Far Horizon (13 page)

‘OK. You get a helicopter, you charter it, maybe even buy it – I don't know for sure. Your helicopter pilot tells you how you can sabotage the National Parks helicopter and you buy someone to do that for you. You take your helicopter and you use it to drive one of the biggest elephants left in Africa across the border, away from where he is protected by men with guns, into a godforsaken part of one of the world's poorest countries, where you know you won't find any police or rangers for hundreds of kilometres. You shoot your elephant, or try and shoot it, but you stumble on to some people who shouldn't be there – you,' he said, nodding to Mike. ‘One of them points a rifle at you so
you kill him. You don't want any witnesses. You kill your elephant, your blacks cut out the ivory and you hover over the dead elephant while they load in the ivory. Then they climb aboard.'

‘Sounds expensive,' Mike said.

‘It is. More than even those tusks are worth. Assuming you could find a buyer.'

‘Why not shoot the elephant from the helicopter and be done with it?' Mike asked. He lurched forward and grabbed the dashboard as Theron geared down suddenly and swerved to miss a fallen branch that had partially blocked the road.

‘This comes back to my theory, that this is a hunt. For a trophy – a bloody big trophy, man. It's not about money, it's about men on foot tracking big game – with some help from a helicopter, of course. Have you ever hunted, Major?'

‘Call me Mike. No. I've seen enough killing in my time.'

Theron nodded. ‘Me too. But I used to hunt when I was a boy, with my father. Small buck, impala mostly, but there was nothing like that thrill. Primitive, you know.'

‘Why
two
white men, plus maybe the helicopter pilot?'

‘The professional hunter and his rich client. In this case, the very rich client.'

‘American?' Mike guessed.

‘Maybe. Or German, or Italian.'

‘But you've got your suspicions about the hunter. You think you know who he is?'

‘Ah, now that would be wrong of me to accuse a
man without any proof. Let us just say that we know of a few hunters who have bent the rules from time to time, yes?'

Bending the rules. Letting a client shoot a couple more buffalo or kudu than their permit allowed them was one thing, but to chase a protected animal out of a national park across an international border, kill it and murder a Mozambican ranger in the process was not bending the rules – that was obliterating them. Mike wondered briefly what sort of man would pay so much for the pleasure of killing one creature, but gave up. He had stopped really trying to fathom mankind after Rwanda. They left the theories there and filled the rest of the bumpy road trip with the stories of their lives.

‘I also was in the army. I was in Angola, but I had enough after that. Mind you, I've seen more than my share of action in the police since then.'

Theron explained that his love of wildlife and the bush had led him to the Animal Protection Unit. The unit was high profile, and specialised in infiltrating and busting poaching and smuggling rings.

‘Must be pretty nerve-racking, working under cover,' Mike suggested.

‘Sometimes. We pose as sellers or buyers of wildlife. On one trip I went to the Netherlands. We were targeting a ring that was smuggling reptiles from South Africa to Europe. I was supposed to be a snake collector and I hate the goddamned things! I actually had to hold a rock python and pretend I was in love with it. Man, I nearly shit myself!' His whole body shook as he laughed out loud. ‘So, why am I taking
you to Mapai, to a clinic in this godforsaken part of the country?' he asked.

Mike told him about Isabella.

‘Sounds like you're serious about her?' Theron ventured.

‘It's looking that way.'

‘Good for you, man,' he said. ‘I'm married. Three teenage daughters. You can't beat a family – they'll lock you up if you do!' He laughed again.

From Isabella's description of the clinic Mike knew that it was part of a mission station, run by a Catholic priest, a kilometre before Mapai on the road they were travelling. He checked the map and gave Theron the directions, telling him to look out for a right turn.

‘Jesus, what a mess,' Theron said, pointing to the side of the road.

An ancient bus was interlocked with the prime mover of a long-distance lorry. The trailer was nowhere to be seen. The two vehicles were meshed as one, obviously having hit head on at some considerable speed. Most of the bus's windows had either shattered on impact, or been smashed so that survivors could be extracted. The faded blue sides were now painted dark brown with streaks of dried blood.

‘Isabella was held up here because of this bus accident.' Mike wondered if by tomorrow he would be describing Isabella as his fiancée.

As they neared the town, the bush was thinning out, felled for building and cooking fires by the residents of the unseen settlement ahead of them. When they crested a small rise, Mike looked across to his left and saw the setting sun was the colour of blood.

‘T
heron needs to speak to you.'

The policeman's name reverberated around Mike's head as he drove through the gates of the Punda Maria rest camp in the north of Kruger National Park and stopped the yellow overland truck in the camping ground.

Jane Muir leaned into the front cab of the truck from her seat behind him. ‘Are you OK?' she asked, placing a hand on his forearm. ‘You look a little pale, and you've been very quiet since you took that call. Do you want to talk?'

Sarah, the journalist, gave the pair a brief glance, then opened her door on the passenger side of the cab and climbed out.

‘Sure. Later. We've got to get dinner on soon, though. I have got to go to the bathroom. Back in five,' he said. Mike walked across to the thatch-roofed ablution block. Inside, he stopped at one of the sinks and turned on the cold tap. He splashed water on his face and stared at his reflection. Long hair, stubbled
cheeks flanking his goatee beard, face a little fuller. His old friends from the army wouldn't recognise him now.

He was desperate to know what Theron had found out – why he wanted to meet him after nearly a year had gone by. At the same time, he dreaded the meeting.

Punda Maria was higher, altitude-wise, than any other camp in the Kruger park, cooler and wetter than the bushveldt and grasslands to the south. As night encroached, the temperature dropped and he felt goosebumps on his bare arms. A chill coursed through his body as he recalled the drive to Mapai with Fanie Theron.

They were met by a policeman at the gate to the mission. A nervy, jumpy policeman who kept his right hand on the pistol grip of his rifle. Sergeant Ndlovhu tried a few words of Tswana, the common African patois that originated in the gold and diamond mines of southern Africa.

‘He understands,' the sergeant said to Theron and Mike. ‘Worked in Jo'burg for a few years. He says people have been killed here, including a policeman.'

‘In the bus accident?' Mike asked.

The sergeant and his Mozambican counterpart exchanged a few words. Ndlovhu looked at Theron, then at Mike. ‘No. Something else.'

Mike's heart beat faster. ‘What does that mean?'

‘He says we should go up there, to the mission buildings. His superior is there. He speaks English.'

‘Thank him, Tobias, and let's go have a look,' Theron said.

Mike had known Isabella was dead as soon as they were stopped by the policeman at the mission gate. He knew it before they saw the bullet holes in the buildings, the bloodstained floor of the clinic, and the patch of sand in the mission square where Isabella had died.

They spoke to the PRM in charge of the investigation and the look on the officer's face confirmed Mike's fears as soon as they asked about the fate of the female doctor who had worked at the mission.

‘You identify body?' the policeman asked Mike.

Hands clenched in rage and swallowing hard to keep from throwing up, Mike had wanted to hit someone. There was obviously not much scope for sympathy and condolences from someone for whom English was his third language.

The bodies had been taken to a butcher's shop in Mapai, the only place with a coldroom big enough to store them all. There was no morgue like the ones Mike had seen on television cop shows. No shiny white tiles, no body laid respectfully on a polished steel table, no crisp white sheet lowered just enough for a grieving relative to give a little nod from the other side of a window in an air-conditioned viewing room. Just Isabella, his Isabella, laid out on a trestle table in a refrigerated shipping container with a hole in the centre of her forehead. No smooth pale skin for him to lay a hand on, no white cheek to kiss farewell and complete the mourning process, just a mask of dried, flaking blood. He choked, staggered from the room and vomited in the street.

‘Come with me, Mike,' Theron said, wrapping a meaty arm around Mike's shoulders.

Theron took him to the local police station, found a telephone and called the Portuguese embassy in Maputo, something the local police hadn't got around to doing.

‘Spend the night here with us, Mike. We'll drop you back at Maputo tomorrow. There's nothing more we can do here.'

Numb and in shock, Mike accepted. ‘Thanks, Fanie,' he said.

‘I want to go back to the mission, see what else I can pick up,' Theron said, not minding they were both on a first-name basis. As well as sympathy for him, he felt a kind of kinship with the Australian soldier.

‘I'll come with you,' Mike said.

‘No. Tobias will stay here with you. You'll gain nothing by going back there, and I've got official police business. You'll do me a favour by staying out of the way.' His words sounded dismissive, but his eyes were kind.

‘Come, I think you need a drink,' Sergeant Ndlovhu said.

They went to a
shebeen
, an African bar. Concrete floor, loud music and cheap booze. The sergeant stayed by Mike's side through long periods of silent staring, until the tears finally welled up from deep within him. Theron was there too, later in the night, when Mike wanted to get into a fight, and by his side when he was sick in the gutter. In the early hours of the morning the two policemen half carried him up the street to his cheap hotel.

‘Sleep now. She is gone, but that does not mean you will ever forget her,' Ndlovhu said as they stared down at the unconscious form on the bed.

They left Mapai early, Theron driving. Breakfast was
pao
in the truck, plus a beer from the cold box for Mike to help ease the pain in his head.

‘OK, tell me what you found at the mission yesterday,' he said.

‘Those Mozambican clowns didn't want me there, man, I tell you. Said it was a robbery, simple as that. I told them what I had been doing, what had happened to you, Mike, but they couldn't see a connection,' he said, pausing to take a long pull from a can of Coke. Sergeant Ndlovhu snored in the back seat while his captain drove.

‘Could you see a connection?' Mike asked. His head hurt, but his mind and heart were moving on from sorrow in another, more dangerous direction. Revenge.

‘Well,' Theron said, weighing up how much he should tell the other man, ‘there were some things that didn't add up.'

‘Like?'

‘Like the weapons used. The local boys found a lot of brass from an AK – in the clinic and near where they . . . where they shot the nuns.'

Mike could tell Theron was trying to spare his feelings, but he also sensed the detective needed to get his theory out in the open, to talk it through with someone. ‘But not near where Isabella was shot?'

‘No, not near her. Look, I understand if you don't want to talk about this . . .'

‘It's OK. I want to know as much about the bastards who did this as you do. Probably more.'

‘She wasn't shot with a Kalashnikov, Mike,' the policeman said.

‘What then?' Mike asked. All he could remember was the ruined face, once so beautiful.

‘I went back . . . to see her again. I checked the wound. It was a pistol shot, up close.'

‘An execution?' Mike asked, closing his eyes at the thought.

‘I've seen that type of wound before. Anyway, so I'm asking myself, who would rob that place, a church-run clinic? It doesn't make sense. I spoke to the priest – he was in a bad way. But he said they had hardly any drugs, no money. The injured bus passengers – they were the people killed in the clinic – had nothing but the clothes they were wearing. It doesn't make sense.' He shook his head.

‘People kill for a lot less on this continent,' Mike said, playing devil's advocate.

‘
Ja
, I know that, but people kill over here for another reason. To cover their tracks. You cross a border, you do something you shouldn't, meet someone you shouldn't. You don't want any witnesses. Besides, there was more I saw there, before those local boys got rid of me.'

‘What?'

‘Two things. One, dust and sand in the clinic, and –'

‘Have you ever seen a Mozambican hospital?' Mike
interrupted, remembering the less than sanitary conditions Isabella had worked in.

‘This was a new building. The rest of it, the treatment room, the priest's house, were spotless. It looked like a big wind had blown dust in through the flywire windows, all over the bodies in the clinic. A big wind . . . you remember?'

Mike recalled the elephant's carcass, the windblown tracks. Had a helicopter landed at the mission station? ‘Why would they have flown there?'

Theron swallowed hard. ‘Mike, the other thing I found there, in the treatment room, was lying in the top of a dustbin. The local police wouldn't have recognised it, or known what to do about it. Besides, they hustled me out before I had a chance to tell them what I'd found.'

‘What was it?'

‘A field dressing. You know what a field dressing is?'

‘I know,' Mike said, remembering the green-wrapped shell dressings they practised with in the army during first aid lessons. He had never had to use one for real until Carlos threw himself on the landmine.

‘There was one in the dustbin. Lot of blood on it. It was a South African Defence Force dressing. I could tell by the written instructions printed on the back. There was only one and the priest told me that he didn't keep any ex-military first aid stuff at the clinic.'

‘So one of the poachers was wounded,' Mike said, and the realisation of what that meant hit him like a fist square in the middle of his face. He felt as though he was going to throw up again. He wound down the
window, but the oven-hot African air did nothing to revive him.

‘Don't blame yourself, Mike. You did the right thing and so did the doctor,' he said.

Theron's words could do nothing to calm the rising tide of anger, hurt and sorrow that threatened to blow Mike's mind and soul into a million pieces. He realised he had wounded one of the poachers with his wild burst of firing from Fernando's rifle. They had flown to the nearest clinic. Isabella had treated the injured man, and then they had killed her and everyone at the mission.

‘I killed her,' Mike said softly.

Theron protested. ‘It was someone else, Mike. A criminal pulled the trigger, not you. I won't stop until I've found these bastards. Believe me.'

Mike knew there was nothing more he could do or tell the police, and nothing more that Fanie Theron was allowed to do in Mozambique. He withdrew into himself for the rest of the trip.

They stopped at the Portuguese embassy at Maputo and an officious bureaucrat in a white suit told them that Dr Nunes's parents had been informed of the tragedy and were on their way to Maputo to collect her remains. Mike had no idea if Isabella had ever told her parents he existed, and he had no wish to make his introductions in these circumstances. Fanie offered him a lift to Johannesburg, and he accepted.

Theron dropped Mike at Rian and Susie's place the next day.

‘If you ever need to get hold of me, these people
will know where I am,' Mike told Theron. ‘Thank you, again, for everything.'

Theron wrote Rian's name and address in his notebook, then shook hands with Mike, holding his hand longer than custom dictated. ‘Policemen aren't in the business of making promises, but I promise you we will find these men. As soon as I have a new lead I'll be in touch. Don't blame yourself, Mike.'

In the backyard of their fashionable Sandton home, the de Witts' three kids laughed and shrieked as they played in their swimming pool. Theron was going home to his family. Mike was going home to nothing.

Theron's words had sounded hollow. Mike doubted the police would find the murderers and, even if they did, no one would be able to identify them by sight. Mike prayed that somehow, somewhere, he would find them first.

Mike had flown back to Australia and completed the formalities of ending twenty years' service with the army. Funnily enough, he didn't find it an emotional experience. There were no old friends to farewell him, no party, no presentation. He signed the official forms at Victoria Barracks in Sydney, and handed in his pack, his webbing, uniforms, identity card – the chattels that had defined who he was for half his life.

He walked out through the big sandstone gates into noisy, exhaust-choked Oxford Street. He was alone and adrift, but in a sense he had been this way for many years, until Isabella, so it didn't feel too
strange. There was nothing left for him in Australia – no job and no prospects.

A bell chimed as he opened the door of the travel agency, the first one he had come to after leaving the barracks.

‘Good morning, how can I help you?' the woman behind the desk asked.

‘I'd like a ticket to South Africa. One way. Leaving as soon as possible.'

He needed a new home, money and a job. Rian provided all of these. When Mike arrived back in Jo'burg, Rian was in trouble. He had just lost one of the regular drivers of his overland trucks – Piet, a white South African. Mike remembered him as a friendly, confident young man. Piet had evidently worked his charm on a female English passenger on a previous trip and he was now off to England to marry her, in a hurry. He had apparently broken Rian's cardinal rule that all drivers had to swear to obey, on pain of death and or dismissal.

‘Rule number one: no sex with the tourists,' Rian said.

Piet was going to be a father in a few months, so even if Rian had decided to bend the cardinal rule and let him stay on in his job, the young man wouldn't have been able to take advantage of his reprieve.

‘I'd do the next trip myself, except Susie would kill me,' Rian explained.

Rian, too, was going to become a father, yet again. Susie was heavily pregnant with their fourth child and was due to give birth the week after Mike's arrival. Rian's problem was that he had a group of
twelve tourists arriving from all points of the globe in two days' time and, with Piet's sudden departure, no one to drive them on their overland adventure.