The Delta (19 page)

Steele shrugged and sat down. ‘That's not for me to decide. It's for you. The Caprivians are ready to fight to seize their homeland, but they need weapons and ammunition – especially the heavy stuff, such as rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and explosives. They need money.'

Sabrina shook her head and looked to Trench. ‘What I don't get, Bernard, is why I'm here at all. I don't have money to contribute to this operation. I'm from an environmental organisation. I seriously hope you don't expect me to go back to head office and ask for a donation. The moms and pops in Sydney, Ontario, San Francisco and Cape Town who support us would have a collective heart attack if they thought their donations were going to fund a
coup
organised by mercenaries.'

Steele took a sip of water. ‘Ms Frost, your organisation chases and boards Japanese whaling ships – technically acts of piracy. Your members chain themselves to shipments of spent nuclear fuels and sabotage bulldozers clearing Amazonian rain forests.'

‘That's different to warfare, where innocents will be killed.'

‘My point, Ms Frost, is that your people are prepared to risk their lives for a cause. The Lozi who live in exile in Botswana are ready and willing to risk their lives for their homeland, and to save the river that means as much, if not more, to them than it does to you. Will you deny them that?'

‘What is it, exactly, you want from me, from my group?'

Trench cleared his voice. ‘Legitimacy.'

Sonja used her knife to carve the seared flesh from the leg of impala and handed a strip to Sam.

His mouth watered as he held the greasy piece of meat in his hand while he waited for her to cut her portion. He felt helpless around her. The least he could do was mind his manners and wait for her before eating – even if he was starving. His stomach rumbled in anticipation.

‘Enjoy,' she said.

The meat was drier than he expected, and quite bland, but he wolfed down his sliver while Sonja was still taking her time over her portion. He didn't want to appear greedy, but wasn't sure what the protocol was for eating a hunk of meat stolen from a cheetah and roasted over open coals. The leg sat on a flat rock Sonja had placed on the coals as a kind of warming and carving surface.

‘May I?' he asked, pointing at her knife.

She looked at him while she chewed and said nothing. He reached for the knife gingerly. The blade didn't reflect the glow from the coals as it was coated with a matt black finish. Only the very edges showed silver, where she had been sharpening it. Judging by the way it glided through the well-cooked meat he reckoned he could shave with it. As he cut himself a ragged slice of meat, he found that despite its sharpness the knife was difficult to carve with. It had a T-shaped handle that normally sat in the palm of the hand, with the second and third fingers either
side of the shaped shank. It wasn't a knife for skinning buck or whittling sticks to roast marshmallows with over the campfire. It was a weapon for stabbing. For killing. He placed the knife back down on the rock carefully next to the joint of meat, and retreated back to his side of the fire clutching the slippery meat in his fingers like a wild man.

As he ate, Sonja glanced at him occasionally, as if to satisfy herself that he was in his place. Other than that she gazed out into the night.

From a nearby tree he heard a high-pitched
brrrr brrr
at regular intervals. ‘Is that an owl?'

She finished chewing her mouthful and swallowed. ‘Scops.'

He nodded. Another Scops owl called from a different tree, maybe fifty metres away. At least the birds had something to talk about.

His sense of being out of his depth and deep in the shit had magnified with each passing hour. He'd been unable to get more than a few words from the woman all afternoon, after the incident with the cheetah. Since realising he wasn't being set up by Cheryl-Ann and that something had gone wrong somewhere along the line he'd decided he had no option but to trust Sonja. Even so, he sensed the little she'd told him about herself and why she was out here in the middle of nowhere contained precious little truth. It was bad enough that he was making a documentary about an environment he knew nothing about, and even worse that when he was put to the test, for real, he had very nearly died. If this brooding, heavily armed stranger hadn't come along when she did, his body might never have been found.

‘Forgive me,' he said.

She glanced across the fire at him and raised her eyebrows.

‘I guess I should say thank you. For saving my life, I mean. If you hadn't come along I would have just lain there in the mud
waiting for the bees to go, and by that time the crocodile would have got hold of me and eaten me. What a way to go, huh? The survival expert who flunked out.' He laughed at his own joke. Lame. Talking to this woman was like walking on hot coals – theoretically possible but likely to cause pain.

She carved another slice of meat, for herself, and began chewing it.

‘What does your tattoo mean? I saw all those letters and numbers while we were walking. Is it a code or something?' He reached for the knife again.

Sonja swallowed her food. ‘It's a place.'

‘Oh, OK. I get it. Like a GPS waypoint. That small “o” is a degree symbol, right?'

She looked at him like he was a moron.

‘Where is it, the place on your arm?'

She looked out into the darkness again.

‘Is it home?'

Good Lord, did the man never shut up? If she answered his banal questions it encouraged him to ask more. If she stayed silent he kept on at her until she said something. It was worse than the resistance-to-interrogation course the SAS had put her through before her deployment to Northern Ireland.

‘I wish I knew where home was,' he said, picking at the gristly leftovers still clinging to the white bone. ‘Time was, I thought I was pretty grounded. I thought I'd grow old in Montana, maybe working for the state in animal management or conservation, or the national parks for twenty or thirty years. I thought maybe I'd go back to college to teach. There'd be a wife and some kids and a nice house, a piece of land outside of town. The American dream, right?'

She unscrewed the lid of the plastic water bottle and took a sip. The American dream? Working as a military contractor she'd
seen it die in the faces of too many idealistic young marines and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her dream had died in Northern Ireland, with the flash and the bang of the stun grenades; the shouted commands; the tear gas; the thud of nine-millimetre bullets tearing into timber, plaster and flesh.

She held a hand over the coals to see if there was enough heat in them to boil some water. It wasn't nearly warm enough.

‘Have you ever found yourself at the wrong place at the wrong time of your life?' Sam asked.

She looked at the American. ‘Yes,' she said, before remembering to stay silent. She stood and winced. The bullet wound was healing well and didn't hurt too much during the day, but when she sat for too long, and after sleeping, her leg became stiff.

‘You look like you're in pain. Are you OK?' he asked.

He was like a puppy, always seeking attention.

‘Pain is just weakness leaving the body.'

He laughed out loud, the peals echoing off the trees. He wiped his eyes. ‘Wait a minute, you're serious? Where did you learn that, the drill sergeant's guide to holistic healing and alternative medicine?'

She felt her cheeks colour. She'd been around soldiers too long. But who was this pampered TV wanker to make fun of her?

‘Pain is not
weakness leaving the body
, it's just pain. It's your body's way of telling you to take it easy, to rest up.'

When and where exactly was she going to ‘rest up'? she wondered. They had another twelve hours of walking and riding to reach Xakanaxa and precious little food and water. The best hope for them was to reach the camp as soon as possible, but it didn't seem worth the time or breath to explain it to him. She took her sleeping bag out of her pack and rolled it out on the ground, then laid her M4 on the down-filled nylon. From her daypack she took a compact mosquito net out of its bag and
slotted the short, three-piece spreader pole into the loops at the top. She tied it to a low branch of the mopane under which she had made the cooking fire and tucked the white netting under her bag. She dragged two more logs on to the fire and stood by it until they caught, sending an offering of sparks to the stars above. She looked up – the sky was clear as far as she could see. No rain on the way and it was already two weeks past Botswana Independence Day, 30 September. For as long as she had lived in the Okavango swamps it had always rained either on or a day or two on either side of Independence Day. Not a drop had fallen here, though, and the last three wet seasons had been terribly dry.

‘Where should I sleep?'

She didn't bother answering him. Sonja knelt and lifted the hem of her mosquito net and slid underneath. She lay on her back and rested her head on her pack. She wished she had a cigarette. On the other side of the fire Sam cursed as he tripped over a tree root. She tried to block his fumblings and babble out of her mind by thinking about Stirling.

How had he aged? Was he seeing someone and hadn't had time to update his Facebook profile? Was he still happy managing the camp and living his life in contented isolation from the rest of the world? Would he take her back? The way she had treated Stirling had been a mistake; she saw that now in hindsight. But was it an error she could rectify?

As she listened to the rustling and faint curses of the American settling under his mosquito net she thought about what it would be like to live in the camp again, with Stirling, but this time as a couple, perhaps even as husband and wife. She wished she had made this trip years ago, and in different circumstances. She knew that by leaving it so long it would be even harder reconnecting with Stirling and that he may not want to have anything to do with her. There was Emma to think of as well. She wondered
if Stirling had found out about her, or even cared that she had a child. God, she thought, she really had left this homecoming too long. She started to feel silly and embarrassed that she was even bothering to daydream that she might be able to pick up again with a boy she'd known so long ago. Yet something was pulling her back to the Delta. The smart thing would have been to get to an airport and fly out of Africa, yet here she was traipsing back to the only place and the only person she had ever associated with a life of innocence and honesty.

She sought out the stars through the close weave of the mosquito net. Bats squeaked like a rusty gate somewhere in the distance. She wished she could travel back in time. Her child should have been Stirling's, and could have been his, if she hadn't been so opinionated, so stubborn, so restless. She was coming back to the Delta because she knew, like a territorial animal, that this was where she belonged. She'd known it nineteen years ago when she'd gotten the stupid tattoo on her arm that this was where her home was. So why had she been so determined to leave it? What was wrong with her?

Ambition? That was part of it. Certainly none of the job choices on offer to her at the time she left were appealing to her. But what had she done with herself? She hadn't become a doctor or a vet or a nurse or even a bloody secretary. Her drive, her
ambition
, her past and her pride had taken her to war and taught her to kill.

Was it the excitement? Don't go there, she told herself. Don't admit the highs – stick with the lows. The depression was easier to understand, easier to live with than the jazz. How could she explain to herself, let alone anyone who hadn't been through it, the rush from heart to brain to fingertips and toes that came from being under fire; firing back, surviving and winning? It was terrifying, just how intense the feeling was. But it didn't
outweigh the regret. The realisation, deep in the dark of night, that the person who died, no matter how bad they were, how much she disagreed with their cause, left a mother or a father or a sister or a brother or a wife or a girlfriend or a husband or a boyfriend. Or all of the above. And there was her fear for Emma, that she would be left alone.

When Emma was growing up Sonja had at least had the comfort of knowing that her mother, Emma's grandmother, was there in case something happened. More often than not it was her mother that took Sonja's place at parent days, recitals, sports days and awards nights. Her mother had been killed just six months earlier, in a hit and run accident. Sonja had been in Dubai, working a two-month contract as a personal protection officer for the wife of an oil sheikh who had received threats to kidnap her children. Sonja's flight had been turned around because a warning light had appeared on the captain's console and she'd had to spend an extra night in Dubai. The funeral had gone ahead without her and she'd returned to England to cuttingly snide abuse from Emma and the frowning disapproval of her mother's friends. She'd grieved for her mother the only way she knew how – in private, with a couple of bottles of wine.

Sonja saw, after the funeral, the woman her daughter was becoming. Emma was very bright academically – the top of her class when she chose to be. There was also a strong streak of independence that had landed her in trouble more than once when she'd spoken back to her teachers. There had been incidents with drinking in the dorms, too, made worse by the fact that Emma had been a ringleader. As saddened as she must have been by her grandmother's death, Emma had been able to rein in her grief around Sonja and treat her with crushing disdain.

Emma knew part of what Sonja did for a living – the close personal protection work. Bodyguarding was easy to explain,
even though it was the safest and least rewarding of the tasks she had undertaken for Martin Steele. Sonja knew she probably shouldn't have agreed to the Zimbabwean job, but the money was good and the job itself had been the biggest challenge of her professional life. Assassination was dirty stuff – black ops as governments called it – but if it had come off and the president had been killed, well … Pity it had gone tits up, she thought.