Wilbur Smith - B4 The Leopard Hunts In Darkness

by B4 The Leopard Hunts In Darkness(Lit)

  When he woke it was morning, and he could not rouse Sally-Anne. Her breathing snored and sawed through her nose and open mouth.

  On his knees he dug. the hole for a solar still. Though the soil was soft and friable, it went slowly. Laboriously, still on his knees, he gathered an armful of the scattered desert vegetation. It seemed there was no moisture in the woody growth when he chopped it finely with the bayonet, and laid it in the bottom of his hole.

  He cut the top off thWempty aluminium water bottle, and placed the cup this formed in the centre of the hole.

  It required enormous concentration to perform even these simple tasks. He spread the plastic ground sheet over the hole, and anchored the edges with heaped earth. In the centre of the sheet he gently laid a single round of ammunition, so that it was directly above the aluminium cup.

  Then he crawled back to Sally-Anne and sat over her so that his shadow kept the sun off her face.

  "It's going to be all right," he told her. "We'll find the road soon. We must be close--2 orn his throat, He did not realize that no sound came fr and that she would not have been able to hear him even if it had.

  "That little turd Ashe is a liar. I'll finish the book, you'll see. I'll pay off what I owe- We'll get a movie deal I'll buy King's Lynn. it will be all right. Don't worry, my darling." He waited out the baking heat of the morning, containing his impatience, and at noon by his wrist-watch he opened the still. The sun beating down on the plastic sheet had raised the temperature in the covered hole close to the boiling point. Evaporation from the chopped plants had sheet and run condensed on the under-side of the plastic down it towards the sag of the bullet. From there it had dripped into the aluminium cup.

  He had collected half a pint. He took it up between both hands, shaking so violently that he almost spilled it.

  He took a small sip and held it in his mouth. It was hot, but it tasted like honey and he had to use all his selfcontrol to prevent himself swallowing.

  He leaned forward and placed his mouth over Sally Anne blackened and bleeding lips. Gently he injected id between them.

  the lieu 11)rink, my sweet, drink it up." He found he was giggling stupidly as he watched her swallow painfully.

  A few drops at a time he passed the precious fluid from his own mouth into hers and she swallowed each sip more easily, He kept the last mouthful for himself and let it to his head like strong trickle down his throat. It went drink and he sat grinning stupidly through fat, scaly black le red, the abraen and sun-baked purp lips, his face swoll scab, and leis ions on his cheek covered with a crusty weeping his bloodshot eyes gummed up with dried mucus.

  He rebuilt the still and lay down beside Sally-Anne. He covered his face from the sun with the tail torn from his shirt and whispered, "All right find help soon. Don't worry my love-" But he knew that this was their last day. He could not keep her alive for another.

  Tomorrow they would die. It would be either the sun or the men of the Third Brigade but tomorrow they would die.

  t sunset the still gave them another half cup of distilled water, and after they had drunk it, they fell into a heavy, deathlike sleep in each other's arms.

  Something woke Craig, and for a moment he thought it was the night wind in the scrub. With difficulty he pushed himself into a sitting position, and cocked his head to listen, not sure whether he was still hallucinating or whether he was truly hearing that soft rise and fall of sound. It must be nearly dawn, he realized, the horizon was a crisp dark line beneath the velvet drape of the sky.

  Then abruptly the sound firmed, and he recognized it.

  The distinctive beat of a four, cylinder Land-Rover engine.

  The Third Brigade had not abandoned the hunt. They were coming on relentlessly, like hyenas with the reek of blood in their nostrils.

  He saw a pair of headlights, far out across the desert, their pale beams swi Any and tilting as the vehicle covered mg the rough ground. He groped for the AK 47. He could not find it. Ashe Levy must have stolen it, he thought bitterly, taken it off with him on the hyena. "I never did trust the son-of-a-bitch." Craig stared hopelessly at the approaching headlights.

  In their beams danced a little pixie-like figure, a diminutive yellow mannikin. "Puck," he thought. "Fairies. I never believed in fairies. Don't say that when you do, one dies.

  Don't want to kill fairies. I believe in them." His mind was going, fantasy mixed with flashes of lucidity.

  Suddenly he recognized that the little half-naked yellow mannikin was a Bushman, one of the pygmy desert race. A Bushman tracker, the Third Brigade were using a Bushman tracker to hunt them down. Only a Bushman could have run on their spoor all night, tracking by the headlights of the Land-Rover.

  The headlights flashed over them, likea stage spotlight, and Craig lifted his hand to shade his eyes. The light was so bright that it hurt. He had the bayonet in his other hand behind his back.

  I'll get one of them, he told himself I'll take one of them The Land-Rover stopped only a few paces away. The little Bushman tracker was standing near them, clicking and clucking in his strange birdlike language. Craig heard the door of the Land-Rover open behind the blinding lights, and a man came towards them. Craig recognize d him instantly. General Peter Fungabera he seemed as tall as a giant in the back lighting of the headlights as he strode towards where Craig huddled on the desert floor.

  Thank you, God, Craig prayed, thank you for sending him to me before I died, and he gripped the bayonet. In the throat, he told himself, as he stoops over me. He marshalled all his remaining strength, and General Peter Fungabera stooped towards him. Now! Craig made the effort. Drive the point into his throat! But nothing happened. His limbs would not respond. He was finished. There was nothing left.

  "I have to inform you that you are under arrest for illegal entry into the Republic of Botswana, sir," said General Fungabera but he had changed his voice. He was using a deep, gentle, caring voice, in heavily accented English.

  He won't al me, Craig thought, the tricky bastard, and lo he saw that Peter Fungabera was wearing the uniform of a sergeant of Botswana police.

  "You are lucky." He went down on one knee. "We found where you were crossing the road." He was holding a felt covered water bottle to Craig's mouth. "We have been following you, since three o'clock yesterday." Coo , sweet water gushed into Craig's mouth and ran down his chin. He let the bayonet drop and grabbed for the bottle with both hands. He wanted to gulp it all down at Once, he wanted to drown in it. It was so marvelous that his eyes flooded with tears.

  Through the tears he saw the Botswana police crest on the open door of the Land' Rover

  "Who?" he stared at Peter Fungabera, but he had never seen this face before. It was a broad, flat nosed face, puckered now with worry and concern, like that of a friendly bulldog.

  "Who?" he croaked.

  "Please not to talk, we must get you and the lady to hospital at Francistown pretty bloody quickly. Plenty people die in desert you goddamned lucky."

  "You aren't General Fungabera?" he whispered. "Who are you?"

  "Botswana police, border patrol. Sergeant Simon Mare, keng at your honour's service, sir." s a boy, before the great patriotic war, Colonel Nikolai Bukharili-had accompanied his father on the wolf hurfts, hunting the packs that terrorized their remote village in the high Urals during the long harsh winter months.

  Those expeditions into the vast gloomy Taiga forest had nurtured in him a deep passion for the hunt. He enjoyed the solitude of wild places and the primeval joy of pitting all his senses against a dangerous animal. Eyesight, hearing, smell, and the other extraordinary sense of the born hunter that enabled him to anticipate the twists and evasions of his quarry all these the colonel still possessed in full strength, despite his sixty-two years. Together with a memory for facts and faces that was almost computer like they had enabled him to excel at his work, had seen him elevated to the head of his department of the Seventh commissariat where he had hunted professionally the most dangerous game of all ma
n.

  When he hunted boar and bear on the great estates reserved for the recreations of high officers of the GRU and KGB, he had alarmed his comrades and the gamekeepers by scorning to fire from the prepared hides and by going on foot alone into the thickest cover. The thrill of great physical danger had satisfied some deep need in him.

  When the assignment on which he was now engaged had been channelled through to his office on the second floor of the central headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square, he had recognized its importance immediately, and taken control of it personally. With careful cultivation, that first potential was gradually being realized, and when the time had come for Colonel Bukharin at last to meet his subject face to face on the ground over which they would manoeuvre, he had chosen the cover which best suited his tastes.

  Russians, especially Russians of high rank, were objects of hostile suspicion in the new republic of Zimbabwe.

  During the chimurenga, the war of independence, Russia had chosen the wrong horse and given her support to Joshua Nkomo's ZIPRA the Matabele revolutionary wing. As far as the government in Harare was concerned, the Russians were the new colonialist enemy, while it was China and North Korea who were the true friends of the revolution.

  For these reasons, Colonel Nikolai Bukharin had entered Zimbabwe on a Finnish passport, bearing a false name. He spoke Finnish fluently, as he did five other languages, including English. He needed a cover under which he could freely leave the city of Harare, where his every move wou watch over, and go out into t -le unpopulated wilderness where he could meet his subject without fear of surveillance.

  Although many of the other African republics under pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had banned big-game hunting, Zimbabwe still licensed professional hunters to operate their elaborate safaris in the designated "controlled hunting areas'. These were large earners of foreign exchange for the embattled economy.

  It amused the colonel to pose as a prosperous timber merchant from Helsinki, and to indulge his own love of the hunt in this decadent manner reserved almost exclusively for the financial aristocrats of the capitalist system.

  Of course, the budget that had been allocated for this operation could not stand such extravagance. However, General Peter Fungabera, the subject of the operation, was a wealthy and ambitious man. He had made no difficulties when Colonel Bukharin had suggested that they use a big game hunting safari as d cover for their meeting, and that General Fungabera, should be allowed the honour of acting as host and of paying the thousand dollars der them that the safari cost.

  Standing in the centre of the small clearing now, Colonel Bukharin looked at his man. The Russian had deliberately wounded the bull Nikolai Bukharin was a fine shot with pistol, title and shotgun, and the range had been thirty yards. If he had chosen, he could have placed a bullet in either of the bull's eyes, in the very centre of the bright black pupil. Instead he had shot the animal through the belly, a hand's width behind the lungs so as not to impair its wind, but not far enough back to damage the hindquarters and so slow it down in the charge.

  It was a marvelous bull, with a mountainous boss of black horn that would stretch fifty inches or more around the curve from point to point. A fifty-inch bull was a trophy few could match, and as he had drawn first blood it would belong to the colonel no matter who delivered the COup de grdce. He was smiling at Peter Fungabera as he poured vodka into the silver cup of his hip-flask.

  "No Zdorovye!" he saluted Peter, and tossed it down without blinking, refilled the silver cup and offered it to him.

  Peter was dressed in starched and crisply ironed fatigues with his name to on the breast, and a khaki silk scarf at his throat, but he was bare-headed with no insignia to sparkle in the sunlight and alarm the game.

  He accepted the silver cup and looked over the rim at the Russian.

  He was as tall as Peter, but even slimmer, erect as a man thirty years younger. His eyes were a peculiarly pale, cruel blue. His face was riven with the scars Of war and of other ancient conflicts, so that it was a miniature lunar landscape. His skull was shaven, the fine stubble of hair that covered it was silver and sparkled in the sunlight like glass fibres.

  Peter Fungabera enjoyed this man. He enjoyed the aura of power that he wore like an emperor's cloak. He enjoyed the innate cruelty of him that was almost African, and which Peter understood perfectly. He enjoyed his deviousness, the layering of lies and truths and half truths so that they became indistinguishable. He was excited by the sense of danger that exuded from. him so powerfully that it had almost an odour of its own. "We are the same breed," Peter thought, as he lifted the silver cup and returned the salute He drank down the pungent spirit at one swallow. Then" breathing carefully so as not to show the smallest sign of distress, he handed back the cup.

  "You drink likea man," Nikolai Bukharin admitted. "Let us see if you hunt like one." Peter had guessed correctly. It had been a test: the voc ca and the buffalo bull, both of them. He shrugged to show his indifference, and the Russian beckoned to the professional hunter who stood respectfully out of earshot.

  The hunter was a Zimbabwe-born white man, in his late thirties, dressed for the part in wide-brimmed hat and khaki gi let with heavy-calibre cartridges in the loops across his breast. He had a thick curly dark beard and an extremely unhappy expression on his face, as befits a man who is about to follow a gun-shot buffalo bull into dense riverine bush.

  "General Fungabera will take the.458," Colonel Bukharin said, and the hunter nodded miserably. How had this strange old bastard managed to make a muck-up of a sitting shot like that? He had been shooting like a Bisley champion u The hunter suppressed a shiver and snapped his fingers for p to now. Christ, but that bush looked really nasty.

  the number two gunbearer to bring up the heavy rifle.

  "You will wait here with the bearers," said the Russian quietly.

  "Sir!" the hunter protested quickly. J can't let you go in alone.

  I'd lose my licence. It's just not on-"

  "Enough,"said Colo nO Bukharin.

  "But, sit, you don't understand-"

  "I said, enough!" The Russian never raised his voice, but those pale eyes silenced the younger man completely. He found suddenly that he was more afraid of this man than of losing his licence, or of the wounded bull in the bush and leapped back thankfully.

  ahead. He subsided ste The Russian took The.458 from the gunbearer, shot the bolt back to check that it was loaded with soft-tipped bullets, and then handed it to Peter Fungabera. Peter took it from him, smiling slightly, hefted it, then handed it back to the gunbearer. Colonel Bukharin raised one silver eyebrow and smiled also.

  The smile was mockery shaded with contempt.

  Peter spoke sharply in Shana to the bearer, Th he, mambo! The man ran, and snatched another weapon from one of the other back bearers. He brought it back to Peter, clapping softly to show his respect.

  Peter weighed this new weapon in his hands. It was a short-shafted stabbing assegai. The handle was of hardwood bound with copper wire. The blade was almost two feet long and four inches broad.

  Carefully Peter shaved the hairs off the back of his thumb with the edge of the silver blade, then, deliberately, he shrugged off his jacket and stripped his trousers and jungle boots.

  Dressed only in a pair of olive-green shorts and carrying the stabbing assegai, he said, "This is the African way, Colonel." The Russian was no longer smiling. "But I do not expect a man of your years to hunt the same way." Peter excuse d him courteously. "You may use your rifle again." The Russian nodded, conceding the exchange. He had lost that one, but now let's see if this black mtqik can make good his boast. Bukharin looked down at the spoor. The great hoof prints were the size of soup plates, and the thin watery gouts of blood were tinged with greenish-yellow dung from the ruptured bowels.

  91 will track," he said. "You will watch for the break." They moved off easily, with the Russian five paces ahead, stooped attentively to the blood spoor, and Peter Fung
abera drifting behind him, the assegai held underhand, and his dark eyes covering the bush ahead with a steady rhythmic sweep, trained eyes not expecting to see the whole animal, searching for the little things, perhaps the shine of a wet muzzle or the drooping curve of a great horn.

  Within twenty paces the bush closed in around them.

  It was sultry green as a hothouse, dank vegetation pressing breathlessly around them. The air stank of the rotting leaf mould that deadened their footfalls. The silence was oppressive, so that the drag of a thorny branch across the Russian's leather leggings sounded loud as a truck engine.

  He was sweating; perspiration soaked his shirt in a dark patch between the shoulder-blades and sparkled like dewdrops on the back of his neck. Peter could hear his ing, deep and harsh, but knew instinctively that it breath was not fear that worked in the Russian, but the pervading excitement of the hunter.

  Peter Fungabera did not share it. There was a coldness in him where his own fear should have been. He had trained himself to that during the chimurenga. This was a necessary task, this thing with the assegai. It was to impress the Russian only, and with all fear and feeling anaesthetized by the coldness, Peter Fungabera prepared himself.