Free Zambezi by Tony Park

Appalachian Trail. They had spent a week together, just the two of them, hiking a demanding stretch of the route through steep valleys and dense woods.
    ‘On nights like this I can see why you joined the Army,’ she had said the night after the picture was taken.
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘You must spend so many nights out under the stars, away from it all. The peace, the freedom, it must be such a blast.’
    ‘Sometimes more of a blast than you might think. It’s not all camping out, you know.’
    ‘Hey, I know it’s dangerous, but tell me you don’t love being out in the field, away from the rat race.’
    ‘I’d be lying if I said I didn’t,’ Jed admitted. ‘Though it sounds like you’ll get your fair share of nights under the stars in Africa.’
    ‘Yeah, that’s part of the attraction. Also, I want to make a difference.’
    ‘You will – hell, you’ll end up saving some endangered tiger or something.’
    Miranda had laughed.
    ‘There aren’t any tigers in Africa?’
    ‘Stop kidding.’ Then her tone was serious again. ‘I want to make a difference. Like you do.’
    ‘I don’t know that I make a difference. I’m just a small part of a big machine.’
    ‘Don’t give me that simple soldier crap, Dad. I thought about military service myself, you know, after nine-eleven.’
    His heart skipped a couple of beats. ‘You haven’t done anything stupid, have you?’
    ‘Relax. I thought about the reserve, but I think I’m better off channelling my energies into other areas.’
    ‘Like your studies, right?’
    ‘Sure. But serving your country is not something to downplay, Dad. You know how proud I am of you, don’t you?’
    Miranda had gone to Africa to study man-eaters. Her mentor, this damned Professor Wallis, had sent her into the Zambezi Valley – to look for animals that ate people. How could Jed have let this happen? How could this goddamned academic have consigned his daughter to an early death?
    Most other fathers in America would hire a lawyer and sue the ass off Professor Wallis. If the professor had been a man, Jed would have killed him. At least, that was how he felt now. In fact, his plan was to track her down as soon as he had finished his business in Zimbabwe – although exactly what that business would be he still did not know. He needed to talk to the police and the National Parks staff, Miranda’s fellow researchers, and the people from the US State Department who had so far been handling the matter of his daughter’s disappearance.
    After all that was done, Jed wanted to look Wallis in the eye and ask her to account for her actions.
    Jed knew Miranda was a wilful young woman, passionately committed to wildlife conservation, but he wanted to make sure she had been fully aware of the risks she would face.
    Part of him knew that she would have gone into her assignment with her eyes wide open. She was a smart girl, a straight-A student, yet had a practical side to her and was at home in the outdoors. He had seen her change a tyre on his SUV – just to prove to him that she could – replace the oil and fuel filters on her own car; start a fire in the wilderness; hike all day; and climb a vertical cliff face unaided.
    What he feared, though, was that she had taken unnecessary risks. She had backpacked around Australia and New Zealand in the year after she graduated from college and he knew she had used the trip to feed a growing hunger for adventure sports. Highspeed downhill mountain biking, whitewater rafting, bungee jumping, heli-skiing, skydiving, hang-gliding and para-sailing, she had tried them all.
    Patti had blamed him for Miranda’s wild streak. He took risks for a living, but, if he was honest with himself, he had the same passion for danger and addiction to risk as his headstrong daughter.
    Miranda had chosen to go to a politically unstable continent to study dangerous animals. In Mana Pools National Park, Miranda had boasted in one of her emails, she slept in a tent in