The Delta

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Africa was dying of thirst before her eyes. To keep herself awake, and alert, she watched the birds and the trees through the scope, but it was a depressing view.

Ficus sycamorus, the sycamore fig, on the bank of the river, still green, defying the drought, but for how much longer? It was a watercourse in name only, now nothing more than a sandy red scar through the tanned, dry skin of Africa.

Ziziphus … Ziziphus what? She couldn’t remember the second part of the Latin name. Buffalo thorn, in English, but she knew it better by the Afrikaans nickname, wag-’n-bietje. It was called wait-a-bit because that’s what you had to do if you brushed against it: stop and take your time to free yourself of its wicked little barbs. They got under your skin and poisoned you – like Africa. Ziziphus mucronata, that was it. Stirling would have been proud of her, although Stirling knew all the Latin names by heart.

She blinked away a drop of sweat, not wanting to risk even the movement of her hand to wipe it from her eyes. The sun was overhead and while the net covering the hide gave her some shade and concealment, it didn’t keep the heat out. So well hidden was she that the cheetah hadn’t seen her.

The sighting had made her heart pound. It was rare enough to see one in the Moremi Game Reserve or a national park. Who would have thought that in the barren farmlands of Zimbabwe she would see one slinking along the dirt verge of the main road at five in the morning? The cat’s coat had shone like spun gold in the first low rays of the sun, the black dots seemed to dazzle her as she studied the cheetah through her binoculars. Later, once the sun was completely up, she saw a pair of steenbok and wondered if the cheetah had been on their scent. Why not cheetahs? she asked herself now that she thought about it. The lands as far as she could see, from left to right and out to the far horizon, had once hosted crops and cattle but were now returning to bush, the scrubby wag-’n-bietje reclaiming the earth and providing food and shade for browsers like the little steenbok antelope that took their name from the brick red colour of their coat.

Cheetah struggled in national parks and game reserves, Stirling had told her long ago as they spent an hour one school holiday watching a mother and four cubs perched on a termite mound at the far end of the Xakanaxa air strip.

‘Ironically,’ he had begun, lapsing easily into the David Attenborough accent that always made her smile, ‘the cheetah is most at risk within the protection of a reserve. Here she will face danger at every turn; her life, and the lives of her cubs under daily threat from hyena, lion and wild dog.’

It stood to reason, then, that cheetah could fare well in a place like Zimbabwe. With the bushveld reclaiming the commercial farms that had been abandoned by the so-called veterans of the liberation war who had taken them from the white farmers years ago, wildlife was slowly coming back. It was unlikely there would be lion in the area – perhaps the odd hyena – so if a cheetah had four cubs then all would have a good chance of survival. How odd, she thought, that something good might come of such a tragic chain of events.

The cheetah hadn’t noticed her, although she’d been no more than two hundred metres from the road’s edge. That was good. The cat had a sprinter’s build, with long skinny legs, narrow hips and a deep chest that held the heart of a hunter. Its long tail twitched and swished as it walked along the gravel verge of the road. Here and there it stopped to scent-mark its territory, with a squirt of urine against a tree or kilometre peg. She watched it for half an hour until it crossed the bridge and carried on over the rise.

‘Good luck,’ she had whispered. One predator to another.

Sonja lowered the binoculars and slowly rolled her shoulders, keeping the blood flowing with an economy of movement. She turned her feet, one at a time, and clenched and unclenched first her calves and then her thighs. She had prepared and moved into the hide after dark, at nine the previous evening, and once she was in place she had moved from the spot where she now lay only twice, to pee. Glancing down at her watch she saw it had been fourteen hours. She would wait as long as it took.

Three days was the longest time she had lain in a hide, but that was in training. It had been cold. No, bloody freezing. And wet, the misting rain collecting on the plastic leaves of the camouflage net and dribbling down on her head, to run down the back of her neck. Three days of peeing in the same patch of dirt and crapping in a plastic bag and wrapping it in tinfoil. They had never let her do it for real, in the field, which had angered her and the other two girls on the course.

Kigelia Africana. Sausage tree. Stirling would have said she was picking the easy ones, which was true. She heard a hum.

She swung the binoculars slowly westwards. She had sited herself on the north side of a bend in the main road that ran between Bulawayo and Victoria Falls, facing southwards, so that the sun would pass behind her on its arching journey from dawn to dusk. It meant she wouldn’t be staring into the sun, and there was less risk of the light reflecting from her powerful Steiner binoculars, or the scope.

She saw the car coming from the west and took a breath, stilling herself. It was only the fourth vehicle she had seen all morning. Crippling fuel shortages did wonders for traffic control. It was moving fast, down the middle of the road, its tyres straddling the broken white centre line. That was a good sign.

As she focused she saw it was a Mercedes; white, with blue, gold and yellow strips running from stem to stern. Zimbabwe Republic Police. Its lights were flashing and she reckoned, judging by the seconds she counted from the first kilometre peg to the second, that it was clocking about a hundred and fifty.

He was coming.

‘The convoy,’ Martin had said during the briefing, ‘is always preceded by two speeding police cars, who maintain visual distance between each other. Their job is to warn oncoming motorists to get off the road. Everyone who lives in Zimbabwe knows that when they see a patrol car screaming down the middle of the highway they must pull over immediately.’

‘What about tourists, or people who don’t know what’s going on?’ Sonja had asked him.

Martin had nodded, dragged quickly on his Benson and Hedges and exhaled. Sonja’s mouth had almost watered from the craving. ‘If the second car sees an oncoming vehicle still on the road he flashes his lights and drives towards, it, forcing it off the road. If all is clear – and other vehicles have pulled over – he lets the next car in the convoy know that it is safe to proceed.’

The police car flashed past her and she looked west again. The second police car was travelling at the same speed and she focused through its windscreen. She caught a glimpse of the occupants, one smiling and nodding at something the other had said.

Her hand moved to the transmitter and she flicked the safety cover off the switch. The second car passed over the low concrete bridge, over the dry riverbed, and she imagined the stories the officers inside the vehicle – both vehicles – would tell for the rest of their lives about how narrowly they had avoided death.

She knew she shouldn’t have looked at the men’s faces. To personalise the targets – to give them an imagined identity – did no good at all. It was easier when they were further away, but the nature of this job meant she had to get close enough to see the men’s faces, and to read them.

Sonja heard the combined drone of more engines and the whine of rubber on hot tar. The noise reminded her of an approaching swarm of African bees. She counted the vehicles with her naked eye as they came into sight. There was another police pursuit car; then three limousines – two black Mercs and a same-coloured BMW, all armour-plated according to Martin. Behind the limos was yet another cop car, followed by an army bakkie, a pick-up with a section of ten paratroopers in the open back. They would be armed, she knew already, with a mix of AK-47s, two RPD belt-fed light machine-guns, and at least one RPG 7 anti-armour weapon. Last in the convoy was a military ambulance.

Sonja pushed a button and the concrete bridge erupted in a cloud of smoke and debris. A split second later she heard the boom, and then felt the shock wave wash over her. The dry yellow grass around her was smoothed for an instant by the hot wind.

Rubber screamed at her from the valley, but at the speed he was travelling there was no way the policeman in the third Mercedes Kompressor could stop in time. The car shot into the smoking void where the bridge had once been and nosedived into the sand.

Twisting, buckling metal screeched in Sonja’s ears, but she blocked out the sights and sounds as she moved her cramped body into a sitting position. She hefted the Javelin antitank guided missile launcher onto her shoulder, pressed her eyes to the rubber cups and stared at the screen of the Command Launch Unit, or CLU for short. The drivers of the three limousines had all managed to avoid following the police car into the riverbed or rear-ending each other and were stopped at odd angles on the road at the end of snaking black skids of burned rubber. Gearboxes whined and a horn hooted as the drivers tried to straighten and reverse. Sonja shifted herself until the army bakkie was centred and bracketed by the aiming marks on the screen. The vehicle’s driver had slewed to the left to avoid slamming into the rear of the police car in front. He was stopped now and the stunned soldiers in the back were rousing themselves. A couple had already jumped clear and were dropping to their bellies, taking up firing positions. The men seemed better trained than Martin had briefed her to expect. Using her thumb Sonja toggled the switch until ‘top attack’ was illuminated. She braced herself for the launch and squeezed the trigger.

There was a loud click as the first of the projectile’s two motors ignited. The missile left its tube like a thoroughbred leaping from its gate. Sonja’s body was rocked and she squeezed her eyes shut to avoid being blindsighted by the ignition of the second-stage motor. The tail of the missile, she knew, would be dropping slowly, about five metres in front of her, but the whoosh she heard told her the main motor had just kicked in. When she opened her eyes again she saw a flying comet of furiously burning exhaust as the missile arced high into the sky then began its downward trajectory.

Javelin is a fire-and-forget weapon and she knew the missile would chase the army pick-up, even if the driver had restarted his engine and begun moving again. She didn’t stop to watch the hit – there was no time. She was already removing the spent missile tube and fitting another to the CLU. As she locked it in place she heard the detonation of the warhead. When she surveyed the scene again it was through the monochrome of the screen. It helped, she knew, not to be able to see the blood as she selected another target.

She only had three missiles. Her plan had been to take out the bakkie so that its burning wreck would bottle the limousines between it and the destroyed bridge. The road was sunk in an earthen cutting at this point, which was why she had chosen it, so that none of the cars could turn off and escape into the thornbush-studded grasslands. But, by training, instinct or accident, the bakkie driver had pulled onto the verge, leaving enough room for the vehicles in front to reverse back past it.

The bakkie was ablaze. She moved the sights to the ambulance, which had been lagging a few hundred metres behind the convoy. She had wanted to spare it, so as to at least give a chance of survival to the soldiers and policemen she had already hurt. However, it now looked as though she would have to take it out.