Leopard Hunts in Darkness b-4

by Wilbur A. Smith

  "The Zimbabwe government has expelled all foreign journalists from Matabeleland. The British High Commission has called upon the prime minister of Zimbabwe to express Her Majesty's government's deep concern at the reports of atrocities being committed by security forces-" Craig switched to Radio South Africa, and it came through sharp and clear' the arrival of hundreds of illegal refugees across the northern border from Zimbabwe. The refugees are all members of the Matabele tribe. A spokesman for one group described a massacre of villagers and civilians that he had witnessed. "They are killing everybody," he said. "The women and the children, even the chickens and the goats." Another refugee said, "Do not s end us back. The soldiers will kill us."" Craig searched the bands and found the Voice of America.

  "The leader of the ZAPU party, the Matabele faction of Zimbabwe, Mr. Joshua Nkomo, has arrived in the neighbouring state of Botswana after fleeing the country. "They shot my driver dead," he told our regional reporter.

  "Mugabe wants me dead. He's out to get me."

  "With the recent imprisonment and detention of all other prominent members of the ZAPU party, Mr. Nkomo's departure from Zimbabwe leaves the Matabele people without a leader or a spokesman.

  "In the meantime, the government of Mr. Robert Mugabe has placed a total news blackout over the western part of the country, all foreign journalists have been expelled, and a request by the international Red Cross to send in observers has been refused."

  "It's all so familiar," Craig muttered. "I even have the same sick feeling in the bottom of my stomach as I listen to it." he Monday was Sally-Anne's birthday. After breakfast, they drove across to Queen's Lynn together to fetch her present. Craig had left it in the care of Mrs. Groenqvald, the overseer's wife, to preserve the secrecy and surp4ise.

  "Oh, Craig, it's beautiful."

  "Now you have two of us to keep you at King's Lynn," he told her.

  Sally-Anne lifted the honey-coloured puppy in both hands and kissed his wet nose, and the puppy licked her back.

  "He's a Rhodesian lion dog," Craig told her, "or now I suppose you'd call him a Zimbabwean lion dog." The puppy's skin was too big for him. It hung down in His back was crested in the distinctive ridge of his breed.

  wrinkles over his forehead that gave him a worried frown.

  "Look at his paws!" Sally-Anne cried. "He's going to be a monster. What shall I call him?" Craig declared a public holiday to mark the occasion of Sally-Anne's birth. They took the puppy and a picnic lunch down to the main dam below the homestead, and lay on a rug under the trees at the water's edge, and tried to find a name for the puppy. Sally-Anne vetoed Craig's suggested "Do"-.

  The black-faced weaver birds fluttered and shrieked and hung upside-down from the basket-shaped nests above their heads, and Joseph had put a cold bottle of white wine in the basket. The puppy chased grasshoppers until he collapsed exhausted on the rug beside Sally-Anne.

  They finished the wine, and when they made love on the rug, Sally-Anne whispered seriously, "Shh! Don't wake the PUPPY!" They drove back up the hills and Sally-Anne said suddenly, "We haven't spoken about the troubles all day."

  "Don't let's spoil our record."

  "I'm going to call him Buster." 419MYP "The first puppy I was ever given I called Buster." They gave Buster his supper in the bowl labelled "Dog" Craig had bought for him, and then made a bed in an empty wine crate near the Ago stove.

  They were both happily tired and that evening left the book and the photographs and went to bed immediately after their own meal.

  raig woke to the sound of gun-fire. His residual war eflexes hurled him from the bed before he was fully awake. It was automatic rifle-fire, short bursts, ve lose, he noted instinctively, short bursts meant good, trained riflemen. They were down by the farm village, or the workshop. He judged the distance.

  He found his leg and clinched the strap, fully awake now, and his first thought was for Sally-Anne. Keeping low, beneath the sill level of the windows, he rolled back to the bed and dragged her down beside him.

  She was naked, and muzzy with sleep.

  "What is it?"

  "Here," he whipped her gown off the foot of the bed.

  "Get dressed, but keep down." While she shrugged into the gown, he was trying to marshal his thoughts. There were no weapons in the house, except the kitchen knives and a small hand axe for chopping firewood on the back veranda. There was no sandbagged fallback position, no defensive perimeter of wire and floodlights, no radio transmitter none of even the most elementary -de fences with which every farm homestead had once been provided.

  Another burst of rifle, fire and somebody screamed a woman the faint scream abruptly cut off.

  "What's happening? Who are they?" Sally-Anne's voice was level and crisp. She was awake and unafraid. He felt a little lift of pride for her. re they dissidents?"

  "I don't know, but we aren't going to wait around to find out," he told her grimly.

  He glanced up at the new highly inflammable thatch overhead. Their best chance was to get out of the house and into the bush. To do that, they needed a diversion.

  "Stay here," he ordered. "Get your shoes on and be ready to run. I'll be back in a minute." He rolled under the window to the wall, and came to his feet. The bedroom door was unlocked and he darted into the passage. He wasted ten seconds on the telephone J. he knew they would have cut the wires, and that was confirmed immediately by the dead echoless void in the earpiece. He dropped it dangling on the cord and ran through to the kitchens.

  Hi There was only one diversion he could think of light.

  I!;.

  He hit the remote-control switch of the diesel generator, and there was the faint ripple of sound from the engine room across the yard and the overhead bulbs glowed yellow and then flared into full brilliance. He tore open the fuse box above the control-board, tripped out the house-lights, and then switched on the veranda and front garden lights.

  h That would leave the back of the house in darkness. They would make their break that way, he decided, and it would have to be quick. The attackers hadn't hit the house yet, but they could only be seconds away.

  He ran back out of the kitchen, paused at the door of the lounge, and glanced through it to check the lighting in the front garden and veranda. The lawns were a peculiarly lush green in the artificial light, the jacaranda trees domed over them like the roof of a cathedral. The firing had ceased, but down near the labourers" village a woman was keening, that doleful sound of African mourning- It made his skin creep.

  Craig knew that they would be coming up the hill already, and he was turning away to go back to Sally-Anne when he caught the flicker of movement at the edge of the light and he narrowed his eyes and tried to identify it. To know who was attacking would give him some small advantage, but he was wasting precious seconds.

  The movement was a running man, coming up towards the house. A black man, naked no, he was wearing a loin-cloth. Not really running, but staggering and weaving !I! drunkenly. In the veranda lights half his body glinted as I.4 though it had been freshly oiled, and then Craig realized R that it was blood. The man was painted with his own blood, and it was falling in scattered drops from him like water from the coat of a retriever when it comes ashore with the duck in its jaws.

  Then a more intense shock of horror. Craig realized that it was old Shadrach, and unthinkingly went to help him. He kicked open the french doors of the lounge, went out onto the veranda at a run, and vaulted the low half wall He caught Shadrach in his arms just as he was about to fall, and lifted him off his feet. He was surprised at how light was the old man's body. Craig carried him at a single bound onto the veranda and crouched with him below the low wall.

  Shadrach had been hit in the upper arm, just above the elbow. The bone had shattered, and the limb hung by a ribbon of flesh. Shadrach held it to his breast likea nursing infant.

  "They are coming," he gasped at Craig. "You must run.

  They are killing our people, they will kill you also." It was mirac
ulous that the old man could speak, let alone move and run with such a wound. Crouching below the wall he ripped a strip of cotton from his loincloth with his teeth and started to bind it around his own arm above the wound. Craig pushed his hand away and tied the knot for him.

  "You must run, little master," and before Craig could prevent him, the old man rolled to his feet and disappeared into the darkness beyond-4he floodlights.

  "He risked his Iifeao warn. me." Craig looked after him for a second, and then roused himself and, doubled over, ran back into the house.

  Sally-Anne was where he had left her, crouched below the window. Light fell through it in a yellow square, and he saw that she had tied back her hair and pulled on a T-shirt and shorts, and was lacing her soft, leather, training shoes.

  "Good girl." He knelt beside her. "Let's go."

  F 11111

  "Buster," she replied. "My puppy!"

  "For God's sake!"

  "We can't leave him!" She had that stubborn took that he had already come to know so well.

  "I'll carry you if I have to," he warned fiercely, and raising himself quickly he risked a last glance over the window-sill.

  The lawns and gardens were still brightly lit. There were the dark shapes of men coming up from the valley, armed men in disciplined extended order. For a moment he could not believe what he was seeing, and then he sagged with relief.

  "Oh, thank you, God!" he whispered. He found that reaction had set in already. He felt weak and shivery, and he took Sally' Anne in his arms and hugged her.

  "It's all right now," he told her. "It's going to be all right." "What has happened?"

  "The security forces have arrived," he said. He had recognized the burgundy-coloured berets and silver cap badges of the men closing in across the lawns. "The Third Brigade is here we will be all right now." They went out onto the front veranda to greet their rescuers, Sally-Anne carrying the yellow puppy in her arms, and Craig with his arm about her shoulders.

  "I am very glad to see you and your men, Sergeant," Craig greeted the noncommissioned officer who led the advancing line of troopers.

  "Please go inside." The sergeant made a gesture with his rifle, imperative if, not directly threatening. He was a tall man, with long sinewy limbs, his expression was cold and neutral, and Craig felt his relief shrink. Something was wrong. The line of troopers had closed likea net around the homestead, while skirmishers came forward in pairs, covering each other, the classical tactics of the street fighter , and they went swiftly into the house, breaking through windows and side doors, sweeping the interior.

  There was a crash of breaking glass at the rear of the house.

  It was a destructive search.

  "What's going on, Sergeant?" Craig's anger resurfaced, and this time the tall sergeant's gesture was unmistakably hostile.

  Craig and Sally-Anne backed off before him into the dining-room and stood in the centre of the room beside the teak refectory table, facing the threatening rifle, Craig holding her protectively.

  Two troopers slipped in through the front door, and reported to the sergeant in a gabble of Shana that Craig could not follow. The sergeant acknowledged with a nod and gave them an order. They spread out obediently along the wall, their weapons turned unmistakably onto the dishevelled couple in the centre of the room.

  "VAlere are the lights?" the sergeant asked, and when Craig told him, he went to the switch and white light flooded the room.

  "What is going on here, Sergeant?" Craig repeated, angry and uncertain and starting to be afraid for Sally-Anne again.

  The sergeant ignored the question, and strode to the door. He called to one of the troopers on the lawn, and the man came at a run. He carried a portable radio transmitter strapped on his back, with the scorpion-tail aerial sticking up over his shoulder. The sergeant spoke softly into the handset ai' the radio and then came back into the room. 0 now in an unm They waited oving tableau. To Craig it seemed like an hour passed in silence, but it was less than five minutes before the sergeant cocked his head slightly, listening. Craig heard it, the beat of an engine, in a different tempo from that of the diesel generator. It firmed, and Craig knew that it was a Land-Rover.

  It came up the driveway, headlights swept the windows, brakes squeaked and gravel crunched. The engine was cut, doors banged and then there were the footsteps of a group of men crossing the veranda.

  General Peter Fungabera led his staff in through the french doors.

  He wore his beret pulled down over one eye and a matching silk scarf at his throat. Except for the pistol in its webbing holster at his side, he was armed only with the leather-covered swagger, stick

  Behind him Captain Nbebi was tall and round shouldered his eyes inscrutable behind the steel-rimmed spectacles. He carried a leather map-case in his hand, and a machine pistol on a sling over his shoulder.

  "Peter!" Craig's relief was tempered by wariness. It was all too contrived, too controlled, too menacing. "Some of my people have been killed. My induna is out there somewhere, badly wounded."

  "There have been many enemy casualties," Peter Fungabera nodded.

  Enemy? "Craig was puzzled.

  "Dissidents," Peter nodded again. "Matabele dissidents." "Dissidents?"

  Craig stared at him. "Shadrach a dissident?

  That's crazy he's a simple, uneducated cattleman, and doesn't give a darrin for politics-"

  "Things are often not what they seem." Peter Fungabera pulled back the chair at the head of the long table and placed one foot on it, leaning an elbow on his knee. Timon Nbebi placed the leather map-case on the table in front of him and stood back, in a position of guard behind his shoulder, holding the machine pistol by the grip.

  "Will somebody please tell me what in the hell is happening here, Peter?" Craig was exasperated and nervous.

  "Somebody attacked my village they've killed some of my people. God alone knows how many why don't you get after them?"

  "The shooting is over," Peter Fungabera told him. "We have cleaned out the vipers" nest of traitors that you were breeding on this colonial-style estate of yours."

  "What on earth are you talking about?" Craig was now truly flustered. "You cannot be serious!"

  "Serious?" Peter smiled easily. He straightened up and placed both feet back on the floor. He walked across to face them. "A puppy, "he was still smiling. "How adorable." He took Buster from Sally-Anne's arms before she realized his intentions. He strolled back to the head of the table, fondling the little animal, scratching behind its ear.

  it was still half-asleep and it made little whimpering sounds, nuzzling against him, instinctively searching for its mother's teat.

  "Serious?" Peter repeated the original question. "I want to impress upon you just how serious I am." He dropped the puppy onto the stone-flagged floor. It fell on its back, and lay stunned. He placed his boot upon its chest and crushed it with his full weight. The puppy screamed once only as its chest collapsed.

  "That is how serious I am." He was no longer smiling.

  "Your lives are as valuable to me as this animal was." Sally-Anne made a small moaning sound and turned away, burying her face. in Craig's chest. She heaved with nausea, and Craig could feel her fighting to control it.

  Peter Fungabera kicked the soft yellow corpse into the fireplace and sat down.

  "We have wasted enough time on the theatricals," he said, and opened the leather map-case, spreading the documents on the table t front of him.