When I’d given the date and number, Pete asked, ‘And the woman?’
‘Surname, Braun. Christian name, Ingeborg. Citizen of Namibia. Born Windhoek, 30 June 1969.’
‘Is that all we know about her?’
‘No, there was a business card in her passport. She’s a rep for a firm called SWAG — South West African Game. Seems to be some kind of big-game management service. There’s an address in Windhoek, too.’
‘Okay, let’s have it.’
I read it out, and said, ‘Her clothes are a mixture of South African and German. The tunic’s from David Lyndon Classics, the upmarket outfitter in Parktown, Joburg. Slacks from Powder Keg, in Melville. Her boots are Meindl — German.’
‘Got that. What was the location of the crash?’
‘Wait one.’ I knew he’d want that, and to cover ourselves — to make it look as though we were less far south — I’d invented some coordinates that put the site about a hundred kilometres north of its real position. I persuaded myself it wouldn’t make much difference: for the Beechcraft, it would have been only twenty minutes’ flying time. But if the Kremlin realised how far we’d advanced already, they might start pissing about and ordering us back.
I gave the duff gen, and added, ‘When we first saw the plane, it was coming from the east.’
‘Okay. What state’s the woman in?’
‘Still unconscious, but stable. Mart reckons she’ll make it.’
‘Can’t you find a hospital to put her into?’
‘Hospital! You’re fucking joking. There’s no hospital within a million miles. There’s no town, no road, no phone, no power, no water — nothing.’
‘What are your plans for her, then?’
‘Good question. We’ll see what she says when she comes round. If we find out where she took off from, we may be able to call in another plane to exfil her.’
‘How’s Whinger?’
‘Stable also. Mart’s cleaned him up as best he can and given him pain-killers. It looks pretty bad, but it could have been worse.’
I was afraid Pete was going to ask why we didn’t get the woman out by calling in the Kam-Ex Cessna that had lifted Andy’s body. The answer was that I knew we were too far from Mulongwe, but I didn’t want to admit it. Luckily he said nothing on those lines, and I ended the call by asking him to put over any information Hereford could dig out.
The plane crash and its aftermath had delayed us by several hours, and we didn’t make it to the ridge of the hills by nightfall. Not knowing how the land lay on the other side, I didn’t want to go over in the dark, so as dusk was falling our force deployed defensively in a level area just short of the crest.
Whinger was on his feet, but pretty miserable. After Mart had treated him he seemed in reasonable shape, but obviously he was getting a lot of pain, and there’d been an uncomfortable flare-up when Genesis had suggested going back up to bury the bodies and say a prayer.
‘Fuck the bodies!’ Whinger had shouted. ‘I’ve just been fried, and if you come up with any more religious shit, I’m going to fucking drop you.’
The atmosphere was tense all round. I took Gen aside and said, ‘Look, ease off the bible-bashing. You’re starting to piss the guys off in a big way.’
‘Sorry,’ he went, innocently. ‘I didn’t realise I was annoying anyone.’
For the woman, we’d cleared space in the back of our mother wagon and put her in there in an American cot, in case we had to move out in a hurry. Mart had fixed her an IV drip, to keep up the level of her body fluids, and we arranged a rota of guys to monitor her, checking her eyes, making sure her pulse and breathing were okay. We all had the same instinct: to get her out, back to safety, as soon as possible, before her condition started to deteriorate. None of us wanted to be burdened with her. Whinger, who hated Germans on principle, nearly shat himself with rage when he realised that it was a Kraut he’d dragged from the wreckage.
‘She’s not a Kraut,’ I told him. ‘She’s a Namibian.’
‘Bollocks,’ he went. ‘All white Namibians are Krauts. How could she be anything else, with a name like that?’
He knew perfectly well that she was called Ingeborg — Inge for short, almost certainly — but because her surname was Braun, he started straight in, referring to her as Eva, like Hitler’s girlfriend, Eva Braun.
‘Firekin’ roll on!’ he cried, his temper not improved by the stinging of his burns. ‘What do we want with her? She’ll bring us nothing but bad luck. Better do what I suggested in the first place: put a bullet through her and leave her for the hyenas.’
‘No way,’ I told him. ‘I want to have a little chat with her and find out what she was up to. I’ve been thinking about the scene of the crash. When we found the two guys lying dead, there wasn’t a mark on their clothes. Those shirts and shorts were clean as clean. Whatever else that party was doing, it hadn’t been on safari.’
SEVEN
We went over the hill at first light, and by 0700 we were established in an excellent OP, looking down through binoculars on the mine from a distance of seven or eight hundred metres. After so much dry, sandy terrain, our first sight of the river valley was quite something. Away to our left, upstream, the Kameni was wide and shining, flowing gently towards us between borders of brilliant green.
‘Phragmites,’ said Joss.
‘What’s that?’
‘The reeds by the water. Spiky leaves. They can be ten feet tall.’
The surface of the river was dotted with what looked like dozens of little sandbanks, and it was only when some of them moved that we realised they were hippos, basking in shallow water. Beyond them, on the far shore, stood a small settlement: a square enclosure fenced with dried reeds, with the conical roofs of four grass huts showing above the walls.
A short way downstream, and close in under us, the land was higher. On our side, the base of the hills reached out to the river bank, and on the far bank rocky, scrub-covered outcrops rose from the water’s edge, framing a shallow gorge, through which the stream tumbled in rapids. The mine was on the far bank at the bottom of that run, where the land levelled out again and the river reverted to a smooth flow. The sun, coming in low from our left, lit up ugly, corrugated-iron buildings clustered on flat ground above the water, with a long, covered gantry reaching out over the centre of the channel and down to river level. A rectangular central block with a pitched roof had been extended piecemeal by having sections of different shapes and sizes bolted on to it. The whole structure looked as though it had expanded bit by bit. Rising above it was a slender tower, square in section, topped by an open gallery under a flat roof. From the top of the roof rose a high, lattice-work radio mast.
Beyond that central assembly lay a compound surrounded by a security fence. Another large building, with two storeys of windows, stood apart, to the right as we looked — the accommodation, perhaps. There was also a dump of red forty-five-gallon fuel drums stacked inside a retaining wall built with concrete blocks. Further off, a low, white-washed bungalow range ran along inside the far perimeter.
Outside the fence a dirt airstrip stretched away into the bush downstream, to the south-east. The only road we could see left the compound in the opposite direction and followed the far bank of the river upstream before swinging off to the south. Transport didn’t seem to be the outfit’s strong suit: we could make out two old Gaz-type jeeps, a bulldozer and a couple of dump-trucks, and that was all. I guessed that because the place was so remote, most personnel and supplies came in by air.
The country beyond the compound was rockier than the terrain we’d come through: everywhere stony outcrops poked up out of the scrub and tall grass. There were also numerous black, burnt-out patches, and the vast, mottled plain faded off to a hazy horizon. The mine itself was particularly graceless: all vegetation had been scraped away to create a level, dusty, stony platform, without a single tree to soften its harsh outlines.