Wilbur Smith - C07 A Time To Die

by C07 A Time To Die(Lit)

  That night the tea company's twin-engine Beechcraft made a midnight crossing of Lake Cabora Bossa, a perilous journey the pilot had undertaken many times before, and a single red flare guided him to the secret bush strip General China's men had hacked out of the wilderness just west of the Gorongosa Mountains.

  A double line of Renamo guerrillas, each holding aloft a burning torch of paraffin-soaked rags, provided a flare path. The Beechcraft pilot landed smoothly and without shutting down his engines deposited his passengers, turned and taxied back to the end of the rough airstrip, then roared away, climbed clear, and turned northward again into the night.

  There had been a time not long ago when such a complicated route for bringing in men and materiel would not have been necessary. Only a year previously China s request would have been radioed southward, rather than north, and the delivery vehicle, instead of a small private aircraft, would have been a Puma helicopter with South African air force markings.

  In those days when the Marxist President of Frehmo, Samara Machel, had hosted the guerrillas of the African National Congress and allowed them to use Mozambique as a staging post for their limpet mine and car bomb terrorist attacks on the civilian population of South Africa, the South Africans had retaliated by giving their full support to the Rename, forces that were attempting to topple Machel's Frefirno government.

  Then, to the dismay of the Rcnamo command, Samara Machel and P. W. Botha, the South African president, had signed an accord at the little town of Nkomati on the border between their two countries, the direct result of which had been a drastic reduction of South African aid to Renarno in exchange for the expulsion of the ANC terror squads from Mozambique.

  With a wink and a nudge both sides had cheated on the agreement. Machel had closed The ANC offices in Maputo but allowed them to continue their terror campaign without official Frelimo support or approval, and the South Africans had cut back on their support of Renamo, but still the Pumas made their clandestine cross- rder flights.

  The deck had been reshuffled when Samara Machel died in the wreck of his personal aircraft, an antiquated Tupelov which had been retired from airline service in the USSR and magnanimously given to Machel by his Russian allies. The Tupelov's instrumentation was decrepit, and oil the night of the crash both of the Russian pilots had been so full 631f vodka that they had neglected to file a flight plan. They were almost two hundred kilometers off course when they crashed on the South African border, actually striking on the Mozambique side and then by some improbable chance bouncing and sliding across into South Africa.

  Despite the evidence of the flight recorder, the Tupelov's "black box," which contained a recording of the two Russian pilots" repeated requests for more vodka from the air hostess and an animated and anatomically precise discussion of exactly what they were going to do to her after they landed, the Russians and the Frelimo government insisted that the South Africans had lured Machel to his death. The Nkomati Accord had died with Machel on that remote African hillside, and the Pumas had resumed their cross-border flights, ferrying supplies to the Renamo guerrillas.

  Then gradually news began to filter out of the Mozambican wilderness. At first a few dedicated missionaries emerged from the ush to describe the appalling destruction, the misery and starvation, and the atrocities that were being perpetrated by the ravaging Renamo, guerrilla armies over an area the size of France.

  A few intrepid journalists managed to get into the battle zone, and one or two of them survived and emerged to relate their accounts of the holocaust that was raging. Some of their reports put the estimate of civilian casualties as high as half a million dead of starvation, disease, and genocide.

  Refugees, tens of thousands of them, began to stream across the border into South Africa. Terrified, starving, riddled with disease, they told their harrowing stories. The South Africans realized to their horror that they had been nourishing a monster in Renanio.

  At the same time, the more moderate Joaquim Chissano, who had replaced Samara Machel as president of the government of Mozambique and Frelimo, began making placatory overtures to South Africa. The two presidents met, and the Nkomati Accord was hurriedly revived, this time with honest intent. Overnight the flow of South African aid to Renarno was cut off.

  This had all taken place only months before, and General China and his fellow Renamo commanders were angry, desperate men, their stores of food and weapons dwindling rapidly without prospect of resupply. Soon they would be reduced to surviving on plunder and loot, foraging and scavenging from a countryside already ravaged by twelve years of guerrilla warfare. It was inevitable that they would turn their fury on what remained of the civilian population and on any foreigner they could capture. The world was against them, and they were against the world.

  Sitting up in the high seat of the Hind, General China let an this run through his mind. From here he seemed to have an overview of the chaos and confusion. The entire country was in a state of flux, and as always in a situation such as this, there was opportunity for the cunning and the ruthless to seize upon.

  Of the Renanio field commanders, General China had proved himself over the years to be the most resourceful. With each victory and success he had established his power more firmly. His army was the most powerful of the three Renamo divisions. The external central committee was nominally the high command of the resistance movement, but paradoxically General China's pres J1i tige and influence were becoming progressively greater with each setback the movement suffered. More and more the central committee acceded to his wishes. The alacrity with which they had reacted to his request for a Portuguese pilot and engineers demonstrated. this most aptly. Of course, the destruction of the Russian squadron and the capture of the Hind had enormously inflated his prestige and importance, while possession of the extraordinary vehicle in which he now soared over the wilderness placed him in a unique position of power.

  General China smiled contentedly and spoke into the microphone of his hard helmet. "Pilot, can you see the village yet?"

  "Not yet, General. I estimate four minutes" more flying time."

  The Portuguese pilot was in his early thirties, young enough still to have dash and fire but old enough to have accumulated experience and discretion. He was handsome in a swarthy olive-skinned fashion, with a drooping gunslinger mustache and the dark, bright eyes of a predatory bird. From the first he had handled the controls of the Hind with precision and confidence, and his skill had increased with each hour flown as he came to terms with every nuance of the Hind's flying characteristics.

  The two Portuguese engineers had taken command of the Russian ground crew and supervised every move they made. One of the Hind's principal advantages was that it could be serviced and maintained in all conditions without the need for sophisticated equipment, and the chief engineer assured General China that the spares and tools he had captured at the laager were sufficient to keep the Hind airborne indefinitely The only shortages were of missiles for the Swatter system and assault rockets, but this was amply compensated for by almost a million rounds of 12.7-mm cannon shells they had captured in the laager.

  It had taken 150 porters to carry the munitions away, while another 500 porters had each carried a twenty-five-liter drum of avgas.

  Renamo used mainly women porters, trained since girlhood to carry weights on their cads That quantity of avgas was sufficient to keep the Hind flying for almost two hundred hours, and by then there would be a good chance of capturing a Frelimo fuel tanker, either on the railway line or on one of the roads nearer the coast that were still open to traffic.

  However, General China's main concern at that moment was to keep the rendezvous he had arranged by radio with General Tippoo Tip, the commander of Renamo's southern division-General, I have spotted the village," the pilot said in China's headphones.

  "All, yes, I see it," China answered. "Turn toward it, please."

  As the Hind approached, Sean shifted his perch, creeping behind a densely leafed bough
and flattening himself against the branch. Although he knew it was dangerous to turn his face toward the sky, he relied on the bush Of his beard and his deep tan to prevent the sun reflecting off his face, and he watched the helicopter avidly.

  He realized that their ultimate survival depended on being able to elude this monster, and he studied its shape to estimate the view the pilot and his gunner commanded from behind their canopies.

  It might be vital for Sean to know the blind spots of the flight engineer and the field of fire of his weapons.

  He saw the cannon in the remote turret below the nose abruptly traverse left and right, almost as though the gunner were demonstrating them for him. Sean could not know that General China was merely gloating over his own power and playing with the weapon controls, but the movement illustrated the Gatling cannon s restricted field of fire.

  The barrel could swing through an arc Of Only thirty degrees from lock to lock; beyond that the pilot was obliged to swivel the entire aircraft on its axis in order to bring the cannon to bear.

  The Hind was very close now. Sean could make out every minute detail of the hull, from the crimson "Excellent Crew" arrow on the nose to the rows of rivet heads that stitched the titanium armor sheets. He looked for some weakness, some flaw in the massive armor, but in the few seconds before she was overhead, he saw she was impregnable, except for the air intakes to the turbo engines, like a pair of hooded eyes above the upper pilot's canopy. The intakes were screened by debris suppressors, bossed light metal discs that inhibited the dust and debris thrown up by the downdraft of the rotors when the helicopter hovered close to the ground from being sucked into the turbines. However, the debris suppressors were not so substantial as to prevent the Stinger missiles flying clearly into the intakes, and Sean saw that there was a gap around the edge of the metal boss wide enough for a man to stick his head through. At the correct angle and from very close range an expert marksman might just be able to aim a burst of machine-gun fire through that gap so as to damage the turbine vanes. Sean knew that even a chip from one of those vanes would unbalance the turbine and set up such vibrations in the engine that it would fly to pieces within seconds.

  "A hell of a shot, and a hell of a lot of luck," Sean muttered, L staring upward through slitted eyes. Suddenly the ugh t reflected from the armored glass canopy altered so that he could see into the interior of the cockpit.

  He recognized General China, despite the hard plastic flying helmet and the mirrored aviator glasses shielding his eyes, and hatred flushed fiercely through his guts. Here was the man on whom he could firmly set the blame for Job's death and all their other woes and hardships.

  "I want you," Sean muttered. "God, how badly I want you."

  China seemed to sense the force of his hatred, for he turned his head slightly and looked down directly at Sean's perch, staring at him evenly through the mirrored lens of his sunglasses. Sean shrank down upon the branch.

  Abruptly the Hind banked away, exposing its blotched gray belly. The downdraft lashed the treetop, shaking the branches and throwing Sean about in the hurricane of disrupted air. He realized that it had been an illusion and that China had not spotted him in his treetop bower.

  He watched the huge machine skitter away on its new heading.

  A few miles distant the engine beat changed, the sound of the rotors whined in finer pitch, and the Hind hovered briefly above the forest and then sank from view.

  Sean clambered down the tree. Matatu had doused the small cooking fire at the first sound of the Hind's approach, but the canteen of maize porridge had already cooked through.

  "We'll eat on the march," Sean ordered.

  Claudia groaned softly, but pulled herself to her feet. Every muscle in her legs and back ached with fatigue.

  "Sorry, beautiful." Sean put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her. "China landed only a mile or two east of here, probably at Dombe.

  We can be pretty sure he has troops there.

  We've got to move on."

  They ate the last handfuls of hot sticky salted maize porridge on the march and washed it down with water from the bottles that tasted of mud and algae. "From now on, we are living off the land," Sean told her. "And China is breathing down our necks."

  The Hind hovered a hundred feet above the road that ran through the village of Dombe.

  It was the only road, and the village was merely a collection of twenty or so small buildings that had long been abandoned. The glass was broken out of the window frames, and the whitewashed plaster had fallen from the adobe walls in leprous patches. Termites had devoured the roof timbers so that the corroded corrugated sheeting sagged from the roof. The buildings fronting onto the road had all once been small general dealers" stores, the ubiquitous dukes of Africa owned by Hindu traders. One faded sign hung at a drunken angle. PAT EL & PAT EL it proclaimed between the crimson trademarks of the Coca-Cola company.

  The road itself was dirt-surfaced and littered with rubbish and debris.

  Weeds grew rankly in the unused ruts.

  "Take us down," China ordered, and the helicopter sank toward the roadway, lifting a whirlwind thick with dead leaves, scraps of paper, discarded plastic bags, and other rubbish.

  There were men on the veranda of Patel & Patel and armed men among the derelict buildings, fifty or more, all heavily armed and dressed in an assortment of camouflage, military, and civilian clothing, the eclectic uniform of the African guerrilla.

  The Hind settled to the rutted road and the pilot throttled back the turbos; the rotors slowed and the engine noise sank to a low whistle. General China opened the armored canopy, jumped lightly to the ground, and turned to face the group of men on the stoep of the general dealer's store.

  "Tippoo Tip," he said, and opened his arms wide in fraternal greeting. "How good to see you again." He raised his voice above the engine whistle.

  General Tippoo Tip came down the steps to meet him, his thick arms held wide as a crucifix. They embraced with the utmost insincerity of two fierce rivals who knew that one day they might have to kill each other.

  "My old friend," said China, holding him at arm's length and smiling warmly and lovingly upon him.

  Tippoo Tip was not his real name; he had taken it as his norn de guerre from one of the most notorious of the old Arab slave traders and ivory runners of the previous century. However, the name and its associations suited him to perfection, China thought as he looked down upon him. Here stood a rogue and brigand cast in the classic mold, a man to admire and to treat with great caution.

  He was short, the top of his head on a level with China's chin, but everything else about him was massive. His chest was like that of a bull gorilla and his thick arms hung in similar fashion, so that his knuckles were at the level of his knees. His head was like one of those gigantic Rhodesian granite boulders balanced on the pinnacle of a rocky kopJe. He had shaved his pate, but his beard was a thick mattress of woolly black curls that hung onto his chest. The forehead and nose above it were broad and his lips full and fleshy.

  He wore a gaily colored strip of cotton cloth bound around his forehead, while a vest of tanned kudu hide was open down the front to expose his naked chest. His chest was covered with black peppercorns of wool, and the naked arms protruding from the short sleeves were thick and roped with muscle.

  He smiled back at China and his teeth were brilliant as mother of-pearl, in contrast to the smoky yellow whites of his eyes, which were laced with a network of veins. your presence has perfumed my day with the scent of mimosa blossoms" he said in Shangane, but his eyes slid Past China's face and returned to the huge helicopter from which he had disembarked. Tippoo Tip's envy was so unconcealed that China felt he could smell and taste it like burning sulfur in the air.

  That machine had altered the fine trim and balance of the relationship between these two most powerful of all the Renamo warlords. Tippoo Tip could not keep his eyes off it. it was obvious he wanted to examine it more closely, but China took his arm an
d led him back toward the shade of the veranda. The pilot had not killed the engines, and as China and his host stepped out of the circle of ors he gunned the Hind and pulled on his collective. The the rot great machine rose and turned away.

  Tippoo Tip twisted out of China's grip and shaded his eyes to watch it. His smoky yellow eyes were as hungry as though he were watching a beautiful naked woman performing an obscene act.

  China let him yearn after it until it passed out of sight. He had sent the Hind away purposely because he knew and understood Tippoo Tip.

  He knew that if the machine had remained, the temptation might have become too strong for him to resist, and treachery was as natural to both of them as breathing was to other men. The Hind was China's joker, his wild card.

  Tippoo Tip shook himself and laughed for no apparent reason.

  "They told me you had destroyed the squadron and captured one ong men and he is of those, and I said, "China is a lion am MY brother." Come, my brother," Cjiina agreed. "It is hot in the sun."