Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  “You are trying to tell me, Armstrong, that time is of the essence?”

  “Precisely, old chap.”

  “It couldn’t be that you’d enjoy a touch of cloak and dagger, a bit of boy-scouting, a spot of amateur sleuthing?”

  “Who me? Don’t be silly! You know me.”

  “Indeed I do,” he agreed with a wink at his image, and subsided back into the steamy suds, which slopped over the bath rim on to the tiled floor.

  The dinner was a vast improvement on his last public meal.

  The fillets of bream were fresh from the lake and the wine was a delicious Hamilton-Russell Chardonnay from the Cape of Good Hope. Reluctantly he rationed himself to half the bottle. Work to do, he muttered ruefully. and went up to the room to make his preparations.

  There was no hurry. He couldn’t move until after midnight. When he was ready he lay on the bed and enjoyed the sensation of excitement and anticipation. He kept looking at his wristwatch. It seemed to have stopped and he held it to his ear. The waiting was always the worst part.

  Chetti Singh watched the security guards usher the last customer from the supermarket and close the double glass doors. The wall clock pointed to ten minutes past five.

  The sweepers were already at work and his daughters were busy at the tills, cashing up the day’s receipts. The girls were as devout as virgins ministering at the altar of some arcane religion, and his wife stood over them as dignified as the high priestess. This was the high point of the daily ritual.

  At last the procession left the tills and made its way across the shop floor, in strict order of precedence, his wife leading and her daughters following, the eldest first and the youngest last. They entered his office and laid the day’s take on his desk in neatly banded bundles of currency notes, and canvas bags of coins, while his wife handed him the print-outs from the tills. “Oh, good!” Chetti Singh told them in Hindi. “The best day since Christmas Eve, I am sure.” He could recite the figures over the last six months without consulting his ledgers.

  He entered the take in the day-book, and while his family watched respectfully, locked the cash and credit-card vouchers into the big Chubb safe built into the back wall. “I will be late home for dinner, he told his wife. I must go down to the warehouse to attend to certain matters.”

  “Papaii, your meal will be ready when you return.” She clasped her hands to her lips in a graceful gesture of respect, and her daughters imitated her example and then filed from his office. Chetti Singh sighed with pleasure. They were good girls but if only they had been boys. It was going to be the devil’s own job finding husbands for all of them.

  He drove down to the industrial area in the Cadillac. The car was not new. Dearth of foreign exchange would not permit an ordinary citizen to import such a luxurious vehicle. Chetti Singh had, as always, a system. He contacted newly appointed members of the American diplomatic staff before they left Washington. Malawi customs regulations allowed them to import a new car and sell it locally at the end of their term.

  Chetti Singh paid them twice the US value of the Cadillac in Malawi kwacha on arrival. They could live in princely style on this amount for the full three years of their tour in Malawi while still retaining use of the car and saving their official salaries.

  When they left, Chetti Singh took over the vehicle, ran it for a year, until the next arrangement matured at which time he placed the Cadillac on the showroom floor of his Toyota agency with a price tag of three times its original US value. It was usually sold within the week. No profit was too small to despise; no loss was too small to abhor. It was not by accident that over the years Chetti Singh had amassed a fortune the full extent of which not even his, wife could guess at.

  At the warehouse gates Chawe swung open the boom to allow him to drive the Cadillac through.

  “Yes?” Chetti Singh asked the big Angoni.

  “He came,” Chawe replied. “As you said he would. He drove by on this road at ten minutes past four. He was in the truck with the man’s arm painted on the door. He drove slowly and he was staring through the fence all the time.”

  Chetti Singh frowned with annoyance. “This chap is becoming an absolute pest. Never mind,” he said aloud, and Chawe looked bemused. His English was rudimentary. “Come with me,” Chetti Singh ordered, and Chawe climbed into the back seat of the Cadillac. He would never be so presumptuous as to sit beside his master.

  Chetti Singh drove slowly along the front of the warehouse complex. All the call doors were already closed and locked for the night. There were no burglar alarms guarding the area; at night even the perimeter fence was unlit by floodlights.

  There had been a period two or three years back during which he had suffered from repeated burglaries and break-ins. Alarms and floodlights had done little to prevent these depredations. In desperation he had consulted the most famous Sangorna in all the territory. This old witch-doctor lived in dread isolation up on the top of the misty Mlanje plateau attended only by his acolytes.

  For a fee commensurate with his reputation, the witch-doctor descended from the mountain with his entourage and, with great fanfare and ceremony, he placed the warehouse under the protection of the most powerful and malevolent of the spirits and demons that he controlled.

  Chetti Singh invited all the idlers and loafers of the town to witness the ceremony. They watched with interest and trepidation as the witch-doctor decapitated a black cockerel at each of the five doors of the warehouse and sprinkled its blood on the portals. After this, to suitable incantations, he placed the skull of a baboon on each corner-post of the perimeter fence. The spectators had been much impressed and the word spread swiftly through the townships and the beerballs that Chetti Singh was under magic protection.

  For six months thereafter there were no further break-ins.

  Then one of the township gangs worked up the courage to test the efficacy of the spell, and they got away with a dozen television sets and nearly forty transistor radios.

  Chetti Singh sent for the witch-doctor and reminded him that his services carried a guarantee. They haggled until finally Chetti Singh agreed to buy from him at a bargain price the ultimate deterrent. Her name was Nandi. Since Nandi’s arrival there had been only a single break-in.

  The burglar had died in Lilongwe hospital the following day with his scalp ripped off his skull and his bowels bulging out of the rents in his belly. Nandi had solved the problem, permanently.

  Chetti Singh drove the Cadillac around the peripheral pathway inside the fence. The fence was in good order, even the baboon skulls still grinned down from the tops of the cornerposts, but the infra-red alarms were gone. Chetti Singh had sold them at a good price to a Zambian customer. After Nandi’s arrival they had become redundant.

  Completing the circuit of the fence, Chetti Singh parked the Cadillac at the rear of the warehouse, beside a neat shed of the same corrugated sheeting as the main building. This was obviously a later addition, tacked on as an afterthought to the rear wall of the warehouse.

  As Chetti Singh stepped out of the Cadillac, his nostrils flared to the faint but rank odour that wafted from the single small window in the shed. This was set high up and was heavily barred.

  He glanced at Chawe. “Is she safe?”

  “She is in the small cage, as you ordered, Mambo.”

  Despite the assurance, Chetti Singh peered through the peephole in the door before he opened it and stepped into the shed. The only light came from the high window and the room was in semi-darkness, made more intense by the contrast of the late sunshine outside.

  The smell was stronger now, a pungent wild scent, and suddenly from the gloom there was a spitting snarl so vicious that Chetti Singh stepped back involuntarily. My goodness. he chuckled to hide his nerves. We are in absolutely foul mettle today. An animal moved behind the bars of the cage, a dark shape on silent pads and there was a gleam of yellow eyes. Nandi. Chetti Singh smiled. ‘The sweet one’. Nandi had been the name of King Chaka’s mother.
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  Chetti Singh reached out to the switch beside the door and the fluorescent tube in the ceiling spluttered and then lit the shed with a cold blue light. In the cage a female leopard shrank away against the far wall, crouching there, staring at the man with murderous eyes, her upper lip lifting in a creased and silent snarl to reveal her fangs.

  She was a huge cat, over seven feet from nose to tail, one of the animals from Mlanje mountain forest, who would turn the scale at 120 pounds. A wild creature captured by the old witchdoctor in her maturity, she had once been a notorious goat and dog-killer, terrorising the villages on the slopes of the mountain. Shortly before her capture she had savagely mauled a young herdboy who had tried to defend his flock against her.

  The forest cats were darker than those of the open savanna, the jet-black rosettes that dappled her skin were close-set, so that she was close in coloration to the melanistic panther. Her tail curled and flicked like a metronome, the gauge of her temper. She watched the man unblinkingly. The force of her hatred was as thick as the wild animal stench in the small hot room.

  “Are you angry?” Chetti Singh asked, and her lip lifted higher to the sound of his voice. She knew him well. Not angry enough, Chetti Singh decided, and reached for the cattle prod on the rack beside the light switch.

  The cat reacted immediately. She knew the sting of the electric prod.

  Her next snarl was a crackling rattle and she ran back and forth trying to escape from the torment she had come to expect. At the end nearest the main wall of the warehouse the steel mesh cage narrowed into a bottleneck just wide enough to admit the leopard’s body, a low tunnel that ended against a steel sliding door in the warehouse wall.

  The prod was bolted on to a long aluminium pole. Chetti Singh slipped it between the cage bars and reached out to touch the leopard. Her movements became frantic as she tried to avoid the device, and Chetti Singh laughed at her antics as he pursued her around the cage. He was trying to drive her into the bottle-necked tunnel.

  At last she flung herself against the bars of the cage, ripping at the steel with her claws as she tried to reach him, coughing and grunting with fury, but the length of the pole kept Chetti Singh out of range.

  “Goodness gracious me!” he said, and touched the side of her neck with the points of the prod. Blue electricity flashed and the leopard recoiled from the sting of it and bounded to the tunnel at the end of the cage. Chawe was ready for this, and he dropped the mesh door behind her.

  Now she was trapped. Her nose was against the steel hatch in the warehouse wall, while at her heels the mesh door prevented her backing away. The tunnel was so low that it almost touched her back and she could not rear up, it was so narrow that she could not turn her head to protect her heaving flanks. She was helplessly pinioned and Chetti Singh handed the prod to Chawe.

  He returned to the table near the door and uncoiled the lead of a small electric soldering iron and plugged it into the wall socket.

  With the plastic-covered lead trailing behind him he came back to where the leopard crouched in the tunnel. He reached through the bars and stroked her back. Her pelt was thick and silky, and she could not avoid his touch. Her whole body seemed to swell with her fury and she snarled and tried to twist her neck to savage his hand but the bars prevented it.

  Chetti Singh lifted the soldering iron and spat on the copper point to test its heat. His spittle sizzled and evaporated in a puff of steam. He grunted with satisfaction and reached through the bars once again. He grasped the leopard’s tail and lifted it high, exposing her fluffy genitalia and the tight puckered black collar of her anus.

  The leopard hissed with outrage and ripped at the cement floor with her claws fully extended. She knew what was coming and she tried to lower her tail and cover her delicate parts. Help me, Chetti Singh grunted, and Chawe seized the tail. It writhed like a serpent in his grip but he forced it upwards, allowing his master free use of both hands.

  Chetti Singh inspected the delicate flesh thoughtfully. It was dimpled and cratered with healed scars, some so fresh that the cicatrice was stilt pink and glossy. He reached out gently with the hot iron, choosing the spot to burn with care, avoiding the freshly healed skin.

  The cat felt the heat of the approaching iron and her body convulsed in anticipation. “Just a little one, my beauty,” Chetti Singh assured her. “Just enough to make you very angry if you should meet Doctor Armstrong tonight.”

  Unmolested, leopards are not a serious threat to human beings. Man does not form a part of their natural prey, and their instinctive fear is enough to make them avoid rather than attack him. However, once injured or wounded, or particularly when they are deliberately tormented, they are, amongst the most dangerous and vicious of all African animals.

  Chetti Singh touched the glowing iron to the soft rim of the leopard’s anus. There was a puff of smoke and the stink of burned skin and hair. The leopard shrieked with pain and bit at the steel bars.

  Chetti Singh inspected the injury. With practice he could inflict a burn that was exquisitely painful, but which would heal within the week and would not damage the animal’s appearance nor hamper her movements when she attacked. Good! he congratulated himself. The iron had only superficially penetrated the outer skin. It was a shallow painful little wound, yet it had infuriated the golden cat.

  He laid the soldering iron back on the table and picked up a bottle of disinfectant. It was raw iodine, dark yellow and pungent on the swab that he pressed against the open wound. The sting of it would increase her fury.

  The leopard shrieked and hissed and struggled wildly against the restraining bars. Her eyes were huge and yellow and froth lined her open snarling lips. “That’s enough. Open the hatch,” Chetti Singh ordered, and the Angoni released the cat’s tail. She whipped it down between her legs to protect herself.

  Chawe went to the handle of the steel hatch and raised it. With one last snarl the leopard bounded through the opening and disappeared into the warehouse beyond.

  At first it had been difficult to get the cat to leave the warehouse at dawn each morning, but with free use of the electric prod and the lure of the goat’s meat on which she was fed, she had at last been trained to return to her cage in the shed on command.

  It was the only training she had received. All night she prowled the warehouse, tormented and murderous. At dawn she returned to the shed and crouched there in the gloom, growling softly to herself and licking her deliberately inflicted injuries, awaiting the first opportunity to avenge her humiliation and pain.

  Chawe closed the hatch behind the leopard and followed his master out into the last glow of the sunset. Chetti Singh mopped his face with a white handkerchief It had been hot in the fetid little shed. “You will remain in your guardhouse at the main gate,” he commanded. Do not patrol the fence or attempt to stop the white man from entering the warehouse. If he does get in, Nandi will warn you.”

  They both smiled at the thought. They remembered the last intruder and his condition as they took him down to the casualty department of the general hospital. When you hear Nandi working on him, ring me from the main gate. The telephone is beside my bed. Do not enter the warehouse until I arrive. It will take fifteen or twenty minutes for me to get here. By that time Nandi may have saved us a great deal of trouble.

  His wife had one of her magnificent curries prepared for his dinner. She did not question where he had been. She was a good and dutiful wife.

  After dinner he worked on his accounts for two hours. His was a complicated system of accountancy: he kept two, separate sets of books, one for the civil tax collector which reflected a fictitious profit figure, and another authentic set which was meticulously correct. From this Chetti Singh calculated the tithe that he paid to the temple. it was one thing to cheat on income tax, but a prudent man did not mess around with the gods.

  Before he went to bed he unlocked the steel safe built into the back of his wardrobe and took out the double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun and a packet of
SSG cartridges. He had an official police permit for the firearm, for, whenever possible and convenient, he was a law-abiding man.

  His wife gave him a puzzled look, but made no comment. He did not satisfy her curiosity, but propped the weapon in the corner nearest the door, ready to hand. He switched out the lights and under the sheets made love to her with his customary dispatch. Ten minutes later he was snoring sonorously.

  The telephone beside his bed rang at seven minutes past two in the morning. On the first peal Chetti Singh was awake, and before it could ring again he had the receiver to his ear.

  “In the warehouse, Nandi is singing a pretty, song,” said Chawe in Angoni.

  “I am coming,” Chetti Singh replied, and swung his legs off the bed.

  Chapter 12

  There were no street lights, which makes the job a little easier, Daniel murmured as he parked the Landcruiser on one of the open plots three hundred yards from the boundary fence of Chetti Singh’s central depot. He had driven the last mile at walking speed without headlights.

  Now he switched off the engine and stepped out into the darkness. He stood listening for almost ten minutes before he checked his wristwatch. It was a little after one o’clock.

  He already wore navy-blue slacks and a black leather jacket. Now he pulled a soft balaclava cap of dark wool over his head. He strapped a small nylon bag around his waist that contained the few items of equipment which he had selected from the tool-box.

  Bolted to the Landcruiser’s roof were two light aluminium extension ladders that he carried for laying as corduroy when negotiating soft sand or deep mud. They weighed less than seven pounds each. He carried both of them under one arm as he set out across the weed-choked wasteland towards the depot. He kept off the road, well back amongst the scrub.