A Time to Die c-13

by Wilbur Smith

  Sean climbed the hill swiftly, passing the first string of Renamo porters. Obviously China was taking everything he could carry, including boxes of helicopter spares and hundreds of jerry cans of avgas. The lines of porters were heading back into the wilderness toward the river, and Sean paid them scant attention. He had played his role. He was eager to get out, reach the border, get Job to where he could receive professional medical attention and get Claudia to safety. However, over all his urgency lay the nagging uncertainty: Was China really going to stand by his word and let them go? Was he not being just a trifle optimistic?

  "We'll. see," he told himself grimly, and shouted at one of the Renamo officers who was supervising the loading of the porters.

  "Where is General China?"

  He found him with his staff and the captured Russians in the laager's command bunker. China looked up from the map he was consulting and smiled affably as Sean entered. "Colonel Courtney, my felicitations. You were magnificent. A famous victory."

  "And now you owe me a favor."

  "You and your party wish to leave," China agreed. "AD debts between us have been paid in full. You are free to go."

  "No," Sean shook his head. "By my calculation you still owe me one. Captain Job has been badly wounded. Ms condition is crit iI want him flown out to Zimbabwe in the captured Hind."

  cal.

  "You jest, of course." China laughed lightly. "I cannot risk sending such a valuable asset on a nonproductive mission. No, Colonel, all debts are paid. Please don't persist in extravagant demands. With my defective hearing, it only annoys me, and I may be tempted to review my generous offer to allow you and yours to depart unhindered." He smiled and held out his hand. "Come now, Colonel. Let us part as friends. You have the services of Sergeant Alphonso and his men. You are a man of infinite resourcefulness. I am sure you will contrive to get yourself and all your party to safety without any further assistance from me."

  Sean ignored the outstretched hand. China glanced at it and then lowered it to his side. "So we part, Colonel. Me to my little war and, who knows, perhaps one day a country of my very own.

  You to the tender embraces of your very rich, very beautiful young American." His smile had a sly, foxy slant to it. "I wish YOU JOY, and I am sure you do the same for me." He turned back to his map, leaving Sean for an instant nonplussed and taken off balance. It was incomplete, it couldn't end like this. Sean wondered if there was more to come, but General China began dictating orders to one of his officers in Portuguese, leaving Sean standing uncertainly at the door of the bunker.

  Sean waited a few moments longer, then turned abruptly and ducked out through the entrance. Only after he was gone did China lift his head and smile after him, a gloating little smile which, if Sean had seen it, would have answered his question.

  Alphonso's men had worked quickly. The fiberglass stretcher was one of those lightweight body-molded types used by mountain rescue teams. Nonetheless it would require four men to carry it over rough ground, and they had a long, hard path to the border.

  "Less than a hundred kilometers and not that hard," Sean reassured himself. "Two days, if we push it."

  Claudia greeted him with relief. "Job seems stronger. He was conscious, asking for you. He said something about a hill. Hill Thirty-one?"

  Sean flickered a smile. "That's where we met. He's wandering a little. Help me to get him onto the stretcher."

  Between them they lifted Job gently and settled him onto the stretcher. Sean rigged the drip set on a wire frame above his head and tucked looted gray woolen blankets around him.

  "Matatu," he said as he stood up. "Take us home." And he gestured to the first team of stretcher bearers to take their positions.

  It was less than two hours since sunrise, but they seemed to have lived an entire lifetime in that short period, Sean thought as he glanced back at the hilltop laager. Streamers of smoke drifted from its crest, and the last column of General China's porters was disappearing into the forest below it, all heavily laden with booty.

  The distant sounds of battle had finally dwindled into silence.

  The halfhearted Frefirno counterattack had long since fizzled out, and China was withdrawing his forces into the bad ground below the Pungwe River.

  As Sean watched, the captured Hind helicopter rose slowly out ng above the hill on its glistening rotor;

  0 1 em , then abrul i [y it dipped toward them, the sound of its engine crescendoc 1, and suddenly Sean was staring into the multiple mouths of the Gatling cannon in its nose.

  As it raced toward him, he recognized China's face behind the armored glass canopy. He was perched in the flight engineer's seat, at the controls of the 12.7-men cannon. Sean saw the barrels of the cannon swing slightly, coming on to aim. The Hind was only fifty feet above them, so close he could see China's teeth flash in his dark face as he smiled.

  Their little column had not reached the edge of the forest. There was no cover, no protection from the blast of that terrible weapon, and instinctively Sean reached out and drew Claudia to him, trying to shield her with his own body.

  Above them General China lifted his right hand in an ironic salute, and the Hind banked steeply away into the northwest, dwindled swiftly to a speck, and was gone. They all stared after it silently, seized by a sense of anticlimax, until Sean broke the spell.

  "Let's go, brethren!" And once again the stretcher bearers started forward at an easy jog trot, very softly singing one of the ancient marching songs.

  Scouting ahead of them, Matatu came across a few scattered parties of Frehmo assault troops, but they were all in headlong retreat from the river wilderness. After the loss of their air support the Frefirno offensive seemed to have collapsed completely and the situation was fluid and confused. Although they were forced to detour further northward than Sean had planned, Matatu steered them out of contact with any Frelimo and the stretcher bearers were rotated regularly so they made swift progress.

  At nightfall they stopped to cat and rest. Alphonso made the scheduled radio contact with Renamo headquarters and gave them a position report. He received only a laconic acknowledgement without change of orders. They feasted on canned goods looted from the Russian stores and smoked the perfumed Balkan tobacco in yellow cigarette paper with hollow cardboard filters.

  Job was conscious again and complained in a husky whisper, "There is a lion gnawing on my shoulder." Sean injected an ampule of morphine into Rob's drip set, and it eased him so he was even able to eat a fe mouthfuls of the bland-tasting tinned meat.

  However, his thirst was far greater than his hunger, and Sean held his head and helped him get down two full mugs of the surprisingly good Russian coffee.

  Sean and Claudia sat beside the fitter and waited for the moon in through the Honde Valley again." Sean to rise. "We are going told Job. "Once we get you to Saint Mary's Mission you'll be fine.

  One of the Catholic fathers is a doctor, and I'll be able to sen a message to my brother Garry in Johannesburg. I'll ask him to send the company jet to Urntafi. We'll fly you into Johannesburg General Hospital before you know what's hit you, mate. There you'll get the best medical attention in the world."

  When the moon rose, they went on. It was almost midnight before Sean called a halt for the night. He made a mattress of cut grass beside Job's litter, and as Claudia drifted off to sleep in his arms, he whispered to her, "Tomorrow night I'll give you a hot bath and put you between clean sheets."

  Promise?" she sighed.

  "Cross my heart."

  From deeply ingrained habit, he woke an hour before first light and went to rouse the sentries for dawn standby. Alphonso threw aside his blanket, stood up, and fell in beside him. When they had made the sentry round, they paused on the edge of the camp and Alphonso offered him one of the Russian cigarettes. They smoked from cupped hands, shielding the glow of burning tobacco.

  "What you told me about South Africa, is it true?" Alphonso asked unexpectedly.

  J "What did I tell you?"


  "That men, even black men, eat meat every day?"

  Sean smiled in the darkness, amused by Alphonso's concept of paradise, a place where a man could eat meat every day. "Sometimes they get so sick of eating beef," he teased, "that they try chicken and lamb just for a change."

  Alphonso shook his head. That was beyond belief-, no African could ever tire of beef.

  "How much does a black man earn in South Africa?" he demanded.

  About five hundred rand a month if he is an ordinary unskilled laborer, but there are many black millionaires,." Five hundred rand was more than a man earned in Mozambique in a year, even if he were lucky enough to find employment. A million was a figure beyond Alphonso's powers of imagination.

  "Five hundred?" He shook his head in wonder. "And paid in rands, not paper escudos or Zimbabwe dollars?" he demanded earnestly.

  "Rands," Sean confirmed. Compared to other African currencies, the rand was as good as a gold sovereign.

  "And there are things in the stores, things for a man to buy with his rands?" Alphonso demanded suspiciously. It was difficult lo r him to visualize shelves laden with goods for sale, other than a few pathetic bottles of locally produced carbonated soft drinks and packets of cheap cigarettes.

  "Whatever you want," Sean assured him. "Soap and sugar, cooking oil, and maize meal." Half-forgotten luxuries in Alphonso's mind.

  "As much as I want?" he asked. "No rationing?"

  "As much as you can pay for," Sean assured him. "And when sistor your belly is full, you can buy shoes and suits and ties, transister radios and dark glasses-"

  "A bicycle?" Alphonso demanded eagerly.

  "Only the very lowest men ride bicycles." Sean grinned, enjoying himself. "The others have their own motorcars."

  "Black men own their own motorcars?" Alphonso thought about that for a long time. "Would there be work for a man like me?" he asked with a diffidence that was completely out of character.

  You?" Sean pretended to consider it, and Alphonso waited apprehensively for his judgment. "You?" Sean repeated. "My brother owns a gold mine. You could be a supervisor on his mine within a year, a shift boss in two years. I could get you a job the same day you arrived at the mine."

  "How much does a supervisor earn?"

  "thousand, two thousand," Sean assured him. Alphonso was A stunned. His Renamo pay was the equivalent of a rand a day, paid in Mozambican escudos.

  "I would like to be a boss supervisor," he murmured thoughtfully.

  ant?" Sean teased. Alphonso char' Better than a Renamo serge tied derisively.

  "Of course, in South Africa you would not have the vote," Sean efaces get to vote."

  ribbed him. "Only pal Vote, what is a vote?" Alphonso demanded, then answered t have the himself. "I don't have a vote in Mozambique. They don" vote in Zambia or Zimbabwe or Angola or Tanzania. Nobody has the vote in Africa, except. perhaps once in a man's life to elect a president-for-life and a one-party government." He shook his head and snorted. "Vote? You can't eat a vote. You can't dress in a or ride to work on it. F or two thousand rand a month and vote, a full belly you can have my vote."

  "Anytime you come to South Africa, You come and see me."

  d see the trees against Sean stretched and looked at the sky. He could it. Dawn was only a short time away. He crushed out the butt of the cigarette and began to get to his feet.

  "There is something I must tell you," Alphonso whispered. His altered tone caught Sean's full attention.

  "Yes?" He squatted down again and leaned closer to the Shangane.

  Alphonso cleared his throat in embarrassment. "We have traveled a long road together," he murmured.

  "A long, hard road," Sean agreed. "But the end is in sight. This time tomorrow-" He did not have to go on, and Alphonso did not reply immediately.

  "We have fought side by side," Alphonso said at last.

  "Like lions," Sean confirmed.

  "I have called you Babo and Nkosi Kakulu."

  "You have honored me thus," Sean said formally. "And I have called you friend."

  Alphonso nodded in the darkness. "I cannot let you cross the Zimbabwean border," he said with sudden decisiveness, and Sean rocked back on his heels.

  "Tell me why not."

  "You remember Cuthbert?" Alphonso asked.

  It took Sean a moment to place the name. "Cuthbert, you mean the one from Grand Reef air base? The one who helped us on the raid?" It all seemed so long ago.

  "General China's nephew." Alphonso nodded. "That is the one I speak of."

  "Sammy Davis Junior." Sean smiled. "The cool laid-back cat.

  I remember him well."

  "General China spoke to him on the radio. This very morning from the laager of the hen shaw after our victory. I was in the outer room of the bunker. I heard everything he said."

  Sean felt a cold wind blow down his spine, and the hair at the base of his skull prickled. "What did China tell him?" he asked dreading the reply.

  "He ordered Cuthbert to let the Zimbabwean Army know that it was you who led the raid on Grand Reef and stole the indeki full of missiles. He told Cuthbert to tell them that you would be ssing k into Zimbabwe through the Honde Valley at Saint ary's Mission, and they must wait for you there."

  Sean's gut knotted with shock, and for long moments he was stunned by the enormity and cunning of the trap China had prepared for him. The cruelty of it was diabolical. To allow them to believe they were being set free, to let them taste the relief of crossing out of harm, when in fact they were going to a fate even worse than China himself could have meted out to them.

  The fury of the Zimbabwean high command would know no bounds. Sean was the holder of a Zimbabwean passport, a document of convenience but one that would make him a traitor and murderer beyond any help from outside. He would be handed over to the notorious Zimbabwe Central Intelligence Organization and taken to the interrogation cells at Chikarubi prison, and he would never emerge from there alive. Job, despite his wounds, would share the same fate.

  Even though Claudia was an American citizen, officially she no longer existed. It was weeks since she had been reported missing.

  By this time, interest in her case, even at the U.S. embassies in Harare and Pretoria, would have cooled. Along with her father, she was presumed dead, so she could expect no protection. She was as vulnerable as they were.

  The trap was completely closed; there was no way out. The Renamo army behind them, Frelimo on either hand, and the Zimbabwe CIO ahead of them. They were marooned in a devastated wasteland, doomed to be hunted down Ike wild animals or to starve slowly in the wilderness.

  "Think!" Sean told himself. "Find the way out."

  They could attempt to cross the Zimbabwean border at some other point than the Honde Valley, but the CIO would have the entire country alerted for them. There were permanent army blocks on every road. Without papers they wouldn't get more than a few miles, and then there was Job--what would he do with Job?

  wounded man when every police and How could they transport a r somebody in a stretchers military post would be looking lo we must go southward," Alphonso said. "We must go to South Africa."we?" Sean stared at him. "You want to come with us?"

  "I can't go back to General China," he pointed out philosophwill come with you to betrayed him. I ically. "Not after I have South Africa."

  "That's a trek of three hundred miles, through two Opposed armies, Frefimo and the southern division of Renamo. And what ut Job?"

  abO 99

  "We will carry him , Alphonso replied.