The Ian Fleming Files (48 page)

Dalzel and Archer retaliated unleashing hell.

Fleming yelled “Cease fire!” but wasn’t heard in the din.

A slug slammed into Raines. He screamed and clutched his chest. Archer
sprayed lead haphazardly into the jungle pummeling a towering mahogany tree
until it split in two.

Fleming hollered in his ear, “Cease fire! Damn it, cease fire!”

A bullet landed in Archer’s forehead felling him instantly.

Jones, clutching his shattered arm, reached for a rifle and was suddenly
riddled by a burst of automatic fire.

Fleming blinked at the sight of Archer, Jones and Raines lying dead
beside each other in the mud. In an instant, everything had changed.

Patrick Dalzel went berserk, spraying his submachine gun, raking the
terrain with lead while Fleming crouched, his fingers in his ears.

The gun-smoke cleared and it was eerily silent. A macaw cawed once.
Fleming trod tentatively forward, slapped a new clip into his weapon and
scanned the brush for movement, shaking from adrenalin, breathing heavily.

Neither he nor Dalzel saw the huge webbed netting until it was too late.
There was a slight whistle of air, like the sound from a silenced pistol, and
two tranquilizer darts thudded into the two men, knocking them both
unconscious.

Fleming’s eyes opened to behold a nightmarish scene. He was in the middle
of a vast red soiled field, his wrists and ankles were lashed tightly with
plant cord as he lay stretched between two mangroves, swaying between the
boughs like a human hammock. Everything was blurred. He tried to focus his
vision fighting the last pull of the powerful sedative he’d been slipped. The
bodies of his comrades were slumped around on the ground like macabre
decorations. He stretched his neck to look behind him but saw only the high
stillness of the primeval forest in the heavy night air.

Fleming used all his resources to focus on his right ankle. He had
returned the knife to its hiding spot but it was too probably much to expect it
to still be there. He tilted his foot, rotating around. The heel was empty.
Someone had hacked it open and it was hanging there with its cavity exposed and
its contents missing. He had replaced the pencil fuse with the original knife
but it was too much to hope it would still be there.

He became conscious of a flickering fire nearby. The shifting patterns of
light and dark made the vegetation seem to strobe. Natives were busy
constructing a pyramid of cordwood about thirty feet high and sloshing paraffin
around its base. Fleming looked into the faces of the Kikuyu around him, some
of them children looking up and giggling at him. Men gathered around the
woodpile and sparked it. The wood caught quickly, the flames towering up. The
effect of the torchlight on the faces was sinister. Primitive music quietly
commenced as a tall black figure strode in on long black legs, waving long
black arms, across the glow. It had horns on its head. Some sorcerer, some
witch-man, figured Fleming. A shaman-fiend.

Wolfgang Krupp appeared behind him and whispered in his ear as the shaman
danced. “We meet again, Commander.” He dragged the edge of the Victor Forge
knife across Fleming’s cheek, drawing a film of sweat away. “Thank you for the
knife, by the way.” Krupp wore shorts and high tropical boots and was stripped
to the waist, his taut torso glistening with sweat, his nipple-like bullet scar
on full display.

“This isn’t Valhalla,” said Fleming.

“No, Commander, this is Africa. The dark continent. Africa before the
white man. We are a universe away from Europe. The local custom that you are
about to witness few Westerners have ever seen. I first saw it when I was a
boy. I had nightmares for years, I admit.”

The drums began to step up the tempo. Fleming craned his stiff neck to
see Dalzel swinging a few feet away in a similar fashion. Two Bantus hacked him
down and dragged his writhing body to the bonfire.

He was gagged with cloth and the gag was held in place with thick strands
of twine wrapped tight around his head. A stave thudded into the side of his
head. Sticks pummeled him till he was bloodied but still conscious, still
hanging on to life, grasping, moaning and moving, sprawled grotesquely, limbs
splayed with stark white bone exposed, writhing in the filth, barely
recognizable as a human being.

Fleming looked away but Krupp gripped his jaw in a tight clasp and
twisted his face to watch.

The drums thudded faster, a complexity of interlaced rhythms. The horned
figure tossed his animal hide cowl to the ground and held his bare arms up
above his head. His whole body began to shudder. He moved around the fire
making strange sounds, gesticulating wildly.

Two Bantu women appeared bearing a cauldron of boiling fat suspended from
planks. They set it down and then the huge vat was hefted high by two strong
tribesmen and tipped over Dalzel who screamed a horrible mangled cry muffled
but still audible as he was lifted dripping in steaming goo and hogtied to a
pole.

Fleming watched with a vacant look in his eyes as his friend of six years
was hung between two upright ‘Y’ sticks over the fire like a pig on a spit.

The drums began to crash and roll. Chanting overtook any ungodly sounds
that might have been emanating from Dalzel as he cooked. The natives were
pummeling the ground with staves and working up into a frenzy. The natives
clamored fiercely. Sweat poured off the drummers.

The shaman broke into great convulsive jerks and screamed. The drummers
were silent.

“It’s a strange tradition when they capture an enemy,” said Krupp over
the caterwauling. “They aren’t cannibals. But the enemy is roasted alive and
served up on a ceremonious dish. Sliced and left to the jackals.”

The Bantu children pointed and laughed at the man dipped in goo suspended
over the flames. There was a horrible smell of burnt flesh that reeked of human
sweat and was utterly nauseating, turning Fleming’s entrails.

Krupp saw his discomfort and looked pleased. “What do you think,
Commander? Ready? Or do you like your meat well done?”

Fleming regarded Krupp with ice in his eyes.

“You want to kill me,” said Krupp. “It is understandable.”

Fleming managed to croak one word out: “Coward.”

“I have something else in store for you,” said Krupp who had the manic
look in his eyes of someone with a god complex. “At sunrise, I’m going to give
you a chance to prove that white man’s superiority I know you feel you hold
over these savages.”

The sun was a sliver of red on the horizon when a lone Masai hacked
Fleming free. The native with the machete stared at him. There was no one else
around. Fleming bolted into the jungle.

He hurtled for his life through the dense brush, jagged branches and
thorns slitting his exposed skin. He leapt over a fallen mangrove, cleared a
ditch.

There was a roar of engines. Krupp and three Masai in pursuit.

Fleming scrambled to higher ground, forcing his pursuers to abandon their
vehicle and continue on foot. He had a few yards on them. Krupp brandished a
Mauser pistol; the Masai held bows and blow sticks. A hail of narrow sticks flew
past Fleming. An arrowhead grazed his forearm. He ran flat-out, came to a
clearing with a waterless dike to his side. One of the Masai appeared on the
other side of the ditch, running parallel to Fleming, flanking him.

Fleming was fast but the Masai was gaining. The Masai stopped and hurled
his spear. It missed. Fleming plucked it from the soil, turned and met the
Masai with it, pinioning him with the plunged tip, lifting him aloft screaming,
retching blood.

The two other Masai came into view a few yards back. Fleming frantically
ransacked the dead Masai, snatched the pouch from around his waist and
scampered off into the thicket.

The Masai stopped before their fallen comrade. The tallest fell to his
knees and wailed plaintively. His friend slapped himself and made wild
gesticulations. Krupp berated them in Gikuyu whilst jabbing his arms in the
direction of where Fleming went. The two natives were in tears, grief-stricken,
ignoring Krupp’s fierce exhortations.

Krupp fired his pistol and then aimed it at them. They darted off in
pursuit, splitting up at a fork in the dirt path.

The first one caught up with Fleming then lost sight of him. A few
minutes later, he arrived at a grove of trees and paused upon seeing a
protruding shadow. He crept closer. Fleming appeared behind him and drove his
spear deep into him. The Masai choked on his blood and fell forward at an
awkward angle, slid down the shaft of the spear, gurgling, drowning, impaled.
Fleming searched the man, took his knife.

He sped off until he was in familiar territory. It was the river bend
where the first group of tribesmen attacked. He looked around for weapons,
spied Dutch’s inlaid rifle sticking up in the ground and ran to it, pulled the
lock back and looked inside the breech. One single bullet.

The last Masai appeared over a crest and charged him, wailing as he ran.

Fleming turned the rifle around and pressed the stock into his chest,
leveled it at his foe and noticed that the end of the barrel was mangled. He
cursed, frantically removed the stud fixing the bayonet to the sliding socket
on the muzzle and snapped off the blade.

He held the bayonet aloft, made a fast calculation and threw it overhand,
point first into the runner’s temple sending the man toppling to the dirt
inches from Fleming’s feet.

Fleming was bare-chested, wearing a hat made of a banana palm as he sat
perched halfway up a towering cypress putting the finishing touches on a
crossbow. With the Masai’s knife and scrap metal from the rifle he was able to
construct a rudimentary fieldpiece. The stock consisted of a center spine
covered on each side by a strengthening flank. The front sight was a simple
strap of metal fitted with a bead.

He had set
the bow, or prod, into the nose of the forestock, and a simple two-piece
trigger mechanism was pinned between the right and left flank pieces just below
the receiver. No time and no need for a trigger safety. Fraser Smith was right.
All one needed in the jungle was a piece of sharpened steel. It had taken him
less than an hour to complete the bow. Another hour for sharpening six
quarrels. The crude weapon’s range was about fifty yards. Beyond that it was
unlikely that the velocity would create enough impact for a kill unless he got
extremely lucky with a head or heart shot which would be almost impossible with
the naked eye. Fleming pondered the irony that he was situated in the exact
position Krupp had wanted him to be in to shoot Hitler, lodged in a tree,
waiting.

He heard a drumming noise. A woodpecker with bright red and yellow head
markings was drilling its bill into the bark of a baobab tree. It stopped
pounding and extracted a wriggling grub.

A faint crunching sound made Fleming whip his head around and scan the
environs below. Slowly, Krupp’s cream colored pith helmet came into view bobbing
along amid the lush greenery. The German was stalking the ground beneath
Fleming’s arboreal realm and appeared to be naked save for a loin cloth,
sandals, helmet and his antique knife belt which was stocked with a dozen
deadly blades.

Fleming froze. With acute concentration, he tilted the bow up and tried
to get a fix on Krupp, peering down the sights and steadily panning the terrain
until he had him in the line of fire. But the German was too far. Fleming
waited as Krupp hacked the brush with a machete and gradually chopped his way
nearer until he was directly underneath.

Fleming held steady and locked onto him. Slowly, almost painfully slow,
he moved his finger to the trigger and brushed its edges without applying
pressure. He pressed down and the quarrel flew from its crude launch device
with a force that surprised Fleming and a sound that was a few decibels higher
than he would have liked. The sharp cylinder of wood had barely hit the air
before its intended target passed under the drooping bough of a banyan tree.

Fleming cursed. His position blown from the loud thwack of the mushy
impact, he hurled his weapon and scrambled down. He had barely landed when a
rapid salvo of shots shattered the tree branches. The gunfire quelled as he
reached for his bow and then a kpinga blade whistled past him and just missed
his head by a centimeter slamming into the tree behind him. Fleming did a
somersault, swiped his crossbow and stood up holding it before him.

He scanned the vegetation. Twang! Another blade flew past. Twang!

Twang! Two
more. He felt a slight sting below his knee and looked down in astonishment to
see the head of a cobra carved into a wooden knife handle jutting forth from
his shin. Another blade landed in his shoulder with a kick like a bullet. He collapsed
in agony, crawled to the shelter of a rotten elephant carcass. Two vultures
cawed and flew off.

He lay there a moment, looking like an early Christian martyr, then began
the painful process of extracting the two shafts. The bone was broken in his right
shinbone, probably the fibular. With the care of a surgeon he pulled the blade
out. Pure white pain wracked him. He thought he might pass out. The one in his
shoulder slid out with relative ease. It had missed bone. The flesh ached but
he could still use his arm.

A sliver of steel flashed before his eyes and he managed to step aside in
time for it to zing past. With great pain he was able to crouch and aim his
bow. There was a flash of movement. He fired, moving Krupp closer to the river.
He waited but it was silent. He crawled to his feet and dragged himself
forward. Krupp had vanished.

Fleming hobbled into a dark tree-lined glade and dragged himself
painfully down it. An hour later, he came to a desolate spot hewn out of the
brush where a series of camouflaged wooden huts could be made out. An eerie
stillness pervaded and there was a sense of the cut-back jungle growth slowly
reclaiming the settlement.