Текст книги "Leopard Hunts in Darkness"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

Соавторы: Wilbur Smith
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"That's all you came to tell usr Sally-Anne asked at last.

"Isn't it enoughr Morgan stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. "There is one other thing, Craig. Henry Pickering asked me to tell you that the Land Bank of Zimbabwe has repudiated its suretyship for your loan. Their grounds are that you have been officially declared an enemy of the people. Henry Pickering asked me to tell you they will be looking to you for repayment of capital and interest. Does this make sense to your "Unfortunately," Craig nodded glumly.

"He said he would try to work something out with you when you reach New York, but in the meantime they have been forced to freeze all your bank accounts and serve your publishers with a restraining order to withhold all future royalty payments."

"That figures."

"Sorry, Craig. It sounds real tough." Morgan held out his hand. "I liked your book, I really did, and I liked you. I'm just sorry it all had to end this way." Craig walked with him as far as the green Ford with diplomatic registration plates that Morgan Oxford was driving.

"Will you do me one last favourr "If I can." Morgan looked suspicions.

"Can you see that a package is delivered to my publisher in New Yorkr And when Morgan's suspicions were unabated, "It's only the final pages of my i -Lew manuscript, give you my word." Hill Okay, then," said Morgan Oxford dubiously. "I'll see he gets it." Craig fetched the British Airways bag from the hired Land-Rover at the far end of the car park. "Look after it," he pleaded. "It's my heart's blood and my hope of salvation." He watched the green Ford drive away and went back into the hospital building.

"What was all that about the banks and loansr Sally Anne asked as he entered her ward.

"It means that when I asked you to marry me I was a millionaire." Craig came back to sit on the edge of her bed.

"Now I'm just about as broke as anybody who has no assets and owes a couple of million bucks can be."

"You've got the new book. Ashe Levy says it's a winner."

"Darling, if I wrote a bestseller every year for the rest of my life, I would just about keep level with the interest payments on what I owe to Henry Pickering and his banks." She stared at him.

"So what I am trying to say is this my original offer is up for review, you've got a chance to change your mind.

You don't have to marry me."

"Craig," she said. "Lock the door and pull the shutters."

"You've got to be joking not here, not now! It's probably a serious offence in this country, illicit cohabitation or something." Listen, mister, when you are wanted for murder and armed insurrection, a little bit of illicit nip and tuck with your future husband, even, if he is a pauper, sits lightly on the conscience." raig picked Sally -Anne up from the hospital the following morning. She wore the same jeans, shirt and trainers as she had when she was admitted.

"Sister had them washed and mended-" she stopped as she saw the Land-Rover. "What's this? I thought we were broke."

"The computer hasn't had the happy news yet, they are still honouring my American Express card."

"Is that kosher?"

"When you owe five big Ms, lady, another couple al hundred bucks sits pretty lightly on the conscience." lie grinned at her as he turned the ignition key and when the engine fired, said cheerfully, "Eat your heart out, Mr. Hertz."

"You're taking it very well, Craig." She slid across the seat closer to him.

"We are both alive that is cause for fireworks and general rejoicing. As for the money well, I don't think I aire. When I've got money was truly cut out to be a million I spend all my time worrying about losing it. It saps mi energy. Now that I've lost it, I feel free again in a funny sort of way."

"You're happy to have lost everything you ever owned?" She turned sideways in the seat to look at him. "Even for you, that's cuckoo!" I'm not happy, no," he denied the charge. "What I truly regret is losing King's Lynn and Zambezi Waters.

We could have made something wonderful out of them, you and I. I regret that very much and I regret Tungata Zebiwe."

"Yes. We destroyed him." Both of them were sobered and saddened. "If there, was only something we could do for him."

"Not a damned thing." Craig shook his head. "Despite Timon's assurances, we don't know that he is still alive, and even if he is, we don't have the faintest idea where he is, or how to find him." They rattled across the railway lines and into the main street of Francistown.

""Jewel of the north"," said Craig. "Population two thousand, main industry consumption of alcoholic beverage, reason for existing uncertain." He parked outside the single hotel. "As you can see, total population now in permanent residence in the public bar." However, the young Botswana receptionist was pretty and efficient.

"Mr. Mellow, there is a lady waiting to see you," she called, as Craig entered the lobby. Craig did not recognize his visitor, not until Sally-Anne ran forward to embrace her.

"Sarah!" she cried. "How did you get here? How did you find usT Craig's room had two single beds with a dressing-table between them, a threadbare imitation Persian rug on the shiny red-painted cement floor and a single wooden chair.

The two girls sat on one bed, with their legs curled up under them in that double-jointed feminine attitude.

"They told me at the Red Cross that you had been found in the desert and brought in by the police, Miss Jay."

"My name is Sally' Anne Sarah." Sarah smiled softly in acknowledgement. "I wasn't sure if you would want to see me again, not after the trial. But then my friends here told me how you had been ill-treated by Fungabera's soldiers. I thought you might have realized that I was right all along, that Tungata Zebiwe was not a criminal and that he needs friends now." She turned towards Craig. "He was your friend, Mr. Mellow. He told me Rout you. He spoke of you with respect and great feeling. He was afraid for you, when he heard that you had returned to Zimbabwe. He realized that you wanted to take up your family land in Matabeleland, and he knew there were going to be terrible troubles and that you would be caught up in them. He said that you were too gentle for the hard times that were coming. He called you "Pupho", the dreamer, the gentle dreamer, but he said that you were also stubborn and obstinate. He wanted to save you from being hurt again. He said, "Last time he lost his leg this time he could lose his life. To be his friend, I must make myself his enemy. I must drive him out of Zimbabwe."

it Craig sat in the sttaight-backed wooden chair and remembered his stormy meeting with Tungata when he had come to him for assistance in acquiring King's Lynn.

Had it been an act, then? Even now he found that hard tory so believe. Tungata's passion had been so real, his fit convincing.

41 am sorry, Mr. Mellow. These are very rude things that I am saying about you. I am telling you only what Tungata said. He was your friend. He still is your friend."

"It doesn't really matter any more, what he thought of me, "Craig murmured. "Sam is probably dead by now."

"No!" For the first time Sarah raised her voice, her tone vehement, almost angry. "No, do not say that, never said that! He is alive. I have seen and spoken to him. They can never kill a man like thad" The chair creaked under Craig as he leaned forward eagerly. "You have seen him? When?"

"Two weeks ago."

"Where? Where was he?"

"Tuti at the camp."

"Sam alive!" Craig changed as he said it. TIte despondent slump of his shoulders squared out, he held his head at more alert angle and his eyes were brighter, more eager.

He wasn t really looking at Sarah. He was looking at the wall above her head, trying to marshal the torrent of emotions and ideas that came at him, so he did not see that Sarah was weeping.

It was Sally-Anne who put a protective and comforting arm about her, and Sarah sobbed. "Oh, my lord Tungata.

The things they have done to him. They have starved and beaten him. He is likea village cur, all bones and scars.

He walks likea very old man, only his eyes are still proud." Sally-Anne hugged her wordlessly. Craig jumped up from the chair and began to pace. The room was so small, he crossed it in four strides, turned and came back. Sally Anne dug in her pocket and found a crumpled tissue for Sarah.

"When will the Cessna be ready?" Craig asked, without pausing in his stride. His artificial leg made a tiny click each time he swung it forward.

"It's been ready since last week. I told you, didn't ! Sally-Anne replied distractedly, fussing over Sarah.

"What is her all-up capacity?"

"The Cessna? I've had six adults in her, but that was a squeeze. She's licensed for-" Sally' Anne stopped. Slowly her head turned from Sarah towards him and she stared at him in total disbelief.

"In the love of all that's holy, Craig, are you out of your mind?" "Range fully loaded?" Craig ignored the question.

"Twelve hundred nautical miles, throttle setting for maximum endurance but you can't be serious."

"Okay." Craig was thinking aloud. "I can get a couple of drums in the Land-Rover. You can land and refuel on a pan right on the border I know a spot near Panda Matengal five hundred kilometres north of here. That is the closest point of entry-"

"Craig, do you know what they'd do if they caught us?" Sally-Anne's voice was husky with shock.

Sarah had the tiss& over her nose, but her eyes swivelled between thL* two of them as they spoke.

"Weapons," Cra I ig muttered. "We'd need arms. Morgan Oxford? No, damn it, he's written us off."

"Guns?" Sarah's voice was muffled by tears and tissue.

"Guns and grenades," Craig agreed. "Explosives, whatever we can get."

"I can get guns. Some of our people have escaped. They are here in Botswana. They had guns hidden in the bush from the war."

"What kind? "Craig demanded.

"Banana guns and hand grenades."

"AKs," Craig rejoiced. "Sarah, you are a star."

"Just the two of us?" Sally-Anne paled as she realized th at he truly meant it. "Two of us, against the entire Third Brigade is that what you are thinking about?" A "No, I'm coming with you." Sarah put aside the tissue.

"There will be three of us."

"Three of us, gread" said Sally-Anne.

"Three of us bloody marvelous!" ack and stood in front of them.

Craig came b "Number one: we are going to draw up a map of Tuti camp. We are going to put down every detail we can remember." He started pacing again, unable to stand still.

"Number two: we meet with Sarahs friends and see how much help they can give us. Number dime: Sally-Anne takes the commercial flight down to Johannesburg and brings back the Cessna how long will that takeP 11 can be back in three days." Colour was coming back into Sally-Anne's cheeks. "That's if I decide to gaP okay! Fine!" Craig rubbed his hands together. "Now we M can start on the map." Craig ordered sandwiches and a bottle of w me to be sen t to the room and they worked through until 2 am.

when Sarah left them with a promise to return at breakfast time. Craig folded the map carefully and then he and Sally-Anne climbed into one of the narrow beds together, but they were so keyed up that neither of them could sleep.

"Sam was trying to protect me," Craig marvelled. "He was doing it for me, all along."

"Tell me about him," Sally-Anne whispered and she lay against his chest and listened to him talk of their friendship. When at last he fell silent, she asked softly, "So you are serious about this thing?"

"Deadly serious, but will you do it with me?"

"It's crazy," she said. "It's plain dumb but let's do it then." he sooty black smoke from the beacon fires of oil rags that Craig had set climbed straight up in two columns into the clear desert sky. Craig and Sarah stood together on the bonnet of the Land' Rover staring into the south. This was the dry wild land of northeastern Botswana. The Zimbabwe border was thirty kilometres east of them, the flat and plain between pimpled with camel.

thorn trees and blotched with the leprous white salt pans

The mirage shimmered and tricked the eye so that the stunted trees on the far side of the pan seemed to swim and change shape like dark amoeba under a microscope. A spinning dust devil jumped up from the white pan surface, and swirled and swayed sinuously as a belly dancer, rising two hundred feet into the hot air until it collapsed again as suddenly as it had risen.

The sound of the Cessna engine rose and fell and rose again on the heat-flawed air. "There!" Sarah pointed out the mosquito speck, low on the horizon.

Craig made a last anxious appraisal of his makeshift landing, strip He had lit the beacon fires at each end of it as soon as they had pick el tip the first throb of the Cessna's motor. He had driven the Land-Rover back and forth between the beacons to mark the hard crust at the edge of the pan. Fifty metres out, the surface was treacherously soft.

Now he looked back at the approaching aircraft. Sally Anne was banking low over the baobab trees, lining up with the strip he had set out for her. She made a prudent precautionary pass along it, her head twisted in the cockpit window as she examined it, then she came around again and touched down lightly, and taxied towards the Land Rover.

"You were gone for ever." Craig seized her as she jumped down from the cockpit.

"Three days," she protested with her feet off the ground.

"That's for ever, "he said and kissed her.

He set her down but kept one arm around her as he led her to the Land-Rover. After she had greeted Sarah, Craig introduced her to the two Matabele who were squatting in the shade of the Land-Rover.

They rose courteously to meet her.

"This is Jonas, and this is Aaron. They led us to the arms cache and they are giving us all the help they can." They were reserved and unsmiling young men with old eyes that had seen unspeakable things, but they were willing and quick.

They pumped the Avgas from the forty-four-gallon drums on the back of the Land-Rover directly into the Cessna's wing tanks, while Craig stripped out the seats from the rear of the cockpit to reduce weight and give them cargo space.

Then they began loading. Sally-Anne weighed each item of cargo on the spring balance that she had bought for the purpose, and entered it on her loading table. The ammunition was the heaviest part of the load. They had eight thousand rounds of 7.62 men ball Ps. Craig had broken bulk and repacked it in black plastic garbage -bags to save weight and space. It had been buried for years and many of the rounds were so corroded as to be useless.

However, Craig had "hand-sorted it, and test-fired a few rounds from each case without a single misfire.

Most of the rifles had also been corroded and Craig had worked through the nights by gas lantern, stripping and cannibalizing until he had twenty-five good weapons.

There were also five Tokarev pistols and two cases of fragmentation grenades which seemed in better condition than the rifles. Craig had set off one grenade from each case, popping them down an ant-bear hole to a satisfactory Crump and cloud of dust. That had left forty-eight from the original rift),. Craig packed them in five cheap canvas haversacks that he had bought from a general dealer in Francistown.

The rest of the equipment he had also purchased in Francistown, Wire-cutters and bolt-cutters, nylon rope, pan gas that Jonas and Aaron sharpened to razor edges, flashlights and extra batteries, canteens and water bottles and a dozen or so other items which might prove useful.

Sarah had been appointed medical orderly and had made up a first-aid kit with items purchased at the Francistown pharmacy. The food rations were spartan. Raw maize meal packed in five, kilo plastic bags, the best nourishment-to weight ratio available, and a few bags of coarse salt.

"Okay, that's it," Sally-Anne called a halt to the loading.

"Another ounce and we won't get off the ground. The rest of it will have to wait for the second trip." When darkness fell, they sat around the campfire and gorged on the steaks and fresh fruit that Sally-Anne had brought with her from Johannesburg.

"Eat hearty, my children," she encouraged them. "It could be a long time." Afterwards Craig and Sally' Anne carried their blankets away from the fire, out oCearshot of the others, and they lay naked in the war me desert air and made love under the silver sickle of the moon, both of them poignantly aware that it might be for the last time.

They ate breakfast in the dark, after the moon had set and before the first glimmering of the dawn. They left Jonas and Aaron to guard the Land-Rover and help with loading and refuelling for the second trip and Sally-Anne taxied out to the end of the strip when it was just light enough to make out the tracks.

Even in the cool of night it took the overloaded Cessna for ever to unstick, and they climbed away slowly towards the glow of the sunrise.

"Zimbabwe border," Sally-Anne murmured. "And I still can't believe what we are doing." Craig was perched up beside her on the bags of ammuition, while Sarah was curled up likea salted anchovy on n I top of the load behind them.

Sally-Anne banked slightly as she picked up her landmarks from the map on her lap. She had laid out a course cross the railway line fifteen miles south of the coal, to in ming town of Wankie, and then to cross the main road a few miles beyond, avoiding all human habitation. The " I terrain below them changed swiftly, the desert falling away d with open glades of gold I and becoming densely foreste en grass. There were some high fair-weather cumulus clouds in the north, otherwise the sky was clear. Craig squinted ahead down the track of the rising sun.

"There is the railway." e closed the throttle and they descended Sally-Ann sharply. Fifty feet above the treetops they roared over the deserted railway tracks, and minutes later crossed the main to ad. They had a glimpse of a truck crawling along the blue, grey tarmac ribbon, but they crossed behind it and were visible to it for only seconds. Sally-Anne pulled a face.

"Let's hope they make nothing of us there must be quite a bit of light aircraft traffic around here." She glanced at her wristwatch. "Expected time of arrival, forty minutes."

"All right," Craig said. "Let's go over it one more time.

You drop Sarah and me, then clear out again as quickly as possible. Back to the pan. Reload and refuel. Two days from now you come back. If there is a smoke-signal, yot, land. No signal and you head back to the pan. Give it tw( more days and then the last trip. If there is no smoke signal on the second trip, that's it. You head out and don't come back." She reached out and took his hand. "Craig, don't even say it. Please, darling, come back to me." They held hands for the rest of the trip, except for the brief moments when she needed both for the controls.

"There it is!" The Chizarira river was a dark green python across the vast brown land, and there was a glint of water through the trees.

"Zambezi Waters just up there." They were keeping well clear of the camps that they had built with so much loving labour, but both of them stared longingly upstream to where the dreaming blue hills studded the line of the horizon.

Sally-Anne dropped lower and still lower until she was shaving the treetops, and then she turned slowly back in a wide circle, keeping the hills between them and the buildings on Zambezi Waters.

"There it is," Craig called, and pointed out under the par t wingtip, and they had a glimpse of white beads at the edge of the trees.

"They are still there! The bones of Craig's poached rhinoceros had been picked over by the scavengers and bleached by the sun.

Sally-Anne, ran her Jnding-check, and then lined tip for the nsrrow strip of grassland along the head of the gorge, where she had landed before, "Just pray the wart hog and ant-bear haven't been digging around, she murmured, and the overloaded Cessna wallowed sluggishly and the stall warning bleeped and flashed intermittently at the reduced power setting.

Sally-Anne dropped in steeply over the tree-tops and touched down with a jarring thud. The Cessna pitched and bounced over the rough ground, but maximum safe braking and the coarse grass wrapping the undercarriage pulled them up quickly, and Sally-Anne let out her breath.

Thank you, Lord." They offloaded with frenzied haste, piling everything in a heap and spreading over it the green nylon nets designed for shading young plants from the sun that Craig had found in Francistown.

Sally' Anne and Craig looked at each other Then miserably.

"Oh God, I hate this," she said.

"Me too so go! Go quickly, damn it." They kissed and she broke away and ran back to the cockpit. She taxied to the end of the clearing, flattening the grass, and then came back at full throttle in her own tracks. The lightened aircraft leapt into the air, and the last he saw of her was her pale face in the side windowing back towards him, and then the tree-tops cut them turn off from each other.

Craig waited until the last vibration of the engine died away and the silence of the bush closed in again. Then he picked up the rifle and haversack and slung them over his shoulders. He looked at Sarah. She wore denims and blue canvas shoes. She carried the food bag and water bottles, with a Tokarev bolstered on her belt.

"Ready?" She nodded, fell in behind him, and stayed with the forcing pace he set. They reached the kopie in the early part of the afternoon, and from the summit Craig looked towards the camps of Zambezi Waters on the river.

This would be the dangerous part now, but he lit the then, taking Sarah with him, moved out signal fire and and set up an ambush on the approach path, just in case the smoke signal brought unwanted visitors.

He and Sarah lay up in good cover, and neither of them moved nor spoke for three hours. Only their eyes were sweeping the slopes below and above and the bush busy, all around.

Even so, they were taken unawares. The voice was a harsh, raw whisper in Sindebele, close very close by.

"Ha! Kuphela. So you have brought my money." Comrade Lookout's scarred visage peered at them. He had crept up to within ten paces without alerting them. "I thought you had forgotten us." but hard and dangerous work,"

"No money for you Craig told him.

here were three men with Comrade Lookout, lean, wolflike men. They extinguished the signal fire and then spread back into the bush in an extended scouting order, that would cover their march.

"We must go," Comrade Lookout explained. "Here in the open the Shana kanka press us like hunting dogs. Since we last met, we have lost many good men. Comrade Dollar has been taken by them.."

"Yes." Craig remembered him, beaten and bedraggled, giving evidence against him on that terrible night at King's Lynn.

They marched until two hours after darkness, northwards into the bad and broken land along the escarpment of the great river. The*way was cleared for them and u guarded by the sco & who were always invisible in the forest ahead. Only their bird calls guided and reassured them.

They came at last to the guerrilla camp. There were women at the small smokeless cooking-fires and one of them ran to embrace Sarah as soon as she recognized her.

"She is my aunt's youngest daughter," Sarah explained.

She and Craig spoke only Sindebele to each other now.

The camp was an uncomfo series of rude caves, hacked out rtable and joyless place, a of the steep bank of a dried water-course and screened by the overhang of the trees. It had a temporary air about it. There were no luxuries and no items of equipment that could not be packed within minutes and carried on a man's back. The guerrilla women z were as unsmiling as their men.

"We do not stay at one place," Comrade Lookout kanka see the signs from the air if we do.

explained. "The Even though we never walk the same way, not even to the latrines, in a short time our feet form pathways and that is what they look for. We must move again soon.

The women brought them food and Craig realized how hungry and tired he was, but before he ate he opened his pack and gave them the cartons of cigarettes he had carried se embittered men smile as in. For the first time he saw the they passed a single butt around the circle.

"How many men in your group?"

"Twenty-six. Comrade Lookout puffed on the cigarette and passed it on. "But there is another group nearby.

Twenty-six was enough, Craig brooded. If they could exploit the element of surprise, it would be just enough.

They ate with their fingers from the communal pot and then Comrade Lookout allowed them to share another cigarette.

"Now, Kuphela, you said you had work for us." Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe is the prisoner

4the of the Shana."

"This is a terrible thing. It is a stab in the heart of the Matabele people but even here in the bush we have known of this for many months. Did you come to tell us something that all the world knows?"

"They are holding him alive at Tuti."

"Tuti. Haul" Comrade Lookout exclaimed violently and every man spoke at once.

"How do you know this?"

"We heard he was killed-"

"This is old women's talk–2 Craig called across to where the women sat apart.

"Sarah!" She came to them.

"You know this woman? "Craig asked.

"She is my wife's cousin."

"She is the teacher at the mission." "She is one of us."

"Tell them," Craig ordered her.

They listened in attentive silence, while Sarah related her last meeting with Tungata, their eyes glittering in the firelight, and when she had finished, they were silent.

Sarah rose quietly and went back to the other women, and Comrade Lookout turned to one of his men.

"Speak" he invited.

e Th one chosen to give his opinion first was the youngest, the most junior. The others would speak in their ascending order of seniority. It was the ancient order of council and it would take time.

Craig composed himself to patience, this was the tmpo of Africa.

After midnight Comrade Lookout summed up for them.

"We know the woman. She is trustworthy and we believe what she tells us. Comrade Tungata is our father. His blood is the blood of kings, and the stinking Shana hold him.

On this we are all agreqJ." He paused. "But there are some who would try to wrest him from the Shana child, rapers and others who say we are too few, and that we have only one rifle between two men, and only five bullets for each rifle. So we are divided." He looked at Craig. "What do you say, Kuphela?" 41 say that I have brought you eight thousand rounds of ammunition and twenty-five rifles and fifty grenades," said Craig. "I say that Comrade Tungata is my friend and my brother. I say that if there are only women and cowards alone with here and no men to go with me, then I will go this woman, Sarah, who has the heart of a warrior,-and I I will find men somewhere else." Comrade Lookout's face puckered up with affront, uIled out of true by the scar, and his tone was reproachful.

p "Let there be no more talk of women and cowards, Kuphela. Let there be no more talking at all. Let us rather go to Tuti and do this thing that must be done. That is what I say." hey lit the smoke signal as soon as they heard the ished it immediately Sally Cessna, and extingu to acknowledge.

Anne flashed her landing lights Comrade Lookout's guerrillas had cut the grass in the clearing with pan gas and filled in the holes and rough spots, so Sally-Anne's landing was confident and neat.

Eli The guerrillas unloaded the rest of the ammunition and the weapons in disciplined silence, but they could not conceal their grins of delight as they handed down the bags of ammunition and the haversacks of grenades, for these were the tools of their trade. The loads disappeared swiftly into the forest. Within fifteen minutes Craig and the empty Sally-Anne were left alone under the wing of Cessna.

"Do you know what I prayed for?" Sally-Anne asked. "I able to find the gang, and if prayed that you wouldn't be you did, that they would refuse to go with you, and that you had been forced to abort and had to come back with me."

"You aren't very good at praying, are you?" "I don't know. I'm going to get in a lot of practice in the next few days."

"Five days," Craig corrected her. "You come in again on Tuesday morning."

"Yes," she nodded. "I will take off in the dark, and be over Tuti airfield at sunrise that's at 05.22 hours."

"But you are not to land until I signal that we have secured the strip. Now, for the love of God, don't run yourself short of fuel to get back to the pan. If we don't show up, don't stay on hoping."

"I will have three hours" safe endurance over Tuti. That means you will have until 08-30 hours to get there."

"If we don't make it by then, we aren't going to make it.

It's time for you to go now, my love." I know, Sally-Anne said, and made no move.

"I have to go," he said.

"I don't know how I'm going to live through the next few days, sitting out there in the desert, not knowing a thing, just living with my fears and imagination." He took her in his arms and found she was trembling.

"I'm so very afraid for you," she whispered against his throat.

4see you Tuesday morning, "he told her. "Without fail."

"Without faffl" she agreed, and then her voice quavered.

"Come back to me, Craig. I don't want to live without you.

Promise me you'll come back."

"I promise." He kissed her.

"There now, I feel much better." She gave him that cheeky grin of hers, but it was all soft around the edges.

She climbed up into the cockpit and started the engine.

"I love you." Her lipiformed the words that the engine drowned, and she svAng the Cessna round with a burst of throttle and did not look back.

m the front t was only sixty miles on the map and fro seat of an aircraft it had not looked like hard going.

On the ground it was different.

They were crossing the grain of the land; the watershed dropped away from their right to their left, towards the escarpment of the Zambezi valley. They were forced to ack of hills and the intervening valleys follow the switchb so they were never on level ground.