And that, she had realised, was exactly what she needed right then. The thought came to her with the clarity that only seven brandy and Cokes could bring. They kissed and clawed at each other like a pair of teenagers after the matric dance. ‘Not here,’ she whispered.
‘My place,’ Wessels panted.
Sannie felt lascivious, wanton, desperate for the feel of a man again. She had her hand in the captain’s pants as he drove, dangerously fast, back to his empty house.
The drive there should have been enough to warn her that the night was not going to improve. Henk had been unable to rise to the occasion, and no amount of her ministrations had helped, not in the car, or in his shabbily furnished, untidy house. He had eventually admitted defeat and dropped her home. Exhausted, drunk, frustrated, embarrassed and dreadfully sad, she had cried herself to sleep. Mixed with her hangover the next morning was a crushing feeling that she had been unfaithful to Christo. She tried, in vain, to tell herself she should get on with her life, perhaps even go looking for another husband, but her feelings of guilt won out. She wondered later if she would have felt differently if they’d had sex.
‘Is that the welcoming committee?’ Tom Furey asked.
‘What? Oh, sorry. I was just thinking of something I need to tell my mom about the kids. Yes, that’s Captain Tshabalala from Skukuza. That’s the park’s main camp and there’s a police post there. He’ll escort us in so we don’t need to worry about entrance fees and park permits and whatnot.’
The captain was a rotund, smiling man in his mid-forties with whom Sannie had worked often over the years. She liked him, even though he was exactly the sort of person she would have been trying to arrest pre-1994 when Nelson Mandela had led the country to majority rule. Isaac Tshabalala had trained in the former Soviet Union as a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe — the spear of the nation — the military arm of the African National Congress. Thankfully, South Africa had made the transition to true democracy without Isaac’s training in explosives and sabotage needing to be put to the test.
‘Welcome to the Kruger National Park,’ Isaac said to Tom as he shook hands. ‘ Kunjani, Sannie. How are you?’
‘Fine, sir, and you?’
Isaac ushered them into the gate office and spoke rapidly, in the language of the Shangaan people, to the young woman behind the desk. Sannie understood every word. She had learned it from her nanny as a child and practised with the children of the farm labourers. Her mother had not approved and had smacked her bottom on more than one occasion for talking in the language of the majority of inhabitants of their part of the old Eastern Transvaal. Her father had winked at her whenever the punishment was delivered, which took some sting out of the blows. Isaac was now telling the woman they were all police officers, even the pretty but too skinny blonde one. The receptionist put a hand to her mouth to cover her laugh. Sannie had never let on to the captain that she spoke his language and she kept a straight face, knowing an African language was a handy card to have up one’s sleeve and one to be played judiciously.
Captain Tshabalala drove ahead in his ageing Toyota Venture people-mover. ‘Look, on the right… some giraffe,’ Sannie said to Tom matter-of-factly.
‘Where? Boy, you’ve got good eyesight. Blimey, that’s incredible. Look at them just wandering around without a care. That’s just…’
He was lost for words, literally, and she smiled as she noticed him craning his head back to continue staring at the animals as she drove on behind their escort. She wished she could remember the first time she had seen a giraffe. The awesome, addictive terror of her first close-up sighting of a lion, when she was five, was something which would stay with her forever. It was one of her earliest childhood memories. The Africa bug had just bitten Tom Furey for the first time. The more incredible things one saw — lion kills, a leopard stalking an impala, bull elephants fighting — the more one needed to keep coming back. Tom’s new principal, Robert Greeves, was clearly a hopeless addict. She remembered him saying once that he had been to Africa, either on business or pleasure or both, annually for the past fifteen years.
‘Damn, my camera’s in my bag.’ Tom sounded disappointed.
‘Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty more giraffe for you to see later — and everything else.’
Tshabalala led them to the Skukuza police post where, over coffee, he explained for Tom’s benefit the local chain of command and areas of responsibility. Basically he and his officers, who were limited in numbers and resources, would be available to provide initial uniformed back-up if any incident during the visit required it. Political relations between South Africa and the UK were good, so there was no threat of any demonstration or protest — not that such actions would even be feasible within the confines of a national park where, for the most part, animals rather than people held sway. Isaac explained that should Greeves be taken ill, or injured in any way, there was a doctor on call twenty-four hours a day at Skukuza, and Nelspruit hospital was forty-five minutes away.
‘Really, I can’t think of anything that could go wrong, other than the minister falling ill, or being eaten by a lion on a game drive.’ The burly captain’s whole body shook and Sannie swore she felt the floor vibrating under her high heels as he laughed at his own joke.
Tom, she saw, smiled politely, then asked questions about police radio communications, emergency frequencies, phone numbers, and crime figures for the national park and its surrounds. He was very professional, but Sannie expected nothing less of the Englishman. As she had reflected earlier, even that sleaze Nick Roberts was good at his job. Being a protection officer — dropping in and out of other people’s turf — required diplomacy, and Tom had it.
Their briefing session over, Sannie and Tom left the captain and went back to her car. ‘The lodge is only about ten minutes from here.’
‘Do you share his confidence about the risk assessment here in the park?’ Tom asked as she unlocked the Mercedes by remote. The horn gave a little beep and the hazard lights flashed as the alarm was disabled.
‘I lock my car, even when I know there’s about a one in a million chance of it being broken into or stolen outside a police post in the middle of a national park.’
Tom opened the car door. ‘That’s why we’re here.’
4
‘Mr Speaker, will the Minister for Defence Procurement elaborate on remarks he made to defence contractors recently in which he indicated the government in fact has no real intention to further scale back troop numbers in Iraq? Further, will the minister come clean on the government’s timetable for withdrawal?’ The opposition backbencher grinned, and sat as the guffaws rose from his side of the House of Commons in the Palace of Westminster just as the groans and jeers from the government benches mocked him.
Robert Greeves buttoned his suit jacket as he stood and approached the despatch box and coldly eyed the members of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, though how loyal this cretinous mob of political featherweights were was debatable. ‘Mr Speaker, once more for the slow learners…’
He paused as the peals of forced laughter erupted from the government benches. When the theatrics had subsided, he continued. ‘Mr Speaker, this would be a laughably dim question if the subject were not so desperately serious. We sit here in parliament today, safely surrounded by armed police, security staff, metal detectors, cameras and an array of protective systems. Out in the deserts of Southern Iraq, and on the streets of Basra and Baghdad and many other towns and villages of that poor benighted country, there are British men and women in harm’s way. Men and women who face the dangers of improvised explosive devices — bombs to you and me — rocket-propelled grenades and bullets.’