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Leopard Hunts in Darkness
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Текст книги "Leopard Hunts in Darkness"


Автор книги: Wilbur Smith


Соавторы: Wilbur Smith
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

He saw a pair of headlights, far out across the desert, their pale beams swi Any and tilting as the vehicle covered mg the rough ground. He groped for the AK 47. He could not find it. Ashe Levy must have stolen it, he thought bitterly, taken it off with him on the hyena. "I never did trust the son-of-a-bitch." Craig stared hopelessly at the approaching headlights.


In their beams danced a little pixie-like figure, a diminutive yellow mannikin. "Puck," he thought. "Fairies. I never believed in fairies. Don't say that when you do, one dies.


Don't want to kill fairies. I believe in them." His mind was going, fantasy mixed with flashes of lucidity.


Suddenly he recognized that the little half-naked yellow mannikin was a Bushman, one of the pygmy desert race. A Bushman tracker, the Third Brigade were using a Bushman tracker to hunt them down. Only a Bushman could have run on their spoor all night, tracking by the headlights of the Land-Rover.


The headlights flashed over them, likea stage spotlight, and Craig lifted his hand to shade his eyes. The light was so bright that it hurt. He had the bayonet in his other hand behind his back.


I'll get one of them, he told himself I'll take one of them The Land-Rover stopped only a few paces away. The little Bushman tracker was standing near them, clicking and clucking in his strange birdlike language. Craig heard the door of the Land-Rover open behind the blinding lights, and a man came towards them. Craig recognize d him instantly. General Peter Fungabera he seemed as tall as a giant in the back lighting of the headlights as he strode towards where Craig huddled on the desert floor.


Thank you, God, Craig prayed, thank you for sending him to me before I died, and he gripped the bayonet. In the throat, he told himself, as he stoops over me. He marshalled all his remaining strength, and General Peter Fungabera stooped towards him. Now! Craig made the effort. Drive the point into his throat! But nothing happened. His limbs would not respond. He was finished. There was nothing left.


"I have to inform you that you are under arrest for illegal entry into the Republic of Botswana, sir," said General Fungabera but he had changed his voice. He was using a deep, gentle, caring voice, in heavily accented English.


He won't al me, Craig thought, the tricky bastard, and lo he saw that Peter Fungabera was wearing the uniform of a sergeant of Botswana police.


"You are lucky." He went down on one knee. "We found where you were crossing the road." He was holding a felt covered water bottle to Craig's mouth. "We have been following you, since three o'clock yesterday." Coo , sweet water gushed into Craig's mouth and ran down his chin. He let the bayonet drop and grabbed for the bottle with both hands. He wanted to gulp it all down at Once, he wanted to drown in it. It was so marvelous that his eyes flooded with tears.


Through the tears he saw the Botswana police crest on the open door of the Land' Rover


"Who?" he stared at Peter Fungabera, but he had never seen this face before. It was a broad, flat nosed face, puckered now with worry and concern, like that of a friendly bulldog.


"Who?" he croaked.


"Please not to talk, we must get you and the lady to hospital at Francistown pretty bloody quickly. Plenty people die in desert you goddamned lucky."


"You aren't General Fungabera?" he whispered. "Who are you?"


"Botswana police, border patrol. Sergeant Simon Mare, keng at your honour's service, sir." s a boy, before the great patriotic war, Colonel Nikolai Bukharili-had accompanied his father on the wolf hurfts, hunting the packs that terrorized their remote village in the high Urals during the long harsh winter months.


Those expeditions into the vast gloomy Taiga forest had nurtured in him a deep passion for the hunt. He enjoyed the solitude of wild places and the primeval joy of pitting all his senses against a dangerous animal. Eyesight, hearing, smell, and the other extraordinary sense of the born hunter that enabled him to anticipate the twists and evasions of his quarry all these the colonel still possessed in full strength, despite his sixty-two years. Together with a memory for facts and faces that was almost computer like they had enabled him to excel at his work, had seen him elevated to the head of his department of the Seventh commissariat where he had hunted professionally the most dangerous game of all man.


When he hunted boar and bear on the great estates reserved for the recreations of high officers of the GRU and KGB, he had alarmed his comrades and the gamekeepers by scorning to fire from the prepared hides and by going on foot alone into the thickest cover. The thrill of great physical danger had satisfied some deep need in him.


When the assignment on which he was now engaged had been channelled through to his office on the second floor of the central headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square, he had recognized its importance immediately, and taken control of it personally. With careful cultivation, that first potential was gradually being realized, and when the time had come for Colonel Bukharin at last to meet his subject face to face on the ground over which they would manoeuvre, he had chosen the cover which best suited his tastes.


Russians, especially Russians of high rank, were objects of hostile suspicion in the new republic of Zimbabwe.


During the chimurenga, the war of independence, Russia had chosen the wrong horse and given her support to Joshua Nkomo's ZIPRA the Matabele revolutionary wing. As far as the government in Harare was concerned, the Russians were the new colonialist enemy, while it was China and North Korea who were the true friends of the revolution.


For these reasons, Colonel Nikolai Bukharin had entered Zimbabwe on a Finnish passport, bearing a false name. He spoke Finnish fluently, as he did five other languages, including English. He needed a cover under which he could freely leave the city of Harare, where his every move wou watch over, and go out into t -le unpopulated wilderness where he could meet his subject without fear of surveillance.


Although many of the other African republics under pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had banned big-game hunting, Zimbabwe still licensed professional hunters to operate their elaborate safaris in the designated "controlled hunting areas'. These were large earners of foreign exchange for the embattled economy.


It amused the colonel to pose as a prosperous timber merchant from Helsinki, and to indulge his own love of the hunt in this decadent manner reserved almost exclusively for the financial aristocrats of the capitalist system.


Of course, the budget that had been allocated for this operation could not stand such extravagance. However, General Peter Fungabera, the subject of the operation, was a wealthy and ambitious man. He had made no difficulties when Colonel Bukharin had suggested that they use a big game hunting safari as d cover for their meeting, and that General Fungabera, should be allowed the honour of acting as host and of paying the thousand dollars der them that the safari cost.


Standing in the centre of the small clearing now, Colonel Bukharin looked at his man. The Russian had deliberately wounded the bull Nikolai Bukharin was a fine shot with pistol, title and shotgun, and the range had been thirty yards. If he had chosen, he could have placed a bullet in either of the bull's eyes, in the very centre of the bright black pupil. Instead he had shot the animal through the belly, a hand's width behind the lungs so as not to impair its wind, but not far enough back to damage the hindquarters and so slow it down in the charge.


It was a marvelous bull, with a mountainous boss of black horn that would stretch fifty inches or more around the curve from point to point. A fifty-inch bull was a trophy few could match, and as he had drawn first blood it would belong to the colonel no matter who delivered the COup de grdce. He was smiling at Peter Fungabera as he poured vodka into the silver cup of his hip-flask.


"No Zdorovye!" he saluted Peter, and tossed it down without blinking, refilled the silver cup and offered it to him.


Peter was dressed in starched and crisply ironed fatigues with his name to on the breast, and a khaki silk scarf at his throat, but he was bare-headed with no insignia to sparkle in the sunlight and alarm the game.


He accepted the silver cup and looked over the rim at the Russian.


He was as tall as Peter, but even slimmer, erect as a man thirty years younger. His eyes were a peculiarly pale, cruel blue. His face was riven with the scars Of war and of other ancient conflicts, so that it was a miniature lunar landscape. His skull was shaven, the fine stubble of hair that covered it was silver and sparkled in the sunlight like glass fibres.


Peter Fungabera enjoyed this man. He enjoyed the aura of power that he wore like an emperor's cloak. He enjoyed the innate cruelty of him that was almost African, and which Peter understood perfectly. He enjoyed his deviousness, the layering of lies and truths and half truths so that they became indistinguishable. He was excited by the sense of danger that exuded from. him so powerfully that it had almost an odour of its own. "We are the same breed," Peter thought, as he lifted the silver cup and returned the salute He drank down the pungent spirit at one swallow. Then" breathing carefully so as not to show the smallest sign of distress, he handed back the cup.


"You drink likea man," Nikolai Bukharin admitted. "Let us see if you hunt like one." Peter had guessed correctly. It had been a test: the voc ca and the buffalo bull, both of them. He shrugged to show his indifference, and the Russian beckoned to the professional hunter who stood respectfully out of earshot.


The hunter was a Zimbabwe-born white man, in his late thirties, dressed for the part in wide-brimmed hat and khaki gi let with heavy-calibre cartridges in the loops across his breast. He had a thick curly dark beard and an extremely unhappy expression on his face, as befits a man who is about to follow a gun-shot buffalo bull into dense riverine bush.


"General Fungabera will take the.458," Colonel Bukharin said, and the hunter nodded miserably. How had this strange old bastard managed to make a muck-up of a sitting shot like that? He had been shooting like a Bisley champion u The hunter suppressed a shiver and snapped his fingers for p to now. Christ, but that bush looked really nasty.


the number two gunbearer to bring up the heavy rifle.


"You will wait here with the bearers," said the Russian quietly.


"Sir!" the hunter protested quickly. J can't let you go in alone.


I'd lose my licence. It's just not on-"


"Enough,"said Colo nO Bukharin.


"But, sit, you don't understand-"


"I said, enough!" The Russian never raised his voice, but those pale eyes silenced the younger man completely. He found suddenly that he was more afraid of this man than of losing his licence, or of the wounded bull in the bush and leapped back thankfully.


ahead. He subsided ste The Russian took The.458 from the gunbearer, shot the bolt back to check that it was loaded with soft-tipped bullets, and then handed it to Peter Fungabera. Peter took it from him, smiling slightly, hefted it, then handed it back to the gunbearer. Colonel Bukharin raised one silver eyebrow and smiled also.


The smile was mockery shaded with contempt.


Peter spoke sharply in Shana to the bearer, Th he, mambo! The man ran, and snatched another weapon from one of the other back bearers. He brought it back to Peter, clapping softly to show his respect.


Peter weighed this new weapon in his hands. It was a short-shafted stabbing assegai. The handle was of hardwood bound with copper wire. The blade was almost two feet long and four inches broad.


Carefully Peter shaved the hairs off the back of his thumb with the edge of the silver blade, then, deliberately, he shrugged off his jacket and stripped his trousers and jungle boots.


Dressed only in a pair of olive-green shorts and carrying the stabbing assegai, he said, "This is the African way, Colonel." The Russian was no longer smiling. "But I do not expect a man of your years to hunt the same way." Peter excuse d him courteously. "You may use your rifle again." The Russian nodded, conceding the exchange. He had lost that one, but now let's see if this black mtqik can make good his boast. Bukharin looked down at the spoor. The great hoof prints were the size of soup plates, and the thin watery gouts of blood were tinged with greenish-yellow dung from the ruptured bowels.


91 will track," he said. "You will watch for the break." They moved off easily, with the Russian five paces ahead, stooped attentively to the blood spoor, and Peter Fungabera drifting behind him, the assegai held underhand, and his dark eyes covering the bush ahead with a steady rhythmic sweep, trained eyes not expecting to see the whole animal, searching for the little things, perhaps the shine of a wet muzzle or the drooping curve of a great horn.


Within twenty paces the bush closed in around them.


It was sultry green as a hothouse, dank vegetation pressing breathlessly around them. The air stank of the rotting leaf mould that deadened their footfalls. The silence was oppressive, so that the drag of a thorny branch across the Russian's leather leggings sounded loud as a truck engine.


He was sweating; perspiration soaked his shirt in a dark patch between the shoulder-blades and sparkled like dewdrops on the back of his neck. Peter could hear his ing, deep and harsh, but knew instinctively that it breath was not fear that worked in the Russian, but the pervading excitement of the hunter.


Peter Fungabera did not share it. There was a coldness in him where his own fear should have been. He had trained himself to that during the chimurenga. This was a necessary task, this thing with the assegai. It was to impress the Russian only, and with all fear and feeling anaesthetized by the coldness, Peter Fungabera prepared himself.


He felt his muscles charging, felt the tension build in his sinews and nerves until he was like an arrow, notched -bow against the curve of the long With his eyes he swept the bush directly in the run of the spoor only lightly, and concentrated his main attention on the flanks. This beast that they were hunting was the most cunning of all the dangerous game of Africa, except perhaps the leopard. But it was possessed of the brute strength of a hundred' leopards The lion will growl before he charges, the elephant will turn under the punishment of heavy bullets in the chest, but the Cape buffalo comes and in silence, and only one thing will stop his charge that is death.


A big, metallic-blue fly settled on Peter Fungabera's lip and crawled into his nostril. So complete was his concentration that he did not feel it, or brush it away. He watched the flanks, he concentrated the very essence of his being on the flanks.


The Russian checked, examining the change in the spoor, the plant of solid hooves, the puddle of loose bloody dung. This was where the bull had stood, after his first wild run. Peter Fungabera could imagine him, standing massive and black, with his nose held high, looking back towards the hunters with the spreading agony in his guts and liquid faeces from his torn intestines beginning to ooze uncontrollably down his quarters. Here he had stood and listened and heard their voices, and the hatred and anger had begun to seethe in him. Here the killing rage had begun.


He had dropped his head, and gone on, humping his back against the agony in his bowels, sustained by the rage within him.


The Russian glanced back at Peter, and they did not have to speak.


In unison they moved forward.


The bull was acting on an atavistic memory: everything he did had been done countless times before by his ancestors. From that first wild gallop as he received the bullet, the stop to listen and peer back, the gathering of great muscles, and now the more sedate trot, angling to resent his haunches to the fitful breeze so that the scent of the hunters would be borne down to him, great armoured head swinging from side to side as he began the search for the ambush point, it was all part of a pattern.


"Me bull crossed a narrow clearing ten paces across, forced his head into the wall of glossy green leaves on the far side, leaving it smeared with fresh bright blood, and went on another fifty yards. Then he turned sharply aside, and started back in a wide circle. Now he moved with deliberate stealth, insinuating his bulk gently through the intertwined creeper and branch a single pace at a time until he came back to the clearing again.


Here he stopped, hidden on the far edge of the clearing, covering from the side his own bloody tracks across the narrow opening, his body screened entirely by dense growth, and a terrible stillness settled upon him. He let the stinging flies feast on his open wound without shuddering his skin or swinging his tail. He did not twitch either of his large, Cup-shaped ears but strained them forward.


Not even his eyes blinked as he peered back along the blood spoor and waited for the hunters to come.


The Russian stepped lightly into the clearing, his gaze darting ahead to where blood painted branches hung on the far side and a huge body had forced its way through into the forest beyond. He started forward quietly. Peter Fungabera followed him, watching the flanks, moving likea dancer, his body glowing with a light sheen of sweat, the flat, hard muscle in his chest and arms changing shape at his slightest movement.


He saw the bull's eye. It caught the light likea new coin, and Peter froze. He snapped the fingers of his left hand, and the Russian froze with him. Peter Fungabera stared at the bull buffalo's eye, not quite sure what he was seeing, but knowing that it was in the right place thirty yards out on the left. If the bull had doubled, that was where he would be.


Peter blinked his eyes, and suddenly the image cleared.


He was no longer focused only on the eye, and so he could see the curve of one horn held so still that it could have been a branch. He saw the crenellations of the boss meeting above the bull's eye, and now he looked into the eye itself and it was likea glimpse into hell.


The bull charged. The forest burst open before his rush, branches crackled and broke, the leaves shook and fluttered as though struck by a hurricane and the bull came out into the clearing. He came out crabbing sideways, a deceptive but characteristic feint that had lulled many a hunter until the sudden direct I ge at the end.


He came fast. uhnsetemed impossible that any beast so enormous could move so fast. He was broad and tall as a granite kopje, his back and shoulder crusted with dried mud from the wallow, and there were obscene silvery bald patches on his shoulders and neck, crisscrossed with the long-healed scars of thorn and lions" claws.


From his open jaws drooled silver ropes of saliva, and tears had tracked wet lines down his hairy cheeks. A man could barely have encompassed that neck with both arms, or matched the spread of those horns with arms extended.


In the skin folds of his throat hung bunches of blue ticks like ripe grapes, and the rank bovine smell of him was choking in the hothouse of the forest.


He came on, majestic in his killing rage, and Peter Fungabera went out to meet him. He passed in front of the Russian just as Colonel Bukharin swung up the stubby heavy-calibre rifle, screening the shot, forcing him to throw the barrel up towards the sky. Peter moved likea dark forest wraith, crossing the bull at the opposite angle to his crabbing charge, taking him off balance so that the bull hooked at him likea boxer punching as he moves away, not timing the swing of horns, not sighting true, and Peter swayed away from it with his upper body only, letting the curved point hiss past his ribs by the breadth of a hand and then swaying back as the bull's head was flung high at the finish of the stroke.


In that instant the bull was open, from his reaching chin to the soft folds of skin between his forelegs, and Peter Fungabera put the fall weight of his body and all the momentum of his run behind the silver blade.


The bull ran onto the point. It went into him with the sucking sound of a foot in mud, and the blade was swallowed by living flesh. It went in until the fingers of Peter's right hand on the shaft followed the blade into the wound and spurting blood drenched him to the shoulder.


Peter released his grip on the assegai, and pirouetted away, sptrming clear while the bull bucked stiff4 egged against the long steel in his chest cavity. He tried to follow Peter round, but came up short and stood with his thick stubby forelegs braced, staring at the naked man with a glaze spreading over his eyes.


Peter Fungabera posed before him, with both arms lifted gracefully. "Ha, earth-shaker! "he called in Shana. "Ha, you sky thunder!" The bull made two Plunging strides forward and some thing burst inside him. Blood erupted in a double gush from his flaring nostrils. He opened his jaws and bellowed, and blood shot up his throat in a frothing bright cascade and drenched his chest. The great bull reeled, fighting to keep his balance.


"Die, spawn of the black gods!" Peter taunted. "Feel the steel of a future king and die!" The bull went down. The earth jumped beneath their feet as the weight of him struck.


Peter Fungabera stepped up to the huge bossed head in which the smouldering eyes were fading. He went down on one knee and, with his cupped hands, scooped up the rich hot blood as it streamed from the bull's gaping mouth, and he lifted his hands to his mouth and drank the blood like wine. it streamed down his arms and dribbled from his chin, and Peter laughed, a sound that made even the Russian's vinegary blood chill.


"I have drunk your living blood, oh great bull. Now your strength is mine! he shouted, as the bull arched his back in the final spasm of death.


eter Fungabera had showered and changed into mess kit. His trousers were black with a burgundy watered silk side stripe. His short bumfteezer jacket was in the regiment's same distincti e burgundy-red with black silk lapels. His white shirt was starch4 ranted and wing collared with a black1 bow-tie and he wore a double row of miniature decorations.


The camp servants had set a table under the spread branches of a mhoba-hobo tree, on the edge of an open vlei of short lush green grass, out of sight and earshot of the main camp. On the table was a bottle of Chivas Regal whisky and another of vodka, a bucket of ice and two crystal glasses.


Colonel Nikolai Bukharin sat opposite Peter. His long loose cotton shirt hung outside his baggy Cossack pant's and was belted at the waist. His feet were thrust into boots of soft glove-leather. He leaned forward and filled the glasses, and then passed one to Peter.


This time there was no flamboyant tossing back of liquor. They drank slowly, watching the African sky turn mauve and smouldering gold.


The silence was the companionable accord of two men who have risked their lives together and have each found the other worthy, a comrade to die with, or an adversary to fight to the death.


At last Colonel Bukharin placed his glass back on the table with a click.


"And so, my friend, tell me what you want, "he invited.


"I want this land," said Peter Fungabera simply.


"All of it? "the colonel asked.


"All of it "Not just Zimbabwe?"


"Not just Zimbabwe."


"And we are to help you take it?"


"Yes."


"In exchange?"


"My friendship."


"Your friendship unto death?" the colonel suggested drily. "Or until you have what you want and find a new friend?" Peter smiled. They spoke the same language, they understood each other.


"What tangible signs of this eternal friendship will you give us?" the Russian insisted.


"A poor little country like mine," Peter shrugged, "a few strategic minerals nickel, chrome, titanium, beryllium a few ounces of gold." The Russian nodded sagely. "They will be useful to us." "Then, once I am the Monomatapa of Zimbabwe, my eyes will become restless, naturally-, "Naturally." The Russian watched his eyes. He did not like black men, this racist bigotry was a common Russian trait, he did not like their colour nor their smell but this one!


"My eyes might turn southwards," Peter Fungabera said softly. Ha!


Colonel Bukharin hid his glee behind a doleful expression. This one is different!


"The direction in which your own eyes have been focused all along," Peter went on, and the Russian could have chortled.


"What will you see in the south, Comrade General?"


"I will see a people enslaved and ripe for emancipation."


"And what else?" w ill see the gold of the Witwatersrand and the Free State fields, I will see the diamonds of Kimberley, the uranium, the platinum, the silver, the copper in short, I will see one of the great treasure houses of this earth."


"Yes?" the Russian probed with delight. This one is quick, this one has brains, and this one has the courage that it would take.


"I will see a base that' divides the western world, a base that controls both the south Atlantic and the Indian oceans, that sits upon the oil lines between the Gulf and Europe, between the Gulf and the Americas." The Russian held up a hand. "Where will these thoughts lead you?"


"It will be my duty4 to see this land to the south elevated to its true place i the community of nations, in the in tutelage of and under the protection of that greatest of all lovers of freedom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." ed, still watching his eyes. Yes, this The Russian nodd black man had seen the design behind it all. The south was the grand prize, but to win it they needed to take it in the strangler's grasp. To the east they already had Mozambique, to the west Angola was theirs and Namibia would soon be also. They needed only the north to isolate the prize. The north was Zimbabwe, like the strangler's thumb on the windpipe, and this man could deliver it to them.


Colonel Bukharin sat forward in his canvas camp-chair and became businesslike and brisk.


"OpportunityP "Economic chaos, and intertribal warfare, the breakdown of central government." Peter Fungabera counted them off on his fingers.


"The present government is meeting you more than halfway in creating its own economic breakdown," the Russian observed, "and you are already doing fine work in fanning tribal hatreds."


"Thank you, comrade."


"However, the peasants must begin to starve a little before they become manageable-"


"I am pushing in the Cabinet for the nationalization of the white-owned farms and ranches. Without the white farmers I can produce you a goodly measure of starvation," Peter Fungabera smiled.


"I hear you have already made a start. I congratulate you on the recent acquisition of your own estate, King's Lynn?


That is the name is it not?"


"You are well informed, Colonel."


"I


take pains to ensure that I am. But when the moment comes to seize the reins of state, what kind of man will the people look to?"


"A strong man," Peter answered without hesitation. "One whose ruthlessness has been demonstrated."


"As yours was during the chimurenga, and more recently in Matabeleland." A man of charisma and presence, a man well known to the:4 people."


"The women sing your praises in the streets of Harare, not a single day passes without your image on the television screens or your name on the front page of the newspapers."


"A man with force behind him."


"The Third Brigade," the Russian nodded, "and the blessing of the people of the USSR. However," he paused significantly, 'two questions need answers, Comrade General."


"Yes?"


"The first is a mundane and distasteful question to raise between men such as you and I money. My paymasters become restless. Our expenses have begun to exceed by a considerable amount the shipments of ivory and animal products that you have sent us-" He held up his hand again to forestall argument. It was an old man's hand, dappled with withered dark spots and crisscrossed with prominent blue veins. "I know that we should do these things merely for the love of freedom, that money is a capitalist obscenity, but nothing is perfect in this world. In short, Comrade General, you are reaching the limits that Moscow has set on your credit."


"I understand," Peter Fungabera nodded. "What is your second question?"


"The Matabele tribe. They are a warlike and difficult people. I know that you have been forced to stir up enmity, to cause dissension and strife and to bring upon the present government the disapproval of the Western powers by your campaign in Matabeleland. But what happens afterwards?


How do you control them once you yourself have seized power?


(I " est ions with a single name, Peter answer both qu Fungabera. replied.


"Me name?"


"Tungata Zebiwe."


"Ha! Yes! Tungata Zebiwe. The Matabele leader. You had him put away. I presumed that by now he had been liquidated."


"I am holding him in great secrecy and safety at one of my rehabilitation centres near here."


"Explain."


"Firstly, the money."


"From what we know, Tungata Zebiwe is not a rich man," the Russian demurred.


"He has the key to a fortune which might easily exceed two hundred million US dollars." The Russian raised a silver eyebrow in the gesture of disbelief that Peter was coming to know well, and which was beginning to irritate him.


"Diamonds," he said.


"The mother country is one of the world's largest Producers. "The Russian spread his hands disparagingly.


"Not industrial rubbish, not black boart, but gem stones of the first water, large stones, huge stones, some of the finest ever mined anywhere." The Russian looked thoughtful. "if it is true-"


"It is true! But I will not explain further. Not yet."


"Very well. At least I can hold out some sort of promise to the money-sucking leeches in our treasury department?


And the second question. The Matabele? You cannot plan to 0 blite rate them, man, woman and child?" Peter Fungabera shook his head regretfully. "No. Though it would be the better way, America and Britain would not allow it. No, my answer is Tungata Zebiwe again. When I take over the country, he will reappear it will be almost miraculous. He will come back from the dead. The Mota


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