Zambezi (3 page)

The report continued with file vision of the rugged mountains and desolate plains of the warravaged country, then the reporter threw back to the studio announcer, who said: ‘Thanks, Mike. We’re going to go now to the Pentagon, where senior US Army officer General Donald Calvert, who until recently commanded the Coalition forces in Afghanistan, is holding a live press conference.’

The vision cut to a shot of a man with a bristly grey crewcut and the lined face of one who has spent years outdoors. Silver parachutist’s wings and myriad colourful medal ribbons stood out in stark contrast to the dull green of his uniform tunic. On his right shoulder was the yellow embroidered shield of the First Cavalry Division with its black bar and horse’s head. On his left, the blue dragon’s head of the 18th Airborne Corps. He stood at a podium, a map of Afghanistan on the plasma-screen television behind and to one side of him.

A reporter off-camera asked: ‘General Calvert, a few months ago you were the commander of Coalition forces in Afghanistan. When you left you were, quote, “confident we had disrupted Al Qaeda’s ability to mount major offensive operations inside Afghanistan”. What’s gone wrong since you left and do you stand by your earlier comments?’

The general smiled, leaned a little closer to the microphone in front of him and said: ‘Stu, what we’ve seen in the last few days is proof positive that we are making headway against terrorism.

Acting on accurate, timely intelligence, our Special Forces soldiers were able to intercept this band of killers and their deadly hardware and prevent a missile attack from taking place. Call me oldfashioned, but I’d rate that a pretty good success.’

Another reporter said: ‘Rachel Wise from the
Post
, General. On another matter, now that your retirement from the military has been announced there’s been a flurry of speculation about what you will be doing next.’

Again the easy smile. ‘Well, Rachel, right now I’m still an officer in the US Army. My future’s my business, for now, but the first thing I’m going to do when I finish up here is go on a safari holiday.

Now, if there are no more questions about Afghanistan …?’

Hassan hoped Miranda’s father hadn’t been involved in the attack, or been one of those injured.

The raid had occurred near Pakistan. Iqbal was in Karachi, studying at an Islamic university. He was nowhere near the border, thank God.

Hassan pushed aside his half-drunk beer and strode across the polished stone floor of the bar to his private office. Next to his computer a portable satellite phone sat in its desk charger. He picked it up and started to scroll through the saved names, glancing at the silver-framed photo beside the charger. Taken ten years earlier, on the day of his graduation from Cambridge University, it showed him in academic robes, smiling broadly, his darkly handsome father in a western business suit. Iqbal, his twin brother, stood on the other side of their father, wearing a
kansu
, the traditional loose-fitting white robe of the Zanzibari-Omani man. A year after the photo was taken, Hassan senior had succumbed to lung cancer.

Hassan found the number and pressed the dial button. The feeling of unease, a mixture of guilt and dread, started to spread through him once more. He changed his mind and pushed the cancel button before the phone on the other end started to ring. It was nothing, he told himself again.

He put on Ray-Ban sunglasses and a New York Yankees baseball cap as protection against the glare and heat of the African sun and walked along the riverside track to the enclosures.

‘Hello, Maggie,’ he said fondly.

The cheetah, the eldest of his breeding females, responded to his voice, got up and walked to the gate. Hassan opened it; Maggie made no move to escape. Instead she rubbed her flank against his leg like an overgrown household cat. ‘How are your babies today, beautiful?’

He walked to the shade of the apple-ring acacia inside the enclosure, drawn by a series of highpitched squeaks.

The cat’s latest litter of five strong, healthy cubs turned their tiny faces to him. The little balls of fluff knew his scent as well as their mother’s. He picked one up and stroked it. Another clawed at the fabric of his tan trousers, while a third tried to trip him up by attacking the laces of his kudu-leather boots.

One day these cheetahs would take their rightful place in the Zambezi Valley, patrolling the riverine forests and floodplains of the great river. He had helped save Maggie, and a few other heirs to the natural paradise that bordered his own private game reserve, from extinction.

Hassan bin Zayid also thought himself an heir to the valley. His family had made their fortune in this part of Africa hundreds of years earlier. His people, on his father’s side, were Omanis. Great traders and seafarers, they had left the Arabian Gulf and followed the east coast of Africa in search of exotic animals, spices and the most valuable cargo of all – slaves.

Hassan certainly did not think of Juma or his other staff as slaves, just as loyal paid servants, but his ancestors had not been as benevolent. They had forged deeper and deeper into the forests and savannas of central and southern Africa, spreading Islam as they went and returning to their bases at Zanzibar and Bagamoyo with dhows crammed with live cargo.

He thought of the news item he had just seen. The war against terror, as the Americans called it, had touched many more countries than Afghanistan and Iraq. His ancestral homeland of Oman had lined up with the Americans, the oil-rich state providing land for US bases. The place of his birth, Zanzibar, had seen a drop in tourist numbers because world events and his family’s fortunes had suffered as a result.

Hassan found himself missing Zanzibar less and less and spending more time at his game reserve in Zambia with every trip. He loved the island where he had been born, with its azure waters, white sands and heady aroma of cloves and other spices. But the paradise he had known as a child was changing, and not for the better. Each year hotels encroached a little more on the beaches. Even now, with tourist numbers down it seemed to him there were still more European faces than Arabs or Africans on the streets of Stone Town, and that dance music and hip-hop were drowning out the gentle melodies of his own people.

Of course, he didn’t mind the presence of tourists when it came to the monetary aspect – they had made him and his family extremely wealthy over the years. Since the demise of the trade in slaves, ivory and, more recently, rhino horn, the bin Zayid family had made their living from the development and running of hotels on Zanzibar and the Tanzanian mainland. Hassan liked to think of himself as a progressive man. He didn’t hate westerners and, although he had been raised a Muslim, he did not follow all the rules of his father’s religion. Neither had his father, for that matter. Hassan had inherited from him a weakness for malt whisky and a fondness for women with golden hair.

He thought for the hundredth time that day of Miranda, just across the Zambezi from him. He would send the boat for her tonight, to her camp on the Zimbabwean side of the river. They would dine and share a bottle or two of fine wine from his cellar. There were so many things he wanted to discuss with her, but they could wait until after they had made love. He had fallen under her spell so quickly and completely that it still amazed him. He, the millionaire bachelor, with a string of sexual conquests to rival a Hollywood leading man, had found himself ensnared by her beauty, her wit and their shared love of Africa’s precious wildlife. There were still, however, so many things he needed to clear up with her.

‘Boss, excuse me.’ It was Juma, returned from lunch. He strode down the pathway, carrying the satellite phone. The African was not given to smiling, but his face looked more solemn than ever.

‘There was a telephone call for you. The caller wouldn’t wait, but I have a message.’

‘What is it?’ Hassan asked as he gently laid the cheetah cub back amongst its siblings.

‘I am sorry, boss, with all my heart, but there has been a death.’

*

Panthera Leo
. The African lion. This one was a beauty. She guessed his weight at close to a hundred and ninety kilograms – nearly four hundred and twenty pounds where she came from. A big boy.

Professor Christine Wallis flipped open a cheap photo album and leafed through the pages until she found Nelson. To a casual observer the pages and pages of digital photo prints would have all looked the same. All big, tawny lions. Nelson was a little easier to distinguish from the rest because, like his namesake, British admiral Horatio Nelson, he was a one-eyed warrior.

His disability had not affected his ability to fornicate and fight – the king of beast’s two top, and pretty much only, duties in life. Chris put down the album and made some notes in her journal, recording Nelson’s condition – good – and activity – nil.

The lion yawned, baring yellowed fangs the length and girth of a man’s finger. He curled his long pink tongue. It was roughened, like a domestic cat’s, and made for flaying the skin off a dead animal.

Chris was three metres away from Nelson, but the predator paid her no mind. The shape of the fourwheel drive she was sitting in was as familiar to him as the striped zebra, or the fearsome bulk of an elephant. Nelson lowered his head, rolled onto his back, wriggled a little to dislodge an annoying tick, then sat up.

Chris took up her camera, focused tight on Nelson’s sleepy face and snapped off three frames in succession, getting a better, closer shot of his scarred face. He blinked lazily at the whirr of the camera’s motor wind. He’d heard that sound his whole life. He was all power, Chris thought. The top of the food chain, irresistible to the six females in his pride, respected by his dozen children and feared by his enemies. He was the reason why she was living in South Africa’s Kruger National Park instead of her other home town in Virginia, USA.

Nelson sniffed the air, reassured himself all was well in his kingdom and, content in the knowledge that his wives were either caring for his children or hunting for his supper, laid his big maned head down and fell asleep.

Lions. Chris shook her head. For all their majesty, the big cats were also some of the most boring animals in Africa to watch and study – most of the time. Nelson was doing what every lion did for about eighteen hours a day – nothing. But it was those rarely glimpsed moments of the hunt and the kill, where the members of the pride came together instinctively as one to bring down their prey in a tawny blur of dust and blood, that made her rise before dawn six days a week and drive out into the bush. Taking her lead from the lion, Chris laid her head back and closed her eyes.

Her home for the past eighteen months had been a caravan parked under a marula tree in the camping ground of Pretoriuskop rest camp in the south-west of the Kruger National Park. An American university had provided funding for research into the feeding habits of lions and other large predators in the southern part of South Africa’s premier park. A particular focus was the prevalence of humans as prey for large predators. The reserve’s eastern boundary was also the border with Mozambique, and illegal immigrants from that country had for decades been risking the natural hazards of the bush in their quest to find their fortunes in comparatively prosperous South Africa.

Even though Mozambique’s prolonged and bloody civil war had long since ended, the flow of illegals had continued unabated. Many of Kruger’s lions, beloved and photographed by tourists from around the world, had feasted on the flesh of luckless refugees. Chris wanted to find out how many lions were man-eaters, and whether there were individuals or prides that now specialised in hunting humans. She had interviewed rangers who had come across human remains on the veldt and, with the help of the local police, with whom she maintained an excellent relationship, she had also been able to speak to detained illegal immigrants about their brushes with wildlife. So far she had not actually seen the remains of a human killed by a lion. That was just fine by her.

The noise of a vehicle engine woke her from her doze. A game-viewer – an open-top Land Rover with a canvas awning roof and tiered bench seats crammed with tourists – pulled up in front of her truck. Chris waved when she recognised the driver.

The tourists were open-mouthed with awe at the sight of the lion. However, their silent fascination soon gave way to chattering in at least three languages. Cameras flashed and a child shrieked as Nelson rose on his front legs and yawned. He looked at the game-viewer, considered moving, but couldn’t be bothered. He fell asleep again.

Chris knew most of the safari guides and rangers in her part of the park, including the ‘jeep jockey’ driving this vehicle, a South African guy named Jan. He was young, blond and attractive. Not her type, but he looked good in his short khaki shorts. Jan was sitting up on the backrest of his seat, facing his passengers and explaining some facts about lion behaviour to them.

‘We’re safe as long as we stay in the vehicle, but if you got out and tried to pat the big kitty it would be the last decision you ever made in your life,’ Jan said. There were a few nervous laughs from the crowd.

Jan started his vehicle and edged it around Chris’s until he was parked beside her window.

‘Morning, Professor,’ he said, smiling.

‘Had much luck, Jan?’ Sometimes the jeep jockeys were a pain in the ass, getting too close to animals in order to present a better photo opportunity for the tourists, and scaring off the game in the process. Jan, she recalled, was studying zoology and seemed to have a genuine respect for wildlife.

‘Only need a leopard and we’ll have nailed the big five this morning.’

‘Head via the Klipspringer kopjes on your way back to camp. That big male was out on a rock sunning himself this morning.’

‘Thanks, Professor. I’ll buy you a beer with my tips if we catch up with him. Hey, how’s Miranda doing up in Zim? You heard from her lately?’

‘She’s fine. Working hard and much better able to concentrate on her studies now that she’s away from you guys.’ Chris attracted her fair share of attention from the men in the national park, but Miranda, blonde, blue-eyed, gorgeous and thirteen years her junior, sent the South African young bloods into a frenzy of competition for her affections whenever she passed through Kruger.