35
A Range Rover was waiting for them outside the front door. McGuinness loaded the guns and cartridge bags into the back then drove them down one of the private roads that criss-crossed the estate until they came to a massive earthwork, at least thirty feet high, extending in either direction as far as the eye could see. The road led to a tunnel through the earthwork.
When they emerged into the open again, Carver could see that the ground fell away into a gigantic bowl that must have been at least fifty feet deep. The land within was laid out like a golf course, with patches of open grass separated by copses of trees, hedgerows, man-made hills and valleys and even a stream that fed into a small lake. But instead of golf tees, fairways, bunkers and greens, each individual section of land was equipped with a selection of different stands for guns to fire from; traps to launch clay pigeons; a selection of what looked like watchtowers, or mobile telephone masts; and a rifle range.
‘Impressive,’ said Carver.
‘Thank you,’ said Klerk. ‘I’ve taken elements from the finest shoots in the British Isles and reproduced them right here. Different landscapes, different types of game, we’ve got them all.’
McGuinness drove them down to the bottom of the bowl and parked the car. He handed each of the three competitors their gun, a cartridge bag and a set of ear-protectors. Then he stood before them and, abandoning his usual deference, spoke to them as the man who, as keeper, would be taking responsibility for the shoot.
‘You will each be shooting ten clays per stand, at five separate stands,’ he said. ‘So you each have fifty-five rounds: fifty for the competition and five spares in case any shots have to be retaken. Guns will be carried broken and unloaded. Ear-protectors must be worn while shooting is taking place. I will keep score and act as referee. Does anyone have any questions? No? Well, in that case, if you would please follow me, we will go to the first trap.’
‘Do you shoot much?’ Klerk asked Carver as they walked away. ‘For sport, I mean, rather than business.’
‘Every now and then. Been a while since I shot any clays.’
Carver wasn’t paying too much attention to Klerk. He was watching Zalika, who was walking ahead of them. She’d put her hair back into a ponytail and changed into jeans and a Beretta ladies’ shooting vest. The vest, in theory a purely functional garment, was cut to follow every curve of her upper body and to stop just high enough to reveal the contours beneath her jeans. As she walked, the sway of her body seemed designed to tantalize, giving Carver just a hint of the pleasures in store if he was man enough to match her challenge.
Zalika half-turned to look at him over her shoulder, a teasing smile on her face, and for a second Carver felt another surge of anger at her blatant tactics and irritation at himself for falling for them so easily. She’d meant to distract him, and it had worked. It was time to concentrate on the matter in hand: winning the shooting match.
They were walking through heather now. A short way ahead of them, Carver saw three circular butts, or shooting hides, constructed of dry-stone walls, topped with turf. Ahead of the butts the heather-covered ground rose gradually, simulating the slope of a grouse moor.
‘Thought we’d start with grouse,’ said Klerk. ‘We’ll be shooting one at a time from the centre butt. Sam, why don’t you shoot first, hey?’
It was an obvious tactic to put Carver at a disadvantage. The other two had shot there a hundred times and knew all the quirks of the land and the positions of the traps from which the clays would be fired like miniature black Frisbees, precisely 108mm across. As the newcomer, Carver would have benefited hugely from watching the others go first. Instead, he would have to shoot sight unseen, trust his reactions and hope for the best.
Carver transferred ten cartridges from his cartridge bag to a pocket of his shooting vest then walked into the butt. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a few seconds, trying to clear his mind of everything but the thought processes required to hit a small, fast-moving target. Then he loaded two cartridges into the twin barrels of his gun and raised it to his shoulders.
McGuinness was standing behind him, slightly to one side, holding a control box.
‘Would you like to see a pair, sir?’ he said.
He was offering to release two of the clays before the shooting began so that Carver could see where they came from and at what distance and angle they flew. The obvious response was, ‘Yes please.’ But some perverse refusal to be seen to need outside help prevented Carver from doing the sensible thing. Instead he replied, ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’
He concentrated his vision on the air just above the artificial moor, directly in front of him, and said, ‘Pull!’
McGuinness pushed a button on his control box and Carver heard the sound of a spring being released as the trap slung the first clay pigeon into the air. Then came the fluttering whirr of the clay as it cut through the air. It came low and fast from a point about forty yards away, just as a real grouse would do, flying towards him but slanting right-to-left across his line of fire.
Carver fired.
The clay pigeon kept flying, entirely untouched, until gravity pulled it to earth.
He’d missed.
Appalled by his stupidity and incompetence, he barely heard the release of the second clay, was late getting back into position, and missed that one as well.
Carver could not remember the last time he’d felt so humiliated, so exposed. Behind him, the other three stood in stunned, embarrassed silence for several seconds until Klerk called out, ‘Jesus Christ, Carver, you ever fired a gun before in your life?’ It was meant as banter, pulling his leg. But there was nothing funny about Carver’s shooting. It wasn’t just that he had missed. He had done so like a rank amateur.
He ejected the first two cartridges from his gun, resumed his stance and called ‘Pull!’ once again. This time he hit both clays. They broke into a few large fragments – a sure sign that he’d not struck them dead-centre – but they were hits nonetheless. So were the next three pairs. Carver walked away from the butt with a score of eight out of ten. He only cared about the two dropped shots.
Klerk went next. He shot with the metronomic style of a man who has spent a lot of time and money on lessons from an excellent teacher. Technically, he was faultless, but he wasn’t a natural marksman. Even so, he too scored eight, and seemed perfectly happy to have done so.
Now it was Zalika’s turn. She didn’t just hit the first pair of clays, she dusted them, striking them so perfectly that they disintegrated in mid-air, vanishing in what looked like little puffs of smoke.
When she broke open the gun, she caught the cartridges one-handed as they sprang from the barrels before placing them in a little bin that stood inside the butt. The catch was a nice touch, Carver thought, a clever, deceptively casual way of letting him know how at ease she was around guns. He noticed something else as Zalika reloaded: she rotated her cartridges in the barrels so that the writing on the brass base of each shell was the right way up. It was a telling little ritual, designed to prepare her for action, like a tennis player bouncing a ball, or a golfer practising his swing.
It worked. Zalika vaporized the next four pairs as efficiently as she had the first. She walked away with a perfect ten. If it wasn’t obvious before, Carver knew for sure now that he had a fight on his hands – one he could easily lose. If he were going to stand any chance at all he had to shed the look of a loser and regain some sense of authority.
As they walked away to the next stand, he asked McGuinness, ‘Just out of curiosity, what chokes have I got?’
‘Quarter and cylinder,’ the gamekeeper replied.
‘Interesting,’ said Carver.
He hoped he sounded relaxed, even a little blasé. But inside he was cursing himself. A quarter-choke was the least restriction available; ‘cylinder’ meant an entirely clear barrel. That gave him a much wider spread of shot. At short range that was an advantage; it might have been the only reason he’d been able to hit any clay at all in that disaster of a first round. But the further the shot went, the more holes opened up in the air between the scattered pellets and the tougher it became to get a kill. If they had to shoot at clays flying high, or any distance away, Carver was going to be in trouble.
36
‘So, we’ve shot grouse, now it’s time for partridge,’ said Klerk as they reached the second stand. It was much simpler than the grouse butt, just a basic square of wooden fencing, hip-high, with a bin for used cartridges attached to the shooter’s side. All the effort had been devoted to creating a classic, mature hedgerow of bushes and trees directly in front of the stand that looked as though it had been a part of the landscape for centuries. Carver marvelled at the effort and cost that must have gone into locating, transporting and replanting the mix of dogwood, spindleberry and hawthorn hedging, as well as the oak and chestnut trees that stood among them.
From behind the hedgerow, Carver heard the noise of a motor starting up followed by a quieter, whirring sound. Somewhere back there at least one mechanized platform was rising into the air, taking with it a trap. So the clays, like the birds they were imitating, would emerge from behind the hedge at a variety of heights.
‘Simultaneous pairs,’ said McGuinness, indicating that both clays would be released at the same time. ‘Mr Klerk to go first.’
Now the strike order had rotated in Carver’s favour. This time he would be the last to shoot.
Klerk took his place behind the fencing and called ‘Pull!’ for the first pair.
The clays emerged from behind the hedgerow, passing over one of the oak trees and rising higher into the air as they flew towards Klerk, angled left-to-right this time. They flew at different heights and on marginally differing courses, adding to the challenge of shooting them both in quick succession.
Klerk tracked the clays as they sped through the sky, swinging his gun round clockwise from twelve o’clock almost to three before he fired. Again his technique was well-schooled and effective. He scored nine out of ten.
Zalika demonstrated once again that she was more gifted than her uncle. She dismissed the first four pairs with her usual accuracy, firing earlier, so that the clays were hit when they had barely passed two o’clock. When the final pair appeared, she destroyed the ninth clay with calm efficiency. But as any serious shot knows, the last bird is often the hardest. It may be a matter of mental fatigue, for even the sternest concentration can slip. Or perhaps complacency is the greater danger, a fractional relaxation brought on by the certainty that the tenth will go down just like the last nine have done. In any event, many a competitor has been undone right at the end of a hitherto perfect sequence. And that was what happened to Zalika Stratten. She looked incredulously at the final clay as it kept flying long after the last echoes of her shot had faded away, then snapped her hand irritably round her cartridges as they sprang from the barrels of her gun.
So the girl was human, after all.
Zalika had given Carver an opening. He had to make sure he took full advantage.
This time there were no distractions. He did not look around. He did not think about anything but the clays. While the others had been shooting he had studied the clays’ flight patterns, noting precisely where they first appeared, relative to the oak tree, taking his mark from one specific branch. He dusted the first four pairs by the time they reached one o’clock.
As McGuinness pressed the control-button for the fifth time, Carver’s eyes narrowed, his jaw clenched slightly, and in a moment of pure focus he felt as though the whole world had slowed down around him, so that the clays seemed to be drifting as big and lazy as two black balloons and he had all the time in the world to bring them down. He shot them both before anyone else had even realized they were there, when they’d barely passed twelve on that imaginary clock.
As he placed his cartridges in the bin and turned round to face the others, Carver noticed a wry half-smile on McGuinness’s lips. The gamekeeper caught his eye and gave a fractional nod of acknowledgement.
Zalika’s lead had been reduced to one. Carver was back in the game.
37
‘Now let’s bash some bunnies,’ said Klerk.
The third stand wasn’t based on anywhere fancy. There’s nothing fancy about shooting rabbits, no matter where you are. But that doesn’t make rabbit clays any less of a challenge.
They came out of the trap upright, presenting the full face of the clay to the shooters as they scooted along the ground, bouncing up when they hit a bump, or a thick tuft of grass. McGuinness released the clays on report – in other words, pressing the control for the second clay as soon as he heard the first shot – coming first from the right, then from the left.
Zalika went first and shot flawlessly. She swivelled her gun to the right to pick up the first clay, tracked it until it was directly in front of her, then fired. Without pausing, she kept the gun moving to the left, locked on to the second clay, followed it back into the centre and fired again. She scored two hits, then four, six, eight, ten.
When she had finished, she caught the last two spent cartridges, disposed of them and walked away from the stand as though she had never done anything easier in her life. Memo to Carver: whatever you’ve got, I can handle it.
Carver matched her easily enough for the first four pairs. But the first clay of the final pair took a wicked bounce and he missed. The tenth clay was dusted without any trouble, but he was still left cursing his luck. So much for making a comeback: he was back to two behind.
Klerk shot eight. He was out of the running now, but for all his natural, ferocious competitiveness, he wasn’t bothered. It was enough for him to watch the other two struggle for supremacy.
‘Walk with me a moment,’ he said to Carver as they moved on to the next stand. He nodded towards Zalika, who was chatting to McGuinness. ‘Impressive young woman, isn’t she?’
‘Certainly seems to be,’ Carver agreed.
‘I’ll tell you something, though: this is all new. For years after the kidnap, Zalika was dead to the world, completely blank. She had no energy, no passion. She hardly said a word to me, surly all the time.’
‘Not surprising. She had an incredibly traumatic experience, lost her whole family.’
‘Survivor guilt, the shrinks called it. Christ knows I paid for enough of them. Bought her anything she could possibly want. Nothing worked, she was stuck in the past. Then this whole Gushungo business started. Now she’s a new woman. Take yesterday, playing the secretary – she’d never have done that before.’
‘Sounds like it’s given her a purpose in life.’
Klerk nodded. ‘Ja, that’s exactly what I think, too. She wants to get her hands on that bastard Mabeki. That’s what’s driving her, you mark my words. That and having you about the place.’
‘I’m not so sure about that.’
‘Trust me, she insisted on you being involved. But I’ll tell you what, you had better beat her today or she will be severely disappointed. She will hold you in contempt.’
Klerk put such relish into the word ‘contempt’ that Carver could not help but smile.
‘One more reason to beat her, then,’ he said.
For the fourth test of skill, they stopped in front of a grassy path, three paces wide, that ran between two high blackthorn hedges, one of which was somewhat taller than the other.
‘You ever seen a walk-up before?’ Klerk asked Carver.
Carver shook his head. ‘Nope.’
‘Well, the idea is very simple. You walk steadily down the path. The first clay of each pair is fired without warning, then the second one on report. I tell you, man, some of these bastards fly over the hedge, some run along the ground – there’s no way of knowing what’s going to happen, particularly if you go first.’
‘Which I’ll be doing,’ said Carver.
‘Ja, so I see!’ Klerk laughed. ‘In any case, you are allowed to stop walking to reload. But then you must get on the move again. The two people who are not shooting walk behind the one who is. When we get to the end of the walk, we turn round, come back to the start and repeat the whole process.’
Carver liked the look of the walk-up. It was like being on patrol, knowing that a contact was imminent, ready to shoot the instant danger approached. Wherever the clays came from – left or right, high or low – it made no difference. Carver knew from the first pace he took down the walk that he was going to score ten, and he was not disappointed.
‘Ten straight hits,’ said Klerk as they turned to stroll back to the start. ‘I’m impressed. Donald’s the only man ever to have straighted the walk-up before now. And I have to follow you.’
Carver walked directly behind Klerk as he fired his ten shots, scoring six hits. How was he to know the custom that the next person down the walk-up followed the shooter, so as to get a clear sight of what was in store? Except that Carver did not have to be told that: it was obvious. And so was the irritation that possessed Zalika Stratten as she walked behind him, forced to watch his backside, when she could and should have been taking mental notes on her uncle’s shooting. Good: let her be distracted for once.
Carver spotted a very slight twitch in her neck – a sign of tension at last – as she loaded her opening two cartridges. It didn’t seem to affect her, not at first anyway. She hit the first two pairs and reloaded. The fifth clay came straight up the walk, low and fast. She missed. But before Zalika could curse, or Carver silently cheer, the second clay was released, or what was left of it. The clay had broken in the trap and was now just a scattering of fragments.
‘No bird,’ called McGuinness. ‘The pair will be fired again.’
A smile spread across Zalika’s face. She had been reprieved.
But then McGuinness finished his sentence. ‘However, may I remind you, Miss Zalika, that was a pair on report, and the rules of clay pigeon shooting state that the score for the first bird is counted. I am afraid the miss still stands.’
It said a lot for her strength of mind that she did not let the disappointment distract her. She shot the pair again and hit both times, even though the first counted for nothing. The final two pairs were also disposed of. It was a remarkable recovery, and Carver admired the sheer guts Zalika had displayed. But the fact remained that she had dropped a shot. The gap had come down to one. As they walked to the final stand there was still everything to play for.
38
The stark metallic structure loomed over the shooting ground like a watchtower at a POW camp. But there were no guards standing at its summit, armed with searchlights and machine guns. Instead, two traps were slowly rising up pulleys attached to the outside of the tower, making Carver more uneasy with every second they kept moving.
‘Think of this as a very steep hillside,’ said Klerk. ‘The beaters are about to flush the pheasants off the top of the hill and they’re going to fly right over us, just begging to be shot.’
‘How high are the traps going?’ Carver asked.
‘One hundred and forty feet.’
At that range, the widely scattered shot from Carver’s gun would be far less effective than the tight, heavily choked patterns Zalika would be punching through the air. Just as the competition reached its climax, she would have a major advantage. It was down to him not to make it a decisive one.
‘That’s some pretty serious shooting,’ he said.
Klerk laughed mischievously. ‘Oh ja, this is the bloody black run all right. And we’ve added a little complication, haven’t we, Donald?’
‘Aye, that we have. I’ve loaded the traps with midi clays. They’re ninety millimetres across instead of the standard one-oh-eight.’
Klerk slapped Carver on the back. ‘No worries for you, eh? I’ve seen you shoot. I’m sure you’ll blow them out of the sky. I know Zalika will, that’s for sure.’
‘Maybe,’ Carver replied, doing his best to sound completely unconcerned. ‘But not before you’ve gone first.’
The clays were released in simultaneous pairs this time, but from two separate traps, meaning that they flew towards Klerk at slightly different heights and angles, forcing him to change his aim between shots. He coped well enough, and his score of seven was more than respectable in the circumstances. But he was really just the warm-up act before the main attractions.
Zalika was second up. She walked up to shoot with her usual air of calm self-control. Her breathing was steady. She lined up the cartridges with her standard ritualistic precision.
Everything seemed fine, yet something wasn’t quite right. She hit the first pair, but only by striking the back edges of the two clays.
Now she faced a real test of character. When a good shot makes a very slight mistake there is always the temptation to over-compensate. It’s very easy, having shot the back of a clay, to aim further ahead of its flight and miss the next one entirely to the front. The best and bravest thing to do is nothing at all. You’re still hitting the clays, so why change anything?
Carver could just imagine the battle going on in Zalika’s head. It was visible in her movements, too: the very slight shake in her hands as she slipped the cartridges into the barrels, the fumbling as she rotated them till they faced the right way.
She was tough: she gutsed it out and hit both the next clays. Now there were just six left for her in the entire competition. She was still a shot up. If she could close out the last three pairs she’d win and Carver could do nothing about it. But the tension was rising, no matter how hard she fought to keep it at bay.
After the fourth shot had been fired, Zalika paused just a second too long, staring at the ground, and she took a long, deliberate breath. When she broke open the barrels she was still lost in her thoughts. She made no attempt to catch the used cartridges but let them fall to the ground. When the new cartridges went in, she did not even look at them, still less line up the writing on their bases before snapping the gun shut again.
Carver knew that she was on a knife-edge. ‘Miss one, miss one,’ he whispered soundlessly to himself.
Zalika did not oblige. She hit the fifth clay all right, but the sixth came out broken, prompting McGuinness to call ‘No bird!’ again.
If anything, this seemed to relax Zalika. She looked far less concerned as she once again discarded the used cartridge, replaced it with a new one and then lined up both cartridges to her satisfaction.
She’d got her routine back again. She’d returned to the zone.
The third pair was replayed. This time Zalika missed the first clay but hit the second. She smiled to herself, blessing her good fortune: when she’d made a mistake, it didn’t matter. Carver could see that she’d remembered McGuinness’s words about the rules of clay pigeon shooting stating that the score for the first bird is counted. On that basis, the first bird was a hit, the hit stood, and she was still one up, just four shots left.
Carver saw the confidence flooding back into Zalika as she dusted the next pair. She was in the final straight now, the finishing line in sight.
The final pair were released. Over they came, the right-hand clay slightly higher than the left, the angle between them widening all the time. Zalika hit the right one first then swung her gun in an arc towards her left shoulder. The swing was smooth, her movements controlled, both her eyes open to give her optimum vision and depth perception.
And yet she missed.
Carver couldn’t believe it. He’d have put any money in the world on Zalika getting the pair. Yet, for the second time, she’d been let down by the final shot in a sequence. Zalika looked equally incredulous, staring at the untouched clay as it continued its gentle arc to the ground as if she could dust it by sheer force of will. She gave a final shake of the head, then snapped the gun open, caught the cartridges with an irritated snap of her fingers and hurled them in the bin before turning and walking back towards the others.
As she walked past Carver, her eyes blazing with defiance, she hissed, ‘Well, you still can’t beat me,’ quietly enough that only he could hear.
Carver said nothing. He had no intention of getting ahead of himself. The end result was just a distraction. He had a job to do first.
He strode towards his firing position not hoping he would shoot well, or even believing that he would. He demanded it.
He banished all thoughts of Zalika, dismissed any worries about the height and size of the clays, or the fact that he’d be firing with unrestricted barrels that would spray his shots across the sky like confetti. He concentrated purely and simply on the element he could control: the quality of his shooting.
The first four clays were obliterated.
When the third pair flew from the traps, Carver hit the first clay smack in the middle, but only caught the leading edge of the second, very nearly missing to the front. Now he was the one who had to fight the temptation to change his technique, the one who had to have faith enough to stick with what he’d been doing.
Carver felt the pounding of his heart against his chest and the itchy stickiness of sweat beneath his armpits. He told himself to get a grip.
‘Pull!’ he called.
The clays were flung from their traps, and at that precise moment the wind, which had blown steadily all day, suddenly flurried. The gust only lasted for a second or two, but it was enough to disturb the flight of the clays. The right-hand one slowed in mid-air and lost height, making the left clay appear to race away from it. Now their courses were radically different, and Carver had to adjust his shot in mid-swing as he locked on to the dropping clay. Somehow he managed to hit it and then jerk his gun left and up, his sights scrabbling across the sky to find the other clay.
Where the hell had it got to?
His spine was arched like a tightly pulled bow and the weight of his head was so far back that he was almost toppling over when he finally found his target. He had no balance, no stillness. He was as ragged as hell.
Carver fired.
The crack of the shot slapped the summer air like a palm to a face, closely followed by a frustrated cry of ‘No!’
Zalika Stratten had not been able to contain her frustration at Carver’s absurd good fortune. The clay had been blown to pieces. Somehow, he’d got everything wrong about the shot except the end result.
After that, the last pair was a formality. Carver came away with a perfect ten.
‘So we tied,’ said Zalika, coldly.
‘You sure?’ Carver replied.
She frowned at him uncertainly. But before she could say anything else there was the sound of a polite cough.
‘I have the scores,’ said McGuinness.
He was holding the score cards in one hand, divided into boxes for each pair of clays. The shots were marked down as ‘kills’ and ‘losses’, a diagonal line across a box indicating that both shots had been kills.
‘Mr Klerk, you came third. I’ve never seen you shoot so well, sir. Good enough to win, I reckon, nine times out of ten. And you, Miss Zalika, well, I cannae imagine how anyone could shoot like you did and not come out on top.’
She gave a weary smile. ‘Thank you, Donald.’
‘But the winner,’ he continued, ‘is Mr Carver by one.’
‘What?’ Now Zalika’s eyes blazed with furious energy. ‘That’s not possible! It was a tie!’
‘I’m afraid not, Miss. You lost two shots in the final five pairs.’
‘I know, but one of them was in the pair that I had to reshoot. It didn’t count. You said so yourself: the score from the first bird is counted. I killed the first bird.’
‘Aye, so you did. And the score is counted … when you are shooting on report. But these pairs were simultaneous. And I’m afraid the rules are very clear, Miss. If a “no bird” is called in a simultaneous pair, the score for the other bird does not count. You start from scratch when the pair is released again. And you lost the first bird of that pair, as well as the very last bird of all. When Mr Carver killed all ten, he overtook you.’
Zalika sighed. ‘I see.’ She switched her attention back to Carver. ‘So you win, then.’
‘Yes.’
‘But only on a technicality.’
‘A win is a win. That’s how it works.’
She narrowed her eyes and stared at him. ‘You knew that rule all along, didn’t you? When I said you couldn’t win, you knew.’
‘Yeah, I knew I had the beating of you. But I still had to get all ten.’
The look in Zalika’s eye was as cold as bare steel on a frosty morning. But as she turned and walked away from him, Carver swore he could see the beginnings of a smile spreading across her face, almost as though she, not he, were the real winner.
39
Justus Iluko had spent the day at a UN World Food Programme supply centre, trying to persuade officials there to double the size of their deliveries of maize to the refugee camp that had sprung up on his farm. ‘You bring enough food for ten thousand people, but there are many times that number now. You must send more,’ he begged.
The official’s name was Hester Thompson. She could not remember the last time she had stepped into a hot bath, or grabbed more than four hours’ sleep. Her greasy, unwashed hair was pulled back into a bedraggled ponytail, held in place by a rubber band.
She looked at Justus through eyes made red by fatigue and dust. ‘We don’t have more food,’ she said. ‘The UN has cut its food aid budget. We’re giving you all we’ve got.’
‘But people are dying of starvation. There is no fresh water, no sanitation. Yesterday we had twenty new cases of cholera, but we have no doctors, no medicine to treat them.’
‘I understand, and I sympathize, really I do. But even if I had all the money in the world to spend on food it wouldn’t make any difference because your government—’
‘They are not my government,’ Iluko snapped. ‘They are hyenas, feeding on my country’s corpse.’
Thompson sighed wearily. ‘Whatever, the Gushungo regime refuses to import more than a hundred thousand tons of maize into Malemba. The President says he does not need any more than that. In fact the minimum amount required to keep this country alive is close to six hundred thousand tons. Last week we cut our basic maize allowance to five kilos per person, per week. That works out at six hundred calories a day. And yeah, I know, that’s a starvation ration.’
‘So you will not help …’
‘Not unless I suddenly develop superpowers, no.’
Justus drove home empty-handed. He tried to call his family from the Toyota Land Cruiser he had bought, second-hand, with half the money Samuel Carver had sent him a decade earlier. There was no reply.
When Justus finally returned home he discovered the reason for their silence. Overwhelmed by grief and rage, he screamed out curses against Henderson Gushungo, and cried out to God for vengeance. As the sun set behind the western hills, he began digging Nyasha’s grave, completing the task by the light of a torch. She was buried wrapped in a blanket, and as a handful of refugees gathered round him, Justus said a few prayers to speed his wife’s soul on its way. When he asked the people what had happened to his children, no one knew. They had been taken away, two more recruits to the ranks of the disappeared. What difference did it make where they had disappeared to?
Late that night, in a brief moment of calm before the tears and fury consumed him again, he thought of the one man on earth who might be able to help him. He had always kept in touch with Carver, marking every Christmas with a long letter detailing his children’s progress as they made their way up the school ladder. Less regularly, Carver had replied, but the Englishman had always shown him friendship and respect. Justus could not afford to make an international mobile phone call, but what did that matter now?
He had a number for Carver. So he dialled it and hoped for the best.