Our last map had gone up in flames with the mother wagon, but because of the GPS its disappearance hardly mattered. I plugged the leads into sockets on the dash, so that I didn’t drain the set’s batteries, and once I’d got fixes on three satellites and established our new location, I was amazed to find how close to Waypoint Seven we were. Through all the violent swings of the past few days — our advance to the mine at Gutu, our flight from Gutu to the Zebra Pans and the convent, my capture and journey to Chimbwi, then from there to Ichembo — I’d had the impression that we were moving more or less in a circle. Now it turned out I was right. The GPS revealed that we’d ended up only seventy-eight kilometres from the site of the downed Beechcraft, and needed to advance on a bearing of forty-seven degrees to reach it. We were on the wrong side of the hills, it was true, but so close we could almost walk there in a night.
Also, I had Jason. I’d already seen that he possessed outstanding skills as a tracker, but now I began to realise that he also had an uncanny sense of place and direction. When I asked him, ‘Do you remember where the Beechcraft is?’ he replied, in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘Yassir.’ And when I said, ‘Which way is it?’ he instantly stuck out an arm, with fingers outstretched. When I stood behind him with a compass, I found he was pointing within one degree of the course the GPS had given me.
‘Jason,’ I went. ‘Have you been here before?’
‘One time Ichembo.’
‘But not here, where we are now?’
‘No sah.’
‘Then how the hell can you be so sure about your directions?’
‘Sun,’ he said, pointing up at the sky. ‘Moon, stars — and head.’
‘Any obstacles on our route?’
‘One river.’
‘Jesus! Not that big one?’
He shook his head. ‘Small one.’
‘Can the pinkie drive across it?’
‘I think so.’
I didn’t let on that the GPS agreed precisely with his analysis of our position. I just pretended to go along with his estimate of the course we should take.
We needed to wait a few more minutes, until the moon was high enough to give good light, and as we sat in the dark, we chatted in a desultory way. I already knew about Jason’s wives, but something made me ask about his family.
‘What about your father?’ I went. ‘Is he still alive?’
‘No sah. I show you.’ He began scrabbling in the breast pocket of his DPMs and brought out a small, flat box, which he opened with a pop. I shone my torch on it, and saw it was made of aluminium, battered and dented. From it he took a piece of paper, which he unfolded delicately, with great care, before handing it across.
Like the tin, the paper had seen much service. It was a sheet torn from a ruled school exercise book, frayed at the edges and covered with smudgy finger prints. But the message, written in capital letters, was still perfectly legible:
HORNED MADAM
MAY IT PLEASE YOU TO KNOW YOUR
HUSBAND SHOOTED BY STUDENT
AUGUSTUS MUENDE IN FIGHT ON
ACADEMICAL RANGES. THIS IS
TRUTH. YOUR FATEFUL FREIND
FELLOW STUDENT A.N.OTHER
ANNO DOMINI JANUARY 1985
Puzzled, I skimmed through it twice, then asked, ‘Who was this addressed to?’
‘My mother.’
‘Jesus! So Muende killed your father? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yassir.’
‘But how?’
‘He was weapons instructor at college. Muende was student.’
‘The military academy in Mulongwe?’
Jason nodded.
‘What happened?’
He spread his hands, meaning he’d never known. ‘I was only boy then. Nine years.’
‘And now you’re out to get Muende?’
‘Yassir.’
‘So all that stuff about wanting to come to England was a load of crap? You just wanted to join our team.’
I said it in a jokey way, but he lowered his head rather than answer.
‘Don’t worry,’ I added. ‘I’m glad you did. But how the hell did you know what we were going to do? At that stage we weren’t after Muende at all.’
‘You say you make personal attack.’
‘Did I? Oh yes, that was way back, when we did the training ambush. But then it was only a joke.’ I folded the paper carefully, and handed it back. ‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘Let’s get after him.’
For a couple on honeymoon, it would have been a perfect night. The air was pleasantly cool, the stars brilliant. The complete absence of human habitation would have given lovers the feeling they were the only people in the whole of Africa.
On me, though, all that was wasted. As Jason drove the first stint, weaving steadily through the bush, one anxiety after another crowded into my mind. Foremost was the possibility that Muende might beat us to the crashed plane. He might already have reached it, found the diamond and gone. Again, it was IF, IF, IF: IF the man who nicked my GPS had been discovered with it, or had handed it in; if Muende or Inge had had the sense to recognise the significance of Waypoint Seven; if they’d managed to cross the river, avoid the government forces, and find the site.
That was one of the needles that stopped me admiring the velvety night. The other was the witch doctor. The past twenty-four hours had been so frantic that he and his prophecy had gone largely out of my mind. But now, perhaps because we were heading back in his direction, they loomed up large again. I kept thinking about the abrupt, inexplicable blast of cold wind that had blown across the backs of our necks at the moment that kid expired.
In my head I went through the list of white deaths associated with our presence in Kamanga. Andy’s was the first. The South Africans in the Beechcraft made the score two and three. The guy Joss’s kangaroo court had shot was the fourth, Whinger the fifth, Sam the sixth, Genesis the seventh. The guy I’d pushed out of the chopper made the total eight, and the two Russians I’d topped made it ten. Or did it? It depended on whether you counted the pair in the Beechcraft. Their deaths had nothing to do with us; they happened before we arrived on the scene. But even if I left them out of the calculation, at eight we were getting perilously close to the predicted score — and now, with the rest of the lads gone, there were only two whites left in the action: the German woman and myself. Were both of us destined to go down?
It would have helped to share my anxieties with my companion, but I knew that if I started on about witchcraft, Jason would only give his secret smile and offer me dog-shit medicine to ward off spells. Instead, I tried to take my mind off the question by guessing where Pav and co. had got to. By now they must be in Namibia, at least, or on their way north towards home. They must think I’d lost the plot entirely. God alone knew what they’d tell the Kremlin about me. I couldn’t give a flying monkey’s, because it seemed unlikely I’d ever see them or Hereford again. For the time being my whole world was bounded by the need to reach the Beechcraft first.
Jason drove brilliantly, stopping to investigate every time we saw a black shadow that might conceal a deep hole, but keeping up a good pace overall. His navigation was amazing. The GPS, slotted into its cradle on the dash and framed by a shroud round its little screen, didn’t seem to interest him. As far as I could tell, he never looked at its wavering green arrow, which constantly gave us our heading; rather, he kept glancing up at the sky. However it worked, his system enabled him to hold a course with incredible accuracy; when we stopped to change over just after 2100, the magic box showed that we’d covered twenty-eight kilometres, and that Waypoint Seven was only fifty ahead.