The National Party government in apartheid South Africa kept as tight a muzzle on the press as it could and released rosy pictures about the war in Angola and the fight against communism. Even though he considered himself politically liberal, Matthew realised that censorship was part of the war effort. However, he had quizzed Andre in a subsequent letter about why there had been no reporting in the South African newspapers, radio or television about the loss of a transport aircraft; surely, Matthew theorised, this would be too big a story to keep quiet.
Andre had telephoned him from South West Africa and used veiled speech to ask a favour of him.
"Please, Matthew," Andre had urged him, "don"t talk about the matter we have been discussing in our letters in public. Gareth was doing something of utmost importance for the war effort, and if our enemies knew even vaguely about where he was flying to or from, then it would put many South Africans and many more of our allies at risk."
Matthew had toed the party line for a long time after that, but with the change in government in 1994, when Nelson Mandela came to power, Matthew could see no reason why he should not be given access to information about the mission Gareth had been flying. Terrible things had emerged from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the crimes and human rights abuses perpetuated in the name of apartheid and on the ANC side and Matthew could not imagine his son had been involved in anything as bad as all that. He had discussed the matter with Andre, who had by then left the air force and set up an import-export business, specialising in electronic goods, remote control model aircraft, drones and other gadgets made in China. With sanctions lifted South Africa was now back in the international business community.
"Matthew, not even I know everything that went on with some of the missions we flew," Andre had told him, several years earlier. "I later found out that sometimes our security forces used our aircraft to commit war crimes; we would be tasked to fly some prisoners back from Angola or Owamboland to another base in South West and the aircraft would be diverted over the Skeleton Coast to the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes," and Andre had pinched the bridge of his nose at this point, "sometimes those prisoners were tossed out of our aircraft alive into the ocean, far from sh.o.r.e."
"My G.o.d," Matthew had said. A chill of dread and shame had run through his body; had his own son been involved in such missions? If Gareth"s plane had crashed while taking a cargo of men to their deaths then it was no wonder the authorities would want it covered up. Even if the Truth and Reconciliation Commission could help him uncover more information about Gareth"s mission, did he want his son"s name dragged through the press as being complicit in ma.s.s murder? Gareth"s death had left Helen desolate and empty for years; news like that might kill her.
Instead, Matthew had gone through the snail-paced, resistant, frustrating channels of bureaucracy to trace air force records from the new regime. No one seemed particularly interested in helping him, but the replies he did receive were adamant that there were no records of a South African Air Force Dakota being reported as missing in action, crashed or downed by enemy fire on the date of Gareth"s disappearance or for a period of a month on either side of that day.
Andre had stayed in contact with him. He didn"t discourage Matthew"s attempts to find out more through official channels, but always he would remind Matthew that there were some mysteries that were better left unsolved.
"The government is very clear on this, Andre. There are no records of an SAAF DC-3 Dakota going missing at the time of Gareth"s disappearance. What aren"t you telling me?" Matthew had demanded one day in the golf club bar, raising his voice.
"Shush, man, shush." Andre had run a hand through his thinning hair. "Look, they are right and they are wrong. An aircraft did disappear that night, but it wasn"t an air force Dakota. It was a civilian registered Angolan version of the same type."
"Andre, for G.o.d"s sake, what was Gareth doing flying an airliner?"
Another piece of the puzzle had been revealed but it hadn"t helped much. South Africa, with financial backing from the Reagan administration in the United States, was supplying arms and ammunition to Jonas Savimbi"s UNITA guerrillas. Much of it went by road, via Rundu, but sometimes special consignments of cargo and people went into and out of Angola by air.
"Gareth was working for our State Security people on his final mission, Matthew. I couldn"t have told you this at the time. They were dealing with the CIA it was all on a need-to-know basis, and even as Gareth"s squadron commander I didn"t need to know. All I knew was when he was going, and when he was due back, and the night he was supposed to return to us he never did."
"If you didn"t know where he was going, or what he was doing, how did you mount a search for him? Did you search for him, or was that a lie, too?" Matthew had fumed.
Andre had told him that he had pieced together the known movements of Gareth"s last flight and he and Gareth"s squadron mates had mounted their own search. Gareth had flown from Ondangwa air force base in South West Africa north, presumably to Angola. He had delivered cargo, or possibly flown there to pick something or someone up, and then returned to Ondangwa. His take-offs and landings had been recorded by air traffic controllers at the air force base there was no hiding that, Andre had said.
"Yes, but where did he go after that?"
Andre had looked around the bar, as if he still feared someone from the old regime was eavesdropping on him. "I spoke to a ground crewman at Ondangwa who had refuelled Gareth"s aircraft. He said Gareth"s last words to him, when the man had remarked how warm the evening was, was that it would be cooler over the Skeleton Coast and the Atlantic."
Matthew had been shocked by Andre"s revelation, and the unnamed crewman"s words. The clear implication, based on his earlier conversations with Andre, was that Gareth had been flying a load of live cargo, prisoners of war, who would be dropped to their deaths over the cold grey waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
Matthew had hidden all this from Helen, and had told himself the best thing he could do was stop searching for answers about Gareth; he didn"t want to find them any more. However, a couple of years earlier Matthew had created a Facebook account and against his better judgement had joined a number of groups online dedicated to veterans of the fighting in Namibia and Angola. On a site for SAAF veterans he posted a simple message asking to connect with anyone who had served with Gareth Allchurch.
To his surprise, a man had contacted him a month later. His name was Roland Pretorius and he had been a pilot in Gareth"s squadron. Pretorius lived in Darling, a quaint town in the wine lands north of Cape Town, and he"d agreed to meet with Matthew next time he came to the city. They scheduled a time and place, but Roland hadn"t shown up. Matthew found out through posts from relatives on Roland"s Facebook page a few days later that he had been killed in a car accident.
In a way, as terrible as the news was, Matthew had felt relieved. If Roland Pretorius had been coming to tell him his son had been involved in murder, Matthew didn"t want to hear it. Now he felt the same mix of antic.i.p.ation and dread as he waited for Andre to call back.
"The h.e.l.l with it," Matthew said out loud. He phoned Andre"s office again.
"Matthew, howzit," Andre said.
"Fine, but cut to the chase, Andre, what"s all this about, and who"s this guy "Brand" who they"ve found in the desert?"
"There was something else I didn"t tell you about the night Gareth went missing, Matthew, but I didn"t know until now that this other thing was connected to the missing aircraft."
"Really?" Matthew scoffed. "I"m hardly surprised you"ve left something out."
Andre ignored the barb. "Matthew, the night Gareth and the others went missing another oke who used to work out of Ondangwa sometimes also went missing. His name was Hudson Brand."
"Another of your flight crew?" Matthew said.
"No. He was a foreigner, a half-PortugueseAngolan, half-American guy. He was one of the CIA liaison officers to UNITA and he used to organise the supply flights from Ondangwa into Angola. I knew of him, but never met him personally, because I never needed to."
"So you think he was on Gareth"s aircraft?"
Helen walked into the office carrying a tray with two cups and a teapot on it.
"Matthew, I"m sure he was on that flight, but there"s something else."
"What?"
"I was just making some calls before you rang. I did a search online this morning and found out that unless there are two half-American, half-Portuguese guys called Hudson Brand, then this guy is not dead he"s very much alive."
Hudson Brand ended the call and looked out over the waters of the Sabie River, which swirled around the bulbous, smooth, pink granite rock that gave Hippo Rock wildlife estate its name.
Across the river was the Kruger Park, the happy place he could go to, mentally and physically, when the past reared up to try and devour him, as it was doing right now. He hadn"t known the name of either of the pilots on that aircraft, and had made it his business, when he"d made it out safely, never to ask.
Now he knew a little about the younger man, the co-pilot. Gareth Allchurch, aged twenty-one, son of Matthew and Helen. Matthew had spoken with the familiar grasping, heart-wrenching tones of the bereaved who will never understand why their son had to be taken from them at such an age. That was war for you.
No.
He corrected himself: Gareth was not killed in a war, he was killed in the commission of a crime. So, too, did the others die not for a country or an ideology, but for cold, hard, dirty cash. Brand felt sick to his stomach, and for a change it was not the drink.
He had turned his back on that business decades ago, but he knew, always, somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, that he would have to confront the deaths of those pilots one day, and that he would be found accountable. Brand had been brash, c.o.c.ky, a young field officer on his first posting in the actual field. He had returned to the country of his mother"s birth and he had thought he was there to do good, to fight communism, and to support gallant freedom fighters.
It was almost inconceivable to him now, all these years later, how foolishly nave he had been, how ready to swallow his own government"s propaganda. Angola had not been a n.o.ble crusade; there was nothing good about the country, the politics or the war on either side of the political divide.
Allchurch had told him about the discovery of the body in Namibia and Brand had googled the article on his phone. "Are they your dog tags on that body, and if so, whose body is it?" the man had asked him.
"I don"t have to answer any of your questions," Brand had replied, tempted to end the call there and then.
"Please," Allchurch had begged, and the guilt rose up in Brand, not over the body he had left in the middle of Namibia somewhere that was Jacobus Venter and he"d been a p.r.i.c.k of note but over the fate of the two pilots. Brand didn"t know how complicit they"d been in that mission, whether they were just blindly following orders, or whether they were crooked as well and stood to make a cut from the flight.
"Are you still there?" Allchurch had said.
"Yes." Barely, he thought to himself.
"Look, I don"t care about the body they found in Namibia unless it"s my son with your dog tags on him, of course."
"It"s not," Brand had a.s.sured him.
Brand had heard the man exhale loudly a mix of relief and despair, probably. "This is the closest anyone has come to locating any trace of my son"s flight. Even if I can"t find him I do want to know what my son was doing and what happened to his aircraft. I want to meet you, as soon as possible."
Brand, to add to the shame he already felt, tried, in a cowardly manner, to talk him out of it. "You don"t want to know what happened to that flight," he had told Allchurch.
"You don"t understand, Mr Brand," Allchurch had said. It had been easy for the man to track Brand down his cell phone number was on his personal website which advertised his services as a safari guide. "I need to know everything about my son"s last flight. I want to find out what happened to him and his aircraft I know it was a civilian registered DC-3 Dakota and that it was some sort of hush-hush mission but there"s no excuse after all these years for the truth not to be known. I read online you"re also a private investigator, and you were on my son"s last flight. Please, Mr Brand, I need to know what he was up to."
"Up to?" Brand said. "He was just the co-pilot." At least Brand hoped that Allchurch Junior hadn"t been involved in what was going on that night.
"I need to know, though, if he was a party to the cold-blooded murder of prisoners of war."
Brand was momentarily confused, but he knew enough of the dark deeds of those days to put two and two together. "No, Mr Allchurch, Gareth didn"t kill any innocent men. If you"re talking about people being dumped at sea then that"s not the sort of mission your son was flying. He didn"t kill anyone."
"Really?"
"No, he didn"t kill any innocent people," Brand said.
"That"s something of a relief, but I still want to meet you. You"re in the Lowveld, yes? Where exactly?"
Brand had not been eager to give out his address, but if Allchurch had found him via the web it wouldn"t take him long to track him down.
"On the edge of the Kruger Park, near Kruger Gate."
"I can be on a flight to Skukuza tomorrow," Allchurch said.
Brand had reluctantly agreed to meet him. He tried to remember what the two pilots looked like, but it had been dark and his only memory of them was of ghostly faces illuminated at first by the muted glow of their c.o.c.kpit instruments and, later, by the fire.
Gareth Allchurch hadn"t killed any innocents, but Hudson Brand had, including Matthew Allchurch"s son.
Chapter 9.
Sonja was p.i.s.sed off and not even the lions could lift her mood.
She motored slowly along the dirt road that followed the course of the Auob River as the two magnificent black-maned Kalahari lions ambled their way towards the Montrose waterhole.
Normally the sight of their rippling muscles, their luxuriant manes and their chilling golden eyes would have pleased her. As a child, visiting Etosha National Park with her parents, lions had always been her favourite animal. Here in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park she was as close as she would get to wildlife on this trip, but even having one of the big boys just a couple of metres from her car, close enough to smell his musky scent through the open window, was not enough to distract her from her thoughts about her daughter.
The lion on the other side of the road stopped, lifted his tail and aimed a high-pressure jet of urine at a small thornbush as he marked his turf. He moved on a few paces and curled his lips back from his teeth, inhaling the scent of another cat. Sonja had no territory any more, no mate either; all she had was Emma.
When she reached Mata Mata, she checked in then drove to a row of connected chalets. The front of each room looked depressingly narrow, but once inside she found the rooms were quite long. Her room was also enticingly cool; she dropped her rucksack on one of the single beds and flopped down on the other on her back and checked her phone. There was still no message from Emma and the worry nibbled away at her common sense.
It was part of coming down, as well. She was still wired from the mission in Vietnam, and from taking on the morons in the bar. She couldn"t sit still in a rest camp in the desert.
Sonja got up off the bed and went to the small kitchen at the front of the chalet. Her bottle of brandy was nearly empty and she was almost out of c.o.ke Light. At least drinking gave her something to do. It was a short walk to the camp"s small shop, which sold basic provisions for campers and self-catering visitors.
Sonja walked past the reception building, which doubled as the border post with Namibia. The new flag of the country of her birth red, white, blue and green with a yellow sun in the upper left corner snapped in the breeze across a token expanse of no man"s land between two gates. She was a little surprised to see two white women on the far side nod their thanks to a Namibian policeman in a mottled brown camouflage uniform then walk through to the South African side of the border. They each carried a pair of white plastic shopping bags.
The women chatted to themselves and, noticing Sonja said, "Hi, howzit?"
"Fine. And you?" Sonja replied.
"Fine. You"re not on your way to the camp shop, are you?" one asked. They looked like Johannesburg housewives on holiday blow-dried hair, painted nails and jewellery, bling in the bush.
"Ja."
"Oh, no, no, no," said the other. "You really must visit the little padstal just across the border on the Namibian side. It is simply divine. We just took the last of the springbok wors, but their biltong is to die for and there"s the loveliest selection of homemade jams and preserves."
Padstal was Afrikaans for a roadside stall or farm store. Sonja had imagined there was nothing but desert on the other side of the border. "How did you go about crossing the border? Did you need a pa.s.sport?"
"No," said the first woman. "We"re from Joburg, we"re not crossing into Namibia with our vehicles so we didn"t even bring our pa.s.sports. Just say hi to the policeman on the gate and tell him you"re going to the little shop and he"ll let you through."
"Thanks," Sonja said, experiencing a jolt of adrenaline. "I might just do that."
The women walked down the hill to the camping ground and Sonja turned and went back to her chalet. As well as her large military-style rucksack she had a small daypack that she used as carry-on luggage. Into the smaller bag she stuffed her wallet, lightweight US Army quilted nylon sleeping bag liner, a pair of compact binoculars, a spare pair of cargo pants and a T-shirt, some underpants and a second sports bra. Her Leatherman multi-tool had been in her check-in bag for the flight, so she took it out and threaded its pouch onto her belt. From her wash bag she took soap, toothpaste and toothbrush. She took off her sandals and put on socks and her hiking boots. She was wearing short khaki shorts and a tank top, so she liberally smeared her arms and legs with sunblock and tossed the bottle in her daypack.
She unwrapped the Glock pistol she"d taken from the hunters from the towel in the bottom of her rucksack. Pulling back the slide she chambered a round and gently eased the c.o.c.ked hammer back into position. She put the spare magazine in her pocket and stuffed the pistol in the waistband of her shorts, nestled in the small of her back.
Sonja quickly packed the rest of her things in her rucksack and put it in the boot of her rented car. She drove the X-Trail the short distance to the Mata Mata camp store and parked it under the shady tree out the front. It would be a few days, she reckoned, before anyone thought to check why the car was still there, and where she had gone. Sonja locked the car and put the keys in the exhaust pipe, then walked to the border of South Africa and Namibia.
As she approached the first gate she waved to a South African policeman sitting on a chair in the shade of the overhanging roof of the reception and border control office. "Howzit," she chirped brightly to the man. "I"m just going across the border to the shop, is that fine?"
The man gave her a thumbs-up and waved her on.
Sonja felt a buzz as she walked through the no man"s land area. The policeman in camouflage touched the brim of his cap as she approached. "I"m sorry, I don"t have a pa.s.sport, but is it all right if I just pop across to the shop?"
The policeman smiled. "Welcome to Namibia."
Alex Bahler thought about Emma Kurtz as he drove the white dusty road through Etosha National Park. He was driving from Halali Camp, where he"d spent the night, his sleep disturbed by honey badgers raiding the dust bins in the camping ground.
He believed strongly in his work; in fact it was more of a calling than merely the subject of his postgraduate thesis. He received a basic allowance from the overseas charity that raised money in Europe and America, but he did not feel like this was his job. It was a way of life, and he wondered if he would ever find a woman who would share not only his pa.s.sion for wildlife, but the privations that came as part of a life lived in the bush on a shoestring budget.
Emma clearly had at least a superficial love of the wild, judging by her reaction to their brief drive through Etosha from the King Nehale Gate to Namutoni, but what foreigner didn"t think they"d fallen in love with Africa after their first visit to a national park or a game reserve? He"d seen girls, foreign students and volunteers, who"d visited his camp and accompanied him on drives, burst into tears at the sight of their first elephant. In the end, though, they all went back to Munich or Melbourne or Milwaukee or wherever they came from.
As he drove, instinctively scanning the gra.s.slands for the silhouette of a cheetah sitting upright, surveying its surrounds, his mind turned over their conversations about recent military history and the army.
He didn"t take war lightly, but he did know that when his father and his uncles, and just about every man over the age of fifty in Namibia or neighbouring South Africa got together over a beer, they started talking about their army days and the war in South West Africa and Angola. They were never stories of death or sorrow or trauma, they were tales of mischief and drinking and flouting the regulations.
He was smart enough to know that Namibia"s war of independence had caused nothing but grief and hardship for most of the people caught up in it. There had been no crushing victory by SWAPO, and while the white population and their African conscripts had held the line against Sam Nujoma"s People"s Liberation Army of Namibia, when South Africa finally agreed to pull out of Angola and South West, then free and democratic elections were always going to deliver the country to the black majority. Emma knew the history of his country, better than he did, and she didn"t seem hung up on politics, even though her family had lived through the war. She intrigued him.
Perhaps his one hope of impressing Emma would be to help her find the ident.i.ty of the man they had discovered, the one they had taken to calling Harry. Their visits to local villages had so far turned up nothing.
If there was one person who knew everything that had ever happened in and around Etosha and the surrounding area, it was Oom Otto Stapf. Oom, the Afrikaans word for uncle, was not just a customary term of respect for an elder but also Otto"s enduring nickname. He had been a head warden of the park back in the 1980s and he and his wife, Ria, now owned a small private lodge and campsite just outside Andersson Gate, near Okaukuejo.