face change, possibly to one of worry. It was hard to tell. She fired a series of questions at him, and the African scratched his chin as he talked, and gesticulated with a thumb over his shoulder, towards the coast.
Sannie’s eyes widened. ‘Tom! He says everyone’s looking for two or three men in a bakkie with a tinted canopy on the back, heading for the coast.’
‘What else?’ Tom wiped away the rivulets of sweat that were stinging his eyes. It was hotter and much more humid the closer they travelled to the coast. Sannie spoke to the man again.
‘He says they’ve just had a radio call from Maputo, via their station in Xai Xai, to be on the look-out for up to three men in a Toyota HiLux, suspected of carrying two kidnap victims in the back.’
For the moment Tom shared her enthusiasm. At least they weren’t the only ones on the trail of the suspects. He wondered where the new intelligence had come from and suddenly wished he could call Shuttleworth — or anyone on the team, for that matter. However, there was no signal showing on his mobile phone.
The policeman looked past them anxiously. There were already three other cars — two overloaded pick-ups and the minibus taxi Tom had very nearly rammed — that had been pulled over for speeding by another officer and were queued up behind their Volkswagen. ‘Well, has he seen them?’
Sannie spoke to the man again. ‘He says he only came on duty two hours ago and there’s been no vehicle matching that description so far on his shift. I’ve got the name of his colleague, though, who was working this afternoon. He’s at the main station at Xai Xai.’
‘That’s something.’ The policeman waved them on, without them having to pay a bribe or a fine, obviously thinking there were easier targets behind them. They pulled over after leaving Chokwe and Sannie took a turn behind the wheel. She was a godsend, Tom thought. He knew he would have been completely out of his depth if he had crossed the border alone.
Twice they found themselves behind Toyota pickups and Tom slipped his pistol from his holster and held it ready between his thighs as Sannie, knuckles white on the steering wheel, accelerated and brought the Chico up beside the four-by-fours, which towered menacingly above the little car. One was driven by a Portuguese woman who had four children on board with her; the other’s occupants were an elderly African man and a woman of similar vintage, presumably his wife. Tom was frustrated, but also relieved as either truck could have sent their little car flying off the road into the bush with a gentle nudge.
They came to a T-junction where the road from Chokwe met the EN1, the main north-south road along the coast of Mozambique. ‘Well, here we are. Right or left? Right goes to Maputo, the capital; left goes all the way to Tanzania eventually.’
Tom glanced at the map again, touching the red line that marked the road, as if some unseen force would guide him. ‘It gets quieter, less populated as you go north, right?’
Sannie nodded. ‘Though a gang of kidnappers could very easily lose themselves in the slums of Maputo.’
Tom closed his eyes. ‘North,’ he said. Sannie turned left.
They made good time heading up the coast, with Sannie winding the Chico up to a hundred and twenty between towns where they were forced to slow to sixty again, both to avoid speed traps and to ask more local policeman if they had seen the fugitive vehicle. There were no confirmed sightings and Tom felt seeds of dread germinating in his gut.
They crossed a broad flood plain on a raised road and then a suspension bridge to enter the town of Xai Xai. It must have been quite pleasant in its day, Tom thought. There was more of the architecture he had already come to associate with the country — whitewashed Portuguese-style villas with red roofs and rendered buildings painted in pastel hues, but, unlike the other settlements they had passed through, Xai Xai was a holiday town. There were a couple of white concrete hotels, neither of which Tom would have fancied staying in, and a grassy park with a bandstand. It could have been any holiday town on the Mediterranean coast. Outside a cafe, two Portuguese men sat with four much younger African women in western clothes, one of whom was breastfeeding a coffee-coloured baby. A boy in board shorts and an American basketball shirt held up the largest prawn Tom had ever seen as they coasted past him.
‘River crayfish,’ Sannie said of the creature, which looked nearly as long as the lad’s forearm. Music pumped from a bar and it seemed the beat was almost loud enough to cause their car’s windows to vibrate as Sannie stopped to let a minibus disgorge passengers ahead of her.
It was hot and muggy here on the coast and Tom could smell the cloying scent of salt water above the diesel exhausts and the oily smoke of chicken grilling over sizzling charcoal. Youngsters ran alongside their South African registered car, waving bags of cashews and yet more prawns. ‘Howzit, my boet,’ one yelled at him and Sannie smiled and shook her head as she translated the Afrikaans slang for ‘Hello, my brother’.
‘This was once a nice place, but it’s too busy now. We stayed here not long after the country was opened again to South Africans, but I’m afraid my people have spoiled this part of the coast. These days you can buy cashews and prawns cheaper in South Africa than you can from these guys.’
Sannie had sourced directions to the main police station from the last speed trap they had stopped at and she turned off the main road through the centre of town and parked under a tree outside a building that looked as solid as a block house. The pockmarks in the wall told Tom that the police station had been well built to withstand gunfire and the civil war had proved the point.
Inside, Sannie asked the female police officer on duty at the front desk for Capitao Alfredo — she didn’t have his second name. The woman looked at her blankly for a few seconds, then turned and walked into a back room. Sannie looked at Tom and he shrugged.
‘Ah, good evening,’ said a thin man in blue uniform trousers and a starched white shirt, wiping his hands on a paper serviette as he emerged from the back room. ‘I am Capitao Alfredo Manuel.’ He wiped himself again, this time on the front of his trousers, and then shook hands with Tom and Sannie, who introduced themselves by name and rank. ‘My colleagues from South Africa and England. I have heard you would be coming.’
Sannie complimented the captain on his English and he explained that, ironically, he had learned the language in Russia, where he had trained as a soldier for Frelimo, the rebel force which had subsequently become the government in Mozambique. ‘I also speak Russian, of course, and German. I was a teacher before joining the struggle.’
‘Thank you for agreeing to help us, Captain,’ Tom said.
‘Not at all. The pleasure is all mine. It is not every day that we get reports of a senior politician being abducted by terrorists.’
He led them around the charge counter down the corridor to another room, which was his office. Tom and Sannie took bare metal chairs in front of a large antique wooden desk. Capitao Alfredo sat in a leather office chair. ‘Cigarette?’
They declined, but Alfredo lit up a Benson amp; Hedges anyway. Behind him on the wall was a map of Mozambique and a second one, which Tom couldn’t see clearly but guessed was of the local area. There were coloured pins stuck at intervals on what looked like the main north-south road. On the desk was an open Styrofoam takeaway food container with the bones of a half-chicken in it. Tom smelled chilli and fat. ‘You have heard that one of my officers saw a suspicious vehicle that matches the description of the one you are seeking?’
‘Yes, Captain…’ Sannie said.
‘Please, call me Alfredo.’
Sannie smiled. She was a white Afrikaner and he was a black African, but Tom thought the captain’s eyes were pure Latino when he looked at the attractive blonde. He also thought he saw a trace of a blush on Sannie’s cheeks. ‘Well, Alfredo, yes, we have heard that you are looking for the same Toyota HiLux we are pursuing and that one of your officers may have seen the vehicle in question.’
Tom was impressed at how she was winging it. The truth was that they only now knew they were looking for a Toyota because one of Alfredo’s men had told them that was the vehicle they had been warned to look out for. Tom and Sannie were still behind in the game, but this was their chance to catch up and, hopefully, get ahead.
Alfredo stood and turned to the maps behind him. ‘ Sim,’ he nodded. ‘In fact, more than one of my people have seen it. After the bulletin came through, one of my men at Chisanno recalled seeing a HiLux with a tinted rear cab pass by him. He recalled it as unusual because the other windows on the double cab were untinted. He saw the bakkie about one o’clock this afternoon. You can talk with him if you wish. I have had him called to the station in case. I thought this may be the vehicle and warned all of my officers to be extra vigilant.’
He gave them a long, thoughtful look, as though giving them time to appreciate how efficient he had been in his policing. Perhaps, Tom thought, he was waiting for praise for having done his job. Just get on with it, he willed
