The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Mad dog!’ he roared, and before Craig could move, he had thrust Peter Fungabera backwards through the opening.

  Craig tossed the Uzi to Sarah and sprang to Tungata’s side. Tungata had been dragged to his knees by the weight of Peter Fungabera’s body and he was clinging with one arm to the jamb of the doorway. With the other hand he still had a grip on the strap around Peter’s chest.

  Peter Fungabera dangled outboard. His hands were strapped helpless, his neck twisted back so that he stared up into Tungata’s face above him. The fierce brown hills of Africa lay two thousand feet below him, the black stone crests bared like the teeth of a man-eating shark.

  ‘Sam, wait!’ Craig screamed above the wind-roar and the deafening beat of the engine.

  ‘Die, you treacherous murderous—’ Tungata roared, down into Peter Fungabera’s upturned face.

  Craig had never seen such naked terror as that in Peter Fungabera’s dark eyes. His mouth was wide open and the wind blew his spittle over his lips in silver strings, but no sound came from his throat.

  ‘Wait, Sam,’ Craig screamed, ‘don’t kill him. He is the only one who can clear you, can clear all of us. If you kill him you’ll never be able to live in Zimbabwe again—’

  Tungata rolled his head sideways and stared at Craig.

  ‘Our only chance to clear ourselves!’

  The red glaze of rage began to fade from Tungata’s eyes, but the muscles stood out in his arms from the effort of holding Peter Fungabera’s body against the whip and buffet of the wind.

  ‘Help me!’ he grated, and in one movement Craig snatched the safety-belt, pulling it off the inertia reel, and buckled it around his own waist. He dropped belly-down on the deck, hooked his ankles around the base of the bench and reached down and out to get a double grip on the nylon strap. Between them they lifted Peter Fungabera back into the port, and his legs were so rubbery with terror that they could not bear his weight when he tried to stand.

  Tungata hurled him backwards across the cabin, and Peter hit the rear bulkhead. He slid down it and rolled onto his side, pulling up his knees into the foetal position, and under the crushing weight of defeat and capitulation he moaned quietly and covered his head with both arms.

  Craig climbed unsteadily up into the cockpit, and sank into the co-pilot’s seat.

  ‘What the hell is happening?’ Sally-Anne demanded.

  ‘Nothing serious. I only just managed to stop Sam killing Peter Fungabera.’

  ‘Why did you bother?’ Sally-Anne raised her voice above the clatter of the rotors overhead. ‘I’d love a shot at that swine myself.’

  ‘Darling, can you get a radio connection to the United States Embassy in Harare?’

  She thought about it. ‘Not from this aircraft.’

  ‘Give them the registration of the Cessna, I’ll lay odds it hasn’t been reported missing yet.’

  ‘I’ll have to go through Johannesburg approach, they’re the only station with sufficient range.’

  ‘I don’t care how – just get Morgan Oxford on the blower.’

  Johannesburg approach radio responded promptly to Sally-Anne’s call and accepted her call-sign with equanimity.

  ‘Report your position, Kilo Yankee Alpha.’

  ‘Northern Botswana—’ Sally-Anne anticipated by an hour’s flying time, ‘en route Francistown to Maun.’

  ‘What is the number you wish to connect in Harare?’

  ‘Person-to-person with the cultural attaché, Morgan Oxford, at the United States Embassy. I’m sorry, I don’t know the number.’

  ‘Hold on.’ And in less than a minute Morgan Oxford spoke through the static.

  ‘Oxford here. Who is this?’

  Sally-Anne passed the microphone to Craig and he held it to his lips and depressed the transmit button.

  ‘Morgan, it’s Craig, Craig Mellow.’

  ‘Holy shit!’ Morgan’s voice became strident. ‘Where the hell are you? All hell is breaking out. Where is Sally-Anne? ’

  ‘Morgan, listen. This is deadly serious. How would you like to interrogate a full colonel of Russian intelligence, complete with his files of planned Russian aggression in and destabilization of the southern half of the African continent?’

  There was nothing but the hum of static for many seconds and then Morgan said, ‘Wait ten!’

  The wait seemed much longer than ten seconds, and then Morgan came back.

  ‘Don’t say anything else. Just give me a rendezvous point.’

  ‘These are map references—’

  Craig read off the map coordinates that Sally-Anne had scribbled down for him. ‘There is an emergency landing-strip there. I will light a signal fire. How long for you to get there?’

  ‘Wait ten!’ This time it was shorter. ‘Dawn tomorrow.’

  ‘Understood,’ Craig acknowledged. ‘We will be waiting.’

  ‘Over and out:’ He handed the microphone back to Sally-Anne.

  ‘Border crossing in forty-three minutes,’ she told him.

  ‘That mud pack suits you. I’m beginning to think it’s an improvement.’

  ‘And you, beautiful, are a racing certainty for the cover of Vogue!’

  She blew the hair off her nose and stuck her tongue out at him.

  They crossed the border between Zimbabwe and Northern Botswana and seventeen minutes later they saw the hired Land-Rover standing exactly where they had left it on the edge of the wide white salt-pan.

  ‘My God, Sarah’s buddies are still there – that’s constancy for you.’ Craig made out the two tiny figures standing beside the vehicle. ‘We’d better warn them, or when they see the government markings they are going to start shooting.’

  Sarah called down to the waiting Matabele through the ‘sky-shout’ loudhailer as they approached, reassuring them, and Craig saw them lower their rifles as the Super Frelon sank lower. He could make out the beatific grins on the upturned faces of the two young Matabele.

  Jonas had shot a springbuck that morning, so there was a feast of broiled venison steaks and salted maize cakes that evening, and afterwards they drew lots for guard duty over the two prisoners.

  They first heard the drone of an approaching aircraft when it was still pearly half-light the next morning, and Craig drove out onto the pan in the Land-Rover to light the smudge fires. It came in from the south, an enormous Lockheed cargo plane with US Air Force markings. Sally-Anne recognized it. ‘That is the NASA machine based at Johannesburg to monitor the shuttle programme.’

  ‘They are really taking us seriously,’ Craig murmured, as the Lockheed lowered itself to earth.

  ‘It has amazing short take-off and landing capability,’ Sally-Anne told him. ‘Just watch.’

  The gigantic aircraft pulled up in the same distance that the Cessna had used. The nose section opened like the bill of a pelican and five men came down the ramp, led by Morgan Oxford.

  ‘Like five sardines from a can,’ Craig observed, as they went forward to greet them. The visitors all wore tropical suits, white shirts with button-down collars and neckties and they all moved with athletes’ balance and awareness.

  ‘Sally-Anne. Craig.’ Morgan Oxford shook hands briefly, and then acknowledged Tungata. ‘Of course, I know you, Mr Minister, these are my colleagues.’ He did not introduce them, but went straight on, ‘Are these the subjects?’

  The two young Matabele brought the prisoners forward at gunpoint.

  ‘Son of a gun!’ Morgan Oxford exclaimed. ‘That’s General Fungabera – Craig, are you out of your mind?’

  ‘Read what is in here.’ Craig proffered the attaché case. ‘And then you tell me.’

  ‘Wait here, please.’ Morgan accepted the case.

  Jonas and Aaron led the two captives towards the aircraft and the Americans came forward to receive them.

  Peter Fungabera was still bound at the wrists with the nylon straps from the helicopter. He seemed to have shrunk in physical stature, he was no longer an impressive debonair figure. The cloak
of defeat weighed him down. His skin had a grey tone and he did not lift his eyes as he came level with Tungata Zebiwe.

  It was Tungata who reached out and seized his jaw in one hand, pressing his fingers into his cheeks, forcing his mouth open and twisting his head up so he could look into his face. For long seconds he stared into Peter Fungabera’s eyes, and then contemptuously he pushed him away, so that Peter staggered and might have fallen had not one of the Americans steadied him.

  ‘At the bottom of nearly every bully and tyrant lurks a coward,’ Tungata said in that deep rumbling voice. ‘You did right when you stopped me killing him, Pupho, a clean drop from the sky is too good for the likes of him. He goes now to a juster fate. Take him out of my sight, for he sickens me to the gut.’

  Peter Fungabera and the Russian were led into the interior of the Lockheed, and Craig and his party settled down to wait. It was a long wait. They sat in the shade thrown by the Land-Rover and chatted in a desultory distracted fashion, breaking off every now and then as the squawk and warble from the radio in the Lockheed carried to where they sat.

  ‘They’re talking to Washington,’ Craig guessed, ‘via satellite.’

  It was after ten o’clock before Morgan came down the ramp again, accompanied by one of his colleagues.

  ‘This is Colonel Smith,’ he told them and the way he said it, he didn’t mean to be taken literally. ‘We have appraised the items you have delivered to us, and we conclude, at this stage, anyway, that they are genuine.’

  ‘That’s very generous of you,’ Craig dead-panned.

  ‘Minister Tungata Zebiwe, we would be very grateful if you could spare us a deal of your valuable time. There are persons in Washington very anxious to talk to you. It will be to our mutual benefit, I assure you.’

  ‘I would like this young lady to accompany me.’ Tungata indicated Sarah.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Morgan turned to Craig and Sally-Anne. ‘In your case it’s not an invitation, it’s an order – you’re coming with us.’

  ‘What about the helicopter, and the Land-Rover?’ Craig asked.

  ‘Don’t worry about them. Arrangements will be made to have them returned to their rightful owners.’

  Three weeks later, at the United Nations building, a file was handed to the head of the Zimbabwe delegation. It contained excerpts from the three green files, and transcripts of the debriefing of General Peter Fungabera by persons unnamed. The file was rushed to Harare, and as a direct result an urgent request was made by the Zimbabwe government for the repatriation of General Fungabera. Two senior inspectors of the Zimbabwe police Special Branch flew to New York to escort the general home.

  When the Pan Am flight landed at Harare, General Fungabera descended the boarding staircase from the first-class section of the Boeing handcuffed to one of the police inspectors. There was a closed van waiting on the tarmac.

  There was no media coverage of his return.

  He was driven directly to Harare central prison, where sixteen days later he died in one of the interrogation cells. His face, when his corpse was spirited out of the rear entrance to the main prison block, was so altered as to be unrecognizable.

  A little after midnight that same night, a ministerial black Mercedes went off the road at speed on a lonely stretch of country road outside the city and burst into flames. There was one occupant. By his dental bridgework, the charred body was identified as that of General Peter Fungabera, and five days later he was buried with full military honours in ‘Heroes’ Acre’, the cemetery for the patriots of the Chimurenga on the hills overlooking Harare.

  On Christmas Day at ten o’clock in the morning, Colonel Bukharin left his escort of American military police at the allied guardhouse at Checkpoint Charlie and set out across the few hundred yards to the East Berlin side of the frontier.

  Bukharin wore an American military-issue greatcoat over his safari clothes, and a knitted fisherman’s cap on his bald head.

  Halfway across, he passed a middle-aged man in a cheap suit coming in the opposite direction. The man might once have been plump, for his skin seemed too large for his skull and it had the grey, lifeless tone of long captivity.

  They glanced at each other incuriously as they passed.

  ‘A life for a life,’ thought Bukharin, and suddenly he felt very tired. He walked at last with an old man’s short hobbled gait over the icy tarmac.

  There was a black sedan waiting for him beyond the frontier buildings. There were two men in the back seat and one of them climbed out as Bukharin approached. He wore a long civilian raincoat and a wide-brimmed hat in the style much favoured by the KGB.

  ‘Bukharin?’ he asked. His tone was neutral but his eyes were cold and relentless.

  When Bukharin nodded, he jerked his head curtly. Bukharin slid into the rear seat and the man followed him in and slammed the door. The interior was overheated and smelled of garlic, last night’s vodka, and unwashed socks.

  The sedan pulled away and Bukharin lay back and closed his eyes. It was going to be bad, he thought, it might even be worse than he had anticipated.

  Henry Pickering hosted the luncheon in the private dining suite of the World Bank overlooking Central Park.

  Sarah and Sally-Anne had not seen each other for almost five months, and they embraced like sisters and then went into a huddle in a corner of the private lounge, trying to catch up with each other’s news in the first thirty seconds, ignoring everybody else.

  Tungata and Craig were more restrained.

  ‘I feel so guilty, Pupho – five months. It was too long.’

  ‘I know how they have kept you busy,’ Craig forgave him. ‘And I have been jumping about myself. Last time I saw you was in Washington—’

  ‘Nearly a month of talks with the American State Department,’ Tungata nodded, ‘and then here in New York with the Zimbabwe ambassador and the World Bank. There is so much to tell, that I don’t know where to begin.’

  ‘All right, as a start,’ Henry Pickering suggested, ‘tell him about the dispensation that you prised out of the Zimbabwe government.’

  ‘That’s a good start,’ Tungata agreed. ‘First of all, my conviction and sentence under the poaching charge have been set aside—’

  ‘Sam, that’s the very least they could do—’

  ‘That’s for starters,’ Tungata smiled and clasped his arm. ‘That confession that you signed for Fungabera has been declared void, as it was obtained under duress. The order declaring you an enemy of the state and people has been rescinded, the sale of Rholands’ shares to Peter Fungabera has been declared null and void. King’s Lynn and Zambezi Waters revert to you.’

  Craig stared at him wordlessly as he went on, ‘The prime minister has accepted that all the acts of violence committed by either of us were acts of self-defence, everything from your killing of the Third Brigade troopers who were pursuing you on the Botswana border to the theft of the Super Frelon helicopter, and he has issued a full pardon—’

  Craig merely shook his head.

  ‘Then the Third Brigade has been withdrawn from Matabeleland. It has been disbanded and integrated into the regular army, the pogrom against my people has been called off, and independent observers have been allowed into the Matabele tribal areas to “monitor the peace”.’

  ‘That’s the best news yet, Sam.’

  ‘Still more – still more,’ Tungata assured him. ‘My Zimbabwe citizenship and passport have been returned to me. I am allowed to return home, with the assurance that there will be no check placed on my political activities. The government is to consider a referendum on instituting a form of federal autonomy for the Matabele people, and, in return, I am to use all my influence to convince the armed dissidents to come in from the bush and surrender their weapons under general amnesty.’

  ‘It’s all that you have been working towards – congratulations, Sam, I really mean that.’

  ‘Only with your help.’ Tungata turned to Henry Pickering. ‘Can I tell him about Lobengula’
s Fire!’

  ‘Wait!’ Henry Pickering took both their arms and turned them towards the dining-room. ‘Let’s start lunch first.’

  The dining-room was panelled in light oak, a perfect frame for the set of five Remington paintings of the old west that decorated three walls. The fourth wall was an enormous picture window that looked out across the city and Central Park. The curtains were open.

  From the head of the table Henry smiled down at Craig. ‘I thought we had better pull out all the stops,’ and he showed Craig the wine label.

  ‘Wow! The’61.’

  ‘Well, it’s not every day that I entertain the current number one best-selling author—’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it wonderful!’ Sally-Anne cut in. ‘Craig was number one in the New York Times the very first week of publication!’

  ‘What about the TV deal?’ Tungata asked.

  ‘It’s not signed yet,’ Craig demurred.

  ‘But my information is that it soon will be,’ said Henry, as he filled the wine-glasses. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the toast: Craig Mellow’s latest opus, and its long ride at the top.’

  They drank, laughing and festive, and Craig protested with his glass untouched. ‘Come on! Give me a toast that I can drink as well.’

  ‘Here it is!’ Henry Pickering held up his glass again. ‘Lobengula’s Fire! Now you can tell him.’

  ‘If those two women will stop chattering for ten seconds—’

  ‘Not fair!’ Sally-Anne protested. ‘We never chatter, we seriously debate.’

  Tungata smiled at her as he went on, ‘As you know, Henry arranged for Lobengula’s diamonds to be placed in safe-keeping and for them to be appraised. Harry Winston’s top men have vetted them and come up with an estimate—’

  ‘Tell us!’ Sally-Anne called. ‘How much?’