Текст книги "Leopard Hunts in Darkness"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

Соавторы: Wilbur Smith
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Aware that the beast's weak eyes could not distinguish a motionless man at more than fifteen paces, and that the light breeze was blowing directly into his face, Craig stood frozen but poised to hurl himself to one side if the charge came his way. The rhino was switching his grey bulk from side to side with startling agility, the din of his ire unabated, and in Craig's fevered imagination his horn seemed to grow longer and sharper every second. Stealthily he reached for the clasp-knife in his pocket. The beast sensed the movement and trotted a half dozen paces Closer, so that Craig was on the periphery of his effective vision and in serious danger at last.

Using a short underhanded flick, he tossed the knife high over the beast's head into the ebony thicket behind it, and there was a loud clatter as it struck a branch.

Instantly the rhino spun around and launched its huge grey body in a full and furious charge at the sound. The bush opened as though before a centurion tank, and the clattering, crashing charge dwindled swiftly as the rhinoceros kept going up the side of the hill and over the crest in search of an adversary. Craig sat down heavily in the middle of the path, and doubled over with breathless laughter in which were echoes of mild hysteria.

Within the next few hours, Craig had found three of the pans of stinking, stagnant water that these strange beasts prefer to the clean running water of the river, and he had decided where to site the hides from which his tourists could view them at close range. Of course, he would furnish salt4icks beside the waterholes to make them even more attractive to the beasts, and bring them in to be photographed and gawked at.

Sitting on a log, beside one of the waterholes, he reviewed the factors that favoured his plans. It was under an hour's flight from here to the Victoria Falls, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, that already attracted thousands of tourists each month. It would be only a short detour to his camp here, so that added little to the tourists" original airfare. He had. an animal that very few other reserves or camps could offer, together with most of the other varieties of gawe, concentrated in a relatively small area. He had undeveloped reservations on both boundaries to ensure a permanent source of interesting animal life.

What he had in mind was a champagne and caviar type of camp, on the lines of those private estates bordering the Kruger National Park in South Africa. He would put up small camps, sufficiently isolated from each other so as to give the occupants the illusion of having the wilderness to themselves. He would provide charismatic and knowledgeable guides to take his tourists by Land, Rover and on foot close to rare and potentially dangerous animals and make an adventure of it, and luxurious surroundings when they returned to camp in the evening air-conditioning and fine food and wines, pretty young hostesses to pamper them, wildlife movies and lectures by experts to instruct and entertain them. And he would charge them outrageously for it all, aiming at the very upper level of the tourist trade.

It was after sunset when Craig limped back into his rudimentary camp under the wild figs, his face and arms reddened by the sun, tsetse-fly bites itching and swollen on the back of his neck, and the stump of his leg tender and aching from the unaccustomed exertions. He was too tired to eat. He unstrapped his leg, drank a single whisky from the plastic mug, rolled into his blanket and was almost immediately asleep. He woke for a few minutes during the night, and while he urinated he listened with sleepy pleasure to die distant roaring of a pride of hunting lions, and then returned to his blanket.

He was awakened by the whistling cries of the green pigeons feasting on the wild figs above his head, and found he was ravenously hungry and happy as he could not remember being for years.

After he had eaten, he hopped down to the water's edge, carrying a rolled copy of the Farmers" Weekly magazine, the African farmers" bible. Then, seated in the shallows with the coarse-sugar sand pleasantly rough under his naked backside and the cool green waters soothing his still aching stump, he studied the prices of stock offered for sale in the magazine and did mental arithmetic with the figures.

His ambitious plans were swiftly moderated when he realized what it would cost to restock King's Lynn and Queen's Lynn with thoroughbred blood stock The consortium had sold the original stud for a million and a half, and prices had gone up since then.

He would have to begin with good bulls, and grade cows slowly build up his blood lines. Still, that would cost plenty, the ranches would have to be re-equipped, and the development of the tourist camp here on the Chizarira river was going to cost another bundle. Then he would have to move the squatter families and their goats off his grazing the only way to do that was to offer them financial compensation. Old grandfather Bawu had always told him, "Work out what you think it will cost, then double it. That way you will come close." Craig threw the magazine up onto the bank, and lay back with only his head above water while he did his sums.

On the credit side, he had lived frugally aboard the yacht, unlikea lot of other suddenly successful authors.

The book had been on the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic for almost a year, main choice of three major book-clubs, translations into a number of foreign languages, including Hindi, Reader's Digest condensed books, the T! series, paperback contracts even though at the end, the taxman had got in amongst his earnings.

Then again he had been lucky with what was left to him after these depredations. He had speculated in gold and silver, had made three good coups on the stock exchange, and finally h! transferred most of his winnings into Swiss francs at the right time. Added to that, he could sell the yacht. A-month earlier he had been offered a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for Bawu, but he would hate to part with it.

Apart from that, he could try hitting Ashe Levy for a substantial advance on the undelivered novel and hock his soul in the process.

He reached the bottom line of his calculations and decided that if he pulled out all the stops, and used up all his lines of credit, he might be able to raise a million and a half, which would leave him short of at least as much again.

"Henry Pickering, my very favourite banker, are you ever in for a surprise!" He grinned recklessly as he thought of how he was planning to break the first and cardinal rule of the prudent investor and put it all in one basket. "Dear Henry, you have been selected by our computer to be the lucky lender of one and a half big Ms to a one-legged dried-up sometime scribbler." That was the best he could come up with at the moment, and it wasn't really worth worrying seriously until he had an answer from Jock Daniels" consortium. He switched to more mundane considerations.

He ducked down and sucked a mouthful of the sweet clear water. The Chizarira was a lesser tributary of the great Zambezi, so he was drinking Zambezi waters again, as he had told Henry Pickering he must. "Chizarira" was a hell of a mouthful for a tourist to pronounce, let alone rem em her. He needed a name under which to sell his little African paradise.

"Zambezi Waters," he said aloud. "I'll call it Zambezi Waters," and then almost choked as very close to where he lay a voice said clearly. "He must be a mad man." It was a deep melodious Matabele voice. "First, he comes here alone and unarmed, and then he sits amongst the crocodiles and talks to the trees!" Craig rolled over swiftly onto his belly, and stared at the three men who had come silently out of the forest and now stood on the bank, ten paces away, watching him with closed, expressionless faces.

They were, all three of them, dressed in faded denims the uniform of the bush fighters and the weapons they carried with casual familiarity were the ubiquitous AK 47s with the distinctive curved black magazine and laminated woodwork.

Denim, AK 47s and Matabele there was no doubt in Craig's mind who these were. Regular Zimbabwean troops now w ore jungle fatigues or battle-smocks, most were armed with Nato weapons and spoke the Shana language.

These were former members of the disbanded Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army, now turned political rebels, ubject to no laws, nor higher authority, forged by a men s long murderous and bloody bush war into hard, ruthless men with death in their hands and death in their eyes.

Although Craig had been warned of the possibility, and had indeed been half-expecting this meeting, still the shock made him feel dry-mouthed and nauseated.

"We don't have to take him," said the youngest of the three guerrillas. "We can shoot him and bury him secretly that is good as a hostage." He was under twenty-five years of age, Craig guessed, and had probably killed a man for every year of his life.

"The six hostages we took on the Victoria Falls road gave us weeks of trouble, and in the end we had to shoot them anyway," agreed the second guerrilla, and they both looked to the third man. He was only a few years older than they were, but there was no doubt that he was the leader. A thin scar ran from the corner of his mouth up his cheek into the hairline at the temple. It puckered his mouth into a lopsided, sardonic grin.

Craig remembered the incident that they were discussing. Guerrillas had stopped a tourist bus on the main Victoria Falls road and abducted six men, Canadian, Americans and a Brilbn, and taken them into the bush as hostages for the release of political detainees. Despite an intensive search by police and regular army units, none of the hostages had been recovered.

The scarred leader stared at Craig with smoky dark eyes for long seconds, and then, with his thumb, slid the rate of-fire selector on his rifle to automatic.

"A true Matabele does not kill a blood brother of the tribe." It took Craig an enormous effort to keep his voice steady, devoid of any trace of his terror. His Sindebele was so flawless and easy that it was the leader of the guerrillas who blinked.

"Haul" he said, which is an expression of amazement.

"You speak likea man but who is this blood brother you boast of?"

"Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe," Craig answered, an saw the instant shift in the man's gaze, and the sudden discomfiture of his two companions. He had hit a chord that had unbalanced them, and had delayed his own execution for the moment, but the leader's rifle was still cocked and on fully automatic, still pointed at his belly.

It was the youngster who broke the silence, speaking too loudly, to cover his own uncertainty. "It is easy for a baboon to shout the name of the black-maned lion from the hilltop, and claim his protection, but does the lion recognize the baboon? Kill him, I say, and have done with it."

"Yet he speaks likea brother," murmured the leader, "and Comrade Tungata is a hard man-" Craig realized that his life was still at desperate risk, a little push either way was all that was needed.

"will show you, , he said, still without the slightest quaver in his voice. "Let me go to my pack." The leader hesitated.

"I am naked," Craig told him. "No weapons not even a knife and you are three, with guns."

"Go! the Matabele agreed. "But go with care. I have not killed a man for many moons and I feel the lack." Craig stood up carefully from the water and saw the interest in their eyes as they studied his leg foreshortened halfway between knee and ankle, and the compensating muscular development of the other leg and the rest of his body. The interest changed to wary respect as they saw how quickly and easily Craig moved on one leg. He reached his pack with water running down the hard flat muscles of chest and belly. He had come prepared for this meeting, and from the front pocket of his pack he pulled out his wallet and handed a coloured snapshot to the guerrilla leader.

In the photograph two men sat on the bonnet of an ancient Land-Rover. They had their arms around each other's shoulders, and both of them were laughing. Each of them held a beer can in his free hand and with it was saluting the photographer. The accord and camaraderie between them was evident.

The scarred guerrilla studied it for a long time and then slipped the selector on his rifle to lock. "It is Comrade Tungata," he said, and handed the photograph to the others.

"Perhaps," conceded the youngster reluctantly, "but a long time ago. I still think we should shoot him." However, this opinion was now more wistful than determined.

"Comrade Tungata would swallow you without chewing," his companion told him flatly, and slung his rifle over his shoulder.

Craig picked up hi leg and in a moment had fitted it to the stump and instantly all three guerrillas were intrigued, their murderous intentions set aside as they crowded around Craig to examine this marvelous appendage.

Fully aware of the African love of a good joke, Craig clowned for them. Heldanced a jig, pirouetted on the leg, cracked himself across the shin without flinching, and finally took the hat of the youngest, most murderous guerrilla from his head, screwed it into a ball and with a cry of "Pele!" drop-kicked it into the lower branches of the wild fig with the artificial leg. The other two hooted with glee, and laughed until tears ran down their cheeks at the youngster's loss of dignity as he scrambled up into the wild fig to retrieve his hat.

judging the mood finely, Craig opened his pack and brought out mug and whisky bottle. He poured a generous dram and handed the mug to the scar-faced leader.

"Between brothers," he said.

The guerrilla leaned his rifle against the trunk of the tree and accepted the mug. He drained it at one swallow, and blew the fumes ecstatically out of his nose and mouth. The other two took their turn at the mug with as much gusto.

When Craig pulled on his trousers and sat down on his pack, placing the bottle in front of him, they all laid their weapons aside and squatted in a half circle facing him.

"My name is Craig Mellow,"he said.

"We will call you Kuphela," the leader told him, "for the leg walks on its own." And the others clapped their hands IJ in approbation, and Craig poured each of them a whisky to celebrate his christening.

"My name is Comrade Lookout," the leader told him.

Most of the guerrillas had adopted noyw-de-gue7Te. "This is Comrade Peking." A tribute to his Chinese instructors, Craig guessed. "And this," the leader indicated the young, est, "is Comrade Dollar." Craig had difficulty remaining straight-faced at this unlikely juxtaposition of ideologies.

"Comrade Lookout, "Craig said, "the kanka marked you." The kanka were the jackals, the security forces, and Craig guessed the leader would be proud of his battle scars.

Comrade Lookout caressed his cheek. "A bayonet. They thought I was dead and they left me for the hyena."

"Your leg?" Dollar asked in return. "From the war also?" An affirmative would tell them that he had fought against them. Their reaction was unpredictable, but Craig paused only a second before he nodded. "I trod on one of our own mines."

"Your own mine!" Lookout crowed with delight at the joke. "He stood on his own mine!" And the others thought it was funny, but Craig detected no residual resentment.

"Where?" Peking wanted to know.

"On the river, between Kazungula and Victoria Falls."

"Ah, yes," they nodded at each other. "That was a bad place. We crossed there often, Lookout remembered. "That is where we fought the Scouts." The Ballantyne Scouts had been one of the elite units of the security forces, and Craig had been attached to them as an armourer.

"The day I trod on the mine was the day the Scouts followed your people across the river. There was a terrible fight on the Zambian side, and all the Scouts were wiped out."

"Haul Haul" they exclaimed with amazement. "That was the day! We were there we fought with Comrade Tungata on that day."

"What a fight what a fine and beautiful killing when we trapped them," Dollar remembered with the killing light in his eyes again.

"They fought! Mother of Nkulu kulu how they fought!

Those were real men!" Craig's stomach churned queasily with the memory. His own cousin, Roland Ballantyne, had led the Scouts across the river that fateful -day. While Craig lay shattered and bleeding on the edge of the minefield, Roland and all his men had fought to the death a few miles further on. Their bodies had been abused and desecrated by these men, and now they were discussing it likea memorable football match.

Craig poured morel whisky for them. How he had loathed d-iem and their fellows terrs', they called them, terrorists loathed them with the special hatred reserved for something that threatens your very existence and all that you hold dear. But now, in his turn, he saluted them with the mug, and drank. He had heard of R.A.F and Luftwaffe pilots meeting after the war and reminiscing as they were doing, more like comrades than deadly enemies.

"Where were you when we rocketed the storage tanks in Harare and burned the fuel?" they asked.

"Do you remember when the Scouts jumped from the sky onto our camp at Molingushi? They killed eight hundred of us that day and I was there!" Peking recalled with pride. "But they did not catch me!" Yet now Craig found that he could not sustain that hatred any longer. Under the veneer of cruelty and savagery imposed upon them by war, they were the true Matabele that he had always loved, with that irrepressible sense of fun, that deep pride in themselves and their tribe, that abounding sense of personal honour, of loyalty and their own peculiar code of morals. As they chatted, Craig warmed to them, and they sensed it and responded to him in turn.

"So what makes you come here, Kuphela? A sensible man like you, walking without even a stick into the leopard's cave? You must have heard about us and yet you came here?"

"Yes, I have heard about you. I heard that you were hard men, like old Mzilikazi's warriors." They preened a little at the compliment.

"But I came here to meet you and talk with you," Craig went on.

"Why?"demanded Lookout.

41 will write a book, and in the book I will write truly the way you are and the things for which you are still fighting."

"A book?" Peking was suspicious immediately.

"What kind of book?" Dollar backed him.

"Who are you to write a book?" Lookout's voice was openly scornful. "You are too young. Book-writers are great and learned people." Like all barely literate Africans, he had an almost superstitious awe of the printed word, and reverence for the grey hairs of age.

"A one-legged book-writer," Dollar scoffed, and Peking giggled and picked up his rifle. He placed it across his lap and giggled again. The mood had changed once more. "If he lies about this book, then perhaps he lies about his friendship with Comrade Tungata," Dollar suggested with relish.

Craig had prepared for this also. He took a large manila envelope from the flap of his pack and shook from it a thick sheaf of newspaper cuttings. He shuffled through them slowly, letting their disbelieving mockery change to interest, then he selected one and handed it to Lookout.

The serial of the book had been shown on Zimbabwe television two years previously, before these guerrillas had returned to the bush, and it had enjoyed an avid following throughout its run.

"Haul" Lookout exclaimed. "It is the old king, Mzilikazi!" The photograph at the head of the article showed Craig on the set with members of the cast of the production. The guerrillas immediately recognized the black American actor who had taken the part of the old Matabele king. He was in a costume of leopard-skin and heron-feathers.

"And that is you with the king." They had not been as impressed, even by the photograph of Tungata.

There was another cutting, a photo taken in Doubleday's bookstore on Fifth Avenue, of Craig standing beside a huge pyramid of the book, with a blowup of his portrait from the back cover riding atop the pyramid.

"That is you!" They were truly stunned now. "Did you write that book?"

"Now do you believer" Craig demanded, but Lookout studied the evidence o " are fully before committing himself.

His lips moved as he read slowly through the text of the articles, and when he handed them back to Craig, he said, seriously, "Kuphela, despite your youth, you are indeed an important book-writer." Now they were almost pathetically eager to pour out their grievances to him, like petitioners at a tribal indaba where cases were heard and judgement handed down by the elders of the tribe. While they talked, the sun rose up LA

across a sky as blue and unblemished as a heron's egg, and reached its noon -and started its stately descent towards its bloody death in the sunset.

What they related was the tragedy of Africa, the barriers that divided this mighty continent and which contained all the seeds of violence and disaster, the single incurable disease that infected them all tribalism.

Here it was Matabele against Mashona.

"The dirt-eaters," Lookout called them, "the lurkers in caves, the fugitives on the fortified hilltops, the jackals i who will only bite when your back is turned to them." It was the scorn of the warrior for the merchant, of the man of direct action for the wily negotiator and politician.

"Since great Mzilikazi first crossed the river Limpopo, the Mashona have been our dogs amahob, slaves and sons of slaves." This history of displacement and domination of one group by another was not confined to Zimbabwe, but over the centuries had taken place across the entire continent.

Further north, the lordly Masai had raided and terrorized the Kikuyu who lacked their warlike culture; the giant Watutsi, who considered any man under six foot six to be a dwarf, had taken the gentle Hutu as slaves and in every case, the slaves had made up for their lack of ferocity with political astuteness, and, as soon as the white colonialists" protection was withdrawn, had either massacred their tormentors, as the Hutu had the Watutsi, or had bastardized the doctrine of Westminster government by discarding the checks and balances that make the system equitable, and had used their superior numbers to place their erstwhile masters into a position of political subjugation, as the Kikuyu had the Masai.

Exactly the same process was at work here in Zimbabwe.

The white settlers had been rendered inconsequential by the bush war, and the concepts of fair play and integrity that the white administrators and civil servants had imposed upon all the tribes had been swept away with them.

"There are five dirt-eating Mashona for every one Matabele indo da Lookout told Craig bitterly, "but why should that give them any right to lord it over us? Should five slaves dictate to a king? If five baboons bark, must the black-maned lion tremble?"

"That is the way it is done in England and America," Craig said mildly. "The will of the majority must prevail-"

"I piss with great force on the will of the majority," Lookout dismissed the doctrine of democracy airily. "Such things might work in England and America but this is Africa. They dd not work here I will not bow down to the will of five dirt-eaters. No, not to the will of a hundred, nor a thousand of them.

I am Matabele, and only one man dictates to me a Matabele king." Yes, Craig thought, this is Africa. The old Africa awakening from the trance induced in it by a hundred years of colonialism, and reverting immediately to the old ways.

He thought of the -tens of thousands of fresh-faced une Enelishmen who for very little financial reward had YO come out to spend their lives in the Colonial Service, labouring to inst il into their reluctant charges their respect for the Protestant work-ethic, the ideals of fair play and Westminster government. young men who had returned to England prematurely ted and broken in health, to eke out their days on a. pittance of a pension and the belief that they had given their lives to something that was valuable and lasting. Did they, Craig wondered, ever suspect that it might all have been in vain?

The borders that the colonial system had set up had been neat and orderly. They followed a river, or the shore of a lake, the spine of a mountain range, and where these did not exist, a white surveyor with a theodolite had shot a line across the wilderness. "This side is German East Africa, this side is British." But they took no cognizance of the tribes that they were splitting in half as they drove in their pegs.

"Many of our people live across the river in South P Africa eking complained. "If they were with us, then things would be different. There would be more of us, but now we are divided."

"And the Shana is cunning, as cunning as the baboons that come down to raid the maize fields in the night. He knows that one Matabele warrior would eat a hundred of is, so w1en t we rose against dlem, usec die w-lite soldiers of Smith's government who had stayed on–2 Craig remembered the delight of the embittered white soldiers who considered they had not been defeated but had been betrayed, when the Mugabe government had turned them loose on the dissenting Matabele faction.

"The white pilots came in their aeroplanes, and the white troops of the Rhodesian Regiment-" After the fighting the shunting, yards at Bulawayo station had been crowded with refrigerated trucks each packed from floor to roof with the bodies of the Matabele dead.

"The white soldiers did their work for them, while Mugabe and his boys ran back to Harare and climbed shaking and snivelling under their women's skirts. Then, after the white soldiers had taken our weapons, they crawled out again, shook off the dust of their retreat, and came strutting back like conquerors."

"They have dishonoured our leaders,-2 Nkomo, the Matabele leader, had been accused of harbouring rebels and accumulating caches of weapons, and driven in disgrace by Mashona,dominated government into enforced retirement.

"They have secret prisons in the bush where they take our leaders," Peking went on. "There they do things to our men that do not bear talking of."

"Now that we are deprived of weapons, their special units move through the villages. They beat our old men and women, they rape our young women, they take our young men away, never to be seen or heard of again." Craig had seen a photograph of men in the blue and khaki of the former British South Africa police, so long the uniform of honour and fair play, carrying out interrogations in the villages. In the photograph they had a naked Matabele spreadeagled on the earth, an armed and uniformed constable standing with both booted feet and his full weight on each ankle and wrist to pin him, while two other constables wielded clubs as heavy as baseball bats.

They were using full strokes from high above the head, and raining blows on the man's back and shoulders and buttocks. The photograph had been captioned "Zimbabwe Police interrogate suspect in attempt to learn whereabouts of American and British tourists abducted as hostages by Matabele dissidents'. There had been no photographs of what they did to the Matabele girls.

"Perhaps the government troops were looking for the hostages which you admit you seized," Craig pointed out tartly. "A little while ago you would have been quite happy to kill me or take me hostage as well." "The Shana began this business long before we took our first hostage," Lookout shot back at him.

"But you are taking innocent hostages," Craig insisted.

"Shooting white fame6– "What else can *e do to make people understand what is happening to' our people? We have very few leaders who have not been imprisoned or silenced, and even they are powerless. We have no weapons except these few we have managed to hide, we have no powerful friends, while the Shana have Chinese and British and American allies. We have no money to continue the struggle and they have all the wealth of the land and millions of dollars of aid from these powerful friends. What else can we do to make the world understand what is happening to us?" Craig decided prudently that this was neither the time nor the place to offer a lecture on political morality. and then he thought wryly, "Perhaps my morality is oldfashioned, anyway." There was a new political expediency in international affairs that had become acceptable: the right of impotent and voiceless minorities to draw violent attention to their own plight. From the Palestinians and the Basque separatists to the bombers from Northern Ireland blowing young British guardsmen and horses to bloody tatters in a London street, there was a new morality abroad. With these examples before them, and from their own experience of successfully bringing about political change by violence, these young men were children of the new morality.

Though Craig could never bring himself to condone these methods, not if he lived a hundred years, yet he found himself in grudging sympathy with their plight and their aspirations. There had always been a strange and sometimes bloody bond between Craig's family and the Matabele. A tradition of respect and understanding for a people who were fine friends and enemies to be wary of, an aristocratic, proud and warlike race that deserved better than they were now receiving.

There was an elitist streak in Craig's make-up that hated to see a Gulliver rendered impotent by Lilliputians.

He loathed the politics of envy and the viciousness of socialism which, he felt, sought to strike down the heroes and reduce every exceptional man to the common greyness of the pack, to replace true leadership with the oafish mumblings of trade-union louts, to emasculate all initiative by punitive tax schemes and then gradually to shepherd a numbed and compliant populace into the barbed-wire enclosure of Marxist totalitarianism.