by Wilbur Smith
There were- sixteen dead buffalo, lying strung out along the line of the herd’s flight. On each carcass the belly had been split open to let the vultures in, and the sirloin and fillet had been expertly removed.
‘He killed them just for a few pounds of meat?’ Debra asked incredulously.
‘That’s all,’ David confirmed grimly. ‘But that’s not bad – sometimes they’ll kill a wildebeest simply to make a fly whisk of its tail, or they’ll shoot a giraffe for the marrow in its bones.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Debra’s voice was hopeless. ‘What makes a man do it? He can’t need the meat that badly.’
‘No,’ David agreed. ‘It’s deeper than that. This type of killing is a gut thing. This man kills for the thrill of it, he kills to see an animal fall, to hear the death cry, to smell the reek of fresh blood—’ his voice choked off, ‘this is one time you can be thankful you cannot see,’ he said softly.
Conrad Berg found them waiting beside the corpses, and he set his rangers to work butchering the carcasses.
‘No point in wasting all that meat. Food there for a lot of people.’
Then he put Sam to the spoor. There had been four men in the poaching party, one wearing light rubber-soled shoes and the others bare-footed.
‘One white man, big man, long legs. Three black men, carry meat, blood drip here and here.’
They followed Sam slowly through the open forest as he patted the grass with his long thin tracking staff, and moved towards the unsurfaced public road.
‘Here they walk backwards,’ Sam observed, and Conrad explained grimly.
‘Old poacher’s trick. They walk backwards when they cross a boundary. If you cut the spoor while patrolling the fence you think they have gone the other way – leaving instead of entering – and you don’t bother following them.’
The spoor went through a gap in the fence, crossed the road and entered the tribal land beyond. It ended where a motor vehicle had been parked amongst a screening thicket of wild ebony. The tracks bumped away across the sandy earth and rejoined the public road.
‘Plaster casts of the tyre tracks?’ David asked.
‘Waste of time.’ Conrad shook his head. ‘You can be sure they are changed before each expedition, he keeps this set especially and hides it when it’s not in use.’
‘What about spent cartridge shells?’ David persisted.
Conrad laughed briefly. ‘They are in his pocket, this is a fly bird. He’s not going to scatter evidence all over the country. He picks up as he goes along. No – we’ll have to sucker him into it.’ And his manner became businesslike. ‘Right, have you selected a place to stake old Sam out?’
‘I thought we would put him up on one of the kopjes, near the String of Pearls. He’ll be able to cover the whole estate from there, spot any dust on the road, and the height will give the two-way radio sufficient range.’
After lunch David loaded their bags into the luggage compartment of the Navajo. He paid the servants two weeks’ wages in advance.
‘Take good care,’ he told them. ‘I shall return before the end of the month.’
He parked the Land-Rover in the open hangar with the key in the ignition facing the open doorway, ready for a quick start. He took off and kept on a westerly heading, passing directly over Bandolier Hill and the buildings amongst the mango trees. They saw no sign of life, but David held his course until the hill sank from view below the horizon, then he came around on a wide circle to the south and lined up for Skukuza, the main camp of the Kruger National Park.
Conrad Berg was at the airstrip in his truck to meet the Cessna, and Jane had placed fresh flowers in the guest room. Jabulani lay fifty miles away to the north-west.
It was like squadron ‘Red’ standby again, with the Navajo parked under one of the big shade trees at the end of the Skukuza airstrip, and the radio set switched on, crackling faintly on the frequency tuned to that of Sam’s transmitter, as he waited patiently on the hill-top above the pools.
The day was oppressively hot, with the threat of a rainstorm looming up out of the east, great cumulus thunderheads striding like giants across the bushveld.
Debra and David and Conrad Berg sat in the shade of the aircraft’s wing, for it was too hot in the cockpit. They chatted in desultory fashion, but always listening to the radio crackle, and they were tense and distracted.
‘He is not going to come,’ said Debra a little before noon.
‘He’ll come,’ Conrad contradicted her. ‘Those buffalo are too much temptation. Perhaps not today – but tomorrow or the next day he’ll come.’
David stood up and climbed in through the open door of the cabin. He went forward to the cockpit.
‘Sam,’ he spoke into the microphone. ‘Can you hear me?’
There was a long pause, presumably while Sam struggled with radio procedure, then his voice, faint but clear. ‘I hear you, Nkosi.’
‘Have you seen anything?’
‘There is nothing.’
‘Keep good watch.’
‘Yebho, Nkosi.’
Jane brought a cold picnic lunch down to the airstrip. They ate heartily despite the tension, and they were about to start on the milk tart, when suddenly the radio set throbbed and hummed. Sam’s voice carried clearly to where they sat.
‘He has come!’
‘Red standby – Go! Go!’ shouted David, and they rushed for the cabin door, Debra treading squarely in the centre of Jane’s milk tart before David grabbed her arm and guided her to her seat.
‘Bright Lance, airborne and climbing.’ David laughed with excitement and then memory stabbed him with a sharp blade. He remembered Joe hanging out there at six o’clock but he shut his mind to it and he banked steeply on to his heading, not wasting time in grabbing for altitude but staying right down at tree-top level.
Conrad Berg was hunched in the seat behind them, and his face was redder than usual – seeming about to burst like an over-ripe tomato.
‘Where is the Land-Rover key?’ he demanded anxiously.
‘It’s in the ignition – and the tank is full.’
‘Can’t you go faster?’ Conrad growled.
‘Have you got your walkie-talkie?’ David checked him.
‘Here!’ It was gripped in one of his huge paws, and his double-barrelled .450 magnum was in the other.
David was hopping the taller trees, and sliding over the crests of higher ground with feet to spare. They flashed over the boundary fence and ahead of them lay the hills of Jabulani.
‘Get ready,’ he told Conrad, and flew the Navajo into the airstrip, taxiing up to the hangar where the Land-Rover waited.
Conrad jumped down at the instant that David braked to a halt, then he slammed the cabin door behind him and raced to the Land-Rover. Immediately David opened the throttle and swung the aircraft around, lining up for his take-off before the Navajo had gathered full momentum.
As he climbed, he saw the Land-Rover racing across the airstrip, dragging a cloak of dust behind it.
‘Do you read me, Conrad?’
‘Loud and clear,’ Conrad’s voice boomed out of the speaker, and David turned for the grey ribbon of the public road that showed through the trees, beyond the hills.
He followed it, flying five hundred feet above it, and he searched the open parkland.
The green Ford truck had been concealed from observation at ground level, again in a thicket of wild ebony, but it was open from the sky. For Akkers had never thought of discovery coming from there.
‘Connie, I’ve got the truck. He’s stashed it in a clump of ebony about half a mile down the bank of the Luzane stream. Your best route is to follow the road to the bridge, then go down into the dry river bed and try and cut him off before he gets to the truck.’
‘Okay, David.’
‘Move it, man.’
‘I’m moving.’ David saw the Land-Rover’s dust above the trees, Conrad must have his foot down hard.
‘I’m going to try and spot t
he man himself – chase him into your arms.’
‘You do that!’
David started a long climbing turn towards the hills, sweeping and searching, up and around. Below him the pools glinted and he opened the throttles slightly, seeking altitude to clear the crests.
From the highest peak, a tiny figure waved frantically.
‘Sam,’ he grunted. ‘Doing a war dance.’ He altered course slightly to pass him closely, and Sam stopped his imitation of a windmill and stabbed with an extended arm towards the west. David acknowledged with a wave, and turned again, dropping down the western slopes.
Ahead of him the plain spread, dappled like a leopard’s back with dark bush and golden glades of grass. He flew for a minute before he saw a black mass, moving slowly ahead of him, dark and amorphous against the pale grass. The remains of the buffalo herd had bunched up and were running without direction, desperate from the harrying they had received.
‘Buffalo,’ he told Debra. ‘On the run. Something has alarmed them.’ She sat still and intent beside him, hands in her lap, staring unseeingly ahead.
‘Ah!’ David shouted. ‘Got him – with blood on his hands!’
In the centre of one of the larger clearings lay the black beetle-like body of a dead buffalo, its belly swollen and its legs sticking out stiffly as it lay on its side.
Four men stood around it in a circle, obviously just about to begin butchering the carcass. Three of them were Africans, one with a knife in his hand.
The fourth man was Johan Akkers. There was no mistaking the tall gaunt frame. He wore an old black fedora hat on his head, strangely formal attire for the work in which he was engaged, and his braces criss-crossed his tan-coloured shirt. He carried a rifle at the trail in his right hand, and at the sound of the aircraft engines he swung round and stared into the sky, frozen with the shock of discovery.
‘You swine. Oh, you bloody swine,’ whispered David, and his anger was strong and bright against the despoilers.
‘Hold on!’ he warned Debra, and flew straight at the man, dropping steeply on to him.
The group around the dead buffalo scattered, as the aircraft bore down on them, each man picking his own course and racing away on it, but David selected the lanky galloping frame with the black hat jammed down over the ears and sank down behind him. The tips of the propellers clipped the dry grass, as he swiftly overtook the running Akkers.
He was set to fly into him, driven by the unreasoning anger of the male animal protecting his own, and he lined up to cut him down with the spinning propeller blades.
As David braced himself for the impact Akkers glanced back over his shoulder, and his face was muddy grey with fright, the skull eyes dark and deeply set. He saw the murderous blades merely feet from him, and he threw himself flat into the grass.
The Navajo roared inches over his prone body, and David pulled it round in a steep turn, with the wing-tip brushing the grass. As he came round he saw that Akkers was up and running, and that he was only fifty paces from the edge of the trees.
David levelled out, aimed for the fugitive again but realized that he could not reach him before he was into the trees. Swiftly he sped across the clearing, but the lumbering figure drew slowly closer to the timber line and as he reached the sanctuary of a big leadwood trunk, Akkers whirled and raised the rifle to his shoulder. He aimed at the approaching aircraft; although the rifle was unsteady in his hands the range was short.
‘Down,’ shouted David, pushing Debra’s head below the level of the windshield, and he pulled open the throttles and climbed steeply away.
Even above the bellow of the engines David heard the heavy bullet clang into the fuselage of the aircraft.
‘What’s happening, David?’ Debra pleaded.
‘He fired at us, but we’ve got him on the run. He’ll head back for his truck now, and Conrad should be there waiting for him.’
Akkers kept under cover of the trees, and circling above him David caught glimpses of the tall figure trotting purposefully along his escape route.
‘David, can you hear me?’ Conrad’s voice boomed suddenly in the tense cockpit.
‘What is it, Connie?’
‘We’ve got trouble. I’ve hit a rock in your Land-Rover and knocked out the sump. She’s had it, pouring oil all over the place.’
‘How the hell did you do that?’ David demanded.
‘I was trying a short cut.’ Conrad’s chagrin carried clearly over the ether.
‘How far are you from the Luzane stream?’
‘About three miles.’
‘God, he’ll beat you to it,’ David swore. ‘He’s two miles from the truck and going like he’s got a tax collector after him.’
‘You have not seen old Connie move yet. I’ll be there waiting for him,’ Berg promised.
‘Good luck,’ David called, and the transmission went dead.
Below them Akkers was skirting the base of the hills, his black hat bobbing along steadily amongst the trees. David kept his starboard wing pointed at him and the Navajo turned steadily, holding station above him.
Other movement caught David’s eye on the open slope of the hill above Akkers. For a moment he thought it was an animal, then with an intake of breath he realized that he was mistaken.
‘What is it?’ Debra demanded, sensing his concern.
‘It’s Sam, the damned fool. Connie told him not to leave his post – he’s unarmed – but he’s haring down the slope to try and cut Akkers off.’
‘Can’t you stop him?’ Debra asked anxiously, and David didn’t bother to answer.
He called Conrad four times before there was a reply. Conrad’s voice was thick and wheezing with the effort of running.
‘Sam is on to Akkers. I think he’s going to confront him.’
‘Oh God damn him,’ groaned Conrad. ‘I’ll kick his black ass for him.’
‘Hold on,’ David told him, ‘I’m going around for a closer look.’
David saw it all quite plainly, he was only three hundred feet above them when Akkers became aware of the running figure on the slope above him. He stopped dead, and half-lifted the rifle; perhaps he shouted a warning but Sam kept on down, bounding over the rocky ground towards the man who had burned his children to death.
Akkers lifted the rifle to his shoulder and aimed deliberately, the rifle jumped sharply, the barrel kicking upwards at the recoil and Sam’s legs kept on running while his upper torso was flung violently backwards by the strike of the heavy soft-nosed bullet.
The tiny brown-clad body bounced and rolled down the slope, before coming to a sprawling halt in a clump of scrub.
David watched Akkers reload the rifle, stooping to pick up the empty cartridge shell. Then he looked up at the circling aircraft above him, David may have been mistaken but it seemed the man was laughing – that obscene tooth-clucking giggle of his – then he started off again at a trot towards the truck.
‘Connie,’ David spoke hoarsely into his handset, ‘he just killed Sam.’
Conrad Berg ran heavily over the broken sandy ground. He had lost his hat and sweat poured down his big red face, stinging his eyes and plastering the lank grey hair down his forehead. The walkie-talkie set bounced on his back, and the butt of the rifle thumped rhythmically against his hip.
He ran with grim concentration, trying to ignore the swollen pounding of his heart and the torture of breath that scalded his lungs. A thorn branch clawed at his upper arms, raking thin bloody lines through his skin, but he did not break the pattern of his run.
He turned his red and streaming face to the sky and saw David’s aircraft, circling ahead of him and slightly to his left. That marked for him Akkers’ position – and it was clear that Conrad was losing ground in his desperate race to head off the escape.
The radio set on his back buzzed, but he ignored the call, he could not halt now. To break his run would mean he would only slump down exhausted. He was a big, heavy man, the air was hot and enervating, and he had run three mile
s through loose and difficult going – he was almost finished. He was burning the last of his reserves now.
Suddenly the earth seemed to fall away under him, and he pitched forward and half-slid – half-rolled – down the steep bank of the Luzane stream, to finish lying on his back in the white river sand, clean and grainy as sugar. The radio was digging painfully into his flesh and he dragged it out from under him.
Still lying in the sand he panted like a dog, blinded by sweat, and he fumbled the transmit button of the set.
‘David—’ he croaked thickly, ‘I am in the bed of the stream – can you see me?’
The aircraft was arcing directly overhead now, and David’s answer came back immediately.
‘I see you, Connie, you are a hundred yards downstream from the truck. Akkers is there, Connie, he has just reached the truck, he’ll be coming back down the river bed at any moment.’
Painfully, gasping, choking for breath, Conrad Berg dragged himself to his knees – and at that moment he heard the whirr and catch and purr of an engine. He unstrapped the heavy radio and laid it aside, then he unslung his rifle, snapped open the breech to check the load, and pulled himself to his feet.
Surprised at the weakness of his own massive body, he staggered into the centre of the river bed.
The dry river bed was eight feet deep with banks cut sheer by flood water, and it was fifteen feet wide at this point, and the floor was of smooth white sand, scattered with small water-rounded stones no bigger than a baseball. It made a good illegal access road into Jabulani, and the tracks of Akkers’ truck were clearly etched in the soft sand.
Around a bed in the stream Conrad heard the truck revving and roaring as it came down a low place in the bank into the smooth bed.
Conrad stood squarely in the middle of the river bed with the rifle held across his hip, and he fought to control his breathing. The approaching roar of the truck reached a crescendo as it came skidding wildly around the bend in the stream, and raced down towards him. Showers of loose sand were thrown out from under the spinning rear wheels.
