by Wilbur Smith
"Yes," Job replied simply. "We are beyond the love of brothers."
They were silent then, not embarrassed by what had passed between them, but rather fulfilled and fortified by it.
"As a brother," Sean broke the silence, "may I ask a favor of you?"
Job nodded, and Sean went on softly. "There will be hard fighting at the laager. I would not want Claudia to fall into the hands of Frelimo if I were not there to prevent it. That is the favor I ask."
A shadow passed behind Job's eyes. "I do not like to think about that possibility."
"If I am not there, will you do it for me?"
Job nodded. "I give you my word."
"If you have to do it, do not warn her, do not speak, do it unexpectedly. "She will not know it is coming," Job promised. "It will be quick.
"Thank you," Sean said, and clasped his shoulder. "Now we must rest."
Claudia was still asleep, her breathing so gentle and silent that for a moment Sean was alarmed. He put his face close to hers and felt the warmth of her breath on his cheek. He kissed her, and she murmured in her sleep and reached out, fumbling for him and sighing contentedly as he crept into the circle of her arms.
He seemed only to have closed his eyes for a moment before a light touch on his cheek woke him again and he looked up to see Job squatting over him.
"It's time." Job's lips formed the words, and Sean gently disentangled Claudia's arms.
"Sleep sweetly, my love," he murmured, and left her lying on the blanket.
The others were already waiting for him at the entrance of the cave, Matatu and Alphonso and the section leaders, only lightly armed so that they could move swiftly and steathily.
"Four o'clock," Job told Sean, and he saw that the light in the river-bed had mellowed, the shadows were lengthening.
There was nothing more to say. They had both done this half a hundred times before.
"See you around," Job said, and Sean nodded as he strapped on his pack.
With Matatu dancing ahead of them like a forest sprite, they slipped out of the cavern and into the trees, immediately turning south and settling into their running formation.
Twice they heard the Hind gunships passing at a distance, and once they were forced into cover as one of the helicopters came directly overhead.
However, it was high-over four thousand feet, Sean estimated-and flying at the top of its speed. Studying the aircraft through his binoculars, Sean guessed it had completed a mission and was racing back to the laager to refuel and rearm. Confirming this, the racks for the Swatter assault missiles below the fuselage were empty, and the nozzles of the rocket pods were scorched with the backblast of discharged rockets.
The Hind was heading on exactly the same bearing as Matatu was leading them, and even as Sean held it in the field of his binoculars, the Hind reduced power on its turbos and commenced its descent, homing in on its laager.
"Not more than five miles ahead," Sean guessed. He glanced across at Matatu, who was waiting expectantly for Sean's approbation.
"Like a bee to its hive." Matatu grinned.
"Your eyes are like those of the vulture," Sean agreed. "They see all." Matatu hugged himself with pleasure and rocked on his haunches. Sean's praise was all the reward he ever asked for.
Half an hour later they leopard-crawled up onto the crest of a low, rocky kopje and slid over the skyline into the dead ground below. Sean raised his binoculars, using his cap to shade the lens; a reflected ray of sunlight would telegraph their position like a heliograph.
He picked up the raiNvay line immediately, less than two miles distant; the ballast was of blue granite and the single set of tracks gleamed dully in the late sunshine, polished by the steel wheels of rolling stock.
He followed the tracks for a mile and found the spur onto which two railway tankers had been shunted. They were partially hidden by scraggly trees and rank bush, but minutes later a feather of dust rose out of the forest and a fuel bowser came down a dirt track and pulled in beside the leading tanker. Sean watched though the binoculars as overall-clad workers connected the delivery hose and began to pump fuel between the two vehicles.
While this was happening, a Hind gunship rose with dramatic suddenness from the foreslope of the hill just beyond the railway spur.
At last Sean had a positive fix on the laager.
The Hind rose to three hundred feet above the hill, then turned and bore away, humpbacked and nose-heavy, for one more mission over the battlefield in the north before the light failed and fighting was suspended for the night.
Now that he knew exactly where to look, Sean was able to make out other heavily camouflaged emplacements on the slopes of the hill. He counted six of them and said so to Matatu.
"There are two more." Matatu grinned patronizingly as he pointed out the hidden emplacements Sean had overlooked. "And there are three more on the far side of the hill, you cannot see them from here."
The wisdom of making this reconnaissance in daylight became as Sean was able to pick out the discrepancies between the clearer model with which they had planned the raid and the actual tapa 9raphy of the laager and its surroundings.
Sean jotted the amendments in his notebook, making new estimates of the ranges and fields of fire his missiles could command.
One by one, he called over each of the section leaders and pointed out exactly what positions he wanted them to occupy as soon as their teams arrived and darkness fell to cover them.
Satisfied that Matatu could supply no further information, Sean dispatched him. "Go back to Job. As soon as it is dark, guide him and all the other soldiers up here." of daylight When Matatu was gone, Sean devoted the last hour to watching the gunships return out of the north. There were eleven of them, ample proof of the efficiency of the Russian maintenance crews, who must have repaired the two Hinds that Matatu had reported were not flying. The entire squadron, less the single It gunship that Sean had knocked out of the sky, was once again operational and doing dreadful execution among the Renamo guerrillas.
As each gunship hovered above the hillock, then settled into its emplacement, Sean pointed out the flying characteristics to his section leaders and urged them to mark well the exact position of each emplacement.
"That one is yours, Tendela." He reinforced the target allocations. "See how he stands in the sky. You will shoot from that clump of dark trees at the edge of the vlei. Have you marked it well?"
I have marked it, Nkosi Kakulu," he affirmed. The sky was washed by the blood of the dying day, and as he watched the red orb sink away beneath the trees, Sean wondered how much more blood the dawn would bring.
There was that short period of African twilight during which it was not yet dark enough to move off the ridge. There was nothing further to discuss, and Sean and Alphonso sat close together. The feeling was so familiar. No matter how many times Sean waited like this, he would never be able to control or ignore the tension that pulled like rubber bands across his guts. It was the heady anticipation of the draft of terror that soon he would drink to the dregs. He longed for it as the addict does for the needle, and dreaded it to the limits of his soul.
"We will make a good kill," Alphonso said quietly. "It will be a fight for men who are truly men."
Sean nodded. "Yes, my friend, it will be a good fight, and if we fail, then you must try to kill me. That also will be a good fight."
"We will see," Alphonso growled, his eyes reflecting the smoky red glare of the sunset. "Yes, we will see."
The crisp silhouette of the hill on which the Hinds were laagered dissolved with the onset of night. Then Venus, the evening star, appeared, and its cold unwavering light burned directly above the hilltop, seeming to single it out for them.
Within the first hour of darkness, the leading troopers of the raiding column emerged from the trees behind them. Job was at the head of the column with Matatu guiding him and Claudia beside him. Sean met them with a quiet word and immediately began to marshal the troopers into their
various units. The section leaders took charge of their missile teams, and the Stinger launchers were unpacked and assembled; the spare missiles in their sealed, frangible tubes were checked and readied.
Sean and Job and Claudia went from team to team, running the final checks on the missile launchers, making certain the battery packs were fully charged and correctly connected, the cylinders of freon gas were open-yak;,ed, and the sighting screens lit up when the actuator was engaged.
At last Sean was ready to deploy the missile teams. But before he did so, he called the section leaders together and for the last time made each repeat his orders. Satisfied at last, he began to dispatch them to their attack positions. He allowed a five-minute interval after each team leaving the ridge.
Alphonso was in charge of the missile teams attacking the eastern perimeter of the laager, and because he had farther to go to get into position, he left first.
When it was time for Job, who would lead the missile attack on the western perimeter, to go, he and Sean shook hands briefly.
There was no exchange of good wishes; they were both superstitious about that. Instead Job asked facetiously, "Listen, Sean, about that four thousand dollars in bonus and back pay, don't you want to pay me out now?"
"Will you take a check?" Sean grinned at him through the dark mask of his camouflage cream. Job answered his grin, punched his shoulder, and moved away out of earshot so Sean could speak to Claudia in private.
"I don't want to leave you," she whispered.
Sean hugged her fiercely. "Stay close to Job," he ordered.
"Come back to me safely."
"Yes.
"Promise me.
"I promise," he said, and she pulled out of his embrace and turned away, disappearing into the darkness after Job.
As Sean stared after her, he found that his hands were trembling. He thrust them into his pockets and clenched his fists. "Love doesn't do much for one's fighting instincts," he thought, and tried to dismiss her from his mind. "She'll be all right with Job."
The assault party was waiting for him patiently, squatting at the edge of the tree line. Twenty-four men, the cannon fodder, the meat bombs, he thought ruefully, those who had failed the aptitude tests for operating the Stingers. While the missile crews would fire from standoff positions five hundred meters outside the perimeter of the laager, the assault party would attack it head on and frontal, deliberately drawing fire while trying to flush the Hinds up into the air for the missile gunners to get a fair shot at them. It was this unit that would meet the 12.7-men cannons in their fortified positions, as well as all the other dangers and obstacles that certainly guarded the laager. Theirs was the most dangerous task, and for that reason alone Sean could not delegate the command of them to another. He himself would lead them in.
"Come on, Matatu," he said quietly. When there was real danger at hand, wounded game in thick cover or an enemy position to attack, Matatu's self-chosen place was always at Sean's side. Nothing could dislodge him from it.
As a mark of his esteem, Alphonso had presented Sean with an AKM assault rifle, the improved and updated version of the ubiquitous AK-47 that was much prized and sought after by the Renamo guerrillas. Sean carried this weapon now as he led the assault team down off the ridge. With Matatu guiding them through the night, they circled out to get in between the main railway line and the laager, as close as was prudent to the spur of line on which the railway fuel tankers stood.
There was no urgency-they had an night to get into position so they went with a stealth that increased the closer they came to the enemy positions.
It was after two in the morning, and the small slice of the moon had set before Sean had them in their jump-off positions, spread out at precise intervals so that at his command, they could sweep forward in skirmishing formation.
He made one final inspection of their dispositions, crawling silently from man to man, personally sighting in the 60-men M4 command o mortars for them, checking their equipment by sense of touch alone, making absolutely certain each of them clearly understood his objective, then leaving them with a whisper of encouragement and a brief but firm clasp of the shoulder. At last, with everything done that could be done, he settled down to wait.
This was always both the worst and the best part of the hunt. As he lay in the silence, he wondered how much of his life he had spent like this, waiting for it to began waiting for shooting light, waiting in the blind for that breath-stopping moment when a leopard would appear with magical suddenness in the bait tree, an elegant silhouette against the pale backdrop of the dawn.
His mind went back over the years to those other adventures and wild endeavors, to the terrible risks and almost unbearable thrills, and suddenly it dawned on him that this was probably the last time it would happen. He was over forty years of age and Claudia Monterro had entered his life; it was time for it to change.
There was sadness and, at the same time, satisfaction in that thought.
"Let the last be the best of all the game," he thought, and in the utter darkness of predawn he heard a sound at once thrilling and terrifying, the shrill high whine of a mighty turbo engine, howling like a man-eating wolf in the night. Almost at once it was joined by another and then another. The Hind squadron was starting their engines, warming up for their first sortie in the dawn.
Sean checked his watch. The luminous dial showed eleven minutes before five. It was almost time. Without thinking, he unclipped the curved banana magazine from under the AKM rifle and replaced it with another from the pouch of spare magazines on his webbing. That habitual gesture gave him the comfort of long familiarity. Beside him Matatu, seeing him do it, stirred expectantly. The dawn wind came as softly as a lover and stroked Sean's cheek.
He turned his head toward the east and held up his hand with fingers spread. He could just make out the silhouette of his fingers against the coming dawn. It was what the Matabele called "the time of the horns," when a herdsman could first see the horns of his cattle against the sky.
"Shooting light in ten minutes," Sean reminded himself, and knew how long it would take those minutes to pass.
One after another the Hinds shut down their engines to an idle.
The ground crews would be completing the refueling and rearming, and the flying crews would be going aboard.
Sean had to judge it exactly; the light must be just right. The Hinds would probably not use landing lights, and the missile gunners must be able to see them clearly against the dawn.
The light bloomed swiftly. Sean closed his eyes and counted slowly to ten before he opened them again. Now he could make out the stark outline of the crest of the hill, like a cutout in black cardboard. The lacework of the msasa trees stood out against the purple sky, swaying gracefully in the dawn breeze.
"Shoot!" he said, and tapped the shoulder of the mortar man beside him. The trooper leaned forward, holding the mortar bomb in both hands, and dropped it into the mouth of the mortar tube.
The charge in the tail ignited and with a polite pop hurled the signal bomb five hundred feet into the sky above the hilltop. It exploded in a twinkling red flare of lights.
Claudia Monterro followed Job down off the ridge, keeping close enough behind him she need only reach out her hand to touch him.
Job carried one of the missile launchers across his shoulders, and behind Claudia the number two of their team was bowed beneath the weight of the spare rocket tubes.
The footing was loose and dangerous, while quartz pebbles as treacherous as hall bearings rolled under foot. It pleased her that she was as steady and surefooted as any of them over this difficult ground.
Nevertheless she was sweating in the night chill as they reached the bottom of the slope and crept forward toward the perimeter of the laager. Only a few short weeks ago she would have felt inept and awkward in these circumstances, but now she oriented herself by the beacon of the evening star above the hilltop and responded instantly to Job's signals, picking her footfalls and anti tr
acking almost instinctively.