by Wilbur Smith
Johnny’s progress was a series of rushes where the spoor ran true, broken by halts and painstaking casts on the rocky ridges and areas of broken ground. Twice he left the Landrover to work the spoor through difficult terrain, but across one of the flat white salt pans he covered four miles in as many minutes. The prints were strung like the beads of a checklace, cut clearly through the glistening crust of salt.
Beyond the pan they ran into a maze of black rocks, riven by gullies, and guarded by the tall misshapen monoliths.
In one of the gullies he found Hansie, the little old coloured crewman from Wild Goose. His skull had been battered in with the blood-caked rock that lay beside him.
The blood had dried slick and shiny, and Hansie stared with dry eyeballs at the merciless sky. His expression was of mild SUrprise.
The story of this new tragedy was written in the sandy bottom of the gully. In an area of milling, confused prints the two men had argued. Johnny could guess that Hansie had wanted to turn back for the coast. He must have known that the road lay beyond the mountains, a hundred miles away. He wanted to abandon the attempt, try for the coast and Cartridge Bay.
The argument ended when he turned his back on Benedict, and returned on his old tracks.
There was a depression in the sand from which Benedict had picked up the rock and followed him.
Standing over Hansie, and looking down at that pathetic crushed head, Johnny realized for the first time that he was following a maniac.
Benedict van der Byl was insane. He was no longer a man, but a raging demented animal.
“I will kill him,” Johnny promised the old white woolly head at his feet. There was no need for subterfuge now.
If he caught up with Benedict and did it, no court in the world would question but that it was self-defence. Benedict had placed himself beyond the laws of man.
Johnny took the deflated rubber raft and spread it over Hansie.
He anchored the edges of the rubber sheet with rocks.
He drove on into the dancing, shimmering walls of heat with a new mood on him; murderous, elated expectation.
He knew that at this moment in time he was part animal also, corrupted by the savagery of the man he was hunting.
He wanted payment in full from Benedict van der Byl in his own coin. Life for life, and blood for blood.
A mile farther on he found the water container. It had been flung aside violently, skidding across the sand with the force of its rejection; the water had poured from its open mouth, leaving a dried hollow in the thirsty earth.
Johnny stared at it in disbelief Not even a maniac would condemn himself to such a horrible ending.
Johnny went across to where the five-gallon brass drum lay on its side. He picked it up and shook it, there was the sloshy sound of a pint or so of liquid in it.
“God!” he whispered, awed and feeling a twinge of pity despite himself. “He won’t last long now.” He lifted the container to his lips and sucked a mouthful.
Immediately his nostrils flared with disgust, and he spat violently, dropping the can and wiping at his lips with the back of his hand.
“Sea water!” he mumbled. He hurried to the Land-Rover and washed out his mouth with sweet water.
How the contamination had occurred he would never know. The raft might have lain for years in Wild Goose without its stores being checked or renewed.
From that point onwards Benedict must have known he was doomed.
His despair was easy to read in the blundering footsteps. He had started running, with panic driving him.
Five hundred yards further on he had fallen heavily into the bed of a dry ravine, and lain for a while before dragging himself up the bank.
Now he had lost direction. The spoor began a long curve to the northwards, running again. It came round full circle, and where it crossed itself, Benedict had sat down. The marks of his buttocks were unmistakable. He must have controlled his panic here because once more the spoor struck out with determination towards the mountains.
However, within half a mile he had tripped and fallen.
Now he was staggering off course again, drifting southwards.
Once more he had fallen, but here he had lost a shoe.
Johnny picked it up and read the printed gold lettering on the inner sole. “BALLY OF SWITZERLAND, SPECIALLY MADE FOR HARRODS. That’s out boy Benedict, all right.
Forty-guinea black kid,” he muttered grimly, and climbed back into the Land-Rover. His excitement was climaxing now. It would be soon, very soon.
Farther on Benedict had wandered down into the bed of an ancient watercourse, and turned to follow it. His right foot was lacerated by the razor flints in the river bed, and at each pace he had left a little dab of brown crumbly blood.
He was staggering like a drunkard.
Johnny zigzagged the Land-Rover through the boulders that dotted the watercourse. gu epene , and spicockscomb ridges of black rock hedged it in on either hand.
The air in the watercourse was a heavy blanket of heat. It seared the throat, and dried the mucus in Johnny’s nostrils brick hard. A
small noon breeze came off the mountains, a sluggish stirring of the heavy air, that provided no relief but seemed only to heighten the bite of the sun and the suffocating oppression of the air.
Scattered along the river bed were bushes of stunted scrub.
Grotesque little plants, crippled and malformed by the drought of years.
From one of the bushes ahead of the Land-Rover a monstrous black bird flapped its wings lethargically. Johnny screwed up his eyes, uncertain if it was reality or a mirage of the heat and the tortured air.
Suddenly the bird resolved itself into the jacket of a dark blue suit. It hung in the thorny branches, the breeze stirring the folds of expensive cloth.
“In his coat. He put it in his coat pocket.” With eyes only for the jacket, recklessly he pressed down the accelerator and the
Land-Rover surged forward. Johnny did not see the knee-high boulder of ironstone in his path.
He hit it at twenty miles an hour, and the Land-Rover stopped dead with the squeal of tearing metal. Johnny was flung forward against the steering-wheel, the impact driving the breath from his lungs.
He was still doubled up with the pain of it, wheezing for breath, as he hobbled to the jacket and snatched it out of the bush.
He felt the heavy drag of the weighted pocket.
Then the fat canvas bag was in his hands, the contents crunched nuttily as he tore at the drawstring. Nothing else in the world felt like that.
“Such a diamond as you will never see again.” The drawstring was knotted tightly. Johnny ran back to the Land-Rover. Frantically he scrabbled in the seat locker an with the nile . he cut the rawstring an dumpe the contents of the bag on to the bonnet of the Land-Rover.
“Oh God! Oh sweet God!” he whispered through cracked lips. His eyesight blurred, and the big blue diamond glowed mistily, distorted by the tears that flooded his vision.
It was a full minute before he could bring himself to touch it.
Then he did so reverently - as though it were a sacred relic.
Johnny Lance had worked all his life to take a stone such as this.
He held it in both hands and sank down into the scrap of shade beside the body of the Land-Rover.
It was another five minutes before the hot cloying smell of engine oil reached the conscious level of his mind.
He turned his head and saw the slowly spreading pool of it beneath the Land-Rover chassis. Quickly he rolled on to his stomach and, still clutching the diamond, crawled under the vehicle. The ironstone boulder had shattered the engine sump. The Land-Rover had bled its lifeblood into the hot sand of the river bed.
He wriggled out from under the body of the Land-Rover and leaned against the front tyre. He looked at his wrist watch and was surprised to see it was already a few minutes after two o’clock in the afternoon.
He was surprised also at the conscious effort it r
equired to focus his eyes on the dial of the watch. Two days and two nights without sleep, the unremitting emotional strain of those days and nights, the battering his body had taken, the long hours in the heat and the soul-corroding desolation of this lunar landscape - all these had taken their toll. He knew he was as light-headed as in the first stages of inebriation, he was beginning to act irrationally. That sudden reckless charge down the boulder-strewn river bed, which had wrecked the Land-Rover, was a symptom of his present instability.
He fondled the great diamond, touching the warm smooth surface to his lips, rubbing it softly between thumb and forefinger, changing it from hand to hand, while every fibre of his muscles and the very marrow of his bones cried out for rest.
A soft and treacherous lethargy spread through his body and reached out to numb his brain. He closed his eyes for a moment to shut out the flare, and when he opened them again with an effort the time was four o’clock. He scrambled to his feet. The shadows in the gully were longer, the breeze had dropped.
Although he moved with the stiffness of an old man, the sleep had cleared his mind and while he wolfed a packet of biscuits spread with meat paste and washed it down with a mugful of lukewarm water he made his decision.
He buried the canvas bag of rough diamonds in the sand beneath the
Land-Rover, but he could not bring himself to part with the big blue.
He buttoned it securely into the back pocket of his slacks. Into the light knapsack from the seat locker he packed the two-pint water bottle, the first aid kit, a small hand-bearing compass, two of the smoke flares and the knife. He checked his pockets for his cigarette lighter and case.
Then without another glance at the radio set on the dashboard of the Land-Rover he turned away and hobbled up the gully on the spoor of
Benedict van der Byl.
Within half a mile he had walked the stiffness out of his body, and he lengthened his stride, going well now. The hatred and hunger for vengeance which had died to smouldering ash since he had found the diamonds now flared up again strongly. It gave power to his legs and sharpened his senses.
The spoor turned abruptly up the side of the gully and he lost it on the black rock of the ridge, but found it again on his first cast.
He was closing fast now. The spoor was running across the grain of the land, and Benedict was clearly weakening rapidly. He had fallen repeatedly, crawled on bloody knees over cruel gravel and rock, he had blundered into the scrub bushes and left threads of his clothing on the hooked redtipped thorns.
Then the spoor led out of the ridges and scrub into another area of low orange-coloured sandhills and Johnny broke into a jog trot. The sun was sliding down the sky, throwing blue shades in the hollows of the dunes and the heat abated so that Johnny’s sweat was able to cool him before drying.
Johnny was intent on the staggering footprints, beginning to worry now that he would find Benedict already dead. The signs were those of a man in extreme distress, and still he was driving himself on.
Johnny did not notice the other prints that angled in from the dunes and ran parallel to those of Benedict, until they closed in again and began overlaying the human prints.
Johnny stopped and went down on one knee to examine the broad dog-like pug marks.
“Hyena!” He felt the sick little flutter of revulsion in his stomach as he spoke. He glanced around quickly and saw the other set of prints out on the left.
“A pair of them! They’ve smelt the blood.” Johnny began to run on the spoor now. His skin crawled with what he knew could happen when they caught up with a helpless man. The filthiest and most cowardly animals in Africa, but with jaws that could crunch to splinters the thigh bone of a full-grown buffalo, and their thick stubby fangs were coated with such a slime of bacteria from a diet of putrid carrion that their bite was as deadly as that of a black mamba.
“Let me be in time; please God, let me find him in time.” He heard it then. From beyond the crest of the next dune. The horror of the sound stopped him in mid-stride. It was a shrill giggling gibbering cry that sobbed into silence.
Johnny stood listening, panting wildly from his run.
It came again. The laughter of demons, excited, blood-crazy.
“They’ve got him.” Johnny flung himself at the soft slope of sand.
He reached the crest and looked down into the saucer-shaped arena formed by the crescent of the dune.
Benedict lay on his back. His white shirt was open to the waist.
The blue trousers of his suit were ripped and shredded, exposing his knees. One foot was a bloody lump of sock and congealed dirt.
The pair of hyenas had trampled a path in the sand around his body. They had been circling him for hours, while greed overcame their cowardice.
One hyena sat ten feet from him, squatting obscenely with its flat snakelike head lowered between humped shoulders. Brown and shaggy, spotted with darker brown, its round ears pricked forward, its black eyes sparkling with greed and excitement as it watched its mate.
The other hyena stood with its front paws on Benedict’s chest.
Its head was lowered, and its jaws were locked into Benedict’s face.
It was leaning back, bracing its paws on his chest, tugging viciously as it sought to tear off a mouthful of flesh. Benedict’s head was jerking and twitching as the hyena worried it. His legs were kicking weakly, and his hands fluttered on the sand like maimed white birds.
The flesh of his face tore. Johnny heard it distinctly in the utter silence of the desert evening. It tore with the soft sound of silk - and Johnny screamed.
Both hyenas bolted at the scream, scrambling over the far crest of the dune in horrible clownish panic, leaving Benedict lying with a bloody mask for a face.
Looking down at that face Johnny knew he could not kill him now, perhaps could never have killed him. He could not revenge himself on this broken thing with its ruined face and twisted mind.
He dropped on to his knees beside him, and loosened the flap of the knapsack with clumsy fingers.
Benedict’s one ear and cheek were hanging over his mouth in a thick flap of torn flesh. The teeth in the side of his jaw were exposed and the blood dribbled and spurted in fine needle jets.
Johnny tore the paper packaging off an absorbent dressing and with it pressed the flap back into place. Holding it there with the full pressure of his spread fingers. The blood soaked through the dressing, but it was slowing at the pressure.
“It’s all right, Benedict. I’m here now. You’ll be all right, he whispered hoarsely as he worked. With his free hand he stripped the packaging off another dressing, and substituted it neatly for the sodden one. He maintained the pressure on the clean dressing while he lifted Benedict’s head and cradled it in his lap.
“We’ll just dry this bleeding up, then we’ll give you a drink.” He reached into the first aid kit for a piece of cotton wool and tenderly began to clean the blood and sand from Benedict’s nostrils and lips.
Benedict’s strangled breathing eased a little but still whistled through the black lips. His tongue was swollen, filling his mouth like a fat purple sponge.
“That’s better,” Johnny muttered. Still without relaxing pressure on the compress dressing, he got the screw top off the water bottle.
Holding his thumb over the opening to regulate the flow, he let a drop of water fall into the dark dry pit of a mouth.
After another ten drops he propped the water bottle in the sand, and massage Benedict’s throat gently to stimulate the swallowing reflex.
The unconscious man gulped painfully.
“That’s my boy,” Johnny encouraged him, and began again feeding him a drop at a time, crooning softly as he did it.
“You’re going to be all right. That’s it, swallow it down.” It took him twenty minutes to administer half a pint of the warm sweet water, and by then the bleeding was negligible. Johnny reached into the kit again and selected two salt and two glucose tablets. He placed them in his own mo
uth and chewed them to a smooth thin paste then he bent over the mutilated face of the man he had sworn to kill and pressed his own lips against Benedict’s swollen dry lips. He injected the solution of salt and glucose into Benedict’s mouth, then straightened up and began again dripping the water.
When he had given Benedict another four tablets and half the contents of the water bottle, he stoppered it and returned it to the knapsack. He soaked the compress with bright yellow acriflavine solution, and bandaged it firmly into place. This was a more difficult task than he had anticipated and after a few abortive attempts he passed the bandage under the jaw an dover the eyes, swathing Benedict’s head completely except for the nose and mouth.
By this time the sun was on the horizon. Johnny stood up and stretched his back and shoulders as he watched the splendid gold and red death of another desert day.
He knew he was delaying his next decision. He reckoned it was five miles to where he had abandoned the Landrover in the gully. Five miles of hard going, a round trip of four hours - probably five in the dark. Could he leave Benedict here, get back to the vehicle, radio Cartridge Bay, and return to him?
Johnny swung round and looked up at the dunes. There was his answer. One of the hyenas was squatting on the top of a dune watching him intently. Hunger and the approach of night had made it unnaturally bold.
Johnny shouted an obscenity and made a threatening gesture towards it. The hyena jumped up and loped over the back of the ridge.
“Moon rise at eight tonight. I’ll rest until then - and we’ll go in the cool,” he decided and lay down on the sand beside Benedict. The lump in his back pocket prodded him, and he took the diamond out and held it in his hand.
In the darkness the hyenas began to cackle and shriek, and when the moon rose it silhouetted their evil shapes on the ridge above the saucer.
“Come on, Benedict. We’re going home. There are a couple of nice policemen who want to talk to you.“Johnny lifted him into a sitting position, draped Benedict’s arm over his shoulder and came up under him in a fireman’s lift.