by Wilbur Smith
Matatu was the last across, carrying Sean’s clothing and his rifle, and immediately he was off again, like a wraith of the forest. Sean followed him with the agony of cold shuddering through his body and the sodden furs a heavy burden to add to the rifle and his pack.
A herd of buffalo crashed away through the forest ahead of them, and the bovine stink lingered in their nostrils long after they were gone. Once Sean had a glimpse of a huge antelope, ginger red with vertical white stripes down its heavy body and a head of magnificent spiral horns. It was a bongo. He would have charged one of his rich American clients $1000 for a shot at that rarest and most elusive of all antelopes, but it ghosted away into the bamboo and Matatu led them on without apparent purpose or direction, the spoor three hours cold behind them.
Then Matatu skirted one of the rare forest clearings and stopped again. He glanced back over his naked shoulder and grinned at Sean with the patent adoration of a hunting dog who acknowledges the most important being in its universe.
Sean stepped up beside him and looked down at the spoor. He would never know how Matatu did it. He had tried to make him explain, but the wizened little gnome had merely laughed with embarrassment and hung his head. It was a kind of magic that went beyond the mere art of observation and deduction. What Matatu had just done was to drop the spoor when it was sweet and hot, and go off at an improbable tangent, running blind through trackless bamboo and over wild peaks, to meet the spoor again with the unerring instinct of a migrating swallow, having cut the corner and gained three hours on the quarry.
Sean squeezed his shoulder and the Ndorobo wriggled his whole body with pleasure.
They were less than an hour behind the gang now, but the rain and the mist were bringing on the night prematurely. Sean signalled Matatu on. Not one of them had spoken a single word all that day.
The men they were chasing were becoming careless. In the beginning they had anti-tracked and covered spoor, doubled and jinked so cunningly that even Matatu had puzzled to unravel the sign and get away on the run of it – but now they were feeling confident and secure. They had broken off the succulent bamboo shoots to chew as they marched, leaving glaring wounds on the plants, and they had trodden deeply, heeling with fatigue, leaving signs that Matatu could follow like a tarmac road. One of the fugitives had even defecated on the track, not bothering to cover his faeces, and they were still steaming with his body warmth. Matatu grinned at Sean over his shoulder and made the fluttery hand signal which said ‘Very close’.
Sean eased open the action of the double-barrelled Gibbs, without allowing the sidelock to click. He slid the brass-cased cartridges out of the breeches, and replaced them with two others from the leather ammunition pouch beneath his monkey-skin cape. The .577 cartridges were thicker than a man’s thumb and the clumsy, blunt-nosed bullet heads were jacketed in copper and capped with soft blue lead so they could mushroom through living tissue, tearing open a wide channel and inflicting terrible damage. This little ritual of changing his cartridges was one of Sean’s superstitions – he always did it just before he closed with dangerous game. He closed the rifle as gently and silently as he had opened it and glanced back at the two men behind him.
The whites of Alistair’s eyes gleamed in his blackened face. He carried the Bren gun. Sean had not been able to wean him from it. Despite its unwieldy long barrel and great weight, Alistair loved the automatic weapon. ‘When I’m after Mickey Mouse I like to be able to turn the air blue with lead,’ he explained with that lazy grin. ‘Nobody is going to get a chance to stuff my knackers down my throat, matey!’
At the rear Ray Harris gave Sean the thumbs-up signal, but the sweat and rain had cut pale runnels through the soot and fat on his face, and even through the camouflage Sean could see how haggard he was with fear and fatigue. ‘The old man is getting past it,’ Sean thought dispassionately. ‘Have to put him out to grass soon.’
Ray carried the Stirling sub-machine-gun. Sean suspected it was because he could no longer manage the weight of a more substantial weapon. ‘In the bamboo it’s point-blank,’ Ray excused his choice, and Sean had not bothered to argue or to point out that the tiny 9 mm bullets would be deflected by the frailest twig, and smothered in the dense vegetation of the Aberdares – while the big 600-grain slug from his own Gibbs would plough straight through branch and stem and still blow the guts out of the Mickey Mouse on the other side, while the stubby 20-inch barrels were perfect for close work in the bamboo, and he could swing them without risking hooking up in the brush.
Sean clicked his tongue softly and Matatu went away on the spoor in that soft-footed, ungainly lope which he could keep up day and night without tiring. They crossed another heavily bambooed ridge and in the valley beyond Matatu stopped again. It was so dark by now that Sean had to move up beside him, and go down on one knee to examine the sign. It took him almost a minute to make sense of it, even after Matatu had pointed out the other set of tracks coming in from the right.
Sean gestured Ray to move up and laid his lips to his ear. ‘They have joined another party of Mickey Mice – probably from the base camp. Eight of them, three women, so we have thirteen in a bunch now. A lovely lucky number.’
But as he spoke the light was going, and the rain started again, spilling softly out of the purple-black sky. Within five hundred yards Matatu stopped for the last time and Sean could just make out the pale palm of his right hand as he made the wash-out signal. Night had blanketed the spoor.
The white men each found a treetrunk to prop themselves against, spreading out in a defensive circle facing outwards. Sean took Matatu under the monkey-skin cloak with him as though he were a tired gun dog. The little man’s skinny body was as cold and wet as a trout taken from a mountain stream and he smelled of herbs and leaf mould and wild things. They ate the hard salted dry buffalo meat and cold maize cakes from their belt pouches and slept fitfully in each other’s warmth while the raindrops pattered down on the fur over their heads.
Matatu touched Sean’s cheek and he was instantly awake in the utter darkness, slipping the safety-catch of the Gibbs that lay across his lap. He sat rigid, listening and alert.
Beside him Matatu snuffled the air and after a moment Sean did the same. ‘Woodsmoke?’ he whispered, and both of them came to their feet. In the darkness, Sean moved to where Alistair and Ray were lying and got them up. They went forward in the night, holding the belt of the man ahead to keep in contact. The whiffs of smoke were intermittent but stronger.
It took almost two hours for Matatu to locate the Mau Mau encampment precisely, using his sense of smell and hearing, and at the end the faint glow of a patch of campfire coals. Although the bamboo dripped all around, they could hear them – a soft cough, a strangled snore, the gabble of a woman in a nightmare – and Sean and Matatu moved them into position.
It took another hour; but in the utter darkness before the true dawn Alistair was lying up the slope, forty feet from the dying camp fire. Raymond was amongst the rocks on the bank of the stream on the far side, and Sean lay with Matatu in the dense scrub beside the path that led into the camp.
Sean had the barrel of the Gibbs across his left forearm and his right hand on the pistol grip with the safety-catch under his thumb. He had spread the fur cloak over both himself and Matatu, but neither of them even drowsed. They were keyed up to the finest pitch. Sean could feel the little Ndorobo trembling with eagerness where their bodies touched. He was like a bird dog with the scent of the grouse in his nostrils.
The dawn came stealthily. First Sean realized that he could see his own hand on the rifle in front of his face, and then the short thick barrels appeared before his eyes. He looked beyond them and made out a tendril of smoke from the fire rising out of the Stygian forest towards the lighter pitch of darkness that was the sky through the canopy of bamboo.
The light came on more swiftly, and he saw that there were two crude shelters, one on each side of the fire, low lean-tos not more than waist high, and he thought he
saw a movement in one of them, perhaps a recumbent figure rolling over and pulling up a skin blanket over his head.
Again somebody coughed, a thick phlegmy sound. The camp was waking. Sean glanced up the slope and then down into the stream bed. He could see the soft sheen of the water-polished boulders – but nothing of the other two hunters.
The light hardened. Sean closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again. He could see sharply the support of the roof of the nearest shelter, and dimly beyond it a human shape wrapped in a fur blanket.
‘Shooting light in two minutes,’ he thought. The others would know it also. All three of them had waited like this in countless dawns beside the rotting carcass of pig or antelope for the leopard to come to the bait. They could judge that magical moment when the sights were crisp enough to make the sure killing shot. This dawn they would wait for Sean before they came in with the Bren and the Stirling.
Again Sean closed his eyes and when he opened them again the figure in the nearest shelter was sitting up and looking towards him. For a gut-swooping instant he thought he had been spotted and he almost fired. Then he checked himself as the head turned away from him.
Abruptly the figure threw the fur blanket aside and stood up, crouching under the low roof of the shelter.
Sean saw it was a woman, one of the Mau Mau camp followers, but for Sean just as cruel and depraved as any of her menfolk. She stepped out into the open beside the dead fire wearing only a short kilt of some pale material. Her breasts were high and pointed and her skin smooth and glossy as newly mined anthracite in the soft dawn light.
She came directly towards where Sean lay, and though her gait was still clumsy and unsteady with sleep, he saw that she was young and comely. A few more paces and she would stumble over him, but then she stopped again and yawned and her teeth were very white, gleaming in the soft grey light.
She lifted her kilt around her waist and squatted facing Sean, spreading her knees and bowing her head slightly to watch herself as she began to urinate. Her water splashed noisily and the sharp ammoniacal tang of it made Sean’s nostrils flare.
She was so close that he did not have to lift the Gibbs to his shoulder. He shot her in the stomach. The heavy rifle bounded in his grip and the bullet picked the girl up and while she was in the air it broke her in half, blowing a hole through her spine into which her own head would have fitted, and she folded up, loose and floppy as a suit of discarded clothing as she fell back onto the muddy forest floor.
Sean fired the second barrel as one of the other Mau Mau bolted out of the nearest shelter. The Gibbs made a sound like the slamming of a great steel door, and the man was hurled back into the shelter with half his chest torn away.
Sean had two more cartridges held between the fingers of his left hand, and as he opened the breech of the Gibbs the spent brass cases pinged away over his shoulder and he slid the fresh cartridges into the empty breeches and closed the rifle again in the same movement.
The Bren and the Stirling were firing now. Their muzzle flashes were bright and pretty as fairy lights in the gloom, twinkling and sparkling, and the bullets went frip! frip! frip! amongst the leaves and sang shrilly as they ricocheted into the forest.
Sean shot again and the Gibbs cannoned down another naked figure, knocking him flat against the soft earth as though he had been run down by a locomotive. And again he shot, but this one was a snap shot and the Mau Mau jinked just as the Gibbs thundered. The bullet hit him in the shoulder joint and blew his right arm off so it hung by a tatter of torn flesh and flapped against his side as he spun around. Raymond’s Stirling buzzed and cut him down.
Sean reloaded and shot left and right, clean kills with each barrel and by the time he had reloaded again the camp was silent, and the Bren and the Stirling had ceased firing.
Nothing moved. All three men were deadly natural shots, and the range was point-blank. Sean waited a full five minutes. Only a fool walked directly up to dangerous game no matter how dead it appeared to be. Then he rose cautiously to his knees with the rifle at high port across his chest.
The last Mau Mau broke. He had been feigning dead in the far shelter, and he had judged his moment finely, waiting until the attackers relaxed and began to move. He flushed like a jack rabbit and shot into the bamboo on the far side of the clearing. Alistair’s Bren was blanketed by the wall of the nearest shelter but he fired nevertheless and the bullets futilely thrashed the hut. From the river bank Ray had a clearer shot, but he was a fraction of a second slow, the cold had brought out the malaria in his blood and his hand shook. The bamboo absorbed the light 9 mm bullets as though he had fired into a haystack.
For the first ten paces the running Mau Mau was screened from Sean’s view by the wall of the nearest hut, and then Sean caught only a flickering glimpse of him as he dived into the bamboo, but already Sean was on him, swinging the stubby double barrels as though he were taking a right-hand passing shot on a driven francolin. Although he could no longer see his quarry in the dense bamboo, he continued his swing on the line of the man’s run, instinctively leading him. The Gibbs gave its angry bellow and red flame blazed from the muzzle.
The huge bullet smashed into the wall of bamboo, and at Sean’s side Matatu shouted gleefully, ‘Piga! Hit!’ as he heard the bullet tell distinctly on living flesh.
‘Take the blood spoor!’ Sean commanded and the little Ndorobo loped across the clearing. But it was not necessary: the Mau Mau lay where he had dropped. The bullet had ploughed through bamboo, leaf and stem, without being deflected an inch from its track.
Ray and Alistair came into the camp, weapons ready, and picked over the bodies. One of the other Mau Mau women was still breathing, though bloody bubbles seethed on her lips, and Ray shot her in the temple with the Stirling.
‘Make sure none of them got away,’ Sean ordered Matatu in Swahili.
The little Ndorobo made a quick circuit of the encampment to check for out-going spoor, and then came back grinning. ‘All here.’ He gloated. ‘All dead.’ Sean tossed the Gibbs to him and drew the ivory-handled hunting-knife from the sheath on his belt.
‘Damn it, laddie,’ Ray Harris protested as Sean walked back to where the body of the first girl lay. ‘You are the bloody end, man.’ He had seen Sean do this before and although Ray Harris was a hard, callous man who for thirty years had made his living out of blood and gunfire, still he gagged as Sean squatted over the corpse and stropped the blade on the palm of his hand.
‘You are getting soft, old man.’ Sean grinned at him. ‘You know they make beautiful tobacco pouches,’ he said, and took the dead girl’s breast in his hand, pulling the skin taut for the stroke of the knife blade.
Shasa found Garry in the boardroom. He was always there twenty minutes before any of the other directors arrived, arranging his piles of computer print-out sheets and other notes around him and going over his facts and figures for one last time before the meeting began. Shasa and Centaine had argued before appointing Garry to the board of Courtney Mining.
‘You can ruin a pony by pushing him too hard too soon.’
‘We aren’t talking about a polo pony,’ Centaine had replied tartly. ‘And it’s not a case of pushing. He’s got the bit between his teeth, to continue your chosen metaphor, Shasa, and if we try and hold him back we will either discourage him or drive him out on his own. Now is the time to give him a bit of slack rein.’
‘But you made me wait much longer.’
‘You were a late-blooming rose, and the war and all that business held you up. At Garry’s age you were still flying Hurricanes and chasing around Abyssinia.’
So Garry had gone on the board, and like everything else in his life he had taken it very seriously indeed. Now he looked up as his father confronted him down the length of the boardroom.
‘I heard you have been borrowing money on your own bat,’ Shasa accused.
Garry removed his spectacles, polished them diligently, held them up to the light and then replaced them
on his large Courtney nose, all to gain time in which to compose his reply.
‘Only one person knows about that. The manager of the Adderly Street branch of Standard Bank. He could lose his job if he blabbed about my personal business.’
‘You forget that both Nana and I are on the board of the Standard Bank. All loans of over a million pounds come up before us for approval.’
‘Rand,’ Garry corrected his father pedantically. ‘Two million rand – the pound is history.’
‘Thanks,’ Shasa said grimly. ‘I’ll try to move with the times. Now how about this two million rand you have borrowed?’
‘A straightforward transaction, Dad. I put up my shares in the Shasaville township as collateral, and the bank lent me two million rand.’
‘What are you going to do with it? That’s a small fortune.’ Shasa was one of the few men in the country who would qualify that amount with that particular adjective, and Garry looked mildly relieved.
‘As a matter of fact, I have used half a million to buy up fifty-one per cent of the issued shareholding of Alpha Centauri Estates, and loaned the company another half million to get it out of trouble.’
‘Alpha Centauri?’ Shasa looked mystified.
‘The company owns some of the prime property on the Witwatersrand and here in the Cape Peninsula. It was worth almost twenty-six million before the crash at Sharpeville.’
‘And now it’s worth zero,’ Shasa suggested, and before Garry could protest, ‘What have you done with the other million?’
‘Gold shares – Anglos and Vaal Reefs. At the fire sale prices I paid for them they are returning almost twenty-six per cent. The dividends will pay the interest on the entire bank loan.’
Shasa sat down in his seat at the head of the boardroom table and studied his son carefully. He should have been conditioned by now, but Garry still managed to surprise Shasa. It was an imaginative but neatly logical coup, and if it had not been his own son, Shasa would have been impressed. As it was, he felt duty bound to find flaws in it.