Far Horizon (28 page)

Flynn walked behind the armed ranger, followed by Orlov, Hess and Klaus. Hess wanted Klaus to become as familiar with the path the rhino had followed as he would be. Hess felt naked in the bush without a weapon and he imagined Klaus felt the same.

They picked up the spoor of the big bull rhino
again about two hundred metres from the
boma
. Flynn pointed excitedly to the broad three-toed prints in the red-brown dust. ‘Last night, only a few hours ago,' he whispered.

Every now and then Flynn would stop and pull a small plastic puffer bottle from his pocket. The bottle had originally contained lens cleaning fluid for a camera, but Flynn had filled it with ash from a leadwood fire. The ash was as white and fine as talcum powder, but without the telltale odour. A squirt of ash from the bottle would show them the direction of the faintest puff of wind. ‘The beast is as blind as a bat, but he'll smell us a mile off, so we've got to stay downwind of him,' he said in explanation. ‘Rhinos have good hearing too, so be dead quiet from now on, and remember to pick your tree in case he gets spooked and charges us.'

It was another hour before they sighted the bull and Hess could not help but be impressed by Flynn's keen eyesight when they did. He had stopped and raised a hand. The ranger peered into the dense thorn bush that blocked their path twenty metres ahead and then nodded in recognition. He turned to Orlov and Hess and motioned them to come forward, placing a finger on his lips at the same time.

The guide bent close to Hess's face to whisper and Hess recoiled slightly at the sour smell of last night's whisky. ‘Ear,' breathed Flynn. He pointed into the deep shadows at the base of the thorny thicket.

Hess pulled a small pair of expensive binoculars from the pocket of his bush shirt and scanned the shadows. A few seconds later he nodded, then handed the binoculars to Orlov. Flynn was right, an ear was
all that was visible, although they could make out the faint outline of the rhino as a slightly paler form in the shadows. He was lying on his stomach, asleep. Occasionally his ear would twitch involuntarily to ward off a pesky fly and it was this tiny movement that had betrayed his carefully chosen hide.

‘Come on, let's get a bit closer,' Flynn whispered and motioned to the ranger, signalling they were ready to move.

‘No, let's go,' said Hess, and he placed a hand on Flynn's arm to stop him moving.

That's odd, Flynn thought to himself. Hess's client had come halfway around the world to see a black rhino in the wild and no doubt paid a pretty penny to do so. Why would Hess want to leave now just when they had found one of the most elusive creatures in Africa? Flynn reckoned they could creep at least a few metres closer. Even if the animal was startled, his first instinct would probably be to scarper and that would give the tourist a chance to shoot a few more pictures. Alternatively, they could lie up where they were for an hour or so and see if the animal woke and moved of its own accord. Flynn looked at Orlov for confirmation, but he just nodded his agreement with Hess's decision.

Flynn shrugged. It was nothing to him and he assumed he would still get payment in full. There really was no figuring foreigners, he told himself, and he included Namibian Germans in that broad-sweeping categorisation. He tapped the ranger on the shoulder and motioned back the way they had come with his thumb. Samson looked as surprised as Flynn at the tourists' desire to leave.

When the order of march had been reversed, and Flynn and Samson were once again at the head of the small column, Hess pulled the GPS unit from the black pouch on his belt. The unit was on, as it had been during the previous day's trek, and he checked the screen to make sure it was tracking enough satellites to compute their exact position. He pushed the
mark
button and recorded their position, naming it simply ‘1'. He rarely made mistakes and when he did, he never repeated them.

When they returned to the main dirt road, Hess said to Flynn, ‘Have your man strike camp immediately. Don't worry about breakfast. We have to get back to Kariba as soon as possible.'

A feeling of uneasiness had been festering inside Flynn all that morning, ever since Hess had abruptly broken contact with the rhino. Hess was no ‘bunny-hugger', and by the cold glint in his grey eyes neither was his client. Flynn had watched the way the Russian handled himself in the bush. He lacked the ease that he, Flynn, and Hess had, which came from spending a lifetime in the African veldt, but nonetheless the man was no blundering, loud-mouthed tourist. He was a hunter and he'd acted like a man on the hunt.

Flynn helped Matthew lift the cool box into the boat, and then slid into his seat behind the wheel as the young African pushed off from shore and nimbly jumped onto the bow. As the engines roared to life and the boat surged back into the lake, Gerald O'Flynn was overcome by a feeling that he had just done something terribly wrong.

‘W
hat is this, some kind of midlife crisis in reverse?' Sam asked as clumps of grey and brown hair dropped from Mel's nimble fingers.

‘You're supposed to
grow
a ponytail when you reach fifty, not cut it off,' Terry said with a belch as he crushed yet another empty Zambezi beer can.

Mike was sitting on a fold-out chair on the foredeck of the houseboat, wearing nothing but sunglasses and a pair of knee-length blue-and-white flowered board shorts while Mel snipped away a year's worth of his hair. Having a hairdresser on the trip was handy, he thought. The ponytail would have come off even if Mel wasn't around, but she was doing a better job than he would have. ‘Try that fifty line again and you're going swimming without the crocodile cage, bro,' Mike said, turning to face Terry.

‘Keep still,' Mel said, positioning his head with expert fingers. ‘I don't know, Mike, I think long hair's dead sexy on a man. You're gonna end up looking
more like a stockbroker than a safari guide when I finish with you.'

‘I'm thinking of all the money I'm going to save on shampoo,' Mike said. Hess and Orlov were close, too close for comfort, and he knew both of them would recognise Sarah and himself by their most distinguishing features. He had suggested that Sarah do something to change her appearance, in case they ran into the hunters around the national park, or on the road. The roads in Zambia were as few as they were bad, and it was likely they would pass them, or vice versa.

‘Yeah, I agree,' Sarah said on cue, looking up from a glossy South African women's magazine she had bought in Kariba. ‘Can you give me a trim and put a little colour through mine when you've finished with Mike?'

Sarah was wearing her black bikini top and a pair of denim shorts. Sometime during the previous day on the houseboat she had found time to paint her toenails cherry red. She and Mike were speaking again, since he had relayed his conversation with Flynn to her. The animosity that she had harboured towards him seemed to disappear instantly and they had discussed several scenarios about how they might deliberately get closer to the hunters to spy on them. Mike had discounted all her wild schemes, but she was still adamant that they should find a way to discover more about Hess's plans and to thwart them.

Mike played it straight, however, and phoned in his new information to Fanie Theron. He was annoyed to get the detective's voice mail again, and left a long,
detailed message. Mike had no idea whether Theron was getting the messages, let alone acting on them. He hoped the police appreciated the effort they had gone to, not to mention the pain he had suffered, and the importance of the information they were gathering.

‘There's nothing more we can do,' he had told Sarah when they boarded the houseboat. Secretly, now that he was sure Orlov and Hess were the men who had killed Isabella, he hoped he would have the chance to confront them. The Browning pistol was at the bottom of the daypack he carried on to the boat, just in case.

‘That's them!' Sarah had said on the first day out from Kariba, when a fast-moving speedboat overtook their sluggish floating gin palace.

Mike joined her at the railing and she handed him her binoculars.

‘That's who?' Kylie had asked.

‘Oh, no one,' Mike had said, pulling the baseball cap down more firmly on his head. He doubted they would recognise him from this distance, although Sarah and he had recognised them easily enough. ‘Just a couple of blokes we bumped into in Vic Falls.'

That was what spurred them on to changing their appearances the very next day, along with the fact that they would be anchoring just off Tashinga for their second and final night on the houseboat. There was a good chance the hunters might be able to scan the boat from the shore with their binoculars.

After his haircut Mike ducked below deck to the bathroom to shave off his goatee. The skin around his chin was white compared to the rest of his tanned
face and his new haircut conjured up memories of another life. He hadn't looked like this in over a year. The grey in his hair was more noticeable now that it was short, and the absence of his long sideburns drew attention to the crow's feet at his eyes. Still, he looked like a soldier again instead of an ageing hippie, and that was just fine. He was starting to feel like a soldier again, too.

‘Jesus Christ!' is probably not the right thing to say to a woman when she shows off a new hairstyle, but that's what came out when Mike saw Sarah. Her hair was short. Very short, like a man's, and very black. The cut was stylish enough, but the transformation from soft blonde bob to GI Jane was a shock to Mike.

‘That's all they had in the shop,' she said, throwing an empty cardboard box at him.

He caught it and looked at the label. A smiling African woman with frizzy jet-black hair was surrounded by the words ‘Dark and Lovely'. Many African women coloured their hair, he knew, as they found pure black more attractive than chocolate brown.

‘Well,' Sarah said, pursing her lips, ‘how do I look?'

‘Um . . . dark and lovely?' Mike ventured. Mel laughed. Sarah didn't.

‘How do I look?' Mike questioned back.

‘Old and grey,' Sarah said, trying hard to hold back a smile.

‘I think it looks sexy,' Jane Muir said from behind him.

Mike felt long fingernails suddenly caressing his scalp.

Julie giggled and raised the old Jackie Collins paperback she was reading on the sundeck closer to her face. Sarah, Mike saw, was glaring at Julie with the same burning stare seen on lions when they're stalking.

‘Time to wash off,' Mike said, and climbed up onto the safety railing that surrounded the deck.

‘You've got to be joking!' Jane said with real concern.

‘There're hippos and crocodiles and all sorts of stuff in there. You said so!' Mel added.

‘What about the cage, Mike?' asked Sam.

The houseboat came complete with a steel cage that was lowered into the water from a small hand-cranked derrick on the aft deck. It was big enough for three or four people to splash around in while the boat was stationary. Mike had been out on boats with Zimbabwean friends in the past and they maintained that if you were in the centre of Lake Kariba, as they were now, you were safe from harm.

‘It's too hard to do laps in,' Mike replied and dived off the railing. The water was cool and refreshing. It soothed the dull ache in his bruised ribs and face, and he scrubbed the annoying, itching bits of cut hair from his scalp. He struck out away from the boat in a strong overarm and then rolled onto his back to look back at the faces lining the rails.

‘Sod it,' Sarah said. She stepped out of her shorts and climbed the safety rail.

Mike suddenly felt concerned for her. While it was all right for him to take risks, no matter how slight the chance of his being taken by a crocodile in deep water, he was afraid for her safety. She executed a graceful dive and swam towards him.

Suddenly he felt excited, seeing her swimming towards him. He imagined their warm bodies coming together in the cold water, the feel of erect nipples pressing through the flimsy black lycra of her bikini against his chest. She stopped and trod water a couple of metres away from him.

‘It's great, isn't it?' she said, her smile wide, their earlier jousts forgotten.

‘It certainly is,' he said.

‘Race you back?'

‘Good idea,' Mike said.

Sarah had about ten years on Mike and he shuddered to think what a comparison of their lifestyles and exercise regimens would reveal. She touched the boat a length ahead of him and wasn't even breathing hard when he struggled alongside her. She ran a hand through her short black hair and sent up a shower of tiny droplets. He thought the colour made her blue eyes look striking, rather than merely attractive.

He climbed the aluminium ladder that the boat captain had thoughtfully lowered over the side and instinctively reached out a hand to help Sarah aboard. Sarah looked up and for a moment it seemed to him that she was going to scorn his offer. Just as he started to pull back his arm she reached up out of the water and grasped his hand. Her grip was strong and warm. It was the first time they had touched since the kiss in the nightclub and he felt the same confusion and desire sweep through his body.

Mike handed Sarah a towel as the roar of outboard motors and the slap of a fast-moving hull on the small swell made them all turn towards shore. The
houseboat was pointing towards Tashinga and Mike could just make out the A-frame camping shelters on the shore about a kilometre away. That was where the boat was coming from, loud and fast.

‘Can I borrow your binoculars, please, Kylie?' Mike asked. She had been using them to watch a pair of fish eagles near the shore.

A tall man was standing in the fast-moving boat. He had blond hair. He put a hand on the driver's shoulder and the boat slowed its speed a fraction. Mike focused the binoculars and saw that the standing man was Hess. Orlov sat in the back, arms outstretched and face tilted to the sun.

The speedboat slowed and Orlov opened his eyes and stared at the larger craft. Hess and Orlov were level with the houseboat, but still about two hundred metres away. Flynn was at the helm and concentrating on the waters ahead. Travelling at the speed they were was a risky business on a lake full of submerged forests. Hess raised his binoculars, and for a moment he and Mike stared at each other.

‘Thank God for the haircuts,' Sarah whispered close to Mike's ear.

Mike knew he could have turned away or led Sarah to the other side of the boat, but a part of him hoped Hess could see him, and even recognise him, though he doubted the other man would. Mike felt a burning need to get close to these men again, to exact revenge and to see fear in their eyes.

Hess turned and said something to Orlov and smiled. They were ignoring the houseboat and its passengers. Hess tapped Flynn on the shoulder and
Mike heard the outboards scream as the guide opened the throttle wide again.

‘They're in a hurry,' Mike said to Sarah. She towelled her short hair while they both watched the small boat recede from view.

‘Do you think they've already killed one of the rhinos?' she asked.

‘I doubt that they'd travel with the horn in broad daylight if they had.'

‘Scared off?' she ventured.

‘I doubt it. If Flynn's as good a tracker as I think he is, he's probably found them their rhino. But I can't see him being in on the deal. He didn't strike me as being a poacher.'

‘So this was just a recce and they'll be coming back later.'

Mike nodded and reached for his towel. ‘Soon.'

The houseboat had a shallow draft, but even so, they could only anchor about a hundred metres from the lake shore at Tashinga that afternoon. Sarah and Mike were first into the small aluminium tender boat when the captain offered to take people ashore to stretch their legs.

Mike wanted to call Theron to update him on Hess and Orlov's latest movements, and to pass on his theory about what the hunters were up to, but they were too far from Kariba to get a signal on the mobile phone. Mike had no idea if Theron had taken any action as a result of his earlier reports, and Sarah and he decided that the only other thing they
could do was try to warn the National Parks staff themselves.

‘Where are you two going?' Jane asked as Sarah stepped down into the aluminium boat.

‘Sarah wants to interview the head ranger here, for her story,' Mike lied. ‘I'm just taking her to the Parks office. The boat will be back soon.'

Jane shrugged and turned to George and said, ‘How about that game of poker then, George? The one we were talking about the other night in the club?'

George looked startled, then replied, as calmly as he could, ‘What, strip poker, you mean?'

‘Get us a G and T, there's a good love. I'll shuffle the cards,' she said.

Mike smiled to himself as he climbed down into the boat. Again, Sarah let him take her hand to steady her as she climbed in. He stowed her camera gear at the front of the boat, to keep it under cover.

‘That woman is incorrigible,' Sarah said, as the houseboat crewman started the little motor and they cut towards shore.

‘That's exactly what I was thinking.'

‘And as for her daughter, well . . . It's none of my business, but is there something serious between you two?' she asked.

‘Who, Jane or Julie?' Mike asked, realising his blunder too late.

‘What? You slept with both of them!'

‘No, no. That incident with Julie wasn't how it looked. She came into the shower, but I turned her away after you left.'

‘But what, you slept with her mum?'

Mike felt his face starting to colour.

‘You did, didn't you?' Sarah persisted.

‘Gentlemen don't tell,' he said, turning away from her. ‘Anyway, in answer to your question there is nothing serious or otherwise going on between me and either Jane or Julie Muir.'

Mike could see the boatman was straining to hear their conversation now that it had turned to sex, and he was glad when they coasted into the sandy shore. Sarah left the boat first, so Mike didn't get a chance to offer his hand again.

‘So, you slept with Jane, but it meant nothing to you and you don't care about her? Is that right?' Sarah said as they walked up the sandy incline from the lake shore.

‘Typical journalist, putting words in people's mouths. If you must know, it's more the other way around. She's hardly said a word to me since we . . . well . . .'

‘Maybe you didn't leave a lasting impression? I don't know how people can carry on like that. What sort of example is Jane setting for her daughter?'

‘Haven't you ever had a one-night stand?' Mike asked, drawing level with her.

‘None of your business if I have, but I can tell you it wouldn't be on a trip with my daughter in tow. Rather than playing around like a horny teenager I would have thought she'd have been looking for a serious relationship, so she could set an example for her daughter,' Sarah said.