The Devil's breath

15

Kallie van Reenen had a suspicious mind. She blamed her father for that. He might have been a war hero but, as he always told her, the Angolan war was a bad war, waged for the wrong reasons, instigated by greed. After he had criticized the government openly they began to harass him and he moved to Namibia, away from the unforgiving South African government of the day. Now all that was over, but her father had an intrinsic distrust of bureaucracy. And as far as Kallie was concerned, when she had discovered that Mike Kapuo was involved with Mr. Peterson in England, that distrust now included the police-the very people she had gone to for help. So when they took her back to her plane and the police air mechanic sorted out the problems, she logged her flight plan for home and flew to an airfield south of Walvis Bay. That at least gave the illusion that she was flying back to the farm. Five hours later, when she landed at a desert airstrip for refueling, a fingertip search confirmed her suspicions. She found the satellite tracking device.

Half an hour later, a plane that was returning from safari and which would be sitting on the apron at Windhoek for a few days, carried the electronic tag.

The plane’s pilot turned up only moments after she had planted the small transponder. “You’re van Reenen’s daughter, aren’t you?” the pilot said.

“That’s right,” she said, barely managing to conceal her embarrassment. Moments earlier he would have seen her acting suspiciously around his aircraft.

“If you’re flying up to see your dad, better be careful,” he said, slinging his overnight bag into the plane. “IATA’s just blacklisted Namibian airspace, the relay station at Outjo has gone down. There’s no ATC anywhere.”

“Oh. Right. Thanks. I hadn’t heard.”

“Happened this morning. I’m heading home. The tourist industry ever hears about this, we’ll all be out of work. Take it easy.” He began his preflight checks as she drifted away, barely able to conceal her elation at the good news he had given her.

The International Air Transport Association, which controlled everything to do with aviation, had blacklisted the Namibian government’s air traffic control system. With its major relay station broken down, aircraft would not be able to see each other in the sky or land safely. And if air traffic control was not working, they would not be able to see her on their radar screens.

From now on she would fly low without logging any flight plans.

* * *

Kallie needed to contact Sayid; the best way to do that was through Tobias, and there was only one way she could get his full cooperation: through guilt.

The small airstrips in the desert and at farms had no control towers. They were as informal as garages. Most had a fuel pump, a couple of mechanics and a shop; maybe a bar. When she landed, there was only one other plane needing refueling and no sign of the bogus mechanic who had sabotaged her plane. She pushed the bar’s doors open and strode towards Tobias, who was busy connecting a barrel of beer. The moment he saw her, he reached for the till and snatched a piece of paper. “Boy, did you con me! Do you know what that phone call to England cost? Your father would skin me alive if I gave him this!”

She sat on a barstool; there was no one else in the room. “Tobias, you nearly killed me,” she said with a straight face. Tobias’s mouth opened in an unspoken moment of uncertainty and confusion. “You remember that Desert Buster Ice-Cold Special you made me?” she said.

“Yes. There was no booze in it. Honest.”

“I know.” She waited, wanting to draw out his suffering a little longer.

“I blended the fruit and mix myself. You got sick? Food poisoning? Maybe it was something else you ate.”

“It was the old flask, Tobias. Your Desert Buster must have had fermented fruit in it. It blew up.”

“Blew up?” He was trying to picture the moment when his concoction escaped the confines of the flask. “Did the flask hurt you?”

Kallie grabbed ice cubes from the bucket, dropped them into a glass, reached for the lemonade dispenser and filled the glass. “It’s all right if I have a drink, is it?” she asked.

He nodded, still trying to put together how his actions might have caused her harm.

“It exploded, drenched me and the cockpit, soaked the integrated electronic circuit relay and short-circuited the solenoid on the hydraulic steering mechanism.” She said the first thing that came into her head. Tobias knew how to make every drink under the sun but nothing about airplanes. “I barely made it. I had to report it but I didn’t mention you or the Desert Buster.”

“Thank you. Kallie, I’m sorry, I had no idea a soft drink could cause so much trouble.”

“An exploding soft drink, Tobias.”

“Right.”

“In a container unsuitable for the use for which it was intended.” She remembered the words from a consumer rights report in a magazine.

“It was an old flask, but it was a flask, so it must have been suitable because that’s what flasks are for,” he said.

Kallie realized she might have gone a bit too far in trying to con Tobias on the Trade Description Act. She needed to give him a reality check.

“I could have died, Tobias.”

He nodded gravely.

“But I didn’t. So I just thought I’d come back and let you know. So you didn’t worry.”

Tobias considered this for a moment. “But I would not have worried, because I would not have known if you had not come back and told me.”

“Listen. Do you want my dad to hear about this?”

He shook his head. That was a confrontation no one in their right mind would want.

“No. Course not. And believe me, I have no intention of telling him.”

“Thank you, Kallie.”

“It’s all right. You’re a friend.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes it is. And friends are here to help each other.”

Tobias nodded soberly. “So, how much is this going to cost me?”

“I’m hurt and shocked that you think I would ask you for anything,” she said, refilling her glass. She sipped the lemonade. He waited. She shrugged. “Only the cost of a phone call.”

Sayid was on ablution block cleaning duty. The boys worked by rota, swabbing out the showers, making sure the toilets were clean, wiping tiles, cleaning mirrors, checking if loo rolls needed replacing. No one liked doing it, and deals could be made with other boys to take over a weekly duty which interfered-not with school lessons, because that would mean it would have an abundance of volunteers-but with a much more important matter known as TT, or Town Time, on Wednesday afternoons. The school bus would take them to the city, where afternoon movies, coffee shops, record stores and bookshops beckoned, and where some of the older boys inexplicably spent time chatting up girls. But Sayid had volunteered to swap with one of his friends, making the excuse that he needed to build up some free Wednesdays later in the year. What Sayid really wanted was some undisturbed time to work on the mystery phone number that Mr. Peterson had rung and which was proving to be totally untraceable.

Sayid had never had so much trouble hacking as he had now with the codes for the telephone exchange routing system. This was supposed to be a straightforward procurement of an encrypted telephone number. He had tried a reverse number look-up, but that didn’t work because it was an unlisted number. A GUI on his computer screen had shown a London location, but then it had blanked out. Where the relay stations for the telephone connections should have flashed up in a nice big box with an orange background and kebonged a tone for his attention, the screen had remained still and silent. Sayid, like