Wilbur Smith - C07 A Time To Die

by C07 A Time To Die(Lit)

  The light bobbed as the man carrying it advanced out of the w all of bush. Sean saw it was one of those portable battle lights powered by a heavy rechargeable battery pack the man carried on his back. Slightly behind him, keeping back in the shadow, Came the man with the bullhorn.

  Even through the dazzling beam of the battle light Sean saw he was tall and lean, and that he moved with a catlike grace.

  "It's been a long time, Colonel Courtney." He was close enough now not to have to use the bullhorn, and Sean recognized his voice.

  "Many years," Sean agreed.

  "You'll have to speak up." The man stopped a few paces in front of Sean and jokingly cupped one hand to the side of his head.

  "I am deaf in one ear, you know," he said. Sean grinned sardonically at him through his black camouflage cream.

  "I should have done a better job and blown your other ear out while I was about it, Comrade China."

  "Yes," China agreed. "We really must discuss old times together."

  He smiled, and he was even more handsome than Sean remembered, relaxed, charming, and debonair. "However, I'm afraid you have delayed me a little, Colonel. Pleasant though it is to renew acquaintance, I cannot afford more time away from my headquarters. There will be an opportunity to talk later, but now I must leave you. My men will take good care of you."

  He turned and disappeared into the darkness beyond the beam of light. Sean wanted to call after him, "My men, the girl, are they safe?" but restrained himself. With a man like this it was best to show no weakness, to give him nothing he could use to his advantage later. Sean forced himself to remain silent when the guards urged him forward with practiced use of their gun butts.

  We'll join the main column soon, Sean comforted himself. And I'll see for myself how Claudia and Job are doing.

  The thought of Claudia was a refreshing draft that he craved even more than sweet cool water.

  There were ten men in his guard detail under the co o a sergeant.

  d lean as the Obviously they were picked troops, Powerful an pack of wolves of his nightmare. Soon they intercepted a well to a beaten footpath. They closed up around him and urged him jog trot, heading southward into the night.

  None of his captors spoke. It was an eerie experience, just the sound of their light footfalls and quick shallow breathing, the creak of equipment and the hot feral smell of their bodies close around him in the night.

  After an hour the sergeant signaled a pause, and they stopped beside the track. Sean reached across to the nearest guerrilla and tapped the water bottle on his belt.

  The man spoke to the sergeant, the first words since they had started, and Sean understood him. He was speaking Shangane.

  The Shanganes were the remnants of one of the tiny Zulu tribes that had been defeated by King Chaka's imp is at the battle of Mhlatuze River in 1818. Unlike so many of the other lesser chieftains, Soshangane had resisted incorporation into Chaka's empire and fled northward with his shattered imp is to found his own kingdom along the borders of present-day Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

  So the Shangane language was Zulu-based. Over the years many of Sean's camp staff had been Shangane for, like their Zulu ancestors, they were a fine and noble people. Sean spoke their language fluently, for it contained many similarities to Sindebele.

  He did not, however, make the mistake of letting his captors know this and gave no indication of having understood as the trooper said, "The mabunu wants to drink."

  "Give it to him," the sergeant replied. "You know the ink osi wants him alive."

  The man handed Sean the bottle, and though the water was brackish and tainted by swamp mud, to Sean it tasted like chilled Veuve Chcquot served in a crystal glass.

  "The ink osi wants him alive," the sergeant had said. Sean pondered this as he handed the bottle back. The ink osi or chief, was obviously Comrade China, and they had orders to care for him.

  That gave him a little comfort, but he did not have long to savor it. After only a few minutes, the sergeant gave the order and they resumed that mile-eating jog trot toward the south.

  They ran up the dawn. At any moment Sean expected them to overhaul the main column that was holding Claudia and Job captive, but mile succeeded mile without any sign of them. Now that it was light, Sean could look for the tracks of the column on the footpath ahead, but there were none. They must have taken a different route.

  The sergeant in charge was a veteran. He had flankers out sweeping the verges of the footpath ahead for an ambush by Frelimo, but what seemed to concern him more than attack from the forest was the menace from the sky. At all times they attempted to keep under the canopy of the forest, and whenever they were forced to cross open ground they stopped and searched the sky, listened for the sound of engines before venturing out, then crossed to the next line of trees at a full run.

  Once during the first morning they heard the sound of a turboprop engine, faint and very far off, but instantly the sergeant gave an order and they all dived into cover. A trooper lay on each side V

  of Sean and forced him to keep his head down and his face to the ground until the last murmur of the aircraft engine faded.

  This preoccupation with aerial attack puzzled Sean; all he had heard and read indicated that Frelimo's air force was so weak and scattered as to be almost nonexistent. The types of aircraft they possessed were obsolete and unsuited to ground attack, and a shortage of skilled technicians and spares only compounded their ineffectuality.

  These men, however, were taking the threat very seriously indeed.

  At midday the sergeant ordered a halt. One of the troopers prepared food on a small fire, which he doused as soon as it was cooked. They moved on a few miles before stopping once more to eat the meal. Sean was given an equal share. The maize meal was cooked stiff and fluffy and was well salted, but the meat was rancid and on the point of putrefying. In the average white man it would have caused an immediate attack of enteritis, but Sean's stomach was as conditioned as any African's. He ate it without relish, but without trepidation either.

  "The food is good," the sergeant told Sean in Shangane as he sat beside him. "Do you want more?" Sean made a pantomime of incomprehension and said in English, "I'm sorry, I don't know what you are saying." The sergeant shrugged and went on eating.

  A few minutes later he turned back to Sean and said sharply, "Look behind you, there's a snake!" Sean resisted the natural impulse to jump to his feet. Instead he grinned ingratiatingly and repeated, "I'm sorry, I don't understand."

  The sergeant relaxed, and one of his men remarked. "He does not understand Shangane. It is all right to speak in front of him."

  They ignored him for the remainder of the meal and chatted among themselves, but as soon as they had finished the sergeant produced a pair of light manacles from his pack and locked one side on to Sean's wrist and the other onto his own. He delegated sentry duty to two of his men, and the rest of them settled down to sleep. Despite Sean's'exhaustion-he had been going for days now on only brief snatches of sleep-he lay awake and pondered all he had learned and the missing pieces of the puzzle. He was still not certain that he was in Renamo hands; he had only Claudia's brief note to suggest that. Comrade China had been a commissar in Robert Mugabe's Marxist ZANLA army, but Renamo was a rabidly anticommunist organization committed to the overthrow of the Marxist Frefimo government. It didn't add up correctly.

  Furthermore, China had fought the Rhodesian army of Ian Smith. What was he doing here across the border, involved in another struggle in a foreign country? Was China a soldier of fortune, a turncoat, or an independent warlord taking advantage f the Mozambican chaos for his own private ends? It would be interesting to find out.

  With all this to think about, his last thought before sleep finally overcame him was of Claudia Monterro. If China wanted him alive, it was highly probable that he wanted the girl alive as well.

  With that thought, he fell into a deep, dark sleep with a faint smile on his lips.

  He woke
to the ache of abused muscles and the bruises left by gun butts, but the sergeant had him up and running immediately southward again into the cool shades of evening. Within a mile his muscles warmed and the stiffness evaporated. He settled into the run, matching his escorts easily. Always he looked ahead, hoping at any moment to see the tail of the main column emerge from the darkness ahead, and to see Job and Dedan carrying Claudia's litter.

  They ran through the night, and when they stopped again to eat, his captors began to discuss him through their mouthfuls of maize and high-smelling meat.

  "They say in the other war he was a lion, an eater of men," the sergeant told them. "It was he that led the attack at Inhlozane, the training camp at the Hills of the Maiden's Breasts."

  The troopers looked at him with interest and dawning respect.

  "They say that it was veritably he, in person, who destroyed one ear of General China."

  They chuckled and shook their heads; that was a fine joke.

  "He has the body of a warrior," said one of them, and they considered him frankly, discussing his physique as though he were an in ammate object.

  "Why has General China ordered this?" another asked. The sergeant grinned and picked a shred of meat from his back teeth with a fingernail.

  "We must run the pride and anger out of him," he grinned.

  "General China wants us to change him from a lion into a dog who will wag his tail and do his bidding."

  "He has the body of a warrior," the first man repeated. "Now we must discover if he has the heart of a warrior." And they all laughed again.

  "So it's a contest, then." Sean kept his face impassive. "All right, you bastards, let's see which dog wags its tail first."

  In a perverse fashion Sean began to enjoy himself The challenge was much to his taste. There were ten of them, all in their twenties.

  He was just over forty years of age, but that handicap made it even sweeter and helped him to endure the monotony and hardship of the days that followed.

  He was careful not to let them know that he understood it was a contest. He knew it would be dangerous to antagonize or humiliate them. Their goodwill and respect would be more valuable than their hatred and resentment.

  Sean had spent his entire adult life in the close company of black men. He knew them as servants and as equals, as hunters and as soldiers, as good and loyal friends and as bitter cruel enemies. He knew their strengths and weaknesses and how to exploit them. He understood their tribal customs and their social etiquette, he knew how to flatter and please and impress them, how to gain their respect and make himself agreeable to them.

  He showed them just the right degree of respect, but not enough to make them contemptuous. He took special care not to challenge the sergeant's authority or force him to lose face in front of his men. He made the most of their sense of humor and fun. With sign language and a little clowning he made them laugh, and once they had laughed with him their relationship altered subtly. He became more a companion than a captive, and they no longer used the steel-edged gun butts as instruments of casual persuasion. Most important, he every day was picking up little snippets of information.

  Twice they passed burned-out villages. The cultivated lands around them had gone back to weeds, the black ashes blowing in the wind.

  Sean pointed at the ruins. "Renamo?" he asked.

  His captors were outraged. "Not Not" the sergeant told him.

  "Frehmo! Frehmo!" He tapped his own chest. "Me Renamo," he boasted, then pointed at his men. "Renamo! Renamo!"

  "Renarno!" they agreed proudly.

  "Well, that settles that." Sean laughed. "Frelimo. Bang! Bang!"

  He made the gestqire of shooting a Frelimo and they were delighted, joining'in the pantomime of slaughter enthusiastically.

  Their attitude toward him improved even further, and at their next meal the sergeant handed him an extra-large cut of rotten meat.

  While he ate it, they openly discussed his performance to date, agreeing that he was acquitting himself admirably.

  "But," the sergeant asked, "he can run and we know he can kill men, but can he kill a hen shaw

  Henshaw was the Shangane word for a falcon. Sean had heard them use it many times over the last five days of their trek. Each time they had said the word, they had looked up at the sky with a troubled expression. Now once again at the mention of that bird, they looked unhappy and reflexively glanced upward, "General China thinks so," the sergeant went on. "But who knows, who knows?"

  By now Sean was confident that his position was fairly secure.

  His relationship with the band would allow him to take the first liberty and force a resolution of this trial by attrition.

  On the next stage he began to force the pace. Instead of keeping his station in the file of trotting men two paces behind the Shangane sergeant who led the column, he closed up until he was running on his heels, not quite touching him with each stride, exaggerating his breathing so the sergeant could feel it on the back of his thick sweaty back. Instinctively the sergeant lengthened his own stride and Sean matched him, keeping close, too close, and pushing him.

  The sergeant glanced over his shoulder irritably. Sean grinned at him, breathing into his face. The sergeant's eyes narrowed slightly as he realized what was happening. Then he grinned back at Sean and extended his stride into a full run.

  "That's it, my friend," Sean said in English. "Now let's see whose tail wags."

  The rest of the column had fallen behind. The sergeant called a sharp order to close up, and they went away at a killing pace.

  Within an hour there were only three of them left, the others straggled back over a mile of the forest floor. Ahead of them the path climbed a steep incline to the crest of another tableland.

  Sean moved up slightly until he was running shou to shoulder with the tall sergeant, but when he tried to pull ahead the man kept up with him. The hillside was so steep that the path went up it in a series of hairpins. The sergeant forged ahead of Sean at the first bend, but Sean caught him and passed him on the straight.

  They ran at the top of their speed now, the lead changing back and forth between them, and the third man dropped out before they were halfway up the hillside. They ran grimly in a wash of sweat, their breathing harsh as the exhaust of a steam engine.

  Suddenly Sean darted off the path, scrambling straight upward, cutting across the bend and coming out fifty feet ahead of the Shangane. The sergeant shouted angrily at this ruse and cut the next bend himself. Now both of them abandoned the pathway and ran straight up the steep slope, jumping over boulders and roots like a pair of blue kudu bulls in flight.

  Sean came out on the crest three feet in front of the sergeant, threw himself down on the hard earth, and rolled onto his back, moaning for breath. The sergeant dropped down beside him with his breath sobbing in his chest. After a minute Sean sat up uncertainly, and they stared at each other in awe.

  Then Sean began to laugh. It was a harsh painful cackle, but after a few seconds the Shangane laughed with him, though clearly each gust of laughter was an agony. Their laughter grew stronger as their lungs regained function, and when the rest of the party struggled to the crest of the hill they found them still sitting in the grass beside the track, roaring at each other like a pair of lunatics.

  When the march resumed an hour later, the sergeant left the endless footpath and struck off cross-country toward the west. At last there was direction and purpose in the way he led the column.

  Sean realized the trial was over.

  Before dark they ran into a Renamo fine of permanent defenses.

  They were entrenched along the bank of a wide but sluggish river that flowed green between sandbars and around water polished boulders. The dugouts and trenches were reverted with logs and sandbags and meticulously camouflaged against aerial discovery. There were mortars and heavy machine guns dug in, with commanding fields of fire across the river and sweeping the northern bank.

  Sean had the impression th
ese fortifications were extensive, and he guessed this was the perimeter of a large military area, certainly battalion and possibly even division strength. Once they had crossed the river and been passed through the defenses, Sean's appearance in the ranks of his escort created a stir of interest.

  Off-duty troopers turned out of their dugouts and crowded around them, and his captors clearly enjoyed the elevated status a white prisoner bestowed upon them.

  The crowd of interested and jocular onlookers abruptly thinned and parted as a tubby, bespectacled officer strode through them.