Far Horizon (22 page)

‘You should go on a game drive this afternoon. Everyone else is,' Mike said, then sipped the deliciously chilled beer.

‘Don't try to get rid of me. Let's go find this lodge,' she said doggedly.

‘The lodge is on the northern border of the park. That's over a hundred and fifty kilometres from here and, besides, we can't take the truck through the middle of the park.' Because of its weight, the Bedford attracted a ridiculously high entrance fee in Zimbabwe's national parks if they wanted to use the park's internal roads. Rian wouldn't spring for the fees, so game viewing was courtesy of a fleet of obsolete ex-Rhodesian army Land Rovers and converted Japanese pick-ups driven by enterprising African locals, some of whom were ex-rangers.

‘So we'll have to wait until Victoria Falls,' Sarah said. She looked disappointed.

Mike nodded. He savoured both the beer and the thought of revenge.

‘This place has a life and a noise of its own,' Mike said to Sarah as they crested a hill and caught sight of the town of Victoria Falls.

Clouds of mist made the Zambezi look like a bushfire from a distance.

‘You can buy every kind of high here, from dope to bungee jumping, white-water rafting, parachuting, microlighting, joy-flighting, even elephant rides.'

In his mind, Mike mulled over an action plan for the two and a half days they would spend in the town. For the passengers the plot was simple: two days of free time for action and a half day to recover from the hangover that always followed the second
night. Among the many Generation X-rated attractions the place offered were dance clubs and all-night bars.

Mike reckoned they were now a day ahead of the hunters. Theron had copied the addresses of their accommodation down from their entry cards, but there were no dates. If hunting was the purpose of their trip, Mike guessed they would stay at least a couple of nights in the lodge listed on the card. It wouldn't be too hard to find out from the hotel in Victoria Falls when they were due to arrive – probably in the next day or two, sometime during his group's stay.

The air was hot and sticky as the overlander rolled into the business district, down the hill towards the falls themselves and their home for the night, the Municipal Campground.

‘The place we're staying at is about as appealing as it sounds,' Mike said to Sarah. ‘A patch of dirt set in the middle of the turf of a couple of hundred petty criminals.'

‘Look,' he said, addressing the rest of the crew as they pulled to a halt inside the camping ground, ‘Victoria Falls is a fun town, especially when you've been on the road for a while, but keep your wits about you. If you buy dope, don't tell me about it, and don't get sold garden herbs. Remember, we're crossing a border in a couple of days and I don't want to get busted for smuggling dagga, OK? Also, keep your valuables locked in the back of the truck. It's free time while we're here, and I'd like to get out for a look around as well, so if anyone wants to volunteer to
watch the truck for a couple of hours in the next two days, that'd be great. Any questions?'

‘Where's the party?' Linda asked.

‘Three, two, one, bungee!' yelled a tall dreadlocked New Zealander.

George screamed as he reluctantly tumbled forward in a week-kneed approximation of a swan dive from the bridge one hundred and ten metres above the churning, rock-strewn Zambezi River. Somewhere below, in a chasm downriver, Mel, Linda, Kylie, Sam, Jane and Julie were hurtling down a raging river in an inflatable boat.

Sarah sidled up to Mike, who was staring out over the iron railing of the road and rail bridge that linked Zimbabwe with Zambia.

‘You don't go in for this adrenaline-junkie stuff?' she asked.

‘I've had enough thrills in my life,' he said.

‘What, driving a truck full of spotty backpackers around Africa?'

‘You'd be surprised.'

‘Is that it, the Victoria Falls Hotel?' she asked, pointing across to the sprawling two-storey building on the other side of the chasm.

‘That's it. The grand old lady of the falls.
The
place to stay here,' Mike replied. Now part of an international hotel chain, the opulent colonial relic was certainly one of the most expensive places to stay in the area.

‘What are we waiting for?' she asked.

‘We need a plan, in case they're there. Let's talk.'

Sarah insisted on showering and changing first, and by the end of the long walk up the hill from the border crossing to the camping ground Mike needed a cold shower as well. As Sarah headed for the ladies with her shower bag and towel he wandered over to Nigel, who was sitting on a fold-out chair, reading a book under Nelson's roll-out canvas awning.

‘How's it?' Mike asked him.

‘You're starting to sound like a local,' Nigel said without a trace of humour.

‘All quiet on the western front?'

‘I'm glad to have a bit of time by myself. Some of these people are getting on my nerves.'

Mike bit his tongue. ‘Fine. Not interested in throwing yourself off a bridge or seeing the bottom of the Zambezi?'

‘You wish,' he said, and smiled. ‘So, is she going to do you over in that story of hers?' Nigel asked, gesturing with a flick of his head to Sarah, who had just disappeared into the shower block.

‘We've got a good working relationship going now,' Mike said.

‘What does that mean? Are you screwing her as well?'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘You know. I saw her, Jane, go into the truck that night. I heard you as well. I'd have thought there were rules against that sort of thing.' Nigel shook his head as he spoke.

‘I'm going for a shower, Nigel.'

*

Sarah and Mike emerged from opposite ends of the men's and women's shower block at the same time.

‘Je-sus,' he said, and gave a low whistle.

‘If that's your idea of a compliment, you need to work on your vocabulary,' she said.

‘No, I mean, yes, it is, but . . .' He thought she looked extraordinarily beautiful, and that was the problem. He'd left her as just another backpacker with uncombed hair, sweat-stained T-shirt and baggy shorts and rafter sandals. She stood there now with blonde hair blow-dried and brushed, and make-up that accentuated her high cheekbones and enhanced her large blue eyes, and soft, full-painted lips.

Her unisex traveller's outfit had been exchanged for a low-cut little black dress with spaghetti string shoulder straps that showed off her cleavage and smooth legs. Her only jewellery was a thin gold necklace and a single gold bangle. On her feet were a pair of black dress sandals with just enough heel to pass for evening wear. Her toenails were painted silver and, for the first time, he noticed a little silver ring with a heart on the second toe of her right foot, which he thought looked very sexy. She also carried her expensive Canon camera in its case, slung over her bare shoulder.

‘Don't you think you're just a tad overdressed?' he ventured, and immediately regretted it.

‘Bloody hell. It's a five-star hotel, not some dosshouse,' she countered, her cheeks turning pink through the make-up. ‘How am I supposed to get talking to an organised crime boss, who's probably a millionaire, if I'm dressed like a nineteen-year-old hippie?'

Sarah had expressed a willingness to try to engage the Russian if they saw him. Mike was sure she would have no trouble attracting the man's eye.

‘I suppose you're right,' he said reluctantly. He had changed into lightweight khaki trousers and his cleanest polo shirt, the closest he ever got to formal wear in Africa.

‘You'll be the one who sticks out, not me. Let's go,' Sarah said.

A
s they walked into the elegant, cool reception foyer of the Victoria Falls Hotel, Mike saw a large sign on a noticeboard which read ‘Welcome, Mr and Mrs Harold Carter and guests. Congratulations on your wedding day.' The board also gave the location of the function room where the Carters were having their reception.

‘Looks like you're not going to be overdressed after all,' Mike said to Sarah.

‘Told you.'

A shriek behind them heralded the arrival of the newly wed Mrs Carter, an attractive but painfully thin redhead in her early thirties in an ivory mini dress. It sounded like she had just been goosed by one of the wedding party.

A tall young man with pale skin, lank brown hair and a diamond stud earring pushed past Sarah and Mike and strode across the polished floor to a reception desk framed by a portal of antique red mahogany. When he spoke, it was with the plummy, languid
drawl of the English upper class.

‘Mr and Mrs Carter have arrived,' he announced with a pompous flourish of his right hand to the young white woman at reception.

About twenty chattering men and women now filled the foyer. They sounded to Mike like a herd of braying zebra. Sarah's little black dress, which had stood out like a mink coat in the camping ground, was just one of many in the foyer. From the noise and laughter around them, Mike suspected the wedding party had probably kicked off the day with too much champagne and not enough orange juice.

‘Very good, sir. James will take you through to the Bulawayo Room for cocktails. James?' The woman behind the desk beckoned to a young African bellboy, decked out in a long-sleeved red mess jacket, cropped at the waist, and black trousers. Mike felt hot just looking at him.

Once the revellers had been led away to their function room, Sarah and Mike approached the receptionist.

‘Good day, can I help you?' she asked. She took in Sarah's dress and then added, ‘The wedding reception is through those doors, madam, across the courtyard and to the left.'

‘No, we're not actually here for the wedding,' Sarah said. ‘We're looking for a friend of ours – two, in fact. They're booked in to stay here, but I've lost the fax they sent me with the date that they were due to arrive. Stupid of me, I know.'

‘No problem, madam. The names, please?'

‘Mr Orlov and Mr Hess,' Sarah said.

Mike looked around the foyer.

‘One moment, please, madam.' The woman smiled and tapped on a keyboard beneath the reception counter. She consulted a computer screen then looked up and said, ‘Yes, you've got the right day. They are booked in to arrive today but . . .' she checked the screen again, ‘but no, they haven't arrived yet.'

‘Thanks, we might wait on the terrace. Oh, and please don't tell them I was asking about them. I'd hate them to think I was careless enough to forget when they were arriving,' Sarah said with a conspiratorial wink.

‘Not a problem, madam.'

Mike needed a smoke, but, as was his habit, he had left his lighter in the dashboard of the truck again. He walked over to the concierge at the door and asked the man for a light. The concierge produced a Zippo and lit the cigarette with a flourish. As Mike thanked him he looked outside through the glass door and saw a new, but dusty, Toyota Land Cruiser with blue and white South African plates pull up. The concierge dispatched two bellboys to meet the vehicle.

Two white men stepped from the vehicle and stretched their cramped limbs. Mike knew it was them. Orlov was a little shorter than Mike had expected, but the moustache and wavy hair gave him away immediately. Hess was as tall and good looking as Theron had described him. He looked like he had just stepped out of the frame of a Hitler Youth recruiting poster, although Mike reckoned he must have been a few years older than himself.

Mike stared hard at the pair. On the balance of
probabilities, these were the men who had killed the woman he loved. Their nonchalant arrogance mocked him, enraged him. What right did they have to walk as free men in public? He wanted to punch the smile from Hess's face, to see the Russian on his knees begging for mercy.

He turned and strode quickly across the polished floor. Sarah was looking at him with an annoyed frown. He took her by the crook of the arm and felt her flinch at the overly familiar gesture. ‘Let's get out of the foyer. They're here.'

‘Where?' she asked, craning her head to see past Mike's shoulder. She shrugged her arm from his grasp.

They moved near the doorway which led from reception to the hotel's inner tree-lined courtyard and the terrace bar and restaurant beyond. Sarah sauntered over to one end of the foyer, to a display of tourist brochures advertising elephant-back safaris and various other activities around Victoria Falls. Mike followed her and also pretended to browse.

‘Karl, I need a drink, to celebrate our day's work,' the Russian said loudly in heavily accented English. From his expansive manner and flushed face, Mike guessed Orlov had already started his celebrations during the road trip from the hunting lodge where they had stayed.

‘Yes, Vassily,' the tall blond man said patiently. ‘Of course, but I would like to shower and change first. I will join you in twenty minutes.' He turned to a tall African man in khaki trousers and short-sleeved shirt who had followed him into the foyer.

Mike looked the man up and down. An Ovambo, he thought. Also from Namibia. Despite the heat, the man looked as cool and impassive as an ebony statue.

‘Klaus, have the vehicle cleaned and ensure security keeps a close eye on it. I will come with you to deliver the trophies tomorrow. Pick me up at eight in the morning.'

‘Yes
baas
,' Klaus said with a nod and left the foyer. Hess moved to the reception desk with the angular grace of a giraffe, tall and aloof from the lesser creatures around him.

‘Very well, Karl, I will see you in the bar,' Orlov said, leaving the other man to see to the formalities of checking in.

‘The Russian's half cut already,' Sarah whispered. ‘This is going to be easier than I thought.'

‘You're sure you want to go through with this?' Mike asked. Her proposed approach had sounded risky, even foolhardy. But his military training had taught him that sometimes the boldest plans had the best chance of success.

‘Definitely,' she said.

She led the way, following Orlov out into the late afternoon sunshine. The pathway from reception bisected the manicured lawns of the hotel's inner courtyard. Nearly a century old, the hotel was only two storeys high. The white-painted walls gleamed like pale gold with the reflected rays of the descending sun.

Once across the courtyard they entered the building again and passed between a restaurant on their right and the Bulawayo Room on the left. In the function
room the wedding guests were snatching drinks and canapés from silver platters with the tenacity of yellow-billed kites attacking roadkill. Young men in dinner suits, no doubt chafing in the afternoon heat, and pretty young women in short dresses stood and chattered amongst the chintzy, over-stuffed sofas, antique side tables and potted palms.

Sarah's dressy sandals tapped on the gleaming wooden parquetry floor as she and Mike followed Orlov out onto the terrace. The Russian sat down at a shady table in the covered section. His uninterrupted view took in Batoka Gorge and the Victoria Falls Bridge, stretching between Zimbabwe on one side and Zambia on the other. It was the same bridge where Mike and Sarah had stood watching George make his bungee jump earlier in the day. From where they now stood, while they waited for their table, Mike could see yet another daredevil parting with a large chunk of her travelling budget. Thankfully the diners on the terrace couldn't hear the screams from the bridge.

They chose a table three away from the Russian and settled into deep wicker armchairs. Mike pretended to study the cocktail menu and ordered a beer when the waiter appeared. Sarah ordered a mineral water with a slice of lemon.

‘Put your cigarette out,' she ordered him.

‘Why?' he asked. ‘You smoke, it shouldn't bother you.'

‘Just do it, OK?'

Reluctantly, he stubbed it out.

‘Here goes,' she whispered. Sarah stood and started
walking towards Orlov, who had just taken delivery of a double scotch on the rocks in a heavy tumbler.

He was dressed in khaki trousers and a grey long-sleeved shirt. The trousers were dirtied at the knees and pocked here and there with little holes and scratches, as though he had been in thorn thickets. His boots were heavy brown leather, and looked almost military. His hair was dry but plastered back and unkempt. There were sweat stains on the armpits of his shirt, but other than that, it appeared to be clean.

Despite his concern for Sarah, Mike couldn't help but let his eyes linger on her shapely backside, accentuated as it was by the slow rise and fall of the thin material of her short dress as she sashayed across to Orlov's table. Her legs were long and tanned. In the slender fingers of her right hand was an unlit cigarette. He hoped she was having the same effect on Orlov as she was on him.

‘Excuse me, do you have a light?' she said to Orlov, in a low, husky voice.

‘Pardon me?' Orlov said in his heavily accented English.

‘A light, for my cigarette,' she said, leaning closer to him, holding out her cigarette.

Mike imagined the great white hunter was a little taken aback by the perfumed beauty who hovered above him.

‘Of course, of course,' he said, reaching into the top pocket of his shirt for a gold lighter. He lit her cigarette and she straightened her lithe body so the first puff of smoke didn't go into the Russian's face.

Mike sipped his beer and strained to hear their conversation.

‘You look like you've been in the wars,' she said, placing her left hand on her hip.

‘Excuse me?' he asked, puzzled by the idiom.

‘In the bush, you look like you've been out exploring,' she said with a girlish laugh.

‘Oh, of course. No, I have been hunting,' he replied, leaning back in his chair so he could appraise her better.

‘I love hunting,' she cooed.

‘Really? I think we are, how do the English say, a “dangerous species”,' he said.

Sarah giggled again. ‘
Endangered
species, you mean. But, yes, I suppose we are also dangerous as well!'

Now Orlov laughed. ‘I see your joke. A play on words. Endangered and dangerous, that is us, no?'

‘That is us, yes,' she said.

‘And what does a beautiful young woman hunt?' Orlov asked, raising his tumbler to his lips and downing the remains of his scotch.

‘Foxes, mostly. I love the hunt. I love the baying of the hounds, the chase, the excitement. I even love . . .'

‘The kill?'

She smiled a slow, wicked grin and drew heavily on her cigarette. She blew the smoke out slowly towards the Russian and said, ‘Especially the kill.'

‘Can I buy you a drink, Miss . . .'

‘Grey, Sarah Grey. Yes, please. Gin and tonic, and please, call me Sarah, Mr . . . ?'

‘Vassily Orlov.' The Russian beckoned a waiter over.

Orlov stood and pulled out a chair for Sarah. She eased herself down with catlike grace and crossed one leg over the other, doing nothing to stop the hem of her short dress sliding further up her thigh. Mike watched Orlov. He reluctantly lifted his gaze from her legs as she replied to his question.

‘And your . . . companion? Will he be joining us?' he said.

‘Yes, I suppose so. He's not my companion, by the way. He's my driver, my
safari
guide, actually.' She beckoned with an imperious wiggle of her finger for Mike to join them, and he walked over, self-consciously, drink in hand.

‘You are hunting here, also? But not, I think, dressed like this?'

Sarah gave her girlish chortle again and said, ‘No, sadly. Though I wish I
were
hunting here. I'm on a photographic safari.' She held up the camera slung over her shoulder. ‘As for my clothes, Mr Orlov, a hunter dresses to match his or her environment, don't you agree?'

A lascivious smile crossed Orlov's face as he caught her meaning. ‘I wish you well in your hunting this evening, Sarah, and please, call me Vassily. And this is . . . ?' he asked, turning to Mike.

‘Mr Wilson. Michael, this is Mr Orlov. Say hello to Mr Orlov, Michael, there's a good boy.'

‘Good afternoon, Mr Orlov,' Mike said, biting his tongue.

‘Please, it is all informal here, yes, Sarah?' Orlov asked.

Sarah nodded.

‘Call me Vassily, please. A drink, Michael?'

Orlov's face was redder now and Mike could tell he was a man in the mood for celebration. He asked for a beer and Orlov placed the orders with the hovering waiter, who scooted off.

‘So, Sarah, do you shoot, as well as ride?' Orlov asked, turning away from Mike.

‘Since I was eleven years old. Daddy insisted on it. Mummy was horrified, but then older men always seem to know what's best,' she said, leaning back in her chair. ‘Shotguns, mostly. We shoot pheasant and grouse, occasionally stags on the estate,' she said languidly.

‘
Your
estate?'

‘One day,' she said, and winked theatrically at him.

The waiter brought the drinks and laid them with slow, deliberate care in front of them, halting the conversation temporarily. When, at last, the waiter departed, Orlov was eager to pick up where he had left off.

‘And why are you not hunting in Africa?'

‘Not enough time, really. I'm here for a wedding – friends from England – and some photography, of course. Then it's back to work in a couple of days' time.'

‘And what do you do?'

‘Photographer. Fashion magazines, mostly, but I'm doing a book of female nudes at the moment,' she said deadpan.

Orlov took a long drink from his tumbler and Mike thought he was about to choke on an ice cube. ‘How interesting,' he said.