Jack called to Effrem, “Anyone else?”
“No, just the two of them.” Effrem lifted the shovel above his head and hurled it at the German’s body. He turned to Jack. “Jack, will you please get me out of here?”
They put Effrem in the Hilux, then drove it around the fence and onto the lawn, stopping before the last bungalow. After shouldering the door open, René stood watch while Jack helped Effrem inside and sat him on a bed.
René called, “I’ll have a look around for other stragglers and then get the first-aid kit.” As he left, he shut the door behind him.
Jack closed the curtains and turned on the bungalow’s overhead lights.
Effrem’s appearance momentarily paralyzed Jack.
Scattered across Effrem’s torso were at least ten cylindrical burn marks from the curling iron. The tips of his pinkie and third finger on his left hand were pulp, probably the work of a hammer, Jack guessed. Effrem’s bottom lip was split and his right eye socket was so badly bruised and swollen it looked like a smashed plum.
“Fucking hell,” Jack muttered.
“Is it bad?” Effrem said.
“Pretty bad.”
“It’s starting to hurt, Jack, really bad. For a while I was numb, but now it’s—” Effrem winced, then exhaled heavily. He cradled his shattered hand in his lap. “He didn’t ask me anything. Not one question!”
“Möller?”
“He just did it. For no reason. For fun.” Effrem’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Möller told those two to get rid of me. I thought, Well, how much can a bullet to the head hurt? And then they told me to start digging. They were going to set me on fire… bury me in that hole. Why? Why that way?”
Because Möller’s a psychopath, Jack thought but didn’t say.
Effrem was crying now, his chest heaving with sobs. Jack sat down on the bed and pulled Effrem’s head onto his shoulder. “You’re alive, Effrem. Just keep repeating that in your head: I’m alive.”
René returned with the first-aid kit and went to work on Effrem, checking him for any obvious signs of brain damage or internal hemorrhaging, then having him down four ibuprofen followed by two miniature bottles of whiskey Jack found in the dresser.
Once the battered journalist had stopped shaking, René turned his attention to Effrem’s burns and wounds. He left Effrem’s hand for last.
“Hammer?” René asked him.
“Plumber’s wrench,” Effrem replied.
Jack asked, “What’s the diagnosis?”
“The burns are superficial. As long as they’re kept clean, they’ll heal. Same with his eye and lip.”
“What about my hand?” asked Effrem. “I’m going to lose those fingers, aren’t I?”
“Only if they get infected. The tips of the bones are broken, but the blood flow is still there. You will, unfortunately, never attain your dream of being a hand model.”
Effrem smiled faintly. “Guess I’ll have to stick with journalism. Jack, I’m sorry. You said ‘Jump’ and I didn’t jump. I was worried we were going to lose Möller. I had a gut feeling that Pilatus wasn’t going to move, but Möller was. I thought if I could at least follow them for a while we’d have a direction to follow.”
“You moved the GPS tracker?” Effrem nodded and Jack said, “You’re forgiven.”
They covered him in blankets and gave him another mini-bottle of whiskey. He was asleep within minutes.
“He’s fighting shock,” René said. “He needs at least four hours of sleep before we move him. We need to get him back to Windhoek.”
“Good luck with that. He’s stubborn.”
“And you’re okay with him coming with us?”
Jack said, “Not really, but he’s earned the right to decide for himself. Even if he just wants to go along for the ride, I’m going to let him.”
René shrugged. “You’re the leader. These are some terrible men we’re dealing with, Jack. What they did to him — what they were going to do to him…”
“I know.”
“And they belong to Rostock.”
This wasn’t a question, Jack realized, but rather a statement. The only emotion he heard in René’s voice was one of cold resignation. He’d cleared the chasm, Jack knew.
Seventy-five minutes after they arrived at the lodge, the GPS tracker’s signal faded with the convoy still heading north on the Western Bypass. Jack told René, “We lost them.”
“Maybe not,” Effrem said from his bed. He reached out and turned on the nightstand lamp. “I heard Möller say something about GPS and the Hilux. Maybe its nav system was programmed so they could catch up to the main group.”
René was already on his feet. “I’ll check.” He returned to the bungalow a few minutes later. “He’s right. There’s a destination programmed into the system.”
“Where?”
“Someplace called Kavango Dam.”
37
René monitored Effrem’s condition through the night and shortly after dawn proclaimed him fit to travel. To assuage his conscience, Jack tried to convince Effrem to take the Hilux back to Windhoek for medical treatment, but Effrem dismissed the idea even before all the words had left Jack’s mouth.
After stripping the two dead Germans and their Hilux of anything of use, Jack and the others piled back into the Land Cruiser, left the lodge, and made their way back to the Western Bypass.
According to the coordinates in the Hilux’s navigation system, Kavango Dam lay 110 miles to the northeast, but neither Jack’s phone map nor René’s paper map showed any sign of the structure, or of any body of water. Worse still, though the dam lay just thirty miles west of the Western Bypass, the only access road snaked its way through 150 miles of Otjozondjupa Region’s most rugged terrain.
By mid-morning, having traveled as far north as possible on the Western Bypass, Jack turned off the blacktop and headed east on a dirt track that was little more than twin wheel ruts worn into the earth. After four hours they’d covered only eighty miles and the road was worsening as it zigzagged deeper into the hills. By nightfall they were still forty miles from their destination. The road narrowed until the view out Jack’s window was blocked by a sheer rock face.
From the backseat Effrem said, “The other side’s even worse, Jack. About three feet from our tires there’s a drop-off. I can’t even see the bottom.”
René asked Jack, “Push on or stop and set up camp for the night?”
“Push on,” Jack replied. “Möller has a good eight-hour head start on us. For all we know, they’re already at Kavango.”
“Yes, but doing what?” asked René.
“Effrem, check your phone,” Jack said. Since they’d left Khorusepa Lodge, their reception had been wildly sporadic. Any headway Effrem made into researching Kavango Dam was maddeningly short-lived. Despite the pain, he had been working hard to assemble these information snippets into something cohesive.
So far all they knew was that the Kavango Dam had been completed just two months earlier at a half-mile-wide section of the Omatako River. Since then a massive reservoir had been filling behind the dam. Downstream from the dam were nearly twenty villages and farms.
Effrem said, “I’ve got a bit of signal. Let me see what I can do with it.”
After another ninety minutes and ten miles the road widened and began descending. Jack was able to pick up some speed. By midnight they were within eight miles of the dam.
“It turns out Kavango’s a regulator dam,” Effrem said from the darkness of the backseat.
“Which is what?” asked Jack.
“Regulator dams are built upstream from hydroelectric dams. They’re designed to control the volume of water flowing into a hydro.”