Zambezi (46 page)

Jed sprinted for the storeroom building and, once he reached it, pressed his back flat against the asbestos sheet wall. He edged around the corner of the building to the door and scanned the courtyard and vegetable gardens between the housing blocks. There was no sign of movement. He moved to the door and placed the screwdriver under the padlocked hasp and staple. The lock itself looked secure, but the wooden door and frame were fringed with cracks from a mixture of damp and termite attack.

He levered the screwdriver up in a sharp motion and felt the screws securing the lock start to wriggle free from the decaying doorframe. He put his weight under the screwdriver and the fitting popped out and clattered against the padlock. He looked again, wondering if anyone had heard the noise, and retrieved one of the dislodged screws from the ground and put it in his pocket. No one emerged from the houses. Jed pushed open the door, wincing as it squeaked on rusty hinges, entered the darkened building and closed the door behind him.

On his head was a harness of nylon webbing supporting a night-vision monocle. He reached up and flipped the black metal tube down and switched the device on. It was pitch-black inside the building, so he also turned on the infra-red illuminator, which cast an invisible beam the image intensifier could pick up. The interior was lit up for him in a wash of pale-green light. From outside, an observer would see nothing.

He turned his head from side to side, sweeping the walls until he found the gun rack. A chain ran through the trigger guards of all five rifles and around the solid wooden rack itself, the free ends joined with a heavy padlock. Jed had remembered the rudimentary but effective security and planned for it. From his belt he took his Leatherman and unfolded a small flat-head screwdriver. Years previously he had taken part in a NATO exercise in Arctic warfare with British Royal Marines and Norwegian Special Forces. A British soldier had shown him how the Belgian-designed Fabrique Nationale Self-Loading Rifle, known as the SLR, could be modified for a firer wearing thick snow gloves. The trigger guard was easily removed with a small screwdriver and Jed found the screws in an identical rifle in the rack. He removed them and the metal guard and this freed the rifle from the chain. He did the same with a second SLR.

Further along the wall he found a cardboard box full of assorted magazines for the SLRs and the AK-47s also used by the Parks service. He located only six of the metal, twenty-round magazines for the SLRs. The long-barrelled weapon was more accurate than an AK but, unlike the Russian assault rifle, could not be fired on full automatic. Jed and Moses would be a long way short of the firepower carried by their enemies, but it would have to do. Near the magazines was an already open wooden box of 7.62-millimetre ammunition. Jed knelt on the rough wooden floorboards, placed a magazine between his legs and filled it with twenty of the brass and copper-jacketed rounds. He repeated the exercise for all six magazines.

In another cardboard box was a pile of web gear which smelled of mould and damp. It was probably reject equipment, damaged or superseded by newer issues. For himself he found a chest rig with a broken buckle, but fixed that by knotting the shoulder strap to the waistband, and a belt and two ammunition pouches for Moses. Chris had agreed that she would carry only her pistol.

Jed shrugged on the chest webbing and put all six rifle magazines in the pouches. He fastened the belt for Moses around his waist, slung one of the rifles over his shoulder and carried the other at the ready position. He moved back to the door and switched off Christine’s night-vision device to conserve its battery Outside he paused to reaffix the hasp to the doorframe with the screw he had saved. The screw was loose in its hole and the whole lock would fall off the door again at the slightest touch, but to a casual observer it would look as though the building was still secure.

Jed stepped back out into the yard and a rooster crowed nearby. He dropped to one knee behind a rusted two-hundred-litre drum. The bird continued its alarmed call and a shaft of lamplight shot from one of the staff houses as a door was opened.

A man wandered out into the beam and called out something in an African tongue. Jed heard his heart beating in his chest. The rooster settled and the ranger took a couple of paces from his home, scanned the yard, then returned indoors. Jed sprinted back to the thicket by the fence where he had left Moses and Chris.

He handed one of the rifles, the belt and pouches, and three magazines to Moses. The African silently, expertly, cocked the weapon, checked to see if it was clear, fired the action and fitted a full magazine. Jed did the same. Moses nodded and they moved on.

Moses led them back out of the fence and around the staff village to the Nyamepi camping ground on the other side. Fortunately the ground was nearly empty. A party of two South African four-wheeldrive Toyotas was parked at one riverside spot, the occupants already asleep in foldout rooftop tents on each vehicle. The three of them crept inland, around the ablution blocks, to stay out of sight of a second campsite, where a Zimbabwean family had erected a nylon dome tent beside their truck. A man and a woman sat silhouetted against the moonlit Zambezi, savouring the last of their drinks beside a dying fire.

‘The canoe operators set up at the far end of the camp, out of sight of the other campers,’ Moses whispered. ‘Watch out for buffalo. They favour these open flat areas beside the river.’

They skirted a green canvas dome tent and heard a man snoring inside. Jed smelled the cooling embers of a cooking fire. The canoes were lined up on the sandy bank of the Zambezi, tethered by ropes to hefty iron pegs to stop them drifting away if the water level rose unexpectedly during the night. The Zambezi was not tidal, but its level and speed were affected by the periodic release of water from the mighty Kariba dam upstream. Each canoe was about five metres long. They were painted dark-green and had the same shape as Native American canoes familiar to Chris and Jed from the Western movies of their childhood.

Moses launched a canoe into the river and jumped into the bow. Jed motioned Chris to sit in the middle, between him and Moses. He passed his rifle to her and pushed off from the bank. Moses was already paddling as Jed found his oar in the bottom of the craft.

‘What about me?’ Chris whispered.

Jed took the SLR back from her, grasped the fold-out cocking handle on the left side and yanked it back. He let the handle fly forwards again, chambering a round. ‘Take this,’ he said to her. ‘You never know what we’ll bump into out here.’

She checked the safety catch was still on, and rested the long gun across her lap. ‘The last reported position of the aircraft was near the western border of the Lower Zambezi National Park,’ she said, leaning forwards so Moses could hear her.

The guide nodded. ‘Not far. Less than a kilometre from here, but the going will be hard.’

They rounded the grassy island in front of the Mana Pools campsite and struck out into the main channel of the river. Here the faster flowing water snatched the long canoe and tried to turn it side-on to the direction they were heading. Jed dug the paddle in deep and hard, attacking the current like it was a living thing. Droplets of water splashed Chris’s face as Moses’s arms dipped and rose like pistons.

They approached another island and its width acted as a brake against the current, allowing Moses and Jed to ease their efforts for a few moments. Moses lifted his paddle out of the water altogether and Jed mimicked him, unsure why the tracker was stopping. Moses tapped three times on the side of the canoe with the blade of his paddle.

Chris leaned back and looked over her shoulder to explain. ‘He’s seen some hippos up ahead.

Tapping on the boat lets them know we’re coming and gives them time to move out of the way. We don’t want to surprise them.’

Jed nodded. There would be enough danger in store for them without having to contend with a two-tonne territorial beast capable of biting their fragile craft in half. They left the shelter of the island, the hippos visible to Jed now as dark humps in the water. A few more had already waddled up onto shore to start their evening feeding, huge heads lowered and jaws chomping rhythmically.

The paddling was hard again back in the channel. After half an hour of more back-straining work Moses pointed ahead. ‘Smell the smoke?’

They rounded a point a few minutes later and saw high-powered flashlights sweeping the water.

The beam of one settled on an unnatural mound in the middle of the river. A boat was tied to the incongruous island and another motored slowly around, back over its shiny wake that had transcribed a circle around the scene at least once before.

Moses held up a hand to his eyes as a light stabbed his face.

‘Who goes there?’ a voice called, accompanied by the metal snicker of a rifle being cocked.

‘Americans,’ Jed called. ‘Come to help.’

‘I’m a US Government official,’ Chris said.

The man was still wary. ‘One man paddle. The other two keep your hands high, where I can see them.’

Jed paddled from the rear of the boat and Moses and Chris complied with the order. The man standing on the wing of the downed aeroplane had a rifle pulled firmly into his shoulder, the barrel pointed at Jed’s chest.

‘Where have you come from?’ the man called. Jed picked up the accent of a European born in either Zambia or Zimbabwe. The man wore khaki shorts and shirt. An African in a matching uniform kept a hand-held spotlight trained on them.

‘Mr Wylde?’ Chris said.

‘Who wants to know?’

‘I’m Christine Wallis. I’ve been in Zimbabwe on some other business but the US embassy had instructed me to come across to your camp and brief Lieutenant General Calvert on regional security matters in two days’ time.’

Willy Wylde nodded. ‘I remember your name. The security people told me you’d be joining us soon. Have you got some ID on you?’

Chris reached into the concealed pouch hanging around her neck and under her shirt and found her passport. She held it up as Wylde’s employee reached forwards to grab the bow of the canoe. Willy reached for the passport and compared the photo with her face. The picture didn’t do her justice.

‘I won’t ask what your real job is or your branch of service, Ms Wallis, but I’m grateful you got here so soon. And who are your companions?’

‘Moses is our guide, from the Zimbabwe side, and this is Master Sergeant Jed Banks, US Army Special Forces.’

Willy cocked his head and inspected the American. He was quite a sight, face and arms blackened with camouflage. Wylde saw the two SLR rifles as well. ‘Well, I won’t ask what you were doing on the other side of the border, or where you got your weapons. You all know you’re breaking a halfdozen laws just crossing the river like this, I suppose?’

‘That’s the least of our worries now,’ Chris said, businesslike. ‘Where is … ?’

‘There’s no sign of the general, I’m afraid. Dead or alive,’ Wylde said. ‘There are two dead men inside the cabin – one’s a secret service agent, according to his ID. His face and arms were badly burned, but it looked to me like he was either shot or hit by a blast fragment. The other man was cut quite badly. You can see the holes in the aircraft where shrapnel entered it. It was last light when we got here and the place was already swarming with crocs. They were falling over each other feeding.’

‘My God,’ Chris said.

Wylde nodded. ‘There were blood smears on one wing and muddy bootprints. I’d been told that the general and his bodyguards were coming direct from a meeting with the President of Zambia and that they shouldn’t be asked to do any walking over rough ground until they’d had a chance to change into their bush gear.’

‘So the bootprints didn’t belong to them,’ Jed said, pre-empting the hunter but impressed with his quick deductions. ‘How about the pilot?’

Wylde shook his head. ‘Rob Westcott would have been in a starched uniform and spit-polished dress shoes for this flight. Bloody air force types always like dressing for the occasion.’

‘So at least one other person was on the wreckage,’ Chris said. ‘Presumably one of the people who shot the aircraft down.’

‘I suppose so,’ Wylde shrugged. ‘Whoever did this came to the boat and tried to set fire to it. I also found an empty distress flare canister near the cockpit door, and the whole wreckage still smells of petrol. These things run on aviation gas – kerosene, not gasoline. The blaze must have been extinguished when the aircraft settled further into the water and the cabin started to flood.’

Jed jumped onto the aircraft and made his way into the cabin. He recoiled momentarily at the stench of burned flesh.

‘I’ve had four of my guys patrolling in Land Rovers since it happened, but I don’t have an army of staff here. I’m doing everything I can,’ Wylde said.

‘That’s good, Mr Wylde. I’m sure you’ve done all you can for the moment. We’ve got a team of agents en route from South Africa right now and our embassy in Lusaka has called the Zambian Government for help,’ Chris said.

‘I received a radio call from the police at Chirundu. They’re sending a boat. It should be here soon,’ Wylde said.

Jed poked his head out of the blood-spattered cabin, glad of the fresh air after the stench of the dead men. ‘This guy’s pistol is gone.’

‘So, what now?’ Willy Wylde asked Chris, clearly eager that she, as the only quasi-official representative of the US Government present, should take charge now.

‘Have your men crossed into Hassan bin Zayid’s property yet?’ Jed butted in.

‘Now I remember you. I thought you looked familiar,’ Willy said. ‘You were over here the other day looking for directions to Hassan’s place. He’s in Zanzibar, as I told you the other day.’

Jed repeated his question.

‘No, my men haven’t got to the boundary of my property yet, not that I’ve heard. I suppose you suspect Hassan because he’s an Arab.’

Chris spoke up. ‘Mr Wylde, you’ll agree, I’m sure, that we have to consider all possibilities at a time like this. New information has come to light that sheds some doubt on Hassan bin Zayid’s whereabouts. We’ll need to search his ranch. When was the last time you spoke to Mr bin Zayid, Mr Wylde?’