Let the River Run
Copyright© 2026 by Jody Daniel
Chapter 24
Punda Maria, Kruger National Park.
The sleepover camp crouched low against the darkening bushveld, its yellow-and-grey walls fading into muted blocks beneath the first scatter of stars. From a distance the units looked harmless, almost cheerful in daylight, but at night the neat rows became something else entirely — silent corridors broken by narrow pools of security light and long strips of shadow. Adrian lay still behind a clump of scrub at the edge of the perimeter fence, watching the last unit in the row. It stood slightly apart from the others, isolated at the far end of the compound where the gravel turned to pale sandveld and thorn scrub. Whoever had chosen that room had wanted privacy.
The moon had not yet risen. For now, the night belonged to the stars — hard white points burning over the northern Kruger sky with unnatural clarity. The baobab trees beyond the camp looked ancient and watchful, their swollen trunks silvered faintly by starlight, their branches twisting upward like the arms of buried giants clawing free from the earth. Every now and then the wind moved through the dry grass with a papery hiss. Somewhere deeper in the bush a nightjar called once, then fell silent again.
Beside Adrian, Nadia adjusted the strap of the binoculars around her neck without taking her eyes off the unit through the eyepieces of the instrument.
Darya crouched lower behind the scrub, one knee pressed into the cool sand, listening more than watching.
The three of them had been there nearly forty minutes and the stillness was beginning to feel deliberate, as though the camp itself were holding its breath. The reception building and central walkway glowed softly in the distance, but down at the end unit the light was weaker. One exterior lamp flickered intermittently above the door, throwing uneven shadows across the veranda railing.
Adrian studied the room carefully. Parking bays nearby sat empty except for a dusty white SUV backed into the corner beneath an ana tree. No movement behind the curtains. No voices. Yet he could feel it — the same instinct that had kept him alive before — something hidden inside that quiet little room.
The bushveld around the compound only sharpened the feeling. Out beyond the fence the sand stretched pale and open between the baobabs, broken by black clusters of mopane and sickle bush. It was beautiful country in daylight. At night it became a place where things disappeared.
A jackal barked somewhere far off. Nadia glanced at Adrian briefly, her expression tense in the dim starlight. He checked his watch. One more hour before moonrise. Once the moon cleared the horizon, the silver light would expose the entire edge of the compound, including their position. Whatever was going to happen would happen before then. Adrian returned his gaze to the isolated unit as the weak veranda light flickered again — once, twice — and then abruptly went out.
The curtain inside the room briefly opened a foot or two as a man opened the glass sliding door and stepped outside. The curtain falling back in place, but it was just enough to glimpse the inside of the room.
“Confirmed...” Nadia whispered, barely audible. “It’s Reznikov and two of his thugs. A blond woman is on a chair and tied up...”
“Then we wait no longer,” Adrian replied.
“We don’t go in guns blazing...” Darya replied. “First we take care of the guy outside. Look, he is walking to the side of the unit...”
Moments later the shadow to the side of the unit lit a cigarette. The flame of his lighter flickered and the end of the cigarette glowed red as it caught the flame.
“Seven minutes...” Adrian said. “It takes seven minutes for a smoker to finish a cigarette...”
“He’ll be sleeping in seven minutes...” Nadia replied. “I go now. When I get him down, we bust the place.”
“Go,” Adrian said. “You got less than six of your seven minutes left.”
Darya and Adrian watched as Nadia, now dressed in her dark tactical gear, melted with the shadows.
The memory of the helicopter surfaced again without warning as Nadia wriggled out of her clothes to dress in her tactical gear.
“Eyes front!” Nadia had snapped while pulling the black tactical shirt over her head in the cramped rear cabin. “If I catch you even turning your head, I’ll clobber you!”
“I’m flying,” Adrian had replied over the thump of rotor blades. “If you clobber me, you go down with this bird.”
“Not true. Darya can fly, and she has controls in front of her.” Nadia had leaned closer, fastening the straps of her vest with a grin. “So don’t test me.”
Adrian had laughed despite himself. “Fine. I won’t look.”
“You better not,” she had giggled, before immediately becoming serious again, checking the magazine of her suppressed pistol with cold efficiency.
Back in the present, Nadia melted with the shadows.
The cigarette ember drifted slowly through the darkness beside the unit, rising and falling as the guard inhaled. From where Adrian and Darya lay concealed near the fence line, the glowing tip looked unnaturally bright against the blackness of the sandveld. The man leaned casually against the side wall, one boot crossed over the other, completely unaware that death was already moving toward him through the shadows.
Back to Adrian.
Nadia vanished the way smoke vanishes in darkness — there one moment, gone the next.
I kept my eyes fixed on the strip of open ground between us and the isolated unit, tracking her by instinct more than sight. Every now and then I caught the faint outline of her tactical gear sliding between the scrub and silver thorn, a ripple of darker shadow against the night. Then even that disappeared. The bushveld swallowed her completely.
Most people think stealth is about moving slowly. It isn’t. It’s about knowing when the darkness belongs to you.
Beyond the perimeter fence the baobabs stood enormous and misshapen beneath the stars, their swollen trunks pale in the starlight like ancient things rooted long before mankind arrived with roads and rifles and border wars.
The sandveld stretched open and ghostly between them, patches of dry grass whispering softly whenever the wind stirred. Somewhere out there a nightjar called again, abrupt and lonely.
Beside me, Darya drew in a slow breath through her teeth.
She’d lost sight of Nadia too.
Out near the unit, the smoker remained blissfully unaware. He leaned lazily against the yellow-painted wall beneath the weak exterior light, the ember of his cigarette glowing red each time he inhaled. Smoke drifted upward around his face in thin silver ribbons. He looked bored. Comfortable. The kind of man who thought violence only happened to other people.
Then he flicked the cigarette into the sand.
The tiny burst of sparks died instantly beneath his boot.
For a split second nothing moved.
Then I saw it.
A darker shadow detached itself from the side wall near the veranda — so fast and smooth my brain almost refused to process it. Nadia flashed across the yellow brickwork, crouching low. I caught the brief silhouette of her arm bending downward, fingers closing around something on the ground beside one of the decorative planters outside the unit.
Then she flattened herself against the wall just as the smoker rounded the corner.
The entire world seemed to tighten.
The man took two steps.
On the third, Nadia exploded out of the darkness.
There was no warning shout. No dramatic struggle. Just a blur of controlled violence. Her arm whipped upward and something heavy smashed into the side of the man’s skull with a dull, ugly crack.
The sound barely carried beyond the wall.
The guy folded instantly.
One second he was standing upright; the next his legs collapsed beneath him, and he dropped into a limp heap on the paving stones like somebody had cut his strings. His body hit the ground with a soft thud and didn’t move again.
“Let’s go,” I whispered.
Darya and I broke cover together.
We moved fast, darting from shrub to shrub along the edge of the compound, keeping low beneath the windows. Gravel crunched softly beneath my boots. My pulse hammered hard enough that I could feel it in my jaw, but training kept everything sharp — the position of the doors, the glow behind the curtains, the blind spots between the lights.
As we reached the side of the unit, Nadia was already dragging the unconscious thug deeper into the shadows beside the air-conditioning unit. Even in near-total darkness she moved with terrifying efficiency, hooking her arms beneath his shoulders and hauling him out of sight like he weighed nothing.
Darya crouched beside her and suddenly froze.
Then I caught the grin spreading across her face.
“A garden gnome?” she whispered incredulously. “You clocked him with a damn concrete garden ornament?”
I watched as Nadia held up the weapon in question.
Even in the darkness I could make out the ridiculous little shape — some cheap decorative garden gnome with a pointed hat and a chipped beard.
“My rendition of gnome-lethal-violence,” Nadia smirked. “And the satisfaction nearly gave me an orgasm...”
For one dangerous second I nearly lost it.
A laugh pushed hard against my chest, completely insane considering the situation. We were crouched outside a kidnapping scene in the middle of the northern bushveld with armed Russian traffickers ten feet away — and Nadia had just neutralised a guard using suburban lawn décor.
Only Nadia could pull that off.
I swallowed the laugh before it escaped and forced myself back into focus. The yellow walls of the unit glowed faintly beside us beneath the stars. Somewhere inside, Reznikov was still breathing.
I checked my pistol and MP7 one last time and looked at the two women crouched beside me in the darkness.
“Now-now, ladies,” I murmured, “we have a rat to catch...”
Inside the Overnight Sleeper unit.
The room was dimly lit by two bedside table lamps positioned on either side of the two single beds, their soft amber glow pushing back the darkness just enough to leave the corners drowning in shadow. The weak lighting gave the overnight unit a claustrophobic feel, turning the off-white-painted walls dull and nicotine-stained while deep pockets of darkness lingered near the bathroom door and kitchenette. Above it all, mounted high in the corner near the ceiling, a flat-screen television flickered silently through a DSTV news channel, washing the room every few seconds in cold flashes of blue and white.
Against the tension inside the unit, the television felt strangely surreal, as though the outside world still carried on untouched and indifferent while violence and fear gathered quietly in the room beneath it. The flickering broadcast painted distorted shadows across the furniture and occasionally illuminated the faces inside with brief flashes of pale light, turning ordinary expressions into something colder and more ominous.
Every now and then the signal crackled faintly, the picture momentarily fragmenting into blocks of digital static before correcting itself again. The interruption lasted only seconds, yet in the uneasy stillness of the room it seemed unnaturally loud.
The contrast between the warm bedside lamps and the harsh television light made the scene feel unreal, like something caught between exhaustion and violence. A sharply dressed news anchor spoke soundlessly from the screen while a red ticker crawled endlessly beneath footage of riots, parliament debates, and distant wars. Every flicker from the television briefly sharpened the outlines inside the room before softening them again into shadow.
There were only three occupants inside.
Sergei Reznikov sat heavily in a chair near the small table by the window, one thick hand wrapped around a glass of vodka while the other rested near the pistol beside him. The television glow occasionally caught the hard planes of his face — the pale eyes, shaved head, and expressionless calm of a man long accustomed to brutality. Across from him lounged one of his men, broad-shouldered and thick-necked, half sprawled in another chair.
Near the foot of the bed sat Kait.
She was bound tightly to a wooden chair with her wrists secured behind her back and her ankles lashed together. A strip of silver duct tape covered her mouth, muffling every sound except the occasional shaky breath through her nose. The bedside lamp nearest her illuminated one side of her face while leaving the other in darkness, emphasising the fear in her eyes each time they darted toward the two men. The television’s shifting glow occasionally flashed across her features, turning her pale expression ghostlike for an instant before fading again.
The air conditioner whirred steadily against the wall, fighting a losing battle against the lingering heat trapped inside the room. Beneath it all lay a thick atmosphere of stale cigarette smoke, sweat, cheap alcohol, and dread — the heavy stillness of a place where something terrible was waiting to happen.
“Boris is taking a long time...” Sergei stated while taking a sip from his vodka.
“He’s been gone only a few minutes. Maybe he is smoking two cigarettes,” The man replied.
“Go check on him...” Sergei instructed.
“Okay, Boss,” he replied, then got up with a grunt and walked towards the glass sliding door. He pushed the curtain back, opened the door, stepping outside into the darkness. He never closed the door. Mistake.
Back to Adrian.
The sound of the glass sliding door rolling open shattered the stillness like a blade drawn slowly from a sheath.
Every muscle in my body tightened instantly.
Beside me, Nadia and Darya reacted without hesitation, flattening themselves against the yellow-painted wall next to the whirring air-conditioning unit. The shadows swallowed them almost completely. Only the faint glint of Nadia’s eyes and the matte-black outline of Darya’s MP7 remained visible for a fraction of a second before even those disappeared into the darkness.
I dropped lower into a crouch and raised my suppressed MP7 into firing position.
The weapon settled naturally into my shoulder, red-dot sight aligned toward the corner of the building. My breathing slowed automatically, years of training taking over while adrenaline flooded my bloodstream in cold, controlled waves.
The compound suddenly felt impossibly quiet. I could hear the distant sound of insects in the sandveld beyond the perimeter fence, the low mechanical vibration of the air-conditioning compressor beside us, and somewhere far off in the bushveld, the mournful cry of a jackal drifting beneath the stars.
Then came footsteps. Slow. Casual.
A shadow stretched across the paving stones before the man himself appeared around the corner of the unit. He stepped out into the weak spill of compound light with the lazy confidence of somebody expecting an uneventful cigarette break. One hand rubbed sleep from his face while the other adjusted the pistol shoved into the back of his waistband.
Then he saw the body on the ground.
The unconscious thug lay twisted awkwardly beside the wall where Nadia had dumped him moments earlier.
The newcomer froze.
Even in the half-light I saw the exact instant confusion became shock. His eyes widened. His mouth parted slightly. For one suspended heartbeat his brain simply refused to understand what he was seeing.
That was all the opening Darya needed.
She exploded out of the darkness behind him.
Fast. Terrifyingly fast.
The suppressed MP7 in her hands came down in a brutal arc and smashed into the back of the man’s skull with a thick, sickening crack that I felt in my own teeth. His body jerked violently forward, knees buckling as pain flooded through his nervous system before he even had time to cry out.
Darya never paused. With cold mechanical precision she reversed the weapon in her hands and drove the buttstock sideways into the man’s jaw right on that little jaw indention where the human trip switch sat.
The impact snapped his head sideways hard enough to spray sweat through the air.
The guy staggered blindly for two uneven steps, arms flailing uselessly as his nervous system tried desperately to stay upright. A broken grunt escaped his throat — barely more than trapped air.
Then gravity won.
He collapsed heavily onto the paving stones beside his already unconscious partner with a dull thud that sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness, raising dust from the ground.
For a second nobody moved.