Tony Park - Silent Predator

‘So they’ll want to ditch the vehicle soon and maybe get a new one, possibly steal one, but if they’ve got the money and connections for special forces weapons and white phosphorus hand grenades, then they can also afford to buy a couple of cars and have them pre-positioned.’

‘Which is easier to do in a larger town,’ she said, following on from where his reasoning was taking them, inexorably towards the coast.

His finger, she saw out of the corner of her eye as she geared down and waited for a herd of a dozen elephant to cross the tar road, had reached the blue waters of the Indian Ocean. ‘Where you also have a means of escape via the sea, through an established port or marina, and an airstrip if your budget extends to an aircraft.’

‘Xai Xai?’ she said. Following a straight line from where the gang had illegally crossed the border, the coastal town of Xai Xai — she pronounced it ‘Shy-Shy’ — fitted the criteria they had set for the terrorist group’s hideout. She wondered, however, if they had come to that conclusion simply because it gave them somewhere to go. ‘Or anywhere else on the two and a half thousand kilometre coastline.’

‘Yeah,’ he sighed.

The little Volkswagen town car had no airconditioning and Tom’s saturated shirt was plastered to his back. He was as relieved as Sannie to get out and stretch his legs when they entered Kruger Park’s Letaba rest camp.

He’d noted on the map of the park that the camp was nestled on the banks of a river of the same name. The foliage inside the perimeter was lush and green, typical of what he’d noticed along the other permanent rivers in the park. It was a welcome change from the dry, dusty browns they’d been driving through all afternoon.

While Sannie filled the Chico’s petrol tank she gave him directions to the camp shop, along with instructions to use his debit card to draw out some rand from the cash teller machine he would find at the store. As he walked he mused yet again how different from his expectations Africa was turning out to be. Here was a continent where people died by the million from malaria because they didn’t have mosquito nets, yet a game reserve had a cash teller machine in the middle of the bush. Bizarre.

On his way he was surprised to see delicate brown antelope wandering between the permanent safari tents and huts that made up the camp’s fixed accommodation. After withdrawing the equivalent of three hundred British pounds — the most his bank would let him take out in foreign currency in one transaction — he went into the shop. It was well stocked with frozen meat, soft drinks and alcohol, souvenirs, curios and all the little camping bits and pieces that a holidaying family might forget to pack. He grabbed a basket and selected a collapsible cooler bag, some cans of soft drink, a five-litre plastic bottle of drinking water, a six-pack of Castle beer, two frozen steaks, a bag of ice cubes, some potatoes, a cooking pan, salt and pepper, margarine and some canned peaches. It wouldn’t be a feast, but Sannie had told him to buy food for at least one night. He was paying by credit card when Sannie entered.

‘Got everything?’

‘Hardly seems like enough for a safari into the wilds of Africa.’

Sannie checked her watch. ‘Let’s go. Better move if we want to make the crossing before the border closes at four. Also, this will probably be the last place you can get cell phone coverage for quite a while.’

As she drove out the camp gate, Tom took a deep breath and dialled Shuttleworth’s phone. When the Scot answered he told Tom he was at Gatwick, waiting for his flight to Johannesburg. ‘Where should I meet you tomorrow morning?’ his boss asked him.

‘I’ll be in Mozambique.’

‘ What? ’ Shuttleworth was not a man given to emotional outbursts, so Tom wasn’t ready for the tirade that followed. He was told, in no uncertain terms, and with expletives used in lieu of punctuation, to get his arse back to Tinga Lodge immediately. Tom held the phone away from his ear and rolled his eyes theatrically. Sannie smiled back at him.

‘There’s no point in going back to Tinga,’ Tom said to Shuttleworth.

‘What the hell do you mean, no point?’ Shuttle-worth yelled.

Sannie whispered to him, asking if he wanted her to pull over so he could finish the conversation. She had turned right at a four-way stop outside the camp and was now driving down a steep hill to the wide, mostly sandy expanse of the Letaba River.

Tom shook his head. ‘I’ve typed up my notes and printed them out on the Tinga computer. It’s all there waiting for you. I’m crossing the border tonight and I’ll try to pick up their trail tomorrow. We probably haven’t got a hope in hell, but there’s nothing for me to do at Tinga except sit around and wait to lose my job officially. The South Africans already tried to arrest me this morning.’ Tom smiled at Sannie, again holding the phone away so they could both hear Shuttleworth yelling until the phone signal dropped out.

‘Now we’re really on our own,’ she said.

Away from the park’s traffic Sannie pushed the accelerator pedal harder and the hatchback juddered along a corrugated-dirt, ochre-coloured road flanked by dry yellow grasslands towards the Giriyondo border post, which sat on a navigable hill on the pass through the Lebombo mountain range.

The mountains, which to Tom’s eye weren’t much more than a string of low, hazy blue hills, marked the natural and actual border between South Africa and Mozambique.

Bristling with lightning rods, radio antennae and satellite television dishes, Giriyondo border post was a relatively new addition to the Kruger National Park, set up to provide access to an old hunting reserve on the Mozambican side which had been incorporated into the new Greater Limpopo Transfrontier National Park.

The new park had been designed to re-establish traditional animal migration routes and to help impoverished Mozambique cash in on some of the tourist dollars that came South Africa’s way via Kruger. It was still in its infancy, but already proving popular with local and foreign visitors looking for a different bush experience, or a short cut from Kruger to Mozambique’s beaches. The reserve’s wildlife, Sannie explained as she drove through the post’s gates and parked outside a new tan-coloured thatched building, had been decimated by poaching during Mozambique’s civil war. They were unlikely to see as many animals as they had in Kruger once they crossed the border.

The South African authorities were trying to restock the park, particularly with elephant, whose numbers had grown in Kruger since the government buckled to international pressure and ended the practice of culling. ‘The bunny-huggers overseas stopped us culling our elephants, so now there are too many of them in the park, and they’re causing damage to the environment. The parks guys moved some across the border, but elephants are smart and they knew that Mozambique was a dangerous place. Many of them simply walked back across the border into South Africa.’

They got out and closed the car doors and Tom braced himself for a test of African bureaucracy. Once inside, however, Sannie switched continuously from Afrikaans to the local dialect, and soon had the immigration and customs officers on the South African side smiling and charmed. She used her police credentials to satisfy the national parks staff member on duty that they did not need exit permits as they were travelling on official business.

Things slowed, however, after they walked next door to an identical building, across a white line on the ground which marked the crossing from South Africa to Mozambique.

‘ Bom Dia,’ the blue-uniformed immigration official smiled as they entered, though his pleasant demeanour disappeared once they submitted their passports and completed entry forms.