A Time to Die c-13

by Wilbur Smith

  "I have already called up my best trackers," he agreed. "I'll have fifty of my men on their spoor within the hour, men who can run an eland off its feet. The white man will be in your hands before the sun sets this evening. This time there will be no mistake."

  "Where are these trackers?" China demanded.

  "I have radioed."

  "I will send the helicopter to fetch them."

  "That will save valuable time."

  They watched the Hind rise and bear away northward, low across the darkly flowing waters of the Save River. As it disappeared they both turned to stare toward the south.

  "You no longer control the territory south of the river," China pointed out. "These are the forests you so cunningly relinquished to the Frelinio." He pointed at the dense stands of hardwoods that stood tall against the southern sky.

  "The river is my front line," Tippoo Tip conceded reluctantly.

  "But the nearest Frehmo forces are still many miles further south.

  My patrols cover this ground without interference from them. The men I am sending after the white man will catch him long before he. gets into Frelimo-held territory." Tippoo Tip broke off and pointed along the riverbank. "All, here they come." A long double file of heavily armed guerrillas came trotting down the footpath toward them. "Fifty of my best men. You will eat white chickens for dinner tonight.

  Don't worry, my friend. They are as good as on your plate already."

  The two platoons of Renamo halted and fell out on the bank, waiting for their trackers. China was a good judge of troops. He walked among them, and he recognized in them that eagerness and enthusiasm tempered by discipline and professionalism that is the peculiar mark of first-class bush fighters. For once he agreed with Tippoo Tip. These were hard men who could be relied on to get the job done. China beckoned the section leaders across to him.

  "You know who you are chasing?" he asked, and they nodded.

  "The white man is as dangerous as a wounded leopard, but I want him alive. Do you understand?"

  "We understand, General."

  "You have a radio. I want a report of your progress every hour on the command frequency."

  "Yes, General."

  "And when you have the quarry in sight, call me. I will come in the hen shaw I want to be there at the death."

  The section leaders looked across the river, their expressions alert, and moments later, even with his impaired hearing, China picked up the whistle of the Hind's turbos returning from the north.

  "If you do your job, you will be rewarded. But if you fail me, you will regret it. You will regret it deeply," China promised them.

  As soon as the helicopter landed, the two trackers clambered down with alacrity from the small rear cabin. Tippoo Tip shouted at them and pointed to the outgoing spoor Sean and his party had left.

  Watching the trackers begin their task, China was even more confident of the outcome. These two were good. They made a quick cast ahead, and then came back to the center and squatted over the spoor, whispering together softly, touching the faint tracks with the supple wands of wild willow they each carried, tent as a pair of bloodhounds taking the scent of the chase. When in they stood up again, a change had come over them. They were determined and businesslike. They turned to face the southern forests and went away at a run.

  Behind them the two full platoons of camouflaged Renamo assault troopers fanned out into their running formation and set their pace to match the trackers.

  "The white woman can never keep up that speed," Tippoo Tip exulted. "We will overtake them before they reach the Frelimo lines. We will have them before the end of this day. This time they'll not escape." He turned back to China. "Why don't we follow them in the helicopter?"

  China hesitated. He did not want to explain the Hind's shortcomings. It was better to. let Tippoo Tip go on believing in its infallibility. He would not discuss with him the difficulty of bringing up sufficient fuel, 4he Hind's limited range even with full tanks, or the facts that his Portuguese engineer had warned him that the turbos were long overdue for service and that the pilot had already reported a malfunction and loss of power in the starboard engine.

  "I will wait here," he said. "When your men catch up with the white man, they will call on the radio. That is when I will follow them."

  China adjusted his dark glasses and sauntered across to the Hind. The pilot was waiting for him, leaning with assumed nonchalance against the camouflaged fuselage below the main cockpit.

  "How is the engine behavine." China asked in Portuguese.

  "It is beginning to surge and miss. It needs to be worked on."

  "Fuel?"

  "Main tanks are down to quarter. However, I still have the auxiliary."

  "The convoy of porters with the fuel will be at our forward base by tomorrow morning. The engineer can work on her tonight, but I have to have her on standby until dark. I'll need her when they catch up with the runaways."

  The pilot shrugged. "I'll fly her if you are willing to take the chance on that engine," he agreed.

  "Keep a listening watch on the radio," China ordered. "With luck it will all be over in a few hours."

  Sean realized Claudia could not maintain this pace much further.

  She was running just ahead of him, so he could study the changes Mi in her that privation and hard living had brought about. She was I so lean and wispy that her scanty threadbare shirt flapped around ir her flanks, and the legs of her trousers had been reduced by thorns and razor-edged grass to a fringe of tatters that hung halfway down her thighs; below that, the length of her legs was exaggerated by their extreme thinness, yet somehow they had retained their elegant, high-bred lines. However, the thorns and sharp grass had wrought havoc on the exposed skin of her arms and legs. It looked as though she had been scourged by a cat-o'-nine-tails. Some of the scratches were healed, others scabbed over, but a few still bled.

  Her hair had grown into a lank sweat-tangled mop that thumped between her prominent bony shoulder blades with each pace, and her back was so thin he could have counted the knobs of her vertebrae beneath her shirt. The perspiration had soaked through in a dark line down her spine, and hard exercise had firmed her buttocks into a pair of India-rubber balls in the sun bleached cotton pants; through a tiny three-cornered tear a tender flash of her white bottom winked at him with each pace. Her legs were floppy with exhaustion, throwing out sideways, and her ankles were loose and wobbled under her.

  He would have to let her rest very soon, and yet she had not complained, not once in all the long tortured hours since they had left the river. He grinned fondly as he remembered the spoiled, arrogant bitch who had stepped off the Boeing at Harare airport so many eons ago. This was a different woman-tough, determined, and with a spirit as resilient as a Damascus steel blade. He knew she would never give up, she would keep going until she killed herself. He reached forward and tapped her shoulder.

  "Ease up, wench. We'll take ten."

  When she pulled up, she was unsteady on those long legs and he arm around her shoulders to steady her. "You're a ruddy put an marvel, do you know that?" He eased her down to sit with her back against one of the lead wood trees, and unscrewed the stopper on his water bottle, and passed it to her.

  "Give Minnie to me. It's time for her chloroquine." Claudia's voice was husky with tiredness. Sean swung the little girl off his back and placed her in Claudia's lap.

  "Remember, ten minutes, that's all."

  Alphonso had taken the break to rig the radio. Mickey was squatting on one side of him, Miriam on the other. They watched with fascination as he tuned the set and began searching the bands.

  There was the crackle and buzz of static followed by some faint extraneous snatches of Afrikaans, then an excited voice speaking in Shangane, very close and loud.

  "Very close now," it said, and the reply came immediately.

  "Keep going hard. Push them. Don't let them escape. Call me as soon as you catch them." That voice was unmistakable, and the
y did not need the acknowledgement to confirm it.

  "Very well, General China."

  The transmission ended, and Sean and Alphonso exchanged a quick hard frown.

  "Very close," said the Shangane. "We can't outrun them."

  "You might be able to get away," Sean said, "on your own."

  Alphonso hesitated and looked sideways at Miriam. The Shantrusting eyes, and Algane maid returned his glance with open and scratched himself with embarrassment. "I'll phonso coughed stay," he muttered.

  Sean laughed bitterly and said in English, "Join the club, mate.

  That little witch didn't take long to hook you. These ruddy sheilas will be the death of all of us yet, you mark my words."

  Alphonso frowned. He did not understand, and Sean switched back into Shangane. "Pack up the radio. If you are going to stand with us, we'd best find good place to do it. Your dung-eating Renamo brothers A* going to be with us very soon."

  Sean turned and looked across at Matatu, who was instantly on his feet.

  "That was China on the radio," he told him in Swahili.

  "He hisses like a cobra." Matatu nodded.

  "His men are on our spoor. They boast to him that they are very close.

  Are there any more tricks we can use now, old friencr"

  "Fire?" Matatu suggested, but without conviction.

  Sean shook his head. "The wind is against us. We'd cook ourselves if we torched the forest."

  Matatu hung his head. "If we keep the women and children with us, there are no more tricks," he admitted. "We are slow, and we leave a spoor that a blind man can follow in a moonless night." He shook his small, grizzled head miserably. "The only trick we have left is to fight them, and after that we are dead, my Bwana.

  "Go back, Matatu. Find how close behind us they really are. We will go ahead and find a good place to fight them." He touched the little man's shoulder, then let him go. Sean watched him disappear g the tree trunks and then deliberately altered his expression before he turned to Claudia, striking a lighter, more carefree pose and putting a lift in his tone.

  "How's our patient?" he asked. "She looks pretty chirpy to me."

  "The chloroquine has done wonders." Claudia bounced the child on her lap and, as if to confirm her improvement, Minnie stuck her thumb in her mouth and smiled shyly around it at Sean.

  He felt her smile tug at him with wholly unexpected poignancy.

  Claudia laughed. "No female is immune to your fatal charms.

  You've collected yourself another fan."

  "Typical woman-all she really wants is a free ride." But he stroked the child's soft, woolly little head. "All right, sweetness, your horsey is ready to go."

  Trustingly Minnie held out both arms, and he swung her up on to his back and strapped her there.

  Claudia pulled herself stiffly to her feet and for a moment leaned against him. "Do you know something? You are a much nicer person than you pretend to be."

  "Fooled you, didn't IT"

  "I'd like to see you with a baby of your own," she whispered.

  "Now you really terrify me. Let's go before you come up with any more crazy ideas like that one."

  But the idea lingered with him as they ran on through the forest-a son of his own from this woman.

  He had never even thought about that before, and then, as though to complement the idea, he felt a tiny hand reach across his shoulder from behind and touch his beard, stroking it as lightly as an alighting butterfly. Minnie was reciprocating the caress he had bestowed on her a few minutes earlier, and for a moment his throat closed up and made it difficult for him to breathe. He took her tiny hand in his. It was as silken and fragile as the wing of a hummingbird, and he was overcome with a feeling of terrible regret. Regret that there would never be a son-he accepted that at last--or a daughter. It was almost over. The hunting pack was very close behind. They could never outrun them. There was no escape; all they could hope for was a good pl in which to make the final stand. After that there was nothin'o escape, no future.

  He was so wrapped up in Ins melancholy that he had run out into the open before he realized it. Claudia pulled up so sharply in front of him that he almost ran into her. He stopped at her side, d they looked about them with puzzled uncertainty.

  an The forest had been laid waste. As far ahead as they could see, the great hardwoods had been swept away as though by a hurricane. Only the stumps remained, raw and bleeding gum as red as heart's blood.

  The earth was torn and scarred where the huge trunks had come crashing down. Bright piles of sawdust remained where their branches had been stripped and the logs cut into lengths, and between the windrows of discarded branches and wilting boughs were the drag roads along which the precious timber had been hauled away.

  Miriam stopped beside Sean. "This is where my people were forced to work," she said softly. "Frelimo came and took them to cut the trees. They chained them together and made them work until the meat was torn from the bones of their hands. They beat them like oxen and worked them until they fell and could not rise."

  "How many people?" Sean asked. "So many trees have been destroyed."

  "Perhaps a man or woman died for every tree," Miriam whispered "They took everybody, thousands upon tens of thousands."

  She pointed to the horizon. "They work far south now, and they leave no tree standing."?

  Sean felt the anger beginning to rise through his amazement.

  This was destruction on a scale that affronted the law of nature and the sanctity of life itself. It was not just that those trees had taken three hundred years to reach their full majesty and had been destroyed with a few hours" callous work with the ax blades. It was more, much more. This forest was the source and fountain of myriad forms of life, inset and bird, mammal and reptile, of man himself. In this vast devastation all would perish.

  It did not end there. With his own fate determined, with a term and a number of the hours that remained of his own life, Sean was overtaken by a prophetic melancholia. He realized that the destruction of this forest was symbolic of the predicament of the entire continent.

  In a few fleeting decades, Africa had been overtaken by its own inherent savagery. The checks that had been placed on it by a century of colonialism had been struck off.

  Chains perhaps those checks had been, but since being freed of them the peoples of Africa had been rushing headlong, with almost suicidal abandon, toward their own destruction.

  Sean felt himself shaking with impotent rage at the folly of it and at the same time saddened, sickened almost unto death, by the terrible tragedy of it all.

  "If I have to die," he thought, "then it's best to do so before I N see everything I love, the land, the animals, the people, all of it destroyed."

  With his arm around Claudia's thin shoulders and the little black girl strapped on his back, he turned and looked back the way they had come. At that moment, Matatu came scampering out of the forest behind them. There was desperate urgency in his gait and the fear of death in his small wizened features. "They are very close, my Bwana. They have two trackers leading them. I watched them work-we will not throw them off.

  They are good."

  "How many troopers with them?" With an effort Sean cast off he oppressive mantle of dejection.

  "As many as the grass on the plains of Serengeti," Matatu replied.

  "They run like a pack of wild dogs on the hunt and they are hard men and fierce. Even the three of us will not stand too long against them."