The Delta (11 page)

When she got back to the camp site she shooed a pair of vervet monkeys off Chipchase's camping table. She heard snoring from inside the campervan and wondered how the man could sleep in the mobile coffin in the heat of the day. She'd slept in his hammock, a mosquito net suspended above her from a tree, soothed to slumber by the grunt of the hippos in the Chobe and glimpses of stars through the riverine bush canopy above her.

She eased herself into the safari lounger, grateful to take the weight off her leg, but pleasingly achey from the walk. She
couldn't afford to lose muscle tone, even if it hurt a bit during the recovery. Sonja took another big gulp of her fast-warming beer and opened the newspaper.

BDF, POLICE HELP SEARCH FOR ZIM ASSASSIN
shouted the headline. She frowned as she read.

The Botswana president said that while he had not always agreed with his Zimbabwean counterpart's policies and politics there was no excuse for someone to try and kill a head of state
.

Sonja snorted. For years the dinner-party conversation around the world had been ‘Why hasn't someone simply killed him?'

Police sources said a description of the alleged assassin had been circulated to them and the Botswana Defence Force, although the identikit picture would not be released to the media
.

‘Not surprising,' Sonja said softly. However, the news that the president had nearly been offed by a woman would be too salacious to be kept quiet for too long. It would make travelling harder for her, but not impossible.

Page three of the
Daily News
led with a story sourced from the Botswana president's spokesman admitting a lack of progress in talks with the Namibian and Angolan governments to increase flows from the recently completed dam on the Okavango River. Diplomatic efforts to stop the dam being built had failed and the governments that had part funded the project were pointing to the severe drought as the reason why the impact on the Okavango Delta was so far more drastic than had been predicted. The final stage of the project, the newspaper reported, would soon be completed once the hydro-electric power station associated with the project was commissioned.

Sonja turned her head when she heard the creak of the Land Cruiser's rear springs. The rear cargo door opened and Sydney Chipchase poked his head out.

‘Afternoon. Or is it still morning?' he said, blinking.

‘Too much Bushmills last night?' They had both stayed up late and Sonja had enjoyed blotting out the events of the recent and distant past for a few hours. The stories they'd told had been funny ones, from their army days, and she'd told him a little, very little, of her time growing up in Botswana.

Sydney looked over Sonja's shoulder at the newspaper article about the dam. ‘What do you think about that?'

Sonja shrugged. ‘I know people need electricity, but I can't help thinking there's more to this than meets the eye. Mines need lots of water. This dam could destroy the Okavango Delta for what? So some more people can get satellite TV and some politicians can line their pockets with kickbacks from the companies that will really benefit from damming the river.'

Chipchase nodded. ‘I visit the construction site often, to minister to the workers and their families. It's provided a lot of employment for a poor region in these tough financial times.' He helped himself to one of the beers still in the plastic bag on the table. ‘I've got to leave tomorrow, Sonja. I'm heading south to Francistown. Can I give you a lift?'

‘You know the cops will be looking for me at the roadblocks.'

Chipchase nodded. ‘They'll be looking for a solo woman, not a missionary couple.'

She laughed. ‘I don't know if I can play the part of a Godbotherer's wife.'

‘You played the part of an IRA sympathiser.'

She knew she shouldn't rise to his bait, but she couldn't help herself. There had been too many whispers, too much speculative bullshit after she'd returned from Northern Ireland. ‘I was told to
get close to the quartermaster who supplied the explosives for the school bus bombing. I did that.'

Sydney lowered himself into his camp chair and took a sip of his beer. ‘And Martin Steele hung you out to dry.'

She didn't like him making suppositions about Martin either. Chipchase was an intelligence officer who fought his war from behind a desk. ‘We pushed the boundaries, yes … even for the Det.'

‘The word was you slept with Byrne. Is that true?'

‘That's none of your fucking business, Sydney.'

He nodded. ‘Aye. You're right. I'm interested, though, from a professional and historical point of view. You were probably closer to the fighting in Northern Ireland than any military woman ever was. Didn't you feel Steele was using you, as a woman?'

Sonja shook her head. ‘Why do men have to paint us as victims or, worse, as helpless pawns? I got close to Byrne, yes, and I found out that his brother was the brains behind the bus bombing.'

‘The ends justified the means?'

‘Get your mind out of the gutter, Sydney. It was war, and I fought it the way I thought it needed to be fought.'

‘He was a killer, Sonja – as guilty as his brother was. He supplied the explosives and he must have known what they were going to be used for.'

Chipchase could never understand what had gone on between her and Danny Byrne, or between Danny and his brother. ‘I was able to get close to Danny because I knew where he was coming from. He was a guy who'd grown up in a war, on the side of the minority that thought it could never win. He grew up in an environment where killing made you a man, and where those who carried guns were seen as peacemakers and patriots. I grew up in the same world. That's how I got to him.'

‘And that,' Sydney said, pausing to drink some more beer, ‘is how you set him up to be assassinated by the SAS.'

The road from Kazungula to Francistown was one of the most boring in Africa, and only the potholes provided a distraction from the dull brown bush and dry yellow grass that flanked the shimmering river of tar that stretched endlessly into the distance.

Chipchase played AC/DC on his iPod, fed through the Land Cruiser's radio speakers. When ‘Highway to Hell' blasted forth Sonja told him she thought it an odd choice for a missionary.

‘It reminds me of my good old days as a sinner and gives me a reference point for how far I've travelled.'

She smiled, but she had too much on her mind and small talk wasn't her forte. She was heading for a confrontation. The safest place for her to hide was at Xakanaxa, and that would mean seeing Stirling. Chipchase's gentle but persistent questioning about her days in the army had brought back memories she'd fought for a long time to suppress. She knew that the more she thought about the events in Northern Ireland, the quicker she would reopen that particular wound. Would seeing Stirling again heal her, or kill what was left of her soul for good? A month earlier, while still in the UK, she had succumbed, over a couple of glasses of wine, to a simmering urge to look for Stirling on Facebook. She'd found him and been quietly ecstatic to see his status was listed as ‘single'. It had taken all her self-control not to message him or try to add him as a friend. She'd known she would soon be headed for Africa and she had wanted to surprise
him, rather than give him the option of an easy rejection via the internet. She couldn't quite decide whether her strategy smacked of bravery or idiocy.

‘Sydney, stop!'

Chipchase put on the brakes and veered off onto the dirt strip. The road's surface had improved between the turn-off to Elephant Springs camp and Nata, the next fuel stop. ‘There's nothing here. Do you need to go to the loo?'

Sonja shook her head and pointed to the figure ahead of them, taking form out of the shimmering heat haze, the horizontally shifting bands slowly coalescing into one outline. It was, as she had spotted long before the ageing Chipchase, a man on a horse.

She got out and opened the back of the campervan, retrieving her pack, which contained food and water and a compact camping gas stove she'd bought in Kasane. It also held her M4, broken down into its component pieces, and spare magazines. She moved the nine mil from the front of her shorts to the rear of her waistband and stretched her tank top over the pistol grip.

Sonja hoisted her pack on to her shoulders and walked to the driver's side window. ‘Sydney, I can't thank you enough, but please take this.' As she shook his hand she palmed some green bills to him.

‘I won't take money from you, Sonja.' He thrust the cash back at her.

‘If you don't want it then do some good with it. You're a missionary, for fuck's sake, you must know a worthy cause somewhere.'

He smiled down at her from the cab and reached his hand out to shake hers again. Instead, she rose on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. She was rewarded with a brick-red blush on his weathered old face.

‘I'm sorry, Sonja, if it seemed like I was prying about … well, you know, about the old days.'

She shook her head. ‘I didn't want to talk or even think about it and haven't for years, except in my nightmares. I don't know if it helped, but I do know I've had enough of the past. I've got enough problems in the near future to keep me going.'

‘Aye, well if you feel the need to go after any other African despots then my advice is …'

‘Read the Bible?'

‘Better intelligence and a .50 calibre sniper rifle with a decent scope.'

She smiled and waved as the Land Cruiser was swallowed by the heat haze. The clip-clop of the hooves was close enough to hear now, and she stood in the middle of the road waiting for the man to arrive. She'd need to conserve her depleted energy.

The man was in far better shape than the horse that bore him. He wore a ten gallon cowboy hat made out of zebra-print fabric, and a single-breasted charcoal grey business suit, old and frayed, but clean and pressed. The same went for the blue business shirt with white cuffs and collar. The uppers of his black leather shoes, though as clean as the Kalahari sand would allow, were peeling up from the soles. When he stopped in front of her she saw tightly frizzed patches of grey hair beneath the deep shade of the hat. If she was a tourist she would have wondered what an old African man in a suit and cowboy hat was doing riding slowly down the Nata to Kasane road in the middle of the day in forty-two degree heat, but she wasn't a tourist.

‘
Dumela
,' she said in Tswana, lingering over the middle syllable. ‘
Le kae?
'

‘
Ke teng, wena o kae?
'

‘I, too, am fine, thank you,' Sonja answered in Tswana. In addition to English, from her mother, and German, from her father,
she spoke Ovambo, from the maid who had nursed her until she was ten, and Tswana from Stirling and the staff kids at Xakanaxa. If the old man was curious as to what a white woman was doing wandering the empty highway by herself, then he knew better than to be so rude as to ask. ‘I would like to buy your horse,' she said to the man.

He shook is head. ‘If I sell you this horse, then I would have to walk, and I do not wish to walk to where I am going. Thank you, but no thank you.'

‘With what I will give you, you can buy a motor car.'

‘I have no need of such a thing. Besides,' he looked around him from his position above her, ‘where would I buy the petrol?'

‘I will give you three thousand pula,' she said, reaching into the pocket of her shorts. Pula, the currency of Botswana, meant rain in English. She'd offered him close to five hundred US dollars, but the man shook his head. ‘Four thousand?'

‘Not for ten. This horse is not for sale. He is my prized possession.'

Beneath the cracked saddle she saw the outline of ribs and the fuzzy coat that spoke of malnourishment and disease. The horse shook its head in a futile attempt to chase the flies away and looked down at her through rheumy eyes.

‘Twelve.'

The cowboy shook his head and clicked his tongue. He was serious about not selling.

Sonja sighed. She'd hoped it wouldn't come to this. She reached behind her and pulled out her pistol. Levelling it up to his startled face she said, in English. ‘Get off the fucking horse.'

The old man moistened his lips with his tongue and looked behind him. There was no one. She could see him weighing his options, wondering if he could outrun her. They both knew the horse wouldn't get far at a gallop, but still he didn't move.

Sonja fired. The tired horse tried to rear up but, with the weight of the African on its back, barely managed a buck. The man was on the ground, his feet raising puffs of dust, before she had time to readjust her aim. He brushed imaginary specs from his jacket and tossed away the reins. ‘I will call the police!'

‘I'm sure you will. And be sure and tell them I gave you this.' She threw the rolled wad of twelve thousand pula at his feet, ‘which is more than you deserve for the way you've treated this poor excuse of an animal.'

Sonja wheeled the horse and headed east, towards Zimbabwe.

Fark, fark, faaaark!
The screeching of the bird roused Sam from his dozing. He sat upright in the tent and looked around its gloomy green interior. He was disappointed to discover the events of the past eighteen hours had not been a nightmare.

He'd found it hard to sleep, not only because of the duelling whooping and grunting of the hyena and lion, and the snuffling of something snooping in the grass around his camp fire and tent, but because he was worried about Cheryl-Ann and the camera crew.

Cheryl-Ann had told him to expect surprises, and to keep the camera rolling, but never before had they broken the routine of the morning and evening calls on the satellite phone. It was a safety precaution.

He checked his watch. He'd set the alarm for six a.m., but had woken half an hour earlier. He pushed the send button anyway. ‘Fuck.' It was the out-of-contact recorded message again. ‘This can't be happening.'