of their approach. Animals of the four-footed variety were the least of his concerns now.

Sannie slowed as they entered the village of Macavene, a widely dispersed string of mud huts with thatched- reed roofs. There was the ruin of an old farmhouse, Portuguese they presumed, but no one was living in the gutted building now. A cluster of children gathered around them, staring in silence. Sannie asked for directions and a young man pointed to the left fork of a road as the route to Massingir Dam, their next waypoint.

The road deteriorated rapidly after they left the village and Sannie was forced to drive most of the badly rutted and eroded track in second and third gear. She muttered curses in Afrikaans as she scraped her way along and took the little car up the side of a washed-out section of road so that they were riding at an alarming angle for a hundred metres. At one point Tom instinctively reached out to brace himself against the dashboard when it felt as though they might roll. She laughed at his face and it relieved the tension of the pursuit for a precious minute.

When they arrived at the manned gate marking the border of the Limpopo Park, there was a car ahead of them, a shiny new Corolla, which turned out to be a rental car driven by two middle-aged brothers from Tasmania in Australia. Tom shook his head after chatting briefly to them. It seemed he and Sannie weren’t the only crazy people braving the unknown in Mozambique.

Massingir was an impressive man-made addition to the African landscape, an earthen dam five kilometres long and topped with new concrete, a roadway and modern spillways. It blocked the Olifants River, and the land immediately downstream of the wall was green and fertile, a stark contrast with the uniform khaki of the bush on either side of the watercourse. Tom saw fishermen in canoes hugging the lake shore as they set out for the evening’s work. The trees on the banks were taking on the soft golden hues he had come to associate with the onset of Africa’s brief twilight.

He suddenly felt guilty, for taking Sannie away from her children and having her share the risks in a bid to make up for his mistakes. ‘You know, I couldn’t do this without you,’ he said.

‘I know. It’s why I’m here.’

She let Tom take the wheel after they crossed the dam and encouraged him to push the car up to a hundred and twenty. The road was narrow — just enough room for two cars to pass — and while the tar was studded with gravel it was smooth enough to allow him to reach the maximum speed limit. The bush encroached to the very verge of the surface and he realised that if a goat or a cow — or even a person — emerged from the trees on either side he would have virtually no chance of stopping in time. He gripped the wheel harder and pushed the accelerator until the engine was screaming, before changing up a gear.

Just when he was beginning to think all of Africa was covered with thorny bushes and stunted acacias, the road they were on ended in a T-junction and the countryside changed. Turning right on to a wider, smooth-tarred road they passed into wide open flat land of treeless flood plains. Here the road was raised, on a kind of levee bank. A long, straight irrigation or drainage canal ran parallel, on the left, complete with locks similar to those found on English canals. To the right of the road was a railway line.

‘Good farming country,’ Sannie said. ‘I remember the fruit and vegetables here were some of the best I’ve ever had. The greenest lettuces, the reddest tomatoes you’ll ever see.’

Here and there the seemingly endless verdant farmlands were dotted with white houses with red roofs that looked like terracotta tiles. It was only later when they passed closer to one such farmhouse that Tom saw the roof was actually corrugated asbestos painted to look like tiling. It was a little piece of imitation Portugal, erected by long-gone colonists who must have pined for the far-off homeland they were feeding with the rich soil of Africa and the sweat of her people.

In the small towns they whizzed through were more signs of the old rulers’ influence: signs in Portuguese, Catholic cathedrals, stout concrete buildings of the colonial administration, and clusters of merchants’ villas with a distinct Mediterranean flavour. Some of the houses were freshly painted in pale pastels — more faux Europe — while others bore the bullet holes and black scorch marks of the post-colonial orgy of violence.

They passed a small mosque with a stunted, pointed minaret which was more a gesture to Islam than a tower from which to call the faithful to prayer. It made Tom think about the men they were pursuing. He was assuming they were Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, though he had no proof of their motive, cause or identity at this stage, beyond one man’s facial features. As he reminded himself to keep an open mind, the enormity of the task — the probable futility of their race across a foreign country with no support, no back-up — hit him like a bullet in the chest.

On the edge of the canal beside the road, life went on. Women in bright wraps washed themselves and their babies in soapy plastic washing bowls; small boys dived off bridges; men fished with long reed poles with fishing line tied to the ends. They passed a man in a suit and a cowboy hat riding a bicycle, and a new Land Cruiser driven by a fat, waving Portuguese farmer.

‘Some of the old farmers from the colonial days are returning, and there are white Zimbabwean farmers here too. They were kicked off their own land by their government, which was once allied to the ruling party here in Mozambique. That’s Africa for you,’ Sannie said.

Tom shook his head.

‘What is it?’ Sannie asked. ‘You’re looking grim.’

‘You don’t need to be here, Sannie.’

‘Yes I do.’

They were silent for a few seconds as they both considered the implications of that, but Tom finally broke their reverie.

‘We don’t have a chance in hell, do we?’

‘Probably not.’ She took a sip from a can of Coke and handed it to him. ‘But there’s nothing else we can do.’

14

Bernard Joyce had spent the better part of eight years at sea. He had lived for the wide expanses of empty ocean, even though he was under it for most of the time. Now he prayed that he would see the water again.

He knew they were by the coast. He could smell it. The dank odour of salt water damp was as much a part of a multimillion-pound nuclear submarine as it would have been on one of Nelson’s ships of the line or an Arab trading dhow. And though he knew nothing at all about African birds, seagulls made the same irritating squawk the world over.

His world was one of darkness and pain. He lay on a cold concrete floor, his face covered with a rough hessian sack tied about his throat with string. His hands were cuffed behind his back with plastic cable ties and his fingers were numb. His shoulders ached from the position he had been kept in since the abduction in the cool dark pre-dawn at Tinga.

Time was a hard thing to measure when kept in darkness, but the coarse weave of his hood had let in daylight when he and Greeves had been bundled into the back of the truck, and for parts of their nightmarish journey. He had been elated to hear gunfire, then terrified as the hot bullet casings rained down on him, burning his bare arms, as their captor fired on whomever was pursuing them. Would they be killed before their rescuers got to them? He imagined their abductors — who had so far said virtually nothing — were terrorists rather than petty criminals, and that they would ensure their hostages died if it looked as though they might be caught. But there had been no evidence of a pursuing force since the gun battle in the bush, which had ended with explosions and fire.

Bernard’s feet throbbed with unceasing pain. He had been barefoot, undressed for bed except for a pair of boxer shorts, when they had come for him. They had let themselves into the room — an inside job, for sure — and the needle’s jab had silenced him before he could fight back, though he had managed to call out first. He’d awoken in the bush and panicked at the feel of the tape over his mouth. He’d always suffered sinus problems and needed consciously to force himself to breathe as deeply and slowly as possible through his nose.

His feet had been punctured and torn bloody in the first few steps through the bush, and made worse, later, when he had been dragged from the back of the vehicle and made to run as the bullets flew around him. They had marched him and Greeves hard and fast through the bush, each step compounding Bernard’s agony. Several times he’d tripped and fallen and had either been dragged upright by his cuffed hands — an excruciatingly painful

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