The Devil's Breath (14 page)

But they hadn’t yet, had they? Mr. Slye was a good employee and he knew he needed to relieve some of his master’s burden—because Chang
was
his master; he held the power of life and death over him. Chang had enough to worry about. There was the massive hydroelectric scheme that would generate billions of dollars; there were the illegal drug shipments coming in from all over the world through Walvis Bay, and then there was the not-inconsequential matter of the destruction of the natural habitat and the thousands of people who would probably die as a result of Chang’s plan. And that was why Mr. Slye had taken it upon himself to remove one of the loose ends—Kallie van Reenen.

She had taken the boy from Windhoek Airport and equipped him for his journey. Slye had tracked her northwards to the remote airfield where she met her father. He had left with a safari party so he was not involved, but his informers had told him of the girl’s flight plan filed for Walvis Bay. That was a long way from home. She had information she should not have, that was Mr. Slye’s conclusion. It had not taken much to ensure that one of his local men fixed her plane, guaranteeing it would crash.

Most satisfyingly, he had heard her Mayday call over Skeleton Rock’s radio transmitters.

Even more gratifying was the sound of an explosion and the girl’s scream. Mr. Slye was convinced that Kallie van Reenen must have crashed in the middle of nowhere. In the unlikely event of the crash site ever being found, an investigation would conclude that her old plane was simply not reliable enough. In the meantime, hyenas and jackals would dispose of her remains.

He flipped open his PDA and ticked off one item on his list of things to do. It read: Kill Kallie van Reenen.

Kallie had done her preflight checks as always, but when she took off she thought the engine sounded ragged. She had pushed in the throttle, gained takeoff speed and hauled the plane into the sky.

Within an hour she knew she was in trouble. There was the unmistakable smell of avgas; the engine shook violently in its mountings, followed almost immediately by a loss of power. The aviation fuel was flooding the engine compartment at just about the same time as her brain flooded with fear at falling out of the sky. Fire was her immediate concern, so there was no point in trying to restart the engine. The Cessna 185 was known among pilots as a tail-dragger, difficult at takeoff and landing; if she managed to land without power, she was going to need all her skill to come out of it in one piece. The plane’s nose dropped; the propeller whirled of its own volition, nothing more than a windmill. Her training kicked in. Calmly but urgently, she banked the plane into the start of a sweeping arc, away from the rocky hills piercing the dunes ahead, all the time looking for a
suitable landing site. She flicked the radio dial to the emergency frequency: 121.5 megacycles. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” she called. The international distress signal sounded unreal, coming from her own lips. It was something she had never expected to say. “This is Victor Five, Bravo Mike November … Mayday, Mayday, Mayday …”

And then there was a bang and she was spattered with fluid. She yelled in fright, wiped her eyes clear and brought the plane back under control as best she could. No more time for Mayday signals, she had to get the plane down.

Without the comfort of any response from her radio message—there was a real chance that there was no one close enough to hear her cry for help—she gave one last shout for help, giving her location as best she could, and felt her stomach churn as the plane dropped in a swallowlike curve towards the ground.

The wind whistled through the cockpit, the death of the engine eerily shrouding her in its silence. She was losing altitude rapidly now, the plane was shaking and the vibration shuddered into her arms through the controls. She got her airspeed down to eighty knots, which was near perfect for gliding. A needle-thin strip of track drew a line in the sand in the far distance, and another led for several kilometers to a remote farmhouse. She swooped and curved through the sky, using the configuration to bring the plane lower and lower, trying to get it into the correct landing position. It was tricky and dangerous; she needed to apply the plane’s flaps in the moments before landing, and if she misjudged her rate of descent and final approach she would end up careering off the track. Once the flaps were down, she would
be totally committed to the landing. If it was deep sand down there, it would suck in the wheels and cartwheel the plane—and that would probably kill her. She side-slipped the aircraft, allowing it to remain at a reasonable speed, and by watching the relative motion of the intended point of touchdown through the windscreen she fine-tuned the rate of descent. Whatever the outcome, she knew she would be alive or dead in less than a minute.

A final banked curve, the controls juddered; she leveled out, eased the nose up, shoved the flap levers down and felt the wheels bounce.

The wheels skidded across the hardened surface and she guided the trusty old plane to a final standstill.

Silence.

Then she heard the sound of metal creaking: the engine cooling down.

She sat for a moment, letting her relief at her survival wash over her. And then she laughed. She had brought a crippled aircraft down safely in some of the most frightening minutes of her young life, and she was covered in Tobias’s Desert Buster Ice-Cold Special.

It was the flask that had exploded. She licked some of it from her face. It tasted better than at any other time she could remember.

Mike Kapuo listened carefully to her story. She told him everything that had happened since she had picked Max up at Windhoek Airport, why he was in Namibia; and then finally recounted her own terrifying experience.

“You’re certain it was sabotage?”

“Yes, I thought I didn’t recognize the mechanic when I went back to my plane. The fuel injectors had been loosened—they came away after about an hour’s flying—and a piece of the braided pipe had been replaced with a length of plastic tubing.”

“So what? I’ve done the same with the fuel line on one of my old cars. That’s not proof of sabotage or attempted murder.”

“Yes it is,” she insisted. “Avgas melts plastic. It was enough to get me up into the air, and then it was only a matter of time. If the injectors had not rattled loose, then the pipe would have melted. It was double insurance to bring me down.”

He nodded without saying anything. Kapuo knew the aftereffects of trauma; she would need food and rest.

“We’ll talk tomorrow. You’re coming home with me.”

“Mike, I can’t.”

“Yes you can. I’ll have someone go out and look at your plane, and we’ll thank the farmer who brought you in.”

“You do believe me?”

“Yes, I do. I saw an interdepartmental report about two men being severely injured at Eros Airport the day you picked up this Max Gordon boy. They were known hard men, who hired themselves out for any unpleasant work that needed doing. We’ve also had a report on this boy’s missing father for a few weeks now, but initial searches gave us nothing. We figured he was either dead or dying. You know how it is out there.”

“Max’s father sent a letter to England from here, in
Walvis Bay. And this guy he works with, someone called Leopold, he was here as well,” Kallie told him.

Kapuo hesitated, debating with himself how much he should tell her. How much might his friend’s daughter know? Kapuo folded his jacket over his arm and eased her out of the office. “You need a hot bath and some of Elizabeth’s cooking. We’ll tackle this whole thing tomorrow morning.” His wife’s food and a decent bed for the night would bring the girl down to earth a little. Lower her defenses.

If she had useful information, he could pass that on to the man in England who was hunting the boy and his father.

The chilled night cramped their muscles, and for a long time Max had lain, staring into the cave’s void, knowing his father had been there and had left a message. Only the exhausting anxiety of not knowing what that message meant had finally sent him to sleep.

!Koga shook him awake and, as he rubbed what little sleep he had from his eyes, gestured to Max to follow him to the mouth of the cave. !Koga pointed, smiling contentedly.
“!Kognuing-tara
—the Dawn’s Heart,” he said.

Max looked. Low on the horizon was a fat ball of light. Max had seen that star before. Years ago when they were in Egypt, his father had woken him early, wrapped him in a blanket and taken him out into the cold desert dawn. He pointed. “See that light? That’s Jupiter.” Max realized that’s what the drawing in the cave meant. His father was pointing to the “morning star”—the planet Jupiter, the Dawn’s
Heart. Telling him where to go: east, beyond those mountains. Max smiled. The dawn swept away his self-doubt as the storm had blown away the clouds of darkness.

Max ran with renewed energy towards the rising sun. Spears of light shot through the ragged mountain peaks. His long strides kept up comfortably with !Koga, whose feet seemed barely to touch the ground. The grass was still sparse, barely ankle-deep, but it made the ground softer underfoot and running easier. They had clambered down the slope from the cave and pushed hard to reach the opposite mountainside, whose sweeping grassland curved up to embrace massive, sculptured boulders. The baboons had raced for the safety of the rocks during the night’s storm, so as they drew closer !Koga slowed the pace. The last thing they wanted was to burst unannounced into a baboon colony’s breakfast; their curved, razor-sharp canines could inflict lethal wounds. !Koga stopped as Max caught up with him. They were halfway up the mountainside, a thousand meters from the summit, where the jagged teeth barred any entrance. Down at this level the ground undulated, and if they stayed on course they could skirt the mountain range using these lower slopes—but they had to negotiate their way through the baboons.

A gateway through the boulders led them to a three-sided bowl in the hillside: a small amphitheater of grassland and trees, which offered shelter from severe storms and a collection point for any precipitation. Max and !Koga stood in silence. To reach the far side they would have to walk for at least a kilometer through what looked like a couple of
hundred feeding and grooming baboons. The boys had not yet been noticed. “Walk slowly, yes?” !Koga told him.

“You bet,” Max said, licking his lips nervously.

Although they were scattered across the grassland, the baboons were in family groups; at various points big male baboons stood guard, watching over their females and offspring.

“The big baboons …” !Koga indicated them with a lift of his chin.

“The males?” Max asked.

“Yes. They come for you, they run at you, like attack … you stay. Stand still. They want to see if you a threat. OK?”

“Oh yeah, I’ll invite them for tea while I’m at it.” !Koga seemed uncertain about Max’s sarcastic answer, so he reassured the Bushman boy. “I’ll close my eyes and think of England. I won’t move.”

From somewhere ahead came a sound like a guttural dog bark. One of the guardian baboons had sounded the alarm. A sudden ripple of fear ran through the troop; youngsters ran to their mothers, but it was not the boys’ presence that had frightened them. The baboons crouched, looking up. A shadow drifted across them. Max searched the sky. A martial eagle had stepped off a high peak and glided into a thermal. The warm morning air carried him easily across the gathered baboons, but he was still too high to swoop and make an attack on any vulnerable youngster. !Koga tugged at Max’s arm. This was a good time to make their way through the distracted baboons.

After a few minutes the huge eagle, showing first its
dark-brown back feathers, then its speckled white chest, curved lazily in the air and drifted away. Perhaps it had spotted easier prey further down the valley. Max reckoned it was big enough to take a small antelope, so a young baboon would certainly not have posed a problem for the winged predator, which could strike with stunning power. Its talons could pierce a skull, biting deep into the base of the brain, causing instant death. Then it would carry the prey to its nest and dismember the carcass, tearing out the intestines, severing the head and limbs to be eaten. The baboons obviously knew the ominous reality of the raptor’s shadow.

The danger passed, and now Max and !Koga were in the midst of the baboons. One of the males stood on its hind legs, watching them from a distance; the others returned to their nit-picking duties while the youngsters played in a chattering, raucous rough-and-tumble. A huddle of boulders lay in Max and !Koga’s path; baboons scattered as they approached. Some of the rocks were scooped out, worn down by centuries of weather and baboon activity; now they acted like the granite drinking troughs Max knew from Devon. A distant memory, Devon: gentle, forgiving Devon, where the enfolding hills nurtured the traveler into meandering pathways and fields, where the wildest creature likely to be seen might be a barn owl looking for field mice. Max’s mind wrenched back to reality. The baboons had stopped whatever they were doing and were watching them.

!Koga crouched at one of the basins; his hand tickled the water and brought it to his lips. “It is from the storm. It tastes good.”