Wilbur Smith - B3 The Angels Weep

by B3 The Angels Weep(Lit)

  Esau Gondele shook the great black cannonball of his head doubtfully.

  "The cat cannot resist mauling the dead bird," Roland said. "Perhaps they have not yet started to run, perhaps they are drunk with blood, perhaps we can still take them." "Ready to go!" the pilot shouted as the fuel-tanker started up and backed away from the Super Frelon, and they ran back to the open port in the fuselage and scrambled aboard.

  The helicopter lifted swiftly, not wasting time in climbing, and roared away low over the dark bush.

  At ten minutes to five o'clock the following morning, long before the sun had pushed up above the horizon, but when the light was already strong enough to make out shapes and colours, Roland slapped the pilot's shoulder and pointed to port. The pilot banked the Super Frelon sharply in that direction. It was a broken branch, the underside of the leaves were lighter in colour than those around it, it had been a flag to catch Roland's eye. Then there was another fleck of white, the raw stump of freshly broken branch sticking into the morning light. The pilot checked the Frelon, and they hovered fifty feet above it. They were staring down through the leafy canopy, and something white fluttered in the down-draught of the rotors.

  "Go down!" Roland shouted, and as they sank lower, suddenly it was all there, broken wreckage and the debris of the dead, blowing aimlessly about in the windstorm of the rotors.

  "There is a clearing!" Roland pointed, and as the helicopter settled towards it, the Scouts spilled out of her, jumping from fifteen feet to the earth and immediately spreading out into a defensive perimeter. Then Roland deployed them into a line of skirmishers and they went forward into the swath-line in quick rushes, ready to meet enemy fire. Within minutes they had cleared the area.

  "Survivors!" Roland snapped. "Search for survivors!" They went back down the swath, and in the dawn light the carnage was horrific.

  Beside each corpse a Scout paused briefly, but they were cold and stiff and the men went on. Roland reached the nose-section, and glanced through the windscreen. There was nothing to do for the crew until the long green plastic body-bags arrived. He turned back, searching frantically, looking for a scrap of bright yellow, the colour of Janine's skirt.

  "Colonel!" There was a faint shout from the forest edge. Roland sprinted towards it. Sergeant-Major Gondele was standing by the shattered tail-section of the aircraft.

  "What is it?" Roland demanded harshly, and then saw her.

  EsauGondele had covered Janine's naked body with a blue airways blanket from the wreck. She lay curled under it like a sleeping child with just her tousled head showing. Roland dropped on his knee and gently lifted the corner of the blanket. Her eyes were closed with swollen purple bruises and her lips were raw chewed flesh. For seconds he did not recognize her, and when he did, he believed that she was dead. He laid his open palm upon her cheek, and the skin was moist and warm.

  She opened her eyes. They were mere slits in the abused flesh.

  She looked up at him, and the dull lifeless eyes were more frightening than her torn and battered flesh. Then the eyes came alive with terror. Janine screamed, and there was the ring of madness in the sound.

  "Darling." Roland caught her up in his arms, but she fought him wildly, still screaming. Her eyes were mad and staring. Fresh blood oozed from the cracked scabs on her lips.

  "DoctorP Roland yelled. "Here! On the double!" and it took all his strength to hold her. She had thrown off the blanket, and naked she kicked and lashed out at him.

  Paul Henderson came at the run, and tore open his pack. He filled a syringe and muttered, "Hold her" still!" as he swabbed her skin. He pressed in the needle and squeezed the clear contents of the syringe into her arm. She went on fighting and screaming for almost a minute and then gradually quietened and relaxed.

  The doctor took her from Roland's arms, and nodded to his assistant. The young medic orderly held up a blanket as a screen and the doctor laid Janine on another.

  "Get out of here," he snapped at Rolland, and began his examination.

  Roland picked up his rifle and stumbled to the tail-section of the Viscount. He leaned against it, and his breathing was hoarse and ragged, but slowly it eased and he pushed himself upright.

  "Colonel, sir." Esau Gondele appeared beside him. "We have picked up their spoor, incoming and outgoing." "How long ago?" "Five hours at the least, probably longer." "Be ready to move out. We are going after them. "Roland turned away from him. He needed to be alone just a little longer, he was not yet entirely under control.

  Two of the Scouts came from the helicopter at a trot, carrying one of the yellow plastic body-moulded stretchers between them.

  "Colonel!" Paul Henderson tucked the blue blanket carefully around Janine's body and then he and the orderly lifted her tenderly onto the yellow stretcher and tightened the straps to hold her. While the orderly prepared the plasma drip, the doctor led Roland a little aside.

  "It's not very good news, "he said, softly.

  "What did they do to her?" Roland asked, and Paul Henderson told him. Roland gripped the stock of the rifle so hard that his arms began to shudder and the muscle in his forearms stood out in ridges and hard knots.

  "She is bleeding internally," Henderson finished. "I have to get her into theatre very quickly. A theatre that can handle this type of surgery, Bulawayo." "Take the helicopter," Roland ordered brusquely.

  They ran with the stretcher to the Super Frelon. The orderly holding the drip-bottle high.

  "Colonel," Henderson looked back. "She is still conscious. If you want-" He did not finish. The little group waited for Roland beside the fuselage, not certain whether to load the stretcher aboard.

  With a strange reluctance, Roland walked heavily towards them.

  The enemy had used his woman. She was one thing that was sacred. How many of them? The thought made him check, and he had to force himself to go on to where she lay on the stretcher. He looked down at her.

  Only her face showed above the blanket. It was grotesquely swollen, and her mouth was a raw red ruin. Her once lustrous hair was stiff with filth and dried blood, but her eyes were clear. The drug had driven back the madness, and now she was looking up at him. Only the eyes were the same, dark indigo blue.

  Painfully her damaged lips framed a word, but no sound came. It was his name she was trying to say.

  "Roland!" And his revulsion rushed upon him, he could not hold it back. How many of them had taken her that way, a dozen, more? She had been his woman, but that had been destroyed. He tried to fight it, but he felt nauseated, and quick cold sweat chilled his face. He tried to force himself to stoop over her, to kiss that terribly battered face, but he could not. He could not speak nor move, and slowly the light of recognition went out in her eyes. It was replaced by that dull empty look he had seen before, and then she closed the livid swollen lids over them and rolled her head slowly away from him.

  "Take good care of her," Roland muttered hoarsely, and they lifted the stretcher into the helicopter. Paul Henderson turned to him, his face twisted with pity and helpless anger, and he laid his hand on Roland's arm.

  "Roly, it wasn't her fault," he said.

  "If you say anything more, I might kill you." Roland's voice was thickened and coarsened by disgust and hatred. Paul Henderson turned from him and clambered into the machine. Roland made a wind-up signal to the pilot in the bubble windscreen above him, and the big clumsy aircraft lifted noisily into the sky.

  "Sergeant-Major," Roland called. "Take, the spoor!" and he did not look back as the helicopter rose high into the pink dawn and then swung away southwards.

  They went in deep formation, so that if they ran into an ambush, the tail could circle and outflank the attackers to free the head.

  They went at storming speed, much too fast for safety, going hard as marathon runners. Within the first hour Roland had ordered his Scouts to strip their packs. They abandoned everything but the radio set, their weapons and water-bottles and fir staid kits, and Roland pushed the pace still harder.<
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  He and Esau Gondele took turns at point, the one dropping back each hour as the other came forward. They lost the spoor twice in stony ground but each time picked it up on the first cast ahead. It was running true and straight, and they had quickly made the number of the chase as nine men. Within two hours Roland knew each of them as individuals by the spoor they left behind them, the one with a nick in his left heel, flat-foot, long-one with a gap of over a metre in his stride, and each of the others with more subtle characteristics to differentiate them. He knew them, and he hungered for them.

  "They are going for the drifts," Esau Gondele grunted as he came up and took over the point from Roland. "We should radio ahead and set a patrol for them." "There are twelve drifts, forty miles. A thousand men wouldn't do it." Roland wanted them for himself, all nine of them.

  One look at his face and Esau Gondele realized that. He picked up the run of the spoor. They were crossing an open glade of golden grass.

  The chase had left a sweep line through the grass the stems still bent in the direction of their flight, and the sunlight reflected at a different intensity from these. It was like following a highway. They went down it at a swinging easy run, and ahead of him Esau Gondele saw some of the grass stems springing upright again. They were that close already, and it wasn't yet noon. They had cut at least three hours off the lead that the ZIPRA cadres had upon them.

  "We can catch them before the river we can have them for ourselves," Esau Gondele thought fiercely, and resisted the temptation to lengthen his stride. They could move no faster, an inch more on his stride would put a term on their endurance, whereas at this pace they could run the sun down and the moon up.

  At two in the afternoon they lost the spoor again. They were on a long low ridge of black ironstone, and the ground took no prints. As soon as Esau Gondele lost contact, the line stopped dead, and went into a defensive attitude, only Roland moved up and knelt out on his flank, keeping good separation so that a single burst could not take them both.

  "How does it look?" Roland brushed the tiny mopani bees from his eyes and nostrils. They-were maddeningly persistent in their hunt for moisture.

  "I think they are going straight in." "If they are going to twist, this is the place to do it," Roland answered, he wiped his face on his forearm and the greasy camouflage paint came away in a dirty brown and green smear.

  "If we cast ahead again we may lose half an hour," Esau Gondele pointed out, "three kilometres." "If we run blind we may lose more than that, we may never make them again." Roland looked around thoughtfully at the mopani forest along the ridge. "I don't like it," he decided at last. "We will make a cast." The two of them circled out beyond the ridge, and as Esau Gondele had warned, it cost them half an hour of their gain, but they did not make the cut. There was no spoor on the direct line that they had been following, the chase had turned.

  "They can only have followed the ridge, we have a one only choice. East is away from the drifts, I don't believe they would chance it. We will run the western ridge blind," Roland decided, and they turned and went on harder than before, for they were rested and they had the lost half-hour to make up. Roland ran with doubt gnawing his guts, and rocky black ironstone crunching under his boots.

  Esau Gondele was far out on his right flank, on the softer earth below the ridge, watching for the point where the chase left it and turned northwards towards the river again if it ever did.

  Roland could not cover the southern edge of the ridge as well, the ironstone belt was too wide. It would mean splitting his meagre forces. The south side was his blind side. If they had doubled, or turned eastwards, then he had lost them. The thought of that was unbearable. He clenched his jaws until they ached and it felt as though his teeth might splinter, and he checked his watch they had been on the ridge forty-eight minutes. He was making the conversion of time to distance in his head when he saw the birds.

  There were four of them, two brace of sand grouse and they were flighting in that peculiar quick-winged slant that made their intention unmistakable.

  "They are going down to water," Roland said aloud, and marked their descent below the tree-tops before signalling to Esau Gondele.

  The water was a pothole in the mopani, a relic of the last rains.

  Twenty metres in diameter, most of it black mud, trampled by the game herds to the consistency of putty. The nine sets of man-prints were perfectly cast in it, going directly to the puddle of muddy water in the centre, and then once again heading directly northwards towards the river. They were onto the chase again, and Roland's hatred burned up brightly once more.

  "Drain your bottles," he ordered. There was no profit in adulterating what remained of their sweet water with that filthy coffee-coloured liquid in the pan. They drank greedily and then one man collected their bottles and went out across the mud to refill them.

  Roland would not risk more of his troopers than was necessary. out there on the exposed pan.

  It was almost four o'clock by the time they were ready to take the spoor again, and by Roland's reckoning, they were still ten miles from the river.

  "We can't let them get across, Sergeant-Major," he told him quietly. "From now on we won't hold back, push all out." The pace was too hard, even for superbly trained athletes such as they were. If they ran into contact now, they would be blown, almost helpless during the long minutes it would take to recover but they reached the Kazungula road un-challenged.

  There had been no security patrol over the gravel surface for at least four hours. They found where the chase had taken the precaution of reconnoitring the road and sweeping away the signs of their crossing. That had cost them precious minutes, and the Scouts were within an ace of contact. The patch of earth where one of the terrorists had urinated was still muddy wet. The sandy earth had not had time to absorb it, nor the sun to evaporate it. They were minutes behind. It was folly to go in at the run, but as they crossed the road, Roland repeated, "All out!" And when he saw the flicker of Esau Gondele's eyes as he looked back, Roland went on, "Take number two, I will lead." He led at full run, hurdling the low thorn scrub in his path, relying only on his own speed to survive the first volley when they made the contact, knowing that even if the terrs took him out he could leave Esau Gondele and his men to finish it for him. Survival no longer was important to Roland, all that mattered was to make the contact and destroy them, as they had destroyed Janine.

  Yet when he saw the flash of movement and colour in the scrub ahead of him, he went belly-down from full run. and made two quick rolls to the side, to spoil the aim. He was onto the target an instant later, and fired a short burst, one light touch on the trigger and the FN hammered into his shoulder. Then as the echoes fled there was complete silence. No return fire, and his Scouts were down in cover behind him, not firing until they had a target.

  He signalled Esau Gondele. "Stay and cover me!" and went up on his feet, keeping low, rushing forward, jinking and twisting.

  He dropped to the ground again beside a thorn bush In the thorny branches above his head was the thing that had drawn his fire. It flapped again on the hot little breeze off the river. It was a woman's skirt, soft fine cotton, bright buttercup yellow, but stained with dried blood and dirt.

  Roland reached up and tore the skirt off the thorns, he bundled it in his fist and pressed his face into the cloth. Her perfume still lingered, very faintly but unmistakably. Roland found himself on his feet running forward with all his strength, with all his hatred, driven on by a madness that was at last out of control.

  Ahead of him through the trees he saw the warning markers along the edge of the cordon sanitaire. The little red-painted skulls seemed to taunt him, to goad him on. He did not check as he passed them, nothing was going to stop him now, ahead of him stretched the minefield. Something smashed into the back of Roland's knees, and he was thrown to earth, the wind driven from his lungs, but immediately he was trying to struggle up. Esau Gondele tackled him again, dragged him back from the edge, and th
ey swayed together, straining chest to chest.

  "Let me go! "Roland panted. "I have to,-" Esau Gondele got his right arm free and crashed his fist into Roland's face, into his cheek, knocking his head across, half-stunning him, then taking instant advantage of his shock by twisting his arm up between his shoulder-blades and dragging him back. Clear of the minefield, he threw Roland to earth again, and dropped down beside him, pinning him with one massive black arm.

  "You crazy bastard, you'll get us all killed, "he snarled into Roland's face. "You were into it already just one more step-" Roland stared at him uncomprehendingly, like a sleeper waking from a nightmare.

  "They have gone through the cordon," Esau hissed at him. "They have got clear. It's finished. They have gone." "No, Roland shook his head. "They haven't got away. Get the radio up here. We can't let them get away." Roland used the security network, the calling channel was 129.7 megahertz.

  "All units, this is Cheetah One come in, any station," he called quietly, but with the edge of desperation in his voice. The power on the set was only four watts, and Victoria Falls was thirty miles or so downriver. The only reply was the hum and burr of static.