Upington, South Africa, the present day
After breakfast at Libby’s guesthouse Nick used his phone’s GPS to find the Kalahari Mall, where he stocked up on provisions for his road trip and bought a paper map of Namibia and a road atlas of Southern Africa at the Bargain Books shop.
Electronic devices were good for getting from point A to point B, but useless for situational awareness. He wanted to take a soldier’s – or perhaps a rebel commander’s – look at the distances he would have to cover in the next few days, and where everything was in relation to everything else.
He had his second cup of coffee for the day at the Mugg & Bean in the mall while he studied his map. The first thing that hit him was the vastness of the distances that Blake had travelled in the course of his business in this part of Africa. The area that Steinaecker’s Horse had covered had, at first, seemed large to him, but in comparison to the wide empty lands of the Northern Cape and Namibia it was like comparing a suburban backyard to an outback cattle station.
The map showed him that Jakob Morengo and his rebels had roamed over hundreds of kilometres. The Karas Mountains – there were in fact two ranges, the main one, and a Klein, or small, Karasberge as it was called on the map – seemed huge in area. It was easy to see how Morengo, with his local knowledge, could have hidden from the Germans for so long in this empty corner of a largely uninhabited colony.
Nick’s phone rang and he saw that it was Pippa Chapman.
‘Lili’s in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital,’ Pippa said.
Nick’s stomach flipped. ‘God, no, is she –’
‘She’s OK. She was mugged, in her house. She wasn’t answering her phone so I went to her home in Newtown. Her flatmates filled me in the whole ordeal.’
‘But she’s all right?’
‘She was knocked unconscious. The doctors are keeping her an extra day for observation because she was still a bit woozy. I’ve called her parents in Germany – they’re apoplectic, as you can imagine.’
‘But Lili’s OK?’
‘Again, yes, Nick, but the doctors want to make sure. She’s quite shaken up. She had her backpack stolen; the cops interviewed her. Lili told me to tell you that she’s sorry for not listening to you.’
‘Any other message?’
‘Yes. I’m getting to that. She said to tell you that she’s sorry but they got all your documents. What have you two been up to, Nick?’ Pippa took an audible breath. ‘Are you involved in something criminal?’
‘No.’
‘Well, if whatever you and Lili were doing has got her hurt then I think you need to take a good long look at yourself.’
‘Thanks, Pippa, I really do appreciate you checking up on Lili. I’ll take it from here. Bye.’ He ended the call. He didn’t need his ex-boss to tell him that he needed to take stock of his life.
He tried Lili’s number again, but it went through to voicemail. He left a message telling her to call him, day or night, and to just let the phone ring and hang up and he would call her straight back.
He looked at the map and the atlas, opened to the page that showed Upington and the Northern Cape. Further north across the border in Namibia was Keetmanshoop, where Claire Martin had fetched up as a wealthy landowner married to a doctor. It was a big jump from spying for the Germans, and running guns to the Afrikaners. And, of course, she spoke of her ‘fortune’ and another cache of gold hidden near Lüderitz somewhere on the coast.
Gold.
For as long as man had mined and smelted it they had also stolen and killed for the stuff. He thought of the guy on the flight to Skukuza telling him about the legend of Kruger’s gold and his own check of the internet, in Cape Town, about the ongoing interest, even to this day, in reported findings of the Boer republic president’s missing treasure. What he needed now was more information about Scott Dillon and how he might link to all this, before he confronted the man in person.
He typed ‘Scott Dillon’ into his phone’s internet browser. The first few pages all related to real-estate sales so Nick searched under ‘News’ instead. Again, most of the stories were pieces speculating about the South African and international real-estate markets, though a few from business publications pointed to the falling share price of Dillon’s company. It appeared he had overextended in golf estate developments, which seemed to be going out of style. Nick found another two entries that looked interesting.
Real-estate mogul’s fire sale to pay off ex, was a gossipy piece from the Sunday Times. Nick opened it.
Scott Dillon’s no stranger to auctions, but yesterday it was some property of a different kind going under the hammer in an auction of some of the real-estate titan’s most valued personal items. On the auctioneer’s block were rare pieces of memorabilia once owned by President Paul Kruger, including items of clothing, a desk, and a diary. Sources close to Dillon say the one-hundred-million-rand divorce settlement ordered by a judge when Dillon split from wife of fifteen years Joanne has cleaned out Dillon Real Estate’s cashbox.
Bingo, Nick thought. So, Dillon was into collecting Kruger-era memorabilia, including the former president’s personal papers. Also, it was more speculation about his financial state, reportedly parlous. Here was a man who could certainly use some gold.
The other piece that was interesting was from an online edition of House & Home from a few years earlier, in happier times for Scott and Joanne. A picture showed him sitting in a lounge with her on the arm, draped over him, in a sumptuous living room. It was a profile piece about the celebrity couple’s home and their lifestyle. Nick scrolled down the page.
‘Scott’s a mad keen collector of South African history, especially around the Anglo-Boer War,’ Joanne says, gesturing to a huge bookcase and a number of ‘very valuable’ objects and records . . .
Nick checked his watch. He needed to get moving.
Leaving town, the trappings of the twenty-first century fell away rapidly. Even flying along at a hundred and twenty kilometres per hour he started to feel the isolation of the landscape. Away from the Orange River the vegetation became stunted and mean, the ground rocky and thirsty. He was no farmer but he imagined farms needed to be huge here, as in the Australian outback, to support a viable herd.
From what he knew from Susan’s research into the death of Blake and his own checking of the map, the Australian had been killed much further north of Upington, closer to the border between modern-day Klein Menasse on the Namibian side and Rietfontein on the South African side. He recalled her saying that the patrol that had ridden out to check on Blake, and subsequently executed him, had left from Klipdam, on the German side.
Nick crossed countries instead at Ariamsvlei, which was closer to Upington, with the Karas Mountains on the other side, where the ‘Black Napoleon’ had waged his guerrilla campaign.
He thought of Lili as he drove; he felt terrible that she had been hurt as a result of her involvement with him, but relieved that she seemed to be fine. Anger began to bubble inside him and he gripped the steering wheel hard. He still didn’t know who was targeting him and the people in his life who had been touched by the story of Claire Martin and Cyril Blake, but it had become personal now. Nick had never been one to pick a fight, always avoiding bar-room punch-ups and conflict of all kinds. Now he wanted to find out who was responsible for this series of burglaries and assaults – perhaps even a murder – and exact some form of revenge.
The Karas Mountains popped up out of the surrounding flat, stony country as though God had plonked them there as an afterthought. In the distance they appeared a hazy blue-grey. Nick saw on his map that a detour from the main B3 road onto a side road, the D203, would take him through part of the mountain range.
He left the tar, and the gravel road took him on a winding trail that followed the course of dry riverbeds between flat-topped mesas that appeared red up close. The mountains, if they could be called that, did not seem particularly high, but this struck even his non-military mind as perfect ambush country.
Nick could picture canny rebels, intimately acquainted with the land, scaling these rocky cliffs and raining down fire on German horsemen forced to take the easy way through the valleys. Apart from the odd sheep farmer’s hut there was no real sign of life in these barren hills. The little vegetation was clustered along the parched watercourses. In the summer, when the seasonal rain came, perhaps they flowed, but now, when Nick stopped to stretch his legs by a sandy riverbed, there was no sign of moisture.
It would have been a good place to fight a war, Nick mused, with few civilians hardy or foolish enough to scratch out an existence here, but from the last papers Anja had translated it seemed Jakob Morengo had brought his Nama people, women and children, and their precious livestock to these very same desolate hills.
Nick looked around and savoured the silence. Morengo must have known that what waited for his band’s supporters was far worse than any privation this harsh natural environment held in store for them. To stay in their homeland meant imprisonment and, most likely, death.
So, Jakob Morengo had brought his people not through the wilderness, but into it, and in doing so he had dangled a target too big, fat and juicy for the German military to resist. Here was a man who cared for his people, but at the same time he would have been acutely aware of the risks. There were only two outcomes to this strategy, neither of them great – death or a stay of execution. Because even if Morengo could turn back the German columns that he knew were coming his way, how long would it be before the Kaiser’s men rallied themselves and returned to finish them all off?
Nick looked forward to reading Anja’s next email as soon as he was back in internet range.