by Wilbur Smith
Daniel jumped out of the Toyota and ran back to where the refrigerator truck had managed to pull up, blocking his tailgate.
He recognized Gomo, the senior ranger, at the wheel and called to him. “Sorry! My fault. Are you okay?”
Gomo looked shaken by the near collision but he nodded. “I’m okay, Doctor.”
“When did you leave Chiwewe?” Daniel demanded, and Gomo hesitated. For some reason the question seemed to disconcert him. “How long ago?” Daniel insisted.
“I don’t know for sure…”
At that moment there was the sound of other vehicles approaching down the escarpment road and Daniel glanced around to see the second truck come grinding through the next bend. It was running in low gear to combat the gravity of the steep gradient. Fifty yards behind the truck followed Ambassador Ning Cheng Gong’s blue Mercedes. The two vehicles slowed and then pulled up behind Gomo’s truck and Daniel strode towards the Mercedes.
As he approached, Ambassador Ning opened his door and stepped out into the dusty track. “Doctor Armstrong, what are you doing here?” He seemed agitated but his voice was soft, barely audible.
“When did you leave Chiwewe?” Daniel ignored the question. He was desperate to know that Johnny and Mavis were safe and the Ambassador’s reaction puzzled him.
Cheng’s agitation increased. “Why do you ask that?” he whispered. “Why are you returning? You were supposed to be on your way to Harare.”
“Look here, Your Excellency. All I want to know is that there has been no trouble at Chiwewe.”
“Trouble? What trouble? Why should there be trouble?” The ambassador reached into his pocket and brought out a handkerchief. “What are you suggesting, Doctor?”
“I’m not suggesting anything.” Daniel found it hard to conceal his exasperation. “I picked up the tracks of a large party of men crossing the road and heading in the direction of Chiwewe. I am worried that they may be a gang of armed poachers and I am on my way back to warn the warden.”
“There is no trouble,” Cheng assured him. Daniel noticed that a faint sheen of perspiration bloomed on his forehead. “Everything is well. I left there an hour ago. Warden Nzou is just fine. I spoke to him when we left and there was no sign of any trouble.” He wiped his face with the handkerchief.
“An hour ago? Daniel asked, and checked his stainless steel Rolex. He felt a vast sense of relief at Ambassador Ning’s reassurance. “So you left there at about five-thirty?”
“Yes, Yes.” Cheng’s tone sharpened with affront. “Are you questioning my word? Do you doubt what I am telling you?”
Daniel was surprised by his tone and the strength of his denials. “You misunderstand me, Your Excellency. Of course I don’t doubt what you say.” Cheng’s prestige as an ambassador was the main reason that Chetti Singh had insisted that he be present at Chiwewe.
Cheng’s natural inclination had been assiduously to avoid the scene of the raid, and even to fly to Taipei while it was in progress to give himself an infallible alibi. However, Chetti Singh had threatened to call off the operation unless Cheng was present to vouch for the fact that the raid had taken place after the convoy of trucks had left Chiwewe. That was the whole crux of the operation. As an accredited ambassador, Cheng’s word would carry enormous weight in the subsequent police investigation. The testimony of the two black rangers alone might not have been accepted implicitly. The police might even have decided to give them a little earnest questioning in a back cell at Chikurubi prison and Chetti Singh was not confident that they would have withstood that treatment.
No, the police must be made to believe that when Cheng had left Chiwewe with the convoy all had been well. That way they must assume that the raiders had carried the ivory away With them or that it had been destroyed in the fire that consumed the godown.
“I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that I was doubting your word Your Excellency,” Daniel placated him. “It was just that I am worried about Johnny, about the warden.”
“Well, I assure you that you have no reason to worry.” Cheng stuffed the handkerchief in his hip pocket and reached for the packet of cigarettes in the top pocket of his open-neck shirt. He tapped one out of the pack but his fingers were slightly unsteady and he let the cigarette drop into the dust between his feet.
Daniel’s eyes were instinctively drawn down as Cheng stooped quickly to retrieve the fallen cigarette. He wore white canvas training shoes and Daniel noticed that the side of one shoe and the cuff of his blue cotton slacks were smeared with a stain that looked at first glance like dried blood.
This puzzled Daniel for a moment, until he remembered that Cheng had been present that morning when the fresh tusks had been unloaded from the truck and stored in the godown. The explanation for the stains on his clothing was obvious; he must have picked them up from a puddle of congealed elephant blood in which the tusks had lain.
Cheng noticed the direction of his gaze and stepped back quickly, almost guiltily, into the driver’s seat of the Mercedes and slammed the door.
Unthinkingly Daniel noticed the unusual fish-scale pattern that the soles of his training shoes left in the fine dust of the roadway.
“Well, I am happy to have been able to set your fears at rest, Doctor.” Cheng smiled at him through the window of the Mercedes. He had regained his composure and his smile was once again suave and charming. “I’m glad to have saved you an unnecessary journey all the way back to Chiwewe. I am sure you will want to join the convoy and get out of the Park before the rains break.” He started the Mercedes. Why don’t you take the lead position ahead of the trucks?”
“Thank you, Your Excellency.” Daniel shook his head and stepped back. “You go on with the trucks. I won’t be joining you. I want to go back anyway. Somebody has to warn Johnny Nzou.”
Cheng’s smile evaporated. “You are giving yourself a great deal of unnecessary trouble, I assure you. I suggest you telephone him from Mana Pools or Karoi.”
“Didn’t I tell you? They cut the telephone wires.”
“Doctor Armstrong, that is preposterous. I am sure you, are mistaken. I think you are exaggerating the seriousness of this–”
“You think what you like,” said Daniel with finality. “I’m going back to Chiwewe.” He stepped back from the window of the Mercedes.
“Doctor Armstrong,” Cheng called after him, “look at those rain clouds. You could be trapped here for weeks.”
“I’ll take the chance,” Daniel told him blithely, but to himself he thought, just why is he being so insistent? Something is starting to smell distinctly rotten here.
He walked quickly back towards the Landcruiser. As he passed the trucks he noticed that neither of the rangers had dismounted from the driver’s cabs. They were both looking sullen and neither of them said anything as he passed close beside them.
“All right, Gomo,” he called, “pull your truck forward so I can get past you.” Without a word the ranger obeyed. Then the second truck rumbled past and finally the Ambassador’s Mercedes came level. Daniel lifted a hand in farewell.
Cheng barely glanced in his direction but gave him a perfunctory salute before following the trucks around the bend and heading on down towards the Mana Pools turn-off.
“What did the Chink have to say?” Jock asked as Daniel reversed back into the roadway and put the Toyota to the steep gradient.
“He says it was all quiet at Chiwewe when he left there an hour ago,” Daniel replied.
“That’s a fair do.” Jock reached into the cold box and fished out a can of beer. He offered it to Daniel who shook his head and concentrated on the road ahead. Jock opened the can for himself, took a long slug, and belched happily.
The light began to fade and a few heavy drops of rain splattered against the windscreen but Daniel did not slacken speed. it was completely dark before they reached the crest of the escarpment. The lightning blazed through the darkness, illuminating the forest with a crackling blue radiance and thunder rolled across the sky and cannonade
d the ridges of granite which rose on each side of the road.
The rain began to fall like silver arrows in the headlights, each drop exploding in a white blur against the glass then streaming down it so copiously that the wipers could not clear the windshield fast enough.
Soon it was oppressively humid in the closed cab and the windscreen began to mist over. Daniel leaned forward to wipe it clear with his hand but when it smeared he gave up the effort and opened his side window a few inches to let in the fresh night air. Almost immediately he wrinkled his nose and sniffed.
Jock smelt it at almost the same moment. “Smoke,” he exclaimed. “How far are we from the camp?”
“Almost there,” Daniel replied. “Just over the next ridge.” The odour of smoke thinned out. Daniel thought that it might have come from the cooking-fires in the servants compound.
Ahead of them in the path of the headlights the gates of the main camp sprang out of the darkness. Each whitewashed column was crowned by the bleached skull of an elephant.
The sign read:
WELCOME TO CHIWEWE CAMP THE HOME OF THE ELEPHANTS
and then in smaller letters,
All arriving visitors must report immediately to the Warden’s Office.
The long driveway, lined on each side with dark Casia trees, was running ankle deep with storm water and the Toyota’s tires threw up a dense fog of spray as Daniel headed for the main block of buildings.
Suddenly the reek of smoke was thick and rank in their nostrils. It was the smell of burning thatch and wood with a foul underlay of something else, flesh or bone or ivory, perhaps, although Daniel had never smelt ivory burning.
“No lights,” Daniel grunted as he saw the loom of dark buildings in the rain ahead.
The camp generator was not running; the entire camp was in darkness. Then he became aware of a diffused ruby light that shimmered over the wet Casia trees and played gently on the walls of the buildings. One of the buildings is on fire.
Jock sat forward in his seat. “That’s where the smoke is coming from.”
The Toyota’s headlights cut a broad swathe through the gloom and then focused on a huge amorphous dark pile ahead of them. The misted windscreen obscured his vision and for some moments Daniel could not decide what it was. The strange glow seemed to emanate from it. Only as they drove closer and the lights lit it more clearly could he recognize it as the blackened, smouldering ruins of the ivory godown.
Horrified by what he saw, Daniel let the Toyota roll to a halt and he stepped down into the mud and stared at the ruin.
The heat of the flames had cracked the walls and most of them had collapsed. The fire must have been an inferno to have produced such heat. It still burned and smouldered despite the cascading rain. Oily streamers of smoke drifted across the headlights of the truck and occasionally the flames flared up fiercely until the heavy raindrops beat them down again.
Daniel’s sodden shirt clung to his body and the rain soaked his hair, smearing his thick curls over his forehead and into his eyes. He pushed them back and scrambled up on to the tumbled masonry of the wall. The collapsed roof was a thick mattress of black ash and charred beams that clogged the interior of the devastated godown. Despite the rain the smoke was still too dense and the heat too fierce to allow him to approach any closer and discover how much of the ivory still lay under that blackened pile. Daniel backed away and ran to the truck. He climbed into the cab and wiped the rain out of his eyes with the palm of his hand.
“You were spot on,” Jock said. “It looks as if the bastards have hit the camp.”
Daniel did not answer. He started the engine and gunned the Toyota up the hill to the warden’s cottage. “Get the flashlight out of the locker,” he snapped.
Obediently Jock knelt on the seat and groped in the heavy tool-locker that was bolted to the truck bed, and came out with the big Maglite.
Like the rest of the camp the warden’s cottage was in darkness. The rain streamed down from the eaves in a silver torrent so that the headlights could not illuminate the screened verandah beyond. Daniel snatched the torch from Jock’s hand and jumped out into the rain.
“Johnny!” he yelled. “Mavis!” He ran to the front door of the cottage.
The door had been smashed half off its hinges and hung open. He ran through on to the verandah. The furniture was shattered and thrown about in confusion. He played the torch-beam over the chaos. Johnny’s cherished collection of books had been tumbled from their cases along the wall and lay in heaps with their pages fanned and their spines broken.
“Johnny!” Daniel shouted. “Where are you?”
He ran through the open double doors into the sitting-room. Here the destruction was shocking. They had hurled all Mavis’s ornaments and vases at the stone fireplace and the broken shards glittered in the torch beam. They had ripped the stuffing out of the sofa and easy chairs. The room stank like an animal cage and he saw that they had defecated on the carpets and urinated down the walls.
Daniel stepped over the reeking piles of faeces and ran through into the passageway that led to the bedrooms. Johnny! he shouted in anger and despair, as he played the torch-beam down the length of the passage.
On the end wall was a decoration that had not been there before. It was a dark star-shaped splash of paint that covered most of the white-painted surface. For a moment Daniel stared at it uncomprehendingly and then he dropped the beam to the small huddled shape that lay at the foot of the wall.
Johnny and Mavis had named their only son after him, Daniel Robert Nzou.
After two daughters, Mavis had finally given birth to a son and both parents had been overjoyed.
Daniel Nzou had been four years old. He lay on his back. His eyes were open but sightlessly staring into the beam of the torch.
They had killed him in the old barbaric African way, in the same way that Chaka’s and Mzilikazi’s impis had dealt with the male children of a vanquished tribe. They had seized little Daniel by the ankles and swung him head-first against the wall, crushing his skull and beating his brains out against the brickwork. His splattering blood had daubed that crude mural on the white surface.
Daniel stooped over the little boy. Despite the deformation of the crushed skull his resemblance to his father was still marked. Tears prickled the rims of Daniel’s eyelids and he stood up slowly and turned to the bedroom door. It stood half open but Daniel dreaded pushing it all the way. He had to force himself to do it. The hinges of the door whined softly as it swung open.
For a moment Daniel stared down the beam of the Maglite as he let it play around the bedroom and then he reeled back into the passageway and leaned against the wall, gagging and gasping for breath.
He had witnessed scenes such as these during the days of the bush war, but the years had eroded his conditioning and softened the shell that he had built up to protect himself. He was no longer able to look dispassionately on the atrocity that man is able to perpetrate on his fellows.
Johnny’s daughters were older than their brother. Miriam was-ten and Suzie almost eight. They lay naked and spreadeagled on the floor at the foot of the bed. They had both been raped repeatedly. Their immature genitalia were a torn and bloody mush. Mavis was on the bed. They had not bothered to strip her entirely, but had merely pushed her skirts up around her waist.
Her arms were pulled up above her head and tied by the wrists to the wooden headboard. The two little girls must have died of shock and loss of blood during the prolonged assault upon them. Mavis had probably survived until they were finished with her, then they had put a bullet through her head.
Daniel forced himself to enter the room. He found where Mavis kept her extra bed-linen in one of the built-in cupboards and covered each of the corpses with a sheet. He could not bring himself to touch any of the girls, not even to close their wide staring eyes in which the horror and the terror was still deeply imprinted.
“Sweet Mother of God,” Jock whispered from the doorway. “Whoever did this isn’t
human. They must be ravaging bloody beasts.”
Daniel backed out of the bedroom and closed the door. He covered Daniel Nzou’s tiny body. “Have you found Johnny?” he asked Jock. His voice was hoarse and his throat felt rough and abraded with horror and grief.
“No.” Jock shook his head, then turned and fled down the passage. He blundered out across the verandah and into the rain. Daniel heard him retching and vomiting in the flowerbed below the step.
The sound of the other man’s distress served to steady Daniel. He fought back his own repugnance and anger and sorrow and brought his emotions back under control. “Johnny,” he told himself. “Got to find Johnny–” He went swiftly through the other two bedrooms and the rest of the house. There was no sign of his friend, and he allowed himself the first faint hope. “He might have got away, he told himself. He might have made it into the bush.”
It was a relief to get out of that charnel house. Daniel stood in the darkness and lifted his face to the rain. He opened his mouth and let it wash the bitter bile taste from his tongue and the back of his throat. Then he turned the torch-beam on to his feet and saw the clotted blood dissolve from his shoes in a pink stain. He scrubbed the soles in the gravel of the driveway to clean them and then shouted to Jock “Come on, we have to find Johnny!”
In the Toyota he drove down the back of the hill to the domestic compound that housed the camp servants. The compound was still enclosed with an earthen embankment and barbed-wire fence from the war days. However the fence was in a ruinous state and the gate was missing.
They drove through the gateway and the smell of smoke was strong. As the headlights caught them Daniel saw that the row of servants-cottages was burnt out. The roofs had collapsed and the windows were empty. The rain had quenched the flames, although a few tendrils of smoke still drifted like pale wraiths in the lights.
The ground around the huts was sown with dozens of tiny objects which caught the headlights and sparkled like diamond chips. Daniel knew what they were, but he stepped down from the truck and picked one of them out of the mud. It was a shiny brass cartridge case. He held it to the light and inspected the familiar Cyrillic head stamp in the brass. 7. 62mm, of East European manufacture, it was the calibre of the ubiquitous AK 47 assault rifle, staple of violence and revolution throughout Africa and the entire world.