A Sailor's Honour (6 page)

The front doors opened simultaneously and the operatives spilled out. They hit the ground running and the forest swallowed them within a second. The women in the car could hear them thrashing about.

‘Turn the car and shine the lights in here,' Zirk Bester shouted.

Sandy got into the driver's seat and turned the Range Rover perpendicular to the road. The forest lit up for the first ten metres or so, but beyond that, it remained clad in the eerie mist and dark. The only sounds were the purring of the V8 motor and the heavy breathing of the searchers.

Zoë kept as still as the forest. It was wet and cold. She watched the silhouettes of the searchers from her hiding place as they returned to the car.

‘Come on, let's go,' she heard the driver say. He was the one giving the orders, she knew. He was the one who told the others to pull the hood over her eyes every time they neared a town. They thought she wouldn't know what was happening, but she could work out every time they slowed down and stopped and heard other cars that they were in a town with stop signs and traffic. She heard the doors slamming shut and waited until she could no longer hear the car.

Then she waited some more. She huddled in her hiding place and felt water dripping from the tree into the back of her anorak.

The Third Force prepared to take Liesl Weber to their headquarters in Durban.

‘If you don't get up and walk,' her abductor said, ‘we are going to have to drag you by your hair.'

She looked at him with zombie eyes, not focusing. Her hair was as short as a boy's.

‘On you feet,' the second operative said.

She didn't stir.

‘Let's get a stretcher,' the second operative said. ‘We'll have to strap her down anyway.'

For a moment Liesl Weber considered cooperating, but she held her resolve to make things as difficult as possible for them. From the time they had bundled her into their car, she had played possum. She had gone limp and had refused to speak or to make eye contact with them. For more than a day now, they'd had to carry her wherever they'd wanted her to go.

She slowed her breathing and relaxed her muscles. She closed her eyes. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, she said to herself.

Zoë cautiously made her way back to the road, intent on stopping the first car that came along. She still had to pee and squatted a second time behind the kaori. When she finished and stood up, a pair of strong arms grabbed her from behind and lifted her off her feet. The man turned her across his knee and smacked her hard on her buttocks. Whack! Whack! Whack! She screamed in pain and was still crying when the Range Rover pulled up next to them.

‘If you try something like that again,' the driver said, ‘I'll smack you so hard that blood will come out your ears.'

Zoë got a second hiding within the hour. She cried herself to sleep in the back of the Range Rover. When the gang arrived at the safe house, they had to carry her upstairs and put her to bed still dressed in her day clothes.

The Third Force operatives had planned the operation with meticulous care two weeks earlier. The most deserted street in one of the country's most deserted towns – hardly more than a village – had been scouted for a vacant house in the middle of a vacant neighbourhood. It hadn't been difficult to find: the town had run nearly empty due to a slump in the international market for the woodchips upon which it depended.

No sooner had the operatives put Zoë to bed than she ran away again.

This time it was the reflective strips on the heels of her sneakers that betrayed her. They picked her up in the headlights of the fast-revving Range Rover. Her tiny legs were pumping as she ran and the reflective strips bobbed up and down in the lights until they pulled up beside her. She sat down on the pavement and screamed and screamed, but the street was deserted and no one heard her. When the driver picked her up, she bit his hand. He cuffed her on the side of the head.

He waited until they were back inside the house before he turned her over his knee and spanked her. Then he went upstairs and nailed the windows shut.

‘She's going to be trouble,' Zirk Bester said. ‘You'd better be wide awake.'

Sandy had held her tongue throughout but couldn't any longer. A teacher by profession, she knew the consequences of smacking a child. It was serious enough when it was your own, but smacking someone else's child meant imprisonment.

‘If we get caught, you'll get an extra three years for that,' she said. ‘And I thought you said we shouldn't hurt her. That those were our orders.'

‘It was just a spanking,' Zirk Bester said. ‘And for your information, Miss, I don't intend to get caught.'

The day had not started well. He had hardly slept and the troubles had started before he'd had his breakfast.

Detective Inspector McCarten called while he was still at home.

‘Is there something you're not telling us?' she asked.

‘Like what?' he asked defensively.

‘Like marital problems,' she suggested.

De Villiers was lost for words.

‘Perhaps child abuse,' she added.

‘You know very well,
DI
McCarten,' he said, speaking slowly and deliberately to control his rage, ‘that child abuse is a predominantly Maori problem and factually and statistically nonexistent in the South African immigrant community. White, brown and Indian.'

‘That's not to say that isn't what happened here,' she interrupted. ‘Statistics mean nothing. The case fits the pattern. Child disappears. Man without an alibi. And I have yet to hear you deny it.'

De Villiers lost his temper. ‘Listen, you stupid bitch,' he shouted. ‘It's your job to find my daughter, not to harass me with this crap. Now get off your fat bum and investigate.'

‘That's exactly what I'm doing,' she said calmly. ‘Exactly what I'm doing.'

De Villiers kept quiet. He wondered how you go about finding a missing child. God knows, there is so much that could happen to a child, even in a place as safe and orderly as New Zealand, with a range from the ridiculously ordinary to the most devastatingly cruel. From sleeping over at a friend's without telling the parents, to being abducted by a sadistic paedophile. From getting lost, to drowning in a drainage pipe while trying to retrieve a ball.

He knew that none of these applied, but still didn't know how you would go about looking for the child when nothing is known apart from the fact that the child is missing.

Except that he knew more.

‘Well do your job then,' he said. ‘But I'm telling you here and now that you're wasting your time looking at me.'

He cut the connection. She's probably going to report me for calling her a bitch, he thought.

He waited for the call that would allow him to speak to Zoë, but in vain. Eventually he left for his office in town and there he broke the rules. He called his most trusted junior to the office and gave her the numbers of all three his cellphones. ‘I want you to put a trace on each of these numbers and to tell me as soon as you know from where any incoming calls were made.' Detective Sergeant Vaishna Veerasinghe nodded and left the office.

Then he sat back and waited. They want something from me, and they'll come to me, he said to himself. He expected them to call, but when the phone rang, he jumped with fright. He had expected them to phone on his BlackBerry, but it was the phone he carried on the thong that rang. He fumbled with the small buttons. When he put the phone to his ear, he was just in time to hear a man's voice saying, ‘Say hello and give the phone back to me immediately.'

There was a small pause, and then Zoë's voice came through. ‘Hello, Dad.'

De Villiers tried to speak but had lost his voice. He regained his composure just in time to hear the man's voice again. ‘And that's how much you'll hear until I am convinced that you will do exactly as we say.'

The line went dead.

DS
Veerasinghe phoned when he was on the motorway approaching the Khyber Pass glide-off. The connection was poor. ‘We've traced their call to the tower near Kawarau,' she said.

When he and Emma had first arrived in New Zealand, they had taken a three-week holiday and had driven the length of New Zealand in a cheap rental car. Thirty-five dollars a day had taken them all the way north to Cape Reinga and all the way south to Bluff. And everywhere in between.

Kawarau he remembered as one of the in-between places, with nothing to offer except the bridge from where the first commercial bungee-jumping operation had been launched. De Villiers had jumped too, and stood in the queue waiting for his
T
-shirt, video and photograph. He'd smiled when the man in front of him had said, ‘It's like first-time sex. All that anticipation and then nothing. It's over before you know what's happened.'

But De Villiers wasn't smiling now. Kawarau was near Queenstown, on the South Island. It takes at least three days' driving to get there, so the kidnappers must have taken Zoë by plane. The small airport at Queenstown must have a record of all flights landing and taking off. He knew that by law all commercial flights would have to file their passenger lists at the airport. And private flights would have to record the registration number of the aircraft, pay the landing fees, and provide the pilot's licence details. There was a possible lead here, and De Villiers wasted no time following it up.

The Khyber Pass glide-off loomed and he fought his way across to the left, narrowly missing a truck trying to muscle its way towards the right-hand lane. De Villiers had to change gear and get both hands on the steering wheel. In the process, he dropped his BlackBerry. It fell between the seat and the centre console. He made it onto the glide-off and turned right into Khyber Pass Road and right again to get back onto the motorway. Half an hour later he was at Auckland Airport, his BlackBerry still wedged between the seat and the console. He made it onto the flight to Queenstown with minutes to spare.

The flight was bumpy as a result of very strong winds coming across the Tasman Sea. The mountains were beautiful to look at, with their snowcapped peaks and dark valleys, but they made for swirling winds on the Pacific side. The landing was precarious, the small aircraft running on one set of wheels for a distance before the other side settled on the runway.

‘Kawarau? You mean the bridge?' the young man behind the counter asked when De Villiers asked for directions from the car-hire desk.

‘No, the town,' De Villiers said.

The young man shook his head. He could hear from the accent that De Villiers was not a native New Zealander. ‘Are you looking for the bridge to bungee jump?' the desk clerk asked. ‘In that case, it's better to take a taxi into town. The bungee people have a shop in the centre of town and they run a shuttle service to the bridge for tourists who want to do a jump.'

‘No, the town,' De Villiers said a second time. ‘Kawarau.'

‘There is no such town, sir,' the desk clerk said. ‘The river is Kawarau, but the town is Frankton.'

‘Do you have a map?' De Villiers asked.

The map showed Frankton on the banks of the Kawarau River. De Villiers searched for his cellphone, but his pockets were empty.

‘I've wasted a whole day,' he said to himself as he boarded the same aircraft for the return flight.

When he came out of the airport in Auckland, he found two uniformed policemen at his car.

‘Who are you?' one asked.

De Villiers pointed at his car with the key. ‘This is my car. What are you looking for?'

‘I asked who you were,' the policeman said. He was firm but polite.

De Villiers produced his warrant card. ‘Detective Inspector de Villiers,' he said. ‘And who might you be?'

‘Constables Lam and Reid.'

‘What can I do for you, gentlemen?' De Villiers asked.

Constable Reid swallowed twice before he spoke. ‘We were told to watch the car until the Child Protection Unit arrives. Sir,' he added belatedly.

‘
DI
McCarten, is it?' De Villiers asked.

They nodded.

‘Well, phone her and tell her to hurry up, please. I have work to do,' De Villiers said.

Constable Reid turned away and made the call. ‘She wants to speak to you, sir,' he said. He handed the phone to De Villiers.

‘Where have you been?'
DI
McCarten demanded. ‘We're looking for your child and you disappear without telling anyone where you're going and you don't answer your phone.'

De Villiers had made a fool of himself, he knew, but he also knew that he couldn't tell
DI
McCarten what had happened without getting himself and
DS
Veerasinghe into trouble.

He handed the phone back to Constable Reid. ‘It's your phone,' he said. ‘You talk to her.'

He had to lean deep into the car to retrieve his BlackBerry from under the passenger seat. Its battery was flat and he had to charge it while driving home.

‘Where were you?'
DS
Veerasinghe asked when he phoned her. ‘I could hear you, but you weren't responding.'

‘I dropped the phone,' he said. He had no reason to pretend with her. He explained what he had done.

‘Kawerau,' she said. ‘Not Kawarau.'

‘Where is it?' he asked.

‘The other side of Rotorua, just before Whakatane.'

De Villiers would have to look at a map. ‘How long to get there?'

‘Three hours, I should think.'

‘How big is the town?' he asked.

She knew what he was thinking. ‘Too big for a house-to-house search.'

‘We'll have to find another way, then,' De Villiers said.

‘Be careful, sir.
DI
McCarten is after you,' Vaishna said.

DI
McCarten is the least of my troubles, De Villiers thought. Compared to the people who are really after me, she's a little pussycat. But she caught up with him faster than he had anticipated. He didn't recognise the caller
ID
when his cellphone rang.