Authors: Tony Park
Shelley smiled. The guy was old enough to be her father.
‘Talking on your phone while driving is also illegal, unless you have hands-free. I just had mine installed,’ Isaac said as he pushed the green button to take the call. ‘Captain Tshabalala.’
‘Isaac, hi, it’s Sannie van Rensburg. We’ve got a big problem.’
Shelley sat up straight in the passenger seat of Isaac’s Toyota Venture.
Isaac looked across at her, his face creased with a flash of panic as he swerved off the sealed road onto
the dirt verge. He reached out for the phone, but appeared to be unfamiliar with the locking device which held it in its new hands-free cradle. The woman on the other end of the line said, ‘Isaac, are you there? Greeves is missing. And an aide – it looks like they’ve been kid –’
Isaac wrestled the phone free at last. ‘Sannie, I’ve got a reporter with me. Say that again. I might have to call you back.’
Even with the phone pressed to Isaac’s ear, Shelley heard the woman on the other end of the line swear in Afrikaans.
‘Oh, dear god, Tom,’ Sannie said, and it was more prayer than blaspheming. They were in Greeves’s room.
‘I’ve just called Captain Tshabalala,’ she went on. ‘He’s sending some uniformed officers here.’
Tom nodded. He would have to contact London. It was a call he had hoped he’d never have to make in his career but, as much as he dreaded it, he knew speed was of the essence. He dialled the number he’d saved for just such an emergency.
‘Reserve room, DC Hyland,’ a male voice said on the other end of the line in New Scotland Yard. The night duty officer yawned.
‘This is DS Tom Furey, providing close personal protection to the Minister for Defence Procurement, Robert Greeves, in South Africa. We have a situation here. The minister is missing.’
‘Do what?’
Tom repeated himself and the man seemed to become fully alert. The night duty officer worked in the reserve room of the Counter Terrorist Unit. Tom wasn’t calling him because he suspected this was a terrorist action – not yet, at least – but because this number was manned twenty-four hours a day. The duty officer would now consult the night duty binder, a list of names and numbers of everyone who needed to know about an incident such as this. The man would be busy for some time. Tom gave him the details he had, left his cell phone number, then hung up. Next he called his immediate superior, at home.
‘You’re calling early,’ Shuttleworth said.
Tom repeated the facts.
‘Good god almighty. Are the South Africans on the job?’
‘Uniforms are on their way, and the detectives will be called next, I expect.’
‘What are you going to do next?’
‘I’m going to bloody well find him.’
‘Keep your cool, Tom. If a crime’s been committed in South Africa you’ve no jurisdiction. We’ll need you there, in contact, as our link man. I’ll be on the next available flight. There’ll be two detectives coming with me, to start our investigation. Jesus Christ, Tom.’
There was no way Tom was going to sit on his hands and play receptionist. ‘Okay. I’ll sit tight,’ he lied. He ended the call.
Sannie walked back into the living area of the suite from the bathroom where she had been making calls on her mobile phone. ‘Tshabalala’s on his way, but he’s up near Orpen, so he’ll be a couple of hours. He’s got
two officers at Skukuza, and they’re closing up and heading here now-now.’
Tom had learned already that repeating the word ‘now’ meant immediately in Africa. Two officers. ‘What about detectives?’
‘According to the plan, Tshabalala will be mobilising a team from Nelspruit – the nearest big town.’
‘Good.’
‘I thought you had Greeves’s room alarmed?’ Sannie said.
Tom nodded. ‘It didn’t go off. I checked the laptop that controls the passive alarm, but it hasn’t registered a thing, and I didn’t hear it in the night – obviously. I don’t know how they got around it.’
‘Um, there’s something else, Tom.’
‘What?’
Sannie told him about the reporter in the car with Isaac, and the fact that she had overheard at least part of Sannie’s message.
‘Jesus. I was hoping we could keep a lid on this for a little while longer. What’s the chance that Isaac can keep the reporter quiet?’
‘If you were a twenty-two-year-old journalist straight out of varsity and you found out a foreign government minister had been kidnapped in your backyard, would you sit on the story?’
The obvious answer meant Tom had no time to lose. ‘I’m going after them.’
‘You’re
what
?’
Tom walked out of Greeves’s room onto the walk-way. Sannie followed him, opening her mouth to protest.
‘Hey, what’s all the commotion?’ Carla, her hair in disarray and buttoning her safari shirt, walked out of Tom’s suite. She was barefoot and her green skirt was askew, a rear pocket facing the front.
Sannie shook her head in disgust. ‘You tell her,’ she said to Tom. ‘I’ve got more calls to make and you, Tom, are going nowhere. This is now a South African Police Service matter and
I
have jurisdiction until a more senior officer arrives. Get yourself cleaned up, Carla. There’s bloody work to be done.’
Tom turned and walked back through reception, past the South African minister and his advisor, out front to where the Land Cruisers were still parked in preparation for the morning game drive.
‘Duncan, get your rifle; we’re walking!’ On the dashboard of Duncan’s Cruiser was a Czech-made Brno hunting rifle, which the guide carried in case he took his tourists for a game walk in the Tinga concession.
‘What?’
‘I’ll explain as we walk.’ And Tom did. ‘Ignore them,’ he said as they moved through reception. It seemed everyone had a cell phone pressed to his or her ear and all were talking at the same time.
Tom led Duncan back into Greeves’s unit and then to Joyce’s, explaining what had happened. Duncan climbed over the balcony railing outside Bernard’s suite and dropped the metre to the long grass below. He started moving in an arc, around the front of the suite, to the far side of Greeves’s and then back to a central spot between the two. ‘This way,’ he said.
Tom jumped down into the grass. He would have liked to have changed into trousers and a stouter pair
of shoes, but shorts would have to do as there was no time to waste.
Duncan pointed back towards Bernard’s suite. ‘That man put up more of a fight. Is he the young one?’
‘Yes,’ Tom said. It figured. Joyce was ex-navy, physically fit and well built. Over dinner last night, he’d lamented the lack of a gym, saying he visited his local in Westminster daily when in London. Greeves didn’t carry any excess weight, but as a politician his life consisted of being driven from one free meal to another. It was not surprising the older man had been easier to subdue. Tom was already impressed with Duncan’s skills.
‘Six men moving through the bush, here. Two plus one, and two plus one,’ he said, pointing to each unit, and Tom understood what he was saying. Two pairs of assailants had made the abductions. Duncan moved now, head down, walking bent at the waist, looking for flattened grass. He broke off a yellowish stalk and held it up. Tom saw the dried brown stain. He didn’t need to be told it was blood. Greeves, it seemed, had been injured somehow in his room. There were no bloodstains in Bernard’s room. ‘One man, the younger one, I think, is being dragged now. See here, his heel marks in the dirt. They have made him unconscious, I think.’
Tom tried to imagine the kidnappings. Perhaps the assailants knocked on their doors, masquerading as Tinga staff; perhaps they were in the victims’ rooms already, waiting. All staff would have to be interviewed later, as a matter of course. If it was an inside job they’d soon be able to spot the accomplice or accomplices
through some rigorous interviews. ‘How old are these tracks?’
Duncan paused and dropped to one knee, brushing some stalks of grass aside. ‘A mouse has crossed the path, here, and a small cat, a genet or wild cat, has stopped to sniff the blood on this grass. The blood is dry. The grass that was flattened has recovered. These tracks may be three or four hours old.’
Duncan led him under the boardwalk, then over one of the knee-high electric fences. ‘They stopped here, to lift the two men over the live wire.’
That made sense, Tom thought. They couldn’t have risked Greeves making a noise, or maybe coming to, if the fence zapped him, although presumably by this stage in the escape he would have been gagged. Tom picked at a branch studded with thorns, which had snagged on his shorts. His arms were already latticed with scratches from the short walk.
‘Four men lay here. Look, you can see where the grass is flattened.’ Tom looked to where Duncan was pointing at what must have been the lying-up point prior to the attack. The attackers had waited here, in deep bush behind the elevated walkway, at the base of a thickly leafed tree. They could look up, through the foliage, and out over the boardwalk, but anyone on the walkway would have been hard-pressed spotting them, especially in the dark. ‘Look.’
Tom was about to move on, when Duncan held up a box of matches to the morning light. Tom wished he hadn’t touched it, as it might contain a DNA trace or even partial fingerprint. Still, the niceties were already out the window on this investigation. Time was all
important. It was careless of one of the men to leave behind evidence, let alone to be smoking while waiting to get the jump on someone.
‘Mozambican,’ Duncan said, handing the matchbox to Tom. The label was yellow and carried the words
Pala Pala, Fosforeira De Mocambique
above a picture of a curved-horned sable antelope on the front. Tom turned it over. On the back was a map of Mozambique, and a drawing of a compass.
‘Can you buy these in South Africa?’
Duncan shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen them.’
The Kruger Park occupied a long, narrow swathe of land running north–south along the border between South Africa and Mozambique. Were the kidnappers from the former Portuguese colony, and was that where they had taken Greeves and Joyce? Dropping the matchbox and possibly smoking while waiting told him the men were not professional. Another piece of the puzzle and a small point in their favour, but only if they moved quickly.
Duncan led him along the wooden fence that separated the accommodation units from the staff quarters, which were housed in the buildings of the old national parks camp which had survived the floods in 2000. From there, once they passed the last hut on the extreme left, the trail hooked back around to the entrance road, over another low-level electric fence. Tom cursed. The concept of letting animals move to and from the river through the lodge’s grounds had created an opening for the kidnappers.
Tom was sweating by the time they made it to the dirt track. Duncan moved fast, and the rising sun
burned the top of Tom’s hatless head and stung his bare arms, which were also becoming scratched by thorny branches. He guessed they were about three hundred metres from the Tinga entrance gates – far enough for a vehicle to have been started up without attracting anyone’s attention. ‘Did they have a vehicle parked here?’
Duncan circled the area where the footprints met the road, holding up a hand, silently telling Tom to stay back from the track. He retraced his steps, careful to stay in his own footprints. He knelt on the edge of the road and beckoned Tom over. He was smiling broadly as he nodded to himself.
‘What is it?’
‘Oil.’
‘So?’ Tom had already deduced the kidnappers had rendezvoused with a vehicle.
Duncan dipped a finger in the liquid and, just as he did, Tom registered the significance of what he was seeing. ‘It hasn’t sunk into the dirt yet!’
‘Even better,’ Duncan said, his eyes echoing Tom’s excited look. ‘Feel.’
Tom reached out and touched Duncan’s fingers. ‘It’s still bloody warm!’ It was the best news he’d had since waking. The vehicle had been there a very short time ago. ‘Follow the tracks to the tar road, Duncan. I’ll call for some help.’
Tom had his mobile phone out as he jogged down the dirt road towards the entrance gate. He scrolled through his address list and called Sannie’s mobile number.
‘Van Rensburg.’
‘Sannie, meet me at the entrance gate – now. We’ve found the tracks of the getaway vehicle. They only left half an hour or so ago.’ He didn’t stay on the line long enough for her to object.
She was frowning when he met her at the gate. ‘Tom, I’ve called the detectives at Nelspruit. They’ll be here soon.’
‘Christ, Sannie, we can’t wait. They must have hidden in the bush waiting for sun-up, though I don’t know why.’
‘I do,’ she said. ‘Private citizens can’t drive in the park after dark. If they were seen by a ranger they would have attracted attention to themselves immediately. More likely they hid up in the bush nearby and, when the kidnappers had your guys, radioed for a pick-up. The rest camp gates open at five-thirty and Skukuza’s close by. Tinga’s game drives don’t get onto the public roads until about six-thirty.’
Tom checked his watch. It was six-twenty. ‘So what you’re saying is they could have left some time in the last forty-five minutes or so and not aroused suspicion?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s possible.’
‘Then we’ve got to act
now
.’
She looked back over her shoulder towards the lodge. He could understand her conflicted loyalties. On one hand she, like him, would want to get on the trail of the abductors as soon as possible, but at the same time her prime job was to protect the South African defence minister. Also, she had to wait at Tinga for Isaac Tshabalala to arrive, as well as the detectives from Nelspruit. ‘Tom, you’ve got no jurisdiction here.’
‘I’ve also lost the two men I was supposed to be protecting. There’s nothing more I can do here, Sannie. Can’t you see?’ He told her about the number of men, and the discovery of the Mozambican matchbox. He handed it to her.
Duncan trotted down the road towards them, his rifle held loose in his right hand. His tight, short green shorts, cut high above the knee, and his brown ankle boots emphasised his well-developed thigh and calf muscles. He was barely perspiring, while Tom was wiping his brow with the back of his shirt sleeve. ‘They went left onto the tar road, heading north-east. That’s all I can tell you about the vehicle right now. I can’t track it on the sealed road. Also, I had another look at the point where they met the vehicle. There were two spots of oil. The front drops were from the engine – it was black sump oil, very thin. The rear stains were gear oil, from the diff.’