Wilbur Smith - C07 A Time To Die

by C07 A Time To Die(Lit)

  He would have to let her rest very soon, and yet she had not complained, not once in all the long tortured hours since they had left the river. He grinned fondly as he remembered the spoiled, arrogant bitch who had stepped off the Boeing at Harare airport so many eons ago. This was a different woman-tough, determined, and with a spirit as resilient as a Damascus steel blade. He knew she would never give up, she would keep going until she killed herself. He reached forward and tapped her shoulder.

  "Ease up, wench. We'll take ten."

  When she pulled up, she was unsteady on those long legs and he arm around her shoulders to steady her. "You're a ruddy put an marvel, do you know that?" He eased her down to sit with her back against one of the lead wood trees, and unscrewed the stopper on his water bottle, and passed it to her.

  "Give Minnie to me. It's time for her chloroquine." Claudia's voice was husky with tiredness. Sean swung the little girl off his back and placed her in Claudia's lap.

  "Remember, ten minutes, that's all."

  Alphonso had taken the break to rig the radio. Mickey was squatting on one side of him, Miriam on the other. They watched with fascination as he tuned the set and began searching the bands.

  There was the crackle and buzz of static followed by some faint extraneous snatches of Afrikaans, then an excited voice speaking in Shangane, very close and loud.

  "Very close now," it said, and the reply came immediately.

  "Keep going hard. Push them. Don't let them escape. Call me as soon as you catch them." That voice was unmistakable, and they did not need the acknowledgement to confirm it.

  "Very well, General China."

  The transmission ended, and Sean and Alphonso exchanged a quick hard frown.

  "Very close," said the Shangane. "We can't outrun them."

  "You might be able to get away," Sean said, "on your own."

  Alphonso hesitated and looked sideways at Miriam. The Shantrusting eyes, and Algane maid returned his glance with open and scratched himself with embarrassment. "I'll phonso coughed stay," he muttered.

  Sean laughed bitterly and said in English, "Join the club, mate.

  That little witch didn't take long to hook you. These ruddy sheilas will be the death of all of us yet, you mark my words."

  Alphonso frowned. He did not understand, and Sean switched back into Shangane. "Pack up the radio. If you are going to stand with us, we'd best find good place to do it. Your dung-eating Renamo brothers A* going to be with us very soon."

  Sean turned and looked across at Matatu, who was instantly on his feet.

  "That was China on the radio," he told him in Swahili.

  "He hisses like a cobra." Matatu nodded.

  "His men are on our spoor. They boast to him that they are very close.

  Are there any more tricks we can use now, old friencr"

  "Fire?" Matatu suggested, but without conviction.

  Sean shook his head. "The wind is against us. We'd cook ourselves if we torched the forest."

  Matatu hung his head. "If we keep the women and children with us, there are no more tricks," he admitted. "We are slow, and we leave a spoor that a blind man can follow in a moonless night." He shook his small, grizzled head miserably. "The only trick we have left is to fight them, and after that we are dead, my Bwana.

  "Go back, Matatu. Find how close behind us they really are. We will go ahead and find a good place to fight them." He touched the little man's shoulder, then let him go. Sean watched him disappear g the tree trunks and then deliberately altered his expression before he turned to Claudia, striking a lighter, more carefree pose and putting a lift in his tone.

  "How's our patient?" he asked. "She looks pretty chirpy to me."

  "The chloroquine has done wonders." Claudia bounced the child on her lap and, as if to confirm her improvement, Minnie stuck her thumb in her mouth and smiled shyly around it at Sean.

  He felt her smile tug at him with wholly unexpected poignancy.

  Claudia laughed. "No female is immune to your fatal charms.

  You've collected yourself another fan."

  "Typical woman-all she really wants is a free ride." But he stroked the child's soft, woolly little head. "All right, sweetness, your horsey is ready to go."

  Trustingly Minnie held out both arms, and he swung her up on to his back and strapped her there.

  Claudia pulled herself stiffly to her feet and for a moment leaned against him. "Do you know something? You are a much nicer person than you pretend to be."

  "Fooled you, didn't IT"

  "I'd like to see you with a baby of your own," she whispered.

  "Now you really terrify me. Let's go before you come up with any more crazy ideas like that one."

  But the idea lingered with him as they ran on through the forest-a son of his own from this woman.

  He had never even thought about that before, and then, as though to complement the idea, he felt a tiny hand reach across his shoulder from behind and touch his beard, stroking it as lightly as an alighting butterfly. Minnie was reciprocating the caress he had bestowed on her a few minutes earlier, and for a moment his throat closed up and made it difficult for him to breathe. He took her tiny hand in his. It was as silken and fragile as the wing of a hummingbird, and he was overcome with a feeling of terrible regret. Regret that there would never be a son-he accepted that at last--or a daughter. It was almost over. The hunting pack was very close behind. They could never outrun them. There was no escape; all they could hope for was a good pl in which to make the final stand. After that there was nothin'o escape, no future.

  He was so wrapped up in Ins melancholy that he had run out into the open before he realized it. Claudia pulled up so sharply in front of him that he almost ran into her. He stopped at her side, d they looked about them with puzzled uncertainty.

  an The forest had been laid waste. As far ahead as they could see, the great hardwoods had been swept away as though by a hurricane. Only the stumps remained, raw and bleeding gum as red as heart's blood.

  The earth was torn and scarred where the huge trunks had come crashing down. Bright piles of sawdust remained where their branches had been stripped and the logs cut into lengths, and between the windrows of discarded branches and wilting boughs were the drag roads along which the precious timber had been hauled away.

  Miriam stopped beside Sean. "This is where my people were forced to work," she said softly. "Frelimo came and took them to cut the trees. They chained them together and made them work until the meat was torn from the bones of their hands. They beat them like oxen and worked them until they fell and could not rise."

  "How many people?" Sean asked. "So many trees have been destroyed."

  "Perhaps a man or woman died for every tree," Miriam whispered "They took everybody, thousands upon tens of thousands."

  She pointed to the horizon. "They work far south now, and they leave no tree standing."?

  Sean felt the anger beginning to rise through his amazement.

  This was destruction on a scale that affronted the law of nature and the sanctity of life itself. It was not just that those trees had taken three hundred years to reach their full majesty and had been destroyed with a few hours" callous work with the ax blades. It was more, much more. This forest was the source and fountain of myriad forms of life, inset and bird, mammal and reptile, of man himself. In this vast devastation all would perish.

  It did not end there. With his own fate determined, with a term and a number of the hours that remained of his own life, Sean was overtaken by a prophetic melancholia. He realized that the destruction of this forest was symbolic of the predicament of the entire continent.

  In a few fleeting decades, Africa had been overtaken by its own inherent savagery. The checks that had been placed on it by a century of colonialism had been struck off.

  Chains perhaps those checks had been, but since being freed of them the peoples of Africa had been rushing headlong, with almost suicidal abandon, toward their own destruction.
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br />   Sean felt himself shaking with impotent rage at the folly of it and at the same time saddened, sickened almost unto death, by the terrible tragedy of it all.

  "If I have to die," he thought, "then it's best to do so before I N see everything I love, the land, the animals, the people, all of it destroyed."

  With his arm around Claudia's thin shoulders and the little black girl strapped on his back, he turned and looked back the way they had come. At that moment, Matatu came scampering out of the forest behind them. There was desperate urgency in his gait and the fear of death in his small wizened features. "They are very close, my Bwana. They have two trackers leading them. I watched them work-we will not throw them off.

  They are good."

  "How many troopers with them?" With an effort Sean cast off he oppressive mantle of dejection.

  "As many as the grass on the plains of Serengeti," Matatu replied.

  "They run like a pack of wild dogs on the hunt and they are hard men and fierce. Even the three of us will not stand too long against them."

  Sean roused himself and looked around him. The cut line in which they stood was a natural killing ground, devoid of cover except for the knee-high stumps of hardwood. The open ground stretched two hundred meters wide to where the deadwood was piled in untidy windrows, the leaves long, withered, and browned, the branches forming a natural barricade.

  "We'll make our stand there," Sean decided swiftly, and signaled Alphonso forward. They crossed the open ground at a run, bunched up with the two women in the middle. Miriam was drag her little brother along by one arm, and Alphonso ran protectively beside them. The big Shangane was heavily burdened with the radio and the packs of ammunition and stores they had picked UP from the ambush at the Save River, but he had also carried Mickey whenever the boy tired, setting him down on his feet for only short intervals. The three Shanganes, man, woman, and boy child, had very swiftly formed their own distinct core within the band, drawn together by tribal loyalties and natural physical attraction. Sean knew he could rely on Alphonso to take care of his trac own, and that allowed him to concentrate on his own particular charges, Claudia, Matatu, and now the little girl.

  Alphonso needed no orders. Like Sean, he had a soldier's eye for terrain, and he ran unerringly toward a section of the tumble of discarded branches that formed a natural redoubt and that commanded the best field of fire across the cut line.

  Swiftly they settled in, dragging some of the heavier branches into place to strengthen their position, laying out their weapons and spare ammunition, making their very limited preparations to stand off the first rush of the attackers.

  Claudia and Miriam had taken the children a little further back to where a hollow in the earth and two especially large tree stumps formed some sort of shelter. His own preparations complete, Sean crossed to them quickly and, squatted beside Claudia.

  "As soon as the shooting starts, I want you to take Miriam and the children and run for it," he told her. "Keep heading south." He broke off as he realized that she was shaking her head and her jaw was clenched obstinately.

  "I've run far enough," she told him. "I'm staying with you." She laid her hand on his arm. "No, don't argue. It would be a waste of time."

  "Claudia!"

  "Please don't," she forestalled him. "There isn't much time left.

  Don't spend it arguing."

  She was right, of course, Sean knew. To try to run further on her own was pointless with two children to care for and a team of Renamo on her spoor. He nodded.

  "All right," he agreed. He took the Tokarev pistol from his belt, cocked it, and carefully engaged the safety catch. "Take this."

  "What's that for?" She stared at the weapon with distaste.

  "I think you know what it's for."

  "The same way as Job?"

  He nodded. "It would be easier than going China's way."

  She shook her head. "I couldn't," she whispered. "If there is no other way, at the end, won't you do it for me?"

  "I'll try," he said. "But I don't think I'll have the guts. Here, take it, just in case." Reluctantly she accepted the pistol and tucked it into her belt.

  "Now kiss me," she said.

  Matatu's whistle interrupted their embrace. "I love you," Sean murmured in her calf.

  "I'll love you she replied, "through all eternity."

  He left her and crawled back into the piles of deadwood. At Matatu's side he sank down and peered out through the chink between two branches toward the edge of the forest.

  For many minutes he saw nothing. Then there was a shadowy frit of movement among the holes of the standing hardwood, and Sean laid his right hand on the pistol grip of the AKM rifle and raised it until the butt stock touched his cheek.

  The silence drew out in the languorous sunlit afternoon while they waited. No bird sang, no creature moved, until at last there was a muted bird whistle from the edge of the forest and a man shape detached itself and flitted into the opening, showing for just hi a small part of a second, then disappearing behind One Of the t ck tree stumps. As soon as it was gone another broke from the tree line a hundred meters further to the left and darted forward- This also disappeared, and almost immediately, out on the right, a one third Renamo guerrilla emerged.

  "Three only," Sean murmured. They were not going to expose more men than that, and these were good. They advanced in fleeting rushes, never two together, widely spread out and wary as old torn-leopards coming in to the bait.

  "What a pity," Sean thought. "We are only going to get one out he mark."

  of this lot. I had hoped for a better killing to get us off t He concentrated on the advancing scouts, trying to pick the most dangerous of their enemies.

  "Probably the one in the center," he decided, and almost immethe flick of the man's diately his choice was confirmed as he saw hand from behind the stump that hid him. He was signaling one that marked of the others forward, coordinating the advance, and him as the main man, the one to take out first.

  "Let him come in close," Sean told himself. The AKM was no sniping rifle, and he didn't trust its accuracy over a hundred meters. He waited, willing the man in, watching for him over the sights of the rifle.

  I The Renamo jumped up and kept coming. Sean saw that he was young, mid-twenties, with bandoliers of ammunition over both shoulders and a Rastafarian hairstyle, ribbons of camouflage rag braided into his hair. There was an Arabian cast to his features and an amber patina to his skin. He was a good-looking lad except that his left eye was a little askew and it gave his face a sly, knowing expression. ose enough. Sean Close enough to see the cast in his eye was el lined up carefully on the tree stump behind which the Renamo had disappeared. He drew a breath, exhaled half of it, and let the first joint of his right forefinger rest lightly on the trigger.

  The Renamo popped up into his sights. Sean took him low, deliberately declining a clean kill. He knew what damage the 7.62IN men bullet would do as it plunged through his belly at over three thousand feet a second, and he knew from bitter experience just how unnerving it was to have one of your comrades lying in no-man's4and with his guts shot out, screaming for water and mercy. In the Scouts they called them "warblers," and a warbler in good voice could inhibit an attack almost as effectively as a RPD machine gun.

  well-placed Sean heard the bullet hit the Renamo in the stomach, that meaty thump like a watermelon dropped on a stone floor, and he went down out of sight in the trash and debris.

  Instantly there was a heavy volley of rifle fire from the edge of the forest, but it was obvious from the wild aim that they had not spotted Sean and the firing stuttered swiftly into silence. Renamo was conserving ammunition, a sure sign of their discipline and training. Second-rate African troops started firing at the beginning of a contact and kept shooting until their last round was expended.

  "These lads know their business," Sean confirmed Matatu's estimate. "We aren't going to hold them long." The two guerrillas were still pinned down in the middle of the cut line
, and there was a low, hollow groan from out there as the first pangs of the belly wound hit the downed man.

  "Sing to us, Daddy-o!" Sean encouraged him. "Let your pals know how it hurts." But he was studying the forest edge, trying to get some hint of the next play before it developed.

  "Now they'll make a pincer move to try to outflank us," he guessed. "But which flank, left or right?" As if in answer he saw a tiny blur of movement in the forest. One of them was moving right.