by Wilbur Smith
The gang had shot up the compound, but had left no corpses. Daniel guessed that they had thrown the dead into the cottages before torching-them. The breeze shifted towards him so that he caught the full stench of the burned huts and had his suspicions confirmed. Underlying the smell of smoke was the odour of scorched flesh and hair and bone.
He spat out the taste of it and walked down between the huts.
“Johnny!” he shouted into the night. “Johnny, are you there?” But the only sound was the creak and pop of the doused flames and the sough of the breeze in the mango trees that brought the raindrops pattering down from the branches.
He flicked the torch left and right as he passed between the huts, until he saw the body of a man lying in the open. “Johnny” he shouted, and ran to him and fell on his knees beside him.
The body was horribly burned, the khaki Parks uniform burned half away, and the skin and flesh sloughing off the exposed torso and the side of the face. The man had obviously dragged himself out of the burning hut into which they had thrown him, but he was not Johnny Nzou. He was one of the junior rangers.
Daniel jumped up and hurried back to the track.
“Did you find him?” Jock asked, and Daniel shook his head. “Christ, they’ve murdered everybody in the camp. Why would they do that?”
“Witnesses” Daniel started the truck. “They wiped out all the witnesses.”
“Why? What do they want? It doesn’t make sense.”
“The ivory. That’s what they were after.”
“But they burned down the warehouse!”
“After they cleaned it out.” He swung the Toyota back on to the track and raced up the hill.
“Who were they, Danny? Who did this?”
“How the hell do I know? Shifta? Bandits? Poachers? Don’t ask stupid questions.” Daniel’s anger was only just beginning. Up until now he had been numbed by the shock and the horror. He drove back past the dark bungalow on the hill and then down again to the main camp.
The warden’s office was still standing intact; although when Daniel played the beam of the torch over the thatched roof he saw the blackened area on which someone had thrown a burning torch. Well-laid thatch does not burn readily, however, and the flames had not caught fairly or perhaps had been extinguished by the rain before they could take hold.
The rain stopped with the suddenness which is characteristic of the African elements. One minute it was falling in a furious cascade that limited the range of the headlights to fifty yards, and the next it was over. Only the trees still dripped, but overhead the first stars pricked through the dispersing thunder clouds that were being carried away on the rising breeze.
Daniel barely noticed the change. He left the truck and ran up on to the wide verandah.
The exterior wall was decorated with the skulls of the animals of the Park. Their empty eye-sockets and twisted horns in the torch-beam gave a macabre touch to the scene and heightened Daniel’s sense of doom as he strode down the long covered verandah. He now realised that he should have searched here first, instead of rushing up to the bungalow.
The door of Johnny’s office stood open and Daniel paused on the threshold and steered himself before he stepped through.
A snowstorm of papers covered the floor and desk. They had ransacked the room, sweeping the stacks of forms off the cupboard shelves and hauling the drawers out of Johnny’s desk, then spilling out the contents. They had found Johnny’s keys and opened the old green-painted door to the Milner safe that was built into the wall. The keys were still in the lock but the safe was empty.
Daniel’s torch-beam darted about the room and then settled on the crumpled form that lay in front of the desk. “Johnny,” he whispered. “Oh, Christ, no!”
Chapter 6
“I thought that while I was waiting for the refrigerator truck to be repaired, I might as well go down to the water-hole at Fig Tree Pan.” Ambassador Ning’s voice interrupted Johnny Nzou’s concentration, but he felt no resentment as he looked up from his desk.
In Johnny’s view one of his major duties was to make the wilderness accessible to anybody who had an interest in nature. Ning Cheng Gong was certainly one of those. Johnny smiled at his accoutrements, the field guide and the binoculars.
He rose from his desk, glad of the excuse to escape from the drudgery of paperwork and went with the Ambassador out on to the verandah and down to his parked Mercedes, where he stood and chatted to him for a few minutes, making suggestions as to where he might get a glimpse of the elusive and aptly named gorgeous bush shrike that Cheng wanted to observe.
When Cheng drove away, Johnny walked down to the vehicle workshops where ranger Gomo was stripping and reassembling the alternator of the unserviceable truck. He was dubious about Gama’s ability to effect the repair. In the morning he would probably have to ring the warden at Mana Pools and ask him to send a mechanic to do the job.
One consolation was that the elephant meat would keep indefinitely in the cold storage of the hull. The truck’s refrigerating equipment was plugged in now to the camp generator and the thermometer registered twenty degrees below freezing when Johnny checked it. The meat would be processed and turned into animal feed by a private contractor in Harare.
Johnny left ranger Gomo to his labour over the dismembered alternator and went back to his own office under the Casia trees. No sooner had he left the workshop than Gomo looked up and exchanged a significant glance with David, the other black ranger. The alternator he was tinkering with was a worn out piece of equipment that he had retrieved from the scrap heap in Harare for just this purpose. The truck’s original alternator, in perfect working order, was hidden under the driver’s seat in the cab. It would take less than ten minutes to bolt it back in place and reconnect the wiring.
Back in his office Johnny settled to the monotony of his forms and ledgers. Once he glanced at his wristwatch and found that it was a few minutes before one o’clock, but wanted to finish the week’s reports before knocking off for lunch. Of course, it was a temptation to go up to the house early. He liked to be with the children for a while before lunch, especially with his son, but he resisted the impulse and worked on conscientiously. Anyway he knew that Mavis would probably send the children down to fetch him soon. She liked to serve his lunch promptly.
He smiled in anticipation of their arrival as he heard a sound at the door and looked up. The smile faded. A stranger stood in the doorway, a stocky man with bow legs, dressed in filthy rags. Both his hands were behind his back as though he was concealing something. “Yes?” Johnny asked shortly. “Who are you? What do you want?”
The man smiled. His skin was very dark with purple black highlights. When he smiled the scar that ran down one cheek pulled his mouth out of shape and the smile was malicious and humourless.
Johnny stood up from the desk and went towards him. “What do you want?” he repeated, and the man in the doorway said, “You!”
From behind his back he brought out an AK 47 rifle and lifted the barrel towards Johnny’s belly. Johnny was caught totally off guard in the centre of the room. However, his recovery was almost instantaneous. His reflexes were those of a hunter and a soldier. The armoury door was ten paces to his left and he went for it.
The Parks weapons were kept in there. Through the door he could see the rack of firearms on the far wall. With despair turning his legs as heavy as concrete, Johnny realised that none of the weapons in the rack was loaded. That was his own strict safety rule. The ammunition was kept in the locked steel cupboard under the gun-rack.
All this passed through his mind as he leaped for the door.
From the corner of his eye he saw the scar-faced brigand swing the AK on to him and halfway across the room Johnny tumbled forward like an acrobat, ducking under the blast of automatic fire that swept across the room.
As he rolled smoothly to his feet he heard the man curse and Johnny dived forward once more for the doorway. He realised that his assailant was fooled. He had
seen that he was a killer in the practised way he handled the rifle. It was a miracle that he had been able to evade that first close-range volley.
The air was filled with a haze of plaster dust that the bullets had battered from the wall and Johnny dived through it, but he knew he was not going to make it. The man with the AK 47 was too good. He could not be fooled again. The shelter of the doorway was too far for Johnny to reach before the next burst came.
The clock in Johnny’s head was running; he anticipated how long it would take for the man to recover his balance. The muzzle of the AK 47 always rode up uncontrollably in automatic fire; it would take him the major part of a second to bring it down, and line up for the second burst.
Johnny judged it finely and twisted his body violently aside, but he was a fraction late.
The gunman aimed low to compensate for the rise of the AK.
One bullet sliced through the flesh of Johnny’s thigh, missing the bone, but the second cut through the lower curve of his buttock and smashed into the joint at the femur, shattering the head and the cup of bone of the pelvis.
The other three bullets of the burst flew wide as Johnny threw himself to one side. However, his left leg was gone and he fell against the door jamb and tried to hold himself from falling. His impetus sent him sliding sideways along the wall, and his fingernails screeched as they gouged the plaster. He ended up facing back into the room standing on one leg. His left leg hung from the shattered joint, and his arms were flung open like a crucifix as he tried to hold his balance.
Still smiling, the gunman clicked the rate-of-fire selector on to single-shot. He wanted to conserve ammunition. A single round cost him ten Zambian kwacha, and had to be carried hundreds of miles in his pack. Each cartridge was precious, and the warden was maimed and completely at his mercy. One more bullet would be enough.
“Now,” he said softly. “Now you die.” And he shot Johnny Nzou in the stomach.
The bullet drove the breath from Johnny’s lungs with an explosive exhalation. He was slammed hard against the wall and doubled over by the brutal force of the impact and then he toppled forward. Johnny had been hit before, during the war, but he had never received a full body strike and the shock of it was beyond his worst expectations. He was numbed from the waist down but his brain stayed clear, crystalline, as though the rush of adrenalin into his bloodstream had sharpened his perception to its limits.
“Play dead!” he thought, even as he was going down. His lower body was paralysed, but he forced his torso to relax. He hit the floor with the loose unresisting weight of a flour sack and did not move again.
His head was twisted to one side, his chest pressed to the cold cement floor. He lay still. He heard the gunman cross the floor, the rubber soles of the combat boots squeaking softly.
Then his boots entered Johnny’s field of vision. They were dusty and worn almost through the uppers. He wore no socks and the stink of his feet was rancid and sour as he stood within inches of Johnny’s face.
Johnny heard the metallic snick of the mechanism as the Zambian moved the rate-of-fire selector again, and then felt the cold hard touch of the muzzle against his temple as the man lined up for the coup de grace.
Don’t move, Johnny steeled himself.
It was his last despairing hope. He knew that the slightest movement must trigger the shot. He had to convince the gunman he was dead.
At that moment there was a burst of shouting from outside the room, and then a volley of automatic fire, followed by more shouting. The pressure of the rifle muzzle was lifted from Johnny’s temple. The stinking boots turned away and retreated across the floor towards the doorway. “Come on! Don’t waste time!” the scar-faced gunman yelled through the open door. Johnny knew enough of the northern Chinianja dialect to understand. “Where are the trucks? We must get the ivory loaded!” The Zambian ran out of the office leaving Johnny lying alone on the cement floor.
Johnny knew that he was mortally hit. He could feel the arterial blood squirting out of the wound in his groin and he rolled on his side and swiftly loosened the top of his trousers. Immediately he smelled his own faeces and knew that the second bullet had ripped open his intestines. He reached down into his crotch and pressed his fingers into the wound in his groin. Blood spurted hotly over his hand.
He found the open artery and pinched off the end of the severed femoral.
Mavis, and the babies! That was his next thought. What could he do for them? At that moment he heard more firing from up the hill, in the direction of the domestic compound and his own cottage.
It’s a gang of them, he realised with despair. They are all over the camp. They are attacking the compound. And then, My babies. Oh, God! My babies!
He thought about the weapons in the room next door, but he knew he could not get that far. Even if he did, how could he handle a rifle with half his guts shot away and his life-blood spreading in a pool under him?
He heard the trucks. He recognised the beat of the big diesels and knew that they were the refrigerator trucks. He felt a surge of hope.
Gomo, he thought. David… But it was short-lived. Lying on his side, clinging to his severed artery, he looked across the room and realised that he could see through the open door.
One of the white refrigerator trucks pulled into his view. It reversed up against the door of the ivory godown. As soon as it parked, Gomo jumped out of the cab and began a heated, gesticulating discussion with the scar-faced leader of the gang In his confused and swiftly weakening condition, it took Johnny several seconds to work it out.
Gomo, he thought. Gomo is one of them. He set it up.
It should not have come as such a shock. Johnny knew how pervasive was the corruption in the government, in all departments, not only the Parks Administration. He had given evidence before the official commission of enquiry that was investigating the corruption, and had pledged to help stamp it out. He knew Gomo well. He was arrogant and self-seeking. He was just the type, but Johnny had never expected treachery on this scale.
Suddenly the area around the godown that Johnny could see was teeming with the other members of the gang. Swiftly Scarface organised them into a work-party. One of them shot the lock off the door of the warehouse and the bandits laid aside their weapons and swarmed into the building. There were shouts of greedy joy as they saw the piles of ivory and then they formed a human chain and began passing out the tusks, and loading them into the truck.
Johnny’s vision began to fade. Clouds of darkness passed across his eyes and there was a soft singing in his ears.
I’m dying, he thought without emotion. He could feel the numbness spreading from his paralysed legs up through his chest.
He forced the darkness back from his eyes and thought that he must be fantasising, for now Ambassador Ning stood in the late sunlight below the verandah. He still had the binoculars slung over his shoulder and his manner was impossibly cool and urbane. Johnny tried to shout a warning to him, but it came out of his throat in a soft croak that did not carry beyond the room in which he lay.
Then to his astonishment he saw the scar-faced leader of the gang come to where the ambassador stood and salute him, if not respectfully, at least with recognition of his authority.
Ning. Johnny forced himself to believe it. It really is Ning. I’m not dreaming it.
Then the voices of the two men carried to where he lay.
They were speaking in English. “You must hurry your men,” Ning Cheng Gong said. “They must get the ivory loaded, I want to leave here immediately.”
“Money,” answered Sali . One thousand dollars…” His English was atrocious.
“You have been paid.” Cheng was indignant. “I have paid you your money.”
“More money. More one thousand dollars.” Sali grinned at him. “More money or I stop. We go, leave you, leave ivory.”
“You are a scoundrel,” Cheng snarled.
“Not understand ‘scoundrel’, but think you also ‘scoundrel’, maybe. Sa
li’s grin widened. “Give money now.”
“I haven’t any more money with me,” Cheng told him flatly.
“Then we go! Now! You load ivory yourself.”
“Wait.” Cheng was obviously thinking quickly. “I haven’t got money. You take the ivory, as much as you want. Take everything you can carry.”
Cheng had realised that the poachers would be able to take only a negligible number of tusks from the hoard. They could not possibly manage more than a single tusk each. Twenty men, twenty tusks, it was a small price.
Soli stared at him while he considered the offer. Clearly he had milked every possible advantage from the situation, so at last he nodded. “Good! We take ivory.” He began to turn away.
Ambassador Ning called after him. “Wait, Sali ! What about the others? Did you take care of them?”
“They all dead.”
“The warden and his woman and children? Them too?”
“All dead,” Sali repeated. “Woman is dead, and her piccanins. My men make jig-jig with all three women first. Very funny, very nice jig-jig. Then kill.”
“The warden? Where is he?”
Sali the poacher jerked his head towards the door of Johnny’s office. “I shoot him boom, boom. He dead like a ngulubi, dead like a pig.” He laughed. “Very good job, hey?” He walked away with the rifle over his shoulder, still chuckling, and Cheng followed him out of Johnny’s field of vision.
Anger came to arm Johnny and give him just a little more strength. The poacher’s words conjured up a dreadful vision of the fate that had overtaken Mavis and the children. He could see it as clearly as if he had been there; he knew about rape and pillage. He had lived through the bush war.
He used the strength of his anger to begin to wriggle across the floor towards his desk. He knew he could not use a weapon. All he could hope for now in the few minutes of life that remained to him was to leave some sort of message. Papers had spilled off his desk and littered the floor. If he could just get to a single sheet, and write on it and hide it, the police would find it later.