‘I’ll be in Mozambique.’
‘ What? ’ Shuttleworth was not a man given to emotional outbursts, so Tom wasn’t ready for the tirade that followed. He was told, in no uncertain terms, and with expletives used in lieu of punctuation, to get his arse back to Tinga Lodge immediately. Tom held the phone away from his ear and rolled his eyes theatrically. Sannie smiled back at him.
‘There’s no point in going back to Tinga,’ Tom said to Shuttleworth.
‘What the hell do you mean, no point?’ Shuttle-worth yelled.
Sannie whispered to him, asking if he wanted her to pull over so he could finish the conversation. She had turned right at a four-way stop outside the camp and was now driving down a steep hill to the wide, mostly sandy expanse of the Letaba River.
Tom shook his head. ‘I’ve typed up my notes and printed them out on the Tinga computer. It’s all there waiting for you. I’m crossing the border tonight and I’ll try to pick up their trail tomorrow. We probably haven’t got a hope in hell, but there’s nothing for me to do at Tinga except sit around and wait to lose my job officially. The South Africans already tried to arrest me this morning.’ Tom smiled at Sannie, again holding the phone away so they could both hear Shuttleworth yelling until the phone signal dropped out.
‘Now we’re really on our own,’ she said.
Away from the park’s traffic Sannie pushed the accelerator pedal harder and the hatchback juddered along a corrugated-dirt, ochre-coloured road flanked by dry yellow grasslands towards the Giriyondo border post, which sat on a navigable hill on the pass through the Lebombo mountain range.
The mountains, which to Tom’s eye weren’t much more than a string of low, hazy blue hills, marked the natural and actual border between South Africa and Mozambique.
Bristling with lightning rods, radio antennae and satellite television dishes, Giriyondo border post was a relatively new addition to the Kruger National Park, set up to provide access to an old hunting reserve on the Mozambican side which had been incorporated into the new Greater Limpopo Transfrontier National Park.
The new park had been designed to re-establish traditional animal migration routes and to help impoverished Mozambique cash in on some of the tourist dollars that came South Africa’s way via Kruger. It was still in its infancy, but already proving popular with local and foreign visitors looking for a different bush experience, or a short cut from Kruger to Mozambique’s beaches. The reserve’s wildlife, Sannie explained as she drove through the post’s gates and parked outside a new tan-coloured thatched building, had been decimated by poaching during Mozambique’s civil war. They were unlikely to see as many animals as they had in Kruger once they crossed the border.
The South African authorities were trying to restock the park, particularly with elephant, whose numbers had grown in Kruger since the government buckled to international pressure and ended the practice of culling. ‘The bunny-huggers overseas stopped us culling our elephants, so now there are too many of them in the park, and they’re causing damage to the environment. The parks guys moved some across the border, but elephants are smart and they knew that Mozambique was a dangerous place. Many of them simply walked back across the border into South Africa.’
They got out and closed the car doors and Tom braced himself for a test of African bureaucracy. Once inside, however, Sannie switched continuously from Afrikaans to the local dialect, and soon had the immigration and customs officers on the South African side smiling and charmed. She used her police credentials to satisfy the national parks staff member on duty that they did not need exit permits as they were travelling on official business.
Things slowed, however, after they walked next door to an identical building, across a white line on the ground which marked the crossing from South Africa to Mozambique.
‘ Bom Dia,’ the blue-uniformed immigration official smiled as they entered, though his pleasant demeanour disappeared once they submitted their passports and completed entry forms.
‘No visa?’ he said to Tom, passing back his passport across the counter.
‘I need one?’ he asked Sannie. She spoke to the man in Tsonga Shangaan, the Mozambican version of the tribal language, and he raised his eyebrows at her knowledge of it.
‘He says South Africans are granted visas here, at the border, but you’ll need to go to the high commission in Nelspruit or the embassy in Pretoria to get yours.’
Tom felt his face flush as the anger surged up inside him. ‘What the fuck does he mean by that? They’re hundreds of kilometres away. Tell him there’s a man’s life at stake and — ’
She put a hand on his arm and he looked down at it. The touch calmed him. ‘Shush,’ she chided. ‘I told you before, the best way to deal with bureaucracy in this part of the world is to remain calm and be patient and you’ve blown that already.’
‘Yes, but — ’
‘Yes, but leave it to me.’
The official sat back, crossed his arms in front of his chest and continued to shake his head as he spoke. Sannie switched her attention to the customs official, sitting next to the immigration man, who had been taking an active interest in the conversation.
The immigration officer and his colleague conversed with each other, switching from Tsonga Shangaan to Portuguese. Tom figured they wanted to keep that conversation private from Sannie. She looked over her shoulder at him and winked. ‘It’s okay,’ she mouthed.
‘Come,’ the immigration officer said, standing and beckoning Tom.
Tom looked at Sannie for an explanation. ‘Whatever he asks for, just pay him. We don’t have time to bargain, and the law’s on their side,’ she said.
It was the height of irony, Tom thought as he followed the immigration man into an adjoining private interview room, that the poster on the wall read, Mozambique says no to corruption.
Inside he sat down at a desk opposite the man, who took out a blank entry form and wrote on the back R1000. ‘Bloody hell,’ Tom said out loud, reluctantly reaching for his wallet. The amount was close to a hundred pounds. He counted out the notes and threw them down on the table. The immigration man looked left and right, though the room was empty except for the two of them, then slid the money off the tabletop and into his pocket.
Sannie nodded grimly to him when he emerged. ‘The customs guy will want his cut as well.’
She was right. Outside the airconditioned building the man made a show of checking the car’s interior and boot, saying he was looking for alcohol and groceries. The customs officer then demanded a further five hundred rand in import duties, though he didn’t specify on what the taxes were to be levied. Sannie nodded to Tom’s pants pocket and he peeled off more of the blue hundred-rand notes.
Tom swallowed his indignation and paid the bribe, thankful at last to be waved through the gate. ‘Do you want me to drive?’ he asked.
‘I’m happy to keep going until we hit the tar road. I learned to drive on dirt roads in Africa, Tom. I’d be lost in the traffic in London, though.’
Tom studied a map given to them when they paid their entry fee to the national park, which on the Mozambican side was called the Parque Nacional Do Limpopo. The park’s emblem was the curved-horn sable antelope, the same animal Tom had seen on the box of matches left behind by one of Greeves’s abductors.
‘We’re not likely to run into any speed traps here in the bush, nor many animals,’ she said when she noticed him glancing at the speedometer. ‘I want to get as close as we can to the coast before nightfall. The road’s better there.’
She hovered on eighty, pausing only to gear down expertly a couple of times when the Volkswagen’s path was momentarily slewed by some deep sand. The car skipped along the ridges of the corrugations on the harder surfaced tracks and the suspension absorbed the worst of the ride when they bounced along a section which was cobbled with round rocks each the size of a softball. Once or twice Tom winced as the underneath of the Chico scraped over an earthen mound or rock, but Sannie maintained the relentless pace, taking each curve like a seasoned rally driver.
The vegetation was different on the Mozambican side and Sannie confirmed Tom’s suspicion that the trees were more mature and bush thicker because of the lack of browsing and grazing animals. In the first hour of driving he saw only two impalas and a single steenbok, a delicate little brick-coloured antelope which took off at the sound
