The Delta (38 page)

Steele was urged to resign his commission, which he did, after being promoted to major. Sonja was transferred to a signals unit in the north of England. She'd gone from the frontline in the war against the IRA to operating a bank of fax and telex machines in a room with no windows. There was no psychological debrief, as what she had done was classified top secret and no one in her new unit knew anything of her work in Northern Ireland.

Having worked undercover in civilian clothes for so long, Sonja was bored by the mundaneness of barracks life and the pettiness of the NCOs and their inspections. When a female sergeant abused her on the parade ground for having nonexistent mud on her boots, Sonja told the woman to fuck off in front of the other soldiers. The sergeant grabbed her arm when Sonja tried to walk off the parade ground, but Sonja turned and slapped her. She was arrested by the military police, court-martialled and kicked out of the army. She'd lost contact with Martin Steele after her transfer and the last she'd heard of him, from a former SAS man she met one day in a pub in London, was that Steele was working as a mercenary in Africa.

Emma was born nine months after the end of Sonja's disastrous tour in Northern Ireland. Sonja lived with her mother in a flat in London and, with no business or professional qualifications, worked as a waitress in a curry house. It was a difficult time and nothing in her military training had prepared her for raising a child. For a long while she hated the army, and Martin Steele, and what they had done to her. But after the killing she'd seen in Northern Ireland she wouldn't countenance terminating the life growing inside her. She was numb, traumatised
by her time in the province, yet she couldn't hate the beautiful child she had brought into the world.

Her work was boring, but it allowed her to give something back to her mother and, in time, as scars started to form over her wounds, she started to think about what she would do with the rest of her life. She knew she needed something outdoorsy and action-oriented, but her dishonourable discharge ruled out enlistment in the police or other security services. An application to join the fire brigade looked promising for a while, but failed. Depression loomed large in her life, but when Emma was three Martin Steele called, out of the blue, and offered her a job in Sierra Leone, working as a signaller.

‘Why me?' she'd asked over the phone. ‘There are a thousand sigs you could choose from.'

‘Yes,' he'd replied, ‘but there's only one you.'

‘I'm not going to sleep with you again, Martin.'

‘It's not part of the job description.'

Martin had set up his own private military contracting firm – the new name for mercenary outfits – and had secured a contract to fight the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, rebels and help train the army of the government of Sierra Leone. The money he was offering was astronomical compared to what she earned as a waitress and the job would return her to the only two things, apart from her daughter, that had ever mattered to her – Africa and military life.

Sierra Leone was chaos incarnate. Freetown, where Sonja was first based, was a besieged, seething mass of people driven to terror and barbarity by years of civil war between the Sierra Leone Army – the SLA – and the RUF. The countryside, mostly subjugated by the RUF under a reign of unimaginable terror, was jungle – as dark-hearted and unforgiving as the rebels they were fighting.

Initially, Sonja spent her days sweltering in a tin-roofed hangar at Freetown airport, manning the communications centre, or comcent, a suite of HF and VHF radios. Martin was true to his word and made no sexual advances towards her. However, after a couple of weeks it became clear that he didn't only want her skills as a radio operator. Martin encouraged Sonja to go into Freetown in civilian clothes to visit the bars and clubs on the waterfront and mix with the diplomats, aid workers, journalists, bureaucrats and politicians who partied while the country crumbled. She became a spy, gleaning valuable information about government intentions, potential new contracts and other covert operations going on in and around Sierra Leone. She missed her daughter, but she loved her work.

Not content just to work the cocktail circuit and the comcent, Sonja pestered Martin until he reluctantly agreed to allow her to see more of the country by riding along with a security detail Corporate Solutions had provided to protect an aid convoy heading for Kenema, near the Liberian border.

The convoy was ambushed outside the town of Bo and the driver of the aid truck Sonja was riding in was killed. Sonja climbed down from the lorry and, firing her AK-47 on the run, rushed straight into the jungle, in the direction from which the RUF fire was coming. It seemed to defy logic, but it was the drill she'd been taught in the army to deal with an ambush. Giddy with adrenaline, she'd found herself alone and deep in the jungle, but out of the firing line. She'd hooked back around and snuck up behind an RUF machine-gun crew of two men, who were raking the burning convoy of vehicles. Sonja took up a position behind a tree and shot both men in the back of the head. With their machine-gun out of action, the RUF rebels melted away.

Back at Freetown airport, Martin had given her a tin mug of
Scotch and, in the privacy of his tent, held her to him for a full minute, then sent her back out to her radios. She'd won the confidence of the last of the men in the mercenary force who doubted her abilities as a soldier and, over time, they had seen she wasn't there as the commanding officer's camp follower. Martin maintained their professional relationship through the remainder of the tour, but by the end of their three-month contract she knew she would miss him if he disappeared from her life again.

The government of Sierra Leone bowed to pressure from the UN to cease its contracts with private military companies. On the flight out of the country to South Africa Martin said he might have more work for Sonja, perhaps involving what he called ‘direct action' jobs.

‘Killing?' she asked.

‘Perhaps. Are you interested?'

‘I am,' she said.

‘Good. We should talk about it. How would you like to come to a private safari camp near the Kruger National Park with me for the next three days?'

She looked at him. ‘Separate tents, I hope?'

‘It's the high season. I've booked the last double. It's a very big tent, though. I could sleep on the sofa. Are you interested?'

He'd been a gentleman and a professional these last three months. There'd been no allusions to their brief affair after the business in Northern Ireland and no suggestion that he wanted her in Sierra Leone for anything other than the tasks he'd assigned her. She was smart enough to know that he was a master manipulator; he was also handsome, a born leader, financially well off and, to the best of her knowledge, single.

When they arrived at their destination she looked around the tent. Unlike the rustic ethnic African theme of Xakanaxa the
decor here was British colonial kitsch, but the decorator had stopped just short of the wind-up gramophone, and it was tastefully done. Sonja was aroused with anticipation, but mostly she was nervous.

Martin laid her bags on the night stand. ‘As you know, I'm not particularly good at small talk.'

‘Neither am I.'

‘We're alike, you and me.'

She nodded.

‘I sensed from the moment I met you in Northern Ireland that you were a doer, not a talker …'

Suddenly emboldened by his confidence in her, she placed a finger on his lips and he reached around her. He undid the zipper at the back of her cotton sundress and it was on the floor before they'd finished their first kiss.

‘Sonn? Are you still there?' Martin said into the satellite phone.

The tarred black surface of the B8, the main road through the Caprivi Strip, stretched to shimmering infinity in front of her. It was a lonely road, with not much traffic in the scorching heat of early afternoon.

‘Yes I'm still here,' she said.

To her left, the north, was the Zambezi River, then warravaged Angola and the darker, troubled heart of Africa. To her right were Botswana and the Okavango Delta, the jewel of the Kalahari, whose lustre was dying by the day thanks to the twin evils of the dam and the drought. Ahead of her, at the end of this drive, was a date with a man whose business was war and death. Behind her were three more burning bodies. She was alone in Africa, surrounded by despair. Her only child, somewhere in the air, had become a stranger to her. Emma relied on her for nothing more than money now. In a year she would be
at university, out on her own. Sonja feared she might never reconnect with her daughter, but at the same time Emma provided her with hope – a belief that she had lived her life in this way for a reason, and not just because she was good at killing. Sonja shivered at the thought of what she had done to pay for Emma's future, and how she had relished every second of some of those deeds.

‘I asked,' Martin repeated, ‘are you interested in spending some time together, after this show is all over?'

‘I don't think so, Martin. I want to be free after this one.'

Half a dozen eland took fright at the growl of the approaching Land Rover's diesel, but Sonja had a good look at them as she passed, and they bounded off into the safety of the tree line.

It was an encouraging sign, she thought, seeing the big, muscular antelope, which were considered quite rare in other parts of the continent. The wildlife in the Caprivi Strip had suffered in recent decades from the effects of poaching by hungry locals and refugees from the civil war just across the border in Angola. A wide grassy stretch of cleared land flanked the black top on either side, which meant she could keep her speed up and still have time to brake if an animal strayed out of the trees. The European Union had constructed the B8 and it was in good condition. Unlike when she was a child, one didn't need a four-wheel drive to traverse the Caprivi Strip, but if you deviated off the main road, even a few metres, it was easy to become bogged in the soft sand of the natural floodplain.

The sun was low in her rear-view mirror as she neared Kongola. She was emotionally and physically spent now that the adrenaline from the contact with the Zimbabwean assassins had joined the other horrors of her past, and she didn't want to press on at night in case she fell asleep at the wheel or hit an elephant in the dark. There were plenty of tales of weary travellers running into one of the giant grey ghosts in the night. If the impact didn't kill you, then the angry wounded elephant would make sure you didn't get out of the car alive.

Just before the bridge over the Kwando River she indicated right and turned onto a sandy track. A small metal sign, dented and faded said, simply:
Nambwa km 4x4 only
. The number of kilometres had been scratched out. She'd heard about this place from a South African contractor she'd met in Kabul. The lack of information confirmed what the man had told her, that the camp was something of an off-roader's secret. She couldn't recall how far it was off the main road, and the sign didn't help.

The bush here was thick, and the screen of mopane leaves and trunks glowed golden brown in the failing light. There were mounds of elephant droppings, some old and dry, though one fresh and still covered with tiny flies, and the wrinkled tracks of their big feet – round for the front ones and oval shaped for the rear. There was little risk of her surprising or running into an elephant at the crawling pace she was travelling, but nevertheless she scanned the bush left and right out of habit.

The road climbed and twisted up a low hill and Sonja had to drop to first gear to keep her momentum up the sandy slope. As she neared the crest she saw rusting metal fence poles dripping tendrils of barbed wire on either side of her as she passed through the remains of a gate. The whole area had been occupied by the South African Defence Force during the border war and the fighting in South-West Africa, and as a result the Caprivi Strip was littered with old bases, strong-points, airstrips and bunkers. From the top of what turned out to be a spur she could see the road had brought her close to the Kwando River, and she had a good view over its floodplain. She turned off the engine and got out to stretch her legs.

It was a beautiful spot, but looking around she saw the detritus of war. Concrete foundations showed where military outposts or barracks had stood, and the skeletal remains of a water tower cast a barred shadow over her. The view over the river was as
strategic as it was enchanting. Impala and waterbuck grazed on the green grass below and she heard the deep belly laugh of a hippo. A francolin clucked past the front of the Land Rover, bobbing its head in the grass and squawking in alarm when it looked up and saw her. She kicked the sand with the toe of her boot, hoping she might find more evidence of the past conflict. From her knowledge of the border war she thought this might be Fort Doppies.
Doppie
was slang for both an empty beer bottle and an empty brass cartridge case. There was nothing more to see here.

Sonja got back into the Land Rover, started the engine and carried on. As she drove down the other side of the spur she passed through another ruined gate and wondered what it must have been like to be based here, treated to a view of nature's splendour but forced to remain behind the wire like caged animals.

Dusk was falling when she finally saw a dim light flickering on an island in the middle of the Kwando River floodplain. Thanks to the drought the channel separating her from Nambwa Camp was sand rather than water.

An African man in shorts, a T-shirt and bare feet, no doubt alerted by the sound of her vehicle, was ambling down the track to the tiny reception hut when she pulled up. After exchanging greetings he told her what she already knew, ‘You do not have a booking.'

‘Correct.'

He told Sonja to follow him in her vehicle as he walked back up the track. Driving at the man's slow place Sonja caught glimpses of the other camp sites. She saw now that although she had driven over dry land to reach the island, on its far side the Kwando River was flowing. The sun's dying light turned the channel into a lava flow. A young couple looked up from their
braai
, their faces warmed by the flames of their cooking fire, and waved at her as she passed.