The Devil's Breath (23 page)

“I think we’re about here, !Koga,” Max said as he tapped the area southeast of the spider’s body.

“What are these things?” !Koga asked, pointing to the red crosses.

Max hesitated. “Well … I think these are the places where people have died. Look …” And he traced their own journey until they skirted half a dozen markers. “I think this is the place where the earth bleeds. Where your people died and where our fathers met.”

“So your father has found many dead people.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“But why did they die?”

“Maybe because of the water. These are water maps. All those thin lines might be underground streams. My father specialized in them.” Max got quickly to his feet, climbed back into the cockpit and sat staring at the radio. They needed help. People were dying, his dad was injured. His fingers reached for the On switch. He hesitated. This was his chance to radio for assistance. He could get Kallie, the police, he could have messages sent back to Angelo Farentino. Max was on the verge of finding his father. They’d come a long way, but now he faltered.

In the stillness of the shade Max tried to picture his father and his helper manhandling the aircraft. His father, injured after someone had tried to shoot him out of the sky, and Leopold, about whom Max knew nothing. He was obviously a good field man, or Max’s dad would not have used him. It didn’t matter. What did matter was that they had hidden the plane and readied it for a quick escape. How much power was left in the battery? Max might drain it in one broadcast. No one knew where his father was. Max could not stay at the plane, he had to keep searching. If their paths crossed and his dad got back here and still needed to escape, Max would have ruined everything. Come on,
think! What would Dad have wanted? The message on the cave wall was to bring him here. Had he left the maps for him? Was that deliberate? Or were they tucked away and forgotten in the urgency of the moment? What else had he drawn in that cave? The dove under the scratchy cover, the injured man, the morning star—every picture guiding him. Then he remembered that there was a gaping hole drawn on the cave wall, like a whirlpool, with a cloud hovering over it. He jumped back down to !Koga, who was gazing at the unfamiliar landscape, seen from a surveyor’s eye, of the big map.

“There is a line here. Like a snake,” !Koga said.

“Show me.”

!Koga’s finger was on the coastline at Walvis Bay. The red line meandered towards the darkened area which, on the hydrology map, would have been the spider’s body. “It’s a road,” Max said. “From the coast to this area, whatever that might be. Maybe that’s the route my father’s field assistant took. I can’t tell. Never mind that for now. Do you remember on the cave wall, there was a drawing, like a hole in the ground, a big hole, with something swirling around it?” Max grappled for a description, hoping the Bushman boy might recognize the picture he was trying to describe. “Maybe a dust bowl, or something, y’know, a place where the wind might gather speed and twist itself up into a tornado.”

!Koga shook his head. Max knew he wasn’t explaining things properly. He quickly made a model with sticks and stones, and bits of leaf and dry lichen, in the same manner as !Koga had once shown him the route they had planned to
take. !Koga was part of the land; these tactile representations might carry more meaning than lines on a map.

“This is where we left your camp, where I was hurt….”

!Koga nodded. Max needed to understand !Koga’s own ideas of where they were.

“Can you show me where the people died, the place where the earth bleeds?”

Without hesitation !Koga cleared the dirt. He scratched a line in the sand and gouged deeper scratches into the dirt to represent the ground where the water seeped. “It was here.”

“Where are we now?” Max asked, starting to get his bearings on this dirt map.

Again !Koga drew a line away from the last markings; he pulled some grass and thorn to show the elephant tracks and the trees where they now sheltered, and he made a small stick cross—the plane.

Max made a broad semicircle around their position. “What is here?”

!Koga seemed uncertain. Then he turned a thumb downwards, indicating different places in Max’s semicircle. “Here there are lions. Five families. They are brave lions and my people have hunted near them. To this side the salt lake is hard and takes many days to cross and there is no water and no place to go and no reason to cross it. But here we hunt wild pig and it was here that Ukwane hunted wildebeest and the wildebeest did not forgive him and lifted his head before he died and killed Ukwane. He was a great hunter. There are police at this place where the trucks stop here, it is a garage.”

“How far?”

“Five days.”

“What else?”

“Here is a place we cannot hunt. It is protected for the tourists.”

“A game reserve?”

“Yes. It was the place where we hunted, but the government said we must not kill.” !Koga’s hand now swept further across. “This place we do not go.”

“Why not, !Koga? Is it the police, or the army?” Max remembered that both the police and army, usually made up of tribes other than Bushmen, harassed the nomadic hunter-gatherers.

!Koga clicked words under his breath and shook his head. “There is death there. There has always been death there.”

Bushmen did not like talking about death. Evil spirits were real, tangible forces of nature that could take them without warning.

“Have you been there?”

“No. It is not good.”

“How far is it?” Max persisted.

“Two days—if we run like the wind”—he laughed quickly—“like you! But we cannot go to this place. It is … I do not know the words.”

“Is it sacred for your people? Like a burial site?” Max asked, trying to tease a more exact answer.

“No, it is not sacred. It is bad. It is a bad place.”

!Koga scooped up a handful of dirt and shaped the small hole. His hand darted quickly, gathering stones; anything sharp or irregular he pushed down into the throat of the hole; then, choosing smoother pebbles, he laid them around
the edge. Finally he crumbled dried leaves and lichen, dressing the area with a softer, greener covering. “Only some hunters have been to this place. They say there is a great monster who lives beneath the land. He breathes the stench of the dead. He tries to live with us and the animals. He is trapped beneath the ground. He is angry and wishes to be like men, but he cannot.”

If there was anything as frightening as that on, or under, the face of the earth, then Max knew it was bound to have something to do with him finding his father. He sat quietly for a moment, then looked closely at the map, gauging the direction and distance from what !Koga had shown him on the ground. For the first time he noticed that there were still many references to place names from when the country was occupied by the Germans before the First World War. His finger took his eye across the creased paper, where he found a small, almost indistinguishable image which, if it had been necessary to check the map’s legend, would have told him it represented a fort. But Max knew what the word
Schloss
meant. Angelo Farentino had shown him aerial photographs of the fort built by the crazy German aristocrat in the nineteenth century. The fort that now belonged to Shaka Chang. An awful moment of certainty struck him. Less than half a kilometer from the fort was a small wavelike image, neither lake, nor swamp, nor river, for it couldn’t be described as any of these things. The map’s writing had to be typeset even smaller than most other names because it was longer than most and it read
der Atem des Teufels
—the Devil’s Breath.

That was !Koga’s monster, and that was where Max knew he must go.

Kallie van Reenen had a suspicious mind. She blamed her father for that. He might have been a war hero but, as he always told her, the Angolan war was a bad war, waged for the wrong reasons, instigated by greed. After he had criticized the government openly they began to harass him and he moved to Namibia, away from the unforgiving South African government of the day. Now all that was over, but her father had an intrinsic distrust of bureaucracy. And as far as Kallie was concerned, when she had discovered that Mike Kapuo was involved with Mr. Peterson in England, that distrust now included the police—the very people she had gone to for help. So when they took her back to her plane and the police air mechanic sorted out the problems, she logged her flight plan for home and flew to an airfield south of Walvis Bay. That at least gave the illusion that she was flying back to the farm. Five hours later, when she landed at
a desert airstrip for refueling, a fingertip search confirmed her suspicions. She found the satellite tracking device.

Half an hour later, a plane that was returning from safari and which would be sitting on the apron at Windhoek for a few days, carried the electronic tag.

The plane’s pilot turned up only moments after she had planted the small transponder. “You’re van Reenen’s daughter, aren’t you?” the pilot said.

“That’s right,” she said, barely managing to conceal her embarrassment. Moments earlier he would have seen her acting suspiciously around his aircraft.

“If you’re flying up to see your dad, better be careful,” he said, slinging his overnight bag into the plane. “IATA’s just blacklisted Namibian airspace, the relay station at Outjo has gone down. There’s no ATC anywhere.”

“Oh. Right. Thanks. I hadn’t heard.”

“Happened this morning. I’m heading home. The tourist industry ever hears about this, we’ll all be out of work. Take it easy.” He began his preflight checks as she drifted away, barely able to conceal her elation at the good news he had given her.

The International Air Transport Association, which controlled everything to do with aviation, had blacklisted the Namibian government’s air traffic control system. With its major relay station broken down, aircraft would not be able to see each other in the sky or land safely. And if air traffic control was not working, they would not be able to see her on their radar screens.

From now on she would fly low without logging any flight plans.

* * *

Kallie needed to contact Sayid; the best way to do that was through Tobias, and there was only one way she could get his full cooperation: through guilt.

The small airstrips in the desert and at farms had no control towers. They were as informal as garages. Most had a fuel pump, a couple of mechanics and a shop; maybe a bar. When she landed, there was only one other plane needing refueling and no sign of the bogus mechanic who had sabotaged her plane. She pushed the bar’s doors open and strode towards Tobias, who was busy connecting a barrel of beer. The moment he saw her, he reached for the till and snatched a piece of paper. “Boy, did you con me! Do you know what that phone call to England cost? Your father would skin me alive if I gave him this!”

She sat on a barstool; there was no one else in the room. “Tobias, you nearly killed me,” she said with a straight face. Tobias’s mouth opened in an unspoken moment of uncertainty and confusion. “You remember that Desert Buster Ice-Cold Special you made me?” she said.

“Yes. There was no booze in it. Honest.”

“I know.” She waited, wanting to draw out his suffering a little longer.

“I blended the fruit and mix myself. You got sick? Food poisoning? Maybe it was something else you ate.”

“It was the old flask, Tobias. Your Desert Buster must have had fermented fruit in it. It blew up.”

“Blew up?” He was trying to picture the moment when his concoction escaped the confines of the flask. “Did the flask hurt you?”

Kallie grabbed ice cubes from the bucket, dropped them into a glass, reached for the lemonade dispenser and filled the glass. “It’s all right if I have a drink, is it?” she asked.

He nodded, still trying to put together how his actions might have caused her harm.

“It exploded, drenched me and the cockpit, soaked the integrated electronic circuit relay and short-circuited the solenoid on the hydraulic steering mechanism.” She said the first thing that came into her head. Tobias knew how to make every drink under the sun but nothing about airplanes. “I barely made it. I had to report it but I didn’t mention you or the Desert Buster.”

“Thank you. Kallie, I’m sorry, I had no idea a soft drink could cause so much trouble.”

“An exploding soft drink, Tobias.”

“Right.”

“In a container unsuitable for the use for which it was intended.” She remembered the words from a consumer rights report in a magazine.

“It
was
an old flask, but it was a flask, so it must have been suitable because that’s what flasks are for,” he said.

Kallie realized she might have gone a bit too far in trying to con Tobias on the Trade Description Act. She needed to give him a reality check.

“I could have died, Tobias.”

He nodded gravely.

“But I didn’t. So I just thought I’d come back and let you know. So you didn’t worry.”

Tobias considered this for a moment. “But I would not
have worried, because I would not have known if you had not come back and told me.”

“Listen. Do you want my dad to hear about this?”