The Delta (6 page)

She let him lead her to a padded camping chair, low slung and covered in green canvas. It was a safari lounger and he lowered her into it carefully. She looked around at the thick tangle of bush and vines that separated this camp site from the others around it. Through the natural camouflage she noticed bell
tents and open-sided tour vehicles. A fish eagle called nearby, the piercing, high-pitched rise and fall telling her there was water nearby.

‘Tea?'

She nodded. He crouched in front of her and prodded and blew a mound of white coals into flame. On a
braai
grid above the fire was a battered black kettle. ‘Where are we? Botswana?'

He nodded. ‘Kasane. This place is called the Chobe Safari Lodge. We're not far from where you collapsed, on the side of the road. I found you near the border. Did you come from Zimbabwe?'

Her mouth was dry. She licked her lips and started to speak, but as the fog slowly cleared from her brain she closed her mouth.

‘I don't need to know,' he smiled.

He was about twenty years older than she, nearly sixty, she reckoned. His body was lean under his tight T-shirt and his arms sinewy but muscled. He had blue eyes that glittered when he looked at her, but even when he smiled his mouth had that hard set she'd seen in so many men. It was as if they could never bring themselves to show true joy, because each time they tried, some memory or other returned, unbidden and unwelcome.

She touched the bandage around her right thigh and saw the red spots. ‘My leg … what happened to it?'

‘Through and through. If I'm not mistaken, a 7.62; the AK-47 being the preferred weapon of most shooters in this part of the world. I've seen worse wounds, but like I said, you lost a fair bit of a blood. Also, one side of you is covered in abrasions.'

‘The bike …'

‘Makes sense. I've also seen those types of grazes before.' He prodded the fire, whose flames were now licking the old teapot. ‘I had a 1969 Triumph Bonneville when I was a wee bit younger
and I came off that thing more than once. I also plucked a few fragments of metal out of your side. You wouldn't have been anywhere near a grenade explosion on your holiday, I suppose?'

She ignored the raised eyebrows. ‘My stuff …'

‘Aye, we'll get to that soon enough. But you might consider a thank you, first. I kept that IV drip of saline for emergencies. You seemed to qualify as one.'

‘Thank you.'

He nodded. Steam hissed from the kettle and he poured darkly stewed tea into two enamelled metal mugs. ‘NATO standard?'

She nodded. ‘Please.'

‘Aha!'

Sonja frowned theatrically. ‘Oh dear. You got me. Or was it the assault rifle and the grenade that gave me away?'

‘Well, I was in the intelligence corps for quite a few years before I retired. Tactical questioning of prisoners was one of my fortes, if I do say so myself.'

‘Very intelligent.'

He ignored the sarcasm and heaped two teaspoons of sugar into each mug and poured in generous dollops of long-life Sterimilk. He handed her one. Two sugars and milk – NATO standard, in British Army slang, had told him she had a military background, but not much more.

He blew on his tea and took a tentative sip. ‘BBC World Service is carrying news this morning of a failed attempt on the life of the President of Zimbabwe. Seemed it happened not far from here, just across the border near Victoria Falls. The big man always likes to say the Americans and British are out to get him, and the so-called assassin apparently used a US military antitank weapon to attack the presidential convoy. Bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, I would have thought.'

She said nothing.

‘Of course,' the grey-haired man continued, ‘the radio didn't say the Zimbabwean police and army were looking for a woman.'

He waited for her reply, but none came. ‘It's Kurtz, isn't it, if I'm not mistaken?'

She sipped some more tea.

‘Susie, Suzette … something equally German if I remember correctly. I was at Aldershot when they flew you back from Ulster for the board of inquiry. You won't remember me, though.'

Sonja was grateful for him picking her up out of the dirt, but she was suspicious of his prying and the fact he was from Northern Ireland, and she really needed to put some distance between them. He was fucking with her, and she was in no mood for games.

‘Sonja! Yes, that's it. I thought it was you, even before you woke. You haven't aged much in, what, eighteen years?'

That made her smile. ‘Something like that.' She closed her eyes as she took another sip. It was a lifetime ago; someone else's life. A pied kingfisher squeaked nearby. She knew this place, though the campground was better organised than the last time she and Stirling had stayed here. Simply being back in Botswana made her think of him.

‘Stirling, I love you, too, but I want to see the world. I want to do something with my life.'

He'd tried to be cool, busying himself by putting another worm on the end of his hook, then casting it out into the Khwai River with a practised flick of his wrist. ‘Stay,' he'd quietly pleaded as he reeled in the slack, watching the river's surface, unable to look her in the eye.

He'd suggested that she become a safari guide, but although she knew the bush almost as well as he, except for trees, which
she found boring, she hated pandering to the needs of the tourists. Her dad, Hans, had been the manager of Xakanaxa Camp, until his drinking had become too much for the owners. Her mother had less patience and had gone back to England while Hans still muddled on, but Sonja had lingered, unwilling to abandon the old man, or Africa. In time, she'd become keen to do both. After losing his job at the camp her father had stayed in Maun, lost to his wife and daughter as surely as if he'd died. Perhaps he had.

‘You know I can't handle the foreigners.' When she went into the bush she liked to go alone, or with Stirling. It was hard to describe. For her, going to the bush was like going to church was for her mother. She went into a kind of trance sometimes and felt as close as she ever would to believing, not in the existence of a supreme being, but in a sense of order and completeness in this otherwise fragmented world.

‘What about going to 'varsity?' Stirling had persisted. ‘Your marks were good enough. You could become a zoologist – get a gig as a researcher back here in the Delta. We could be together forever.'

‘
Ag
, I couldn't stand another four years of schooling. I'd go crazy. I've got to
do
something, not read about it.'

She had seen the genuine pleading in his eyes. Why couldn't she love him as much as he loved her? If he truly loved her then he must realise that she needed to do this, to see more of the world. She loved Botswana, and the Okavango swamps and the bush and the wildlife, but if she couldn't be a researcher, a safari guide, a lodge manager, or a cook – cooking was one thing she was totally useless at – then what would she do with her life in Africa? Become the wife of one of the above? That wasn't enough for Sonja.

‘You fucking bitch,' her father had screamed at her when she
told him she was leaving. ‘Just like your fucking mother. That stuck-up, cheating English whore has poisoned you!'

‘Papa, no.' He had abused her verbally a couple of times in recent months when very drunk, and though he had never physically hurt her the words sliced like a panga.

‘Fuck her, and fuck you!' He'd tossed the empty Jägermeister schnapps bottle at her, but she was sober and easily dodged it.

At eighteen she was as tall as he. She had a swimmer's build, lithe and with good upper-body strength and a toned tummy from endless crunches. Living in the confines of a safari camp she had learned to exercise when and how she could, so weights and sit-ups were part of her daily routine. At boarding school she had swum five kilometres a day to escape the soul-crushing boredom of being in Cape Town, so far from Botswana and the delta, and had won interschool championships.

‘Stop it, Papa, you're drunk.' She had grabbed the arm he raised and turned it, behind his back, pinning him there. Stirling had taught her the move as self-defence.

‘Oww. OK, OK, let me go,' her father protested.

When she released him he turned, his face crimson with anger, and slapped her, back-handed across the face. She reeled from the blow, which pushed her against the canvas wall of the permanent safari tent in which they lived. Standing, she glared at him, rubbed her jaw, and walked out on him. For good.

‘Sonja! Wait …'

But it was too late. He had crossed the line and while she had tended to take her father's side in some of the arguments he'd had with her mother, now she would forgive him nothing. Her mother had retained her British citizenship. Sonja had already applied for and been granted right of abode in the United Kingdom.

She scrawled a quick goodbye letter to Stirling, who was out
on a game drive working towards his guiding qualification, got in her father's old Land Rover and drove it to Maun. The old bastard could retrieve it himself, she thought. She caught a bus to Gaborone and her mother wired her the money for a flight to London. England was a shock to her senses but even in the dead of winter the knife-edge chill of the outdoors was still more appealing to her than the overheated fug of a job indoors. To her mother's horror Sonja joined the British Army.

The British girls who reported to the Women's Royal Army Corps recruit training barracks at Queen Elizabeth Park at Guildford, in Surrey, were a mixed bunch, but many of them struck Sonja as coarse and foul-mouthed. Sonja may have grown up wild in the African bush, a barefoot kid who knew more about elephants than human beings, but it wasn't until basic training that she realised how good her manners were and how sheltered her life had been until then.

Unlike most of her fellow recruits she found the physical training a breeze and excelled at weapons handling.

‘Too bad they won't let you in the infantry,' said the male sergeant, a former Special Air Service man named Jones, who took her and the other girls in her section for weapons lessons.

Some of the instructors were even more chauvinistic than the hunters and safari guides she'd grown up with, but Sergeant Jones was patient and encouraging around the women, some of whom had never held a firearm before, let alone fired one.

While some of the other girls fell by the wayside Sonja excelled at basic training and was named the student of merit, the top recruit, at the end of her course. From the limited choices available to women at the time she applied for posting to the Royal Corps of Signals. She'd briefly considered military intelligence – even though everyone joked that was an oxymoron – but when she made enquiries she found she might well
end up spending her days cooped up indoors staring at aerial photographs through a magnifying glass.

Unlike most of the girls on her course she'd learned to use radios for communication from an early age. She had a confidence born of living in a war zone and growing up in the African bush, and her only regret was that as a trainee signalman she spent too much time in the classroom and not enough out in the field. She passed the course with flying colours and was posted to a signals unit at Aldershot, home of the Parachute Regiment.

With peace talks on again it seemed the conflict in Northern Ireland between the Irish Republican Army and the Protestants loyal to the British Crown was winding down, although the paratroopers Sonja met were about to deploy to the troubled province of Ulster, so things weren't over yet.

As the months progressed Sonja grew bored of life in barracks. There was precious little travel involved, save for one exercise in Germany where she thought she would die of the cold. She spent much of her time typing signals on a telex machine and making tea for senior NCOs and officers. Her first full winter in England was depressing, her mood matching the dull grey of the skies. She missed Stirling and wrote to him every week. When she telephoned him in Botswana he begged her to come back. It wasn't, she explained, as if she could just quit with two weeks' notice, and while she was tempted for a brief moment to pack it in and go AWOL she forced herself to be strong.

‘Kurtz,' the female lieutenant said, looking up from her desk.

Sonja saluted. ‘Ma'am.' She'd wondered what she had done wrong when the sergeant major had told her to report to the troop commander's office.

‘At ease. How are you settling in, Sonja?'

‘Fine, ma'am.'

‘You're South African?'

It was a common mistake. ‘Born in South-West Africa – Namibia they call it now – ma'am, and raised mostly in Botswana. British citizen now, though, ma'am.'

‘I see. Your NCOs tell me you're a fine soldier, Kurtz, with potential to go a long way.'

‘Thank you, ma'am.' Sonja had no idea where this was heading. ‘Is something wrong, ma'am?'

The officer looked up and smiled. ‘No, not at all, Sonja. A signal has come through seeking females to volunteer for special duties. All very mysterious, but there's an emphasis in the requirements for physical fitness. If I hadn't done my knee in last month playing squash I might be tempted to volunteer myself. I've also had a signal from a Captain Steele from the Special Air Service Regiment drawing my attention to you in the context of this request. Seems a sergeant …' the officer rechecked the printout in front of her, ‘Jones spoke highly of you after your recruit course.'

Sonja felt proud, excited and nervous all at once. Her troop commander told her to think carefully before making any rash decision. Bluntly, she told Sonja she did not want to lose her, but the mysterious message offered Sonja the ray of sunshine she had been hoping for during the interminable gloom of the British winter.

‘Here're the coordinates for the next checkpoint,' Sergeant Jones said, cupping his hands around the small blue flame of a portable gas cooker as the rain pelted the canvas that sheltered him. Jones, it turned out, had been transferred back to his beloved SAS, but then reassigned to a special forces training role.