Free Far Horizon by Tony Park Page A

rule and it looked like it had gone to pot in the twenty-five years or so since they had left. Jake’s assistant had made an appointment for Mike to see a doctor, apparently Portuguese and allegedly competent. When he arrived at the hospital he had mentioned the name to a bored-looking woman picking her nose behind a cigarette-burned laminate counter. She pointed down a corridor of yellowed linoleum where a fluorescent light buzzed and flickered on and off.
    Half-a-dozen African patients were sitting on a collection of battered kitchen chairs and cheap vinyl-covered lounges oozing foam stuffing from knife wounds. Two of the patients, a heavily pregnant woman and a painfully thin man with a blood-soaked bandage on his arm, had eyed him coldly. As he set off down the corridor into the guttering light, the soles of his boots stuck to the cracked tiles every now and then. The place smelled like it had last been cleaned with bleach diluted with urine and spew. He had thought, briefly, of Kigali hospital in Rwanda, then forced the image from his head.
    At last, he had found a door with a handwritten cardboard nameplate stuck to it. He knocked, and an African woman in a fraying blue nurse’s uniform opened the door. She seemed to be expecting him, which he took as a positive sign. She told him that Dr Nunes – she pronounced it Noon-ez – would seehim shortly. He pictured an overweight, drink-ravaged, ageing Latin quack, debauched by a life of exile in a former colony, not game to show himself in his homeland ever again.
    There was just enough room for a wheeled examination bed, covered in a sheet which, like the nurse, was crisp but a little tatty, a small metal writing desk and a hard chair made of welded steel tubing. On the wall was a poster with Portuguese writing which featured two attractive Africans, one male and one female, and a pink condom with a smiley face. He hoped they would all be very happy together. There was a kidney-shaped dish on the table covered with a white cloth and he didn’t particularly want to know what was in it. The floor tiles were cleaner here than in the corridor, but he noted a tiny pile of pellet-like droppings in one corner. Fortunately there was a window and outside he could hear birds singing. He waited fifteen minutes and was contemplating chickening out when the door scraped open again.
    She was, quite simply, beautiful. Her skin was the colour of dark honey, her brown eyes sparkling as she smiled her first greeting. Her tight white T-shirt and shortish denim skirt accentuated her lithe figure. Her hair was cut in a bob, and she had a pair of wraparound sunglasses with amber-coloured lenses perched on the top of her head.
    â€˜Is hot, no?’ She had smiled, fanning herself with a clipboard. ‘Major, eh? Big man, no? I am Dr Nunes. Sorry to keep you.’
    Mike had coughed, his throat suddenly dry. Here was the most attractive woman he’d so far seen inMozambique making small talk with him and he couldn’t even speak.
    â€˜Sore toe, no? Not sore throat as well!’ she laughed.
    He had thought she must have known the effect she had on men, particularly expatriate men far from home.
    She was younger than he was – in her early thirties, he guessed. There was no wedding band on her finger and for a moment he feared she might be a nun, a member of some modern order that allowed its sisters to shave their legs and wear designer sunglasses. No way, he had told himself. God could be unfair, but not that cruel.
    â€˜What are you doing here? In Mozambique, I mean.’
    He coughed again. ‘Clearing mines.’
    â€˜Ah, good for you. I treat too many landmine victims and it makes me hate soldiers.’
    â€˜Hey, we’re clearing landmines, not laying them,’ he said defensively.
    â€˜You are an army engineer, no?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Then you were trained to lay these things as well as clear them, no?’
    â€˜Yes. But I