Leopard Hunts in Darkness b-4

by Wilbur A. Smith

  They were using full strokes from high above the head, and raining blows on the man's back and shoulders and buttocks. The photograph had been captioned "Zimbabwe Police interrogate suspect in attempt to learn whereabouts of American and British tourists abducted as hostages by Matabele dissidents'. There had been no photographs of what they did to the Matabele girls.

  "Perhaps the government troops were looking for the hostages which you admit you seized," Craig pointed out tartly. "A little while ago you would have been quite happy to kill me or take me hostage as well." "The Shana began this business long before we took our first hostage," Lookout shot back at him.

  "But you are taking innocent hostages," Craig insisted.

  "Shooting white fame6-- "What else can *e do to make people understand what is happening to' our people? We have very few leaders who have not been imprisoned or silenced, and even they are powerless. We have no weapons except these few we have managed to hide, we have no powerful friends, while the Shana have Chinese and British and American allies. We have no money to continue the struggle and they have all the wealth of the land and millions of dollars of aid from these powerful friends. What else can we do to make the world understand what is happening to us?" Craig decided prudently that this was neither the time nor the place to offer a lecture on political morality. and then he thought wryly, "Perhaps my morality is oldfashioned, anyway." There was a new political expediency in international affairs that had become acceptable: the right of impotent and voiceless minorities to draw violent attention to their own plight. From the Palestinians and the Basque separatists to the bombers from Northern Ireland blowing young British guardsmen and horses to bloody tatters in a London street, there was a new morality abroad. With these examples before them, and from their own experience of successfully bringing about political change by violence, these young men were children of the new morality.

  Though Craig could never bring himself to condone these methods, not if he lived a hundred years, yet he found himself in grudging sympathy with their plight and their aspirations. There had always been a strange and sometimes bloody bond between Craig's family and the Matabele. A tradition of respect and understanding for a people who were fine friends and enemies to be wary of, an aristocratic, proud and warlike race that deserved better than they were now receiving.

  There was an elitist streak in Craig's make-up that hated to see a Gulliver rendered impotent by Lilliputians.

  He loathed the politics of envy and the viciousness of socialism which, he felt, sought to strike down the heroes and reduce every exceptional man to the common greyness of the pack, to replace true leadership with the oafish mumblings of trade-union louts, to emasculate all initiative by punitive tax schemes and then gradually to shepherd a numbed and compliant populace into the barbed-wire enclosure of Marxist totalitarianism.

  These men were terrorists certainly. Craig grinned.

  Robin Hood was also a terrorist but at least he had some style and a little class.

  "Will you see Comrade Tungata?" they demanded with almost pitiful eagerness.

  "Yes. I will see him soon."

  "Tell him we are here. Tell him we are ready and waiting." Craig nodded. "I will tell him." They walked back with him to where he had left the Volkswagen, and Comrade Dollar insisted on carrying Craig's pack. When they reached the dusty and slightly battered VW, they piled into it with AK 47 barrels protruding from three windows.

  "We will go with you," Lookout explained, "as far as the main Victoria Falls Road, for if you should meet another of our patrols when you are alone, it might go hard for you.) They reached the macadamized Great North Road well after darkness had fallen. Craig stripped his pack and gave them what remained of his rations and the dregs of the whisky. He had two hundred dollars in his wallet and he added that to the booty. Then they shook hands.

  "Tell Comrade Tungata we need weapons, "said Dollar.

  "Tell him that, more than weapons, we need a leader." Comrade Lookout gave Craig the special grip of thumb and palm reserved for trusted friends. "Go in peace, Kuphela," he said. "Mat the leg that walks alone carry you far and swiftly." 4 "Stay in peace, "my friend, "Craig told him.

  "No, Kuphela, rather wish me bloody war!" Lookout's scarred visage twisted into a dreadful grin in the reflected headlights.

  When Craig looked back, they had disappeared into the darkness as silently as hunting leopards.

  -, 4-A

  wouldn't have taken any bets about seeing you again," Jock Daniels greeted Craig when he walked into the auctioneer's office the next morning. "Did you make it up to the Chizarira or did good sense get the better of you?" I'm still alive, aren't ! Craig evaded the direct question.

  "Good boy, "Jock nodded. "No sense messing with those Matabele shufta bandits the lot of them."

  "Did you hear from Zarich?" Jock shook his head. "Only sent the telex at nine o'clock local time. They are an hour behind us."

  "Can I use your telephone? A few private calls?"

  "Local? I don't want you chatting up your birds in New York at my expense."

  "Of course."

  "Right as long as you mind the shop for me, while I'm out." Craig installed himself at Jock's desk, and consulted the cryptic notes that he had made from Henry Pickering's file.

  His first call was to the American Embassy in Harare, the capital three hundred miles north-east of Bulawayo.

  "Mr. Morgan Oxford, your cultural attache, please," he asked the operator.

  "Oxford." The accent was crisp Boston and Ivy League.

  "Craig Mellow. A mutual friend asked me to call you and give you his regards."

  "Yes, I was expecting you. Won't you come in here any time and say hello?"

  "I'd enjoy that," Craig told him, and hung up.

  Henry Pickering was as good as his word. Any message handed to Oxford would go out in the diplomatic bag, and be on Pickering's desk within twelve hours.

  His next call was to the office of the minister of tourism and information, and he finally got through to the minister's secretary. Her attitude changed to warm co-operation when he spoke to her in Sindebele.

  "The comrade minister is in Harare for the sitting of Parliament," she told him, and gave Craig his private number at the House.

  Craig got through to a parliamentary secretary on his fourth attempt. The telephone system had slowly begun deteriorating, he noticed. The blight of all developing countries was lack of skilled artisans; prior to independence all linesmen had been white, and since then most of them had taken the gap.

  This secretary was Mashona and insisted on speaking English as proof of her sophistication.

  "Kindly state the nature of the business to be discussed." She was obviously reading from a printed form.

  "Personal. I am acquainted with the comrade minister."

  "Ah yes. P-e-r-s-o-n-n-e-l." The secretary spelled it out laboriously as she wrote it.

  "No that's p-e-r-s-o-n-a-I," Craig corrected her patiently. He was beginning to adjust to the pace of Africa again.

  "I will consult the comrade minister's schedule. You will be obliged to telephone again." Craig consulted his list. Next was the government registrar of companies, and this time he was lucky. He was put through to an efficiiInt and helpful clerk who made a note of his requirem%nts.

  "The Share Register, Articles and Memorandum of Association of the company trading as Rholands Ltd, formerly known as Rhodesian Lands and Mining Ltd." He heard the disapproval in the clerk's tone of voice. "Rhodesian" was a dirty word nowadays, and Craig made a mental resolution to change the company's name, if ever he had the power to do so. "Zimlands" would sound a lot better to an African ear.

  "I will have Roneoed copies ready for you to collect by four o'clock," the clerk assured him. "The search fee will be fifteen dollars." Craig's next call was to the surveyor general's office, and again he arranged for copies of documents this time the titles to the company properties the ranches King's Lynn, Queen's Lynn and the Chizarira
estates.

  Then there were fourteen other names on his list, all of whom had been ranching in Matabeleland when he left, close neighbours and friends of his family, those that grandpa Bawu had trusted and liked.

  Of the fourteen he could contact only four, the others had all sold up and taken the long road southwards. The remaining families sounded genuinely pleased to hear from him. "Welcome back, Craig. We have all read the book and watched it on TV." But they clammed up immediately he started asking questions. "Damned telephone leaks likea sieve," said one of them. "Come out to the ranch for dinner.

  Stay the night. Always a bed for you, Craig. Lord knows, there aren't so many of the old faces around any more." Jock Daniels returned in the middle of the afternoon, red-faced and sweating. "Still burning up my telephone?" he growled. "Wonder if the bottle store has another bottle of that Dimple Haig." Craig responded to this subtlety by crossing the road and bringing back the pinch bottle in a brown paper bag

  "I forgot that you have to have a cast-iron liver to live in this country." He unscrewed the cap and dropped it into the waste-paper basket.

  At ten minutes to five o'clock he telephoned the minister's parliamentary office again.

  "The Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe has graciously consented to meet you at ten o'clock on Friday morning.

  He can allow you twenty minutes."

  "Please convey my sincere thanks to the minister." That gave Craig three days to kill and meant he would have to drive the three hundred miles to Harare.

  "No reply from Zurich?" He sweetened Jock's glass.

  "If you made me an offer like that, I wouldn't bother to answer either," Jock grumped, as he took the bottle from Craig's hand and added a little more to the glass.

  Over the next few days Craig availed himself of the invitations to visit Bawu's old friends, and was smothered with traditional old Rhodesian hospitality.

  "Of course, you can't get all the luxuries Crosse and Blackwell jams, or Bronriley soap any more," one of his hostesses explained as she piled his plate with rich fare, "but somehow it's fun making do." And she signalled the white-robed table servant to refill the silver dish with baked sweet potatoes.

  He spent the days with darkly tanned, slow-speaking men in wide-brimmed felt hats and short khaki trousers, examining their sleek fat cattle from the passenger seat of an open Land-Rover.

  "You still can't beat Matabeleland beef," they told him proudly. "Sweetest grass in the whole world. Of course, we have to send it all out through South Africa, but the prices are damned good. Glad I didn't run for it. Heard from old Derek Sanders in New Zealand, working as a hired hand on a sheep station now and a bloody tough life too. No Matabele to do the dirtV'work over there." He looked at hi black herders with paternal affection.

  "They are just the same, under all the political claptrap.

  Salt of the bloody earth, my boy. My people, I feel that they are all family, glad I didn't desert them."

  "Of course, there are problems," another of his hosts told him. "Foreign exchange is murder difficult to get tractor spares, and medicine for the stock but Mugabe's government is starting to wake up. As food-producers we are getting priority on import permits for essentials. Of course, the telephones only work when they do and the trains don't run on time any longer. There is rampant inflation, but the beef prices keep in step with it. They have opened the schools, but we send the kids down south across the border so they get a decent education."

  "And the politics?" "That's between black and black. Matabele and Mashona. The white man's out of it, thank God. Let the bastards tear each other to pieces if they want to. I keep my nose clean, and it's not a bad life not like the old days, of course, but then it never is, is it?"

  "Would you buy more land?"

  "Haven't got the money, old boy."

  "But if you did have?" The rancher rubbed his nose thoughtfully. "Perhaps a man could make an absolute mint one day if the country comes right, land prices what they are at the moment or he could lose the lot if it goes the other way."

  "You could say the same of the stock exchange, but in the meantime it's a good life?"

  "It's a good life and, hell, I was weaned on Zambezi waters. I don't reckon I would be happy breathing London smog or swatting flies in the Australian outback." On Thursday morning Craig drove back to the motel, picked up his laundry, repacked his single canvas holdall, paid his bill and checked out.

  He called at Jock's office. "Still no news from Zarich?"

  "Telex came in an hour ago." Jock handed him the flimsy, and Craig scanned it swiftly.

  "Will grant your client thirty-day option to purchase all Rholands company paid-up shares for one half million US dollars payable Zurich in full on signature. No further offers countenanced." They did not come more final than that.

  Bawu had said double your estimate, and so far he had it right.

  Jock was watching his face. "Double your original offer," he pointed out. "Can you swing half a million?"

  "I'll have to talk to my rich uncle," Craig teased him.

  "And anyway I've got thirty days. I'll be back before then." "Where can I reach you? "Jock asked.

  "Don't call me. I'll call you." He begged another tankful from Jock's private stock and took the Volkswagen out on the road to the north-east, towards Mashonaland and Harare and ran into the first road-block ten miles out of town.

  "Almost like the old days," he thought, as he climbed down onto the verge. Two black troopers in camouflage battle-smocks searched the Volkswagen for weapons with painstaking deliberation, while a lieutenant with the cap, badge of the Korean-trained Third Brigade examined his passport.

  Once again Craig rejoiced in the family tradition whereby all the expectant mothers in his family, on both the Mellow and Ballantyne side, had been sent home to England for the event. That little blue booklet with the gold lion and unicorn" and Honi Soit Qui Nil y Pense printed on the cover still demanded a certain deference even at a Third Brigade road-block.

  It was late afternoon when he crested the line of low hills and looked down on the little huddle of skyscrapers that rose so incongruoutfy out of the African veld, like headstones to the belief in the immortality of the British Empire.

  The city that had once borne the name of Lord Salisbury, the foreign secretary who had negotiated the Royal Charter of the British South Africa Company, had reverted to the name Harare after the original Shana chieftain whose cluster of mud and thatch huts the white pioneers had found on the site in September 1890 when they finally completed the long trek up from the south.

  The streets also had changed their names from those commemorating the white pioneers and Victoria's empire to those of the sons of the black revolution and its allies 4a street by any other name' Craig resigned himself.

  Once he entered the city he found there was a boom town atmosphere.

  The pavements thronged with noisy black crowds and the foyer of the modern sixteen-storied Monomatapa Hotel resounding to twenty different languages and accents, as tourists jostled visiting bankers and businessmen, foreign dignitaries, civil servants and military advisers.

  There was no vacancy for Craig until he spoke to an assistant manager who had seen the T! production and read the book. Then Craig was ushered up to a room on the fifteenth floor with a view over the park. While he was in his bath, a procession of waiters arrived bearing flowers and baskets of fruit and a complimentary bottle of South African champagne. He worked until after midnight on his report to Henry Pickering, and was at the parliament buildings in Causeway by nine-thirty the next morning.