The Protector, page 11
Geoff put a hand over his mouth. Despite the seriousness of the situation he was in he had to stop himself from laughing at the look on the lion’s face as he turned his big head, mid copulation, and stared wide-eyed at the elephant herd, which was on the move again and now striding purposefully towards the big cat and his mate.
As soon as he was done, less than twenty seconds after he had begun, the male lion withdrew, stood up and ran away in the opposite direction to the elephants. He left the lioness, who stood and snarled again, this time at the advancing giants.
The matriarch of the herd raised her trunk again and let out a trumpet call to show she meant business. Geoff knew elephants hated lions and would usually do their best to chase them away from their young. The big female elephant broke into a charge, and her brood followed.
The lioness stood defiantly in the grass, trying to stare down the matriarch. The problem for Geoff was that if the elephants continued on their current course then they would trample him into the ground on their way to trying to kill the lioness. When being chased by an elephant it was acceptable, as a last resort, to run for your life, but to run in full view of a lioness might encourage her to zip after him and take him down as an easy snack.
Geoff drew his pistol, pulled back the slide and then let it fly forward, chambering a round. He took a deep breath and stood, then raised his right hand over his head. The elephant matriarch saw him and slowed. She shook her big head again, then changed direction slightly towards him.
‘Hey!’ he yelled. ‘Voetsek!’
The sound of his voice telling her to go away made her stop, her family bunching to a halt behind her in a cloud of dust. She shook her head again, then decided to kill him. There was no flaring of her ears, no angry trumpet blast. Instead, the old cow folded her ears flat by the sides of her head, curled her trunk up between her tusks and under her chin, lowered her head, and charged.
These were all warning signs that there was nothing ‘mock’ about this attack. Adrenaline coursed through his body, and despite his training and experience he felt fear. This was the first time he’d been on the receiving end of a full-blown charge while on foot.
The cow raised a cloud of dust in her wake as she shifted the focus of her anger and her relatives followed her. Geoff could feel the earth vibrate under the pounding of their feet. He raised his hand and pulled the trigger twice, firing two shots in the air. All this did was scare the lioness, who turned and ran off into the bush, but the noise of the gunfire just seemed to enrage the elephant even more.
Geoff ran for his life, arms and legs pumping, the radio tracking gear bouncing and bumping off his body. He cleared a fallen tree then stumbled as his right foot went into a shallow depression. His arms windmilled as he fought to keep from falling but his feet carried on, almost tripping over themselves. If he fell now, he would be dead.
Ahead of him was a line of trees, which he made for. He recalled there was a game-viewing road somewhere nearby. As he sprinted, not daring to look back, he heard a noise.
Bang. Bang.
Gunfire. The elephant was gaining on him easily, still committed to its mission to catch him and crush him to death. Geoff wondered if someone was shooting at him, or at something else – poachers, maybe. Then he realised that by firing two shots in the air earlier he had inadvertently given the bush-telegraph signal that he was lost – even though he wasn’t. The person who had just fired their weapon was answering him.
Geoff raised his pistol and fired again, twice. The elephants behind him took no notice, judging by the sound of their feet and the odd trumpet blast from an excited juvenile or two, thrilled to be caught up in the hunt.
Thorn branches whipped and ripped at his bare arms as he entered the tree line. The elephants would crash through and mow down this thin vegetation like it wasn’t there. Ahead of him, Geoff could see another clearing. He heard the sound of gunfire, two shots, close enough to be almost as scary as the animals on his tail. Someone had heard and answered his two-shot call for assistance, but he was not safe yet.
Geoff vaulted a mound of dirt and came to the road. In his peripheral vision on the left he saw movement: an open-top Land Rover game viewer was racing towards him. Someone in the back was pointing.
Geoff took a chance and broke ninety degrees left onto the road. ‘Reverse!’ he yelled.
The Land Rover kept coming.
Still running, Geoff raised his gun hand over his head and waved his arm down, away from himself. ‘Reverse!’
The driver seemed to get the gist of what he was saying and the game viewer stopped. Geoff glanced over his shoulder and saw the matriarch and her brood burst out onto the road and stop in a cloud of dust. The grandmother wailed a long, high-pitched trumpet blast at Geoff and the people on the truck.
Geoff kept sprinting until he reached the Land Rover. He put a foot on the front bumper bar and slid into the tracker’s seat perched on the front left-side fender of the vehicle. ‘Drive! Drive! Drive!’
The woman behind the wheel rammed the gear stick into reverse, let out the clutch and accelerated.
Geoff gripped the handle on the side of the green canvas-covered seat hard as the driver reversed at high speed, jinking the steering wheel to stay straight. The female elephant loomed large in Geoff’s view and for a moment he thought he’d left his escape too late.
At that moment, the driver turned hard and took them around the bend. Geoff saw the matriarch falter, then slow as they disappeared from view. The driver kept swinging, then rammed the stick into first and accelerated away, thankfully heading forward this time. Geoff slumped into the seat, feeling faint and dizzy.
A kilometre on, with no sight of elephants in the rear-view mirrors or any other game around, the guide driving the Land Rover pulled off the road into a well-trodden clearing.
‘Geoff? Are you all right?’
He turned and saw Doc, sitting in the row of seats behind the driver. She had a worried look on her face and was cradling a rifle across her lap.
Sue and Zola, in the rearmost tier of seats, broke into uncontrollable fits of laugher.
‘Knock it off, you two,’ Doc said to the two young women.
They all climbed out of the Land Rover and Doc introduced Geoff to the driver, Margaux. ‘She’s a freelance guide and she’s going to be driving us on our tour through Zimbabwe and Namibia.’
‘That was smart work, firing the two shots in the air,’ Margaux said as she shook hands with Geoff. She was tall with short red hair and a nice smile, which she flashed him.
Geoff looked down. ‘Um, thanks, but I feel like an idiot.’ Geoff thought Margaux was probably trying to spare him some embarrassment, but Doc looked angry.
‘You should not have gone out in the bush alone,’ Doc said.
‘No. Bad boy,’ Sue said, from over Doc’s shoulder.
Doc silenced her with a look, then said: ‘Help Margaux organise some water and coffee, Sue.’
‘Yes, Prof,’ Sue said, not quite contritely.
‘But seriously,’ Doc said, turning back to Geoff, ‘why did you go out there unescorted? You never qualified as a walking trails guide, did you?’
He shook his head. ‘No. But I had my nine-mill with me.’
‘Yes, but other than using it to call for help, you know as well as I do that peashooter’s useless against an elephant, and not much better against a lion.’
‘I saw a lion – two in fact, a mating pair,’ Geoff admitted.
Doc glowered at him. ‘Don’t be smart with me, young man.’ Geoff heard Zola and Sue sniggering and whispering behind her, but Doc didn’t react. ‘I know section rangers in the Kruger Park twice your age and with a thousand times more experience who won’t walk more than ten metres from their vehicle in the bush without a .375-calibre hunting rifle. Don’t you ever pull that shit again.’
He looked at the ground. ‘OK, Prof.’
‘No. Yes, Professor.’
He toed the dirt. ‘Yes, Professor.’
Doc put her hands on her hips and sighed. ‘Now, where are these lions, and where’s Charlie?’
*
After Geoff had described where he’d last seen Charlie and the lions, Doc walked to Margaux, who had lifted a cooler box from the back of the Land Rover and was busy pouring coffee. ‘You think we can find the lions?’ Doc asked the guide.
Margaux handed her a mug. ‘Sure, if you’re up for a bit of a game drive and maybe some tracking.’
Doc shook her head. ‘We’re not here to sightsee, but apart from Charlie – if he hasn’t been trampled to death – there’s another pangolin somewhere in this block and I need to know where the lions are so we don’t stumble across their path while my students are doing their research. Let’s find these cats so we can stay out of their way.’
‘After coffee?’ Margaux asked.
Doc took a long sip. ‘Definitely after coffee.’ She lowered her voice. ‘And after Geoff recovers from his near-death experience and the dressing-down I just gave him.’
Margaux laughed. ‘Having just seen you in action, Doc, if it was me, I’d rather face a charging elephant.’
Doc breathed in the cool, dry morning air of the bushveld. This was where she was meant to be, not busting poachers in shopping centre car parks and casinos in Johannesburg. She’d been seduced by the thought that she could make a difference and maybe she had, for a while, but that part of her life was over now.
Dead.
Doc thought about Graham. She replayed her last conversations with him. He’d been his usual flirtatious self and while she’d rebuked him with a firm no, she consoled herself by remembering his smile and the mischievous look in his eye that had said: ‘You’ll change your mind’.
‘What are you smiling about?’ Sue Oliver had sidled up to her without Doc noticing.
‘Oh, nothing; just something Graham said to me,’ Doc said. She didn’t want to say she was smiling about a guy who had just been murdered. The truth was that Graham’s murder had unsettled her. If she was reading too much into it, that it was somehow related to the work she was doing, then it was a sign that she was going crazy. If Graham’s murder was totally unrelated, just the actions of an opportunistic criminal who had decided to shoot and rob a man with a flat tyre, then that said too much that she did not want to acknowledge about her beloved country.
‘Do you think Graham might have been murdered because of his anti-poaching work?’ Sue asked.
‘It’s possible,’ Doc said. That was the third and, possibly, most likely reason why Graham had been killed. Hoedspruit was not a big town and everyone knew everyone’s business. ‘Graham’s shiny camouflage-painted Ford Ranger was a very distinctive vehicle and there are probably many poachers or their friends or relatives who wanted to get even with him. He had a reputation as a real tough oke.’
‘So I heard.’ Sue looked over her shoulder. ‘I think Sara fancied him.’
Doc looked past Sue to where Sara had set up her video camera on a tripod. She seemed to be filming overlay, or ‘B roll’ as Doc had learned it was called – vision that generally set the scene for life in Africa. A coffee stop in the bush fitted the bill.
Doc recalled that it was Sara who had taken the call from the passer-by who had found Graham’s body, but in the rush that followed Doc had forgotten to ask why.
‘What makes you say that?’ Doc said.
Sue dunked a rusk in her coffee before answering. ‘I saw them chatting, quite a bit, at your surprise party. At one point it looked like Sara was giving Graham her number. He took her phone off her and was keying something in.’
As with Annaliese on the dance floor, Doc felt not the slightest hint of jealousy about Sara and Graham potentially getting together, even though Graham had been trying to hit on her at the same time. Nonetheless, she would not have picked Graham as Sara’s type. Like Geoff, though, Graham was very handsome. Had been.
She remembered Graham lying in the dirt, his face drained of life, the bullet wound in his forehead. Was that my fault?
‘Are you OK?’ Sue asked.
Doc took another sip of coffee and nodded. ‘Fine.’ She wasn’t. Another man was dead.
‘Do you think that whoever killed Graham might have been involved in pangolin poaching?’
Doc looked at Sue. ‘Why would you think that?’
She shrugged. ‘Graham was going to be our bodyguard, in the bush. He was a bit of a bragger, wasn’t he?’
Doc thought about that. ‘He did have a tendency to shoot his mouth off after a few drinks.’ Doc remembered the first time she had met Graham, how he’d told her about a gunfight he’d been in, at Khaya Ngala. He and his partner, Oscar, had come across a gunman, a ranger who turned out to be corrupt. Graham had told her at great length about how his partner had been wounded and how Graham had saved his friend’s life.
‘Yes, he told me a couple of stories as well,’ said Sue. ‘Maybe he talked too much about what we’d be doing here. Do you think that maybe some poacher might try and follow us here, in the bush? I mean, they’d know we’ll be tracking pangolins, if Graham said anything about our work.’
It sounded far-fetched, but Doc reminded herself that this was South Africa and criminals were resourceful, cunning and well-informed. Also, the stakes for taking a pangolin were high.
‘We’ll be careful,’ Doc said. She raised her voice so the others could hear her. ‘We’ll be careful, like not going out in the bush without a proper armed escort, whether we’ve been a safari guide or not. Today’s shown us that it’s certainly not just poachers we need to be worried about out here. We’re operating in Big Five country and I want everyone to remember that.’
Geoff nodded. ‘Yes, Professor.’
She gave him a small smile. ‘It’s Prof. Or Doc when we’re being less formal.’
He grinned back at her, happy as a puppy again. ‘OK . . . Doc. Sorry.’
She drained her coffee and held up a hand. ‘Enough. Lesson learned. Now, let’s find these lions, and Charlie.’
Chapter 9
Where am I? Ian Laidlaw groped in the darkness for the bedside table and his fingers closed around his phone. He pressed the side button and the screen illuminated the room. Ian blinked. He was in the Intercontinental, at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport.
He looked at the time: 4.00 am. Ian groaned. He was now wide awake with jetlag. He got up, searched for the light switch and went to the bathroom. He rummaged in his wheelie bag for his running shorts, shoes and T-shirt, dressed, and found his way to the hotel gym.
It was dark outside, the terminal’s lights doing battle with fog or smog, or both. Ian was breathing too heavily after his first kilometre on the treadmill. A man got on the machine next to him and said something to him in a language he didn’t understand, but which he thought was probably Afrikaans.
‘Sorry?’ Ian pushed a button on the treadmill and dropped his pace per kilometre by ten seconds.
‘Don’t worry,’ the guy said in English in between sprints, ‘it’s the altitude. You’re nearly 1,800 metres above sea level.’
Ian panted. ‘Oh, good. I thought I might be heading for a heart attack.’
‘Australian?’
Ian saved his breath and gave another nod.
‘You’ll enjoy it here. I lived in Perth for ten years, but I came back. Too many bloody rules and the cost of living was ridiculous. Also, we couldn’t afford a cleaner and my wife was complaining about having to scrub the toilets.’
Ian jogged on, happy to let the man do the talking.
‘There’s a lot of kak here, with load shedding – no electricity – water problems, crime and crazy politics, but we know how to enjoy ourselves. And the beer and wine are cheap compared to Australia.’ The man ended his run. ‘You must enjoy it here as well.’
‘Thanks.’
Ian pushed himself through five kilometres then went back to his room, showered, packed, checked his emails, and headed for breakfast. Back in the airport terminal he stopped in Books & Things and found himself a thriller novel set in Africa before carrying on past other shops and restaurants to the domestic half of the terminal.
He found the South African Airlink counters and checked in for his flight to Hoedspruit.
His guess at the pronunciation of the name of the town was way off and the woman behind the counter gently corrected him while printing him a boarding pass.
Ian thanked her and headed through security.
Ian found and paid to enter an airline lounge, then browsed the buffet and made himself another cup of coffee. He felt restless. Going through his emails earlier had reminded him, in the sober pre-dawn darkness, of how little he had to do anymore with the business he had created from nothing.
He’d seen little of Africa or African people so far, other than an annoyingly slow hour-long wait to pass through immigration on landing, and the check-in clerk and room service waiter who had brought him a good piece of fillet and a decent bottle of red wine for dinner. The man on the treadmill next to him had given him some insights, but had also left him feeling slightly apprehensive about what lay ahead.
When it was time for him to go to his gate, Ian went down the escalators to ground level, where a bus would take him to his aircraft. Every time the sliding doors opened to allow passengers on other flights to exit the terminal a chilly wind knifed through the lightweight khaki safari shirt he’d bought at the Kathmandu store in Sydney. He boarded the flight on time and nodded off, only to be wakened by the pilot’s voice.
‘Temperature on the ground in Hoedspruit is a warm twenty-six degrees today. We’ll have you disembarking on time.’ The pilot told the crew to prepare the aircraft for landing and Ian stretched his arms over his head and yawned. He turned to look out the window.
