The Hunter
About
The Hunter
Safari guide and private investigator Hudson Brand hunts people, not animals. He’s on the trail of Linley Brown who’s been named as the beneficiary of a life insurance policy.
Linley’s friend, Kate, supposedly died in a fiery car accident in Zimbabwe, but Kate’s sister wants to believe it is an elaborate fraud.
South African detective Sannie van Rensburg is also looking for Linley, as well as a serial killer who has been murdering prostitutes on Sannie’s watch. Top of her list of suspects is Hudson Brand.
Sannie and Hudson cross paths and swords as they track the elusive Linley from South Africa to Zimbabwe to the wilds of Kenya’s Masai Mara game reserve.
Tony Park’s trademark storytelling prowess turns this hunt into a thrilling – and deadly – escapade through some of the most dangerous, yet beautiful, places on earth.
Contents
For Nicola
Prologue
Hazyview, South Africa, June 2010
C
aptain Sannie van Rensburg looked at the vultures in the trees and shuddered.
Only in Africa
, she thought. She took a pair of rubber gloves from the packet in the boot of her Mercedes and snapped them on.
Two officers, a man and a woman in the blue-grey uniforms of the South African Police Service, were standing over the body, and the latter kept glancing up at the vultures, her right hand resting on the Z88 pistol in the holster that perched on her rounded hip. Sannie greeted them.
Her new partner, Mavis Sibongile, exchanged muted greetings with the officers and hung back. Sannie stepped over the rocky ground, winding her way carefully between the stubby thornbushes, and made her way to the bundle wrapped in black builder’s plastic that lay at the officers’ feet. ‘Who found her?’
‘A woodcarver,’ said the female officer. Sannie liked her braids. The officer pointed at a man squatting twenty metres away. The old man didn’t look at her. ‘He makes giraffes and lions and chickens for the tourists. He was in the
veldt
looking for a tree to cut down when he came across her.’
Sannie ignored the witness for the moment and knelt down beside the bundle. A hand – or, more correctly, the remains of a hand – protruded from a ragged tear in the plastic. Sannie saw the hyena spoor in the dirt. ‘Were the hyena still here when the man found the body?’
The male officer called the question to the woodcarver, who responded in Tsonga. Sannie didn’t need a translator. ‘Yes, they were,’ the man said. ‘I threw some rocks at them and they ran off.’
‘What time was this?’ She peeled back some more of the plastic.
‘Just after dawn.’
The hyena couldn’t have been here long, she thought. If the nocturnal animals had been on the body all night they would have made short work of the plastic, and the woman wrapped inside. A Kombi towing a caravan slowed on the main road, the family inside staring at the parked police
bakkie
and the people in the bush. Four hundred metres up the road was the Phabeni Gate entrance to the Kruger National Park. ‘I want this area cordoned off,’ Sannie said to the uniforms. ‘No more walking around here. We need to check for footprints.’ She looked at her new partner, who was still hanging back. ‘Mavis, come help me,’ Sannie said.
Mavis was half her age, a university criminology graduate who had enlisted into the SAPS on an accelerated traineeship. Sannie had retired from the police before she’d turned forty, then returned as a police reservist to help cover manpower shortages in the Nelspruit murder and robbery squad. Like an addict she had been unable to give up the job completely, no matter how destructive the drug, and she had allowed herself to be talked into returning to work fulltime as a detective captain in a mentoring role for new officers. Her husband, Tom, an Englishman, had also once been a police officer, but had now taken to running the family’s banana farm with the vigour and optimism of one who had been brought up in a city all his life. He had been against her going back to work, but loved her enough to give up trying to talk her out of it when he realised he would never win that argument.
Sannie looked at Mavis’s high-heeled boots. She would have to have a quiet talk to her, again, about appropriate clothing for this job. ‘Help me unwrap her some more.’
Flies buzzed and took flight as Mavis dropped hesitantly to one knee and the two women started to unroll the body. Mavis gagged.
Poor girl
, Sannie thought. She would probably be sick. ‘If you must be sick don’t do it close to the crime scene.’
Mavis swallowed hard and nodded. A face emerged from the plastic; eyes wide and ligature marks immediately visible around the neck. She had been a pretty girl, perhaps aged nineteen or twenty, maybe twenty-one. She wore purple eye shadow and her curly hair had been cropped close to her scalp. There were gold hoop earrings, still in place.
‘Her . . .’ Mavis swallowed again, ‘her wrists have been tied as well.’ She held up the pulpy, bloody mess and showed Sannie the marks on the girl’s skin.
‘Naked,’ Sannie said as they unrolled further, revealing more skin. ‘
Ag
,
cigarette burns on her breasts.’
‘Who does such a thing?’ Mavis asked.
Sannie wanted to be home, right then, with her husband and her three children, not in this field of scrubby thorn and death. The carver was glancing over at them. ‘Boyfriends, husbands, fathers, gang members, random rapists; it’s our job to find out who.’
There were other lacerations and bruises on the breasts, as though she had been tied up, and perhaps beaten with something. Sannie shook her head. As she moved away more of the plastic she saw the coagulated blood and the first of the cuts. Beside her, Mavis stood and rocked on her high heels.
‘I’m sorry . . .’ She put her hand to her mouth and turned and ran.
Sannie steeled herself as she uncovered the woman’s groin. The insides of her thighs were coated with dried blood. She saw the incisions and knew this had been more than a rape. Whoever had done this had tortured this poor girl and, by the looks of it, plunged a knife between her legs, inside her body. She fought back the rising tide of bile and, as much as she wanted again to be away from this evil, from this depressing job, she knew she could not go back to her home in the hills and live the life of a farmer’s wife. No matter how many horrible things she saw, this was what God had put her on earth to do; that and raise her own children in safety and love her husband.
The politics of the job and the new South Africa dismayed her on a daily basis, and in a way she wished she could be like those who turned their back on it and said to hell with them all, but when she looked into the wide, pain-filled eyes of the dead girl and imagined her last moments on God’s earth she knew she could never walk away.
‘Clean yourself up, Mavis,’ she called to her partner, who was bent double. ‘We’ve work to do.’
1
Kruger National Park, South Africa, 2014
H
udson Brand watched the lion jump over the guardrail and onto the bridge over the Sabie River.
‘Shoot,’ he said.
‘Shoot what?’ the man wearing South African National Parks khaki behind the register in the Paul Kruger Gate office asked him.
‘Nothing. It’s a euphemism for shit.’
‘You Americans are funny, Hudson, and . . .’
Brand didn’t hear the rest of the man’s sentence. He was already out the door of the gate office. ‘Get back in your cars,’ he yelled to some tourists who were oblivious of the big black-maned cat walking towards them from the other end of the bridge.
The lion was silhouetted in the dawn’s half-darkness by the headlights of three cars that were following it along the bridge. At Brand’s end, tourists checking into the Kruger National Park had faces and cameras pressed to the window of the thatch-roofed gate office, watching the lion’s progress as it passed the last of the cars in the long holiday weekend queue that stretched from the office back a third of the way down the bridge.
Brand had been glancing out the window, checking on his lone client in the Land Rover game viewer while the national parks guy was processing his paperwork, when he’d spied the lion. His first clue that something was amiss was the cars that had stopped at the far end of the bridge. The Paul Kruger Gate was like rush hour at dawn every day, with staffers in a hurry to get to their jobs at Skukuza, the park’s main camp situated twelve kilometres inside the reserve, and tourists in private cars and safari vehicles, like his, coming in for the day or overnight stays. No one stopped at the far end of the bridge without good reason. As a guide and a private investigator, Brand knew that changes in the natural pattern of things often signalled that something interesting – and potentially dangerous – was about to happen.
At first Brand thought the movement in the lead car’s headlights was the big male leopard whose territory encompassed the bridge and gate, and the Sabiepark Private Nature Reserve across the river from Kruger. Brand had seen the big muscled tom, who had the bulk of a lioness, a few times on the bridge, and even on the main road outside the park when he’d been bringing guests in early. The leopard came and went from the protected reserve as he pleased and didn’t give a damn about the rules or the people outside Kruger, some of whom would have gladly killed him to stop him eating their goats or dogs or whatnot. But this animal was bigger.
‘There’s a lion coming towards you,’ Brand said to the nearest couple of tourists, who were standing nearby, poring over a map book on the bonnet of their rented Corolla.
‘
Leone
?’ said the man, who sported an Andre Agassi bandanna.
‘
Si
,’ Brand replied.
Mobile phones were drawn faster than six-shooters as word rippled down through the parked cars in the queue. Some people were jumping back inside, slamming the doors on their BMWs and Kombis, others were getting out. Camera flashes popped like far-off white phosphorous rockets, marking targets in the bush.
Brand’s mobile buzzed in his pocket. He quickly checked it. There was a message from a fellow guide, Bryce Duffy, a young South African guy of English descent, originally from Durban.
I’m in the queue – check the lion on the bridge
. Brand looked up and found Bryce’s Land Rover a few cars back in the slow-moving procession that was following the lion. Bryce must have spotted Hudson’s vehicle parked near the office.
Brand double-checked his own vehicle and saw Darlene, his lone client for the day, climb down out of the game viewer.
‘For crying in a bucket,’ Brand said. He strode down the line of cars to where his game viewer was parked.
The lion was calling as he padded along the tarmac towards Brand. The low throaty rumble got to Brand every time; it was what kept him in Africa, what made this continent, and not the place where he was born, his home. Part of the attraction, too, was the edginess of this part of the world and the fact that danger could and did rear its head with no notice. Like it had now.
‘Darlene, please get back in the truck,’ Brand called as he picked up his stride.
Amateur photographers were piling back into their cars as the king of beasts sauntered past them, hardly deigning to dignify his laughably lesser subjects with a glance. He had other things on his mind; food most likely, perhaps sex.
No wonder I love lions
, Brand thought.
Darlene was holding her tiny digital camera out at arm’s length. The inbuilt flash kept popping off but the lion, who Brand could now recognise as Pretty Boy, a member of the Mapogo coalition, was still too far from her for the flash to be of any use. Pretty Boy was maybe a hundred metres from Darlene, but he was closing fast with that effortless, distance-covering fast walk that lions had.
Darlene looked back at Brand. She was thirty-five, newly divorced, bleached blonde and blue-eyed, with a California tan and a rack that Brand thought looked promisingly natural. ‘Get in the truck,’ he ordered her.
Darlene gave him a thumbs-up and an expensive smile. She didn’t get the urgency or realise how quickly Pretty Boy could cover the ground between him and her.
Brand kept walking towards her, pointing to the truck and using the queue of cars as cover. He didn’t want Pretty Boy taking a bead on him as the only biped still moving on the bridge. Brand was sure that as long as no one did anything stupid Pretty Boy would just keep on walking briskly by, and then peel off into the bush once he reached the statue of
Oom
Paul Kruger. The old president’s big fat face with its leonine beard somehow still managed to dominate the entry and the name of South Africa’s flagship reserve, despite the fact that every other Afrikaner name was busily being changed throughout the country.
But this was the Kruger Park, and Brand knew well that people on holiday and even those who worked here, living cheek by jowl with the Big Five and possibly feeling a false sense of security, did some stupid things. As if to prove him right, a car raced onto the bridge, its driver seemingly oblivious to what was happening up ahead. It was a VW Golf with dark tinted windows, and even from the other end of the bridge Brand could hear – and feel – the thump of deep bass speakers from inside. Brand assumed this was a national parks staff member, who would have a pass they could use to leapfrog the queue of tourists’ private cars and open game-viewing trucks like Brand’s.
‘Shoot,’ Brand said.
Darlene was grasping the side ladder to haul herself back up into the game viewer, but she was still holding her camera in one hand. She looked up at the bridge when she heard the sound of the speakers and the speeding engine, and saw that Pretty Boy was now a whole lot closer.
The staff car saw the lion, at last, and hit his brakes. Rubber painted the tar surface and the little car fishtailed as it skidded. Pretty Boy looked over his shoulder and gave an angry roar.
Darlene’s digital camera clattered to the roadway and she lost her footing, her rubber sandal slipping on the bottom rung of the ladder as she tried to climb faster, but with only one hand on the ladder. Her feet touched the ground again.
The car had come to a halt, but Pretty Boy had decided it was time to fight rather than flee. Lions were like that, Brand mused. Catch them on foot and ninety-nine times out of a hundred they would see you first and get up from their daily snoozing and run away. Surprise one, or corner one, and the instinct to kill took over from the urge to retreat.
Pretty Boy vented his anger at the hapless driver and Brand reckoned he could see the little Golf rocking under the acoustic onslaught.
Brand found himself running – something he knew he should definitely not be doing in the vicinity of a fully grown lion – and Darlene looked like Brand felt in his nightmares. He had the same dream often; he was back in Angola, trying to run from a smoking, ambushed Ratel armoured vehicle, while the Cuban-manned T-54 tank slowly traversed its turret for the killer shot. His legs always felt as though they were encased in lead, and when he pointed his R5 at the tank commander the trigger never worked.
Darlene looked from the lion back to Brand and did what he was doing – she ran.
Brand was running towards the lion, which was stupid enough, but what Darlene was doing was suicidal. Brand saw Pretty Boy’s head flick from the car to the woman. The big beast flattened his ears back, tensed and lowered his whole body, like an aircraft carrier jet pilot bringing his engines up to full power just before the catapult flings him down the deck.
Darlene only had the chance to run four or five metres. That was because she ran slap bang into Brand. He had darted between a Discovery and the front bullbar of his Land Rover Defender game viewer. Brand feared for a moment Darlene might knock him over, but he caught her, grabbed her forearm and pulled her behind him.
Pretty Boy launched, and Brand felt that in all of his twenty-five years of being a safari guide he had never come so close to losing control of one or more of his bodily functions. He had seen lion charges and kills plenty of times over the years – enough to know he never wanted to see a maned missile aimed at him, on foot.
The urge to flee was as strong in Brand as it was in any other creature being preyed upon in the bush. His mind, however, told him he could not run from Pretty Boy because if he did then he, or most likely Darlene, would be dead within seconds. Also, the lion would be killed if it took out a human.
Brand fought the urge to run and raised his arms high above his head and roared back at Pretty Boy as the lion charged him with the speed of a rocket-propelled grenade. As he had on a few other occasions in his life, Brand thought he was dead; never this scared, but dead, for sure.
Just as the Golf had slid to a crazy halt, so, too, did Pretty Boy. The lion stopped no more than a metre from the couple, and when he roared Brand felt the sound waves shake him like a spindly sapling in a gale. He felt Pretty Boy’s hot breath wash over him. Darlene screamed as she clung to Brand’s back, and he felt her face burrow into the weave of his khaki bush shirt. Around him he was dimly aware of voices, and the blinking of camera flashes.
As he waited to die Brand had the sudden thought that if Pretty Boy killed them now then he and Darlene could at least go to their deaths knowing their last moments would go viral, and if someone in the queue had the presence of mind to turn on their video camera then they would be enshrined forever as YouTube’s most viewed and stupidest victims.
Pretty Boy roared again and Brand called back until he was hoarse, though he knew he could not compete with the king, the top of the food chain.
‘Go on, get!’ Brand croaked. Then, because Pretty Boy was a South African lion, he added: ‘
Voetsek
.’
Pretty Boy suddenly seemed to notice the crowds of people and the camera flashes. He shook his head and trotted away, across the grass and into the bush behind the statue of Paul Kruger’s head. A Land Rover roared up and stopped beside Brand. Bryce Duffy was grinning. ‘Gutsy move, Hudson. You OK,
bru
, or should I get you a spare pair of shorts?’
Brand exhaled. ‘A bottle of bourbon and a pacemaker wouldn’t go astray.’
*
Like many old soldiers, Brand was an easy sleeper, but a light one. He had taught himself to grab some shut-eye whenever the opportunity presented itself, whether in pouring rain or the heat of the African day. By the same token, the smallest of noises would bring him alert instantly, sometimes searching for the rifle he no longer carried, all his senses pre-programmed to cry out ‘danger’.
At the sound of the gentle, hesitant knock on his door his eyes were open. He got up, dressed only in boxer shorts, and padded over to it.
‘Hudson,’ a woman’s voice whispered.
Brand coughed. He had tried to give up smoking many times over the years, and had been free of tobacco for four weeks, but one of the camp’s guests, another of his erstwhile countrymen, from Virginia, had produced a cigar after dinner. Brand hadn’t been able to say no. Alcohol, women and tobacco had always been his weaknesses.
‘Can I come in?’ said the voice, a little louder now in case he was still sleeping.
For a moment Brand considered feigning slumber. That would have been the right thing to do, the professional course of action, but Darlene had taken a foolish risk coming to him in the dark alone.
He opened the door. ‘You shouldn’t have walked here without a security guard. You
know
how dangerous this country can be.’
Darlene was an animal nut and Brand’s job that day had been to take her into the Kruger Park for a five-hour game drive, followed by a transfer into the neighbouring Sabi Sand Game Reserve, to a luxury lodge called Leopard Hills. She’d wanted to maximise her time seeing Africa’s wild animals.
It had taken them an hour, though, over breakfast at the Skukuza Golf Club, to recover from the meeting with Pretty Boy on the bridge. After that Darlene had moved from her spot in the first tier of seating behind Brand to the front passenger seat beside him for the rest of their game drive. They’d laughed, eventually, about the lion, and he’d shown her more, as well as buffalo, rhino, zebra, giraffe and a variety of antelope before they’d left the park and driven into the private reserve.
Brand had lunched with Darlene at Leopard Hills. The lodge was set in a pile of granite
koppies
overlooking a waterhole, where a giant bull elephant had drunk while they ate on the viewing deck under a market umbrella. He’d then accompanied her on the afternoon and evening game drive in a Leopard Hills Land Rover. Ordinarily he might have skipped the drive, preferring to let the lodge’s guide take the reins, but he was feeling a connection to Darlene. Perhaps it was shared adversity, the thrill of surviving a near-fatal moment, he thought; or perhaps it was her perfume and her legs.
At dinner they’d put away a four-course gourmet meal and too much beer, wine and Amarula liqueur, which should have rendered them both unconscious by this late hour. But Brand knew that surviving danger did strange things to the human body, especially the libido. It gave men and women strength and stamina beyond their normal capabilities and, when members of the opposite sex were in close proximity it brought on a powerful urge to procreate, or at least go through the motions.