Far Horizon Read online

  Tony Park was born in 1964 and grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney. He has worked as a newspaper reporter in Australia and England, a government press secretary, a public relations consultant, and a freelance writer. He is also a major in the Australian Army Reserve and served six months in Afghanistan in 2002 as the public affairs officer for the Australian ground forces. He and his wife, Nicola, divide their time between their home in Sydney, and southern Africa, where they own a tent and a Series III Land Rover. Tony Park can be contacted at www.tonypark.net

  ‘A racy, well-written tale of international crime located in the exotic setting of Africa . . . The development of the relationship between Mike and Sarah is one of the enduring elements of this highly readable, informative and entertaining book’

  WEST AUSTRALIAN

  ‘This book knows about things that other writers might have to labour to explain. This novel uses many of the standard devices of action-thriller writing. But underneath that is a deep knowledge of, and concern for, the fragile natural and human environments of south east Africa that lift it onto another plane’

  SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

  ‘If you like a cracking action yarn, there’s much to recommend in . . . FAR HORIZON . . . Park . . . obviously has an affinity for Africa, and this shines through in the novel’s strong sense of place.’

  SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

  Also by Tony Park

  Zambezi

  African Sky

  Safari

  Silent Predator

  Ivory

  FAR

  HORIZON

  TONY PARK

  First published 2004 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  This Pan edition published 2005 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Tony Park 2004

  Reprinted 2005(twice)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

  Park, Tony, 1964–.

  Far horizon.

  ISBN 0 330 42147 6.

  1. Safari guides – Africa – Fiction. 2. Poachers – Africa – Fiction. I. Title.

  A823.4

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Birka by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed and bound in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  These electronic editions published in 2007 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  Copyright © Tony Park 2004

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Far Horizon

  Tony Park

  Adobe eReader format 978-1-74197-198-9

  Online format 978-1-74197-801-8

  EPUB format 978-1-74262-582-9

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  Contents

  Cover

  About Tony Park

  Also by Tony Park

  Title page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  For Nicola

  Acknowledgments

  The man who provided me with the greatest assistance during the research of this book wants to remain anonymous. He was one of many Australian Army engineers who were involved in landmine clearance in Mozambique and he provided me not only with a wealth of detail about the dangerous business of de-mining, but also with descriptions and photographs of Maputo. To him, and the members of 17th Construction Squadron, Royal Australian Engineers, who shared with me the stories of their tour in Namibia, thank you. Any mistakes or exaggerations about the work of the Australian Army or the UN in Africa are all mine.

  I researched and wrote Far Horizon while travelling in southern Africa with my wife in our old Land Rover. My thanks go to Dennis and Liz in Zimbabwe, who continue to care for and garage the truck in between our visits, and the many other friends and acquaintances we’ve made on our travels over the past eight years who all added to our knowledge of Africa and its wildlife. Gary Phillips from National Airways Corporation in South Africa helped with information about helicopters, and Dr Michael O’Flynn’s stories of his work in Soweto’s Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital taught me more than I wanted to know about gunshot wounds. Again, any errors are down to me.

  My mother Kathy, wife Nicola and mother-in-law Sheila all read and re-read early drafts and made editorial suggestions that proved sound. The book would not have got this far without them.

  At Pan Macmillan I am indebted (forever) to fiction publisher Cate Paterson for her initial reading and suggestions, and for the deal; to Sarina Rowell and Glenda Downing for their sensible, no-nonsense edits; and to publicist Jane Novak for that first cup of coffee.

  Prologue

  ‘Theron needs to speak to you.’

  The voice on the other end of the mobile phone was South African. Normally its tone was friendly, jovial.

  The man driving the truck said nothing, but swung the steering wheel hard, one-handed, to the left, bringing the bright yellow Bedford to a halt on the grass verge of the road.

  He said nothing despite the flurry of questions.

  ‘What is it? Did you see something?’ asked one of the tourists from the rear cab. ‘Why have we stopped?’

  ‘Mike? Are you still there, Mike?’ Rian de Witt said into the phone from his office in Johannesburg, four hundred kilometres away.

  The driver ran his free hand through his long, dark hair, until it stopped at the band holding the strands in a ponytail. On the other end of the phone line he heard an ambulance siren in the background that brought back memories of the hospital where she worked. As his mind raced he stroked his bristly jawline. Anything to stop h
is hands from shaking.

  He looked out across the expanse of dry yellow grass, the plain spotted here and there with stunted, thirsty acacias. A bachelor herd of impala rams grazed a hundred metres off to the right. They barely paid any notice to the garish overland tour vehicle or the chatting passengers.

  ‘Yeah, I’m still here,’ he said. The accent was from half a world away, maybe softened a little after more than a year’s absence from his native Australia.

  Michael Williams was there in body, but his mind was across the border again, out past where the little antelope were grazing, over the Lebombo Hills that marked the border better than any line on a map. He was thinking of Mozambique.

  ‘Where are you?’ Rian asked, knowing what was going through the Australian’s mind. Worrying.

  Another pause.

  ‘Mike?’

  ‘Kruger. I’m still in the national park. Up north. Near Punda Maria. Mobile phone’s only just come back into range again. What do you mean Theron wants to speak to me?’

  ‘He didn’t say, but he said it was urgent.’

  Sarah Thatcher, a blonde-haired woman in the front passenger seat, realised the tour guide hadn’t stopped because he’d seen a lion or an elephant, or a leopard. This was personal. Sarah’s instincts were aroused. She reached for the notepad in the side pocket of her daypack, flipped it open and wrote the word ‘Theron’ on the blank page, shielding it from his view. It might be nothing, but the way the colour had drained from Mike’s face suggested the opposite.

  He was normally so bloody laid-back. But she had been trained to observe and now saw how his shoulders were bunched and knotted, like a big cat tensing before a final leap. His stocky frame was tensed, the muscles on his nut-brown arms clearly defined, the khaki T-shirt blotched dark with sweat. Something in the truck’s big diesel engine tick-ticked as it idled.

  He said it was urgent. Mike felt his pulse rate climb. His left hand gripped the steering wheel now, so hard it started to hurt. The mobile phone felt like it might shatter in his right hand.

  ‘When? Where?’

  ‘You’re supposed to be crossing from South Africa into Zimbabwe tomorrow. You still on schedule?’ Rian asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He wants you to report to the South African Police post at Messina, at the border crossing, tomorrow morning. I gave him your schedule and he said he’d meet you there.’

  A hundred possible reasons. But why the urgency? ‘OK.’

  ‘Mike?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Are you really OK? Is everything all right, man?’

  ‘I’m fine, the passengers are fine, everybody’s fine,’ Mike said, trying to sound relaxed.

  He’d run away from the horror, changed his life, but he hadn’t run far. Maybe, he told himself, he’d stayed in Africa because one day he might get a call like this one. He hadn’t heard from the detective for a year and had nearly given up hope that he ever would. Or, he wondered, had he started to hope the call would never come?

  The faces, the places, that lived in his nightmares had grown dimmer and appeared less frequently as the months marched on, but now, as he said his goodbyes and switched off the mobile phone, they leapt back into horrible focus.

  Twelve Months Earlier

  1

  ‘I am dying, Michael,’ Carlos said. He folded the single sheet of cheap notepaper carefully in half, then placed it on the smoking embers of the campfire, next to the blackened kettle.

  The day was warm already, even though the sun was only just emerging, red and threatening, above the tree line. The sun can be merciless at the end of the southern African dry season.

  Major Michael Williams – he preferred Mike, but Carlos was always so damned formal – swilled a mouthful of lukewarm water from the plastic litre-bottle. He paused, just for a moment, before swallowing it. He felt ashamed, but he couldn’t help wondering if his friend had drunk from the bottle as well.

  Both men watched in silence as the paper slowly wilted and began to smoulder. The Australian tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound pathetic.

  ‘There are drugs. We can get them through the UN. You can live . . . for years.’ He knew he had failed as soon as he uttered the words.

  Carlos dipped into the breast pocket of the sweat-stained blue two-piece overalls that the African civilian United Nations de-miners wore in the field, and pulled out a crumpled packet of Zimbabwean Newbury cigarettes, the remnants of a carton Mike had bought him on his last leave. At fifty cents a packet there are few economic incentives to quit smoking in southern Africa. Carlos reached across, rising from the jerry can of diesel on which he was perched, and offered Mike a smoke. The army officer accepted, flicked open his Zippo and lit both cigarettes.

  ‘This is Mozambique, not Australia or America. I am finished,’ Carlos said, then dragged deeply on his cigarette.

  He coughed as he exhaled. His cough had been bad for weeks and was getting worse. His eyes were deep in their sockets, his ebony skin stretched much tighter across his cheekbones than it had been when the two men first met in Maputo, five months ago.

  They had been late leaving Maputo, the Mozambican capital, the day before and Mike had grabbed their unopened mail on the way out of the office. He had stuffed the letters in his daypack and had only remembered them this morning. He was sure they both knew when he handed it to him over breakfast what was going to be in Isabella’s letter to Carlos.

  Mike reflected that it had been he who urged Carlos to see Isabella for a check-up and a blood test. Now that the news both men dreaded had finally been delivered, he couldn’t help feeling somehow responsible.

  ‘I have the virus, Michael.’ The smoke from the burning letter had obscured his face for a second or two. It was a tough enough admission for any young African male to make.

  Mike had seen the condom advertisements and the billboards pushing monogamy, but it was all too little, too late. Every day the newspapers carried another story about AIDS orphans, anti-retroviral drugs and statistics. The statistics and projections were mind-blowing, almost unreal. Carlos was real.

  The birds were coming to life as the sun turned the butterfly-shaped mopani leaves on the dense thickets of trees around them from pink to ochre, to gold. Despite his friend’s terrible news there was still promise in the new day for Mike.

  He thought of his own letter from Isabella as he prodded the fire with a rusted tent peg and then topped up the two coffee mugs with hot water from the kettle. Mike’s note was on the same cheap hospital stationery, but its message, unlike Carlos’s, was a lifeline.

  ‘What does your letter say?’ Carlos asked.

  ‘Not much,’ Mike lied. ‘She’s going to be at Mapai in a day or so. I was hoping to meet her there, but now . . .’

  ‘I am not going to die today or tomorrow. You do not have to stay with me every minute.’ White teeth lit his broad black face as he forced a grin for his friend’s sake. ‘I will take you there when we have finished surveying the minefield and you can travel back with her if you like,’ he said, waving his cigarette in a vaguely Latin gesture to indicate the matter was solved.

  Mike was excited because of his news, and, as a result, also felt guilty. ‘We have to talk,’ Isabella had written in her spidery, barely decipherable doctor’s hand, adding the date and time she expected to arrive at the mission clinic in Mapai, where she did volunteer work once a month. Perhaps, he mused, it was the confirmation of Carlos’s illness that spurred on his thoughts. Whatever the cause, he now knew what he had to do, what he had to say to Isabella. Carlos was a good ten years younger than he was. A strong, articulate, educated young African man in his prime, who spoke more languages than any army linguist Mike had ever met. He had been a university-educated teacher before he became a soldier. Currently, as a civilian employee of the United Nations, he oversaw people who dug in the dirt of Mozambique for landmines. Now he faced a death sentence. Life shouldn’t be this fucking hard, Mike said to himself
.

  ‘The doctor, she is the one for you,’ Carlos said. He smiled, but Mike could see sadness in his dark eyes. Carlos turned his glance to the dying fire and flicked his cigarette into the hot ash.

  Mike stood, shrugged off the faded grey T-shirt he had slept in and fetched his mottled camouflage shirt from the front seat of the Nissan Patrol. He ran a hand through his close-cropped hair and then buttoned the uniform shirt as he walked, trying to ignore the smell of stale smoke and dried sweat. He brushed a smear of dust from the circular blue and white embroidered United Nations roundel stitched to the armband on his right sleeve. Below the UN badge was an Australian flag and his country’s name, stitched in white cotton. He was, as he realised everyday, a long way from home. He scratched the stubble on his chin and decided that as he was in the bush he could forgo a shave for one day. Mike walked around to Carlos’s side of the fire and laid a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘We’ll see Isabella together. She’ll tell us what you need and we’ll get it. I’ll see to it, mate.’

  Carlos didn’t look up, and Mike removed his hand. The remains of their half-eaten breakfast, tinned herrings in tomato sauce wrapped in pao, the locally baked bread, sat cold and unappetising on a plastic plate on the upturned Manica beer crate that served as their table. Mike grabbed the last of the pao and shovelled the oily mess into his mouth. ‘Let’s go,’ he said between swallows.

  ‘I do not want to endanger your life, Michael,’ Carlos said as the Australian busied himself loading their meagre camping stores and bedrolls into the back of the Nissan.

  ‘Pass me the gas bottle. You’re not going to endanger my life unless we start kissing, mate,’ Mike said, in a lame attempt at lightening the sombre mood.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  He was hinting at what all of them feared, deep down inside. All of those involved in the dirty, backbreaking task of cleaning up the remains of other people’s wars. If one of them stepped on a mine, the other would have to treat him. There would be blood and there would be saliva and vomit.