Hyena Dawn

by Christopher Sherlock

  She saw the anger cross his face like a ripple across a pool. ‘Cover yourself! You will see what sort of men we are. You will see what this war has done to us. We have suffered and continue to suffer.’

  ‘Enough of the self-pity, you think the white people don’t suffer? They are also paying the price.’ She was tired of the conversation, she wanted an end to it. ‘What’s your name?’ she said.

  ‘It is Tongogara.’

  She shuddered. Tongogara, the deputy-commander of ZANLA.

  He smiled. ‘And now you are afraid, Miss Elliot. You have heard stories, no doubt?’

  ‘I have only heard that you are a very able commander, Mr Tongogara.’

  ‘Comrade, if you please. Now I must decide your fate.’

  ‘I want to be returned to the place I was taken from. You have my word that this camp will remain a secret. I won’t mention anything to anyone.’ She didn’t hold much hope that he’d let her go, but it was worth a try anyway.

  Tongogara frowned. ‘No. You are my prisoner. I’m not going to let you go. FRELIMO has heard that you are here. Besides, we don’t get any journalists from the West who want to cover our side of the war. But it is true, what you say. The journalists only want to see blood.’

  He stood up and started to pace up and down the narrow room.

  ‘I will show you, Miss Elliot, how we live and how we fight. You can write our story. People must hear our story, the story of the victors.’

  ‘Maybe you won’t like what I write about you. Perhaps it won’t reflect well upon you.’

  He turned and stood towering above her. ‘Sit down. You have courage, white woman.’

  She sat down on one of the storage cases and he returned to his seat behind a makeshift desk.

  ‘I will show you the war as it is from the point of view of ZANLA. Then you can write what you want. All I ask is that you make the effort to see. Most white people are very blind. They cannot even recognise their servants, let alone remember their full names.’

  He was silent for a while, as if reflecting on something.

  ‘There was one who was different. He fought with the Selous Scouts. He thinks like a black man, yet he fights us. We tried to kill him many times. This man is like an animal but he has my respect, he is not like the others of his kind. You know what most of them do. They come amongst our people disguised as us, ZANLA troops. Then they find the headman of the village and execute him for cooperating with the Rhodesians. After that the village people will not talk to us. The man of whom I speak has never done this. My brothers tell me that his own men tried to kill him by accident and he killed them all. I hear he was in the hospital in Salisbury and then he disappeared ... You are very quiet, Miss Elliot. Do you know him?’

  ‘No. Look, I’m tired. I need to rest. I haven’t slept properly since I was captured.’

  ‘You speak of sleep as though it were a right. I suppose that is the privilege of your upbringing. You know, I worked on the South African gold mines. I did not think much of sleep then. You may sleep in this room, it is safe. I will be next door, we will talk again when it is light.’

  He got up and handed her a blanket. Then he left the room and pulled an old mattress up next to the open door. He waited till she had bedded down and then turned off the paraffin light.

  Sam wanted to cry. Mnangagwa had been kind to her, but she’d had to march at a killing pace for the past two days. She was dirty, her clothes stank. The bruises from where the men had handled her hurt all the time. She felt disgusting. If only she could wash, use a toilet that flushed . . .

  Her mind was restless in the darkness. She wondered how she would have been feeling now if Mnangagwa had not arrived when he did. She was lucky to be alive, yet she was tormented, for even in this most isolated of places she had not been able to escape thoughts of Rayne.

  Occasionally there were scuffling noises underneath the planks of the hut and she guessed there were rats. Sam tried not to think about what was happening to her, but concentrated instead on trying to make herself comfortable on the thin mattress. Eventu­ally she began to doze off, blessedly forgetting for a time where she was and what she had been through.

  It seemed as though she had been asleep for only a few minutes when she opened her eyes again and looked out through the door into the dimly lit area beyond. She was sure something was moving around outside the door, though she was uncertain whether it was man or animal. She got up quietly and moved towards the doorway. Outside she could see Tongogara sleeping next to some packing cases. A giant claw-hammer was lying on the table next to the door and she picked it up silently.

  A sound to her right almost made her scream out loud but somehow she managed to restrain herself. An eerie shadow passed over her in the half-light.

  The man who had made the shadow strode stealthily into view and peered through the door. For a terrified moment Sam thought he had seen her, but he moved softly away from the door towards the sleeping form of Tongogara. As he did so he drew an enormous dagger from his waistband and raised it into the air, ready to strike.

  Sam acted instinctively, moving towards the man, swinging her right hand back with the hammer held firmly in its grip. She forced the hammer down against the man’s skull. He dropped the knife he was holding and fell across the man he had been about to kill.

  Tongogara woke instantly, reared up and grabbed the knife. He pushed his assailant to the ground and brought the knife up against his chin. ‘Tell me your name, you traitorous jackal or I’ll slit your throat!’ But the man’s eyes were closed for ever, his lips permanently sealed. Sam had hit the upper part of his spinal column, destroying its vital link to the brain above.

  Sam dropped the hammer to the ground, still unable to speak. Tongogara looked across at her.

  ‘You took a terrible risk. If he had seen you he would have killed you. There are people who would like to see me disappear now that the war is almost over; people who worry about who will come to power. I am third in line. It is a dangerous position.’

  ‘I thought I was the one in danger!’

  ‘I owe you my life, Miss Elliot. I will make it known that any man who lays a finger on you will have to reckon with me from now on.’

  ‘You and Mnangagwa.’

  ‘Mnangagwa. He is my half-brother. We have fought many battles together. He told me what happened to you. It will not happen again.’

  He stooped down to lift the dead man’s body across his massive shoulders. Then he carried the corpse off into the darkness.

  It was early in the morning. Tongogara had woken her an hour before and given her breakfast. He gave her camera back to her, though without any film in it, but he had kept her passport. Now they were marching away from the camp - Sam, Tongogara and two other ZANLA guerillas. The pace was quick and she was already sweating with the exertion. Her clothes were badly torn and she ached all over. She was also ridden with guilt about the man she had killed. She couldn’t have felt much worse.

  Tongogara moved closer to her and spoke softly.

  ‘Don’t worry, we do not have far to go. We must get away from the camp, it is dangerous for me. I have hidden the body of my assassin, but there are others. It will not be long before they find it.’ Before she could reply, he had pulled away from her, maintaining the rear guard.

  Now she could see that they were moving downwards. Sud­denly the men in front of her turned and moved into a thicket. They began throwing aside loose branches, and in a matter of minutes had uncovered an open safari Land Rover that had been hidden beneath the brush. Next to it were several jerry-cans, and they unscrewed the fuel cap and filled up the tank. Again Tongogara spoke to Sam.

  ‘We have to be careful. The Rhodesians are always setting light to the bush, so we cannot leave the vehicle with petrol in the tank. Another danger is that the Rhodesians may see the tyre tracks from the air and strafe the bushes. That’s their biggest advantage over us, air support. Of course they haven’t been in such a good position sinc
e the South Africans took their helicop­ters back in the mid-seventies. But they still have the edge.’

  Now they all got into the Land Rover. The engine fired first time and they pulled off down the dirt track at a brisk rate. The driver slowed down over a particularly rough section and Tongo­gara yelled at him to keep moving quickly. The man accelerated, and Sam had to hold on to the grab-rail behind the driver’s seat so that she wouldn’t be thrown out.

  The countryside they travelled through revealed scenes of desolation Sam had not seen since the napalm bombings in Vietnam. The bush was burnt in many places, and most of the buildings she saw were charred and wrecked. Occasionally they would pass the skeleton of a burnt-out military vehicle lying by the side of the track. Nowhere did they see any sign of human existence. Against the roar of the wind-noise Tongogara shouted into her left ear.

  ‘We were fools when we started fighting. We were up against the Portuguese and the Rhodesians. That lasted until 1974. Then FRELIMO gained power in Mozambique. Up to that time the Rhodesians operated in this area quite freely. Here, we’re still less than a hundred kilometres inside the Mozambique border. You can see the devastation.

  ‘Machel and his FRELIMO troops now support us - so the Rhodesians have started attacking FRELIMO bases as well. They’ve conducted many full-scale raids, especially against our training camps.’

  She saw his face tense as he said this. Clearly the Rhodesian operations had been successful.

  ‘Did they hit you badly in these attacks?’ she asked. She wanted to know the truth behind the figures the Rhodesians had released on the number of terrorists killed on some of their raids. The vehicle was travelling more smoothly now as the track improved, and it was easier for her to listen to Tongogara.

  ‘In 1976 a group of Selous Scouts disguised as FRELIMO soldiers crossed the Mozambique border, heading towards the town of Vila de Manica in an armed column of thirteen vehicles. On Monday the ninth of August they entered our training camp at Nyadzonya Pungwe.

  ‘Our men were expecting a FRELIMO supply column, so when these vehicles drew up on the parade ground they didn’t suspect a thing. The entire camp was on morning parade. I don’t know what the Selous Scouts’ original plan was, but one of my men recognised a heavily bearded white man behind the guns of one of the vehicles. He screamed out a warning to the others.

  ‘The Selous Scouts opened fire at point-blank range, a wave of bullets that only stopped when every man on the parade ground was dead. Then they moved through the base, destroying every­thing. Even the hospital went up in flames, the wounded dying inside. By the time the Selous Scouts had finished the entire base had been razed. Then they pulled out and blew up the bridges on the road as they left. Not one of them was captured and only a few were wounded.’

  He was silent then, and she waited a few minutes before she spoke.

  ‘How many of your people died?’

  ‘Our official report to the United Nations didn’t tell the full story. To be honest, there were over five thousand people at the base at that time and nearly all of them died. We were fools to have established such a large training camp. They caught us unawares. It was a day none of us who were there will forget for as long as we live.’

  He leaned forwards and hurled another command at the driver in Shona. Then he continued his story.

  ‘That raid taught us a lesson. In a way, it’s helping us to win the war. Now our training centres are smaller, and spread out over a vast area. There are no high concentrations of men any longer.

  ‘Another raid, which we never reported, took place that same day at Vila Machado, on the Beira-Umtali railway line. The casualties there numbered over a thousand. We kept quiet about it, so as not to dispirit our people. But the fact that we can carry on, despite such high casualties, must show the Rhodesians they can never win this bush war.’

  They were now on a proper sand road and were able to move much faster. There were no signs along the road - this, said Tongogara, was to confuse Rhodesians operating over the border.

  After an hour Sam was aware of a railway line to her left and realised that this must be the main line from Umtali to Beira. She noticed that large sections of it had been tom up. From the rust on the upper part of the rails it was clear that the line had not been used for a considerable time. A little later the road started to descend, and she realised that they were leaving the inland plateau and moving towards the lower ground of the coastal plain. The road curved round to meet the railway line again, and crossed it amidst a scene of total devastation. Both the road and the railway line had been blown up, and torn pieces of metal covered the entire area. The road had to weave its way between mounds of earth and only straightened out again a hundred metres further on.

  After another half hour’s fast driving they pulled up beside a colonial-looking building which Tongogara informed her was the local police station. He leapt out of the Land Rover and went towards the main entrance. It was a huge, crumbling structure with a pillared portico topped by a sculpture of a giant eagle. The enormous wooden doors were stuck permanently ajar and Tongogara disappeared inside. Sam, remaining in the Land Rover with the two men, ran her eyes over the flaking plaster and peeling paintwork. The whole place had the atmosphere of a sleepy ruin. Then Tongogara came outside again and beckoned her in.

  She walked into a large, musty-smelling room. At one end, behind a giant desk, sat a darkly tanned man. He was about thirty years old, wearing a white officer’s cap and a crumpled khaki uniform that was loose at the collar. She judged him to be a half-caste. He was fat, and beads of perspiration covered his forehead. She could smell him - a combination of sweat, garlic and whisky. There was a pistol lying on the desk in front of him. He indicated that she should sit. Tongogara remained standing.

  The man addressed her in a language she guessed was Portu­guese. Tongogara spoke to him quickly, and the man smiled and spoke again, this time in English with a thick Portuguese accent.

  ‘You are Samantha Elliot, the prisoner of Comrade Tongogara?’

  He picked up her passport which was lying in front of him and flicked through it idly. His eyes met hers again. ‘Mmmmm. What were you doing in Rhodesia?’

  Samantha was going to reply when she heard Tongogara speak. ‘She’s a reporter, Captain Georgio.’

  ‘All right, Tongogara, what do you want me to do with her?’ ‘Keep her here for three days.’

  ‘Let me remind you, Comrade. Prisoners are the business of FRELIMO. They must be handed over to us for interrogation, then sent for correctional training. This was agreed upon by Mugabe and President Machel.’

  Tongogara smiled evilly. ‘Suppose, Captain, I was to let high command know about some of your other activities . . .’

  Georgio sat up quickly. ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘Of course not. All I’m asking for is a favour.’

  Georgio could hardly speak and his face was turning white. ‘Tongogara . . . you go too far . . . you are not liked in high command. This will be reported . . . You know that.’

  Captain Georgio’s speech didn’t seem to scare Tongogara. He gestured for Sam to get up. ‘Say goodbye to your career, Georgio.’

  Georgio immediately rose and ran in front of them, blocking the door and smiling obsequiously. ‘Forgive me, Tongogara. I apologise. Of course I’ll look after her.’

  Tongogara walked up close to Georgio and stared down into his eyes. ‘You touch her or harm her and I’ll blow your brains out. And if I’m not around to do it, one of my men will do it with pleasure.’

  The Captain walked back behind his desk and sat down. He took out a bottle of whisky and two glasses from his desk. Tongogara declined the offer of a drink but he did take a seat next to Sam. She gazed up at the big fan on the ceiling above her, turning lazily in the mid-day heat. She was terrified. How could Tongogara leave her with this man?

  The two men discussed routine matters in Portuguese, includ­ing the fate of some prisoners currently being held in t
he cells of the police station. Then they came back to the subject of Sam. Georgio was most conciliatory.

  ‘There is a small flat behind the station. It is quite comfortable, she can stay there. But I warn you, if she escapes you will be in more danger than you realise.’

  ‘That’s my problem, Georgio. I must leave now. I’ll talk to her for a few minutes privately, then she will be your responsibility.’

  Sam followed Tongogara out of the office, and he led her into another room and closed the door. Never in her life had she felt so desperate, so little in control of events. He held her shoulders in his massive hands.

  ‘Trust me, Samantha Elliot. If you stay with me you will be in grave danger - high command will insist I hand you over. I owe you my life, and I will come back in three days’ time to get you. At least here you can clean yourself and rest.’

  ‘I don’t trust him!’

  ‘He will do nothing. I have too much on him.’

  The room was quiet except for the sound of flies buzzing in the hot afternoon air. Far in the distance she heard a dog barking; for the first time in her life she understood the real meaning of the word ‘freedom’. Yet she trusted a man whom she had only known for two days, and something told her that he would not let her down.

  In Salisbury the evening before, Sam’s disappearance had created a few problems for the interim government. The death of a farmer on the Mozambican border was one thing, the suspected abduction of an American reporter quite another. With the tense situation that now existed in the country, the last thing Bishop Abel Muzorewa’s government needed was an incident that focused the world’s attention on the bush war. At all costs, the impression must continue to be given that things were well under control.

  The chief difficulty was that the editor of Time had threatened to fly out to find the true facts behind the disappearance of one of his top war reporters. After all, he had reasoned, if she could cope with Vietnam, she could cope with anything. He had said he was going to release the story to the world media.