Текст книги "The Angels Weep"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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At last, after six weeks in the field, low on ammunition and explosives, they began to pull back, laying ambushes as they withdrew.

They abandoned the first ambush after two fruitless days. However, at the second ambush on a remote country road, they were lucky.

They trapped a white farmer who was rushing his wife, suffering from a peritonitis following a burst appendix, to the local hospital.

The farmer had his two teenage daughters in the vehicle with him. He almost broke through the ambush, but as the armoured vehicle passed Tungata's position, he jumped up and ran into the road behind it. He hit it in the soft rear section with an armour-piercing RPG7 rocket at point-blank range.

The farmer and his eldest daughter were killed in the blast, but his sick wife and the younger daughter were still alive. The political commissar let the "boys" have the dying women. They queued up and took them in the road beside the shattered vehicle, one after the other.

When Tungata did not join the line, the commissar condescended to explain, "When a honey guide leads you to the hive, you must leave him a piece of the comb. Since the beginning of history, rape has always been one of the rewards of the conquerors. It makes them fight better, and it will madden the enemy." They left the road that night and moved back into the hills, back towards the lake and sanctuary.

Ballantyne's Scouts caught them in the middle of the following afternoon. There was very little warning. just a tiny Cessna 210 spotter plane circling high overhead, and while the commissars and the captains were still shouting the orders to deploy and set up a perimeter, the Scouts came in.

The delivery vehicle was an ancient twin-engined Dakota that had seen service in the Western Desert during World War II. It was painted with grey non-reflective paint to thwart the infra-red seekers of SAM-7 missiles. It flew so low that it seemed to scrape the ragged rocky crests of the kopjes, and as its shadow momentarily blotted out the sun, the fighting men spewed out of the gaping belly-port.

The olive-green umbrellas of their parachutes popped open only seconds before they hit the ground. As the silk flared, they were down. They landed on their feet, and even before the parachutes settled softly in billowing folds, they had snapped their harnesses and were running forward, firing.

"The commissar and both veteran captains were killed within the first three minutes, and the Scouts swept forward, rolling up the green panic-stricken guerrillas against the foot of the kopje. Tungata, acting without conscious thought, gathered the men closest to him and led them in a desperate counter-attack down a shallow don ga that bisected the line of Scouts.

He heard the Scout commander give the order on the bull-horn.

"Green and red, hold on your position, blue, clean out that gulley."

The distorted voice echoed against the hills, but Tungata recognized it. He had last heard it at Khami Mission on the night Constance was murdered. It turned him cold "and clear thinking.

He judged his moment finely, and then pulled out of the don ga under the whipping crackle of the FNs. His calm steadied the men with him, and he started the running defence as Wan Lok had taught him.

They were in contact for three hours, in contact with Oite battle-hardened troops, and Tungata kept his little band in hand and they counterattacked and laid AP mines behind them and held at every natural strongpoint, until it was dark. Then Tungata broke off the contact and pulled his men out. By that time there were only eight of them left and three of these were wounded.

Seven days later, in the morning before the dew dried, Tungata opened a passage through the cordon sanitaire, probing with a bayonet until he found, the key to the pattern, and he took his men across the drifts. There were only five of them left. None of the wounded had been able to stand the pace, and Tungata had personally finished them with the commissar's Tokarev pistol to save them being interrogated by the pursuers.

In the town of Livingstone, on the north bank of the Zambezi opposite the Victoria Falls, Tungata reported to ZIPRA headquarters, and the commissar was astonished.

"But you were all killed. The Rhodesians claimed on the television.-" A driver in a black Mercedes with the party flag fluttering on the bonnet took Tungata up to the Zambian capital of Lusaka, and there in a safe house on a quiet street he was ushered into a sparsely furnished room where a man sat alone at a cheap pine desk.

"Babo!" Tungata recognized him immediately. "Nkosi nkulu! Great Chief)" The man laughed, a throaty bellow of sound. "You may call me that when we are alone, but at other times you must call me Comrade Inkunzi." Inkunzi was the Sindebele word for a bull. It suited the man admirably. He was huge, with a chest like a beer-keg and a belly like a sack of grain. His hair was thick and white, all the things that the Matabele venerate, physical size and strength and the hair of age and wisdom.

"I have watched you with interest, Comrade Tungata. Indeed, it was I that sent to fetch you." "I am honoured, Babo." "You have richly repaid my faith." The big man settled lower in his chair and linked his fingers over the bulk of his stomach. He was silent for a while, studying Tungata's face, then abruptly he asked, "what is the revolution?" The reply, so often repeated, came instantly to Tungata's lips.

"The revolution is power to the people." Comrade Inkunzi's delighted bull-bellow crashed out again.

"The people are mindless cattle," he laughed. "They would not know what to do with power if anyone was fool enough to let them have it! No, no! It is time you learned the true answer." He paused, and he was no longer smiling. "The truth is that the revolution is power to the chosen few. The truth is that I am the head of those few, and that you, Commissar Comrade Tungata, are now one of them." Craig Ballantyne parked the Land-Rover and switched off the engine. He twisted the rear-view mirror on its goose-neck and used it to adjust the angle of his peaked uniform cap. Then he looked around at the elegant new building that housed the museum. It stood in the middle of the botanical gardens, surrounded by tall palms and green lawns and bright beds of geraniums and sweet-peas.

Craig realized that he was putting off the moment and clenched his jaw determinedly. He left the Land-Rover in the car park and climbed the front steps of the museum.

"Good morning, Sergeant. "The girl at the enquiries desk recognized the three stripes on the sleeve of his khaki and navy blue police uniform. Craig still felt vaguely ashamed of his rapid promotion.

"Don't be damned silly, boy," Bawu had growled when he protested at the family influence. "It's a technical appointment, Sergeant Armourer." " Craig gave the girl his boyish grin, and her expression warmed instantly. "I'm looking for Miss Carpenter." "I'm sorry. I don't know her." The girl looked unhappy at having to disappoint him.

"But she works here, "Craig protested. "Janine Carpenter." "Oh, she brightened. "You mean Doctor Carpenter. Is she expecting you?"

"Oh, I'm sure she knows I'm coming, "Craig assured her. "She is in Room 2." Up the stairs, turn left, through the door that says "Staff Only", and it's the third door on the right. Craig pushed the door open at the invitation of "Enter!" that greeted his knock. It was a long narrow room with skylights and fluorescent tubes overhead and the walls lined as high as the ceiling with shallow drawers, each with a pair of bright brass handles.

Janine stood at the bench table which ran down the centre of the room. She was dressed in blue jeans and a brightly checked lumberjack's woollen shirt.

"I didn't know you wore glasses," Craig said. They gave her an air of owlish erudition, and she whipped them off her face and hid them behind her back.

"Well!"she greeted him. "What do you want?" "Look," he said, "I just had to find out what an entomologist does. I had this bizarre picture of you wrestling with tsetse flies and beating locusts to death with a club." He closed the door quietly behind him and kept talking as he sidled up to the table beside her. "I say, that looks interesting!"

She was like an affronted cat, back arched and every hair upon it erect, but slowly she relaxed.

"Slides," she explained reluctantly. "I am setting up microscopic slides." And then with fresh irritation in her voice, "You know, you show the typical prejudice of the ignorant and uninformed layman. As soon as anyone mentions insects, you immediately think of pests like locusts and disease-carriers like tsetse flies." "Is that wrong?" "Hexapoda is the largest class of the largest animal phylum, Arthropoda. It has literally hundreds of thousands of members, most of which are beneficial to man, and the pests are in the vast minority."

He wanted to take her up on the "vast minority" as a contradiction in terms, but his good sense for once prevailed. Instead he said, "I never thought of that. How do you mean beneficial to man?" "They pollinate plants, they scavenge and control pests, and they serve as food-" She was away, and after a few minutes, Craig's interest was no longer feigned. Like any dedicated specialist, she was fascinating while talking in her chosen field. Once she realized that he was a receptive and sympathetic audience, she became even more articulate.

The banks of shallow drawers contained the collection which she had boasted on their first meeting was the finest in the world. She showed Craig microscopic feather winged beetles of the family Pdhidae which were a mere one hundredth of an inch long and compared them" to the monstrous African Goliath beetles. She showed him insects of exquisite jewelled beauty and others of repulsive ugliness. She showed him insects that imitated orchids and flowers and sticks and tree bark and snakes. There was a wasp that used a pebble as a tool, and a fly that, like a cuckoo, placed its eggs in the nest of another. There were ants that kept aphids as milk cows and farmed crops of fungus.

She showed him insects that lived in glaciers and others that lived in the depths of the Sahara, some that lived in seawater and even larvae that existed in pools of crude Petroleum where they devoured other insects trapped in the glutinous liquid.

She showed him dragonflies with twenty thousand eyes and ants. that could lift a thousand times their own body weight, she explained bizarre forms of nutrition and reproduction, and such was her rapture that she forgot her -vanity and put the horn-rimmed spectacles back on her nose. She looked so cute that Craig wanted to hug her.

At the end of two hours, she removed the spectacles and faced him defiantly. "Okay," she said. "So I am primarily the curator of the collection of Hexapoda, but at the same time I am also a consultant to the Departments of Agriculture, Wildlife and Nature Conservation and Public Health. That's what entomologists do, mister now what the hell do you do?" "What I do is I go around inviting entomologists to lunch." "Lunch?" She looked vague. "What is the time? My God, you've wasted my entire Saturday morning!" "T-bone steaks," he wheedled. "I have just been paid." "Perhaps I am lunching with Roly,"she told him cruelly. "Roly is in the bush." "How do you know that?" "I phoned Aunty Val at Queen's Lynn to check." "You crafty blighter." She laughed for the first time. "Okay, I give up. Take me to lunch." The steaks were thick and juicy and the beer was icy cold, with dew running down the glass. They laughed a lot and at the end of the meal he asked, "What do entomologists do on Saturday afternoons?" "What do police sergeants do? "she countered.

"They go sleuthing up their family antecedents in weird and wonderful places want to come along?" She knew all about the Land-Rover by now, so she put a silk scarf around her head and dark glasses over her eyes to protect them from the wind, and Craig restocked the cool box with crushed ice and beer. They drove out into the Rhodes Matopos National Park, into the enchanted hills where once the Umlimo had held sway and the Matabele had come for succour and sanctuary in the times of tribal disasters. The beauty of the place struck Janine to the heart.

"The hills look like those wonderful fairy castles along the banks of the Rhine." In the valleys there were herds of wild antelope, sable and kudu, as tame as sheep. They barely lifted their heads as the Land-Rover passed and then returned to graze.

It seemed that they had the hills to themselves, for few others would risk being alone on these dirt-surfaced roads in the very stronghold of Matabele tradition, but when Craig parked the Land-Rover in a shady grove beneath a massive bald dome of granite, an old Matabele guardian in the suntans and slouch hat of the Park Board came down to meet them and escort them as far as the gates that bore the inscription. "Here are buried men who deserve well of their country."

They climbed to the summit of the hill and there, guarded by stone sentinels of natural granite and covered by a heavy bronze plaque, they found the grave of Cecil John Rhodes.

"I know so little about him,"Janine confessed.

"I don't think anybody knew much about him," Craig said. "He was a very strange man, but when they buried him, the Matabele gave him the royal salute. He had some incredible power over other men." They went down the far side of the hill to the square mausoleum of stone blocks with its bronze frieze of heroic figures.

"Allan Wilson and his men," Craig explained, "they exhumed their bodies from the battlefield on the Shangani, and reburied them here."

On the north wall of the memorial were the names of the dead and Craig ran his finger down the graven roll of honour and stopped at one name.

"The Rev. Clinton Codrington," he read it aloud. "He was my great-great-grandfather, a strange man, and his wife, my great-great-grandmother was a remarkable woman indeed. The two of them, Clinton and Robyn, founded the Mission Station at Khami. A few months after he was killed by the Matabele, she married the commander of the column who had ordered Clinton to his death, an American chap called St. John. I bet there was some interesting hanky panky there! A bit of hithering and thithering, a touch of to-ing and fro-ing "They used to do it even in those days?" Janine asked. "I thought it was a recent invention." They wandered on around the side of the hill and came to another grave. Over the grave stood a misshapen and dwarfed ms asa tree that had taken precarious hold in a fault in the solid granite. Like the one on the summit, this grave also was covered by a heavy plate of weathered bronze, but the inscription read. "Here lies the body of SIR RALPH BALLANTYNE, FIRST PRIME MINISTER OF SOUTHERN

RHODESIA.

He deserves we'll of his country." "Ballantyne,"she said. "Must be an ancestor of Roly's." "A mutual ancestor of both of ours," Craig agreed. "Our great-grandfather, Bawu's papa. This is the real reason why we have driven out here." What do you know about him?" "A great deal, actually. I have just finished reading his personal journals.

He was quite a lad. If they hadn't knighted him, they would probably have had to hang him. By his own secret confessions, he was an unqualified rogue, but a colourful one." "So that is where you get it from," she laughed. "Tell me more "Funny things." he was a sworn enemy of that other old rogue up there." Craig pointed up the hill towards Cecil Rhodes" grave. "And here they are buried almost side by side. Great-grandpa Ralph writes in his journal that he discovered the Wankie coal field but Rhodes cheated him out of it. He swore an oath to destroy Rhodes and his Company, he actually wrote that down! I'll show you! And he boasts that he succeeded. In 1923 the rule of Rhodes" British South Africa Company came to an end. Southern Rhodesia became a British colony, old Sir Ralph was its prime minister. He had made good his threat." They sat down, side by side, on the curbstone of the grave and he told her the-funniest and most interesting of the stories that he had read in the secret journals, and she listened with fascination.

"It's strange to think that they are a part of us and we a part of them," she whispered. "That everything that is happening now had its roots in what they did and said." "Without a past there is no future," Craig repeated the words of Samson Kumalo, then went on, "that reminds me, I have something else I want to do before we go back to town." This time Craig did not have to be warned of the hidden turn-off, and he swung onto the track that led past the cemetery, down the avenues of spathodea trees to the whitewashed staff cottages of Khami Mission.

The first cottage in the row was deserted. There were no curtains in the windows and when Craig climbed up onto the porch and peered in, he saw the rooms were bare.

"Who are you looking for?" Janine asked, when he came back to the Land-Rover.

"A friend "A good friend?" "The best friend I ever had." He drove on down the hill to the hospital and parked again. He left Janine in the Land-Rover and went into the lobby. A woman came striding to meet him. She wore a white laboratory coat, and her unnaturally pale face was set in a belligerent frown. (I hope you haven't come here to harass and frighten our people," she began. "Here police mean trouble." "I'm sorry," Craig glanced down at his uniform. "It's a private matter. I am looking for a friend of mine. His family lived here. Samson Kumalo-" "Oh," the woman nodded.

"I recognize you now. You were Sam's employer. Well, he's gone."

"Gone? Do you know where?" "No," flatly, and unhelpfully. "His grandfather, Gideon-" "He's dead." "Dead?" Craig was appalled. "How?"

"He died of a broken heart when your people murdered someone who was dear to him. Now, if there is nothing more You want to know, we don't like uniforms." By the time they reached town it was late afternoon. Craig drove directly to his Yacht without asking her Bpermission, and when he parked under the mango trees, Janine made no comment, but climbed out and walked beside him to the ladder way

Craig put a tape on the recorder and opened a bottle of wine, then he brought down Sir Ralph's leather-bound journal that Bawu had loaned him, and they sat side by side on the bench in the saloon and pored over it. The faded ink and pencil drawings that decorated the margins delighted Janine, and when she came to a description of the locust plagues of the 1890s, she was captivated.

"The old geezer had a good eye." She studied his drawing of a locust. "He might have been a trained naturalist, just look at the detail." She glanced up at him sitting close beside her. He looked like a puppy, an adoring puppy. She deliberately closed the leather-bound book without taking her eyes from his. He leaned closer to her, and she made no effort to pull away. He covered her lips with his own, and felt them soften and part. Her huge slanted eyes closed, and the lashes were long and delicate as butterflies" wings.

After a long time she whispered huskily, "For God's sake, don't say anything stupid. just keep right on doing what you are doing at the moment." He obeyed, and it was she who broke the silence. Her voice was shaky.

"I hope you had enough forethought to make the bunk wide enough for two." Still he said nothing, but lifted her up in his arms and took her to see for herself.

"Do you know, I didn't realize it could be like that. "There was wonder in his voice, as he stared down at her, leaning on one elbow.

"It was so good and natural and easy." She traced a fingertip over his bare chest, drawing little circles around his nipples. "I like a hairy chest," she purred.

"I mean you know, I always felt it was such a solemn thing to do after vows and declarations." "The sound of organ music?" she giggled. "If you'll excuse the expression." "That's another thing," he said. "The only time I have ever heard you giggle is when you are doing it, or when you have just done it." "That's the only time I ever feel like giggling," she agreed, and giggled again. "Do be a pet and get the wineglasses." "Now what is so funny?" he demanded from the companion way.

"Your bottom is white and baby smooth no, don't cover it." While he hunted in the galley cupboard, she called from the cabin, "Do you have a tape of the "Pastoral"." "I think so." "Put it on, pet." Why? "will tell you when you come back to bed." She was sitting at the head of the bunk, stark naked in the lotus position. He put one of the wineglasses in her hand, and after a short struggle managed to twist his own long legs into the lotus and sat facing her.

"So tell me,"he invited.

"Don't be dense, Craig I mean isn't that just a perfect accompaniment?" Another great storm of music and love swept over them, leaving them clinging helplessly to each other, and in the aching silence that followed, she tenderly stroked back the sweat-damp hair that had fallen into his eyes.

It was too much for him. "I love you, "he blurted out. "Oh God, I love you so!" Almost roughly she pushed him aside, and sat up.

"You are a sweet funny boy, and a gentle considerate lover, but you do have an ungodly talent for saying stupid things at the wrong time." In the morning, she said, "You made dinner, so I'll make breakfast," and went to the galley wearing only one of his old shirts.

She had to roll the sleeves up and the tails dangled below her knees.

"You've got enough eggs and bacon to open your own restaurant were you expecting a visitor?" "Not expecting, but hoping," he called back from the shower. "Make mine sunny side up!" After breakfast she helped him install the big glittering stainless-steel winches on the maindeck. It needed someone to hold the gusset plates in position while he drilled and bolted through from the other side.

"You are very handy, aren't you?" she said. They had to shout at each other, for he was working below deck while she was perched on the edge of the cockpit.

"It's kind of you to notice." "So I suppose you are a first-class armourer." "I'm pretty good." "Do you do what I suspect, fix up guns?"

"One of my duties." "How can you bring yourself to do it? Guns are so evil." "That is the typical prejudice of the ignorant and uninformed layman." He turned her own words against her. "Firearms are on one level highly functional and useful tools, and on another level they can be magnificent works of art. Man has always lavished some of his most creative instincts on his weapons." "But the way men use them!" she protested.

"For instance, they were used to prevent Adolf Hitler gassing the entire Jewish nation, "he pointed out.

"Oh come on, Craig. What are they being used for out there in the bush at this very moment?" "Guns aren't evil, but some of the men who use them are. You could say the same about spanners. " He tightened the bolts on the winch and stuck his head out of the hatch. "That's enough for today on the seventh day He rested how about a beer?"

Craig had rigged a speaker in the cockpit and they lolled in the sun and drank beer and listened to the music.

"Look, Jan, I don't know a tactful way to put this, but I don't want you seeing anyone else, do you know what I mean?" "There you go again." Her eyes slanted and crackled like blue ice. "Do shut up, Craig!" "I mean after what has happened between us," he ploughed on doggedly. "I think we should-" "Look, dear boy, you have a choice make me mad again, or make me giggle again, what's it going to be." At lunchtime on Monday, she came up to police headquarters, and they ate his ham sandwiches while he showed her around the armoury, and despite herself, she was intrigued by the exhibits of captured weapons and explosives. He explained the operation of the various types of mines and how they could be detected and disarmed.

"You have to hand it to the terrs," Craig admitted. "The swine carry those things in on their backs, two hundred miles or so through the bush. just try and pick that up, and you'll see what I mean." At last he took her through to a small back room. "This is my special project. It's called T & I, trace and identify." He gestured at the charts that covered the walls and the big boxes of empty cartridge-cases piled beside the workbench. "After each contact with terrs our armourers sweep the area and pick up every used cartridge.

Firstly they are checked for fingerprints. So if the terr has a record, then we can identify him immediately. If he has polished his rounds before loading or if we have no record of his fingerprints we can still trace exactly which rifle fired the cartridge." He led her to the bench, and let her look into the low power microscope that stood on it.

"The firing-pin in each rifle strikes an indentation into the cap of the cartridge which is as individual as a fingerprint. We can follow the career of each active terr in the field. We can make accurate estimates of how many there are and which are the hot ones." "The hot ones?" She looked up from the microscope.

"Out of every hundred terrs in the field, ninety or so of them hole up in good cover near a village which can supply them with food and young girls, and they try to keep out of danger and contact with our forces. But the hot ones are different. They are the tigers, the fanatics, the killers, these charts show their first team." He led her to the wall.

"Look at this one. We call him Primrose because his firing-pin leaves a mark like a flower. He has been in the bush for three years, and been in contact ninety-six times. That is almost once every ten days, he must be made of steel." Craig ran his finger down the chart.

"Here is another, we call him Leopard Paw, you can see why by the print of his rifle. He is a newcomer, his first time across the river, but he hit four farms and ran an ambush, then he went into contact with Roly's Scouts. Not many of them survive that, Roly's boys are incredible. They wiped out most of the cadre, but Leopard Paw fought like a veteran and got away with a bunch of his men. Roly's combat report says he lost four men to AP mines that Leopard Paw put down as he ran, and another six in the actual fighting ten men. That's the heaviest casualties the Scouts have ever taken in any one contact."

Craig tapped the name on the chart. "He is the hot one. We are going to hear more of this lad." Janine shuddered. "It's awful all this death and suffering. When will it ever end?" "It started when man first stood up on his hind legs, it's not going to end tomorrow. Now let's talk about dinner tonight, I'll pick you up at your flat at seven, okay." She telephoned him at the armoury a little before five o'clock.

"Craig, don't come for me this evening." "Why not?" "I won't be there." "What has happened?" "Roly is back from the bush." Craig did a little work on the foredeck of the yacht, placing the cleats for the jib sheets, but when it was too dark, he went below, and wandered around disconsolately. She had left her dark glasses on the table beside the bunk, and a lipstick on the edge of the wash-basin. The saloon still smelled of her perfume, and the two wineglasses stood together in the sink.

"I think I will get drunk," he decided, but he had no tonic, and gin with plain water tasted awful. He tipped it into the sink, and put the "Pastoral" on the tape, but the images it conjured up were too painful. He hit the "stop" button.

He picked Sir Ralph's leather-bound journal off the table, and flicked through it. He had read it twice, he should have gone out to King's Lynn at the weekend, Bawu would have been expecting him to come for the next journal in the series. He started to read it again, and it was an immediate opiate for the loneliness.

After a while he searched in the drawer of the chart-table and found the ruled exercise book which he had used for drawing the layout of the cabins and galley. He tore out the used pages, and there were still over a hundred unused sheets. He sat down at the saloon table with an HB pencil from the navigation set, and stared at the first empty sheet for almost five minutes. Then he wrote. "Africa crouched low on the horizon, like a lion in ambush, tawny and gold in the early sunlight, seared by the cold of the Benguela Current.

"Robyn Ballantyne stood by the ship's rail and stared towards it-" Craig re-read what he had written, and felt a strange excitement, something he had never experienced before. He could actually see the young woman. He could see the way she stood with her chin lifted eagerly and the wind snapping and tangling her hair.

The pencil started to race across the empty page, and the woman moved in his mind and spoke aloud in his ears. He turned the page and wrote on, then, almost before he realized it, the exercise book was filled with his pointed pea ky handwriting and outside the porthole by his head the day was lightening.

Ever since Janine Carpenter could remember, there had always been horses in her father's stables at the Eback of the veterinary dispensary. When she was eight her father had taken her out for the first time with the local hunt. Just after her twenty-second birthday, a few months before she had left home for Africa, she had been awarded her hunt buttons.

The mount that Roland Ballantyne had given her was a beautiful chestnut filly without any other marking. She was curried to a gloss so that she shone in the sunlight like wet red silk. Janine had ridden her often before. She was fleet and strong, and there was an accord between them.

Roland rode his stallion. It was an enormous black beast he called "Mzilikazi" after the old king. The veins stood out under the skin of his shoulders and belly like living serpents. The great black bunch of his testicles was crudely and overpoweringly masculine. When he laid back his ears and bared his teeth, the mucous membrane in the corner of his savage eyes was the colour of blood. There was an arrogance and menace in him that frightened Janine, and yet excited her also. Horses and rider were of a pair.