Wilbur Smith - Shout At The Devil

by Shout At The Devil(Lit)

  "The plating will weigh many tons! "he cried.

  "In German East Africa there are many hundreds of thousands of indi genes I doubt not that you will be able to persuade them to serve as porters."

  "The route is impossible... and what is more, there is a band of enemy guerrillas operating in the area north of here. Guerrillas led by those same bandits that you allowed to escape from the dhow, off the mouth of this river." In agitation Fleischer had risen from his chair and now he pointed a fat accusing forefinger at von Kleine. "You allowed them to escape. Now they are ravaging the whole province.

  If I try to bring a heavily laden, slow moving caravan of porters down from Dares Salaam, word will reach them before I have marched five kilometres. It's madness I won't do it!"

  "It seems then, that you have a choice." Von Kleine smiled with his mouth only. "The English marauders, or a firing party on the afterdeck of this ship." "What do you mean? "howled Fleischer.

  "I mean that my request is no longer a request, it is now an order. If you defy it, I will immediately convene a court martial." Von Kleine drew his gold watch and checked the time.

  "We should be able to dispose of the formalities and shoot you before dark. What do you think, Kyller?"

  "It will be cutting things fine, sir. But I think we could manage it." When the Governor of Mozambique had offered Flynn a captaincy in the army of Portugal, there had been an ugly scene. Flynn felt strongly that he deserved at least the rank of colonel. He had suggested terminating their business relationship. The Governor had countered with an offer of major and signalled to his aide de-camp to refill Flynn's glass. Flynn had accepted both offers, but the one under protest. That was seven months ago, a few short weeks after the massacre at Lalapanzi.

  Since then Flynn's army, a mixed bag of a hundred native troops, officered by himself, Sebastian and Rosa Oldsmith, had been operating almost continually in German territory.

  There had been a raid on the Songea railway siding where Flynn had burned five hundred tons of sugar, and nearly a thousand of millet that was in the warehouses awaiting shipment to Dares Salaam, supplies badly needed by Governor Schee and Colonel Lettow von Vorbeck who were assembling an army in the coastal area.

  There had been another brilliant success when they had ambushed and wiped out a band of thirty Askari at a river crossing. Flynn released the three hundred native recruits that the Askari were escorting, and advised them to get the hell back to their villages and forsake any ambitions of military glory using the corpses of the Askari that littered the banks of the ford as tangible argument.

  Apart from cutting every telegraph line, and blowing up the railway tracks they came across, three other raids had met with mixed results. Twice they had captured supply columns of bearers carrying in provisions to the massing German forces. Each time they had been forced to run as German reinforcements came up to drive them off. The third effort had been an abject failure, the ignominy of it being compounded by the fact that they had almost had the person of Commissioner Fleischer in their grasp.

  Carried on the swift feet of the runners who were part of Flynn's intelligence system came the news that Herman Fleischer and a party of Askari had left Mahenge boma and marched to the confluence of the Ruhaha and Rufiji rivers.

  There they had gone aboard the steam launch and disappeared into the fastness of the Rufiji delta on a mysterious errand.

  What goes up must come down," Flynn pointed out to Sebastian. "And what goes down the Rufiji must come up again. We will go to the Ruhaha and wait for Herr Fleischer to return." For once there was no argument from either Sebastian or Rosa. Between the three of them it was understood without discussion that Flynn's army existed chiefly to act as the vehicle of retribution. They had made a vow over the grave of the child, and now they fought not so much from a sense of duty or patriotism, but from a burning desire for revenge.

  They wanted the life of Herman Fleischer in part payment for that of Maria Oldsmith.

  They set out for the Ruhaha river. As happened so often these days, Rosa marched at the head of the column. There was only the long braid of dark hair hanging down her back to show she was a woman, for she was dressed in bush jacket and long khaki cotton trousers that concealed the feminine fullness of her hips. She stepped out long-legged, and from her shoulder the loaded Mauser hung on its strap and bumped lightly against her flank at each pace.

  The change in her was so startling as to leave Sebastian bewildered. The new hard line of her mouth, her eyes that gave off the dark hot glow of a fanatic, the voice that had lost the underlying ripple of lighter. She spoke seldom, but when she did, both Flynn and Sebastian were forced to hear her with respect. Sometimes listening to that flat deadly tone Sebastian could feel a prickle of horror under his skin.

  They reached the landing-place and the jetty on the Ruhaha river and waited for the launch to return. It came three days later, heralding its approach by the soft chugging of its engine. When it came round the river bend, pushing briskly against the current, headed for the wooden jetty, they were lying in wait for it.

  "There he is!" Sebastian's voice was thick with emotion as he recognized the plump grey-clad figure in the bows.

  "The swine, oh, the bloody swine!" and he jerked the bolt of his rifle open then snapped it shut.

  "Wait!" Rosa's hand closed on his wrist before he could lift the butt to his shoulder.

  "I can get him from he reP protested Sebastian.

  "No. I want him to see us. I want to tell him first. I want him to know why he must die." The launch swung in broadside to the current, losing its way, until it came in gently to nudge the jetty. Two of the Askari jumped ashore, laying back on the lines to hold her while the Commissioner disembarked.

  Fleischer stood on the jetty for a minute, looking back down the river. This action should have warned Flynn, but he did not see its significance. Then the Commissioner shrugged slightly and trudged up the jetty towards the boat, house.

  "Tell your men to drop their weapons into the river," said Flynn in his best German as he stood up from the patch of reeds beside the jetty.

  Herman Fleischer froze in mid-stride, but his belly quivered and his head turned slowly towards Flynn. His blue eyes seemed to spread until they filled his face, and he made a clucking noise in his throat.

  "Tell them quickly, or I will shoot you through the stomach," said Flynn, and Fleischer found his voice. He relayed Flynn's order to the Askari, and there were a series of splashes around the launch as it was obeyed.

  Movement in the corner of his eye made Fleischer swing his head, and he was face to face with Rosa Oldsmith.

  Beyond her in a half circle stood Sebastian and a dozen armed Africans, but some instinct warned Fleischer that the woman was the danger. There was a merciless quality about her, some undefinable air of deadly purpose. It was to her he addressed his question.

  "What do you want?" His voice was husky with apprehension.

  "What did he say?" Rosa asked her father.

  "He wants to know what you want."

  "Ask him if he remembers me." As he heard the question, Fleischer remembered her in her nightdress, kneeling in the fire-light, and with the memory came real fear.

  "It was a mistake," he whispered. "The child! I did not order it."

  "Tell him..." said Rosa, "tell him that I am going to kill him." And her hands moved deliberately on the Mauser, slipping the safety-catch across, but her eyes never left his face.

  "It was a mistake," Herman repeated and he stepped backwards, lifting his hands to ward off the bullet that he knew must come.

  At that moment Sebastian shouted behind Rosa, just one word.

  "Look!" Around the bend of the Ruhaha river, only two hundred yards from where they stood, another launch swept into view. It came silently, swiftly and at its stubby masthead flew the ensign of the German navy. There were men in crisp white uniforms clustered around the Maxim machine gun in its bows.

  Flynn's party stared at i
t in complete disbelief. Its presence was as unbelievable as that of the Loch Ness monster in the Serpentine or a man-eating lion in St. Paul's Cathedral, and in the long seconds that they stood paralysed the launch closed in quickly on the jetty.

  Herman Fleischer broke the spell. He opened his mouth and from the barrel of his chest issued a bellow that rang clearly across the water.

  Kyller, they are Englishmen!" Then he moved, with three light steps he danced sideways, incredibly quickly he moved his gross body from under the threatening muzzle of Rosa's rifle and dived from the jetty into the dark green swirl of water below the boards.

  The splash of his dive was immediately followed by the tack, tack, tack of the launch's machine gun and the air was filled with the swishing crack of a hundred whips. The launch drove straight in towards them with the Maxim blazing on its bow. Around Flynn, and Rosa and Sebastian the earth erupted in a rapid series of dust fountains, a ricochet howled dementedly, one of the gun-boys spun on his heels in a brief dervish dance and then sprawled down the bank, with his rifle clattering on the wooden boards of the jetty, and the frozen party on the bank exploded into violent movement. Flynn and his black troopers ducked and dodged away up the bank, but Rosa ran forward. She reached the edge of the jetty unscathed through the hailstorm of Maxim fire, there she checked and aimed the Mauser at the wallowing body of Herman Fleischer in the water below her.

  "You killed my baby!" Rosa shrieked, and Fleischer looked up at her and knew he was about to die. A Maxim bullet Struck the metal of the rifle, tearing it from Rosa's hands, and she staggered off balance, her arms windmilling as she tottered on the edge of the jetty.

  Sebastian reached her as she fell. He caught her and swung her up on to his shoulder, whirled with her and bounded away up the bank, running with all the reserves of his strength unlocked by the key of his terror.

  With ten of the gun-boys Sebastian took the rear guard; for that day and the next they skirmished back along the Hill line of the retreat, briefly holding each natural defensive point until the Germans brought up the Maxim gun. Then they dropped back, retreating slowly while Flynn and Rosa made a straight run of it. In the second night Sebastian broke contact with the pursuers and fled north towards the rendezvous at the stream below the ruins of Lalapanzi.

  Forty-eight hours later he reached it. In the moonlight he staggered into the camp, and Rosa threw off her blankets and came running to him with a low joyous cry of greeting.

  She knelt before him, unlaced and gently drew off each of his boots. While Sebastian gulped the mug of coffee and hot gin that Flynn brewed for him, Rosa bathed and tended the blisters that had burst on his feet. Then she dried her hands, stood and picked up her blankets.

  "Come," she said, and together they walked away along the bank of the stream. Behind a curtain of hanging creepers, on a nest of dry grass and blankets, while the jewelled night sky glowed above them, they gave each other the comfort of their bodies for the first time since the death of the child. Afterwards they slept entwined until the low sun woke them. Then they rose and went down the bank together naked into the stream. The water was cold when she splashed him, and she giggled like a little girl and ran through the shallows across the sandbank with the water bursting in a sparkling spray around her legs, drops of it glittering like sequins on her skin, her waist was the neck of a Venetian vase flaring down into full double rounds on her lower body.

  He chased and caught her and they fell together and knelt facing each other, spluttering and laughing, and with each gust of laughter her bosom jumped and bounced.

  Sebastian leaned forward with the laughter drying in his throat and cupped them in his hands.

  Instantly her own laughter ceased, she looked at him a moment, then suddenly her face hardened and she struck his hands away.

  "No!" she hissed at him, and jumping to her feet she waded to where her clothing lay on the bank. Swiftly she covered her femininity, and as she strapped the heavy bandolier of ammunition around her body the last soft memory of their loving was gone from her face.

  It was that stinking Rufiji water, Herman Fleischer decided, and moved painfully in his maschille as another cramp took him.

  The hot hand of dysentery that closed on his stomach added to his mood of dark resentment. His present discomfort was directly linked to the arrival of Blitcher in his territory, the indignities he had experienced at the hands of her captain, the danger he had run into in his brush with the English bandits at the start of this expedition, and since then the constant gruelling work and ever-present fear of another attack, the nagging of the engineer whom von Kleine had placed over him he hated everything to do with that cursed warship, he hated every man aboard her.

  The jogging motion of the maschille bearers stirred the contents of his belly, making it gurgle and squeak. he would have to stop again, and he looked ahead for a suitable place in which to find privacy.

  Ahead of him the caravan of porters was toiling along the shallow bottom of a valley between two sparsely wooded ridges of shale and broken rock.

  The column was spread out in an untidy straggle half a mile long, for it comprised just under a thousand men.

  In the van a hundred of them, stripped to loin-cloths were wielding their long pari gas on and shiny with sweat, the scrub. The blades glinting as they rose and fell, the thudding of the blows muted in the lazy heat of afternoon.

  Working under the supervision of Gunther Raube, the young engineering officer from Blitcher, they were cutting out the narrow track, widening it for the passage of the bulky objects that followed.

  Dwarfing the men that swarmed around them, these four objects rolled slowly along, rocking and swaying over patches of uneven ground.

  Now and then halting as they came up against a tree stump or an outcrop of rock, before the animal exertions of two hundred black men could get them rolling again.

  Three weeks previously they had beached the freighter Rheinlander in Dares Salaam harbour and dismantled eight slabs of her plating. Then from the metal frames of her hull, Raube had shaped eight enormous wheel rims, fourteen feet in diameter; into each of these he had welded a sheet of -inch plating ten foot square. Using the freighter's bollards as axles, he had linked these eight discs in four pairs. Thus each of these contraptions looked like the wheel and axle assembly of a gigantic Roman chariot.

  Herman Fleischer had made a swift recruitment tour, and secured nine hundred able-bodied Volunteers from the town of Dares Salaam and its outlying villages. These nine hundred were now engaged in trundling the four sets of wheels southward towards the RLIfiji delta. While they worked, Herman's Askari stood by with loaded Mousers to discourage any of the volunteers from Succumbing to an attack of homesickness; a malady which was fast reaching epidemic proportions, aggravated as it was by shoulders rubbed raw by contact with harsh sun-heated metal, and by palms whose outer layers of skin had been smeared away on the rough hemp ropes. They had been two weeks at their labours and they were still thirty torturous miles from the river.

  Herman Fleischer squirmed again in his maschille as the amoebic dysentery gnawed at his guts.

  "Mother of a pig!" he moaned, and then shouted at the bearers, "Quickly, take me to those trees." He pointed to a clump of wild ebony that smothered one of the side draws of the valley.

  With alacrity, the maschille bearers swung off the path and trotted up the draw. Within the screen of wild ebony they paused while the Commissioner alighted from the hammock and hurried into the deepest recess of the bush to be alone. Then they drew themselves down with a communal sigh and gave themselves up to a session of African callisthenics.

  When the Commissioner came out of retreat he was hungry. It was cool and restful in the shade, an ideal place to take his midafternoon snack. Raube would have to fend for himself for an hour or so. Herman nodded to his personal servant to set up the camp table and open the food box. His mouth was fulll of sausage when the first rifle shot clapped dully in the dusty dry air.

  "
Where is he?" He must be here. The scouts said he was here. Can you see him?" Rosa Oldsmith spoke through lips that were chapped dry by sun and wind, white flakes of skin had -come loose from the raw red patches of sunburn on her nose, and her eyes were bloodshot from the dust and the glare.

  She lay on her stomach behind a bank of shale and coarse grass with the Mauser probing out in front of her.

  "Can you see him?" she demanded again impatiently, turning her head towards her father.

  Flynn grunted noncommittally, holding the binoculars to his eyes, panning them slowly down the length of the valley then back again to the head of the strange caravan.

  There is a white man there, he said.

  "Is it Fleischer, is it?

  "No," doubtfully Flynn gave the negative. "No, I don't think so." "Look for him. He must be there somewhere."

  "I wonder what the hell those things are." Flynn concentrated on the four huge sets of wheels. The lens of the binoculars magnified the heat distortion through the still air, making them change shape and size so that one second they were insignificant and the next they were monstrous.