Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  They were all there, everybody Shasa loved – Grandpater Garry at the head of the table, sprightly as a pixie; Anna beside him, her red face creasing into an infinity of smiles like a friendly bulldog; Blaine; Tara, as lovely as this spring morning; Matty, all freckles and carroty red hair; the Ou Baas; and of course Mater. Only David was missing.

  Shasa went to each of them in turn, laughing and exchanging banter, embracing and shaking hands and kissing. There were whoops and whistles when he pecked Tara’s blushing cheek. He handed Grandpater Garry his present and stood beside him as he unwrapped the specially bound first editions of Burchell’s Travels and exclaimed with delight. He shook hands with the Ou Baas respectfully and glowed with pleasure at his quiet commendation, ‘Good work you are doing, Kêrel.’ Finally he exchanged a quick word with Blaine before loading his plate at the sideboard and taking the chair between Tara and Mater.

  He refused the champagne – ‘I’ve got work to do today’ – and played with Tara’s foot under the table while he joined in the hilarity that resounded around the long table.

  Too soon they were all rising and the women went to get their coats while the men went out to the cars and made certain that the rugs and picnic baskets were loaded.

  ‘I’m sorry you can’t come with us, Shasa.’ Grandpater Garry took him aside. ‘I hoped we could have a chat, but I’ve heard from Blaine how important your work is.’

  ‘I’ll try and get back here tomorrow night. The pressure should be off by then.’

  ‘I won’t go back to Natal until we’ve been able to spend a little time together. You are the one to carry on the Courtney name, my one and only grandson.’

  Shasa felt a rush of deep affection for this wise and gentle old man; in some strange way the fact that they had both suffered mutilation, Sir Garry’s leg and Shasa’s eye, seemed to have forged an even stronger bond between them.

  ‘It’s years since I have been up to visit you and Anna at Theuniskraal,’ Shasa burst out impulsively. ‘May I come to spend a couple of weeks with you?’

  ‘Nothing would give us greater pleasure,’ Sir Garry hugged him, and at that moment Field-Marshal Smuts came across.

  ‘Still talking, old Garry, do you ever stop? Come along now, we have a mountain to climb, and the last one to the top gets sent to an old-age home.’

  The old friends smiled at each other. They could have been brothers, both slight of build but wiry and dapper, both with little silver goatee beards and disreputable old hats upon their heads.

  ‘Forward!’ Sir Garry brandished his cane, linked his arm through the field-marshal’s and led him to the back seat of Centaine’s yellow Daimler.

  The Daimler led the procession, followed by Blaine’s Bentley and Tara blew Shasa a kiss as it passed. He stood on the front steps of Weltevreden and it was very quiet after they had all gone.

  He turned back into the house and went upstairs to his own room, selected a batch of clean shirts, socks and underpants from his drawers and stuffed them into a grip.

  On the way downstairs he turned aside, went into Centaine’s study and picked up the telephone. One of the duty sergeants in the operations room at CID headquarters answered.

  ‘Hello, Sergeant. Have there been any messages for me?’

  ‘Hold on, sir, I’ll have a look.’ He was back in a few seconds. ‘Only one, sir, ten minutes ago. A woman – wouldn’t leave her name.’

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ Shasa hung up quickly. He found that his hand was trembling and his breath had shortened. A woman – wouldn’t leave her name. It had to be her. Why hadn’t she called him here? She had the number.

  He stood over the phone, willing it to ring. Nothing happened. After five minutes he began to pace the floor – moving restlessly between the wide french windows and the huge ormolu Louis Quatorze desk, watching the silent telephone. He was undecided, should he go back to CID headquarters in case she called there again, but what if she came through here? Should he ring the sergeant – but that would block the line.

  ‘Come on!’ he pleaded. ‘Come on!’ He glanced at his wristwatch – thirty-five minutes he had wasted in indecision.

  ‘I’ll have to pack it up. Can’t stand here all day.’

  He went to the desk. He reached for the instrument, but before he could touch it, it rang. He hadn’t been ready for it, the sound raked his nerves shrilly, and he snatched it up.

  ‘Squadron Leader Courtney,’ he spoke in Afrikaans. ‘Is that you, Mevrou?’

  ‘I forgot the number – I had to go back to the house to fetch it,’ she said. Her voice was rough with exertion, she had been running. ‘I couldn’t call before – there were people, my husband—’ she broke off. She had said too much.

  ‘That is all right. Don’t worry, everything is all right.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s terrible what they are going to do. It’s just terrible.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me?’

  ‘They are going to kill the field-marshal—’

  ‘The field-marshal?’

  ‘The Ou Baas – Field-Marshal Smuts.’

  He could not speak for a moment, and then he rallied. ‘Do you know when they plan to do it?’

  ‘Today. They will shoot him today.’

  ‘That’s not possible—’ he did not want to believe it. ‘The Ou Baas has gone up Table Mountain today. He’s on a picnic with—’

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ The woman was sobbing. ‘On the mountain. White Sword is waiting for him on the mountain.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Shasa whispered. He felt as though he were paralysed. His legs were filled with concrete and a great weight crushed his lungs so that for a moment he could not breathe.

  ‘You are a brave woman,’ he said. ‘Thank you for what you have done.’

  He dropped the telephone onto its cradle and snatched open the drawer of Centaine’s desk. The gold-engraved Beretta pistols were in their presentation case. He lifted one of them out of its nest of green baize and checked the load. There were six in the magazine and an extra magazine in a separate slot in the case. He thrust the pistol into his belt and the magazine into his pocket and turned for the door.

  The pistol was useless at anything farther than point-blank range, but the hunting rifles were locked in the cabinet in the gunroom, the ammunition was kept separately, his key was in the Jag – it would take precious minutes to fetch it, open the cabinet, unchain his 9.3 Mannlicher, find the ammunition – he could not afford the time. The picnic party had a start of nearly forty minutes on him. They might be halfway up the mountain by now. All the people he loved were there – and an assassin was waiting for them.

  He sprinted down the steps and sprang into the open cockpit of the Jag. She started with a roar; he spun her in a tight circle, gravel spraying from under the back tyres, and went down the long drive with the needle climbing quickly to the eighty mph notch. He went out through the Anreith gates, and into the narrow curves and dips as the road skirted the base of the mountain. More than once he nearly ran out of road as the Jag snarled and screeched through the turns, but it was fully fifteen minutes before he snaked her in through the gates of Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens and at last pulled into the parking area behind the curator’s office. The other vehicles were there, parked in a straggling line, the Daimler and the Bentley and Deneys Reitz’s Packard, but the parking area was deserted.

  He took one quick look up at the mountain that towered 2000 feet above him. He could make out the path as it climbed out of the forest and zigzagged up the gut of Skeleton Gorge, passing the pimple of Breakfast Rock on the skyline and then crossing the rim onto the tableland.

  There was a line of moving specks on the pathway, just emerging from the forest. The Ou Baas and Grandpater were setting their usual furious pace, proving to each other how fit they were, and as he shaded his eyes he recognized Mater’s yellow dress, and Tara’s turquoise skirt, just tiny flecks of colour against the grey and green wall of the mountain. They were trailing far behin
d the leaders.

  He began to run. He took the first easy slope at a trot, pacing himself. He reached the 300-metre contour path and paused beside the concrete signpost to draw a few long breaths. He surveyed the track ahead.

  It went up very steeply from here, jigging through the forest, following the bank of the stream, a series of uneven rocky steps. He went at it fast, but his town shoes had thin leather soles and gave him little purchase. He was panting wildly and his shirt was soaked through with sweat as he came out of the forest. Still almost 1000 feet to the top, but he saw immediately that he had gained on the picnic party.

  They were strung out down the pathway. The two figures leading were Grandpater and the Ou Baas – at this distance it was impossible to distinguish between them, but that was Blaine a few paces behind them. He would be hanging back so as not to force the older men to a pace beyond their strength. The rest of the party were in groups and singles, taking up half the slope, with the women far in the rear.

  He drew a deep breath and shouted. The women paused and looked back down the slope.

  ‘Stop!’ he yelled with all his lung power. ‘Stop!’

  One of the women waved – it was probably Matty – then they began to climb again. They had not recognized him, nor had they understood the command to stop. They had taken him for another friendly hiker. He was wasting time, the leaders were just under the crest of the summit.

  Shasa began to climb with all his strength, leaping over the uneven footing, forcing himself to ignore the burning of his lungs and the numbing exhaustion of his legs, driving himself upwards by sheer force of will.

  Tara looked back when he was only ten feet below her.

  ‘Shasa!’ she cried, delighted but surprised. ‘What are you doing – ?’

  He brushed past her. ‘Can’t stop,’ he grunted, and went on up, passing Anna and then Mater.

  ‘What is it, Shasa?’

  ‘Later!’ There was no wind for words, his whole existence was in his agonized legs, and the sweat poured into his eye, blurring his vision.

  He saw the leaders make the last short traverse before going over the top, and he stopped and tried to shout again. It came out as an agonized wheeze, and as he watched Grandpater and the Ou Baas disappeared over the crest of the slope with Blaine only twenty paces behind them.

  The shot was dulled by distance, but even so Shasa recognized the sharp distinctive crack of a Mauser.

  From somewhere he found new strength and he flew at the slope, leaping from rock to rock. The single shot seemed to echo and re-echo through his head, and he heard somebody shouting, or perhaps it was only the wild sobbing of his breath and the thunder of his blood in his own eardrums.

  Manfred De La Rey lay all that night in his hide. At sunrise he stood up and swung his arms, squatted and twisted to loosen his muscles and banish the chill that had soaked through the overcoat into his bones. He moved a few paces back and emptied his bladder.

  Then he stripped off the overcoat and the jersey – both had been bought from a second-hand clothes dealer on the Parade. They were unmarked and could never be traced to him. He bundled them and stuffed them under a rock. Then he settled back in his hide, stretched out on the tarpaulin. A few blades of grass were obscuring his line of fire and he broke them off and aimed at the head of the path.

  His aim was clear and uninterrupted. He worked a cartridge from the magazine into the breech of the Mauser, checking it visually as it slid home, and he locked the bolt down.

  Once more he took his aim, and this time he curled his finger round the rear trigger and carefully set the hair trigger with that crisp satisfying little click. Then he pushed the safety-catch over with his thumb and laid the rifle on the tarpaulin in front of him.

  He froze into immobility. Patient as a leopard in a tree above a water-hole, only his yellow eyes alive, he let the hours drift by, never for an instant relaxing his vigil.

  When it happened, it happened with the abruptness that might have taken another watcher by surprise. There was no warning, no sound of footsteps or voices. The range was too long for that. Suddenly a human figure appeared on the head of the path, silhouetted against the blue of the sky.

  Manfred was ready for it. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder with a single fluid movement and his eye went naturally to the aperture of the lens. He did not have to pan the telescopic sight, the image of the man appeared instantly in his field of vision, enlarged and crisply focused.

  It was an old man, with thin and narrow shoulders, wearing an open-neck white shirt and a Panama hat that was yellow with age. His silver goatee beard sparkled in the bright spring sunshine. The unwavering cross hairs of the telescope were already perfectly aligned on the exact centre of his narrow chest, a hand’s breadth below the vee of his open shirt. No fancy head shot, Manfred had decided, take him through the heart.

  He touched the hair trigger and the Mauser clapped in his eardrums, and the butt drove back into his shoulder.

  He saw the bullet strike. It flapped the loose white shirt against the skinny old chest and Manfred’s vision was so heightened that he even saw the bullet exit. It flew out of the old man’s back on a long pink tail of blood and living tissue like a flamingo’s feather, and as the frail body was plucked out of sight into the grass, the cloud of blood persisted, hanging in the clear morning air for the thousandth part of a second before it settled.

  Manfred rolled to his feet and started to run. He had plotted every yard of his escape route back to the Morris, and a savage elation gave strength to his legs and speed to his feet.

  Behind him somebody shouted, a plaintive bewildered sound, but Manfred did not check or look back.

  Shasa came over the crest at a full run. The two men were kneeling beside the body that lay in the grass at the side of the track. They looked up at Shasa, both their faces stricken.

  Shasa took one look at the body as it lay face down. The bullet must have been a dum-dum to inflict such a massive exit wound. It had carved a hole through the chest cavity into which he could have thrust both his fists.

  There was no hope. He was dead. He hardened himself. There would be time for grief later. Now was the time for vengeance.

  ‘Did you see who did it?’ he gasped.

  ‘Yes.’ Blaine jumped to his feet. ‘I got a glimpse of him. He cut back around Oudekraal Kop,’ he said, ‘dressed in blue.’

  Shasa knew this side of the mountain intimately, every path and cliff, every gorge and gully between Constantia Nek and the Saddle.

  The killer had turned around the foot of the kop – he had a start of less than two minutes.

  ‘The bridle path,’ Shasa gasped. ‘He is heading for the bridle path. I’ll try and cut him off at the top of Nursery Ravine.’ He started to run again, back towards Breakfast Rock.

  ‘Shasa, be careful!’ Blaine yelled after him. ‘He has the rifle with him – I saw it.’

  The bridle path was the only way a vehicle could reach the tableland, Shasa reasoned as he ran, and this had been so carefully planned that the killer must have an escape vehicle. It had to be parked somewhere on the bridle path.

  The footpath made a wide loop around Oudekraal Kop, then came back to the edge and ran along the cliff top past the head of Nursery Ravine until it intersected the bridle path half a mile farther on. There was another rough, little-used path that cut this side of the Kop, along the cliff top. The beginning was difficult to find and a mistake would lead into a dead end against the precipice – but if he found it he could cut a quarter of a mile off the route.

  He found the path and turned off onto it. At two places the track was overgrown and he had to struggle through interlaced branches, at another spot at the edge the track had washed away. He had to back up and take a run at it, jumping over the gap with five hundred feet of open drop below him. He landed on his knees, clawed himself to his feet and kept running.

  He burst out unexpectedly into the main footpath and collided at full tilt with the blue-o
veralled killer coming in the opposite direction.

  He had a fleeting impression of the man’s size and the breadth of his shoulders, and then they were down together, locked chest to chest, grappling savagely, rolling down the slope of the path. The impact had knocked the rifle out of the killer’s hand, but Shasa felt the springy hardness and the bulk of his muscle, and the first evidence of the man’s strength shocked him. He knew instantly that he was outmatched. Against his fiercest resistance the man rolled him onto his back and came up on top of him, straddling him.

  Their faces were inches apart. The man had a thick dark curling beard that was sodden with sweat, his nose was twisted and his brows were dense and black, but it was the eyes that struck terror into Shasa. They were yellow and somehow dreadfully familiar. However, they galvanized Shasa, transforming his terror into superhuman strength.

  He wrenched one arm free and rolled the killer over far enough to yank the Beretta pistol from his own belt. He had not loaded a cartridge into the chamber, but he struck upwards with the short barrel, smashing it into the man’s temple, and he heard the steel crack on the bone of the skull.

  The man’s grip slackened and he fell back. Shasa wriggled to his knees, fumbling to load the Beretta. With a metallic snicker the slide pushed a cartridge into the chamber, and he lifted the barrel. He had not realized how close they had rolled to the clifftop. He was kneeling on the very brink, and as he tried to steady his aim on that bearded head, the killer jack-knifed his body and drove both feet into Shasa’s chest.

  Shasa was hurled backwards. The pistol fired but the shot went straight into the air, and he found himself falling free as he went over the edge of the cliff. He had a glimpse down the precipice; there was open drop for hundreds of feet, but he fell less than ten of those before he wedged behind a pine sapling that had found a foothold in a cleft of the rock.

  He hung against the cliff face, his legs dangling free, winded and dazed, and he looked up. The killer’s head appeared over the edge of the cliff, those strange yellow eyes glared at him for an instant and then disappeared. Shasa heard his boots scrabble on the pathway, and then the unmistakable sound of a rifle bolt being loaded and cocked.