Hassan bin Zayid took a deep breath and duck-dived as he neared the shore, coming into the steeply shelved shore underwater. Even two metres down he heard and felt the beat of the bass from the disco’s speakers reverberate through his body. The tide was high and he surfaced under the overhanging rock that supported part of the terrace above him. The music was deafening now, assaulting his senses, insulting his reawakened religious sensibilities with its calls for the barely clad youngsters above him to gyrate against each other. He’d been seduced, too, danced to their tune for years, but he was turning his back on the west now, for good. He felt ashamed of his past weakness, for falling the same way as his father. But he would have revenge enough for both of them.
Hassan turned his head in surprise at a noise behind him. He followed the trickling stream with his eyes. A young white man was hanging his penis over the edge of the balcony and urinating. He was disgusted, and the thoughtless laziness of the boy steeled his reserve further. Even others on the island, like him, who had made their fortunes from the tourist industry, would not mourn the passing of people like these.
Avoiding the ripples caused by the cascading urine, he finned his way around the rock and under the bare wooden floorboards. Sand showered him and the water’s surface as dozens of bare feet stomped above him in response to the primitive rhythm from the speakers. Hassan slung his spear gun over his shoulder and grabbed one of the deck’s wooden supports. The pole was slick and he slid back into the water on his first attempt. On his next try he managed to hook one arm over a timber support and haul himself up. His face was only a few centimetres from the floorboards now and he peeked up through a crack. He smiled at the sight. A girl was standing astride the gap. She wore a red G-string under a printed Zambian and her legs were long and smooth. The whore would get more than she bargained for this night.
He sat on the cross-member and unslung the waterproof bag from his shoulder. From inside he withdrew the bomb and roll of wide black duct tape. The Semtex had come as part of the delivery he had taken from the man in Dar. The timing mechanism was a cheap digital travel clock. As he had to swim with the device, he had been limited in the amount of shrapnel he could place in it. The fifty or so nails packed along one side of the soft plastique hardly seemed enough. He wanted to wipe this cancerous growth off the pristine beach it sullied.
Further along the shore an inflatable boat was tied to the wooden handrail of a flight of steps that led into the water at high tide. On his way in he had given a wide berth to a gleaming white catamaran flying the French tricolour. He assumed the dinghy belonged to the cat. It gave him an idea about improving the bomb’s effectiveness. He placed the explosives and tape back in the bag and wedged it into the gap between pillar and cross-member, then slid back into the water. Beneath the surface the music once more subsided to a dull throb. He swam to the moored boat and ducked under it, emerging on the far side, out of sight of any casual observer leaning over the railing of the deck above. He placed his hands on the rubber side of the craft and lifted himself up. As he’d hoped, the plastic fuel tank was sitting on the floor of the boat and it was not chained to anything. He reached into the water, drew the stainless-steel dive knife from its scabbard and slashed the fuel hose. He lifted the tank over the edge, clamped off the cut end of the hose with his fingers, and swam on the surface, the fuel container floating in front of him.
It was a delicate balancing act, getting the container up onto the wooden struts under the deck, and he spilled gasoline onto the water’s surface in the process. It wouldn’t matter. In his mind’s eye he saw half-naked backpackers leaping into the water to escape the fire and carnage above, only to land in water ablaze with fuel. He hosed some more of it onto the greasy surface below him.
With the tape he fixed the bomb securely to one of the cross-members and, using the rubber hose, tied the plastic fuel tank through its carrying handle to a support post, above and to one side of the explosives. He set the clock for thirty minutes and slid back into the water, which now smelled strongly of gasoline. He dived deep for cleaner water and finned his way silently back out to sea, the sickening thump of the music getting softer with every powerful stroke of his legs. Sadly, the boat was out of sight of the shoreline when the red numerals on the clock reached midnight.
The resort, with its sun-bleached wooden decking and ageing thatched roof, was consumed by flames in a matter of seconds.
A German tourist, who had always wanted to make his living as a freelance news photographer, was in his bedroom when the bomb went off. He snatched up his digital camera and ran towards the inferno. He threw up after taking his first ten frames. What made him retch, and rethink his career options, was the sight of the badly burned torso of a girl, the charred remnants of a lime-green bikini top stuck to her body.
The media reports the next day listed the death toll as nine western tourists from nearly as many countries. Another nineteen were in hospital with severe burns. An African bartender, a Muslim Zanzibari dive instructor and a teenage girl who painted henna tattoos on the white hands and feet of tourists were also burned to death.
Jed stood on the upstairs verandah of the lodge in Mana Pools National Park watching a herd of buffalo through his binoculars. He was dressed for the bush. He wore a pair of dun-coloured fatigue trousers with baggy side pockets, a brown T-shirt and sandy suede desert boots. All of his gear had been issued to him for service in Afghanistan but it suited the dry African bush just as well.
Jed heard the rattle of a diesel engine as a vehicle pulled up behind the lodge, out of sight. The buffalo, sixteen of them by his count, were meandering slowly along the length of the narrow island in the middle of the river, munching away on the grass like big black cows.
‘They call them black death, you know.’
Jed put the glasses down and saw Moses below him. He waved. Moses had brought Jed’s hired Land Rover back with him from the staff village. The sun was not long up, still low over the hills at his back. The sharp-eyed tracker had seen where Jed was looking and had identified the buffalo immediately, even though Jed found it almost impossible to pick them up again without the binoculars.
‘Why is that?’ Jed asked, although he knew he would be told the answer in any case.
‘The buffalo is the animal most feared by big-game hunters. They are unpredictable and will charge with no notice if you are on foot. If you wound a buffalo when hunting, then you had better put it down with your very next shot or run up the nearest tree, because if you don’t, he will kill you.’
‘I’ll try to remember all that.’
‘Good. The ones to fear most are the
dagga
boys, the muddy old male buffalos who are not part of a herd any more. Be especially wary of a lonely buffalo.’
Jed headed downstairs to let Moses in. Chris was at work on Miranda’s laptop computer, which she had set up on the dining table.
‘Coffee, Chris?’
She looked up. ‘Pardon me? Oh, sorry, Jed, I was just reading something. No, I’m fine, thanks.’
She had already been awake and at the computer when Jed had woken at five, half an hour before the dawn.
‘Good morning, Professor,’ Moses said as he entered the lodge.
‘Morning, Moses. I hope you got some sleep last night. Not too much partying?’
He smiled sheepishly. ‘Of course not, Professor. I was on my best behaviour.’
‘That’s good, because we don’t want to rescue you from any jealous husbands. What’s the good word around the village?’
‘As a matter of fact, there is some news from the staff. There is another person missing.’
‘Really?’ Jed asked, sitting on the carved wooden arm of a sturdy lounge chair.
‘Yes. A young woman – a maid from one of these lodges.’
‘What do they think happened to her?’ Chris looked up from the computer screen.
‘They are not sure. She went missing about the same time as Miss Miranda. This girl was bad sometimes – she used to visit a man in one of the hunting camps outside the park, so for some days they thought she had taken leave without telling anyone.’
‘Which would explain why Ncube wasn’t told about it, I guess.’ Chris looked at Jed.
Moses continued. ‘The warden checked the neighbouring camps when she did not return and she was not there. Some people think she may have been taken by a lion as well.’
‘It’s possible,’ Chris nodded. ‘The one I shot was stalking a female Parks employee.’
‘But there were no other remains found in the lion you killed, apart from …’
All three let the statement hang, unchallenged, until Chris changed the subject. ‘If she’s dead it could also have been a crocodile. Maybe she was fishing or swimming.’
‘Yes, that is very possible too,’ Moses agreed. ‘She would not be the first person in the valley to be taken by a croc. There is another thing I learned about the missing maid.’
‘What’s that?’ Jed asked.
‘Although it was not part of her duties, she used to work for your daughter.’
‘Work?’
‘She did her washing for her, her clothes, and sometimes cooked for Miranda if she was out late in the bush, calling the lions.’
‘Calling?’ Jed was trying to piece all this new information together in his mind.
Chris interrupted. ‘She’d go out at nights, with an armed ranger as an escort and sometimes the park’s ecologist, and play tapes to try to lure lions to her, so she could study them. The tapes are of other lions, and of dying prey. But, Moses, there are signs in all the lodges saying that washing and cooking are not part of the maids’ duties.’
‘Exactly. This girl caused some resentment amongst the other staff. Jed, your daughter was very good to her, and paid her well, in US dollars, but the other staff say the girl was letting her normal duties slip. They were jealous of her, and of her clothes.’
‘Her clothes?’
‘Yes. It seems Miranda had given this girl some of her own clothes. The other staff think that maybe she was stealing things from Miranda’s washing.’
Chris shrugged, not sure what to make of the new information, then had a thought. ‘Maybe that’s why we haven’t been able to find any of Miranda’s day-today clothes. It’s possible this missing maid stole them and ran off.’
‘Hard to say. I’d sure like to talk to her, though, if she isn’t already dead,’ Jed said. ‘For now, I want to see Miranda’s campsite. Do you want to come with us, Chris?’
‘No, I think I’ll keep going through these computer files. See what I can salvage. Miranda did some great work here and I want to make sure it’s catalogued and maybe even published in a paper, with full credit, some day.’
Jed nodded. ‘That’d be nice. Have you found anything else personal on the computer? Emails, a diary, that kind of thing?’
‘I can’t get into her email account because it’s password-protected. I’ve tried everything I can think of, but I can’t crack it. She’s got a file marked personal, but that’s blocked as well. I’m afraid I’m no computer hacker, but I’ll find someone in Jo’burg who can get into this stuff and then I’ll email it to you.’
‘Thank you,’ Jed said. He thought Chris looked fresh and lovely this morning, dressed in a sleeveless blue shirt with the top three buttons undone. He couldn’t help but notice the swell of her full breasts as she leaned forwards to take a closer look at the computer screen. Her short cut-off jeans and brown ankle-boots showed off her golden legs to perfection. Her hair was piled high and he noticed she had put on a little makeup.
Last night, when he’d seen she had been crying, he’d had the urge to take her in his arms, to comfort her and to seek solace for himself, despite the arguing that had gone on between them beforehand. He’d seen soldiers hug each other after a dangerous mission or cry on each other’s shoulders over the loss of a comrade. Wounded men needed friends to hold their hands. Humans often needed to touch as part of the healing process. He and Christine had both loved Miranda, and they were both grieving for her now.
Jed put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Sure you don’t want to take a break and get some fresh air with us?’
She placed her hand on his and looked up into his eyes, forcing a little smile. ‘I’m OK, Jed. You go with Moses, see some of the bush. I’ll fix us a salad for lunch and maybe we’ll go for a drive and a sundowner together later.’
He felt his heart beat a little faster at the touch of her hand. He was experiencing stirrings in his body which had been dormant for six months during his time in Afghanistan. There was an old myth, common to all armies of the world, that the cooks put something in the food to suppress the men’s sexual urges. In fact, it was just plain old hard work and lack of sleep that made life easier, in one respect at least, for soldiers away from home. Jed had done nothing physically strenuous since his fight with the burglar in Johannesburg, and there was nothing stopping him from feeling acutely aroused by the close presence of a beautiful woman.
He reluctantly removed his hand from her shoulder and asked Moses to help him with Miranda’s folded safari tent.
‘Are we going to camp now?’ The tracker looked surprised.
‘No. I just want to take the tent out and have a look at it. I thought that if I do that on the spot where Miranda was camped it might at least give me a feel for what her life here was like.’
‘I see,’ Moses lied. Death was a part of every African family these days, especially with the virus.
In the old days families had grieved for days and days, the women wailing and the men drinking. Now it was not unusual for people in the towns to take an hour off for a funeral and then go back to work afterwards. Moses had lost many friends to HIV-AIDS and the cemeteries of Zimbabwe were overflowing with the bare earthen mounds of fresh graves. In most towns, new land had been acquired to meet the demand for more and more burial spaces. Kariba, where Moses lived, had been hit particularly hard by the disease. The town had a high population of prostitutes whose clientele included long-distance truck drivers crossing the border with Zambia, as well as the fishermen from the kapenta rigs – the floating fishing platforms that harvested tiny fish from the lake.