Текст книги "The Angels Weep"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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Текущая страница: 37 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

"They are through the minefield, coming down to the river.

His observers were on the north bank of the Zambezi, in carefully prepared positions from which they could sweep the opposite bank and the small heavily wooded islands that split the shallows of the wide river-course.

"How many?"Tungata asked into the microphone. "No count yet." Of course, they would be mere flickers of movement in the darkening bush, impossible to get a head count, as they came forward in overlapping covering rushes. Tungata looked up at the sky, there was less than an hour before dark, he estimated, and felt a fresh onslaught of the doubts that had beset him ever since he had brought his cadre through the drifts almost three hours before.

Could he entice the pursuers into crossing the river? Without that the destruction of the Viscount and all else that he had so far achieved would be halved in propaganda and psychological value against the enemy. He had to bring the Scouts across into the carefully prepared killing-ground. He had carried the woman's skirt and left it on the edge of the cordon sanitaire for just that purpose, to bring them on.

Yet he recognized that it would be an irrational act for any commander to take a small force across such a natural barrier as the Zambezi at the close of day with darkness only minutes away, into hostile territory against an enemy of unknown strength who must anticipate his arrival and who had been able to prepare for it at leisure. Tungata could not expect them to come he could only hope.

It would depend chiefly upon who had command of the pursuers. The bait that he had laid to draw them in would be only truly effective on one man, the multiple rape and mutilation of the woman, the bloodied skirt would have their full effect only upon Colonel Roland Ballantyne himself. Tungata tried objectively to assess the chances that it was Ballantyne himself commanding the pursuit.

He had been at Victoria Falls Hotel, ZIPRA agents had made a positive identification. The woman had called herself Ballantyne, the Scouts were the nearest and most effective force in the area. Surely they must be the first to the site of the wreck, and surely Ballantyn would be with them. Tungata had to allow himself a better than even chance that his operation was working as planned.

Tungata's first confirmation that the pursuit was close had been a little before four o'clock that afternoon, when there had been one short burst of automatic fire from the south bank. At that moment, Tungata's cadre had just completed the crossing of the drift. They were still soaked and lying panting, like hunting-dogs too hard run, and Tungata had been chilled to realize how close the Scouts had been behind them, despite the many hours" start they had had and the fierce pace that Tungata had forced on his men. Twenty minutes more and they would have been caught on the south bank at the cordon sanitaire, and Tungata cherished no illusions as to what that would have meant. His men were the elite of the ZIPRA forces, but they were no match for Ballantyne's Scouts. On the south bank they would have been doomed, but now that they were across the Zambezi, the advantage had swung dramatic cally. Tungata's preparations to receive the pursuing force had taken fully ten days, and had been carried out with the full co-operation of the Zambian army and police force.

The radio crackled again and Tungata lifted the microphone to his lips and acknowledged curtly. The observer's voice was lowered, as though he feared it might carry to the dangerous quarry across the river.

"They have not attempted the crossing. Either they are waiting for dark, or they are not coming." "They must come," Tungata whispered to himself, and then he keyed the microphone.

"Put up the flare," he ordered.

"Stand by!" the observer answered, and Tungata lowered the microphone and looked up expectantly into the purple and rose of the evening sky. It was a risk, but then it had all been a risk, from the very moment they crossed the Zambezi carrying the SAM-7 launcher.

The signal flare streaked up into the sunset, and five hundred feet above the river it burst into a crimson ball of fire. Tungata watched it begin to sink gracefully towards the earth again, He found that he had driven his fingernails into the flesh of his palms with the strength of his grip upon the radio microphone.

The flare, fired so tantalizingly close to the river bank, from just behind the first line of trees on the north bank, could frighten them off and make them abandon the pursuit, or it could have the effect that Tungata hoped for. It could convince them how close they were to their quarry, and precipitate the cat-like reflex to follow anything that flees.

Tungata waited and the seconds dragged by. He shook his head, facing at last the prospect of failure, feeling the chill of it begin in the pit of his stomach and beginning to spread. Then the radio crackled, and the observer's voice was strained and hoarse. They are coming! "he said.

Tungata snatched the microphone to his lips. "All units. Hold your fire. This is Comrade Tungata. Hold your fire." He had to pause then, his relief mixed with dread that at this last moment one of his nervous guerrillas might spring the trap prematurely. He had six hundred men deployed on the killing-ground, only regimental strength was sufficient for a detachment of kanka. With his own eyes Tungata had seen them fight, and anything less than odds of twenty to one in his favour would not be acceptable.

He had achieved his numerical advantage, but in his own great numbers there was a concealed danger. Control was weakened, not all of his men were warriors of quality, amongst them there must be many of those who were nervous and susceptible to the mysterious aura, the almost superstitious awe, that surrounded the legend of Ballantyne's Scouts, "All field commanders, "he kept repeating into the microphone, "hold your fire. This is Commissar Comrade Tungata. Hold your fire. "Then he lowered the microphone and made one long last careful study of the ground in front of him.

The north bank of the river was almost a mile from where he waited. It was marked by a palisade of taller trees, the twisted trunks of great strangler figs and tall mkusi, their branches laden with trailing lianas, and higher even than these were the elegant bottle palms, their spiky fronds silhouetted against the blushing sunset. There was no glimpse of the river through this wall of lush growth.

Then abruptly the line of forest ended on this wide meadow-like opening. It was one of the Zambezi flood plains. In the rainy season, when the river burst its banks, this area would be inundated and transformed into a shallow lagoon filled with water-lilies and reeds, but now it had dried out, and the reeds had witted and fallen, no longer providing cover for a pursuer, or a fugitive.

One of Tungatas main concerns had been to keep the soft surface of this wide pan uncontaminated by spoor and footprints. There had been a regiment encamped along its fringes for almost ten days now, a regiment digging the trench system and batteries for the mortars. just one man wandering across the pan would have left a warning to the pursuers, but it had been kept clean.

The only spoor out there was that of the wild buffalo herds, of the dainty red puku antelope, and the tracks of nine men, the same tracks that led from the crash site of the Viscount, and which Tungata and his cadre had laid only three hours previously. These tracks emerged from the fringe of riverine bush and ran down the centre of the open flood plain to the higher forested ground on this side.

The carrier band of Tungata's radio hummed to life and the whisper of his observer warned, "They are halfway across the drift." Tungata imagined the line of dark heads above the sunset-pink waters, looking like a string of beads on a bodice of velvet.

"How many?"Tungata asked. "Twelve." Tungata felt a quick drop of disappointment. So few? He had hoped for more. He hesitated for a heartbeat before he asked. "Is there a white officer?" "Only one man in camouflage paint, he is at the head of the line." "It's Ballantyne," Tungata told himself. "It's the great jackal himself, it must be him."

Again the voice spoke from the radio. "They are across, into the trees. We have lost sight." Now, would they commit themselves to cross the flood plain? Tungata focused his night-glasses on the treeline.

The specially ground and coated lens picked up every available ray of light but still even through the lens the shapes of the trees and bushes beneath them were becoming indistinct. The sun had gone, and the last colours of the sunset were fading, the first stars were pricking the dark canopy of the night sky.

"They are still in the trees." It was a different voice on the radio, deeper and harsher. One of the second line of observers covering the southernmost fringe of the pan.

Tungata gave another order into the microphone. "Unscreen the fire!" he said quietly, and seconds later there was a tiny yellow glow of a camp-fire in the treeline furthest from the river. As Tungata. stared at it through the night-glasses, a human figure passed in front of the low flames. It gave the perfect illusion of a quiet camp amongst the trees, where an unsuspecting quarry exhausted from the long chase, but believing themselves safe at last, were resting and preparing the evening meal. But -was it too obvious a lure, Tungata wondered anxiously, was he relying too much upon the unbalanced rage of the pursuers?

His self-doubts were answered almost immediately. The gruff voice on the radio said suddenly, "They have left the trees, they are crossing the pan." It was too dark now to make out anything at that range. He had to rely on the sighting of his forward posts, and he turned the luminous dial of his wristwatch so that he could see the sweep of the second-hand. The pan was one and a half kilometres across, at a run the Scouts would take approximately four minutes to cross it.

Without taking his eyes off the dial, Tungata spoke into the microphone. "Mortars, stand by with star-shell." "Mortars, standing by!" The second-hand completed its circuit of the dial, and started around again.

"Mortars, fire!" Tungata ordered.

From the forest behind him came that hollow clunking sound of three-inch mortars, and Tungata heard the flute of the mortar bombs rising swiftly overhead. Then suddenly, at the zenith of their trajectory, the star shells burst.

They hung suspended on their tiny parachutes, and their light was a harsh electric blue. The open flood plain was illuminated like some gigantic sports stadium. The tiny group of running men in the centre were trapped in the naked glare, and their shadows on the earth beneath them seemed black and weighty as solid ironstone.

They went down instantly but there was no cover. Even though they were flattened against the earth, their bodies formed sharply defined hummocks. But they were almost immediately obliterated by the leaping sheets of dust and flying clods of earth that sprang up around them like a bank of pale whirling fog. Tungata had six hundred men in the treeline surrounding the pan. All of them were firing now, and the hurricane of automatic fire swept over the huddled figures in the middle of the open pan.

From the mortar batteries set farther back in the forest, the bombs rose high over Tungata's head and then dropped into the open pan.

The crack of their explosions added a sharp counterpoint to the background thunder of small-arms fire, and the mortar bursts jumped up like pale dust-devils in the light of the star-shells.

Nothing could live out there. The Scouts must long ago all be torn to shreds by shot and shrapnel, but still it went on and on, minute after minute, while more star-shells crackled into eye-searing bright sizzling blue light overhead.

Tungata panned his binoculars slowly over the drifting screen of dust and smoke. He could see no sign of life and at last he shifted the microphone to order the cease fire But before he could speak, he saw movement, directly in front of his position, not two hundred paces distant, and out of the curtain of dust came two ghostly figures.

They came at a run, side by side, seeming to wade through the thick swamp of mortar-smoke and dust, and they appeared monstrous and inhuman in the stark light of the star-shells. One of them was a huge Matabele. He had lost his helmet and his head was round and black as a cannonball, his open mouth was a pink cave lined with ivory teeth, and his bull bellow rose above even that storm of gunfire. The other was a white man, the top of his battle dress torn half off his body, exposing the pale flesh of chest and shoulders, but his face was daubed with fiendish streaks of dark green and brown paint.

The two of them were firing as they came on, and Tungata felt a stir of the superstitious dread that he had despised in his own troops, for they seemed immune to the storm of bullets through which. they charged.

"Kill them!"Tungata heard his own voice screaming, and a burst of FN fire from one of them kicked the top of the bank of loose earth in front of his slit trench.

Tungata ducked and ran to the gunner behind the heavy machine-gun at the end of the trench.

"Aim carefully," he shouted, and the gunner fired a long thunderous burst, but the two figures ran on towards them unscathed.

Tungata pushed the man away from the gun and took his place. For infinite seconds he peered over the sights, making the tiny adjustments to the gun's elevation, and then he fired.

The tall Matabele was driven backwards, as though he had been hit by a runaway automobile, and then he seemed to disintegrate, breaking up like a straw man in a high wind as the bullets tore him to pieces.

He melted into the surface of the pan.

The second man came on, running and firing, screaming an incoherent challenge, and Tungata swung the machinegun onto him. He paused for a micro-second to make certain of his aim, and he saw the flash of hard white flesh through the gunsight, and the diabolically painted face above it.

Tungata fired, and the heavy gun pounded briefly in his hand, then jammed and was silent.

Tungata was frozen, completely in the grip of supernatural dread, for the man was still coming on. He had dropped his FN rifle, and half his shoulder was shot away. The shattered arm dangled uselessly at his side, but he was on his feet coming straight at Tungata.

Tungata jumped to his feet and pulled the Tokarev pistol from the webbing holster on his side. The man was almost at the trench now, not ten paces away, and Tungata pointed the pistol at him. He fired and saw the bullet strike in the centre of the naked white chest. The man dropped to his knees, no longer able to come forward, but straining to do so, reaching out towards his enemy with his one remaining arm, no sound coming out of the open blood-glutted mouth.

This close, despite the thick mask of camouflage paint, Tungata recognized him from that never-forgotten night at Khami Mission. The two men stared at each other for a second longer, and then Roland Ballantyne fell forward onto his face.

Slowly the great storm of gunfire from around the rim of the pan shrivelled and died away. Tungata Zebiwe climbed stiffly out of the trench and went to where Roland Ballantyne lay. With his foot he rolled him down the bank of earth onto his back, and with a sense of disbelief saw the eyelids quiver and then open slowly. In the light of the star shells the green eyes that stared up at him still seethed with rage and hatred.

Tungata squatted beside the man, and said softly in English, "Colonel Ballantyne, I am very pleased to meet you again." Then Tungata leaned forward, placed the muzzle of the Tokarev against his temple, just an inch in front of his ear hole and fired a bullet through Roland Ballantyne's brain.

The paraplegic section of St. Giles" Hospital was a haven, a sanctuary into which Craig Mellow retreated gratefully.

He was more fortunate than some of the other inmates. He suffered only two journeys along the long green-painted corridor, the wheels of the trolley on which he lay squeaking un rhythmically and the masked impersonal faces of the theatre sisters hovering above his, down through the double swing doors at the end, into the stink of asepsis and anaesthetic.

The first time they had built him a fine stump, with a thick cushion of flesh and skin around it to take the artificial limb. The second time they had removed most of the larger fragments of shrapnel that had peppered his crotch and buttocks and lower back. They had also searched, unsuccessfully, for some mechanical reason for the complete paralysis of his body below the waist.

His mutilated flesh recovered from the surgery with the rapidity of that of a healthy young animal, but the leg of plastic and stainless steel stood unused beside his bedside locker, and his arms thickened with muscle from lifting himself on the chain handles and from manipulating the wheelchair.

Swiftly he found his special niches in the sprawling old building and gardens. He spent much of his day in the therapeutic workshop working from the wheelchair. He stripped his old Land-Rover completely and rebuilt the engine, grinding the crankshaft and re boring the block.

Then he converted it to hand controls, fitted handles and adapted the driver's seat to make it easier to swing his paralysed lower body in and out. He built a rack for the folding wheelchair where once the gun racks had been behind the front seat, and he re sprayed the body a lustrous maroon colour.

When he finished work on the Land-Rover, he began designing and machining stainless-steel and bronze fittings for the yacht, working hour after hour on the lathes and drilling presses. While his hands were busy he found he could crowd out the haunting memories, so he lavished care and total concentration on the task, turning out small masterpieces in wood and metal.

In the evenings he had his reading and his writing, though he never read a newspaper, nor watched the television set in the hospital common room. He never took part with the other patients in any discussion of the fighting or of the complicated peace negotiations which commenced with such high hopes and broke down so regularly. That way, Craig could pretend to himself that the wolves of war were not still hunting across the land.

Only at night he could not control the tricks his mind and memory played upon him, and once again he sweated with terror in an endless minefield, with Roly's voice whispering obscenities in his ears, or he saw the electric glare of star-shells in the night sky above the river and heard the storm of gunfire. Then he would wake screaming, with the night nurse beside him, concerned and compassionate.

"It's all right, Craig, it was just one of your feemies. It's all right." But it was not all right, he knew it would never be all right.

Aunty Valerie wrote to him. The one thing that tortured her and Uncle Douglas was that Roland's body had never been recovered. They had heard a horror story through the security forces" intelligence that Roland's bullet-riddled corpse had been put on public display in Zambia and that the guerrillas in the training camps had been invited to spit and urinate upon it to convince themselves that he was truly dead.

Afterwards the body had been dumped into one of the pit latrines of the guerrilla training camp.

She hoped Craig would understand that neither she nor Uncle Douglas felt up to visiting him at present, but if there was anything he needed, he had only to write to them.

On the other hand, Jonathan Ballantyne came to visit Craig every Friday. He drove his old silver Bentley and brought a picnic basket with him. It always contained a bottle of gin and half a dozen tonics.

He and Craig shared it, in a sheltered nook at the end of the hospital gardens. Like Craig, the old man wanted to avoid the painful present, and they found escape together into the past. Each week Bawu brought one of the old family journals, and they discussed it avidly, Craig trying to glean every one of the old man's memories of those far-off days.

Only twice did they break their accord of forgetfulness and silence. Once Craig asked, "Bawu, what has happened to Janine?"

"Valerie and Douglas wanted her to go and live at Queen's Lynn, when she was released from hospital, but she wouldn't go. As far as I know, she is still working at the museum. The next week it was Bawu who paused as he was about to climb back into the Bentley, and said, When they killed Roly, that was the first time I realized that we were going to lose this war." "Are we going to lose, Bawu?" "Yes, said the old man, and drove away leaving Craig in the wheelchair staring after the Bentley.

At the end of the tenth month at St. Giles', Craig was sent for a series of tests that lasted four days. They X-rayed him and stuck electrodes to his body, they tested his eyesight and his reaction time to various stimuli, they scanned the surface of his skin for heat changes that would show nervous malfunction, they gave him a lumbar puncture and sucked out a sample of his spinal fluid. At the end of it, Craig was nervous and exhausted. That night he had another nightmare. He was lying in the minefield again, and he could hear Janine. She was in the darkness ahead of him. They were doing to her what Roland had described and she was screaming for him to help her.

He could not move. When he woke at last, his sweat had formed a tepid puddle in the red rubber under sheet

The next day -the doctor in charge of his case told him, "You -did wonderfully in your tests, Craig, we are really proud of you. Now I am going to start a new course of treatment, I am sending you to Doctor Davis." Dr. Davis was a young man with an intense manner and a disconcerting directness in his stare. Craig took an immediate dislike to him, sensing that he would seek to destroy the cocoon of peace which Craig had almost succeeded in weaving about himself. It was only after he had -been in Davis" office for ten minutes that Craig realized that he was a psychiatrist.

"Look here, Doctor, I'm not a funny bunny." "No, you are not, but we think you might need a little help, Craig." "I am fine. I don't need help." "There is nothing wrong with your body or nervous system, we want to find out why you have no function in your lower body."

"Listen, Doctor, I can save you a lot of trouble. The reason I can't move my stump and my one good kicker is that I stepped on an AP mine and it blew pieces of me all over the scenery." "Craig, there is a recognized condition, once they used to call it shell-shock.-" "Doctor." Craig interrupted him. "You say there is nothing wrong with me?" "Your body has healed perfectly." "Fine, why didn't somebody tell me before?"

Craig wheeled his chair down the corridor to his room. It took him five minutes to pack his books and papers, then he wheeled himself out to the shiny maroon Land-Rover, slung his valise into the back, dragged himself up into the driver's seat, loaded the wheelchair into the rack behind him and drove out to the yacht.

In the St. Giles" workshop he had designed and put together a system of pulley and hand winches to lift himself easily up the high side of the hull to deck-level. Now the other modifications to the yacht absorbed all his energy and ingenuity. Firstly he had to install grab handles to pull himself around the deck and cockpit and below decks. He sewed leather patches on the seat of his trousers and skidded around on his backside, as he adapted the galley and the head, lowered the bunk and rebuilt the chart-table to his new requirements.

He worked with music blaring out from the speakers and a mug of gin within easy reach. music and liquor helped to chase away unwanted memories.

The yacht was a fortress. He left it only once a month, when he went into town to pick up his police pension cheque, and to stock up his larder and his supply of writing-paper.

On one of these trips he found a second-hand typewriter, and a "teach yourself to type" paperback. He screwed the carriage of the machine to a corner of the chart-table where it would be secure even in a gale at sea, and he began converting the mess of handwritten exercise books into neat piles of typescript, his speed built up with practice until he could make the keys chatter in time to the music.

Dr. Davis, the psychiatrist, tracked him down at last, and Craig called down to him from the cockpit of the yacht. "Look here, Doc, I realize now that you were right, I am a raving homicidal psychopath.

If I were you, I wouldn't put a foot on that ladder." After that Craig rigged up a counter-balance so that he could pull the ladder up after him like a drawbridge. He let it down only for Bawu and each Friday they drank gin and built a little world of fantasy and imagination in which they both could hide.

Then Bawu came on a Tuesday. Craig was up on the foredeck reinforcing the stepping of the mainmast. The old man climbed out of the Bentley, and Craig's happy cry of welcome died on his lips. Bawu seemed to have shrivelled up. He looked ancient and fragile, like one of those unwrapped mummies in the Egyptology section of the British Museum. In the back of the Bentley was the Matabele cook from King's Lynn who had worked for the old man for forty years. Under Bawu's direction, the Matabele unloaded two large crates from the boot of the Bentley, and placed them in the goods lift.

Craig winched the crates up, and then lowered the lift for the old man. In the saloon Craig poured gin into the glasses, avoiding looking at his grandfather, embarrassed for his sake.

Bawu was truly an old man at last. His eyes were rheumy and unfocused, his mouth slack so that he mumbled and sucked noisily at his lips. He spilled a dribble of gin down his shirt-front and didn't realize that he had done so. They sat in silence for a long time, the old man nodding to himself and making small incoherent grunts and burbles. Then suddenly he said. "I've brought you your inheritance," and Craig realized that the crates on the deck must contain the journals that they had haggled over. "Douglas wouldn't know what to do with them anyway." "Thank you, Bawu." "Did I ever tell you about the time Mr. Rhodes held me upon his lap?" Bawu asked with a disconcerting change of direction. Craig had heard the story fifty times before.

"No, you never did. I'd love to hear it, Bawu." "Well, it was during a wedding out at Khami Mission must have been "95 or "96." The old man bumbled on for ten minutes, before he lost the thread of the story entirely and lapsed into silence again.

Craig refilled the glasses, and Bawu stared at the opposite bulkhead, and suddenly Craig realized that tears were running down the withered old cheeks.

"What is it, Bawu?"he demanded with quick alarm. Those slow painful tears were a terrible thing to watch.

"Didn't you hear the news?" the old man asked. "You know I never listen to the news." "It's. over, my boy, all over. We have lost.

Roly, you, all those young men, it was all for nothing we have lost the war. Everything we and our fathers fought for, everything we won and built, it's all gone. We have lost it all over a table in a place called Lancaster House." Bawu's shoulders were shaking quietly, the tears still streaming down his face. Craig dragged himself across the saloon and lifted himself onto the bench beside him. He took Bawu's hand and held it. The old man's hand was thin and light and dry, like the dried bones of a dead seabird.

The two of them, old and young, sat holding hands like frightened children in an empty house.

On the following Friday, Craig crawled out of his bunk early and did his housekeeping in anticipation of Bawu's regular visit. The previous day he had laid in half a dozen bottles of gin, so there was unlikely to be a drought, and he broke the seal on one of them and set it ready with the two glasses polished to a shine. Then he put the first three hundred pages of the typescript next to the bottle.

"It will cheer the old man up." He had taken months to pluck up his courage sufficiently to tell Bawu what he was attempting. Now that another person was about to be allowed to read his typescript, Craig was seized by conflicting emotions, firstly by dread that it would all be judged as valueless, that he had wasted time and hope upon something of little worth, and secondly by a sharp resentment that the private world that he "had created upon those blank white sheets was to be invaded by a trespasser, even one as beloved as Bawu.

"Anyway, somebody has to read it sometime," Craig consoled himself and dragged himself down to the heads. While he sat on the chemical toilet he could see his own face in the mirror above the hand-basin.

For the first time in months he truly looked at himself. He had not shaved in a week, and the gin had left soft putty-coloured pouches under his eyes. The eyes themselves were hurt and haunted by terrible memories, and his mouth was twisted like that of a lost child on the verge of tears.

He shaved, and then switched on the shower and sat under it revelling in the almost-forgotten sensation of hot suds. Afterwards, he combed his wet hair over his face and with the scissors trimmed it straight across the line of his eyebrows, then he scrubbed his teeth until the gums bled. He found a clean blue shirt, and then slid along the companionway, hoisted himself to deck-level, lowered the boarding-ladder, and found a place in the sun with his back against the coping of the cabin to wait for Bawu.

He must have dozed, for the sound of an automobile engine made him start awake, but it was not the whisper of the old man's Bentley, but the distinctive throb of a Volkswagen Beetle. Craig did not recognize the drab green vehicle, not the driver who parked it under the mango trees, and came hesitantly towards the yacht.