Leopard Hunts in Darkness b-4

by Wilbur A. Smith

  This would be the dangerous part now, but he lit the then, taking Sarah with him, moved out signal fire and and set up an ambush on the approach path, just in case the smoke signal brought unwanted visitors.

  He and Sarah lay up in good cover, and neither of them moved nor spoke for three hours. Only their eyes were sweeping the slopes below and above and the bush busy, all around.

  Even so, they were taken unawares. The voice was a harsh, raw whisper in Sindebele, close very close by.

  "Ha! Kuphela. So you have brought my money." Comrade Lookout's scarred visage peered at them. He had crept up to within ten paces without alerting them. "I thought you had forgotten us." but hard and dangerous work,"

  "No money for you Craig told him.

  here were three men with Comrade Lookout, lean, wolflike men. They extinguished the signal fire and then spread back into the bush in an extended scouting order, that would cover their march.

  "We must go," Comrade Lookout explained. "Here in the open the Shana kanka press us like hunting dogs. Since we last met, we have lost many good men. Comrade Dollar has been taken by them.."

  "Yes." Craig remembered him, beaten and bedraggled, giving evidence against him on that terrible night at King's Lynn.

  They marched until two hours after darkness, northwards into the bad and broken land along the escarpment of the great river. The*way was cleared for them and u guarded by the sco & who were always invisible in the forest ahead. Only their bird calls guided and reassured them.

  They came at last to the guerrilla camp. There were women at the small smokeless cooking-fires and one of them ran to embrace Sarah as soon as she recognized her.

  "She is my aunt's youngest daughter," Sarah explained.

  She and Craig spoke only Sindebele to each other now.

  The camp was an uncomfo series of rude caves, hacked out rtable and joyless place, a of the steep bank of a dried water-course and screened by the overhang of the trees. It had a temporary air about it. There were no luxuries and no items of equipment that could not be packed within minutes and carried on a man's back. The guerrilla women z were as unsmiling as their men.

  "We do not stay at one place," Comrade Lookout kanka see the signs from the air if we do.

  explained. "The Even though we never walk the same way, not even to the latrines, in a short time our feet form pathways and that is what they look for. We must move again soon.

  The women brought them food and Craig realized how hungry and tired he was, but before he ate he opened his pack and gave them the cartons of cigarettes he had carried se embittered men smile as in. For the first time he saw the they passed a single butt around the circle.

  "How many men in your group?"

  "Twenty-six. Comrade Lookout puffed on the cigarette and passed it on. "But there is another group nearby.

  Twenty-six was enough, Craig brooded. If they could exploit the element of surprise, it would be just enough.

  They ate with their fingers from the communal pot and then Comrade Lookout allowed them to share another cigarette.

  "Now, Kuphela, you said you had work for us." Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe is the prisoner

  4the of the Shana."

  "This is a terrible thing. It is a stab in the heart of the Matabele people but even here in the bush we have known of this for many months. Did you come to tell us something that all the world knows?"

  "They are holding him alive at Tuti."

  "Tuti. Haul" Comrade Lookout exclaimed violently and every man spoke at once.

  "How do you know this?"

  "We heard he was killed-"

  "This is old women's talk--2 Craig called across to where the women sat apart.

  "Sarah!" She came to them.

  "You know this woman? "Craig asked.

  "She is my wife's cousin."

  "She is the teacher at the mission." "She is one of us."

  "Tell them," Craig ordered her.

  They listened in attentive silence, while Sarah related her last meeting with Tungata, their eyes glittering in the firelight, and when she had finished, they were silent.

  Sarah rose quietly and went back to the other women, and Comrade Lookout turned to one of his men.

  "Speak" he invited.

  e Th one chosen to give his opinion first was the youngest, the most junior. The others would speak in their ascending order of seniority. It was the ancient order of council and it would take time.

  Craig composed himself to patience, this was the tmpo of Africa.

  After midnight Comrade Lookout summed up for them.

  "We know the woman. She is trustworthy and we believe what she tells us. Comrade Tungata is our father. His blood is the blood of kings, and the stinking Shana hold him.

  On this we are all agreqJ." He paused. "But there are some who would try to wrest him from the Shana child, rapers and others who say we are too few, and that we have only one rifle between two men, and only five bullets for each rifle. So we are divided." He looked at Craig. "What do you say, Kuphela?" 41 say that I have brought you eight thousand rounds of ammunition and twenty-five rifles and fifty grenades," said Craig. "I say that Comrade Tungata is my friend and my brother. I say that if there are only women and cowards alone with here and no men to go with me, then I will go this woman, Sarah, who has the heart of a warrior,-and I I will find men somewhere else." Comrade Lookout's face puckered up with affront, uIled out of true by the scar, and his tone was reproachful.

  p "Let there be no more talk of women and cowards, Kuphela. Let there be no more talking at all. Let us rather go to Tuti and do this thing that must be done. That is what I say." hey lit the smoke signal as soon as they heard the ished it immediately Sally Cessna, and extingu to acknowledge.

  Anne flashed her landing lights Comrade Lookout's guerrillas had cut the grass in the clearing with pan gas and filled in the holes and rough spots, so Sally-Anne's landing was confident and neat.

  Eli The guerrillas unloaded the rest of the ammunition and the weapons in disciplined silence, but they could not conceal their grins of delight as they handed down the bags of ammunition and the haversacks of grenades, for these were the tools of their trade. The loads disappeared swiftly into the forest. Within fifteen minutes Craig and the empty Sally-Anne were left alone under the wing of Cessna.

  "Do you know what I prayed for?" Sally-Anne asked. "I able to find the gang, and if prayed that you wouldn't be you did, that they would refuse to go with you, and that you had been forced to abort and had to come back with me."

  "You aren't very good at praying, are you?" "I don't know. I'm going to get in a lot of practice in the next few days."

  "Five days," Craig corrected her. "You come in again on Tuesday morning."

  "Yes," she nodded. "I will take off in the dark, and be over Tuti airfield at sunrise that's at 05.22 hours."

  "But you are not to land until I signal that we have secured the strip. Now, for the love of God, don't run yourself short of fuel to get back to the pan. If we don't show up, don't stay on hoping."

  "I will have three hours" safe endurance over Tuti. That means you will have until 08-30 hours to get there."

  "If we don't make it by then, we aren't going to make it.

  It's time for you to go now, my love." I know, Sally-Anne said, and made no move.

  "I have to go," he said.

  "I don't know how I'm going to live through the next few days, sitting out there in the desert, not knowing a thing, just living with my fears and imagination." He took her in his arms and found she was trembling.

  "I'm so very afraid for you," she whispered against his throat.

  4see you Tuesday morning, "he told her. "Without fail."

  "Without faffl" she agreed, and then her voice quavered.

  "Come back to me, Craig. I don't want to live without you.

  Promise me you'll come back."

  "I promise." He kissed her.

  "There now, I feel much better." She gave him that ch
eeky grin of hers, but it was all soft around the edges.

  She climbed up into the cockpit and started the engine.

  "I love you." Her lipiformed the words that the engine drowned, and she svAng the Cessna round with a burst of throttle and did not look back.

  m the front t was only sixty miles on the map and fro seat of an aircraft it had not looked like hard going.

  On the ground it was different.

  They were crossing the grain of the land; the watershed dropped away from their right to their left, towards the escarpment of the Zambezi valley. They were forced to ack of hills and the intervening valleys follow the switchb so they were never on level ground.

  The guerrillas had hidden their own women in a sate place, and only reluctantly consented to Sarah accompanying the raiding pare, but she carried a full load and kept up with the hard pace that Comrade Lookout set for them.

  The ironstone hills soaked up the heat of the sun and at them, as they toiled up the steep bounced it back hillsides and dropped again into the next valley. The descents were as taxing as the climbs, the heavy load-, the backs of their legs jarring their spines and straining and their Achilles tendons. The old elephant trails that pebbles they were following were littered with round rolled under foot like hall washed out by the rains that bearings and made each pace fraught with danger.

  One of the guerrillas fell, and his ankle swelled up so that they could not get his boot back on his foot. The m and left him to find his distributed his load amongst the own way back to where they had left the women.

  i bees plagued them dit ring the day, The tiny mo pan clouding around their mouths and nostrils and eyes in their persistent search for moisture and in the nights the mosquitoes from the stagnant pools in the valleys took over from them. At one stage of the trek they passed fly-belt, and the silent, light through the edge of the -ie torment, settling so softh footed tsetse-flies joined ri that the, victim was unaware until a red-hot needle stabbeJ

  7 into the soft flesh at the back of the, ear, or under the armpit.

  Always there was danger of attack. Every few miles either the scouts out ahead or the rear-guard dragging the trail behind them would signal an alert, and they would be forced to dive into cover and wait with finger on trigger until the all-clear signal was passed down the line.

  it was slow and gruelling and nerve-racking two full days" marching from freezing dawn through burning noon into darkness again, to reach Sarah's father's village.

  Vusamanzi was his name and he was a senior magician, soothsayer and rainmaker of the Matabele tribe. Likeall his kind, he lived in isolation, with only his wives and immediate family around him. However great their respect for them, ordinary mortals avoided the practitioners of the dark arts; they came to them only for divination or treatment, paid the goat or beast that was the fee, and hurried thankfully away again.

  Vusamanzi's village was some miles north of Tuti Mission Station. It was a prosperous little community on a hilltop, with many wives and goats and chickens and fields of maize in the valley.

  The guerrillas lay up" in the forest below the kopje, and they sent Sarah in to make certain all was safe and to warn the villagers of their presence. Sarah returned within an hour, and Craig and Comrade Lookout went back to the village with her.

  Vusamanzi had earnqa his name, "Raise the Waters', from his reputed ah9ity to control the Zambezi and its tributaries. As a much younger man he had sent a great flood to wash away the village of a lesser chief who had cheated him of his fees, and since then a number of others who had displeased him had drowned mysteriously at fords or bathing holes. It was said that at Vusamanzi's behest the surface of a quiet pool would leap up suddenly in a hissing wave as the marked victim approached to drink or bathe or cross, and he would be sucked in. No living man had actually witnessed this terrible phenomenon but never an did not have much ffieless, Vusamanzi, the magici trouble with bad debts from his patients and clients.

  Vusamanzi's hair was a cap of pure white and he wore a small beard, also white dressed out to a spade shape in the fashion of the Zulus. Sarah must have been a child of his old age, but she had inherited her fine looks from him, for he was handsome and dignified. He had put aside his only a simple loin-cloth and his body was regalia.

  He vote straight and lean, and his voice, when he greeted Craig IR courteously, was deep and steady.

  Clearly Sarah revered him, for she took the beer-pot from one of his junior wives and knelt to offer it to him herself. In her turn, Sarah obviously had a special place in the old man's affections, for he smiled at her fondly, and when she sat at his feet, he fondled her head casually as he listened attentively to what Craig had to tell him. Then he sent her to help his wives to prepare food and beer and take it down to the guerrillas hidden in the valley before he turned back to Craig.

  4the man you call Tungat a Zebiwe, the Seeker after justice, was born Samson Kumalo. He is in direct line of succession from Mzilikazi, the first king and father of our people. He is the one upon whom the prophecies o t. e ancients descend. On the night he was taken by the Shons Idlers, I had sent for him to appraise him of his responsiso bility and to make him privy to the secrets of the kings. It he is still alive, as my daughter tells us he is, then it is the duty of every Matabele to do all in his power to seek his m. The future of our people tests with him. How can free do I assist you? You have only to ask."

  "You have already helped us with food," Craig thanked him. "Now we need information."

  "Ask, Kuphela. Anything that I can tell you, I will." and the camp of the "The road between Tuti Mission soldiers passes close to this place. Is that correct?"

  isi

  "Beyond those hills," the old man pointed.

  "Sarah tells me that every week the trucks come along this road on the same day, taking food to the soldiers and the prisoners at the camp."

  "That is so. Every week, on the Monday late in the afternoon, the trucks pass here loaded with bags of maize and other stores. They return empty the following morning.

  "How many trucks?"

  "Two or, rarely, three."

  "How many soldiers to guard them?"

  "Two in front beside the driver, three or four more in the back. One stands on the roof with a big gun that shoots fast." A heavy machine-gun, Craig translated for himself. "The soldiers are very watchful and alert and the trucks drive fast."

  "They came last Monday, as usual?" Craig asked.

  As usual," Vusarnanzi nodded his cap of shiny white wool. He must believe then that the routine was still in operation, Craig decided, and bet everything on it.

  "How far is it to the mission station from here?" he as cec.

  "From there to there." The witch-doctor swept his arm through a segment of the sky, about four hours of the sun's passage. Reckoned as the pace of a man on foot, that was approximately fifteen mil4;s.

  "And from here to the camp of the soldiers?" Craig went on.

  Vusamanzi shrugged. "The same distance."

  "Good." Craig unrolled his map, they were equidistant between the two points. That gave him a fairly accurate fix. He began calculating times and distances and scribbling them in the margin of the map.

  "We have a day to wait." Craig looked up at last. "The men will rest and ready themselves."