Текст книги "A Time to Die"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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They found only the patterns of old cultivated lands, now gone back to weed and bush, and burned-out deserted villages with no sign of human life around the shells of roofless huts.

Sean intersected the road running between Vila de Monica and Cabora Bossa and flew along it for ten miles. He was so low he could see the ruts and potholes in the surface and weeds growing in the wheel tracks. No vehicle had used it for months, perhaps years. The culverts and bridges had been destroyed by explosives and the bodies of mined vehicles, burned out and rusted, littered the verges.

He turned back toward the west and the border now, searching for a place that all three of them remembered so well. As they came up ahead, Sean recognized the symmetrical hillocks they called Inhlozane, "The Maiden's Breasts," and south of them the confluence of two minor rivers, now reduced to strings of green pools in wide sand beds.

Job pointed ahead. "There it is." In the back seat, Matatu forgot his fear and discomfort to cackle with laughter and clutch Sean's shoulder.

"Inhlozane. Do you remember, Bwana?"

Sean banked steeply over the junction of the two rivers, circling them, all three of them peering down. They could make out no trace of the old guerrilla camp. The last time they had been here was in the spring of"1976 and they had come as scouts–Ballantyne's Scouts.

Under interrogation, a prisoner had revealed the existence of a major guerrilla training camp in this area, and the Rhodesian high command had sent one of the Vampire jets over on a high photographic run. The camp had been cunningly concealed and every artifice of camouflage employed. However, the Rhodesian evaluators were highly skilled, most of them ex-R.A.F personnel. It is possible to camouflage the dugouts and hutments used by hundreds of men and women, but the pathways between them are the telltales. Thousands of feet moving daily between barracks and lecture huts, between mess halls and latrines, going out to forage for firewood or carrying water from the river, beat pathways that from the air look like the veins in a dead leaf.

"Between two and two and a half thousand," the air force photographic reconnaissance squadron leader had told the briefing. "They have been there for approximately six months, so training is almost complete. They are probably just waiting for the rains to break before beginning a major offensive."

A simultaneous incursion by two thousand trained terrorists would have strained the Rhodesian security forces" capabilities to breaking point.

"Preemptive strike," General Peter Walls, the Rhodesian commander in chief, had ordered. "I want a battle plan prepared within twenty-four hours." The code name chosen for the attack was "Popeye."

Rivalry between the Selous Scouts and the Ballantyne Scouts was fierce, and Sean had been jubilant when he had been given the ground attack role of "Popeye" in preference to the Selous lads.

They had gone in with the slow, ancient Dakotas, crowded on the benches along the fuselage, fifty men and their equipment to an aircraft, sitting on their parachutes. There were almost equal numbers of black and white troopers, but they were homogeneous in their camouflage paint. They had jumped from three hundred feet, just high enough for the parachutes to flare before they hit the ground. When they jumped from that height, they jokingly referred to themselves as "meat bombs."

The jump area was twelve miles from the guerrilla training camp, ninety-six miles inside the Mozambican border. They were on the ground an hour before sunset. All three hundred Scouts were assembled and ready to move out by nightfall.

They had made the approach march by moonlight, each man carrying a pack that weighed almost a hundred pounds, most of that weight made up of ammunition for the RPD machine guns.

They had reached the fork of the river after midnight and prepared their ambush position along the south bank, overlooking the dry river-bed and its shallow green pools and facing the training camp on the far bank.

With Job beside him, Sean crept along the bank, checking every position personally, speaking to his men in whispers, calling them by name. They had lain for the rest of the night behind their machine guns, and small sounds and smells of the wood smoke and cooking food had drifted across to them on the night breeze.

At dawn a bugle had sounded reveille in the dark forest that hid the camps, and they had seen the obscure movement of many persons in the gloom beneath the trees.

Twenty minutes later, Precisely at the moment of good shooting light, the Vampires had come whistling in from the west and dropped their napalm cansters. Towering bans of orange flame shot through with evil black smoke had erupted into the sky, palling the sunrise; the heat and the chemical stink of the napalm came rolling down to where the scouts lay in ambush. The VamPires had deliberately dropped their loads of napalm along the northern perimeter of the camp, sealing off that escape route with a wall of fire. The Canberra bombers came in twenty seconds behind the Vampires, and their bomb loads were fragmentation and high explosive. They fell into the camp with jarring crumping detonations, sending up fountains of dirt and debris, and the trainee guerrillas who survived came out of the forest, screaming and howling in a panic-stricken mob.

The napalm had cut them off from the north, and they poured into the river-bed and came running directly at the waiting machine guns. Sean let them come, studying them with a detached interest.

There were almost as many women as men, but it was difficult to differentiate between the sexes. They wore no uniform; some were in khaki shorts and T-shirts with portraits of guerrilla leaders or Political slogans printed on the chests. Others wore blue denim or bush jackets, and some were bare-chested and in their underwear.

Nearly all of them were young, in their middle or late teens, all of them terrified and running blindly to escape the conflagration of napalm and high explosive.

They splashed into the pools and the sand held their feet, slowing them. As they ran, they looked back over their shoulders at the flames and dust of the pomp, so none of them saw the gunners waiting for them on the south bank.

The river-bed was filled with struggling humanity, like a pit full of rats, and as the first of them reached the bank on which Sean lay and began to clamber up the steep earthen side, he blew a piercing blast on his whistle. The last note of the whistle was drowned out by gunfire, three hundred automatic weapons opening up together.

Sean had been hardened by years of brutal warfare, but even he found the carnage stunning. At close range, the volleys of machine-gun fire tore one human body to shreds, then went on to destroy the next rank and the next. Shots boiled the white sand of the river-bed so it rose in a waist-high fog turning the running figures to ghostly silhouettes in the dust, then hid them as they collapsed or were flung carelessly aside by point-blank bursts of fire.

The din lasted for four minutes. Then there were no more targets and the guns fell silent. They had fired fifty thousand bullets into the river-bed. The barrels of the guns were so hot that, like the plate of a stove, they ticked and pink led as they cooled. Though their ears were dulled and numbed by the roar of gunfire, they could hear the moans and cries of those who still lived in the river-bed.

Sean blew another blast on his whistle and they leaped down the bank and went forward in a skirmishing line.

Sean's orders were that the only prisoners to be taken were to be officers or political commissars. As they crossed the river, they shot those who showed any signs of life, holding the muzzles against their heads, a single bullet for each, making certain they would never recover from their Wounds to attack another Rhodesian farmhouse or hack the arms and legs off the black villagers who refused to supply them with food and women. They left nobody alive in the river-bed. Then they went on to sweep through the camp, tossing grenades into the dugouts and searching the huts for survivors and, more important, for maps and documents. Like all good Marxists, the guerrillas were obsessed with record keeping.

The capture of the camp archives was one of the major priorities of "Popeye. Racing at the head of his men, Sean was the first to reach headquarters hut in the center of the camp. He recognized it by the gaudy flag drooping on its flagpole in front.

The doorway was dangerous. He fired a burst through the grass wall and then dived in headfirst through the window. There was a tall black man in the front office. He was dressed in blue denim, and he was scooping armfuls of documents out of the paraffin boxes that served as filing cabinets and dumping them in the center of the floor. Clearly he was going to attempt to burn them, but now he dropped his armful of paper and reached for the pistol in the holster on his belt.

Sean kicked his legs out from under him and, as he dropped, slammed the butt of his weapon into the side of his neck just below the ear. As Sean rolled to his feet, Matatu appeared beside him like a grinning gnome and stooped to slit the unconscious guerrilla's throat with his skinning knife.

"No!" Sean stopped him. "We want that one." Job was seconds behind him, bursting into the room with the heavy RPD machine gun held ready across his hip.

"Okay, Captain," Sean ordered him, "get a detail to recover all this burnt." He glanced at his watch. "The choppers will be here in twenty minutes."

The Rhodesian Air Force was desperately short of helicopters.

Rhodesia was under sanction by every nation in the world except South Africa, and a British warship was blockading the Mozambique Channel to deny those ports to them.

They could risk only two helicopters for this operation. One of those was loaded with captured documents, almost five tons of them: lists of the trainees and their organization, target priorities and supply sheets, equipment dossiers, training manuals, field evaluations of Rhodesian countermeasures, communist propaganda, maps of the attack routes and safe corridors, the entire order of battle of the guerrilla army. It was a treasure trove, its aquisition a greater blow to the enemy than the hundreds of bodies lying in the river-bed, but it filled one of the precious helicopters.

The second Alouette helicopter Sean used for casevac" and for ferrying out the prisoners. However, the Scouts had taken more casualties than he had anticipated: three troopers had been injured in the parachute drop, torn cartilage and sprained ligaments, and five others had been wounded by the desultory and quickly suppressed counterfire of the more plucky of the guerrillas. Then one of the guerrillas had feigned dead in the river-bed and thrown a grenade when the Scouts came forward, killing a black trooper and wounding two others. The Scouts always took their dead out for decent burial and the trooper's corpse was already in its green plastic body bag.

In addition to his own casualties, Sean's men had captured eight suspected officers and commissars. The guerrilla leaders wore no insignia of rank but could usually be identified by the superior quality of their clothing, by their sunglasses, wristwatches, and the rows of ball-point pens in their breast pockets.

They had too many passengers for the helicopters, and Sean was forced to keep some of his prisoners with him for the outward march. He picked those who looked fit enough to survive a forced march with the Scouts. One of these was the man they had captured in the command hut.

Forty-five minutes after the attack had begun, the last helicopter took off and the Scouts were ready to move out. They could expect the Frelimo counterattack to be dilatory and unenthusiastic, but Sean was taking no chances. He was on the riverbank surveying the carnage of the killing ground. They couldn't afford the time to make a body count, but the air force would run another reconnaissance later this morning and they would get a fair estimate from the photographs.

"Must be at least fifteen hundred" Sean decided. They were lying in heaps and windrows like newly cut wheat, and already the flies were hanging over them in a gray mist.

Sean turned away from the scene. "All right," he called. "Move them out!"

The first section of fifty men set off at a trot. The troop trucks would race across the border and come in as far as they could to meet them, but the men would still have to run thirty miles or more before they could ride, a full marathon under arms. But most of their ammunition had been shot away and their packs were almost empty.

Job hurried across to where Sean stood on the bank. "The prisoner you took, Colonel. I have recognized him. It's Comrade China himself."

"Are you sure?" Sean did not wait for Job to reply. "Damn, if I had known I would have sent him out on the chopper."

Comrade China was high on the wanted list of the Rhodesians.

He was the area commander of the entire northeastern sector, the equivalent of a major general and one of their most successful commanders, a man with a lot of interesting stories to tell to military intelligence.

"Make sure he gets out safely, Captain," Sean ordered brusquely. "Treat him like your new wife."

"China refuses to march," Job said. "We can't shoot him, and we can't carry him. He knows that."

under guard, Sean strode across to where the prisoner was held squatting sullenly with his hands behind his head.

"On your feet and march," Sean ordered. Comrade China spat on Sean's boots. Sean unbuckled his holster and drew the.357 Magnum revolver. He laid it against the side of the man's head.

"On your feet," he repeated. "Your last chance."

"You won't shoot," the man sneered. "You daren't shoot." And Sean fired, The muzzle was aimed over Comrade China's shoulder, but the barrel was pressed hard against his ear.

Comrade China screamed and clutched at his ear with both hands. A thin trickle of blood from his ruptured eardrum ran out between his fingers. "On your feet!" Sean said and still holding his damaged ear, Comrade China spat at him again. Sean laid the revolver barrel against his other ear. "After your ears, we will take out your eyes, with a sharp stick." Comrade China stood up.

At the double, move out." Job took over. He placed his hand between China's shoulder blades and sent him tottering down the riverbank.

Sean took one more look around the battlefield. it had been done swiftly and thoroughly, what the Scouts called "a good kill."

"All right, Matatu," Sean said softly. "Let's go home." And the little Ndorobo ran ahead of him.

When Comrade China faltered and his knees went rubbery and he collapsed from the agony of his burst eardrum, Sean gave him a subcutaneous shot of morphine from a disposable syringe and a drink from his water bottle.

"For a soldier of the revolution who shoots babies and chops the feet off old women, this is a stroll in the park," Sean told him.

Brace up, China, or I'll blow your other ear out." And he took one of China's elbows and Job the other. Between them they hoisted him to his feet and half carried him until the morphine had a chance to work, but they kept up the pace of the running column of Scouts through the forest and over the rolling rocky hills.

"You may have killed some of our people today." After a mile or so the morphine was working and China became loquacious.

"Today you have won a single little battle, Colonel Courtney, but tomorrow we will have won the war." China's voice was harsh with bitter self-righteousness.

"How do you know my name?" Sean asked with amusement.

"You are famous, Colonel, or should I say infamous. Under you, this pack of killer dogs is even more dangerous than when the murderous Ballantyne himself was leading it."

"Thank you for the pretty compliment, my old China, but aren't you claiming victory a little prematurely?"

"The side which controls the countryside by night wins the war.

"Mao Tse-tung." Sean smiled. "A most appropriate quotation for one of your kind."

"We control the Countryside at last, we have you bottled up in your villages and towns. Your white farmers are losing heart, their women are sick of war. The black peasants are openly sympathetic to our cause. Britain and the world are against you. Even South Africa, your only ally, is growing disenchanted with the struggle.

Soon, very soon..

They argued as they ran, and despite himself Sean could not suppress a grudging admiration for his prisoner. He was quick witted his command of English impressive and his grasp of politics and military tactics even more so. He was physically strong and fit.

Sean could feel the wiry muscle in his arm as he supported him, and few other men with a burst eardrum could have sustained the pace of the march.

"He would make a superb Scout," Sean thought. "If we could turn him" Many of his most valuable men were former guerrillas, captured and skillfully turned by Rhodesian intelligence.

So as they ran on he studied Comrade China with renewed interest. He was probably a few years younger than Sean. He had refined Nilotic features, more Ethiopian than Shana, a narrow high-bridged nose and chiseled lips rather than the broadly negroid. Even the morphine could not dim the intelligence of his large dark eyes. He was a handsome man, and of course he would be tough and utterly ruthless. He would not have reached his rank were he not.

"I want him," Sean decided. "My God, he would be worth another full regiment to us." And he tightened his grip on the man's arm, a proprietorial gesture. "This little darling is going to get the full treatment."

The vanguard ran into a Frelimo patrol in the middle of the morning and brushed them aside, hardly slackening their pace to do so. The corpses in their blotched Frelimo camouflage lay beside the track as they trotted past.

They came up with the troop convoy a little after midday. The trucks were guarded by Eland armored cars, and they had cans of ice-cold Castle beer in the cool boxes. The Scouts had covered forty-two miles in just over seven hours, and the beer tasted like nectar.

Sean gave a can to Comrade China. "Sorry about your ear," he told him, and saluted him with the beer can.

"I would have done the same to you." China smiled, but his eyes were inscrutable. "To our next meeting?" he suggested the toast.

"Until we meet again," Sean agreed, and handed him over to a guard detail under a white sergeant. Then he climbed into the Command armored car to lead the final stage of withdrawal.

Sean extricated his column and had them back across the border ten and a half hours after the attack began. Ian Smith, the prime minister, came on the radio net in person to congratulate him and inform him of his decoration, a bar to his Silver Cross.

Sean didn't learn about Comrade China's escape until the column went into laager that evening. Apparently China had slit the canvas hood of the troop truck and slipped through it while his guard was dozing. Undeterred by his manacles, he had dropped off the speeding truck, screened by the dust boiling out from the back wheels, and rolled into the head-high elephant grass along the verge.

Two months later Sean had seen an intelligence report that placed China in command of the successful attack that had wiped out a supply convoy on the Mount Darwin road.

"Yes, Matatu, I remember it all very well," Sean answered his question. He made one more steep turn above the site of the old terrorist base before he returned the Beechcraft to straight and level flight on a southerly heading.

He did not, however, fly as far southward as the railway line that linked the port of Beira to the landlocked Zimbabwean border.

This was a focus for all the military and rebel activity in the area, and the countryside would be swarming with Frelimo and Zimbabwean troops, all armed with RPG rockets and eager to get a shot at an unmarked low-flying aircraft with no flight authorization.

"At least," Sean told Job, "it looks like a possibility."

Job agreed. "The border opposite our camp seems undefended and deserted."

"Worth a try for half a million?" Sean asked. Job just grinned at him.

"One more little chore before we go home," Sean told them.

It required precise navigation and an eye for the terrain, but Sean crossed back into the Zimbabwean side, and by flying low they were able to pick out the spot where the previous day they had first come across the poachers" tracks; from that point, with Matatu craning his head to see down and calling directions, they found the tableland and valley where they had come up with the band of poachers and taken them under fire. From the air the distances seemed much shorter than they had on foot.

Matatu directed Sean along the trail the old bull had made toward the border. It seemed his gift for direction and terrain was not impaired by being high above the ground, and Sean was following their course on The map he held in his lap.

"We are crossing bact into Mozambique now." Sean was scribbling notes on the map.

"That way. Matatu leaned over the back of the seat and pointed out a more northerly track. Sean knew better than to argue with him and turned a few degrees left.

Minutes later Matatu demanded he turn slightly south again.

"Little bugger is actually sensing the old bull's trail, he is thinking like the elephant," Sean marveled. At that moment Matatu gave a squeak of triumph and pointed urgently out of the side window.

As they flashed across another dry river-bed, Sean glimpsed the tracks trodden in the soft sand. They were so deep that they were filled with shadow, a string of dark beads on the white background. Even Sean, who for twenty years had watched Matatu work, was amazed. On instinct alone, Matatu had followed the bull to this river crossing.

It was a supernatural feat.

Sean circled the tracks, his port wingtip pointing directly at them, so steep was his turn.

"Which way now?" he called to the back seat. Matatu tapped his shoulder and pointed downstream. Without demur, Sean followed the gnarled black finger.

there he is!" Job shouted suddenly. Matatu shrieked with laughter and clapped his hands, bouncing in his seat like a child at a pantomime.

A mile ahead the river ran into a wide vlei that still held water from the last rains. The elephant's humped back showed above the tops of the tall reeds that surrounded the pool, like a gray whale in a sea of green.

As they raced low toward him, the elephant heard the Beechcraft's engine. He lifted his head and spread his ears wide, turning to face them, and they saw his tusks, those legendary shafts of black ivory raised to the sky. The beauty of their curved symmetry struck Sean all over again.

There was just a glimpse of them as they flashed overhead, but the image was printed vividly on his mind's eye. Half a million dollars and those tusks-he had risked his LIFE a hundred times for much lesser prizes.

"Going back for another look?" Job asked, twisting his head to try and see back over the tailplane.

"No." Sean shook his head. "We don't want to disturb him more than necessary. We know where to find him. Let's go home."

"It's MY half-million dollars you're so gaily throwing around," Claudia told her father.

"How do you work that out?" Riccardo asked. He was lying on his camp bed dressed in a pair of silk pajama bottoms, his chest and feet bare. Claudia noticed that most of his body hair was still crisp, curly and black, with only a patch of fuzzy gray in the center of his chest.

"My inheritance," she explained sweetly. "You're blowing my inheritance, Papa."

Riccardo chuckled. She had the sass of a divorce lawyer, coming bursting into his tent to renew the argument he thought he had finalized in the mess tent over breakfast.

"If I'm not going to get it in your will, the very least you can do is let me enjoy it with you now."

"According to the last audit, young lady, you will have a little over thirty-six million coming to you after taxes, after I've allowed myself this small extravagance. I hasten to add that every cent is tied up in a trust fund that not even the most crafty lawyers will ever break. I don't want you handing out my hard -earned loot to one of your bleeding-heart charities." "Papa, you know the money has never interested me. What interests me is coming with you on this crazy jaunt after the elephant.

I came to Africa with you on the understanding that I was to be included in everything. That was our bargain."

"I'll say it one more time, tesoro, my treasure." He only called her by that baby name when he was feeling very affectionate or very exasperated. "You're not coming into Mozambique with us."

"You'd go back on your solemn promise?" she accused.

"Without a qualm," he assured her. "if your safety or happiness was involved."

She jumped up from the canvas camp chair and began to prowl around the tent. He watched her with secret pleasure. Her arms were folded over those pert little breasts, and she was frowning heavily, but the frown left no lines on her smooth plastic skin. In looks she reminded him of the young Sophia Loren, his favorite actress.

Now she stopped beside the camp bed and glared down at him.

"You know I always get my way," she said. "Why don't you make it easier for both of us, and just say I can come."

"I'm sorry, tesoro. You aren't coming."

"all right." She drew a deep breath. "I don't want to do this, Papa, but you leave me no choice. I've begun to understand what this means to you, why you're prepared to pay such a vast sum for a chance to do it, but if I can't go with you, as is my right and my duty, then I'll prevent you from going."

He chuckled again, easily and unconcernedly.

"I'm serious, deadly serious, Papa. Please don't make me do it."

"How can you stop me, little girl?" he asked.

"I can tell Sean Courtney what Dr. Andrews told me."

Riccardo Monterro came to his feet in one lithe swift movement and seized her arms. "What did Andrews tell you?" he asked in a voice as thin and cutting as a razor blade.

"He told me that last November you had a little black spot on your right arm," she said. Instinctively he put his right arm behind his back, but she went on. "It had a pretty name, melanoma, like a girl's name, but it wasn't pretty at all, and you left it too late. He cut it out, but the pathologist graded it Clarke five-that's six months to a year, Papa. That's what he told me."

Riccardo Monterro sat down on the bed and his voice was suddenly very weary.

"When did he tell you?"

"Six weeks ago." She sat down beside him. "That's why I agreed to come to Africa with you. I didn't want to be apart from you for one day of the time we have left. That's why I am coming with you into Mozambique."

"No." He shook his head. "I can't let you."

"Then I'll tell Sean that at any moment it may reach your brain."

She did not have to elaborate. Dr. Andrews had been most graphic as he described the many possible directions the disease could take. If it went to the lungs, it would be death by suffocation, but if it affected the brain or nervous system, it would be either general paralysis or total derangement.

"You wouldn't," he said, shaking his head. "The last thing in my life that I really want. You wouldn't deny it to me?"

"Without a qualm," she said, repeating his own words. "If you refuse me my right to be with you for every one of these last days, and to be with you at the end as is the duty of a loving daughter."

"I can't let you." He let his face sink into the cup of his hands, a gesture of defeat that hurt her. It required all her resolve to keep her tone firm.

"And I can't let you die alone," she replied.

"You don't understand how much I want this thing. It's the last thing in my LIFE. The old bull and I will go together. You don't understand. If you did you wouldn't prevent me."

"I'm not preventing you," she said gently. "I want you to have it-if you'll let me come with you." As she said it, they both became aware of a faint vibration in the air, and together they looked up.

"The Beechcraft," Riccardo murmured. "Sean's on his way back to the airstrip." He glanced at his wristwatch. "He'll be here within the hour."

"And what will you tell him?" Claudia asked. "Will you tell him I'm coming with you?"

"No!" Sean bellowed. "No bloody fear! Forget the idea, Capo.

She can't come, and that's absolutely bloody final!"

"For half a big M, I get to call the shots," Riccardo told him quietly.

"I say she's coming, so she's coming."

They were standing beside the Toyota. Riccardo and Claudia had met Sean as he drove into camp. Sean drew a breath and glared at father and daughter as they stood side by side confronting him. He saw that their expressions were set and determined.

Sean had been on the point of bellowing again, but with an effort he checked himself. "Be reasonable, Capo," he said, moderating his tone. "You know it's impossible."

They stared at him grimly, closed against argument or reason.

"It's war out there. We'll take her."

"Claudia comes with us."

"The hell she does."

Claudia spoke for the first time. "What are you making a fuss about? Is it because I am a woman? There's nothing a man can do that I can't."

"Can you pee standing up?" He wanted to disconcert her, make her lose her temper, but she ignored the crude jibe and went on as though he had not spoken.

"You've seen me hike. I can stand the heat and the tsetse fly. I'm as good as my father."

He turned from her deliberately and spoke to Riccardo. "As her father, you can't allow it. Can you imagine what would happen to her if she were caught by a gang of Renamo cutthroats?"

He saw Riccardo flinch, but Claudia had seen it also, and before he could weaken she took his hand and spoke up firmly.

"Either I go or nobody goes, and you can kiss your half a million good-bye, Colonel Sean Courtney."

That was the key, the half-million dollars. She had him, and they both knew it. He couldn't afford to pass it by, but he made one last effort.