An Empty Coast Part 3

'I haven't seen you here before,' the general said to Sonja.

'No, I'm new to Vietnam, I was invited here by a friend.'

'Irina.'

Sonja nodded. 'She's unwell.' She glanced at Ngo, who looked distinctly uncomfortable.

'Ah,' Nguyen said, 'so you're both in the same business?'

Sonja was surprised by the elderly man's directness, but the woman on his arm, whom he had not bothered to introduce, could have pa.s.sed for his granddaughter. This was a party where women, escorts, had the status of pretty baubles. 'Yes, you could say that.'

'Ah . . . so perhaps, Ngo, you were holding out on us, eh?' The general laughed and clapped Ngo on the arm. 'We must go. We have a long night ahead of us, yes?' He looked to the young girl for the first time and she lowered her eyes.

Sonja was pleased when the general and the last of the guests finally left. Her whole operation had been compromised and Ross was dead. Other people, notably Madam Nhu, would be aware of what was going on and it wouldn't be long before someone called Ngo to check on her whereabouts.

Ngo glanced at his watch. 'Right, I just need to discuss some follow-up matters with my secretary, then we can spend some time together.'

'I think you'll find he's gone,' Sonja said. 'When I went outside earlier, for some fresh air, I saw him walk out the gate with your driver.'

Ngo frowned. 'Really? That is annoying. He was not dismissed.'

Sonja reached out and put a finger on Ngo's chest and looked into his eyes. 'I'm pleased you're not putting me off any longer while you do business. I have work of my own to attend to.'

He smiled. 'Oh, do you, and what do you want to do?'

'You.'

'I know that it is rude to keep a lady waiting. Perhaps we should conclude our business upstairs, in private.'

Sonja laid a hand on Ngo's shoulder. 'You can seal this deal wherever you want, at your desk if you wish.' She leaned forward and kissed him. His lips were soft, like a woman's, and he made no attempt to invade her mouth with his tongue. Their meeting was sensual rather than urgent.

He broke from her and took her hand. 'There is champagne in my bedroom, come with me.'

'Yes, sir.' She lowered her eyes.

Ngo opened the door to a large, tastefully decorated master bedroom. The style was modern, minimalistic, the colours cool. An air conditioner hummed. Ngo went to a silver ice bucket by the side of the bed and took out a bottle of Dom Perignon. 'I've been looking forward to this.'

She smiled.

Sonja was pleased she wouldn't need to bother with the messy work of using the hatpin again. She opened her clutch bag, took out the chauffeur's pistol and shot Ngo between the eyes.

He fell backwards, dead before he hit the floor, but to make sure, she put two more shots through his heart. 'Me too.'

Chapter 4.

Sonja sat in the business cla.s.s seat of the Thai Airways Boeing 777 and took out her iPhone. She plugged in the earbuds and fitted them then switched on the phone, which she'd set to flight mode.

She had promised herself that after the business was done in Vietnam she would not watch the video again. She had seen it so many times, on the television news, on Facebook, on Twitter, on the doc.u.mentary they had made about rhinos and at the Emmy Awards where they had presented him an honorary award. Sonja hated maudlin shows of emotion, but it seemed no one else in America did. Strangers had stopped her in the street after the news had aired worldwide, recognising her from some paparazzi snaps that the networks were re-running as stills.

She had been careful, after it happened, moving out of the big house and changing location twice to escape the vultures of the media. A few photographers had tried to get pictures of her at the funeral, but she'd worn a headscarf as well as dark gla.s.ses. After the wake they'd tailed her and Emma. Sonja had opened the door of the Hummer, climbed out and stood there, still in her disguise, and waited while they had taken their pictures. After they were sated she had called each of them over, one by one, and whispered into their ears, in case they were carrying digital audio recorders, that if they continued to hound her and Emma she would find out where each of them lived and hurt them, in some small but unforgettable way.

There had been stories about her, the television star's girlfriend, that pieced together some of her life in the British Army, and as a mercenary. There was vision of the conflict in Namibia's Caprivi Strip from several years earlier, and allegations of Sonja's involvement in fomenting a brief and ultimately unsuccessful revolution by ethnic Caprivians against the legitimate government. It had all died down, eventually. The press had a short attention span.

She opened the video she had saved to the phone. It was a montage made by some stalker or other, cheesy with its gospel music background. His face appeared.

Sonja reached out with her trigger finger and caressed the strong jaw, the thick dark hair.

Sam Chapman, wildlife doc.u.mentary maker and conservation hero. RIP, read the crawler line under his picture.

Sonja caught her breath. It was always the same. She felt her throat tighten and the tears begin to form. The video began, showing him riding in the back of an open Land Rover in South Africa's Kruger Park. He jumped down from it and swaggered through the bush behind a Shangaan tracker. The macho act was just that, a performance for the cameras. The rangers accompanying him carried guns, but Sonja knew how much Sam had hated firearms. He'd made her sell all of hers, which she'd resented at first. In time, though, she had come to believe that she could live in a world without guns, bullets, knives and bloodshed.

She had been wrong.

d.a.m.n it, d.a.m.n him, she had been wrong. She cuffed her eyes before the tears began. Again she watched the scenes of a rhino being darted, its horn drilled and then infused with a poisonous dye. Tran Van Ngo had not cared about poisoned rhino horns; no doubt he sourced horn that was yet to be contaminated. Sam was talking, caressing the ma.s.sive head of the drugged rhino. He'd loved animals.

'I've never loved a human being as much as I love you,' he had said to her, his last words before he'd boarded the flight from the States to Africa.

And her reply? She shuddered as she remembered, reliving the pain, hurting herself all over again. 'Get on the plane, you fokken sissy.'

Sam had laughed, as he always did, at her mock disdain for public affection and endless protestations of devotion. She loathed Valentine's Day, barely acknowledged anyone's birthday except Emma's, and had pretended to vomit when Sam had bought her a locket to celebrate the one-year anniversary of their meeting.

She felt for it now, under her bush s.h.i.+rt. In it was a picture of him. She'd never told him she had cut one out of a celebrity magazine and put it in there, the night after he'd given it to her. Sonja had put it in the drawer of her bedside table, pretending that she never wore it.

They had Skyped, the day before it happened. He had been in a luxury safari camp in a private game reserve on the edge of the Kruger National Park. She had kidded him about how this was Hollywood's idea of roughing it in the bush.

He laughed and she thought her heart would turn to molten honey when he smiled and winked at her.

'Hey, you're wearing the locket,' he said, and reached out to the screen of his iPad to try and touch her.

With one hand she'd met his fingertips, with the other she had clasped the locket. 'I'm embarra.s.sed now,' she had said.

'Don't be, it's OK to love.'

And there was the problem. The Thai flight attendant stopped beside her. Sonja paused the video and removed a bud. 'Vodka and tonic, double.' It was her third. f.u.c.k it, Sonja thought. Drink wasn't the answer, but it was a good short-term alternative.

Sonja closed her eyes and rested her head back against the seat. She needed to sleep. She had gone from Tran's in a cab direct to Ho Chi Minh City's Tan Son Nhat Airport, arriving in time, as planned, to catch a flight to Bangkok. Still pumped when she got off the plane, she had tried to level out with a couple of drinks in the lounge while she killed the more than two hours before the flight to Johannesburg, which left at a quarter past one in the morning. The flight was ten-and-a-half hours, plenty of time to sleep if she could stop the thoughts that were whirling through her mind on an endless loop.

Killing Tran was never supposed to bring closure, a stupid word invented by soft people who couldn't face reality. The only thing she had closed was the door on one gangster's life. Her mission had been payback, nothing more, but it had gone horribly wrong with the death of Ross. Sonja knew that if Sam had been alive he would not have approved of her taking out a kingpin in the wildlife trade, no matter how pa.s.sionate he was about saving rhinos. But she didn't come from the same world as Sam.

They had met in Botswana. He had been hopelessly lost in the Okavango Delta, stuck on the real-life set of an absurd reality TV show that had gone wrong. He had been dropped in the bush like some survival expert, but in reality Sam was a scientist, not an SAS operative. She had saved his life and then had become embroiled in a plan to blow up a dam. They had made an unlikely pair, the mercenary and the television pretty boy, but she had loved him.

Emma, unlike Sonja, had actually heard of Sam Chapman and she had been over the moon when Sonja had announced that she would be going to Los Angeles to live with Sam. Emma had been on the cusp of finis.h.i.+ng her schooling and Sonja had given her the option of staying at boarding school in England or coming to America with them. Emma had finished high school in California.

Sam had doted on Emma and her daughter had adored him. For a time Sonja had recognised her own pangs of jealousy. She and her mother had raised Emma, but the truth was that Emma's grandmother had done most of the work while Sonja was away earning money in the worst places on earth. Sonja had been through a trying time with Emma and had only just reconnected with her when Sam had come into their life. But Sonja had got over her need to be over-protective and revelled, if only for a short time, in being able to share the trials and tribulations of a teenage girl's transition to adulthood with someone else.

The flight attendant returned with the drink. As she leaned across Sonja to place the drink on the small table between Sonja and the next empty seat, she saw Sam's face, frozen on the small screen.

'Oh, I loved him so much.'

Sonja nodded, tipped a splash of tonic into the vodka, and took a deep sip. 'So did I.'

'He made advertis.e.m.e.nts, in Thailand and other countries in Asia, telling people not to buy products from elephants or rhinos that had been killed. He was a very good man.'

The woman left and Sonja touched the screen again, remembering how soft his skin had been. She closed her eyes and fancied she could almost smell him, almost feel his touch. When she opened her eyes the screen had gone to sleep. She switched the phone off. A flush of anger replaced her indulgent reminiscing. Her mission had cost the life of a good man, tortured to death, and G.o.d alone knew what horrors Irina would be subjected to as payback for her complicity in getting Sonja across Tran Van Ngo's threshold.

Sonja's anger, in turn, morphed into self-loathing. It was the same as it had been in the aftermath of Sam's death. She knew he had signed on to make Wildlife Frontline, a series of doc.u.mentaries about national parks rangers around the world who were involved in the deadly business of counter-poaching operations, because of her. He had denied it, but she'd known he was trying to impress her, trying to prove he could be as brave as she had been.

In fact, as she'd tried to tell him, she didn't consider herself brave. She was no more than a tradesperson, doing the only job she had been trained for. She did not put herself in harm's way in war zones because she was brave or n.o.ble, or fighting for some cause or other. 'It's just b.l.o.o.d.y money, Sam,' she had tried to tell him.

'And it's money for me, for us, if I make Wildlife Frontline,' he'd countered. A second later, though, he'd recanted. 'No, I'll tell you the truth, it's more than money; you and I both know that the men and women who are trying to stop rhino poaching in Africa, trying to stop people killing tigers in Asia and orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra are good people doing a valuable job. I want to tell their story.'

She had envied him his idealism, but when he had told her he planned on going on patrol with rangers in the Kruger Park as part of a filming trip to South Africa she had said she would come with him, to provide security.

He'd been mad, telling her that he could look after himself.

Sonja drained her drink and pushed the call b.u.t.ton for the flight attendant. No, Sam, you couldn't look after yourself, and I should have been there to protect you.

She'd been with Sam long enough to know that shooting a doc.u.mentary involved long days of work for Sam and that she wouldn't have had much time with him even if she had tagged along, so she had decided to stay in the States a decision she knew she would regret forever. She had imagined, hoped, the night-time anti-poaching patrol would be set up and filmed in some safe area of the reserve; so much of reality television was anything but. However, as bad luck would have it the real patrol Sam and his crew were filming had heard shots in the night, near the Stolsnek rangers' post in the south of the park, and they had been first on the scene. Rangers had opened fire on the poachers and the Mozambican criminals had returned fire with an AK-47. Sam had been hit in the chest.

A helicopter had been called and Sam had died in the air over White River on the way to the Nelspruit Mediclinic.

Death followed her, always. She knew that depression would come hard on its heels and that she would keep it at bay, through alcohol, until she ended up as she had last time, after the funeral, with the barrel of her Glock in her mouth in the middle of the night. Perhaps, this time, she would have the guts to go through with it. If she believed in the hereafter, or in any form of religion, she might take solace in the thought that she might be reunited with her beautiful Sam, floating with him on a f.u.c.king cloud or, better yet, roaming some dry golden savannah with him for eternity, arm in arm, kissing as they wandered amid the animals he had given his life for.

But that was just bulls.h.i.+t. Even if it were true and she had no problem with people believing in G.o.d she, Sonja Kurtz, had led a life that would end in only one place.

h.e.l.l.

As Alex and Emma approached Namutoni Camp, the white tower of the fort now visible, Emma checked her phone and saw she finally had a signal. She tapped out a message: 'Hi Mum, where are you? I need your help', but before she could finish the sentence with 'identifying a military uniform', her finger slipped and hit send.

'd.a.m.n,' she said.

'What is it?' Alex asked.

'Just tried to send my mum a message and I've lost the signal again.' It was more than an inconvenience; Emma re-read the fragment she had been able to send and realised her mother would probably freak out. She hoped the signal returned soon.

Alex had driven her into Etosha National Park and they were approaching the northernmost rest camp, Namutoni, the closest place to the dig site that had mobile phone coverage. They had entered the park through the King Nehale Gate, crossing open gra.s.slands where cattle ranged, before coming to the fence that stretched to the left and right as far as she could see, and marked the border of the game reserve.

'This is the Andoni Plain,' Alex had told her on the drive in, 'part of the same ecosystem as your dig site, but this area is protected.'

'It's beautiful.' The vast expanse of pale green gra.s.s waved in the light breeze under a cloudless sky tinged blue-grey by a layer of dust that hung permanently just above the horizon. This was wild, empty Africa, just as Emma had imagined it.

'It's fantastic cheetah country; despite the fence they still get through, into the cattle lands. Also, there are populations of cheetah living in the communal lands, where the local people graze their cows and goats.'

Alex slowed as they pa.s.sed a waterhole on their left. It was full from the recent rains and Emma was surprised to see a flock of a hundred or more pink flamingos wading in the shallows, searching with their beaks for food. 'Gosh, they're beautiful, I wouldn't have expected to see them here now. Isn't this the beginning of your winter?'

He nodded. 'The summer rains lasted a long time this year, so Etosha is still very green, but by the end of our winter many of these pans dry out and the ground is just white limestone rock and dirt.' They left the flamingos and drove the rest of the way to the camp.

Emma had seen this part of Etosha before, but only briefly. She, Natangwe and Professor Sutton had driven to the dig site via the park, but it had been a quick one-day transit. Professor Sutton had taken the time, though, to give them a lecture at Namutoni, in the whitewashed fort, about the battle that had been fought here in 1904, as it was central to the theory that they could possibly find human remains at their dig site. Fort Namutoni, along with another garrison at Sesfontein to the west, in Damaraland, marked the northernmost extent of German military occupation of the colony at the time, Sutton had explained by way of introduction.

'I know there was a battle here during the Herero War,' Alex said as they drove through the gates of the camp, 'but not many details. But from what I learned at school, I believe most of the fighting was further south of here.'

'You're right,' Emma said, secretly pleased that she knew more about this part of his country's history than Alex did. It would be a chance to dazzle him with what she had read, and learned from Professor Sutton. 'Samuel Maherero, leader of the Herero, rebelled against the Germans in central Namibia and tried to get your other peoples, the Owambo, the Damara and the Nama to join him.'

'The Nama and the Witbooi did, eventually,' Alex said.

'Yes,' Emma replied. She had been intrigued by the politics of the time; the Witbooi, under Hendrik Witbooi, had originally fought with the Germans, but he and his men were shocked into changing sides after the Germans ordered them to shoot Herero prisoners of war. 'But initially only the Ndonga, part of the Owambo, joined Maherero.'

Alex nodded. 'They're from near here; the gate we entered through is named after their King Nehale.'

'Exactly,' Emma said, enjoying playing teacher. 'King Nehale attacked the fort here, but seven Schutztruppen fought off hundreds of the king's warriors then slipped away to safety. King Nehale took the fort and destroyed it, but it was eventually rebuilt.'

'I'm impressed,' Alex said. 'I wish I'd known you in high school; I might have got a better mark in history with you as a tutor.' Alex parked his truck near reception and they got out and wandered towards the imposing building that dominated the flat landscape around it. 'So this fort isn't the original?'

Emma shook her head. 'No, it's a rebuild. The Germans apparently planned a punitive mission against King Nehale, but according to the history books the German military decided against this as they were tied up further south, fighting the Herero and the Nama, who'd joined the fight by then.'

'But isn't your dig trying to find evidence of some ma.s.s grave of victims from the war? They couldn't be the men killed here at the fort as you're more than seventy kilometres away.'

'You're right. There's a strong tradition in local oral history that Ndonga women and children were killed and their village destroyed some time during the war. Professor Sutton thinks it might have been an unauthorised revenge raid by a rogue element of German soldiers when they went back to start rebuilding the fort. It's something we just don't know much about, but if it's on the site of the proposed new mine it's worth investigating.'

Emma checked her phone as they walked through an archway into the courtyard inside the fort. 'Still no signal. This is so frustrating.'

Alex smiled at her. 'No, this is Africa. You can't expect things to work out here like they do in LA or Glasgow,' he said.

He was right. 'Believe me, things don't always work in Glasgow, and if you think African bureaucracy is bad you should try applying for a Green Card.'

'Did your message get through to your mom?'

She nodded. 'I think so, but I've lost signal again so I can't get a reply. My mum is going to freak. She'll think I'm in some kind of trouble based on what I was able to send her.'

He pulled the brim of his bush hat down lower over his eyes. 'There's not much trouble you can get into out here; believe me, I know. I've tried.'

Emma laughed. She decided she loved her chosen field of study, even if the work on the dig site was punis.h.i.+ng. It had all been madly exciting since she'd found the body, but it was also nice to get away from the dirt and the dust for a couple of hours, and even better to be able to do so with Alex.

Emma felt a thrill course through her body every time she remembered that it was she who had found the mysterious dead man. They were now trying to work out who he was and what he was doing north of Etosha. Professor Sutton had, reluctantly, agreed to her suggestion that she try and contact her mother. Sutton had asked, full of arrogance, how Emma's mother could possibly help identify a man in what appeared to be a military uniform, and then had raised his bushy grey eyebrows in surprise when she had whispered to him that her mother was a mercenary who had served in various African countries with military types of all nationalities.

'So, how come your mother is an expert on military uniforms?' Alex asked. She had told him she needed to talk to her mother to help identify the body's clothing and Alex had offered to drive her to Namutoni as the camp usually had a good phone signal and was the nearest supply of fuel; he also needed diesel for his truck.

'She joined the British Army when she was very young, then worked as a military contractor and sometimes as a bodyguard around the world. She has contacts all over.'