The night air was completely still, and in the silence of our break we heard hyenas howling away to the north. Then I took over and drove up into an area with more trees, until we hit on an overgrown dirt road running nearly north and south. Its pale line showed clearly in the moonlight, and Jason indicated that I should follow it, even though its direction was far from ideal. I couldn’t make out whether he’d known about the track beforehand, or whether our finding it was a fluke, but I turned on to it, and for a while enjoyed the relief of being on a relatively smooth surface.
The further we drove to the north, the more sharply the arrow on the GPS swung to our right, until it was pointing at right angles to our line of advance. In twenty minutes the distance to target remained exactly the same, and I was on the point of remonstrating when Jason stood up, holding on to the grips on the dash, and told me to go slow. For a few seconds I crawled on in second, then he pointed sharply to the right, and said, ‘Road to river.’
We were at a T junction — although without Jason, I’d never have known it. Even when he told me to turn, I could scarcely make out any opening between walls of bush, but when I pushed the nose of the pinkie into a gap, the vegetation parted, and a moment later we were rolling along a smooth pathway, with the vehicle’s belly-plate scratching over grass and scrub.
The river took me by surprise. No dramatic valley opened out ahead; we just kept going on the level until suddenly we were on the bank, with fast-moving water glittering in the moonlight ahead of us as it flowed from left to right. The sight sent a spurt of adrenalin round my system as I tried to estimate the width of the stream. Eighty metres? A hundred?
‘Jesus!’ I went. ‘Where’s the pontoon, Jason?’
‘No pontoon, sah. Now dry season, water very shallow.’
‘How shallow?’
‘So much.’ He held his hands a foot apart. ‘It is sand river,’ he added, as if that would reassure me. ‘Sand on bottom.’
‘Crocs?’
‘No crocs, sah.’
‘Hippos?’
‘Hippos gone to big river for dry season.’
‘You’d better be right.’
‘I walk first.’
Already he had taken off his boots. Leaving them on the seat, he got out and strode down the bank ahead of me, into the stream. At once the water was up to his knees, deeper than he’d indicated. I waited till he was four or five metres out before rolling the pinkie forward in first and easing it into the river.
The stream was surprisingly fast. Even though the tyres were on the bottom, I could feel the current lifting and tugging at the vehicle, pushing it bodily to the right. Moonlight flashed and glanced and glinted off the eddying surface, with disorientating effect. My surroundings were suddenly so mobile that I found it impossible to judge speed or distance.
Jason moved steadily ahead, sometimes ankle-deep, sometimes in as far as mid-thigh. Water invaded the floor of the pinkie, but I knew the air intake was level with the top of the engine, and I wasn’t worried. Twice Jason stopped when he came to deeper holes. Each time he moved crabwise upstream to go round them, and I followed him, three or four metres behind.
Everything went fine until we were within twenty metres of the far bank. Then I felt the wheels starting to judder. Without any guidance from me the pinkie slewed round until it was facing straight upstream, and came to a halt with water surging past either front mudguard. I gunned the engine furiously: no result. The same in reverse. Even with the current helping, the vehicle wouldn’t move backwards. We’d run into a patch of softer sand and bellied.
‘Shit!’ I went. ‘Shit! Shit!’
At my shouts, Jason turned and waded back alongside.
‘Have to winch it,’ I said. ‘I need to keep the engine running fast, to stop water coming up the exhaust. D’you know how to release the cable?’
‘Yassir,’ he went.
Round the front of the vehicle he plunged his arms into the water, feeling for the catch. I felt a prick, sitting there in the dry as he waded off with the shackle in his hands. Luckily, there were trees growing on the far bank, and when Jason went ashore he disappeared among them, swallowed by the moon shadows. I waited till a call came over the water, then engaged the winch, hauled the steering wheel over to the right, in the direction of the bank, and gunned the engine. The cable juddered and jumped on the drum as tension came on it. Inch by inch the vehicle rotated. Then the tyres again got a grip and hauled it forward. In a couple of minutes I reached the bank.
Beyond the river the track continued eastwards for a couple of kilometres, then turned away to the north. By then the GPS was giving a course to target of ninety-eight degrees, south of east, and a distance to target of twenty-three kilometres.
‘We can’t afford to head any further north,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to go straight for it.’
Jason said nothing, but threw out an arm, again on precisely the right heading.
On we went, following the green arrow, climbing gently now. We were back in mopane scrub. Hundreds of slender saplings bristled up all round us, black in the moonlight, but they were growing well apart, and it was easy to weave between them. I remembered Joss telling me that areas like this had been destroyed by elephants when the population was excessive. Over-browsing had killed off huge tracts of forest. But that was before the civil war. Now that most of the elephants had been shot out, the trees were re-establishing themselves.
The ground was hard and bare and scattered with loose stones. Several times a pebble was squeezed out from under one of the tyres and flew into a larger piece of rock with a sharp crack. Again and again a smell of soot told us that we were crossing areas where fires had swept through the scrub, and at one point, as we cleared a low ridge, we saw flames on the skyline far off to our left. After that the terrain kept rising.
‘Eh, Jason,’ I went. ‘Are we on the back of the Totani Hills already?’
‘Yassir. These the hills. Broken aircraft other side.’
I felt a surge of excitement. We were closing in on the target. I was pretty certain we’d have to complete the last few kilometres of the trip on foot; remembering how steep the ground was on the north side of the range — all those rocky ledges — I reckoned it would be impossible to drive over the ridge. In any case, it would be safer to leave the pinkie on the south face of the ridge and tab over. That way, we could creep down on the site from above in a silent approach.
By 0230 the GPS was giving us a distance to target of only seventeen kilometres. With three hours to go before first light, we had time in hand. All the same, we didn’t hang about. Having changed places, we carried straight on, with Jason driving.
Fifteen minutes later, he gave a sudden exclamation. The pinkie was veering off to the right, downhill, and when he heaved on the steering wheel, trying to straighten up, it kept going.
‘Puncture?’ I went.
‘Yassir.’
‘Stop, then.’
I jumped out. Sure enough, the tyre was flat and the wheel-rim had buried itself in gravel.
‘Grab the jack,’ I told him. ‘On the bulkhead between front and back seats. The brace is there too, in the clips. I’ll get the spare.’
The spare wheel was held in place by a jumbo-sized wing-nut. I’d just started to turn it when I put a hand on the tyre itself and with a jolt realised that it, too, was flat. Obviously the lads had had a puncture earlier, and had had no chance to repair it.
‘Jason!’ I called. ‘Stop. Bin that. This one’s down as well. We’re fucked. It’s feet or nothing now.’