The Angels Weep

by Wilbur Smith

  Before dawn Tungata drove the bus to the brink of the steep watercourse, and then, yelling with delight, the boys pushed it over the edge. The girls helped them gather branches and heap them over the vehicle until it was hidden from even a low-flying helicopter.

  They moved out northwards at first light. Tebe took the point, keeping half a kilometre ahead of the column. The schoolmaster stayed with the children, enforcing the complete silence Tebe had ordered. Before they had covered a mile, he was sweating through the back of his shirt and his spectacles were misted over. Tungata came up behind them, carrying the AK at the trail, avoiding the footpath, staying in the dappled forest shade, stopping every few minutes to listen, and once every hour doubling back to lie beside the path and make certain they were not followed.

  None of the skills of the game-ranger had deserted him. He found himself completely at ease, and in a strange sort of way he was happy. The future had taken care of itself. He was committed at last. There were no longer any doubts, no guilty sense of duty neglected, and the warrior blood of Gandang and Bazo flowed strongly in his veins.

  At noon they rested for an hour. There were no fires and they ate cold maize cake and washed it down with muddy water from a water-hole in the mopani. The water tasted of the urine of the elephants who had bathed in it during the night. When Miriam brought his ration to Tungata, she could not look into his face, and when she walked away she moved carefully, as though favouring an injury.

  In the afternoon they began to descend towards the Zambezi river, and the character of the bush altered. The grand forests gave way to more open savannah, and there was profuse sign of wild game. Circling out behind the column, Tungata surprised a solitary old sable antelope bull, with ebony and salt-white body and elegant back-swept horns. He stood noble and proud. Tungata felt a strange affinity with him, and when he took the wind and went away at a gallop, he left Tungata feeling enriched and strengthened.

  Tebe halted the column in the middle of the afternoon and told them, ‘We will be marching all night. You must rest now.’

  Then for Tungata he drew a sketch-map in the dust with a twig.

  ‘This is the Zambezi. Beyond it is Zambia. They are our allies. That is where we go. To the west is Botswana and the waterless land. We are moving parallel to its border, but before we reach the Zambezi we must cross the road between Victoria Falls and Kazungula. The Rhodesians patrol it. We must cross it in darkness. Then beyond it, along this bank of river the Rhodesians have laid their cordon sanitaire. It is a minefield to prevent us using the drifts. It is necessary to reach it at dawn.’

  ‘How do we cross the minefield?’

  ‘Our people will be waiting for us there to take us through. Now rest.’

  Tungata woke with a hand on his shoulder, and was instantly alert.

  ‘The girl,’ Tebe whispered. ‘The girl Miriam, she has run.’

  ‘Did the schoolteacher not stop her?’

  ‘She told him she was going to relieve herself.’

  ‘She is not important,’ Tungata suggested. ‘Let her go.’

  ‘She is not important,’ Tebe agreed. ‘But the example to the others is important. Take the spoor,’ he ordered.

  Miriam must have known the geography of this extreme northwestern corner of Matabeleland. Instead of going back, she had struck boldly northwards on the line of their march; clearly she was hoping to reach the Kazungula road while it was still light, and then she would go in to one of the Rhodesian patrols.

  ‘How wise we were to follow her,’ Tebe whispered, as soon as the line of the spoor was evident. ‘The bitch would have called the kanka down on us within an hour.’

  The girl had made no attempt to hide her spoor, and Tungata followed it at a run. He was superbly fit, for he had worked beside Craig Mellow in the bloody elephant culls, and ten miles was barely far enough to roughen his breathing. Comrade Tebe matched him stride for stride, leopard-quick and with cruel bleak eyes searching ahead.

  They caught Miriam two miles before she reached the road. When she saw them behind her, she simply gave up. She sank onto her knees, and trembled so uncontrollably that her teeth rattled in her jaw. They stood over her, and she could not look up at them.

  ‘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 Kumalo 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 kilometre 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.’

  H
e 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 antbear 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 landmine, 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.