Текст книги "A Time to Die"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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"Is she in charge around here, Capo? Do I take my orders from you or from her?"

"That won't work either." Claudia tried to keep her tone placatory, although she longed to tear into him with tooth and nail.

That crude sally of his rankled. "My father and I are agreed on this. Both of us go, or we call the deal off. Isn't that right, Papa?"

"I'm afraid that's it, Sean." Riccardo looked tired and discouraged. "It's not negotiable. If you want your money, you take Claudia along with us."

Sean turned on his heel and strode away toward his own tent, but after a few paces, he stopped and stood with his hands on his hips. His shouts had attracted the camp servants, and they hovered around the mess tent and peered out of the doorway and windows of the kitchen hut, apprehension mingled with curiosity. "What the hell are you all gawking at?" he roared. "Have you got no work to do around here?" And they disappeared.

He turned and walked slowly back to where the two of them stood beside the Toyota. "Okay," he agreed, staring coldly at Claudia. "Cut your own throat, but don't come to me for a bandage."

"I won't, that's a promise." Her voice was dripping honey, more irksome to him than straightforward gloating would have been, and they both knew their declared truce was at an end.

"We've got some paperwork to do, Capo." Sean led the way to the mess tent without looking back at them.

With two fingers, Sean typed out the indemnity statements on his old portable Remington, one for Riccardo and one for his daughter. Each began: "I acknowledge that I am fully aware of the danger and the illegality..." Then he typed an acknowledgement of debt for Riccardo to sign and called Job and the chef to witness the signature. He sealed all the copies in an envelope addressed to Reema at the Harare office and locked it in the small steel safe at the back of the mess tent.

"Let's do it, then," he said.

The poaching expedition would consist of the three whites, Job, Mattu, Pumula, and the stocky, bearded tracker who had picked UP Tukutela's spoor at the river crossing. His name was Dedan.

"It's too many, but each of those tusks weighs a hundred and thirty pounds," Sean explained. "Matatu is too small to act as a porter. We need four big men to bring them back."

Before the equipment was loaded into the Toyota, Sean ordered it laid out, and he opened and checked each pack. Claudia protested when he opened her personal pack. "That's an invasion of my privacy!"

"So take me to the Supreme Court, ducky," he challenged as he went through the pack remorselessly, throwing out most of the tubes and bottles of cosmetics, allowing her only three tubes of moisturizer and sunscreen.

"One change of underwear," he ordered, discarding half a dozen pairs of panties. "But you'll need two more pairs of thick socks.

Get them."

He pulled out her box of tampons. "Everything a man can do, and then some," he remarked coldly. "You don't need the box, it takes up too much space. Pack them loose." Her poorly suppressed fury gave him a sour pleasure.

By the time he had finished, they were down to the barest essentials, and the packs were carefully weighed and apportioned depending on the strength and physical condition of each bearer.

Sean, Job, Pumula, and Dedan carried sixty pounds each, Riccardo and Matatu forty, while Claudia was down to twenty-five pounds.

"I can carry more," she protested. "Give me forty, the same as Matatu." Sean did not bother to answer her.

"And what's more, I eat half as much as any of you!" But he had already turned away to supervise the loading of the Toyota.

There were still four hours of daylight remaining when they left Chiwewe camp, but Sean drove the first section very fast, jouncing them around in their seats. It was partly an expression of his objection to Claudia's presence but mostly an urgent desire to be at the jump-off point before nightfall.

As he drove, he spoke in a tightly controlled voice. "Before we commence this guided tour of the Mozambican paradise of the proletariat, this shining gem of African socialism, will you bear with me while I give you a few facts and figures." Nobody protested, so he went on. "Until 1975 Mozambique was a Portuguese colony. For almost five hundred years it had been under Portuguese control and had been a reasonably happy and prosperous community of some fifteen million souls. The Portuguese, unlike the British or German colonists, had a relaxed attitude toward miscegenation and the result was a large mulatto population and an official policy of assimilado under which any person of color, if he attained certain civilized standards, was considered to be white and enjoyed Portuguese nationality. It all worked very well, as indeed did most colonial administrations, especially those of the British."

"Bullshit," said Claudia demurely. "That's Limey propaganda. 91

"Limey?" Sean smiled thinly. "Careful, your prejudice is showing. Nonetheless, your average Indian or African living today in a former British colony is a damned sight worse off now than he was then.

Certainly that goes one hundred times more for your average black man living in Mozambique."

"At least they're free," Claudia cut in.

Sean laughed. "This is freedom? An economy managed under the well-known socialist principles of chaos and ruination which has resulted in a negative growth rate of up to ten percent per annum for every year since the Portuguese withdrawal, a foreign debt amounting to double the gross national product, a total breakdown in the educational system, only five percent of children regularly attending a recognized school, one doctor per forty-five thousand persons, only one person in ten with access to purified drinking water, infant mortality at three hundred forty per thousand births? The only worse countries in the world are Afghanistan and Angola, but as you say, at least they are free. In America, where everybody eats three huge meals a day, freedom may be a big deal, but in Africa a full belly counts for a hell of a lot more."

"It can't be as bad as that," she protested.

"No," he agreed, "it's a lot worse. I haven't mentioned two other factors, the civil war and AIDS. When the Portuguese were pushed out, they handed over to a dictator named Samara Machel and his Frelimo party. Machel was an avowed Marxist. He didn't believe in the nonsense of elections, and his rule was directly responsible for the present condition of the country and for the emergence of the National Mozambican Resistance or, as it is known to its friends and admirers, Renamo. Nobody know s much about it, what its objectives are, who its leaders are. All we know is that it controls most of the country, especially the north, and that it is made up of a pretty ruthless bunch of characters."

"Renamo is a South African front organization directed, supplied, and controlled from Pretoria," Claudia helped him out.

"Committed to the overthrow of sovereign government and the destabilization of the southern continent."

"Well done, ducky." Sean nodded approval. "You've been studying the wisdom and erudition of the Organization of African Unity and the nonaligned nations. You have even mastered their jargon. If only South Africa had the military and technological capability to commit half the skulduggery it is accused of, it would not be simply the most powerful country in Africa, it would be running the entire world."

"I keep forgetting you're one of them, which is silly of me. You don't attempt to conceal your bigotry. The simple fact is that your government and apartheid are the scourge and curse of Africa."

"Of course, we are responsible for everything-the AIDS epidemic, the famines of Ethiopia and Angola and Mozambique, the breakdown of government in Uganda and Zambia, the corruption in Nigeria and Zaire, it's all a dirty South African plot. We even killed Samara Machel, we fed vodka to the Russian crew of his Tupelov jet, and, with our incredibly sophisticated technology, lured them over the border. Machel hit one of our racist mountains with such force that his brains and major organs were instantly expelled from his body. Nevertheless, our apartheid doctors kept him alive long enough to torture state secrets out of him. That is the truth as determined by the UN and

OAU."

"Shut up," said Riccardo Monterro. "I've had enough. Shut up, both of you."

"Sorry." Sean grinned at him. "I get carried away. I just wanted to let you know what to expect when we cross the border. We can just hope that we aren't going to meet any of the lads from either Frelimo or Renamo. there is not a lot to choose between them.

They both shoot the same bullets."

The thought made the back of his own neck prickle, and he felt his mood lighten. He was going into mortal danger again, and the thrill of it began. having the girl with him no longer irked but rather heightened that anticipation, and he felt his resentment of her begin to fade. He was glad she was here rather than jetting back to Alaska. Sean drove on in a silence that gripped them all, even the men standing braced against the roll bar in the back of the Toyota. The closer they came to the border, the deeper the silence became.

At last Sean turned and looked over his shoulder, and Job nodded in agreement.

"This is it, ladies and gentlemen," Sean said quietly. "All change!" He let the Toyota trundle to a halt where the track crossed a stony ridge.

"Where are we?" Riccardo asked.

"As close as we can safely get to the border, about three miles.

From here, it's shanks" pony."

Riccardo swung one leg out of the truck, but Sean said sharply, "Hold it, Capo, step onto that slab of rock. Leave no tracks."

One at a time, each carrying his or her own pack, they alighted from the truck, at Sean's instruction stepping precisely in the footsteps of the person in front. Matatu was the last off, and he went backward, brushing over the signs with a switch of dried grass, wiping out every trace of their departure from the truck.

The chef had come with them to drive the truck back to the camp. "Go in peace, Mambo!" he called to Sean as he puffed away.

"Fat hope," Sean laughed, sending him off with a wave. Then to Job: "Antitracking, let's go!"

Neither Riccardo nor Claudia had ever watched anti tracking procedure, for while hunting they had always run free in pursuit.

The formation for anti tracking was Indian file, Job leading and everyone else stepping in his footprints. Behind them all Matatu, the old maestro, was covering the signs, replacing a pebble lichen side up, stroking a blade of grass into its original position, flicking at the earth with his grass switch, picking up a leaf dislodged from a low-hanging branch or the bruised blade of grass on which a foot had trodden.

Job avoided the gaime paths and soft ground, always choosing the line of march that was most obscure and yet moving surprisingly fast, so that within half an hour Claudia felt the chill of fresh sweat between her shoulder blades and at the cleavage of her shirt front.

Job led them to the top of a low kopJe, and Sean motioned to them to conceal themselves below the skyline with the sunset behind them.

Watching them work, Riccardo remarked softly, "Pumula and Dedan seem to know what they're doing." The two of them had moved out to guard the flanks without being ordered to do so.

"Yes." Sean settled down between him and Claudia, using the same low bush for cover. "They were both noncoms in the Scouts.

They've done this before."

"Why are we stopping here? Claudia asked.

"We are sitting on the border," Sean explained, "and we'll spend the last of the daylight studying the ground ahead. As soon as the moon comes up, we'll move in. You can relax until then."

He lifted his Zeiss binoculars and stared through them; a few yards away Job lay on his belly and focused his own pair of binoculars in the same direction. They lowered the binoculars from time to time to blink their vision clear or polish an imaginary speck from the lens. Claudia had noticed how they protected and looked after these most essential tools of their craft, but apart from that, their concentration on the terrain ahead was absolute and ended only when the last gleam of the sunset faded. Then Sean buttoned the binoculars into his top pocket and turned to her.

"Time for your makeup," he said. For a moment she did not understand. Then she felt the greasy touch of camouflage cream on her cheek and instinctively pulled away.

"Hold still," he snapped. "Your white face shines like a iniffor.

It's good for insects and sunburn also."

He daubed her face and the backs of her hands.

"Here comes the moon." Sean finished working on his own camouflage and screwed the top back on the tube of cream. "We can go in now."

Sean changed the formation once again, putting out Job and Pumula as flankers while he led the center. Once again Matatu brought up the rear, diligently sweeping their tracks.

Once Sean stopped and checked Claudia's equipment. A loose buckle on her pack had been tapping regularly in time with her stride, a noise so small that she had not noticed it.

"You sound like the charge of the Light Brigade," he breathed in her ear as he adjusted it.

"Arrogant bastard," she thought.

They went on in silence, an hour and then another hour without pausing. She never knew the exact moment when she crossed the border. The moonlight through the forest was silvery, and the shadows of the trees flickered over Sean's broad shoulders ahead of her.

Gradually the silence and the moonlight gave the march a dreamlike unreality, and she found herself mesmerized by it, her movements were like-those of a sleepwalker, so that when Sean stopped abruptly she bumped into him and might have fallen had he not whipped. a hard, muscular arm around her and held her.

They stood frozen, listening, staring into the dark forest. After almost five minutes Claudia moved slightly to free herself from his arm, but instantly his grip tightened and she submitted to it. Out on the right flank, Job gave a bird call, and noiselessly Sean sank to the ground, drawing her down with him. Her nerves strained tighter as she realized there must be real danger out there. Now his arm no longer annoyed her. Instinctively she relaxed and pressed a little closer to him. It felt good.

Another soft bird call from the darkness, and Sean put his lips to her ear. "Stay!" he breathed. She felt lonely and exposed as he released her and she watched him disappear like a ghost into the forest.

Sean moved in a low crouch, rifle in one hand, reaching forward to touch the earth with the fingers of his left hand, brushing away the dry twigs and leaves that might crackle under his foot before stepping forward. He sank down ten feet from where Job lay and glanced across at his dark shape. The pale palm of Job's hand flashed a signal, and Sean concentrated on the left front that Job had indicated, For long minutes he neither saw nor sensed anything untoward, but he trusted Job completely and he waited with a hunter's patience. Suddenly he caught a taint on the night air and he lifted his nose and sniffed at it. Both his confidence and his patience were repaid. It was the acrid stink of burning tobacco, one of those cheap black Portuguese cigarillos. He remembered them so well they had been issued to the guerrillas in the days of the bush war and were probably Frelimo issue still.

He signaled Job and they went forward, leopard-crawling, absolutely silently, for forty paces. Sean picked out the glow of the cigarette as a man drew on it. Then the man coughed, a soft phlegmy sound, and spat. He was at the base of one of the large trees directly ahead; now Sean could make out his shape. He was sitting with his back to the trunk.

"Who is he? Local tribesman? Poacher? Bee hunter? Refugee?"

None of those seemed likely. This one was awake and alert, almost certainly a sentry. As Sean reached that conclusion, he sensed other movement farther out, and he flattened against the earth.

Another man emerged from the forest and came directly to where the sentry was rising to his feet to meet him. As soon as he stood. Sean could make out the AK-47 rifle slung over his shoulder, muzzle down. The two men talked softly together.

IT', "Changing the guard," Sean thought as the new sentry leaned against the tree and the other man sauntered back into the forest.

"That is where the camp is," Sean guessed.

Still on his belly, he leopard-crawled forward, passing well wide of the sentry, who would be fresh and vigilant. Once he was within the perimeter, Sean rose into a crouch and went forward swiftly.

He found the camp in a fold of ground up against the hills. It was a fly camp no huts or shelters, only two small fires that had burned down to coals. He counted eleven men lying around the fires, all of them with a blanket pulled completely over their heads in typical African fashion. There might be five or six others on guard duty, but it was a small band.

Even lacking automatic weapons, Sean and his men could have dealt with them. All of Sean's men still carried their piano-wire no loses and Matatu his skinning knife with the blade so sharp it was honed down to half its original width. Nobody in the camp would even have woken up.

Sean shook his head with regret. He was certain now that these were either Frelimo regular troops or Renamo guerrillas. He had no quarrel with them, whoever they were. Just as long as they did not interfere with his elephant hunt. Sean backed away to where Job was waiting for him at the perimeter.

"Eleven of them at the fires," Sean breathed.

"I found two more sentries," Job said, nodding.

"Frelimo?"

"Who knows?" Job shrugged. Sean touched his arm and they crept away farther out of earshot of the camp so they could speak more freely.

"What do you think, Job?"

"A small group, they mean little. We can go around them."

"They could be the advance guard for a bigger party," Sean suggested.

"These are not crack troops," Job muttered contemptuously.

"Smoking on guard duty, sleeping next to a fire. They aren't soldiers, they are tourists." Sean smiled at the term of derision. He knew that Job's determination was more Anglo-Saxon than African. Once he had decided, it was difficult to dissuade him.

"You want to go on?" he asked.

"For five hundred thousand dollars?" Job whispered. "You're damned right I want to go on!"

Claudia was afraid. The African night was so charged with mystery, uncertainty, and menace. The wait aggravated her feeling of apprehension. Sean had been gone for almost an hour, and though her father was close beside her she felt alone and very vulnerable.

Suddenly Sean was back, and she experienced a rush of relief.

She wanted to reach out and cling to him and was ashamed of herself for the weakness. Sean was whispering to her father, and she drew close to listen. Her arm touched Sean's bare arm, but he did not seem to notice, so she left it there for the feeling of security and comfort it gave her.

"Small party of armed men camped up ahead," Sean was explaining. "Not more than twenty of them. We don't know who the hell they are, but we can circle around them and keep going, or we can turn back. It's up to you, Capo."

"I want that elephant!"

"This is probably your last chance to pull out," Sean warned him.

"You're wasting time," Riccardo said. Claudia was torn by her father's decision. It would have been such an anticlimax to turn back now, and yet her first taste of the real flavor of Africa had been disconcerting. She realized as the march resumed and she fell in behind Sean that this was the first time in her life that she had been beyond the trappings and buttresses of civilization, the first time there was no police force to protect her, no recourse to law or justice or mercy. Here she was as vulnerable as an antelope to the leopard, in a forest full of predators.

She quickened her step, closing up behind Sean, and found to her surprise that in some bizarre fashion she was more alive and aware than she had ever been before. For the first time in her life she was on the bottom rung of existence, the level of survival. It was a novel and quite overwhelming sensation. She was glad her father had not decided to turn back. Claudia had long since lost all sense of direction, for Sean led unpredictably. They turned and twisted through the forest, at times moving swiftly and at others creeping forward a stealthy pace at a time and then freezing into absolute stillness at a signal from the flank which she often had not even heard. She noticed that Sean looked up at the night sky every few minutes and guessed he was navigating by the stars, but to her their whorls and blazes and fields were as confused as the lights of a foreign city.

Then, after a while, she realized they had not turned or paused for a long while and were once again heading in a straight line.

Obviously they were clear of danger for the moment. With the excitement over, she soon felt the weight of her legs and the weariness in the small of her back. The pack between her shoulders seemed to have quadrupled in weight, and she glanced at her wristwatch. The luminous dial showed her that they had been going for almost five hours since circling around that hidden camp.

"When will we rest?" she wondered, but made it a point of honor to keep close behind Sean and not to lag by a single pace.

Almost as though a refrigerator door had opened, the temperature plunged, and when they crossed another open glade, the dew on the long grass soaked the legs of her trousers and her boots squelched. She shivered, in real discomfort for the first time.

"When will he rest?" She stared at Sean's back, resenting him, willing him to stop. On he went, ever on, and she had the feeling he was deliberately trying to humiliate her, to break her down, to force her to squeal for mercy.

"I'll show you." She did not slacken her pace as she reached back and unstrapped her Gore-Tex ski jacket from the top of her pack. It was really cold now, the frost crackled underfoot, and her feet were numb, but she kept her station in the line. Quite suddenly she realized that she could see clearly each thick glossy tress of hair down the back of Sean's neck.

"Dawn. I thought it would never come." As she thought it, Sean stopped at last. She pulled up beside him with the nerves in her legs jumping and trembling with fatigue.

"Sorry, Capo," Sean spoke softly past her. "I had to push a little. We had to get well clear of that bunch before light. How are you making out?"

"No problem," Riccardo muttered, but in the gray dawn light, his face looked pale and drawn. He was suffering as much as she was, and she hoped she didn't look as bad. He went to find a place to sit and lowered himself stiffly.

Sean glanced at Claudia, still standing beside him. Neither of them spoke, but he had a faint, enigmatic smile on his lips.

"Don't ask me how I feel," she thought. "I'd rather drink Drana than tell you the truth."

He inclined his head slightly, whether in condescension or respect, she wasn't sure. "First day and the third are always the worst," he said.

"I feel fine," she said. "I can go on quite happily."

"Sure." He grinned openly. "But you'd better go and look after Papa rather."

Sean brought mugs of tea to where she sat beside her father, wrapped in her lightweight down-filled sleeping bag against the dawn chill. Job had brewed it on a tiny smokeless fire that he extinguished immediately once the billy boiled. The tea was strong and sweet and scalding; she had never tasted anything more welcome. With it he handed her a stack of maize cakes and cold cuts of venison. She tried not to wolf them down.

"We'll move on in a few minutes," he warned her. When he saw the dismay in her eyes, he explained.

"We never sleep next to a cooking fire; it can attract the uglies." They went on for five miles. In the middle of the morning, on higher ground in a place secure and easily defended, Sean showed her how to scoop a hollow for her hip and use her pack as a pillow.

She fell asleep as though she had been sandbagged.

She could not believe it when he shook her awake only a minute later. "It's four o'clock." He handed her a mug and another stack of maize cakes. "You've slept six hours straight. We are moving out in five minutes."

Hastily she rolled her sleeping bag, then peered at herself in the metal hand mirror she had surreptitiously retrieved after Sean had thrown it out of her pack.

"Oh God," she whispered. The camouflage cream had caked and striped with her sweat. "I look like Al Jolson in drag." She tidied her hair, dragging her comb through the tangles, and then tied a scarf around it.

With short breaks every two hours, they kept going all that night.

At first Claudia's legs felt as though they were in plaster casts, but soon she walked the stiffness out of them and kept her place in the line without lagging, though the pace Sean set was every bit as hard as the previous night.

In the dawn, they drank tea. Claudia had begun to depend on the brew. She had always been a coffee drinker, but now on the march she found herself fantasizing over her next scalding mug of tea.

"It's the only thing keeping me going," she confided to her father, only half joking.

Riccardo nodded agreement. "They say the Limeys conquered their empire on the stuff."

Sean came across from where he had been in deep discussion with Matatu and Job. "We are only a few hours" march from the reed beds where we saw Tukutela from the air." He looked pointedly at Claudia. "I'd like to try and get there before we sleep, but of course some of us are a little hushed..." He let it hang between them, a dare and an accusation.

"I need a little stroll to settle my breakfast," she said amiably, but she wished her face was not coated with black cream. She hated ceding even the slightest advantage to him.

As Sean walked away, her father swirled the tea leaves in his mug and flicked them out.

"Don't fall for him, tesoro. He'd be too big a handful even for you."

She stared at him, outraged and appalled. "Fall for him? Are you out of your skull, Papa? I can't stand the sight of him."

"That's what I mean," he chuckled.

She jumped up and threw her pack onto her back with unnecessary strength, then told her father with disdain, "I could cope with him and five others like him with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back, but I've got better taste than that."

"Which is fortunate for you," he murmured just low enough so she was uncertain what he had said.

A little before noon that day, Matatu led them into the papyrus beds that surrounded the green pool they had seen from the air. He led them directly to the great dished spoor printed in the mud, and they gathered round to inspect it.

"See!" Matatu told them. "This is where Tukutela stood when he heard the indeki coming. Here and there he turned to look up in the sky and challenge us." Matatu imitated the old bull, holding his head at the same angle, humping his back and cupping his hands at each side of his head. It was such a faithful impression that for a moment he seemed to become the old bull and they all laughed. Claudia forgot her fatigue and applauded.

"Then what did the old bull do?" Sean demanded. Matatu spun and pointed along the run of the spoor.

"He went away with all his speed, he went fast and very far."

"Well," Sean said, "that puts us almost exactly forty-eight hours behind him and we have to sleep now. We'll be fifty-five hours behind him when we march again."

Tukutela's dam had been the matriarch of a herd of over one hundred beasts. She had come into her last period of estrus in her fifty-second year, and over the days it lasted, she had been mounted and serviced by six of the herd bulls, all young animals, vigorous and at the height of their powers.

It was the ideal formula for the conception of an extraordinary calf, old cow and young bull. Although it was uncertain which seed had taken root in her, the old cow had carried the genes of great elephants, big in body and tusk, natural intelligence, and the urge to dominate. These same genes had made her the leader of her herd, and now she transferred them to the fetus she carried in her womb.

She carried him twenty-two months, and then in the year when the German askaris under General von Lettow-Vorbeck were ravaging eastern Africa, the year 1915, she left the herd. Accompanied only by another old female past calf bearing, her companion of forty years, she went deep into the fastnesses of the swamps that lie on the south bank of the Zambezi River and there, on an islet fringed with ivory-nut palms, surrounded by miles of papyrus beds, and with the white-headed fish eagles chanting overhead, she cleared an area of sandy earth for her couch. When her time came, she spread her back legs and squatted over the open area, squealing in the agony of her labor, her trunk rolled up on her chest.

Her eyes had no tear ducts to drain them, so the tears poured freely down her withered cheeks as though she wept, and the spasms racked her huge, gaunt frame. The other old cow stood close beside her like a midwife, caressing her with her trunk, stroking her back and rumbling with sympathy. She forced out the calf's head and then rested for a minute before the last violent effort expelled the purple-pink fetal sac and the calf fell to the earth, rupturing the umbilical cord. Tukutela began to struggle immediately, still trapped in the glistening mucus-coated membrane, and the old cow, her companion, stood over him and, with the prehensile tip of her trunk, delicately stripped it away.

Then with her trunk his dam gently and lovingly lifted him to his feet and placed him between her front legs, making the deep, purring rumble of elephant contentment. Still wet and smooth and shining pinkly from his birthing, covered in copious gingery hair, almost blind, Tukutela rolled his little trunk back onto his forehead and reached up instinctively to the twin breasts on his mother's chest.