Read Online Softly Calls the Serengeti by Frank Coates - Free Book Online Page A

surge of his lust swept him up, up, up, before he groaned and fell over the edge. Down, down, down…
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    Kazlana flipped a cigarette from the packet and tossed it onto the coffee table. She walked around her desk, trailing a finger along its edge until reaching the soft leather chair, where she paused to light the Marlboro. The flame illuminated her face, now cool and composed. As she took a long pull, the glow warmed the semi-darkness of her office. Before her was the file.
    She slowly swung the leather swivel chair to the left and right as she contemplated the long and winding path she had taken to find the key man—they were always men—who could give her a copy of the incident report following her father’s last flight. Now that she had it, she wondered if she really wanted to know the truth. If it were as she suspected, she knew that to pursue the culprits would mean a difficult and possibly dangerous journey that, once commenced, could not be abandoned until her father’s death was avenged. The Ramanovas had always lived by that tradition and even today were sworn to observe it.
    Her family had done business in Africa for generations, but had not always been agents. A century and a half ago, they were pirates, plucking rich fruit from sailing vessels plying the waters off the Horn of Africa. They had a reputation for quite imaginative methods of slaughtering those who resisted them. It served to make their boarding and looting more efficient. Merchant captains very quickly lowered their flags and sails when the most bloodthirsty pirates from Ceylon to the Swahili coast hove into view.
    When the British became churlish about the piracy, sending gun boats to protect their link with India, the family changed their operations to become trading and shipping agents, working with whoever was prepared to pay a fair commission for their services. At about that time, they adopted the name Ramanova, which seemed to straddle the continents of Asia and Africa, their sphere of operation. It was deliberately chosen to disguise their ancestry—a move so successful that nobodycould now remember where they had originated. Kazlana’s father had once told her: ‘By the time anyone realised our family was important, our history had been lost in the past.’
    From its early beginnings in East Africa, the Ramanova empire had expanded into the Middle East, extending into the Far East at the end of the nineteenth century. Wars, and the whims of politicians and power-brokers, had caused the family to win and lose several fortunes. But the Ramanovas had endured. In recent years Kazlana and her father, Dieter, had worked to develop separate parts of their business. She was aware that Dieter had cultivated contacts within the Department of Regional Development, but wasn’t aware of the details.
    Kazlana knew a little of her mixed-race heritage on her father’s side, which included elements of Swahili, Indian and Arab. Her grandfather was a Swahili trader, plying the route from India to East Africa, who met a young German woman on a world cruise with her parents, and convinced her to run away with him.
    On her mother’s side, it was more easily defined. After her father’s first wife died, he married Kazlana’s mother—an Austrian—who suffered postnatal depression after giving birth to Kazlana. Two years later, unrecovered, she went back to Europe. She never returned. The only clue she had ever been in Kenya was the blue of her daughter’s eyes. With no memory of her mother, Kazlana’s affection was centred firmly on her father.
    She looked again at the file on her desk. The newspaper report had said her father had run short of fuel and crashed the Cessna while attempting an emergency landing. Kazlana had never accepted that finding. Firstly, her father would never have been so careless as to fly without sufficient fuel. He’d been an excellent pilot with thirty