Far Horizon (21 page)

‘O
K, I'll keep quiet about your deal with the police, but on one condition,' Sarah said as Mike stopped the truck outside the Spur restaurant in Messina, where the rest of the passengers had long since finished their lunch.

‘What's the catch?' he replied, dreading but guessing the answer.

‘You keep me informed of any information you pick up about the poachers. And I want to be in on any snooping you do. You'll need help and I've been trained to get information about people without them necessarily knowing about it.'

‘Sure,' he said. He didn't expect to be breaking into hotel rooms or sneaking about with a camera, rather just keeping an ear to the ground as they travelled, so he didn't see any harm in Sarah knowing what he was up to. She thought she was on to the story of a lifetime – an investigative exposé of poaching and smuggling that would propel her out of the pages of
Outdoor Adventurer
and onto the front page of
The Times
or
The Guardian
.

‘Jeez, Sarah, what have you done to your eye? And where have you two been?' Kylie, the Australian nurse, asked when they got out of the truck.

‘I went for a look around town and this guy tried to mug me,' Sarah said, and was greeted with a chorus of gasps and ‘no-way's from the assembled crew. ‘But Mike was on his way back from the garage and saw it happening. He saved me.'

Mike could see the cheeky glint in her eyes, but everyone else turned and gave him approving nods.

‘That's not quite true. Sarah had fought the guy off, I just chased him away,' Mike said modestly. As they climbed back into the truck, Sarah sitting next to Mike in her usual position, she smiled and winked at him. There was a bond between them now, of shared conspiracy and white lies. She thought she had conned him into letting her join a grand adventure. He hoped to give her nothing worth writing about.

The border crossing between Messina and Beitbridge, on the Zimbabwe side, was uneventful. This was the first crossing for the passengers and Mike shepherded them through the intricacies of African customs and immigration form-filling.

After the barcoded stamps in their passports were scanned and bleeped by officials on the South African side, they drove to Zimbabwe across the broad, mostly sandy Limpopo River on a bridge lined with razor wire and high steel fences. The former British colony of Rhodesia is less prosperous than its southern neighbour and, consequently, slower to adopt new technology. Mike thought it would be a long time before computers and barcode
readers replaced the deafening thud of the rubber stamp at Zimbabwean border posts.

The different nationalities of the passengers on board the truck presented its own problems. ‘Everyone needs a visa, but the rates are different. The poms will have to pay more than the Aussies,' he said as they parked outside the whitewashed customs and immigration office.

‘That's not fair,' Linda said.

‘Few things in life are.'

The hot, sticky, slow process involved a lot of queuing and called for even more patience than the previous border crossing. From the South African side, scores of Zimbabwean ex-pat workers were crossing the border in cars and vans loaded down with household furniture, pots and pans and bicycles – anything they could sell or take home to their families.

‘Does it always take this long?' Julie asked. She fanned her face with her Zimbabwean entry permit.

‘This has been quick, believe me,' Mike said. The border formalities for both countries had so far taken them a little more than an hour.

Once through the formalities on the Zimbabwean side they passed a long row of ramshackle stalls selling carved wooden African animals. Giraffes, some as tall as a man, dominated the menagerie. Interspersed among them were carved buffalos and rhinos, still huge at about a third the size of the real thing.

Mike took the left fork in the road onto the A6, towards Bulawayo. The countryside was hot and flat – dry red dirt and low scrubby bush – tough country in which only goats seemed to thrive, and they were
doing a good job of denuding what vegetation was left. He honked the horn as they overtook a donkey-drawn cart made of rough planks on top of the rear axle and wheels of a scrapped motor car. The skinny young boy on the reins waved at the truck and lashed the back of his two donkeys with a wicked-looking whip.

‘Tough life here if you're a donkey,' Sarah said, shaking her head.

‘Tough life if you're a human,' Mike said. ‘People are doing it hard here, no doubt about it. A lot of the other overland companies have stopped driving through Zimbabwe because of all the bad press about violence, farm invasions, fuel shortages and various other economic and political problems. But I still love the place.'

‘Good for you, but are we safe here?' Sarah asked.

‘The political violence, intimidation and oppression is real, but it's also carefully targeted against opponents of the government and minorities. The average Zimbabwean, black, white or coloured, is friendly and welcoming to tourists. I've never encountered any aggro on my previous trips.'

The countryside started to change as they drove north, moving from the arid, flat low veldt into rolling hills with more trees and prominent granite koppies. They passed game reserves surrounded by high electric fences, cattle and sheep ranches, and the one-street one-horse country towns of Mazunga, Makado and West Nicholson. A big open-cast mine at a place called Colleen Bawn was well advanced in the job of dismantling a hill.

Mike knew that Orlov and Hess had a good lead on them and that the men appeared to have no plan to stop on the way to Bulawayo. There were so few cars on the road, thanks to the intermittent fuel shortages and recent price hikes, that Mike was sure he would have noticed their hired South African vehicle easily if they had stopped for some reason.

‘We'll stop here for the night,' Mike said to Sarah, as they entered the outskirts of Bulawayo. ‘This place reminds me of a large Australian country town. Our streets are the same – wide enough to turn a bullock cart – and you often see the same jacaranda trees.'

They stayed in a tranquil walled campsite with manicured green lawns, at the back of a sprawling single-storey house in leafy Hillside, Bulawayo's nicest suburb. The next morning Sarah pestered Mike to go and look for Orlov and Hess, who, according to their immigration entry declaration, were staying at the Bulawayo Holiday Inn. Sarah had spotted the conspicuous mini sky-scraper that was the hotel.

‘I don't think they'll have got up to much between here and the border,' Mike said to Sarah outside the TM supermarket in Hillside as they unloaded bags of groceries from a shopping trolley into the storage boxes under the cab of the truck.

Mike reached in his pocket for a crumpled Zimbabwean five-hundred-dollar bill and tipped the uniformed security guard, who had been hanging around the vehicle expectantly. The man touched the peak of his cap and smiled, even though the note was barely enough to buy a drink.

‘You should have gone with the rest of the crew to the Matopos,' Mike said to Sarah.

The other passengers had opted for an early morning safari in open-top vehicles to the nearby national park. The Matopos, he had explained on the trip up, was a collection of granite hills topped by impressive stacks of boulders precariously balanced by nature. Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia, was buried there and the caves and outcrops in the hills were alive with bushman paintings of hunting scenes and wild animals.

‘What did you do with the gun, by the way?' Sarah asked as they drove back to the campsite from the supermarket.

‘I sealed it in plastic and stowed it in a tin of grease in the tool box at the back.'

‘Hard to get to in an emergency,' she said.

‘Hard for the cops or customs officers to find when we cross a border,' he replied. Mike had no wish to declare the pistol and wondered what he would do when they entered a national park. By law, he knew he should surrender the weapon when they entered a national park in South Africa or Zimbabwe and that, in the latter country, rangers have the authority to shoot on sight any armed person they come across in a park. ‘Anyway, I'm not planning on using it,' he said.

They struck their tents and packed up after the rest of the passengers returned from the game drive. The others were excited about having spotted some rhino, but Sarah and Mike were both looking for different game from now on.

‘If you want a real story, take a look over there,'
Mike said to Sarah as they drove out of the Bulawayo city limits on the road to Victoria Falls. On their left, in what once had been an open field, half-a-dozen bare-chested black men sweated in the midday sun, swinging picks down into the rocky bare earth.

‘What are they digging?' she asked, shielding her eyes from the glare as Mike geared down, slowing the truck a little.

‘Graves. That's the new cemetery. The old one's full, thanks to AIDS.' He pointed out row upon row of fresh graves, topped by nothing more than mounds of rocky red soil.

‘But where are all the headstones, the flowers?'

‘The funeral industry's the only one that's growing in Zimbabwe these days, but no one can keep pace with the growth. You'll see as we travel some more, there are roadside undertakers selling coffins springing up everywhere. In Harare it's getting hard to find your way around town because the undertakers are stealing the metal road signs to melt them down to make coffin handles.'

‘Amazing.'

‘More than amazing. It's a nightmare. It's almost like living in the time of the black plague, in Europe, in the Middle Ages.'

‘You talk like it's personal.'

He thought of Carlos, choosing a quick death instead of the alternative. ‘It is.'

The scenery on the drive from Bulawayo to Hwange National Park turned to rolling tree-covered hills as they passed through forestry estates. Road signs warned drivers to keep watch for antelope and
elephant, which moved freely through this part of the country.

They stopped for fuel at a restaurant and service station called the Halfway House, midway between Bulawayo and Victoria Falls. As the attendant topped up the tank and Mike's passengers bought ice creams and Cokes, a brand-new white Toyota Land Cruiser flashed by without stopping.

Sarah trotted down the service station driveway, Coke in hand, and raised her free hand to shield the sun from her eyes as she watched the fast disappearing white speck. ‘Did you see that?' she said breathlessly, as she strode back towards Mike. ‘Jo'burg plates. That's got to be them.'

‘Could be,' Mike said. He felt his chest tighten. He wasn't sure whether it was fear or anticipation, but he knew that he would have to confront those men somehow, somewhere. What he would do when he met them and if he was able to link them to Isabella's death, he wasn't sure. His mind turned to the can of grease in the tool box.

‘I like to think of Hwange as the grandmother of all African national parks,' Mike said to Sarah as they walked along a sandy track from the camp ground to a complex of old buildings housing the park's offices, restaurant, shop and bar.

‘Why as a granny?' Sarah asked.

‘A bit decrepit, old-fashioned, but worth making the effort to visit. This place doesn't have the same concentration of game as Kruger, but it can surprise
you. I've driven for days and seen nothing but elephant and trees, then come across three leopard in the space of half an hour.'

‘Where are we, by the way? I haven't looked at the map today.'

‘We're in the north-western corner of Zimbabwe. Hwange's western boundary is the Botswana border. Up north it's about a hundred kilometres from the top of the park to Victoria Falls and the Zambezi. Zambia's on the other side of the river.'

Mike thought the park's facilities, accommodation, roads and shower blocks all resembled a grandmother's house. Clean, where the broom can reach, lovingly cared for as far as a tight budget will allow, but looking a little tatty and outdated. There was a musty air about the camps and their official buildings, like an open-air museum of the late 1960s and early '70s. The camp reception areas were decorated with fading black-and-white photos of strapping white men with sideburns, shorts and long socks watching on while their trusty black foot soldiers hog-tied captured rhino. The once-glossy public relations photos of the various camps showed ruddy-faced men and women with big hair lounging outside newly whitewashed lodges. In the car spaces were big cars with even bigger tailfins. The clock seemed to have stopped around the mid 1970s, when war took hold of the country and the poachers moved in virtually unchecked.

Still, the park and its wildlife had survived – just. Mike had seen rhino there but they were few and heavily guarded. Unlike most of Kruger, Hwange was
not fenced. Animals, particularly the park's tens of thousands of elephants, were free to migrate to and from neighbouring Botswana, and also into the hunting concessions which bordered parts of the park.

Mike knew it was in one of these private hunting concessions that Vassily Orlov would start his international killing spree. He had driven past the lodges before, or rather, past the turn-offs to the lodges. They were very private concerns and there was no chance of him lumbering ten or twenty kilometres up a private road in a bright yellow truck on the pretext of asking for directions.

‘Why can't we go and visit the hunting lodge where Hess and Orlov are staying? We could say we wanted some information about a hunting trip,' Sarah asked.

Mike was more than a little disconcerted that Sarah was apparently able to read his mind. He shook his head in reply to her question. Sarah and Mike took a seat at an outdoor table on the lawn in front of the Waterbuck Arms, the pub and restaurant at Hwange's main rest camp. Mike had finished driving for the day, the dome tents were up in the camping ground, everyone had had lunch and it was time for his first beer. The waiter, dressed in a loud African-print shirt which reminded Mike of a 1970s cushion cover, set a dew-coated green bottle of Zambezi Lager and a white-frosted beer glass down in front of him. Sarah was sticking to Coke, in a glass with a slice of lemon.