The Delta (31 page)

Sonja was saved by the sight of a white Toyota Land Cruiser
bakkie
with a flashing orange light on the roof of its cab screaming down the road towards them. It pulled up at the roadblock and the African passenger greeted the soldiers and the quarantine officer and spoke with them. All of them, at various times, looked at the Land Rover and nodded at the foreigners. A white
man was driving the Toyota and he waved at them. Cheryl-Ann waved back.

When the Land Cruiser turned Sonja saw the logo on the passenger's door – Roberts Engineering Pty Ltd, Windhoek. The vehicle pulled up next to them and the driver got out. He was about six foot tall, and solidly built with a rugby forward's shoulders and muscular thighs that seemed to bulge from his tight blue denim shorts. He wore a two-tone blue and khaki bush shirt, with the same emblem as the truck door embroidered above the heart, and
veldskoen
with no socks. With his red exposed skin, short blond hair and blue eyes he was as Namibian German as could be.

‘Howzit?' he said to them collectively. ‘Miss Daffen?'

‘Over here,' Cheryl-Ann said, extending her hand. ‘And it's Ms, but you can call me Cheryl-Ann.'

He nodded. ‘Deiter Roberts. As you are too many and my
bakkie
has only room for me and Hermand, you will please follow us?'

Sonja pushed the Land Rover's accelerator to the firewall to keep up with the Toyota Hilux. Deiter drove like a local – fast. Namibia was a vast, empty country with the lowest population density and some of the best roads on earth – an environment conducive to reckless speeding. However, Sonja kept a steady distance between her and the other vehicle as the corridor along the edge of the Okavango was home to several small villages and plenty of meandering goats and people.

On their left was a turn-off to Bagani airstrip and Sonja slowed to keep the gap between her and the other four by four. ‘Another roadblock ahead. This is the town of Divundu. Don't blink or you'll miss it.'

They passed a general store and a shebeen. Half a dozen African men in blue overalls, two with orange hard hats, sat on a bench outside the bar with brown plastic containers of opaque
beer in their hand, which they raised as the Land Cruiser drove past. Roberts honked his horn, returning the salute. It looked like the dam was good for business, as there were also two more of the engineering company's trucks parked outside the store.

Sonja geared down as they neared the roadblock. They were just before the intersection of the C48, which they were travelling on, and the B8, the main east–west highway that ran through the Caprivi Strip, which branched off to their right, via a high-level bridge over the Okavango.

Sonja expected more delays. This was a checkpoint like few she had seen. As well as the ubiquitous quarantine ladies in their blue overalls, there were police and soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs. If there were this many guns this far out on the road in full view, Sonja thought, there would be more positions in depth, hidden away but covering the men on point duty.

Her eyes scanned left and right until she found the machine-gun position. It was off to the right seventy metres from the checkpoint and sighted so that it could cover vehicles or people coming from any direction towards the crossroads, including the bridge. She recognised the silhouette of the barrel that protruded above the parapet – a belt-fed 7.62 millimetre Russian-made PKM. The gunner and his loader were in a makeshift bunker of sandbags and corrugated iron, roofed with a sheet of tin topped by a single layer of sandbags. Around the post was a coil of concertinaed razor wire and a seemingly flimsy screen of chicken wire. The mesh, she knew, was protection against RPGs – rocket-propelled grenades. The RPG was designed to take out light armoured vehicles by first penetrating a layer of steel, and then detonating inside, killing the crew. The fence would cause a projectile to detonate before it hit the sandbags, increasing the odds of the men inside the bunker surviving. She could see the number two on the gun raising a pair of binoculars. These men were prepared and alert.

Surprisingly, the boom gate in front of the Land Cruiser was raised before it came to a stop. Roberts thrust his arm from the driver's window and motioned them to follow. Sonja cruised past the checkpoint, taking in the numbers, the guns, uniforms and general attitude of the men and women manning it, without making eye contact with any of them. It was one time she would have welcomed a brief delay, in order to better carry out her recce.

The road had turned from tar to gravel and was now called the D3402, according to her GPS. They had swung west again, the Okavango still somewhere off to their right, and Sonja eased off the accelerator to stay out of the dust cloud stirred up by the Toyota in front. The dry grass to her right was covered in a layer of white grit, a testimony to the amount of traffic on the road. A small
bakkie
with rotating orange warning lights on its cab and a sign saying
abnormal load
emerged from the dust. Sonja moved to the left and rolled up her window as a lorry towing a giant bulldozer on a low-loader trailer trundled past.

Ahead of them, the dust devil chasing Deiter's
bakkie
swung to the right and Sonja indicated to follow them. The cloud slowed after a few hundred metres and, caught by a faint breeze, shrouded the Toyota for a moment. When it cleared, Sonja was close enough to see Roberts had reached a gate set in a chain-link fence topped with electrified strands of wire.

Inside the outer gate there was a boom and a newly erected portacabin which, like the machine-gun strongpoint, was surrounded by razor wire and mesh. Instead of soldiers, this post was manned by blue-uniformed security guards. Both Roberts and the African man travelling with him, Hermand, were holding out what looked like black nylon identification wallets, with a clear plastic window and a cord that looped around their necks. The security guard, who wore a holstered pistol, passed a clipboard
to Roberts while a colleague, armed with a drum-fed automatic shotgun, stood nearby. Another man, with a slung South African-made R5 military assault rifle, stood by the boom, while a fourth looked on from inside the portacabin. All of the guards wore body armour.

Sam leaned forward from the second tier of seats and peered out through the windscreen between Sonja and Cheryl-Ann. ‘Tight security.'

And that was just what they could see. Sonja looked up and down the fence line. She spotted two cameras, and noted portable arc lights at intervals of every fifty metres. Cabling snaked back to a large generator on a trailer behind the portacabin, which must also power the hut's airconditioning.

Having satisfied the guards, Roberts was allowed through the barrier, and pulled over to the side of the dirt road once inside. He walked back to the boom gate and Sonja rolled down her window as Roberts and one of the guards stepped up to the Land Rover.

‘A necessary formality. We are very strict about security here on the construction site. Once you have all signed in I will also have to take you through a full site induction, for your safety.'

Sonja and the camera crew got out and, under the instructions of the guard, filed into the hut.

‘Why such strict security?' Sam asked Roberts as he stood aside to let Cheryl-Ann and Sonja enter.

‘Routine,' Roberts shrugged. ‘We have a lot of valuable equipment and vehicles here. We wouldn't want any to be stolen.'

Routine, my arse, Sonja thought. As she filed into the hut behind Cheryl-Ann she noted the gun safe behind the counter, and the flat computer screen on the desk, which was angled enough for her to see it was quartered with constantly changing images from the security cameras. The feed probably went to the
construction site's head office, but giving the guards' office access meant they could respond quickly.

Sonja filled in her name and false passport number on a form that the guard behind the counter slipped into a clear plastic wallet with a clip on it and handed back to her. ‘Please wear this at all times when on site, madam.' She nodded. While the others filled in their tags she casually looked around the room. On a whiteboard on the far wall was a shift roster. There were ten names per shift.

She moved to the door and opened it to the oven-hot outdoors. A dust cloud was moving down the fence towards the hut. It was another Land Cruiser, though this one was the same colour blue as the uniforms of the guards in the hut. The fence looked new and the road around it recently graded. The vehicle slowed as it passed the gate and the occupants, in the same livery as those on the gate, waved and continued on. Mobile patrol. That made six guards now. She had to assume there was another vehicle on mobile patrol, while the remaining two men could be taking a break somewhere. The security guards seemed efficient and well armed, but there were not many of them.

With the paperwork completed they filed back out to the Land Rover and got in. The man on the boom checked that they were all wearing their badges, and Sonja motored through to where Deiter Roberts was waiting for them, inside his vehicle with the engine running and the airconditioning on. He wound down the window, stuck his arm out and motioned for them to follow. Sonja got the distinct impression that this man would much rather be building a dam than babysitting a television crew.

Sonja raced through the gears to keep up with him on the wide but corrugated dirt road that led from the gate through a cordon of dust-covered bush. The gradient increased and Sonja dropped down to second as the vegetation on either side of them began
to thin. At the top of the low hill she slowed to take in the view of the dam construction site.

‘Wow,' Gerry said from the back.

Roberts stopped and got out of his Land Cruiser. ‘You can get out here,' he said through Sonja's window. The film crew got out and stood around him. ‘This is OK for filming, if you wish.'

Rickards took Gerry to the back of the Land Rover and began unloading their gear.

Roberts turned his attention towards his guests. ‘My job is to explain to you how we are building this dam. I can be interviewed on camera if you wish, though my preference would be not to appear on film. I will not answer questions about why the dam is being built, or anything to do with politics or the environment, other than to outline how we minimise environmental impacts on site, in accordance with our environmental impact assessment.'

Sonja got the impression he had rehearsed this monologue.

‘There is a man from Windhoek, from the government's Nampower organisation – our electricity people – who will talk to you about those things. Also there is a woman from the consortium that developed the plan for the dam who will talk to you about agricultural uses of the water and so forth. Is this clear?'

Sonja noticed that he didn't ask if it was all right.

‘Crystal,' Cheryl-Ann said. ‘Though if you don't mind I'll get Jim to film your briefing, so at least we have it all on tape and get it right for the voice-over. We may not use any of your stuff on film, but it's good for us to have it on file.'

Roberts frowned, but nodded.

Jim and Gerry mounted the camera on its tripod and plugged in the boom mike and tested their gear while Cheryl-Ann and Sam briefly discussed angles and positioned Roberts so that Rickards could get as much of the construction site in shot while he gave his briefing.

From the top of the hill the Okavango looked like a giant blue-green python that had swallowed a fat
duiker
and was having trouble digesting the buck. The waters had started to back up behind the newly completed dam. Sonja wondered what the destructive force of that water would be once it was unleashed. She forced from her mind images of flimsy African huts and people and cattle being washed away.

Roberts cleared his voice. ‘The dam on the Okavango River is twelve hundred metres long and four metres high. It has an earth core and is covered in concrete.'

Sonja tuned out for the moment. She moved a few paces away from the group, trusting that Roberts was too preoccupied with the camera pointing at him to notice her pulling her small binoculars from the pouch on her belt. She found the far end of the concrete dam, her reference point, and swung slowly to the left. There it was. An eight-wheeled armoured vehicle painted camouflage. It was a BTR 60, a Russian-designed armoured troop carrier. It could seat sixteen fully equipped soldiers and was armed with a 14.5 millimetre heavy machine-gun in the turret on top and a 7.62 millimetre machine-gun in the hull. The BTR was amphibious, Sonja recalled, making it a good vehicle for use in the defence of the dam site. If trouble flared on the opposite side of the river it could be there soon. She doubted there was just the one vehicle. It faced eastwards, out towards the bush beyond the clearing that demarcated the edge of the construction site on the far side of the dam and the border of the Bwabwata National Park. The perimeter on that side of the river was fenced with triple coils of razor wire.

She lowered the binoculars. On this side of the river, below them, were rows of identical portacabins. She saw washing hanging from lines strung between the cabins – overalls mostly – so she assumed this was where the dam construction workers lived.
Beside them, however, was an encampment of tan-coloured canvas tents. She lifted the binoculars again and saw two soldiers in camouflage uniforms, with AK-47s slung over their shoulders, walking down the well-trodden path between the lines of accommodation. She counted twenty-four tents in all. With, say, four men to a tent, there was enough space to house an infantry company of about a hundred soldiers.

Sonja swept upriver, to the left, to the extent of the construction site. There were the predictable fuel tanks, tin-roofed workshops – open on the sides because of the heat – vehicle parks and a constant procession of dump trucks moving to and from what looked like an onsite concrete plant. Every couple of minutes a cement mixer trundled along the earthen ramp, which had yet to be surfaced, and onto the dam wall. Sonja could see there was still construction going on part way along the wall, and tuned back into Roberts's spiel to hear that work was almost finished on the spillway and the installation of the hydro-electric generator. The noise of trucks and generators and jackhammers rolled up the hill to provide a constant buzzing backdrop to Roberts's monotone delivery of his briefing. Like his introduction, she gathered he had given the speech many times before to other visitors.