Chapter Eight

Duncan and Joseph Mpande left the river and the camp behind and followed the dirt road out past an abandoned village, a burned-out farmhouse with its blackened roof open to the sky, past woodlands that opened until the road merged almost seamlessly with the green and gold savannah that spread out before them. They were following the tire-tracks of the previous search party now, a long winding pair of parallel tracks weaving through the trees and across the dull-gold grass.

Mpande drove, flooring the Land Rover and handling it with careless confidence so that it hurtled around the bends in the track. Duncan braced himself and sat quietly beside him, trying to get a sense of this man he was going to depend on to get Methos back.

Mpande was a Zulu, Duncan knew at least that much, recognizing the greeting he had given. He had the round face and long, lean stature of his people, although he stood a few inches shorter than Duncan himself. Perhaps he was not as young as he had first appeared, his smile creased his eyes and mouth too deeply for him to be much under thirty, it was the slenderness of his frame and the manner of his dress that were deceptive.

Not unlike someone else he knew, Duncan thought, a pang warring with the urge to smile. But where Methos was all relaxed, catlike grace, appearing completely unaware until the moment he had his claws into you, Mpande was all coiled energy, intense and barely constrained -- a springbok ready to leap into the air in a second.

If it weren’t for the clothes, Duncan might have picked him as ex-military. There was something in the way he held himself, something in the way his eyes never stopped scanning the horizon, in the studied, adept casualness of his movements. Duncan had served in too many armies, in too many war zones not to recognize that look.

They had talked only a little so far, sorting out the plan of attack -- which Mpande seemed to have all arranged without so much as a by-your-leave from him, Duncan recalled with a vague brush of irritation -- and the itinerary for the day, which was as simple as Duncan had expected: drive out to the crash site and track from there. But he still had very little insight into Mpande himself.

Joseph Mpande. Duncan had already taken to calling him by his surname in his head, his first seemed hard-wired to the part of Duncan's heart where the pain still lived and he could not bring himself to use it, not even in his thoughts.

Was it fate or just another coincidence that he shared his first name with the man who had brought him and Methos together the first time? Memories uncovered a fresh spot of unhealed grief in his heart and the pain flared quick and hot before he could bank it down again. He would never forgive himself for the way Joe died, no matter how long he lived. The Two had killed Joe because of him, to hurt him, and done it in such a way to ensure that Duncan would never forget it.

He'd thought to burn the memories away five years ago with the burning of the barge, send them drifting away with the pall of smoke over the Seine, but it hadn't worked. For a long time, the hellish sight of Joe's butchered body had haunted him, overlaying his dreams with the redness of blood and the scent of death.

It had been years before the dreams began to fade with time blunting the sharp edge of grief and guilt. He lived with it, only because for him there was no other choice. No matter what the pain, the loss, there was nothing in him that would allow him to go quietly into the night. So, the scar tissue built up around his heart, not nearly as tough as he would have liked, but tough enough.

He'd lost Joe; in the end he had to accept that there was nothing that he could do about that, but he was damned if he was going to lose Methos too. There had been no way to prevent what had happened to Joe, but Methos was a whole other story. His fear had lost Methos to him once, but not this time ... never again. There was a certainty -- a determination -- humming inside him now, that filled him until the fear had no place to go but the no-man's-land at the edges of his consciousness. He could ignore it there, though it prowled like a night-hunting leopard, waiting for the moment of weakness he could not allow.

He could almost hear Joe Dawson's voice inside his head, echoing past death: Don't let the bastards win, MacLeod. Don't let them win.

No, Joe, Duncan thought, they've been winning for far too long already.

"You're quiet over there, MacLeod. You gone to sleep on me?" Mpande said, breaking into Duncan's thoughts.

"Sorry.... Just thinking," Duncan answered, managing a smile for the other man.

"Thinking is always a good thing, a man should always think a great deal more than he speaks," Mpande told him, the solemn sagacity of his tone at odds with the flicker of amusement lurking at the corner of his mouth.

Well, he sure as hell didn't sound like Dawson. Joe would have told him not to hurt himself and laughed that quick bark of a laugh of his. Duncan could hear it now, echoing in his mind.

He was still deep in thought when Mpande offered into the silence, "You are thinking of your friend?"

"Yes," Duncan answered, still thinking of Joe. "No," he amended, realizing what the other man had meant. "No, another friend, he...died a few years ago."

Mpande nodded, every trace of humor gone from his face. "But he is with you still."

For a moment the bittersweet pain threatened to rise up and drown him. He forced it down and managed to answer, "Yes," though his throat was suddenly tight.

"I have many such friends," Mpande told him quietly. "They are my shadows now."

He didn't elaborate and Duncan didn't ask. Duncan's ghosts -- yes, his shadows -- were as much a part of him as his name. They walked with him all the days of his life and always would.

From behind the cover of his sunglasses, Duncan continued to evaluate the tracker. He wondered how much Grant had told him about the situation and the mission. He would have to sound him out later. The mission... He knew Grant expected him to keep working on it, even while he was searching for Methos, but Duncan knew that when push came to shove, his priority would always be Methos. There was just no other way for it to be. Not for him. Duncan leaned back in the passenger seat and recalled the day Grant had laid it all out for him.

Eighteen months earlier

"What do you know about Angola, MacLeod?" Grace's husband asked him as they sat in the vast glass conservatory of the Montgomerys' elegant Kensington house. Grace herself had disappeared from the room shortly after leading him in there and introducing him to her husband. Now Duncan and Grant Montgomery sat either side of a small round table, sipping very fine scotch, in the airy, plant-filled space.

Duncan paused with the crystal tumbler he held halfway to his mouth. What an odd question. "Not a lot," he admitted. "On the west coast of southern Africa, involved in a civil war for a few years now. Why?" He had the definite sensation of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"Twenty-seven years, to be exact," Montgomery began, and Duncan could help but noticed that his question was going unanswered. "Since 1975. And the situation is not improving, despite the best efforts of several interested parties, including the UN. While the UNITA rebels remain outside the democratic process, it seems that peace will never be possible. But, unfortunately, while they continue to commit acts of terrorism against the civilian population, that can never happen. Just last week, they ambushed a train in Lunda Norte province and massacred two hundred and fifty civilians. The instability resulting from the ongoing conflict is affecting the political and economic situations in that whole area of Africa. The human toll alone has been immense. Huge numbers of civilians are being displaced, both internally and to the surrounding countries. It has to stop -- it's gone on too long already."

"I can understand that, Grant. It's awful. But where do I fit into all that? For that matter, where do you fit in?" Duncan asked, truly puzzled. If he had expected anything of this conversation, it sure as hell hadn't been this.

A small smile creased the other man's tanned, even features as he answered, "We have known for a long time that UNITA is being financed in large part by the sale of diamonds mined in Angola and sold illegally elsewhere in Africa. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but Angola has some of the world's richest deposits of alluvial diamonds, and worldwide, diamond trading is very strictly controlled," Montgomery explained, a little pedantically.

"Anyhow, as I was saying," he went on, "UNITA is financing its operations by the sale of these stones and while they are able to still finance their terrorist activities, they have very little incentive to lay down their arms and fully rejoin the democratic process. The failure of this year's elections has only made this more obvious and the situation more urgent."

Duncan could feel Montgomery's assessing gaze on him, watching for his reaction. He returned it, laying down his glass on the table and replying, "I still don't see how I can help you."

"We've been trying, without much success so far, to close down their routes of supply, the places where the diamonds and cash are being exchanged. Since the situation in the DRC has escalated to the point of outright war and the Namibian border is largely desert it seems unlikely that UNITA is using those routes. Instead, we believe that a high proportion of the stones are being smuggled through refugee camps along Angola's border with Zambia. That's where you come in."

***

The truck hit a bump in the track and bounced, jolting Duncan back to the present. So, his accidental meeting with Grace in London hadn't been all that much of an accident after all. She'd been looking for him, had suggested him for the job long before Grant had offered it. He'd been uncomfortable at the time; the sensation of being managed at best or, at worst, manipulated was not one he enjoyed at any time. But, in the end, Grant's arguments had been too compelling to ignore. And he never could stay angry with Grace.

So, he'd made promises to people, given his word that he would help them and now he was putting all of that aside to go after the man he loved. Guilt flared briefly in his chest, making him wish he had some other option, some way to help everyone, but he knew only too well that his choices had already been made. If he'd ever had choices at all. And he was beginning to wonder about that. Fate seemed to be pushing him in directions he hadn't anticipated, for reasons he couldn't yet fathom. It was unsettling, to say the least, but if the path led him to Methos he would take what came and count the cost light.

For his own part, anyway. Looking across to where Mpande sat in the driver's seat, Duncan yet again debated the wisdom of leading this mortal man into such a dangerous situation. It worried him, more than he liked to admit; that this mission could mean another innocent's death on his hands.

No matter what his experience or credentials, Mpande was still only a mortal. Even if he drove like a bat out of hell, Duncan added to himself as the truck lifted off the track as they crested a low, red termite mound, crashing back to earth with a jolt that reverberated up his spine, despite the truck's heavy-duty suspension. Shit! Duncan reached up and threaded his hand through the handle above the window, hanging on, just in case Mpande tried it again.

But the tracker appeared not to notice Duncan's discomfort, continuing to speed across the savannah. By the map that lay spread across Duncan’s lap, he figured they must have passed into Angola by now -- not that there was anything tangible to mark it. All in front of them was lightly wooded savannah, disconcertingly devoid of animals. There should have been grazing herds of wildebeest and zebra dotted all around, perhaps a lazy pride of lions sheltering from the sun in the shade of a tall tree, but there were nothing. The landscape looked so...wrong without them, expectantly empty like a stage in a deserted theater. He'd read the reports, the stories of the indiscriminate slaughter, the machine-gunning of herds from the air, and the short-sightedness sickened him. No land would give forever treated like that. He gazed out the window into the emptiness.

But no matter what he tried to distract himself with, thoughts of Methos were never far away; every kilometer they covered brought them closer to him. Suddenly, the map in his lap lifted in an extra-strong gust of wind pushing through the windows and he had to grab the map and hold it down. As he smoothed it, his hand slid over the red 'x' that marked the crash site. "Not too much longer now," he said with the vaguest suggestion of a question in his tone.

"Nah...ten, maybe fifteen k's. Slower going soon, though," Mpande replied easily. With one hand resting casually on the steering wheel, he reached into the Rover's ashtray and pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette. "Dagga?" he said, lighting the joint with an ancient Zippo that seemed to just appear in his hand, and hauling in a huge lungful, then waving it in Duncan's direction.

"Err...no, thanks," Duncan replied as the sweet, herbed odor filled the inside of the vehicle. "If you're going to do that, why don't you stop and let me drive?" This was not a good start, what the hell had possessed Montgomery to recommend this man?

"What for?" Mpande asked, a puzzled frown between his eyebrows as he turned his face towards Duncan. The speeding truck did not swerve, even though he could not have been paying the slightest attention to its direction.

For which Duncan was grateful. But not grateful enough. "Pull over," he ordered, his tone brooking no opposition.

Mpande shrugged and pulled the truck to a halt close by the spreading overhang of a baobab tree. "What's up, baas?" The words may have been servile, but the tone definitely was not. There was an amused lift to the African's eyebrows and his mouth twitched in one corner again.

"This." Duncan plucked the joint from the other man's fingers and crushed it in the ashtray. "I think we need to get a few things straight, Mpande. I don't know how much Grant Montgomery told you about this mission but the outcome -- finding my friend -- is very important to me. Too important for me to risk depending on someone whose judgment and behavior I can't count on. I don't care what you do on your own time--"

"Now, hang on a minute," Mpande broke in over Duncan's tirade, the amusement banished from his face and replaced by sudden, fierce anger. "Just you hang on a bloody minute. I owed Grant a favor -- fair enough -- I said I'd do this for him. But you, ou maat...I don't owe you anything. And I sure as blazes don't answer to you. This is my show, and I'll run it my way. We get that straight or we finish an' klaar, okay?" Anger blazed in the dark eyes and Duncan glared back, his head inclined in a get-on-with-it angle while he seethed inside. "You just going to have to trust that I know what I'm about. A little dagga doesn't change that. You need a bloody good tracker going in there, and that's what you got. You want to turn back -- you say so now. Makes no difference to me -- makes a big difference to you, I think. You want some boy to say 'yes, bwana -- no bwana', you can go find youself some other tracker."

Duncan glared him for a long moment, his words forming a logjam somewhere between his brain and his mouth. Mpande was right, on one point anyway, he did need help getting Methos out of Angola, someone who knew the territory and the people. But for all the other man's pride and self-assurance, Duncan wasn't convinced he was the one to do it. "I can't be responsible for you if you're wandering around stoned."

"Responsible for me?" Mpande hissed exasperatedly. "That's a bloody good joke. I don't need you, or anyone else being responsible for me, white man... I could smoke a pound of hash every day and still run rings around you in the bundu." He jerked a thumb in the direction of the wide plain, fierce pride glaring back at Duncan from dark eyes that refused to waver.

Still, Duncan could do stubborn with the best of them. "That's as may be, Mpande, but I still don't want you compromising the search by not being at your best." The other man's expression didn't change and Duncan added, with all the persuasiveness he could convey, "I need your best...Joseph. Matthew needs your best."

Mpande's face was stone, his eyes anthracite. "And what makes you think you get any less from me?"

Duncan frowned and gestured at the smoldering remains of the fat joint in the ashtray. Surely that was obvious.

Mpande sighed and rolled his eyes expressively. "Bloody Americans.... You come here and think you got to tell everybody what to do. I tell you a little something for free, ou maat, my people were smoking dagga before they went into battle since before Chaka was a boy. You ask the Boers if the Zulu were 'wandering around stoned'," he finished with an arrogant tilt of his head.

This was all going around in circles and Duncan was damned if he going to apologize for having an opinion. But instead he said, "Two things, Mpande: I'm not an American and can we get moving? This is getting us nowhere." There would be time enough to sort this out later.

Mpande's eyes searched Duncan's face for a long moment before he nodded sharply and gunned the engine back into life. An uneasy silence spread out between them.

***

The sun was a bright copper disc high in the sky by the time they reached the crash site, stinging Duncan's skin with its bite as soon he stepped out of the vehicle. The atmosphere in the truck had not warmed nearly as much, a chilly silence prevailing through the remainder of the journey. But that mattered not at all now; Duncan's heart was hammering in his chest as he took in the disaster in front of him.

Wreckage spread out, a couple of hundred meters across at the widest point, spiraling out from the twisted and broken fuselage in its center. One rotor blade had speared into the earth and it stood like a broken mast to one side of the cracked bubble. The other blade lay at the furthest edge of the site, snapped in two ragged halves. Small pieces of wreckage lay all around, most of them completely unrecognizable. Without thinking, Duncan went to walk towards it.

A hand grasped his arm roughly, holding him back. "No! The tracks!" Mpande barked. "Let me go first."

Duncan stopped. He knew better than to tramp all over a scene when you were trying to track what had happened there, really he did. But the moment he had laid eyes on the devastation, all he could think of was Methos and every bit of sense he possessed flew out of his head. It was dangerous, he knew that too -- dangerous to allow his heart to over-rule his head -- he had to keep better control of himself than that.

He watched as Mpande cautiously approached the site, walking with his knees bent and his head down, bending lower occasionally to touch the ground. Duncan knew what the other man was doing, had done it himself many times, but the last time had been more than ten years ago on another continent altogether and he couldn't think about that now.

Thoughts of the men he'd tracked in the Americas were leading him down paths he didn't want to follow and he shook off the memories with a short, quick shake of his head. He needed to focus now, focus on finding Methos and bringing him back. He could not think beyond that -- not yet.

Mpande was squatting now, pressing his fingers against the dark earth and Duncan could see his frown from where he stood. Then the tracker looked up and beckoned him over. Duncan picked his way over the wreckage, conscious of the tension tightening his chest as he approached the other man. He glanced down at the ground as he went, the disconnected spots where the grass had been torn aside to reveal the earth, seeing the mess of footprints trailing back and forth, but unable to tease out any meaning from them.

Mpande nodded as Duncan reached him, then gestured down at the ground before them. A rusty stain was smeared over the dun-colored grass. Duncan didn't have to ask what it was. "It's a bloody mess," Mpande began without a flicker of irony. "The rescue team left their tracks all over the place and there's been hyena here too. But something happened here," he said, pointing to the churned dirt beneath the flattened grass. This is where one of them died..." He gestured a little further away. "Someone else fell there, and another man -- not very big -- stood here." He waved his hand close by their feet although Duncan could barely see what the other man was pointing to, let alone read any meaning from it. Mpande unfolded himself from his crouch, straightening easily. "The man who fell got up and walked back over this way," he went on, pointing back towards the center of the site, "then he was carrying a heavy weight -- see, here?"

Duncan looked and saw a single clear indentation of what had to be Methos' boot print, pressed heavily into the raw earth carved up by the crash. He nodded, swallowing hard. "That's him," he said quietly. "That's...Matthew." He glanced around for the next sign Methos had left, leaving Mpande to walk to the furthest edge of the clearing. The dusty surface of a narrow game trail leading away from the clearing showed a muddle of footprints, mostly the worn, interlocking 'v's of old canvas tennis shoes, but there was a partial print of a long, narrow boot just visible amidst the rest. The tracks led out into the bush.

Suddenly and silently, Mpande was beside him. "They went this way," Duncan told him. "And they took him with them."

"Yes," Mpande nodded then turned away. Duncan stood for a long moment, staring out to where the game trail disappeared into the bush, reaching out with his senses as if there would be some trace of Methos still there, still able to be found lingering in the air. But there was nothing. When he could stand still no longer, he turned around and headed back to the truck. There was a hell of a lot to do.

***

Mpande signed off the two-way and leaned into the cab of the truck to replace the handpiece. Duncan had been listening as the African spoke to an associate, arranging for the truck to be picked up from their current location and reporting the situation. From there they would have to track on foot, as dangerous as that was going to be. Normally, air travel was the only relatively safe means of passage in that area -- hell, in all of Angola -- but there was no way that they could follow the spoor from the air. So, they would make their way on foot.

Duncan went on dividing up the supplies that Mpande had brought into both of their packs, sorting just as carefully through the dangers ahead and mentally preparing himself to deal with them.

Mpande strode back towards him, a laser-sighted automatic rifle slung casually over his shoulder. He did not look in Duncan's direction, but Duncan could see him scanning out to the west, his eyes narrowing. The weapon was only one of a sizable cache Mpande had revealed in the rear of the Land Rover when they had began to unpack. Handguns, another rifle that was the pair to the one Mpande carried, ammunition, a couple of machetes, communication gear, and a few other assorted bits and pieces lay under a tarp in a well in the vehicle's floor. At least they were well prepared.

"Nearly done?" Mpande asked blandly, his gaze still far away.

"Aye," Duncan answered, tucking the last of the food rations into the pack. He closed it securely and stood up. "Ready?" He picked his sheathed machete up from the ground and strapped it to his belt, feeling the familiar security of having a blade close at hand once more. He hadn't even been aware of it until now, but he found that a small tension had eased in the back of his mind, now that he was armed again.

"There's one of those in the truck for you," Mpande said, gesturing at the weapon.

"This one's fine," Duncan replied, not mentioning that he had honed the blade of his until it was almost as sharp as his beloved katana.

The other man shrugged. "Come on, then. Let's load up." Mpande snagged the other pack Duncan had prepared from the ground and carried it over to back of the truck.

They each took their share of the weapons, Duncan slung the strap of the other rifle over his shoulder in the same way that Mpande had and shoved a Browning semi-automatic pistol into the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back. Ammunition was loaded into pockets and spare clips went into their packs. At last, it was all done and Mpande slammed the tailgate shut.

A second thought made Duncan pause in the middle of shrugging his pack onto his shoulders. "Wait!" he said suddenly. He opened the Land Rover's tailgate and took out the spare machete in its sheath, sliding it into a loop on the side of his pack. He had a whetstone in his pack he could use to sharpen it later on, when there was time. "I know someone who'll be pleased to have this."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Continued in Chapter Nine Back to Main Page Back to Contents