Tony Park - Silent Predator

‘Sannie, listen to me. Robert Greeves, with Nick Roberts as his protection officer, visited Khan’s lodge on at least three occasions in the last two years.’

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

‘Sannie? Presumably you guys ran a criminal check on Khan.’ It was all too much of a coincidence — Khan having a property on the border of Kruger, not far from Tinga, and disappearing just before the abduction. He wanted to check out the doctor’s life for himself, and his first cursory look had revealed a solid connection to Greeves that the South African police had missed. That was sloppy detective work, if not something worse, on their part.

‘Of course. It came up clean — I double-checked.’

‘What about ongoing criminal investigations?’

Sannie paused again. ‘I don’t know. I’ll check tomorrow, but what am I to tell my people — that you’re freelancing on this?’

‘No. Tell them you’re acting on a hunch. Ask the detectives who went out to Khan’s place if they checked his guest book. They obviously didn’t. They were probably looking for bomb-making kits or AK 47s, but Khan was no terrorist.’

‘Then what do you suspect them of, Tom?’

‘Try your sex crimes unit. We know Khan was a bachelor who liked to party — but how and with whom? You’ve got to dig deep on this guy. He’s got a connection with Greeves and I don’t believe in coincidences.’

‘No cop does. Are you all right, Tom?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine. You?’

‘I miss you.’

‘Me too.’

‘Are you coming back?’

It was his turn to pause. ‘Once all this is finished. I’ve got to bring your truck back, remember?’

‘Don’t joke. What is “all this”?’

‘I’ll let you know when I find out, Sannie. I promise. I’ll call you back when I can.’

He hung up and put some lamb chops on the braai. He ate and drank alone, save for a hyena which paused outside the camp fence and looked at him with mournful eyes. It was amazing, Tom thought, how quickly he’d become used to the presence of predators around him. He spoke to the hyena as though it was a pet, gently telling it he had no food to spare. There were plenty of signs on the fence and in the toilet blocks warning campers of the perils of feeding wildlife.

Tom opened another beer and thought about the road ahead of him.

Africa continued to reveal herself to him, at her own languid, alluring pace.

He packed in the pre-dawn cool and left for the Pafuri Gate in the far north. He stopped on the bridge over the Luvuvhu River to take in the view. Below him, browsing in some bushes on the bank of the fast-flowing river, were some antelope he hadn’t so far encountered. The map book Sannie had given him had pictures of animals as well. The chocolate brown creature with fine white stripes and dots and a long shaggy beardlike mane was a nyala. If the animal knew he was there, it ignored him. He envied its peaceful, simple existence. It still had to beware of lurking predators, though. In Africa, death could be as close as the next tree. He got back in the Land Rover and drove off.

Tom left behind the increasingly empty and restful national park, and was thrust back into the conflicts of modern-day Africa as he drove through the lands of the Venda people. Here, traditional reed and mud huts with bright geometric designs painted on the walls and pointed roofs stood side by side with new, utilitarian brick houses, funded by government construction programs. It looked to Tom as though the authorities were trying to skip the twentieth century altogether, to catapult people whose living standards had not changed much since the nineteenth into the twenty-first century. There was still a long way to go, from what he could see.

The Land Rover’s windscreen wipers worked overtime, trying to give him enough visibility to see through a sudden downpour, which drummed hard and loud on the vehicle’s aluminium roof. A trickle of water ran down the inside of the windscreen and door pillar, behind the dashboard, down the accelerator and over his sandalled foot. Some things were common to Land Rovers around the world, no matter the model or age.

He stopped in the hot, sticky border town of Musina, where the sun broke through the clouds and sucked the moisture back into the heavens, to top up on food and fuel, and headed west for another ninety-odd kilometres. There he drove across the dry bed of the Limpopo River, which marked the border between South Africa and Botswana at an out-of-the-way crossing called Pont Drift.

It would have been quicker for him to reach his destination by driving through Zimbabwe, but Sannie had warned him that the country’s perennial fuel shortages were a problem. Botswana, he soon discovered, consisted of miles and miles of empty countryside. He crossed more sandy riverbeds and skirted a herd of skittish elephants while driving through the Mashatu Game Reserve, where the land had been picked clean of vegetation and resembled, in places, the surface of a hot, dusty, red moon.

Once back on the tar road he made good time, heading ever north. The monotony of the black ribbon flanked by thick thorny bush would have put him to sleep if it weren’t for the deep rumble of the diesel and the heat of the engine pulsing through the fire-wall. Slowing only for towns, most of which seemed to be guarded by a police car and a radar speed trap, he kept the Land Rover above a hundred kilometres an hour for most of the rest of the day.

Hot and tired, he followed the signs to the Marang Hotel in the bustling regional city of Francistown. It was another of Sannie’s recommendations. She and Christo had stopped there on their honeymoon, on their way to the Okavango Delta. It was strange to think of her with another man, now that he knew every inch of her slim, golden body. Past the hotel itself and its shaded green lawns and swimming pool was a dusty camp ground. He said a polite good evening to an elderly South African couple in a Land Cruiser, but avoided a conversation by heading to the pool. The cold water sluiced the grit from his skin, and he ordered a beer from the poolside bar’s waiter while he lay on a canvas-covered sun bed and let the fast-closing gloom cool his body.

The next day was more of the same, the monotony of the empty bush broken only by the sight of two elephants. The first was dead, its carcass swarming with the giant flapping wings and pecking hooked beaks of vultures. He dropped his speed to eighty and a gust of wind brought the unmistakable stench of death into the cab. The second animal gave him a fright when it charged across the road in front of him. He braked hard, missing it by a couple of metres, and tried not to think about the damage he would have caused to the truck and himself if he’d hit it. Sannie had advised him not to drive at night, and he could now see why. With not a streetlight for hundreds of kilometres, and the thorn-studded trees growing thick right up to the sides of the road, a collision with an animal would spell disaster.

He stopped to refuel in the middle-of-nowhere outpost of Nata, a crossroads settlement where one route ran north, towards Zambia, and another took travellers west, to the lush inland paradise of the Okavango Delta. Nata itself, however, was a strain on the eyes. The rains were hard-pressed reaching here, and a cloud of glary white dust hovered over two filling stations, a cheap hotel, a post office, a general store, a shebeen and a butcher’s shop. A small man with the fine, almost oriental features, of the San — once known as the Bushmen — came up to Tom while a chatty attendant filled his tank with diesel, and asked for money, cigarettes and beer. The whites of the San’s eyes were a rheumy yellow and he smelled of booze. Tom shook his head, both at the man and the effects of so-called civilisation on an ancient people.