Wilbur Smith - B4 The Leopard Hunts In Darkness

by B4 The Leopard Hunts In Darkness(Lit)

  Sally-Anne sat behind the dugt-smeared windscreen. The lump on her forehead l*oked likea huge, blue, bloodsucking tick clinging to her pale skin. She stared at Craig through the glass, her eyes and her expression desperate.

  "Hit id" Craig grunted and they straightened together, lifting with their knees and all the strength of their bodies.

  Craig felt the front end come up a few inches on the suspension and he nodded at Sally-Anne. She let out the clutch and the engine blustered, the wheel spun, and she jerked back and then stuck fast, blocking on the edge of the hole.

  "RestP Craig grunted, and they slumped gasping over the bonnet.

  Craig saw the dust of the pursuit was so close that he expected the trucks to appear beneath it as he watched.

  "Okay, we'll bounce her," he told Timon. "Hit it! One!

  Two! Three!" While Sally-Anne raced the engine, they flung their weight on the fender in a short regular rhythm. "One!

  Two! Three!" Craig gasped, and the vehicle started surging ! and bouncing wildly against the rim of the hole.

  "Keep her going!" Dust boiled around them, and the voice on the radio yelped exultantly likea lead hound taking the scent. They had seen the dust, "Keep it up! Craig found strength and reserves that he had never known were there. His teeth ground together, his breath whined in his throat, his face swelled dark angry red, and his vision starred and filled with shooting light. Still he heaved, and knew that the sinew and muscle in his back was tearing, his spine felt as though it was crushing and suddenly the Land' Rover wheels bounced over the rim and it shot backwards, clear and free.

  Deprived of support, Craig fell on his knees, and thought he did not have the strength to rise again.

  "Craig! Hurry!" Sally-Anne yelled at him. "Get in! With another vast effort, he heaved himself upright, and staggered to the moving Land-Rover. He dragged himself up onto the bonnet, and Sally-Anne accelerated away; for long seconds Craig clung to the bonnet, as strength oozed back into his limbs. He crawled up onto the roof tack and peered over the back of the cab.

  There was only one truck behind them, a five, ton Toyota painted the familiar sand colour. Through the shimmer of heat mirage, it appeared monstrous, seeming to k float towards them, disembodied from the earth. Craig blinked the sweat out of his eyes. How close was it? Hard to tell over level ground and through the mirage.

  His vision cleared, and he saw that the ungainly black superstructure above the Toyota's cab was a heavy machine-gun on a ring mount with the gunner's head behind it. It looked at this distance to be the modified Goryunov Stankovy, a nasty weapon.

  "Sweet Jesus!" he whispered, as for the first time he became aware of the Land-Rover's altered motion. She was vibrating and shaking brutally, and there was the shrill protest of metal bearing on metal from the left front end where she had hit and the speed was down, way down.

  Craig leaned out and yelled into the driver's window.

  "Speed up! "She's busted up front." Sally-Anne stuck her head out of the window. "Any faster and she'll tear herself to pieces." Craig looked back. The truck was closing, not rapidly, but inexorably. He saw the gunner on the cab roof traverse his weapon slightly.

  "Go for it, Sally-Armi! he shouted. "Take a chance of it holding.

  They've got a heavy machine-gun and they're coming into range." The Land-Rover lumbered forward, and now there was a heavy clattering combined with the whine of metal. The vibration chattered Craig's teeth, and he looked back.

  They were holding t1! truck off and then he saw the pursuing vehicle judder" to the recoil of the heavy weapon on the cab.

  No sound of gunfire yet, Craig watched with an academic interest. Abruptly dust fountained close down their left flank, jumping six feet into the heated air in a diaphanous curtain, appearing ethereal and harmless, but the sound of passing shot spranged viciously likea copper telegraph wire hit with an iron bar.

  "Turn left!" Craig yelled. Always turn towards the fall of shot. The gunner will be correcting the opposite way, and the dust will help obscure his aim.

  The next burst fell right and very wide.

  "Turn right!" Craig shouted.

  "Shoot back at them!" Sally' Anne stuck her head out again. She was obviously recovering from the head knock, and getting fighting mad.

  "I'm giving the orders," he told her. "You keep driving." The next burst was wide again, a hundred feet out.

  "Turn left!" Their weaving was confusing the gunner's aim, and their dust obscuring the range, but it was costing them ground. The truck was gaining on them again.

  The salt-pan was close ahead, hundreds of bare acres shimmering silver in the path of the sun. Craig narrowed picked up the tracks where his eyes against the glare, and rface. Their a small herd of zebra had crossed the smooth su hooves had broken through the salt crust into the yellow mush beneath. It would bog any vehicle that attempted that deceptively inviting crossing.

  "Angle to miss the right edge of the pan left! More!

  More! okay, hold that," he shouted.

  There was a narrow horn of salt-pan extending out towards them, perhaps he could tempt the pursuit to take the cut across it. He stared back over their own dust cloud and said, "Shit!" softly.

  The truck commander was too canny to try to cut across the horn. He was following them around, and a burst of I around them. Three rounds machinegun fire fell al ed craters crashed into the metal of the cab, leaving jagg rimmed with shiny metal where the camouflage paint flaked off.

  "Are you okay?"

  "Okayr Sally-Anne called back, but the tone of her cky. "Craig, I can't keep her voice was no longer so co going. I've got my foot flat and she is slowing down.

  Something is binding up! Now Craig could smell red-hot metal from the damaged front end

  "Timon, hand me up a rifle! They were still well out of range of the AK 47, but the burst he fired made him feel less helpless, even though he could not even mark the fall of his bullets. They roared around the horn of the salt-pan, in the stink of hot metal and dust, and Craig looked ahead while he reloaded the rifle.

  How far to the border now? Ten miles perhaps? But would a punitive patrol of the Third Brigade, given the "leopard" code, stop at an international border? The Israelis and South Africans had long ago set a precedent for "hot pursuit" into neutral territory. He knew they would follow them to the death.

  The Land-Rover lurched rhythmically now to her unbalanced suspension and for the first tim Craig knew that they weren't going to make it. The realization made him angry. He fired the- second magazine in short-spaced bursts, and at the third burst the Toyota swerved sharply and stopped in a billow of its own dust.

  "I got himP he bellowed exultantly.

  "Way to go!" Sally-Anne shouted back. "Geronimo!"

  "Well done, Mr. Mellow,jolly well done." The truck stood mass iNly immobile while the wreaths of dust subsided arounf it.

  "Eat thad" Craig howled. "Stick that up your rear end, you sons of porcupines!" And he emptied the rifle at the distant vehicle.

  Men were swarming around the cab of the truck like black ants around the carcass of a beetle, and the Land Rover limped away from them gamely.

  "Oh, no," Craig groaned.

  The silhouette of the truck altered as it turned back towards them, once again dust rose in a feathery tail behind it.

  "They are coming on!" Perhaps he had fluked a hit on the driver, but whatever damage he had inflicted, it was not permanent. It had stopped them for less than two minutes and now, if anything, the truck was coming on faster than before. As if to emphasize that fact, another burst of heavy machinegun fire hit the Land-Rover with a crash.

  In the cab, somebody screamed, and the sound was ask, shrill and feminine. Craig went cold, not daring to clinging to the roof tack frozen with dread.

  and Craig's "Timon's been hit." Sally-Anne's voice heart raced with relief.

  "How bad?"

  "Bad. He's bleeding all over."

  "We can't stop. Keep going." Craig looked
desperately ahead, and there was a great nothingness stretched before him. Even the stunted trees had disappeared. It was flat and featureless, the reflection from the white pans turned the sky milky pale and smudged the horizon so that there was no clear dividing line between earth and air, nothing to hold the eye.

  Craig dropped his gaze, and shouted, "Stop!" To enforce the order he stamped on the roof of the cab with all his strength. Sally' Anne reacted instantly, and locked the brakes. The crippled Land-Rover skidded broadside, and came up short.

  The cause of Craig's urgency was an apparently innocuous little yellow ball of fur, not as big as a football. It hopped in front of the vehicle, on long kangaroo back legs, totally out of proportion to the rest of its body, and then abruptly disappeared into the earth.

  "Spring hare! Craig called. "A huge colony, right across our front."

  AA

  "Kangaroo rats!" Sally-Anne leaned out of the window, the engine idling, turning her face up to his for guidance.

  They had been fortunate. The spring hare was almost entirely nocturnal, the single animal outside the burrows was an exceptional warning in daylight. Only now, under close scrutiny, could Craig make out the extent of the colony. There were tens of thousands of burrows, the entrances inconspicuous little mounds of loose earth, but Craig knew that the sandy soil beneath them would be honeycombed with the inter linking burrows, the entire area undermined to a depth of four feet or so.

  That ground would not bear the weight of a mounted man, let alone the Land' Rover With the engine idling, Craig could clearly hear the roar of the truck behind them, and machine-gun fire whiplashed over them, so close that Craig ducked instinctively.

  "Turn left! "he shouted. "Back towards the pan: They turned at right, angles across the front of the approaching truck, machinegun fire goading them on, Timon's groans reachirg Craig above the engine beat. He closed his ears to them.

  "There is no way through" Sally-Anne called. The spring-hare burrows were everywhere.

  "Keep going," Craig answered her. The truck had swung to cut them off, closing very swiftly now.

  "There!" Craig cried with relief. As he had guessed, the spring, bare colony mopped short of the salt, pan edge, avoiding the brackish seepage from the pan. There was a narrow bridge through, and Craig guided Sally-Anne into it. Within five hundred paces they were over the bridge with the ground firm ahead. Sally-Anne pushed the Land Rover to its limit, directly away from the pursuit.

  "No! No!" Craig called. "Turn right, hard right." She hesitated.

  "Do it, damn you!" And suddenly she saw what he intended, and she spun the steering-wheel, running ite direction across the front Of the back in the OPPOS approaching truck.

  Immediately the truck turned to head them off again, turning away from the pan, and from the bridge of firm ground through the subterranean maze of burrows. It was so close that they could see the heads of the troopers in the open back, catch the colour of a burgundy-red ge, hear the beret and the bright spark of a silver cap-bad fierce, bloodthirsty yells, see an AK 47 rifle brandished triumphantly.

  feet ahead Machine,gun fire ploughed up the earth ten the standing dust.

  of the Land-Rover and they tore into Craig was blazing away with the AK 47, trying to keep the driver's attention off the ground ahead of the truck.

  as he changed "Please! Please, let it happen," he pleaded gods were listening.

  the magazine on the hot rifle. And the full bore.

  The truck went into the undermined ground at ing into a pitfall. The earth it was like an elephant running opened and swallowed her down, and as she went in she men out of toppled to one side hurling the load of armed the back. When the dust rolled aside, she was half buried, around her, lying on her side. Human bodies were strewn upright, others me of them beginning to drag themselves so lying where they had been thrown.

  y'll need a bull' That it! Craig shouted down. "The dozer to get out of that."

  "Craig!" she called back. "Timon is in a bad way. Can't you help him?"

  "Stop for a second." the roof, and scrambled into the back Craig dropped off seat, and immediately Sally' Anne drove on.

  eat, his head Timon was lying sprawled half off the s thrown back and pillowed against the door. He had lost gargled in his throat, and the his glasses. His breathing back of his battle-jacket was a soggy mess Of blood. Craig eased him cautiously back in the seat and unzipped his jacket.

  He was appalled. The bullet must have come in through the metal cab, and been deformed by the impact into a primitive durn-durn. It had torn a hole the size of a demitasse coffee cup in Timon's back. There was no exit wound.

  The bullet was still in there.

  There was a first-aid box clamped to the dashboard.

  Craig took out two field dressings, stripped the wrappers and wadded them over the wound. Hampered by the Land Rover's erratic and violent motion, he strapped them tightly.

  "How is he?" Sally-Anne took her eyes off the ground ahead for a moment.

  "He's going to be okay," Craig said for Timon's benefit, but to Sally-Anne he shook his head and mouthed a silent denial.

  Timon was a dead man. It was merely a matter of an hour or two. Nobody could survive a wound like that. The smell of hot metal in the cab was suffocating.

  can't breathe," Timon whispered, and sawed for breath.

  Craig had hoped he was unconscious, but Timon's eyes were focusing on his face. Craig knocked out the Perspex pane of the window above Timon's head with his fist, to give him more air. A

  "My glasses," Tim(on said. "I can't see." Craig found the steel-rimmed spectacles on the floor between the seats, and placed them on the bridge of his nose, ing ille sis over is ears.

  "Thank you, Mr. Mellow." Incredibly, Timon smiled. "It doesn't look as though I'll be coming with you, after all." Craig was surprised by the strength of his own regret.

  He gripped Timon's shoulder firmly, hoping that physical contact might comfort him a little.

  "The truck?" Timon asked.

  "We knocked it out."

  "Good for you, sir." with the smell of burning As he spoke, the cab filled rubber and oil.

  "We're on fire! Sally-Anne cried, and Craig whipped around in the seat.

  The front end of the Land-Rover was burning, red hot metal from the damaged bearing had ignited the grease and rubber of the front tyre. Almost immediately the -tough the engine bearing seized up completely, and aid roared vainly, they ground to a halt. The slipping clutch wing out from under the burned out, more smoke spe chassis.

  "Switch off Craig ordered and banged open the door, grabbing the fire, extinguisher from its rack on the doorpost.

  He sprayed a white cloud of powder over the burning front end, snuffing out the flames almost instantly, and then unhitched and lifted the bonnet, scalding his fingers on hot metal. He sprayed the engine compartment to of the fire, and then stood back.

  prevent a resurgence "Well," he said with finality. "This bus isn't going anywhere any more! The silence after the engine roar and the gunfire was overpowering. The pinking of cooling metal from the body ig walked of the Land' Rover sounded loud as cymbals. Cra to the rear of the cab and looked back. The bogged truck was out of sight behind them in the heat haze. The silence buzzed in his ears and the loneliness of the desert bore down upon him with a physical weight and substance, seeming to slow his movements and his thinking.

  His mouth felt chalky dry from the adrenalin hangover.

  Voter!" He went quickly to the reserve tank under the seat, unscrewed the cap and checked the level.

  "At least twenty, five lit res sop There was an aluminium canteen hanging beside the AK 47 in the rack, left by one of the grave, diggers Craig topped it up from the tank, and then took it to Timon.

  Timon drank gratefully, gulping and choking in his haste to swallow. Then he lay back panting. Craig passed the canteen to Sally-Anne and then drank himself. Timon seemed a little easier, and Craig checked the dressings.

  The bleed
ing was staunched for the moment.

  "The first rule of desert survival, Craig reminded him self, "stay with the vehicle." But it didn't apply here. The vehicle would draw the pursuit likea beacon. Timon had mentioned spotter aircraft-On this open plain they would see the Land-Rover from thirty miles. Then there was the second patrol coming down from the Plumtree border-post. They would be here in a few hours.

  They couldn't stay. They had to go on. He looked down at Timon, and understanding flashed between them.

  "You'll have to leave me," Timon whispered.

  Craig could not hold his eyes, or reply. Instead he climbed on to the roofagain and looked back.