Zambezi

1-4

‘What is it?’ Hassan asked as he gendy laid the cheetah cub back amongst its siblings.

‘I am sorry, boss, with all my heart, but there has been a death.’

South AfricaPanthera Leo. The African lion. This one was a beauty. She guessed his weight at close to a hundred and ninety kilograms – nearly four hundred and twenty pounds where she came from. A big boy.

Professor Christine Wallis flipped open a cheap photo album and leafed through the pages until she found Nelson. To a casual observer the pages and pages of digital photo prints would have all looked the same. All big, tawny lions. Nelson was a little easier to distinguish from the rest because, like his namesake, British admiral Horatio Nelson, he was a one-eyed warrior.

His disability had not affected his ability to fornicate and fight – the king of beast’s two top, and pretty much only, duties in life. Chris put down the album and made some notes in her journal, recording Nelson’s condition -good – and activity-nil.

The lion yawned, baring yellowed fangs the length and girth of a man’s finger. He curled his long pink tongue. It was roughened, like a domestic eat’s, and made for flaying the skin off a dead animal. Chris was three metres away from Nelson, but the predator paid her no mind. The shape of the four-wheel drive she was sitting in was as familiar to him as the striped zebra, or the fearsome bulk of an elephant. Nelson lowered his head, rolled onto his back, wriggled a little to dislodge an annoying tick, then sat up.

Chris took up her camera, focused tight on Nelson’s sleepy face and snapped off three frames in succession, getting a better, closer shot of his scarred face. He blinked lazily at the whirr of the camera’s motor wind. Hdl heard that sound his whole life. He was all power, Chris thought. The top of the food chain, irresistible to the six females in his pride, respected by his dozen children and feared by his enemies. He was the reason why she was living in South Africa’s Kruger National Park instead of her other home town in Virginia, USA.

Nelson sniffed the air, reassured himself all was well in his kingdom and, content in the knowledge that his wives were either caring for his children or hunting for his supper, laid his big maned head down and fell asleep.

Lions. Chris shook her head. For all their majesty, the big cats were also some of the most boring animals in Africa to watch and study – most of the time. Nelson was doing what every lion did for about eight­ een hours a day- nothing. But it was those rarely glimpsed moments of the hunt and the kilwhere the members of the pride came together instinctively as one to bring down their prey in a tawny blur of dust and blood, that made her rise before dawn six days a week and drive out into the bush. Taking her lead from the lion, Chris laid her head back and closed her eyes.

Her home for the past eighteen months had been a caravan parked under a marula tree in the camping ground of Pretoriuskop rest camp in the south-west of the Kruger National Park An American university had provided funding for research into the feeding habits of lions and other large predators in the southem part of South Africa’s premier park. A particular focus was the prevalence of humans as prey for large predators. The reserve’s eastern boundary was also the border with Mozambique, and illegal immigrants from that country had for decades been risking the natural hazards of the bush in their quest to find their fortunes in comparatively prosperous South Africa. Even though Mozambique’s prolonged and bloody civil war had long since ended, the flow of illegals had continued unabated. Many of Kruger’s lions, beloved and photographed by tourists from around the world, had feasted on the flesh of luckless refugees. Chris wanted to find out how many lions were man­ eaters, and whether there were individuals or prides that now specialised in hunting humans. She had interviewed rangers who had come across human remains on the veldt and, with the help of the local police, with whom she maintained an excellent rela­tionship, she had also been able to speak to detained illegal immigrants about their brushes with wildlife. So far she had not actually seen the remains of a human killed by a lion. That was just fine by her.

The noise of a vehicle engine woke her from her doze. A game-viewer – an open-top Land Rover with a canvas awning roof and tiered bench seats crammed with tourists- pulled up in front of her truck. Chris waved when she recognised the driver.

The tourists were open-mouthed with awe at the sight of the lion. However, their silent fascination soon gave way to chattering in at least three lan­guages. Cameras flashed and a child shrieked as Nelson rose on his front legs and yawned. He looked at the game-viewer, considered moving, but couldn’t be bothered. He fell asleep again.

Chris knew most of the safari guides and rangers in her part of the park, including the ’jeep jockey’ driving this vehicle, a South African guy named Jan. He was young, blond and attractive. Not her type, but he looked good in his short khaki shorts. Jan was sitting up on the backrest of his seat, facing his passengers and explaining some facts about lion behaviour to them.

‘We’re safe as long as we stay in the vehicle, but if you got out and tried to pat the big kitty it would be the last decision you ever made in your life,’ Jan said. There were a few nervous laughs from the crowd.

Jan started his vehicle and edged it around Chris’s until he was parked beside her window. ‘Morning, Professor,’ he said, smiling.

‘Had much luck, Jan?’ Sometimes the jeep jockeys were a pain in the ass, getting too close to animals in order to present a better photo opportunity for the tourists, and scaring off the game in the process. Jan, she recalled, was studying zoology and seemed to have a genuine respect for wildlife.

‘Only need a leopard and we’ll have nailed the big five this morning.’

‘Head via the Klipspringer kopjes on your way back to camp. That big male was out on a rock sunning himself this morning.’

‘Thanks, Professor. I’ll buy you a beer with my tips if we catch up with him. Hey, how’s Miranda doing up in Zim? You heard from her lately?’

‘She’s fine. Working hard and much better able to concentrate on her studies now that she’s away from you guys.’ Chris attracted her fair share of attention from the men in the national park, but Miranda, blonde, blue-eyed, gorgeous and thirteen years her junior, sent the South African young bloods into a frenzy of competition for her affections whenever she passed through Kruger.

Jan laughed. ‘She wasn’t interested in any of us last time she was here. Oh, by the way, I nearly forgot. The gate guard said there’s a message for you at reception.’

Chris checked her mobile phone. She was out of range, even though much of the park was now covered by the cellular phone network. ‘Thanks, Jan. m better be getting back, then. Good luck with your spotting.’

She followed the game-viewer back onto the main tarred road running through the park, then overtook Jan and drove as fast as she dared back towards Pretoriuskop camp. When she was close to the camp and its tower, her mobile phone beeped. Chris pulled over, ignoring the bull elephant snapping branches from a tree a scant fifty metres from her. She dialled the number to retrieve her message.

It was the embassy. A female secretary started to dictate the number for her to call, but she cut the woman off, ended the call and started to dial again. She knew the number by heart. Bad news, Chris thought. The embassy only ever called when something terrible had happened.

AfghanistanJed’s spirits were high as he walked down Disney Parade, the main thoroughfare through Bagram Air Base. The road was named not after the cartoon creator, but a US Army soldier who had been killed in a welding accident in the early days of the American occupation of the old Russian base.

The jet engines of a C-17 transport aircraft screamed at full pitch and the fat-bellied bird roared down the runway. Jed smiled. He had just visited the APOD, the aerial point of debarkation, and confirmed his seat on a flight out of Afghanistan that night.

The dust by the side of the road was ankle-deep and as fine as talcum powder. It broke over his boots like the foamy edge of an ocean tide. The wind picked up and he shielded his eyes from the flying grit. He could no longer see the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains, couldn’t even see two hundred metres down Disney. A convoy of Hummers rumbled down the road, stirring up even more dust. The paratroopers manning the 50 calibre machine-guns and Mark 19 automatic grenade-launchers mounted in the turrets of each vehicle had their faces wrapped in Arab shamags, their eyes protected by goggles. He would not miss Afghanistan.

From the runway to his left, on the other side of the old Russian aircraft hangars, he heard the whine of helicopter turbine engines winding up to full power. Another patrol, another search for an enemy who was both hard to find and hard to identify. He thought of the men he had killed on his last mission, a few days earlier. He pressed his fingers to his eyes to wipe out some particles of dirt, and to squeeze out the image of the face of the man he had shot at close range.

He had killed before. He had called in airstrikes on Iraqi Republican Guard positions and armoured columns during the first Gulf War. He had seen the burned and shattered bodies of some of his victims, become hardened to the grotesque face of death, but he had never been close enough to one of his victims to look into his eyes. He had no doubt about himself as a soldier, the righteousness of his cause, or the fact that the man would have shot him without blinking if he had been quicker on the draw.

The rangers who had swept the compound the day after the mission had found two Hongying 5 surface­ to-air missiles, Chinese knock-offs of the portable shoulder-launched Soviet SAM 7, or Strela. Although based on nineteen sixties technology, the lightweight missiles were still a serious threat to modern aircraft. There was no doubt the team had hit the right target at the right time and probably saved Coalition lives. But still the face of the man haunted him. He supposed it was only normal.

Two Black Hawks and an Apache rose above the dust stirred up by their rotor wash and headed south. Khost, he guessed. Afghanistan might have dropped off the front pages of the world’s newspapers, but Americans were still fighting and dying there. He wondered how long the war would go on. He believed the operations in this blighted country had made a real dent in Al Qaeda’s ability to conduct terrorist operations around the world, but their enemy was like the mythical Hydra, growing a new head as soon as one was lopped off. The war, such as it was, had spread to Asia and Africa, where terrorists had tried to down an Israeli airliner in Kenya with weapons identical to the ones discovered after his last mission.

He thought about Africa. It was ironic that at a time when much of the rest of the world was prepar­ing itself for possible terrorist attacks, Miranda was probably safer in strife-torn Zimbabwe than any­ where else.

‘Jed!’ a man’s voice called from behind him.

Jed turned. ‘Morning, sir. Hell of a day for a walk,’ he said to his commanding officer, a full colonel who had served in the Army since Vietnam. Jed had enor­mous respect for the old man. A veteran of too many firefights to count, with more combat experience than any of them, he was also a devoted family man who cared for his soldiers like they were his sons. He almost always had the makings of a smile on his face, no matter how bad the situation.

‘Just got a signal from the States, Jed,’ the colonel said. ‘Thought I’d better come find you in person.’

Jed looked into the other man’s eyes. There was no smile.

‘It’s not good, Jed. There’s been an accident …’