Let the River Run
Copyright© 2026 by Jody Daniel
Chapter 19
Apartment in Maputo
The apartment was swallowed by silence.
Not the ordinary stillness of the afternoon, but a silence that seemed alive — taut, listening, pressing itself into every darkened corner of the room. Outside, Maputo breathed in distant fragments: the faint growl of a passing engine along the Marginal, the restless whisper of wind coming off the Indian Ocean, the occasional bark of a stray dog somewhere far below. Inside, however, the world had narrowed to the dimly lit room and the cold glow of a phone screen in Sergei Reznikov’s hand.
The silence stretched for a count or two longer.
Then Maria finally spoke. Her voice came through the line low, measured, and disturbingly calm — the voice of someone who had spent years balancing books for dangerous men and had long ago learned that panic was a luxury.
“I did not make these payments,” said the Wolf’s bookkeeper, each word crisp and deliberate, “and neither have I any knowledge of the fifty million dollars deposited into the account.”
Reznikov’s brow furrowed. He stood motionless near the broad apartment window, the city lights of Maputo glittering beneath him like scattered shards of broken glass.
“What fifty million?”
There was a pause on the line, the faint rustle of papers.
“Thirty million from your friends in the Middle East,” Maria said, “and twenty million from your associates in Pemba, Cabo Delgado.”
For a moment, Sergei said nothing. His fingers tightened around the phone.
“They don’t owe me any funds,” he said sharply. “All transactions were concluded.”
Again, the quiet rustle of paper, the clicking of keys in the background.
“Well,” Maria continued, her tone becoming colder, “approximately one hour after those deposits were made, the funds from your business account and your personal account were merged. Eighty million dollars was then transferred to a numbered account in Switzerland.”
The words hit him like a hammer blow.
Maria continued. “You now have five hundred dollars left in your business account. Your personal account shows a zero balance ... with a marker indicating that funds need to be deposited.”
The room seemed to tilt.
Sergei’s pulse thundered in his ears.
“Shit,” he muttered.
The curse escaped him in a low growl, but after that there was only silence.
A thick, suffocating silence.
Minutes seemed to drip by.
Maria said nothing. She knew he was still there. She could hear it — his breathing, slow at first, then heavier, rougher, dragged through clenched teeth like a wounded animal trying to keep itself upright.
Across the room, the amber liquid in the glass on the table trembled faintly as Sergei’s hand brushed past it.
Finally, he spoke. “My account was hacked.”
The words came slowly, as if forcing themselves through layers of disbelief.
“Someone knew about the deals in Pemba ... and the Middle East.” He swallowed hard. “They hacked the accounts, deposited the money there first ... then used it as cover.”
Maria did not immediately respond.
When she did, there was something dangerous in her voice — the cold logic of a woman who trusted numbers more than men.
“It still doesn’t explain how all the funds in both your accounts were transferred to a Swiss bank,” she said. “Unless you did it yourself.”
Sergei’s restraint snapped.
“I did not do it!” he roared.
His voice exploded through the apartment, bouncing off marble floors and bare walls. Down below, somewhere in the city, a car alarm briefly chirped in startled protest.
Then Maria said something that made the blood freeze in his veins.
“So,” she said carefully, “who is Elsabe Riana Coetzee? She sounds Dutch.”
Sergei frowned.
The name struck something deep in the dark corridors of his memory.
Maria, unaware of the storm she had unleashed, continued almost absent-mindedly. “Dutch as in the Netherlands.”
Then it came.
A flash.
A face.
A courtroom.
A woman with steel in her eyes and a voice sharp enough to cut flesh from bone. Suddenly, a light ignited in Sergei Reznikov’s mind.
“No...” he whispered. His eyes widened. “South Africa.”
He straightened, every muscle in his body going rigid.
“Coetzee was from South Africa,” he said, more to himself than to Maria. “She was the prosecutor in a case against ... a friend of mine.”
His voice trailed off. Images flooded back now. Johannesburg. The trial. The witness statements. The whispers in back rooms. The bribes that had failed.
And the woman who had refused to bend.
Maria’s voice sliced through his thoughts.
“So if she was the prosecutor ... why was there a payment made to her?”
Sergei’s jaw tightened.
“I would like to know that too.”
His voice had dropped to a whisper now.
“I had no dealings with her. My name never surfaced in that ... issue.”
Maria did not let go. “Still,” she pressed, “why a payment to her?”
Sergei turned slowly toward the window. Beyond the glass, the city shimmered under a cloudless sky.
A dark shape moved across the street below. A figure. Standing too still. Watching.
His stomach tightened.
“She can’t receive any payment.”
A pause.
“Why not?”
Sergei’s voice became hollow.
“Because, Maria...” He swallowed. “She’s dead.”
The words seemed to suck the warmth out of the room.
Even Maria fell silent.
Then he heard her exhale — a slow, controlled breath she had clearly been holding. When she spoke again, her voice was different. No longer merely curious. Now it carried fear. Real fear.
“Sergei,” she said quietly, “were you involved in her death?”
He closed his eyes. The shadows in the apartment suddenly seemed longer.
“Not directly,” he said. His voice was barely audible. “Why?”
The next words came like ice sliding down his spine.
“Someone is coming for you,” Maria said.
A cold shiver ran through Reznikov’s body, sharp and immediate. He turned back to the window. The figure below was gone.
Then Maria spoke again, softer this time, almost a whisper.
“And they know where you are.”
At that exact moment, three slow knocks echoed from the apartment door.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Sergei stopped breathing.
“There is someone at the door...” He said. Let me check.
Sergei, still holding the phone went up to the door of the apartment and looked out through the peephole. He sighed a sigh of relief.
“It’s the women from next door. Looks like she brought me some of her cookies I smelled her bake this morning.”
“Call me back...” Maria said and closed the connection.
Back with Adrian and his SAR crew aboard the Bell 222.
By the time we reached Satara, the afternoon had begun its slow slide toward evening, that golden hour in the bush when everything seemed sharper and softer at the same time.
The camp itself sat in a haze of dust and amber light, alive with the subdued rhythm of late-day movement. Vehicles rolled in from game drives, tires crunching over gravel, while tourists leaned from open safari trucks with cameras still clutched in their hands, excited voices carrying across the open space from the bungalows. The picture was all just animation as the whine of the turbines and the sound of the rotors droned out all other sound.
The air was hot, dry, and heavy with the smell of sun-baked earth.
Satara always had a different feel to it than the southern camps. Wilder somehow. More open, yet more dangerous. The kind of place where the bush began to feel less like a reserve and more like an ancient kingdom that merely tolerated our presence.
I brought Jessie down onto the dusty landing area in a tight approach, the Bell 222 shuddering gently as the skids kissed the ground. Rotor wash exploded outward in a storm of red dust, dry grass, and loose leaves, sending everything within fifty feet into a swirling frenzy. The tourists stopped to look at the helicopter landing on the gravel patch just beside the gate of the camp.
Through the spinning haze, I saw Wolfie already moving toward us.
Even from the cockpit I could recognise that purposeful stride — broad shoulders slightly forward, hat pulled low against the rotor wash, rifle slung across his chest, boots crunching through the gravel with the confidence of a man who belonged to this land more than most.
I kept the turbines running. No point shutting down. Every minute counted.
Kait cracked the passenger door and motioned him in. Wolfie climbed aboard quickly, ducking instinctively beneath the blurred sweep of the rotor disk, then slammed the rear door shut behind him.
“Afternoon, Adrian,” his voice crackled through the headset a moment later, calm as ever.
“Wish it were under better circumstances,” I replied.
“Any word?”
“Nothing.”
Just that one word sat between us for a moment.
Nothing. No radio contact. No ELT signal. No sightings.
Just four men and a Bell 206 that had vanished into one of the wildest stretches of country in the park.
I eased the collective up again, and Jessie lifted cleanly off the ground, dust boiling beneath us in widening circles.
Satara fell away below.
Ahead, the land opened northward.
And what a land it was.
From above, the central Kruger spread out like an endless living tapestry — dense, textured, and almost impossible to read in places. The afternoon sun cast long shadows across the bushveld, turning every thicket and tree line into pools of black and gold.
The vegetation thickened the further north we pushed. This wasn’t open savanna anymore.
The land between Satara, Olifants, and Letaba became increasingly rugged and deceptive from the air. Dense mopane woodland spread across vast stretches like an uneven green-gray sea, the butterfly-shaped leaves flashing silver-green where the light caught them. Interspersed among them were heavier stands of knob-thorn and marula, their twisted limbs reaching upward like skeletal hands.
Dry riverbeds cut across the terrain in winding scars — pale ribbons of sand and stone where water would roar during the rains but now lay silent and empty.
From altitude, it was beautiful.
From a search-and-rescue perspective, it was a nightmare.
A downed Bell 206 could vanish in this.
One hard landing beneath the tree canopy and the wreck could disappear completely, swallowed by the vegetation as if the bush itself had chosen to hide it.
The terrain undulated gently at first, long low ridges and shallow depressions rolling northward, but as we approached the sectors between Olifants and Letaba, the land became more dramatic.
Granite outcrops rose from the earth like the backs of ancient beasts.
Rocky kopjes broke through the vegetation.
Drainage lines and ravines carved darker channels through the woodland.
To the east, I caught glimpses of the Olifants River system, its course winding through the land in flashes of reflective bronze under the sun.
This was lion country. Buffalo country. Elephant country.
And if the Bell 206 had gone down here, ground access would be slow and dangerous.
I leaned forward slightly, eyes sweeping the terrain.
Every unnatural line. Every broken treetop. Every glint of metal. Every patch of scorched ground. Anything.
The sunlight had begun to lower enough that shadows beneath the trees deepened into almost solid blackness, making the search harder by the minute.
“Dense as hell,” Wolfie muttered behind me.
He was right.
From up here the vegetation looked almost woven together — thick canopies, interlocking crowns, and dark undergrowth that concealed everything below.
A helicopter fuselage painted in bush colours could sit twenty meters beneath us and still remain invisible.
I felt the tension settling in my chest again.
Somewhere ahead of us, in this endless expanse of thornveld, mopane woodland, and broken river country, a Bell 206 and four souls had disappeared.
And now the bush was keeping its secrets.
I nudged Jessie further north, her engines humming strong beneath my hands, and watched the wilderness unfold before us like a map drawn in dust, shadow, and fading gold.
The search had truly begun. Time was ticking and the sun wanted to go rest for the night.
By our third circuit, the afternoon light had begun to turn sharper, harder, the sun sinking westward and throwing long shadows across the endless bushveld.
We were running the leg back from Letaba toward Olifants Camp, holding roughly three kilometres west of the Mozambique border. To our right, somewhere beyond the dense mopane and thorn scrub, the invisible line of the frontier ran north and south like a scar across the land. Ahead and slightly east lay Longwe Lookout Point, still about eight kilometres off.
I had settled into that focused rhythm that comes with search flying — eyes constantly moving, scanning patterns in the landscape, looking for anything unnatural in a wilderness that could swallow a machine whole.
Then Wolfie’s voice crackled sharply into my headset.
“Adrian, nine o’clock. Sun reflecting off metal.”
Every muscle in my body tightened.
“Got it!”
I hauled Jessie sharply to the left.
The Bell 222 answered with a hard banking turn, and the rotors let out a deep, baritone blade slap that thudded through the cabin like a warning drum. The sound reverberated through the airframe, heavy and raw, as the horizon tilted and the world swung beneath us.
Then I saw it. There, nestled like a forgotten toy in the middle of the bush, was the unmistakable silhouette of a Bell 206 Jet Ranger III.
For one strange second, relief hit me while looking at the white and black helicopter with the broad yellow vertical stripe.
We’d found it. But that relief lasted only a heartbeat.
Because the helicopter looked ... intact. No fire damage. No broken rotor mast.
No obvious impact scars. No shredded canopy.
She sat almost perfectly square in the middle of a small clearing, no more than twenty meters by twenty, surrounded on all sides by dense trees and tangled undergrowth. It looked as though someone had simply set her down there with deliberate care.
Too deliberate.
“And it looks undamaged,” I said, more to myself than anyone else.
I brought Jessie lower, circling once over the clearing.
The space was tight.
Far too tight.
The Bell 206 fit comfortably enough, but Jessie was a different beast altogether.
Longer fuselage. Wider rotor disk. Less forgiveness.
“I can’t land there,” I said, eyes measuring trees, rotor clearance, escape routes. “The space is big enough for the smaller 206, but I can’t squeeze Jessie in there.”
“Hover as close as you can,” Wolfie said immediately. “I’ll get out and go look.”
Before I could respond, Nadia leaned forward in the back.
“And how are you getting back?”
Wolfie turned to her and grinned, his white teeth flashing against his sun-darkened face.
“I’ll climb a tree and let Adrian skid-reach for me.”
He unclipped his rifle sling and handed the .30-06 over the seat.
“Here. Hold my thirty-oh-six.”
Nadia stared at him for a beat, then took the rifle with a disbelieving expression.
“Nuts.”
I almost laughed despite the tension.
That was Wolfie in a single word. Absolutely nuts.
I eased Jessie into a hover as close to the clearing as I dared, the rotor wash flattening grass and sending leaves and dust spiralling violently through the air.
Wolfie didn’t hesitate.
The moment I had us steady, he stepped to the open door and jumped.
Two meters down.
He hit the ground like a trained paratrooper — knees bent, body loose, absorbing the impact with practised ease before straightening immediately.
Smooth. Controlled. He barely stumbled.
Then he moved toward the Bell 206.
I pulled Jessie slightly higher and backed us off a little to avoid blasting him with rotor wash, keeping the helicopter in a steady hover while all three of us watched him below.
The clearing looked unnaturally still. No movement. No sign of life. No bodies. No blood.
Wolfie circled the 206 once, moving cautiously, his eyes sweeping the ground and windows.
Then he peered inside. Even from above, I could see the tension in his posture.
A moment later, he shook his head. My stomach dropped. He reached for his radio. Seconds later his voice came through the airband set.
“Nobody here. The chopper looks okay, and there are a lot of footprints. About a day and a half old.”
For a moment I just stared at the scene below.
The missing helicopter. Undamaged. Empty. Footprints. “Shit,” I muttered under my breath.
That was worse in some ways than a crash.
It meant they had landed. Or been forced down. And then they had left on foot.
I keyed the mic.
“Where do the footprints lead?”
Wolfie moved a few paces away from the aircraft, crouching to inspect the ground.
“Away from the chopper,” he replied after a moment. “Heading north-east into the bush.”
Northeast. My mind immediately began mapping terrain. Ravines. Watercourses. Possible routes to higher ground.
Or to the border.
“Roger. Now find a tree.”
There was a pause.
Then Wolfie came back, maddeningly calm.
“Negative. I’ll stay here while you scan the area to the north-east for two or three kilometres. Maybe they crossed that ravine we saw earlier.”
I looked out over the endless sea of mopane and thornveld stretching ahead.
Dense. Dark. Perfect for losing four men.
“Roger,” I replied, though every instinct in me hated leaving him alone.