Leopard Hunts in Darkness b-4

by Wilbur A. Smith

  "My name is Sally' Anne Sarah." Sarah smiled softly in acknowledgement. "I wasn't sure if you would want to see me again, not after the trial. But then my friends here told me how you had been ill-treated by Fungabera's soldiers. I thought you might have realized that I was right all along, that Tungata Zebiwe was not a criminal and that he needs friends now." She turned towards Craig. "He was your friend, Mr. Mellow. He told me Rout you. He spoke of you with respect and great feeling. He was afraid for you, when he heard that you had returned to Zimbabwe. He realized that you wanted to take up your family land in Matabeleland, and he knew there were going to be terrible troubles and that you would be caught up in them. He said that you were too gentle for the hard times that were coming. He called you "Pupho", the dreamer, the gentle dreamer, but he said that you were also stubborn and obstinate. He wanted to save you from being hurt again. He said, "Last time he lost his leg this time he could lose his life. To be his friend, I must make myself his enemy. I must drive him out of Zimbabwe."

  it Craig sat in the sttaight-backed wooden chair and remembered his stormy meeting with Tungata when he had come to him for assistance in acquiring King's Lynn.

  Had it been an act, then? Even now he found that hard tory so believe. Tungata's passion had been so real, his fit convincing.

  41 am sorry, Mr. Mellow. These are very rude things that I am saying about you. I am telling you only what Tungata said. He was your friend. He still is your friend."

  "It doesn't really matter any more, what he thought of me, "Craig murmured. "Sam is probably dead by now."

  "No!" For the first time Sarah raised her voice, her tone vehement, almost angry. "No, do not say that, never said that! He is alive. I have seen and spoken to him. They can never kill a man like thad" The chair creaked under Craig as he leaned forward eagerly. "You have seen him? When?"

  "Two weeks ago."

  "Where? Where was he?"

  "Tuti at the camp."

  "Sam alive!" Craig changed as he said it. TIte despondent slump of his shoulders squared out, he held his head at more alert angle and his eyes were brighter, more eager.

  He wasn t really looking at Sarah. He was looking at the wall above her head, trying to marshal the torrent of emotions and ideas that came at him, so he did not see that Sarah was weeping.

  It was Sally-Anne who put a protective and comforting arm about her, and Sarah sobbed. "Oh, my lord Tungata.

  The things they have done to him. They have starved and beaten him. He is likea village cur, all bones and scars.

  He walks likea very old man, only his eyes are still proud." Sally-Anne hugged her wordlessly. Craig jumped up from the chair and began to pace. The room was so small, he crossed it in four strides, turned and came back. Sally Anne dug in her pocket and found a crumpled tissue for Sarah.

  "When will the Cessna be ready?" Craig asked, without pausing in his stride. His artificial leg made a tiny click each time he swung it forward.

  "It's been ready since last week. I told you, didn't ! Sally-Anne replied distractedly, fussing over Sarah.

  "What is her all-up capacity?"

  "The Cessna? I've had six adults in her, but that was a squeeze. She's licensed for-" Sally' Anne stopped. Slowly her head turned from Sarah towards him and she stared at him in total disbelief.

  "In the love of all that's holy, Craig, are you out of your mind?" "Range fully loaded?" Craig ignored the question.

  "Twelve hundred nautical miles, throttle setting for maximum endurance but you can't be serious."

  "Okay." Craig was thinking aloud. "I can get a couple of drums in the Land-Rover. You can land and refuel on a pan right on the border I know a spot near Panda Matengal five hundred kilometres north of here. That is the closest point of entry-"

  "Craig, do you know what they'd do if they caught us?" Sally-Anne's voice was husky with shock.

  Sarah had the tiss& over her nose, but her eyes swivelled between thL* two of them as they spoke.

  "Weapons," Cra I ig muttered. "We'd need arms. Morgan Oxford? No, damn it, he's written us off."

  "Guns?" Sarah's voice was muffled by tears and tissue.

  "Guns and grenades," Craig agreed. "Explosives, whatever we can get."

  "I can get guns. Some of our people have escaped. They are here in Botswana. They had guns hidden in the bush from the war."

  "What kind? "Craig demanded.

  "Banana guns and hand grenades."

  "AKs," Craig rejoiced. "Sarah, you are a star."

  "Just the two of us?" Sally-Anne paled as she realized th at he truly meant it. "Two of us, against the entire Third Brigade is that what you are thinking about?" A "No, I'm coming with you." Sarah put aside the tissue.

  "There will be three of us."

  "Three of us, gread" said Sally-Anne.

  "Three of us bloody marvelous!" ack and stood in front of them.

  Craig came b "Number one: we are going to draw up a map of Tuti camp. We are going to put down every detail we can remember." He started pacing again, unable to stand still.

  "Number two: we meet with Sarahs friends and see how much help they can give us. Number dime: Sally-Anne takes the commercial flight down to Johannesburg and brings back the Cessna how long will that takeP 11 can be back in three days." Colour was coming back into Sally-Anne's cheeks. "That's if I decide to gaP okay! Fine!" Craig rubbed his hands together. "Now we M can start on the map." Craig ordered sandwiches and a bottle of w me to be sen t to the room and they worked through until 2 am.

  when Sarah left them with a promise to return at breakfast time. Craig folded the map carefully and then he and Sally-Anne climbed into one of the narrow beds together, but they were so keyed up that neither of them could sleep.

  "Sam was trying to protect me," Craig marvelled. "He was doing it for me, all along."

  "Tell me about him," Sally-Anne whispered and she lay against his chest and listened to him talk of their friendship. When at last he fell silent, she asked softly, "So you are serious about this thing?"

  "Deadly serious, but will you do it with me?"

  "It's crazy," she said. "It's plain dumb but let's do it then." he sooty black smoke from the beacon fires of oil rags that Craig had set climbed straight up in two columns into the clear desert sky. Craig and Sarah stood together on the bonnet of the Land' Rover staring into the south. This was the dry wild land of northeastern Botswana. The Zimbabwe border was thirty kilometres east of them, the flat and plain between pimpled with camel.

  thorn trees and blotched with the leprous white salt pans

  The mirage shimmered and tricked the eye so that the stunted trees on the far side of the pan seemed to swim and change shape like dark amoeba under a microscope. A spinning dust devil jumped up from the white pan surface, and swirled and swayed sinuously as a belly dancer, rising two hundred feet into the hot air until it collapsed again as suddenly as it had risen.

  The sound of the Cessna engine rose and fell and rose again on the heat-flawed air. "There!" Sarah pointed out the mosquito speck, low on the horizon.

  Craig made a last anxious appraisal of his makeshift landing, strip He had lit the beacon fires at each end of it as soon as they had pick el tip the first throb of the Cessna's motor. He had driven the Land-Rover back and forth between the beacons to mark the hard crust at the edge of the pan. Fifty metres out, the surface was treacherously soft.

  Now he looked back at the approaching aircraft. Sally Anne was banking low over the baobab trees, lining up with the strip he had set out for her. She made a prudent precautionary pass along it, her head twisted in the cockpit window as she examined it, then she came around again and touched down lightly, and taxied towards the Land Rover.

  "You were gone for ever." Craig seized her as she jumped down from the cockpit.

  "Three days," she protested with her feet off the ground.

  "That's for ever, "he said and kissed her.

  He set her down but kept one arm around her as he led her to the Land-Rover. After
she had greeted Sarah, Craig introduced her to the two Matabele who were squatting in the shade of the Land-Rover.

  They rose courteously to meet her.

  "This is Jonas, and this is Aaron. They led us to the arms cache and they are giving us all the help they can." They were reserved and unsmiling young men with old eyes that had seen unspeakable things, but they were willing and quick.

  They pumped the Avgas from the forty-four-gallon drums on the back of the Land-Rover directly into the Cessna's wing tanks, while Craig stripped out the seats from the rear of the cockpit to reduce weight and give them cargo space.

  Then they began loading. Sally-Anne weighed each item of cargo on the spring balance that she had bought for the purpose, and entered it on her loading table. The ammunition was the heaviest part of the load. They had eight thousand rounds of 7.62 men ball Ps. Craig had broken bulk and repacked it in black plastic garbage -bags to save weight and space. It had been buried for years and many of the rounds were so corroded as to be useless.

  However, Craig had "hand-sorted it, and test-fired a few rounds from each case without a single misfire.

  Most of the rifles had also been corroded and Craig had worked through the nights by gas lantern, stripping and cannibalizing until he had twenty-five good weapons.

  There were also five Tokarev pistols and two cases of fragmentation grenades which seemed in better condition than the rifles. Craig had set off one grenade from each case, popping them down an ant-bear hole to a satisfactory Crump and cloud of dust. That had left forty-eight from the original rift),. Craig packed them in five cheap canvas haversacks that he had bought from a general dealer in Francistown.

  The rest of the equipment he had also purchased in Francistown, Wire-cutters and bolt-cutters, nylon rope, pan gas that Jonas and Aaron sharpened to razor edges, flashlights and extra batteries, canteens and water bottles and a dozen or so other items which might prove useful.

  Sarah had been appointed medical orderly and had made up a first-aid kit with items purchased at the Francistown pharmacy. The food rations were spartan. Raw maize meal packed in five, kilo plastic bags, the best nourishment-to weight ratio available, and a few bags of coarse salt.

  "Okay, that's it," Sally-Anne called a halt to the loading.

  "Another ounce and we won't get off the ground. The rest of it will have to wait for the second trip." When darkness fell, they sat around the campfire and gorged on the steaks and fresh fruit that Sally-Anne had brought with her from Johannesburg.

  "Eat hearty, my children," she encouraged them. "It could be a long time." Afterwards Craig and Sally' Anne carried their blankets away from the fire, out oCearshot of the others, and they lay naked in the war me desert air and made love under the silver sickle of the moon, both of them poignantly aware that it might be for the last time.

  They ate breakfast in the dark, after the moon had set and before the first glimmering of the dawn. They left Jonas and Aaron to guard the Land-Rover and help with loading and refuelling for the second trip and Sally-Anne taxied out to the end of the strip when it was just light enough to make out the tracks.

  Even in the cool of night it took the overloaded Cessna for ever to unstick, and they climbed away slowly towards the glow of the sunrise.

  "Zimbabwe border," Sally-Anne murmured. "And I still can't believe what we are doing." Craig was perched up beside her on the bags of ammuition, while Sarah was curled up likea salted anchovy on n I top of the load behind them.

  Sally-Anne banked slightly as she picked up her landmarks from the map on her lap. She had laid out a course cross the railway line fifteen miles south of the coal, to in ming town of Wankie, and then to cross the main road a few miles beyond, avoiding all human habitation. The " I terrain below them changed swiftly, the desert falling away d with open glades of gold I and becoming densely foreste en grass. There were some high fair-weather cumulus clouds in the north, otherwise the sky was clear. Craig squinted ahead down the track of the rising sun.

  "There is the railway." e closed the throttle and they descended Sally-Ann sharply. Fifty feet above the treetops they roared over the deserted railway tracks, and minutes later crossed the main to ad. They had a glimpse of a truck crawling along the blue, grey tarmac ribbon, but they crossed behind it and were visible to it for only seconds. Sally-Anne pulled a face.

  "Let's hope they make nothing of us there must be quite a bit of light aircraft traffic around here." She glanced at her wristwatch. "Expected time of arrival, forty minutes."

  "All right," Craig said. "Let's go over it one more time.

  You drop Sarah and me, then clear out again as quickly as possible. Back to the pan. Reload and refuel. Two days from now you come back. If there is a smoke-signal, yot, land. No signal and you head back to the pan. Give it tw( more days and then the last trip. If there is no smoke signal on the second trip, that's it. You head out and don't come back." She reached out and took his hand. "Craig, don't even say it. Please, darling, come back to me." They held hands for the rest of the trip, except for the brief moments when she needed both for the controls.

  "There it is!" The Chizarira river was a dark green python across the vast brown land, and there was a glint of water through the trees.

  "Zambezi Waters just up there." They were keeping well clear of the camps that they had built with so much loving labour, but both of them stared longingly upstream to where the dreaming blue hills studded the line of the horizon.

  Sally-Anne dropped lower and still lower until she was shaving the treetops, and then she turned slowly back in a wide circle, keeping the hills between them and the buildings on Zambezi Waters.

  "There it is," Craig called, and pointed out under the par t wingtip, and they had a glimpse of white beads at the edge of the trees.

  "They are still there! The bones of Craig's poached rhinoceros had been picked over by the scavengers and bleached by the sun.

  Sally-Anne, ran her Jnding-check, and then lined tip for the nsrrow strip of grassland along the head of the gorge, where she had landed before, "Just pray the wart hog and ant-bear haven't been digging around, she murmured, and the overloaded Cessna wallowed sluggishly and the stall warning bleeped and flashed intermittently at the reduced power setting.

  Sally-Anne dropped in steeply over the tree-tops and touched down with a jarring thud. The Cessna pitched and bounced over the rough ground, but maximum safe braking and the coarse grass wrapping the undercarriage pulled them up quickly, and Sally-Anne let out her breath.

  Thank you, Lord." They offloaded with frenzied haste, piling everything in a heap and spreading over it the green nylon nets designed for shading young plants from the sun that Craig had found in Francistown.

  Sally' Anne and Craig looked at each other Then miserably.

  "Oh God, I hate this," she said.

  "Me too so go! Go quickly, damn it." They kissed and she broke away and ran back to the cockpit. She taxied to the end of the clearing, flattening the grass, and then came back at full throttle in her own tracks. The lightened aircraft leapt into the air, and the last he saw of her was her pale face in the side windowing back towards him, and then the tree-tops cut them turn off from each other.

  Craig waited until the last vibration of the engine died away and the silence of the bush closed in again. Then he picked up the rifle and haversack and slung them over his shoulders. He looked at Sarah. She wore denims and blue canvas shoes. She carried the food bag and water bottles, with a Tokarev bolstered on her belt.

  "Ready?" She nodded, fell in behind him, and stayed with the forcing pace he set. They reached the kopie in the early part of the afternoon, and from the summit Craig looked towards the camps of Zambezi Waters on the river.