by Peter Tonkin
It was just dawning on her how lucky she had been when the tank’s turret slammed into view again, gun pointing directly up the short, narrow track towards them. She framed it and hit the button, screaming a warning as she did so.
‘HARRY!’ It was all she could think of to say, but it was enough. He swung the wheel to the right and crashed into the thorn scrub. With tough-branched bushes and saplings screaming and clawing along the sides and bottom of the vehicle like an army of wildcats being crushed beneath its wheels, the battered old Rover forged its own track through the forest while the tank’s last shell set fire to the dry trees behind them.
‘That’s sorted him,’ Harry yelled as they burst out onto the old elephant track they had followed earlier. With the engine still racing wildly, Harry turned the Rover towards the ruined village with its slaughtered inhabitants. ‘He’ll never get back round now. We’re OK for the moment.’
He rearranged the gears and the Land Rover settled into her accustomed steady rumble, chewing up the trackway at the fastest possible speed. Harry hit the lights. Tree trunks appeared dazzlingly, like the legs of tall elephants standing still among the scrub.
‘Is that a good idea?’ asked Robert. ‘That T-80 may have friends.’
‘Will certainly have friends. There were no tank tracks around the village. There’s some kind of guerrilla squad out here somewhere and I reckon the tank is backing them up.’
‘Where did it come from?’ asked Ann, who was just beginning to shake with shock again.
‘Congo Libre,’ said both the men at once. Then Harry continued, ‘Has to be. No tank tracks this side of the river that I’ve seen.’
‘But why?’ Ann asked, and for the first time her question included the village as well as everything else. ‘Why is all this horror going on?’
‘It’s a message,’ said Harry. ‘They want to drive the people off the land.’
‘But why?’
Robert turned round. ‘You know why,’ he said. ‘You’re just not thinking clearly. They want the population on the move. The N’Kuru people starving and drought-stricken, moving down to the coast looking for help. But all they’ll find there is Kyoga roadblocks run by Nimrod Chala’s state police and Moses M’Diid’s tank regiments. The N’Kuru will explode. It’ll be civil war.’
‘But what will they fight with?’ cried Ann. ‘They haven’t any weapons!’
‘With sticks and stones,’ said Robert wearily, ‘until the Lions arrive. Where do you think all the men from the villages were? They’re in Congo Libre being trained to fight the Kyoga, being armed with Kalashnikovs and die odd T-64 tank, I’d guess. They’ll come in and the real slaughter will begin. It’ll be just another local African war unless the UN gets fully involved - and why should they? If they try now and it doesn’t work, why shouldn’t they just wash their hands and walk away? Then Mau will be just another bloody Senegal, another Angola, another Sudan, Rwanda or Somalia, except the war won’t last nearly as long. After a while the Congo Libre troops will come in and clean up with their brand new T-80 main battle tanks and their battle-hardened troops who specialise in putting six bullets into women and children before they hit the ground.’
‘But if you know all this why aren’t you putting a stop to it?’ she screamed.
‘What do you think I’m doing here?’
‘No! Not you! The United Nations!’
‘Because it takes information. Organisation. Money. Commitment. Political will. Publicity! Because the guy from Gary, Indiana - or wherever they do all those US political surveys - and the man on the Clapham omnibus, they have to be made to see, to know, to care. They’ve got to tell the politicians that they care, and the president and the prime minister and all the other premiers and politicians have to get up and get organised. They have to do it before it’s all too late! That’s what it’s all about. That’s why you’re here. Christ, look what happened when that little girl in Bosnia hit the news! Think what we could do with a ravaged village and a T-80 main battle tank!’ He beat the dashboard in front of him with an uncontrollable overflow of passion.
‘Harry,’ he said, ‘just get us to the airstrip as fast as ever you can and we’ll have those photos on every newsdesk within the next two days, I promise!’
His words struck Ann with powerful force. She sat back then and began to search through the wreckage of her belongings, checking for those tiny, irreplaceable spools of film while Harry took them far faster than was safe back westwards along the trackways towards the little bush landing strip, trusting on the one remaining headlight to warn him of obstacles and potholes and to warn any animals up ahead to clear out of the way. She couldn’t remember exactly how many pictures she had taken or how many times she had reloaded, but she found six films in all, four exposed, two still wrapped, and had to be satisfied with that. In the last of the moonlight, she stowed five of them safely in her camera bag and ripped open one of the still unused ones. She had no idea how many frames were left on the film still in the camera, but she rewound it and changed it for a new one anyway. She had come across some batteries for the motor, so she changed those as well.
By the time she had finished, the moon was setting behind the hills in the north, so when she looked between the men’s shoulders dead ahead, she thought the glow in the sky must be dawn.
But no.
‘This looks bad,’ rumbled Robert.
‘Very bad indeed,’ Harry agreed quietly.
A spike of ice suddenly thrust down from the pit of Ann’s throat into the very depths of her stomach.
They drove on in silence as the glow intensified and crept inexorably up the western sky.
‘Do we need to look any closer?’ Robert asked at last.
‘Better to be sure. What have we got to lose?’
‘Don’t ask!’ Ann intruded herself into the conversation on as light a note as she could manage. ‘If they were laying a trap for us,’ she continued, ‘they wouldn’t be advertising their presence, would they?’
‘True,’ said Harry. ‘But there’s still short odds we could meet them by chance.’
‘Dancing round the bonfire,’ she said.
‘It’s a bit early for Guy Fawkes,’ Harry observed.
‘Or trick or treat,’ she agreed.
‘It’d be a bit dangerous to dance round that much aviation fuel anyway,’ said Robert wearily. ‘And your place is probably next on the list. No fires over that way. Yet.’
‘But they mightn’t have torched everything,’ persisted Harry. ‘There might be some petrol left in the second hut. Enough to give Rover here a bit of a drink. I took the last of the petrol at my place this afternoon. There’s nothing else there that I need now.’
‘We have to risk a closer look at the landing strip, then. We have to check there,’ said Robert.
‘That we do, that we do,’ said Harry. He switched off the lights and the engine and they coasted to a halt in an invisible cloud of coarse dust which would have been kept out by the canvas cover if they hadn’t lost it to the tank. The fall of silent dust emphasised to Ann just how exposed she was now, and she looked around the star-bright bush to check for the presence of dangerous animals. The moon had set now, but there was still light enough to see the nearest rolls of grassland quite clearly. Their upper slopes were painted garishly, almost gruesomely, by a combination of bright fire and red dust. The hollows between were relatively shadowed, but even here the stars gave enough light for her to be sure there was nothing large nearby.
While she was looking round, the men had begun a quiet conversation. ‘I’ll go in first,’ Harry was saying. ‘I’ve got the bush craft to get close enough for a detailed recce before anyone sees me. And I know where to look.’
‘Yeah. I see that.’
‘So, you cover me from the ridge with the Remington. If the coast’s clear, I’ll signal and you can bring Rover down.’
‘Makes good sense.’
Harry turned to her. ‘Ann, the Remington doesn’
t have a decent telescopic sight. Does your camera have a big lens?’
‘Well, yes. I guess it does ...’
‘Fine. I’d like you to put it on and use it to spot for Robert, please. The Remington will kill at a kilometre but only if the person firing it knows there’s a target there. You use your longest lens like a telescope and you watch my back in the biggest close-up you can manage. OK?’
‘OK,’ she said.
‘And if I do anything really heroic,’ added the dapper little Englishman, ‘then you will get an excellent photograph of it.’
They all laughed, and the men climbed down. Ann took an instant longer screwing the biggest of her camera’s lenses in place, and then she followed. They left their doors open. So did she.
By the time they were approaching the crest of the low hill overlooking the airstrip, she had caught up with the men. They slowed down and fell into a crouch. Harry motioned her to keep down too and, feeling faintly ridiculous, like an adult caught up in a childish game, she crouched like them, lower and lower until she was lying flat out beside them on the very crest, only just peeping over the top.
‘Right,’ whispered Harry, his voice little more than a breath, ‘you check it out, Ann, and I’ll be off on your all-clear.’
‘OK.’ She began to move, but his hand fell on her arm.
‘Just before I go, I want you to take this,’ he said. He held up one of his automatic pistols. ‘Seven shots. Automatic. Flick this switch at the back and you’ll get a red dot up on whatever you’re aiming at. Bullet goes where the red dot is. Understand?’
He sensed rather than saw her hesitation. ‘Self-defence only,’ he whispered. ‘Remember what we’re dealing with. I don’t see you lying back and thinking of England, so you’ll have to do some fighting. Get one back for the girls in the village.’
She agreed. Pacifism, she suddenly realised, could be taken too far. She took the gun. It seemed to be made of moulded plastic and it was heavy. It fitted in her palm as though it had always been there. ‘Bullets go where the red dot is,’ he reminded her, his voice as light as dust sliding over silk, only just audible over the sullen rumble of the fire. She shoved it into the back of her shorts until the barrel rested snugly in the cleft at the top of her buttocks. Then she edged up to the crest and looked over.
The slope fell away shallowly to the end of the runway where the two little huts had stood. Robert’s plane leaned, blazing and broken, beside the hut which had been filled with aviation fuel, and both were brightly ablaze. The fire gave light enough to show the details of the ground for quite a way around, certainly bright enough for them all to see the threads of smoke rising from the roof of the second hut as it smouldered up towards its own flashpoint. Even here they could feel the heat on their foreheads, and when Ann put the camera to her eyes for the first time, the brightness in the telescopic lens came near to blinding her.
She was an imaginative person and, although of extremely peaceful nature, had seen enough war films, empathised with enough tough warriors to have a good idea what to do first. Prompted by what she had seen today and perhaps by the snug coolness of the gun into accepting a role she had mistrusted since early maturity with all her fierce intellectual strength, she mentally split up the ground below into a grid and used the close-up pictures in her viewfinder to sweep across the quadrants until she knew no area had been left unchecked and was certain there was no one down there.
‘All clear,’ she whispered to Harry.
She felt the slightest stir of movement and he was gone. At once Robert slid closer to her and side by side they peered over the hillcrest, searching the stark brightness below for any sign of their friend - or of any enemies. The heat and stench of the destruction eddied around them, the roaring of the flames overwhelmed them, keeping the rest of the vast night at bay. Robert looked over his shoulder from time to time - it would have been all too easy for someone to creep up behind them with his presence masked by what was going on at the bottom of the slope. Ann concentrated on the scene before her, however, scouring the brightness for movement and checking the shadows with her telescopic lens.
Harry appeared after ten minutes or so. His first movement in the corner of her eye nearly gave her a heart attack, but her lens soon showed the top of his bush hat and she breathed a little more easily. She nudged Robert to make sure that he had seen too. The hunter moved from shadow to shadow, like a lizard. He moved swiftly when he had to move and was absolutely still when at rest. Once or twice she looked away when he moved and had trouble focusing in on his absolutely still outline crouching in a new location. When at rest, his rough, dusty bush clothing blended perfectly with his surroundings. When he crouched flat on the ground, even his shadow gave little away.
He scouted all the way round the blazing wreckage. Then, satisfied that he had covered the area fully, he pulled himself to his feet and dashed towards the smaller, smouldering shed in a weaving, crouching run. When he arrived, he stood up straight-backed to his full height, looking around for one last time, then he tried the door handle. The door opened infinitesimally. He swung it open and jumped back all in one motion. The door slammed wide and bounced closed, all in silence, its noise buried beneath the roaring of the flames from the Cessna and her flaming fuel. At last, satisfied that there was no one nearby and that the little hut was also safe, Harry began to wave slowly, facing up the hill towards them.
‘Right, let’s go,’ said Robert and pulled himself to his feet.
Harry dived out of sight into the shed.
As she prepared to pull herself to her feet, Ann realised she hadn’t taken any pictures of the heroic little figure after all. She paused and focused on the distant door. ‘You go on and start up the Land Rover,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there.’
‘Hurry,’ yelled Robert.
‘Don’t wait for me!’
Harry emerged, hauling a pair of jerry cans which were obviously full of petrol. Ann focused in on him, waiting for a good photograph.
‘Hurry!’ yelled Robert, more distantly.
‘Don’t wait for me!’
Harry staggered free of the heat between the buildings with a can swinging from each hand. She had him solidly framed. The shutter clicked.
Later she would swear she saw the shot but it must have been her imagination that drew the thread-thin black line which was there and gone, streaking across the picture as Harry suddenly stopped.
THUD, went her heart.
A stream of petrol arced brightly out of each can, looking ridiculously like urine in the yellow light. Just as she was sure she had seen the bullet going through them, she was certain the curves of petrol from the cans hung lingeringly in the air, falling elegantly out and down from the level of his hips.
THUD, went her heart.
Sharp and clear as the breaking of a bone in her own body came the sound of a single shot. It was only then that she started screaming, ‘NO! NO! NO!’
When the very first drop of the orange liquid touched the smouldering grass, it ignited and the cans exploded, with Harry still standing stricken between them. His slight frame was wreathed with fierce yellow flames in an instant. He toppled forward onto the ground and a sea of flame swept out across the grass towards the second hut.
Still screaming, unaware that her rigid finger was holding the button down, she swung the lens wildly around until the viewfinder picked up a group of men who had appeared out of nowhere. There seemed to be several of them standing on the grass at the edge of the shadow, with two in violent argument, gesturing as though they were yelling at each other.
THUD, went her heart.
The second hut exploded, ignited by Harry’s funeral pyre, and the light flashed across the smouldering grass to the tiny group just in time for Ann to see one of the arguing men pull out a pistol. He put it to his opponent’s chest, across which was held a smoking rifle, and pulled the trigger. The second man fell down, flat on his back, with his rifle still held tight across his chest.
/> Then the man with the pistol was screaming at the others, pointing at the burning hut, and gesturing towards the hilltop, apparently right at Ann herself. He was a tall man, cadaverously thin, and his hawk-like face was burned deep into her memory. Unlike the other soldiers, he was white.
Exactly ten seconds after Robert had turned away to go and get the Land Rover, Ann tore herself up off the ground. She had been screaming for five seconds but the first agonised cries of ‘No!’ had been lost beneath the noise - the suddenly louder noise. In the three seconds which had elapsed since he realised that there was something wrong, Robert had stopped, frowned and turned. He still had five metres to go before he reached the Land Rover. The sight of Ann running pell-mell towards him made him turn and break into a sprint too but, even so, they reached the vehicle side by side. ‘Drive!’ she screamed, and he was far too wise to hesitate, question or argue.
