Wilbur Smith - B3 The Angels Weep

by B3 The Angels Weep(Lit)

  "Kill her," Tebe ordered softly.

  Tungata had known instinctively that it would happen this way, and yet his soul turned leaden and icy.

  "We never give an order twice," Tebe said, and Tungata changed his grip on the stock of the AK.

  "Not with the rifle,"Tebe said. "The road lies just beyond those trees. The Rhodesians could be here in minutes." He took a clasp-knife from his pocket and handed it to Tungata. Tungata propped his rifle against a mopani trunk, and opened the knife. He saw that the point of the blade had been snapped off, and when he tested the edge with his thumb, he found that Tebe had deliberately dulled the edge by rubbing it against a stone.

  He felt appalled and sickened by what he was expected to do, and the manner in which he was expected to do it. He tried to hide his emotions, for Tebe was watching him curiously. He understood that he had been set a test, trial by cruelty, and Tungata knew that if he failed it, then he was as doomed as was the child, Miriam. Still stony-faced, Tungata pulled the leather belt from the loops of his jeans and used it to strap the girl's wrists together behind her back.

  He stood behind her so that he did not have to look into the dark terrified eyes. He placed his knee between her shoulder-blades and pulled her chin back to expose the slender throat. Then he glanced once more at Tebe for a reprieve. There was no mercy there, and he began to work.

  It took some minutes, with the damaged blade and the child struggling wildly, but at last the carotid artery erupted and he let her fall forward on her face. He was panting and bathed in his own rancid-smelling sweat, but the last vestiges of his previous existence as Samson Kurnalo were burned away. At last he was truly Tungata Zebiwe, the Seeker after what has been Stolen the Seeker after Vengeance.

  He broke a bunch of leaves off the nearest mopani sapling and scrubbed his hands with it. Then he cleansed the blade by stabbing it into the earth. When he handed the knife back to Comrade Tebe, he met his eyes unflinchingly, and saw in them a spark of compassion and understanding.

  "There is no going back now," Tebe said, softly. "At last you are truly one of us." They reached the road a little after midnight, and while the schoolmaster held the children in a quiet group in a copse beside it, Tebe and Tungata swept the verges for a kilo metre in both directions, in case the Rhodesians had laid an ambush. When they found it clear, they took the children across at the point which Tungata had chosen where hard gravel approaches would hold no signs. Then Tungata went back and carefully swept the road surface with a broom of grass.

  They reached the cordon sanitaire before the light. The minefield was forty miles long and one hundred yards deep. It contained over three million explosive devices, of various types, from the Claymores on trip-wires, to the plastic antipersonnel mines which would take off a limb, but would seldom kill outright. The object was to leave the enemy with a casualty to succour and nurse, a casualty who would never again be a fighting warrior.

  The edge of the minefield was marked by a line of enamel discs set on stakes or nailed to the trunks of trees. They bore a red skull and crossbones device and the words "Danger Minefield." Tebe ordered the children to lie flat in the dense brown grass, and to draw the stalks over them as concealment from the air. Then they settled to wait and Tebe explained to Tungata. "The AP mines are laid in a certain pattern.

  There is a key to the pattern, but it is very difficult to discover and often there are deliberate flaws in it. It requires great skill and iron courage to enter the field and pick up the pattern, to identify exactly at which point one has come in, and to anticipate the sequence. The Claymores are different and need other tricks." "What tricks are those?" "You will see when our guide comes." But he did not come at dawn.

  At noon Tebe said, "We can only wait. It is certain death to go into the field alone." There was no food or water, but he would not let the children move. "It is something they would have had to learn anyway." He shrugged. "Patience is our weapon The guide came in the late afternoon. Even Tungata did not know he was close until he was amongst them.

  "How did you find us?" "I cast along the edge of the road until I found where you had crossed." The guide was not much older than any of the hijacked schoolchildren, but his eyes were those of an old man for whom life had no surprises left.

  "You are late,"Tebe accused.

  "There is a Rhodesian ambush on the drifts," the guide shrugged.

  "I had to go around." "When can you take us through?" "Not until the dew falls." The guide lay down beside Tungata. "Not until the morning." "Will you explain to me the pattern of the mines?" Tungata asked, and the boy glanced across at Tebe. He nodded his permission.

  "Think of the veins in the leaf of the mopani," the guide began, and drew the lines in the dust. He talked for almost an hour with Tungata nodding and asking an occasional question.

  When he had finished speaking, the boy laid his head on his folded arms and did not move again until dawn the following morning. It was a trick that they all learned, the trick of instant sleep and instant awakening. Those who did not learn it never lasted very long.

  As soon as the light was strong enough, the guide crawled to the edge of the field. Tungata followed him closely. In his right hand the guide carried a sharpened spoke from a bicycle wheel, in the other a bunch of yellow plastic strips cut from a cheap shopping-bag. He crouched low against the earth, his head cocked like a sparrow.

  "The dew," he whispered. "Do you see it?" and Tungata started. just a few paces in front of them a string of sparkling diamond drops seemed suspended in the air a few inches above the earth." The almost invisible trip-wire of a Claymore was lit up for them by its necklace of dew and by the first low rays of the sun. The guide marked it with a yellow strip and began to probe with the bicycle spoke. Within seconds he hit something in the loose friable earth, and with gentle fingers swept clear the grey circular top of an AP mine. He stood with it between his toes and reached out to probe again. He worked with amazing speed, and found three more mines.

  "So, we have found the key," he called to Tungata who lay at the edge of the field. "Now we must be quick, before the dew dries." The young guide crawled boldly down the passageway to which he had discovered the entrance. He marked two more Claymore trip-wires before he reached the invisible turn in the passage. Here he probed again, and as soon as he confirmed the pattern, turned into the next zigzag.

  It took him twenty-six minutes to open and mark the passage through to the far edge of the field. Then he came back and grinned at Tungata. "Do you think you can do it now?" "Yes," Tungata replied without conceit, and the boy's cocky grin faded.

  "Yes, I think you could but always watch for the wild one. They put it there on purpose. There is no way to guard against it, except care." He and Tungata took the children through in groups of five, making them hold hands. At each Claymore, Tungata or the guide stood with a foot on each side of the trip-wires to make certain not one of them touched it as they passed.

  On the last journey through, when Tungata was less than a dozen paces from safety, but while he was straddling the final trip-wire, they all heard the throb of an aircraft engine. It was coming up-river from the direction of the Victoria Falls, and it grew rapidly in volume. Tungata and the last three children were in the open. The temptation to run was almost irresistible.

  "Do not move," the young guide called desperately. "Stay still, crouch down." So they knelt in the middle of the open minefield, and the fine steel wire with its single plastic strip marker ran through the crotch of Tungata's legs. He was an inch away from violent death.

  The aircraft noise built up swiftly, and then it roared over the tree-tops between them and the river. It was a silver-painted Beechcraft Baron with the letters "RUAC" in black upon the fuselage.

  "Rhodesian United Air Carriers," the guide identified it. "They take rich capitalist pig tourists to see the Smoke that Thunders." The machine was so low and close that they could see the pilot chatting to the woman passenger beside him, and then the plane
banked away and was hidden again by the fronds of the ivory-nut palms growing along the banks of the Zambezi river. Slowly Tungata straightened up. He found his shirt was sticking to his body with perspiration.

  "Move," he said to the child beside him. "But carefully." At the Victoria Falls the entire Zambezi river plunges over a precipitous ledge, and falls in a turmoil of thundering spray into the narrow gorge far below, giving it the African name "the Smoke that Thunders."

  A few miles up-river from this incredible phenomenon, the drifts begin. For forty miles, up as far as the little border post at Kazungula, the wide river tumbles through rapids and then spreads into dawdling shallows. There are twelve places at which oxen can drag a wagon through to the north bank, or a man can wade across if he is willing to chance the Zambezi crocodiles, some of which weigh a ton and can tear the leg off a buffalo and swallow it whole.

  "They have an ambush on the drifts," the skinny little guide told Tungata. "But they cannot guard them all. I know where they were this morning, but they may have moved. We will see." "Go with him," Tebe ordered, and Tungata accepted it as a mark of trust.

  That morning he learned from the little guide that to survive it was necessary to use all the senses, not merely the ears and the eyes.

  The two of them moved in on the approaches to the nearest drift. They moved an inch at a time, searching and listening, sweeping the dense riverine scrub and the tangled lianas beneath the water-fattened trunks of the forest. The guide's touch alerted Tungata, and they lay shoulder to shoulder on a bed of damp leaf-mould, utterly still but tense as coiled adders. It was only minutes later that Tungata realized that beside him the guide was snuffling the air. When he placed his lips on Tungata's ear, his whisper was a breath only.

  "They are here." Gently he drew Tungata back, and when they were clear he asked. "Did you smell them?" Tungata shook his head, and the guide grinned. "Spearmint. The white officers cannot understand that the smell of toothpaste lingers for days." They found the next drift unguarded, and waited for darkness to take the children across, making them hold hands to form a living chain. On the far bank the guide would not let them rest. Although the children were shivering with cold in their sodden clothing, he forced them on.

  "We are in Zambia at last, but we are not yet safe," he warned.

  "The danger is as great here as it is on the south bank. The kanka cross at will, and if they suspect us, they will come in hot pursuit."

  He kept them marching all that night, and half the following day, by which time the children were dragging and whining with hunger and fatigue. In the afternoon, the path brought them suddenly out of the forest to the wide cut of the main railway-line, and beside the track were half a dozen crude huts of canvas and rough-hewn poles. In the siding stood two cattle trucks.

  "This is the ZIPRA recruiting-post," the guide explained. "For the moment you are safe." In the morning while the children were embarking into one of the cattle trucks, the skinny guide came to Tungata.

  "Go in peace, Comrade. I have an instinct for those who will survive, and for those who will die in the bush. I think you will live to see the dream of glory fulfilled." And he shook hands, the alternate grip of palm and thumb which was the sign of respect. "I think we will meet again, Comrade Tungata." He was wrong. Months later, Tungata heard that the skinny little guide had walked into an ambush at the drifts. With half his stomach shot away, he had crept into an ant bear hole and kept them off until his last round was fired. Then he had pulled the pin of a grenade and held it to his own chest.

  The camp was two hundred miles north of the Zambezi. There were fifteen hundred recruits housed in the thatched barracks. Most of the instructors were Chinese. Tungata's instructor was a young woman named Wan Lok. She was short and broad, with the sturdy limbs of a peasant.

  Her face was flat and sallow, her eyes slitted and bright as those of a mamba, and she wore a cloth cap over her hair, and a baggy cotton uniform like a suit of pyjamas.

  On the first day she made them run forty kilometres in the heat, carrying a forty-kilo pack. Equally burdened, she kept easily ahead of the strongest runners, except when she doubled-back to harangue and chivy on the stragglers. By that evening Tungata was no longer supercilious and scornful of being taught by a woman.

  They ran every day after that, then they drilled with heavy wooden poles, and learned the discipline of Chinese shadow-boxing. They worked with the AK assault rifles until they could field-strip them while blindfolded and reassemble them in under fifteen seconds. They worked with the RPG-7 rocket-launchers and the grenades. They worked with bayonet and trench-knife. They learned to lay a land mine and how to boost it with plastic explosive to destroy even a mine-proofed vehicle. They learned how to set a mine under the black top of a macadamized highway by tunnelling in from the verge. They learned to lay out an ambush on a forest path, or along a main road. They learned how to make a running defence in front of a superior fire force while delaying and harassing it, and they did all this on a daily ration of a scoop of maize meal and a handful of dried kapenta, the smelly little fish from Lake Kariba, that looked like English whitebait.

  Zambia, their host country, had paid a high price for supporting their cause. The railway-line to the south that crossed the bridge over the Victoria Falls had been closed since 1973, and Rhodesian task forces had attacked and destroyed the bridges into Tanzania and Maputo, which were land-locked Zambia's only remaining lifeline to the outside world. The rations offered the guerrillas were sumptuous fare compared to those of the average Zambian citizen.

  Starved to the leanness of greyhounds, and worked to the hardness of iron, half their nights were spent in the political rallies, the endless chanting and singing, and shouted massed responses to the commissar's catechism.

  "What is the revolution?" "The revolution is power to the people."

  "Who are the people?" "Who is the power?" After midnight they were allowed to stagger away to the thatched barracks and sleep until the instructors woke them again at four o'clock in the morning.

  After three weeks, Tungata was taken to the sinister isolated hut beyond the camp periphery. Surrounded by instructors and political commissars, he was stripped naked and forced to "struggle." While they shrieked the foulest abuse at him, calling him "running dog of the racist capitalists" and "counter-revolutionary" and "imperialist reactionary', Tungata was driven to strip his soul as bare as his body.

  He shouted aloud his confessions, he told them how he had worked with the capitalist tyrants, how he had denied his brethren, how he had doubted and back-slid and harboured reactionary and counter-revolutionary thoughts, how he had lusted for food and sleep, and had betrayed the trust of his comrades. They left him utterly exhausted and broken on the floor of the hut, then Wan Lok took him by the hand, as though she were his mother and he her child, and led him stumbling and weeping back to the barracks.

  The next day he was allowed to sleep until noon and awoke feeling serene and strong. In the evening at the political rally, he was called to take his place in the front rank amongst the section-leaders.

  A month later, Wan Lok summoned him to her sleeping hut in the instructors" compound. She stood before him, a dumpy squat figure in her rumpled cotton uniform.

  "Tomorrow you are going in," she said, and took the cloth cap from her head.

  He had never seen her hair before. It fell to her waist, as thick and black and liquid as a spill of crude oil.

  "You will not see me again, "she said, and unbuttoned the front of her uniform. Her body was the colour of butter, hard and immensely powerful, but what startled and intrigued Tungata was that her pubic hair was as straight as that upon her head, without any kinking or curling. It excited him inordinately.

  "Come," she said, and led him to the thin mattress on the dirt floor of the hut.

  They did not use the drifts on the return but they crossed the Zambezi in dugout canoes at the point where the river flowed into the immensity of Lake Kariba. In the mo
onlight the stark silhouettes of the drowned trees were silver and tortured as the limbs of lepers against the starry sky.

  There were forty-eight of them in the cadre, under a political commissar and two young but battle-tempered captains. Tungata was one of the four section-leaders with ten men under him. Each of them, even the commissar, carried a sixty-kilo load beneath which they toiled like pregnant hunchbacks. There was no place for food in their packs, so they lived on lizards and bush rats, and the half-incubated eggs of wild birds. They competed with the hyena and vulture at lion kills for the putrefying scraps, and at night they visited the kraals of the black peasant farmers and emptied the grain bins.

  They crossed the Chizarira Hills and struck southwards through trackless forest and waterless wilderness until they hit the Shangani river. They followed it southwards still, passing within a few kilometres of the lonely monument in the mopani forest which marks the spot where Allan Wilson and his patrol made their last heroic but futile stand against the impi of Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, brother of the last Matabele. king, Lobengula.