by Wilbur Smith
The passenger door had been removed, leaving a square opening above the wing root. In the opening crouched a familiar lanky figure with the cross-webbing of the parachute harness coming out of his crotch over his chest and shoulders. The bulky chute package dangled low against the back of his legs. He wore a paratrooper's helmet and goggles, but his legs were brown and bare and his feet were thrust into plain suede velskoen.
The Beechcraft was very low perhaps too low. Roland felt a stab of anxiety, Sonny was no Scout. He had done his eight jumps for his paratrooper wings, but they were standard jumps from four thousand feet. The Beechcraft was barely two hundred feet above the bush. The pilot was taking no chances with incoming SAM fire.
"Make another pass," Roland shouted. "You are too low." He crossed his arms overhead, waving them off, but as he did it the wind-battered figure in. the hatch of the Beechcraft dropped head-first over the trailing edge of the silver wing. The tail seemed to slash at him like an executioner's axe, skimming his back, and the long ribbon of the rip-cord flirted out behind him, still attached to the speeding machine like an umbilical cord.
Craig dropped like a stone towards the earth, and watching him Roland felt his breath jam in his throat. Abruptly the silk streamed from the chute pack, flared open with an audible snap like a whiplash and Craig was plucked violently erect, his legs rodding out stiffly under him, almost touching the earth. For a long second he seemed to be suspended there like a man on the gallows, and then he dropped and rolled on his back with his feet together but high above him. Another roll and he was on his feet, sawing the parachute cords to collapse the blooming silk mushroom.
Roland let his breath out. "Bring him in,"he ordered.
Two of the Scouts hustled Craig forward, with a grip on each arm, forcing him to crouch and run. He dropped beside Roland who greeted him harshly. "You have to get us through, Sonny, as quick as you can."
"Roly, was Janine on the Viscount?" "Yes, damn you, now get us through." Craig had opened his light pack, and was assembling his tools, probe-and side-cutters and rolls of coloured. tape, steel tape-measure and hand-compass.
"Is she alive?" Craig could not look at Roland's face for the answer, but he started to tremble as he heard it.
"She's alive, but only just-" "Thank God, oh thank God," Craig whispered, and Roland studied his face thoughtfully.
"I didn't realize that you felt that way, Sonny." "You never were very perceptive." At last Craig looked up at him defiantly. "I loved her from the first moment I saw her." "All right, then you will want to get these bastards as much as I do. Open that field, and hurry."
Roland signalled and his Scouts moved up quickly and lay along the edge of the minefield, their weapons pointing forward. Roland turned back to Craig.
"Ready?" Craig nodded.
"You know the pattern?" "You'd better pray I do." "Get in there, Sonny," Roland ordered, and Craig stood up and walked into the minefield and started to work with the probe and the tape-measure.
Roland contained his impatience for less than five minutes, then he called, "Christ, Sonny, we have two hours of daylight how long is this going to take?" Craig did not even look around. He was stooped like a potato harvester, probing the earth gently, and the sweat had soaked through the back of his khaki shirt in a long dark stain.
"Can't you hurry it up?" With all the concentration of a surgeon clamping off an artery, Craig snipped the piano-wire trip of a Claymore mine, and then laid the coloured tape on the earth behind him, as he moved forward a pace. It was their thread through the labyrinth that Craig was laying.
Craig probed again. He had chosen an unfortunate point to enter the pattern on an overlap of two separate systems. Ordinarily he would have retraced his steps along the coloured. tape, and begun again at another point on the perimeter, but that could cost him precious time, perhaps as much as twenty minutes.
"Craig, you are bloody standing still," Roland called. "Christ, man, have you lost your nerve?" Craig flinched at the accusation. He should have checked the pattern to his left, there should be an AP at a 30,degree angle from the last one he had found, and a twenty-four, inch gap between them, if he had correctly read the pattern. To check it would mean two minutes" work.
"Move, damn you, Mellow!" Roland's voice lashed him. "Don't just stand there. Move!" " Craig steeled himself, the chance was three-to-one in his favour. He stepped forward one pace, and gingerly put his weight onto his left foot. It was firm. He took another pace, placing his right foot with the delicacy of a cat stalking a bird, firm again. Now the left foot, a droplet of sweat fell from his brow into his eye, flooding it and half-blinding him. He blinked it away and completed the step. Safe again.
There must be a Claymore mine on his right now. His legs were trembling, but he lowered himself into a squat. The wire, it wasn't there! He had mis-read the pattern. He was blind in the middle of the field, living on chance. He blinked his eyes rapidly, and then with a surge of relief he picked up the almost invisible wire exactly where it should have been. It seemed to quiver with tension like his own nerves. He reached out with the side-cutters, and had almost touched the wire when Roland's voice spoke just at his shoulder.
"Don't waste time-" Craig started violently and jerked his hand away from the deadly wire. He looked back. Roland had followed the coloured tape marker, he had come out into the minefield, and he was down on one knee with his FN rifle across his thigh only a pace behind Craig. His face was masked with a thick layer of camouflage paint, like some primitive warrior from another time, savage and monstrous.
"I am going as fast as I dare." Craig used his thumb to squeeze the heavy drops of nervous sweat from his eyebrows. "You aren't," Roland told him flatly. "You have been in here almost twenty minutes, and you haven't moved twenty paces. It will be dark before we get through if you chicken it." "Damn you! "Craig whispered hoarsely.
"Yes," Roland encouraged. "Get mad. Get fighting mad." Craig reached forward and snipped the trip-wire. It made a tiny quivering spring like a guitar string lightly plucked with a fingernail.
"That's it, Sonny. Move!" Roland's voice was at his back, a low monotonous litany.
"Think of those bastards, Sonny. They are out there, running like rabid jackals. Think of them getting away." Craig moved forward, taking each pace more firmly.
"They killed everybody on that Viscount, Craig. Everybody, men and women and children. Everybody except. her." Roland did not use her name. "They left her alive. But when I found her, she couldn't speak, Sonny. She could only scream and struggle like a wild animal."
Craig stopped dead, and looked back. His face was icy pale.
"Don't stop, Sonny. Keep going." Craig stooped and probed quickly. The AP was there, exactly where it should be. He went forward into the corridor with quick short steps and Roland's dry cold whisper was in his ear.
"They had raped her, Sonny, all of them. Her leg was broken in the crash, but that didn't stop them. They got on top of her, like rutting animals one after the other." Craig found himself running forward up the invisible corridor, merely counting his paces not using the tape, measure to check the length of it not using the compass to measure the angle of the turn.
At the end he fell flat and stabbed frantically into the earth with the probe, but Roland's voice was there behind him.
"When they had all finished, they started again," he whispered.
"But this time they rolled her over and sodomized her, Sonny-" Craig heard himself sob with each stroke of the probe. He hit the casing of a mine lying just under the surface, and the force of the blow jarred his arm. He dropped the probe and scratched with his fingers into the earth, exposing the circular top of the AP mine. It was the size of one of those old-fashioned tins of fifty Players Navy Cut cigarettes.
Craig lifted it out of its cavity, set it aside and went forward, but Roland's whisper followed relentlessly.
"One after the other they did it to her, Sonny, all except the last one. He couldn't manage it twice, so he
took his bayonet and pushed that up her instead." "Stop it, Roly! For Chrissake, stop it!" "You say you love her, Sonny then hurry, for her sake, hurry!"
Craig found the second AP mine and plucked it from the earth, he hurled it away from him down the length of the minefield and it bounced and rolled like a rubber ball before disappearing into a clump of grass.
It did not explode. Craig clawed his way forward, stabbing the probe ferociously as though into the heart of one of them, and he found the third mine, the last one in the ninety-degree corner of the corridor.
It was open all the way to the opposite perimeter of the minefield, where there would be two Claymore trip-wires. Craig jumped to his feet and ran down the corridor, with violent death only inches on each side of his flying feet. He was almost blinded by his own tears, and he sobbed in time to his run. He reached the end of the corridor and stopped. Only the trip-wires now, only the trip-wires of the Claymores and they would be through the cordon sanitaire.
"Well done, Sonny," Roland's voice close behind, "well done, you've got us through." Craig changed the side-cutters into his right hand and took one step more. He felt it move under the sole of his right foot, the almost infinitesimal give, as though he had stepped on a subterranean mole, run and it had collapsed.
"It shouldn't have been there," he thought despairingly, and time seemed to be suspended.
He heard the click of the primer. It sounded like the release of a camera-shutter, but muted by the thin layer of sand over it.
"The wild one," he thought, and still time was frozen. He had time to think. "It's the wild one in the pattern." And nothing happened, just that click. He felt a spring of hope. "It's dud, it's a misfire." He was going to get away with it.
Then the mine exploded under his right foot. It felt as though someone had hit him with a full swing of a crow-bat under the sole.
There was no pain, just that stunning slam of shock into his foot, driven up his spine until his jaws clashed and he felt his tongue split between his teeth, bitten clean through.
No pain, just the deafening implosion of the shock-wave into his eardrums, as though somebody had held a double-barrelled shotgun, close to his head and fired both barrels together.
No pain, just the blinding rush of dust and smoke past his face, and then he was flung into the air as though he were the plaything of a callous giant, and he came down again on his belly. The wind driven from his lungs, so he wheezed for breath, his mouth filled with blood from his bitten tongue. His eyes were stinging from flying grit and smoke. He wiped them clear and Roland's face was in front of his, hazy and wavering like a heat mirage. Roland's lips were moving, but Craig could not hear the words. His ears buzzed viciously from the blast.
"It's all right, Roly," he said, and his own voice was almost lost in the singing memory of the explosion. "I'm all right," Craig repeated.
He pushed himself up and rolled into a sitting position. His left leg stuck straight out ahead of him, the inside of the calf was lacerated and discoloured purple black from the explosion, and blood oozed from out of the opening of his short khaki pants, shrapnel must have flown up into his buttocks and lower belly, but the velskoen was still on his left foot. He tried to move his foot and it responded immediately, waggling at him reassuringly.
But there was something wrong. He was dazed and groggy, his ears still dinning, yet through it he realized there was something dreadfully wrong and then gradually it dawned on him.
There was no right leg, just the short fat stump of it sticking out of the leg of his pants. The heat of the explosion had cauterized the raw end of the stump, and seared it white-, the dead bloodless white of frostbite. He stared at it, and knew it was a trick of his eyesight, because he could feel his leg was still there. He tried to move the missing foot, and he felt it move, but there was nothing there.
"Roly." Even through the din in his ears, he heard the high hysterical tone of his own voice. "Roly, my leg. Oh God, my leg!
It's gone!" Then at last the blood came, bursting through the hear seared flesh in bright arterial spurts.
"Roly, help me!" Roland stepped over him, squatting with a foot on each side of Craig's body, his back to Craig, screening him from his own mutilated lower body. Roland unrolled the canvas wallet that contained his field medical kit, and strapped the tourniquet from it around the stump. The haemorrhage shrivelled and he bound the field-dressing over the stump. He worked quickly, with the dexterity of practice and experience, and the second that he finished, he swivelled to look into Craig's pale dusty sweat-streaked face.
"Sonny, the Claymores. Can you do the Claymores? For her sake, Sonny, try!" Craig stared at him. "Sonny for Janine," Roland whispered, and pulled him up into a sitting position. "Try! For her sake, try!" "Side-cutters!" Craig mumbled, staring with great hurt eyes at the blood-soaked turban that wrapped his stump. "Find my side-cutters!" Roland pressed the tool into his hand. "Turn me onto my belly, "Craig said.
Roland rolled him carefully, and Craig began to slide himself forward, walking his elbows in the torn dusty earth, he dragged his one remaining leg over the shallow crater left by the exploding AP mine, and then stopped and reached forward. There was the guitar twang, as the first trip-wire parted in the jaws of the cutter, and, laboriously as a maimed insect squashed under a gardener's heel, Craig dragged himself onto the very edge of the minefield. For the last time he reached out. His hand was shaking wildly, and he seized his own wrist with his left hand to steady it, sobbing with the effort he guided the open jaws of the cutter over the hair-thin steel wire, and bore down.
It went with a ping, and Craig dropped the tool.
"Okay, it's open," he sobbed, and Roland pulled the lanyard out of the vee of his shirt, and lifted the whistle to his lips. He blew a single crisp blast, and pumped his arm over his head.
"Let's go!" The Scouts came through the minefield at a run, keeping their rigid ten-pace separation, following the zigzag of the tape that Craig had laid down the corridor to guide them. As each one of them came to where Craig still lay on his belly, they jumped lightly over his back and melted away into the open bush, beyond the minefield, spreading out into their running formation. Roland lingered a second longer at Craig's side.
"I can't spare anyone to stay with you, Sonny." He laid the medical kit beside his head. "There is morphine for when it gets too bad." He laid something else beside the medical kit. It was a hand-grenade. "The terrs may get to you before our boys do. Don't let them take you. A grenade is messy, but effective." Then Roland leaned forward and kissed Craig on the forehead. "Bless you, Sonny!" he said, and then he was on his feet going forward again at a run ". Within seconds, the thick riverine Zambezi bush had swallowed him, and slowly Craig lowered his face into the crook of his arm.
Then, at last, the pain came at him like a ravening lion.
Commissar Tungata Zebiwe crouched in the bottom of the slit trench, and listened to the husky voice speaking from the portable radio.
"They are through the minefield, coming down to the river.
His observers were on the north bank of the Zambezi, in carefully prepared positions from which they could sweep the opposite bank and the small heavily wooded islands that split the shallows of the wide river-course.
"How many?"Tungata asked into the microphone. "No count yet." Of course, they would be mere flickers of movement in the darkening bush, impossible to get a head count, as they came forward in overlapping covering rushes. Tungata looked up at the sky, there was less than an hour before dark, he estimated, and felt a fresh onslaught of the doubts that had beset him ever since he had brought his cadre through the drifts almost three hours before.
Could he entice the pursuers into crossing the river? Without that the destruction of the Viscount and all else that he had so far achieved would be halved in propaganda and psychological value against the enemy. He had to bring the Scouts across into the carefully prepared killing-ground. He had carried the woman's skirt and left it on the edge of t
he cordon sanitaire for just that purpose, to bring them on.