Sundowner Ubunta (24 page)

Godfrey pulled down a lever and away we went.

To my great consternation, not unlike our experience with the van, the speedboat wasn’t so much a speedboat as it was a chug-boat. The river was calm, which helped our progress to the Kasane jetty on the opposite shore, but the going was painfully slow. As we puttered along, Godfrey informed us that we were about to cross the exact spot in the river where four countries meet- Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia. Okay, I had to admit that was very cool, just as long as it didn’t also become the exact spot where Jaegar from Germany met Russell from Canada and Cassandra from the United States.

Thankfully the rain was beginning to let up. Cassandra and I kept our eyes on the retreating shoreline, monitoring our pursuer’s progress. We watched as the A&K van pulled out of the parking lot (thank goodness Johnning was okay) and then, barrelling toward the river’s edge like an out-of-control locomotive, came the refrigerator-like Jaegar. When he made the bank he stood there huffing and puffing in all his Ho-Ho-Ho-Green Giant glory and I swore I felt malevolence reach across the waters, right into my chest, like a fist intent on palming my heart and squishing the life out of it. But ho ho ho, no boat for him.

About then, halfway across the river, another pseudo-speedboat chugged by us, making its crossing from the Kasane side (where we were headed) to the Kazangula side (where Jaegar was waiting for a ride). Damn! I’d been hoping he’d have to wait for the ferry-which doubtlessly would be even slower than our boat and still didn’t look anywhere near ready to leave port-but now he had a better option. I knew 106 of 170

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there was no way he wouldn’t be on that next speedboat after us.

Two minutes later-at roughly the same time the opposing boat had reached Kazangula and Jaegar-we were across the river and dumped at the Kasane jetty. I calculated that we had, at most, a five to eight minute lead.

Godfrey directed us to Michael, who looked like his twin brother and was waiting for us behind the wheel of an open Jeep with a canvas canopy. I turned to Cassandra. I’d made a decision.

It was time to extricate her from my danger.

“You stay here,” I told her. “Catch the next boat across and get yourself back to Livingstone. You shouldn’t be here. It’s dangerous, and this has nothing to do with you.”

She laughed. “And leave all the fun for you? Forget it
Mister Mayor
.” I think my cover was blown.

“Let’s go!” And with that she tossed her bags into the rear of the Jeep and pulled herself up into a seat.

I glanced across the water. Jaegar was getting on the speedboat. There was no time to argue. I hoisted myself up next to her and instructed the driver to move it, politely of course, but he got the idea. Off we went, zooming into the safety of African bush country.

For about four hundred metres.

The Jeep pulled into a clearing next to a set of buildings identical to the ones at the Zambian exit station.

“Botswana Customs,” Michael informed us.

Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!

So out we got. We entered one of the buildings and showed our identification to a squat woman sitting on a creaky chair on casters behind a long, glassed-in counter. She seemed much too busy talking to another squat woman sitting on an identical chair down the counter from her to actually pay us much attention, so it didn’t take long. Back outside, while Michael drove our Jeep through a shallow ditch of dirty-looking amber liquid, we were instructed to step into a metal cake pan of the same stuff and then pull out every pair of shoes from our luggage to dip the soles in the solution as well.

“Foot and mouth disease precaution,” Michael explained.

Uh, yup, okay, but we’re kinda trying to escape the clutches of an evil madman who wants to shoot us.

Just as Cassandra was putting a shockingly high-heeled pair of silver toed, white leather boots (she had those in a duffle bag?) through their paces, I saw a dark-coloured SUV approaching the customs area. I couldn’t see the driver but something about the angry looking grille, the blacked-out windows, the roar of the engines, told me we did not want to come face-to-face with whoever was behind the wheel, and I didn’t need two guesses to conclude who it was. Jaegar was catching up!

I had no time to figure out how he’d arranged for a new vehicle so fast; he’d just done it. We had to go now! We hopped into the Jeep and encouraged Michael to make like a rocket. He did his best, and we were soon beyond the customs area and back on a road that wound its way through a landscape comfortingly thick with bush.

But it was no use. My heart sank as I faced the undeniable truth: our slow, lumbering Jeep would clearly be unable to outrun the big, bad guy in the big, bad truck on our tail. Jaegar and his gun were going to catch us, and we were defenseless.

I thought about it for about two-and-a-half seconds and whispered a plan into Cassandra’s ear. She 107 of 170

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gave me a surprised look, but bless her heart did not question me. She simply grabbed hold of her bags. I grabbed mine. We jumped.

We fell hard into a swath of tall grasses and rounded bushes that had looked like a soft landing spot but wasn’t. Keeping low to the ground, we scrambled to concealment and, we hoped, safety, behind a collection of gnarled trees and shrubs and watched in horror as our Jeep exploded into an angry ball of fire.

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Scalding bits and pieces of what was once the back end of the Jeep we’d just jumped from rained down on us like a crematory shower. For impossibly long seconds we crouched there in the relative safety of a stand of trees, aghast and overwhelmed by what had just happened and what had just about happened to us.

As the incinerated vehicle rolled to an inevitable stop on its two remaining, flattened, front tires, we watched for our driver to jump from his place behind the wheel, but he did not. God, no! I immediately tossed aside the piece of luggage I was still clasping to my chest as if it were a newborn infant, and rose to run to his rescue. I felt a hand drag me back down, causing me to stumble gracelessly to the ground.

“No, Russell!” she warned me off. “Stop!”

I looked at her as if she were crazy. “I’m going to help him!”

“Russell!” she said in an urgent but hushed voice, her eyes wild. “Take a close look. There’s no one in the Jeep.”

I did as she suggested and saw that she was right.

“But…”

“He jumped too,” she said. “Just before we did.”

“Before…?”

We looked at one another and recognized in each other’s face the horrifying significance of that act.

This was no accident. This was attempted murder.

My gaze shifted to a dark SUV pulling to a grinding stop a safe distance back from the burning wreckage. It was the same one we had seen at the Botswana customs station, with the ominous black windows and wicked looking grille. The bad guys were here.

A minute later, another vehicle, likely containing more recent arrivals from the Kasane jetty (or maybe more bad guys for all I knew), screeched to a halt behind the truck. The inhabitant or inhabitants of the first vehicle were not yet risking getting out, but soon they would, and when it was discovered that Cassandra and I-or rather, our burning bodies-were not there, they’d come looking for us. We had to make our escape now and put as much distance as we could between us and whoever was in that truck.

“Come on,” I said to Cassandra as I gathered my stuff. “We have to hurry-and keep low.”

“You know what,” she replied, her voice a little unsteady. “I’ve changed my mind. I think I do prefer boring old Victoria Falls. I’m going back.”

I searched her face for any signs of jest, but saw none. Cassandra Wellness wore a tight-fitting adventurer’s shell around her southern belle interior, but enough was enough; she’d reached her limit.

People with guns. Escape over water. Exploding vehicles. Stuff like that can take its toll, even on the toughest nut. An acrid smoke perfumed the air around us, and the ravenous fire that was slowly devouring our Jeep crackled like a million miniature firecrackers. This was not a pleasant environment and I could understand her desire to go back to life the way it had been. I pulled a stray twig from her dishevelled hair, then took her hands in mine and met her eyes with my own. “I’m sorry, Cassandra, but it’s too late.”

She looked at me, aghast.

“Look,” I said with as much gentle reassurance in my voice as I could muster. “I think you should go back too.”

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“Good,” she told me. “I’m ready.”

“But not from here,” I burst her bubble. “And not now.”

I could see her back stiffen and her eyes glaze over with steel. “I don’t remember giving you permission to tell me what to do. I came on this stupid trip because I wanted to. And now I’ll go back because I want to.”

This was not the time or place for a discussion. Our margin of safety was narrow enough as it was, and if we didn’t hightail it out of there fast, it would soon disappear. “Cassandra, you have to listen to me,” I urged. “These guys are serious, and they mean to kill us. As soon as they find out they’ve failed, they’re gonna be on our backs like mint jelly on a lamb shank. And they have an advantage; they know this terrain. They know we’re together. If you try to get back to the river from here, they’re going to find you, and if they don’t kill you right away, they’ll use you to try to find me.”

She shook her head. “I won’t tell them where you’re going, Russell, I promise. I’ll tell them I have no idea where you were heading, that you were just some guy I picked up for some fun, and now it’s over.” I saw a glimpse of her familiar raffish smile when she added, “And let me tell you, this is
sooooo
over.”

“They won’t believe you, Cassandra. They don’t care about any of that. But if they think you can help them, they’ll do anything to get information out of you.” I gave her hands an extra squeeze. “Anything.”

“You don’t know that!” she argued back. “How do you know that?”

“I don’t,” I answered back. “But I’ve dealt with these kinds of people before. Think, Cassandra. You know Jaegar had a gun. You saw what they did to the Jeep. These aren’t disgruntled businessmen we’re dealing with here.”

I saw the look in her eyes begin to change. She knew I was right.

“Look, I’m sorry I got you into this,” I told her, and I meant it. “But, it’s too late now. We’ve gotta get away from here while we still have a chance, while they think we’re dead. We have to find a place to hide until they’ve lost our scent.”

“Why do you keep on saying ‘they’? Don’t you mean this Jaegar guy? Do you think there’s more than one person out to get you?” She stopped there, dawning realization eroding her strong but now faltering features. “What the hell have you done, Russell Quant?”

I’d been thinking about exactly the same stuff. “Cassandra, I wasn’t lying when I told you I wasn’t sure why Jaegar is after me. But what I am sure about is that there has to be more than just him behind all of this. Jaegar knows too much. How did he know to find me in Zambia? How did he get a vehicle so fast after he came across the river? How did he know to set the explosives on that Jeep? He has to have had help. I know it’s a dreadful thought, but we have to assume there’s more than just one bad guy after us.”

I saw her head make a slow bobbing motion up and down as if she were finally coming to admit the horrible truth of the situation to herself. “How far is it to Chobe from here?”

“We’re not going to Chobe,” I told her.

“What? Why not?”

“Cassandra, if they knew we were going to be in that Jeep, then they know we’re headed for Chobe.

When they find out we’re not dead, that’s the first place they’ll go looking to finish the job. We have to find someplace else to hole up.”

She glanced about at the scrubby landscape, trees scarred to premature death by elephant tusks, stalagmite-like termite hills that looked like mini pyramids and, seeing no handy Four Seasons Hotel 110 of 170

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nearby, threw up her hands and eyebrows and regarded me with an “I hope you have a plan” look in her wide eyes.

I didn’t. Not really. All I knew was that I had to get her-and me-out of there as soon as possible. “This way,” I said with the authority of every hopelessly lost city guy traipsing through rural Saskatchewan.

“Okay.” She nodded resolutely, no fading flower for long.

After grabbing her bags, Cassandra followed my
Rambo
lead through the dense cover of trees and reeds, on the way to safety.

As we snuck away, I noticed that the rain had finally stopped.

It was a going to be a beautiful evening in Botswana.

Just as remote and unspoiled as Mashatu, the Chobe area, with its not-so-bald prairie-like landscape, provided us sufficient camouflage as Cassandra and I stealthily crab-walked our way in search of a secure refuge. We kept as close to the river as we could without revealing ourselves, hoping it would lead us to some type of shelter before dark or an unwanted animal encounter. After a long and sometimes treacherous journey, it did. We were never quite sure whether the place was an impromptu settlement of semi-nomadic Africans or an actual village, or perhaps a camp that provided nearby game lodges with willing and cheap labour, but it didn’t much matter to us. For a very reasonable price, an English-speaking lady, Masha, offered us a room, a bed, some food and, hopefully, a safe haven until we could figure out what the heck to do next.

“God, I am so tired I could sleep standing up,” Cassandra announced once we were alone inside our room.

The place was tiny and dark, hot and musty-smelling, and we loved every inch of it. We were so exhausted (and relieved to be in one piece) that a used chicken coop would have seemed a paradise.

Cassandra pulled off her scarf, khaki jacket and T-shirt, leaving her with only a fancy-by my inexperienced evaluation-bra on (it had lots of lace, and each cup had a patterned underbelly.)

“Don’t worry,” she said with a fleeting look in my direction. “I’m not going to seduce you again. I just want to clean up a bit before moss starts growing under my arms.” And with that she headed for the basin of tepid water provided by our hostess.