by Wilbur Smith
‘Proceed to Port Reprieve and relieve the town.’
‘We know about you.’ The Irishman nodded. ‘Let me see the pass.’
Bruce left the tracks, climbed the earth wall and handed the pink slip to the Irishman. He wore the three pips of a captain, and he glanced briefly at the pass before speaking to the man beside him.
‘Very well, Sergeant, you can be clearing the barrier now.’
‘I’ll call the train through?’ Bruce asked, and the captain nodded again.
‘But make sure there are no more accidents – we don’t like hired killers.’
‘Sure and begorrah now, Paddy, it’s not your war you’re a-fighting either,’ snapped Bruce and abruptly turned his back on the man, jumped down on to the tracks and waved to Mike Haig on the roof of the coach.
The Irish sergeant and his party had cleared the tracks and while the train rumbled slowly down to him Bruce struggled to control his irritation – the Irish captain’s taunt had reached him. Hired killer, and of course that was what he was. Could a man sink any lower?
As the coach drew level with where he stood, Bruce caught the hand rail and swung himself aboard, waved an ironical farewell to the Irish captain and climbed up on to the roof.
‘No trouble?’ asked Mike.
‘A bit of lip, delivered in music-hall brogue,’ Bruce answered, ‘but nothing serious.’ He picked up the radio set.
‘Driver.’
‘Monsieur?’
‘Do not forget my instructions.’
‘I will not exceed forty kilometres the hour, and I shall at all times be prepared for an emergency stop.’
‘Good!’ Bruce switched off the set and sat down on the sandbags between Ruffy and Mike.
Well, he thought, here we go at last. Six hours run to Msapa Junction. That should be easy. And then – God knows, God alone knows.
The tracks curved, and Bruce looked back to see the last white-washed buildings of Elisabethville disappear among the trees. They were out into the open savannah forest.
Behind them the black smoke from the loco rolled sideways into the trees; beneath them the crossties clattered in strict rhythm, and ahead the line ran arrow straight for miles, dwindling with perspective until it merged into the olive-green mass of the forest.
Bruce lifted his eyes. Half the sky was clear and tropical blue, but in the north it was bruised with cloud, and beneath the cloud grey rain drifted down to meet the earth. The sunlight through the rain spun a rainbow, and the cloud shadow moved across the land as slowly and as darkly as a herd of grazing buffalo.
He loosened the chin strap of his helmet and laid his rifle on the roof beside him.
‘You’d like a beer, boss?’
‘Have you any?’
‘Sure.’ Ruffy called to one of the gendarmes and the man climbed down into the coach and came back with half a dozen bottles. Ruffy opened two with his teeth. Each time half the contents frothed out and splattered back along the wooden side of the coach.
‘This beer’s as wild as an angry woman,’ he grunted as he passed a bottle to Bruce.
‘It’s wet anyway.’ Bruce tasted it, warm and gassy and too sweet.
‘Here’s how!’ said Ruffy.
Bruce looked down into the open trucks at the gendarmes who were settling in for the journey. Apart from the gunners at the Brens, they were lying or squatting in attitudes of complete relaxation and most of them had stripped down to their underwear. One skinny little fellow was already asleep on his back with his helmet as a pillow and the tropical sun beating full into his face.
Bruce finished his beer and threw the bottle overboard. Ruffy opened another and placed it in his hand without comment.
‘Why we going so slowly, boss?’
‘I told the driver to keep the speed down – give us a chance to stop if the tracks have been torn up.’
‘Yeah. Them Balubas might have done that – they’re mad Arabs all of them.’
The warm beer drunk in the sun was having a soothing effect on Bruce. He felt at peace, now, withdrawn from the need to make decisions, to participate in the life around him.
‘Listen to that train-talk,’ said Ruffy, and Bruce focused his hearing on the clickety-clack of the crossties.
‘Yes, I know. You can make it say anything you want it to,’ agreed Bruce.
‘And it can sing,’ Ruffy went on. ‘It’s got real music in it, like this.’ He inflated the great barrel of his chest, lifted his head and let it come.
His voice was deep but with a resonance that caught the attention of the men in the open trucks below them. Those who had been sprawled in the amorphous shapes of sleep stirred and sat up. Another voice joined in humming the tune, hesitantly at first, then more confidently; then others took it up, the words were unimportant, it was the rhythm that they could not resist. They had sung together many times before and like a well-trained choir each voice found its place, the star performers leading, changing the pace, improvising, quickening until the original tune lost its identity and became one of the tribal chants. Bruce recognized it as a planting song. It was one of his favourites and he sat drinking his lukewarm beer and letting the singing wash round him, build up into the chorus like storm waves, then fall back into a tenor solo before rising once more. And the train ran on through the sunlight towards the rain clouds in the north.
Presently André came out of the coach below him and picked his way forward through the men in the trucks until he reached Hendry. The two of them stood together, André’s face turned up towards the taller man and deadly earnest as he talked.
‘Doll boy,’ Hendry had called him, and it was an accurate description of the effeminately pretty face with the big toffee eyes; the steel helmet he wore seemed too large for his shoulders to carry.
I wonder how old he is; Bruce watched him laugh suddenly, his face still turned upwards to Hendry; not much over twenty and I have never seen anything less like a hired killer.
‘How the hell did anyone like de Surrier get mixed up in this?’ His voice echoed the thought, and beside him Mike answered.
‘He was working in Elisabethville when it started, and he couldn’t return to Belgium. I don’t know the reason but I guess it was something personal. When it started his firm closed down. I suppose this was the only employment he could find.’
‘That Irishman, the one at the barrier, he called me a hired killer.’ Thinking of André’s position in the scheme of things had turned Bruce’s thoughts back to his own status. ‘I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but I suppose he’s right. That is what we are.’
Mike Haig was silent for a moment, but when he spoke there was a stark quality in his voice.
‘Look at these hands!’ Involuntarily Bruce glanced down at them, and for the first time noticed that they were narrow with long moulded fingers, possessed of a functional beauty, the hands of an artist.
‘Look at them,’ Mike repeated, flexing them slightly; ‘they were fashioned for a purpose, they were made to hold a scalpel, they were made to save life.’ Then he relaxed them and let them drop on to the rifle across his lap, the long delicate fingers incongruous upon the blue metal. ‘But look what they hold now!’
Bruce stirred irritably. He had not wanted to provoke another bout of Mike Haig’s soul-searching. Damn the old fool – why must he always start this, he knew as well as anyone that in the mercenary army of Katanga there was a taboo upon the past. It did not exist.
‘Ruffy,’ Bruce snapped, ‘aren’t you going to feed your boys?’
‘Right now, boss.’ Ruffy opened another beer and handed it to Bruce. ‘Hold that – it will keep your mind off food while I rustle it up.’ He lumbered off along the roof of the coach still singing.
‘Three years ago, it seems like all eternity,’ Mike went on as though Bruce had not interrupted. ‘Three years ago I was a surgeon and now this—’ The desolation had spread to his eyes, and Bruce felt his pity for the man deep down where he kept it imprisoned
with all his other emotions. ‘I was good. I was one of the best. Royal College. Harley Street. Guy’s.’ Mike laughed without humour, with bitterness. ‘Can you imagine my being driven in my Rolls to address the College on my advanced technique of cholecystectomy?’
‘What happened?’ The question was out before he could stop it, and Bruce realized how near to the surface he had let his pity rise. ‘No, don’t tell me. It’s your business. I don’t want to know.’
‘But I’ll tell you, Bruce, I want to. It helps somehow, talking about it.’
At first, thought Bruce, I wanted to talk also, to try and wash the pain away with words.
Mike was silent for a few seconds. Below them the singing rose and fell, and the train ran on through the forest.
‘It had taken me ten hard years to get there, but at last I had done it. A fine practice; doing the work I loved with skill, earning the rewards I deserved. A wife that any man would have been proud of, a lovely home, many friends, too many friends perhaps; for success breeds friends the way a dirty kitchen breeds cockroaches.’
Mike pulled out a handkerchief and dried the back of his neck where the wind could not reach.
‘Those sort of friends mean parties,’ he went on. ‘Parties when you’ve worked all day and you’re tired; when you need the lift that you can get so easily from a bottle. You don’t know if you have the weakness for the stuff until it’s too late; until you have a bottle in the drawer of your desk; until suddenly your practice isn’t so good any more.’
Mike twisted the handkerchief around his fingers as he ploughed doggedly on. ‘Then you know it suddenly. You know it when your hands dance in the morning and all you want for breakfast is that, when you can’t wait until lunchtime because you have to operate and that’s the only way you can keep your hands steady. But you know it finally and utterly when the knife turns in your hand and the artery starts to spurt and you watch it paralysed – you watch it hosing red over your gown and forming pools on the theatre floor.’ Mike’s voice dried up then and he tapped a cigarette from his pack and lit it. His shoulders were hunched forward and his eyes were full of shadows of his guilt. Then he straightened up and his voice was stronger.
‘You must have read about it. I was headlines for a few days, all the papers. But my name wasn’t Haig in those days. I got that name off a label on a bottle in a bar-room.
‘Gladys stayed with me, of course, she was that type. We came out to Africa. I had enough saved from the wreck for a down payment on a tobacco farm in the Centenary block outside Salisbury. Two good seasons and I was off the bottle. Gladys was having our first baby, we had both wanted one so badly. It was all coming right again.’
Mike stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket, and his voice lost its strength again, turned dry and husky.
‘Then one day I took the truck into the village and on the way home I stopped at the club. I had been there often before, but this time they threw me out at closing time and when I got back to the farm I had a case of Scotch on the seat beside me.’
Bruce wanted to stop him; he knew what was coming and he didn’t want to hear it.
‘The first rains started that night and the rivers came down in flood. The telephone lines were knocked out and we were cut off. In the morning—’ Mike stopped again and turned to Bruce.
‘I suppose it was the shock of seeing me like that again, but in the morning Gladys went into labour. It was her first and she wasn’t so young any more. She was still in labour the next day, but by then she was too weak to scream. I remember how peaceful it was without her screaming and pleading with me to help. You see she knew I had all the instruments I needed. She begged me to help. I can remember that; her voice through the fog of whisky. I think I hated her then. I think I remember hating her, it was all so confused, so mixed up with the screaming and the liquor. But at last she was quiet. I don’t think I realized she was dead. I was simply glad she was quiet and I could have peace.’
He dropped his eyes from Bruce’s face.
‘I was too drunk to go to the funeral. Then I met a man in a bar-room, I can’t remember how long after it was, I can’t even remember where. It must have been on the Copperbelt. He was recruiting for Tshombe’s army and I signed up; there didn’t seem anything else to do.’
Neither of them spoke again until a gendarme brought food to them, hunks of brown bread spread with tinned butter and filled with bully beef and pickled onions. They ate in silence listening to the singing, and Bruce said at last:
‘You needn’t have told me.’
‘I know.’
‘Mike—’ Bruce paused.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m sorry, if that’s any comfort.’
‘It is,’ Mike said. ‘It helps to have – not to be completely alone. I like you, Bruce.’ He blurted out the last sentence and Bruce recoiled as though Mike had spat in his face.
You fool, he rebuked himself savagely, you were wide open then. You nearly let one of them in again.
Remorselessly he crushed down his sympathy, shocked at the effort it required, and when he picked up the radio the gentleness had gone from his eyes.
‘Hendry,’ he spoke into the set, ‘don’t talk so much. I put you up front to watch the tracks.’
From the leading truck Wally Hendry looked round and forked two fingers at Bruce in a casual obscenity, but he turned back and faced ahead.
‘You’d better go and take over from Hendry,’ Bruce told Mike. ‘Send him back here.’
Mike Haig stood up and looked down at Bruce.
‘What are you afraid of?’ his voice softly puzzled.
‘I gave you an order, Haig.’
‘Yes, I’m on my way.’
– 4 –
The aircraft found them in the late afternoon. It was a Vampire jet of the Indian Air Force and it came from the north.
They heard the soft rumble of it across the sky and then saw it glint like a speck of mica in the sunlight above the storm clouds ahead of them.
‘I bet you a thousand francs to a handful of dung that this Bucko don’t know about us,’ said Hendry with anticipation, watching the jet turn off its course towards them.
‘Well, he does now,’ said Bruce.
Swiftly he surveyed the rain clouds in front of them. They were close; another ten minutes’ run and they would be under them, and once there they were safe from air attack for the belly of the clouds pressed close against the earth and the rain was a thick blue-grey mist that would reduce visibility to a few hundred feet. He switched on the radio.
‘Driver, give us all the speed you have – get us into that rain.’
‘Oui, monsieur,’ came the acknowledgement and almost immediately the puffing of the loco quickened and the clatter of the crossties changed its rhythm.
‘Look at him come,’ growled Hendry. The jet fell fast against the backdrop of cloud, still in sunlight, still a silver point of light, but growing.
Bruce clicked over the band selector of the radio, searching the ether for the pilot’s voice. He tried four wavelengths and each time found only the crackle and drone of static, but with the fifth came the gentle sing-song of Hindustani. Bruce could not understand it, but he could hear that the tone was puzzled. There was a short silence on the radio while the pilot listened to an instruction from the Kamina base which was beyond the power of their small set to receive, then a curt affirmative.
‘He’s coming in for a closer look,’ said Bruce, then raising his voice, ‘Everybody under cover – and stay there.’ He was not prepared to risk another demonstration of friendship.
The jet came cruising in towards them under half power, yet incredibly fast, leaving the sound of its engine far behind it, sharklike above the forest. Then Bruce could see the pilot’s head through the canopy; now he could make out his features. His face was very brown beneath the silver crash helmet and he had a little moustache, the same as the jack of spades. He was so close that Bruce saw the exact moment that he recognized t
hem as Katangese; his eyes showed white and his mouth puckered as he swore. Beside Bruce the radio relayed the oath with metallic harshness, and then the jet was banking away steeply, its engine howling in full throttle, rising, showing its swollen silver belly and the racks of rockets beneath its wings.
‘That frightened seven years’ growth out of him,’ laughed Hendry. ‘You should have let me blast him. He was close enough for me to hit him in the left eyeball.’
‘You’ll get another chance in a moment,’ Bruce assured him grimly. The radio was gabbling with consternation as the jet dwindled back into the sky. Bruce switched quickly to their own channel.
‘Driver, can’t you get this thing moving?’
‘Monsieur, never before has she moved as she does now.’
Once more he switched back to the jet’s frequency and listened to the pilot’s excited voice. The jet was turning in a wide circle, perhaps fifteen miles away. Bruce glanced at the piled mass of cloud and rain ahead of them; it was moving down to meet them, but with ponderous dignity.
‘If he comes back,’ Bruce shouted down at his gendarmes, ‘we can be sure that it’s not just to look at us again. Open fire as soon as he’s in range. Give him everything you’ve got, we must try and spoil his aim.’
Their faces were turned up towards him, subdued by the awful inferiority of the earthbound to the hunter in the sky. Only André did not look at Bruce; he was staring at the aircraft with his jaws clenching nervously and his eyes too large for his face.
Again there was silence on the radio, and every head turned back to watch the jet.
‘Come on, Bucko, come on!’ grunted Hendry impatiently. He spat into the palm of his right hand and then wiped it down the front of his jacket. ‘Come on, we want you.’ With his thumb he flicked the safety catch of his rifle on and off, on and off.
Suddenly the radio spoke again. Two words, obviously acknowledging an order, and one of the words Bruce recognized. He had heard it before in circumstances that has burned it into his memory. The Hindustani word ‘Attack!’
‘All right,’ he said and stood up. ‘He’s coming!’
The wind fluttered his shirt against his chest. He settled his helmet firmly and pumped a round into the chamber of his FN.