The Hunter (9 page)

The gunman’s next shot went into the driver’s body somewhere as he writhed and punched at Brand. The driver screamed and arched his back. He was not dead, but he was hurting. Brand ignored the man’s kicking and clawing and reached down to his right ankle. The wet hem of his cargos had ridden up, making it fractionally easier for him to draw the little .32 semi-automatic from the ankle holster he had velcroed to his leg before going out.

Using the wounded driver as a shield Brand rolled and fired a double tap, two shots at the gunman. The gunman fired again and the bullet went through the driver’s chest and into Brand’s upper right shoulder. The shot killed the driver, but Brand was running on adrenaline and didn’t even register the hit. The gunman cried and staggered backwards. Brand had winged him, but he was still very much alive. Brand rolled the dead weight of the driver off him, but stayed low in his makeshift foxhole. He raised the shovel’s head above the edge of the grave and it clanged painfully in his hand as a bullet ricocheted off the metal. He raised his gun hand over the rim of the hole and fired twice more, blindly.

Brand had fired to keep the other man’s head down, and as soon as he’d loosed his second shot he vaulted up and over the edge of what was now the driver’s grave and slithered on his belly in the mud to the next grave. The rain started to increase and he felt it pattering hard on his back as he peered around the mound of fresh, damp earth.

The gunman raised his head above the burial mound he was hiding behind and Brand was surprised to see that he was no more than three metres away. He squeezed the trigger and although the CIO man had lowered his head on seeing him, the fresh earth piled at the top of the hummock he was lying behind was not packed nearly hard enough to stop even Brand’s puny .32-calibre projectile. Brand hadn’t seen the hit immediately, but he later realised the bullet had entered the man’s head via his nose and then bounced around inside his cranium, killing him instantly.

Brand waited thirty seconds, or perhaps thirty minutes – he couldn’t remember now – for the adrenaline to subside, and to make sure the gunman was dead. He had barely registered the wound in his shoulder – the one across his chest was just a graze – but it throbbed painfully now as he stood, his pistol loose in his right hand, and walked across to the dead CIO agent. He rolled him over with his boot and the man stared past him to the cloudy sky above. The rain washed away the blood in rivulets that followed the pronounced contours of his face, down his cheeks and into his open mouth. Brand searched him and pulled a phone from the inside of the black vinyl bomber jacket. He noticed the man’s scuffed shoes. He had been a tool of a brutal regime that had bled his country dry in order to line the pockets of the ruling elite, and this guy was wearing cheap shoes made of imitation leather.

Figuring the CIO would trace the call he dialled Dani’s number in the UK, which he knew by heart. ‘It’s me,’ he said when she answered.

‘Hudson,’ she asked, her voice slow from waking. ‘Are you all right?’

‘No.’ Brand told her what had happened as a result of him gathering the evidence he needed to prove Tatenda Mbudzi had faked his own death. ‘I know the insurance company won’t like it, but I need you to go public about this case, straight away. Issue a media release to the expatriate Zimbabwean online news media saying Tatenda, son of a government minister, is alive and a fraud.’ A number of Zimbabwean news websites were watched by government and opposition alike and fed the fledgling independent press inside Zimbabwe, which was making a comeback after years of suppression by the president.

‘It’s against our protocols, going public,’ Dani said. ‘This is a matter for the insurance company and its client, and the local police now.’

‘I know all that, and you and I both know nothing will happen to Mbudzi. Hell, Dani, you’ve got to go public with this – get it out so that everyone knows that we know about Mbudzi. Otherwise his father is going to have me killed before I can get out of the country. He’ll probably rub out the doctor who issued the fake death certificate, if he hasn’t already.’

Dani paused while thinking his proposed strategy through. ‘I’ll talk to the insurance company. What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to the American embassy, but I don’t have their number. I need a doctor.’

‘Hudson! You didn’t tell me you were hurt. How bad is it?’

The phone beeped. Either the signal had dropped out or the CIO agent had run out of pre-paid airtime. Brand had certainly just cancelled the man’s account for good. He tried Dani again, but the call failed to connect, so he dropped the phone on the dead guy and headed for the cemetery gate. Brand figured that when the agent’s buddies checked the phone they would see he had called the UK and, even if Dani didn’t deliver via the media, they would at least know that someone else apart from Brand knew about the minister and his crooked son.

Brand found the keys to the truck in the driver’s jeans. He floored the accelerator, the car slipping and skidding on the muddy cemetery roads, but as the entry gate came into sight he saw through the slapping of the wiper blades the flashing lights of a police car. There was nowhere he could go. As he pulled up he saw the security guard smiling as two officers approached the car and hauled Brand out. They grabbed his wrists, raw from the plastic ties, and snapped cuffs tightly round them.

‘I want to make a call,’ he had said to the member in charge, the term for the officer commanding the station at Southerton, where they took him.

The senior officer shrugged. ‘The landline is not working and there is no Zesa to charge my cell phone. Sorry for that.’

Brand knew that Zesa, the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority, was local slang for electricity, which was all too often not working in the city. He waited two hours in a cell for a doctor to arrive at the station to check his shoulder wound. The man was a Nigerian, and when he mumbled his name, Brand, light-headed from blood loss, was momentarily gripped by the fear that it might have been the same quack who’d issued Tatenda Mbudzi’s death certificate.

‘Are you here to kill me?’

The doctor had smiled as he drew up a syringe. ‘No, I am here to help you.’

The doctor had been true to his word, and he patched Brand up well enough for him to be moved to Chikurubi Prison, the country’s most notorious, and dumped in a cell made for five men but inhabited by ten. By the next morning, after a sleepless night, he was covered in lice from lying on a piece of cardboard on the floor.

A US consular officer arrived, and shook his head when Brand was led into the interview room. The man, who said his name was Peters, slid a copy of the
Daily News
, one of the independent newspapers in Zimbabwe, through the bars separating them. Tatenda’s faked demise was all over the front page, as was the news that the CID, the police criminal investigation division, had found and arrested him.

‘The police are saying it was two muggers who hijacked you,’ Peters said. He was half Brand’s age, dressed in a blazer and chinos.

‘Bullshit. They were Charlie 10; they wanted to know what I knew about Mbudzi and who I had told.’

‘You’re not licensed to operate as a private investigator in Zimbabwe,’ Peters said. ‘The authorities take a dim view of people trying to do their job for them, especially foreigners.’

Brand held his tongue. Peters was right. But the money Dani paid for a few days of investigating work was better than he could make in a month of guiding. He asked Peters what he should do.

‘You’re in court later today. The murder charges are being dropped. The police don’t like the CIO and the opposition is cock-a-hoop about getting Mbudzi’s head on a platter. Plead guilty to the charge of carrying a firearm without a licence and you’ll get a fine.’

Despite the lumps and bumps and bites all over him, and the bullet wound that needed proper treatment and a clean bandage, Brand had started to feel quite good about himself and what he had achieved, even though it had almost got him killed.

‘And leave Zimbabwe straight away, and don’t ever come back,’ Peters had said.

But that was exactly what Brand was about to do, only three months later. He drove across the Sabie River on the bridge where the lion Pretty Boy had nearly had Darlene and him for breakfast. He tried not to think about her as he checked in at the office and obtained a permit.

‘No guests today, Mr Brand?’ the same national parks man who’d been on duty that day asked.

‘You heard, I guess.’

He nodded and stamped Brand’s permit. ‘Good for you. These poachers are evil.’

Brand slid his new weapon, a nine-millimetre SIG Sauer – the Zimbabwean police had never returned his .32 – across the counter and filled out the firearms declaration he handed him in return. The man placed his pistol in a canvas bag and closed it with a lead seal that would be broken when he left the park.

Brand went back out to his Land Rover and, after showing his permit to the security man at the boom, passed through the gates into the park.

On the twelve-kilometre drive to Skukuza he saw a pair of white rhino and a breeding herd of nine elephants, including a couple of tiny calves. The sight of these animals, in particular, helped ease Brand’s mind. The elephant and the rhino were both hunted, poached to extinction in some parts of Africa, yet when left to their own devices they were no threat to man or other creatures. There was an innocence, a simplicity, about these lumbering giants that made him want to stay there, in the Kruger Park, and hide among them forever.

The two CIO men in the Harare cemetery had not been the first men Brand had killed, but he had hoped they would be his last. He put the Land Rover in gear and left the elephants, unable to look at them any more. He felt the darkness start to engulf him. He fought it, as he always did, but it seemed his vision started to blur at the edges and he felt the terrible weight of the things he had done in his life bearing down on him, as if this invisible force from within was crushing him from every angle.

He blinked at the morning sun and tried to ignore the pain in his beaten and booze-drenched brain. What was he doing here, in this paradise? he asked himself. What right did he have to be alive? He stopped the truck again, pulling over onto the verge beside the road. His pistol sat on the passenger seat, next to him, in its canvas bag. Brand looked at it for long, lonely minutes.

‘What can you see?’

Brand looked up from the bagged firearm and out the driver’s window. Slightly below him, in the passenger seat of a Hyundai Atos, a miniscule rental car, an attractive brunette of about nineteen was looking up at him expectantly. The young man behind the wheel next to her peered up at him through the tiny windscreen. ‘Are you looking at an animal?’ the man asked.

The accent was Dutch, or maybe German. ‘We want to see a zebra,’ the girlfriend added.

‘A zebra? Not a lion or a leopard?’ Brand countered.

‘No, we have seen them,’ she said, ‘but I just want to see a zebra. I think it is my favourite animal and it would make me happy to see one. I have been looking for the past nine days and have not seen one.’

Brand resisted the urge to ask if she’d had her eyes closed the whole time, but game viewing could be like that. He knew that if he really wanted to see a particular animal or find one for a client, and deliberately went looking for it, then he would be unlikely to find it. If he told himself, or a paying customer, that he could never predict the future or know exactly what a mobile animal with a mind of its own was up to or where it was likely to be, then fate would, hopefully, take a hand. He felt the blackness of his mood ebb slowly away. He had just been thinking about leaving this place, this time, this life, when this wide-eyed tourist had reminded him of a young man who had come to Africa in search of a war and instead been seduced by the peace and the inestimable beauty of nature.

Brand remembered how excited he had been, all those years ago, when he had seen his first zebra. He was battle-hardened by then, having experienced the mixed elation and horror of surviving his first combat. He was drinking hard, living hard and loving hard to keep the first of the many nightmares at bay, and he and some army buddies had gone to the Kruger Park on a weekend pass. Instead of stupefying himself with alcohol, as he’d fully expected he would, he was hypnotised and hooked by the simple sight of birds and animals living as their maker had intended, free of cages and safe from hunters’ rifles.

‘Follow me,’ Brand said. ‘I’ll find you a zebra.’ In fact, he’d seen a herd grazing in open country no more than a couple of kilometres back towards the gate. There was a pretty good chance they were still there and the Dutch couple, with their untrained tourist eyes, had simply missed them.

He found the zebra in a matter of minutes and the Dutch pair were over the moon. The guy passed him a sixpack of Heineken, which Brand gladly accepted. He
could
have picked up some more freelance guiding work, perhaps in Zimbabwe or in South Africa once his licence was reinstated, but Dani’s job would pay better, and in any case there was more to him going back to investigating than the cash.

Brand drove through the thatched entry gate to Skukuza, over the ridiculously bumpy rumble strips and past the main reception building. He headed down to the restaurant and park shop, where he parked, grabbed his laptop out of the Land Rover and nodded to a couple of the other guides he knew who were waiting while their clients raided the shop for wooden giraffes and more safari clothes. He walked past the bronze statue of two kudus fighting, towards the cafeteria.

He bought a Coke and sat down at an empty wrought-iron table overlooking the Sabie River. A
dagga
boy, an old male buffalo, wallowed in the brown shallows on the far side of the shrinking waterway. Mouse birds flitted in the grand old sycamore fig tree that cast its welcome shade over him. In the distance was the disused railway bridge that used to carry steam trains to the Indian Ocean coast, through what was now the Kruger Park. The line had been decommissioned and ripped up decades ago, collisions with wildlife being too regular. It was probably one of the few times in history, he decided, where nature had won out over people in the ongoing battle for space and supremacy.