Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  “How many?” Daniel asked, and counted them aloud. “Eight, nine, ten” he exclaimed. “Running side by side that gives them a cutline almost four hundred yards wide. It doesn’t seem possible that just ten machines have been able to inflict such terrible damage.”

  Victor’s voice shook uncertainly. “They are like giant locusts, remorseless, insensate, terrible. The caterpillar tractors were working ahead of the line of MOMUs, scything the forest to make way for the monstrous earth-eating machines to follow.”

  Even as they watched, one of the tall trees quivered and swayed. Then it began to move, swinging ponderously as the steel blades ate through the base of its trunk. Even at this distance they heard the scream of living timber rending. It sounded like the death throes of a wounded animal. The falling tree gathered momentum, its death cry rose higher and shriller, until the trunk thudded into the red earth and the mass of foliage shivered, then lay still.

  Daniel had to look away. Sepoo was perched beside him on a high branch, and he was weeping. The tears ran very slowly down his wrinkled old cheeks and dripped unheeded on to his naked chest. It was a terrible intimate grief, too painful for Daniel to watch.

  He looked back just in time to see another tree fall and die, and then another. He unslung the VTR from his shoulder and lifted it to his eyes, focused the telephoto lens, and began to film.

  He filmed the devastated bare red plain on which not a living thing remained, not an animal, or bird, or a green leaf.

  He filmed the line of yellow machines grinding inexorably forward, keeping their formation rigidly, attended by an endless horde of container trucks, like worker ants behind the queen ant, carrying away the succession of eggs she laid.

  He filmed the red poison spewing from the dump chutes at the rear of the MOMU, falling carelessly upon the savaged earth where the next rainstorm would carry it away and spread it into every stream and creek for a hundred miles down the contour.

  He filmed the fall of the trees ahead of the line of yellow machines and the giant mechanical saws mounted on specially modified caterpillar tractors. Fountains of wet white sawdust flew high into the air as the spinning silver blades bit in and the tree-trunks fell into separate logs.

  He filmed the mobile cranes lifting the logs on to the trailer beds of the logging vehicles.

  He filmed the hordes of naked Uhali slaves working in the red mud to keep the roads open for the massive trucks and trailers to pass over, as they bore away the looted treasures of the forest.

  He had hoped that the act of manipulating the camera and viewing the scene through the intervening lens might somehow isolate him from reality, might allow him to remain aloof and objective. It was a vain hope. The longer he watched the destruction, the more angry he became until his rage matched that of the woman who sat on the branch beside him.

  Kelly did not have to give voice to her outrage. He could feel it like static electricity in the air around her. It did not surprise him that he was so in tune with her feelings. It seemed only right and natural. They were very close now. A new bond had been forged between them, to reinforce the attraction and sympathy that they had already conceived for each other.

  They stayed in the treetop until nightfall, and then they remained another hour, sitting in darkness as though they could not tear themselves away from the terrible fascination of it. They listened to the growl of engines in the night and watched the floodlights and the swinging headlights turn the forest and the devastated red plain to daylight. It never stopped, but went on and on, cutting, digging, roaring, spilling out poison and death.

  When at last it began to rain again and the lightning and the thunder crashed overhead, they crept down from the treetop and made their way slowly and sadly back to where Pamba waited in the forest with the porters.

  In the morning they started back through the steaming silent forest towards Gondola, stopping only for Daniel to film the polluted, bleeding rivers. Victor Omeru went down into the muck and stood knee-deep in it and spoke into the camera, giving articulate voice to all their sorrow and rage. His voice was deep and compelling and filled with concern and compassion for his land and its people. His silver hair and dark noble features would hold the attention of any audience, and his credentials were impeccable. His international reputation was such that nobody could seriously doubt that what he described to them was the truth. If Daniel could show this to the outside world, he knew that he would be able to communicate his own sense of outrage.

  They moved on slowly. The Bambuti porters were still subdued and dismayed. Although they had not witnessed the mining, Sepoo had described it to them and they had seen the bleeding rivers. Yet even before they reached the boundary between the heartland and their traditional hunting grounds they were given even greater cause for sorrow.

  They cut the tracks of an elephant. They all recognized the spoor of the beast, and Sepoo, called him by name. “The Old Man with One Ear,” he said, and they all agreed. It was the bull with half his left ear missing. They laughed for the first time in days as though they had met an old friend in the forest, but the laughter was short-lived as they studied the spoor. Then they cried out and wrung their hands and whimpered with fear and horror.

  Kelly called urgently to Sepoo. “What is it, old friend?”

  “Blood,” Sepoo answered her. “Blood and urine from the elephant. He is wounded; he is dying.”

  “How has this happened?” Kelly cried. She also knew the elephant like an old friend. She had come across him often in the forest when he had frequented the area round Gondola.

  “A man has struck and wounded him. Somebody is hunting the bull in the sacred heartland. It is against all law and custom. Look! Here are the tracks of the man’s feet lying over the spoor of the bull.” He pointed out the clear imprints of small bare feet in the mud. “The hunter is a Bambuti. He must be a man of our clan. It is a terrible sacrilege. It is an offence against the god of the forest.”

  The little group of pygmies were shaken and horrified. They clustered together like lost children, holding each other’s hands for comfort in these dreadful days when all they believed in was being turned upside down, first the machines in the forest and the bleeding rivers, and now this sacrilege committed by one of their own people. I know this man, Pamba shrieked. I recognize the mark of his feet. This man is Pirri. They wailed then and covered their faces, for Pirri had made his kill in the sacred places and the shame and the retribution of the forest god must come down upon all of them.

  Pirri the hunter moved like a shadow. He laid his tiny feet down gently upon the great pad marks of the elephant, where the bull’s weight had compacted the earth and no twig would snap and no dead leaf would rustle to betray him.

  Pirri had been following the elephant for three days. During all that time Pirri’s entire being had been concentrated upon the elephant, so that in some mystic way he had become part of the beast he was hunting.

  Where the bull had stopped to feast on the little red berries of the Selepe tree, Pirri read the sip and could taste the tart acidic juice in his own throat. Where the elephant had drunk at one of the streams, Pirri stood upon the bank as he had done and felt in his imagination the sweet clear water squirt and gurgle into his own belly. Where the elephant had dropped a pile of yellow fibrous dung on the forest floor, Pirri felt his own bowels contract and his sphincter relax in sympathy.

  Pirri had become the elephant, and the elephant had become Pirri.

  When he came up with him at last, the bull was asleep on his feet in a matted thicket. The branches were interwoven and covered with thorns that were hooked and tipped with red; they could flay a man’s skin from his limbs. As softly and slowly as Pirri moved, yet the elephant sensed his presence and came awake. He spread his ears, one wide and full as a mainsail, the other torn and deformed, and he listened.

  However, he heard nothing, for Pirri was a master hunter.

  The elephant stretched out his trunk, sucked up the air and blew it so
ftly into his mouth. The olfactory glands in his top lip opened like pink rosebuds and he tasted the air, but he tasted nothing, for Pirri had come in below the tiny forest breeze and he had smeared himself from the top of his curly head to the pink soles of his feet with the elephant’s own dung. There was no man-smell upon him.

  Then the elephant made a sound, a gentle rumbling sound in his belly and a fluttering sound in his throat. It was the elephant song. The bull sang in the forest to learn if it was another elephant or a deadly enemy whose presence he sensed.

  Pirri crouched at the edge of the thicket and listened to the elephant sing. Then he cupped his hand over his mouth and his nose and he gulped air into his throat and his belly and he let it out with a soft rumbling and fluttering sound.

  Pirri sang the song of the elephant.

  The bull sighed in his throat and changed his song, testing the unseen presence. Faithfully Pirri replied to him, following the cadence and the timbre of the song, and the elephant bull believed him. The elephant flapped his ears, a gesture of contentment and trust. He accepted that another elephant had found him and come to join him.

  He moved carelessly and the thicket crackled before his bulk. He came ambling forward to meet Pirri, pushing the thorny branches aside. Pirri saw the curved shafts of ivory appear high above his head. They were thicker than his waist and longer than he could reach with his elephant spear.

  The elephant spear was a weapon that Pirri had forged himself from the blade of a truck spring -that he had stolen from one of the dukas at the roadside. He had heated and beaten it until the steel had lost its temper and he was able to work it more easily. Then Pirri had shaped and sharpened it, and fitted it to a shaft of hard resilient wood and bound the blade in place with rawhide. When the rawhide dried it was hard and tight as the steel it held.

  As the elephant’s head loomed above him, Pirri sank down and lay like a log or a pile of dead leaves on the forest floor.

  The elephant was so close that he could make out clearly every furrow and wrinkle in the thick grey hide. Looking up he could see the discharge from the glands in the elephant’s head running like tears down his cheeks, and Pirri gathered himself.

  Even with the spear he had made, which was sharp and heavy and almost twice as long as Pirri was tall, he could never drive the point through the hide and meat and the cage of ribs to pierce the bull’s heart or his lungs. The brain in its bony casket was far beyond his reach.

  There was only one way that a man of Pirri’s size could kill an enormous beast like this with a spear.

  Pirri rolled to his feet and bounded up under the elephant’s belly. He stood between the bull’s back legs and he braced himself and drove the point of the spear upwards into the angle of his groin.

  The elephant squealed as the blade sliced through the baggy skin that hung around his crotch and lanced up into the sac of his bladder. The razor steel split his bladder open and the hot urine sprayed out in a yellow jet. He convulsed with agony, hunching his back, before he began to run.

  The elephant ran screaming through the forest, and the foliage crashed and broke before him.

  Pirri leaned on his bloody spear and listened to the elephant run out of earshot. He waited until the silence was complete and then he girded up his loincloth and began to follow the dribbled trail of blood and urine that steamed and reeked on the forest floor.

  It might take many hours to die, but the elephant was doomed. Pirri, the hunter, had struck a mortal blow and he knew that before tomorrow’s sunset the elephant would be dead.

  Pirri followed him slowly, but he did not feel the fierce hunter’s joy in his heart. There was only a sense of emptiness and the terrible guilt of sacrilege. He had offended his god, and he knew that now his god must reject and punish him.

  Pirri the hunter found the carcass of the elephant bull the next morning. The elephant was kneeling, with his legs folded up neatly beneath him. His head was supported by the massive curves of ivory that were half buried in the soft earth.

  The last rainstorm had washed his hide so that it was black and shiny and his eyes were open.

  He appeared so lifelike that Pirri approached him with great caution and at last reached out with a long thin twig to touch the open staring eye fringed with thick lashes. The eyelid did not blink to the touch and Pirri noticed the opaque jelly-like sheen of death over the pupil.

  He straightened up and laid aside his spear. The hunt was over. By custom he should now sing a prayer of thanks to the forest god for such largesse. He actually uttered the first words of the prayer before he broke off guiltily. He knew that he could never sing the hunter’s prayer again, and a profound sadness filled his being.

  He made a small fire and cut the rich fatty meat out of the elephant’s cheek and cooked it on a skewer over the coals. For once this choice morsel was tough and tasteless in his mouth. He spat it into the fire and sat for a long time beside the carcass before he could rouse himself and shrug off the sense of sorrow that weighed him down.

  He drew his machete from its sheath and began to chop one of the thick yellow tusks from its bony canal in the elephant’s skull. The steel rang on the skull and the bone chips flew and fell about his feet as he worked.

  That was how the men of his clan found him. They were drawn to Pirri by the sound of his machete hacking through bone. They came out of the forest silently, led by Sepoo and Pamba, and they formed a circle around Pirri and the elephant. He looked up and saw them, and he let the machete fall to his side, and he stood with blood on his hands, not daring to meet their eyes. “I will share the reward with you, my brothers, he whispered,” but nobody answered him.

  One at a time the Bambuti turned from him and disappeared back into the forest as silently as they had come, until only Sepoo remained.

  “Because of what you have done the forest god will send the Molimo to us,” said Sepoo, and Pirri stood with despair in his heart and could not raise his head to meet his brother’s eyes.

  Chapter 37

  Daniel began a review of the videotapes as soon as they reached Gondola.

  Kelly set aside a corner of her laboratory for him to work in and Victor Omeru hovered over him, making comments and suggestions as he compiled his editing notes.

  The quality of the material he had gathered was good. As a cameraman he rated himself as competent but lacking the artistry and brilliance of somebody like Bonny Mahon. What he compiled was an honest sober record of the mining and logging operation in the Wengu forest reserve, and of some of the consequences.

  “It has no human warmth to it,” he told Victor and Kelly at dinner that evening. “It appeals to reason, not to the heart. I need something more.”

  “What is it you want?” Kelly asked. “Tell me what it is and I’ll get it for you.”

  “I want more of President Omeru,” Daniel said. “You have presence and style, sir. I want much more of you.”

  “You shall have me.” Victor Omeru nodded. “But don’t you think it is time we dispensed with the formalities, Daniel? After all, we have climbed the sacred honey tree together. Surely that entitles us to use each other’s Christian names?”

  “I’m sure it does, Victor,” Daniel agreed. “But even you won’t be enough to convince the world. I have to show them what is happening to human beings. I have to show them the camps where the Uhali forced labour units are housed. Can we arrange that?”

  Victor leaned forward. “Yes,” he said. “You know that I am the leader of the resistance movement to Taffari’s tyranny. We are growing stronger every day. At present it is all very much underground, but we are organising ourselves and recruiting all the most important and influential people who reject Taffari. Of course, we are mostly Uhali, but even some of Taffari’s own Hita people are becoming disenchanted with his regime. We will be able to get you to see the labour camps. Of course, you won’t be able to get into the camps, but we should be able to get you close enough to film some of the daily atrocities which arc bein
g perpetrated.”

  “Yes,” Kelly asserted. “Patrick and the other young resistance leaders will be arriving here within the next few days for a conference with Victor. He will be able to arrange it.” She broke off and thought for a moment. “Then there are the Bambuti. You can show your audience how the destruction of the forest will affect the pygmies and destroy their traditional way of life.”

  “That’s exactly the type of material I still need,” Daniel replied. “What do you suggest?”

  “The Molimo ceremony,” Kelly said. “Sepoo tells me that the Molimo is coming and he has agreed that you may witness it.”

  Patrick, Victor Omeru’s nephew, arrived at Gondola a day earlier than was expected. He was accompanied by a retinue of a dozen or so Uhali tribesmen. The pygmies had guided them through the forest. Many of the delegation were also relatives of Victor Omeru, all of them educated and committed young men.

  When Daniel showed them the tapes he had already filmed and described the material he still required, Patrick Omeru and his men were enthusiastic. “Leave it to me, Doctor Armstrong,” Patrick told him. “I’ll arrange it for you. Of course, there will be some danger involved. The camps are well protected by the Hita, but we’ll get you as close as is humanly possible.”

  When Patrick and his men left Gondola, Daniel and Sepoo went with them. The two of them returned to Gondola nine days later. Daniel was thin and gaunt. It was obvious that they had travelled hard and unremittingly. His clothing was mud-stained and tattered and Kelly saw at once that he was near the point of exhaustion as he stumbled up on the verandah of the bungalow.

  Without thinking she ran to greet them and the next moment they were in each other’s arms. It startled both of them. They clung to each other for a moment, but when Daniel turned his mouth down towards hers, Kelly broke away and shook his hand instead.