by Wilbur Smith
‘It’s no flyweight,’ Bruce agreed. ‘But we’ll have to take the chance. We’ll bring the Ford across first, then the trucks and the tanker last.’
Ruffy nodded and wiped his face on his forearm; the muscles below his armpits knotted as he moved and there was no flabbiness in the powerful bulge of his belly above his belt.
‘Phew!’ He blew his lips out. ‘I got the feeling for a beer now. This thirst is really stalking me.’
‘You’ve got some with you?’ Bruce asked as he passed his thumbs across his eyebrows and squeezed the moisture from them so it ran down his cheeks.
‘Two things I never travel without, my trousers and a stock of the brown and bubbly.’ Ruffy picked up the small pack from the corner of the shelter and it clinked coyly. ‘You hear that sound, boss?’
‘I hear it, and it sounds like music,’ grinned Bruce. ‘All right, everybody.’ He raised his voice. ‘Take ten minutes.’
Ruffy opened the bottles and passed them out, issuing one to be shared between three gendarmes. ‘These Arabs don’t properly appreciate this stuff,’ he explained to Bruce. ‘It’d just be a waste.’
The liquor was lukewarm and gassy; it merely aggravated Bruce’s thirst. He drained the bottle and tossed it out of the shelter.
‘All right.’ He stood up. ‘Let’s get these trusses into position.’
‘That’s the shortest ten minutes I ever lived,’ commented Ruffy.
‘Your watch is slow,’ said Bruce.
Carrying the trusses within it, the shelter lumbered out on to the bridge. There was no laughter now, only laboured breathing and curses.
‘Fix the ropes!’ commanded Bruce. He tested the knots personally, then looked up at Ruffy and nodded.
‘That’ll do.’
‘Come on, you mad bastards,’ Ruffy growled. ‘Lift it.’
The first truss rose to the perpendicular and swayed there like a grotesque maypole with the ropes hanging from its top.
‘Two men on each rope,’ ordered Bruce. ‘Let it down gently.’ He glanced round to ensure that they were all ready.
‘Drop it over the edge, and I’ll throw you bastards in after it,’ warned Ruffy.
‘Lower away!’ shouted Bruce.
The truss leaned out over the gap towards the fire-blackened stump of bridge on the far side slowly at first, then faster as gravity took it.
‘Hold it, damn you. Hold it!’ roared Ruffy with the muscles in his shoulders humped out under the strain. They lay back against the ropes, but the weight of the truss dragged them forward as it fell.
It crashed down across the gap, lifted a cloud of dead wood ash as it struck, and lay there quivering.
‘Man, I thought we’d lost that one for sure,’ growled Ruffy, then turned savagely on his men.
‘You bastards better be sharper with the next one – if you don’t want to swim this river.’
They repeated the process with the second truss, and again they could not hold its falling length, but this time they were not so lucky. The end of the truss hit the far side, bounced and slid sideways.
‘It’s going! Pull, you bastards, pull!’ shouted Ruffy.
The truss toppled slowly sideways and over the edge. It hit the river below them with a splash, disappeared under the surface, then bobbed up and floated away downstream until checked by the ropes.
Both Bruce and Ruffy fumed and swore during the lengthy exasperating business of dragging it back against the current and manhandling its awkward bulk back on to the bridge. Half a dozen times it slipped at the crucial moment and splashed back into the river.
Despite his other virtues, Ruffy’s vocabulary of cursing words was limited and it added to his frustration that he had to keep repeating himself. Bruce did much better – he remembered things that he had heard and he made up a few.
When finally they had the dripping baulk of timber back on the bridge and were resting, Ruffy turned to Bruce with honest admiration.
‘You swear pretty good,’ he said. ‘Never heard you before, but no doubt about it, you’re good! What’s that one about the cow again?’
Bruce repeated it for him a little self-consciously.
‘You make that up yourself?’ asked Ruffy.
‘Spur of the moment,’ laughed Bruce.
‘That’s ’bout the dirtiest I ever heard.’ Ruffy could not conceal his envy. ‘Man, you should write a book.’
‘Let’s get this bridge finished first,’ said Bruce. ‘Then I’ll think about it.’
Now the truss was almost servile in its efforts to please. It dropped neatly across the gap and lay beside its twin.
‘You curse something good enough, and it works every time,’ Ruffy announced sagely. ‘I think your one about the cow made all the difference, boss.’
With two trusses in position they had broken the back of the project. They carried the shelter out and set it on the trusses, straddling the gap. The third and fourth trusses were dragged into position and secured with ropes and nails before nightfall.
When the shelter waddled wearily back to the laager at dusk, the men within it were exhausted. Their hands were bleeding and bristled with wood splinters, but they were also mightily pleased with themselves.
‘Sergeant Jacque, keep one of your searchlights trained on the bridge all night. We don’t want our friends to come out and set fire to it again.’
‘There are only a few hours’ life left in each of the batteries.’ Jacque kept his voice low.
‘Use them one at a time then.’ Bruce spoke without hesitation. ‘We must have that bridge lit up all night.
‘You think you could spare a beer for each of the boys that worked on the bridge today?’
‘A whole one each!’ Ruffy was shocked. ‘I only got a couple cases left.’
Bruce fixed him with a stern eye and Ruffy grinned.
‘Okay, boss. Guess they’ve earned it.’
Bruce transferred his attention to Wally Hendry who sat on the running-board of one of the trucks cleaning his nails with the point of his bayonet.
‘Everything under control here, Hendry?’ he asked coolly.
‘Sure, what’d you think would happen? We’d have a visit from the archbishop? The sky’d fall in? Your French thing’d have twins or something?’ He looked up from his nails at Bruce. ‘When are you jokers going to get that bridge finished, instead of wandering around asking damn-fool questions?’
Bruce was too tired to feel annoyed. ‘You’ve got the night watch, Hendry,’ he said, ‘from now until dawn.’
‘Is that right, hey? And you? What’re you going to do all night, or does that question make you blush?’
‘I’m going to sleep, that’s what I’m going to do. I haven’t been lolling round camp all day.’
Hendry pegged the bayonet into the earth between his feet and snorted.
‘Well, give her a little bit of sleep for me too, Bucko.’
Bruce left him and crossed to the Ford.
‘Hello, Bruce. How did it go today? I missed you,’ Shermaine greeted him, and her face lit up as she looked at him. It is a good feeling to be loved, and some of Bruce’s fatigue lifted.
‘About half finished, another day’s work.’ Then he smiled back at her. ‘I won’t lie and say I missed you – I’ve been too damn busy.’
‘Your hands!’ she said with quick concern and lifted them to examine them. ‘They’re in a terrible state.’
‘Not very pretty, are they?’
‘Let me get a needle from my case. I’ll get the splinters out.’
From across the laager Wally Hendry caught Bruce’s eye and with one hand made a suggestive sign below his waist. Then, at Bruce’s frown of anger, he threw back his head and laughed with huge delight.
– 25 –
Bruce’s stomach grumbled with hunger as he stood with Ruffy and Hendry beside the cooking fire. In the early morning light he could just make out the dark shape of the bridge at the end of the clearing. That drum was still beatin
g in the jungle, but they hardly noticed it now. It was taken for granted like the mosquitoes. ‘The batteries are finished,’ grunted Ruffy. The feeble yellow beam of the searchlight reached out tiredly towards the bridge.
‘Only just lasted the night,’ agreed Bruce.
‘Christ, I’m hungry,’ complained Hendry. ‘What could I do to a couple of fried eggs and a porterhouse steak.’
At the mention of food Bruce’s mouth flooded with saliva. He shut his mind against the picture that Wally’s words had evoked in his imagination.
‘We won’t be able to finish the bridge and get the trucks across today,’ he said, and Ruffy agreed.
‘There’s a full day’s work left on her, boss.’
‘This is what we’ll do then,’ Bruce went on. ‘I’ll take the work party out to the bridge. Hendry, you will stay here in the laager and cover us the same as yesterday. And Ruffy, you take one of the trucks and a dozen of your boys. Go back ten miles or so to where the forest is open and they won’t be able to creep up on you. Then cut us a mountain of firewood; thick logs that will burn all night. We will set a ring of watch fires round the camp tonight.’
‘That makes sense,’ Ruffy nodded. ‘But what about the bridge?’
‘We’ll have to put a guard on it,’ said Bruce, and the expressions on their faces changed as they thought about this.
‘More pork chops for the boys in the bushes,’ growled Hendry. ‘You won’t catch me sitting out on the bridge all night.’
‘No one’s asking you to,’ snapped Bruce. ‘All right, Ruffy. Go and fetch the wood, and plenty of it.’
Bruce completed the repairs to the bridge in the late afternoon. The most anxious period was in the middle of the day when he and four men had to leave the shelter and clamber down on to the supports a few feet above the surface of the river to set the king-posts in place. Here they were exposed at random range to arrows from the undergrowth along the banks. But no arrows came and they finished the job and climbed back to safety again with something of a sense of anticlimax.
They nailed the crossties over the trusses and then roped everything into a compact mass.
Bruce stood back and surveyed the fruit of two full days’ labour.
‘Functional,’ he decided, speaking aloud. ‘But we certainly aren’t going to win any prizes for aesthetic beauty or engineering design.’
He picked up his jacket and thrust his arms into the sleeves; his sweaty upper body was cold now that the sun was almost down.
‘Home, gentlemen,’ he said, and his gendarmes scattered to their positions inside the shelter.
The metal shelter circled the laager, squatting every twenty or thirty paces like an old woman preparing to relieve herself. When it lifted and moved on it left a log fire behind it. The ring of fires was completed by dark and the shelter returned to the laager.
‘Are you ready, Ruffy?’ From inside the shelter Bruce called across to where Ruffy waited.
‘All set, boss.’
Followed by six heavily armed gendarmes, Ruffy crossed quickly to join Bruce and they set off to begin their all-night vigil on the bridge.
Before midnight it was cold in the corrugated iron shelter, for the wind blew down the river and they were completely exposed to it, and there was no cloud cover to hold the day’s warmth against the earth.
The men in the shelter huddled under their gas capes and waited. Bruce and Ruffy leaned together against the corrugated iron wall, their shoulders almost touching, and there was sufficient light from the stars to light the interior of the shelter and allow them to make out the guard rails of the bridge through the open ends.
‘Moon will be up in an hour,’ murmured Ruffy.
‘Only a quarter of it, but it will give us a little more light,’ Bruce concurred, and peered down into the black hole between his feet where he had prised up one of the newly laid planks.
‘How about taking a shine with the torch?’ suggested Ruffy.
‘No.’ Bruce shook his head, and passed the flashlight into his other hand. ‘Not until I hear them.’
‘You might not hear them.’
‘If they swim downstream and climb up the piles, which is what I expect, then we’ll hear them all right. They’ll be dripping water all over the place,’ said Bruce.
‘Kanaki and his boys didn’t hear them,’ Ruffy pointed out.
‘Kanaki and his boys weren’t listening for it,’ said Bruce.
They were silent then for a while. One of the gendarmes started to snore softly and Ruffy shot out a huge booted foot that landed in the small of his back. The man cried out and scrambled to his knees, looking wildly about him.
‘You have nice dreams?’ Ruffy asked pleasantly.
‘I wasn’t sleeping,’ the man protested. ‘I was thinking.’
‘Well, don’t think so loudly,’ Ruffy advised him. ‘Sounds though you sawing through the bridge with a cross cut.’
Another half hour dragged itself by like a cripple.
‘Fires are burning well,’ commented Ruffy, and Bruce turned his head and glanced through the loophole in the corrugated iron behind him at the little garden of orange flame-flowers in the darkness.
‘Yes, they should last till morning.’
Silence again, with only the singing of the mosquitoes and the rustle of the river as it flowed by the piles of the bridge. Shermaine has my pistol, Bruce remembered with a small trip in his pulse, I should have taken it back from her. He unclipped the bayonet from the muzzle of his rifle, tested the edge of the blade with his thumb, and slid it into the scabbard on his web-belt. Could easily lose the rifle if we start mixing it in the dark, he decided.
‘Christ, I’m hungry,’ grunted Ruffy beside him.
‘You’re too fat,’ said Bruce. ‘The diet will do you good.’ And they waited.
Bruce stared down into the hole in the floorboards. His eyes began weaving fantasies out of the darkness, he could see vague shapes that moved, like things seen below the surface of the sea. His stomach tightened and he fought the impulse to shine his flashlight into the hole. He closed his eyes to rest them. I will count slowly to ten, he decided, and then look again.
Ruffy’s hand closed on his upper arm; the pressure of his fingers transmitted alarm like a current of electricity. Bruce’s eyelids flew open.
‘Listen,’ breathed Ruffy.
Bruce heard it. The stealthy drip of water on water below them. Then something bumped the bridge, but so softly that he felt rather than heard the jar.
‘Yes,’ Bruce whispered back. He reached out and tapped the shoulder of the gendarme beside him and the man’s body stiffened at his touch.
With his breath scratching his dry throat, Bruce waited until he was sure the warning had been passed to all his men. Then he shifted the weight of his rifle from across his knees and aimed down into the hole.
He drew in a deep breath and switched on the flashlight. The beam shot down and he looked along it over his rifle barrel.
The square aperture in the floorboards formed a frame for the picture that flashed into his eyes. Black bodies, naked, glossy with wetness, weird patterns of tattoo marks, a face staring up at him, broad sloped forehead above startlingly white eyes and flat nose. The long gleaming blade of a panga. Clusters of humanity clinging to the wooden piles like ticks on the legs of a beast. Legs and arms and shiny trunks merged into a single organism, horrible as some slimy sea-creature.
Bruce fired into it. His rifle shuddered against his shoulder and the long orange spurts from its muzzle gave the picture a new flickering horror. The mass of bodies heaved, and struggled like a pack of rats trapped in a dry well. They dropped splashing into the river, swarmed up the timber piles, twisting and writhing as the bullets hit them, screaming, babbling over the sound of the rifle.
Bruce’s weapon clicked empty and he groped for a new magazine. Ruffy and his gendarmes were hanging over the guard rails of the bridge, firing downwards, sweeping the piles below them with long bursts,
the flashes lighting their faces and outlining their bodies against the sky.
‘They’re still coming!’ roared Ruffy. ‘Don’t let them get over the side.’
Out of the hole at Bruce’s feet thrust the head and naked upper body of a man. There was a panga in his hand; he slashed at Bruce’s legs, his eyes glazed in the beam of the flashlight.
Bruce jumped back and the knife missed his knees by inches. The man wormed his way out of the hole towards Bruce. He was screaming shrilly, a high meaningless sound of fury.
Bruce lunged with the barrel of his empty rifle at the contorted black face. All his weight was behind that thrust and the muzzle went into the Baluba’s eye. The foresight and four inches of the barrel disappeared into his head, stopping only when it hit bone. Colourless fluid from the burst eyeball gushed from round the protruding steel.
Tugging and twisting, Bruce tried to free the rifle, but the foresight had buried itself like the barb of a fish hook. The Baluba had dropped his panga and was clinging to the rifle barrel with both hands. He was wailing and rolling on his back upon the floorboards, his head jerking every time Bruce tried to pull the muzzle out of his head.
Beyond him the head and shoulders of another Baluba appeared through the aperture.
Bruce dropped his rifle and gathered up the fallen panga; he jumped over the writhing body of the first Baluba and lifted the heavy knife above his head with both hands.
The man was jammed in the hole, powerless to protect himself. He looked up at Bruce and his mouth fell open.
Two-handed, as though he were chopping wood, Bruce swung his whole body into the stroke. The shock jarred his shoulders and he felt blood splatter his legs. The un-tempered blade snapped off at the hilt and stayed imbedded in the Baluba’s skull.
Panting heavily, Bruce straightened up and looked wildly about him. Baluba were swarming over the guard rail on one side of the bridge. The starlight glinted on their wet skins. One of his gendarmes was lying in a dark huddle, his head twisted back and his rifle still in his hands. Ruffy and the other gendarmes were still firing down over the far side.
‘Ruffy!’ shouted Bruce. ‘Behind you! They’re coming over!’ and he dropped the handle of the panga and ran towards the body of the gendarme. He needed that rifle.
