He checked his watch. He would be at the house in twenty minutes. He did not expect Carver to have got too far away by then.
Back at the house, the last two members of the unit detailed to stand guard over Zalika Stratten were not planning a desperate last stand to defend their master’s chosen woman. They were climbing through a window at the back of the building, sliding down the thatched roof, falling the last seven feet to the ground and then running away as fast as their legs would carry them.
91
Carver was not a fan of the open-plan style. Not when it was fully lit and he had to make his way across a good fifty feet of living area, then up a single straight flight of stairs with flimsy wooden banisters and no decent cover anywhere. He came out of the dark with his M4 up and his eyes looking through the sights, ready to fire at the slightest movement or sound.
Yet none came.
At first he thought it might be a trap. He was being lured right into the property, the more easily to be caught at point-blank range. But the ambush he expected never came.
He took the stairs in half-a-dozen strides, three steps at a time.
The landing was deserted.
Carver turned right and made his way along the landing, stepping quietly, keeping his back to the wall until he came to the furthermost door. He paused to listen for any movement or noise from the room beyond it. There was none. He took a pace back, then smashed the heel of his boot against the door, crashing it open.
Nothing happened. The room was empty.
Carver checked around the bed. He opened the wardrobes and went through an internal door to the en-suite bathroom.
No one there.
He went back out to the landing and repeated the process in two more bedroom suites.
The main house had only ever had four bedrooms; guests were put up at smaller cottages in the grounds. When he reached the last bedroom, it was empty, just like the others. But the bedcover was pulled back, the sheets were crumpled and the indentation made by a resting head could still be seen on the pillow. A pair of jeans and a T-shirt had been left carelessly draped over the back of a chair. And there was something more, a lingering trace of scent in the air, a scent that went straight to his brain like a potent drug, triggering memories so powerful it was almost as if he were back in a hotel suite in Hong Kong with her body draped around his, his hand tracing a path down the curve of her spine…
‘Zalika!’ he shouted. ‘Where are you?’
There were no words of reply. But he thought he heard a sound from behind the bathroom door, the whimper of a frightened animal.
He was there in a second, striding across the room, flinging open the door and saying it again – ‘Zalika!’ – when he saw her naked body curled up in the bottom of a huge stone bath.
He went to her and reached down to touch her, desperate to know that she was still warm, still alive.
‘Are you all right?’
She nodded wordlessly and looked at him with wide, panicked eyes. All her hard-won self-assurance had deserted her, leaving just the broken husk of the girl he had first rescued all those years ago.
‘The guards ran away,’ she said. ‘They were so scared. I just wanted to hide. I didn’t know what was out there. I… I…’ The faintest glimmer of an exhausted smile flickered across her face. ‘I hardly dared hope it was you.’
‘Come on,’ Carver said, helping her from the bath, ‘let’s get you out of here.’
He hesitated then, trying to find the right words for what he had to ask next.
‘Has he… has he treated you all right?’
Zalika pressed herself closer to Carver. He felt her nod against his shoulder. Then she pulled away a fraction and looked him in the eye as she gently ran the tips of her fingers down the side of his face.
‘I’m OK,’ she whispered. ‘He hasn’t hurt me. I promise.’
She pulled on her clothes and followed Carver out of the house, clutching him tight as they passed the four dead bodies on the terrace. Justus met them outside and they began the walk to the Land Rover.
Far away in the night, a lion’s roar echoed across the bush once again, like a rumble of distant thunder.
92
The wardens called him Lobengula, after the last great warrior king of the Ndebele people. From the moment he was born, he was the biggest, most dominant cub in his litter. The two brothers and one sister that were born with him all died young, as most lion cubs do: one killed by hyenas, another by a snake-bite, and the third mauled by an older male. But Lobengula survived and swiftly grew to be the finest young male in his pride.
In time, as all male lions must do, he had left his birth-pride and become a nomad, ranging across the Stratten Reserve until he found another pride whose alpha male was past his prime and weakening. Lobengula had fought him, killed him and assumed his place at the head of the pride. For five years he had been the master of all he surveyed, a magnificent creature, standing almost five feet tall at the shoulder and measuring twelve feet from his muzzle to the tuft of his tail. In his prime he had weighed six hundred pounds, and the extravagant size and deep black-brown colour of his mane was a signal to all who came near of his physical prowess and regal status.
The male lion, however, leads a precarious existence. He is not required to hunt – his mane, acting like a massive scarf, causes him to overheat if forced to chase prey for any length of time – but he does have to fight. He must defend the pride against external threats and defend himself against other males seeking to take his place. In the end, a lion’s career, like a politician’s, inevitably ends in failure. He is either killed or forced to leave the pride and go back to a solitary, nomadic existence.
When Lobengula finally met his match he was still enough of a warrior to preserve his own life. But death in battle might have been a more noble end than the half-life to which he was condemned, wandering the bush, searching for carrion or particularly young or weak prey animals that he could bring down swiftly before exhaustion overtook him. But the shortage of food that affected the human population soon transferred itself to the animal population. Though the wardens of the reserve did their best to deter poachers, still the desperation of the people was so great that many of the wildebeest, bucks and even zebras were killed for their meat. And, in the end, unpaid and hungry, the wardens themselves joined the slaughter.
Every creature killed by human predators was one less for the animal ones. The lions grew hungry. Mothers could no longer provide for their cubs. And solitary males like Lobengula felt their muscles waste and their ribs press against their fur as starvation gnawed at their guts. But even a mangy, ageing Lobengula was still a very large, dangerous beast. He was also becoming more bad-tempered by the day; an angry, embittered old man with a grudge against his world.
Tonight he had been roaring his displeasure and frustration as he paced the bush, looking for something, anything, to eat but finding not a scrap. Now he was tired and hungrier than ever. So he lay down, as cats of all sizes will do, exactly where he pleased. And, like any other cat, once he had found his spot, he had absolutely no intention of moving from it.
93
For fifteen minutes the Land Rover made steady progress over relatively flat, open terrain. From time to time they came across game: a giraffe, some warthogs, even a female rhino and her calf. All made way for the car, disappearing into the bush at the sound of its engine and the smell of its exhaust. Carver was driving without lights so as not to give away his position, a skill he’d first been taught in the SBS. But for all his training, even the most docile bush country was still littered with hazards: potholes, boulders, tree-roots and thickets of tangled, thorn-bearing undergrowth. It was far better to temper his impatience, keep his speed down and stay out of trouble than risk going too fast and suffer an accident. Yet he knew it was just a matter of time before some kind of pursuit came after them and it took every ounce of self-control he possessed to resist the temptation to press the pedal to the floor.