by Jo Bannister
Something touched his leg. It did not feel like a man’s body tumbling against him, or anything he could put a name to. But Vanderbilt had not paused to consider what it might be. That flaccid random touch was all he had been waiting for, and at it he flung himself bodily at the thing deep in the water.
For a moment he could not find it; then the frantic, slow-motion milling of his hands connected with something inert in the stream and his fingertips recognized the texture of cloth. Groping for an elusive hold he encountered the gossamer threads of floating hair: he twisted it in a grip that Victoria Falls would not have broken and lunged for the surface and the shore.
But it had taken too long. Vanderbilt could see that as soon as he lifted Grant’s face to the surface, and when he hauled the drowned man out onto a little muddy spit where the sheep came to drink he knew for sure that Grant had won. In his thin face, fish-belly white and chill to the touch, the eyes were half open. Nothing moved under the hooded, translucent lids, no breath whistled past the bloodless lips onto Vanderbilt’s lowered cheek, and when he ripped the coat buttons open the narrow chest naked beneath was still.
In weariness and frustration, and something else to which he gave no name but which could have been grief, Vanderbilt expended the last of his breath in a small and bitter epitaph. “Damn you, Joel Grant—you better like dead now you got it.”
He went to get up and walk away and begin the long, depressing journey home, but his big cold clumsy body was heavy with exhaustion. He pushed himself off Grant with a hand on his bare breast. Under his palm fluttered a tiny movement that struck him momentarily rigid.
Strength came from nowhere. Before he had worked out logically that where a heartbeat lingers death has yet to occur, Vanderbilt had yanked Grant’s head back, forced his jaws apart and clamped his mouth on Grant’s mouth in a strange parody of a kiss that had everything to do with life and nothing to do with love. Counting in his head, making himself take his time, Vanderbilt pushed big steady draughts of air into Grant’s starved lungs. His chest rose under Vanderbilt’s chest. He breathed for himself and then again for Grant; and again, and again.
Finally he breathed into Grant’s lungs and Grant responded with a tiny choked cough in his mouth. Gasping, grinning, Vanderbilt rolled him onto his face and let him vomit away the bitter water into the mud. He pressed his hands against the heaving ribs under Grant’s bound arms and helped the water out. “Breathe, damn you,” he panted, rocking, letting his weight do the work; “damn you, live.”
Wound for Wound
Chapter One
By the late afternoon, with no news of any kind, the tension in the terraced house had built up to such a pitch that Liz had said she could stand it no longer, she was going out for some fresh air. She took her car. Half an hour later Will Hamlin found the letter Sellotaped to the coffee jar. It was addressed to Nathan Shola. The African read it and then said, very quietly, “She’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
Shola passed him the letter and Hamlin read.
“There’s nothing I can do here,” she had written, “except sit by the phone and dread it ringing, and fill my head with crazy pictures. So I’m going to Pretoria. If we’re right, and if the police can’t find them in time, that’s where Joel will end up. He’ll need one of us to be there.
“You wouldn’t get past Immigration, and though they might let Hamlin in they’d watch wherever he went. They won’t follow me. My papers are good, they don’t know my name and I’m the right colour. Maybe if I can find out what this is all about we can stop it.
“I won’t contact your people there unless and until direct action is the only answer; and I won’t call you unless I need your help more than I need my cover. Don’t worry, I won’t do anything rash. Mostly all I shall be doing is listening. If Vanderbilt is stopped, or if Joel is dead, I’ll come out the same way I’m going in, as a good little tourist. But if they get him as far as Pretoria he’s going to need all the help he can get, and then maybe having someone on the spot will somehow make the difference. Anyhow, I feel I have to be there.
“I know you won’t do anything crazy, like trying to stop me, or following me. You can do more for Joel’s safety, and to some extent for mine, by aiding the search here in England: remember, probably no one in the entire police force knows the Boers like you do.
“If everything works out I’ll see you in a few days. Look after yourself; but get the bastard.”
Hamlin looked up, startled, when he had finished. “Of course she’s wrong. You will stop her.”
“No,” Shola said very softly.
“Nathan, you must! There’s nothing she can do in Pretoria without putting herself at terrible risk.”
“That is her choice.”
Hamlin did not understand. There was anger in his eyes as he reached for the telephone. “I’m sorry, Nathan, but if you won’t call the police I shall. I know Grant’s your friend, but—”
Shola’s hand closed gently, immovably, over the instrument. “Joel is my friend,” he agreed quietly. “He is also Liz’s friend. I have no right to tell her what she may do for her friends, and certainly, Will, you have none. She is not our property, even by virtue of friendship. Her life and her time are in her own gift.”
“And if she winds up in a South African gaol?”
“She’ll be in good company. Most of our friends have served that apprenticeship.”
Hamlin stared at him, clearly shocked. “Hellfire, Nathan, it’s not the same. She’s—”
Shola raised a faintly sardonic eyebrow. “White? Like Joel. English—like you? A woman?” He shook his head, laughing softly. “You people have some primitive ideas; but a great sense of rhythm.”
Hamlin yielded up the phone with an explosive, frustrated gesture of his hands. “Then what are we going to do?”
“What she said. Fight.” Shola thought for a moment, then began to dial, calling the numbers out of his head. “She was right about something else. My people know the Boers: we know who they are and we watch them. There are Boers here too. If the one who has Joel needs help—a plane maybe?—that’s where he’ll turn. That’s our edge, the thing we can do that the police can’t—have someone watching all the cats to see which one jumps.”
Vanderbilt found a suitable field virtually on the helicopter’s flight path. Right on top of the hills, where there were no dwellings and the only roads were mere ribbons of fractured tarmac used exclusively, but still not very often, by farmers and forestry workers, a brake of dark conifers girdled a rough meadow. There had been a cottage there once, the tumbled walls still stood shoulder high, and the few open acres had provided the occupants with a vegetable garden, grazing for the house cow, maybe a handful of sheep. Now it was reverting to moorland, and in a few more years the Ministry of Agriculture would acquire it too, the Forestry Commission would plant it and there would be nothing left to show that people once eked out a kind of living on these hard hills but yielded at last to the temptations of supermarket shopping and church hall bingo.
At the agreed time Vanderbilt turned on the radio beacon; almost at once he heard the faint tinny throb of rotors. The sound grew rapidly but he could not see the machine until it suddenly lifted over the trees, surprisingly close and unexpectedly large. It was flying below radar, following the nap of the land. Vanderbilt switched off the beacon and showed himself. The down draught from the whipping blades cut through his dry suit to his wet body and set him shivering afresh. His overcoat was in the boot of the car.
After a brief pause there was an answering wave from the egg-shaped cabin and the monstrous bee settled towards him, head up. The wind and the proximity of the big skids forced him back a pace. The pilot grinned at him through the big Perspex window. The helicopter was a French job, in the dignified livery of a London business house—an executive runabout for people whose time was vast quantities of money, most of whom would have been horrified to know the use to which it was currently being put. Not becaus
e of the South African connection, Vanderbilt reflected sourly, since much of the money that made them worth their own sky taxi came from the mines of his homeland; nor even from outrage at the rape of a man’s liberty and all that was likely to follow it—for if Vanderbilt did not know what Pretoria wanted with Grant he was at least fairly sure it was not permitted under the Geneva Convention; but for fear that such activities could lead to disclosures that would knock whole pennies off the price of shares.
The pilot did not belong to that Nelson fellowship. A professional like Vanderbilt, he worked with his eyes open and his hands steady, confident that—even if their actions were often illegal and sometimes immoral—their existence was essential to the prevention of greater evil. If discovered they would keep their mouths shut and their fingers crossed: they would not deny all knowledge and claim to have been hoodwinked. It was a more honest form of mayhem.
Vanderbilt had known the pilot for some years. He had worked with him in Europe and once in America. He knew him only as Piet, and strongly suspected that was not his name. His occupation, which was also his cover, made him especially useful but also involved him in abnormal amounts of documentation. It was easier to hide his real identity from those who knew his involvement with Pretoria than from those on whom he relied for licences.
They exchanged a nodded greeting as the helicopter settled on the rough grass. The vibrant roar of the engine died back and the manic clatter of the rotors subsided to a whisper as they slowed to idle. The pilot swung down from the cockpit, looking round. “I thought you had a passenger for me.” His accent was ambivalent. His narrow face sheltered behind a large fair moustache. “If I’d known it was only you I’d have told you to take the train.”
“If I’d known it was you flying I’d have walked.” Vanderbilt indicated a maroon shadow under the trees at the edge of the field. “Our friend is waiting in the car.”
Piet raised a sandy eyebrow. “Is that wise? I mean, how keen can he be to go home?”
“It’s funny, that,” said Vanderbilt, “he doesn’t seem keen at all. However, the boot locks from the outside.”
The pilot nodded, moustache twitching with a grin he was trying, not too hard, to suppress. “Been giving you trouble, has he?”
From his greater height Vanderbilt fixed him with a severe eye. His expression did not flicker. “Trouble?”
Piet started to walk with him to the car but Vanderbilt waved him peremptorily to his machine. “About the time I can’t secure my own prisoner without help from a sky jockey,” he said with dignity, “I shall retire to a corner of the family farm up the Orange River and grow coffee. You get that glorified egg-whisk ready to leave and let me get on with my own job.”
The pilot turned back with a grin. As he climbed into the cabin he shouted after Vanderbilt, “I know the Orange River country. It’s rubbish.”
Vanderbilt grinned too, cheered by the meeting, mostly because it promised a quick end to the excursion but also because talking with a countryman about a place he cared about was a timely reminder of what the excursion, and all the other excursions, were for. Like De Witte, and in the same often bloody ways, he was a patriot. If he did not always like what he did, he valued what he accomplished.
Inside the big boot Vanderbilt’s big lightweight coat swaddled the folded, cramped figure of Joel Grant. It was not so much a gesture of humanitarianism by the Boer as a reflection of his mounting irritation: he had been put to too much trouble to take home a corpse, and he was worried that his own sodden coat would leach vital heat from a body already pushed to, and briefly beyond, the limits of endurance.
Grant did not move when the boot lid lifted but he was not dead, or comatose or asleep. His eyes focused on Vanderbilt, but dully, as drained of emotion as his body was sapped of strength. Vanderbilt hauled him out and set him on his feet, and draped the coat round his bare shoulders like a giant cape, and pushed him down the field towards the helicopter, its rotors idling softly in the gathering dusk, and twice picked him up when he fell.
Piet, going through his pre-flight checks as if he had not been flying the machine five minutes before, saw them coming and broke off in surprise. No one had told him Vanderbilt’s prisoner was white. It disturbed something quite fundamental to his equilibrium: like looking at a picture of two white faces that suddenly turned into a black candlestick and said meaningful things about one’s early life and struggles. In Piet’s model of the world terrorists came exclusively in the shadow shades. But there was clearly no confusion in Vanderbilt’s mind: he had his man trussed up like a chicken, his hands behind him, so that when he stumbled he could not save himself. Twice he measured his length on the wiry turf and twice Vanderbilt hauled him up, single-handed, like a bag of groceries.
As they came down to the helicopter a thought occurred to Vanderbilt. His broad bland face screwed up in a brief grimace. From inside the cabin Piet frowned a question mark at him. He shouted a reply, but the whistling wittering of the circling blades drowned out his voice. The pilot dropped to the ground. “What?”
“That electronic gismo,” mouthed Vanderbilt. “I suppose we should take it with us?”
“The beacon? Christ, yes.” Piet nodded vigorously. “They trace where those things are made, they’re getting a little close to home. Where did you leave it?”
“In the car.” Vanderbilt sighed. “Watch him for me, I’ll go get it. No, watch him,” he added forcefully as Piet turned back to his machine. “He’s sneaky.”
The pilot humoured him. “I’ll watch, I’ll watch.” He smiled: an easy, confident, handsome, invulnerable young man’s smile. Vanderbilt wished he could warn him—not against Grant, who was a spent force, but against feeling that confident in a line of business as likely to drop one in it as this was. But Piet, though younger than Vanderbilt, was still old enough and experienced enough to know the rules. Perhaps it took confidence to regularly trust one’s life to a machine kept improbably aloft by a screw and a theory. Thinking that Vanderbilt cast a suspicious glance at the rotor, but it was way above his head, out of reach for even an athletic suicide. He turned away and headed back up the hill. After a moment, largely to show he could, he broke into a jog.
Joel Grant said, “I’ll make it worth your while to help me.” His voice was low and breathy, unenlivened by much hope.
The pilot eyed him with curiosity and dislike. “Get in.”
“They’re going to kill me. If that mad bastard gets me back to Pretoria, they’ll kill me slowly.”
“I think you’re confusing me with someone who cares.”
Grant’s head rocked back and he laughed. There was not, in truth, much humour in it, it had a hollow graveyard ring, but from a man in his position it was undeniably impressive. It impressed Piet. It also disguised the fact that Grant was subtly shifting his position relative to the helicopter.
Vanderbilt had thought of danger and looked up. Grant, more cunning or perhaps only more needy, saw another weapon. He was not sure what would happen when he tried to use it, only what would happen if he did not. It would be difficult: the projection of a stabilizer from the tapering fuselage made the angle critical. But he would contrive a way of using it—if not on the pilot, then on himself. One way or another, unless Vanderbilt got psychic and turned back now, one of them was going to take a dive into the tail rotor.
He backed away: away from the open door, but more importantly towards the rear of the machine. “I’m not getting in that plane.” He let his voice run up thin and ready, as if with fear. It required almost no acting at all. Stumbling backwards he waited until he was behind the guarding fin, then deliberately turned one ankle under him. The ground came up to hit him again and he accepted the blow with resignation.
The pilot moved towards him automatically. “Get up, for Christ’s sake.” Grant rolled clumsily onto his face, leaving Vanderbilt’s heavy coat behind, and got his knees under him. He hauled his body upright with muscles he did not know he had, and then he waited.
Vanderbilt may have been a little psychic, for he turned then and looked back down the hill. He saw Grant kneeling, head bowed, in the grass and Piet moving towards him. It was a big field, from halfway up the hill the figures looked like dolls; even the big machine looked like a toy. For a moment, frowning, he studied what they were doing, down where the shadows were gathering.
Before he was aware of having solved the puzzle he was running, driving down the hill as fast as his strong legs could push his big body, mouth agape with a shout the slipstream threw back in his throat, a warning that had no chance of reaching its mark and which would anyway have been too late.
When the pilot was between him and the rotor Grant launched himself from his crouch like a hundred-metre runner from his blocks. The crown of his head pitched into the pit of Piet’s stomach with a force that drove all the wind out of him in a surprised grunt. He staggered back, folding, but Grant kept coming, hands tied back and head low, still pushing hard, so that their two bodies described an attenuated parabola, a seemingly endless fall.
Vanderbilt, watching spellbound even as he ran, could not believe that reality could be so long suspended as to allow it. The pilot had to fall, or Grant to weaken, or one of them to realize the enormity of what was happening. It was too improbable, too bizarre: like watching a crazy old man weaving magic with a couple of sticks only to have the magic confirmed by a shovelful of wet sand.
The long fall and Vanderbilt’s certainty that the laws of physics would intervene in time ended together with a shrill clatter and a thump.
Grant lay face down in the grass, still except for the heaving of his shoulders over his labouring lungs.
The damaged rotor had gone on turning until the bent ends had hacked enough from their tips and from the skin of the tail that they could turn freely and without screaming once more.
