Michael Ridpath - See No Evil

Calder thinned the fuel mixture some more. He did not want the engine to cut out here. He didn’t fancy a forced landing into a baobab, especially now the sun was plunging towards the western horizon.

The radio crackled into life. ‘Tango Oscar, you have been refused permission to enter Zimbabwean airspace. Estimate the Zimbabwe border in three minutes. What are your intentions?’

Calder glanced at Cornelius. Crossing international boundaries without a flight plan was a major sin as far as air-traffic controllers were concerned, however generally helpful they were. He decided it was best to be vague. ‘Lowveld Information, this is Tango Oscar leaving your frequency. Thanks for all your help.’ With that he turned the radio off.

They were still at 2,000 feet. Zan remained at 300 and was pulling away. She was very hard to see. Calder checked his map. She was making a direct line for a small airport at a place called Chiredzi. That was where she probably hoped to refuel and stay the night. Calder did not warm to the prospect of chasing her over the African bush in the dark.

Ahead, her plane skimmed across a lake, sending up a swarm of hundreds if not thousands of large white birds, cranes of some kind. Calder and Cornelius lost her. By the time the flock had peeled off to the west her aircraft was too low and too far away to be seen.

Time passed. Two hours. Two hours five minutes. Two hours ten minutes. Any moment Calder expected to hear the cough of the engine cutting out. He kept his eye on the ground looking for clearings where he could make an emergency landing without doing too much damage. The sun was glowing red in the west and the light was going.

Two hours fifteen minutes. On the horizon they spotted smoke, chimney stacks, some kind of large processing plant. Then they made out the shape of a runway in the twilight. Calder had no idea whether Zan was there or not, at this point he just wanted to get on to the ground before his fuel ran out. He decided not to call up the airfield on the radio, in case they refused him permission to land.

Two hours twenty minutes. The fuel gauges of both tanks were on empty. The engine coughed. Calder switched the tank selector to the right and the engine restarted. The left tank was finished. It wouldn’t be long before the right failed too.

They were nearing the runway. Ideally he should join the circuit overhead to inspect it first, but he had no time for that, and he lined up the aircraft for a straight-in approach, keeping high. The engine coughed again, sputtered and died.

Everything went very quiet. Below him were fields of sugar cane, not comfortable if he landed short.

He trimmed the aeroplane to its best rate of descent and glided towards the runway. The numbers on the threshold drifted up in the windshield, a sign that he was sinking. He resisted the temptation to raise the nose; that would just cause the aircraft to lose speed and sink even faster.

They weren’t going to make the runway, but there was a stretch of brown grass a hundred yards before it. In front of that was the airfield perimeter and the sugar-cane field.

‘There she is,’ said Cornelius. Calder could just see the Warrior on a taxiway a few yards from the runway, but he was focusing on getting the aircraft down in one piece. They skimmed over the perimeter fence and he flared the aeroplane for a bumpy landing on rough grass. At least they were down. They rolled to a halt on the runway threshold.

Silence from the aircraft, but they could hear excited chattering thirty yards to their left. Zan was standing by her aircraft in front of a group of three angry Africans, shadowy figures in the gathering darkness. She was screaming at them and waving her rifle. A uniformed policeman was marching towards her from the control tower, shouting. He seemed to be unarmed.

Zan turned towards their Cessna and raised her rifle. Calder and Cornelius ducked. There was a crack followed by the explosion of the windshield shattering.

‘Jesus!’ muttered Cornelius. He reached behind him for the rifle which was lying on the back seat.

They raised their heads gingerly over the coaming. The policeman had stopped, but he was still shouting at Zan. The other Africans, one in shirtsleeves and two in overalls, were backing off.

Zan screamed something at the policeman and raised the rifle to her shoulder, pointing it directly at him. He shut up.

She pressed the trigger. The round sent the policeman flying backwards.

‘Here!’ said Cornelius, handing the rifle to Calder. ‘You’ve got to stop her. I can’t.’

Calder hesitated. He had never killed anyone before, let alone a woman.

‘Quick, man, before she shoots someone else!’ Cornelius’s eyes were full of pain — pain and desperation.

Calder took the rifle, unlatched the aircraft door and pushed it open. On the taxiway the Africans were running away. Zan lifted the rifle to her shoulder again, aiming at their backs.

Calder chambered a round, flicked off the safety, threw himself on to the tarmac and rolled once. He stared down the sight of the rifle and moved it downwards and to the right, so that it covered Zan’s upper body. She had seen the movement from the aeroplane and was swinging her own weapon round towards him.

He pressed the trigger. A gaping hole appeared in Zan’s chest as she staggered backwards, an expression of total surprise on her face.

By the time Calder and Cornelius had run over to her felled body, she was dead.

Calder looked down on the familiar countryside to the west of Heathrow, landscape he had flown over many times at weekends when he was still working in the City. He recognized the airfields of White Waltham and Blackbushe and the scattering of wealthy towns and villages hugging the Thames. It was seven hours to New York. He had no idea what would happen in the next few days, but he was optimistic.

He had received a short, simple e-mail from Sandy.

Got three days off next week. Can you come? We can talk when you get here.

Sandy

PS — Tell Kim van Zyl I’m sorry I was so hard on her. She’s a good friend of yours and I admire her courage for talking to me.

PPS — I promise I’ll be here when you arrive!

PPPS — Please come.

He had spoken to Kim, who admitted to her attempt to see Sandy on his behalf. She urged him to go, and he was surprised how much he wanted to. There were all kinds of difficulties and problems with the relationship, past and future, but at that moment he realized it was only the present he was interested in. So he had booked the flight.

Kim and Todd had flown back to the US a couple of days before. Todd was still improving and was planning to return to his teaching job for the new school year, although the doctors thought that might be a little optimistic. Kim had told Calder she was pregnant. She was overjoyed, and to Calder’s immense relief, she was sure the baby was her husband’s, not his.

Anne was due to leave hospital soon. She would be in a wheelchair at first, but she would be fitted up with a prosthetic leg in time. Against William’s strongly expressed wishes, Calder had visited her. She had been polite initially, asking what happened in South Africa in a dispassionate voice, but Calder could see she was hiding her anger with him. Then a tear had emerged in one eye and she had turned away from him. He tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t reply. He couldn’t blame her, but he could blame himself. He thought bleakly of her struggling to raise her children from a wheelchair, hobbling after them on a false leg in the school playground. His relationship with his sister had been perhaps the most stable thing in his life since his mother had died. As so often before he had put himself in danger, but this time it was she who had got hurt.