Far Horizon (43 page)

Mike felt as though his arm was being pulled from its socket, as Hess dangled in space below him, kicking his legs as he tried to gain a foothold on the skid. The helicopter was still high, the pilot circling at altitude to avoid mist-shrouded hills and the possibility of more ground fire from the truck.

‘Help me!' Hess screamed, staring up into Mike's eyes.

The pilot looked over his shoulders and yelled, ‘Pull him in. Now! Pull him in!'

If Mike had been holding onto Hess, instead of the other way around, he would have let go, then and there. Mike wanted Hess dead more than anything else in the world, but there was nothing he could do while Hess gripped him. Mike was using his free hand to help keep himself inside the helicopter by gripping a strut supporting the troop seats. ‘Help me, Sarah,' he called.

She grabbed hold of Mike's belt and started to drag him back across the cargo compartment floor. Slowly, painfully, they hauled the struggling Hess upwards. Eventually, he was able to hook a leg over the helicopter's skid and pull himself to a sitting position.

Mike sat back on the aircraft floor, drained by the effort. Hess stood on the skid, one hand holding the roof to support himself. He smiled at Mike again as his right hand reached behind his back.

‘Mike, look out!' Sarah screamed.

He saw the flash of steel as Hess pulled the bloodstained knife from his back. Mike dropped onto his back as the blade arced down towards him. He drew his knees protectively up to his chest. He avoided Hess's killing stroke, but the point of the knife scored a bloody trough down one of his shins.

Mike kicked out, ankles together, and caught Hess in the stomach with both his feet. Hess lost his grip on the roof and sailed backwards, arms windmilling. Mike couldn't see the ground below and guessed they
were three or four hundred feet above the blackened bush. Hess didn't scream, but Mike knew he would never forget the wide-eyed look of surprise on the Namibian's face as he fell.

Sarah knelt beside Mike and wrapped her arms around him as he sat up.

‘It's over,' she said.

The pilot settled the helicopter into a hover with the stick between his knees and removed his helmet with his free hand. He turned and looked at them over his shoulder.

‘Sarah, meet Captain Fanie Theron of the South African Police Service,' Mike said.

‘Did you have to do that?' Theron shouted. He was trying to look stern, but Mike saw the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth as he shook his head.

‘Yes,' Mike replied.

M
ichael Williams had found a quiet piece of Africa where he could recuperate. He was ready for some peace.

Over the past few mornings he had watched two old bull elephants drinking from the Zambezi River, casting dark reflections on the water like black irises in shining blue eyes. Crocodiles basked lazily on golden spits of sand in the middle of the day and the hippos came out to graze in the afternoon, as the sun set.

The only sounds in his refuge came from nature, not from man. Last night he had heard hyena calling and the night before that it was a lion.

Three months of eating, drinking and fishing had cured the worst of his wounds, including a bout of bilharzia, which he had probably picked up from the flooded river when they rescued Sarah. The gunshot wounds had turned to pink puckered scars. The memories and the dreams were taking longer to go away.

The house where he had been living, if one could call it a house, was a two-room fishing shack on the Zambezi near Chirundu, in the far north of Zimbabwe. The place wasn't much to look at, but the big concrete verandah was well shaded by a cracked asbestos roof, and the fridge worked.

Mike had left his job, mainly to escape the glare of publicity that followed his last overland trip. Despite what some people said, he hadn't been sacked. In fact, bookings actually increased and Rian had begged him to return after a rest at the shack, which was owned by some Zimbabwean friends of his.

He had decided that he wasn't going back, though. Forward, maybe, but not back. He had made pretty good money working for Rian on the overland trips and, with all his food and expenses covered by the job, he had managed to put some cash away. Lately he had been thinking about buying some land, perhaps setting up a small game farm and a lodge. The proposition would be more attractive if he could find a partner, although not necessarily a financial partner.

An old African caretaker also lived in the fishing shack. Moses had kept Mike company over the long, hot summer months on the river. They would fish for bait together in the mornings and then go out on a boat to drift lazily in the current in the hope of bagging a tiger fish or two in the afternoon. Mike never caught many of the tenacious fighting fish, but that was fine with him. He found no great thrill in hunting, fishing or killing.

Rian and Susie forwarded get-well cards and postcards from the other members of the tour group, and
just the other day he had received a letter from Nigel. He and Nigel had been flown out of Mfuwe airport on an air ambulance to Lusaka as soon as Fanie Theron had touched down in the helicopter. They had missed the chance to say a proper goodbye to everyone else.

Nelson, the truck, was still plying the highways and dirt roads of southern Africa. According to Rian, the new driver, a young American guy called Sam, loved showing the female travellers where the bullet holes were patched. Rian had told him the rules when he took him on as a driver, but Mike had told him that some rules were made to be broken.

Sarah left for England the day after Mike was flown to Lusaka. Susie regularly pulled Sarah's stories from
The Times
off the internet and sent hard copies to Mike in the post.

A raid by Russian police on Orlov's mansion outside Moscow unearthed a huge pair of elephant tusks which, with the help of the South African authorities, were positively identified as having once belonged to Skukuza. There was no direct evidence linking Orlov to the killings in Mozambique, mainly because there were no witnesses. However, the South Africans had enough on him to extradite him from Zambia. Orlov hadn't actually killed anyone in Zambia, except for an inflatable doll, of course. A string of firearms charges, while proved by a Zambian court, weren't enough to keep him in jail in Zambia for very long; however, the South Africans took poaching seriously and it looked like Orlov would be in prison for a couple of years at least.

Susie had kept in touch with Sarah via e-mail and they had corresponded intermittently. She posted copies of the messages to Mike, but the mail took weeks to arrive. There was no phone at the fishing shack and the payphone in Chirundu rarely worked. He'd tried a few times to call Sarah, but on the one occasion he had been able to get through to her work, he was kept on hold so long waiting to talk to her that his money ran out.

Mike was grown up enough to realise that Sarah's future was a world away in England in pursuit of her career, which seemed to have really taken off in a very short space of time. He was pleased for her.

The shack came with its own vehicle: a beat-up, roofless old Land Rover. Moses and Mike mainly used it to go shopping and to pick up the mail. This morning was Moses's turn to pick up their beer, canned food and mail from the postbox at the general store.

‘Letter for you,
bwana
,' said Moses.

Mike had given up telling Moses to stop calling him
‘bwana'
.

‘Thanks, Moses.'

‘From the lady,' he added.

Mike's mail was almost always from Susie, and Moses could recognise her large, girlish handwriting. He looked at his watch and saw that it was after eleven, so he relieved Moses of one of the cold bottles of Castle beer in the carry bag and knocked the top off with the opener on his pocketknife.

‘Sundowner already,
bwana
?' Moses cackled.

‘I'm on holiday.'

‘You been on holiday more than any man I know,
bwana.
'

Mike sat down in his favourite deck chair and slit the envelope with the blade of his pocketknife. Inside was a single sheet of paper and he saw it was a photocopy of a one-paragraph item from
The Times
.

The beer bottle slid from his fingers as he read the lines. Moses wore a disapproving scowl as he emerged from the kitchen and saw the broken glass and spilt beer.

Mike read the item again.

Times
reporter Sarah Thatcher has been appointed as this newspaper's new Africa correspondent. Ms Thatcher, who will be based in Johannesburg, won two major media awards for her first-hand coverage of an armed attack on a tour group in Zambia and the subsequent arrest of a Russian national on poaching charges.

At the bottom of the photocopied page was a handwritten message giving the date and time of arrival of a British Airways flight from London to Johannesburg. The aircraft was due in a few days' time. After that she had written: ‘Do you know a good safari guide who could show me around and not get me killed? Love, Sarah.'

‘Moses,' Mike said, ‘how much fuel's in the Land Rover?'