Zambezi

2-1

2

Jed drained the last of the Scotch from the plastic tumbler and let the single ice cube slide into his mouth as the fasten-seatbelt sign chimed and lit up. He turned and stared out of the window of the United Airlines 737-300 and chomped on the ice as the plane descended through the clouds.

He needed a clear head for his meeting with Patti – she had sounded incoherent on the phone – but at the same time he had needed a couple of Scotches to calm his own nerves for the flight. A combat veteran and paratrooper with more than two hundred jumps on his log card he might have been, but he was still scared of flying. Also, there was the constant pain, a feeling deep in his core, every time he thought of Miranda.

She couldn’t be dead, he told himself over and over again. There was no body, according to Patti, who desperately wanted to believe Miranda was hiding, or maybe alive but lost in the African bush.

‘I don’t know how to tell you this,’ the CO had said to him on the dusty roadside at Bagram, ‘but it seems Miranda has been killed by a lion in Africa.’

For a moment he had thought the colonel was jok­ing. Everyone in the unit knew his daughter was researching carnivores in Africa. The guys in Special Forces were hard men and, Lord knew, some of them had twisted senses of humour, but one thing a guy would never do was joke about another man’s kids.

It was no joke, but it was absurd. Miranda had lived in the African bush for six months and she had repeatedly told Jed in her emails that she knew how to take care of herself. Also, he remembered her reassuring him in one message that when she camped out in the field there was always an armed ranger or safari guide in the party. What had happened to the guard? For the man’s own sake, Jed hoped he was dead. If not, he would be by the time Jed finished with him.

Boston looked cold and bleak through the gaps in the cloud cover. He had never liked coming here, although the thought of meeting Miranda had always made the trip worth it. Nightmarish scenes played over and over in his head as he prepared to face Patti. The thought of his baby being torn apart by a wild beast was too much to bear. He screwed his eyes tight for a couple of seconds to rid himself of the recurring image. He was tired, fall-down tired, but there would be time to sleep on the next flight, later that evening.

He pulled his green suit bag from the overhead locker. He had about an hour with Patti. He doubted he could take more than that.

She was waiting for him when he emerged from the air bridge. They stared at each other for a few seconds.

She was wearing jeans and high-heeled boots, a white T-shirt and a cropped black leather jacket. Her golden hair was piled carelessly high, stray wisps framing her face. She was a little fuller in the face, but still as beautiful as the day they had met. He saw Miranda in her eyes and mouth. It was all he could do to fight back the tears.

Patti Vernon had transferred to his school in his senior year. They had started dating a week after she arrived. She lost her virginity to him on prom night. It seemed as though they would live happily ever after, until he made a spur of the moment decision to join the Army instead of going to college. They had planned to marry as soon as possible, and he wanted to start earning money. She had reluctantly become a soldier’s bride, on the promise that he would eventu­ally go to college with the money he made from his first enlistment.

Their teenage passion lasted for the first year of marriage. Patti was on the pill and took it religiously, except for the weekend between Jed’s basic training and advanced infantry training. They went away to a country hotel and she forgot her oral contraceptive packet. They risked it. Patti fell pregnant.

Jed loved his baby girl, but he was being seduced away from his overtired wife, who seemed to blame him for the fact that she had to drop out of college and could barely afford to make ends meet. Domestic duties left Jed cold, particularly when compared with the excitement of airborne school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and ranger training in the Florida swamps.

Grenada, in 1983, was the first time America had seriously flexed its military muscles since Vietnam. The brief conflict also marked the beginning of the end of Jed and Patti’s marriage. The Army had shaken off the shame of defeat in south-east Asia and Jed Banks had discovered that he was born to be a warnor.

Patti’s lower lip started to tremble and Jed walked to her. He folded her in his arms as she started to cry.

‘Oh, Patti,’ was all he could say.

‘Jed, it can’t be true.’ She leaned back and wiped her face with the back of her hand.

‘I know, Patti. I can’t believe it myself.’

‘She’s all right, Jed, I know it. She might be hurt, but she’s not dead.’

Jed wanted so much to believe Patti was right.

‘Let’s find somewhere to sit down. Are you alone?’

‘Rob’s outside. It’ll take an age for him to park the car. How long have you got?’

‘Less than an hour, and I’ve got to check in for my connection to Johannesburg. Let’s get a coffee.’

He ushered her across to a cafe, his hand on her elbow. He sat her at a table and she blew her nose on a tissue.

‘OK, tell me about this email you got,’ Jed said when he returned from the counter with two black coffees.

She sniffed again, then rummaged in her big leather handbag. ‘It’s from a professor. Wallis is her name, Christine.’ Patti pulled a crumpled print-out from the bag and smoothed it out on the laminated tabletop. ‘Miranda met her during her final year at college – said the professor ran a postgraduate program for zoology majors in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. Professor Wallis was the one who put Miranda onto this research project in Zimbabwe.’

Jed nodded. He remembered Miranda’s description of the program, if not the names of the people involved. Zimbabwe had been short of foreign aid for years, because of its political and security situation, and it seemed the few foreign wildlife researchers left in the troubled nation were welcoming with open arms any contributions or volunteers. Miranda had mentioned that she was being funded by a US-based wildlife conservation group, as an offshoot of the program being run by Christine Wallis in South Africa. He couldn’t remember the name of the organisation. ’So what did the professor have to say?’

‘Well, the media were reporting Miranda’s …’ Patti’s lip began to tremble again.

‘It’s OK, Sugar,’ he said, a little surprised at how easily the old nickname came back.’ I saw the reports.’ He had printed them off at Bagram. ‘They said it appeared she had been sleeping with her tent flap open and that a lion had entered.’

Patti nodded, took a deep breath and held up the paper. ‘Professor Wallis says,“These reports surprised me greatly as Miranda is always so sensible when she spends time in the field. She always made a point of making sure her tent was completely secure, and was well aware of a recent case in which a young man was taken by a lion because he slept with his tent open on a particularly hot evening.”’

Jed nodded. He wondered why anyone would sleep in a tent when there were lions around. ‘I don’t know, Patti. People get lazy when they get out into the field.’ That was true. He’d had a buddy who had been bitten by a snake at ranger school because he had left his sleeping bag unrolled during the day, allowing the reptile to slither inside.

‘This goddamned professor sent her there, Jed, and now she feels guilty. That’s what I know. But she does say that the press reports don’t tally with what she knew of Miranda.’

Jed took the offered print-out and scanned it. ‘Says she’s going to go to Zimbabwe to talk to the authori­ties herself.’

‘Find her, Jed. Talk to her. Find out if Miranda could still be alive. I know she’s not dead, and the police and park rangers say they haven’t found her body.’

Jed nodded. There were explanations for that, but he didn’t want to voice them in front of Patti. She was conveniendy ignoring the media reports that human remains had been found at the scene of the attack. Now wasn’t the time to remind her. ‘I’ll do what I can, Patti. There will be arrangements to make with the embassy in any case.’

‘Thank you, Jed.’ Patti looked as though she would cry again.

‘You look great,’ Jed said, trying to get her to relax. She looked down at the table and felt her cheeks start to colour. She glanced up at him.

God, she thought, he looked even better now than he did when he was nineteen. Patti hated the way she felt right now. So distraught over Miranda, so devoted to her second husband, but still captivated by that sandy hair and those blue eyes. It was the way he fixed her with them like she was a butterfly pinned to a board, helpless around him. She’d had the courage to move on with her life when Miranda was still young, and given Miranda and her other children a great life with Rob Lewis, but there were times, like now, when she wondered if she shouldn’t have stuck it out a couple more years.

‘Here’s Rob,’ Jed said. ‘I should be going.’

‘Stay a while.’ Patti wiped her eyes again and waved to a handsome man in chinos and loafers and a blue button-down shirt. A gangly ten-year-old boy loped along behind him and the man carried a three-year­ old girl, Louise, in his arms.

‘Hi, Jed,’ Rob Lewis said. ‘I’m so sorry about Miranda. It’s good you can go over there at such short notice.’

‘I had a ticket booked.’ Jed didn’t dislike Lewis. He was a nice enough guy, for a lawyer. He supposed he envied the normality of the relationship he and Patti had- the very domesticity he had turned his back on nearly two decades before.

Patti stepped between the two men and took Louise in her arms. ‘Jed, find her, please.’

Jed picked his green beret up off the coffee-stained table and put it on. He shook hands with Lewis and turned to face Patti.

‘Be strong. You know I may find nothing.’

She nodded, tears welling in her eyes again. ‘God, Jed, I just want to know for sure, even if it’s … ’

Jed knew enough about death and grieving to understand that the recovery of a body gave closure, allowed relatives to grieve, services to be said and life to go on. He hated to think he was going to Africa in search of the mortal remains of the one good thing he had given to this world.

‘I’ll bring her back with me, Patti. I promise. I’ve got to go check in. They’ll be calling my flight soon.’

He kissed Patti on the cheek, smiled down at her son, who had been too shy to talk to the uniformed stranger, and shook Rob’s hand again.

‘Travel safe,’ the lawyer said.

Jed reflected that he had never travelled anywhere safe in his life.

In truth, he still had forty minutes until his flight boarded, but he wanted some time alone, to think. He didn’t want to be reminded of the family life he had forsaken.

He walked the length of the terminal and stopped at a bar. He ordered a beer and took it to an internet work station on the other side of the lounge. He popped some change into the slot and sipped his beer while the browser loaded. His life was governed by planning and routine and he was about to travel halfway around the world with the benefit of neither. All he knew of Zimbabwe and South Africa was what he had seen on the Discovery Channel or read in tattered copies of National Geographic while waiting for dental appointments.