by Wilbur Smith
don't bully-girls. Please don't let it happen again."
He straightened up and spoke to Royan, "Get her to your tent and keep
her there." He combed his hair back from his face with his fingers. "And
now, if you have no serious objections, may we get a little sleep?"
It rained again during the early hours. The heavy drops drummed down on
the canvas and the lightning lit the interior of the tents with an eerie
brilliance. However, by the time that Nicholas went through to the
dining tent for breakfast the next morning, the clouds had cleared and
the sunshine was bright and cheering. The sweet mountain air smelt of
wet earth and mushrooms.
Boris greeted Nicholas with hearty good fellowship.
"Good morning, English. We had some fun last night. I still laugh to
remember it. Very good jokes. One day soon we will have some more vodka,
then we will makesome more good jokes." And he bellowed through to the
kitchen tent, "Hey! Lady Sun, bring your new boyfriend something to eat.
He is hungry from all the sport last night."
Tessay was quiet and withdrawn as she supervised the' servants handing
round breakfast. One eye was swollen almost closed, and her lip was cut.
She did not look at Nicholas once during the meal.
"We will go on ahead," Boris explained jovially as they drank coffee.
"My servants will break camp, and follow us in my big truck. With luck,
we will be able to camp tonight on the rim above the gorge, and tomorrow
we will begin the descent."
As they were climbing into the truck, Tessay was able to speak to him
softly for a moment, without danger of Boris overhearing her. "Thank
you, Alto Nicholas. But it was not wise. You don't know him. You must be
careful now. He does not forget, not does he forgive."
From the village of Debra Maryarn Boris took a branch road that ran
alongside the Dandera river directly south, wards. The road they had
followed the previous day from Lake Tana was shown on the map as a major
highway. It had been bad enough. But this track that they were now on
was marked as a secondary road "not passable in all weather'. To
compound matters, it seemed that most of the heavy traffic that had torn
up the main road had followed this same track. They came to a place
where some huge vehicle had become bogged down in the rain-saturated
earth, and the efforts to free it had left areas of ploughed land and an
excavation like a bomb crater that resembled an old photograph of the
battlefields of First World War Flanders.
Twice during the day the Toyota too became stuck in this foul ground.
Each time this happened, the big truck that was following them came up
and all the servants swarmed down from the cargo body to push and heave
the Toyota through. Even Nicholas stripped to the waist to work with
them in the mud to free it.
"If you had only listened to my advice," Boris grumbled, "we would not
be here. There is no game where you want to go, and there are no roads
worth the name either."
In the early afternoon they stopped beside the river for an alfresco
lunch. Nicholas went down to the pool beside the road to wash off the
mud and filth of the morning's labours. He had been in the forefront of
the efforts to keep the truck moving. Royan followed him down the slope
and perched on a rock above the pool while he stripped off his shirt and
knelt, at the verge to splash himself with the cold mountain water. The
river was muddy yellow and swollen from the rainstorms.
"I don't think Boris believes your story about the striped dik-dik," she
warned him. "Tessay tells me that he is suspicious of what we are up
to." She watched with interest as he sluiced his chest and upper arms.
'"ere the sun had not touched it, his skin was very white and
unblemished.
His chest hair was thick and dark. She decided that his body was good to
look at.
"He is the type that would go through our luggage if he gets a chance,'
Nicholas agreed. "You didn't bring anything with you that has any clues
for him? No papers or notes?"
"Only the satellite photograph, and my notebooks are all in my own
shorthand. He won't be able to make anything of them."
"Be very careful of what you discuss with Tessay."
"She is a dear. There is nothing underhand about her." Heatedly Royan
came to the defence of her new friend.
"She may be all right, but she's married to my chum Boris. Her first
allegiance lies there. No matter what your feelings towards her, don't
trust either of them." He dried himself on his shirt, slipped it on and
then buttoned it over his chest. "Let's go and get something to eat."
Back at the parked truck Boris was pulling the cork from a bottle of
South African white wine. He poured a tumbler full for Nicholas. Chilled
in the river, it was crisp and fruity. Tessay offered them cold roast
chicken and injera bread, the flat, thin sheets of stone-ground
unleavened bread of the country. The trials and labours of the morning's
travels faded into insignificance as Royan lay beside Nicholas in the
grass and they watched a bearded vulture sailing high against the blue.
It saw them and drifted overhead curiously, twisting its head to look
down at them. Its eyes were masked in black like those of a highwayman,
and the distinctive wedge-shaped tail feathers flirted with the wind the
way the fingers of a concert pianist would stroke the ivories of the
keyboard.
When it was time to go on, Nicholas gave her his hand to lift her to her
feet. It was one of their rare moments of physical contact, and she held
on to his fingers for just a second or two longer than was strictly
necessary.
There was no improvement in the surface of the trac as they drew nearer
to the rim of the gorge, and the hours passed in this bone-jarring,
teeth-rattling progress. The track snaked over a rise and then
dog-legged down the far slope. Halfway down Boris swore in Russian as
they came round the hairpin bend of a high earthen bank to find a huge
diesel truck slewed across the track, almost blocking it.
Even though they had been following the tracks of this convoy of
vehicles since the previous day, this was the first of them that they
had encountered, and it took Boris by surprise. He hit his brakes so
suddenly that his passengers were almost catapulted from their seats,
but on the steep incline in the mud the brakes did not bring them to a
complete halt. Boris was forced to change down into his lowest gear and
steer for the narrow gap between the bank and the truck.
From the back seat Royan looked out of the window I beside her, up the
high side of the diesel truck. There was a company name and logo
emblazoned in scarlet on the green background.
A strong feeling of du vu overcame her as she stared at the image. She
had seen this sign recently, but her memory cheated her: she could not
recall the time or the place. She only knew that it was of vital
importance that she should remember.
The side of the Toyota scraped against the metal of the truck, and then
>
they were past it. Boris leaned out of his window and shook his fist at
the driver of the larger vehicle.
He was a local man, probably recruited in Addis by the owner of the
truck. Grinning at Boris's antics, he leaned out of his own cab to
return the clenched fist salute, adding a nice little touch by jerking a
raised forefinger upwards.
"Dungeater!" Boris roared with outrage at being bested in the exchange,
but he did not stop. "No use even talking to them. What do they know?
Black chimps!'
For the rest of the wearisome journey Royan remained silent and
withdrawn, shaken and troubled by the conviction that she had seen the
trademark of the winged red horse before, with, set above it in a
pennant, the name of the company: "PEGASUS EXPLORATION'.
As they approached the end of the day's journey at last they passed a
signpost beside the track. The supporting legs of the sign were solidly
set in concrete, and the artwork was of such high quality that it could
only have been that of a professional signwriter.
Across the top of the board an arrow indicated a newly bulldozed road
that headed off to the right, and the directions read:
PEGASUS EXPLORATION
BASE CAMP - ONE KILOMETRE
PRIVATE ROAD
NO ENTRY TO UNAUTHORIZED TRAFFIC
The scarlet horse reared in the centre of the board with its wings
spread wide, on the point of flight.
Now she gasped aloud as the elusive memory came upon her with stunning
clarity. She remembered where she had last seen the flying red horse. In
an instant she was transported back into the icy waters of an English
salmon river, flung from the rolling body of the Land Rover, the huge
MAN truck roaring over the bridge above her, and, for a subliminal pulse
of time, the prancing red horse upon its side.
she almost shouted aloud, but controlled herself. The terror of the
moment returned to her with full force, and she found herself breathing
hard and her heart racing as though she had run a long way.
"It cannot be a coincidence," she assured herself silently, "and I am
not mistaken. It is the same company.
Pegasus Exploration."
She was withdrawn and distracted for the last few miles of the journey,
until the track they were following ended abruptly on the brink of the
sheer cliffs of the escarpment, Here Boris pulled on to the grassy verge
and stopped the engine.
"This is as far as we ride. We camp here tonight. My big truck is not
far behind. They will make camp as so on as they arrive. Tomorrow we
will go down into the gorge on foot."
As they dismounted, Royan tugged at Nicholas's arm, "I must speak to
you," she whispered urgently, and she followed him as he led her along
the bank of the river.
He found a place for them to sit side by side, with their legs dangling
over the drop. Beside them the swollen yellow river seemed to sense what
lay ahead of it. The cold mountain waters speeded up, swirled amongst
the rocks, and gathered themselves for that dizzying leap out into empty
space. The cliff below them was a sheer wall of rock almost a thousand
feet deep. It was so high that in the evening light the abyss far below
was a dark, mysterious place, its bottom hidden from them by shadow and
spray from the falls. As Royan looked down into it her sense of balance
swirled with vertigo. She cringed back from the edge and found herself
instinctively leaning against Nicholas's shoulder to steady herself.
Only when they touched did she realize what she was doing, and she
pulled away from him self-consciously.
The muddied waters of the Dandera. river leaped from the brink, and were
miraculously transformed into curtains of ethereal lacework as they
fell. Like the skirts of waltzing bride they shimmered and swirled, and
rainbows of light played through them as though from an embroidery of
seed pearls. Still falling, the columns of white spray twisted and
changed into lovely but ephemeral shapes, until they struck the lower
ledges of glistening black rock and exploded outwards into fresh clouds
of white that at last screened the dark depths of the abyss with " an
opalescent veil.
It was with a conscious effort that Royan pulled her mind away from the
awe-inspiring scene and back to the troubled present.
"Nicky, do you remember I told you about the truck that forced my mother
and me over the bridge in the Land Rover?"
"Of course." His expression was mystified as he studied her face. "You
are upset. "What is it, Royan?"
"The truck had signwriting down the sides of the trailers that it was
towing."
"You told me, yes. Green and red. You told me that you didn't get a good
enough look to read the sign."
"It was the same as the truck we passed this afternoon.
I saw the sign at the same angle as before and it came back to me. The
red Pegasus, the flying horse."
He studied her face for a while, "Are you absolutely certain?"
"Absolutely!" She nodded vehemently.
Nicholas stared out over the magnificent panorama of the gorge spread
below them. It was forty miles to the far wall of the canyon, but in the
brilliant rain-washed air it seemed so close that he could reach across
and touch it.
"A coincidence?"he wondered at last.
"Do you think so? A very strange and wonderful coincidence, then.
Pegasus in both Yorkshire and Gojam?
Do you accept that?"
"It doesn't make sense. The truck that hit you was stolen-'
"Was it?" she demanded. "Are we sure of that?"
"If it wasn't, then let's hear your ideas."
"If you were planning an assassination, would you rely on stealing a
truck conveniently left at a Little Chef for you?"
He shook his head, "Go on."
"Suppose you arranged for your own truck to be placed there for you, and
for your driver to report it stolen only after you had a good head start
on the police."
"It's possible," he agreed without enthusiasm.
"Whoever murdered Duraid, and made two further attempts to kill me,
obviously has considerable resources at his disposal. He is able to make
arrangements in Egypt and England. On top of that, he has the seventh
scroll in his possession. He has our notes and all our workings and
translations which point him clearly to this spot on the Abbay river.
Just suppose that he has control of a company like Pegasus - is there
any reason why he can't be here in Ethiopia, just as we are, right at
this moment?"
Nicholas was silent for a while. He picked up a stone from the ledge
beside him and tossed it out over the cliff.
They both watched it drop away, dwindling in size until it vanished in
the veils of spray far below where they sat.
Abruptly Nicholas stood up and reached for her hand to pull her to her
feet beside him. "Come on," he said.
"Where are we going?"
"Pegasus base camp. Let's go and have a chat to the site foreman."
Boris protested angrily and hurried to intervene when Nicholas climbed
in
to the Toyota and started the engine, "Where the hell do you think you
are going?, "Sight-seeing." Nicholas let in the clutch. "Back in an
hour."
"Hey, English, my truck!" He ran to catch up with them, but Nicholas
accelerated away.
"Charge me for the hire." fie grinned back at Boris in the rear-view
mirror. -off and followed the They reached the signposted turn side
track over the ridge. The Pegasus camp lay on the far side. Nicholas
braked to a halt on the crest of the rise and they studied it in
silence.
An area of about ten acres had been cleared and levelled. It was
surrounded by a barbed-wire security fence, with a single closed gate.
Three of the massive diesel trucks in their green and red livery were
parked in a rank inside the fence. There were also several smaller
vehicles and a tall mobile drilling rig in the line. The rest of the
yard was filled with prospecting equipment and stores. There were stacks
of drilling rods and steel core boxes, wooden crates of spares, and
several hundred forty-four-gallon drums of diesel and oil and drilling
mud. The drums and the stores were stacked with a neatness and sense of
good order that was startling in this wild and rocky landscape. just
inside the gate stood a small village of a dozen buildings made of
corrugated sheet sections, of the Quonset type. They too were set out in
a street of military precision.
"A big, well-organized outfit," Nicholas commented.
"Let's go down and see who is in charge."
There were two armed guards on the gate, dressed in the camouflage
uniform of the Ethiopian army. They were clearly surprised by the
arrival at the gate of the strange Land Cruiser, and when Nicholas
sounded his horn one of them came forward suspiciously with his AK,47
rifle at the ready.
"I want to speak to the manager here," Nicholas told him in Arabic, with
enough haughty authority to make the entry uncertain and uneasy.
The soldier grunted, went back and consulted his colleague, then lifted
the handset of the two-way radio and spoke earnestly into the
mouthpiece. There was a five minute delay after he finished speaking,
and then the door of the nearest Quonset building opened and a white man
came out.
He was dressed in khaki coveralls and a soft bush cap.
His eyes, covered by mirrored sunglasses, were set in a deeply tanned,