Piranha. Rudie van Rensburg

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СКАЧАТЬ laughed along when Smiley made jokes about the incident. Smiley had become my hero: the hardy farm boy with the big smile and a certainty about how things worked in Africa.

      4

      The shaft in which they stored the horns was two-and-a-half metres deep. Freedom stood at the bottom while another man passed them to him. They stashed the two guns in the shaft and then shifted the heavy steel cover over the opening again.

      Theodore secured it with locks attached to four corner pegs sticking up about ten centimetres above ground. They pulled a big plastic sheet over it, used grass brooms to sweep sand and leaves over that, and then packed logs on top.

      Theodore nodded his satisfaction, then handed the money over in individual envelopes, which were received with wide smiles.

      ‘See you guys in a week’s time,’ he said to Freedom.

      ‘We’ll be here,’ Freedom reassured him.

      They piled into the bakkie, laughing and joking. As the vehicle drove off, the engine protested under its heavy load of wood. Theodore watched it leave with a frown. How many more times would they be able to poach in the Kruger under that ruse?

      Next time would be the last time, he decided. Time for a new strategy … another strike in Bubiana in Zim, perhaps.

      He walked to his tent to fetch a cold beer from the little camping fridge. He sat down in a camping chair and took a long drink. Around him, the quiet of the bush was disturbed only by the soft hum of the generator.

      Usually, he was able to relax, but the great number of horns in the shaft made him uneasy. Billions of rands’ worth of the stuff. He’d received a message from Cape Town to hang on to them for a while, which made him even more uneasy. He’d never had to store this many horns for this long in the nine years he’d been at it. But Cape Town was waiting for the right moment to ship the horns. A risk-free option was about to present itself.

      He slapped a mosquito on his forearm and took another sip of beer. The great responsibility to hang on to the stash here and then get it to Cape Town safely weighed on him. He’d have to do the driving himself. He couldn’t trust Nichols with such valuable cargo – he was a reckless driver.

      Besides, he had no idea what he was transporting along with the load of curios.

      Theodore dug in his pocket when he heard a message come in on his phone. It was Freedom, thanking him for the R500 bonus he’d put into each of their envelopes.

      Theodore looked at his phone pensively. Freedom Chiweshe … their greatest asset.

      They’d hand-picked him nine years earlier. He was a leader of one of Zimbabwe’s zebra gangs. His deft knife work meant he could part a zebra from its skin in five minutes. His knife skills meant he didn’t waste time, as other rhino poachers did, sawing through the horn or trying to hack it off with a panga. A rhino’s horn, unlike a buck’s antlers, doesn’t have a solid core of bone. The horn develops on top of a layer of cartilage above the rhino’s nose, rather like a human fingernail. For someone with Freedom’s cutting skills, it was easy to develop a technique of lifting the horn away from the nose with some neat cleaving around the base. Time was of the essence in any poaching operation.

      Along with the highly effective silencers on the .303s which Theodore and his people had had specially designed in Cape Town, Freedom and his cohort – his two brothers and a cousin – had become a formidable poaching unit. Theodore, meanwhile, had honed his skill as operations planner to a fine art and was always a step ahead of the rangers.

      What had impressed them most about Freedom back then was that he refused to reveal who he’d been working for. There’d been stories that a group of white men known as the Musina Mafia was involved in the zebra-skin trade and that it had relied on several Zim gangs for its supply. Freedom denied working for them, and wouldn’t reveal anything else.

      That was what had convinced Theodore: if Freedom’s team were ever caught, he’d be safe. Theodore had promised them that if anything happened, he would pay for the best defence lawyers available and would cover all legal costs. Not that that was a major concern. It had become a joke among poachers how easy it was to get off in the South African courts.

      Theodore got up from the camping chair and stretched his arms above his head. Now and again the loneliness and the silence of the bush got to him. He shook his head. He wasn’t going to indulge in self-pity. His choice had been made a long time ago and he simply had to live with it.

      He walked back to the tent and stretched out on his bed. The hardest part was living with the knowledge that he was responsible for the death of so many rhinoceroses. That fact was starting to eat at him like a cancer.

      And now he’d been instructed to make a donation to a conservation organisation on behalf of the company, ostensibly to position themselves as ‘an organisation that cares for nature’.

      He sighed. That gimmick was going to be of zero help the day they got caught.

      * * *

      Back then, the white high school in the south-west of Uganda had even fewer pupils than the little primary school. Most children were sent back to England for their high school education. But a few prosperous white farmers, including Smiley’s father, had delved deep into their pockets to establish a viable high school for the British settlers.

      When I was sixteen, there were only seven of us in my class. Vicci was the only pretty girl in the school, which made it inevitable that she would become Smiley’s girlfriend. He was handsome, intelligent and the best sportsman by a long shot. He didn’t only rake in all the athletics trophies, but sometimes even played for Kampala club’s first rugby team, a sport the settlers had made popular among the locals.

      I was rather jealous of what Smiley and Vicci did together when they were alone. Sex was limited to my dreams. I hadn’t even kissed a girl at that point.

      In fact, the first time I saw a woman’s breasts was on a weekend I went to the farm with Smiley and Vicci. Smiley and I always cleaned up in the reed-sheltered outdoor shower after a swim in the dam. That Saturday afternoon, Smiley whispered that he was going to shower with Vicci and that I was welcome to sneak a peek through the bamboo fencing. I watched with a thumping heart and a growing erection as Smiley took off her bathing costume. I couldn’t see the bottom half of her body, but the image of her tiny, firm breasts supplied me with weeks of fodder for wet dreams.

      After that day, I even considered starting a relationship with the fifteen-year-old Mary Davies despite her acne and her thick glasses. She wasn’t badly built. I was desperate for physical contact. But she wasn’t interested in boys. I started making peace with the fact that my hand was going to be my only bed mate for the foreseeable future.

      But in the last term of that year a new missionary arrived on the scene, and he had a stunning daughter. It was like a fairy tale.

      Sophia.

      And then my life was turned upside down.

      5

      The late afternoon winter sun made patterns on Captain Kassie Kasselman’s desk at the Newlands police station. He stacked a few loose papers in a neat pile and put a docket in one of his desk drawers. Quarter to five. Almost time to go home.

      His thoughts were not on the things he was busy with. СКАЧАТЬ