Tony Park - Silent Predator

‘No visa?’ he said to Tom, passing back his passport across the counter.

‘I need one?’ he asked Sannie. She spoke to the man in Tsonga Shangaan, the Mozambican version of the tribal language, and he raised his eyebrows at her knowledge of it.

‘He says South Africans are granted visas here, at the border, but you’ll need to go to the high commission in Nelspruit or the embassy in Pretoria to get yours.’

Tom felt his face flush as the anger surged up inside him. ‘What the fuck does he mean by that? They’re hundreds of kilometres away. Tell him there’s a man’s life at stake and — ’

She put a hand on his arm and he looked down at it. The touch calmed him. ‘Shush,’ she chided. ‘I told you before, the best way to deal with bureaucracy in this part of the world is to remain calm and be patient and you’ve blown that already.’

‘Yes, but — ’

‘Yes, but leave it to me.’

The official sat back, crossed his arms in front of his chest and continued to shake his head as he spoke. Sannie switched her attention to the customs official, sitting next to the immigration man, who had been taking an active interest in the conversation.

The immigration officer and his colleague conversed with each other, switching from Tsonga Shangaan to Portuguese. Tom figured they wanted to keep that conversation private from Sannie. She looked over her shoulder at him and winked. ‘It’s okay,’ she mouthed.

‘Come,’ the immigration officer said, standing and beckoning Tom.

Tom looked at Sannie for an explanation. ‘Whatever he asks for, just pay him. We don’t have time to bargain, and the law’s on their side,’ she said.

It was the height of irony, Tom thought as he followed the immigration man into an adjoining private interview room, that the poster on the wall read, Mozambique says no to corruption.

Inside he sat down at a desk opposite the man, who took out a blank entry form and wrote on the back R1000. ‘Bloody hell,’ Tom said out loud, reluctantly reaching for his wallet. The amount was close to a hundred pounds. He counted out the notes and threw them down on the table. The immigration man looked left and right, though the room was empty except for the two of them, then slid the money off the tabletop and into his pocket.

Sannie nodded grimly to him when he emerged. ‘The customs guy will want his cut as well.’

She was right. Outside the airconditioned building the man made a show of checking the car’s interior and boot, saying he was looking for alcohol and groceries. The customs officer then demanded a further five hundred rand in import duties, though he didn’t specify on what the taxes were to be levied. Sannie nodded to Tom’s pants pocket and he peeled off more of the blue hundred-rand notes.

Tom swallowed his indignation and paid the bribe, thankful at last to be waved through the gate. ‘Do you want me to drive?’ he asked.

‘I’m happy to keep going until we hit the tar road. I learned to drive on dirt roads in Africa, Tom. I’d be lost in the traffic in London, though.’

Tom studied a map given to them when they paid their entry fee to the national park, which on the Mozambican side was called the Parque Nacional Do Limpopo. The park’s emblem was the curved-horn sable antelope, the same animal Tom had seen on the box of matches left behind by one of Greeves’s abductors.

‘We’re not likely to run into any speed traps here in the bush, nor many animals,’ she said when she noticed him glancing at the speedometer. ‘I want to get as close as we can to the coast before nightfall. The road’s better there.’

She hovered on eighty, pausing only to gear down expertly a couple of times when the Volkswagen’s path was momentarily slewed by some deep sand. The car skipped along the ridges of the corrugations on the harder surfaced tracks and the suspension absorbed the worst of the ride when they bounced along a section which was cobbled with round rocks each the size of a softball. Once or twice Tom winced as the underneath of the Chico scraped over an earthen mound or rock, but Sannie maintained the relentless pace, taking each curve like a seasoned rally driver.

The vegetation was different on the Mozambican side and Sannie confirmed Tom’s suspicion that the trees were more mature and bush thicker because of the lack of browsing and grazing animals. In the first hour of driving he saw only two impalas and a single steenbok, a delicate little brick-coloured antelope which took off at the sound of their approach. Animals of the four-footed variety were the least of his concerns now.

Sannie slowed as they entered the village of Macavene, a widely dispersed string of mud huts with thatched-reed roofs. There was the ruin of an old farmhouse, Portuguese they presumed, but no one was living in the gutted building now. A cluster of children gathered around them, staring in silence. Sannie asked for directions and a young man pointed to the left fork of a road as the route to Massingir Dam, their next waypoint.

The road deteriorated rapidly after they left the village and Sannie was forced to drive most of the badly rutted and eroded track in second and third gear. She muttered curses in Afrikaans as she scraped her way along and took the little car up the side of a washed-out section of road so that they were riding at an alarming angle for a hundred metres. At one point Tom instinctively reached out to brace himself against the dashboard when it felt as though they might roll. She laughed at his face and it relieved the tension of the pursuit for a precious minute.

When they arrived at the manned gate marking the border of the Limpopo Park, there was a car ahead of them, a shiny new Corolla, which turned out to be a rental car driven by two middle-aged brothers from Tasmania in Australia. Tom shook his head after chatting briefly to them. It seemed he and Sannie weren’t the only crazy people braving the unknown in Mozambique.

Massingir was an impressive man-made addition to the African landscape, an earthen dam five kilometres long and topped with new concrete, a roadway and modern spillways. It blocked the Olifants River, and the land immediately downstream of the wall was green and fertile, a stark contrast with the uniform khaki of the bush on either side of the watercourse. Tom saw fishermen in canoes hugging the lake shore as they set out for the evening’s work. The trees on the banks were taking on the soft golden hues he had come to associate with the onset of Africa’s brief twilight.

He suddenly felt guilty, for taking Sannie away from her children and having her share the risks in a bid to make up for his mistakes. ‘You know, I couldn’t do this without you,’ he said.

‘I know. It’s why I’m here.’

She let Tom take the wheel after they crossed the dam and encouraged him to push the car up to a hundred and twenty. The road was narrow — just enough room for two cars to pass — and while the tar was studded with gravel it was smooth enough to allow him to reach the maximum speed limit. The bush encroached to the very verge of the surface and he realised that if a goat or a cow — or even a person — emerged from the trees on either side he would have virtually no chance of stopping in time. He gripped the wheel harder and pushed the accelerator until the engine was screaming, before changing up a gear.

Just when he was beginning to think all of Africa was covered with thorny bushes and stunted acacias, the road they were on ended in a T-junction and the countryside changed. Turning right on to a wider, smooth-tarred road they passed into wide open flat land of treeless flood plains. Here the road was raised, on a kind of levee bank. A long, straight irrigation or drainage canal ran parallel, on the left, complete with locks similar to those found on English canals. To the right of the road was a railway line.