The Delta (40 page)

‘Out.'

Ironic, she thought as she stepped out of the Land Rover, that she might die like this after surviving years at war. ‘Please, I've got a daughter. She has no father. I will do whatever you want me to.'

‘Quiet,' the man growled. ‘Search the vehicle. Under the driver's seat, in the console box. She will have a weapon there somewhere. Would you like to tell us where it is?'

She glanced up at him, even though she knew she shouldn't
make eye contact. Did he assume any white woman travelling alone through Africa would carry a gun? Perhaps if the plates on the Land Rover were South African – where it seemed everyone carried a gun – but this vehicle was from Botswana, where violent crime was relatively uncommon.

‘Under the driver's seat.' There was no way she could get to it.

‘Here it is,' said the man with the AK-47. He stuffed the Glock into his waistband.

The other policeman, who had been standing by the supposedly broken-down
bakkie
, lowered and closed the truck's bonnet then strode over to the Land Rover. He took the keys from the man with the pistol, who still covered Sonja, got into her vehicle, started it and drove off the road into the long grass and trees at the edge of the cleared area.

‘Ms Kurtz,' the man with the pistol said.

She kept looking at the ground, surprised that he knew her name, but determined not to show recognition.

‘It is all right, Ms Kurtz. We are not going to harm you, but we had to take certain precautions. We are taking you to meet with Mr Steele, but we could not allow you to travel all the way to the border and then on to Dukwe. There isn't time.'

She looked up at him. ‘Why not, what's changed?'

He smiled again. ‘Mr Steele will explain. We are friends. Please trust us. We are in grave danger from the police and army all the time, so we must take our own precautions. I guarantee you will be safe and I regret any inconvenience to you, but, please, we must leave now.'

She nodded.

‘I regret, too, that I must take certain precautions from now on. We have been betrayed in the past. I am going to have to cover your eyes. Do you wish to go to the toilet or eat or drink something before we leave?'

‘No, I'm fine. Can I have my pistol back?'

‘When we arrive at our destination. We will stop for water on the way. We must hurry.'

They walked to the police
bakkie
and the man who had confiscated her Glock reached into the cab and pulled out a wide strip of cloth. He held it up and she nodded. She wasn't thrilled about being blindfolded, but at least it wasn't a hood. Before the rag covered her eyes she saw a second police vehicle hidden deeper in the trees. These men were well organised.

‘This way, Ms Kurtz,' the first officer said. She felt him take her hand and he gave her instructions for climbing into the back to the secure area at the rear of the
bakkie
. She could tell it was a real police wagon by the odours of disinfectant, urine and vomit. When she sat down she found they had placed a thick foam mattress on the bench seat. Considerate.

She was tired and decided there was no use trying to time how far they were travelling or in which direction. If the men were genuine members of the CLA and had been in touch with Martin, which appeared to be the case, then she had nothing to fear. If this was a set-up of some kind, then she would soon be dead. The mattress had been placed lengthwise so she found that if she lay back, her head was cushioned from the bumpy ride along the corrugated dirt track. She let the vibrations soothe her to sleep.

‘Ms Kurtz.'

Sonja sat bolt upright and tried to stand, banging her head. For a terrible, tense moment she had no idea where she was.

‘It's all right. We have stopped. You can get out of the
bakkie
now, Ms Kurtz.'

Recognition flooded her brain and she realised she was safe. ‘Can I take this bloody thing off, now?'

‘Of course. Allow me.'

She blinked at the harsh light and, looking up, saw the sun was high in the sky. They must have been driving for hours, but judging by the poor condition of the track they might not have covered too many kilometres. They were at the end of a road, at a collection of mudbrick and thatch huts that appeared empty. She looked around, but knew better than to ask where she was. There was only the one police vehicle in sight – the one she had travelled in.

The man who had pulled her over – she guessed he was the leader – had changed out of his police uniform. He wore a faded and stained blue T-shirt and a pair of torn and tattered shorts. He spoke to the other two in Lozi. One had changed into similarly ragged clothes, while the other was still in his police uniform. The uniformed man nodded, got into the
bakkie
and reversed up the track before executing a laborious three-point turn and driving off.

‘Risky,' she said, pulling back her hair and refastening her ponytail with its elastic band. ‘Stealing a police car.'

The leader shrugged, then smiled broadly. ‘Who said we stole it? Come.'

She followed him through the eerily quiet settlement.

‘This was once a thriving community – my home, in fact, but it has ceased to exist.'

‘Why?'

He talked without looking back at her, his eyes scanning left and right as they walked past the stripped, rusted hulk of a VW Golf. ‘AIDS, poverty, the Namibian Defence Force …'

She'd heard of ghost villages in parts of Africa – communities that had ceased to exist because of the impact of HIV-AIDS. Typically, the menfolk contracted the disease, often by sleeping with prostitutes, then passed it on to their wives. If both spouses and other members of the extended family died off, their children might end up in an AIDS orphanage. Even if a mother
survived, without her family's breadwinner she would probably be forced to move from the village and seek work in the nearest town or city.

The man continued, ‘In our case, it was much more than a disease. After the last attack on the dam the police and army came to many villages, looking for CLA supporters. Many of our people fled across the border, into Botswana. Some brought tales of rape and beatings by the policemen and soldiers.' He stopped, and so did Sonja. He looked around him. ‘All I want is to come back here one day, to live. Let us keep moving – there is no time for sentimentality.'

Sonja smelled stagnant water and, once they passed through the remnants of the village, the man led her into a wall of pampas grass, taller than she was. They were on a very narrow pathway and she saw the deep four-toed indentations of hippo tracks. The black earth beneath her hiking boots slowly became softer, until the ooze was ankle deep.

‘Normally this area should be flooded, with the water right up near the village,' he said. ‘The water here used to be free-flowing and sweet to drink, but now … It is the drought and global warming. Just one more problem for us.'

Sonja glanced back and saw the other man with them had an AK-47, as well as her Glock, and her pack on his back. Every few paces the man stopped and turned, checking the track behind them and listening.

Weaver birds chattered as they brushed through the reeds, making the birds' intricately woven nests dance and sway like Chinese lanterns on flimsy poles. Somewhere ahead she heard a hippo grunting. She was glad it was another scorching hot day, so the sensitive-skinned creatures would be unlikely to be out of the water grazing. If they ran into an angry hippopotamus out of water then even the AK might not be enough to save them.

The leader paused and held up his hand. The tail-end Charlie stopped and covered their rear. Sonja stayed put as the man lowered his profile and crept forward. Sonja could see the glitter of sun on water through the reeds. He waited for a few moments then waved her on.

Sonja squelched forwards, the mud and water over the tops of her boots now. The leader was bent over and hauling on something. She joined him and saw he was dragging a long
mekoro
from its hiding place in the pampas. The
mekoro
, a dugout canoe usually carved from the trunk of the sausage tree, was the traditional means of transport throughout the swamps of the Okavango Delta and neighbouring wetlands that spilled over into the Caprivi.

The leader held the
mekoro
steady for her, and nodded for her to get in. ‘I will sit in the front, then you. My colleague will be the poler.'

She thought colleague an unusual word for a fellow warrior. She stepped into the narrow canoe and, gripping the sides, sat down. ‘Before this, what did you do?'

He placed Sonja's pack further back in the
mekoro
, so that Sonja could use it as a backrest, then waded to the front of the long, narrow boat, which was barely wide enough to accommodate his quite ample backside. He checked the safety catch on the AK and climbed in, in front of Sonja. ‘I was the village school teacher.'

‘And now?' she probed.

‘And now, I am taking you where you need to go.'

She felt the canoe tip and grabbed the sides to steady herself as the second man pushed the
mekoro
out into the muddy water and nimbly jumped aboard. He stabbed a narrow wooden pole, its length nearly twice his height, into the bank and the vessel slid quickly and easily into the channel.

Reeds and pampas taller than the poler shielded them from view as the
mekoro
glided silently down the waterway, which seemed no more than two or three metres across at its widest.

‘Too shallow for hippos to spend the day here, in case you are wondering,' the leader grinned back at her.

‘And crocodiles?'

He kept his gaze ahead now, adjusting the assault rifle on his lap and wrapping his right hand around the pistol grip. ‘Ah, plenty.'

Sonja had travelled by
mekoro
many times in her youth, but she never tired of it. To her, it was the only way to travel through the swamps. It was as close, literally, to nature and the delta as a human could be. ‘How long will we be on the water?'

‘Two, maybe three hours, depending on the strength of the man behind you.' The poler chuckled.

Sonja unzipped her daypack and pulled out her bush hat. One thing she remembered about travelling on the waters around Xakanaxa was how easy it was to get sunburned out on the water. Next, she unlaced her right boot, slid off her sock and rinsed it by trailing it in the water, which was just a few centimetres below the top of the canoe's sidewall. She squeezed the water out of her sock and wriggled her toes, letting her feet dry.

The leader looked back, disturbed by her slight movements, and looked down at her pale foot and smiled. ‘One boot at a time, eh? Like a good soldier.'

‘My father taught me that.' The memory came from her subconscious. It was a pleasant one of them going for long walks on the cattle farm at Okahandja, tracking kudu and impala and other wild game that also lived on the property. Sometimes he would shoot for the pot, and on other occasions they would go just to watch the graceful antelope. He'd told her, when she wanted to stop and massage her aching and blistered feet after
wearing some new boots, to take off one at a time, and replace and lace the one boot before taking off the other – in case she had to suddenly run from danger.

‘But Papa,' she'd said to him, ‘you always told me not to run from lions or leopards.'

‘People, my girl. In case of bad people.'

It was her first, but not her last lesson in the art of war and bushcraft from her father. As much as she despised him now, some of what he'd taught her had saved her life.

The leader returned his gaze to the front.

By two in the afternoon she could tell from the sun's position that they were more or less heading south, which figured. She pictured the map of the Caprivi Strip in her mind. South of the highway, the B8, on this eastern side of Caprivi, was a series of wetlands not unlike the country in the Okavango Delta. On the Namibian side of the border were Mamili and Madumu national parks and this seasonally flooding environment continued across the border into the Linyanti swamps of Botswana. It was a good place to hide a rebel army – remote, inaccessible and easy to get lost in if you weren't a local.

Many refugees from the Caprivi region had settled in Dukwe, which was where she had been supposed to meet Martin, but that was a long way south of the border, well into the dry heartland of Botswana. She wondered if the Botswana government had deliberately chosen a spot so far from the border in order to avoid the refugees fomenting trouble too close to their former homeland.

Pop, pop, pop
.

Sonja swivelled to look up at the poler. ‘My pistol. Give it to me!'

The leader looked back over his shoulder. ‘Relax. It is all right. We are near.'

‘That was an AK-47,' she said, suddenly feeling naked and trapped in the boat without her sidearm.

‘Very good,' replied the leader.

A faster burst of gunfire erupted somewhere up ahead.

‘And that?' asked the leader.

Sonja cocked her head and waited for the next burst. ‘Seven point six two millimetre, again. A PKM, this time, I think.'

‘Close,' the teacher corrected her, ‘Good guess. But it's actually one of the new MAG 58s that have just arrived. We are conducting weapons training today. I prefer the RPD myself – it's lighter and easier to move with.'

Sonja agreed. ‘The drum magazine is simpler to change during an assault.'

The leader laughed, deep and loud, obviously relaxing a little as they neared their destination and no longer having to worry about making too much noise. ‘I can see we are going to have much to talk about. Perhaps we can learn a few things from you. I understand you have been in many battles.'

‘A few. And you?'

He stayed looking ahead, but she could see his shoulders sag ever so slightly. ‘Only two,' he said softly. ‘The raid on the Katima Mulilo police station more than ten years ago, and the attack on the dam. Both went badly.'