Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  He moved like a maimed caterpillar, lying on his back, still clutching the severed artery. He drew up his good knee, dug in his heel and pushed himself painfully across the floor, sliding on his back a few inches at a time, his own blood lubricating his passage. He moved six feet towards the desk and reached out for one of the sheets of paper. He saw then that it was a sheet from the wages register.

  He had not touched it when the intensity of the light in the room altered. Somebody was standing in the doorway. He turned his head and Ambassador Ning was staring at him. He had come up on to the verandah. His rubber-soled training shoes made no sound at all. Now he stood petrified with shock in the doorway, and for a moment longer he stared at Johnny.

  Then he yelled shrilly, “He is still alive. Sali, come quickly, he is still alive.” Cheng; disappeared from the doorway and ran down the verandah still shouting for the poacher. “Sali, come quickly.”

  It was all over, and Johnny knew it. Only seconds remaining to him. He rolled on his side reached out and snatched up the register sheet. He pressed the sheet flat on the floor with one hand, and then released the severed artery and drew his blooddrenched hand out of the front of his trousers. Immediately he felt the artery begin to pulse and fresh blood jetted from the wound.

  With his forefinger he scrawled on the blank sheet of paper, writing in his own blood. He formed the letter N in a large lopsided character, and dizziness made his senses swirl. and It was more difficult to concentrate. The down stroke of the I was elongated and curved, too much like a J. Painfully he dotted the letter to Make its meaning clearer.

  For a moment his finger was glued lightly to the paper with his sticky blood. He pulled it free. He started on the second N. It was crude and childlike. His finger would not follow the dictates of his mind. He heard the ambassador still calling for Sali, and the poacher’s answering shout filled with alarm and consternation. NIN, Johnny began the G but his finger wandered off at an angle and the wet red letters wiggled and swam before his eyes like tadpoles.

  He heard running feet come pounding down the verandah and Sali’s voice. “I thought he was dead. I finish him good now!” Johnny crumpled the sheet of paper in his left hand, the hand that was clean of blood, and be thrust his closed fist into the front of his tunic and rolled over onto his belly with his arm trapped under him, concealing the balled note.

  He did not see Sali come in at the door. His face was pressed to the concrete floor. He, heard the poacher’s boots squeak and slip on the blood, and then the click of the safety-catch on the rifle as he stood over Johnny’s prostrate form.

  Johnny felt no fear, only a vast sense of sorrow and resignation. He thought about Mavis and the children as he felt the muzzle of the rifle touch the back of his head. He was relieved that he would not be left alone after they were gone. He was glad that he would never see what had happened to them, would never be forced to witness the signs of their agony and degradation.

  He was already dying before the bullet from the AK 47 tore through his skull and buried itself in the concrete under his face. “Shit,” said Sali . He stepped back and shouldered the rifle, a faint feather of gunsmoke still drifting from the muzzle. “A hard man to kill. He made me waste many bullets, each one ten kwacha. Too much!”

  Ning Cheng Gong advanced into the room. “Are you sure that you’ve finished the job, at last?” he asked.

  “His head gone,” Sali grunted as he picked up Johnny’s keys from the desk and went to ransack the Milner safe. “Kufa! He dead, for sure.”

  Cheng moved closer to the corpse, and stared at it with fascination. The killing had excited him. He was sexually aroused, not as much as if it had been a young girl who had died, but aroused, nevertheless. The smell of blood filled the room. He loved that smell. He was so absorbed that he did not notice that he was standing in a puddle of blood until Gomo called him from below the verandah.

  “All the ivory is loaded. We are ready to go.”

  Cheng stepped back and exclaimed with disgust as he saw the stain on the cuff of his crisply ironed blue cotton slacks. “I’m going now,” he told Sali. “Burn the ivory godown before you leave.”

  In the safe Sali had found the canvas bank bag that contained the month’s wages for the camp staff, and he grunted without looking up from the contents. “I burn everything for sure.”

  Cheng ran down the verandah steps and climbed into the Mercedes. He signalled to Gomo and the two refrigerator trucks pulled away. The ivory was packed into the holds and then covered with the dismembered carcasses of the culled beasts. A casual inspection would not reveal the hoard, but there was nobody to stop the convoy. They were protected by the badges of the National Parks Board painted on the trucks, and by the khaki uniforms and shoulder flashes of Gomo and David, the two rangers. Not even one of the frequent roadblocks was likely to delay them. The security forces were intent on catching political dissidents, not ivory-runners.

  It had all gone as Chetti Singh had planned it. Cheng glanced at the rear-view mirror of the Mercedes. The ivory godown was already ablaze.

  The poachers were forming up into a column for the return march. Each of them carried a large tusk from the hoard.

  Cheng smiled to himself. Perhaps Sali’s greed would work to his advantage. If the police ever caught up with the gang, the disappearance of the ivory would be neatly explained by both the fire and the loads the poachers were carrying.

  At Cheng’s insistence they had left forty tusks in the burning godown, to provide traces of charred ivory for the police forensic laboratory. As Chetti Singh might have said, “Another dead herring.”

  This time Cheng laughed aloud. He was elated. The success of the raid and the thrill of violence and death and blood warmed his belly and filled him with a sense of power. He felt masterful and sexually charged, and suddenly he was aware that he had a hard throbbing erection. He determined that next time he would do the killing himself. It was quite natural to believe that there would be a next time, and many more times after that. Death had made Cheng feel immortal.

  Chapter 7

  “Johnny. Oh, God. Johnny.” Daniel squatted beside him and reached out to touch the side of his throat just below the ear feeling for the pulse of the carotid. It was an instinctive gesture, for the bullet entry wound in the back of Johnny’s skull was conclusive.

  Johnny’s skin was cool and Daniel could not yet bring himself to turn him over and look at the exit wound. He let him lie a little longer and rocked back on his heels, letting his anger flourish to replace the enervating chill of grief. He cherished his rage, as though it were a candle flame on a dark night. It warmed the cold empty place in his soul that Johnny had left.

  Daniel stood up at last. He played the torch-beam on the floor ahead of him, and stepped over the pools and smears of Johnny’s blood as he went to the armoury.

  The remote control for the generator was on the mains panel beside the door. Daniel threw the switch and heard the distant clatter of the diesel engine in the power house down near the main gates to the camp. The diesel engine ran up to speed an settled at a steady beat, then the generator kicked in and the lights flickered and bloomed. Through the window he saw the street lamps lining the driveway light up and in their glow the Casia trees were vivid green and shiny with raindrops.

  Daniel fetched the bunch of keys that still hung in the lock of the Milner safe and strode through into the armoury. Along with the .375 culling rifles, there were five AK 47 assault rifles on the rack.

  These were used on anti-poaching patrols when the rangers needed equivalent fire-power to take on the gangs of poachers. Ammunition was stored in the cupboard below the gunrack. He unlocked the steel door. There were four magazines of AK ammunition in each pouched webbing belt hanging. on the hooks.He slung one of these over his shoulder, then lifted an automatic rifle down from the rack and loaded it with deft movements; the old warlike arts once learned were never forgotten.

  Armed and angry, he ran down the verandah st
eps. Start with the ivory godown, he decided. They’ll been there for sure. He circled the burned-out building, searching for sign by the light of the street lamps, flashing his torch at anything that caught his attention. If he had allowed himself to think about it, he would have realised he was wasting his time. The only prints that had withstood the erosion of the rain were those protected by the overhanging verandah roof, a set of heavy tyre tracks in the mud at the front entrance to the ivory godown.

  Even these were almost erased and only just recognisable.

  Daniel ignored them; he was after the gang and they would not be using vehicles. Quickly he widened the circles of his search, trying to pick up an outgoing set of tracks, concentrating on the northern side of the camp’s perimeter, for the gang would almost certainly head back to the Zambezi River.

  It was useless, as he had known deep down that it would be. After twenty minutes he gave it up. There were no tracks to follow. He stood under the dark trees and raged with frustration and sorrow.

  “If only I could get a shot at the bastards,” he lamented.

  It meant little to him in his present mood that he was one man against twenty or more professional killers. Jock was a cameraman, not a soldier. He would be of no help in a fight. The memory of those mutilated bodies in the bedroom of the bungalow and of Johnny’s shattered head overpowered all rational thought. Daniel found that he was physically shaking with the strength of his anger, and that put him on the road to recovering his scattered wits.

  “While I’m wasting time here, they’re getting clean away,” he told himself. “The only way is to cut them off on the river. I need help.” He thought of the Parks camp at Mana Pools. The warden there was a good man. Daniel knew him well from the old days. He had an anti-poaching team and a fast boat. They could get downstream and patrol the river crossing to catch the gang as it attempted to get back on to the Zambian side. Daniel was already starting to think logically as he started back towards the warden’s office. From Mana Pools they could ring Harare and get the police to send in a spotter plane.

  He knew that speed was vital now. Within the next ten hours the gang would be back across the river. However, he could not leave Johnny like that, lying in his own blood. It meant wasting a few more minutes, but he had to show him some last respect and at the very least cover him decently.

  Daniel paused in the doorway to Johnny’s office. The overhead lights were brutally explicit; they left nothing of the horror concealed. He set aside the AK 47 and looked around for a covering for his friend’s corpse. The curtains over the front windows were green government issue, faded by sunlight, but they would do as a makeshift shroud. He took one of them down, and went with it to where Johnny lay.

  Johnny’s attitude was tortured. One arm was twisted up under his chest and his face lay in a pool of thick congealing blood. Gently Daniel rolled him over. The body had not yet stiffened in rigor mortis. He winced as he looked at Johnny’s face, for the bullet had come out through his right eyebrow. He used a corner of the curtain to wipe his face clean, then arranged him in a comfortable attitude on his back.

  Johnny’s left hand was thrust into the front of his tunic and his fist was tightly clenched. Daniel’s interest quickened as he saw the balled up sheet of paper in his hand. He prised Johnny’s fingers open and freed the wad. He stood up, crossed to the desk and spread the paper on it.

  He saw at once that Johnny had scrawled on it, using his own blood, and Daniel shivered at the macabre characters. NJNC. The letters were childlike and crude, smeared and barely legible. They made no sense, although perhaps the J was an I. Daniel studied it. NINC. Still there was nothing obvious in the message. Either it was gibberish or had some obscure meaning that only made sense to a dying man.

  Suddenly Daniel felt a stirring in his subconscious, something was trying to surface. He closed his eyes for a minute to give it a chance. Often it helped to let his mind go blank when searching for an elusive idea or memory, rather than to harry the point and drive it further under. It was there, very close now, a shadow just below his conscious mind like the shape of a man-eating shark under the surface of a turgid sea.

  NINC.

  He opened his eyes again and found himself looking at the floor. There were bloody footprints left by his own boot soles and by those of the killer. He was not thinking about them; he was still grappling with that single cryptic word that Johnny had left for him.

  Then he found his eyes had focused on one of the footprints, and his nerves jumped tight and shrieked like the strings of a violin slashed with the bow. The footprint was chequered with a fish-scale pattern.

  NINC. It resounded through his mind and then that distinctive footprint turned the sense of it and the echo came back, altered and compelling.

  NING. Johnny had tried to write NING! Daniel found that he was cold and trembling with the shock of the discovery. Ambassador Ning, Ning Cheng Gong. How was it possible? And yet there were the bloody footprints to confirm the impossible. Ning had been here after Johnny was shot. Ning had been lying when he said that he had left, Daniel broke that train of thought as another memory struck him like a bolt from a cross-bow.

  The blood on the cuff of the blue cotton slacks, the tracks of Ning’s training shoes and the blood, Johnny’s blood. At last his rage had a target on which to focus, but now it was a cold constructive rage. He pressed the bloody note back into Johnny’s hand and folded his fingers around it for the police to find. Then he spread the green curtain over Johnny’s body, covering the shattered head. He stood over him for a few seconds.

  “I’ll get the bastard for you, old friend. For you and Mavis and the babies. I promise you, Johnny, on the memory of our friendship. I swear it.” Then he snatched up the rifle and ran from the office, down the steps to where Jock waited beside the parked Landcruiser.

  In the few seconds that it took him to reach the truck, the last details fell into place in his mind. He remembered Cheng’s perturbation when he thought Daniel might be staying longer at Chiwewe, and his obvious relief when he learned that Daniel was leaving.

  He glanced back towards the ruins of the ivory godown and the tyre treads were still just visible in the mud. It was simple and ingenious. Let the gang of poachers draw the pursuit, while they ferried the ivory out in the Parks Board’s own trucks.

  Daniel remembered the surly unnatural behaviour of Gomo and the other driver when he had met them on the road. Now it made good sense. They had been sitting on a load of stolen ivory. No wonder they were acting strangely.

  As he slipped behind the wheel of the Landcruiser and ordered Jock to climb aboard, he glanced at his wristwatch. it was almost ten o’clock, nearly four hours since he had passed Cheng and the trucks on the escarpment road. Could he catch them before they reached the main highway and disappeared?

  He realised that it had been so carefully planned that they must have worked out an escape route and some means of disposing of the ivory.

  He started the Landcruiser and hit the gear-lever. “You aren’t going to get away with it, you dirty bastard!”

  In many places the recent storm waters had scoured the escarpment road, gouging knee-deep gulleys across the tracks and exposing boulders the size of cannonballs. Daniel pushed the Landcruiser over them so violently that Jock seized the grab handle on the dashboard for support. “Slow down, Danny, damn it. You’ll kill us both. Where the hell are we going? What’s the rush?” In as few words as possible Daniel told him the bare outlines. “You can’t touch an ambassador,” Jock grunted as the bouncing truck slammed the words out of him. “If you’re wrong, they’ll crucify you, man.”

  “I’m not wrong,” Daniel assured him. “On top of Johnny’s note, I feel it in my guts.”

  The rain waters had rushed down the slope of the escarpment, but when they reached the floor of the valley they slowed and piled up upon themselves.

  Only hours before, Daniel had crossed and re-crossed a dry river-bed at the foot of the escarpment. Now h
e pulled up on the approach to the ford and stared down the beam of the headlights.

  “You’ll never get through there,” Jock muttered with alarm.

  Daniel left the motor running and jumped down into ankledeep mud. He ran to the edge of the crazy water. It was the colour of creamed coffee, racing past in a muddy blur, carrying small tree-trunks and uprooted bushes with it. It was almost fifty yards across.

  One of the trees growing beside the ford draped its branches out over the torrent, in places just touching the swirling waters with its lowest twigs. Daniel grabbed the main branch for support and let himself down into the river. He edged out across the flood and it took all the strength of his arms to prevent himself from being swept away.

  The drag of the water was overpowering and his feet were continually lifted clear of the bottom. However, he worked himself out to the deepest section of the river.

  It was as deep as his lowest rib. The branch to which he was clinging was creaking and bowing like a fishing-rod to the strain as he began to work his way back to the bank. He emerged from the torrent with water streaming down his lower body, his sodden clothing clinging to his legs and his boots squelching.

  “It’ll go,” he told Jock, as he clambered back into the cab.

  “You’re crazy mad,” Jock exploded. “I’m not going in there.”

  “Okay! Fine! You’ve got just two seconds to get out,” Daniel told him grimly, and changed the gearing of the Toyota into four-wheel drive and low ratio.

  “You can’t leave me here,” Jock howled. “The place is lousy with lions. What happens to me?”

  “That’s your problem, mate. Are you coming or going.”