Wilbur Smith - C07 A Time To Die

by C07 A Time To Die(Lit)

  In the dawn the wind veered into the south, but the smoke still hung over the land like a heavy river mist, reducing visibility to a few hundred feet.

  Sean and Claudia treated the children first, smearing their blisters and burns with yellow iodine paste, and though Mickey bore it with the stoicism of a Shangane warrior, the little girl whined with the sting of the iodine and Sean had to take her on his lap and blow on her injuries to cool them.

  Once the children were taken care of, the women tended their men. The burns on Sean's chest and back were all superficial, but Claudia treated them with a gentleness that reflected her gratitude and complete love.

  Neither of them spoke of the moment when he had lifted the 110karev pistol to her temple. They probably never would, but both of them would be conscious of it forever more. It would always be there between them: for Sean the most horrific moment of his life, worse even than that of Job's death; for Claudia, an affirmation of his devotion to her. She knew he would have found the strength to do it, but she knew also that it would have cost him dearer than the sacrifice of his own life. She needed no more proof of his love.

  The children needed water desperately; they were desiccated by the heat of the flames and the smoke. Sean gave half the remaining water to them and shared the remainder disproportionately among the adults, most of it to the two women and a bare taste to the men.

  "Matatu," he said in a harsh, gravelly whisper, "if you don't find us water before nightfall, then we are as dead as if the hen shaw had blown us into dust with its cannons."

  They limped on through the blackened, smoldering forest, and in the late afternoon Matatu led them to a shallow clay pan surrounded by the smoking stumps of burned-out trees. In the center of the pan, thick with black ash and the charred bodies of small creatures, snakes and rats and civet cats that had fled there for protection from the flames, was a puddle of filthy water.

  Sean strained it through his shirt, and they drank it as though it were nectar, groaning with pleasure through their scorched and smoke-abraded throats. When they had drunk until their bellies ached, they scooped the water over their heads and let it soak their clothing, and they laughed weakly with the joy of it.

  A mile beyond the water hole, they reached the fine at which the wind had changed and held the fire, driving it back on itself. They left behind them the devastation of black ash and smoldering stumps and camped that night among the confusion of withered dead branches, where the logging gangs had wrought almost as much destruction as the flames had.

  For the first time since the fire Alphonso rigged the radio aerial, and they gathered around the set and listened for General China's taunts and threats. They all stiffened instinctively as they recognized his voice, but he was talking in Shangane and they could hear the sound of the helicopter's engines in the background. His trans missions were terse and enigmatic, and the replies from his subordinates were equally abrupt and businesslike.

  "What do you think he is up to?" Sean asked Alphonso.

  The Shangane shook his head. "It sounds like he is moving troops into fresh positions." But there was no conviction in his tone.

  "He hasn't given up?" Sean said. "He may have lost our spoor in the burn, but I don't think he has given up."

  "No," Alphonso agreed. "I know him well. He has not given up.

  He will follow us all the way. General China is a man who hates well. He will not let us go."

  very "We are in Frelimo-held territory now. Do you think he will follow us in here?"

  Alphonso shrugged. "He has the hen shaw he does not have to worry too much about Frelimo. I think he will follow us wherever we go." General China made his last transmission, and it was obvious he was arranging for refueling. He had changed to Portuguese, and the reply seemed to be from a ground engineer in the same language. Alphonso translated.

  "The porters have arrived. We now have reserves of two thousand liters."

  China's voice: "What about the spare booster pump?"

  (1 t's here, my General." The engineer again. "I can change it tonight."

  "We must be airworthy again by first light tomorrow."

  "I will have it ready by then. I guarantee it, General."

  Very well, I'll be landing in a few minutes. Be ready to begin work immediately," China ordered. Then he signed off.

  They listened for another ten minutes, until it was fully dark, but there were no further transmissions and Alphonso reached across to turn off the radio. On impulse Sean prevented him doing so and instead switched frequencies. almost at once he picked up the South African military traffic. It was much stronger now. They were that much closer to the border on the Limpopo River, and to Sean the sound of Afrikaans was a comfort and a promise.

  After a few minutes Sean sighed and switched off the set. "Alphonso, you take the first sentry. Go!" he ordered.

  With the threat of aerial surveillance reduced, Sean decided to resume daylight travel. Every mile they covered toward the south, the signs left by the logging gangs were fresher and more numerous.

  On the third day after the fire, Matatu led them on a wide detour.

  The hardwood stumps had been cut very recently and were still weeping sap. The leaves on the discarded branches piled in tall windrows had not dried out and were still green and pliant.

  Matatu cautioned them to silence, and as they trudged on between the piled rows of trash, they heard, not far off, the whine of chain saws and the doleful work chant of the labor gangs.

  The forest around them was full of human activity, and the soft soil carried the prints of thousands of bare feet and the skid marks of heavy logs being dragged and manhandled toward the rough logging roads.

  However, so skillfully did Matatu shepherd them through the torn and despoiled forests that it wasn't until the fourth day of travel that they actually caught sight of any other human beings.

  Leaving the others to eat and rest well concealed under a shaggy pile of newly cut branches, Sean and Matatu sneaked forward to the edge of a natur#l open glade in the forest, and through the binoculars Sean lay and watched the Frelimo logging gangs at work on the far side of the opening. Hundreds of black men and women, some of them no more than children, were toiling in teams, supervised by guards in Frelimo camouflage battle dress.

  The guards all carried AK rifles slung on their shoulders, but they wielded the long hippo-hide whips, the savage African sjambok, which they plied on the naked backs and legs of their charges.

  The snap of the lash on bare flesh and the agonized yelps carried across five hundred yards of open ground to where Sean and Matatu lay.

  The labor gangs were piling the roughly trimmed logs into tall pyramid-shaped stacks, half of them straining and heaving on the heavy ropes while the others pushed against the huge timber baulks from the lower side. The guards urged them to greater effort, calling out the verses of the work chant to which the gangs responded with a deep melancholy chorus and a concerted heave on the heavy manila ropes.

  While Sean watched through his binoculars, one of the huge logs was laboriously hoisted toward the pinnacle of the stack. But before it could be rolled securely into place, one of the ropes parted and the log slewed sideways and went bouncing and rumbling down the side of the pyramid. Wailing with terror, the labor gang broke and fled before it, but some of the weaker ones were not fast enough and the log steam rolled over them. Sean heard their shrill shrieks snuffed out and the crackle of their bones like dried twigs being fed through a clothes mangle.

  It was too much even for a soldier's hardened stomach. He touched Matatu's shoulder and they crept away, back to where they had left the others.

  That afternoon they passed close to the labor camps, a vast AI collection of primitive lean-to huts that stank of wood smoke, open latrines, and human misery.

  "The cheapest African commodity these days is black flesh," Sean told Claudia grimly.

  "If you told people back home about this, they simply wouldn't understand what you were
talking about. It's just so contrary to our own experience, said Claudia.

  At this time of day, the camps were almost deserted. All the able-bodied were at work in the forest and only the sick and the dying lay under the crude open shelters. Sean sent Matatu into the camp to scavenge, and he must have found one of the field kitchens and eluded the cooks, for he returned with a half sack of uncooked maize meal slung over his shoulder.

  Huddled around the radio, they ate handfuls of maize porridge that evening, listening to General China's voice on the Renamo command frequency.

  Once again after General China had made his last transmission ary frequency at nightfall, Sean switched to the South African mi lit and listened for almost half an hour, learning the voices and call signs of the various units within range. At last he felt he had identified the South African border headquarters. It was using the call sign "Kudu," that beautiful spiral-homed antelope of the bush veld

  Sean waited patiently for a hill in the military traffic. Then he keyed the microphone and spoke in Afrikaans.

  "Kudu, this is Mossie. This is a storm sending. Do you read me, Kudu?

  This is Mossie!"

  A storm sending was the call for a top-priority message. It was the radio procedure they had used back in the days of the Rhodesian bush war. He hoped the South African commander's military experience went back that far. In Afrikaans a "mossie" was a sparrow. It had been Sean's call sign in those far-off days.

  A long silence followed Sean's transmission. The static echoed in the void of the stratosphere, and Sean thought his call had been lost. He lifted the microphone to call again just as the radio came to life.

  "Station calling Kudu," said a voice heavy with suspicion. "Say again your call sign."

  "Kudu, this is Mossie, I repeat, Mossie. Mike Oscar Sierra Sierra India Echo. I request a relay to General De La Rey, the deputy minister of law and order."

  Lothar De La Rey had been Sean's control back in the seventies.

  Since then he had risen to high political office "Kudu" would surely know who he was and hesitate to refuse a request for relay to such a source.

  It was clear that "Kudu" must be thinking the same thoughts but taking longer to reach a decision. At last he called again.

  "Mossie, stand by. We are relaying you to De La Rey."

  Almost an hour later, long after dark, "Kudu" called again.

  "Mossie, this is Kudu. De La Rey is unobtainable."

  "Kudu, this is life and death. I will call you on this frequency every six hours until you reach De La Rey."

  "Dood reg, Mossie. We'll keep a six-hour listening watch for you.

  Totsiew.

  They had abandoned their blankets when they fled before the fire, and tonight it was frosty. Sean and Claudia lay in each other's arms and whispered together softly.

  "I didn't understand what you were saying on the radio. Who were you speaking with?" Claudia used the Americanism "with," and Sean corrected it as he replied.

  I was speaking to a South African military base, probably on the border where we are headed."

  "Will they give us assistance?" she asked hopefully.

  "I don't know. They might if I can contact someone I know. I have asked them to try, but they can't get hold of him."

  "Who?"

  IL

  d of the

  "During the bush war, although I was in common Rhodesian Scouts, I was also reporting to the South African military intelligence," he explained.

  "A spy?" she asked.

  "No," he answered, too quickly. "The South Africans and the Rhodesians were allies, both on the same side. I am a South African, so I was neither a spy nor a traitor."

  "A double agent, then?" she teased him.

  "Call it whatever you like, but De La Rey was my South African control. Since the war I have continued sending him reports from time to time. Whenever I have been able to pick up pieces of information about ANC terrorist activity or sanctioneering moves by hostile governments, I pass it on to him."

  "He owes you, does he?" she asked.

  "He owes me plenty, besides which we are related. He's a cousin, a first cousin on my grandmother's side." Sean broke off as a small body insinuated itself between them. "Well, look who's here! If it isn't Minnie Mouse herself!"

  Claudia wriggled around to make room for the child, and Minnie settled down happily in the warm cradle formed by their bodies and pillowed her head on Sean's arm. He drew the child's body a little closer.

  "She's so cute." Claudia stroked the child's head. "I could just eat her up."

  They were silent for so long Sean thought she had fallen asleep, but Claudia spoke again, softly and thoughtfully. "If we get out of here, do you think we could adopt Minnie?"

  The simple question was fraught with snares and pitfalls. it presupposed a LIFE together thereafter, a settled existence with home and children and responsibilities, all the things Sean had avoided over a lifetime. It should have startled him, but instead it made him feel warm and comfortable.

  The portable Honda generator clattered noisily, its light bulbs strung on poles around the grounded helicopter.

  The engine hatches were open and the debris suppressors had been removed from over the turbo intakes. The Portuguese engineer in blue overalls supervised and checked every task performed by his Russian prisoners. He had very soon come to know and understand General China, and to appreciate just how vulnerable was his own position. During the short time he had been with the Renamo force he had on more than one occasion been a witness to the punishment General China dealt out to anyone who failed or offended him, and he was conscious now of those dark, fanatical eyes upon him as he worked.

  It was after midnight, but General China had not yet retired to rest. He had been flying all the previous day, from first light to dusk, only landing to refuel the helicopter. A normal man would have been exhausted by now--certainly the Portuguese pilot had slouched off to his tent many hours before-but General China was indefatigable. He prowled around the helicopter, watching every move, every action, asking questions, demanding haste, as restless as though he were possessed by some dark passion.

  "You must have her ready to fly at dawn," he repeated, it seemed for the hundredth time that night. Then he went striding back to the open canvas-roofed shelter he was using as his forward headquarters and pored over the large-scale map, once more studying his troop dispositions, brooding over them and muttering to himself.

  On the map he had noted the features he had observed from the air, the location of the Frelimo logging camps and the rough roads they had hacked out of the forest. He had very soon realized the scope of the deforestation and the numbers employed in the forced labor battalions. He had swiftly realized the futility of trying to find such a small party among such multitudes. He knew any sign of Sean's progress would have been obliterated by the intense activity in the area. He dared not send trackers or a pursuit into the logging area. He had already lost almost forty men in the Frelimo attack and the subsequent fire.

  "No, I must be patient," he told himself. He moved his hand down across the map. The Frehmo logging operation had not yet reached as far south as the hills that guarded the approaches to the Limpopo River basin; between the hills and the river the forest thinned out and gave way to open mo pane veld. It was a strip fifty kilometers wide, good ground for tracking the fugitives, ground they would be forced t4; traverse in order to reach the Limpopo and the border.

  General China had decided to set his final stop fine there. All that day he had ferried in the fresh troops Tippoo Tip had placed at his disposal. In its rear cabin the Hind was able to carry men in full field kit, and they had made eleven sorties. They had hopped over the forest, fully laden with assault troops, and landed them along the fine of hills with orders to set up observation posts on each hill crest and to patrol the gaps between them. He now had almost 150 men in place to cut Sean Courtney off from the Limpopo General China stared at the map as though it were a portrait
of the white man's face. Once again he experienced bitter disapPointment and frustration. He had almost had the white man in his grasp, pinned down by his pursuit troops, with no possible avenue of escape, and then had come the Frefimo intervention; the forest below him had been obliterated by the roiling clouds of smoke and the screaming of his men on the radio, crying for help as the flames engulfed them.

  Tippoo Tip had tried to convince him that Sean Courtney had perished with them in the forest fire, but General China knew better than that. He had dropped his own trackers from the Hind into the blackened ashes as soon as they had cooled sufficiently for men to walk upon them. They had found the spot where the white man had buried his people to evade the heat-the marks of their bodies were still imprinted in the soft earth-and they had found the tracks leading away southward, ever southward.