A Time to Die c-13

by Wilbur Smith

  "We would have made it. I would have got you out." Still hugging Job's quiescent body, he began to rock him gently, murmuring to him softly, pressing his cheek to Job's, his eyes closed tightly.

  "We have come so far together, it wasn't fair to end it here."

  Claudia came to them and went down on one knee beside Sean.

  She reached out to touch his shoulder and searched desperately for something to say, but there were no words and she stopped her hand before she touched him. Sean was oblivious of her and everything else around him.

  His grief was so terrible that she felt she should not watch it. It was too private, too vulnerable, and yet she could not tear her eyes from his face. Her own feelings were entirely overshadowed by the magnitude of Sean's sorrow. She had developed a deep affection for Job, but it was as nothing compared to the love she now saw laid naked before her.

  It was as though that pistol shot had destroyed a part of Sean himself, and she experienced no sense of shock or surprise when he began to weep. Still holding Job in his arms, Sean felt the last involuntary tremors of dying nerves and muscle grow still and the first chill of death sap the heat from this body he hugged so tightly to his chest.

  The tears seemed to well up from deep inside of Sean. They came up painfully, burning all the way, scalding his eyelids when at last they forced their way between them and rolled slowly down his darkly weathered cheeks into his beard.

  Even Alphonso could. not watch it. He stood up and walked away into the thorn scrhb, but Claudia could not move. She went on kneeling beside Stan, and her own tears rose in sympathy with his. Together they wept for Job.

  Matatu had heard the shot from a mile out, where he was guarding their rear, lying up on their back-spoor to watch for a following patrol. He came in quickly and from the bush at the perimeter of the camp watched for only a few seconds before he deduced exactly what had happened. Then he crept in quietly and crouched behind Sean. Like Claudia, he respected Sean's mourning, waiting for him to master its first unbearably bitter pangs.

  Sean spoke at last, without looking round, without opening his eyes.

  "Matatu," he said.

  "N,&,.0w,="Go and find the burial place. We have neither tools nor time to dig a grave, yet he is a Matabele and he must be buried sitting up, facing the direction of the rising sun."

  "Ndio, Bwana. " Matatu slipped away into the darkling forest.

  At last Sean opened his eyes and laid Job gently back upon the gray wool blanket. His voice was steady, almost conversational.

  "Traditionally we should bury him in the center of his own cattle kraal." He wiped the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand and went on quietly, "But we are wanderers, Job and I, he had no kraal nor cattle to call his own."

  She was not certain Sean was speaking to her, but she replied, "The wild game were his cattle, and the wilderness his kraal. He will be content here."

  Sean nodded, still without looking at her. "I am grateful that you understand."

  He reached down and closed Job's eyelids. His face was undamaged except for the chips from his front teeth, and with a fold of the blanket Sean wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.

  Now he looked peaceful and at rest. Sean rolled him on his side and began to wrap him in the blanket, using the nylon webbing and the rifle slings to bind his body tightly into a sitting position with his knees up under his chin.

  Matatu returned before he had finished. "I have found a good place," he said. Sean nodded without looking up from his task.

  Claudia broke the silence. "He gave his life for us," she said quietly. "Greater love hath no man." It sounded so trite and unworthy of the moment that she wished she had not said it, but Sean nodded again.

  "I was never able to square the account with him," he said.

  "And now I never will."

  He was finished. Job was trussed securely into the gray blanket, only his head exposed.

  Sean stood up and went to his own small personal pack. He took out the only spare shirt it contained and came back to where Job lay. He knelt beside him again. "Good-bye, my brother. It was a good road we traveled. I only wish we could have reached the end of it together," he said softly, and leaned forward and kissed Job's forehead. He did it so unaffectedly that it seemed completely natural and right.

  Then with the clean shirt he wrapped Job's head, hiding the ghastly wound, and he picked him up in his arms and walked with him into the forest, cradling Job's head against his shoulder.

  Matatu led him to an abandoned ant bear hole in the thorn forest nearby. It was the work of a few minutes to enlarge the entrance just enough to slide Job's body down into it. With Matatu assisting him, Sean turned him until he was facing east, his back to the evening star.

  Before they covered the grave, Sean knelt beside it and took the fragmentation grenade from the pocket on his webbing. Matatu and Claudia watched as he cautiously rigged a booby trap with the grenade and a short length of bark twine. As he stood up, Claudia looked at him inquiringly, and he answered her shortly, "Grave robbers."

  Matatu helped him pack stones around Job's shoulders to hold him in a sitting position. Then with larger boulders they covered him completely, building a calm over his grave that would keep the hyenas out. When it was done, Sean did not linger. He had said his farewell.

  He walked away without looking back, and after a few moments Claudia followed him.

  Despite her sorrow, in some strange way she felt privileged and sanctified by what she had witnessed. Her respect and love for Sean had been reinforced a hundredfold by the emotions he had displayed at the loss of his friend. She felt his tears had proved his strength rather than betrayed his weakness, and the rare demonstration of love had only pointed up his manhood. From this terrible tragedy she had learned more about Sean than she might otherwise have done in a lifetime.

  They marched hard. that night. Sean forged on as though he were trying to outrun his grief. Claudia did not try to slow him.

  Although she was now lean and fit as a coursing greyhound, she had to put out all her strength to stay with him, but she did not complain.

  By sunrise they had covered almost forty miles from where they had buried Job. Ahead of them lay a wide alluvial plain.

  Sean found a grove of4a trees to give them a little shade. While Claudia and Matatuprepared their meal, he slung his binoculars across his back, stuffed the field map into his back pocket, and went to the base of the tallest tree.

  Claudia watched him anxiously as he began to climb, but he was as nimble as a squirrel and as powerful as a bull baboon, using the brute strength of his arms to haul himself up the smooth stretches of the hole where there were no footholds.

  When he neared the top of the tree, a white-backed vulture launched herself from her shaggy nest of dried branches and circled anxiously overhead while Sean settled into the fork of a branch only a few feet from the nest.

  The vulture's nest contained two large chalk-white eggs and Sean murmured soothingly to the bird cruising high above, "Don't worry, old girl. I'm not going to steal them." Sean did not share the popular distaste for these birds. They performed a vital function in cleansing the veld of carrion and disease, and while grot hey were models of elegance and beauty in the tesque in repose, sky and of natural flight, revered as gods by the air, masters of the ancient Egyptians and other peoples with a close affinity to nature.

  Sean smiled up at the bird, the first smile that had bent his lips since Job had gone. Then he gave his full attention to the terrain spread out below him. The alluvial plain ahead had been intensively cultivated; only scattered groves of trees still stood between the open fields. Sean knew these would mark the sites of the small family villages shown on his map. He turned his binoculars upon them.

  He saw at once that the fields had not been tilled or planted for seasons. They were thick with the rank secondary growth many on in Africa. He recognized the that invades abandoned cultivate tall harsh stems of Hibiscus irri
tans, named for the sharp fine hairs that cover the leaves and that brush off on anyone that touches them. He saw castor-oil bush and cotton gone wild. There were also the orange-colored blossoms of wild cannabis, whose narcotic properties had so delighted Jack Kennedy's Peace Corps boys and girls and which over the years since then had given solace to the hordes of other European and American youngsters who had followed them out to Africa equipped only with backpacks, dirty blue jeans, good intentions, and a hazy belief in beauty, peace, and the brotherhood of man. Recently fear of AIDS had slowed their arrival to a trickle, for which Sean was grateful. He realized his thoughts were wandering, and he pulled himself up and panned his binoculars slowly across the scene of desolation ahead.

  He could just make out the roofless ruins of the villages. On some of the huts the roof timbers were still intact but skeletal and ugh he scrutiblackened by flames, the thatch burned away. Though he scrutinized the area meticulously, he could make out no sign of recent human presence. The paths between the fields were all overgrown, and there was no sign of domestic stock, no chickens or goats, and no telltale tendrils of smoke rising from a cooking fire.

  "Somebody, Frelimo or Renamo, has worked this area over pretty thoroughly," he thought, and looked away to the east to the distant blue hills of the interior. This early in the morning the air was still clear and bright, and he was able to recognize some of the features and cross-reference them to the topography of his field map. Within fifteen minutes he was able to mark in their position with reasonable accuracy and confidence.

  They had made a little better progress than he had estimated.

  Those mountains out on the right-hand side were the Chimanimani; they formed the border between Mozambique and Zimbabwe, but their nearest peaks were almost forty kilometers distant. His map was marked in kilometers, and Sean still liked to work in miles rather than the metric scale.

  The larger village of Dombe should be a few kilometers out on his left flank, but he could pick out no indication of its exact whereabouts. He guessed that like the other family villages ahead, it had long since been abandoned and allowed to return to bush and forest, in which case there would be little prospect of finding food there. With so many feeding from it, the small quantity of maize meal they had been able to bring with them was a most expended. By tomorrow they would need to begin foraging, and that would slow them up. On the other hand, if Dombe were still inhabited, it would certainly be either a Frelimo or Renamo stronghold. Prudently he resolved to avoid any contact with all other humans. Nobody, not even Alphonso, could say which territory was held by the opposing forces and which was a destruction area devastated equally by both sides. Even those boundaries would be fluid and would alter on a daily if not hourly basis, like the amorphous body of an amoeba.

  He looked directly southward along their intended route. In that direction there were no features rising above the plain. This was a part of the littoral that stretched down to the shores of the Indian Ocean, and no mountain or deep valley ruffled it. The only natural obstacles ahead were the dense hardwood forests, the rivers, and the swamps that guarded the approaches to them.

  The largest river was the Sabi, or the Rio Save as the Portuguese had named it. It flowed in across their border with the land that was to become Zimbabwe and down toward the ocean. It was broad and deep, an4 they would probably need some sort of craft to make the crossing'.

  The last river, Rudyard Kipling's great gray-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees, was the final obstacle they would face. It was still three hundred kilometers further south. Three national borders converged and met upon its banks: Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and the Republic of South Africa. If they were able to reach that point, they would have reached the northern boundary of the celebrated Kruger National Park, heavily guarded and patrolled by the South African military. Sean studied the map longingly-South Africa and safety, South Africa and home, where the rule of law held sway and men did not walk every moment in the shadow of death.

  A soft whistle brought him out of his reverie, and he looked down.

  Matatu was at the base of the tree, sixty feet below where he sat. He gesticulated up at Sean.

  "Listen!" he signaled. "Danger!" Sean felt his pulse trip and accelerate. Matatu did not use the danger signal lightly. He cocked his head and listened, but it was almost a full minute before he heard it. As a bushman Sean's senses, especially eyesight and hearing, were honed and acute, but compared to Matatu he was a blind mute.

  As he heard and recognized the sound at last, even though it was faint and far away, Sean's pulse jumped again and he swiveled round in the fork of the branch and looked back northward, in the direction from which they had come.

  Apart from a few high streaks of cirrostratus cloud, the morning sky was empty blue. Sean put up his binoculars and searched it, looking low along the horizon, close to the tops of the tall hardwood trees. The distant sound, increasing in volume, gave him a direction in which to search until suddenly the shape appeared in the field of his binoculars and he felt the slide of dread in his guts.

  Like some gigantic and noxious insect, the Hind cruised, humpbacked, nose low, above the forest tops. It was still some miles distant but coming on directly toward Sean's treetop perch.

  General China sat in the flight engineer's seat under the forward canopy of the Hind and looked ahead through the armored windshield. This early in the morning the air had a aystalline lucidity through which the rays of the low sun lit every detail of the landscape below him with a radiant golden light.

  Although he had already flown many hours in the captured machine, he had not yet grown accustomed to the extraordinary sense of power his seat under the forward canopy aroused in him.

  The earth and everything in it lay below him; he could look down on mankind and know he held the power of LIFE and death over them.

  He reached out now and gripped the control lever of the Gatling cannon. The pistol grip, fitted neatly into his right hand, and as the heel of his hand depressed the cocking plunger, the remote aiming screen fit on the control panel directly in front of him. As he moved the control lever, traversing, depressing, or elevating, the multiple barrels of the cannon faithfully duplicated each movement and the image of the target was reflected on the screen.

  With the slightest pressure of his forefinger he could send a dense stream of cannonihell hosing down to obliterate any target he chose. By simply troving a switch on the weapons console, he could select any oftlTe Hind's alternative armaments, the rockets in their pods or the banks of missiles.

  It had not taken China long to master the complex weapons control system, for the basic training he had received in the Siberian guerrilla training camp so long ago, at the beginning of the Rhodesian war of liberation, had stood him in good stead down the years. However, this was the most awe-inspiring firepower he had ever had at his fingertips and the most exhilarating vantage point from which to deploy it.

  At a single word of command he could soar aloft like an eagle in a thermal or plunge like a stooping peregrine, he could hover on high or dance lightly on the leafy tops of the forest. The power this machine had bestowed upon him was truly godlike.

  At first there had been serious problems to surmount. He could not work with the captured Russian pilot and crew. They were sullen and unreliable. Despite the threat of horrible death that hung over them, he realized they would seize the first opportunity to escape or to sabotage his precious new Hind. One of the Russian ground crew need only drain the lubricant from a vital part of the machine, loosen a bolt, or burn out a section of wiring, and neither China nor any of his Renamo would have the technical expertise to recognize the sabotage attempt until it was too late. In addition, the Russian pilot had from the very beginning made communication between them difficult. He had played dumb and deliberately misunderstood China's commands. Trading on the knowledge that China could not do without him, he had become progressively more defiant and recalcitrant.

 
China had solved that problem swiftly. Within hours of the destruction of the Russian squadron and the capture of the Hind, he had radioed a long coded message to a station two hundred miles further north across the national boundary between Mozambique and Malawi. The message had been received and decoded at the headquarters of a large tea plantation on the slopes of Mlanje Mountain, the proprietor of which was a member of the central committee of the Mozambique National Resistance and the deputy director of Renamo intelligence. He had telexed China's report and requests directly to the director general of the central committee at his headquarters in Lisbon, and within six hours a crack Portuguese military helicopter pilot with many thousands of hours flying experience and two skilled aeronautical engineers were aboard a TAP airliner bound for Africa. From Nairobi they changed to an Air Malawi commercial flight scheduled directly for Blantyre, the capital of Malawi. There a driver and Land-Rover from the tea plantation were waiting to whisk them out to the private airstrip on the tea estate.