Free Hyena Dawn by Christopher Sherlock Page B

beneath him. For the time being he had even forgotten about the mission that had occupied his thoughts almost continuously since his first briefing with John Fry nearly a month before. Instead he was staring at the picture of a woman on the front page; a beauty with long blonde hair who was being heralded as the new Marilyn Monroe.
    Penelope O’Keefe. She had always been ambitious. The daughter of Sir George O’Keefe, one of Johannesburg’s richest mining magnates, she had been destined for a life of leisure. A year in one of Europe’s finest finishing schools had prepared her for a suitable marriage and a comfortable existence. Except that Penelope had been different. She’d returned to South Africa from Europe with a loathing for high society, and greedy for excitement. Her parents had despaired of her, especially when she announced that she wanted to become a model while studying for her BA. But she finally got her way, as she always did.
    Rayne had met her in his first year at university. He was sure they hadn’t met by chance. He’d noticed her before, watching the rugby trials, enjoying the admiring glances of the young men and parrying their lewd shouts. Then she’d managed to get herself into the same English tutorial group as he, and had struck up a casual conversation. Some weeks later he found himself invited to her father’s trout lodge in the Eastern Transvaal. He couldn’t quite remember when he’d told her that he enjoyed fly fishing, but he accepted with alacrity. Sir George’s farm was known to be on one of the best sections of the river.
    Fly fishing had not taken up much of that weekend. In fact the only times Rayne’s hands had touched the rod were when he took it into the lodge when they arrived, and took it out when they left. The rest of the time had been spent in bed. And for the next year and a half he and Penelope had had a stormy relationship that was the talk of the campus.
    He remembered when they’d flown down to the family’s house in Port St Johns for Christmas. Port St Johns was a tiny old harbour on the Transkei east coast, just below the province of Natal. They’d narrowly escaped death when Sir George’s company plane had crashed just before landing. The pilot had been killed, but miraculously Penelope and Rayne had survived.
    Afterwards she’d been a lot keener to leave South Africa. Rayne thought the accident might have been sabotage though that was never confirmed officially.
    He and Penelope had graduated in the same year. She scraped through, and he had the highest average of any student in the previous ten years. He had gone on to study further, she’d left for New York, to take up a lucrative modelling contract, and had never looked back.
    Rayne looked at the picture in the paper again and smiled ruefully to himself. There certainly weren’t going to be any women like that where they were going. He felt an enormous void between his former existence as a law student and what he was now. How would it be if he met Penelope again? Would the same animal magnetism be there? He felt a stab of guilt for his disloyalty to Sam. She was the only woman who had really understood him. And he had let her down.
    The noise of the flaps going down, ready for landing, pulled him from such thoughts.
    ‘ Well, here we are. It’s all stations go.’ Michael’s voice was confident. Rayne wondered if it would still be confident in a week’s time.
     
    Lois was at the airport to meet them. He’d bought a used Land Rover to ferry them all to the base camp. After a brief exchange of greetings they sped off north into the night.
    The high humidity of the Natal coastal belt hit them immediately. Rayne’s London clothes became uncomfortable in the sticky heat. Lois was ideally dressed in a wide-collared open- neck white shirt, khaki shorts and leather sandals.
    ‘ No one’s been poking around or asking any questions, Lois?’ He had to shout above the noise of the Land Rover