She was silent for a while and Luke covered his free ear with his palm to shut out the honking of traffic and shouts of Dar es Salaam’s market vendors, in case he missed her reply.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘But don’t give this number to any other reporter or else no one will save you from me.’
‘You got it,’ he said, and she gave him Jed’s mobile phone number.
‘Where was he when you last spoke to him?’ Luke asked before she could hang up.
Again she hesitated, but having revealed the phone number, saw no harm in telling him. ‘Still in Zimbabwe. God, I even hate the sound of the name of that damn country. He said he was in a place up north, near where Miranda lived. Kabira or somewhere like that. Only place his phone has worked in the last few days.’
‘You mean Kariba. Thanks, Mrs Lewis. Did he say when he was leaving?’
Her patience was wearing thin. ‘He’s booked on a flight from South Africa next Thursday, I think, but he doesn’t tell me everything, Mr Scarborough. Never has. That was always the problem with being married to a Special Forces guy. They never tell you squat.’
‘Thanks again for all your help. I’ll call back and explain some more if I can, when I can.’
‘No offence, Mr Scarborough, but I hope I never speak to another reporter as long as I live.’
He’d got what he wanted from her, but having Jed’s number was no use if the man never answered his bloody phone.
The Tazara Express was an express in name only and made interminable stops during the fortyfive- hour trip from Dar to its terminus at Kapiri Mposhi, about two hundred kilometres north of Lusaka. At Kapiri Mposhi station Luke had to push away a pickpocket. He was petrified he would lose the camera memory card with the pictures of Hassan bin Zayid and his companion. After the encounter with the Zambian thief he stuffed the card into his underpants, paranoid that he might still lose his daypack on the remainder of his journey.
He suffered attacks of nausea every time he recalled how he had killed the man in Zanzibar, the sight of the body and the smells of death. However, his stomach was empty and he knew he had to eat.
He crammed a gristly meat pie into his mouth and downed a litre bottle of water before heading to the bus station. He found a coach bound for Lusaka and jumped aboard just as the driver was shutting the door. Sleep-deprived and filthy, he drifted off into a fitful doze, waking twice when the African businessman sitting next to him politely but firmly removed his head from his shoulder.
The coach pulled up at the Lusaka terminal. Luke staggered out into the harsh sunlight and joined a queue for the reeking men’s toilet. Afterwards he tried Jed Banks’s number again. Once more, all he got was the soldier’s recorded voicemail message. He screwed his eyes shut and fought back a terrible urge to start sobbing. He took a deep breath. He realised he was probably suffering from shock and fatigue, but he had to keep it together.
Luke tossed up whether to go directly to the United States embassy in Lusaka, wherever that was, or to press on to Kariba, in Zimbabwe, in the hope of tracking Jed down there. First, however, he knew he had to call his chief of staff in London and explain what had happened to him.
‘Let me get this straight,’ Bernie said, incredulous, ‘you killed a man in self-defence. Fucking hell, Luke!’
‘Yes, Bernie. I was mugged in Zanzibar, but it wasn’t a coincidence, he was after my camera and -’
‘It’s an expensive camera, but you should have just given it over. You’re insured, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Let me finish, Bernie!’ Luke talked his chief of staff through his theory about Hassan bin Zayid and the link to Jed Banks. At the end, he said, ‘So, what do you think?’
‘I think you’ve had a bad experience, and that you should probably find a lawyer. Better still, let me get our legal people onto it. I’ll get them to see if they have a contact in Tanzania and we’ll get this mess sorted out.’
The driver of the bus was honking the horn, signalling passengers he was ready to depart. Africans loaded with snacks and drinks lined up to board. The bus carried on to Harare, Zimbabwe, via the border crossing at Chirundu. Once across the border, Luke figured he could hitchhike or take a minibus to Kariba.
‘I’m not in Tanzania any more. I’m in Zambia,’ Luke shouted above the bus station’s din.
‘Fucking hell, Luke! You mean you left the country without telling the police or
anyone
you were involved in the death of a local citizen? Where are you now? Exactly? I’ll have one of our lawyers call you back as soon as possible and give you advice.’
‘I’ve got a bus to catch, Bernie. I’ll email you the pictures as soon as I can download them onto a computer. You judge for yourself.’ Luke knew this was a career-making news story, one worth risking imprisonment over.
‘I don’t care about the bloody pictures. The story’s no good to me with you rotting in an African jail, Luke.’
‘Bye, Bernie. I’ll call again once I’ve found Banks.’
‘Luke, wait, I’ll -’
Luke ended the call and sprinted for the bus, which had started to move. The driver opened the door for him and he jumped aboard. He reclaimed his former seat, squeezing in next to the disappointed-looking businessman.
Luke dialled Jed Banks’s phone again. He heard the same message. ‘Shit!’ he said out loud, and thumped the window with his fist.
The businessman started and then stared at him.
‘Sorry,’ Luke mumbled. He began to shake, as he’d done after the killing, and wrapped his arms around himself. Despite his bravado on the phone to Bernie, he was scared. Eventually, he calmed himself and fell asleep against the window, waking a little while later once the soothing hum of the coach’s big diesel came to a halt. Luke wiped his eyes and pulled back the curtain. ‘Where are we?’ he asked the man next to him.
‘This is the border. We will be here for some time.’
It was an understatement. For two hours they sat in a queue of long-distance lorries. Children sold corn cooked on charcoal braziers to the passengers. Prostitutes in gaudy miniskirts and low-cut blouses, some reed thin with the virus, sold themselves to the truck drivers. African music blared loud from car radios and battery-powered boom boxes. Luke walked up and down the line of vehicles to stretch his legs and try to clear his head. The sun’s rays felt as though they were singeing his scalp and he regretted the loss of his hat, amongst the rest of his possessions. He took out the phone and saw he had no signal and, of more concern, the battery indicator showed he was nearly out of power. Even if he could have found a power point he had left his charger at the hotel.
The coach passengers joined a long queue of travellers seated outside the Zambian customs and immigration offices. Luke had switched from his Australian to his British passport – the latter a legacy of having an English-born father. He thought that if the Tanzanian police had put out an alert for him they would have used his Australian passport number, which he had declared to the owner of the hotel he had stayed at in Stone Town. When he finally made it inside the building and fronted the immigration clerk, the bored woman barely gave him a second glance as she pounded his passport with a worn stamp.
The bus crossed a new-looking bridge over the wide Zambezi. The Zimbabwean border formalities were a little quicker, but by now Luke was losing what little reserves of patience he had.
‘Come on, come on,’ he fumed under his breath as the last of the passengers ambled over to the bus.
Africans, he had noticed, never seemed in a hurry to do anything.
Chirundu, on the Zimbabwean side, from what Luke could see of it, consisted of a few official buildings, a seedy-looking hotel and a general store. As the bus rolled past a line of lorries Luke was surprised to see a lone bull elephant standing between two of the trucks.
The man next to him noted his wide-eyed look and said, ‘You often see elephants around here. They come sniffing around the trucks at night, looking for those transporting maize and other food. They wander from the bush and through the township on the way to the river to drink.’
The border-town squalor of Chirundu quickly gave way to thick bushland. The coach had to stop after a few kilometres for three big black Cape buffalo that were ambling across the road.
‘I didn’t see any game on the roads in Zambia,’ Luke said.
‘You slept most of the journey, remember? But no, you’re right, there are virtually no wild animals left in Zambia outside of their national parks. They have all been poached. The Zambians are all criminals, you know.’
‘So I’ve been told.’
The road came to a T-junction and Luke saw a sign that pointed to Mana Pools National Park on the left. The bus went right, climbing slowly up the Zambezi escarpment, and Luke was treated to a grand view of the national park where Miranda Banks-Lewis had supposedly been killed by a lion.
The bus stopped at the service station at Makuti, where a sign pointed down the hill to Kariba, seventy-three kilometres away. Luke waved goodbye to the businessman and found a shady tree to sit under while he waited to hitch a ride into town.
He felt better being out of the confines of the coach and another step closer to his quarry. He forgot his tiredness and rank smell and the fact that he was wanted for trumped-up drug offences and, possibly, murder. He sniffed the warm, heavy air of the Zambezi Valley. He was on the scent of a story that would probably make the newspapers in every country in the western world, and then some.
There could even be a book in it.
He would not stop until he found Jed Banks. He owed Banks for saving his life in Afghanistan and, if things panned out as he hoped they would, the news he had for the Green Beret master sergeant might just settle that debt – if he wasn’t too late.
The Tanzanian customs man was impressed by the luxury motorboat. Boats of all sizes came and went from Bagamoyo Harbour, from leaking dhows to cargo ships, but the cruiser, with its sleek modern lines, polished chrome fittings and impressive array of radar and radio masts, was a thing of beauty It was registered in Zanzibar, he saw from the writing on the stern. It had to be owned by an Arab.
He was right.
‘
Jambo,’
the Arab said as he stepped onto the dock.
‘
Habari,’
the customs officer replied. ‘You are coming from Zanzibar?’ he continued in Swahili.
‘Yes. I have some very sad duties to perform here. Two of my most trusted workers are returning home,’ the Arab explained. ‘Come aboard, fetch them now,’ he said to two African men in the uniforms of bellhops from a hotel in town.
‘Sad?’ the customs officer asked as he accepted an expensive foreign cigarette from the packet proffered by the Arab.
The man gestured back to the boat’s gangway with his glowing cigarette tip. It was early morning and the light was still dim, thanks to the overcast sky which masked the rising sun.
The customs officer shook his head as the first of the two coffins was carried down the gangway, the Africans struggling under its weight.
‘The virus,’ the Arab said, shrugging his shoulders as if there was nothing anyone could have done.
‘Would you like to look inside?’
The customs man was a good Muslim. He did not drink and he led a relatively pure life. He was young, twenty-five, and he had his whole life ahead of him. He had listened to the advertisements, seen the billboards and read the pamphlets about HIV-AIDS and he was determined to stay healthy.
He rarely cheated on his wife and when he did use the services of prostitutes he always took up the offer of a condom. He knew the risks of transmission other than by the exchange of bodily fluids was minimal; however, he did not want to take any risk that was not absolutely crucial to the performance of his job.
‘No, I do not need to see the bodies,’ he said.
The Arab handed over the two death certificates, and the customs man scanned them. They appeared to be in order. ‘Why weren’t these men buried on Zanzibar?’
‘They were from the same village, here on the mainland. Their last wish was to be buried with the other members of their families.’
‘It is good of you to go to this trouble.’
‘These men served me well. This is the least I can do for them.’
The customs officer felt bad. He had assumed he would dislike the rich Arab, simply from the look of his new boat and the cut of his tailor-made clothes. This was a good man. He wrote down the name of the Arab –
Hassan bin Zayid -
and the description of cargo –
human remains ×
2 - on his log sheet.
Hassan climbed into the passenger seat of the minibus and the second African slid shut the rear door and sat on one of the two cheap coffins. Hassan smiled. One type of cargo that did not raise eyebrows in Africa these days was human remains. Coffins were for sale at roadside carpentry stalls and in hardware stores and it was not unusual to see them being carried, full, on the backs of pick-up trucks.
The virus had taken the mystery, the ritual, the strangeness and even the solemnity out of death.
Disposing of human beings had become big business in Africa.
‘Where to, boss?’ the driver asked.
‘To the ranch,’ bin Zayid said, referring to a game farm owned by the family. The manager, a white Kenyan who had moved to Tanzania to run the property, was away on holidays with his young family.
Hassan’s private aircraft, a Cessna 208, was parked there.
They drove fast and in silence and eventually the driver turned onto a potholed secondary road.
‘Careful,’ Hassan barked as the two coffins bounced and slammed into the metal tray of the van.
The man in the back, who had bumped his head on the roof when the caskets bounced, turned away to hide his smile. What difference did a few bumps make to people who were already dead?
‘Where are you taking these men to be buried, boss?’ the driver asked.
‘I’m going to fly them to the village where they came from. It is near Arusha.’
‘Ah,’ said the driver. ‘That is far.’
‘Yes, that is why I am flying there.’
‘Will you be wanting us to pick you up again, from the ranch, when you return the aeroplane?’