Far Horizon (29 page)

‘Maybe she thinks she'll never be able to replace
the man she lost. She was very young when it happened. Maybe she sees sex as a substitute for true love.'

‘Do you feel like that? That you'll never replace Isabella?' Sarah asked.

He thought for a moment about his answer. He hated other people reminding him about Isabella, and a couple of days earlier in the trip he would have told Sarah to mind her own business. But now he felt it was OK to talk about his lost love and that maybe Sarah was a good person to talk to. He stopped to pick up a gnarled piece of driftwood and inspect its sun-bleached surface.

‘It's different for me. I found Isabella late in my life. I'd been floating around aimlessly – having a pretty good time – but I was beginning to think I'd never find someone. I'll never forget what we had together, no matter how brief it was, but the odds of me finding a love like that again are pretty long.'

Mike didn't know what, if anything, he was starting to feel for Sarah now, despite her often prickly manner. Jane's advances and their one night of sex had awoken feelings of lust in him that he had suppressed since Isabella's death.

‘What about you?' he asked. ‘Where does Mr Right fit into your plans?'

‘Who said I was looking for Mr Right? No, I'm not where I want to be yet with my career. But when I am, maybe there'll be time for . . . I don't know, time for love, maybe even children.'

‘Want some advice from an old soldier?'

‘Keep your gun clean and always carry a condom?'

‘Very funny. No, just go for life, wherever it takes you. Grab it by the bit and run with it. Do whatever you want and chase whatever goals you want, but don't try to live your life by a timetable. I had only a few years to go in the army before I could retire with a full pension, but then I met Isabella and I knew that we wouldn't have a chance if I marked time at some middle-of-nowhere army base in Australia while she waited half a world away. I made the right choice, even with everything that happened in Mozambique, and I don't regret chucking away my old job. My only regret is that I didn't do it sooner, then maybe none of that stuff would have happened.'

‘You shouldn't go on like that, Mike. I believe in fate. What will be, will be, and there's no point wondering “what if”. It's easy for you to talk about chucking away your career on a whim, but it's still early days for me. I'm trying to make a name for myself. I want to do well and be successful, even if that means making some sacrifices in my personal life.'

They arrived at the park headquarters. The building was green-painted, rendered brick with an array of solar panels on the roof and a tall radio mast at one end. Garbled voices chattered noisily through a veil of static from the radio's loudspeaker as Mike and Sarah entered the building.

An old ranger with tight curly grey hair greeted them from behind the polished wooden counter.

‘Good morning, sir, madam. How are you?' He spoke with a whistle through the gap where his front teeth had once been.

They exchanged pleasantries and introduced themselves quickly, as Mike was eager to raise the alarm. ‘Are you the head ranger here?'

‘No, sir, the boss he is in Kariba for three days,' the old man said.

‘We have information that some poachers will be coming to this camp, probably to shoot one of your rhinos.'

The ranger was taken aback. ‘Poachers? No, sir, we shoot the poachers here.' He raised his arms, pantomiming pointing a rifle.

‘No, you don't understand. There are men planning to come here, maybe tonight, to shoot a rhino.'

‘How do you know this?' the ranger asked, narrowing his eyes.

Mike thought things were going badly. Not only did the ranger not believe them, but now he was getting suspicious.

Sarah tried a different tack. ‘There were five men camped here last night. They tracked a wild rhino this morning, in the bush, didn't they?'

The ranger looked even more distrustful now. ‘How did you know this?' he asked. He was fidgeting with a piece of paper now, but Mike couldn't read what it said.

Sarah continued. ‘These are the men that the South African Police suspect of poaching. We overheard them talking about illegally hunting a rhino in Zimbabwe when we were travelling in South Africa and we reported our concerns to the police. Haven't you received any information about this?'

Mike liked Sarah's neat paraphrasing of the truth
and nodded in support. The ranger looked down at the paper again.

‘As a matter of fact we have received a warning of possible illegal activity from the police. But those men who came yesterday, they were with a man who would not be involved in such things. I do not think they are the ones.'

‘Gerry O'Flynn, you mean? Flynn?' Mike asked.

‘Yes. That is the man. He worked here as warden in the old days. I once saw him kill a poacher. He would never shoot a rhino.'

‘I know Flynn also, and I believe you. I don't think he knows what the other men were up to.'

‘Let me take your name and I will make a report,' the ranger said, reaching for a large book on the counter.

Mike knew there was nothing more they could do and his exasperation must have shown.

‘Don't worry, sir. We take poaching very seriously in this country and we do not need the South Africans to tell us to be vigilant. We know how to treat these people.'

Mike wasn't sure whether the man was referring to meddling South Africans or desperate poachers, but either way they had to leave it in his hands. Sarah and Mike supplied their names and addresses, and the man took a long time writing down a short version of what they had told him. When they were finished, the ranger offered to arrange a visit to where the young orphan rhinos were kept. Sarah was keen to see them and Mike realised he had no problems about spending another hour or so with her away from the group.

H
ess looked up at the half moon. He knew they needed its light to track the rhino, but any illumination at night increased the risk of their being spotted, by a National Parks or border patrol boat, or by anti-poaching patrols on the ground.

Hess was dressed in black denim jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt, his blond hair covered with a navy-blue woollen watch cap. Orlov, as usual, had scorned his advice and insisted on wearing his faded old
Spetsnaz
smock. Klaus was dressed like his employer, while the three poachers wore ragged T-shirts and shorts. Hess had produced specially made boots for Orlov and himself before they left the lodge at Siavonga. They were leather hiking boots, but Klaus had fitted new soles to them.

‘The tread looks like it has been cut from an old car tyre,' Orlov had said as he turned one of the boots over in his hands.

‘It was,' Hess said. ‘Any tracks we leave will look
like those left by African poachers wearing locally made sandals.' Sure enough, when they rendezvoused with the local poachers on a small lakeside beach just out of the Zambian border town of Siavonga, the poachers were wearing sandals cut from old car tyres.

The night air was cool on their faces as the boat skimmed across the calm silvery waters of Lake Kariba. They detoured around a couple of kapenta boats, the noise and lights from the ungainly vessels visible from far off and, as they closed on the shores of Matusadona, Hess pointed out a lone houseboat to the helmsman, the eldest of the Zambian poachers, whose name was Alfred.

Alfred nodded and gave the houseboat a wide berth. He adjusted the throttle setting at the same time to reduce the noise from the seventy-horsepower outboard motor. The outboard was already muffled, its top housing covered with an old wooden packing crate lined with hessian sacks. Hess guessed this was not the first time the three poachers had used this speedy but comparatively silent craft on the lake. They moved with no lights and, at Alfred's urging, Hess and Orlov sat with the others in a puddle of water at the bottom of the sleek, open fibreglass ski boat so as to lower their silhouette as they crossed the lake.

On his lap, Hess cradled the weapon they would use for the hunt. He would hand it to Orlov once the rhino was in sight, but not before. The rifle was an old American M-14, and it was perfect for the mission at hand. The M-14 was issued to American soldiers and Marines in the late 1950s and '60s. The rifle
looked very much like its ancestor, the semi-automatic M1 Garrand rifle carried by US soldiers in the Second World War but the M-14 could be fired on full automatic. To feed the faster rate of fire the weapon had been fitted with a twenty-round magazine. The American army had swapped its M-14s for the newer, lighter, mostly plastic M-16 by the mid 1960s. The US Marine Corps, however, had held on to the trusty M-14 for most of the '60s during the Vietnam War. The rifle's heavier 7.62mm-calibre ammunition gave it a greater accuracy over long distances than the smaller-calibre M-16 and, as such, it had an extended lease of life as a sniper rifle.

Hess had bought his weapon from an ex-Marine who served in the Rhodesian Light Infantry during the bush war. Already a long and heavy rifle, Hess's model was even more cumbersome as it was fitted with a silencer on the end of the barrel and a starlight nightscope on the top. The rifle was the largest-calibre weapon Hess owned that could be silenced to an acceptable level, and that was why he had brought it along. He wanted Orlov to kill the rhino in silence and, if it became necessary, Hess would be able to deal with any rangers who stumbled into their path during the hunt in the same way.

Klaus and the three poachers each carried their trademark AK-47s, and the Zambian rogues also carried razor-sharp
pangas
, to behead the dead rhino. One of the men had an old potato sack stuffed with hessian to wrap the massive skull in and rope to sling the trophy between them.

Hess had left his Glock pistol behind, but had
given Orlov Klaus's Russian Tokarev pistol for personal protection. Klaus had taken the old pistol from a Cuban military adviser he killed on a cross-border raid into Angola. If they were stopped by the authorities from either side of the lake during the crossing, they would ditch their rifles and the old pistol over the side of the boat and claim that they had gotten lost while on a night-time fishing trip. The cover story was flimsy, but they carried rods, bait, tackle and half-a-dozen fresh-caught bream at the bottom of the boat to help substantiate it.

Orlov raised the heavy pistol slightly to catch the moonlight and, for the second time that night, eased back the metal slide to check that there was a round chambered in the breech. At that moment, Alfred swung the outboard's tiller sharply to port to avoid the top of a dead tree that only just broke the black surface of the water. Instinctively, Orlov reached for the side of the boat with the same hand that was holding the pistol. The weapon clunked against the fibreglass hull with enough noise to make all the occupants turn and stare at him. Orlov hurriedly replaced the pistol in the pocket of his combat smock. He cursed silently and was glad the darkness hid his embarrassment.

Hess masked his annoyance at the noise by kneeling lower and resting the wooden stock of the M-14 on the side of the boat. He peered intently into the M-14's nightscope. The houseboat showed as a bright, pale-green box against the darker shoreline. The low-wattage navigation light that burned dully on top of the boat's stubby mast shone like a full lime-coloured
moon surrounded by a lighter, brighter halo. The nightscope magnified any ambient light it detected and had the single bulb been brighter, its luminescence might have washed out everything else in his view, and even damaged the scope. As it was, Hess could scan the decks easily, the weak navigation light helping, rather than obscuring his view. It was after two in the morning and, predictably, there was no sight of movement on deck. All the cabin lights were dark. He had no reason to fear the houseboat – the tourists on board would see and hear nothing if all went to plan. There was no sign that anybody aboard had heard Orlov's clumsiness.

The most direct route to where they had last seen the rhino would have been to beach at Tashinga Camp again and retrace their steps, via the
boma
where the orphan animals were kept. But that was also the most dangerous route. Instead, Alfred took them past the camp and the moored houseboat, and into a small cove half a kilometre further on. As they entered the cove, he cut the engine and the boat coasted noiselessly into shore and beached gently in the sand.

As they had rehearsed on the beach near Siavonga, Klaus was first out. He sprinted across the sand to where the grass began and dropped to one knee. The barrel of his assault rifle followed the sweep of his eyes as he scanned the bush in front of them. Hess followed, then Orlov, and they crouched beside Klaus while the three Zambians dragged the boat into the tree line. Alfred broke a branch from a mopani tree and returned to the water's edge. He
walked backwards to the group, sweeping the sand clear of footprints and drag marks as he moved. Then he handed the branch to one of his comrades, a tall, thin man named Ezekial, who would bring up the rear from now on and follow Alfred's example as they moved.

Hess touched the third man, William, on the arm, and pointed towards the camp. William nodded and scratched the ugly, puckered scar running vertically down his left cheek. Alfred, the leader of the trio, claimed the wound had been inflicted by a leopard, which William had subsequently killed with a knife. Hess thought it more likely the injury originated in a
shebeen
brawl and that William had encountered the business end of a broken bottle.

‘Disable the radio first, then watch the
boma
,' Hess whispered to William, who nodded, once again, that he understood his part in the operation. He was to break into the camp office, cut the antenna and any other leads he could find on the solar-powered radio, and then make his way to the orphan rhino enclosure, where he would maintain surveillance on the guard there. ‘Only watching, OK? No shooting unless there is trouble. Understand?' Hess repeated his orders again.

William nodded once more, annoyed that the hunter was treating him like a stupid child. He crept off through the bush, the AK-47 pointing ahead of him, and followed the shoreline back towards the camp.

Hess raised his hand and pointed into the bush. Klaus surrendered the lead to Ezekial, who would
take point until they reached the approximate area where the rhino's tracks had last been seen. The Zambian had hunted rhino many times before and, though his trips across the lake had been fewer and fewer in recent years, he was still able to detect the animal by sound and smell, as well as by any visible spoor.

Orlov was eager to find their prey as soon as possible. He felt acutely underpowered with only the ageing Russian pistol for protection and eyed Hess's long, ungainly M-14 covetously. The rifle was the same one with which he had shot his sable, and he had enjoyed the feel of the heavy sniper's weapon.

They crept silently, pausing every ten or twenty metres for the trackers to listen and smell the bush around them. After an hour at this snail-like pace, Hess slipped the GPS unit from its belt pouch during one of the stops. He knelt and bent over the instrument to shield the glare from the tiny screen light. The distance to the point where they had seen the rhino during the day was a mere hundred metres, but instead of heading towards the sighting point, Ezekial was now leading them away, back towards the camp.

Hess moved forward until he could whisper into the tracker's ear. ‘What have you found?'

‘Fresh spoor. He left the area where you found him during the day sometime, but look, see the broken branch and the footprint, he has passed back this way tonight. He can smell the woman, you understand?' Hess nodded. ‘He is heading for the
boma
. We are close to him now.'

Hess reckoned they were now less than a kilometre
from the camp and the lake shore. He wanted Orlov to make the kill as far away from the rangers' post and the guarded
boma
as possible, but the lovesick rhino was making it difficult for them. ‘Move quickly, Ezekial,' he whispered.

The tracker nodded, hiding his exasperation at such a foolhardy command. The money the three poachers would make from this one kill was more than they would have received if they had taken all the horns from all the rhinos in the
boma
, so he held his tongue.

A gentle breeze rustled the leaves above their head, but the wind, what little there was of it, was on their faces, so the rhino would not smell them. Hess had to admit that the Zambians knew their trade well. Of course, for them the price of sloppiness was death.

For another half-hour they continued the hunt, all the while the footprints and other evidence of the rhino's path becoming more obvious to everyone in the small column now they knew what they were looking for. Ezekial stopped, so abruptly that Klaus nearly walked into him. They all knelt. From somewhere in front of them they clearly heard a low grunt and a shuffling of heavy but nimble feet in the dry leaves. Then there was a sniffing noise. The rhino was almost as close to his prey now as the hunters were to theirs.

The tracker pointed into the gloom ahead. Hess raised the butt of the M-14 to his shoulder and peered into the starlight scope. At first he saw nothing but a fuzzy haze of glowing green vegetation. He swung the rifle a little to the right, to the exact spot where
Ezekial was still pointing, and waited. The problem with the night sight was the lack of depth in the image it displayed. Everything looked as if it was the same distance away from the observer. Hess blinked sweat from his eyes and stared hard to find meaning in the illuminated clutter.

Then he saw it. Just a shape moving among the glowing leaves, but an unmistakable silhouette. The rhino was moving into a thinner patch of thorn bush now and was clearly visible in the scope, though hardly so to the naked eye. Hess estimated the range at seventy-five metres, no more. Close enough for a killing shot.

He lowered the rifle and nodded to Ezekial, who crouched lower into the grass. Hess turned to Orlov and the Russian instinctively knew it was time. ‘It's cocked,' he whispered as he handed over the M-14.

Orlov took the weapon, relishing its weight, the smoothness of the stock, the ungainly, brutal beauty of the long barrel.

Hess knelt close to the Russian and whispered, ‘Remember, put as many rounds into the animal as you can. You must disrupt his internal organs, the way the poachers do with their AK-47s.'

The Russian frowned at the unnecessary advice. They had been over the killing tactics earlier in the day, and he did not need to be told how to hunt. Also, Hess's comparison of their hunt to a poaching expedition annoyed him.

Orlov squinted into the eyepiece of the nightscope and sighted the rhino immediately through the lime-coloured haze of intensified moonlight. The rifle was
fitted with a folding bipod for extra stability in the sniper role, but if Orlov lay on the ground and used the supports he would not see the rhino clearly. He chose a sitting position instead, knees bent and legs spread, pointing at forty-five degrees to the right of the rhino.

He swivelled his torso slightly to the left and rested his elbows just below his raised knees. He double-checked the selector was set to semi-automatic fire. The rifle would fire one shot every time he pulled the trigger. He lifted the butt of the rifle to his shoulder again.

Hess willed the Russian to take his shot, because the rhino was starting to move again. Mercifully, the beast stopped and sniffed the wind.

Orlov had the rhino in his sights now. The animal was munching contentedly on the thorns from a head-high branch. The Russian took a breath and slowly exhaled, then he lowered the rifle without moving his elbows. Orlov raised the sight to his eye again and allowed himself a small smile – the moment's relaxation had allowed him to confirm, when he looked into the sight once more, that his whole body was aligned perfectly for the shot.