As she turned to look at him she could see the doubt in his face and the softening of his anger, along with the pain that lurked just beneath the surface. He rubbed his eyes and looked back out at the darkened bush.
‘You’ll still check her laptop for me, won’t you, for anything personal?’
She laid a hand on his arm. The muscle was hard as rock, but warm. ‘Of course, Jed. I’ll do it in the morning. The lodge attendant lit a fire in the barbeque before she left. It should be about right for cooking now. Let’s get some steaks on and open some wine.’
They walked down the creaking wooden stairs to the kitchen and Jed took two bottles of beer from the gas fridge to keep him going during his barbeque duty. Chris started fixing a salad and said, ‘I’ll come and join you soon. Take that with you,’ she added, pointing to a long black flashlight that reminded Jed of a nightstick. The cooking fire embers glowed a warm red in the darkness beyond the pale pool of light cast by an outside bulb.
‘Should I take a gun with me too?’
‘You may laugh. I’d take a knife if I were you, though.’
‘For the lions?’
‘For the steak.’
Chris heard and smelled the sizzling steaks as she stepped from the lodge carrying a bowl of green salad and a bottle of wine. She watched Jed staring intently at the hot coals beneath the meat. She wondered if checking through Miranda’s things had taken some of the fire out of him. He hadn’t asked her about her last meeting with his daughter, but there was still a look of puzzlement on his face as he placed the steaks on a platter and carried them to a large outdoor table whose top was a single slab of stone.
As he uncorked the wine, he said, ‘So you don’t think there’s anything unusual about all of her bags and equipment being packed away?’
‘That’s how I’d keep my stuff, particularly the valuables. If you leave stuff unattended and unlocked, you’ve really only got yourself to blame if something disappears. She might have been packed up in preparation for a day walk in the bush.’
‘You say you’d keep your gear secured, but don’t forget I’ve seen your hotel room. Forgive the observation, but you’d hardly be classed as anally retentive by a shrink.’
Chris faked a look of indignation. ‘You’re saying I’m a slob! Anyway, it’s one thing to be messy, but I always leave my valuables locked away.’
‘But don’t you see, that’s my point. Even if Miranda did lock away her expensive monitoring or photographic gear or whatever all that shit is, where was the rest of her stuff? The odds and ends that all of us leave lying around?’
‘I’d get Moses to ask around the staff village if I were you. Some of her bits and pieces could have found their way there.’
‘Don’t you think it’s at all unusual there was no trace found of the clothes she was wearing? No shoes, nothing?’
Chris finished the last of her steak. ‘Not really. What the lions don’t eat, the hyenas and the vultures pretty well clean up. It’s not unusual to find a victim’s clothes inside a man-eater – they don’t stop at anything when they’re in a feeding frenzy.’
‘Would it have done much damage to her tent, if that’s where it took her?’
‘Hard to say, really. We do know that lions don’t, as a rule, break into tents to get their victims, even though it would be easy enough for them to do so. The best defence for campers is to stay inside with the zipper shut and the lion will walk past, thinking the tent’s just another anthill or mound.’
‘Surely they have a good sense of smell?’
‘Oh, they do, but they don’t hunt by smell. Their olfactory senses are primarily for detecting other members of the pride and intruders in their territory, or for sniffing out carrion. Lions are great scavengers. They hunt by sight and sound. You’ve watched a domestic cat hunting birds or mice?’
‘Sure.’
‘It’s the same thing. The cat notices movement and that’s what gets it going. They see in black and white, so movement is crucial to allow them to detect something. Once they see that little twitch, or the prey making a dash for it, they charge and pounce – just like a little kitty cat back home.’
‘That’s why the guide books tell you not to run?’
‘Exactly If you stay rock still, the lion will, theoretically at least, lose interest in you or lose sight of you. However, if I’m ever out with you in the bush and we come across an angry lion, I’m going to run.’
‘Don’t tell me you can outrun a lion?’
‘No, but I don’t have to be able to outrun the lion – I only need to be able to outrun you.’
He laughed. ‘I’ll have to remember that one.’
‘Don’t try it on anyone over here. It’s an old joke, I’m afraid.’
‘Funny how we’re laughing about it like this. It’s the same as in the Army – using black humour to get through the worst of it.’
‘I’m sorry, Jed, I didn’t mean to …’
‘No, really, Chris, I mean it. It does help in an odd kind of way. I’m clinging to the hope that Miranda is still alive, somehow, somewhere, and that maybe this has all been a terrible misunderstanding, that she’ll pop up at her mother’s place in a week’s time, brokenhearted over a guy or something. But in the event that doesn’t happen, I want you to know that coming here … meeting you … well, it’s sort of helping me to come to terms with it, to prepare myself for the worst.’
‘Thanks, Jed.’ She reached forwards, across the table and touched his arm again. She really did feel for him. ‘Let me get us both another beer.’
Inside the lodge she stood in the kitchen, leaned against the sink and gripped the cool stainlesssteel edge with all her might. Oh, God, she said to herself, I don’t know if I can keep this up for much longer. Then she started to cry.
The beer was an anaesthetic; the warm Indian Ocean a soothing bath; the English girl’s kisses a soft, moist balm on his bruised skin. Luke Scarborough was in paradise, Zanzibar-style.
He opened his eyes and stared up through the mosquito net at the lazily rotating fan and painted white ceiling of the bungalow. She lay on her back beside him, all pink and warm and smelling of last night’s sex. She wasn’t overly attractive, but she was relaxed and experimental in bed and had a wicked sense of humour. He didn’t want to leave her. He reckoned he could easily spend a fortnight drinking, dancing and practising new positions, but he had work to do. He climbed out from under the grubby white gauze and padded across the linoleum floor, fine grains of sand sticking to the soles of his feet. He shifted her brightly coloured sarong, called a Zambian in this part of Africa, and her limegreen bikini from the chair and found his own clothes. He pulled on still-damp board shorts and a Tshirt that smelled of sweat, cigarette smoke and spilled beer.
He was technically on the island for business, but after a night at the budget beach bungalows at Nungwi, at the northern tip of Zanzibar, the visit had quickly slid into pleasure. He had arrived at Dar es Salaam on a flight from Dubai the previous morning. The swaying green palm trees, white sandy beaches, azure waters and industrious bustle of the Tanzanian port city were a world away from the barren mountains and deserts of Afghanistan. He’d taken the first ferry out of Dar – a catamaran constructed in his native Australia, of all places – and feasted on fresh cashews and Coca-Cola on the hundred-minute trip across to Zanzibar Island. A young African tout had attached himself to Luke as soon as he stepped off the ferry, offering him in a single breath a hotel room, hashish and a spice tour.
‘No thanks,’ Luke had tried politely. It had been hot and sticky and Stone Town, the island’s historic Arab trading capital, loomed ahead of him, a daunting maze of narrow alleys and decaying once-grandiose buildings.
‘Please, you let me take you to a hotel and I get some bread, man.’ The tout was still pestering him.
Luke smiled at the out-of-date hippy slang. ‘I’m not looking for a hotel and I don’t need your help, thanks,’ he said, more firmly this time.
‘Stupid fucking tourist,’ the African said.
Luke stopped and turned. ‘Now you’re insulting me? That’s no way to make money, my friend.’
‘I’m not your friend. You people, you start wars and invade other countries. Go back to where you came from, you stupid tourist.’
Luke looked around. The boy was lean and hard and his dark face bore more than one scar. Other people had stopped to watch the exchange, including two Arab women dressed from head to foot in black
kangas
. Luke shook his head and walked on. He lost the tout by walking into a shop on the waterfront advertising scuba diving. Although rattled by the man’s quick aggression, Luke now had a lead-in for his story.
At the dive shop he booked a seat on the next minibus shuttle to Nungwi. The drive took him through swampland and crowded villages, and past dense groves of palms. The vibrant greenery assaulted his eyes after the lifeless browns of Afghanistan, but the conservative dress of the island’s African and Arab inhabitants and the village mosques reminded him he was still in the world of Islam, even on the east coast of equatorial Africa. It was not until he climbed out of the minibus at Nungwi and stretched his cramped muscles that he realised just how beautiful the beach and water were. He peeled off twenty-five grimy dollars for a bungalow and dumped his backpack inside the door without bothering to inspect the room.
Luke had been born in Sydney and grown up in the northern beaches suburb of Avalon. The ocean had been part of his life since before he could walk and he headed for the water with the same ingrained need as a hatchling sea turtle. He peeled off his T-shirt and kicked off his sandals on sand as fine and white as icing sugar. The water was blue and inviting and he lost himself in it, diving and corkscrewing like a dolphin as he shook the last imaginary grains of dust of the windswept Shomali Plain from his locks.
Two English girls, lobster-red from their first day of sun, giggled at his abandon as they silently appraised his lithe body and unruly curly hair. They chatted to him when he eventually returned to land, and arranged to meet for drinks at the resort bar later in the evening.
The bar was perched on a wide deck of bleached, rough-hewn timber shaded with a steep-pitched thatch roof. The music was a mixture of rap and Bob Marley Luke didn’t mind either but, as he knew from his time in the Jo’burg Bureau of International News, Africans tended to have only one setting on their stereo volume controls – max. He dragged his chair out to the balcony away from the booming speakers, the water visible under his feet through gaps between the planks. As the sun dived for the horizon the English girls joined him, along with a mixed bag of South African divers, Italian honeymooners and German backpackers.
They’d chatted, as travellers do, about prices and hotels and ferry timetables, trying to outdo each other with how little they’d paid and how much they’d seen. Luke stayed silent for most of it, his mind still in the foothills of the Hindu Kush though the delicious smells wafting from the bar’s kitchen reminded him he was a world away from war-ravaged Afghanistan. There he’d eaten courtesy of the US Army – reconstituted eggs, powdered potatoes and chunked steak. The cooked meals were prepared four thousand kilometres away at a base in Germany, frozen and then flown by C-17 to Bagram, where they were reheated and slopped onto polystyrene plates. The meals did not travel well. For lunch he’d eaten Army MREs, which officially stood for ‘Meal, Ready to Eat’. The brown plastic packets of brown plastic food were referred to by the troops as Meal, Rarely Edible or Meal, Rejected by Ethiopians.
That night Luke gorged on grilled Zanzibar rock lobster and fried fresh calamari, washed down by ice-cold Safari and Kilimanjaro lager. After dinner, as a DJ pumped up the volume in a bid to get people dancing, the talk turned to politics.
‘Fucking Americans. They want to rule the goddamned world. They think they can bomb civilians and invade any country they want to,’ one of the South African divers, tanned and muscled with his blond hair plaited in incongruous dreadlocks, said.
‘
Ja
,’ a German guy agreed. ‘They are all, how you say, Rambos. All they do is kill, kill, kill. It makes me sick.’
‘One saved my life,’ Luke said, only half aware he’d spoken. The Safaris had dulled his senses and he was losing himself in the alcohol’s ministrations and the bright white smile of one of the English girls.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
He told her about Jed Banks and the helicopter being fired on, and the Arab he’d seen gunned down in front of him. He said it in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice that belied the terror and the nightmares, and the rest of them sat in stunned silence.
Afterwards, he’d been embarrassed, and had walked down the stairs from the wooden deck onto the sand at the first opportunity. The girl in the lime-green bikini had followed him to the beach and, later, to his bungalow.
Now, the next morning, Luke walked back out onto the bar’s terrace. He lit a cigarette and thought about what he must do. A fisherman in an outrigger canoe, his chiselled black body impervious to the sun’s rays, paddled effortlessly past the resort on his way to work. Luke, too, had work to do, and it scared as much as excited him. Here, on this island paradise, Afghanistan was still very much on his mind. Rather than running away from the horror he’d experienced, he would be chasing it, holding onto the beast’s tail and shaking it for all it was worth.
He walked back to the bungalow to see if the English girl was awake yet. She stirred and opened her eyes at the squeaking of the door. She smiled. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse from the cigarettes and vodka. Sexy as hell. ‘Leaving already?’
‘I’m afraid so. It was great. Thanks. I mean …’ She did not look angry or disappointed, he thought.
‘What time’s the minibus?’ she croaked.
‘Ten.’
She checked her Swatch. ‘It’s only eight-thirty. That gives us an hour and twenty-five minutes.’
He smiled. ‘An hour and twenty-five?’
‘You’ll have to comb your hair and dress, won’t you?’
She lifted the mosquito net and threw back the sheet. Luke climbed in.
*
Beneath him, Stone Town snoozed the afternoon away, but Luke was hard at work, his mobile phone clamped to his ear.