Far to the northwest of the Valley of Bones, beyond the hundreds of kilometers of red sand dunes that lay, scalloplike, towards the coastline, Atlantic fog sucked in by the intense temperature inland shut down any flying Kallie’s father had planned for the next few hours.
Ferdie van Reenen was a big man, with a wild beard and a battered face from being a boxer in his youth. He had survived war, flood and famine on his farm, but it would be his daughter Kallie who would break his heart one day, when she grew older and left home. But until that happened she could also raise his blood pressure. He was due to fly his clients further north, to the Kunene River on the Angolan border. His twin-engined Beechcraft Baron could do the trip comfortably with its fifteen-hundred-kilometer range, and he was all set, now that Kallie had delivered the additional supplies he needed. She had also delivered the news about Max and!Koga.
Van Reenen secured the luggage net in the back of the plane. His voice was as rough as old desert boots, and distinctive: a mixture between a Dutch and a German accent.
“That was a stupid thing to do, my girl. Helping that boy will bring trouble down on our heads, you see if it doesn’t!”
Kallie ticked off the final item on the supply manifest; she always kept accurate records for the farm’s accounts. Legend had it that when her father served in the South African Air Force, he could fly a Hercules C130 transport plane through the eye of a needle at three hundred knots, upside down and with a full cargo; but money and income taxes presented a bigger challenge. And so, at times, did his daughter.
“Pa, don’t start.”
“Start? You fly to Windhoek, you send him off with my old Land Rover, my
“Pa, it’s the
“Exactly. I cherish that thing. That’s not the point. He’s just a boy!”
“He’s fifteen,” she interrupted.
“A boy!” he insisted.
“When you were fifteen, you spent three months in the bush hunting, you rounded up five hundred cattle for your father …”
“It was a thousand head of cattle. Never mind me! He’s an English schoolboy who has probably never even seen the sun, and he’ll fry out here. And now he’s gone off on a scatterbrained expedition to try and find his father, who is nowhere to be seen or heard of!” Ferdie van Reenen angrily wrenched the securing rope tight. Kallie stayed quiet; there was little point in going head to head with her dad. “Do you have any idea what this would mean if anything happened to him? We helped him. We sent him out there-probably to die!” her father spluttered.
“I sent him out there. Me. I made the decision.”
“Wrong one to make!”
“He’s got diesel, water, food-he can reach any of the game lodges by radio if he gets lost or if the Land Rover has any problems,” she replied.
“The Land Rover is in perfect running order. That’s not the point! We will be the ones dragged into court. Accessory to stupidity will be the charge, as well as accessory to careless abandonment, or accessory to manslaughter, or accessory to something! Father missing. Son missing. My daughter’s brain missing!”
Kallie took a deep breath. Her father’s life was stressful enough, trying to keep two planes, a farm and a struggling safari business going. The Beechcraft had been bought with a big loan from the bank, and any mishaps or drop in business could push her father into bankruptcy. “Pa …” She touched his arm. “You taught me to fly when I was twelve; I’ve been able to look after myself for a while now…. Believe me, this boy would have gone off on his own if I hadn’t helped him. And I think he’s capable of handling things. He’s a tough kid. The man from London called, asking if I could help. I picked him up, I did the best I could for him. He thinks his father is in trouble.!Koga thinks he’s been sent by the Great God to be with his people….” She stopped; she could hear herself making matters worse.
“The Bushman was still at the farm?” he asked.
She nodded. “He wouldn’t leave until
Her father pulled up his coat collar. He hated the damp. He hated not flying. But he loved his daughter. He looked at her, the moisture from the fog clinging to his beard. Then he shook his head. “No. He sounds like a brave boy.” He kissed her cheek, turned towards the airfield’s building and pointed a finger at her. “But when this weather lifts, you fly straight back to the farm. Enough is enough. Understand?” She nodded, and he put his arm around her. “Good. Come on, buy your old man a cup of coffee. God, I hate this weather.”
Kallie returned his hug and fell into step as they set off for the airfield clubhouse. She wanted to make radio contact with Max, to see if he was all right. She was responsible for helping him, she knew that; but now she felt like a big sister towards the English boy. And, from her experience, brothers always got into trouble.
A low-pressure weather front had moved across the North Atlantic, tumbled across Ireland and then punished the Devon coast with torrential rain. Dartmoor High’s granite walls kept the elements at bay, but during storms like these, when the clouds hugged the high ground and enshrouded the school, the long, low-lit corridors and stairwells created an almost sinister atmosphere. And shadows seemed to move when they shouldn’t. It was all in the imagination, Sayid told himself as he skulked along, hugging the gloomier side of the corridor’s walls. Since he had sent the message telling Max that Peterson knew where he was, there had been no contact with his friend. And there had been no chance for Sayid to eavesdrop again on Peterson, so yesterday he had taken matters into his own hands. He needed a piece of equipment from a specialist shop in London that he could buy on the web. And for that he needed a credit card, and there was only one place where he could find one: his mother.
Sayid had been brought up with a strict code of behavior, and theft and dishonesty were considered “heinous crimes” according to his mother and his late father. But Sayid had no choice but to use his mother’s credit card illegally and order what he needed. His mother would have done anything she could to help Max, but then she would have asked why he needed this particular device, and then he would have had to explain that he wanted to bug Peterson’s phone; his mother would have thrown a wobbly, and matters would have got totally out of hand. He had four weeks before his mother would discover the item on her credit card billing, so he would worry about the consequences when the time came. By then, he hoped, Max would have returned safely. It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried another way of doing things. He had tried to hack into Peterson’s computer, but the granite walls, as well as Peterson’s firewall, stopped him. Sayid soothed away his guilt over the card. There had been no choice. Not if he was to help his friend.
He had to discover who Peterson reported to, so that he could relay that information to Max and Farentino. But how to get into Peterson’s locked room was another problem altogether.
Shaka Chang could buy anything he desired, but he could not get the information he needed from Tom Gordon. The scientist had outwitted Chang and hidden the vital evidence which could ruin Chang’s plans for good. He comforted himself with the thought that the scientist was no longer of any consequence; Tom Gordon would not be telling anyone anything. But Chang had a grudging admiration for the boy who had set out from England. Max Gordon’s determination could prove more troublesome than he expected. Once his men had driven him and the Bushman boy into the Valley of Bones, Max had held little interest for Chang; now he began to wonder if he had been too hasty in that dismissal. If by some absolute fluke the boy survived, and if, as he suspected, the boy’s father had somehow told him where to find the information that was so very damaging-then he should not underestimate the emotional strength of anyone trying to save a loved one. Not that Shaka Chang had ever been loved. Feared and loathed, yes. Love was too difficult and complex an emotion to analyze, but he did recognize it as a driving force in others.
Mr. Slye, ever aware of his master’s desire to be in total control of any given situation, muttered that perhaps it would be prudent to double-check on the boy’s survival. Chang agreed. “Send them back again. No excuses. Find either the boy’s body or, if wild animals have had him, his remains.”
“And if by any chance they track him down and he is still alive …?” Slye asked. He would never presume to offer a complete answer to any situation: suggestions were complimentary to his employer’s intelligence; a solution without one being requested, impertinent.
