Kill Four Read online

  I handed him my passport and driver’s license. He handed them back to me and there was a glint of hostility in his eyes.

  “Where is your import license?”

  I felt my gut twist and said, “I wasn’t aware I needed an import license.”

  “For the merchandise you have in the back.”

  “I was told…”

  “Whatever you were told, you need an import license for the merchandise. If you do not have one, you must pay a fine of two hundred U.S. dollars.”

  “Two hundred U.S. dollars? In U.S. dollars?”

  “That is correct.”

  We’d expected something like this and had come prepared. I pointed back at Njal with my thumb. “What about my colleague, will the fine cover him too?”

  The expression on his face became crafty. “If your friend has no license, then he must pay another fine also.”

  I nodded and gave him four hundred bucks. He took the money, stepped back and smacked the side of the Land Rover, like he was slapping a horse. The barrier lifted and we snaked our way past two more huts and onto the half-mile bridge that spans the river into South Africa. I still had the twisted knot in my gut. I had the irrational feeling that for some reason, the border control in South Africa was going to be tougher, and harder to bribe than in Namibia.

  At the far end of the bridge, we came to a cluster of yellow huts with corrugated roofs. Ours were the only vehicles there. The place was desolate. We pulled up at the barrier and a woman in a blue uniform, wearing soft, white canvas shoes, came out of the yellow hut chewing and wiping her mouth. She leaned in my window and spoke to me in what I assumed was Afrikaans. I smiled.

  “I am sorry, do you speak English?”

  She shook her head. “Pepah.”

  She held out her hand. I gave her my passport and driver’s license. She glanced at them, then glanced in the back. She pointed and said, “What is it?”

  I cursed Jim in my mind and said, “Photographic equipment.”

  She shook her head. “No, must pay import duty. Two hundred U.S. dollar.”

  I concealed a sigh behind a smile and jerked my thumb at Njal behind me. “I’ll pay for me and my friend.”

  “Four hundred dollar, U.S.”

  I handed over the money and we pulled away from the huts into sandy scrubland. In my rearview, I could see her walking back into the hut, counting the money. The scrub soon faded away and became nothing but sand as far as the eye could see, ranging through a variety of hues, from white through gray to red and black. It was warm, but the heat was not oppressive, and the dust and dryness were tolerable.

  I figured we had two choices. Option one was to take a dirt track that branched off to our left, four hundred yards from the border control, and follow it along the course of the Orange River, two hundred miles through desert and rocky highlands to the east, trusting in the satellite images we had that the tracks would be clear enough to follow. If we took that option and made fifty miles an hour, it would take us just four hours to reach our destination. But we both knew the chances of the satellite images being accurate were slim, and we were more likely to be doing fifteen miles an hour than fifty—if we could make out the tracks at all in the windblown sand.

  The second option was to follow the R382 fifty miles south, along the coast, then follow it inland, east, for another fifty miles until we came to Steinkopf, and there pick up the National Route 7, headed back north for about twenty miles, having made a big ‘U’. After that, we would veer off the road for forty miles along desert tracks toward the black, rocky hills that bordered the river. There, among those massive rocks, on the banks of the Orange, was our objective.

  Though that route was longer, it was also easier and faster, but it had the major drawback that we were exposed and highly visible. However, after discussing it, Njal and I had both agreed that the risk of getting lost in the desert, among the hills and the invisible tracks, was too great. We needed to act and act fast. So we would take the main road and as soon as we had left Steinkopf behind, we would lose the trucks among the sand dunes and the black rock hills.

  We reached Steinkopf in a little under two hours, just as the sun was beginning to settle on the horizon, having encountered practically no traffic on the road. We didn’t enter the town. We bypassed it on our right. Viewed from the windows of our Land Rovers, it seemed to consist mainly of wooden prefabs with corrugated roofs and walls patched with blue tarps and wooden pallets. Each house seemed to have its own plot of land, but the land was little more than parched ochre dust, and what trees and shrubs grew there were stunted and gnarled, more wood and bark than leaves.

  We picked up the National 7 just beyond the town and accelerated north. Then, after twenty minutes, as dusk was shifting to dark, we pulled off the empty blacktop and, keeping our headlamps off, drove east into the gathering darkness of the desert.

  Pretty soon, the darkness was all but impenetrable. There was no moon and what little light there was came from the stars. If we had put on our headlamps, they would have been visible for miles around. So we drove slowly, no more than ten or fifteen miles an hour, negotiating the rocks and small potholes as best we could. There was no road to follow, only the knowledge that we had to head north and east, and that before long, the flatlands we were crossing would narrow into a valley between the sandy highlands to the south and the black, rocky hills in the north, which bordered the river.

  Finally, after fifteen minutes of slow, grinding, bumping progress through the night, we came to a place where massive, dark silhouettes began to rise up ahead to block out the stars, leaving only a narrow ‘V’ of luminous sky in between. We drove on, heading for that ‘V’, and soon found that we were enveloped, bound on both sides by steep walls of rock and earth.

  There we slowed and searched for some kind of hollow, cave or ravine where we could conceal our vehicles till first light. We eventually found one: a deep, winding gash in the rock wall on our left. We pulled in, keeping as close as we could to the cliff face, and killed the engines.

  Using the Land Rovers’ roof racks and the tarpaulins, we improvised a kind of shelter where we could make a fire with no risk of being seen. There we cooked a meal of canned beef stew again, with dry crackers, took turns to keep watch and slept four hours each.

  At four the following morning, we scouted the area on foot, with the help of the light from a late moon, and found a deeper crevice between two massive rocks that must have towered to at least a thousand feet out of the sand. There we were able to hide the Land Rovers in the cover of overhanging boulders, so there was no chance of being spotted either from the ground or from the air. After that, before the sun had risen, we took an HK416 each, plus our sidearms, binoculars and night vision goggles, and set off on foot, guiding ourselves by our satellite maps, across the soft sand among the sheer black stone walls, to take our first look at the monolithic structure they were building beyond, by the river.

  We followed the winding paths, like a maze, for about fifteen minutes, making slow progress. Then, as we drew nearer the target, we began to ascend into the towering rocks, climbing high among the jagged peaks, but taking care never to make a silhouette against the translucent, pre-dawn sky. The going was slow and painstaking, and it took us a full two hours to cover three miles, winding through steep gorges, clambering up sheer walls of smooth, volcanic rock, and crawling, inch by inch, along hard stone surfaces at a snail’s pace.

  Eventually, at four after six AM, at the darkest hour before dawn, and just as the moon was setting into the western horizon, we came to the top of a huge, smooth rock. We lay flat on our bellies and peered down.

  What we saw, maybe one and a half thousand feet below, was a flat, sandy plateau bordering the south bank of the thick black snake of the Orange River. The plateau was enclosed by a horseshoe of the black stone hills in which we were lying, with its apex in the south, about one and a half miles from the river, and about a mile across at its widest point. Sitting in th
e middle of this sandy plateau, measuring about two thousand feet across at its base, was a square, concrete structure that tapered gently as it rose to about forty or fifty feet, which was faintly luminous in the fading moonlight.

  I fitted my night vision binoculars and had a closer look. It was hard to make out much detail, but from what I could see there was a massively thick, tapering outer wall with a gaping maw that might have been an entrance in the eastern wall. At the center there was a vast, hollow, concrete circle, as though they were allowing space for some kind of tower, or vast cylinder at the center. It must have been a good twelve or thirteen hundred feet in diameter.

  As we lay and watched, we saw spotlights and arc lights snap on, and within a minute or so, the place was flooded with Jeeps, trucks and a couple of hundred people. And five minutes after that, work had started again on whatever it was they were building.

  While Njal set about photographing and filming it, I tried to make sense of the construction. I tried to estimate the height of the outer wall by judging it against the people and then vehicles. I confirmed what I had thought: it was fifty feet high, and, from where we were, the walls did seem to be tapering in. It was looking like the base of a pyramid.

  I spoke under my breath. “You make that six hundred and fifty yards across?”

  Njal nodded. “Yuh.”

  “So if that’s going to be a pyramid, it’s going to be the height of the Chrysler building, about nine hundred feet.”

  “That is big.”

  “What the hell is it?”

  “I don’t like that ring in the center.”

  I looked at him. “Why?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. But it’s telling me something that is not good. It is to hold something, contain something. Something so big. That is not a good thing, Lacklan.”

  I grunted and turned back to watching the construction.

  The sun rose in the east and soon the spotlights and the arc lights were doused. Now we could make out a row of buildings a couple of hundred yards to the east of the building site. They were little more than wooden shacks, two and three stories high. They looked more like administrative buildings than dorms or sheds. The row of five coaches parked nearby seemed to confirm that the workers were bussed in, and didn’t sleep there.

  Just short of those buildings, maybe a hundred yards from the construction, we could also see a perimeter fence. It was made of a series of concrete towers, twenty or thirty feet high, with crows nests on top occupied by a guy with an assault rifle. Between one tower and the next, there was a chain link fence, bound on either side by barbed wire. Along this fence, men with rifles were on patrol.

  Construction continued at a pace. It was hard to estimate accurately how many people were working there, but on several counts I made, I always came back to roughly two hundred or two hundred and fifty men. Njal estimated the same.

  They worked in teams of between ten and twenty men, and each team was supervised by a guy in a hardhat. The workers themselves wore all kinds of things on their heads, but none of them was a hardhat. As well as the supervisors, I also spotted four guys in pale jackets and ties who appeared in a Range Rover and strolled around talking to each other, looking and pointing and consulting clipboards.

  I elbowed Njal and pointed at them. “We need to talk to those guys.”

  “It’s not gonna be easy. You seen the perimeter fence?”

  “Yeah, they seem as keen to stop people getting out as they do to stop them getting in. But the workers don’t sleep on site. You saw the coaches?” He shifted his glasses, found them and nodded. I went on, “The workers are bussed in, and I’d lay you twenty bucks that those guys in the Range Rover don’t sleep here either. There must be a town nearby.”

  He made a skeptical face. “Steinkopf?”

  I shook my head. “No. At least, not the workers. This is a secret operation. With security like that, they don’t want people shooting their mouths in a town with major roads running through it. Uh-uh.” I pointed down river. “Didn’t we see a town east of here on the satellite pictures?”

  “Goodhouse. It’s like a mile upstream, behind those hills. But it is abandoned. There is nobody there anymore.”

  “Two gets you twenty, Njal, the town has been revived as a dormitory for the construction site. That’s where these guys are sleeping and eating.”

  “Could be. But the guys in suits? I don’t think so. What you wanna do?”

  I lay for a while watching and thinking. Eventually I pointed at where the rocks formed the apex of the horseshoe.

  “We circle ’round till we have a good view of the town, Goodhouse. We watch, and see when the Range Rover comes in and out, what route it takes, how much security there is in the village, what we’re dealing with. When we have enough intel, we make a plan. We need to snatch those guys and find out what this place is.”

  He sighed and nodded. “Yeah, OK. It’s the plan.”

  It was a six mile trek through extremely difficult terrain. Sometimes we walked along deep gullies with sandy floors, and that was easy and the going was good, but at other times we had to scale rock walls that were smooth and almost vertical, or crawl through narrow, rocky gullies over a loose, slippery mix of sharp stones and sand, and then the going was agonizingly slow and difficult. In the end it took us almost six hours to cover the distance, and by the time we got there, we were exhausted and our hands and knees were raw and bruised.

  We found a hollow in the rocks about a half mile from the village and lay down to watch. The first thing that struck me was that the place had, as I had suspected, recently been revitalized. There was a hotel in the main square that was reminiscent of a saloon in an old cowboy movie. The streets were broad and dusty, and the houses were made of wood, with corrugated roofs. Some houses had yards where there were goats tethered, and nearby, at the riverbank, there were allotments where canals had been dug and vegetables were being cultivated.

  Njal stared for a long while and eventually nodded. “Yuh, it’s a dormitory town, but not only a dormitory town. People are living here also who do not work at the site. They are growing crops, keeping animals. You see? There is also a hotel. Which means people are coming and going.”

  “Laborers from neighboring villages, attracted by the work?”

  “Maybe.”

  “OK, here’s what we do. We make provisional camp here for the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours. We watch the town. We want to know to what extent it’s a part of the construction site, and to what extent it continues to function as a normal town.”

  “OK.”

  “But our primary objective is the Range Rover and those four guys in it. It is a short drive from here to the construction site, so we need to see if they go anywhere else. Do they go to Steinkopf? Maybe you’re right and they’re making the commute there. Or are they staying at the hotel in Goodhouse? Maybe they’re even going to Springbok. We need to know. If we are lucky, they drive to Steinkopf or Springbok in the evening to stay in a decent hotel, and drive back in the morning. If they do, we set an ambush for them where the rocks begin, near where we left the Land Rovers.”

  He nodded. “Yuh, it’s good, but as soon as we do that, we gonna put the whole place on red alert. What we gonna do then?”

  “We have two options, Njal.” I held up a finger. “One, we make it look convincingly like an accident.”

  “You mean we interrogate them and kill them, then make it look like an accident.”

  “Yes.”

  He looked skeptical. “That is gonna be hard to pull off. What’s the other option?”

  “We make it stage one in a comprehensive attack on the whole site. We take out their communications so they can’t call their HQ, take out their cars and trucks, and then blow the whole damn place to hell.”

  He grunted, still looking skeptical. “No third option?”

  I shrugged. “Something halfway between, maybe.”

  SIX

  For the next t
wenty-four hours, we took it in turns to do four hour shifts during which one of us dozed or ate and the other made detailed notes and observations about what went down in the village of Goodhouse: who came in, who left, where they came from and where they left to; was there any nightlife or did they all just go home to bed? Were there women, and if so, were they wives or prostitutes?

  The following evening, we sat around a small fire in a hollow formed by two rocks and compared notes. Njal had taken the last watch.

  “The hotel is working like a bar, like a saloon. There were people going in there until midnight, and the last one was kicked out…” He checked his notepad. “Three forty-eight in the morning. Some of the guys who are workin’ at the site are living with women. I marked five guys and followed their movements, where they live, where they went, what they did. Three of them have women living in their houses. I saw one of the women hang out washing in the backyard. Some of the washing was women’s clothes.”

  I nodded. “Good. I saw the same thing.”

  “Also, twenty of the houses have at least one goat in the backyard. Most of them, and…” He hesitated, shrugged and splayed his hands. “It’s hard to tell in just twenty-four hours, right? But there are at least ten houses where you got this combination.” He held up his thumb. “There is a guy with a woman, there are animals in the yard and the guy does not work at the site, he works on the fields by the river. Some of those guys have also kids in the house.”

  I nodded again. “I counted twenty houses where I saw kids.”

  “So if you ask me, is this a dormitory village for the site workers? I’m gonna say yes and no. It is a village that used to live from the orchards and fields by the river, it was becoming a ghost town, and the constructors have taken it, revitalized it, and used it as a dormitory.”

  “I agree. I noticed a couple of other things. Twice during the afternoon I saw small groups of guys arrive—three guys on foot and a larger group of six in a pickup truck. The truck came from the direction of the N7, southwest. The guys on foot came from the east, along the river. They wandered into the village and made for the hotel. I didn’t see them leave and I am guessing they were looking for work.”