by Wilbur Smith
‘Schnell! Schnell! He’ll get away,’ gasped Fleischer and the thick stems wrapped his ankles so that he fell headlong in the mud. Two of his Askari dragged him up and they staggered on until the thicket of tall grass ended, and they stood on the elbow of the river bend with a clear view a thousand yards downstream.
Disturbed by the gun-fire, the birds were up, milling in confused flight above the reed-beds. Their alarm cries blended into a harsh chorus that spoiled the peace of the brooding dawn. They were the only living things in sight. From bank to far bank, the curved expanse of water was broken only by a few floating islands of papyrus grass; rafts of matted vegetation cut loose by the current and floating unhurriedly down towards the sea.
Panting, Herman Fleischer shook off the supporting hands of his two Askari and searched desperately for a glimpse of Flynn’s bobbing head. ‘Where did he go?’ His fingers trembled as he fitted a new clip of ammunition into the Luger. ‘Where did he go?’ he demanded again, but none of his Askari drew attention to himself by venturing a reply.
‘He must be on this side!’ The Rufiji was half a mile wide here, Flynn could not have crossed it in the few minutes since they had last seen him. ‘Search the bank!’ Fleischer ordered. ‘Find him!’
With relief the sergeant of his Askari turned on his men, quickly splitting them into two parties and sending them up and downstream to scour the water’s edge.
Slowly Fleischer returned the pistol to its holster and fastened the flap, then he took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped at his face and neck.
‘Come on!’ he snapped at his sergeant, and set off back towards the camp.
When he reached it, his men had already set out the folding table and chair. New life had been stirred into Flynn’s camp-fire, and the Askari cook was preparing breakfast.
Sitting at the table with the front of his tunic open, spooning up oatmeal porridge and wild honey, Fleischer was soothed into a better humour by the food, and by the thorough manner in which the execution of the four captives was conducted.
When the last of them had stopped twitching and kicking and hung quietly with his comrades in the monkey-bean tree, Herman wiped up the bacon grease in his plate with a hunk of black bread and popped it into his mouth. The cook removed the plate and replaced it with a mug of steaming coffee at the exact moment when the two parties of searchers straggled into the clearing to report that a few drops of blood at the water’s edge was the only sign they had found of Flynn O’Flynn.
‘Ja,’ Herman nodded, ‘the crocodiles have eaten him.’ He sipped appreciatively at his coffee mug before he gave his next orders. ‘Sergeant, take this up to the launch.’ He pointed at the stack of ivory on the edge of the clearing. ‘Then we will go down to the Island of the Dogs and find this other white man with his English flag.’
– 8 –
There was only the entry wound, a dark red hole from which watery blood still oozed slowly. Flynn could have thrust his thumb into it but instead he groped gently around the back of his leg and located the lump in his flesh where the spent slug had come to rest just below the skin.
‘God damn it, God damn it to hell,’ he whispered in pain, and in anger, at the unlikely chance which had deflected the ricochet downwards to where he had stood below the bank, deflecting it with just sufficient velocity to lodge the bullet in his thigh instead of delivering a clean in-and-out wound.
Slowly he straightened his leg, testing it for broken bone. At the movement, the matt of drifting papyrus on which he lay rocked slightly.
‘Might have touched the bone, but it’s still in one piece,’ he grunted with relief, and felt the first giddy swing of weakness in his head. In his ears was the faint rushing sound of a waterfall heard far off. ‘Lost a bit of the old juice,’ and from the wound a fresh trickle of bright blood broke and mingled with the water-drops to snake down his leg and drip into the dry matted papyrus. ‘Got to stop that,’ he whispered.
He was naked, his body still wet from the river. No belt or cloth to use as a tourniquet but he must staunch the bleeding. His fingers clumsy with the weakness of the wound, he tore a bunch of the long sword blade leaves from the reeds around him and began twisting them into a rope. Binding it around his leg above the wound, he pulled it tight and knotted it. The dribble of blood slowed and almost stopped before Flynn sank back and closed his eyes.
Beneath him the island swung and undulated with the eddy of the current and the wavelets pushed up by the rising morning wind. It was a soothing motion, and he was tired – terribly, achingly, tired. He slept.
The pain and the cessation of motion woke him at last. The pain was a dull persistent throb, a pulse that beat through his leg and groin and his lower belly. Groggily he pulled himself on to his elbows and looked down on his own body. The leg was swollen, bluish-looking from the constriction of the grass rope. He stared at it dully, without comprehension, for a full minute before memory flooded back.
‘Gangrene!’ he spoke aloud, and tore at the knot. The rope fell away and he gasped at the agony of new blood flowing into the leg, clenching his fists and grinding his teeth against it. The pain slowed and settled into a steady beat, and he breathed again, wheezy as a man with asthma.
Then the change of his circumstances came through to the conscious level of his mind and he peered around shortsightedly. The river had carried him down into the mangrove swamps again, down into the maze of little islands and water-ways of the delta. His raft of papyrus had been washed in and stranded against a mud bank by the falling tide. The mud stank of rotting vegetation and sulphur. Near him a gathering of big green river crabs were clicking and bubbling over the body of a dead fish, their little eye-stalks raised in perpetual surprise. At Flynn’s movement they sidled away towards the water with their red-tipped claws raised defensively.
Water! Instantly Flynn was aware of the gummy saliva that glued his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Reddened by the harsh sunlight, heated by the first fever of his wound, his body was a furnace that craved moisture.
Flynn moved and instantly cried out in pain. His leg had stiffened while he slept. It was now a heavy anchor, shackling him helplessly to the papyrus raft. He tried again, easing himself backwards on his hands and his buttocks, dragging the leg after him. Each breath was a sob in his dry throat, each movement a white-hot lance into his thigh. But he must drink, he had to drink. Inch by inch, he worked his way to the edge of the raft and slid from it on to the mud bank.
The water had receded with the tide, and he was still fifty paces from the edge. With the motion of a man swimming on his back, he moved across the slimy evil-smelling mud, and his leg slithered after him. It was beginning to bleed again, not copiously but a bright winedrop at a time.
He reached the water at last, and rolled onto his side with the bad leg uppermost in an attempt to keep the wound out of the mud. On one elbow he buried his face in the water, drinking greedily. The water was warm, tainted with sea salt, and musky with rotted mangroves so it tasted like animal urine. But he gulped it noisily with his mouth and his nostrils and his eyes below the surface. At last he must breathe, and he lifted his head, panting for breath, coughing so the water shot up his throat, out through his nose and dimmed his vision with tears. Gradually his breathing steadied and his eyes cleared. Before he bowed his head to drink again, he glanced out across the channel and saw it coming.
It was on the surface, still a hundred yards away but swimming fast, driving towards him with the great tail churning the water. A big one – at least fifteen feet of it – showing like the rough bark of a pine log, leaving a wide wake across the surface as it came.
And Flynn screamed, just once, but shrill and high and achingly clear. Forgetting the wound in his panic, he tried to get to his feet, pushing himself up with his hands – but the leg pinned him. He screamed again, in pain and in fear.
Belly down, he wriggled in frantic haste from the shallow water back onto the mud bank, dragging himself across the glutinous s
lime, clawing and threshing towards the papyrus raft where it lay stranded among the mangrove roots fifty yards away. Expecting each moment to hear the slithering rush of the huge reptile across the mud behind him, he reached the first of the mangroves and rolled on his side, looking back, coated with black mud, his face working in his terror, and the sound of it spilling in an incoherent babble through his lips.
The crocodile was at the edge of the mud bank, still in the river. Only its head showed above the surface and the little piggy bright eyes watched him unwinkingly, each set on its knot of horny scale.
Desperately Flynn looked about him. The mud bank was a tiny island with this grove of a dozen mangroves set in the centre of it. The trunks of the mangroves were twice as thick as a man’s chest, but without branches for the first ten feet of their height; smooth bark slimy with mud and encrusted with little colonies of fresh-water mussels. Unwounded Flynn would not have been able to climb any of them – with his leg those branches above him were doubly inaccessible.
Wildly now he searched for a weapon – anything, no matter how puny – to defend himself. But there was nothing. Not a branch of driftwood, not a rock – only the thick black sheet of mud around him.
He looked back at the crocodile. It had not moved. His first feeble hope that it might not come out onto the mud bank withered almost before it was born. It would come. Cowardly, loathsome creature it was – but in time it would gather its courage. It had smelled his blood; it knew him to be wounded, helpless. It would come.
Painfully Flynn leaned his back against the roots of mangrove, and his terror settled down to a steady, pulsing fear – as steady as the pain in his leg. During the frantic flight across the bank, stiff mud had plugged the bullet hole and stopped the bleeding. But it does not matter now, Flynn thought, nothing matters. Only the creature out there, waiting while its appetite overcomes its timidity, swamps its reluctance to leave its natural element. It might take five minutes, or half a day – but, inevitably, it will come.
There was a tiny ripple around its snout, the first sign of its movement, and the long scaly head inched in towards the edge. Flynn stiffened.
The back showed, its scales like the patterned teeth of a file, and beyond it, the tail with the coxcomb double crest. Cautiously, on its short bowed legs, it waddled through the shallows. Wet and shiny, as broad across the back as a percheron stallion, more than a ton of cold, armoured flesh, it emerged from the water. Sinking elbow-deep into the soft mud, so its belly left a slide mark behind it. Grinning savagely, but with the jagged, irregular teeth lying yellow and long on its lips, and the small eyes watching him.
It came so slowly that Flynn lay passively against the tree, mesmerized by the deliberate waddling approach.
When it was half-way across the bank, it stopped – crouching, grinning – and he smelled it. The heavy odour of stale fish and musk on the warm air.
‘Get away!’ Flynn yelled at it, and it stood unmoving, unblinking. ‘Get away!’ He snatched up a handful of mud and hurled it. It crouched a little lower on its stubby legs and the fat crested tail stiffened, arching slightly.
Sobbing now, Flynn threw another handful of mud. The long grinning jaws opened an inch, then shut again. He heard the click as its teeth met, and it charged. Incredibly fast through the mud, grinning still, it slithered towards him.
This time Flynn’s voice was a lunatic babble of horror and he writhed helplessly against the mangrove roots.
The deep booming note of the gun seemed not part of reality, but the crocodile reared up on its tail, drowning the echoes of the shot with its own hissing bellow, and above the next boom of the gun, Flynn heard the bullet strike the scaly body with a thump.
Mud sprayed as the reptile rolled in convulsions, and then, lifting itself high on its legs, it lumbered in ungainly flight towards the water. Again and again the heavy rifle fired, but the crocodile never faltered in its rush, and the surface of the water exploded like blown glass as it launched itself from the bank and was gone in the spreading ripples.
Standing in the bows of the canoe with the smoking rifle in his hands, while the paddlers drove in towards the bank, Sebastian Oldsmith shouted anxiously, ‘Flynn, Flynn – did it get you? Are you all right?’
Flynn’s reply was a croak. ‘Bassie. Oh, Bassie boy, for the first time in my life I’m real pleased to see you,’ and he sagged only half conscious against the mangrove roots.
– 9 –
The sun burned down on the dhow where it lay at anchor off the Island of the Dogs, yet a steady breeze came down the narrow waterway between the mangroves and plucked at the furled sail on the boom.
With a rope sling under his armpits, they lifted Flynn from the canoe and swung him, legs dangling, over the bulwark. Sebastian was ready to receive him and lower him gently to the deck.
‘Get that goddamn sail up, and let’s get the hell out of the river,’ gasped Flynn.
‘I must tend to your leg.’
‘That can wait. We’ve got to get out into the open sea. The Germans have got a steam launch. They’ll be looking for us. We can expect them to drop in on us at any minute.’
‘They can’t touch us – we’re under the protection of the flag,’ Sebastian protested.
‘Listen, you stupid, bloody limey,’ Flynn’s voice was a squawk of pain and impatience. ‘That murdering Hun will give us a rope dance with or without the flag. Don’t argue, get that sail up!’
They laid him on a blanket in the shadow of the high poop before Sebastian hurried forward to release the Arab crew from the hold. They came up shiny with sweat and blinking in the dazzle of the sun. It took perhaps fifteen seconds for Mohammed to explain to them the urgency of the situation, and this invoked a few seconds of paralysed horror before they scattered to their stations. Four of them were hauling ineffectively at the anchor rope, but the great lump of coral was buried in the gluey mud of the bottom. Sebastian pushed them aside impatiently and with one knife stroke, severed the rope.
The crew, with the enthusiastic assistance of Flynn’s bearers and gun-boys, ran up the faded and patched old sail. The wind caught it and bellied it. The deck canted slightly and two Arabs ran back to the tiller. From under the bows came the faint giggle of water, and from the stern spread a wide oily wake. With a cluster of the Arabs and bearers calling directions in the bows to the steersman at the rudder, the ancient dhow pointed downstream and ambled towards the sea.
When Sebastian went back to Flynn, he found old Mohammed squatting anxiously beside him and watching, as Flynn drank from the square bottle. Already a quarter of its contents had disappeared.
Flynn lowered the gin bottle, and breathed heavily through his mouth. ‘Tastes like honey,’ he gasped.
‘Let’s look at that leg.’ Sebastian stooped over Flynn’s naked, mud-besmeared body. ‘My God, what a mess! Mohammed, get a basin of water and try and find some clean cloth.’
– 10 –
With the coming of evening, the breeze gathered strength, kicking up a chop on the widening water-ways of the delta. All afternoon the little dhow had butted against the run of the tide, but now began the ebb and it helped push her down towards the sea.
‘With any luck we’ll reach the mouth before sunset.’ Sebastian was sitting beside Flynn’s blanket-wrapped form under the poop. Flynn grunted. He was weak with pain, and groggy with gin. ‘If we don’t, we’ll have to moor somewhere for the night. Can’t risk the channel in the dark.’ He received no reply from Flynn and himself fell silent.
Except for the gurgle of the bow-wave and the singsong chant of the pilot, a lazy silence blanketed the dhow. Most of the crew and the bearers were strewn in sleep about the deck, although two of them worked quietly over the open galley as they prepared the evening meal.
The heavy miasma of the swamps blended poorly with the stench of the bilges and the cargo of green ivory in the holds. It seemed to act as a drug, increasing Sebastian’s fatigue. His head sagged forward on his chest and his hands
slipped from the rifle in his lap. He slept.
The magpie chatter of the crew, and Mohammed’s urgent hands on his shoulder, shook him awake. He came to his feet and gazed blearily around him. ‘What is it? What is the trouble, Mohammed?
For answer, Mohammed shouted the crew into silence, and turned back to Sebastian. ‘Listen, master.’
Sebastian shook the remnants of sleep from his head, then cocked it slightly. ‘I can’t hear …’ He stopped, an expression of uncertainty on his face.
Very faintly in the still of the evening he heard it, a faint huffing rhythm, as though a train passed in the distance. ‘Yes,’ he said, still uncertain. ‘What is it?’
‘The toot-toot boat, she comes.’
Sebastian stared at him without comprehension.
‘The Allemand. The Germans.’ Mohammed’s hands fluttered with agitation. ‘They follow us. They chase. They catch. They …’ He clutched his own throat with both hands and rolled his eyes. His tongue protruded from the corner of his mouth.
Flynn’s entire retinue was gathered in a mob around Sebastian, and at Mohammed’s graphic little charade, they burst once more into a frightened chorus. Every eye was on Sebastian, waiting for his lead, and he felt confused, uncertain. Instinctively he turned to Flynn. Flynn lay on his back, his mouth open, snoring. Quickly Sebastian knelt beside him. ‘Flynn! Flynn!’ Flynn opened his eyes but they were focused beyond Sebastian’s face. ‘The Germans are coming.’
‘The Campbells are coming. Hurrah! Hurrah!’ muttered Flynn and closed his eyes again. His usually red face was flushed hot-scarlet with fever.
‘What must I do?’ pleaded Sebastian.
‘Drink it!’ advised Flynn. ‘Never hesitate. Drink it!’ his eyes still closed, his voice slurred.
‘Please, Flynn. Please tell me.’
‘Tell you?’ muttered Flynn in delirium. ‘Sure! Have you heard the one about the camel and the missionary?’