If Harry Parkinson wore a pair of guns like a cowboy, his long, low, wooden headquarters building was like a ranch house on the Kansas plains. There was a picket fence round it with an empty guard hut and a wide, five-barred gate. ‘It’s electrified now,’ Harry told her as Robert opened the gate, let them roll through and then closed it behind them. ‘Looks like old-fashioned crap but it’s state of the art. I had it done when the Lions came back, but oddly enough they’ve never bothered me. Or my men. It’s the poachers we have to worry about. The ones that come over the Blood River after the tuskers and the rhinos.’
‘Why is it called the Blood River?’
‘Not as grim as it sounds. About the only place in this neck of the woods which isn’t. Right, Robert? No, it was called that because of the mud. It used to run red because of the red soil. When it ran. It’s just a dry valley now and little commandos from the Congo Libre army pop across it in the dead of night to come after our ivory and rhino horn. Bastards.’
They pulled up in a storm of red dust and the three piled out together and went up the three long wooden steps onto the veranda.
‘A-TEN-SHUN!’ bellowed Harry as they entered through the door into what was obviously the main operations room. But nobody was there to obey his order. The big radio stood switched on but unmanned. The chair and tables all around the big room were scattered with open magazines and burdened with half-consumed cups of coffee. Cushions still bore the imprints of bodies. But there was nobody there at all. The three new arrivals stood, frozen by the strangeness of the room. The door swung behind them as though there was a wind but there was no wind.
A tiny lizard scuttled up the wall and through the ceiling boards.
‘Now this is bloody odd,’ said Harry Parkinson. Unconsciously, he eased his pistols in their holsters and Ann noted that she could see not the pearl handles of Colt revolvers she had half expected but the square, moulded, composite grips of modern, state of the art automatic handguns. She felt reassured, somehow.
‘SHOP!’ bellowed Harry.
Absolute silence by way of reply.
‘There are, what, five rooms upstairs?’ asked Robert.
‘This room and kitchen down here. My quarters upstairs — lounge, dining room, two bedrooms and bathroom.’
‘We’d better have a look.’
‘You wait here. I’ll look.’
He was gone, out through the still open door.
‘Most likely a panic call over the radio,’ said Robert cheerfully. ‘Poachers or something like that. The askaris are supposed to leave someone to report if they get called out. They can’t always find a volunteer to wait behind. They’re all very keen.’
A floorboard above their heads creaked. A tiny cloud of dust filtered down through the still hot air. The lizard scuttled out, saw them and froze.
‘It’s more than that and you know it. What you were saying about the lid coming off. Do you think it has?’
He looked down at her. Their eyes met. Suddenly she was angry. At the situation. At her fear. At herself. At him. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I know I’m naive. I know I’m out of my depth. But I’m not some subnormal infant, and I’m good at my job. Tell me the truth, for God’s sake. Stop trying to mother me!’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, apparently capitulating. ‘Harry and his askaris are a great team. Thirteen men. One mind. They need it sometimes, I can tell you. Ten thousand square miles and they’re the only law. I’ve never known them all to go off like this before. Only something very big indeed would have made them vanish without even a message.’
‘The same sort of thing as would have made Chobe at the landing strip desert his post as well?’
‘I guess so, but he went last night. They went today. While Harry was picking us up.’
Harry reappeared framed in the doorway. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Not a hide or a hair. They took the lorry, though. Easy enough to track. Let’s go.’
Robert frowned. ‘Maybe I should take Miss Cable back.’
‘If they’ve gone near the airstrip, ask me again. If not, you walk. Your choice. I’m going after my men.’
Ann had opened her mouth to protest at Robert’s suggestion but Harry’s answer suited her. ‘I’m going with Mr Parkinson,’ she said. ‘I just need to use the john first.’
‘Can you shoot?’ asked Robert five minutes later. They were in motion as he asked the question, following Harry to the Land Rover.
‘Shoot what?’ she asked as she followed, thinking he was perhaps asking about marksmanship or hunting.
‘This,’ he said, pointing to the rifle in its clip above the windshield.
‘What at?’ she asked, settling into the back seat.
‘At anyone who looks as though he’s coming after you,’ said Harry and he fired up the engine.
It took a moment for her to realise he had said ‘anyone’ and for the first time since the shower she went cold all over.
This time it was Harry who swung down to let them out of the gate. He checked in the guard hut and looked at the red dirt of the road.
‘Thought so,’ he said when he climbed back in. ‘They’ve gone up to the villages.’
He drove on, relatively slowly, talking again as he went. But this time he did not keep glancing back over his shoulder as he spoke.
‘All my askaris are N’Kuru. When I came here I was told the N’Kuru were lazy, arrogant and bolshie and the Kyoga were intelligent, trustworthy, hard-working chaps. That’s not been my experience at all. Quite the reverse, in fact. I’m much happier working with the N’Kuru, especially out here on their land.
‘There are three N’Kuru villages between here and the Blood River. They’ve remained more or less unchanged for several reasons. Firstly, they are the last viable villages able to provide for themselves in the old, traditional ways. Secondly, they were preserved as part of the game reserve. Finally, they bear a cultural importance to the N’Kuru people. The Heart of the Homeland, or some such. The N’Kuru phrase is impossible to translate exactly.’
‘And you think something has happened there to call your men away so suddenly?’
‘It’s the only reason I can think of to account for what they seem to have done. They are highly trained and absolutely reliable, but they all have family in the villages. Something must have happened.’
Silence fell.
They were driving across the grassland where the zebra were grazing; the animals, obviously used to the sight of Harry’s Land Rover, paid little attention to it. Ann felt her mood begin to lighten as she leaned out through the window watching the big herds milling by. Soon there were more than mere zebra to look at. Great dark-skinned wildebeest collected in massive herds lazily grazing and, on the low hillocks overlooking them, a pride of lions.
The camera clicked and clicked. The men in the front glanced at each other without a word.
They reached the first village within half an hour. It was as deserted as the house had been. They stopped. They searched. The huts, made of wattle and daub with wooden doorframes exquisitely carved, all stood empty. Stripped. Not a rug on wall. Not a stool on hard earth floor. Not a copper pot by cold hearth. Not a cow or a goat in the stockade nearby.
The three of them stood side by side at the entrance to the thorn stockade which surrounded the huts and Harry looked north across the plain. ‘That’s where they went,’ he said. ‘Every mother, child and mother’s son among them. I don’t know why, but that’s where they went.’
‘What about your men in the lorry?’ asked Ann.
Harry’s eyes were chilly as they regarded her. ‘They went east, to the next village,’ he said. ‘They were here after the villagers had gone so they found the same as us. They didn’t stop, though. Their tracks just go straight over the tracks heading north.’