Natangwe closed his book. "That"s a typical western response to humanwildlife conflict. You"re automatically a.s.suming the farmer has done something wrong."
"Well, if he"s killed an endangered lion then that"s wrong."
"What about the farmer"s cattle, or sheep or goats? They"re worth money."
"You can"t compare the worth of a goat to a lion," Emma said. "And by the way, Alex isn"t my boyfriend."
"Your people, the Germans, cleared the lions and other big game from the fertile plains of Herero land, yet you cry foul when an African farmer tries to protect his flocks, or even his family, by killing a predator."
"Do you believe all the lions should be shot at then?"
"No, that"s not what I"m saying," Natangwe said, "just that you have to see both sides of the story. It"s cool that the desert lions are coming back from the brink of extinction, but the very thing that nearly caused them to be wiped out in the first place is happening again; the reason they were all shot in the past was that they were raiding cattle white people"s cattle in most cases. Now when an African farmer kills a lion you western liberals think he"s evil or backward or uneducated."
Emma sat down in an empty camping chair in the shade. She was hot and tired and wondered whether it had been a good idea to strike up a conversation with Natangwe after all.
"Anyway," he said, "isn"t that why we"re here, to try and shed light on conflicts of the past and hopefully learn from them?"
"I guess," said Emma.
They both heard a far-off engine at the same time and looked up to find an approaching cloud of dust. It was Professor Sutton"s Land Cruiser. They got up to meet him when the vehicle pulled up. There was another man with him of about the same age, perhaps late fifties or early sixties, and a much younger guy, who smiled at her as soon as he climbed out of the vehicle. Emma felt suddenly self-conscious, all sweaty and covered in dust. The man who had caught her eye had dark hair, thick but cut short, finely chiselled features and she could see from the way his T-shirt clung to his body that he was ripped to shreds. He wore an elephant-hair bracelet and what looked like a very expensive diving watch.
"Emma, Natangwe, this is Mr Andre Horsman, from Cape Town, and his nephew . . . sorry . . ."
"No problem, Professor," said the man, looking straight at Emma, "Sebastian Lord."
"Sorry, yes, Sebastian," Dorset said. "He and Andre just flew into Ondangwa today on Andre"s private plane."
"Howzit," Horsman said to both of them, and shook their hands.
"Andre"s got some information about our mystery man and how he got to be here. I"ll put the kettle on while he explains." Sutton opened the back of his vehicle and took out a gas bottle and cooker and a battered black kettle.
Horsman cleared his throat. "I served in the air force, near here at Ondangwa, during the war. The man you found was on board a transport aircraft, a DC-3 Dakota, that went missing on a resupply mission in 1987. We don"t know exactly what happened on the flight but finding the body here gives us another piece of the puzzle. From what Professor Sutton"s told me about the state of the body you found we"ve surmised that the man was able to parachute out, which would seem to indicate some sort of problem on board either that, or he accidentally fell out, which seems less likely. While he probably survived the jump, given what the professor told me about the state of the body, we think he was then killed stabbed, according to Professor Sutton by insurgents."
"Freedom fighters, you mean," Natangwe said.
"Have you told the police all this?" Emma asked.
Dorset poured boiling water into three mugs. "We went to see the police at Ondangwa. They"re going to get their own forensic people to examine Harry, but they seem to think Mr Horsman"s theory is sound."
"Please, call me Andre," Horsman said, and thanked Sutton for his coffee. "I was in charge of the search and rescue operation that looked for our missing aircraft and it"s pained me ever since that we didn"t find any trace of the Dakota or the men on board her. You finding this body, and now learning what happened to him, makes my sense of failure even more acute. If we"d tried harder or, more importantly, if we"d been looking in the right place, we might have found him in time to save him, and found the aircraft, even if it was wreckage."
"What do you mean "if you"d been looking in the right place"?" Natangwe asked.
Horsman nodded. "The flight plan for the Dakota"s last mission would have seen it heading northwest of Ondangwa, towards Angola, yet here we are south of the airbase, on the edge of Etosha National Park, which is very strange."
"We"ve found out that some local people reported seeing what looked like an aircraft on fire, heading west from here, back in 1987," Emma said.
"Yes, your professor told me," Horsman said, "which is precisely why I"m here. I want to start the search for the missing aircraft again, now that we have a starting point here where Hudson Brand met his fate."
"You"d need an aeroplane to do that," Emma said.
"Well, as Dorset pointed out, I"ve got one," Horsman replied. "I flew to Ondangwa myself, in my twin-engine Beechcraft. I"m ready to start looking now, as soon as my aircraft"s refuelled."
"Would there be anything left of an aircraft after thirty years?" Natangwe asked.
Emma interjected. "Yes, quite possibly. We studied the discovery and recovery of the Lady Be Good at university."
"What"s that?" said Natangwe.
"An American B-24 Liberator bomber," Dorset said. "It got lost in a sandstorm over Libya during the Second World War. The crew bailed out when it ran out of fuel and the bomber flew on for a little further and crash-landed. It was remarkably well preserved by the desert conditions, not dissimilar to those in Namibia, if Andre"s Dakota crashed between here and the Skeleton Coast. The machine guns on the Lady Be Good were still serviceable and when the wreckage was inspected, decades after the crash, a thermos was found on board and the tea inside it was still drinkable."
"Surely it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack," Emma said. "You"ve only got a vague report that it flew west of here."
"You"re right, of course," Horsman conceded.
"But that"s where you we come in," Professor Sutton said. "Mr Horsman Andre needs some extra eyes to help with his search. He wants us to fly with him and Sebastian, to help scan the desert for the missing aircraft."
"Wow." Emma turned to Natangwe. "Isn"t that awesome?"
Natangwe frowned. "Professor, are we not supposed to be looking for victims of the genocide?"
Dorset folded his arms and regarded Natangwe. "It looked to me, Mr Heita, as though you were sitting in the shade reading, rather than looking for heroes past."
"I was waiting for some direction from you," Natangwe said defiantly.
"Well, now that we have found a body from recent times we should stop digging and wait for the police to investigate. In any case, our time here was only ever going to be brief, as our budget was limited. You look surprised, Natangwe. Are you?"
"So this was just about window dressing for a mining company," Natangwe said.
Emma felt a little cheated, although she countered her lesson in real-world cynicism with the knowledge that they she, in fact had unearthed a modern-day archaeological mystery and what seemed like a valuable clue in the puzzle that might just locate a missing aircraft. She couldn"t understand why Natangwe wasn"t as excited as she.
"I think it might be better if we went back to the university," Natangwe said.
"Speak for yourself," Emma countered. "Sure, I"m disappointed we didn"t find what we came for, but isn"t unearthing the remains of a man missing for decades and giving his family some closure just as important?"
"Natangwe," Professor Sutton said, "I intend on taking Andre up on this new project. If we find this missing aircraft it will be worldwide news well, at least Africa-wide and it could very well turn out to be one of the most important archaeological finds in Namibia. If you"d rather go back to varsity then I"m sure we can drop you somewhere on the main road and you can hitchhike or get a bus back to Windhoek. Emma, are you coming with us?"
"Absolutely! One thing, though, Prof, I"ll need to call my mother as soon as we get signal to let her know where we"re going. She"s on her way here."
"Who knows where our search might take us?" Horsman said. "However, why don"t you just tell your mother to meet you at, say, Namutoni Camp in Etosha in a few days? I can drop you there at the appointed time. If we haven"t found the aircraft then you can decide at that point whether to leave with your mother, or stay with the search. She might even want to join us."
"Cool," Emma said, then looked at Natangwe again. "Please, Natangwe, stay with us. It"ll be awesome."
"So you said. I"m still not sure."
Sebastian, who had remained quiet so far, took a step closer to Emma, but directed his words to Natangwe. "There are families in South Africa who have no idea what happened to their loved ones on that flight. My uncle"s been talking about finding this Dakota ever since I was a kid. Please, it would mean a great deal if you could help us."
Natangwe frowned.
Emma detected a slight scent of cologne on Sebastian. She had never dated a guy who wore a scent, but she loved the smell of this man. "So, where do you fit in with the mining company?" she asked him.
He looked at her and smiled, his teeth even and white. "Nowhere. I"m in my uncle"s business, importexport. I look after a lot of his overseas work, travelling to factories in Asia, checking on our Australian operations, going to design fairs and trade shows in Europe and America, that sort of thing. He"s a big shareholder in the mining company and I"m just kind of tagging along."
"Nice work," Emma said.
Sebastian laughed. "It"s a living. I studied law at university but I"ve found business far more interesting. Andre"s company is rapidly growing. I give him some limited legal advice, but I love the travel. I think what you"re doing, though, is fascinating."
Emma heard a far-off drone and turned around to the north, shielding her eyes as she peered through the heat haze. "Dust trail from a vehicle. All of a sudden it"s like Grand Central Station here."
Dorset frowned. "Well, whoever it is they shouldn"t be here."
Natangwe looked at the approaching speck. "It"s Alex."
"He left not long before you arrived," Emma said to Dorset. "One of his lions has probably been killed by a farmer."
"They"re not his lions," Natangwe said. "They belong to the people of Namibia."
"Quite," said Dorset.
"Time is wasting," Horsman said. "Shall we get moving?"
"Wait," Emma countered. "I have to see what Alex wants, it must be important for him to come back."
Horsman checked his watch and looked at Sutton, who shrugged his shoulders. Alex"s truck took shape and Emma broke away from the men to greet him. "What"s up?" she asked as he opened the door.
Alex got down from the driver"s seat and looked past her to the men. "That"s Sutton"s mystery man or men?"
She nodded. "They want to take us flying, over the desert, to look for Harry"s aeroplane."
"I"ve just come back to pack up." He walked back to his truck and opened the door.
She went to him and put her hand on his arm. "I"ve got an idea. The collar on your lion, it"s a GPS collar, right, not a radio collar?"
"Yes."
"So you know, more or less, where the lion is, right?"
"Yes, I know where he is, or to be more precise, where his collar is. Sometimes a farmer will kill a lion then take the collar somewhere else and burn it, or try to make it look like the collar fell off. I"m actually more worried about the females in his area. There is a small pride of two lionesses with two cubs. XLR 501 was near them. I need to know if those females are all right, but they are not collared. The collar that stopped moving is several hundred kilometres away. I want to get there before nightfall."
"All right, wait here. Don"t leave just yet." Emma walked over to the two older men. "Professor, Andre, Alex has a problem. He needs to get to the last known location of the lion as soon as possible, and to check on another pride."
"Andre is looking for an aeroplane, Emma, not lions."
Horsman raised his eyebrows. "Emma, does Alex know that you"re leaving with us now and what we"re looking for?"
Emma nodded. "I just told him. He could help us look for the Dakota, as well. He spends all his time in the bush and his eyesight is amazing."
Horsman rubbed his chin and looked to Sutton. "What do you think?"
"I think it"s a great idea," Sebastian said.
Dorset looked back towards Alex. "I suppose it"s the right thing to do."
Emma returned to Alex and recounted her conversation with the men. He wasn"t as excited as she"d hoped. "Emma, all my equipment is in my truck. If I fly over the pride and they"re out in the desert we most likely will not be able to land and there will be nothing I can do for them."
"No," she agreed, "but at least you"ll know where they are and if they are OK?"
Alex shrugged his shoulders, but agreed to come. Emma found herself hoping it was partly because he wanted to stay in her company.
Sonja woke, hungover again, and ate a full cooked breakfast at the B&B in Klein Windhoek where she had spent the night. She settled her bill and loaded her meagre belongings into the pastor"s Land Rover.
"Where to next?" she asked herself out loud as she started the engine. Her question was as pertinent to her life at the moment as it was to the journey ahead. She had no idea what she would do with herself. She didn"t have to go back to work as a military contractor, but nor could she see herself whiling away her days and years as a Beverly Hills widow. The thought of moving to Scotland didn"t appeal to her either. She would have loved to be near her daughter and spend more time with her, but even though their relationship was stronger than it ever had been, she knew enough about young women to realise that the last thing a university student needed was her mother hanging around. Also, she"d had enough of windswept, rainy moors and freezing weather in her brief time with the British Army; the rest of her career had been spent fighting wars in warmer climes.
Sonja had toyed with the idea of setting up her own contracting business, but with the coalition forces pulling the plug on Afghanistan there was a reduced demand and an oversupply of ex-soldiers. Iraq was looking promising again with the rise of Islamic State, but the redeployment of troops from the west had been minimal so far. She quite liked the idea of Kenya Al-Shabaab was a threat and the beaches were nice. However, she simply couldn"t muster much enthusiasm for any of them. But her current concern was more immediate. Emma was fine, and now Sonja had a few days to kill.
Sonja turned on the heater in the truck it was chilly here in the capital and switched on the radio. A Hitradio Namibia announcer was giving the national weather forecast, in German. The seaside town of Swakopmund was going to reach an unseasonal twenty-nine today.
She put the car in gear and waited as the B&B"s manager opened the security gates with a remote control. "Swakopmund it is," Sonja said to herself as she rolled out onto Barella Street then turned right into Nelson Mandela Avenue.
Sonja drove through Katutura, which had been the official location for the black people of Windhoek, segregated from the whites who lived in more upmarket suburbs such as Klein Windhoek. Katutura itself had been divided into different areas for different tribes; Herero on one side of the road, Owambo on the other, and Nama in another location. The mechanics of the apartheid system, which had filtered across into South West Africa, seemed absurd when viewed through the prism of time, but as a child she had thought it all perfectly normal.
Clear of the city the smooth tar road took her north towards the town of her birth, Okahandja. An uneasiness, like indigestion, grew in her with each pa.s.sing kilometre. On the one hand she wanted to see how the town had changed what was the same, and if any of the precious few pleasant memories of her childhood could be rekindled and on the other, she dreaded it.
If Sonja had one guiding motivator or a creed in her life it was her desire her need to move forward. It was like the first time she"d been in an ambush, in Sierra Leone: her army training had overcome the instinctive need to run away; instead she had charged into the barrage of rebel fire and broken through their lines. To dither or to turn one"s back was to present more of a target; to push on, to drive through the fire was to get past it, and either move on, literally, or turn and fight on one"s own terms. As she left the hills of the city for the open, gra.s.sy plains and farms of her childhood she realised that was why she was finding it so incredibly hard to get over Sam for the first time in her life she seemed incapable of fighting through the sorrow and the pain and moving on. She was stuck in the purgatory of here and now. Her drinking was what they called in the army a "combat indicator" of a problem that, and all the other f.u.c.ked-up s.h.i.t she"d been doing lately.
But how to move on? She had been alone before Sam, and content to find s.e.x when and if she needed it on a casual basis, or to take matters into her own hands, so why should it be so impossible for her to move on from Sam, to lay him to rest, and to return to that same state?
Why? She knew the answer; it was because she was not the person she had been before she met Sam Chapman she was half that woman. She was like any of the many soldiers she"d known in Afghanistan who had lost a limb, or two, to an IED. They spoke of the pain of a phantom limb, still feeling the missing arm or leg when they closed their eyes, but the illusion of the physical presence was compounded and tortured by a feeling of agonising, twisted pain. That"s how her heart felt.
A road sign said Okahandja was ten kilometres further down the road. Her family"s farm was on the other side of the town, heading north, and her route would take her to the west. She didn"t mind that she wouldn"t be pa.s.sing the farm and even if she had, she would not have turned off on the gravel road that led to the house where she had grown up.
The place held few fond memories for her. There were some, of course riding her horse with her father alongside her, camping in the bush with him and him teaching her about tracking. The war had put an end to those good times. Hans taught her to shoot, not only for the pot but also to defend herself. Her little fingers had bled and been covered in blood blisters as she learned to load a twenty-round R1 magazine with 7.62-millimetre bullets in under seven seconds. Her father had inherited the farm, but he was not interested in cattle; he preferred to go off hunting with his friends, and when the war intensified he"d been more than happy to leave the territorial forces for a fulltime posting to Koevoet.
Her mother had been left to run the farm and she had hated it. She was British and loathed the hot summers and the endless dry winters. When the terrorists mortared the farm and a group of them tried to get into the farmhouse, Sonja had killed her first man; she was aged ten.
The tall communication tower in Okahandja came into view and she remembered it from Sunday trips to town for church. There were no happy Sunday school memories, just those of her father coming back from the bush, dirty and sweaty in his camouflage uniform and green canvas boots, and wanting nothing more from his wife and family than a safe place to drink himself into oblivion.
Sonja knew, now, what he had been through. She had been there herself was there now and the rational part of her mind kept reminding her that she could seek help if she wanted. Sonja had made her peace with Hans, before he died. He had sobered up, found G.o.d, and remarried.
Mercifully, a new bypa.s.s had been built around Okahandja so she was spared any further pain that the town"s old buildings and streets might have dredged up, and instead hit the road, which turned southwest, towards the coast. The country here was th.o.r.n.y bushveld, game farms and some cattle. On the side of the road warthogs fossicked with their snouts in the dirt, and through the trees she caught glimpses of the occasional farmhouse or hunting lodge, some with Bavarian-style high-pitched roofs. There was little to distract her from her thoughts, which was a pity.
Sonja remembered the morning Sam had left for Africa. She had tried hard not to recall those last precious hours, but now, lulled by the monotony of the countryside and the long straight road that she navigated on autopilot, his voice came back to her.
"I"m sorry," was the first thing he had said to her when she"d opened her eyes.
They had fought, late into the night, as he packed. One of his faults was that he was disorganised and always left his packing until the last minute. She, on the other hand, always had a bag ready to go, a legacy from her time as a military contractor when she could be called away at a moment"s notice. He"d once accused her of being ready to walk out on him, if the going got too tough. That barb had hurt her more than anything else he"d ever said to her.