for the job was contagious.
When Tim flew in three years ago for the interviews with potential managers, they never expected their choice would land on her. The image of a former international ramp model certainly wasn’t reconcilable with what they’d had in mind.
There had been some serious heavyweights queuing for the job, men with years of experience. At twenty-five, Natasha was a rookie. The only reason they’d reluctantly granted her an interview was that she’d worked for the Conservation Action Trust for two years after she’d given up modelling.
She’d stood head and shoulders above the other candidates. It was the way she answered their questions in the interview that had convinced them. Not one of the others was able to speak about conservation with as much intelligence and knowledge. And she had a clear vision, one that had essentially redefined IESA’s role for him and Tim. They’d practically fallen over their feet to make her an offer.
Since then she’d developed IESA into an indispensable component of southern Africa’s battle against rhino and elephant poaching. In fact, the head honcho at SANParks had admitted to Werner that the crisis in the Kruger National Park, in particular, would have been much worse if it hadn’t been for IESA’s proactive analyses of poachers’ movements. His exact words had been that ‘Natasha van der Merwe has given us a competitive advantage we’ve never had in South Africa before’. Conservationists from Zimbabwe and Mozambique had recently said similar things to Werner.
And now he had to go in there and deliver the bad news.
* * *
On my very first day of school I met a boy who seemed to have a permanent smile on his face. We were the same age and sat next to each other in the class for six-year-olds. One of the other kids called him Smiley and I went along with it. Years later he forbade me from using the nickname.
Smiley’s father was one of the few white farmers in the district. Because Uganda was a British protectorate, and not a colony, most of the agricultural land actually belonged to Ugandans. Only a handful of white settlers were allowed to own land. As a result, Uganda was one of the most peaceful British areas, in sharp contrast to its neighbour Kenya.
Smiley and I soon became good friends. At break, we often ran over to my house, where my father treated us to ginger beer and little tarts baked by Mum. Then we played with my toy cars or marbles until my father sent us back to school. Those were carefree and innocent times.
When we were older, Smiley often invited me to his parents’ farm, a place that felt like paradise to me. We hunted birds with airguns, swam in the dam and played soccer with the farm workers’ children on the huge lawn in front of the house.
Joseph, who was a few years older than we were, was an exceptional soccer player who put the rest of us to shame. I soon realised that Smiley, who was a good player himself, didn’t like him. Smiley always wanted to be the best. Whenever Joseph and Smiley played on opposing teams, an argument would break out between the two of them.
Joseph was the son of a Tutsi, Rwandan refugees who’d joined the exodus from their country after the Hutu rebellion of 1959. The Baganda had always looked down on the refugees because they were foreigners and because they were mostly extremely poor.
There was always tension between the two groups. Theft was not tolerated in Uganda, especially not when the accused was a Tutsi. Suspects often paid with their lives and no one said a word about it.
One Saturday, when we were about thirteen, Smiley and I were walking in the veld when we heard a huge racket. It was coming from the other side of the hill and we ran to see what was going on. A group of Baganda were beating Joseph up, two of them hanging around with pangas in their hands. Joseph’s bloodied face was almost unrecognisable.
I turned to Smiley and shouted at him hysterically to do something to stop them. He calmly established from a bystander what was going on and, when he heard that Joseph was supposed to have stolen a screwdriver from his father’s storeroom, he threw down his airgun, grabbed a panga, commanded the men to back off and, with a mighty swing, slashed open Joseph’s temple. The Baganda laughed, whistled and applauded. I stood frozen to the spot and watched Smiley swing the panga a second, then a third time.
When Joseph stopped moving, Smiley turned towards me with blood splatters like freckles all over his face. He told the workers to bury Joseph, picked up his airgun, smiled his familiar blinding smile, and said: ‘Let’s go for a swim.’
3
Natasha van der Merwe, Werner realised each time he saw her, did not look like the models in glossy magazines. She had high cheekbones and big, dark eyes, but there was a lack of softness in the lines one usually saw in cover girls. There was something angular about her face that excluded her from the mainstream idea of beauty. There was something challenging in her gaze, too.
She didn’t wear makeup, nor did she need it. But she was naturally sensual. She even looked great in IESA’s unflattering khaki uniform.
‘Morning. You’re early,’ she said when she saw Werner. ‘You didn’t drive all the way from Pretoria, did you?’
He shook his head. ‘No. I went to see my brother in Vaalwater yesterday. I left there this morning.’
She waved her hand towards the chair across her desk. ‘Make yourself at home. Can I get you some cold juice?’
‘Not right now, thanks.’
He took the documents out of his briefcase. No use hedging. He’d get straight to the point. Natasha had little patience for detours. She preferred straight talk.
As he was about to begin, the cellphone lying on her desk rang. She picked it up and looked at the screen. She frowned. ‘It’s Gert. I’m going to have to take it.’
She got up and moved towards the back of the long, narrow office. The way she walked, with a languid swing to her hips, was a reminder that she’d once sashayed down runways in designer clothes. This thought was somehow hard to reconcile with her current reputation as a relentless hunter of game poachers.
He heard the pitch of her voice rise, but her exact words were drowned out by the drone of the fan on the windowsill behind him. It was a disgrace, really, that they had no air conditioner, but Natasha had decided it would be too indulgent.
‘I don’t spend enough time in the office to justify the expense.’
When she was done and had sat down again, she looked upset. Her face was flushed and her eyes were darker than usual. ‘The Silencers have struck again. Two rhinos dead. They left the calf, thank goodness, but …’
She swallowed. ‘He’s blind. They’re guessing from the trauma of losing his mother. It’s happened once before. To a calf in Zim.’
‘Where were they shot?’
‘In the Kruger, near Shingwedzi. Gert and his people saw the carcasses from the helicopter this morning. The rangers are shocked. They said they were in the area all day yesterday and they didn’t hear a thing.’
‘Any clues?’
She shook her head. ‘They had the cheek to drive right up to the rhinos, so at least there are tracks. It’s The Silencers’ modus operandi: no one heard a thing and the horns were loosened and cut out, not sawn or chopped off. The whole operation couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes.’
She sighed. ‘If only we could catch that lot. Then we’ll have won half the battle.’
Werner coughed. The poachers’ timing couldn’t be worse. He already felt guilty about what he had come to say.
He pointed at the documents on the table between them. ‘Tim sent me this yesterday. It’s not good news.’
Natasha narrowed her eyes. ‘What do you mean?’ Her voice had dropped an octave.
‘They’re cutting our budget by half,’ he said, summarising the fifteen pages of the report.
‘What!