by Peter Rimmer
Clem Barkley picked up the running spoor close to the kopje. He gave a brief shout; the RLI stick came back into formation and the hunt continued.
“They were unsure last night. Now they’ve run for the river.” Jonathan broke into a steady jog, despite the heat and the flies. Above the running men, the thousands of tsetse fly sounded like an engine. They were following the spoor of four men, the dead man and one other having dropped out of the war.
Just before nightfall, they found another terrorist. He was unable to walk and he was clutching his gun as his only protection. He had been abandoned, left by the others to die in the night. As he heard the stick approaching, he swung the Russian gun up from the ground and Jonathan shot him in the head.
“These poor sods are committing suicide. Who the hell sent them into the valley with water bottles that size? Probably twisted his ankle running from the buffalo that were spooked by the lions. I’d like to get the bloody commissar in Lusaka, not the other three, poor sods. We’re heading straight for the river; they want water more than they want to cover their tracks. The moon comes up at ten twelve and there isn’t any cloud. We’ll move ten degrees off the cross and be at the river to wait for his friends. We’ll cover this gook with stones. Get his ID. Someone somewhere loves him. Why the hell did he want to come playing around in my back yard?”
Jonathan reached the river six hours later and set the trap along two kilometres of the Zambezi. The false dawn had enabled him to position his men on high ground, giving them an interlocking field of fire. If the terrs had reached the river ahead of him, they would be safe in Zambia. He waited in the shade of a tree, chewing a stick of biltong and imbibing regular sips of water. When they had taken out the terrs, they would make a fire and catch themselves a fat bream each. There was nothing in the world Jonathan wanted more at that moment than a nice piece of fish.
The sun rose higher in the sky, subduing the sounds of the bush, pushing the crickets to silence. A hundred metres up the river on the Zambian side, a fish eagle waited patiently and, from behind him, a lonely dove called for a lover. The day grew brutally hot and the Mopani flies crawled into the moisture around his eyes. Methodically, he scratched at his crotch where it itched like a bastard. Under his woollen socks, his athlete’s foot was giving him as many problems as his itch, but he could not take off his boots.
Forcing his ears to listen intently and ignoring the irritations of his skin, he listened for the sounds of the terrs. He was the middle man in the man-trap he had set along the river bank. Down in front from his high-ground tree, some seventy metres away, two Nile crocodiles basked in the sun. He could even smell their fetid breath. In the middle of the river, a family of hippo, only their eyes and noses above the surface of the dark-flowing river, was watching him on his bank, dappled by the shade of the almost leafless acacia tree, its thorns giving more shade than its leaves.
At midday, a small buck was somewhere behind where he was sitting, probably a kilometre away behind, and Jonathan concentrated on the sound. The dove had stopped calling at the sound of flight and the big eagle moved a centimetre or two on his perch, giving Jonathan a better view of his white feathers and a perfect silhouette of the hooked beak of the predator. Ten minutes later, a flock of sand grouse broke cover, and Jonathan was sure they were coming straight at him, the broken twigs sending small, brief reports into the noonday sun.
The eagle moved its wings, dropping in a flash to glide and clutch the river, snatching a bream in its claws and gliding with the fish across the water to the sand in front of the crocodiles. The bird stood and looked at Jonathan, the fish struggling helplessly in the power of the talons. Methodically, the bird began to tear its prey apart with its beak, feeding hungrily. The crocodiles ignored so small a parcel of food.
Jonathan was watching the exact spot when a terrorist, dressed in a similar camouflage to himself, broke cover and ran to the river, startling the crocodiles onto their feet, before they moved with violent speed towards the food they saw running towards the water of the river. Jonathan’s FN came up and fired in the same movement. The bullet took the crocodile behind its head as it swept its lethal tail at the drinking man. Water gushing out of his open month, the terrorist turned to face the danger and screamed.
The second crocodile and the fish eagle made off across the river, alarmed by the noise. The thrashing crocodile, now half in the water, was over four metres long and still snapping. Jonathan fired at it again. The terrorist, waiting to die, gaped at him horrified. The dying crocodile floated slowly away into deeper water and the two men were left alone, looking at each other.
“The others?” asked Jonathan, in English.
“Don’t know.” He was shaking from fear. His English was intelligible. “How old are you?”
“Why?”
“I’m not going to fire,” Jonathan assured him.
“Fifteen.”
“Drink your water… ONLY ONE!” shouted Jonathan to his hidden companions. Wearily they joined him, and then took the boy back to the tree and gave him a stick of biltong to chew while they waited. It was a long, hot afternoon for all of them and, when dusk came, the boy described how all his friends had died. They lit a fire and cooked the fish they had caught in the river, the boy far too frightened and grateful to have told them a lie.
The boy had been abducted from a Church of England mission six months earlier. The terrorists had attacked the mission, seventy kilometres from Sinoia, at dusk, and ordered the pupils to join the glorious struggle to kill the white people and free their country. Not all the children wanted to go, and the boy claimed he was one of them, but he was led into the bush with the others. For three days, they avoided the security forces, leaving some of the younger girls behind to fend for themselves in the bush. He never knew what had happened to them.
They crossed the river in motor boats sent across by the Zambian police, making the crossing at night. They were then made to train as soldiers and go back, over the river to kill the white farmers. Their people would give them food and hide their guns and uniforms during the day, so at night they could attack the farmhouses. He had lost his rifle when the buffalo charged, and only because he knew how to find south from the Southern Cross had he led the others back to the river.
“Who was your leader?” asked Jonathan.
“I was the leader.”
“The others were older?”
“Younger.”
“Do you want to go back to Zambia?” asked Jonathan, causing his men to look up in surprise.
“I want to go back to the mission.”
“They killed your teachers and burnt down the school.”
“Why?”
“You’d better ask the Russians and the World Council of Churches,” suggested Jonathan. “The people who give your people money to fight the war. The people who think we are wrong to try and give Rhodesia a better life than the rest of Africa.”
“If I go to police, they kill me. Maybe army torture me. Information, they say. Cut off my balls. Sharp knife, they say. I go back, they send me back… We are the sheep.”
They ate round the fire, feeling the comfort of the flickering flames that shot light into the trees and kept the animals away during the dark of the night. The smoke repelled mosquitoes. They were seven men alone in the middle of nowhere – six white and one black.
“Where you from?” asked the boy, his English and curiosity the product of five years’ good schooling.
“London… That’s in England.”
“I know… What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know, really. I like Africa. Want to live here. We all want to live here.”
“It’s my country.”
“Maybe. But all of us need help. You help me and I help you.”
“Maybe. But my country. I don’t want help.”
“You wanted a lot of help from the crocodile.”
“Why you kill the crocodile, not me?”
“Instinct. We’re al
l human. Against the crocodile, we fight together.”
“I want Zambia. War over soon.”
“We’ll shoot up the water on either side so you can swim across. What’s your name?”
“Jamba Sithole.”
“I’m Jonathan Holland.”
The next morning, they watched the boy reach the far side of the river, turn to them from the top of the Zambian bank and wave.
“Don’t look at me like that, Clem. Did you want to shoot him? I shot one young boy because he was going to shoot me. The balls I’d like to cut off belong to the do-gooder sods in armchairs who send those kids to the slaughterhouse. One day I hope they’ll all be very proud of themselves. The report will say six dead terrorists, all under sixteen years old. Are you all agreed?”
“Yes, sir,” they replied in unison.
“You think he’ll get back to Lusaka alive?” asked Clem.
“He has a chance, probably a good one if he meets a Zambian patrol. I’m going to take my boots off and scratch my athlete’s foot.”
Within a minute, the whole stick was scratching with deep satisfaction. This was followed by a wash in the river, powder and clean socks. Jonathan’s feeling of bliss was equal to a cold Lion Lager. He was glad the boy had made it across. Jamba Sithole. He would remember the name.
It took them two days to walk across the Zambezi Valley, where the clouds were building up all day with the oppressive heat. There was thunder but no rain, and the nights were as hot as the days. At the foot of the escarpment, they camped next to a giant baobab tree that was as wide as an elephant. Clem was pushed up into the stunted branches of the big tree until he could pull himself into the bowl where the giant arms converged.
“About two litres in this one,” he called down.
“Looks bigger.” The taste would be tainted from the sap in the tree, but a man dying of thirst who was still able to climb the giant tree would survive.
The six men sat down with their backs to the tree. They were all tired but Jonathan stopped them making a fire to eat the snake that Harry Simlet had caught and skinned. They ate from tins and drank the tainted water to conserve the little that remained in their water bottles.
“Let it rain. Just let it rain,” said Harry, who was nineteen years old and a clerk in a bottle store when at home in Salisbury. When he entered the army, he knew more about French wines than rifle drills and land mines.
“A cold frosty,” said Clem.
As the dusk turned to night, the great pre-rain clouds obscuring the moon and the stars shrank visibility to the distance of a man’s arm. Their voices came out of the darkness. There were no mosquitoes as there was no water for kilometres around. The animal calls that were heard during the night were from farther back by the river, and now there was no need to sleep in a tree. Jonathan arranged the guard roster and the conversation gave way to snores and the sounds of sleep.
They had been in the valley a month. The immediate bush, the tangled thorn thicket and long, straw-coloured, sun-dried elephant grass were ominously quiet, even the insects waiting silently for the blessing of rain. Not a drop had fallen in the valley for six months. The surface earth had turned to dust, making it easy to follow a spoor. Thunder rumbled from across the great escarpment as Jonathan fell asleep, wedged comfortably against the tree, his rifle resting under the crook of his left hand. By three in the morning, all six men were sound asleep.
Jonathan was the first to wake with the dawn. It was cooler, but still hot and humid.
“Make a fire, Harry,” he ordered. By the time the terrs found his camp, they would have long since departed. Dusk had been different.
The climb up the escarpment taxed every muscle in their bodies as they scrambled round boulders and through crevices washed out by the rains, using stunted trees rooted deep in the crevices to haul themselves up. The view looking back was spectacular all the way to the river, which was now shrouded in heat, the Zambian escarpment barely visible. They looked over the tops of the trees, the landscape dotted with baobabs, with not a trace of colour in the sea of brown. They climbed on upwards, spurred by the thought of food and beers, the comforts of civilisation. No one spoke.
At the top, Jonathan looked back over the heat-crushed valley far below. It was like standing in the heavens above the earth. Not a sound reached them from the valley, not a whiff of smoke as the sun dipped blood-red into the heat-haze, a great ball of molten red fire. When the light had almost gone, a bat began to circle them, dipping down almost at their heads, its keening coming and going, but the bat itself was invisible. They scanned the treetops looking for it.
“I hate bats,” said Petrus Krobler, the one Afrikaner in the stick. “Hell, man, they sound like ghosts. Disembodied. I once shot one with an air gun. A fluke man. Right through the bloody head. I was drunk, waving my kid brother’s gun, and down came the bat, shot between the little devil’s radar. Don’t have eyes, bats… Give me the creeps, man… When’s it going to bloody rain?”
Jonathan was glad to lead his men out of the valley. The air was cooler and less oppressive, and his feeling of isolation lifted with the highveld plateau and the first msasa tree. Somewhere far away he could hear the distant sound of a tractor ploughing the lands at night. It was as if he had re-joined the human world and the sound was deeply comforting.
The gunfire when it came was just as distant, but farther to his right than the tractor sound, some fifteen kilometres from the top of the escarpment. The explosion was more distant, and Jonathan was able to pinpoint the direction of the sound. Softly, he took a compass bearing.
“That’s a farmhouse under attack.” They were all listening.
“Too far to be sure it’s AK47 fire.”
“The bang was an RPG rocket,” said Clem.
“Some of the sods must have got round us down in the valley,” said Petrus. “There are too many bloody terrs, man.”
Every man in the stick was buckling on his webbing and, without any word of command, Jonathan led his men in the direction of the gunfire. By the time they had covered the first kilometre, the gunfire had stopped and the last of the day had faded into darkness.
“Terrs,” said Jonathan. “Hit at dusk and run for the valley. They’ll be coming towards us, away from the police going to help that farm. In half an hour we’re going to set an ambush. They’ll be running, not concerned with noise, wanting to get as far from the police as possible before the dawn sends in the choppers.” Adrenalin was pumping through his body as he pushed his way through the bush, the darkness enfolding them.
He set the trap in an arc, his men lying flat in the dark, well-spaced but each knowing the exact whereabouts of his companions. They waited and listened and, when the moon began its game of hide and seek among the clouds of black cumulus, they heard the terrorists running from their pursuers, blundering through the bush and making a noise that could be heard three kilometres away. They were halfway between the farm and the escarpment.
Petrus Krobler opened the contact, killing two men he could see by the light of the moon. Jonathan saw nothing, but heard the gunfire from his men on either side of him. They waited in position for the dawn, and then waited four further hours, baked by the sun, awaiting any of the terrorists who had gone to ground, looking for movement. The vultures were flying lazily on the winds when he finally gave the command to advance. If any terrorists had survived the ambush, they would be well on their way down into the valley.
“Boys,” called Clem, studying the corpses. “Kids. Just bloody kids.” They left the bodies of the children for the vultures and advanced in open formation towards the farmhouse they could identify on a low kopje amid a grove of gum trees, surrounded by tobacco barns and grading sheds.
The rocket had gone over the defence wire, through the wire cage that protected the window, and exploded when it hit the wall of the bedroom, showering the two sleeping children with deadly shrapnel and punching a two metre hole in the wall into the bathroom behind. The police had arrive
d within thirty-seven minutes of Raleen Urbach calling the police station on the agric-alert. There had not been a chopper available for the follow-up operation as the terrorists were attacking farmhouses throughout Rhodesia, escalating the air defence and disseminating the security forces.
“Kids they might have been,” said Clem. “Now are you glad you let that terr go home so he can come back again?”
“It seemed right at the time,” said Jonathan.
“We got to go and hit their camps in Zambia.”
“We got to stop this war, that’s for sure.” Jonathan Holland felt a long way from Charterhouse and the petty search for popularity.
“The woman won’t leave,” the police constable said to Jonathan. “Will you try, sir? Her husband was killed three months ago by a land mine on the road into Karoi.”
There was blood on her skirt, blood on her hands and blood down one side of her face. “Are you hurt?” Jonathan asked her.
“Not me. Oh, for God’s sake. Now the kids.”
“I’ll take you into Karoi.”
“Why didn’t they kill me as well?”
“My name is Jonathan Holland. Maybe you had better come to Salisbury. You have relations?”
“In South Africa.”
“Then you’ll stay with my mother.”
“What for?”
“Because I can’t think of anything else right now and you can’t stay here,” Jonathan told her firmly but kindly.
“What does it matter? Take me where you like. I want to kill those bastards.”
“We did. All of them. One of them wasn’t old enough to carry a rifle. He had the last rocket on his shoulder. He was probably twelve.”
She looked at him with an expression of horror. Then she was sick; the vomit spurted out, covering the blood of her children.
The crowd stood on their feet to applaud at the Royal Albert Hall with the same feeling of indignation and self-righteousness that the World Council of Churches had felt when they diverted parishioners’ offerings to God to freedom fighters in Southern Africa, money ostensibly for medical supplies but in reality used for the waging of revolutionary war. Des Donelly on stage felt the waves of applause at the end of his concert in support of the anti-apartheid movement and was sure they were clapping for him, his music and his great generosity.
