Place of Bones (26 page)

Every nerve in Hewes’ body urged him on, to continue his run for safety. But he found himself unable to do so. The ruined hanger was no more than five hundred yards back up the slope...and he
had
to know!

So, against his every instinct, Hewes had turned. Fifteen shaking, heart-pounding, sphincter-constricting minutes later, and in full view of the compound, had anyone cared to look, he had climbed through the jagged and ripped metal and found what he was looking for, on a flight deck which had quite obviously been torn apart by bullets prior to the grenade being lobbed into a full fuel cell. Quite deliberately, coldly so now, Hewes had removed the four dog-tags from the dead and mutilated mens’ necks, and slipped them into his pocket, for that was all he could do for them now.

Then he had thrown up.

He threw up again when, an hour later, as Winterhoek was climbing into his bed for a sobering nap, Hewes, his clothes ripped and mud-spattered, had entered the swing doors of the Inkisi Springs Hotel and had heard, behind the raised voices of the crowd at the reception desk, the soft murmur of music from the hotel’s public address system - musac!

That sound, the peace of it, the sheer incongruousness of it, had unlocked the door to his self-control at last. After he had thrown up, and with no-one having noticed his presence at all, he fainted clean away.

EPILOGUE:

We drifted slowly above the elephant grass. The clouds of the morning had disappeared and the sky was an inverted bowl of deepening blue. I was on my feet, gripping the pilot’s seats, to get a better view, as the tall grass, waving like corn on a huge field, unrolled beneath our wheels.

“Will there be nothing at all to starboard?” asked Mahindru.

“No,” I said. I had the clammy feeling that something was desperately wrong. If the RCA transceiver had packed up, then Piet should have been standing by on one of the portables. But we had made no contact at all, with anyone! “Keep looking to port. There’ll be a small chopper. Camouflaged, but you’ll see it at this height.”

“Bloody weird,” said the copilot.

No-one answered him.

Twenty minutes later we saw the truck, its canvas hood well above the grass. And there was the brush-covered chopper...and a jeep. So they had certainly been able to retrieve the transport from the river. What the hell had happened since that!  There was no sign of life down there at all.

Mahindru put us down in the cleared landing area.

Then I saw the first body. He lay on his back, his open mouth and eyes covered with flies. Then there was Kimba, sitting in the cab of the truck. The radio hissed gently on receive, but Kimba was not alive to hear it. None of the detail were. They appeared to have died as they were, calmly, without movement. Kimba’s head was slumped on the seat back and, except for the flies, he might have been asleep. His hands were clasped loosely in his lap. I saw Zwekki, the semi-albino. He seemed to have dropped where he stood. Three of the others lay on a groundsheet. One had a dice in his open hand.

I stood there in the middle of it all and felt numb.

Mahindru stepped over, his expression fathomless. “Jesus,” he said. He did not ask what I thought had happened because he would know that I did not have an answer. And I didn’t.

I just stood and looked.

Some of the men came out of the choppers and drifted about, saying nothing. I was aware of faces pressed to the windows. Then I thought of Piet and the rest. “Come on, pilot. You’re going to winch me down on the camp. We’ll never get there before dark in the transports.”

Mahindru nodded bleakly. Then he frowned. “Can you find the place from the air? Didn’t you tell me that - “

“The aerial balloon,” I said, more brusquely than I wished to. “It’ll still be unwound out through the trees. We’ll see it.”

Char Abbas stepped forward, a sad, lost look on his face. “Sir...” was all he said.

“I’m going in by myself,” I said. I waved a hand at the bodies. “Bury them if you feel like it. Come on, pilot!”

Three minutes later we were in the air and streaking in over the jungles of the swampland.

I stood there in the middle of some two hundred and fifty men and was quite alone.

Piet lay sprawled on the steps of the portacabin. I looked down at his body for some moments and was surprised at my own detachment from my surroundings; surroundings that seemed to have lost all traces of familiarity. The body at my feet might have been that of a stranger, for that inert form, that fly-covered face, bore no resemblance at all to the living, breathing, talking Piet Vryburg I had last seen only that morning. I looked in the door and saw Augarde; or something that I used to call Augarde. I lifted the W/T to my head. “Same story here,” I said, in a voice that did not belong to me.

Tinnily, Mahindru’s voice came over the set. “I’m sorry, colonel.” He added, “Harness taken up. Pulling away. Call when you need me. We’ll be close by.”

The whacking of the rotor blades faded, then steadied to a muted throb as the helicopter circled the balloon. I heard the genny then, chugging away. But that sound served only to heighten the other silence. I stepped away from the portacabin and wandered around. I did not bother to check for signs of life. There was no life here, except for the flies and the bluebottles. And for them it was a feast. I ambled through that open graveyard emotionless, yet sick through to my soul. I knew that what I was seeing was the result of some kind of a gas attack, but beyond that my mind would not, could not, proceed.

I walked over the open space and had a quiet, odd kind of laugh to myself. There had been a football game in progress...there was the “ball”.

Football...football...football.

Everything in Africa revolves around football, I thought. Where there’s football, there’s death. Was someone trying to tell me something?  I found myself back at the portacabin. I stepped over Piet’s body and lifted the microphone of the RCA which, also, was still switched to receive.

“Gemini...Gemini...Gemini.”

The loudspeaker replied immediately. “This is Gemini. Stand by, colonel...”

No blips now, I mused. No codes. And that voice had been lazily slow. I looked at Piet and said, “Now you can join “Cat”, old buddy. You too, sergeant Augarde. How’s the leg, by the way?”

The ‘speaker blurted again. “This is Gemini.”

I recognized that voice. I said, “Camp-One no longer exists, Gemini.”

The voice said, “We have recently received Intelligence to that effect, colonel. What can I say? We are very sorry. Truly.”

I pressed the button. “Right.”

The voice went on, “Briefly, you did a magnificent job today. If you are interested in a continuation, one is open to you. You have but to report back to Kinshasa. And on the matter of our unfinished business, I will meet you at your convenience. Contact me in the usual manner.”

I ignored that. “We have wounded, Gemini,” I said.

“Mbandaka hospital has been alerted and is ready to receive your casualties, colonel. Your current transport remains at your disposal for as long as needs be. I will close now. Good-bye, colonel. And thank you again.”

I placed the microphone on the table. To Piet’s body, I said, “I’ll leave the RCA on for you, Piet. Something to listen to. The genny’ll keep going until the gas runs out, so you’ll have light, too. But I don’t guess you’ll be throwing any parties, eh?”  Then I had a thought. “No, perhaps not, old buddy. That balloon is a dead giveaway.” I lifted the W/T. “Pilot?”

“Here, colonel.”

“Have you marked the spot?”

A pause. “I’ve got it, Charlie-One...I mean...colonel.”

I smiled. Then I snapped the aerial wire and let it go. “Sorry, Piet. But you’ll still have the light.” I stepped outside and pressed the transmit button on the W/T.

“Come get me, Baker-One.”

*

Karen McCann looked at Ryan and could have cried. The adventure was over, and he seemed glad!

He smiled down at her. “Where do you want to go? Back to Jo-burg? Or to see your father?”

She felt hurt, betrayed. All her visions, all the feelings, and he seemed to know nothing of them. She wanted desperately for him to know, to realize what he had meant to her, if only in her fantasies. She heard herself say, “I might tell” It was a wild grab at the first thing to come into her mind.

Ryan grinned that worldly grin of his, the one that unleashed that new feeling of abandon within her. “Tell who what, kid?” He always called her that. She had come to believe - made herself believe - that he meant it affectionately.

“I’ll tell my father that you tried to rape me. That you
did
rape me!”  It was ridiculous, childish, she knew. But she could not help herself, the words simply flooded out.

Ryan nodded patiently, seeing right through her deception - and that was the worst of it. “And?”

It was to remain a puzzle to her that she had not broken out crying at that moment. She had wanted to, passionately, more than at any other time in her life. She felt utterly destroyed.

Ryan placed an arm around her shoulders and walked her out towards the waiting aircraft. “Look, kid, go back to your discos and your pop records and your boyfriends. Try and forget about all this. You’ll learn soon enough that this world is not about peace, love and ban the bloody bomb. It’s about something else entirely.”

She shook his arm away petulantly. “I’m not a child, you know!”

He replaced his arm. “Of course you’re not a child; you’re a growing woman. And if it help any, I’m sorry for what you’ve been through. But this is the way things are out in the world...ugly. Everything else is cosmetic, and you’ve been touched by it before you were due. And here’s a tip from a pal, the trick is not to let it sour you too much. When your time comes, try to get along with it, accept it for what it is. Because, by God! you scratch any surface and you’ll find dirt. So don’t scratch unless you have to,
until
you have to. It’s an act, sure. But it’s the only way to get through it. But not yet, eh?  Later. Much later. For the time being...just live. So now, where shall I tell the pilot to take you?  Jo-burg, or Kinshasa?”

Now, as the jet in which, this time, she was the only passenger, circled above Kinshasa International Airport, she knew that discos and pop music and panting, groping boyfriends were no longer important. She knew also that she would tell no-one about her experience, not even her diary - in fact she would burn the damn thing the instant she had it in her hand. It never told the truth anyway. And the truth had to be faced, and now, despite Ryan’s wise words. She had grown up. It was a somehow frightening thought, but she had grown up. And grown people accept life as it is, not as they would like it to be. Ryan had been right about that.

And Karen McCann’s life was about having a father, no matter how hard she had tried to ignore that fact in the past. And - very well! - if the father refused to accept his responsibilities, then it was up to the daughter to make the first advance. Life could go on from there, in maturity. And Karen’s heart began to beat a little faster as the world, and life itself, opened up before her...

*

I stood on the grass at the end of the south-west runway, feeling stupid in neat, clean civilian clothes, all bought that morning in a very subdued Kinshasa, and I watched the jet settle into its landing pattern.

I had not yet decided upon Lumimba’s offer. My feeling was that I would eventually refuse, though what the hell I would do with my life instead of that, was a puzzle. One thing was not a puzzle, however, and that was Jean-Paul Winterhoek’s current state of mind. Despite all his fine words he, like everyone else involved in the events of the past few days, would be looking to cover his tracks. I had no doubts that he would honor his pledge to the others, but mine was a different case altogether. He would want me out of the picture on a permanent basis, since I was the only one of my command still alive who knew anything of his existence. I
had
to be silenced! 

Oddly enough, that problem scared me not at all, compared to the one that was about to land.

I wondered what Karen would have to say for herself, and how I would answer her. I also wondered why she had chosen to come here, rather than Jo-burg. In her shoes I would not have had two words to say to me. Well, perhaps just the two!

I realized that I was trembling.

For chrissakes! I told myself. It’s your daughter, not a horde of screaming Simbas!  That line of reasoning did not help. I gripped my hands tighter. Was I crazy, or what? I was trembling because I was about to come face to face with my daughter. Jesus H.Christ!

The plane touched down with a brief yelp of scorched rubber, slowed, then turned onto the perimeter track. It rocked to a halt some fifty yards ahead of me and the door opened. She stepped out into the sunshine.

I could not believe it. She was beautiful! A woman. She wore a flowered dress which flared when she walked. And high heels. Her long auburn hair fluttered in the gentle breeze...and she was smiling!