Far Horizon (2 page)

Twelve Months Earlier

‘I
am dying, Michael,' Carlos said. He folded the single sheet of cheap notepaper carefully in half, then placed it on the smoking embers of the campfire, next to the blackened kettle.

The day was warm already, even though the sun was only just emerging, red and threatening, above the tree line. The sun can be merciless at the end of the southern African dry season.

Major Michael Williams – he preferred Mike, but Carlos was always so damned formal – swilled a mouthful of lukewarm water from the plastic litre-bottle. He paused, just for a moment, before swallowing it. He felt ashamed, but he couldn't help wondering if his friend had drunk from the bottle as well.

Both men watched in silence as the paper slowly wilted and began to smoulder. The Australian tried to think of something to say that wouldn't sound pathetic.

‘There are drugs. We can get them through the UN. You can live . . . for years.' He knew he had failed as soon as he uttered the words.

Carlos dipped into the breast pocket of the sweat-stained blue two-piece overalls that the African civilian United Nations de-miners wore in the field, and pulled out a crumpled packet of Zimbabwean Newbury cigarettes, the remnants of a carton Mike had bought him on his last leave. At fifty cents a packet there are few economic incentives to quit smoking in southern Africa. Carlos reached across, rising from the jerry can of diesel on which he was perched, and offered Mike a smoke. The army officer accepted, flicked open his Zippo and lit both cigarettes.

‘This is Mozambique, not Australia or America. I am finished,' Carlos said, then dragged deeply on his cigarette.

He coughed as he exhaled. His cough had been bad for weeks and was getting worse. His eyes were deep in their sockets, his ebony skin stretched much tighter across his cheekbones than it had been when the two men first met in Maputo, five months ago.

They had been late leaving Maputo, the Mozambican capital, the day before and Mike had grabbed their unopened mail on the way out of the office. He had stuffed the letters in his daypack and had only remembered them this morning. He was sure they both knew when he handed it to him over breakfast what was going to be in Isabella's letter to Carlos.

Mike reflected that it had been he who urged Carlos to see Isabella for a check-up and a blood test. Now that the news both men dreaded had finally been delivered, he couldn't help feeling somehow responsible.

‘I have the virus, Michael.' The smoke from the burning letter had obscured his face for a second or two. It was a tough enough admission for any young African male to make.

Mike had seen the condom advertisements and the billboards pushing monogamy, but it was all too little, too late. Every day the newspapers carried another story about AIDS orphans, anti-retroviral drugs and statistics. The statistics and projections were mind-blowing, almost unreal. Carlos was real.

The birds were coming to life as the sun turned the butterfly-shaped mopani leaves on the dense thickets of trees around them from pink to ochre, to gold. Despite his friend's terrible news there was still promise in the new day for Mike.

He thought of his own letter from Isabella as he prodded the fire with a rusted tent peg and then topped up the two coffee mugs with hot water from the kettle. Mike's note was on the same cheap hospital stationery, but its message, unlike Carlos's, was a lifeline.

‘What does your letter say?' Carlos asked.

‘Not much,' Mike lied. ‘She's going to be at Mapai in a day or so. I was hoping to meet her there, but now . . .'

‘I am not going to die today or tomorrow. You do not have to stay with me every minute.' White teeth lit his broad black face as he forced a grin for his friend's sake. ‘I will take you there when we have finished surveying the minefield and you can travel back with her if you like,' he said, waving his cigarette in a vaguely Latin gesture to indicate the matter was solved.

Mike was excited because of his news, and, as a
result, also felt guilty. ‘We have to talk,' Isabella had written in her spidery, barely decipherable doctor's hand, adding the date and time she expected to arrive at the mission clinic in Mapai, where she did volunteer work once a month. Perhaps, he mused, it was the confirmation of Carlos's illness that spurred on his thoughts. Whatever the cause, he now knew what he had to do, what he had to say to Isabella. Carlos was a good ten years younger than he was. A strong, articulate, educated young African man in his prime, who spoke more languages than any army linguist Mike had ever met. He had been a university-educated teacher before he became a soldier. Currently, as a civilian employee of the United Nations, he oversaw people who dug in the dirt of Mozambique for landmines. Now he faced a death sentence. Life shouldn't be this fucking hard, Mike said to himself.

‘The doctor, she is the one for you,' Carlos said. He smiled, but Mike could see sadness in his dark eyes. Carlos turned his glance to the dying fire and flicked his cigarette into the hot ash.

Mike stood, shrugged off the faded grey T-shirt he had slept in and fetched his mottled camouflage shirt from the front seat of the Nissan Patrol. He ran a hand through his close-cropped hair and then buttoned the uniform shirt as he walked, trying to ignore the smell of stale smoke and dried sweat. He brushed a smear of dust from the circular blue and white embroidered United Nations roundel stitched to the armband on his right sleeve. Below the UN badge was an Australian flag and his country's name, stitched in white cotton. He was, as he realised everyday,
a long way from home. He scratched the stubble on his chin and decided that as he was in the bush he could forgo a shave for one day. Mike walked around to Carlos's side of the fire and laid a hand on his shoulder.

‘We'll see Isabella together. She'll tell us what you need and we'll get it. I'll see to it, mate.'

Carlos didn't look up, and Mike removed his hand. The remains of their half-eaten breakfast, tinned herrings in tomato sauce wrapped in
pao
, the locally baked bread, sat cold and unappetising on a plastic plate on the upturned Manica beer crate that served as their table. Mike grabbed the last of the
pao
and shovelled the oily mess into his mouth. ‘Let's go,' he said between swallows.

‘I do not want to endanger your life, Michael,' Carlos said as the Australian busied himself loading their meagre camping stores and bedrolls into the back of the Nissan.

‘Pass me the gas bottle. You're not going to endanger my life unless we start kissing, mate,' Mike said, in a lame attempt at lightening the sombre mood.

‘You know what I mean.'

He was hinting at what all of them feared, deep down inside. All of those involved in the dirty, backbreaking task of cleaning up the remains of other people's wars. If one of them stepped on a mine, the other would have to treat him. There would be blood and there would be saliva and vomit.

‘No, Carlos, don't worry about it,' Mike said. ‘We'll see it through.' Mike knew this was an easy statement for him to make, as he only had a month left to run in
Mozambique of his posting with the UN Accelerated De-mining Program. After that, he would be off home to Australia. Or maybe even to Portugal with Isabella, if things worked out.

‘Right, let's get to work,' Mike said.

Carlos nodded and drained his cup. They loaded the jerry cans and climbed into the Nissan for the short, bumpy trip from their bush campsite along a track one of the UN teams had been clearing of antipersonnel mines. The team had been called away two days earlier to destroy some mortar bombs found in a small village north of Mapai. They should have been back by now, but it had turned out the bombs were just the first items in a big cache of ammo left over from the civil war days, and they had been delayed.

Carlos and Mike had been warned that a party of politicians and journalists were going to be visiting their AO – area of operations – in a week's time. They had been tasked by Jake, their supervisor, to find some accessible places where they could safely show the VIPs what the UN teams were doing.

‘All this for a PR stunt, eh? What a joke,' Mike said as he drove. Carlos stayed silent. Despite his complaining, Mike knew that glad-handing politicians and babysitting journalists was an important, if sometimes painful, part of their job. The recent pace of international events had taken the world's attention away from UN backwaters like Mozambique and the de-miners knew they were fighting for every cent of funding from a shrinking budget. The more publicity they could generate about their work, the greater
chance they had of staying in business until the job of mine clearing was finished once and for all.

Carlos's silence unnerved Mike. Normally the African was chatty, and ordinarily Mike would have been grateful for the respite. He hated mornings. Today, though, he craved his friend's banal questions about life in Australia and the other countries he had visited, or his musings on the league table of African soccer teams, which interested the Australian about as much as the game itself. Mike busied himself by turning on the Global Positioning System receiver mounted on the dashboard and watching the clever little gadget acquire a signal from three orbiting American satellites somewhere in space.

It was seven o'clock when they arrived at the track junction, where the mine-clearing team had stopped work before being called away. Carlos and Mike had arrived in the area the previous evening, but it had been too dark to carry out their inspection. They had camped overnight in the bush nearby.

Mike stopped the truck and pulled out the large-scale map of Mozambique from between the driver's seat and the console, and then pushed the
mark
button on the GPS. This gave him a readout of their position on the earth's surface, in latitude and longitude. He wrote down the coordinates in his green hard-covered army-issue notebook.

‘Twenty-three degrees, twenty-seven minutes south, and thirty-one degrees, fifty-five minutes east. We're slap-bang on the Tropic of Capricorn,' he said, pointing at the first row of numbers on the screen. Carlos smiled politely, but said nothing.

There were no recognisable features in the dense mopani forest, but somewhere a few kilometres to the west of them was the border with South Africa and, on the other side, the world-famous Kruger National Park. About a hundred kilometres to their north, and slightly west, the borders of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique all converged. On the South African side, opposite where they were plotting the minefield, was one of the highest densities of wildlife in the world, but in Mozambique, the bush was all but devoid of large mammals.

They stayed seated in the Nissan, the engine ticking over in order to keep the air-conditioner running.

‘Bloody shame to think about all those rhinos and elephants and everything else that used to be here,' Mike said, as he surveyed the bush around them.

‘People starved during the civil war – and after it. They had to eat,' Carlos replied, not meeting Mike's eyes as he spoke.

Mike knew that the local people had snared and shot game to feed themselves, but others had turned to the poaching of bigger game, such as rhino and elephant, out of greed. He said nothing, though.

The only sign of wildlife Mike had encountered in Mozambique, apart from snakes and baboons, was the eerie whoop of the hyena, which could occasionally be heard in the bush at night. Recently, however, he had read that the fence on the South African border had come down and there was now nothing stopping all manner of dangerous creatures from wandering into areas like the one they were visiting, where their teams had been clearing mines.

Mike checked the map again. The area where they were working, an old hunting concession named Coutada 16 by the Portuguese, was to become part of a peace park or, to use the technical name, a trans-frontier conservation area. The peace park concept, he thought, was a good one. It envisaged cross-border national parks where animals could migrate freely and safely across Africa's international borders, and well-heeled tourists could pour millions of dollars into bankrupt economies. One of the envisioned ‘super parks' would unite the Kruger park with Coutada 16, along with Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe to the north. A great idea, but there were many obstacles to overcome before it would ever become a reality. Like landmines, for instance.

‘Someone's taking this peace park thing seriously, otherwise why would we be clearing bush in the middle of nowhere?' he asked rhetorically.

‘At times I never thought I would live to see peace in my country,' Carlos said as he wound down the window and lit a cigarette. ‘You think it is sad about the animals, and it is, but think how cruel man is to man as well. Look at the landmines and the bombs we uncover. From all over Africa, from all over the world. First the Rhodesians chasing the Zimbabwean nationalists around our country – mining, bombing, shelling. Then the South Africans and RENAMO fighting us in FRELIMO. Landmines and bombs from Russia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, England, Portugal, South Africa . . .'

Mike said nothing, just nodded. He sensed the sad realisation that was sweeping over his friend, the
bitter irony that he had survived so many years of war only to be struck down by an avoidable disease. Though still poor, Mozambique's fortunes had grown year by year since the end of the civil war between
Resistencia Nacional Mocambicana
, the Mozambique National Resistance, or RENAMO, and the
Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique
, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, known as FRELIMO. Former fighters from both sides had been working together to rebuild the country since the first multiparty elections in 1994, and while Carlos had lived to see his country at peace, he would not see it prosper.

When Carlos had finished his cigarette, Mike said, ‘Remember, we're just here for a recce, OK? I want to make sure it's going to be safe enough to bring the politicians and the media this far into the bush.'