When they reached the command bunker, General China led them through to his underground office. There was tea ready for them, and Sean piled brown sugar into his mug and savored the first steaming mouthful.
"So what did you want to tell me?" he asked.
China was standing with his back to him, studying the wall map Frelimo offensive with on which he had marked the developing colored pins. He did not answer Scan's question, and Sean would not pander to him by asking again. He sipped at the tea and waited.
A signaler came through from the radio room and handed China a message flimsy. As he read it, the General exclaimed with disgust tinged with anxiety and reached up to move a group of colored pins on the map. Frelimo had broken through in the west and were closing in remorselessly.
"We are not containing them," China told Sean without looking around. Another messenger ducked into the bunker. He was one of China's personal bodyguards, wearing the distinctive maroon beret. He whispered something to China, and Sean thought he heard the word "American." It quickened his interest.
China smiled briefly and dismissed the man with a nod before he "t work," he said.
turned to Sean. "It won "What won't work?"
"The attack as you have planned it."
"Nothing is certain in war, as you should know, General. But I disagree. The plan has about a sixty percent chance of total success. That's pretty good odds."
"The odds would be considerably higher, perhaps eighty percent, if you led the attack, Colonel Courtney."
"I'm flattered by your estimate. However, it's hypothetical. I'm not leading it. I'm going home."
"No, Colonel. You are leading the attack."
"We had a bargain."
"Bargain?" China smiled. "Don't be naive. I make bargains and break them as the need arises. The need has arisen, I'm afraid."
Sean sprang to his feet, his face pale as candle wax beneath the deep tan. "I'm going," he said. Despite his fury, he managed to keep his voice thin and tight. "I'm taking my people, and I'm leaving now. Right away. You'll have to kill me to stop me."
China touched his deaf ear and smiled again. "That notion is not without its attractions, I assure you, Colonel. However, I don't think it will come to that."
"We'll see." Sean kicked back the sto al on which he had been sitting, and it hit the wall and crashed over on its side. He turned and ducked out of the low doorway.
"You'll be back," China assured him softly, but Sean gave no sign of having heard him. He came out in the sunlight and strode down toward the river.
He had reached the amphitheater before he realized that something was desperately amiss.
The Shanganes so t rigid at their places upon the slope; they seemed not to have moved since he had last seen them. Alphonso's features were graven in black ironstone, expressionless and dull, the shield of deliberate stupidity behind which the African distances himself from powers and forces against which he has no other defense.
Job was sprawled across the table in the center of the amphitheater. Ms tunic was floury with dust, and his cap lay in the dirt at his feet. He shook his head in a dazed, uncertain fashion, and drops of blood dripped from his nose.
"What happened?" Sean ran to him, and Job stared at him, trying to focus his eyes. He had been brutally beaten. His lips were swollen into purple bruises, his mouth full of blood that stained his teeth like red wine. One eyebrow was cut through, a deep jagged split from which blood trickled down the side of his nose. Blood welled out of both nostrils, swelling into bright pink bubbles as he breathed through it. There were lumps on his forehead like overripe grapes, and the lobe of one ear was torn. Blood dripped onto the front of his dusty tunic.
shoulder.
"Job, what the hell,-?" Sean caught him by the
"WhaT "I tried to stop them"" Job blurted out, his eyes fixed on Sean's face. "I tried!"
"Take it easy."
Sean tried to lead him to a seat, but he shook Scan's hands away and said, "Claudia."
A flash frost of dread chilled Sean's belly. "Claudia!" he repeated, and looked around him wildly. "Where is she, Job? What happened?"
"They took her," Job repeated. "China's goons. I tried to stop them."
Sean reached for the pistol on his webbing belt. "Where is she, Job?" The pistol grip fed his hand.
"I don't know." Job Swiped the palm of his hand down his face and looked at the blood. "I was out cold, I don't know for how long."
"China, you turd-munching bastard, you are going to die." Sean whirled, ready to go charging back to the headquarters bunker.
"Sean, think first!" Job called urgently, and Sean checked. So often Job had saved him with those two words: "Think first!"
It required an enormous effort of will, but for seconds Sean managed to keep his head above the wave of his killing rage. "The manuals, Job!" he gritted out. "Burn them"" Job blinked at him through the blood that spilled from the split eyebrow. "Burn the manuals!" Sean repeated. "Insurance, wan.
We are the only ones who know."
Job's expression cleared. "And the cassettes!" he exclaimed.
"Right!" Sean said. "The cassettes. Give them to me."
While Job hastily repacked the attack cassettes into their carrying case, Sean walked across to where Alphonso sat at the front of the amphitheater and unhooked a phosphorus grenade from his belt.
Working swiftly, he used his pistol lanyard and the phosphorus grenade to rig a makeshift self-destruction device in the interior of the case of attack cassettes. He hooked the clip of his pistol lanyard through the pin of the grenade and laid the grenade itself in the middle of the case. Using the point of a bayonet, he drilled a hole through the rid of the carrying case and threaded the end of the lanyard through it. When he locked the case, he looped the free end of the lanyard securely around his own wrist.
"Let China try and get them away from me now," he said grimly. If the case were jerked out of his grip, or if he let it fall, the lanyard would pull the pin of the grenade, destroying not only the contents but anybody standing nearby. He waited just long enough to watch Job set a match to the pile of instruction manuals.
Once they were fully ablaze he ordered Job, "Stay here, make certain they are burned to ashes."
Then, lugging the case of cassettes, he started back to the headquarters bunker.
"I said you would be back," China greeted him, but that icy sardonic smile faded swiftly as he saw the case Sean carried and the lanyard looped around his wrist.
Sean lifted the case in front of him and flaunted it in China's face. "There is the Hind squadron, China," he said, keeping his voice level with an effort. "Without this your Stingers are useless to YOU."
China's eyes flicked toward the entrance of the dugout.
"Don't even think about it," Sean warned him. "There is a grenade inside the case, a phosphorus grenade. This lanyard is attached to the firing pin. If I drop it, like if I was to die suddenly or someone were to pull it out of my hand, the whole lot goes up in a nice little bonfire, happy fifth of November."
They stared at each other across the desk.
"So this is a pretty little stalemate, Colonel." China's smile was reborn, colder and more deadly than Sean had ever seen it before.
"Where is Claudia Monterro?" Sean asked. China raised his voice, summoning an orderly from the radio room.
"Bring the woman!" he ordered, and they waited, both of them poised and alert, watching each other's eyes.
"I should have thought of the cassettes," China said in conversational tones. "That was good, Colonel. Very good. You can see why I want you to lead the attack."
"While we are on the subject," Sean replied, "I have also burned the instruction manuals. There are only three of us-Job, Claudia, and me-who understand the Stingers."
"What about the Shanganes-Alphonso, Ferdinand?" China challenged.
Sean grinned at him like a death 9s head. "Not on, China. They know how to shoot them, but they don't have any idea how to program the micropr
ocessors. You need us, China. Without us the Hinds are coming after you, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it. So don't fool with me. I have your survival in my hands."
There was a scuffle in the outer room, and both of them looked to the entrance as Claudia was pushed through from the radio room. Her hands were once more manacled behind her back, she tumbled into her face and down had lost her cap, and her hair had her neck.
"Sean!" she blurted when she saw him. She pulled against the hands of the two bodyguards who held her, trying to reach him.
They jerked her back and threw her against the side wall of the dugout.
"Tell your baboons to knock that off," Sean snarled. When they glowered at him, China restrained them with a sharp order.
"]?ut that woman in the chair!"
They forced her into the solid mahogany seat and at another order from China used the manacles to chain her wrists securely to the heavy arms of the chair.
"I have something of yours, Colonel, and you have something of mine. Shall we workout a deal?" General China suggested.
text us go, Sean aid promptly. "At the border, I'll hand over the cassettes." China shook his head regretfully.
"Not acceptable. Here is my counteroffer. You lead the attack on the Hind laager. When it is completed successfully, Alphonso will escort you to the border."
Sean raised the booby-trapped case head high, and China smiled. In retaliation he drew the trench knife from its sheath on his belt. It was ivory-handled with a five-inch blade.
Still smiling, he lifted a single hair from Claudia's scalp and with a sharp jerk pulled it out. He held it up between thumb and forefinger and touched the hair with the blade. Half of the dark strand fell away and floated down to the earthen floor of the dugout. mat is how sharp it is," China said softly.
"If you kill her you haven't got anything to bargain with."
Sean's voice was harsh with strain, and he was sweating.
"I have this to bargain with," China replied. He nodded to his j guards at the doorway.
They led in someone Sean had never seen before, an apparition with an ancient skull-like head. The hair had fallen out in tufts, A leaving shiny black patches on the scalp. The lips had shrunk and peeled back to expose teeth that were too large and white for that ruined head.
At a word from China the guards stripped away the single filthy ragged shift that covered the body, leaving it entirely naked, and for the first time Sean realized that it was a woman.
Her body reminded him of the horror pictures he had seen of the survivors of Dachau and Belsen. She was a skeleton covered with baggy skin, her empty dugs dangled over the rack of her ribs, her stomach was drawn in so her pelvic girdle was an empty bony basin. Her arms and legs were fleshless, the bony elbows and knees grotesquely enlarged.
Sean and Claudia stared at her with horror, unable to speak with the shock of it.
"Look at the lesions on her abdomen," China invited in a pleasant voice. Numbly they obeyed.
They were blind boils, hard and shiny as ripe black grapes beneath the skin, covering her lower belly and disappearing into the wiry mop of pubic hair.
While their attention was on this pathetic figure, China reached down quickly with the knife and touched the back of Claudia's hand with the point of the blade. Claudia gasped and tried to jerk her hand away, but it came up short against the manacle chain and she stared down as a thin snake of bright blood trickled down her forefinger and dripped onto the floor.
"What did you do that for, you snot-gobbling bastard?" Sean demanded.
China smiled. "It's only a scratch."
Slowly he reached out toward the naked skeletal figure of the black woman, pointing with the knife at her shrunken belly.
"The extreme emaciation and those characteristic lesions are diagnostic," he explained. "The woman is suffering from what we in Africa call the "slim sickness.""
"AIDS," Claudia whispered, and her voice was filled with the dread that single word conjured up.
Despite himself, Sean took a step back from the dreadful figure before him.
"Yes, Miss Monterro," China agreed. "AIDS in its terminal stage."
He touched one of the marble-hard chancres on the woman's belly with the point of the blade, and she gave no reaction as it split open and a mixture of pus and dark tarry blood oozed from the wound and trickled down into the matted bush of her pubic hair.
"Blood," whispered China, and gently scooped it up onto the bright silver blade. "Warm, living blood, swarming with the virus."
He proffered the blade for Sean's inspection. Involuntarily Sean pulled back further as blood dripped from the point.
"Yes," China nodded. "Something that even the bravest have reason to fear, the most certain, the most lingering, the most loathsome death of all the ages."
With his free hand he took hold of Claudia's wrist. "Consider this other blood. The sweet bright blood of a vibrant, beautiful young woman." The scratch on the back of Claudia's hand was vivid, but the tiny flow of blood from it almost quenched it.
"Blood to blood," China whispered. "Sick blood to healthy blood."
He brought the filthy blade closer to Claudia's hand, and she stiffened in the chair, straining silently against the manacle, her the knife.
face white with horror as she stared at "Blood to blood," China repeated. "Shall we let them mingle?"
Sean found he could not speak. He shook his head dumbly, staring at the knife.
"Shall we do it, Colonel?" China asked. "It's all up to you now."
He brought the blade closer to the open wound in Claudia's smooth, creamily tanned skin.
"Just another inch, Colonel," China whispered. Suddenly Claudia screamed. It was a wild ringing release of horror and terror, but China did not flinch. He did not look at her face, and his knife hand was steady and tremor less
"What shall we. dc, Colonel Courtney?" he asked.
He lowered the knife and touched her wrist with the flat of the blade, leaving a smear of diseased blood on the unblemished skin, only inches from the scratch on Claudia's hand. Then, slowly, he moved the knife downward.
"Speak quickly, Colonel. In seconds it will be too late." The knife left a shiny track of blood like the shine trail of some disgusting snail across her skin. Inexorably it moved down toward the open wound.
"Stop it!" Sean screamed. "Stop it!"
China lifted the blade away and looked at him inquiringly.
"Does that mean we have reached an agreement?"
"Yes, damn you to hell! I'll do it!"
China tossed the contaminated knife into a corner of the dugout, then opened one of the drawers in his desk and brought out a bottle of Dettol antiseptic. He soaked his handkerchief in the undiluted fluid, then carefully wiped the smear of diseased blood from Claudia's skin.
The tension went out of her rigid body and she slumped in the chair. She was panting softly and trembling like a kitten left out in the rain.
"Turn her loose," Sean croaked.
China shook his head. "Not until we have made our terms of agreement clear."
"All right," Sean snarled. "And the first of those terms is that my woman comes with me on the mission. No more dugouts filled with rats."
China pretended to ponder that. Then he nodded. "Very well, but the second term is that if you fail me in any way, Alphonso WM kill her immediately."
"Get Alphonso in here," Sean demanded. The sweat had not yet dried on his forehead, and his voice was still rough and unsteady.
"I want to hear you give him his orders."
Alphonso stood to attention and listened expressionlessly as China told him, "However, if the attack fails, if you are intercepted by Frelimo before you reach the laager, or if any of the hen shaw are allowed to escape-" Sean interrupted. "No, General, a hundred percent success is too high to hope for. Let us be reasonable and realistic. If I can destroy all but six of the Hinds, then it must be counted that I have fulfilled my part of the bargain."
>
China frowned and shook his head. "Even six Hinds will be sufficient to ensure our defeat. I'll allow you two. If more than two Hinds escape from the laager, your mission will be a failure, and you must pay the price." He turned back to Alphonso and went on with his instructions. "And so, Sergeant, you win obey all orders from the Colonel, carrying out the attack exactly the way he has planned it. But if the raid fails, if more than two hen shaw escape, you are to take full command, and your very first duty will be to shoot the two whites and their black servant-you will shoot them immediately."
Alphonso blinked almost sleepily at the order. He did not turn his head to look at Sean, and Sean found himself wondering if, despite their relationship, the friendship that had grown up between them, despite the fact that Alphonso had Caw bun Nkosi Kakulu and Babo and had exhorted him to lead the mission, if despite all of this he would carry out the execution order.
Wilbur Smith - C07 A Time To Die Page 47
