit of all the people of Malemba.

As Carver was driven away to give Wendell Klerk his account of Zalika’s rescue, his mind turned to Justus Iluko. They’d said goodbye at Tete airport.

‘Thanks,’ Carver had said, ‘you know …’

He hadn’t spelled it out. Both men knew that Justus had saved his life. There was no need to make a big deal about it.

‘No problem,’ Justus had replied.

‘Keep in touch, yeah?’

‘Sure,’ the Malemban had said, though his smile suggested he thought it was pretty unlikely.

Carver had given him a contact number anyway, and Justus had responded with the address of his family farm. It hadn’t seemed significant at the time. But now, sitting in the limo riding into Cape Town from the airport, Carver realized he’d been given a chance to show his appreciation for everything Justus had done.

Carver’s first thought was simply to wire him a hundred grand in US dollars – just a fraction of his own fee for the job. But it didn’t take five seconds’ thought to realize that in a small rural community in Malemba that kind of money would cause as many problems as it solved. People would look on their newly rich neighbour with a festering mixture of envy, greed and resentment. Far better to give him, say, ten up front, but then set up a discreet trust fund for the children to make sure they got a good education. Justus would prefer that too: those kids meant everything to him. Carver made a mental note to call his banker as soon as he got back to Geneva.

Shortly after dawn, the first police arrived in Chitongo and set to work examining the building where Zalika Stratten had been held, the warehouse and its surroundings, and the area around the football pitch. A uniformed constable was picking his way through a group of four bodies, all lying within metres of one another, when he stopped and frowned as a fractional movement caught his eye. He got down on his knees next to a body and leaned over it, his head tilted so that one ear was just above the body’s mouth. Then he gasped, jumped back up to his feet and shouted out, ‘Doctor, doctor! Over here! One of them is still alive!’

Part 2
Now

25

The second time Wendell Klerk summoned Carver, he phrased it as an invitation: a weekend at Campden Hall, his estate in Suffolk, seventy miles north of London. ‘I’m having a few people over. I think you’d enjoy it,’ he said. ‘If there’s a better chef or a finer wine-cellar in any private home in England, I’ve yet to see them. And I’ve got a shooting set-up that’s second to none.’

Whatever the reason Klerk was so keen to see him, Carver didn’t think it had much to do with good company or fine wine. But the Mozambique assignment had given him a lot of respect for the man. In a business filled with double-crossing bastards, Klerk had told it straight, kept his word and paid in full when the job was done. That was a decade ago now, but there was no harm in at least listening to what he had to say.

‘Sounds good,’ Carver said.

‘Excellent. You still based in Geneva? I’ll send a plane to pick you up.’

The plane duly arrived one Friday afternoon in May, and a uniformed chauffeur driving a Bentley Arnage limousine collected Carver from the airport and drove him to Campden Hall. A butler opened a front door that nestled beneath the portico of classical Ionic columns that dominated the building’s Palladian facade. When Carver stepped into the marble-floored grand hall, from which a double staircase rose through the heart of the house, one of the most striking women he had ever seen in his life was waiting there to greet him.

She walked towards him with a click-clack of teetering patent black heels and a smile that proclaimed there was nothing, absolutely nothing in the whole wide world that could possibly delight her more than saying hello to Samuel Carver. Her glossy auburn hair floated around her shoulders like a slow-motion close-up in a shampoo commercial. Below the breasts that pressed against the soft cream silk of her blouse a broad black belt – patent, to match her shoes – emphasized the slenderness of her waist, while an apparently demure knee-length black pinstriped skirt was somehow cut to suggest every inch of the long, slender thighs sheathed in sheer black stockings that swayed beneath it.

‘Hello, I’m Alice, Mr Klerk’s personal assistant,’ she said.

Her voice was soft, pliant, almost submissive; but for a fleeting moment Carver caught a much sharper glint in her hazel eyes and the hint of an ironic twist to the corners of her mouth. Alice, he decided, knew precisely the effect she had on men and liked to play with it a little.

She paused, as if daring him to make some cheap crack about the nature of the assistance she offered, then went on: ‘Mr Klerk is so sorry he can’t be here to meet you himself. He’s tied up on a call. But if you follow me, I’ll do my best to make you feel at home.’