The Prey (19 page)

Cameron heard Kylie and Chris start climbing again. From the sounds coming from below they weren’t as far behind him as he’d thought. Chris had snapped out of the daze he’d been in when Cameron had first found him and was now putting his youth and strength to good use.

‘Be a man, McMurtrie,’ called a voice from above.

Cameron’s hand closed tighter around the grip of his shotgun. The bastard was taunting him.

‘I’ll be back, you know.’

Cameron knew Wellington was probably correct. He had rescued Chris and killed a few
zama zamas
, but he hadn’t had time to destroy any of Wellington’s gear or processing plants, and there could still be more than a hundred illegals unaccounted for, scuttling away like rats into more disused workings. Cameron would move to his office job and Wellington would return to what he’d always been, the mine boss.

Cameron also knew he should stay put and wait for the others. Instead, he started to climb again.

*

Wellington paused at the next chairlift landing, shrugged off his daypack and unzipped it. He was one more flight of steps from the entrance to the disused mine. There was still a risk that McMurtrie and the others would emerge from the escape shaft in time to catch him fleeing across the open ground and old mine dumps. It was a long way to the fence and the gold in the pack was heavy.

McMurtrie probably had a cellphone or radio and would call security or the police to intercept Wellington before he could exit through his concealed cutting in the old mine’s security fence. Wellington needed to ensure there would be no pursuit and the best way to do that was to kill McMurtrie.

But he couldn’t risk getting into a gunfight with McMurtrie, as Loubser had let on that McMurtrie was an ex-recce commando.
Loubser had also told him, during one of their many conversations, that McMurtrie’s wife had run off with another man, to America. ‘I’ll go see your wife for you if you like,’ he called down below. Wellington smiled to himself when he heard the other man’s grunted exertions.

Wellington lay on the edge of the parapet overlooking the steps below him and waited for McMurtrie to appear. He couldn’t see him, but he would hear him. From the glimpse he’d had of McMurtrie earlier, it looked like he was wearing night-vision goggles. A handy device, Wellington thought, and he would have to invest in a pair for himself before returning to take over Eureka again.

He heard McMurtrie’s breathing and his footsteps slowing as he prepared to move to the next level. Wellington picked up the hand grenade he had taken from his pack and pulled the pin. He let the lever fly off the side of the orb.

*

Cameron heard the metallic clang of something hitting the side wall of the escape tunnel and looked up. He caught a brief glimpse of Wellington’s face, but was preoccupied by what he saw falling from the man’s outstretched hand as he disappeared from view.

‘Grenade!’

Cameron reached for it as it bounced from the floor of the shaft onto the concrete landing in front of him. He watched, momentarily transfixed in horror, as it rolled past him along the platform.

‘Shit.’

‘What is it?’ Kylie called up from below.

She must not have heard him. ‘Hand grenade! Get back!’

Kylie’s head and torso came into view as the grenade slowed to a stop two metres from her. Chris’s face appeared, contorted with the labour of carrying Luis. Cameron rushed along the landing and pushed Kylie in the chest with the palm of his hand, knocking her backwards into Chris, who cried out in surprise as they tumbled back down the last few stairs.

Cameron dived on top of the grenade.

T
he fisherman preened his feathers in the deep shade of the sycamore fig. He needed the darkness and he needed food for his two young chicks. The voices and the light that searched the trees for him and his family most nights had cost him a meal again the previous evening. He hated the light.

The sun, too, was his enemy. He nestled deeper into the shadows moving slowly and carefully along the branch as the moving rays began to pick him out. His young slept and his mate blinked her eyes from the nest.

She was the only one he had been with; they would be together for life. They had successfully raised just two offspring from six eggs in the past three years. Their habitat was being disturbed along the river, by flood, by predators and by man.

Their roost was far from ideal. The fig was a big tree, but the elephants drank and browsed here often. The massive pachyderms would rub themselves against the trunk, shaking the nest as though the earth itself was moving. In the summer, when the tree fruited, they would have to move because the resident troop of baboons would raid the tree, gorging themselves on its juicy bounty.

He swivelled his head slowly and checked his surroundings. One of his chicks squealed. When the fisherman looked upriver again his head froze as he caught the fast-moving sweep of a shadow on the surface of the river below their perch. A second later he heard the sound that was part of the daily symphony of the bush, yet one that always caused him concern.
Wee-aah, hyo-hyo-hyo
, cried Inkwazi, the African fish eagle, in his ringing, rising and descending tones as he called to his mate.

Like the fisherman, Inkwazi was a devoted partner to his female and together they were also struggling to raise a family. But whereas the fisherman relied almost solely on the river for his food, the fish eagle’s name was something of a misnomer. He and his wife could, and would given half a chance, feast on lesser birds. The fisherman sat very still.

Along the branch, however, one of his young, denied his feed from the night before, cried out in hunger. The owl turned his head at the sound of beating wings.

Inkwazi had heard the noise or glimpsed the slightest of movements in the dappled shadows of the fig. He dived from his own perch, flying fast, aiming for the kill.

O
NE WEEK LATER

T
ertia Venter received the message by radio that her guests had entered the Sabi Sand Game Reserve via Shaw’s Gate and were on their way to Lion Plains. She hoped a rogue elephant stopped them en route and trampled the mining executives to death.

The other operators and landowners in the reserve had all signed her petition condemning the mine, but none of them would be as directly affected as she by Global Resources’ plans. She appreciated the other lodges’ support and solidarity, but they didn’t want to contribute to a legal case and Tertia couldn’t afford a high court challenge by herself.

She knew her strategy of taking a high-profile stance against the mine in the media was a two-edged one. As well as several articles in the
Sunday Times
, the
Citizen
, and the Afrikaans newspapers
Beeld
and
Rapport
, and a feature story on the local television current affairs program
Carte Blanche
, Tertia had also attracted the interest of the South African correspondents of CNN and BBC World and the Australian ABC. While she felt she was gaining traction – two
international environmental peak bodies had recently issued a media release condemning Global Resources, and the South African government for approving the company’s application – she knew the publicity had also cost her business. She’d had feedback from her neighbours from clients who had been considering staying at Lion Plains but had mistakenly thought the mine was already operating. People could be stupid – they absorbed only the worst of the facts they saw on TV or read in a newspaper – but many other strangers had contacted her via Facebook to express their support for her and some had made a point of booking with her so they could personally vent their anger about the mine while staying at Lion Plains.

There were plenty of people out there with a passion for wildlife. Passion, she mused, was a funny word – and one that had been absent from her life for so many years, until the mine proposal came along.

Tertia had lost the deeds to the property in a land claim by the local community several years earlier, but thanks to what she believed were her close ties to them she had negotiated a contract to lease the rights to continue operating Lion Plains Lodge on the communal lands for a nominal annual fee. Tertia had received compensation from the government for the loss of ownership of the land and, although she knew the amount was the land’s fair value, she had decided not to buy somewhere else or emigrate to Australia, but to plough most of the money back into Lion Plains. Many had thought she was crazy, but she had built another camp on the property, the community received a good profit from her game lodges and Tertia had been more or less happy with the outcome. Now, of course, the community knew it could make far more from the mining company, and her five-year initial contract had not been renewed. But she wasn’t dead yet; she would show them all – the community, Global Resources, and the government, that they’d been wrong to cross her.

The Eureka
bakkie
pulled up in front of her lodge. She watched them get out. There was a woman, who would be Hamilton, with a
sticky plaster over a swollen nose – served the bitch right, whatever happened to her – and the man she knew was Cameron McMurtrie. She had last seen his blackened, sweat-streaked face on the front page of the
Star
, after the mine rescue.

Chris Loubser, the project’s environmental officer, had come to her seven months earlier to explain how his company was going to destroy her life and the land she loved.

He walked fast, to overtake the others. ‘Tertia,
howzit
?’

She folded her arms. ‘How do you think? Can you imagine what I’ve been going through?’

He smiled. ‘
Ja
. I’ve had an interesting time, too.’

‘So I read.’

‘Let me introduce you to Dr Kylie Hamilton, head of health, safety, environment and community at Global Resources.’

‘Hmph, chief window-dresser by the sound of it.’

Tertia made no move to approach the other two, and they were smart enough not to extend a hand for her to pointedly ignore. Normally guests would have been greeted by a ranger and tracker, who would have loaded their luggage into a game-viewing vehicle for transport to their suites. Technically this lot were guests, as they were staying the night – Tertia had invited them as she wanted the senior people, particularly the foreigner, to see first hand what they were about to destroy – but she would not be going out of her way to make them feel at home.

‘Tertia, please,’ Chris appealed to her. ‘And this is Cameron McMurtrie. He’s taking over as Global Resources’ head of new project developments.’

‘Please excuse me if I don’t hand you a welcome fruit cocktail,’ Tertia said. ‘If you load your luggage into the game viewer I’ll send someone to park your
bakkie
. It’s a short drive to the lodge where you’re staying and we can have a game drive on the way.’

Kylie Hamilton walked to the open-topped Land Rover and hefted her bag onto the rearmost of the three tiers of seats. The men did the same and they all clambered up and into the vehicle.

Tertia got into the driver’s seat and took another look at the newcomers, on the pretext of making sure they were all seated. In fact, she wouldn’t have cared less if one had fallen out and been cleaned up by Stompie, the cranky old male lion with only half a tail, and brother to Big Boy.

The woman was trying to smile, but it looked like the action made her swollen nose hurt. McMurtrie had a plaster over a cut above his left eye. He was a good-looking man, but not nearly as handsome as Chris Loubser. Despite her shock and anger when he had first come to Lion Plains to deliver the bad news to her that the mining project had been approved, she still thought him one of the most attractive young men she had ever laid eyes on. He smiled at her and she scowled and turned the Land Rover’s key.

Tertia attacked the track to the lodge, aiming for every rut and pothole she could see. Twice she had the satisfaction of hearing the woman gasp behind her.

‘No point in grading the roads as we get so few guests these days,’ Tertia said in the wind, not deigning to look back at her passengers.

‘Stop!’ the woman called from behind her.

Tertia instinctively pushed the brake and clutch and looked back. The dust cloud that had been trailing the Land Rover now enveloped them. ‘What is it?’

‘I just saw an elephant!’

Kylie, the senior member of the group, was as wide-eyed as a five year old on her first visit to the Kruger Park. Tertia had seen that look countless times, in people of all ages when they first encountered Africa’s glory. Despite her hatred of the woman, of all of them and their filthy business, this was what she had hoped for. The woman was pointing.

‘Back there.’ Kylie looked at Cameron McMurtrie and Chris, who were both smiling.

‘We saw it,’ Cameron said.

‘Please won’t you reverse, Tertia?’ Chris said. ‘I’m sure Kylie would like to have a better look.’

‘
Ag. Pleez
,’ Tertia mimicked. They were coming here to raze this place and relocate or destroy everything that lived here.

‘Sorry,’ Kylie said, trying to be professional again. ‘We’ve got a meeting to attend. It’s OK.’

Tertia took her hand off the gear lever and waved it in the air. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s a foregone conclusion. I’ll show you old Marula if you wish.’ She dropped her hand and found reverse, not caring how bumpy the return journey was on them. Looking back over her shoulder she saw the woman frantically scrabbling in her daypack for her camera.

‘There it is,’ Kylie hissed. ‘Oh. My. God.’

‘An old bull,’ Cameron said, leaning back in his seat as Kylie raised the camera to her eyes, then cursed, lowered it and quickly removed the lens cap.

‘Sixty, sixty-five, I reckon,’ Tertia said. ‘Just think of how much history he’s seen, and now –’

‘Tertia, you know he’s a lone bull who follows the breeding herds which move in and out of the national park,’ Chris said.

‘
Yes
, I know, but he
always
comes back to Lion Plains, as do the breeding herds, and Marula has lived most of his life in the Sabi Sand. It’s his home.’ She swallowed as her voice caught. ‘Now there’ll be even less of the greater Kruger Park for them to feed in, which will add to the pressure on the rest of the reserve.’