An Empty Coast.

Tony Park.

About An Empty Coast.

A BODY. A COVER-UP. A BURIED SECRET.

Sonja Kurtz former soldier, supposedly retired mercenary is in Vietnam carrying out a personal revenge mission when her daughter sends a call for help.

Emma, a student archaeologist on a dig at the edge of Namibia"s Etosha National Park, has discovered a body dating back to the country"s liberation war of the 1980s.

The remains of the airman, identified as Hudson Brand, are a key piece of a puzzle that will reveal the location of a modern-day buried treasure a find people will kill for.

Sonja returns to the country of her birth to find Emma, who since her call has gone missing.

Former CIA agent Hudson Brand is very much alive and is also drawn back to Namibia to finally solve a decades-old mystery whose clues are entombed in an empty corner of the desert.

For Nicola.

PART 1.

LIFE.

Skeleton Coast National Park, South West Africa, 1987.

In all probability, the rest of her kind had been exterminated. Her sisters were all dead and she hadn"t seen the father of her offspring for weeks.

Once they had ruled from the icy waters of the Atlantic, so cold she"d hated to touch it when she was young, through the golden dunes as far east as the baking white salt of Etosha Pan, but now she had nowhere safe to raise her youngsters. She trudged along the firm, wet sand, the only living thing visible on a beach littered with bleached bones.

She was hungry, tired and very pregnant, but there was no tree to provide shade, no cool water to slake her thirst, no ready meal to fill her rumbling belly. Gulls squawked at her approach through the golden twilight and somewhere a jackal called, signalling it was readying for its evening patrol.

Darkness would not help her; the sun"s pain would be replaced by the cold of the night, which seeped into her old bones.

The setting sun kicked her shadow inland, towards the dunes and the rocky desert beyond. She had hoped to find a dead seal or, even better, a beached whale, but there was nothing. She knew she had to head east, where the sand and rock would eventually give way to golden gra.s.s plains, farms with cattle and goats, and dainty springbok. It was risky, because she was an outcast and she would not be welcome, but she had no choice.

Under the bright light of the moon she crested the first dune and trudged into the interior. There was not a sound in her world, not another sign of life. The night, however, held no fear for her, for she was a hunter, a killer, a predator.

Above the wind she heard voices. Men were her enemy. She had learned to fear them. They had probably killed her mate, as they had eradicated almost all of her kind.

Normally she would have run away from the sound of them, but the babies hung heavy in her belly. Soon the cubs would be born and she would need to eat, to produce milk. Without food she would die, her young would die, and the last of the desert lions would die.

She lowered herself and started to slink slowly forward, ears back, tail straight. At the crest of the dune she dropped. Through golden eyes finely tuned to maximise the dullest glimmer of star and moonlight, she saw them. Two men.

The crack of a gunshot echoed across the dunes and made her turn and run, her hunter"s heart beating as fast as a fleeing springbok.

She hid in the dunes until just before dawn when a choking, repet.i.tive bark roused her curiosity and her hunger. She crept back to where she had heard the voices and, when she saw the scavenger with his pointed ears and s.h.a.ggy coat gnawing on something, she charged down the hill. For a moment the brown hyena considered staying its ground, but even in her state she was more than a match for it. Beaten, he scuttled away.

Most of the man"s body was intact. She bared her fangs, snarled at the dark in case the hyena was still there, then lowered herself to her belly and started to eat.

Chapter 1.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2015.

Sonja Kurtz slowed the small Honda motorcycle and stopped outside the ornate French-built Saigon Opera House on the corner of Dong Khoi and Le Loi.

She had grown used to the relentless traffic, the exhaust smoke, the noise and the sheer numbers of people more like features of another planet than a different continent which had a.s.saulted her senses when she first arrived in Vietnam. Africa was her natural hunting ground, but predators had to adapt to their environments.

Sonja wore urban camouflage, a cheap open-faced red helmet over piled-up hair; sungla.s.ses; a flower-patterned facemask of the kind locals wore to filter the pollution; gloves and a wrap of cheap fabric around her westerner"s legs that a Saigonese woman would have donned to protect herself from sun and grit. From a distance she resembled one of the city"s millions of commuters.

Her prey unfurled herself from the green and white Vinasun taxi outside the Union Square shopping centre, as she always did this time on a Tuesday. The woman was tall, blonde, strikingly good looking. She moved with the easy elegance of a giraffe, aloof from the hustle and bustle of the streetscape and the people below her.

The woman was a means to an end, and while Sonja would do her best to protect her, she was also prepared to kill her if she had to. Collateral damage.

The woman, Irina Aleksandrova, lived in a secure complex of villas across the river in Ho Chi Minh"s District 7, an expensive new part of the city popular with expats and wealthy Vietnamese, a busy, happening place. Irina was protected in her home, but not on the streets. Sonja had followed the cab on her bike from Irina"s home, knowing that on Tuesdays the Russian woman came, religiously, to the old colonial heart of the city, to walk, to shop, to eat and to prepare herself for that evening"s work.

As soon as Irina entered the shopping centre Sonja revved the throttle on her bike and drove around behind the Opera House. She parked and handed the attendant a handful of crumpled Vietnamese dong notes. "Cam on ong," she said, thanking him.

Sonja took off her helmet, gloves, long-sleeved blouse and wrap and stowed them under the seat. She took her daypack from where it had been nestled between her legs, and pulled out a green peaked cap with a yellow star on the front and put it on. In her faux-military hat, loose-fitting sleeveless top and elephant-printed harem pants she was now a sightseeing backpacker.

Her hair, normally auburn with the occasional mildly annoying strand of silver, matched her target"s today, dyed for the purpose and cut in a similar style. Irina never varied her routine or her route.

Sonja unzipped her daypack and double checked the rigid sungla.s.ses case was there, then zipped the bag closed and shrugged it on. She walked past the Continental Hotel, another grande dame of the French era, and crossed the road to the shopping centre. The air con was a relief from Saigon"s heat and humidity. Sonja picked up Irina in Dior; the only thing that changed in this weekly routine was the brand-name store in which the woman blew her hard-earned fees. Sonja wasn"t judgemental about how Irina made her money, but she had never been one to fritter away her own wages on handbags and trinkets.

Motor scooters choked the street and horns beeped as Sonja and her quarry emerged into Dong Khoi again. Sonja settled into position behind her target, close enough to keep visual contact, far enough away not to be noticeable. A party of elderly tourists, cruise ship pa.s.sengers judging by their shorts, long white socks and clean Nikes, provided her extra cover, and Sonja tagged along at the rear of the group.

She shrugged off the slight feeling of agoraphobia she"d experienced since arriving in Vietnam. She had been born in Namibia, known as South West Africa at the time, a country with the second-lowest population density in the world. Growing up there, and later in Botswana"s Okavango Delta, she had only ever known open s.p.a.ces and isolated pockets of people. Here humans swirled around her, as thick as quelea, the tiny birds of her homeland that flew in dense flocks of hundreds. She forced herself to ignore them.

As Irina pa.s.sed the imposing People"s Committee Building Sonja deliberately looked away from the green-uniformed soldier on duty, his folding-stock AK-47 slung casually across his chest. Pretending to scratch herself, she reached around and touched the familiar hard bulk of the SIG Sauer nine-millimetre pistol sitting snugly in a pancake holster on her jeans belt in the small of her back. She made sure the weapon was covered by her untucked top as she, in turn, pa.s.sed the guard.

Was she any better than Irina and the other people she was hunting? she asked herself. Not for the first time she answered the question with a mental shrug; good and bad, right and wrong didn"t matter any more. Revenge was the only thing that had kept her sane these past twelve months.

After this business was done she could not return to Los Angeles; if she was identified, or the pieces put together, people would come looking for her. LA, in any case, was no longer her home, if it ever had been. No, she would return to Africa. Even if she didn"t belong in the country of her birth she would find somewhere to hide there. More importantly, the one person in her life she cared for was there, right now. Emma, her daughter, was on a study field trip, fossicking in the baked dry dirt north of Etosha National Park, for G.o.d cared what.

At the cathedral, Irina, true to form, turned left into Hn Thuyn. Pretty girls in traditional o dis, long silk gowns slit from ankle to waist over matching pants, and with flowers in their hair posed for photographs in a neatly kept park. Irina headed towards the Reunification Palace, but stopped short on the left at Propaganda, a lively restaurant popular with expats.

Sonja carried on to the adjoining eatery, Au Parc, took a table and ordered a cappuccino. Irina, she knew, would be having the Ph for lunch. Sonja had become accustomed to the traditional Vietnamese soup of noodles and rare beef; Propaganda served the best she"d tasted. The restaurants were owned by the same people and through an open portal in the adjoining wall she could keep an eye on the target, who sat in front of a wall painted with a colourful faux-political mural.

As she sipped her coffee Sonja wondered what the older Vietnamese, those who had fought in the war, thought of this new wave of consumerism and commercialism, the hallmarks of the enemy they had fought for so long and eventually defeated. Did any war matter, in the long run? Her father had fought in the border war, supposedly against communism, but the party that had won and turned South West Africa into Namibia was still running the country, and it bore no resemblance to North Korea or even communist China. The scattered battles of the Cold War, from the jungles of Vietnam to the th.o.r.n.y bushveld and arid deserts of Namibia, had wrested power from old colonialists and their successors, but had anything really changed? Both here and in her homeland the gap between rich and poor was still great; the urban elite lived the high life on the backs of the rural poor. Communism had not triumphed; the batons of crime, corruption and wealth that power brought had simply changed hands.

But Sonja was not in Vietnam stalking Irina Aleksandrova because of politics or brain-dead ideologies; she was there for a much simpler reason. A man.

Irina was pretty in a sculpted, manicured and made-up way, due in no small part to the time she spent in one of District 9"s beauty salons. Sonja normally had no time for such frivolous indulgences, but this morning she had also been coiffed, waxed, spray-tanned, plucked and painted to within an inch of her life.

"Wow," Ross had said, when she"d walked into the apartment. She had taken his open-mouthed gaping as a compliment, then threatened to shoot him if he said another word.

He"d pantomimed b.u.t.toning his lip as she"d unzipped the suit bag bearing the name of the tailor she"d been to. Inside was a c.o.c.ktail dress, short, backless, with a plunging neckline. Normally the only stiletto she admired came with a point and a blade she could shave her legs with, but she had to admit the pair in the box she"d opened to show Ross were rather fetching. He"d nodded in mute approval. She hadn"t dared open the other box, secured with a ribbon that contained the cla.s.sily provocative lingerie she"d also selected. Sonja liked Ross, a lot, but she did not want to encourage whatever feelings he may have developed for her.

Ross c.o.o.nan was a good man, far younger than she, and she had corrupted him enough by enlisting his help, not only with research but to act as her partner today. He was putting himself at risk of arrest and imprisonment, perhaps even death. She had not consciously tried to use her charms to win him over, but she knew from the things he"d said and the invitations to dinner he"d made after they"d finished their planning and briefing sessions that he wanted more than just to help her carry out her mission.

Sonja took a breath and another sip of coffee. She flicked through a gossip magazine, though as it was in Vietnamese all she could do was look at the pictures. There were some American and British actors and singers she vaguely recognised, though she couldn"t recall all their names. Her heart lurched when she turned the next page and saw a full-page ad featuring a slaughtered rhinoceros. In a separate picture a Vietnamese man in a suit presented a rhino horn to another man. Sonja bit her lip. She couldn"t read the words, but she guessed the intent of the advertis.e.m.e.nt.

The war against rhino poaching was still being fought in the African bush with guns and bullets, and here, in the number one destination for illegal rhino horn, in what the American military called "the cognitive s.p.a.ce" the new term for "hearts and minds". The fight could not be won by African soldiers and national parks rangers alone; the price of rhino horn was so astronomically high more than gold, or cocaine that poachers would keep trying to slaughter the animals despite the risk of being ambushed and shot. Now, various conservation groups were trying to target the customers who bought this worthless substance, prized not for its use as an aphrodisiac, which was a common myth, but more for its purported value as a substance that would prevent hangovers. It had become a status symbol for Vietnam"s rich and powerful, who flaunted their wealth by serving drinks in cups made of horn, or ground the horn to serve with alcohol. Cancer sufferers and their families provided a secondary market, clutching at the lies peddled by sellers that rhino horn cured the disease.

Sonja had grown up around rhinos, and while she did not consider herself overly pa.s.sionate about wildlife, these days the sight of a dead rhino could almost bring her to tears. She had rarely cried throughout her life, and hated public outpourings of emotion; she thought such behaviour weak and stupid. She reached behind her and touched the b.u.t.t of the pistol. That was her talisman, her strength, the tool of her trade.

While she waited for Irina, Sonja checked her emails on her phone. There was a confirmation message from the airline, a reminder she was booked on a flight to Bangkok the following morning, with a connection to South Africa. This was it; months of planning and weeks of surveillance and reconnaissance had come down to this day, this evening. This was her one shot at righting the wrong that had been done to her and Emma. There was no message from her daughter, and while Sonja knew Emma was out of contact in the wilds of Namibia, and would be for the next few days, she checked each day, just in case.

The phone rang. "Yes," she said, recognising the caller as Ross.

"I"m in position."

Sonja looked through the portal to the neighbouring restaurant. Irina was asking for the bill and opening her handbag. "Target"s moving. Get ready."

"OK," Ross replied. "Sonja, I . . ."

"No names, I told you. Don"t get cold feet now. I have to go." She ended the call, not wanting to give him the chance to air any misgivings he might be having.

Irina walked out of Propaganda. Sonja left a few dong notes for her coffee and began to weave her way through the tourists and locals. Irina headed towards the Reunification Palace but turned left into Pasteur. Like clockwork, Sonja thought. They pa.s.sed small eateries, roadside workshops and garages servicing motorcycles. Sonja breathed the familiar scents of spices, food cooking, exhaust smoke, impending rain; it wasn"t unpleasant, but every now and then she crossed the perforated cover of a drain and caught a whiff of sewage. She needed the dry air of Africa again, more than she"d realised when she"d been cossetted in America. She tried to push the nagging, offensive thought away, but it had been clawing its way to the surface of her consciousness more and more recently: Was I really happy in LA? Sonja hated herself for even considering such a question; she was here because her time in Los Angeles was the only time in her life she had been truly content.

She steadied her breathing. Irina habitually made one more stop before hailing a cab back to her villa. The building was the ant.i.thesis of the rest of her whistlestop luxury tour. There was only one reason someone like Irina would enter the dilapidated colonial-relic apartment block. Ross"s police sources had told him this place was inhabited by junkies and the dealers who preyed on them. It was a dangerous environment for the take-down, but it was also the only location in this teeming city where Sonja could get to Irina away from prying eyes. If anyone did see her, Sonja had reasoned in her planning, they would be too stoned or too afraid of the law to report her.

Irina looked behind her, but even that move was well known to Sonja, doc.u.mented in a Post-it note she had placed on the planning board in her apartment. Sonja was ready for it and had ducked into the alcove of a tailor"s shop. When Sonja emerged Irina had already entered the apartment block.

Sonja followed her inside and took up a position under the first flight of the concrete staircase, in a foyer that smelled of urine. Irina would be above her, knocking on the door of apartment four. Sonja hadn"t got close enough to know what the callgirl was buying, but a.s.sumed it would be something high end to match her other tastes. She only bought on the day she was to meet Tran Van Ngo, which she did every week, without fail, on a Tuesday.

Sonja shrugged off her daypack, unzipped it and took out the sungla.s.ses case and a pair of latex surgical gloves. She snapped on the gloves and opened the case. From it she took a syringe. She sent a text message to Ross. In position.

Her phone vibrated three seconds later. Ditto.

The clack of high heels above confirmed Irina had made her purchase. Sonja removed the plastic cap from the needle on the end of the syringe. As Irina descended the last stair and walked around the bannister Sonja emerged from the shadows. Irina looked surprised but not alarmed to see another western woman.

"I wonder if you could help me," said Sonja, feigning an American accent. "I"m lost and I"m looking for the war relics museum."

"I"m sorry, I"m late," Irina said, and walked past her.

Sonja had hoped for such a response. She moved behind Irina and, bringing her hand up to cover the other woman"s mouth, stuck the needle into her neck and depressed the plunger, shooting the Ketamine into Irina"s veins. Sonja dropped the syringe and crushed it with the heel of her hiking boot. Irina stopped her m.u.f.fled calls for help and frantic clawing when she felt the blunt steel barrel of Sonja"s SIG in her rib cage.

"Move," Sonja hissed, "or you"re dead." She could feel Irina already becoming unsteady on her feet. By the time they made it to the door of the apartment building Irina couldn"t form coherent words and she was becoming heavier in Sonja"s arms. Ross was double-parked. A motorcyclist honked his horn and yelled at him to move, but he got out of the little Toyota and opened the back door. An elderly Vietnamese woman was saying something to Sonja while she half carried, half dragged Irina to the car. Ross answered the woman in her language as he grabbed Irina"s long legs and slid them into the back of the car.

"I told her that she"s just fainted and we"re taking her to a doctor."

"Good." Sonja smiled and nodded at the woman, then finished folding Irina into the back seat. She closed the door, then she and Ross climbed quickly into the front. "Now drive. Not too fast."

In Sonja"s rented apartment, an hour later, the Ketamine began to wear off. Irina was tied to a dining chair. Sonja pointed the pistol between the woman"s eyes as she hooked a finger in the gag and pulled it from her mouth.

Irina coughed. "Who are you working for, what do you want? Get me water."

"You"re in no position to make demands," Sonja said. She faced Irina, while Ross stood behind the woman.

Irina looked around her. "It"s late. What time is it? There are people who will miss me. They don"t like to be kept waiting. They"ll look for me, kill you."

Sonja smiled. "It"s not "they", is it, Irina, it"s "he". Tran Van Ngo, your regular Tuesday night f.u.c.k."

Irina spat on the floor, then laughed. "You"re going after him? That"s crazy. Now you will die, for sure."

Traffic hummed outside and music played in a neighbouring flat. Through the fabric of the blind, the light was fading. "We"re going to call Madam Nhu, and you"re going to talk to her," Sonja said.

"Like h.e.l.l I will. He"ll kill me if he thinks I had anything to do with this. You do know that, don"t you?"

Sonja nodded. "If you don"t do what I want, I"ll kill you."

Irina shook her head. "No way. I"m not going to do it. You can go to h.e.l.l."

Sonja picked up Irina"s Gucci handbag and opened it. "I"ll meet you there soon for a latte. You know, I thought you were a user, that maybe you were buying cocaine or some designer drug to get you through your weekly appointment with Tran, but I never figured you for a mule." Sonja pulled out three wads of US dollars and waved them in front of Irina"s face.

Irina said nothing.

"How you make your money s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g people, dealing or couriering drugs is not my concern. All I want is to get into Tran"s villa, past his bodyguards, and have some alone time with him."

Irina laughed again. "If you do, you"ll never get out alive."

"That"s my problem. Now, we"re going to call Madam Nhu and you"re going to tell her that you"ve come down with acute food poisoning and that you can"t make it this evening. You"re going to add that you"ve just had a call from an old friend from South Africa, another working girl who came over here to see a client and has a few days spare. You"re going to say that your friend me would be happy to visit Tran tonight and that you can vouch for her."

"No."

"Fine," said Sonja. She stuffed the SIG into the waistband of her jeans. From behind the white sofa she pulled a plastic tarpaulin and began unfolding it, in front of Irina. She placed it on the parquetry flooring. "Give me a hand to get it under her," she said to Ross, who remained out of Irina"s field of vision.

"Really?" Ross said.

Sonja put her hands on her hips. "Don"t go soft on me. It"s simple. I wasn"t bluffing when I said I"d kill her. She knows too much." Sonja hadn"t told Ross she was prepared to kill Irina if she didn"t cooperate she"d said they would lock her up somewhere and try another strategy to get to the Vietnamese gangster. The shock in the Australian"s voice was helping her convince Irina she was ready to execute her and that this wasn"t an orchestrated ruse. "We dump her body, make sure there"s a card from Madam Nhu"s in her purse, and I tip off the cops. It shouldn"t take them long to call her. In the meantime, I show up at the wh.o.r.ehouse, say I"m a friend of Irina"s and looking for her. I also let slip I"m in need of work. I"m tall, now blonde, and I"m a western hooker. Madam Nhu won"t want to offend her number one client so she might just send me to Tran."