Wilbur Smith - C07 A Time To Die

by C07 A Time To Die(Lit)

  Farther off the air was blue, so when she looked back, the escarpment down which they were climbing was washed with pale blue, misty and ethereal. The sky was a different blue, deep and vigorous, and the clouds stood on the firmament in towering ranges the colors of lead and silver, their bottoms cut cleanly horizontal to the earth, their heads shaped like full-rigged ships, mainsail and topsail, royal and skysail piled up into the heavens. Under the cloud ranges the air was trapped and lay upon the earth so it felt as heavy as hot syrup. They trudged along beneath its weight.

  From the forest around them the minute black mo pane flies came swarming and gathered at the corners of their eyes and mouths, crawled up into their nostrils and into their ears to drink the moisture from their bodies. Their insistence was an exquisite torture.

  As each long mile fell behind them, so vistas of the valley floor opened ahead. On the horizon they could at last make out the dark belt of riverine vegetation that marked the course of the great Zambezi. Always Matatu danced along ahead of them like a wraith, following a trail that no other eye than his could discern, tireless and unaffected by the heat, so that Sean had to call him back for the regular periods of rest with which he interrupted the march.

  "There is no sign of game," Riccardo remarked, peering ahead through his binoculars. "We haven't seen so much as a rabbit since we crossed into Mozambique."

  it was the first time he had spoken in hours, and Sean was encouraged. He had begun seriously worrying about his client.

  Now he responded quickly.

  "This was once a paradise of big game. I hunted here before the Portuguese pulled out and the buffalo were running in herds ten thousand strong."

  "What happened to them?"

  "Frelimo fed the army with them. They even offered me the contract for the slaughter. They couldn't understand why I refused. In the end they did it themselves."

  "How did they do it?"

  "From helicopters. They flew low over the herds and machine gunned them. They killed almost fifty thousand buffalo in three months. For all that time the sky was black with vultures and you could smell the killing fields from twenty miles off. When the buffalo were finished they started on the other game, the wildebeest and the zebra."

  "What a cruel and savage land this is," Claudia said quietly.

  "Surely you don't disapprove?" Sean asked. "It was done by black men, not whites. It couldn't possibly be wrong." He glanced at his Rolex wristwatch. "Time to move on."

  He put out his hand to help Riccardo to his feet, but the older man shrugged the hand away. Nevertheless, Sean fell in beside him as the march resumed and let Claudia move up directly behind Matatu, while he chatted quietly to her father, jollying him along, trying to distract him from his weariness.

  He recounted anecdotes from the bush war. He pointed out the site of the guerrilla training camp as they passed a few miles north of it and described the raid by the Ballantyne Scouts.

  Riccardo was interested enough to ask questions. "This Comrade China sounds like a good field commander," he commented.

  "Did you ever find out what happened to him after he escapedT"

  "He was active right up to the end of the war. A tough cookie, all right. His men had to backpack all their munitions into Rhodesia, and a Russian T-5 antitank land mine weighs almost seventy pounds. The story goes that Comrade China brought in one of them at enormous cost in sweat and blood and laid it on the main Mount Darwin road for one of our regular armored patrols.

  However, the local blacks had hired a bus that same weekend to go into town to watch the football match, and they touched off the land mine. There were sixty-five of them on the bus and twenty-three of them survived the explosion. Comrade China was so incensed by the waste of his precious T-5 that he sent for all the next of kin of the victims and the survivors who were still able to walk and fined them each ten dollars to cover the cost of another land mine."

  Riccardo stopped and doubled over with laughter. Claudia turned on them furiously. "How can you laugh? That's the most outrageous story I've ever heard."

  "Oh, I don't know," Sean replied evenly. "I don't think ten dollars was so outrageous. I think old China was being fairly lenient."

  She tossed her head and lengthened her stride to catch up with Matatu, and Riccardo still chuckling, asked, "After the war, what happened to this character?"

  Sean shrugged. "He was in the new government in Harare for a while, but then he disappeared in one of the political purges. He might have been liquidated.. the old revolutionaries are always looked on with distrust when the regime they fought for comes to power. Nobody likes sharing a bed with a trained killer and toppler of other rulers."

  Sean called a halt an hour before dark for a brew of tea and their frugal evening meal. While Job cooked it over his small smokeless fire, Sean took Matatu aside and talked to him quietly. The tracker watched Sean's face as he spoke, nodding eagerly, and as soon as he finished Matatu slipped away, heading back the way they had come.

  Riccardo looked a question as Sean came back to join them and he explained.

  "I sent Matatu to backtrack us. Make sure we aren't being followed. I'm worried about that shot. It could have called up those uglies we found near the border."

  Riccardo nodded. Then he asked, "Have you got a couple of aspirin, Sean?"

  Sean opened the side flap of his pack and shook three tablets from their bottle.

  "Headache?" he asked as he passed them to Riccardo, who nodded as he popped them into his mouth and washed them down with a swallow of hot tea.

  "The dust and sun glare," he explained. But both Sean and Claudia were studying him and he bridled. "Damn it, don't look at me like that. I'm fine."

  "Sure," Sean agreed smoothly. "Let's eat and move on to find a place to sleep." He went across to the cooking fire and squatted beside Job.

  They talked softly.

  "Papa," Claudia moved a little closer to her father and touched his arm. "How are you feeling, honestly?"

  Don't worry about me, tesoro.

  "it has started, hasn't it?"

  "No," he replied, too swiftly.

  Doc Andrews said there might be headaches."

  "It's the sun."

  "I love you, Papa," she said.

  "I know, baby, and I love you too."

  "An ocean and a mountain?" she asked.

  "The stars and the moon," he confirmed, putting his arm around her shoulders. She leaned against him.

  As soon as they had eaten, Job doused the fire and Sean got them up and moving again. Tukutela's spoor was easy to follow in the soft earth, and he and Job had no need of Matatu for this stage.

  However, at dark they were forced to stop for the night.

  "We'll reach the swamps tomorrow afternoon," Sean promised Riccardo as they stretched out on top of their sleeping bags.

  Claudia lay awake worrying about her father long after the others were asleep. Riccardo snored softly, lying on his back with his arms extended like a crucifix. When she raised herself on one elbow to look at him in the starlight, she heard Sean's light breathing alter subtly and sensed he had been awakened by her movement, He slept as lightly as a cat; sometimes he frightened her, But even her concern for her father was at last overcome and she fell into that dark, drugged sleep of exhaustion. Waking was like coming back from a faraway place.

  "Wake up, come on, wake up." Sean was slapping her face lightly, and she pushed his hand away and sat up groggily.

  "What?" she mumbled. "God, it's still dark."

  He had left her and gone to her father. "Come on, Capo, wake UP, man, wake UP. "What the hell, what is it?" Riccardo's voice was slurred and grumpy.

  "Matatu has just come into camp," Sean told them quietly. "We are being followed."

  Claudia felt the icy wind of dread blow across her skin. "Followed? By whom?"

  "We don't know," Sean said.

  "The same bunch that was camped at the border?" Riccardo asked. His voice was still slurred.
<
br />   "Possibly," Sean said.

  "What are you going to do?" Claudia asked, annoyed that her tone sounded afraid and confused.

  "We are going to give them the slip," Sean said. "Get up on your hind legs."

  They had slept with their boots on. They had simply to roll their sleeping bags and they were ready to move out.

  "Matatu is going to lead you away and cover your spoor," Sean explained. "Job and I are going to lay a false trail for them in the original direction. As soon as it's light we'll break away and circle back to join you."

  "You aren't going to leave us alone?" Claudia blurted out fearfully, then bit it off.

  "No, you won't be alone. Matatu and Pumula and Dedan will be with you," Sean told her disdainfully.

  "What about the elephant?" Riccardo demanded. His voice had firmed. "Are you breaking off the hunt? You going to let my elephant get away?"

  "For a few lousy gooks armed with a couple of lousy AK-47s?"

  Sean chuckled. "Don't be ridiculous, Capo. We will shake them off and be after Tukutela again before you know it."

  Sean and Job waited while Matatu assembled his group and then shepherded them away. By now Riccardo and Claudia had learned the basics of anti tracking and went swiftly under Matatu's direction while the tracker brushed and covered the signs behind them.

  Once they were clear, Sean and Job trampled the area around the camp, back and forth and around in circles, until they had confused any remaining spoor. Then they fell into single file, Sean leading, and went away at a run. They did not make it too apparent that they were laying a false trail but adopted all the usual precautions, which would not fool a good tracker.

  It was the old Scout pursuit pace Sean set, seven miles an hour, and gradually he began to veer off in a southerly direction. Matatu was heading northward toward the river, and Sean would lead the pursuit directly away from them.

  While he ran, Sean puzzled over the identity of his pursuers government soldiers or rebels, poachers or simply armed bandits looking for plunder, it was impossible to guess. However, Matatu had been worried when he came into camp.

  "They are good, Bwana, " he had told Sean. "They have done well to follow the spoor we left, and they are coming on fast. They move in formation like bush fighters, with flankers out."

  "Didn't you get a good look?" Sean had asked.

  little Ndorobo ha4 shook his head. "It was getting dark and I wanted to get back to, warn you. They were closing in swiftly."

  "Even the best tracker won't be able to follow us in darkness.

  We've got the rest of the night to get clear of them."

  It was a strange reversal of roles, Sean thought grimly as he and Job trotted through the dark bush. They, the hunters, were now being hunted just as remorselessly.

  At first he had considered breaking off the chase after the elephant and doubling back for the border. Riccardo Monterro's condition was causing him real concern, and so was Matatu's warning that their pursuers were skilled and appeared dangerous.

  However, he had swiftly rejected the idea; they were beyond the point of no return.

  "No turning back," Sean said aloud and grinned as he admitted to himself the true reasons for his determination, two ivory tusks and half a million dollars in cash, By now he was honestly not certain which of those was the most compelling. The tusks were beginning to loom large in his imagination. They represented the old Africa, a symbol of a better world that had vanished. He wanted them more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, except perhaps half a million dollars. He grinned again.

  In the first light of dawn they were running directly southward, k and they had covered twenty miles since splitting off from the rest of the party.

  "Time to disappear, Job," he grunted without breaking stride.

  There must be no indication to the trackers following them that they were about to split again.

  "Good place just ahead," Job agreed. He was running exactly in Sean's footprints.

  "Do it," Sean said, and as they ran under the low branches of a grevia tree Job reached up and swung himself off the ground.

  Sean did not look back, did not alter his stride. Job would work himself through the branches of the closely growing grevia. until he found a good place to drop off and anti track away.

  Sean ran on for twenty minutes, once again curving away into the southwest, heading for a low ridge that just showed in the dawn ahead of him. He crossed the ridge and as he had anticipated from the lie of the terrain found a small river in the valley beyond. He drank at the edge of the pool and milled around, splashing water onto the bank as though he were bathing.

  A tracker would expect him to choose this as a breakaway point, wading either upstream or downstream before leaving the river again. They would send scouts along both banks to search for SIP.

  Sean waded downstream, supporting himself on overhanging branches to give them a trail to confirm their suspicions. Then, without leaving the water, he returned to the exact spot where he had entered the stream and on the bank carefully dried his feet and legs, replaced his dry velskoen shoes that he had hung around his neck on their laces, and backtracked on his incoming spoor.

  He retraced his footsteps to the crest of the ridge, walking backward, stepping precisely on his original footprints. At the top of the ridge he employed the same trick Job had. He swung himself into the air from a branch and over handed himself well clear of the spoor before lowering himself to the edge of a rock slab and anti tracking away.

  "Even Matatu wouldn't be able to unravel that," he thought with satisfaction as he struck off back toward the north at a run.

  Two hours later he joined up with Job at the rendezvous, and in the early afternoon they came up with the other party waiting for them five miles north of the point where they had split up.

  "Good to see you, Sean. We were beginning to worry," Riccardo told him as they shook hands. Even Claudia smiled as Sean flopped down beside her and said, "My kingdom for a cup of tea."

  As he sipped at the mug Matatu brought him, he listened attentively to the little tracker. Matatu squatted beside Sean and chattered in his excited falsetto.

  "Matatu went back and kept an eye on the camp we left," Sean translated for Riccardo and Claudia's benefit. "He didn't dare approach too closely, but he saw the gang that was following us arrive This time he counted twelve of them. They searched the area of the camp, then took the bait and followed the false trail Job and I laid for them."

  "So we're clear, then?" Riccardo asked.

  "Looks like it," Sean agreed. "And if we push along we should be able to reach the beginning of the swamps either this evening or early tomorrow."

  "What about Tukutela?" Riccardo asked.

  "Well, we know from his track approximately where he would have reached the swamps. We'll just cast along the edge until we find where he went in, but we've lost a lot of ground on him. We'll have to go hard if we don't want him to get away from us. Do you feel up to it, Capo?"

  "Never better," Riccardo said. "Lead on, man."

  Before they set off again Sean went quickly over their packs.

  They had consumed a great deal of the provisions, and he redistributed the remainder. By giving both Job and himself an extra ten pounds or so, he was able to reduce Riccardo's pack to twenty pounds and Claudia's to a mere ten, just her sleeping bag and personal items.

  They both responded well to their reduced burdens, but again Sean marched beside Riccardo to encourage him and watch over him. Claudia was still going surprisingly well; he needn't have worried about her at all. Under her light pack she was stepping out lithely. He took pleasure in watching her long legs driving and her hard little buttocks oscillating in those tight blue jeans. They reminded him of the cheeks of a chipmunk chewing a nut.

  They were on the valley floor now. There were open vleis and baobabs, those trees with bloated trunks, bark like a reptile's skin, and crooked bare branches from which a few late cream-of-tartar pods still hun
g. It was easy to see why the Zulus said the gods had accidentally planted the baobab upside down with its roots in the air.

  Far ahead of them a slow standing cloud of evaporation marked the position of the swamps, and the alluvial soil was sandy and yielding underfoot.

  "Just think of this, Capo." Sean was trying to divert him. "You are probably one of the last men who will ever hunt a great elephant in the classical tradition of the long chase. This is the way it should be done, man. Not grinding around in a Land-Rover and then leaning out of the window to kill him. This is how Selous and "Karamojo" Bell and Samaki" Salmon hunted their elephant."