Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  He paced the forest clearing, lost in thought. The ground was muddy and rutted underfoot and the humidity steamed up the lenses of his sunglasses. He removed them and slipped them into the breast-pocket of his open-neck shirt. He glanced around him at the solid green wall of jungle that hemmed in the clearing. It was dark and menacing and he suppressed the sense of unease that it evoked and instead glanced at his wristwatch. “He is late,” he said sharply. “When will he come?”

  Chetti Singh shrugged and folded the game licence with one hand. “He does not have the same sense of time that we do. He is a pygmy. He will come when it suits him. Perhaps he is already here, watching us. Perhaps he will come tomorrow or next week.”

  “I cannot waste any more time,” Cheng snapped. “There is other important work to do.”

  “More important than your honourable father’s gift?” Chetti Singh asked, and his smile was ironical.

  “Damn these black people.” Cheng turned away again. “They are so unreliable.”

  “They are monkeys,” Chetti Singh agreed, “but useful little monkeys.”

  Cheng made another turn around the clearing, his feet squelching in the red mud, and then stopped in front of Chetti Singh again. “What about Armstrong?” he asked. “We have to deal with him.”

  “Ah, yes!” Chetti Singh grinned. “That will be fun, indeed.” He massaged the stump of his missing arm. “I have dreamed about Doctor Armstrong every night for nearly a year. And yet I never thought to have him delivered so neatly to Sengi-Sengi. Like a trussed chicken, never mind. “

  “You will have to deal with him while he is still here,” Cheng insisted. “You can’t allow him to leave here alive.”

  “Perish the thought,” Chetti Singh agreed. “I have been devoting much contemplation to the problem. I wish the good doctor’s demise to be suitably symbolic and painful, and yet to be adequately explainable as a most unfortunate accident of fate.”

  “Don’t wait too long,” Cheng warned!

  “I have five more days,” Chetti Singh pointed out complacently. I have seen the filming schedule. He cannot finish his work at Sengi-Sengi before that-Cheng cut in impatiently.

  “What about the red-haired woman, his assistant?”

  “At the moment President Taffari is having some bonking fun with her, but nevertheless I think it might be prudent to arrange for her to accompany Doctor Armstrong on the long journey–” Chetti Singh broke off abruptly and stood up. He peered into the forest and when Cheng opened his mouth to speak he silenced him with an imperative gesture. For another minute he stood listening with his head cocked before he spoke again. “I think he is here.”

  “How do you know?” Despite himself Cheng’s voice was a cautious whisper and he cleared his throat nervously as he peered into the jungle.

  “Listen,” said Chetti Singh. “The birds.”

  “I hear nothing.”

  “Precisely.” Chetti Singh nodded. They have fallen silent.”

  He stepped towards the green wall and raised his voice, calling in Swahili. “Peace be with you, son of the forest. Come forward, so that we may greet each other as friends.”

  The pygmy appeared like a trick of the light in a hole in the wall of vegetation. He was framed in a wreath of shining green leaves, and a ray of sunshine through the top branches that surrounded the clearing danced upon his glossy skin and threw each muscle of his powerful little body into high relief. His head was small and neat. His nose was broad and flat and he wore a goatee beard of soft curling black wool, laced with silvery grey.

  “I see you, Pirri, the great hunter,” Chetti Singh greeted him with flattery and the little man came into the clearing with a lithe and graceful step.

  “Did you bring tobacco?” he asked in Swahili, with a childlike directness, and Chetti Singh chuckled and handed him a tin of Uphill Rhodesian.

  Pirri unscrewed the lid. He scooped out a loose ball of yellow tobacco and wadded it under his top lip and hummed with pleasure.

  “He is not as small as I thought he would be,” Cheng remarked as he studied him. “Or as dark.”

  “He is not a full-blooded Bambuti,” Chetti Singh explained. “His father was a Hita, or so it is said.”

  “Can he hunt?” Cheng asked dubiously. “Can he kill an elephant?”

  Chetti Singh laughed. “He is the greatest hunter of all his tribe, but that is not all. He has other virtues, not possessed by his brethren, by reason of his mixed blood.”

  “What are they?” Cheng wanted to know.

  “He understands the value of money,” Chetti Singh explained. “Wealth and property mean nothing to the other Bambuti, but Pirri is different. He is civilised enough to know the meaning of greed.”

  Pirri was listening to them. Not understanding the English words, his head turned to each of them as they spoke, and he sucked his wad of tobacco. He was dressed only in a brief loincloth of bark cloth, his bow standing up behind his shoulder and his machete in a wooden scabbard at his waist.

  Abruptly he interrupted their discussion of him. “Who is this wazungu?” he asked in Swahili, indicating Cheng with his woolly bearded chin.

  “He is a famous chief, and rich,” Chetti Singh assured him, and Pirri strode across the clearing on muscular legs with bulging calves and looked up at Cheng curiously.

  “His skin has the malaria colour and his eyes are the eyes of the mamba,” he announced without guile.

  Cheng understood just enough Swahili to bristle. “He may know greed, but he does not know respect.”

  “It is the Bambuti way,” Chetti Singh tried to placate him. “They are like children; they say whatever comes into their heads.”

  “Ask him about the elephant,” Cheng instructed, and Chetti Singh changed his tone of voice and smiled ingratiatingly at Pirri.

  “I have come to ask you about elephant,” he said, and Pirri scratched his crotch, taking a large handful of the contents of his loin-cloth and joggling it thoughtfully.

  “Ah, elephant,” he said vaguely. “What do I know about elephant?”

  “You are the greatest hunter of all the Bambuti,” Chetti Singh pointed out. “Nothing moves in the forest but Pirri knows of it.”

  “That is true,” Pirri agreed, and studied Cheng reflectively. “I like the bracelet on this rich wazungu’s wrist,” he said. “Before we talk of elephant he should give me a gift.”

  “He wants your watch,” Chetti Singh told Cheng.

  “I understood!” Cheng snapped. “He is impertinent. What would a savage do with a gold Rolex?”

  “He would probably sell it to one of the truck-drivers for one hundredth of its value,” Chetti Singh replied, enjoying Cheng’s anger and frustration.

  “Tell him I will not be blackmailed. I will not give him my watch,” Cheng stated flatly, and Chetti Singh shrugged.

  “I will tell him,” he agreed, “but that will mean no gift for your honourable father.” Cheng hesitated and then unclipped the gold bracelet from his wrist and handed it to the pygmy. Pirri cooed with pleasure and held the wristwatch in both hands, turning it so that the small diamonds around the dial sparkled.

  “It is pretty,” he giggled. So pretty that suddenly I remember about the elephant in the forest.”

  “Tell me about the elephant,” Chetti Singh invited.

  “There were thirty elephant cows and calves in the forest near Gondola,” Pirri said. “And two large bulls with long white teeth.”

  “How long?” Chetti Singh demanded, and Cheng who had followed the conversation thus far leaned forward eagerly.

  “One elephant is larger than the other. His teeth are this long,” said Pirri, and unslung his bow from his shoulder and held it above his head and stood on tiptoe. “This long,” he repeated. “As high as I can reach with my bow, from the tip of the tooth to the lip, but not counting the part concealed in the skull.”

  “How thick?” Cheng asked in atrocious Swahili, his voice coarse with lust, and Pirri turned to him and half
circled his own waist with his dainty childlike hands.

  “This thick,” he said. “As thick as I am.”

  “That is a great elephant,” Chetti Singh murmured with disbelief, and Pirri bridled.

  “He is the greatest of all elephants and I have seen him with my own eyes. I, Pirri, say this thing and it is true.”

  “I want you to kill this elephant and bring me his tusks,” Chetti Singh said softly, and Pirri shook his head.

  “This elephant is no longer at Gondola. When the machines of yellow iron came into the forest, he ran from their smoke and noise. He has gone into the sacred heartland where no man may hunt. It is decreed by the Mother and the Father. I cannot kill this elephant in the heartland.”

  “I will pay you a great deal for the teeth of this elephant,” Chetti Singh whispered seductively, but Pirri shook his head firmly.

  “Offer him a thousand dollars,” Cheng said in English, but Chetti Singh frowned at him.

  “Leave this to me, he cautioned. We don’t want to ruin the trade with impatience.” He turned back to Pirri and said in Swahili, “I will give you ten bolts of pretty cloth which the women love, and fifty handfuls of glass beads, enough to make a thousand virgins spread their thighs for you.”

  Pirri shook his head. “It is the sacred heartland,” he said. “The Mother and the Father will be angry if I hunt there.”

  “In addition to the cloth and beads, I will give you twenty iron axe-heads and ten fine knives with blades as long as your hand.” Pirri wriggled his whole body like a puppy.

  “It is against law and custom. My tribe will hate me and drive me out.”

  “I will give you twenty bottles of gin,” Chetti Singh said. “And as much tobacco as you can lift from the ground.” Pirri massaged his crotch frantically and rolled his eyes.

  “As much tobacco as I can carry!” His voice was hoarse. “I cannot do it. They will call out the Molimo. They will bring down the curse of the Mother and Father.”

  “And I will give you a hundred silver Maria Theresa dollars.” Chetti Singh reached into the pocket of his bush jacket and brought out a handful of silver coins. He juggled them in one hand, jingling them together and making them sparkle in the sunlight.

  For a long moment Pirri stared at them hungrily. Then he let out a shrill yelp and sprang in the air and drew his machete.

  Chetti Singh and Cheng stepped back nervously, expecting him to attack them, but instead, Pirri whirled and, with the blade held high above his head, rushed at the wall of the forest and swung a hissing stroke at the first bush. Shouting with anger and temptation, he hacked and slashed at the forest growth. Leaves and twigs flew, and branches were sliced through. Slabs of bark and white wood rained down from the bleeding trunks under his onslaught.

  At last Pirri stopped and rested on his blade, his muscular chest heaving, sweat pouring down his face and dripping into his beard, sobbing with exertion and self-loathing. Then he straightened up and came back to where Chetti Singh stood and said, “I will kill this elephant for you, and bring you his teeth. then you will give me all those things you promised me, not forgetting the tobacco.”

  Chetti Singh drove the Landrover back along the rudimentary forest track. it took almost an hour for them to reach the main corduroy roadway on which the convict gangs were working, and over which the great ore-carriers and the logging trucks rumbled and roared.

  As they left the overgrown logging track and joined the heavy flow of traffic towards Sengi-Sengi, Chetti Singh turned to grin at the man beside him. “That takes care of the gift for your father. Now we must apply all our ingenuity and brains to a little gift for me, the head of Doctor Daniel Armstrong on a silver platter, with an apple in his mouth.”

  Chapter 31

  Daniel had been waiting for this moment, praying for it. He was high on the command deck of the MOMU and it was raining. The air was blue and thick with falling rain, and visibility was down to fifty feet or less. Bonny was sheltering in the command cabin at the end of the platform, keeping her precious video equipment out of the rain. The two Hita guards had gone down to the lower deck and for a moment Daniel was alone on the upper deck.

  Daniel had become hardened to the rain. Since arriving at Sengi-Sengi he seemed always to be wearing wet clothing. He was standing now in the angle of the steel wall of the command cabin and the flying bridge, only partially shielded from the driving rain. Every now and then a harder gust would throw heavy drops into his face and force him to slit his eyes.

  Suddenly the door to the command cabin opened and Ning Cheng Gong came out on to the flying bridge. He had not seen Daniel and he crossed to the forward rail under cover of the canvas sun awning and leaned on the rail, peering down at the great shining excavator blades that were tearing into the earth seventy feet below his perch.

  It was Daniel’s moment. For the first time they were alone and Cheng was vulnerable. “This one is for Johnny,” he whispered, and crossed the steel plates of the bridge on silent rubber soles. He came up behind Cheng. All he had to do was stoop and seize his ankles. A quick lift and shove, and Cheng would be hurled over the rail and dropped into the deadly blades. It would be instantaneous and the chopped and dismembered corpse would be fed into the tube mills and pounded to paste and mixed with hundreds of tons of powdered earth.

  Daniel reached out to do it, but before he could touch him he hesitated involuntarily, suddenly appalled at what he was about to do. It was cold-blooded, calculated murder. He had killed before as a soldier, but never like this, and for a moment he was sick with self-loathing. “For Johnny,” he tried to convince himself, but it was too late.

  Cheng whirled to face him. He was quick as a mongoose confronted by a cobra. His hands came up, the stiff-fingered blades of the martial arts expert, and his eyes were dark and ferocious as he stared into Daniel’s face.

  For a moment they were poised on the edge of violence, then Cheng whispered, “You missed your chance, Doctor. There will not be another.”

  Daniel backed away. He had let Johnny down with such weakness. In the old days it would not have happened. He would have taken Cheng out swiftly and competently and rejoiced at the kill. Now the Taiwanese was alerted and even more dangerous.

  Daniel turned away, sickened by his failure, and then he started. One of the Hita guards had come up the steel ladder silently as a leopard. He was leaning against the rear rail of the bridge with his maroon beret cocked over one eye and the Uzi submachine-gun on his hip pointed at Daniel’s belly. He had been watching it all.

  That night Daniel lay awake until after midnight, unnerved by the narrowness of his escape and sickened by the savage streak in himself that allowed him to pursue such a brutal vengeance. Yet even this attack of conscience did not shake his determination to act as the vehicle of justice and in the morning he awoke to find his lust for revenge undiminished, and only his temper and his nerves shaky and uncertain. This led directly to his final bust-up with Bonny Mahon.

  It began when she was late to start the day’s assignment, and kept him waiting in the teeming rain for almost forty minutes before she finally sauntered out to meet him. “When I said five o’clock, I didn’t mean in the afternoon,” he snarled at her, and she grinned at him, all rosy and smug.

  “What do you want me to do, commit hara-kiri, Master?” she asked.

  He was about to let fly a verbal broadside, when he realised that she must have come directly from Taffari’s bed without bathing, for he caught a whiff of the musky odour of their lovemaking on her, and had to turn away. He felt so furious that he could not trust himself not to strike her. “For Chrissake, Armstrong, get a hold on yourself,” he cautioned himself silently, “you’re going to pieces.”

  They worked in brittle antagonism for the rest of the morning, filming the bulldozers and chainsaws as they cleared the mining track for the monstrous MOMU to waddle down.

  It was heavy going in the mud and rain, and dangerous with falling tree trunks and powerful machinery
working all around them. This did nothing to improve his mood but Daniel managed to keep a check on his tongue until just before noon when Bonny announced that she had run out of tape and had to break off to return to the main camp to fetch new stock from the cold rooms.

  “What kind of half-baked cameraman runs out of stock in the middle of a shoot?” Daniel wanted to know, and she rounded on him.

  “I know what’s eating you up, lover boy. It’s not shortage of film, it’s shortage of good rich fruitcake. You hate me for what Ephrem is getting and you’re not. It’s the old green-eyed monster.”

  “You’ve got an inflated idea of the value of what you sit on,” Daniel came back as angrily.

  It escalated rapidly from there until Bonny yelled into his face, “Nobody talks to me like that, Buster. You can stick your job and your insults up your left earhole, or in any other convenient orifice.” And she sloshed and slipped in the red mud back to where the Landrover was parked.

  “Leave the camera in the Landrover,” Daniel shouted after her. It was all hired video equipment. “You’ve got your return ticket to London and I’ll send you a cheque for what I owe you. You’re fired.”

  “No, I’m not, lover boy. You’re way too late. I resigned! And don’t you forget it.” She slammed the door of the Landrover and raced the engine. All four wheels spinning wildly and throwing up sheets and clods of red mud, Bonny tore up the track and left him glaring after her. His bad temper increased as he belatedly thought of a dozen other clever retorts that he should have thrown at her while he had the chance.

  Bonny was as angry, but her mood was longer-lasting and more vindictive. She racked her imagination for the cruellest revenge she could conjure up, and just before she reached the main camp at Sengi-Sengi it came to her in a creative flash. “You are going to regret every single lousy thing you said to me, Danny boy,” she promised aloud, grinning mercilessly. “You aren’t going to shoot another tape in Ubomo, not you, nor any other cameraman that you hire to replace me. I’m going to make damned double sure of that.”