The Angels Weep (67 page)

Tebe halted the column in the middle of the afternoon and told
them, ‘We will be marching all night. You must rest
now.’

Then for Tungata he drew a sketch-map in the dust with a
twig.

‘This is the Zambezi. Beyond it is Zambia. They are our
allies. That is where we go. To the west is Botswana and the
waterless land. We are moving parallel to its border, but before
we reach the Zambezi we must cross the road between Victoria
Falls and Kazungula. The Rhodesians patrol it. We must cross it
in darkness. Then beyond it, along this bank of river the
Rhodesians have laid their
cordon sanitaire
. It is a
minefield to prevent us using the drifts. It is necessary to
reach it at dawn.’

‘How do we cross the minefield?’

‘Our people will be waiting for us there to take us
through. Now rest.’

Tungata woke with a hand on his shoulder, and was instantly
alert.

‘The girl,’ Tebe whispered. ‘The girl
Miriam, she has run.’

‘Did the schoolteacher not stop her?’

‘She told him she was going to relieve
herself.’

‘She is not important,’ Tungata suggested.
‘Let her go.’

‘She is not important,’ Tebe agreed. ‘But
the example to the others is important. Take the spoor,’ he
ordered.

Miriam must have known the geography of this extreme
northwestern corner of Matabeleland. Instead of going back, she
had struck boldly northwards on the line of their march; clearly
she was hoping to reach the Kazungula road while it was still
light, and then she would go in to one of the Rhodesian
patrols.

‘How wise we were to follow her,’ Tebe whispered,
as soon as the line of the spoor was evident. ‘The bitch
would have called the
kanka
down on us within an
hour.’

The girl had made no attempt to hide her spoor, and Tungata
followed it at a run. He was superbly fit, for he had worked
beside Craig Mellow in the bloody elephant culls, and ten miles
was barely far enough to roughen his breathing. Comrade Tebe
matched him stride for stride, leopard-quick and with cruel bleak
eyes searching ahead.

They caught Miriam two miles before she reached the road. When
she saw them behind her, she simply gave up. She sank onto her
knees, and trembled so uncontrollably that her teeth rattled in
her jaw. They stood over her, and she could not look up at
them.

‘Kill her,’ Tebe ordered softly.

Tungata had known instinctively that it would happen this way,
and yet his soul turned leaden and icy.

‘We never give an order twice,’ Tebe said, and
Tungata changed his grip on the stock of the AK.

‘Not with the rifle,’ Tebe said. ‘The road
lies just beyond those trees. The Rhodesians could be here in
minutes.’

He took a clasp-knife from his pocket and handed it to
Tungata. Tungata propped his rifle against a mopani trunk, and
opened the knife. He saw that the point of the blade had been
snapped off, and when he tested the edge with his thumb, he found
that Tebe had deliberately dulled the edge by rubbing it against
a stone.

He felt appalled and sickened by what he was expected to do,
and the manner in which he was expected to do it. He tried to
hide his emotions, for Tebe was watching him curiously. He
understood that he had been set a test, trial by cruelty, and
Tungata knew that if he failed it, then he was as doomed as was
the child, Miriam. Still stony-faced, Tungata pulled the leather
belt from the loops of his jeans and used it to strap the
girl’s wrists together behind her back.

He stood behind her so that he did not have to look into the
dark terrified eyes. He placed his knee between her
shoulder-blades and pulled her chin back to expose the slender
throat. Then he glanced once more at Tebe for a reprieve. There
was no mercy there, and he began to work.

It took some minutes, with the damaged blade and the child
struggling wildly, but at last the carotid artery erupted and he
let her fall forward on her face. He was panting and bathed in
his own rancid-smelling sweat, but the last vestiges of his
previous existence as Samson Kumalo were burned away. At last he
was truly Tungata Zebiwe, the Seeker after what has been Stolen
– the Seeker after Vengeance.

He broke a bunch of leaves off the nearest mopani sapling and
scrubbed his hands with it. Then he cleansed the blade by
stabbing it into the earth. When he handed the knife back to
Comrade Tebe, he met his eyes unflinchingly, and saw in them a
spark of compassion and understanding.

‘There is no going back now,’ Tebe said, softly.
‘At last you are truly one of us.’

T
hey reached
the road a little after midnight, and while the schoolmaster held
the children in a quiet group in a copse beside it, Tebe and
Tungata swept the verges for a kilometre in both directions, in
case the Rhodesians had laid an ambush. When they found it clear,
they took the children across at the point which Tungata had
chosen where hard gravel approaches would hold no signs. Then
Tungata went back and carefully swept the road surface with a
broom of grass.

They reached the
cordon sanitaire
before the light. The
minefield was forty miles long and one hundred yards deep. It
contained over three million explosive devices, of various types,
from the Claymores on trip-wires, to the plastic antipersonnel
mines which would take off a limb, but would seldom kill
outright. The object was to leave the enemy with a casualty to
succour and nurse, a casualty who would never again be a fighting
warrior.

The edge of the minefield was marked by a line of enamel discs
set on stakes or nailed to the trunks of trees. They bore a red
skull and crossbones device and the words ‘Danger –
Minefield’. Tebe ordered the children to lie flat in the
dense brown grass, and to draw the stalks over them as
concealment from the air. Then they settled to wait and Tebe
explained to Tungata:

‘The AP mines are laid in a certain pattern. There is a
key to the pattern, but it is very difficult to discover and
often there are deliberate flaws in it. It requires great skill
and iron courage to enter the field and pick up the pattern, to
identify exactly at which point one has come in, and to
anticipate the sequence. The Claymores are different and need
other tricks.’

‘What tricks are those?’

‘You will see when our guide comes.’ But he did
not come at dawn.

At noon Tebe said, ‘We can only wait. It is certain
death to go into the field alone.’ There was no food or
water, but he would not let the children move. ‘It is
something they would have had to learn anyway.’ He
shrugged. ‘Patience is our weapon.’

The guide came in the late afternoon. Even Tungata did not
know he was close until he was amongst them.

‘How did you find us?’

‘I cast along the edge of the road until I found where
you had crossed.’ The guide was not much older than any of
the hijacked schoolchildren, but his eyes were those of an old
man for whom life had no surprises left.

‘You are late,’ Tebe accused.

‘There is a Rhodesian ambush on the drifts,’ the
guide shrugged. ‘I had to go around.’

‘When can you take us through?’

‘Not until the dew falls.’ The guide lay down
beside Tungata. ‘Not until the morning.’

‘Will you explain to me the pattern of the mines?’
Tungata asked, and the boy glanced across at Tebe. He nodded his
permission.

‘Think of the veins in the leaf of the mopani,’
the guide began, and drew the lines in the dust. He talked for
almost an hour with Tungata nodding and asking an occasional
question.

When he had finished speaking, the boy laid his head on his
folded arms and did not move again until dawn the following
morning. It was a trick that they all learned, the trick of
instant sleep and instant awakening. Those who did not learn it
never lasted very long.

As soon as the light was strong enough, the guide crawled to
the edge of the field. Tungata followed him closely. In his right
hand the guide carried a sharpened spoke from a bicycle wheel, in
the other a bunch of yellow plastic strips cut from a cheap
shopping-bag. He crouched low against the earth, his head cocked
like a sparrow.

‘The dew,’ he whispered. ‘Do you see
it?’ and Tungata started. Just a few paces in front of them
a string of sparkling diamond drops seemed suspended in the air a
few inches above the earth.

The almost invisible trip-wire of a Claymore was lit up for
them by its necklace of dew and by the first low rays of the sun.
The guide marked it with a yellow strip and began to probe with
the bicycle spoke. Within seconds he hit something in the loose
friable earth, and with gentle fingers swept clear the grey
circular top of an AP mine. He stood with it between his toes and
reached out to probe again. He worked with amazing speed, and
found three more mines.

‘So, we have found the key,’ he called to Tungata
who lay at the edge of the field. ‘Now we must be quick,
before the dew dries.’

The young guide crawled boldly down the passageway to which he
had discovered the entrance. He marked two more Claymore
trip-wires before he reached the invisible turn in the passage.
Here he probed again, and as soon as he confirmed the pattern,
turned into the next zigzag.

It took him twenty-six minutes to open and mark the passage
through to the far edge of the field. Then he came back and
grinned at Tungata. ‘Do you think you can do it
now?’

‘Yes,’ Tungata replied without conceit, and the
boy’s cocky grin faded.

‘Yes, I think you could – but always watch for the
wild one. They put it there on purpose. There is no way to guard
against it, except care.’

He and Tungata took the children through in groups of five,
making them hold hands. At each Claymore, Tungata or the guide
stood with a foot on each side of the trip-wires to make certain
not one of them touched it as they passed.

On the last journey through, when Tungata was less than a
dozen paces from safety, but while he was straddling the final
trip-wire, they all heard the throb of an aircraft engine. It was
coming up-river from the direction of the Victoria Falls, and it
grew rapidly in volume. Tungata and the last three children were
in the open. The temptation to run was almost irresistible.

‘Do not move,’ the young guide called desperately.
‘Stay still, crouch down.’ So they knelt in the
middle of the open minefield, and the fine steel wire with its
single plastic strip marker ran through the crotch of
Tungata’s legs. He was an inch away from violent death.

The aircraft noise built up swiftly, and then it roared over
the tree-tops between them and the river. It was a silver-painted
Beechcraft Baron with the letters ‘RUAC’ in black
upon the fuselage.

‘Rhodesian United Air Carriers,’ the guide
identified it. ‘They take rich capitalist pig tourists to
see the Smoke that Thunders.’

The machine was so low and close that they could see the pilot
chatting to the woman passenger beside him, and then the plane
banked away and was hidden again by the fronds of the ivory-nut
palms growing along the banks of the Zambezi river. Slowly
Tungata straightened up. He found his shirt was sticking to his
body with perspiration.

‘Move,’ he said to the child beside him.
‘But carefully.’

At the Victoria Falls the entire Zambezi river plunges over a
precipitous ledge, and falls in a turmoil of thundering spray
into the narrow gorge far below, giving it the African name
‘the Smoke that Thunders’.

A few miles up-river from this incredible phenomenon, the
drifts begin. For forty miles, up as far as the little border
post at Kazungula, the wide river tumbles through rapids and then
spreads into dawdling shallows. There are twelve places at which
oxen can drag a wagon through to the north bank, or a man can
wade across if he is willing to chance the Zambezi crocodiles,
some of which weigh a ton and can tear the leg off a buffalo and
swallow it whole.

‘They have an ambush on the drifts,’ the skinny
little guide told Tungata. ‘But they cannot guard them all.
I know where they were this morning, but they may have moved. We
will see.’

‘Go with him,’ Tebe ordered, and Tungata accepted
it as a mark of trust.

That morning he learned from the little guide that to survive
it was necessary to use all the senses, not merely the ears and
the eyes. The two of them moved in on the approaches to the
nearest drift. They moved an inch at a time, searching and
listening, sweeping the dense riverine scrub and the tangled
lianas beneath the water-fattened trunks of the forest.

The guide’s touch alerted Tungata, and they lay shoulder
to shoulder on a bed of damp leaf-mould, utterly still but tense
as coiled adders. It was only minutes later that Tungata realized
that beside him the guide was snuffling the air. When he placed
his lips on Tungata’s ear, his whisper was a breath
only.

‘They are here.’ Gently he drew Tungata back, and
when they were clear he asked: ‘Did you smell
them?’

Tungata shook his head, and the guide grinned.
‘Spearmint. The white officers cannot understand that the
smell of toothpaste lingers for days.’

They found the next drift unguarded, and waited for darkness
to take the children across, making them hold hands to form a
living chain. On the far bank the guide would not let them rest.
Although the children were shivering with cold in their sodden
clothing, he forced them on.

‘We are in Zambia at last, but we are not yet
safe,’ he warned. ‘The danger is as great here as it
is on the south bank. The
kanka
cross at will, and if they
suspect us, they will come in hot pursuit.’

He kept them marching all that night, and half the following
day, by which time the children were dragging and whining with
hunger and fatigue. In the afternoon, the path brought them
suddenly out of the forest to the wide cut of the main
railway-line, and beside the track were half a dozen crude huts
of canvas and rough-hewn poles. In the siding stood two cattle
trucks.