The Secret Chamber (2 page)

‘Golf. Hotel. Juliet. Come in.’

The radio crackled to life and for a moment the sound washed over her. After a pause, she pulled her head clear of the window and sat up straight.

‘Hotel. Juliet. What’s up, Johnny?’

‘Listen, Bear, we’ve just got word of some kind of explosion at the Bloemfontein mine. I don’t have much more than that to tell you right now, but the labs might have been hit and there could be some contamination. Can you divert, over?’

‘Stand by.’

Bear dragged her charts up from the seat behind, unfolding the first then pulling out the marker pen and slide rule from a clip in the sun visor. She quickly drew two tight green circles and, with the pen clamped to her mouth, measured the distance between them with the slide rule. She scrawled a quick fuel calculation, before pressing her thumb down on the comms switch.

‘Affirm, I can divert. ETA twenty-five to thirty minutes. Any casualties?’

‘Negative. Looks like they were lucky.’

‘Wilco …’ Bear paused, the faint crackling of the radio echoing in her headset. ‘And, Johnny, who’s on the ground?’

‘That’s Wilhelm.’

‘Copy that. Hotel. Juliet.’

Bear slowly shook her head, sliding the map off her lap and on to the empty seat beside her. She looked down at the smooth skin of her thighs and cursed herself for having worn such a tight skirt to the office that morning. She instinctively wriggled back in the seat, pulling it half an inch further down her legs, but knew it was useless. As she lifted her arm to check the DI against the compass for her new heading, she felt the shirt she was wearing cling to her skin in the heat. It outlined her cleavage perfectly. She shook her head once again.

That was all the excuse those testosteroned idiots at the mine would need. Stuck out in the middle of the Kalahari, they didn’t see women for weeks on end. The only female contact most of them had was in the knocking shops in town. The proceeds of a month’s work for a long weekend of boozing and whoring. Seemed like a high price to pay, given the looks of most of the women out in Bloemfontein.

This would have to be the one day she’d had to dress up for meetings. To make matters worse, the fitted jacket to match the skirt was hanging neatly on the back of her chair in the office. In the heat and the hurry to get back to Cape Town, she had managed to forget it.

Pulling her long, black hair into a tight ponytail, Bear looked down again to see the material of her white shirt clinging to the sides of her breasts.

‘Shit,’ she muttered, her French accent drawing out the ‘s’ so that it reverberated into the radio mic. She buttoned
the
shirt a notch higher and pulled it away from her skin, trying to get some air beneath the fabric.

And Wilhelm too. That fat Boer bastard had barely been able to stop himself from rubbing up against her when she’d been in overalls, let alone dressed like this. That leering grin of his always made her want to grab him by the balls and squeeze the look from his jowly face.

With another shake of her head, she angrily jerked the control column forward, sending the plane diving down in a steep banking turn. The noise of the wind increased with each turn of the altimeter and she held the column pressed forward, enjoying the feeling of really flying once again. Even an old boneshaker like a 206 could be fun if you knew how to push it.

Levelling out at only 100 feet, Bear rolled the wings on to her new heading and put in the power. Her eyes darted between the instruments and the horizon, while everything else seemed to fade into significance. It was always like this when she flew the way her father, Jean-Luc, had taught her. She was a gangly teenager with barely enough strength in her arms to pull out of a dive when she first started flying, yet even now she could remember his voice coming through softly on the mic. It was always calm, always precise. The instructions whispered, getting her to edge lower and lower, until the ground ripped past in such an adrenalin-fuelled blur that she could hardly breathe. It felt as if the termite mounds dotted across the red savannah would rip off the undercarriage, but still his voice told her everything was OK, that she could go lower, push it a bit more.

That was always the way it was with her father. It was one of his many hang ups from a life spent touring Africa as a mercenary. They’d ingrained it in him, and he, in turn, in her.

And here she was, the result of the most incompatible union imaginable. A single night spent by her father, the French mercenary, with a local woman from the Hema tribe in Eastern Congo. Back then her father had been a different man – a kind man with principles, despite the realities of his profession.

Eight years after that fateful night, when Bear’s mother had abandoned her for some merchant trying to make it big in Lubumbashi, it was Jean-Luc who came looking for her. He’d found her at last on the streets in Bunia, her stomach swollen from malnutrition, her hair infested with lice, and wearing nothing but a ragged T-shirt and the beaded belly chain given to each girl from her tribe on the day of her birth.

With no paperwork or witnesses, Jean-Luc had smuggled her across the border into Rwanda. As the years passed, they travelled from Uganda to Liberia, then Angola to Sierra Leone; heading off into every war-torn, shit-hole on the planet where her father’s mercenary unit could make some money. It became her life, became normality. She was just a little girl trying to do her homework amid the faded grandeur of the ex-colonial hotels with their pockmarked ceilings and incongruously smart waiters. She would hide under the piano, practising her English by listening to the BBC World Service.

In each new country she had to find her own space, construct her own little world amongst the chaos, while her father disappeared into the bush with his faithful unit, losing another part of his soul with every new war.

But it was Sierra Leone that really changed him. Something had happened out there while he was fighting the RUF. Even at the mention of Freetown, Jean-Luc’s face would darken, his grey eyes clouding over with a terrifying blanknesss.

Then came the drinking. Drinking so hard that the weeks would blur and missions converge into a monotonous litany of atrocities. What little meaning there was to it became quickly lost amongst the spiralling complexity of feuding autocrats as he took one job, then the next. Her father became a stranger to her, showing sides of his character that she had never known existed, until finally he had become as amoral as the people he was fighting.

The others in the unit tried to hide it, of course; Laurent and Marcel the most. They’d apologise for him, tell her it was malaria or that her father wasn’t feeling himself, but the excuses soon became hollow and repetitive. It was only when she got her scholarship to the University of Cape Town and actually broke away from it all that she realised how wrong it had all become, or had always been.

A few years later her father came to Cape Town to make amends, but instead of repairing their relationship, he spent the entire first day meeting an Englishman at Uitsig restaurant in the Cape winelands, getting increasingly drunk as lunch wore on. That evening, as they had all ventured off to one
of
the nightclubs on Long Street, Jean-Luc had screwed one of Bear’s friends in the toilets before arguing with the coat check girl about his jacket. Bear had to drag her father off the bouncer he had beaten unconscious in the ensuing argument and walk him into one of the back alleys to try to calm him down. And as she stood there, barring him from returning to the club, all she could see were the wild eyes and bloodstained knuckles of a fighter and a drunkard. This wasn’t her father any more.

She stared at his fists, clenching and unclenching in a constant rhythm, and felt a sickness well up inside her. In that moment, he seemed so disgusting, so absolutely wretched, it was as if the ugliness of all those African wars was seeping out of him.

Later, she realised that the Englishman had been Simon Mann and that her father had been involved in the attempted coup on Equatorial Guinea. Somehow, Jean-Luc had avoided the group arrests in Zimbabwe and had headed north to the Rwandan-Congo border. Now his unit was stationed there, flying helicopters in what was ostensibly a ‘freighting’ business, but with all the contraband coming out of the Eastern DRC each month, from diamonds to coltan, uranium to copper, it was all too obvious that he had become nothing more than a petty smuggler.

It was nine years since that night in Cape Town, the last time Bear had spoken to her father. She had a new life now; she was married with a two-year-old son. And, most importantly, her family was something that
he
had never been a part of. But even after all that had happened, and all that he
had
done, she would still sometimes imagine introducing her son Nathan to his grandfather. But even as she imagined it, the dream would start to collapse. Her father was too far gone now. Just another casualty of Africa’s endless conflicts.

Through the cockpit of the plane, Bear caught the faint imprint of a settlement rising above the flat horizon. Pulling back the control column, she set the Cessna climbing in a steep arc, pushing Bear back into her seat from the positive G. As the speed bled off, she clicked down the first stage of flap, then the second, turning the plane in a tight, slow circle above the settlement. She could see movement outside the open-cast mine itself, with the conveyor belts fanning out like arteries from the northern entrance to the outlying buildings.

By flipping the plane on to its other axis, she was able to see the crater from the explosion. It had blown outwards in a massive but near-perfect circle. Reaching into her flying bag on the rear seat, she pulled out a small Lumix camera and took five shots in quick succession. From altitude, it looked like the lab complex had been just beyond the explosion’s reach. It had been close.

Two hundred feet below the circling plane, three men stood beside a white Toyota pickup truck. All were dressed in khaki shirts with matching shorts and socks pulled up to just below their knees. Despite the scorching sun, none of them wore hats. They stood squinting into the cobalt blue sky, following the plane as it passed the windsock and came into land.

They heard the propeller speed change in pitch, then
with
a tiny spray of dust kicking up from the rear wheels, the plane touched down. A few seconds later, it came to a standstill on the far side of their truck.

The three men moved round the vehicle, their eyes fixed on the interior of the plane as Bear got out, trying to keep her knees as close together as possible.

‘I don’t believe it,’ the largest of the men said to no one in particular, his voice thick with an Afrikaner accent and a lifetime of smoking. ‘They’ve sent in that fucking kaffir woman again.’

He pulled himself to a halt, the others drawing up behind him, and crossed his forearms over his rotund belly. The natural scowl on his sun-damaged face deepened as his gaze moved upward from Bear’s ankles and rested somewhere in the vicinity of her crotch. He nodded slowly, his tongue moving over his lips as if wetting the glue on a roll-up cigarette.

As Bear opened the rear door of the Cessna and pulled out a large canvas bag, Wilhelm squared off his shoulders a little more.

‘You know we have this all under control, don’t you?’ he called out to her. ‘Any idiot can see what happened. The compressors have gone. So you want to tell me why the hell head office have sent a little girl to inspect my mine?’

The man on his left gave a crooked smile, taking a packet of reds from his breast pocket and tapping the filter a couple of times. Putting the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he fished out a Zippo from his trouser pocket and went to click it open.

‘Would you not do that?’ Bear said, leaning her shoulder against the door of the plane to get the latch closed. The man eyed her disdainfully and, after a moment’s hesitation, ignored her.

‘It’s just that you’re standing a couple of feet away from the fuel overflow and, as nice as those tight shorts of yours are, you might not want to see them go up in flames.’

The man looked at the L-shaped pipe sitting under the wing of the plane and the single drop of fuel which had welled up on its end. He looked back at Bear, then gave a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

Wilhelm’s bearish forearms flexed while he watched his colleague slowly lower the lighter.

‘Now you listen to me,’ he growled, his chin tilting upwards, ‘we don’t need some kaffir woman coming here and telling us how to run our own bloody mine. Why don’t you climb on board your pretty plane and piss off back to the city?’

Bear swung the bag over her shoulder and stopped in front of him. Her eyes were fixed on Wilhelm, but her expression remained unreadable; neither confrontational nor compliant. His eyes met hers, then seemed to settle on her right eye. There was something strange about it … Only as he looked closer did he realise that there was a loss of pigmentation across the very top of the iris, leaving a clear white fleck that made it appear as if the eye was constantly reflecting some distant light.

‘Listen, Wilhelm, because I’m only going to say this once,’ Bear said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. ‘We both
know
I’m the only one here qualified to assess the damage. So instead of wasting everybody’s time, why don’t you just take me to those compressors?’

‘I don’t need you …’

‘Just this once,’ Bear cut in, ‘try thinking with your head and not your balls. You’ve got a Cat-4 explosion on an open mine site. You could have all sorts of shit leaking out here.’