African Dawn (31 page)

The warden rounded up his four rangers, who were all now dressed in green field uniforms and carrying a mix of AK-47s and FN self-loading rifles. Tate spread a map of the park on the bonnet of his vehicle and pointed out where the poaching attack had occurred. ‘You can follow me, if you like.’

The warden nodded, ordered his men to climb into the back of his Land Rover and got in. There was a painful groaning noise from the starter motor when he turned the key.

‘
Sheesh
,’ Tate fumed. Natalie saw his knuckles were white on the steering wheel. The Land Rover continued to refuse to start. Tate got out and slammed the door of his vehicle. ‘Give him a push start,’ he yelled at the rangers. They climbed out and, with Tate helping, pushed the Land Rover. The warden let out the clutch and the vehicle lurched, belched a cloud of diesel smoke and the engine started. Tate was getting into the Toyota when the Land Rover's engine died.

Three times more they tried starting it, but the Land Rover refused to be coaxed into life. Tate went to the driver's door and stood with his hands on his hips. ‘Get into my vehicle. I'll drive.’

The warden shook his head. ‘Ah, that is not possible. It is against regulations. What if we have to drive off-road to chase the poachers? You cannot be involved in the pursuit. You no longer work for parks and wildlife.’

Tate stood there glaring at the man. ‘Bloody hell, they're getting away while we speak.’

One of the rangers spoke in Ndebele to the warden, but the senior man silenced his interjection with a short, angry rebuke. The ranger looked away in shame.

‘I will call the police in Hwange town. They will come, when it gets light,’ the warden said.

Tate ran a hand through his thick hair. He looked to Natalie like he was about to explode, but then he took a deep breath. Nicholas, too, looked like he wanted to enter the debate, but Natalie guessed that as a researcher he was beholden to the warden. She couldn't work out why the man wouldn't take up Tate's offer.

Natalie sensed the rangers were on Tate's side and seemed to resent their boss, though none of them dared to speak up against him again. Nicholas spoke, breaking the deadlock. ‘Too bad I can't fly.’

‘Why?’ Tate said, turning on him. ‘You'd have little or no chance of seeing the poachers on the ground. If they had a vehicle hidden nearby they could be halfway to the Zambian border by now. If I thought it would do any good I'd fly it.’

‘You can fly a microlight?’ Nicholas asked.

Tate nodded. ‘I used one in Namibia for a year, monitoring desert rhinos.’

Nicholas beamed. ‘Choice!’

‘Why?’ Tate's eyes suddenly widened. ‘Was Chizzi …’

‘Yep, you guessed it. I put a transmitter in her horn. If they haven't found the transmitter and killed it, you can track the poachers through the signal from her horn.’

*

Tate could hardly believe that Natalie had talked him into letting her fly with him.

Tate had asked Chris, the coordinator of the volunteer counters, if he would fly with him and operate the radio direction finder. Chris had been keen to help, but his first duty was to the people scattered around the northwest sector of Hwange National Park. Although the poachers were probably well on their way, Chris wanted to drive around to all of the teams of counters and check on them.

Nicholas had been equally frustrated. There was no way he could monitor the frequencies on the tracker and hold the antenna aloft with only one good hand. ‘We can try fixing the antenna to the wing now.’

Natalie had stepped in at that point. ‘How long will that take?’

‘An hour and a half, an hour if we work quickly.’

‘Tate, like you said, if the poachers have a car they could be a hundred kilometres away in an hour if they've already reached the tarred road. I'll come. You can show me how to work your radio thingy, right, Nicholas?’

Nicholas had nodded.

It had infuriated Tate that Natalie had been right. It was easy to use the direction finder once someone learned the basics, but Tate hated the thought of being responsible for her. ‘It might not be safe, if we find them.’

She'd scoffed. ‘Rubbish. You're not taking a gun, are you?’

‘I wasn't planning on it,’ Tate had said. ‘The warden seems less than keen on catching up with the poachers, so I doubt he'll lend me an FN. If we track the poachers down my plan is to shadow them and then radio back here and have Nicholas pass on the location to the police.’

‘See,’ Natalie had said defiantly, ‘nothing unsafe at all. Are we going to get started or are all you men going to stand around talking for another hour?’

The moon was setting and the sun was entering the narrow band of clear washed-out sky between the horizon and the lower edge of the clouds which, while breaking up, still covered most of the sky. The unseasonal conditions were by no means ideal flying weather for the tiny craft.

Natalie and Tate got into their seats and Nicholas showed Natalie how to use the intercom. She put on a headset and Nicholas adjusted the microphone closer to her lips. ‘Can you hear me, Tate?’ she said.

‘I can,’ he replied. He checked the gauges and started the small engine.

‘
Brrr
, it's cold now, and I bet it'll be colder once we get airborne,’ she said.

Tate knew she was nervous, and so she should be – he knew what cornered poachers were capable of. ‘It's always coldest just before dawn. We'll be fine soon.’

He looked back at her, forced a smiled and gave her a thumbs-up. She replied and then lowered her head to concentrate on the receiver. ‘OK,’ Natalie said, her voice clear in his headphones as he started to taxi, ‘I've punched in Chizzi's frequency on the receiver. It's scanning now.’

‘OK. Here we go.’ Tate opened the throttle and the microlight raced along the airstrip.

‘Wow,’ Natalie said once they were airborne, ‘What a rush! I've never experienced a takeoff like that, not even in a small aircraft.’

‘It's being so close to the ground, racing along, that makes it so much more noticeable once you're airborne,’ Tate said. He kept his voice calm, but he never tired of the ‘rush’ either. Tate turned the microlight to the north, following the dirt road towards Victoria Falls. Ten kilometres later they crossed from the national park to the Matetsi Safari Area, the government-controlled hunting area to the north of the park. ‘Keep sweeping the antenna. The gain at the front is higher than behind, so that'll give us a direction.’

Tate climbed and slowly increased the speed to a hundred and forty kilometres an hour. He'd flown a microlight at speeds of up to two hundred and twenty in the past, but he wanted to conserve fuel in case they picked up a strong signal. He looked back and saw Natalie's face was grim as she held her arm out into the slipstream, moving the antenna array from side to side. The device looked like an old-fashioned TV antenna, attached to a pistol grip, and was joined to the receiver with a length of coaxial cable that snapped in the breeze. Natalie looked up at him and grinned.

She was brave, he conceded. She had no need to be up here with him, but she had insisted on coming. He wondered if it was just a journalist's pursuit of a story.

‘Tate! Hear that? There,’ Natalie said. Tate held up his left hand to silence her.

‘Come right, to about one o'clock,’ she said, ignoring him.

Tate made the turn and increased the throttle. As the airspeed rose he heard the faint bleep in the headphones. ‘Well done. You've found it.’

They both concentrated on the sound now and Natalie issued minor direction corrections. Tate glanced back and saw she was pointing the antenna straight ahead now. The signal seemed to pulse louder and clearer with every beep. ‘Sixty beats per minute,’ he said into the boom microphone connected to his headset. ‘That means they're on the move.’

A herd of buffalo, startled by the drone of the little aircraft, took flight and Tate briefly watched the scattering of black dots coalesce and wind their way across an open
vlei
like smoke caught on the wind. He pointed ahead when he saw the ribbon of black tar. He looked back and Natalie nodded to confirm that she had seen the main Bulawayo to Victoria Falls road.

From Robins Camp to Victoria Falls was only about a hundred kilometres, though the first fifty was on rough gravel roads through the Matetsi area. They had seen no vehicles and the signal was still coming from straight ahead, somewhere up the main road. The poachers, Tate realised, must have had a vehicle waiting outside the northern entrance gate. They had moved fast on foot to the park boundary, then probably rendezvoused with their lift and sped north. Natalie had been right; if they had waited even an hour to attach the antenna to the microlight they would have lost them.

Tate lowered the nose but the needle moved frustratingly slowly on the airspeed indicator. Zimbabwe's roads were still in relatively good condition, with a maximum speed limit of a hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, but a decent vehicle could easily cruise at a hundred and forty.

‘Look. Vehicle ahead,’ Tate said. Natalie leaned out around Tate's body and put her thumb up to show she had seen the black Toyota double-cab
bakkie
ahead of them. ‘He's not travelling as fast as us.’ If this was the vehicle, Tate wondered, was the driver taking it easy so as not to be stopped by traffic police?

‘Is that them?’ Natalie asked into her microphone.

‘One way to find out.’ Tate banked to the right and told Natalie to keep the antenna pointed straight ahead, in the direction they were flying.

‘I'm losing the signal. It's getting fainter,’ she said.

‘That could be them. I'll try and confirm.’ Tate turned lazily to the left, then increased speed and headed north again, but on a track parallel to the main road. The signal returned, stronger, but not as loud as before. They pulled ahead of the pickup and carried on.

‘It's getting weaker again, now that they're behind us,’ Natalie said, the excitement of the chase plain in her voice.

Tate said nothing but carried on to the north, coaxing as much as he could from the small droning engine. He looked back over his shoulder then pulled around in a tight one-eighty turn that made Natalie groan into his headphones.

‘Tate, it's very strong again!’ she said as she pointed her antenna back at the
bakkie
, which passed underneath them. As soon as they overflew the vehicle, the signal dropped off. ‘Gotcha!’

26

E
mmerson Ngwenya had left the pretty young croupier lying on her back in his hotel room, gently snoring off the effects of the Johnny Walker Blue Label she had shared with him as they partied and fornicated late into the night at the Kingdom hotel and casino in Victoria Falls.

He stepped out of the lift and walked across the polished floor to the reception desk. ‘Send up a bottle of French champagne and some strawberries and orange juice to my suite.’

‘Of course, Comrade Minister,’ said the girl at the desk, smiling and batting her eyelids. Emmerson winked at her. He wondered … No, he told himself, it was time to think about business. And if all went well with the Vietnamese then he could continue to have as many women as he wanted.

His protection officer and driver, Ncube, was waiting for him at the entrance and got out and opened the rear door for him. Emmerson glanced up at the grey skies and saw the water beaded on the polished black metal of the new Mercedes. He hadn't heard the rain last night – not surprising given the volume of the girl's screaming. He smiled to himself.

The girl had pouted when his cell phone had rung just after one am and he insisted, despite her protests, that he must answer it. She'd paused, sitting astride him, as he took the call. The soldiers had told him they had the goods, at last, and had offered to bring them to his hotel.

‘No, you'll look out of place. I'll meet you on the road at six.’

‘Yes sir,’ the commander of the hunting party had replied. While they had settled on a location for the meeting the croupier had placed her palms on his chest and started moving again, squeezing him between her thighs and raising and lowering herself slowly on him. He'd waggled a finger at her as he continued the conversation, but his protest had been half-hearted. Rather than being distracted by the details of arranging the pickup of the rhino horn he'd been further inflamed by a jolt of adrenaline at the thought of what he was about to do, and the money he would make on the deal. As soon as he'd ended the call he'd grabbed the cheeky maiden by the hips and rammed up into her with his considerable force and exploded inside her. She'd told him she was HIV negative and he'd told her he was negative as well. In fact he'd never been tested, but he hadn't been able to be bothered walking to the hotel bathroom to search for a complimentary condom. He didn't know whether rhino horn worked as an aphrodisiac or not, but the thought of making $50,000 for a few hours' work certainly did.

Ncube had placed a copy of the morning's
Herald
on the back seat for him and Emmerson unfolded it as the car sped out of Victoria Falls, past a stream of people walking into town to work. The newspaper failed to hold his interest, however, and his mind turned to ways he could maximise his returns from his latest business venture.

The problem with rhinos, Emmerson knew, was supply and demand. Demand was threatening to outstrip supply at a great rate. The solution, he knew, was not to send armed gangs out into the bush to track down wild rhinos. That was too difficult and, as recent experience had showed him, too unreliable. He needed a guaranteed, possibly ongoing supply of rhino horn, and he knew just where to find it. But that would have to wait.

‘You asked me to tell you when we were twenty kilometres out of town, Comrade Minister,’ Ncube said, glancing back from the road. ‘Coming up now.’

‘Very good, Tobias,’ Emmerson said, peering through the windscreen. ‘Up ahead … see the deserted woodcarvers' stalls? Pull over here.’

Once, hundreds of carvers had lined the roads from Bulawayo to the Falls selling all manner of artefacts. However, since tourists had abandoned Zimbabwe the curio business had collapsed and the line of rusting tin-roofed lean-tos, which had once been packed with a wooden menagerie of giraffe, rhino and elephant, were now abandoned.

Emmerson wore a Ralph Lauren linen bomber jacket against the morning cool. He slid his hand inside and brushed the envelope containing $10,000 in US greenbacks. He shifted in his seat as the Makarov pistol in the waistband of his chinos was digging into his back. One had to take precautions when the stakes were high.

‘Comrade Minister?’

‘I see them,’ Emmerson said. Two men emerged from behind the abandoned stalls. One wore an old green army greatcoat. The air was still crisp, Emmerson noted as he opened the door, but not that cold. He guessed the coat was to cover a slung AK. He was expecting three men, and assumed the third was waiting with a vehicle somewhere behind the shacks. While the soldiers had come highly recommended, Emmerson didn't know them personally.

The other man wore a khaki bush shirt and jeans crusted with dried mud. He carried a bulky parcel wrapped in hessian. Emmerson felt his pulse quicken. They exchanged greetings. Emmerson wondered if these men realised just how many times more than ten grand the horn was worth.

‘Nine hundred and ninety-eight grams,’ said the man in the bush hat.

Emmerson had told them that he would still pay them the price they had agreed per kilo, the full ten thousand. The Vietnamese diplomat, Nguyen, had initially offered him $40,000 per kilo, but Emmerson had bargained that price up to $50,000. He knew that once ground into powder the horn would fetch nearly $300,000 in Asia.

Emmerson reached for the envelope and the other man passed him the package. Emmerson slid away part of the hessian and marvelled that people would pay so much for something so worthless and unattractive. He started to smile, but when he ran his finger along the length of the horn his smile turned to a scowl. He unwrapped the package and held it up to the morning light. A piece of wire protruding from the horn. ‘Idiots!’

Emmerson heard the whine of an approaching engine.

Ncube strode away from the shelters and out to the road. ‘Boss! Police coming up the road!’

*

Natalie watched the operation in fascination, mentally recording all the details. Tate had banked away from the road when they saw the
bakkie
pull over and park behind what looked like a row of empty market stalls. He wanted to stay well out of range in case the poachers became suspicious.

As they orbited high above the bush the clouds began to clear and brilliant sunshine warmed their faces. Tate had radioed Nicholas Duncan at Robins Camp and he had acted as a relay man, passing information about the vehicle's location to the national parks rangers, who then passed it on to the police at Hwange.

When the Mercedes limousine had showed up and then pulled off the road, Tate had radioed news of its arrival to Nicholas. ‘This could be a pick-up, over.’

‘Affirmative, Tate,’ Nicholas had replied. ‘I'll get the rangers to tell the cops to put foot.’

‘It'll be a miracle if they can get their act together,’ Tate said to Natalie, while they had orbited.

But the plan had worked and Natalie had spotted a white Land Rover crammed with armed officers hurtling up the road from the south. ‘It's the cavalry!’

‘Don't speak too soon,’ Tate said, as he turned back towards the road and lowered the nose of the microlight. ‘There's no sign of any police from Victoria Falls, so these guys could still get away. If they take off now there's no way the cops will be able to keep up with them.’

‘Look,’ Natalie said into her microphone, leaning around Tate and pointing, ‘there are two men getting into the Mercedes. They're leaving!’

The car's rear wheels sent up a spray of mud and painted twin lines of rubber as it slid out on to the tar road. The pickup truck was not far behind. Tate could see the light on top of the police Land Rover flashing and a cloud of black smoke blooming from the exhaust as the officer driving geared down and floored the accelerator. But the Defender was heavily laden and had clearly seen better days.

Tate brought the nose of the microlight around until he was over the road then turned and dived. ‘Hang on,’ he said to Natalie.

The airspeed indicator climbed through one-fifty, to one-sixty and finally one-eighty. Slowly they gained on the two vehicles below. ‘Come on, come on,’ Natalie urged the aircraft.

Eventually they passed over the
bakkie
, and then the Mercedes.

‘Fuel's getting low,’ Tate said. He radioed Nicholas and asked for an update on what was happening with the police at Victoria Falls.

‘No good, Tate,’ Nicholas replied. ‘Hwange station can't get in touch with the Falls. Seems their phone and radio links are out of order.’

‘Dammit.’ Tate looked back at Natalie and she saw the indecision on his face.

‘We can't let them get away, Tate.’ The police Land Rover was fading to a speck in the distance behind them. Tate nodded, then pushed the controls forward. The microlight started to drop.

The men in the
bakkie
must have seen the little aircraft coming down out of the sky before the driver of the Mercedes, because the pickup driver started flashing his lights and honking on his horn, but the Mercedes continued to speed on.

Natalie felt her stomach leap as Tate dropped lower still, until he was flying no more than ten metres above the road. Natalie looked back over her shoulder. ‘The Merc's slowing, Tate.’

‘Good,’ Tate replied, his concentration fixed on the road ahead and his instruments. Natalie saw he was throttling back to one hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. Trees flashed past on either side at a terrifying pace. ‘If I can keep him at this speed or slower the police might be able to catch up.’

Natalie looked over her shoulder and checked the car again. ‘He's speeding up, Tate! He's going to try and get under us.’

Natalie gripped the edges of her seat as she felt the aircraft sink even more. ‘Tate!’ The bonnet of the black car was right below them. The driver blew his horn, but still Tate kept coming down. The roadway looked close enough to reach out and touch. Natalie screamed as the microlight's wheels touched the road. The machine bounced back up into the air and lurched sickeningly as Tate fought to regain control.

‘On the right!’ she yelled into her microphone. The pickup driver had veered out to the right and accelerated hard. The truck was overtaking the Mercedes – and the microlight. ‘Oh my God! He's got a gun!’

Tate jinked to the left as they heard the
pop-pop-pop
of bullets leaving the barrel of an AK-47. The driver of the Mercedes also swerved instinctively.

Natalie felt sure Tate would give up now and climb to a safe altitude. It was what she would have done. She screwed her eyes up tight at the sight of the winking rifle barrel. The noise shot her back to her childhood and she clenched her fists around the seat supports as the dreadful images of the night at her grandparents' farm flashed across her mind.

‘… something,’ Tate said, his words intruding on her nightmare.

‘What?’ she yelled into the microphone.

‘Throw something!’

The two vehicles were side by side now, the pickup driver struggling to overtake the Mercedes. The gunfire had stopped and when Natalie dared look at the
bakkie
she saw the rifleman had pulled his weapon inside. He was fiddling with something on the rifle, yanking it back and forth as though there was a problem. Natalie looked around her then realised she was still holding the radio tracking scanner. It was the size and weight of a large handheld radio. It was all that she could see that was loose.

Tate eased the microlight over to the right until he was between the two speeding vehicles below. ‘Up ahead! Tractor!’

Natalie peered around Tate and saw the tractor slowly trundling along the left-hand side of the road, its two nearside wheels straddling the yellow line that ran along the edge of the highway. Tate edged a little more to the right. The windscreen of the pickup was below her, no more than two metres away. She saw the wide-eyed face of the driver staring up at her. The gunman seemed to have fixed his rifle and she saw its barrel poke out of the open window again. She was suddenly filled with hate for these men who had tried to kill her – and for the man who had abducted her all those years ago. She had been scared all her life, since that moment, and it was time to fight back. Natalie gave an animal-like growl as she pulled the coaxial cord from the tracking device, raised her arm and then hurled the grey box downwards with the strength born of thirty years of pent-up rage.

The radio tracker hit the windscreen in front of the driver's face and the safety glass shattered into a silvery mosaic. The driver of the
bakkie
swerved violently to the right onto the verge of the road, then swung hard back to the left.

At the same time the driver of the Mercedes instinctively slowed and dropped back when he saw something fall out of the microlight.

Tate dropped the microlight and bounced off the roadway again. The driver of the
bakkie
braked hard while still trying to overcorrect back to the left. The Mercedes driver hit the brakes but was too close to avoid slamming into the side of the truck as it flashed across his path. Both vehicles skidded off the road.

*

Emmerson Ngwenya wasn't wearing a seatbelt and he was thrown violently against the driver's seat in front of him. His left shoulder ached and his arm felt weakened as he opened the rear door with his right hand and stumbled out. The car was a write-off and steam hissed from the burst radiator under the crumpled bonnet.

Ncube, who had disabled the airbag on the limousine two weeks earlier and sold it to a second-hand auto-parts dealer, was slumped over the steering wheel, which had crushed his chest. His broken ribs had skewered his heart and lungs. The windscreen was cracked and bloody where his forehead had connected with it.

The
bakkie
had been pushed down the road sideways by the force of the impact of the Mercedes and all four of the truck's tyres had blown. The idiot of a driver, however, was still trying to get away, his buckled rims screeching on the tar. The man who had been in the front passenger seat, with the AK, was slumped over the dashboard. A third man, the one who had handed over the horn to Emmerson, opened the rear door of the double cab and got out. He, too, looked unsteady on his feet.