The Delta (39 page)

The attendant led her to a site behind a rustic timber ablution block. ‘You can camp here. We save this place for people who arrive late.'

The overflow site didn't have a view of the river, but it was close to the shower, which she needed far more than a view. ‘Thank you.'

Sonja looked up at the sky, which was turning a deep, dark velvet. The first stars were already beginning to twinkle. It was clear. There would be no rain tonight. She climbed onto the roof of the Land Rover and undid the tarpaulin covering the camping gear she had brought for the Americans. She slid out a canvas-covered single mattress, a sleeping bag and a mosquito net. She tied the tarp back in place, laid the mattress and bag on the ground, and then tied the top of the net to the low-hanging branch of a big thorn tree that shaded the site. It was still very warm and there would be no dew tonight.

She rummaged in the back of the Land Rover for the toolbox. In it, she found a can of Spark lubricating spray and a rag. She got back into the vehicle and closed the driver's side door so the interior light went off. She looked out the windows to make sure none of her fellow campers was nearby and, in the dark, began stripping and cleaning her Glock. In the army, you cleaned your weapon each day, before you cleaned yourself.

The lubricating spray moistened her fingers and when she wiped them on the rag she saw the stain was a deep purple. She held her hands up above the dashboard and inspected them in the light coming from the shower block. The blood of the man whose throat she had cut was ingrained in the furrows of her skin, and under her nails. She needed a shower, though she knew she would never be truly clean.

The tear ran off her cheek and landed with a splat on the shiny, lightly oiled working parts of the Glock, but when she flicked the release catch with her thumb the slide shot forward and took the salty drop with it. She wiped her eyes with the back of her grimy hand, put the pistol under her seat and went to wash. Afterwards, she sought out the camp caretaker again and paid for her site, given she would be leaving early the next morning.

Despite her exhaustion, or because of it, sleep eluded her for many hours. She lay on her back in her shorts and bikini top, on top of the sleeping bag, gazing at the stars with one arm under her head. Sonja believed she and Emma were safe from the threat of a Zimbabwean hit squad – for now – but that gave her more opportunity to dwell on her next mission, and on the brief conversation she'd had with Martin on the road.

Things had changed between them. After Sierra Leone and their time at the private safari camp, Sonja and Emma moved in with Martin. Sonja worked part-time in the Corporate Solutions office, as an operations-officer-cum-clerk, and while the work was not particularly exciting the hours enabled her to spend more time with Emma and make up for the months she'd lost.

They lasted as a de facto couple for two years. The first was passionate and fun-filled, but after eighteen months Sonja detected changes in Martin. He was working late, travelling a lot in search of more contracts, and seemed to have less time for sex. He was evasive when she tried to talk to him. One night, when he was supposedly waiting in the office for a conference call from a military contact somewhere in Asia, Sonja called him and the phone rang out. She'd started to worry after her third call went through to the answering machine. She dressed Emma and was about to take her to her mother's and go out looking for him, when he walked in the door, at midnight.

He snapped at her when she berated him for not calling, saying
he'd taken the call earlier than expected and gone to a pub.

‘Casino, more likely,' she said. She'd known, early on in their relationship, that Martin liked to gamble occasionally, but hadn't realised he had a problem until he confessed to losing ten thousand pounds in one night. He'd asked her for money, from the stash she'd saved during her time at Sierra Leone, and she had supported him for two months until the next job came in. He'd claimed to have reformed his ways.

When she stared at him he couldn't meet her eyes. ‘Yes, it was the casino,' he confessed. ‘But there's more I have to tell you.'

The ‘more' was a twenty-one-year-old croupier. Sonja ran upstairs and grabbed her illegal nine millimetre Browning and sent him out into the cold, followed by his clothes, which she tossed from the upstairs bedroom window of the house they were renting.

The anger she had felt was softened by the secret relief she had at being back on her own again, with Emma, just the two of them. Better to be alone, she told herself, than to support a gambler who later confessed, over a conciliatory drink and dinner, that he was a serial philanderer with a hopeless attraction to young women. Sonja had reminded him that she was still in her twenties and hardly old. ‘Is it because of Emma?'

‘God, no,' he'd said. ‘And it's got nothing to do with what happened in Ireland. I don't want you to stay mad at me, Sonn. I know it sounds corny, but you really are better off without me. I can't be a good enough man for you.'

She'd laughed. ‘You're right, very corny.' She raised her glass of wine and sipped from it while he stared intently into her eyes, ignoring her amusement at his confession.

‘You know, I did … do love you, Sonn. You're the only person I've ever loved, and I don't want to hurt you any more.'

Somehow, she sensed it was true, although it could have just
been more of his masterful manipulation. He'd said he still wanted – needed – her to work for him and, with no other source of income waiting around the corner, Sonja agreed. When the hurt of his betrayal finally wore off she found she still liked him, though not in a romantic or sexual way. True to his word, he stayed a serial seducer of younger women and she had watched half a dozen come and go from his life over the years.

Professionally, the job she was about to undertake for Martin, like the assassination attempt on the Zimbabwean president, was in direct contravention to the mission statement Martin had drawn up for Corporate Solutions when he'd formed it prior to their deployment to Sierra Leone.

Corporate Solutions
, he'd written in the document he'd shown to her when she and other recruits signed up before leaving for Freetown,
will work only for legitimate governments or reputable private companies. We will not take part in political assassinations
… and so on.

A bush rustled nearby. She reached under her pillow and pulled out the Glock. She'd slept under the stars not only because of the heat but also so she could better hear and react to anyone who might want to sneak up on her. She doubted the Zimbabweans had fielded another hit squad, but those in her line of work who weren't cautious were dead.

The next noise was louder. It was a branch breaking, followed by a low grumbling noise. She relaxed. Elephants. Oddly, the presence of the huge beasts was reassuring. If there were men sneaking up on her the elephants would hear them first and let everybody in the camp site know about it. She lay back again, charting the progress of the herd by the sounds of their feeding, and wondering about her future.

Frogs croaked away in the reeds on the banks of the Kwando and a spotlight flashed through the trees as some campers, up
late, watched the grazing elephants. The camp site was a piece of paradise where man and animal could coexist in harmony and respect. This part of Africa had once been a bloody battleground and now she was going to help lead the Caprivi Strip into hell once more.

Sonja dozed off and the sound of a vehicle's engine startled her from a dream about being crushed under the falling, burning wreckage of a helicopter.

She reached for her pistol again and lay still, her body as taut as a coiled spring, until she heard the camp manager leading the late arrivals to their camping spot.

Sonja woke again in the pre-dawn cool, but instead of climbing into the sleeping bag she'd been lying on, she got up and rolled and stowed her bedding. She loaded her kit and was on the B8 again, hurtling towards the sun as it showed itself.

There were more signs of human habitation on the eastern side of the Kwando, as she had left the Bwabwata National Park after crossing the river, but this was one of the poorest parts of Namibia. The far-flung north-eastern corner could have been a different country to the Germanic orderliness and clockwork-reliable infrastructure of Windhoek, and the prosperous fishing and holiday towns on the Atlantic Coast. If you believed people like Gideon, the CLA and their political representatives in the United Democratic Party, it should have been another country.

Surely these people had the right to choose their own destiny, and to harness their natural resources for their own good? She shook her head. She wasn't even convincing herself. If every African tribe that disputed the lines drawn by colonial mapmakers a century ago decided to take up arms then the continent would never know peace. What she was doing, aiding and abetting this rebellion, was wrong. She pulled her mobile phone out
of her pocket and pressed the green button. The last few numbers she had dialled showed up, with Martin's at the top of the list. Her thumb hovered over the call button.

The next major town she would come to was Katima Mulilo, the provincial capital of the Caprivi Strip. She knew that Martin's plan, in outline, was for the main force of the CLA to attack and capture Katima, seizing the police station, government offices and the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation radio and TV studios. At the same time she and a smaller detachment would blow up the dam on the Okavango, at the other end of the strip – though quite how she was going to do this, she still didn't know. The simultaneous attacks at either end of the strip would divide the Namibian Defence Force. The party from the dam would retreat eastwards to Kongola, while the main force pushed west to link up with them. They would blow the bridge over the Kwando and the Caprivi Strip east of the river would secede from Namibia.

Martin had told her that CLA agents had done a close-target recce on Katima Mulilo but suggested that Sonja take a look at the town as she passed through to provide an up-to-date and independent assessment of police and troop dispositions in the town.

‘No,' she said aloud to herself.

She would not go through with it. She would call him now and tell him she was out. She would return to Botswana immediately, collect Emma and disappear, perhaps into South Africa. She would pay Martin for her daughter's airfare and say her goodbyes to him. The more she thought about the prospect of starting a war – rather than joining an existing one – the more she realised she couldn't go ahead with this job. It was a liberating moment for her. Her financial situation was secure and Emma's expensive boarding school education would soon be over. Sonja had money put away already for Emma to go to university, and for a sizeable nest egg of her own. She could live reasonably comfortably off the
interest and if she sold the flat in London she could buy a mansion somewhere in Africa.

The road had been empty so far this morning, but ahead of her, about two hundred metres distant, a man walked out into the middle of the road. He stood there, on the centre line, waving his hand up and down.

‘Shit.' She put the phone down and changed to third gear. The engine protested, and the Land Rover began to slow. ‘Idiot.'

The morning sun was behind the man, and as she got closer Sonja saw reflective stripes on his sleeve catch the morning light. A few seconds later she made out the silhouette of a peaked cap. Police.

She checked her speedometer, but was sure she hadn't been exceeding the legal limit. It wasn't unknown in Africa for carjackers to masquerade as policemen, setting up fake roadblocks or just flagging down drivers who might feel disposed to giving a police officer a lift. Sonja reached down between her legs and pulled the Glock from under her seat. She lifted her left leg and slid the pistol under her thigh, out of sight.

The man was still waving his arm up and down, slowly. She complied and now noticed the police markings on the
bakkie
off to the right, under the shade of a tall tree in a demarcated picnic spot. The vehicle's bonnet was open. Sonja relaxed a little – it was one thing to dress up in a fake uniform, but another thing altogether to re-spray your vehicle in police colours. It looked like they had genuinely broken down. She quickly moved her pistol back under the seat. If she had to give this policeman a lift into Katima Mulilo she didn't want him to see her weapon.

She geared down and put her foot on the brake. The policeman moved to her side and smiled widely. ‘Good morning, madam, how are you?'

‘I'm fine. How are you? You have a problem, I see.'

‘Ah yes, madam, I have a problem. Our
bakkie
it does not want to work and we are in need of assistance.'

‘I'm sorry, officer. I don't even know how to check the oil and water in my own car,' she lied. ‘Perhaps I can take a message to the police in Katima for you?'

‘Maybe you could just get out and have a look at the engine for us?'

Warning bells sounded in her mind. ‘I don't think that's a good idea. I'm in a hurry, and …'

She heard the snicker of a rifle being cocked and looked to her left. A man in a green T-shirt was peering down the barrel of an AK-47, which was pointed at her head. The man in the police uniform reached in and took her keys from the ignition.

‘Out, now.' All sign of friendliness disappeared as he drew his pistol and pointed it at her.

Sonja could have kicked herself. She'd fought off a team of assassins and now she'd been taken down by some bloody car thieves. The first rule of surviving a car hijack, she knew, was to do as she was told. If these men were just common thieves perhaps they would take the Land Rover and leave her in the middle of nowhere. It would be humiliating, but at least she would live. If they wanted to rape her, then she would make it her mission to kill at least one of them with her bare hands, and die fighting. She thought about Emma, and how much she loved her.