Текст книги "Leopard Hunts in Darkness"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

Соавторы: Wilbur Smith
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A light touch on his upper arm rescued him from embarrassment and General Fungabera drew him aside just far enough to ensure privacy.

"You seem to have a way of making enemies, Mr. Mellow."

"We had a misunderstanding in New York." Craig glanced sideways at Sally-Anne.

"Although I did detect a certain arctic wind blowing there, I was not referring to the charming young photographer, but to others more highly placed and in a better position to render you disservice." Now all Craig's attention focused upon Peter Fungabera as he went on softly. "Your meeting this morning with a cabinet colleague of mine was," he paused, "shall we say, unfruitful?"

"Unfruitful will do very nicely," Craig agreed.

"A great pity, Mr. Mellow. If we are to become self sufficient in our food supplies and not dependent on our racist neighbours in the south, then we need farmers with capital and determination on land that is now being abused."

"You are well informed, General, and far-seeing." Did everyone in the country already know exactly what he intended, Craig wondered?

"Thank you, Mr. Mellow. Perhaps when you are ready to iL

make your application for land-purchase, you will do me the honour of speaking to me again. A friend at court, isn't that the term? My brother-in-law is the Minister for Agriculture." When he smiled, Peter Fungabera was irresistible. "And now, Mr. Mellow, as you heard, I am going to accompany Miss Jay on a visit to certain closed areas. The inter, national press have been making a lot of play regarding them. Buchenwald, I think one of them wrote, or was it Belsen? It occurs to me that a man of your reputation might be able to set the record straight, a favour for a favour, perhaps and if you travelled in the same company as Miss Jay, then it might give you an opportunity to sort out your misunderstanding, might it not?" t was still dark and chilly when Craig parked the Volkswagen in the lot behind one of the hangars at New Sarum air force base, and, lugging his holdall, ked through the low, side-entrance into the cavernous interior.

Peter Fungabera. was there ahead of him, talking to two airforce non-commissioned officers, but the moment he saw Craig he dismissed them with a casual salute and came towards Craig, smiling.

He wore a camouflage-battle-smock and the burgundy red beret and silver lo pard head cap-badge of the Third Brigade. Apart from'a bolstered sidearm, he carried only a leather-covered swagger-stick.

"Good morning, Mr. Mellow. I admire punctuality." He glanced down at Craig's hold-all. "And the ability to travel lightly." He fell in beside Craig and they went out through the tall rolling doors onto the hardstand.

There were two elderly Canberra bombers parked before the hangar. Now the pride of the Zimbabwe airforce, they had once mercilessly blasted the guerrilla camps beyond the Zambezi. Beyond them stood a sleek little silver and blue Cessna 210, and Peter Fungabera headed towards it just as Sally-Anne appeared from under the wing. She was engrossed in her walk-around checks and Craig realized she was to be their pilot. He had expected a helicopter and a military pilot.

She was dressed in a Patagonia wind-cheater, blue jeans and soft leather mosquito boots. Her hair was covered by a silk scarf. She looked professional and competent as she made a visual check of the fuel level in the wing tanks and then jumped down to the tarmac.

"Good morning, General. Would you like to take the right-hand seat?"

"Shall we put Mr. Mellow up front? I have seen it all before." "As you wish," she nodded coolly at Craig. "Mr. Mellow," and climbed up into the cockpit. She cleared with the tower and taxied to the holding point, pulled on the hand brake and murmured, "Too much pork for good Hebrew e at ion causes trouble." As a conversational opener it took some following.

Craig was startled, but she ignored him and only when her hands began to dart over the controls setting the trim, checking masters, mags and mixture, pushing the pitch fully fine, did he understand that the phrase was her personal acronym for pre-take-off, and the mild misgivings that he had had about female pilots began to recede.

After take-off, she turned out of the circuit on a northwesterly heading and engaged the automatic pilot, opened a large-scale map on her lap and concentrated on the route. Good flying technique, Craig admitted, but not much for social intercourse.

"A beautiful machine," Craig tried. "Is it your own?"

"Permanent loan from the World Wildlife Trust," she answered, still intent on the sky directly ahead.

"What does she cruise at?"

"There is an air-speed indicator directly in front of you, Mr. Mellow," she crushed him effortlessly.

It was Peter Fungabera who leaned over the back of Craig's seat and ended the silence.

"That's the Great Dyke," he pointed out the abrupt geological formation below them. "A highly mineralized intrusion chrome, platinum, gold-" Beyond the dyke, the farming lands petered out swiftly and they were over a vast area of rugged hills and sickly green forests that stretched endlessly to a milky horizon.

"We will be landing at a secondary airstrip, just this side of the Pongola Hills. There is a mission-station there and a small settlement, but the area is very remote. Transport will meet us there but it's another two hours" drive to the camp," the general explained.

"Do you mind if we go down lower, General?" Sally Anne asked, and Peter Fungabera chuckled.

"No need to ask the "reason. Sally-Ainne is educating me in the importance of wild animals, and their conservation." Sally' Anne eased back the throttle and went down.

The heat was building up and the light aircraft began to bounce and wobble as it met the thermals coming up from the rocky hills. The area4 below them was devoid of human habitation and cultivation.

"Godforsaken hills," the general growled. "No permanent water, sour grazing and fly." However, Sally-Anne picked out a herd of big beige hump-backed eland in one of the open vleis beside a dry river-bed, and then, twenty miles further on, a solitary bull elephant.

She dropped to tree-top level, pulled on the flaps and did a series of steep slow turns around the elephant, cutting him off from the forest and holding him in the open, so he was forced to face the circling machine with ears and trunk extended.

"He's magnific end she cried, the wind from the open window buffeting them and whipping her words away. "A hundred pounds of ivory each side," and she was shooting single-handed through the open window, the motor drive on her Nikon whirring as it pumped film through the camera.

They were so low that it seemed the bull might grab a wingtip with his reaching trunk, and Craig could clearly make out the wet exudation from the glands behind his eyes. He found himself gripping the sides of his seat.

At last Sally-Anne left him, levelled her wings and climbed away. Craig slumped with relief.

"Cold feet, Mr. Mellow? Or should that be singular, foot?" "Bitch," Craig thought. "That was a low hit." But she was talking to Peter Fungabera over her shoulder.

"Dead, that animal is worth ten thousand dollars, tops.

Alive, he's worth ten times that, and he'll sire a hundred bulls to replace him."

"Sally-Anne is convinced that there is a large-scale poaching ring at work in this country. She has shown me some remarkable photographs and I must say, I am beginning to share her concern."

"We have to find them and smash them, General," she insisted.

"Find them for me, Sally-Anne, and I will smash them.

You already have my word." Listening to them talking, Craig felt again an oldfashioned emotion that he had been aware of the very first time he had seen these two together. There was no missing the accord between them, and Fungabera was a dashingly handsome fellow. Now he darted a glance over his shoulder, and found the general watching him closely and speculatively, a look he covered instantly with a smile.

"How do you feel about the issue, Mr. Mellow?" he said, and suddenly Craig was telling him about his plans for Zambezi Waters on the Chizarira. He told them about the black rhinoceros and the protected wilderness areas surrounding it, and he told them how accessible it was to Victoria Falls, and now Sally-Anne was listening as intently as the general. When he finished, they were both silent for a while, and then the general said, "Now, Mr. Mellow, you are making good sense. That is the kind of planning that this country desperately needs, and its profit potential will be understood by even the most backward and unsophisticated of my people."

"Wouldn't Craig be easier, General?"

"Thank you, Craig my friends call me Peter." Half an hour later Craig saw a galvanized iron roof flash in the sunlight dead ahead, and Sally-Anne said, "Tuti Mission Station," and began letting down for a landing.

She banked steeply over the church and Craig saw tiny figures around the cluster of huts waving up at them.

The strip was short and narrow and rough, and the wind was across, but Sally-Anne crabbed in and kicked her straight at the moment before touch-down, then held the port wing down with a twist of the wheel. She was really very good indeed, CraigWiealized.

There was a saq-coloured army Land-Rover waiting under a huge manila tree off to one side of the strip, and three troopers saluted Peter Fungabera with a stamping of boots that raised dust and a slapping of rifle-butts. Then while Craig helped Sally-Anne tie down the aircraft, they loaded the meagre baggage into the Land' Rover

As the Land-Rover drew level with the mission schoolhouse beside the church, Sally-Anne asked, "Do you think they have a girls" room here?" and Peter tapped the driver on the shoulder with his swagger-stick and the vehicle stopped.

Goggle-eyed black children crowded the veranda and the school-mistress came out to greet Sally-Anne as she climbed the steps, and gave her a little curtsey of welcome.

The teacher was about the same age as Sally' Anne with long slim legs under her simple cotton skirt. Her dress was surgically clean and crisply ironed, and her white gym shoes were spotless. Her skin was glossy as velvet, and she had the typical moon face, shining teeth and gazelle eyes of the Nguni maiden, but there was a grace in her carriage, an alert and intelligent expression and a sculpturing of her features that was truly beautiful.

She and Sally-Anne talked for a few moments and then she led the white girl through the door.

"I think you and I should understand each other, Craig." Peter watched the two girls disappear. "I have seen you looking at Sally Anne and me. Let me just say, I admire Sally-Anne's accomplishments, her intelligence and her initiative however, unlike many of my peers, miscegenation has no attraction for me whatsoever. I find most European women mannish and overbearing, and white flesh insipid. If you will pardon my plain speaking."

"I am relieved to hear it, Peter, "Craig smiled.

"On the other hand, the little schoolteacher there strikes me as you are the word master give me a word for her, please."

"Toothsome." "Good "Nubile."

"Even better," Peter chuckled. "I really must find time to read your book." And then he was serious again as he went on, "Her name is Sarah. She has four A levels and a high school teacher's diploma; she has qualifications in nursing, she is beautiful and yet modest, respectful and dutiful with traditional good manners did you see how she did not look directly at us men? that would have been forward." Peter nodded approval. "A modern woman with oldfashioned virtues. Yet her father is a witch-doctor who dresses in skins, divines by throwing the bones, and does not wash from one year to the next. Africa," he said. "My wonderful, endlessly fascinating ever-changing never changing Africa." The two young women returned from the outhouses behind the school and were chatting animatedly to each other, while Sally-Anne clicked away with her camera, capturing images of the children with their teacher who seemed not much older than they.

The two men watched them from the Land-Rover.

"You strike me as a man of action, Peter and I cannot believe you lack the bride-price?" Craig asked. "X%at are you waiting for?" "She is Matabele, and I am Mashona. Capulet and Montague," Peter explained simply. "And that is an end of it." The children, led by Sarah, sang them a song of welcome from the veranda and then at Sally-Anne's request recited the alphabet and the multiplication tables, while she photographed their intent expressions. When she climbed back into the Land-Rover, they trilled their farewells and waved until the billowing dust hid them.

The track was rough and the Land-Rover bounced over the deep ruts formed in the rainy season in black glutinous mud and dried nAto the consistency of concrete.

Through gaps in the forest they glimpsed blue hills on the northern horizon, sheer and riven and uninviting.

"The Pongola Hills," Peter told them. "Bad country." And then as they neared their destination, he began telling them what they might expect when at last they arrived.

"These rehabilitation centres are not concentration camps but are, as the name implies, centres of reeducation and adaptation to the ordinary world." He glanced at Craig. "You, as well as any of us, know that we have lived through a dreadful civil war. Eleven years of hell, that have brutalized an entire generation of young people. Since their early teens, they have known no life without an automatic rifle in their hands, they have been taught nothing but destruction and learned nothing except that a man's desires can be achieved simply by killing anybody who stands in his way." Peter Fungabera was silent for a few moments, and Craig could see that he was reliving his own part in those terrible years. Now he sighed softly.

They, poor fellows, were misled by some of their leaders. To sustain them in the hardships and privations of the bush war they were made promises that could never be kept. They were promised rich farming land and hundreds of head of prime cattle, money and motor-cars and many wives of their choice." Peter made an angry gesture. "They were built up to great expectations, and when these could not be met, they turned against those who made the promises. Every one of them was armed, every one a trained soldier who had killed and would not hesitate to kill again. What were we to do?" Peter broke off and glanced at his wrist-watch. "Time for lunch and a stretch of the legs, "he suggested.

The driver parked where the track crossed a high earthen causeway and a timber bridge over a riverbed in which cool green waters swirled over the rippled sand, banks and tall reeds nodded their heads from either bank.

The escort built a fire, roasted maize cobs over it and brewed Malawi tea, while Peter walked his guests in leisurely fashion along the causeway and went on with his lecture.

"We Africans once had a tradition. If one of our young people became intractable and flouted the tribal laws, then he was sent into bush camp where the elders licked him back into shape. This rehabilitation centre is a modernized version of the traditional bush camp. I will not attempt to hide anything from you. It is no Club Med holiday home that we are going to visit. The men in it are tough, and only hard treatment will have any effect on them. On the other hand, they are not extermination camps let us rather say that they are equivalent to the detention barracks of the British army-" Craig could not help but be impressed by Peter Fungabera's honesty you are free to speak to any of the detainees, but I must ask you not to go wandering off into the bush on your own that applies to you especially, Sally-Anne," Peter smiled at her. "This is a very isolated and wild spot. Animals like hyenas and leopards are attracted by offal and sewage, and become fearless and bold. Ask me if you want to leave the camp, and I will provide you with an escort." They ate the frugal lunch, husking the scorched maize with their fingers and washing it down with the strong, black, over-sweetened tea.

"If you are ready, we will go on." Peter led them back to the Land-Rover, and an hour later they reached Tuti Rehabilitation Centre.

During the bush war it had been one of the "protected villages" set up by the Smith government in an attempt to shield the black peasants from intimidation by the guerrillas. There was a central rocky kopje that had been cleared of all vegetation, a pile of large grey granite boulders on top of which had been bhilt a small, sandbagged fort with machine-gun embrasures, firing platforms, communication trenches and dugouts. Below this was the encampment, orderly rows of mud, and-thatched huts, many with half walls to allow air circulation, built around a dusty open space which could have been parade ground or football field, for there were rudimentary goal posts set up at each end, and, incongruously, a sturdy whitewashed wall at the side nearest the fort.

A double fence of barbed, wire sandwiching a deep ditch, surrounded the camp. The wire was ten-foot high and tightly woven. The floor of the ditch was armed with closely planted, sharpened wooden stakes, and there were high guard-towers on bush poles at each corner of the stockade. The guards at the only gate saluted the Land.

Rover, and they drove slowly down the track that skirted the parade ground.

In the sun, two or three hundred young black men, dressed only in khaki shorts, were performing vigorous calisthenics to the shouts of uniformed black instructors.

In the thatched open-walled huts hundreds more were sitting in orderly rows on the bare earth, reciting in chanted unison the lesson on the blackboard.

"We'll do a tour later, Peter told them. "First we will get you settled." Craig was allocated a dugout in the fort. The earthen floor had been freshly swept and sprinkled with water to cool it and lay the dust. The only furnishings were a plaited-reed sleeping-mat on the floor and a sacking screen covering the doorway. On the reed mat was a box of matches and a packet of candles. Craig guessed that these were a luxury reserved for important guests.

Sally' Anne was allocated the dugout across the trench from his. She showed no dismay at the primitive conditions, and when Craig glanced around the screen, he saw her sitting on her reed mat in the lotus position, cleaning the tens of her camera and reloading film.

Peter Fungabera excused himself and went up the trench to the command post at the hilltop. A few minutes later an electric generator started running and Craig could hear Peter on the radio talking in rapid Shana which he could not follow. He came down again half-an-hour later.

"It will be dark in an hour. We will go down and watch the detainees being given the evening meal." The detainees lined up in utter silence, shuffling forward to be fed. There were no smiles nor horseplay. They did A N not show even the slightest curiosity in the white visitors and the general.

I -meal porridge

"Simple fare, Peter pointed out. "Maize and greens." Each man had a dollop of the fluffy stiff cake spooned into his bowl, and topped by another of stewed vegetable.

"Meat once a week. Tobacco once a week both can be withheld for bad behaviour." Peter was telling it exactly as it was. The men were lean, ribs racked out from under hard-worked muscle, no trace of fat on any of them. They wolfed the food immediately, still standing, using their fingers to wipe the bowl clean. Lean, but not emaciated, finely drawn but not starved, Craig judged, and then his eyes narrowed.

"That man is injured." The purple bruising showed even over his sun-darkened skin.

"You may speak to him," Peter invited, and when Craig questioned him in Sindebele, the man responded immediately.

"Your back what happened?"

"I was beaten."

"Why?) "Fighting with another man." Peter called over one of the guards and spoke quietly to him in Shana, then explained. "He stabbed another prisoner with a weapon made of sharpened fencing wire.

Deprived of meat and tobcco for two months and fifteen strokes with a heavy one. This is precisely the type of anti-social behaviour we are trying to prevent." As they walked back across the parade ground past the whitewashed wall, Peter went on, "Tomorrow you have the run of the camp. We will leave the following morning early." They ate with the Shana officers in the mess, and the fare was the same as that served to the detainees with the addition of a stew of stringy meat of indeterminate origin and dubious freshness. Immediately they finished eating, Peter Fungabera excused himself and led his officers out of the dugout leaving Craig and Sally-Anne alone together.

Before Craig could think of anything to say, Sally-Anne stood without a word and left the dugout. Craig had reached the limit of his forbearance and was suddenly angry with her. He jumped up and followed her out. He found her on the firing platform of the main trench, perched up on the sandbag parapet, hugging her knees and staring down on the encampment. The moon was just past full and already well clear of the hills on the horizon. She did not look round as Craig stepped up beside her, and Craig's anger evaporated as suddenly as it had arisen.

"I acted likea pig," he said.

She hugged her knees a little tighter and said nothing.

"When we first met I was going through a bad time," he went on doggedly. "I won't bore you with the details, but the book I was trying to write was blocked and I had lost my way. I took it out on you." Still she showed no sign of having heard him. Down in the forest beyond the double fence there was a sudden hideous outcry, shrieks of mirthless laughter rising and falling, sobbing and wailing, taken up and repeated at a dozen points around the camp perimeter, dying away at last in a descending series of chuckles and grunts and agonized moans.

Hyena," said Craig, and Sally-Anne shivered slightly and straightened up as if to rise.

"Please." Craig heard the desperate note in his own voice. "Just a minute more. I have been searching' for a chance to apologize."

"That isn't necessary," she said. "It was presumptuous of me to expect you to like my work." Her tone was not in the least conciliatory. "I guess I asked for it and did you ever let me have it! "Your work your photographs-" his voice dropped they frightened me. That was why my reaction was so spiteful, so childish Now she turned to look at him for the first time and the moon silvered the planes of her face. "Frightened you?" she asked.

"Terrified me. You see, I wasn't able to work. I was ing to believe that it had been only a one-off thing, beg inn that the book was a fluke, and there was no real talent left in me. I kept going back to the cupboard and each time it was bare–2 she was staring at him now, her lips slightly parted and her eyes mysterious cups of darkness and then you hit me with those damned photographs, and dared me to match them." She shook her head slowly.

"You might not have meant that, but that's what it was a challenge. A challenge I didn't have the courage to accept. I was afraid, I lashed out at you, and I have been regretting it ever since." "You liked them? "she asked.

"They shook my little world. They showed me Africa again, and filled me with longing. When I saw them, I knew what was missing in me. I was struck with homesickness likea little boy on his first lonely night at boarding school He felt a choking in his throat, and was unashamed of it. "It was those phQjographs of yours that made me come back here."

"I didn't understand," she said, and they were both silent. Craig knew that if he spoke ago , in, it might come out as a sob, for the tears of self-pity were prickling the rims of his eyelids.

Down in the encampment below them someone began to sing. It was a fine African tenor voice that carried faint but clear to the hilltop, so that Craig could recognize the words. It was an ancient Matabele regimental fighting

_.(7 chant, but now it was sung as a lament, seeming to capture all the suffering and tragedy of a continent; and not even the hyena cried while the voice sang: "The Moles are beneath the earth, "Are they dead?" asked the daughters of Mashobane.

Listen, pretty maids, do you not hear Something stirring, in the darkness?" The singer's voice died away at last, and Craig imagined all the hundreds of other young men lying in wakeful silence on their sleeping-mats, haunted and saddened by the song as he was.

Then Sally-Anne spoke again. "Thank you for telling me," she said. J know what it must have cost you." She touched his bare upper arm, a light brush of her fingertips which thrilled along his nerve ends and made his heart trip.

Then she uncurled her legs and dropped lightly off the parapet and slipped away down the communication trench.

He heard the sacking flap fall over the entrance to her dugout and the flare of a match as she lit a candle.

He knew he would be unable to sleep, so he stayed on alone listening to the African night and watching the moon. Slowly he felt the words rising up in him like water in a well that has been pumped down to the mud. His sadness fell away, and was replaced by excitement.

He went down to his own dugout and lit one of the candles, stuck it in a niche of the wall and from his holdall took his notebook and ballpoint pen. The words were bubbling and frothing in his brain, like boiling milk. He put the point of the pen to the lined white paper and it sped away across the page likea living thing. Words came spurting out of him in a joyous, long, pent-up orgasm and All spilled untidily over the paper. He stopped only to relight fresh candles from the guttering stump.

In the morning his eyes were red and burning from the strain. He felt weak and shaky as though he had run too far and too fast, but the notebook was three, quarters filled and he was strangely elated.

His elation lasted him well into the hot brilliant morning, enhanced by Sally Anne change of attitude towards him. She was still reserved and quiet, but at least she listened when he spoke and replied seriously and thoughtfully. Once or twice she even smiled, and then her too-large mouth and nose were at last in harmony with the rest of her face. Craig found it difficult to concentrate on the plight of the men that they had come to study, until he realized Sally-Anne's compassion and listened to her speaking freely for the first time.

"It would be so easy to dismiss them as brutish criminals," she murmured, watching their expressionless faces and guarded eyes, "until you realize how they have been deprived of all humanizing influences. Most of them were abducted from their schoolrooms in their early teens and taken into the guerrilla training-camps. They have nothing, have never had any possession of their own except an AK 47 rifle. How can we expect them to respect the persons and properties of others? Craig, please ask that one how old he is"

"14

"He does not knoW," Craig translated for her. "He does not know when he' was born, nor where his parents are."

"He does not even have a simple birthright," Sally' Anne pointed out, and suddenly Craig remembered how churlishly he could reject a wine that was not exactly to his taste, or how thoughtlessly he could order a new suit of clothing, or enter the first-class cabin of an airliner while these men wore only a ragged pair of shorts, without even a pair of shoes or a blanket to protect them.

"The abyss between the haves and the have-nots of this world will suck us all into destruction," Sally' Anne said as she recorded through her Nikon lens that dumb-animal resignation that lies beyond despair. "Ask that one how he is treated here," she insisted, and when Craig spoke to him the man stared at him without comprehension, as though the question was meaningless, and slowly Craig's sense of well-being burned off like mist in the morning.

In the open huts the lessons were political orientation, and the role of the responsible citizen in the socialist state.

On the blackboards, diagrams showed the relationship of parliament to the judiciary and the executive branches of the state. They had been copied onto the boards in a laboured, semi-literate hand by bored instructors and were recited parrot-fashion by the rows of squatting detainees.

Their obvious lack of comprehension depressed Craig even more.

As they trudged back up the hill to their quarters, a thought struck Craig and he turned to Peter Fungabera.

"All the men here are Matabele, aren't they?"

"That is true," Peter nodded. "We keep the tribes segregated it reduces friction." "Are there any Shana detainees?" Craig insisted.

oh, yes, Peter assured him. "The camps for them are up in the eastern highlands exactly the same conditions-" At sunset the generator powering the radio was started and twenty minutes later Peter Fungabera came down to the dugout where Craig was re-reading and correcting his writing of the previous night.

"There is a message for you, Craig, relayed by Morgan Oxford at the American Embassy." Craig jumped to his feet eagerly. He had arranged for Henry Pickering's reply to be passed on to him as soon as it was received. He took the sheet of notepaper on which Peter had jotted the radio transmission, and read; "For Mellow. Stop. My personal enthusiasm for your project not shared by others. Stop. Ashe Levy unwilling to advance or guarantee. Stop. Loans Committee here requires substantial additional collateral before funding. Stop. Regrets and best wishes. Henry." Craig read the message once fast and then again very slowly.

"None of my business," Peter Fungabera murmured, "but I presume this concerns your plans for the place you call Zambezi Waters?" "That's right and it puts the kibosh on those, I'm afraid," Craig told him bitterly.

"Henry?"

"A friend, a banker perhaps I relied on him too much." "Yes," Peter Fungabera said thoughtfully, "it looks that way, doesn't it?" Even though he had missed the previous night, Craig had difficulty sleeping. His mat was iron-hard and the hellish chorus of the hyena pack in the forest echoed his sombre mood.