Wilbur Smith - C07 A Time To Die

by C07 A Time To Die(Lit)

  "There were stools rca4 for them on the veranda in the shade, and two of Tippoo Tip's young women brought them clay pots of beer, thick as gruel' and refreshingly tart. The girls were both in their teens, pretty little things with eyes like fawns. TipPoo Tip liked women and always surrounded himself with them. It was one of his weaknesses, China thought, and he smiled a cold, superior smile. He himself could take a boy or a girl with equal enjoyment, but only as a brief diversion and not as a necessity of life, and the women engaged his attention for only a fleeting moment before he turned back to his host.

  The bodyguards had retired out of earshot, and Tippoo Tip waved the girls away.

  "And you, my brother?" China asked. "How goes the battle? I hear that you have taken the head of Frelimo and pushed it down between their knees to give them a close-up view of their own fundament. Is that true?"

  It was not true, of course. As commander of the southern division of Renamo, Tippoo Tip was closer to the capital and port of Maputo, the center of government power. He was therefore more compromised by the withdrawal of South African military assistance, and he stood in the front line of Frelimo counterattacks and reprisals. China knew that in the last few months Tippoo Tip had experienced heavy reversals and lost many men and much territory in the south, but now Tippoo Tip chuckled and nodded.

  "We have eaten everything that Frelimo has sent against us.

  Swallowed them without a belch or a fart."

  They sparred lightly over the beer pots, smiling and laughing but watching each other like lions over a kill, on guard and ready at any instant to pounce or defend themselves, until at last China murmured, "I am pleased to hear that all goes so well with you. I had come to see if my Hind gunship could assist you against Frelimo." He spread his hands in a deprecating gesture. "But I see you have no need of help from me."

  It was a Machiavellian ploy, and China watched as the point slid through Tippoo Tip's guard and his expression changed.

  China knew it would have been a serious tactical error to ask a man like this for assistance. Tippoo Tip had the nose of a hyena for sineffing out weakness. Instead China had offered the bait of the Hind dangled it for an instant before his eyes, and then with craft; sleight of hand made it disappear again.

  Tippoo blinked, and behind his grin he searched for a response.

  He also hated to admit failure or weakness to one he knew would exploit it ruthlessly, but still he craved and lusted after that fabulous machine.

  "The help of a brother is always welcome," he contradicted pleasantly, "especially a brother who rides the skies in his own hen shaw " He went on swiftly, "Perhaps there is some small service that I can offer in return for your help?"

  "Crafty rogue," China thought, admiring his style. "He knows I haven't come here out of compassion. He knows I want something." And both of them retreated, in the African manner, behind another screen of pleasantries and trivialities, coming back only circuitously and almost flirtatiously to the main subject.

  "I laid a trap for Frelimo," Tippoo Tip boasted. "I pulled back from the Save forests." In truth he had been driven out of those infinitely valuable indigenous forests only after hard fighting, in the face of the most determined Frelimo attacks since the beginning of the long campaign.

  "That was cunning of you," China agreed, letting the razor edge of sarcasm flash in his tone. "What a trap to leave the forests to Frehmo and how stupid of them to fall for it."

  The Save forests were a treasure house-seventy-foot-tall lead woods also known as ivory tusk trees for their dense, finely grained timber; magnificent Rhodesian mahogany, which yielded logs five feet in diameter; and the most rare and valuable of all African trees, the tamboti, or African sandalwood, with its richly figured and scented timber.

  Probably nowhere on the continent was there such a concentration of these precious hardwoods. They constituted the last natural resource of this ravaged land. First the great elephant herds had been wiped out, then the rhinoceros and the buffalo had been machine-gunned from the air. The Soviets and North Koreans had plundered the vast natural prawn beds and fisheries of the rich warm Mozambican current along the eastern coast, while foreign adventurers with Frefimo licenses and approval had decimated the crocodile population of Lake Cabora Bossa. Only the forests still remained intact.

  Even more so than the other newly independent African states, the government of Mozambique was desperately short of foreign exchange. For over a decade they had been fighting a drawn-out guerrilla war that had bled their economy white. Those forests were the last assets they had to sell for hard cash.

  "They have moved in with labor battalions, twenty, perhaps thirty thousand slaves," Tippoo Tip told China.

  I'So many?" China asked with interest. "Where did they find them?"

  They have swept the last peasants off the land. They have raided the refugee camps, gathered the vagrants and the unemployed from the slumsAand streets of Maputo. They call it the "Democratic People'# Full Employment Programme," and the men and women work, from dawn to sundown for ten Frelimo escudos a day, and the single meal they are fed costs them fifteen Frelimo escudos." Tippoo Tip threw back his head and laughed, more in admiration than amusement. "Sometimes Frelimo is not so stupid," he admitted. "The labor battalions pay five escudos a day for the privilege of cutting the government timber, a most admirable arrangement"

  "And you have allowed Frelimo to do this?" China asked. It was not the plight of the labor battalions that concerned him. A single sixty-foot log of tamboti was valued at approximately fifty thousand U.S. dollars, and the forests extended for hundreds of thousands of acres.

  "Of course I allow them to do this," Tippoo Tip agreed. "They cannot move the timber out until the roads and the railway are reconstructed, and until then they are piling the logs in dumps along the old line of rail. My scouts count each log that is added to the stockpile." Tippoo Tip took a grubby plastic-covered notebook from the pocket of his kudu-skin vest and showed China the down in blue ballpoint pen on the back figures he had neatly noted page China kept his face impassive as he read the total, but his eyes glittered behind the gold-rimmed sunglasses. That sum of dollars was sufficient to finance the war chests of both armies for a further five years, enough to buy the alliance of nations or to elevate a warlord to the estate of president-for-life over the entire small nation.

  "The time is almost ready for me to return to the forests of Save and collect the harvest Frelimo has gathered in, ready for me."

  "How would you export this harvest? A log of tamboti weighs a hundred tons. Who would buy it from you?"

  Tippoo Tip clapped his hands and shouted to one of his aides, who was squatting in the shade of the building across the street.

  The guerrilla jumped up and hurried to where the two generals sat.

  He knelt to unroll a field map on the cracked concrete floor of the veranda between their stools and placed lumps of broken concrete on the corners of the map to hold it flat. Tippoo Tip and China leaned forward to study it.

  "Here are the forests." Tippoo Tip traced out the boundaries of the vast area between the Save and Limpopo rivers, directly south of their own position. "Frelfino have set up their timber yards here and here and here."

  "Go on," China encouraged him.

  "The most southerly dump is only thirty miles from the north bank of the Limpopo, thirty miles from the South African border."

  "The South Africans have disavowed us-they have signed an accord with Chissano and Frelimo," China pointed out.

  "Treaties and accords are merely pieces of paper." Tippoo Tip waved them aside. "Here we are discussing half a billion U.S.

  dollars" worth of timber. I have already received assurances from our erstwhile allies in the south that if I can make good delivery, they will arrange transport to their border and payment in Lisbon or Zurich." He paused. "Frelimo has cut and stacked the goods for me. It remains only for me to collect and deliver."

  "And my new helicopter gunship will assi
st your collection?"

  China suggested.

  "Assist, yes, although I could achieve the same result with my own forces."

  "Perhaps, but a joint operation would be quicker and more certain," China told him. "We share the fighting and the spoils.

  With my hen shaw and reinforcements from the north it would take a week or less to drive the Frelimo forces out of the forests."

  Tippoo Tip pretended to consider the proposition, then nodded and said delicately, "Of course, I could reward you for your help, with a modest percentage of the value of the timber we capture."

  ""Modest" is not a word I greatly favor." China sighed. "I prefer the good socialist word "equal," let us say an equal share?"

  Tippoo Tip looked pained and threw up his hands in protest.

  "Be reasonable, my brother." For an hour longer they haggled and argued, slowly drawing closer to striking a bargain over the private distribution of a nation's wealth and the fate of tens of thousands of wretched individuals in the labor battalions.

  "My scouts tell me that the people in the logging camps are near the end of their usefulness," Tippoo Tip remarked at one point.

  "Frelimo has fed them on such rations that nearly all of them are sick and starving. They are dying by hundreds each day, and they are cutting half the timber that they were two months ago. Frelimo has run out of replacements for the logging gangs, and the whole business is running down. There is not much to be gained by waiting any longer. We should attack immediately, before the beginning of the rains."

  China looked at his digital wristwatch, a badge of rank as significant as the star on his epaulettes. The Hind would be returning to pick him up within half an hour; he must conclude the negotiations and strike the bargain. Within minutes they had agreed on the last details of the combined operation. Then China mentioned casually, "There is one other matter." His tone alerted Tippoo Tip to the importance of the next request. He leaned forward on the stool and placed his hands, as broad and powerful as the paws of a grizzly bear, on his knees. "I am chasing a small party of white fugitives. It seems that they are attempting to reach the South African border." Briefly China sketched out a description of Sean's party and ended, "I want you to alert all your forces between here and the Limpopo to be on the lookout for them."

  "A white man and a white woman, a young white woman. It sounds interesting, my brother," Tippoo Tip said thoughtfully.

  "The man is the most important. The woman is an American and may have some value as a hostage, but otherwise she means little."

  "To me a woman always has value," Tippoo Tip contradicted him. "Especially if she is white and young. I like a change of flesh occasionally. Let us make another bargain, my brother, once again equal shares. If I help you to capture these runaway whites, you P may have the man, but I will keep the woman. Is it agreed?"

  China thought for a moment, then nodded. "Very well, you may have her, but I want the man alive and uninjured."

  "That is exactly how I want the woman," Tippoo Tip chuckled.

  "So again we are in accord." He stretched out his right hand, and China took it. Both of them knew as they stared into each other's eyes that the gesture was meaningless, that their agreement would be honored only as long as it favored both of them, and that it could be broken without warning by either of them as circumstances altered.

  "Now tell me about this young white woman," Tippoo Tip invited. "Where was she last seen, and what are you doing to catch her?"

  China returned immediately to the map spread between them, and Tippoo Tip took note of the new animation in his expression and the eagerness in his voice as he explained how Sean and his party had avoided the trap he had set on the border and how the Shangane deserters had reported their position and their intention of heading southward.

  "We know their last definite position was here." China touched a spot just north of the railway line. "But that was three days ago.

  They could be anywhere along here." He spread his hand and drew it down across the map. "One of the party is badly wounded, so they have probably not reached this far south. I have patrols, almost three hundred men quartering the ground south of the railway looking for their spoor, but I want you to lay a net, like this, in front of them. How many men can you spare?"

  Tippoo Tip shrugged. "I have already placed three companies here along the Rio Save, keeping watch on the logging in the forests. There are five more companies spread across here, further north. If these whites are trying to reach the Limpopo border, they will have to pass right through my fines and the Frelimo, guards in the forest. I will radio my company commanders to be fully alert for them."

  General China's tone was sharp and authoritative. "They must cover every trail, every river crossing. They must stake out a stop line with no gaps in it, and my sweep line coming down from the north will drive them onto it. But warn your section commanders that the white man is a soldier and a good one. He commanded the Ballantyne Scouts at the end of the war."

  "Courtney," Tippoo Tip broke in. "I remember him well." He chuckled. "Of course; it was Courtney who led the raid on your base. No small wonder that you want him so badly. You and Colonel Courtney go back many years. You have a long memory, my brother."

  "Yes." China nodded and touched the lobe of his deaf ear.

  "Many years and a long memory, but then revenge is a dish that tastes best if it is eaten cold."

  They both looked up as the sound of the Hind's turbos whistled in from the north of the village. China checked his wristwatch. The pilot was precisely on time for the pickup, and China felt his confidence in the young Portuguese reinforced. He stood up from the stool.

  "We will maintain radio contact on 118.4 megahertz," he told Tippoo Tip. "Three schedules daily, Six A.M noon, and six in the evening." But Tippoo Tip was not looking at him-he was looking up longingly at the shape of the Hind as it hovered above the village like some mutated monster from a horror movie.

  General China settled himself into the flight engineer's seat and closed the armored-glass canopy. He raised his right thumb toward where Tippoo Tip stood on the veranda of the derelict duka and as he returned the salute, the Hind rose vertically above the village and swung its nose toward the north.

  "General, one of the patrols has been calling you urgently on the radio," the pilot said in China's earphones. "They are using the call sign "Twelve Red.""

  "Very well, please switch to the patrol frequency," China ordered, and watched the digital display on the panel of his radio transmitter.

  "Twelve Red, this is Banana Tree. Do you read?" he said into his helmet microphom'Twelve Red" was one of his crack scouting groups sweeping for spoor south of the railway line. Glancing at the map on his knee, China tried to guess the scouts" exact position. The section leader answered his call almost immediately.

  "Banana Tree, this is Twelve Red. We have a confirmed contact.

  China felt excitement and triumph rise in his chest, but he kept his voice level. "Report your position," he ordered, and as the section leader read out the coordinates China checked them on his field map and saw that the patrol was about thirty-five miles due north of the village.

  "Have you got that, pilot?" he asked. "Get there as fast as you can. " As the engine tone of the Hind rose sharply he called, "Twelve Red, give us a red flare when you have us in sight."

  Seven minutes later the flare arced up out of the forest almost directly under the Hind's nose, and the pilot slowed the machine and let it drift down toward the treetops.

  The Renamo patrol had cleared a landing zone with their machetes and the pilot maneuvered the Hind into it and let her settle in a cloud of dust and debris. China saw with satisfaction that the scouts had thrown out a protective screen around the ing zone. They were crack bush fighters. He Icaped eagerly out of the cockpit, and the section leader came forward to salute him. He was a lean veteran, festooned with weapons, water bottles, and bandoliers of ammunition.

  "They passed this way somet
ime yesterday," he reported.

  "Are you sure it's them?" China demanded.

  "The white man and woman." The section leader nodded. "But they buried something over there." He pointed with his chin. "We have not touched it, but I think it is a grave."

  "Show me," China ordered, and followed him into the thorn thicket.

  The section leader stopped beside a cairn of boulders.

  "Yes, a grave," China said with finality. "Open it up."

  The section leader snapped an order at two of his men and they laid aside their weapons and went forward. They kicked away the top stones and rolled them down the slope.

  "Hurry!" China called. "Work faster!" And the ironstone boulders rang against each other and struck sparks as they were hurled aside.

  "There is the corpse," the section leader called as Job's bundled head was exposed. He stepped forward and jerked aside the stained shirt that covered it.