The President Must Die

By Lionel Latigan

A professional hunting guide who is a brilliant rifle shot is requested to assassinate the dictator of a fictional African country. His parents were killed when their farm was taken over and his best friend also killed because of his opposition to the dictator. He accepts the the assignment and there follows a kidnapping, a rescue, a car chase, the planning of the job and the aftermath.
The action is fast and readers who enjoy accurate technical detail will be satisfied. Most of the action takes place in the African bush which the author knows well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lionel Latigan
• Release date: Jun 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9780620561372

Lionel Latigan

Lionel Garth Latigan. Retired Civil Engineering Technician. Educated at De la Salle College, East London, South Africa. Played Scottish bagpipes. Scuba diver. General handyman. Prospected for gold in the African bush. Built an ocean-going yacht. Qualified yacht skipper who has sailed 140 000 Nautical miles under sail in all the major oceans. Two married daughters and one married son. Now living in Cape Town, South Africa with his wife Lyn.

Book preview

THE PRESIDENT MUST DIE

by

LIONEL LATIGAN

Published by Lionel Latigan at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Lionel Latigan

ISBN 978-0-620-56137-2

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Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All persons and incidents in this ebook are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

THE PRESIDENT MUST DIE

PROLOGUE

The little parcel arrived in my office by courier from Botswana. The sender was my old friend Rodney Manning. We had known each other when we both studied Engineering at University for two years and still kept up a fitful e-mail correspondence. Rod had left ‘Varsity and become a professional hunter, finally landing up in Botswana while I had changed to studying law and was practicing in Johannesburg.Rod should really have gone into Mechanical Engineering. In our University days I used to race a Volkswagen Golf in club races and Rod acted as my mechanic. He was a genius with machines and the car was always perfect. He didn’t race but once he took the car out in a tune-up session and came within a tenth of a second of my best lap time after only five laps. When I offered the car to him for a race he just laughed and said: Not my scene. She was just talking to me to-day!

Inside the parcel was a little computer flash drive wrapped in bubble wrap, a check for 1000 South African Rand made out to his bank account in South Africa and a short note from Rod. It simply said: Not before 1st December 2011 then you can go public. The password is a lower case mathematical spook. Enclosed check for any expenses. Cheers, Rod Manning. A set of GPS Latitude and Longitude figures followed.

The password for the flash drive was not difficult to figure out. We had a cadaverous mathematics lecturer at University who was known to all the students as Gees, the Afrikaans word for Ghost.

William Holerith

I first met Rod Manning when he started his career as a professional hunter in Botswana. He had been through a full Game Management course in South Africa and was qualified as a Game Ranger and a Professional Hunter but I think he could have taught his instructors as much as they taught him. He is a natural in the bush, a man who seems to read the minds of the animals, the finest rifle shot I ever met and a peoples’ person who can mix with anyone around the camp fire and he can fix any piece of machinery or vehicle he lays his hands on. He told me once that his father had given him an abandoned old Chevrolet car on their farm and he and his pal had got it running and chopped the body down to a bush car.

The company had sent Rod to spend two months with me to get to know our methods and the type of country when I was their senior professional before he joined Zack van Vollenhoven, another young professional, to set up a new camp in a new concession area.

I think Rod is too intelligent to never be scared but he has nerves of steel. Once I saw him catch a puff adder in the camp with his bare hands and put it in a bag for releasing out in the bush and it looked as if he was picking up a playful kitten. Only a week before the incident I want to tell you about, a buffalo cow boiled out of thick bush in front of us with a lioness on her back and she shook the lioness off and it landed about four paces from Rod while the buff took off in the opposite direction. He never turned a hair, just tracked the lioness with his rifle until she bolted for the thick stuff. His only comment as he reset the safety was: That was one cross kitty!

Once I saw Rod shaken. We had new clients coming in the next day and we were doing a recce that morning. I’d stopped the hunting car and we were walking to a dambo, or open grass area, where a herd of elephants often went to drink from the water hole in the middle. We kept an eye on our elephants and their numbers were building up nicely but there were not enough of them yet to be killing enough trees to turn the bush country into grassland. Historically elephants had changed the ecology of an area by eating the tree bark and creating grassland, then they had moved on and after a hundred to two hundred years the trees had become re-established and the elephants moved in again. With man’s success at overpopulating the planet the elephants could no longer wander at will over vast areas and we had to try and keep a balance.

Sorry, I let my hobby-horse run away!

We walked quietly to the edge of the bush and there was no herd of elephant or any other animals in sight. The grass was only waist high and we could see something lying near the water.

Damn! I said. Dead elephant, probably bastard poachers!

We spread out about ten paces, Rod on my left, July, my chief tracker on my right, unslung our rifles and walked towards the carcass. Suddenly three figures stood up out of the grass and started running away.

Frighten the Hell out of them! I called and sent a .458 round next to one’s head. If it didn’t deafen him, the big bullet would scare him gray! As I reloaded I saw a fourth figure had stood up and was shooting towards us. He was shooting on automatic and about five or six rounds whip-lashed past to my left and the crackle of reports arrived. Rod’s light .30-’06 cracked just before I fired again past the fleeing figures, then another burst arrived and I heard the slap of a bullet hitting something. A quick glance showed Rod still standing and I looked back to the running figures as I reloaded. A couple more rounds came our way and Rod fired again. Another bullet came past and then I heard the sound of a solid hit just after the report of the last shot from the poacher.

Shit! Don’t shoot them, just frighten them! I shouted and put a bullet into a tree as the last of the runners slipped past it into the bush. If he got a face full of splinters it was his problem, not mine. The man who had been shooting had gone down in the long grass.

Rod had reloaded and now he cradled his rifle in the crook of his left elbow and took off his bush hat. I walked over and saw that he was examining an elongated hole in the right side of the hat and there was a trickle of blood from a little above his ear.

"Christ! That was close! Are you OK?’

Yeah! Its just starting to sting a bit, there was no impact, I’m sure it didn’t touch bone. He wouldn’t stop shooting when I put one near him! I'm afraid I didn't have time to shoot to wound him.

He took out his handkerchief and dabbed at the blood. I took out my knife, took the handkerchief, slit one edge , tore off a strip, made a hole in one end of each piece, threaded them together and knotted the ends around his head to keep the flies off the cut.

Rod was completely calm as we walked to where the downed poacher lay, his AK 47 next to him. The bullet had taken him in the left side of his chest and come out of his right shoulder blade. Clean through the heart at a good two hundred and seventy paces.

You know, you’re as lucky as Hell! I told Rod.

Because he only grazed me and didn’t get me between the eyes?

No, because he grazed you! It was self defense and July will confirm that it was not a white on black killing. We’ll take photos and go into town right now, make statements and hand the body and his rifle in. With luck there may not even be a charge laid and if there is it’ll be a formality.

It was only when we examined the dead elephant that the poachers had been chopping the tusks out of that I saw that Rod was pale and his hands were slightly unsteady.

I don’t think it had anything to do with nearly being killed. I’m sure it was because he had shot a man.

That’s the kind of man Rod is.

Harold Birdwood

Chapter 1

I tore the printed e-mail that I'd had in my pocket for three days into sixteen pieces and trickled them into the one gallon tin can that served as a waste paper basket next to the folding table in my office. When your office is a mud hut in the Botswana bush, a tin can is a good waste paper basket. This was the third time Eco Tour Africa had invited me to become a tour guide in their organization and now they wanted a reply but I couldn't see myself leading parties of chattering tourists around what I considered to be my bush.

Inane comments and half muffled shrieks of delighted fright are not my cup of tea. Driving a load of tourists around and leaving wheel tracks all over the countryside. Then they would have to eat venison or have a buffalo barbecue to tell their friends about when they got home from Africa, which meant that I would have to go out at night and murder some young and tender impala or buffalo that had never had a chance to breed and live its natural life.

Not for me! I am a professional hunter and the people I connect with are the ones who can keep quiet for six hours while we stalk an old solitary kudu which might be facing starvation because of his worn out teeth but still had the incredible hearing of his sort, or the old solitary, ill tempered dagha boy buffalo, scarred from the lost fight that kicked him out of the herd and ready to pit his ton of fury against the skill and nerve of a human being. The same people who pay more into the Game Department for conservation than a bus load of tourists. Primitive, perhaps, but that's how I am.

I sent a negative reply to the e-mail, shut down the laptop and disconnected the satellite phone. The generator that purred in its own lean-to was still charging batteries so it was left to run. There were clients arriving so I wanted the batteries fully charged. The evenings in a bush camp should not be disturbed by even the quietest internal combustion engine any more than by canned music!

Solomon! Izaaapah! I called out.

Ehweh, Rodini. Solomon appeared from the kitchen hut, chewing enthusiastically, with a piece of meat in one hand.

Solomon is a mixture of several African races, short, bow-legged, approximately middle-aged, with an uncanny bush sense and amazing eyesight. His command of several African languages, excellent broken English, Portuguese, French and German speaks of travels in Kenya or Tanzania, possibly in Mozambique or Namibia and Congo. The delight with which he will empty the magazine of my semi-automatic Remington 12 gauge shotgun against a flock of guinea fowl in a few seconds, plus a few other conversational clues give me the feeling that he is no stranger to an automatic AK47 assault rifle and had probably been involved in one or more of Africa’s never-ending wars of liberation or revolution. He has told me many funny stories of his adventures but has never mentioned any war experiences and it would not be polite for me to ask. Solomon is my chief tracker, gun bearer, bush guide, major domo, French, German and some African languages interpreter, headman and general factotum. He is also one of my best friends, the only indigenous local who calls me by the Africanized version of Rodney instead of Ingwe (Leopard), a name I probably picked up from the spots I got when I had measles at the late age of thirteen.

Time to fetch the new clients, Solomon.

All ready, Rodini.

Solomon climbed into the front passenger seat of the Toyota 4X4 double cab, I got into the driver’s seat and we drove through the open gate of the camp and headed for the airstrip. The 4X4 was as clean as one scarce bucket of water could make it and the air-conditioned interior as dust free as the type of country allowed. It was our town car and we used it to impress on the clients that ours was not a shoestring operation. Of course, the 20 mile drive over bush tracks and gravel roads would soon make it dusty but we had to try!

You don’t keep clients waiting and we were half an hour early, having had no punctures or other problems. The time was spent chatting to the local headman who looked after the runway until a familiar twin engine Beechcraft Baron made a neat landing on the newly tarred airstrip. The clients climbed out and we all shook hands and introduced ourselves. A few words with the pilot while Solomon unloaded two smart leather suitcases and we were ready to go.

See you soon, Peter. Don’t hit any trees! Peter had flown through a treetop a few months before. There were still a few minor dents in the leading edge of the Baron’s port wing.

OK Rod, phone the office when you want a pickup. Peter made a cheerful rude sign and the Baron started taxing to its take off point while we walked the few yards to the 4X4.

Solomon loaded the expensive suitcases into the back of the Toyota and followed them under the fiberglass rear canopy where there was a rudimentary padded seat while I ushered my two clients into the cab. They were both clad in well fitting safari suits with long pants and obviously new bush boots. Large middle-aged men, a trifle overweight, I got more the impression of successful African businessmen or perhaps politicians than of men interested in the bush and the animals.

Gentlemen, the local facilities in the village are not quite up to five star standards yet and I suggest that we head straight for the camp where I promise you we can give you colder drinks and more comfortable chairs than we can find here.

The clients showed no inclination to explore the dubious delights of Mpofo village near the airstrip, so we headed off along the gravel road from which we would eventually branch off onto the track to our camp.

Albert Koleni, sitting in the passenger seat next to me was obviously the senior partner of the duo and did most of the talking in a cultured English with an accent reminiscent of the best English schools or Universities. His companion, Zandile Malinga, was out of the same mold but he tended to listen rather than talk. When I stopped the double cab to show them a small herd of rare tsessebe, they only showed a polite interest in the ungainly looking but fastest antelope in Africa and soon continued talking about the political and economic situation in neighboring Bonsmara.

No matter. We often had clients who'd never been in the bush before and although they needed a lot of extra looking after and teaching, the good ones repaid the effort when they became lovers of the real outdoors.

The sun was slipping close to the horizon when we arrived at camp. Shebane, the cook had heard the Toyota and was holding the seven feet high gate open as I drove into the camp and stopped in the clients’ boma. This was a reed fenced enclosure within the thorn bush fenced main camp and it separated the clients’ quarters, dining shelter, ablutions and fireplace from the more mundane staff huts, store, kitchen and the rest of the workings of a permanent camp.

Well, here we are. I’ll show you your quarters and Solomon will bring your cases in. We’ve got double rooms and single rooms, take your pick, we have accommodation for eight and there are no other clients here at the moment.

We entered the white-washed thatch roofed building and I indicated the rooms leading off of the small lounge. My clients looked into a couple of the single rooms.

Thank you, Mr. Manning. These two single rooms look very comfortable, I like the rustic style but with all the comforts of home. As usual it was Albert Koleni who made the decision.

A young grinning imp with sparkling white teeth and a fez topping off a white jacket, white shorts and bare feet had slipped in behind us.

This is Charlie, your personal man. I said. Its not his real name, but even he battles to pronounce the real one! He’ll unpack for you and show you the ablutions. I’m not even going to tell him your names because he will give you nick names within fifteen minutes and I’m afraid I haven't been able to cure his habit. Yes, by the way, he has been to Mecca and he won’t help himself to your whiskey but he cheerfully tolerates other folks’ customs. Anything you want in camp, if I’m not around, call Charlie.

Both men shook hands with Charlie.

"I’d suggest a