The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

by Wilbur Smith

  Thirty-five minutes later they heard the first burst of automatic fire. Craig stopped to listen. The Land-Rover was just a little black pimple in the distance, with the dusk darkening and drooping down over it. The first burst was answered by a storm of gunfire, many weapons firing together furiously.

  ‘He’s a good soldier,’ Craig said. ‘He would have made sure of that first shot. There aren’t eight of them any more. I’d bet on that.’

  With surprise he saw that the tears were running down her cheeks, turning to muddy brown in the dust that coated her skin.

  ‘It’s not the dying,’ Craig told her quietly, ‘but the manner of it.’

  She flared at him angrily. ‘Keep that literary Hemingway crap to yourself, buster! It’s not you that’s doing the dying.’ And then, contrite immediately, ‘I’m sorry, darling, my head hurts and I liked him so much.’

  The sound of gunfire became fainter as they trotted on, until it was just a whisper like footsteps in dry brush far behind them.

  ‘Craig!’ Sally-Anne called, and he turned. She had fallen back twenty paces behind him and her distress was apparent. As soon as he stopped, she sank down and put her head between her knees.

  ‘I’ll be all right in a moment. It’s just my head.’

  Craig split open a blister pack of pain-killers from the first-aid box. He made her take two of them and swallow them with a mouthful of water from the canteen. The lump on her forehead frightened him. He put his arm around her and held her tightly.

  ‘Oh, that feels good.’ She slumped against him.

  On the silence of the desert dusk came the distant woof of an explosion, muted by distance, and Sally-Anne stiffened.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Hand grenade,’ he told her, and checked his wrist-watch. ‘It’s over, but he gave us a start of fifty-five minutes. Bless you, Timon, and God speed you.’

  ‘We mustn’t waste it,’ she told him determinedly and pulled herself to her feet. She looked back. ‘Poor Timon,’ she said, and then set off again.

  It would take them only minutes to discover that there was but one man defending the Land-Rover. They would find the outgoing tracks almost immediately, and they would follow. Craig wondered how many Timon had taken out and how many there were left.

  ‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ he told himself, and the night came down with the swiftness of a theatre fire-curtain.

  New moon three days past, and the only light was from the stars. Orion stood tall on one hand, and the great cross blazed on the other. Through the dry desert air their brilliance was marvellous, and the milky way smeared the heavens like the phosphorescence from a firefly crushed between a child’s fingers. The sky was magnificent, but when Craig looked back he saw that it gave enough light to pick out their footprints.

  ‘Rest!’ he told Sally-Anne, and she stretched out full-length on the ground. With the bayonet from the AK 47 he chopped a bunch of scrub, wired it together and fastened the wire to the back of his belt.

  ‘Lead!’ he told her, saving energy with economy of words. She went ahead of him, no longer at a trot, and he dragged the bunch of dry scrub behind him. It swept the earth, and when he checked again, their footprints had dissolved.

  Within the first mile the weight of the scrub dragging like an anchor from his belt was beginning to take its toll on his strength. He leaned forward against it. Three times in the next hour Sally-Anne asked for water. He grudged it to her. Never drink on the first thirst, one of the first survival laws. If you do, it will become insatiable, but she was sick and hurting from the head injury, and he did not have the heart to deny her. He did not drink himself. Tomorrow, if they lived through it, would be a burning hell of thirst. He took the canteen from her, to remove temptation.

  A little before midnight, he untied the wire from his belt; the dragging weight of the scrub thorn brush was too much for him, and if the Shona were still on their spoor, it would not serve much further purpose. Instead, he lifted the rucksack from Sally-Anne’s back and slung it over his own shoulder.

  ‘I can manage it,’ she protested, although she was reeling like a drunkard. She had not complained once, although her face in the starlight was silver as the saltpan they were crossing.

  He tried to think of something to comfort her.

  ‘We must have crossed the border hours ago,’ he said.

  ‘Does that mean we are safe?’ she whispered, and he could not bring himself to lie. She shivered.

  The night wind cut through their thin clothing. He unfolded the nylon groundsheet and spread it over her shoulders, then he took her weight on his arm and led her on.

  A mile further on they reached the far edge of the saltpan, and he knew she could go no further that night. There was a crusty bank eighteen inches high, and then firm ground again.

  ‘We’ll stop here.’ She sagged to the ground and he covered her with the groundsheet.

  ‘Can I have a drink?’

  ‘No. Not until morning.’

  The water canteen was light, sloshing more than half-empty as he lowered the pack.

  He cut a pile of scrub to break the wind and keep it off her head, and then pulled off her jogging shoes, massaging her feet and examining them by touch.

  ‘Oh, that stings.’ Her left heel was rubbed raw. He lifted it to his mouth and licked the abrasion clean, saving water. Then he dripped Mercurochrome on it and strapped it with a band-aid from the first-aid kit. He changed her socks from foot to foot, and then laced up her shoes again.

  ‘You’re so gentle,’ she murmured, as he slipped under the groundsheet and took her in his arms, ‘and so warm.’

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Go to sleep.’

  She sighed and snuggled, and he thought she was asleep until she said softly, ‘Craig, I’m so sorry about King’s Lynn.’

  Then, at last, she did sleep, her breathing swelling deeply and evenly against his chest. He eased out from under the groundsheet and left her undisturbed. He went to sit on the low bank with the AK 47 across his knees, keeping the open pan under surveillance, waiting for them to come.

  While he kept the watch, he thought about what Sally-Anne had said. He thought about King’s Lynn. He thought of his herds of great red beasts, and the homestead on the hill. He thought about the men and the women who had lived there and bred their families there. He thought about the dreams he had fashioned from their lives and how he had planned to do with this woman what they had done.

  My woman. He went back to where she lay and knelt over her to listen to her breathing, and he thought about her spread naked and open on the long table under the cruel scrutiny of many eyes.

  He went back to wait at the edge of the pan and he thought about Tungata Zebiwe, and remembered the laughter and comradeship they had shared. He saw again the hand-signal from the dock as they led Tungata away.

  ‘We are equal – the score is levelled,’ and he shook his head.

  He thought about once being a millionaire, and the millions he now owed. From a man of substance he had been reduced in a single stroke to something worse than a pauper. He did not even own the bundle of paper in the British Airways bag. The manuscript would be forfeit, his creditors would take that also. He had nothing, nothing except this woman and his rage.

  Then the image of General Peter Fungabera’s face filled his imagination – smooth as hot chocolate, handsome as mortal sin, as powerful and as evil as Lucifer – and his rage grew within him, until it threatened to consume him.

  He sat through the long night without sleep, hating with all the strength of his being. Every hour he went back to where Sally-Anne slept and squatted beside her. Once he adjusted the groundsheet over her, another time he touched the lump on her forehead lightly with his fingertips and she whimpered in her sleep, then he went back to his vigil.

  Once he saw dark shapes out on the pan, and his stomach turned over queasily, but when he put Timon’s binoculars on them, he saw they were pale-coloured gemsbok, huge desert
gazelle, large as horses, the diamond-patterned face masks that gave them their name showing clearly in the starlight. They passed silently upwind of where he sat and merged into the night.

  Orion hunted down the sky and faded at dawn’s first glimmering. It was time to go on, but he lingered, reluctant to put Sally-Anne to the terrors and the trials that day would bring, giving her just those last few minutes of oblivion.

  Then he saw them, and his guts and his loins filled with the molten lead of despair. They were still far out across the pan, a darkness too large to be one of the desert animals, a darkness that moved steadily towards him. The scrub brush that he had dragged must have been effective to delay them so long. But once he had abandoned it, they would have come on swiftly down the deeply trodden spoor.

  Then his despair changed shape. If it had to come, it might as well be now, he thought, this was as good a place as any to make their last stand. The Shona must come across the open pan, and he had the slight advantage afforded by the bank and the sparse cover of knee-high scrub, but little time in which to exploit them.

  He ran back to where he had left his rucksack, keeping doubled over so as to show no silhouette against the lightening sky. He stuffed the five grenades down the front of his shirt, snatched up the roll of wire and the side cutters, and hurried back to the edge of the bank.

  He peered out at the advancing patrol. They were in single file because the pan was so open, but he guessed they would spread out into a skirmishing line as soon as they reached the bank, adopting the classic arrowhead running formation that would give them overlapping cover, and prevent them being enfiladed by ambush.

  Craig began to place his fragmentation grenades on that assumption. He sited them along the top of the bank, that slight elevation would spread the blast out a little more. He wired each grenade securely to the stem of a bush, twenty paces apart, and then used a haywire twist to secure a single strand to each of the split pins that held down the firing-handles. Then he led the strands back one at a time to where Sally-Anne slept and secured them to the flap of his rucksack.

  He was down on his knees now, for the light was coming up strongly and the patrol was closer each minute. He readied the fifth and last grenade, and this time wriggled back on his belly. The strands of wire were spread out fanlike from where he lay behind the screen of cut brush. He checked the load of the AK 47 and placed the spare magazines at his right hand.

  It was time to wake her. He kissed her softly on the lips, and she wrinkled her nose and made little mewing sounds, then she opened her eyes and love dawned green in them for an instant, to be replaced by dismay as she remembered their circumstances. She started to sit up, but he held her down with an arm over her chest.

  ‘They are here,’ he warned her. ‘I’m going to fight.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Have you got Timon’s pistol?’

  She nodded again, groping for it in the waistband of her jeans.

  ‘You do know how to use it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Keep one bullet for the end.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘Promise you won’t hesitate.’

  ‘I promise,’ she whispered.

  He lifted his head slowly. The patrol was four hundred yards out from the edge of the pan, and as he had guessed, they were already spreading into the arrowhead hunting formation.

  As they separated from a single amorphous blot in the poor light, he was able to count them. Five! His spirits dropped again sharply. Timon had not done as well as he had hoped for. He had culled out only three of the original pursuit. Five was too many for Craig. Even with all the advantages of surprise and concealment, it was just too many.

  ‘Keep your face down,’ he whispered. ‘It can shine like a mirror.’ Obediently she dropped it into the crook of her arm. He pulled up his shirt to cover his own mouth and nose, and watched them come on.

  Oh God, they are good, he thought. Look at them move! They have been going all night, and they are still as sharp and wary as lynx. The point was a tall Shona who moved like a reed in the wind. He carried his AK 47 low on the right hip, and he was charged with a deadly intensity of concentration. Once the light of coming dawn caught his eyes and they flashed like distant cannon-fire in the blackness of his face. Craig recognized him as the main man.

  His drags, two on each side of him, were sombre, stocky figures, full of dark menace and yet subservient to the man who led. They reacted like puppets to the hand-signals that the tall Shona gave them. They came on silently towards the edge of the pan, and Craig arranged the wires across the palm of his left hand and ran them out between his fingers.

  Fifty paces from the bank the Shona stopped them with a cut-out signal, and the line froze. The Shona’s head turned slowly from side to side as he surveyed the low bank and the scrub beyond it. He took five paces forward, stepping lightly, and stopped again. His head turned once more, back and forth – and then back again. He had seen something. Craig instinctively held his breath as the seconds drew out.

  Then the Shona moved again. He swivelled and picked out his flanks, marking them with a stab of his forefinger, and then a pumped fist. Their formation changed into a reversed arrowhead – the Shona had adopted the traditional fighting formation of the Nguni tribes, the ‘bull’s horns’ that King Chaka had used to such terrible effect, and now the horns were moving to invade Craig’s position.

  Craig felt a surge of relief at his own foresight in spreading the grenades so widely. The two flank men would walk almost on top of his outside grenades. He sorted the wires in his hand, taking up the slack, and watching the flank men come on. He wished it had been the tall Shona, the danger man, but he had not moved again. He was still way back out of blast range, watching and directing the flanking movement.

  The man on the right reached the bank, and gingerly stepped up onto it, but the man on the left was still ten paces out on the pan.

  ‘Together,’ Craig whispered. ‘I’ve got to take them together.’

  The man on the bank must have almost brushed the hidden grenade with his knee as Craig let him overrun it. The man on the left reached the bank, there was a bloody bandage around his head, Timon’s work. The grenade would be at about the level of his navel. Craig heaved with all his weight on the two outside wires, and heard the firing handles fly off the grenades with a metallic Twang! Twang!

  Three seconds delay on the primers, and the Shona were reacting with trained reflexes. The man on the bank dropped from sight, but Craig judged he was too close to the grenade to survive. The three others out on the pan went down also, firing as they dropped, rolling sideways as they hit the crust, firing again, raking the top of the bank.

  Only the trooper out on the left, the wounded man, perhaps slowed by his injury, stayed on his feet those fatal seconds. The grenade exploded with the brilliance of a flashbulb, and the man was hit by fragmenting shrapnel. He was lifted off his feet as the blast tore into his belly. On the right the other grenade burst in brief thunder, and Craig heard the taut, drumlike sound of shrapnel slapping into flesh.

  Two of the bastards, he thought, and tried for the tall Shona, but his aim was through scrub and over the lip of the bank, and the Shona was rolling. Craig’s first burst kicked white salt inches short, but on line, his second burst was a touch left, and the Shona fired back and kept rolling.

  One of the other troopers jumped up and charged the bank, jinking like a quarter-back with the ball, and Craig swung onto him. He hit him cleanly with a full burst, starting at the level of his crotch and pulling up across his belly and chest. The AK 47 was notorious for the way she rode up in automatic and Craig had compensated for it. The trooper dropped his rifle, and spun around sharply, fell onto his knees and then toppled forward on his face like a Muslim at prayer.

  The tall Shona was up, coming in, shouting an order, the second man followed him, twenty paces behind. Craig switched his aim back to him exultantly. He couldn’t miss now. The AK 47 kicked once,
and then snapped on an empty chamber. The Shona kept on coming, untouched.

  Craig was not as quick on the reload as he had once been; just that micro-second too late he swung back onto the Shona, and as he squeezed the trigger, the man dropped out of sight, below the rim of the bank, and Craig’s burst flew high and harmless.

  Craig swore, and swung left onto the last trooper who was just five paces from the safety of the bank. It was snap shooting, but a single lucky bullet out of the long burst hit him in the mouth, and snapped his head back like a heavy punch. The burgundy-red beret, glowing like a pretty bird in the dawn light, flew high in the air, and the trooper collapsed.

  Four out of five in the first ten seconds, it was more than Craig could possibly have hoped for, but the fifth man, the danger man, was alive down there below the bank – and he must have marked Craig’s muzzle flashes. He had Craig pinpointed.

  ‘Keep under the sheet,’ Craig ordered Sally-Anne, and pulled the wires on the other three grenades. The explosions were almost simultaneous, a thunderous roll like the broadside of a man-of-war, and in the dust and flame, Craig moved.

  He went forward and right, thirty running paces, doubled over, with the reloaded AK in his hand, and he dived forward and rolled and then waited, belly down, covering the spot below the bank where the Shona had disappeared, but darting quick glances left and right.

  The light was better, the dawn coming up fast, and the Shona moved. He came up over the bank, a brief silhouette against the white pan, quick as a mamba but where Craig had not expected him. He must have elbow-walked under the bank, and he was way out on Craig’s left.

  Craig swung the AK onto him, but held his fire, that quick chance wasn’t good enough to betray his new position, and the Shona disappeared into the low brush fifty paces away. Craig crawled forward to intercept, slowly as an earthworm, making no noise, raising no dust, and listening and staring with all his being. Long seconds drew out, slow as treacle, and Craig inched forward, knowing that the Shona must be working towards where he had left Sally-Anne.

  Then Sally-Anne screamed. The sound raked his nerve ends like an emery wheel, and out of the brush they rose together, Sally-Anne fighting and clawing like a cat and the Shona holding her by the hair, down on his knees, but holding her easily, turning with her to frustrate any chance of a shot.