Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  He made his decision. He leaned back against the seat. The wound stabbed him like a knife in the back, but he wasn’t losing much blood.

  “Internal bleeding,” he thought. “You aren’t going to walk away from this one, Danny boy.” But he kept going, waiting for the weakness to overcome him.

  There were five logging roads branching off from the main highway before it reached the first road-block. Some of them were disused and overgrown, but at least two were still being subjected to heavy daily traffic. He chose the first of these, two miles from Sengi-Sengi and turned on to it, heading westwards.

  The Zaire border was ninety miles in that direction, but the logging track only ran five miles through the forest before it intersected the MOMU excavation.

  He would have to dump the Landrover and try to make the remaining eighty miles on foot through uncharted forest. The last part of the journey would be over high mountains, glaciers and alpine snowfields.

  Then he thought about the bullet wound in his back and knew he was dreaming. He wasn’t going to get that far.

  The logging track he was on had been deeply rutted and chopped up by the gigantic treaded tyres of the trucks and heavy trailers. It was a morass of mud the consistency and colour of faeces, and the Landrover churned through it in fourwheel drive, pounding through the knee-deep ruts.

  Flying mud stuck to the glass of the headlights and dimmed the beams to a murky glow that barely lit the roadway twenty paces ahead.

  The wound in his back was beginning to ache, but his head was still clear. He touched the end of his own nose with his forefinger to check his coordination. No sign of losing it yet.

  Suddenly he was aware of lights far ahead of him on the track. One of the logging trucks was coming towards him, and instantly he realised the possibility it offered. He slowed the Landrover and searched the verge of unbroken jungle that pressed in upon the track. He sensed rather than saw a break in the foliage and swung the Landrover boldly into it.

  For fifty paces or so he forced his way through almost impenetrable undergrowth. It scraped along both sides of the bodywork, and small trees and branches thumped along beneath the chassis. The soft forest floor sucked at the wheels and the Landrover’s speed bled off until at last she was high-centred and stranded.

  Daniel cut the engine and switched off the headlights. He sat in the darkness and listened to the logging truck rumble past, headed eastwards towards Sengi-Sengi along the road he had come. When the sound of the huge diesel engine had dwindled into silence, he leaned forward in the seat and steeled himself to examine the bullet wound in his back.

  Reluctantly he twisted one arm up behind him and groped towards the centre of pain.

  Suddenly he exclaimed and jerked his hand away. He switched on the interior lights and examined the razor scratch on his forefinger. Then quickly he reached behind himself again, and cautiously fingered the wound. He laughed aloud with relief. A shard of flying glass from the rear window had sliced open his back, and lodged against his ribs. It was a long superficial wound with the sharp glass still buried in it.

  He worked it loose and examined it in the overhead light. It was bloody and jagged, and the bleeding had started again. “But you aren’t going to die from it,” he reassured himself, and tossed the splinter out of the side window and reached for the first-aid kit which was under the VTR equipment in the back of the vehicle.

  It was difficult to treat the wound in his own back, but he managed to smear it liberally with Betadine ointment and strap an untidy dressing over it and knot the ends of the bandage in front of his chest. All the time he was listening for other vehicles on the logging road, but he heard only the small jungle sounds of bird and insect and beast.

  He found the Maglite in his kit and went back on foot to the road.

  From the verge he examined the muddy rutted tracks. As he had hoped, the logging truck had completely obliterated the Landrover’s tracks with its own massive multiple wheels. Only the spot where he had driven over the verge still carried the Landrover’s prints. He picked up a dead branch and swept them away carefully. Then he turned his attention to the foliage that the Landrover had damaged as it crashed into the forest.

  He rearranged it as naturally as possible and smeared mud on the raw broken ends of branches and twigs so they would not catch the eye. After half an hour’s work he was certain that nobody would suspect that a vehicle had left the road here and was hidden only fifty feet away in the dense undergrowth.

  Almost immediately his work was put to the test. He saw headlights approaching from the direction of Sengi Sengi. He drew back a little way into the forest and dropped flat. He smeared his face with a handful of mud and then covered the backs of his hands. His wind-cheater was dark forest green in colour; it would not show up in the lights. He watched the vehicle approaching along the logging track.

  It was moving slowly an as it drew level with his hiding-place he saw that it was an army transport painted in brown and green camouflage. The rear was crowded with Hita. soldiers and he thought he glimpsed Chetti Singh’s white turban in the driver’s cab, but he couldn’t be certain. One of the soldiers in the rear was flashing a spotlight along the verges of the road.

  They were obviously searching for him.

  Daniel dropped his face into the crook of his arm as the beam of the spotlight played over where he lay. The truck passed on without slowing and was soon out of sight.

  Daniel stood up and hurried back to the stranded Landrover. Swiftly he made a selection of items from the lockers, most importantly the hand-bearing compass. He packed them into the small day pack. From the first-aid kit he took field dressings and antiseptic and anti-malarial tablets. There was no food in the truck.

  He’d have to live off the forest. He could not carry the pack the normal way without restarting the bleeding so he slung it over the other shoulder. He guessed that the wound really required stitching, but there was no way in which he could even attempt that.

  “I have to get across the MOMU track before first light,” he thought. “That’s the one place I’ll be in the open and vulnerable.”

  He left the Landrover and struck out westwards. It was difficult to orientate in darkness and the dense forest. He was forced to flash the torch and study the compass every few hundred yards. The going was soft and uneven and his progress was slow as he found his way between the trees. When he reached the MOMU excavation the open sky above it was flushing with dawn’s first light.

  He could make out the trees on the far side of the clearing, but the MOMU itself had passed on weeks before and was already working six or seven miles further north. This part of the forest should be deserted, unless Kajo and Chetti Singh had sent a patrol down the strip to cut him off.

  It was a chance he had to take. He left the shelter of the forest and started across. He sank to his ankles in the red mud and it sucked at his boots. Every second he expected to hear a shout or a shot, and he was panting with exertion when at last he reached the far tree-line.

  He kept going for another hour before he took his first rest. Already it was hot and the humidity was like a Turkish bath.

  He stripped off all his clothing, except for shorts and boots, rolled it into a ball and buried it in the thick soft loam of the forest floor. His skin was toughened by sun and weather and he had a natural resistance to insect stings. In the Zambezi valley he had been able to tolerate even the bite of the swarming tsetse fly. As long as he kept the wound on his back covered he should be all right, he decided.

  He stood up and went on. He navigated by compass and wristwatch, timing his average stride to give him an estimate of distance covered.

  Every two hours he rested for ten minutes. By nightfall he calculated he had covered ten miles. At that rate it would take eight days to reach the Zaire border but, of course, he wouldn’t be able to keep it up. There were mountains ahead, and glaciers and snowfields, and he had abandoned most of his clothing. it was going to be interesting out on
the glaciers in his present attire, he decided, as he made a nest in the moist leaf mould and composed himself for sleep.

  When he woke it was just light enough to see his hand in front of his face. He was hungry and the wound in his back was stiff and painful. When he reached to touch it he found it was swollen and the flesh hot.

  “All we need is a nice little infection,” he thought, and renewed the dressing as best he could.

  By noon he was ravenously hungry. He found a nest of fat white grubs under the bark of a dead tree. They tasted like raw egg yolks. “What doesn’t kill you, makes you fat,” he assured himself, and kept on towards the west, the compass in his hand. In the early afternoon he thought he recognized a type of edible fungus and nibbled a small piece as a trial.

  In the late afternoon he reached the bank of a small clear stream, and as he was drinking he noticed a dark cigar shape lying at the bottom of the pool. He cut a stake and sharpened one end, carving a crude set of barbs above the point. Then he cut down one of the hanging ant’s nests from the branches of a silk-cotton tree and sprinkled the big red ants on the surface of the pool, taking care to stand well back from the edge with the crude spear in his right hand.

  Almost immediately the fish rose from the bottom and began to gulp down the struggling insects trapped in the surface film.

  Daniel drove the point of his fish spear into its gils and brought it out flapping and kicking on to the bank. It was a barbeled catfish, as long as his arm. He ate his fill of the fatty yellow flesh and the rest of the carcass he smoked over a fire of green leaves. it should keep him going for a couple more days, he decided. He wrapped it in a package of leaves and put it in his pack.

  However, when he woke the next morning his back was excruciatingly painful, and his stomach was swollen with gas and dysentery. He couldn’t tell whether it was the insect grubs, the fungus or the stream water that had caused it, but by noon he was very weak. His diarrhea was almost unremitting, and the wound felt like a red-hot coal between his shoulder-blades.

  It was about that time that Daniel had the first sensation that he was being followed. It was an instinct that he had realised he possessed when he was a patrol leader with the Scouts in the valley. Johnny Nzou had trusted this sixth sense of his implicitly and it had never let them down. It was almost as though Daniel was able to pick up the malevolent concentration of the hunter following on his tracks.

  Even in his pain and weakness Daniel looked back and felt a presence. He knew that he was out there, the hunter.

  “Anti-tracking,” he told himself, knowing that it would slow his progress, but it would almost certainly throw off his real or imaginary pursuer, unless he was very good indeed, or unless Daniel’s anti-tracking skills had atrophied.

  At the next river-crossing he took to the water, and from then on he used every ruse and subterfuge to cover his tracks and throw off the pursuit.

  Every mile he grew slower and weaker. The diarrhea never let up, his wound was beginning to stink, and he knew with clairvoyant certainty that the unseen hunter was still after him, and drawing closer every hour.

  Chapter 33

  Over the years Chetti Singh, the master poacher, had developed various systems of contacting his hunters. In some areas it was easier than others. In Zambia or Mozambique he had only to drive out to a remote village and talk to a wife or brother, and rely on them to pass the message.

  In Botswana or Zimbabwe he could even rely on the local postal authority to deliver a letter or telegram, but contacting a wild pygmy in the Ubomo rain forest was the most uncertain and time-consuming of all.

  The only way to do it was to drive down the main highway and stop at every duka or trading-store, to accost every halftame Bambuti that he met upon the roadside and bribe them to get a message to Pirri in the forest.

  It was amazing how the wild pygmies maintained a network of communication over those vast and secret areas of the rain forest, but then they were garrulous and sociable people. A honey-seeker from one tribe would meet a woman from another tribe who was gathering medicine plants far from her camp, and the word would be passed on, shouted from a forested hilltop in a high penetrating sing-song to another wanderer across the valley, or carried by canoe, along the big rivers, until at last it reached the man for whom it was intended. Sometimes it took weeks, sometimes, if the sender was fortunate, it might take only a few days.

  This time Chetti Singh was extremely lucky. Two days after he had given the message to a straggling group of pygmy women at one of the river crossings, Pirri came to the rendezvous in the forest. As always he appeared with the dramatic suddenness of a forest sprite and asked for tobacco and gifts.

  “Have you killed my elephant?” Chetti Singh asked pointedly, and Pirri picked his nose and scratched himself between the legs with embarrassment.

  “If you had not sent for me, the elephant would by now be dead.”

  “But he is not dead,” Chetti Singh pointed out. “And thus you have not earned those marvelous gifts I promised you.”

  “Just a little tobacco?” Pirri pleaded. “For I am your faithful slave, and my heart is full of love for you. Just a small handful of tobacco?”

  Chetti Singh gave him half what he asked for and while Pirri squatted down to suck and enjoy it, he went on, “All I have promised you, I will give you that much again if you kill another creature for me, and bring me its head.”

  “What creature is this?” Pirri asked guardedly, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. “Is it another elephant?”

  “No,” said Chetti Singh. “It is a man.”

  “You want me to kill a man!” Pirri stood up with alarm. “If I do that the wazungu will come and take me and put a rope around my neck.”

  “No,” said Chetti Singh. “The wazungu will reward you as richly as I will.” And be turned to Captain Kajo. “Is that not so?”

  “It is so,” Kajo confirmed. “The man we wish you to kill is a white man. He is an evil man who has escaped into the forest. We, the men of the government, will reward you for hunting him.”

  Pirri looked at Kajo, at his uniform and gun and dark glasses and knew he was a powerful government wazungu, so he thought about it carefully. He had killed white wazungu before in the Zaire war when he was a young man. The government had paid him for it then and it had been easy. The white wazungu were stupid and clumsy in the forest. They were easy to follow and easy to kill. They never even knew he was there until they were dead.

  “How much tobacco?” he asked.

  “From me, as much tobacco as you can carry,” said Chetti Singh.

  “From me also, as much tobacco as you can carry,” said Captain Kajo.

  “Where will I find him?” asked Pirri, and Chetti Singh told him where to begin his search, and where he thought the man was heading.

  “You want only his head?” Pirri asked. “To eat?”

  “No. Chetti Singh was not offended. “So that I know you have killed the right man.”

  “First I will bring you this man’s head,” said Pirri happily. “Then I will bring you the teeth of the elephant and I will have more tobacco than any man in the world.” And like a little brown ghost he disappeared into the forest.

  Chapter 34

  In the early morning, before the heat built up, Kelly Kinnear was working in the Gondola clinic. She had more patients than usual, most of them suffering from tropical yaws, those great suppurating ulcers that would eat down to the bone unless they were treated.

  Others were malarial or had swollen eyes running with flyborne or ophthalmia. There were also two new cases of AIDS. She didn’t need blood slides to recognize the symptoms, the swelling of the lymph glands and the thick white thrush that coated their tongues and throats like cream cheese.

  She consulted Victor Omeru and he agreed that they should try the new treatment on them, the herbal extract of the selepi tree bark that was looking so promising. He helped her prepare the dose. The amount was necessarily an arbitrary decision, and t
hey were discussing it when there was a sudden commotion outside the clinic front door.

  Victor glanced out of the window and smiled. Your little friends have arrived, he told Kelly, and she laughed with pleasure and went out into the sunshine.

  Sepoo and his wife Pamba were squatting below the verandah, chatting and laughing with the other waiting patients. When they saw her they both squealed with delight and came running, competing with each other to take her hands and tell her all the news since their last meeting, trying to shout each other down to be the first to impart the choicest morsels of scandal and sensation from the tribe.

  One on each hand they led her to her usual seat on the top step of the verandah and sat beside her, still chattering in unison. “Swilli has had a baby. It is a boy and she says she will bring it to show you at the next full moon,” said Pamba.

  “There will be a great net hunt soon, and all the tribes will join…” said Sepoo.

  “I have brought you a bundle of the special roots I told you about last time we met,” shrilled Pamba, not to be outdone by her husband.

  Her bright eyes were almost hidden in a cobweb of wrinkles and half her teeth were missing. “I shot two colobus monkeys,” boasted Sepoo. “And I have brought you one of the skins to make a beautiful hat, Kara-Ki.”

  “You are kind, Sepoo,” Kelly thanked him. “But what news from Sengi-Sengi? What about the yellow machines that eat the earth and gobble up the forest? What news of the big white man with curly hair and the woman with hair like fire who looks into the little black box all the time?”

  “Strange,” said Sepoo importantly. “There is strange news. The big man with curly hair has run away from Sengi-Sengi. He has run into the forest to hide.” Sepoo was gabbling it out to prevent Pamba from getting in before him. “And the government wazungu at Sengi-Sengi have offered Pirri my brother, vast treasure and reward to hunt the man and kill him.”