powered him on, his eyes fixed on Max. His prey.
Max was defenseless, the man less than ten meters away now, and Max could hear him grunting with exertion and see the sheen of sweat on his face. The man’s gun hand hung limply at his side-he had caught it a punishing blow on the rock-but the knife he wielded would be enough to do the job. The man slashed at Max’s feet and the tough canvas slit as if it were tissue paper.
The driver’s injured arm stopped him from coming aboard, but there was no way Max could keep his own balance on such a flimsy roof. He needed a weapon. The radio aerial! It was in a podlike bracket on the rear bulkhead. The man slashed again and spittle shot from his lips as he snarled in frustration, but Max jumped over the cab, found his footing on the spare wheel that was locked on the bonnet and jinked to the left as his feet hit the ground.
The driver was on the far side of the Land Rover, near the right-hand headlight. He would have to come all the way back to reach Max, who had reached the aerial and had both hands pressing down on its base. He twisted it free from its locked position and held what was now a three-meter-long metal whip. The man lunged, but he was a couple of meters away. Max slashed at him and the stinging metal cut across the top of his neck and shoulder. He cried out, but then snarled and spat even more, like a tormented scrapyard dog. If he ducked beneath Max’s swinging arc he would gut him like a fish.
Max was well balanced-a slight bend in his knees, his feet edging up onto his toes, waiting for the rush of his opponent. His fists were clenched around the aerial’s base as a warrior would hold a double-edged sword. The driver waited, Max watched his eyes; the man stabbed forward, but that was a feint-he intended to swing his arm back and plunge the razor-sharp blade into Max’s stomach. Max yelled, giving himself a surge of energy, ridding himself of the last vestige of fear, and whipped the aerial across his body-left and right and back again. Welts of blood suddenly appeared on the driver’s arms, chest and face. An almost surgical cut suddenly ran from above his left ear, down across his face and onto his neck. He was blinded. Max stepped back, nausea welling inside. He had caused the man serious injury, it felt terrible, and his feeling of guilt almost made him lower his guard. A voice shouted from his own mind-
Max’s efforts on the back of the Land Rover had rocked it free, and it had slid off the flat-topped rock. He threw the aerial into the back. They needed help and the radio was their only means of contacting anyone. Kallie. He would radio Kallie. She would send the police, or the army, anyone. Max felt the icy fear of being completely out of his depth.
But as the physical exertion of coaxing the Land Rover diagonally down the reverse slope of the ridge focused Max’s panic, his doubts swept away like the dust behind him. He would radio for help, but he was not going to stop. He would find his father. The bouncing Land Rover jolted!Koga. Max was steering with one hand and holding the Bushman’s shoulder with the other, keeping the boy’s head from banging against the dashboard. By the time they reached the flat road!Koga’s eyes had opened.
“What happened?” he asked.
“We won!” Max shouted. He laughed, though the steering wheel had a life of its own and demanded less celebration and more concentration as they lumbered across the uneven ground.!Koga smiled and said something Max took to be the Bushman equivalent of “Let’s get out of here while the going’s good.”
They were on the cooler, moister side of the hills, which offered more vegetation, the reason why animals trekked here. The boulders gave way to gentler ground with the hills to one side; they were now in a valley, heading towards the guardian mountains. As the ground leveled, Max let the tension ease out of his hands-he had been gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles were white. With a backwards glance and the thought that it would take their attackers at least an hour, probably longer, before they contacted the other group, he allowed himself a sigh of relief. Fear had dried his mouth and he was parched, but he made a deal with himself to stop and drink only when they were in the lee of the mountains, which had already lost the sun and which would offer them safety and shelter. A good vantage point, a safe haven for the night, was all he wanted now. And that drink.
As they drove towards the mountains, now purple in the evening light, he gazed in wonder at the amphitheater which lay before him. Perhaps this was a small corner of the Garden of Eden. He could not know its beauty concealed a treacherous place of death, where bones of the dead already lay.
A satellite link between Shaka Chang and his man in England beamed their voices across the thousands of kilometers between them. Things were not going as planned. There was no friendliness when they spoke, only irritation that the simple task of eliminating a boy was taking so long. Chang was on the first level of his desert fortress. It was a proper fort, huge and square, with battlements, like the French Foreign Legion had had in the Sahara, only this one had been built by a deluded German count in the nineteenth century. He had imagined himself to be a king and he built the castle as a fortress. It was impenetrable, riddled with underground chambers, escape routes, cellars, dungeons and a gravity-fed water system from a deep well. Unbeknown to the count, the castle lay on a fault line that a future owner-Shaka Chang-would develop into a mini-hydroelectric power supply. One day, the count told his wife and children he was going for a walk to admire the flowers along the riverside boulevard, and his wife realized that he had finally gone mad. There were no flowers, no boulevard and, by that night, no count. They found his blood-smeared, silver-topped cane next morning. She and the children went back to Bavaria, to the cold, the snow and everything she had missed, including the count’s wealth, which she inherited. The fortress lay empty until the First World War, when the German army took control. A bitter war of extermination was levied against the indigenous people and the fortress’s reputation for housing mad and then cruel people was embedded.
And ten years ago Shaka Chang moved in.
He made it a modern outpost with every conceivable luxury. Now he stood in a vast room. Deep, cool shadows created an almost permanent chill, so there was no need for air-conditioning. The view from the panoramic window encompassed desert, mountain and an area of wetland, almost swamplike, which seeped away from the reed beds at the riverbank. When animals came to drink, there was no greater observation place in southern Africa. It also gave him a view of the crocodile sandbanks, where he liked to watch them bask and glide like assassins into the still waters to feed on unwary victims. Not all the prey were four-legged animals. A salutary lesson for all to see-anyone displeasing Shaka Chang made a serious mistake.
The driver who had led the chase earlier had been summoned. With one of his men dead, and himself still bleeding from Max’s whipping, humiliation competed with the physical pain that had been inflicted on him. The driver was thirsty but dared not ask for water.
Guards stood at the entrance as he awaited his master. He shifted nervously from foot to foot, his slashed T-shirt, encrusted with blood, stuck to his dust-caked body and by now the cuts were itching furiously. Chang, by contrast, was dressed in a cotton shirt, handmade of the highest-quality materials in Jermyn Street, London. He reached for a bottle of water, the condensation on the blue glass clinging like frost. His tailor always cut the shirts loose enough so as not to stretch across Chang’s muscular frame, but nothing could deny that bulk and power. Black slacks and calfskin slip-on shoes completed the effect of a modern businessman-immaculate taste and informal appearance which stamped his authority.
To one side, in one of the darker corners, another man hovered, barely visible, which was the way he liked it. He was quite opposite in physique and style to Chang. Small and skinny to the point of being gaunt, with a gray pallor to his skin, Mr. Lucius Slye never went outside unless he had a big black umbrella to shield him from the sun and glare. Secretly, he was known as Mr. Rat to everyone who knew him, though they would never say it out loud- he was too dangerous. His pinched face, his pointed, sniffy, twitching nose and threads of hair pulled back across his balding head gave him a definitely ratlike appearance. A buttoned-collar black shirt, black suit, black shoes and socks heightened his anemic look. But he was essential to Chang. At every minute of every day he knew the status of Mr. Chang’s widespread business interests. A PDA never left his hands. And now as Chang spoke to his man in England, his gaze never left the wretched face of the driver. It was hard to tell whose eyes were more frightening- Chang’s deep brown pools of mystery or Slye’s soulless gray portals.
Chang spoke calmly as he gazed out across the vastness that was a small corner of his empire. “This line will only be secure for a few moments more,” Chang said as he trickled water into a glass, “so what do we know?”
The voice from England was as clear as if the man was in the room himself, the speakerphone creating a slight echo within the confines of the fortress’s stone walls. “He’s a smart boy, and he’s tough. The training at school has given him a certain resilience. And he can look after himself. But …” The man hesitated, he was buying
