by Peter Rimmer
The second day had taken them fifteen miles from the river. The water bottles were empty, they had seen a pride of lion at close quarters, fortunately on a kill with full bellies, twice they had been mock-charged by elephant flapping their ears, and the trail they had left behind them was so obvious they might as well have blazed the mopani trees. All through the day, the tsetse fly had hovered over the party making a noise like an engine.
Half an hour before dusk the trackers brought them to a dried-up river, making Comrade Jack look around his command of sixteen soldiers and the trackers with utter despair. The thirst was the worst torture he had ever endured in his life. He wanted to scream when he saw the cheerfulness of the trackers, who were chatting among themselves while they took three small sips from their water bottles that were still half-full. Then they walked off upriver, over the dry white river sand and over the intermittent outcrops of rock. The banks of the river rose on either side of them and the birds and the insects were silent in the extreme heat captured by the bed of the dried-up river.
“Where are you going?” shouted Comrade Jack, pointing his gun at them. The sound of his voice echoed for a long distance down the riverbed, far ahead of the trackers.
“To find water,” called back Sixpence.
Not believing the trackers were not running away and leaving them to die of thirst or be eaten by wild animals, Comrade Jack ran after them. Halfway to the trackers, who had stopped and were waiting for him, he fell over one of the outcrops of rock in the riverbed and his gun went off on automatic, shattering the silence of the bush. The trackers had seen Comrade Jack falling and had fallen flat on their stomachs behind another outcrop of rock, the reflex tuned by inept big-game hunters ‘from across the seas’. In their ears all three heard the voice of Hannes Potgieter. ‘If he trips and falls holding a gun, man, drop to the ground fast’, which was just as well as the AK-47 sprayed half a magazine in their direction before it stopped.
Two hundred metres further upriver, they found what they were looking for, a deep hole in the riverbed made by the trunk of an elephant looking for water. With a further foot of sand removed from the hole by Onepenny, sweet water seeped to the surface, and Fourpence used his Russian army issue tin mug to bring up cups of water. He had to lie on the sand and reach to the full length of his arm for the water. If the water had been deeper, they would have tied a stick to the mug. The underground water would last right through the dry season.
By the time the soldiers had rushed to the small waterhole, called up by Comrade Jack, it was almost dark but every man was able to slake his thirst. While the men drank the water, the trackers carefully chose a place by the riverbed for the night’s camp. Away from the site, a smooth run of rock ran right across the riverbed into the trees where it rose up to the top of the riverbank.
In the dark of the night, before the moon came up and with the men sleeping the sleep of exhaustion, Sixpence took the reading of south from the Southern Cross as he had been taught so many years before by Hannes Potgieter. From the south line, he judged the direction of northwest. In bare feet, Sixpence led his trackers across the smooth bare rock, making neither sound for the night nor spoor for the morning. When they reached the trees, they melted into the African night and stopped. An hour later, the moon came up, and they moved off through the ghosts of the mopani trees in the direction of home.
Ant Scott, on the Botswana border, had identified the shots as AK-47 automatic fire and left his camp at dawn with a troop of six men. None of his other patrols were near the direction of the gunfire and there had been no return fire.
“Wild animals,” he had said to his corporal after waiting in silence for ten minutes.
By twelve o’clock the troop had cut the untidy spoor of a large group of men moving away from the Zambezi River. Ant took the centre and sent three men out on either side of him in the shape of a horn, so when they came up on the terrorists the front of the horns would close round the terrs, cutting off retreat. Ant could have followed the tracks at a gallop but kept the horses down to a trot, watching up ahead. By two o’clock Ant knew the exact position of the terrorists by the startled movement of birds up ahead. The danger call of a crested guinea fowl gave him the first warning, and he brought the horses back to a cautious walk. By hand signal, he sent the points of the horns to circle around up ahead through the mopani forest. The terrs were now making enough noise themselves to camouflage the sound of the horses.
Comrade Jack died without seeing the enemy. The sixteen men and Comrade Jack had just moved out of the forest into the clearing where the grass was knee-high. With calculated efficiency, his fellow freedom fighters were shot down one at a time, the FN rifles of the encircling House Scouts staying on single shot. Some of the men tried to fire back into the surrounding forest, not even hitting the horses which were trained not to run from the sound of gunfire.
Ant camped his men in the cover of the forest and waited through the rest of the day and then through the night. Only the next day did he lead them out into the small clearing to count the seventeen dead men.
“Whoever trained these men should be court-martialled,” said Ant. “Better leave them where they are. Pick up the guns, ammunition and those bloody landmines. Poor sods. The animals and birds will eat well for the next three days. Why the bloody hell couldn’t the rest of the world have left us alone? Russian guns, Russian boots and Russian water bottles but not a bloody Russian in sight.”
Laurie Hall heard the contact and estimated it had lasted less than ten minutes. He had also heard the short burst of AK fire the previous evening. The previous night they had not made a fire and their food had been the dried biltong. It was the first time either of them had heard shots fired in the war and Laurie began to take the process of his survival more seriously. They were patrolling the riverbank and one hour after the contact had fallen silent they found the point of disembarkation and two of the makoris that had brought the terrs across from Zambia.
“No wonder, they didn’t last long,” said Laurie, surveying the multiple signs of the landing. Both he and Mike Barrow had heard the single shots of the Belgian-made FN rifles well after the sporadic AK fire had stopped. “The remnants will be coming back this way and you and I will wait for them, young Mike. They will find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. We’ll make camp in the mopani forest and listen for them coming back.”
Taking the hunting knife with the long blade, Laurie began carving a large hole in the first dugout canoe. Mike kept guard.
That night only one of them slept while the other stood guard. The metal bits had been taken from the mouths of the horses and muffles put on their feet.
The trackers had heard the contact and understood what it meant. They had moved slowly through the mopani forest, expertly covering their tracks. The surrounding bush had fallen silent after the gunfire. ‘Don’t forget if you find one lion hunting there is always another waiting for the buck to run. Usually there are five or six females and the old man waiting for his supper to be killed for him.’ The words of Hannes Potgieter were constantly running through the mind of Sixpence as he tried to lead his friends away from death. The Russians had said they would not meet opposition, that the white farmers would be soft targets.
“Better we keep away from the river and go northwest into Botswana,” he said. “If I were a Boer, I would have cut the spoor of Comrade Jack and followed it back to the river, using the makoris as bait.”
“Can’t we run for the river?” said Onepenny.
“Never we go back to that army camp. We will walk back to Mongu and build a hut where we had the base camp. There is fish and game and the vegetables we will start again. There we wait for these people to stop killing each other.”
“How do we get across the river?”
“We will find a way.”
Laurie Hall and Mike Barrow staked out the canoes for three days but nobody came. By the time they left to return to camp and report what they had foun
d, the trackers were well into the safety of Botswana. Then they cut across the border into Zambia and made once again for the river. They found a small village that knew nothing of the war and were taken across to the other side of the Zambezi.
Three weeks later they found the broken site of the old base camp. The river had cut away the main house, leaving behind wooden stumps and the first three steps that had led up to the deck. The small house that had been the home of Laurie Hall was still standing. Being a rondavel, the water had washed round and away, finding no purchase. The thatch had gone from the roof and the old mattress on the double bed was rotten. The trackers smiled at each other.
“Better we never left,” said Fourpence.
The next day at dawn, when Onepenny came out of the rondavel they had slept in, he was attacked by the Goliath heron. The bird gave him a painful nip on the back of his leg. Man and bird stood eyeballing each other, the big bird with one cocked eye looking at Onepenny.
“You are a fine bird,” said Onepenny in Lozi. “The bloody heron’s still here,” he called back to his friends.
In Laurie Hall’s tin trunk, the one he had brought out from England on the boat, they found an unopened tin of coffee. The pack of powdered milk had gone as hard as a rock. Next to a small pile of books they found Laurie’s box of fishing tackle. By the time the smell of coffee drifted down to the river, Fourpence had caught two fat bream and was casting for the third. The fire that was sending the sweet smell of wood smoke and the coffee would never be allowed to go out. Behind Fourpence in a tall acacia tree, vervet monkeys were trying to see what he was doing, the pert eyes and black-ringed faces popping out from the sanctuary of the tree trunk forgetting their long tails that hung in full view.
The windmill that drew water from the river into a holding tank next to the ruins of the big house had seized up, probably rusted. The fence that guarded the kitchen garden from the baboons and wild pig was broken.
Sixpence, after careful searching, concluded no human had been to the base camp after the great flood. With luck, he concluded, they would be left alone by the rest of mankind. All the crocodile money had gone with nothing to show for it. They were not so young anymore. They would make themselves comfortable and sit in the sun as their ancestors had done as far back as the stories handed down by his grandfather. The new life brought to Africa by the white man was nothing but trouble.
2
Shelley Lane had not sung a note in public for five years. She now lived with Will Langton rather than Will living with her. The EMI contract had not been renewed, and no one wished to sing the songs she wrote. At thirty-three her career was not only over but most people could no longer remember her name. The thirty per cent share in Music Lane Limited had been sold to Byron Langton for a small amount of money to maintain the last six months of her hedonistic lifestyle. Then it was over and they could no longer afford the Chelsea flat.
Will was working for his brother. The coffee-table book had been reasonably successful and would have sold better without competition from a similar African wildlife book out of Australia. This time Lindsay Healy had not put her name on the book but Will knew quite well who had taken the photographs. When Shelley needed looking after financially, Will went to his brother and asked for a mortgage loan to buy himself a semi-detached house in Wimbledon. He had calculated the net income from the book would be just enough for the deposit on the two-bedroom house; the government having added his royalties to his salary and taxed him sixty-four per cent for the privilege of living in England. Will had asked Heathcliff Mortimer how it could be that someone who neither risked publisher’s capital nor spent ten years taking the photographs had run off with two-thirds of his money to give to people less fortunate than himself.
“They are in the majority,” Heath had explained patiently. “Democracy takes from the competent and gives to the less competent as they are in the majority. How else can a democratic government get elected?”
“What happens when the competent, as you call them, stop producing?”
“That is what communism and socialism will find out. First, they create a very boring society with everyone down at their level and then they run out of money to give away. Then the whole bloody thing collapses and a new ideology takes its place.”
“Which one?”
“It doesn’t matter when people are starving. They do exactly what they are told. Look at Africa. In the process and even after the collapse, the likes of your brother laugh their way to the bank.”
“How do they get away with it?”
“Their competence is unscrupulous. An unscrupulous businessman can always understand a politician. Both are only in it for themselves whatever the politician says in public. They feed each other, the businessman with party funds, the politician with favours. You were left with a third of your money. The men of big business and politicians leave you enough to make it worth your while working. And don’t think your two-thirds went to a worthy cause. It didn’t. It went to keep up the system. Go and buy your semi-detached in Wimbledon. What they want you to do. Live in a row like the rest of us like a good little boy and watch television. That way everyone thinks the same and the individual in all of us is exterminated. And best of all, big business produces what we watch on television. These same people are able to control our minds. They tell us when to cry, to laugh, to be up in arms for whichever cause they wish us to follow. They even make us feel we are in control of our democratic governments. The almost perfect manipulation.”
“You make it sound very horrible, Heath.”
“It’s quite all right if you like watching television.”
Shelley watched Will become accustomed to his life. The man shrivelled in front of her. At exactly nine minutes past eight every morning, in sunshine, snow or rain, Will Langton left 27 Primrose Lane and walked for ten minutes to Wimbledon station. There he waited on the platform for two minutes to board the eight twenty-one for Waterloo where twenty-three minutes later he got off and walked forward with the other commuters to the Piccadilly Line entrance to the Tube station and walked to the office, in sunshine, snow or rain, and at nine o’clock he walked into the offices of Langton Merchant Bank. He would hang up his umbrella with his bowler hat, overcoat or raincoat depending on the season, and sit down at his desk to address matters that interested him even less than the journey up from Wimbledon.
His brother had not put him on the board of directors which was to no one’s surprise. The sinecure of a job enjoyed by Will, the other members of the staff put down to brotherly love.
Having not told his brother after so many years that Will was worth more than half a million pounds, the West German industrial shares having done particularly well on the Frankfurt stock exchange, Byron assuaged the faint residue of his guilt by giving his brother a job and house mortgage Will did not deserve.
Within a few more years Byron would forget the money ever belonged to his brother. If his brother had not been around, like Laurie Hall, Byron would have forgotten all about the guilt a long time ago. Anyway, Will had run off with Shelley Lane which was some consolation. Deliberately, Music Lane Limited had been refusing the copyright of Shelley’s music to other musicians until the singer sold her shares. Knowing Shelley was comfortably living in a small house in Wimbledon helped Byron convince himself that he had always done the right thing by her. At the right time he would again release her songs sung by the new, young singers in his stable, one of whom he was having an affair with.
The country estate was everything he wanted, including his children, and his wife was making him money as a publisher. Since Jack Pike had died, Johnny Pike had legitimised his father’s empire and taken himself off to elocution lessons. Johnny had both his sons down for Harrow School, the alma mater of Winston Churchill. The Pike family had moved from peep shows and prostitution to the establishment in one generation thanks to Byron Langton’s ability to launder their money. It would not be long before Byron agreed to Johnny Pike joining
the board of Langton Merchant Bank in which the Pikes had a major shareholding.
There had been a lot of water down the Thames since Johnny Pike had given him LSD to circumvent his national service in the army. For old times’ sake, once a month, the two of them met in the Green Dolphin in Greek Street where it had all begun. Every month they drank to having beaten the system.
Josephine Langton started off standing outside South Africa House in the pouring rain. In the same demonstration were three bishops and four Labour Party MPs. The placard Josephine held in her cold hands called for the stopping of forced removals and the dividing of the races into separate areas under the apartheid government of South Africa.
When Byron heard his sister was part of an upbeat demonstration in the Strand, he suggested his editor of the Daily Garnet get along a man with a camera and have a picture of the ex-Labour minister, drenched in the rain, with a clergyman on either side, doing her moral duty. The bedraggled picture appeared on the front page of the paper the following morning. The photograph ricocheted round the world which pleased Byron and made his sister out to be a hero. She stood up for the poor blacks starving in the gutters under the jackboot of the Boers who were now no better than the Nazis. Byron was particularly pleased to have his name linked to his sister’s as some of the good deed rubbed off onto the proprietor of a popular tabloid. They were both part of a popular cause.
