by Tom Cain
As the wheels of the fixed undercarriage brushed through the desiccated leaves of an ancient baobab tree, the pilot jinked right and sent the Twin Otter into a corkscrewing roll, its tumbling wingtips almost seeming to brush the ground before he spiralled back up into the sky.
And then the F-7s were on them again, coming in one after another and raking the Otter with armour-piercing rounds that ripped straight through the flimsy fuselage and out the other side, barely impeded by anything they encountered.
‘Right engine’s been hit!’ shouted the co-pilot. ‘It’s on fire!’
They’d lost half their power and now the pilot faced another problem: the same burst of fire that had knocked out his right engine had also torn through the control surfaces at the rear of the wing. He was in danger of stalling. The plane was lurching drunkenly from side to side, and he could see the fighter planes turning for one last, assuredly fatal attack run.
When he looked down, however, there was hope. The border crossing was clearly visible just a few hundred feet below, little more than a mile ahead. Beyond the customs post on the South African side stretched a narrow black ribbon of highway and the safety of home.
If he could only reach it.
88
The pilots in the F-7s were like predatory raptors eyeing a dove with a broken wing. They wheeled and swooped in ruthlessly perfect formation, screaming down towards the Twin Otter as it limped past the first trucks on the Malemban side of the border. Down the fighters roared, and beneath them cab-doors and tarpaulins were flung open as drivers and passengers desperately sought to get away from the angels of death plunging from the sky.
Again the guns spat out a continuous hail of deadly shells, strafing the Twin Otter and the trucks and customs huts below it with indiscriminate malice. A petrol tanker bound for the thirsty pumps of Malemba’s empty filling stations erupted in a ball of fire that seemed to swallow the fragile little plane before it emerged on the far side. Its wings and tail had been pierced so often they looked more like torn lace than solid metal. Its left engine had gone, too. All that its wounded, bleeding pilot could hope to do was bring a little control to the final glide as the Otter hit the top of a brilliantly painted bus, smashing several boxes filled with chickens that had been strapped there, bounced forward and crashed down on to the road surface as the F-7s roared by, less than a hundred feet above the ground.
The undercarriage collapsed, sending the aircraft skidding over the road surface, slewing round as it went. The right wing hit a fully loaded lumber truck and sheared off, but the Otter kept going, spinning like a Frisbee as it left the road, ploughed through a stretch of bare ground and then came to a halt in a cloud of thick black smoke and choking dust.
For a while, nothing moved. The crowd of people gathered on the roadside stood there motionless, too afraid to approach the crashed plane for fear of an explosion. But as the seconds passed and no eruption came, the first few figures made their tentative, nervous way towards it.
One clambered up on to the nose and peered through the cracked windscreen into the cockpit. Others tugged at the main passenger door, just to the rear of the battered remnants of the left wing and engine. Then they sprang back as the handle was operated from within the aircraft cabin.
The door swung open.
A white man was revealed in the open doorway, dressed in black combat fatigues. His face was covered in blood from an open wound across his forehead. He was only held upright by his right hand gripping the door frame. He tried to move his left hand, waving towards himself.
‘Come here,’ he croaked. ‘Please help.’
A trucker dressed in a replica Manchester United football shirt helped the white man down on to the ground. Then he started shouting exuberantly, yelling at his travelling companions to come and assist him. Very soon the crowd could see what the excitement was all about as two slender black figures were carried from the plane. One was a young man in his late teens. The other was his older sister.
And they were both alive.
89
Justus Iluko tried not to think back to the night he had first met Sam Carver. But sometimes he couldn’t avoid it, nights when his dreams were filled with images from a small town in Mozambique: the white-hot glow of a man leaning over a helpless girl; the shouts of drunken men and the giggles of prostitutes doing business in a squalid drinking den; firing guns and exploding grenades; the screams of wounded men; the clatter of an approaching helicopter; the dead weight of Captain Morrison’s body as they dragged him back aboard. But above all the sense of chaos and confusion, the pervasive grip of mortal dread, clawing at his guts. He’d wake up in a cold sweat and Nyasha would have to calm him till the night demons had vanished back into the darkness. Now Nyasha was gone, and so, he supposed, was his bed, even the very house in which he’d raised his family and dared to dream of a better future for his children.
Here he was, though, still alive when so many others had gone, and now the nightmare that had cursed him for so long was being replayed in a new form. The night was quiet this time with just the chatter of insects and the occasional rustle of animals in the long grass to disturb the moonlit stillness. From his position behind a fallen tree trunk, Justus could see what he still thought of as the Stratten house no more than a hundred paces away, a low-slung building that nestled beneath a grass-thatched roof. The terrace where the Strattens had eaten so many of their meals and held so many parties, the African guides like Justus transformed into white-jacketed waiters for the night, was exactly as he remembered it. Even the woven palm-leaf sofas and chairs were still there. Yet Zalika Stratten was a prisoner in what had once been her home and the rest of the family were rotting in unmarked graves.
Now those chairs were occupied by armed men, four of them, sitting hunched over a table while they played games of cards. Though there were a few beer bottles on the table, these men had not let themselves get drunk. Their manner was sober in the extreme, the cards merely a means to pass the time between watches in the house, or out in the grounds. A woman appeared from time to time, but she was no prostitute, instead a respectable housekeeper who upbraided any man who dared put his feet on the furniture, even as she brought them their meals of thick maize porridge and stew.
Carver and Justus had arrived two hours earlier, having left the Land Rover hidden in the bush more than a mile from the house. They had approached their destination with extreme stealth, and Justus had been surprised and not a little impressed by the skill with which Carver selected his path, always avoiding soft ground; taking extreme care to move silently, without leaving tell-tale broken twigs or disturbed leaves in his path; regularly pausing to listen out for anyone who might be following them. Together they had reconnoitred the property and assessed the number of guards and the routine with which they carried out their assignments. There were eight in total: two inside the building, presumably standing guard over Miss Stratten; two patrolling the perimeter, walking in opposite directions; four resting between watches. Yet even these, the card players and beer drinkers, maintained their readiness.
Far in the distance, Justus heard the roar of a lion, a noise that struck a primitive, animal terror into a man, no matter how far away it sounded. Instantly, all four of the men stopped their game and looked out into the night, towards the direction from which the roar had come. As the sound of the lion subsided in a series of short, coughing growls, one of the men got to his feet and walked to the edge of the terrace, sweeping his gaze from side to side and causing Justus to fear that he had been spotted, even though he knew that no man had night-vision sharp enough to penetrate as far as his position.
All Justus had to do was wait. His job was very simple. As and when Carver emerged from the building, with Zalika in tow, it was his duty to lay down covering fire to suppress anyone who might want to stop them getting away. The orders Carver had given him were very specific. He was to remain exactly where he was. If anything went wrong, then he should melt back into the bush,
return to the Land Rover and drive like hell for the border, which was less than ten miles from where he now stood. Under no circumstances was he to risk his own life in an attempt to save Carver’s.
Justus wondered about that last point. He was by nature a man who obeyed his commanding officer. He also had a very good reason indeed to survive the night in one piece. Yet he had a feeling that if the moment came, he might for once be insubordinate.
But what about Carver? Justus could not see or hear him. He was out there somewhere, silently tracking the patrolling guards like a deadly spirit, his sharp, black-bladed knife in his hand.
90
Carver had already struck once, though Justus did not know it. The first of the sentries had been eliminated and his body dragged off the path on which he’d been walking. Carver had walked on a little further, towards the oncoming second sentry, and now he was invisible in the undergrowth by the side of the path, waiting for his next victim.
He was a young soldier who looked little older than the Iluko boy he’d rescued a few hours ago, and who carried himself with the nervous bravado of any squaddie in any army forced to mount a solitary patrol in the dark. It was almost too easy to let him go by and then slip out on to the path and approach the soldier from behind, place his left hand over the lad’s mouth, pulling his head back, and then slide the blade in a single smooth stroke across the exposed neck, slicing through the trachea and feeling his body go as limp in his arms as an exhausted lover.
Slowly, with almost tender care, Carver lowered the dead soldier to the ground. Then he stepped back off the path and dropped to his belly to snake across the ground to his next position. When he got there, he pulled round the M4 carbine that had been slung across his back and found a comfortable shooting position. He imagined he was back on one of the stands at Campden Hall, waiting for his targets to be released. He thought of the sequence of shots he would be firing, the various adjustments he would have to make as he tracked from one target to another. He calmed himself, let every last dreg of tension be bled from his neck and shoulders. And then he got to work.
From where Justus was watching, what happened next had an eerie calmness, even a detachment, to it that made him wonder for a moment whether he was back in the world of his dreams. There were four gentle but quite distinct popping sounds, each less than a second apart. And then a spell seemed to be cast over the card players. The man who had just seconds earlier been looking so purposefully into the darkness fell to the ground without so much as a murmur of pain or surprise. A card player suddenly jerked backwards, his head resting against the back of his sofa, a bright-red hole between his wide-open, sightless eyes. The man sitting next to him was knocked sideways by the impact of a bullet in his temple. The third slumped forward over the card table, his beer glass still gripped in his right hand. As his head hit the table, his grip relaxed and the glass smashed on the stone-tiled floor – the first loud noise since the first shot had been fired.
Justus realized that the two sentries must also have fallen to Carver. Six men dead, and still Justus had no idea of where, precisely, their killer was.
The sound of breaking glass alerted the two men posted inside the house. From the first-floor landing it was possible to see right through the open-plan interior to the terrace where the four bodies now lay. Whoever had killed them was surely on their way into the house. Nervous fingers tapped out a number on a satellite phone, and the voice that spoke into the mouthpiece trembled with fear.
‘We are under attack. At least four men are dead, maybe six. Please come quickly, I beg you, or it will be too late.’
In the back of the helicopter transporting him south from Sindele, Moses Mabeki felt a mixture of fury and delight. Carver’s sheer effrontery was intolerable, and the possible seizure of Zalika Stratten was a nuisance, to put it mildly. But at least this gave him an opportunity to deal with Carver once and for all. It had been a mistake to expect a gang of Chinese peasant gangsters to solve his problems for him. From now on, Mabeki would rely on his own resources and do the job himself.
He checked his watch. He would be at the house in twenty minutes. He did not expect Carver to have got too far away by then.
Back at the house, the last two members of the unit detailed to stand guard over Zalika Stratten were not planning a desperate last stand to defend their master’s chosen woman. They were climbing through a window at the back of the building, sliding down the thatched roof, falling the last seven feet to the ground and then running away as fast as their legs would carry them.
91
Carver was not a fan of the open-plan style. Not when it was fully lit and he had to make his way across a good fifty feet of living area, then up a single straight flight of stairs with flimsy wooden banisters and no decent cover anywhere. He came out of the dark with his M4 up and his eyes looking through the sights, ready to fire at the slightest movement or sound.
Yet none came.
At first he thought it might be a trap. He was being lured right into the property, the more easily to be caught at point-blank range. But the ambush he expected never came.
He took the stairs in half-a-dozen strides, three steps at a time.
The landing was deserted.
Carver turned right and made his way along the landing, stepping quietly, keeping his back to the wall until he came to the furthermost door. He paused to listen for any movement or noise from the room beyond it. There was none. He took a pace back, then smashed the heel of his boot against the door, crashing it open.
Nothing happened. The room was empty.
Carver checked around the bed. He opened the wardrobes and went through an internal door to the en-suite bathroom.
No one there.
He went back out to the landing and repeated the process in two more bedroom suites.
The main house had only ever had four bedrooms; guests were put up at smaller cottages in the grounds. When he reached the last bedroom, it was empty, just like the others. But the bedcover was pulled back, the sheets were crumpled and the indentation made by a resting head could still be seen on the pillow. A pair of jeans and a T-shirt had been left carelessly draped over the back of a chair. And there was something more, a lingering trace of scent in the air, a scent that went straight to his brain like a potent drug, triggering memories so powerful it was almost as if he were back in a hotel suite in Hong Kong with her body draped around his, his hand tracing a path down the curve of her spine …
‘Zalika!’ he shouted. ‘Where are you?’
There were no words of reply. But he thought he heard a sound from behind the bathroom door, the whimper of a frightened animal.
He was there in a second, striding across the room, flinging open the door and saying it again – ‘Zalika!’ – when he saw her naked body curled up in the bottom of a huge stone bath.
He went to her and reached down to touch her, desperate to know that she was still warm, still alive.
‘Are you all right?’
She nodded wordlessly and looked at him with wide, panicked eyes. All her hard-won self-assurance had deserted her, leaving just the broken husk of the girl he had first rescued all those years ago.
‘The guards ran away,’ she said. ‘They were so scared. I just wanted to hide. I didn’t know what was out there. I … I …’ The faintest glimmer of an exhausted smile flickered across her face. ‘I hardly dared hope it was you.’
‘Come on,’ Carver said, helping her from the bath, ‘let’s get you out of here.’
He hesitated then, trying to find the right words for what he had to ask next.
‘Has he … has he treated you all right?’
Zalika pressed herself closer to Carver. He felt her nod against his shoulder. Then she pulled away a fraction and looked him in the eye as she gently ran the tips of her fingers down the side of his face.
‘I’m OK,’ she whispered. ‘He hasn’t hurt me. I promise.’
She pulled on her clothes and followed Carv
er out of the house, clutching him tight as they passed the four dead bodies on the terrace. Justus met them outside and they began the walk to the Land Rover.
Far away in the night, a lion’s roar echoed across the bush once again, like a rumble of distant thunder.
92
The wardens called him Lobengula, after the last great warrior king of the Ndebele people. From the moment he was born, he was the biggest, most dominant cub in his litter. The two brothers and one sister that were born with him all died young, as most lion cubs do: one killed by hyenas, another by a snake-bite, and the third mauled by an older male. But Lobengula survived and swiftly grew to be the finest young male in his pride.
In time, as all male lions must do, he had left his birth-pride and become a nomad, ranging across the Stratten Reserve until he found another pride whose alpha male was past his prime and weakening. Lobengula had fought him, killed him and assumed his place at the head of the pride. For five years he had been the master of all he surveyed, a magnificent creature, standing almost five feet tall at the shoulder and measuring twelve feet from his muzzle to the tuft of his tail. In his prime he had weighed six hundred pounds, and the extravagant size and deep black-brown colour of his mane was a signal to all who came near of his physical prowess and regal status.
The male lion, however, leads a precarious existence. He is not required to hunt – his mane, acting like a massive scarf, causes him to overheat if forced to chase prey for any length of time – but he does have to fight. He must defend the pride against external threats and defend himself against other males seeking to take his place. In the end, a lion’s career, like a politician’s, inevitably ends in failure. He is either killed or forced to leave the pride and go back to a solitary, nomadic existence.