The Delta

3-1

3

Sonja woke up feeling like she’d spent a week in the kickboxing ring. It hurt even to open her eyelids, so she closed them again, carefully.

She reached up and found a wall, made of plastic or fibreglass, less than a metre above her head. When she kicked her feet out her toe stubbed something. She blinked a couple of times. It was gloomy, though she was aware of weak light above her. She craned her head back and saw a dull glow behind a translucent blue window. Her right arm ached in the crook of her elbow and when she touched it with her left hand she felt the tube. She grabbed it and ripped the long needle from her arm, gasping with shock. She was inside something – a vehicle, her brain slowly transmitted back to her. She had to escape. She rolled painfully onto her side, but when she tried to sit up she felt nauseous and banged her head on the roof. Cursing, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and tried to stand, but her right leg buckled under her.

An onslaught of light blinded her as she dropped painfully to one knee. She crumpled, but then felt herself caught by strong arms.

‘Steady, steady, girl.’

Sonja swallowed hard, forcing back the bile.

‘Back into bed with you, young –’

‘Outside,’ she gagged. ‘I need some fresh air.’

‘OK, OK, let me help you. I’m not here to hurt you.’

She stiffened in his arms. The accent was from another world, another time in her life, and it frightened her. Soothing as the tone was, the off-kilter vowels with their jagged edges were from Ireland. Northern Ireland. Ulster.

‘What … what do you want with me?’

‘Sit. Sit yerself down.’

Sonja shook her head but did as she was told. She lowered herself and found she was sitting on the floor of a Land Cruiser, at its split rear doors, with her legs out on a set of fold-down stairs. The sun was adding to her pain and she raised a hand to her eyes.

‘I’d just gone to the gents. You’ve been out of it all night, and most of yesterday afternoon. Lost a lot of blood, you did.’

Sonja looked up at the man. He had his back to the morning sun, and its rays shone through his wild, unbrushed grey hair like a halo, preventing her from seeing his face.

‘You should lie down again.’

She shook her head.

‘Over here then.’ He took her arm and placed it over his shoulder and around his neck and supported her as she stood.

She was too shaky to resist. Panic rose in her chest as she suffered the soldier’s special nightmare of suddenly realising she was unarmed. ‘Where’s my … my stuff?’

He snorted back a laugh. ‘You’ll be talking about your M4 and your Glock, I suppose? Safely hidden away, along with the spare ammo and the fragmentation grenade. You’re the most heavily armed backpacker I’ve ever come across.’

She let him lead her to a padded camping chair, low slung and covered in green canvas. It was a safari lounger and he lowered her into it carefully. She looked around at the thick tangle of bush and vines that separated this camp site from the others around it. Through the natural camouflage she noticed bell tents and open-sided tour vehicles. A fish eagle called nearby, the piercing, high-pitched rise and fall telling her there was water nearby.

‘Tea?’

She nodded. He crouched in front of her and prodded and blew a mound of white coals into flame. On a braai grid above the fire was a battered black kettle. ‘Where are we? Botswana?’

He nodded. ‘Kasane. This place is called the Chobe Safari Lodge. We’re not far from where you collapsed, on the side of the road. I found you near the border. Did you come from Zimbabwe?’

Her mouth was dry. She licked her lips and started to speak, but as the fog slowly cleared from her brain she closed her mouth.

‘I don’t need to know,’ he smiled.

He was about twenty years older than she, nearly sixty, she reckoned. His body was lean under his tight T-shirt and his arms sinewy but muscled. He had blue eyes that glittered when he looked at her, but even when he smiled his mouth had that hard set she’d seen in so many men. It was as if they could never bring themselves to show true joy, because each time they tried, some memory or other returned, unbidden and unwelcome.

She touched the bandage around her right thigh and saw the red spots. ‘My leg … what happened to it?’

‘Through and through. If I’m not mistaken, a 7.62; the AK-47 being the preferred weapon of most shooters in this part of the world. I’ve seen worse wounds, but like I said, you lost a fair bit of a blood. Also, one side of you is covered in abrasions.’

‘The bike …’

‘Makes sense. I’ve also seen those types of grazes before.’ He prodded the fire, whose flames were now licking the old teapot. ‘I had a 1969 Triumph Bonneville when I was a wee bit younger and I came off that thing more than once. I also plucked a few fragments of metal out of your side. You wouldn’t have been anywhere near a grenade explosion on your holiday, I suppose?’

She ignored the raised eyebrows. ‘My stuff …’

‘Aye, we’ll get to that soon enough. But you might consider a thank you, first. I kept that IV drip of saline for emergencies. You seemed to qualify as one.’

‘Thank you.’

He nodded. Steam hissed from the kettle and he poured darkly stewed tea into two enamelled metal mugs. ‘NATO standard?’

She nodded. ‘Please.’

‘Aha!’

Sonja frowned theatrically. ‘Oh dear. You got me. Or was it the assault rifle and the grenade that gave me away?’

‘Well, I was in the intelligence corps for quite a few years before I retired. Tactical questioning of prisoners was one of my fortes, if I do say so myself.’

‘Very intelligent.’

He ignored the sarcasm and heaped two teaspoons of sugar into each mug and poured in generous dollops of long-life Steri-milk. He handed her one. Two sugars and milk – NATO standard, in British Army slang, had told him she had a military background, but not much more.

He blew on his tea and took a tentative sip. ‘BBC World Service is carrying news this morning of a failed attempt on the life of the President of Zimbabwe. Seemed it happened not far from here, just across the border near Victoria Falls. The big man always likes to say the Americans and British are out to get him, and the so-called assassin apparently used a US military antitank weapon to attack the presidential convoy. Bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, I would have thought.’

She said nothing.

‘Of course,’ the grey-haired man continued, ‘the radio didn’t say the Zimbabwean police and army were looking for a woman.’

He waited for her reply, but none came. ‘It’s Kurtz, isn’t it, if I’m not mistaken?’

She sipped some more tea.

‘Susie, Suzette … something equally German if I remember correctly. I was at Aldershot when they flew you back from Ulster for the board of inquiry. You won’t remember me, though.’

Sonja was grateful for him picking her up out of the dirt, but she was suspicious of his prying and the fact he was from Northern Ireland, and she really needed to put some distance between them. He was f*****g with her, and she was in no mood for games.

‘Sonja! Yes, that’s it. I thought it was you, even before you woke. You haven’t aged much in, what, eighteen years?’

That made her smile. ‘Something like that.’ She closed her eyes as she took another sip. It was a lifetime ago; someone else’s life. A pied kingfisher squeaked nearby. She knew this place, though the campground was better organised than the last time she and Stirling had stayed here. Simply being back in Botswana made her think of him.

‘Stirling, I love you, too, but I want to see the world. I want to do something with my life.’

He’d tried to be cool, busying himself by putting another worm on the end of his hook, then casting it out into the Khwai River with a practised flick of his wrist. ‘Stay,’ he’d quietly pleaded as he reeled in the slack, watching the river’s surface, unable to look her in the eye.

He’d suggested that she become a safari guide, but although she knew the bush almost as well as he, except for trees, which she found boring, she hated pandering to the needs of the tourists. Her dad, Hans, had been the manager of Xakanaxa Camp, until his drinking had become too much for the owners. Her mother had less patience and had gone back to England while Hans still muddled on, but Sonja had lingered, unwilling to abandon the old man, or Africa. In time, she’d become keen to do both. After losing his job at the camp her father had stayed in Maun, lost to his wife and daughter as surely as if he’d died. Perhaps he had.

‘You know I can’t handle the foreigners.’ When she went into the bush she liked to go alone, or with Stirling. It was hard to describe. For her, going to the bush was like going to church was for her mother. She went into a kind of trance sometimes and felt as close as she ever would to believing, not in the existence of a supreme being, but in a sense of order and completeness in this otherwise fragmented world.

‘What about going to ’varsity?’ Stirling had persisted. ‘Your marks were good enough. You could become a zoologist – get a gig as a researcher back here in the Delta. We could be together forever.’

‘Ag, I couldn’t stand another four years of schooling. I’d go crazy. I’ve got to do something, not read about it.’

She had seen the genuine pleading in his eyes. Why couldn’t she love him as much as he loved her? If he truly loved her then he must realise that she needed to do this, to see more of the world. She loved Botswana, and the Okavango swamps and the bush and the wildlife, but if she couldn’t be a researcher, a safari guide, a lodge manager, or a cook – cooking was one thing she was totally useless at – then what would she do with her life in Africa? Become the wife of one of the above? That wasn’t enough for Sonja.

‘You f*****g b***h,’ her father had screamed at her when she told him she was leaving. ‘Just like your f*****g mother. That stuck-up, cheating English w***e has poisoned you!’

‘Papa, no.’ He had abused her verbally a couple of times in recent months when very drunk, and though he had never physically hurt her the words sliced like a panga.

‘f**k her, and f**k you!’ He’d tossed the empty Jägermeister schnapps bottle at her, but she was sober and easily dodged it.

At eighteen she was as tall as he. She had a swimmer’s build, lithe and with good upper-body strength and a toned tummy from endless crunches. Living in the confines of a safari camp she had learned to exercise when and how she could, so weights and sit-ups were part of her daily routine. At boarding school she had swum five kilometres a day to escape the soul-crushing boredom of being in Cape Town, so far from Botswana and the delta, and had won interschool championships.

‘Stop it, Papa, you’re drunk.’ She had grabbed the arm he raised and turned it, behind his back, pinning him there. Stirling had taught her the move as self-defence.

‘Oww. OK, OK, let me go,’ her father protested.

When she released him he turned, his face crimson with anger, and slapped her, back-handed across the face. She reeled from the blow, which pushed her against the canvas wall of the permanent safari tent in which they lived. Standing, she glared at him, rubbed her jaw, and walked out on him. For good.

‘Sonja! Wait …’

But it was too late. He had crossed the line and while she had tended to take her father’s side in some of the arguments he’d had with her mother, now she would forgive him nothing. Her mother had retained her British citizenship. Sonja had already applied for and been granted right of abode in the United Kingdom.

She scrawled a quick goodbye letter to Stirling, who was out on a game drive working towards his guiding qualification, got in her father’s old Land Rover and drove it to Maun. The old bastard could retrieve it himself, she thought. She caught a bus to Gaborone and her mother wired her the money for a flight to London. England was a shock to her senses but even in the dead of winter the knife-edge chill of the outdoors was still more appealing to her than the overheated fug of a job indoors. To her mother’s horror Sonja joined the British Army.