Текст книги "Leopard Hunts in Darkness"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

Соавторы: Wilbur Smith
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

Tomorrow, if they lived through it, would be a burning hell of thirst. He took the canteen from her, to remove temptation.

A little before midnight, he untied the wire from his belt; the dragging weight of the scrub thorn brush was too much for him, and if the Shana were still on their spoor, it would not serve much further purpose. Instead, he lifted the rucksack from Sally-Anne's back and slung it over his own shoulder.

J can manage it," she protested, although she was reeling likea drunkard. she had not complained once, although her face in the starlight was silver as the salt pan they were crossing.

He tried to think of something to comfort her.

"We must have crossed the border hours ago," he said.

"Does that mean we are saleP she whispered, and he could not bring himself to lie. She shivered.

The night wind cut through their thin clothing. He unfolded the nylon ground sheet and spread it over her shoulders, then he took her weight on his arm and led her on.

A mile further on they reached the far edge of the salt pan and he knew she could go no further that night.

There was a crusty bank eighteen inches high, and then firm ground again.

"We'll stop here." She sagged to the ground and he covered her with the ground sheet.

"Can I have a drink?"

"No. Not until morning." The water canteen was light, sloshing more than half, empty as he lowered the pack.

He cut a pile of scrub to break the wind and keep it off her head, and then pulled off her jogging shoes, massaging her feet and examining them by touch, "Oh, that stings." Her left heel was rubbed raw. He lifted it to his mouth and licked the abrasion clean, saving water. Then he dripped Mercurochrome on it and strapped it with a band-aid from the first, aid kit. He changed her socks from foot to foot, and then laced up her shoes again.

"You're so gentle, "she murmured, as he slipped under the ground sheet and took her in his arms, "and so warm."

"I love you," he said. "Go to sleep." She sighed and snuggled, and he thought she was asleep until she said softly, "Craig, I'm so sorry about King's Lynn." Then, at last, she did sleep, her breathing swelling deeply and evenly against his chest. He eased out from under the ground sheet and left her undisturbed. He went to sit on the low bank with the AK 47 across his knees, keeping the open pan under surveillance, waiting for them to come.

While he kept the watch, he thought about what Sally Anne had said.

He thought about King's Lynn. He thought of his herds of great red beasts, and the homestead on the hill. He thought about the men and the women who had lived there and bred their families there. He thought about the dreams he had fashioned from their lives and how he had planned to do with this woman what they had done.

My woman. He went back to where she lay and knelt over her to listen to her breathing, and he thought about her spread naked and open on the long table under the cruel scrutiny of many eyes.

He went back to wait at the edge of the pan and he thought about Tungata Zebiwe, and remembered the laughter and comradeship they had shared. He saw again the hand-signal from the dock as they led Tungata away.

"We are equal the score is levelled," and he shook his head.

He thought about once being a millionaire, and the millions he now owed. From a man of substance he had been reduced in a single stroke to something worse than a pauper. He did not even own the bundle of paper in the British Airways bag. The manuscript would be forfeit, his creditors would take that also. He had nothing, nothing except this woman and his rage.

Then the image of General Peter Fungabera's face filled his imagination smooth as hot chocolate, handsome as mortal sin, as powerful and as evil as Lucifer and his rage grew within him, until it threatened to consume him.

He sat through the long night without sleep, hating with all the strength of his being. Every hour he went back to where Sally-Anne slept and squatted beside her. Once he adjusted the ground sheet over her, another time he touched the lump on her forehead lightly with his fingertips and she whimpered in her sleep, then he went back to his vigil.

Once he saw dark shapes out on the pan, and his stomach turned over queasily, but when he put Timon's binoculars on them, he saw they were pale-coloured gemsbok, huge desert gazelle, large as horses, the diamond-patterned face masks that gave them their name showing c or in the starlight. They passed silently up, wind of where he sat and merged into the night.

Orion hunted down the sky and faded at dawn's first glimmering. It was time to go on, but he lingered, reluctant to put Sally-Anne to the terrors and the trials that day wou Id bring, giving her just those last few minutes of oblivion.

Then he saw them and his guts and his loins filled with the molten lead of despair. They were still far out across the pan, a darkness too large to be one of the desert animals, a darkness that moved steadily towards him. The scrub brush that he had dragged must have been effective to delay them so long. But once he had abandoned it, they would have come on swiftly down the deeply trodden spoor.

Then his despair changed shape. If it had to come, it might as well be now, he thought, this was as good a place as any to make their last stand. The Shana must come across the open pan, he he had the slight advantage afforded by the batbk and the sparse cover of knee-high scrub, but little time in which to exploit them.

He ran back to where he had left his rucksack, keeping doubled over so as to show no silhouette against the lightening sky. He stuffed the five grenades down the front of his shirt, snatched up the roll of wire and the side cutters, and hurried back to the edge of the bank.

He peered out at the advancing patrol. They were in single file because the pan was so open, but he guessed they r would spread out into a skirmishing line as soon as they reached the bank, adopting the classic arrowhead running formation that would give them overlapping cover, and prevent them being enfiladed by ambush.

Craig began to place his fragmentation grenades on that assumption. He sited them along the top of the bank, that slight elevation would spread the blast out a little more.

He wired each grenade securely to the stem of a bush, twenty paces apart, and then used a haywire twist to secure a single strand to each of the split pins that held down the ands back one at a time firing-handles. "Then he led the str ere Sally-Anne slept and secured them to to A the flap of his rucksack.

He was down on his knees now, for the light was coming up strongly and the patrol was closer each minute.

He readied the fifth and last grenade, and this time wriggled back on his belly. The strands of wire were spread out fanlike from where he lay behind the screen of cut brush. He checked the load of the AK 47 and placed the spare magazines at his right hand.

it was time to wake her. He kissed her softly on the lips, and she wrinkled her nose and made little mewing sounds, then she opened her eyes and love dawned green in them for an instant, to be replaced by dismay as she remembered their circumstances. She started to sit up, but he held her down with an arm over her chest.

"They are here, "he warned her. "I'm going to fight." She nodded.

"Have you got Timon's pistol?" She nodded again, groping for it in the waistband of her jeans.

"You do know how to use it?"

"Yes."

"Keep one bullet for the end." She stared at him.

"Promise you won't hesitate."

"I promise, "she whispered.

He lifted his head slowly. The patrol was four hundred yards out from the edge of the pan, and as he had guessed, they were already spreading into the arrowhead hunting formation.

As they separated from a single amorphous blot in the poor light, he was able to count them. Five! His spirits dropped again sharply. Timon had not done as well as he had hoped for. He had culled out only three of the original pursuit. Five was too many for Craig. Even with all the advantages of surprise and concealment, it was just too many.

"Keep your face down," he whispered. "It can shine likea mirror." Obediently she dropped it into the crook of her arm. He pulled up his shirt to cover his own mouth and nose, and watched them come on.

Oh God, they are good, he thought. Look at them move! They have been going all night, and they are still as sharp and wary as lynx. The point was a tall Shana who moved likea reed in the wind. He carried his AK 47 low on the right hip, anct he was charged with a deadly intensity of concentration. Once the light of coming dawn caught his eyes and they flashed like distant cannon-fire in the blackness of his face. Craig recognized him as the main man.

His drags, two on each side of him, were sombre, stocky figures, full of dark men ate and yet subservient to the man who led. They reactM like puppets to the hand-signals that the tall Shana gave them. "They came on silently towards the edge of the pan, and Craig arranged the wires across the palm of his left hand and ran them out between his fingers.

Fifty paces from the bank the Shana stopped them with a cut-out signal, and the line froze. The Shana's head turned slowly from side to side as he surveyed the low bank and the scrub beyond it. He took five paces forward, stepping lightly, and stopped again. His head turned once more, back and forth and then back again. He had seen something. Craig instinctively held his breath as the seconds drew out.

Then the Shana moved again. He swivelled and picked out his flanks, marking them with a stab of his forefinger, into a and then a pumped fist. Their formation changed reversed arrowhead the Shana had adopted the traditional fighting formation of the Nguni tribes, the 'bull's horns" that King Chaka had used to such terrible effect, and now the horns were moving to invade Craig's position.

Craig felt a surge of relief at his own foresight in spreading the grenades so widely. The two flank men would walk almost on top of his outside grenades. He sorted the wires in his hand, taking up the slack, and watching the flank men come on. He wished it had been the tall Shana, the danger man, but he had not moved again. He was still way back out of blast range, watching and directing the flanking movement.

The man on the right reached the bank, and gingerly stepped up onto it, but the man on the left was still ten paces out on the pan.

"Together," Craig whispered. "I've got to take them together." The man on the bank must have almost brushed the hidden grenade with his knee as Craig let him overrun it.

The man on the left reached the bank, there was a bloody bandage around his head, Timon's work. The grenade ig heaved with would be at about the level of his navel. Cra all his weight on the two outside wires, and heard the firing handles fly off the grenades with a metallic Twang!

Twang!

Three seconds delay on the primers, and the Shana were reacting with trained reflexes. The man on the bank dropped from sight, but Craig judged he was too close to the grenade to survive. The three others out on the pan went down also, firing as they dropped, rolling sideways as they hit the crust, firing again, raking the top of the bank.

Only the trooper out on the left, the wounded man, perhaps slowed by his injury, stayed on his feet those fatal seconds. The grenade exploded with the brilliance of a flashbulb, and the man was hit by fragmenting shrapnel.

He was lifted off his feet as the blast tore into his belly. On the right the other grenade burst in brief thunder, and Craig heard the taut, drum like sound of shrapnel slapping into flesh.

Two of the bastards, he thought, and tried for the tall Shana, but his aim was through scrub and over the lip of the bank, and the Shana was rolling. Craig's first burst kicked white salt inches short, but on line, his second burst was a touch left, and the Shana fired back and kept rolling.

One of the other troopers jumped up and charged the bank, jinking like a quarter-back with the ball, and Craig swung onto him. He hit him cleanly with a full burst, starting at the level of his crotch and pulling up across his belly and chest. The AK 47 was notorious for the way she rode up in automatic find Craig had compensated for it.

The trooper dropped his rifle, and spun around sharply, fell onto his knees and then toppled forward on his face likea Muslim at prayer.

The tall Shana was up, coming in, shouting an order, the second man followed. him twenty paces behind. Craig switched his aim back to' him exultantly. He couldn't miss now. The AK 47 Aked once, and then snapped on an empty chamber. The Shana kept on coming, untouched.

Craig was not as quick on the reload as he had once been; just that microsecond too late he swung back onto the Shana, and as he squeezed the trigger, the man dropped out of sight, below the rim of the bank, and Craig's burst flew high and harmless.

Craig swore, and swung left onto the last trooper who was just five paces from the safety of the bank. It was snap shooting, but a single lucky bullet out of the long burst hit him in the mouth, and snapped his head back likea heavy punch. The burgundy-red beret, glowing like a pretty bird in the dawn light, flew high in the air, and the trooper collapsed.

Four out of five in the first ten seconds, it was more than Craig could possibly have hoped for, but the fifth man, the danger man, was alive down there below the bank and he must have marked Craig's muzzle flashes.

He had Craig pinpointed.

"Keep under the sheet," Craig ordered Sally-Anne, and pulled the wires on the other three grenades. The explosions were almost simultaneous, a thunderous roll like the broadside of a man-of-war, and in the dust and flame, Craig moved.

He went forward and right, thirty running. paces, doubled over, with the reloaded AK in his hand, and he dived forward and rolled and then waited, belly down, covering the spot below the bank where the Shana had disappeared, but darting quick glances left and right.

The light was better, the dawn coming up fast, and the Shana moved. He came up over the bank, a brief silhouette against the white pan, quick as a mamba but where Craig had not expected him. He must have elbow-walked under the bank, and he was way out on Craig's left.

Craig swung the AK onto him, but held his fire, that quick chance wasn't good enough to betray his new position, and the Shana disappeared into the low brush j fifty paces away. Craig crawled forward to intercept, slowly as an earthworm, making no noise, raising no dust, and listening and staring with all his being. Long seconds drew out, slow as treacle, and Craig inched forward, knowing that the Shana must be working towards where he had left Sally-Anne.

Then Sally-Anne screamed. The sound raked his nerve ends like an emery wheel, and out of the brush they rose together, Sally-Anne fighting and clawing likea cat and the Shana holding her by the hair, down on his knees, but holding her easily, turning with her to frustrate any chance of a shot.

Craig charged. It was not a conscious decision. He found himself on his feet, hurling forward, swinging the AK 47 likea club. The Shana saw him, released Sally Anne and she staggered backwards and fell.

The Shana ducked under the swinging rifle, and hit Craig in the ribs with his shoulder as he came off his knees. The rifle flew from Craig's hands, and he grappled, holding desperately as he fought to regain the breath that had been driven out of him. The Shana, realizing that his rifle was useless in hand-to-hand contact, let it fall, and used both arms.

Craig knew in that first moment of contact that the Shana was simply too strong for him. He had height and weight and he was trained to the hardness of black anthracite. He whipped a long arm around the back of Craig's neck, but Craig, instead of resisting, put all his own weight into the direction of the Shana's pull. It took him by surprise, and they cartwheeled. As he went over, Craig kicked out with the metal leg but he didn't connect cleanly.

The Shana twisted and struck back at him. Craig smothered it and they locked, chest to chest, rolling first one on top, then the other, flattening the coarse scrub, their breathing hissing "into each other's face. The Shana snapped likea wolflat Craig's face with his square white teeth. If he got a grip, he would bite off Craig's nose or rip his cheek away. Craig had seen it done before in beer hall brawls.

Instead of pulling his head back, Craig butted forward with his forehead, and hit him in the mouth. One of the Shana's incisors snapped off at the gum and his mouth glutted with blood. Craig reared back to butt him again, but the Shana shifted over him and suddenly he had the trench knife out of its scabbard on his belt. Craig grabbed his wrist desperately, only just smothering the stab.

They rolled and the Shana came out on top, straddling Craig, the knife in his right hand probing with the bright silver point for Craig's throat and face. Craig got both hands to it, one on the Shana's wrist, the other into the A of his elbow, but he couldn't hold him. The knife cro point descended slowly towards him, and the Shana kicked his legs and locked one between Craig's, pinning him likea lover.

Down came the knife, and behind it, the Shana's face, swollen with effort, his broken tooth pink with blood, blood running from his chin and dripping into Craig's upturned face, his eyes mottled with tiny brown veins, bulging from their sockets and the knife came down.

Craig put all his strength against him. The knife point checked for a second, then moved down to touch Craig's skin in the notch where his collarbones met. It stung likea hypodermic needle as it pierced the skin. With a sense of horror, Craig felt the Shana's body gathering for the final thrust that would force the silver steel through his larynx and he knew that he could not prevent it.

Miraculously, the Shana's head changed shape, distorting likea rubber Halloween mask, collapsing upon itself, the contents of the skull bursting in a liquid fountain from his temple and the sound of a shot dinned in on Craig's eardrums. The strength went out of the Shana's body and he rolled off and flopped on the ground likea fresh-caught catfish.

ay, kneeling Craig sat up. Sally-Anne was only feet aw facing him, the Tokarev pistol held doublehanded, the barrel still pointing skywards where the recoil had thrown it. She must have placed the muzzle against the Shana's temple before she fired.

J killed him," she breathed gustily and her eyes were filled with honor.

"Thank God for id" Craig gasped, using the collar of his shirt to dry the nick on his throat.

"I've never killed anything before," Sally-Anne whispered.

"Not even a rabbit nor a fish nothing." She dropped the Pistol and started to dry, wash her hands, scrubbing one with the other, staring at the Shana's corpse. Craig crawled to her, and took her in his arms. She was shaking wildly.

"Take me away," she pleaded. "Please, Craig. I can smell the blood, take me away from here: "Yes. Yes." He helped her to her feet, and in a frenzy of haste rolled the ground sheet and buckled the straps of the rucksacks.

"This way." Burdened by both packs and the rifle, Craig led. aer away from t i ing grounc towards taste west.

They had been going for almost three hours and had stopped for the first sparing drink, before Craig realized his terrible oversight. The water bottles! In his panickly haste, he had forgotten to take the water bottles from the dead Shana.

He looked back longingly. Even if he left Sally-Anne here and went back alone, it would cost him four hours, and the Third Brigade patrols would surely be coming up.

He weighed the water bottle in his hand, a quarter fall: barely enough to see out this day, even if they laid up now and waited for nightfall and the cool, not nearly enough if they kept going and t9ey had to keep going.

The decision was made for him. The sound of a single engined aircraft throbbing down from the north. Bitterly he stared up into the pale desert sky, feeling the helplessness of the rabbit below the towering falcon.

"Spotter plane," he said, and listened to the beat of the engine. It receded for a while, and then grew stronger again.

"They are flying a grid search." As he spoke, he saw it. It was closer than he had thought, and much lower. He forced Sally' Anne down with a hand on her shoulder, and spread the cape over her, glancing back as he did so. It was coming on swiftly, a low winged single-engined monoplane. It altered course slightly, heading directly towards him. He dropped down beside Sally-Anne and crawled under the ground sheet beside her.

The engine roared louder. The pilot had spotted them.

Craig lifted a corner of the ground sheet and looked out.

"Piper Lance," said Sally-Anne softly.

It carried Zimbabwe Air Force rounders, and incongruously the pilot was a white man, but there was a black man in the right, hand seat, and he wore the dreaded ey both stared burgundy, red beret and silver cap-badge. Th onlessly as the Piper made a steep turn, with down expressi one wingtip pointed likea knife directly at where Craig lay. The black officer was holding the radio microphone to his lips. The wings of the Piper levelled and she came out turn, heading back the way she had come. The J of her throb of the engine receded and was lost in the desert silence.

Craig pulled Sally-Anne to her feet.

"Can you go on?" She nodded, pushing back the sweat-damp wisp of hair i from her forehead. Her lips were flaking, and the lower one had cracked through. A drop of blood sat on it likea tiny ruby.

"We must be well inside Botswana, the border road can't be far ahead. If we can find a Botswana police patrol-'

I.J

he road was single width, two continuous ruts running north and south, jinking now and then to avoid a spring-hare colony or a soft pan. it was patrolled regularly by the Botswana police on anti, poaching and prevention of alleged entry duties.

Craig and Sally-Anne reached the road in the middle of the afternoon. By this time Craig had discarded the rifle and ammunition, and stripped the pack of all but essentials.

He had even considered for a while burying his manuscript for later retrieval. It weighed eight pounds, but Sally-Anne had dissuaded him in a hoarse whisper.

The water bottle was empty. They had had their last drink, a blood-warm mouthful each, just before noon.

Their speed was reduced to little more than a mile an hour. Craig was no longer sweating. He could feel his tongue beginning to swell and his throat closing as the heat sucked the moisture out of him.

They reached the road. Craig's gaze was fastened grimly on the heat-smudged horizon ahead, all his being concentrated on lifting one foot and placing it ahead of the other.

They crossed the road vhthout seeing it, and kept going on into the desert. They were not the first to walk past the chance of succour and go on to death by thirst and exposure. They staggered onwards for two hours more before Craig stopped.

"We should have reacked the road by now, he whispered, and checked ee compass heading again. "The * I North isn't there." He was con compass must be wrong.

fused and doubting. "Damaged the bloody thing. We are too far south," he decided, and began the first aimless circle of the lost and totally disorientated, the graveyard spiral that precedes death in the desert.

An hour before sunset Craig stumbled over a dried brown vine growing in the grey soil. It bore only a single green fruit the size of an orange. He knelt and plucked it as reverently as if it had been the Cullinan diamond.

Mumbling to himself through cracked and bleeding lips, he split the fruit carefully with the bayonet. It was warm as living flesh from the sun.

"Gemsbok melon," he explained to Sally-Anne as she sat and watched him with dull, uncomprehending eyes.

He used the point of the bayonet to mash the white flesh of the melon, and then held the half shell to Sally Anne mouth. Her throat pumped in the effort of swallowing the clear warm juice, and she closed her eyes in ecstasy as it spread over her swollen tongue.

Working with extreme care, Craig wrung a quarter of a cupful of liquid from the fruit and fed it to her. His own throat ached and contracted at the smell of the liquid as he made her drink. She seemed to recharge with strength before his eyes, and when the last drop had passed between her lips, she suddenly realized what he had done.

"You?" she whispered.

He took the hard rind and the squeezed, out pith, and sucked on them.

"Sorry." She was distraught at her own thoughtlessness, but he shook his head.

J1!"

"Cool soon. Night." He helped her up, and they stumbled onwards.

Time telescoped in Craig's mind. He looked at the sunset and thought it was the dawn.

"Wrong." He took the compass and hurled it from him.

It did not fly very far. "Wrong wrong way." He turned, and led Sally' Anne back.

Craig's head filled with shadows and dark shapes, some were faceless and terrifying and he shouted soundlessly at them to drive them away. Some he recognized. Ashe Levy rode past on the back of a huge shaggy hyena, he was brandishing Craig's new manuscript, and his gold-rimmed spectacles glinted blindly in the sunset.

can't make a paperback sale," he gloated. "Nobody wants it, baby, you're finished. One,book man, Craig baby that's you." Then Craig realized that it was not his manuscript, but the wine list from the Four Seasons.

"Shall we try the Carton Charlemagne?" Ashe taunted Craig. "Or a magnum of the Widow?"

"Only witch-doctors ride hyena," Craig yelled back, no sound issuing from his desiccated throat. "Always knew you were-" Ashe hooted with malicious laughter, spurred the hyena into a gallop and threw the manuscript in the air. The white pages fluttered to the earth like roosting egrets, and when Craig went down on his knees to gather them, they turned to handfuls of dust and Craig found he could not rise. Sally-Anne was down beside him and as they clung to each other, the night came down upon them.

When he woke it was morning, and he could not rouse Sally-Anne. Her breathing snored and sawed through her nose and open mouth.

On his knees he dug. the hole for a solar still. Though the soil was soft and friable, it went slowly. Laboriously, still on his knees, he gathered an armful of the scattered desert vegetation. It seemed there was no moisture in the woody growth when he chopped it finely with the bayonet, and laid it in the bottom of his hole.

He cut the top off thWempty aluminium water bottle, and placed the cup this formed in the centre of the hole.

It required enormous concentration to perform even these simple tasks. He spread the plastic ground sheet over the hole, and anchored the edges with heaped earth. In the centre of the sheet he gently laid a single round of ammunition, so that it was directly above the aluminium cup.

Then he crawled back to Sally-Anne and sat over her so that his shadow kept the sun off her face.

"It's going to be all right," he told her. "We'll find the road soon. We must be close–2 orn his throat, He did not realize that no sound came fr and that she would not have been able to hear him even if it had.

"That little turd Ashe is a liar. I'll finish the book, you'll see. I'll pay off what I owe– We'll get a movie deal I'll buy King's Lynn. it will be all right. Don't worry, my darling." He waited out the baking heat of the morning, containing his impatience, and at noon by his wrist-watch he opened the still. The sun beating down on the plastic sheet had raised the temperature in the covered hole close to the boiling point. Evaporation from the chopped plants had sheet and run condensed on the under-side of the plastic down it towards the sag of the bullet. From there it had dripped into the aluminium cup.

He had collected half a pint. He took it up between both hands, shaking so violently that he almost spilled it.

He took a small sip and held it in his mouth. It was hot, but it tasted like honey and he had to use all his selfcontrol to prevent himself swallowing.

He leaned forward and placed his mouth over Sally Anne blackened and bleeding lips. Gently he injected id between them.

the lieu 11)rink, my sweet, drink it up." He found he was giggling stupidly as he watched her swallow painfully.

A few drops at a time he passed the precious fluid from his own mouth into hers and she swallowed each sip more easily, He kept the last mouthful for himself and let it to his head like strong trickle down his throat. It went drink and he sat grinning stupidly through fat, scaly black le red, the abraen and sun-baked purp lips, his face swoll scab, and leis ions on his cheek covered with a crusty weeping his bloodshot eyes gummed up with dried mucus.

He rebuilt the still and lay down beside Sally-Anne. He covered his face from the sun with the tail torn from his shirt and whispered, "All right find help soon. Don't worry my love-" But he knew that this was their last day. He could not keep her alive for another.

Tomorrow they would die. It would be either the sun or the men of the Third Brigade but tomorrow they would die.

t sunset the still gave them another half cup of distilled water, and after they had drunk it, they fell into a heavy, deathlike sleep in each other's arms.

Something woke Craig, and for a moment he thought it was the night wind in the scrub. With difficulty he pushed himself into a sitting position, and cocked his head to listen, not sure whether he was still hallucinating or whether he was truly hearing that soft rise and fall of sound. It must be nearly dawn, he realized, the horizon was a crisp dark line beneath the velvet drape of the sky.

Then abruptly the sound firmed, and he recognized it.

The distinctive beat of a four, cylinder Land-Rover engine.

The Third Brigade had not abandoned the hunt. They were coming on relentlessly, like hyenas with the reek of blood in their nostrils.