The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (39 page)

Craig pulled Sally-Anne to her feet.

‘Can you go on?’

She nodded, pushing back the sweat-damp wisp of hair from her forehead. Her lips were flaking, and the lower one had cracked through. A drop of blood sat on it like a tiny ruby.

‘We must be well inside Botswana, the border road can’t be far ahead. If we can find a Botswana police patrol—’

T
he road was single width, two continuous ruts running north and south, jinking now and then to avoid a spring-hare colony or a soft pan. It was
patrolled regularly by the Botswana police on anti-poaching and prevention of alleged entry duties.

Craig and Sally-Anne reached the road in the middle of the afternoon. By this time Craig had discarded the rifle and ammunition, and stripped the pack of all but essentials. He had even
considered for a while burying his manuscript for later retrieval. It weighed eight pounds, but Sally-Anne had dissuaded him in a hoarse whisper.

The water bottle was empty. They had had their last drink, a blood-warm mouthful each, just before noon. Their speed was reduced to little more than a mile an hour. Craig was no longer sweating.
He could feel his tongue beginning to swell and his throat closing as the heat sucked the moisture out of him.

They reached the road. Craig’s gaze was fastened grimly on the heat-smudged horizon ahead, all his being concentrated on lifting one foot and placing it ahead of the other. They crossed
the road without seeing it, and kept going on into the desert. They were not the first to walk past the chance of succour and go on to death by thirst and exposure. They staggered onwards for two
hours more before Craig stopped.

‘We should have reached the road by now,’ he whispered, and checked the compass heading again. ‘The compass must be wrong! North isn’t there.’ He was confused and
doubting. ‘Damaged the bloody thing. We are too far south,’ he decided, and began the first aimless circle of the lost and totally disorientated, the graveyard spiral that precedes
death in the desert.

An hour before sunset Craig stumbled over a dried brown vine growing in the grey soil. It bore only a single green fruit the size of an orange. He knelt and plucked it as reverently as if it had
been the Cullinan diamond. Mumbling to himself through cracked and bleeding lips, he split the fruit carefully with the bayonet. It was warm as living flesh from the sun.

‘Gemsbok melon,’ he explained to Sally-Anne as she sat and watched him with dull, uncomprehending eyes.

He used the point of the bayonet to mash the white flesh of the melon, and then held the half shell to Sally-Anne’s mouth. Her throat pumped in the effort of swallowing the clear warm
juice, and she closed her eyes in ecstasy as it spread over her swollen tongue.

Working with extreme care, Craig wrung a quarter of a cupful of liquid from the fruit and fed it to her. His own throat ached and contracted at the smell of the liquid as he made her drink. She
seemed to recharge with strength before his eyes, and when the last drop had passed between her lips, she suddenly realized what he had done.

‘You?’ she whispered.

He took the hard rind and the squeezed-out pith, and sucked on them.

‘Sorry.’ She was distraught at her own thoughtlessness, but he shook his head.

‘Cool soon. Night.’

He helped her up, and they stumbled onwards.

Time telescoped in Craig’s mind. He looked at the sunset and thought it was the dawn.

‘Wrong.’ He took the compass and hurled it from him. It did not fly very far. ‘Wrong – wrong way.’ He turned, and led Sally-Anne back.

Craig’s head filled with shadows and dark shapes, some were faceless and terrifying and he shouted soundlessly at them to drive them away. Some he recognized. Ashe Levy rode past on the
back of a huge shaggy hyena, he was brandishing Craig’s new manuscript, and his gold-rimmed spectacles glinted blindly in the sunset.

‘Can’t make a paperback sale,’ he gloated. ‘Nobody wants it, baby, you’re finished. One-book man, Craig baby – that’s you.’

Then Craig realized that it was not his manuscript, but the winelist from the Four Seasons.

‘Shall we try the Corton Charlemagne?’ Ashe taunted Craig. ‘Or a magnum of the Widow?’

‘Only witch-doctors ride hyena,’ Craig yelled back, no sound issuing from his desiccated throat. ‘Always knew you were—’

Ashe hooted with malicious laughter, spurred the hyena into a gallop and threw the manuscript in the air. The white pages fluttered to the earth like roosting egrets, and when Craig went down on
his knees to gather them, they turned to handfuls of dust and Craig found he could not rise. Sally-Anne was down beside him and as they clung to each other, the night came down upon them.

When he woke it was morning, and he could not rouse Sally-Anne. Her breathing snored and sawed through her nose and open mouth.

On his knees he dug the hole for a solar still. Though the soil was soft and friable, it went slowly. Laboriously, still on his knees, he gathered an armful of the scattered desert vegetation.
It seemed there was no moisture in the woody growth when he chopped it finely with the bayonet, and laid it in the bottom of his hole.

He cut the top off the empty aluminium water bottle, and placed the cup this formed in the centre of the hole. It required enormous concentration to perform even these simple tasks. He spread
the plastic groundsheet over the hole, and anchored the edges with heaped earth. In the centre of the sheet he gently laid a single round of ammunition, so that it was directly above the aluminium
cup.

Then he crawled back to Sally-Anne and sat over her so that his shadow kept the sun off her face.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ he told her. ‘We’ll find the road soon. We must be close—’

He did not realize that no sound came from his throat, and that she would not have been able to hear him even if it had.

‘That little turd Ashe is a liar. I’ll finish the book, you’ll see. I’ll pay off what I owe. We’ll get a movie deal – I’ll buy King’s Lynn. It
will be all right. Don’t worry, my darling.’

He waited out the baking heat of the morning, containing his impatience, and at noon by his wrist-watch he opened the still. The sun beating down on the plastic sheet had raised the temperature
in the covered hole close to the boiling point. Evaporation from the chopped plants had condensed on the under-side of the plastic sheet and run down it towards the sag of the bullet. From there it
had dripped into the aluminium cup.

He had collected half a pint. He took it up between both hands, shaking so violently that he almost spilled it. He took a small sip and held it in his mouth. It was hot, but it tasted like honey
and he had to use all his self-control to prevent himself swallowing.

He leaned forward and placed his mouth over Sally-Anne’s blackened and bleeding lips. Gently he injected the liquid between them.

‘Drink, my sweet, drink it up.’ He found he was giggling stupidly as he watched her swallow painfully.

A few drops at a time he passed the precious fluid from his own mouth into hers and she swallowed each sip more easily. He kept the last mouthful for himself and let it trickle down his throat.
It went to his head like strong drink and he sat grinning stupidly through fat, scaly black lips, his face swollen and sun-baked purple red, the abrasions on his cheek covered with a crusty weeping
scab, and his bloodshot eyes gummed up with dried mucus.

He rebuilt the still and lay down beside Sally-Anne. He covered his face from the sun with the tail torn from his shirt and whispered, ‘All right – find help – soon.
Don’t worry – my love—’

But he knew that this was their last day. He could not keep her alive for another. Tomorrow they would die. It would be either the sun or the men of the Third Brigade – but tomorrow they
would die.

A
t sunset the still gave them another half cup of distilled water, and after they had drunk it, they fell into a heavy, deathlike sleep in each
other’s arms.

Something woke Craig, and for a moment he thought it was the night wind in the scrub. With difficulty he pushed himself into a sitting position, and cocked his head to listen, not sure whether
he was still hallucinating or whether he was truly hearing that soft rise and fall of sound. It must be nearly dawn, he realized, the horizon was a crisp dark line beneath the velvet drape of the
sky.

Then abruptly the sound firmed, and he recognized it. The distinctive beat of a four-cylinder Land-Rover engine. The Third Brigade had not abandoned the hunt. They were coming on relentlessly,
like hyenas with the reek of blood in their nostrils.

He saw a pair of headlights, far out across the desert, their pale beams swinging and tilting as the vehicle covered the rough ground. He groped for the AK 47. He could not find it. Ashe Levy
must have stolen it, he thought bitterly, taken it off with him on the hyena. ‘I never did trust the son-of-a-bitch.’

Craig stared hopelessly at the approaching headlights. In their beams danced a little pixie-like figure, a diminutive yellow mannikin. ‘Puck,’ he thought. ‘Fairies. I never
believed in fairies. Don’t say that – when you do, one dies. Don’t want to kill fairies. I believe in them.’ His mind was going, fantasy mixed with flashes of lucidity.

Suddenly he recognized that the little half-naked yellow mannikin was a Bushman, one of the pygmy desert race. A Bushman tracker, the Third Brigade were using a Bushman tracker to hunt them
down. Only a Bushman could have run on their spoor all night, tracking by the headlights of the Land-Rover.

The headlights flashed over them, like a stage spotlight, and Craig lifted his hand to shade his eyes. The light was so bright that it hurt. He had the bayonet in his other hand behind his
back.

I’ll get one of them
, he told himself.
I’ll take one of them.

The Land-Rover stopped only a few paces away. The little Bushman tracker was standing near them, clicking and clucking in his strange birdlike language. Craig heard the door of the Land-Rover
open behind the blinding lights, and a man came towards them. Craig recognized him instantly.
General Peter Fungabera
– he seemed as tall as a giant in the back lighting of the
headlights as he strode towards where Craig huddled on the desert floor.

Thank you
,
God
, Craig prayed,
thank you for sending him to me before I died
, and he gripped the bayonet.
In the throat
, he told himself,
as he stoops over me.
He marshalled all his remaining strength, and General Peter Fungabera stooped towards him.
Now!
Craig made the effort.
Drive the point into his throat!
But nothing happened. His limbs
would not respond. He was finished. There was nothing left.

‘I have to inform you that you are under arrest for illegal entry into the Republic of Botswana, sir,’ said General Fungabera – but he had changed his voice. He was using a
deep, gentle, caring voice, in heavily accented English.

He won’t fool me
, Craig thought,
the tricky bastard
, and he saw that Peter Fungabera was wearing the uniform of a sergeant of Botswana police.

‘You are lucky.’ He went down on one knee. ‘We found where you were crossing the road.’ He was holding a felt-covered water bottle to Craig’s mouth. ‘We have
been following you, since three o’clock yesterday.’

Cool, sweet water gushed into Craig’s mouth and ran down his chin. He let the bayonet drop and grabbed for the bottle with both hands. He wanted to gulp it all down at once, he wanted to
drown in it. It was so marvellous that his eyes flooded with tears.

Through the tears he saw the Botswana police crest on the open door of the Land-Rover.

‘Who?’ he stared at Peter Fungabera, but he had never seen this face before. It was a broad, flat-nosed face, puckered now with worry and concern, like that of a friendly
bulldog.

‘Who?’ he croaked.

‘Please not to talk, we must get you and the lady to hospital at Francistown pretty bloody quickly. Plenty people die in desert – you goddamned lucky.’

‘You aren’t General Fungabera?’ he whispered. ‘Who are you?’

‘Botswana police, border patrol. Sergeant Simon Mafekeng at your honour’s service, sir.’

A
s a boy, before the great patriotic war, Colonel Nikolai Bukharin had accompanied his father on the wolf hunts, hunting the packs that terrorized
their remote village in the high Urals during the long harsh winter months.

Those expeditions into the vast gloomy Taiga forest had nurtured in him a deep passion for the hunt. He enjoyed the solitude of wild places and the primeval joy of pitting all his senses against
a dangerous animal. Eyesight, hearing, smell, and the other extraordinary sense of the born hunter that enabled him to anticipate the twists and evasions of his quarry – all these the colonel
still possessed in full strength, despite his sixty-two years. Together with a memory for facts and faces that was almost computerlike, they had enabled him to excel at his work, had seen him
elevated to the head of his department of the Seventh commissariat where he had hunted professionally the most dangerous game of all – man.

When he hunted boar and bear on the great estates reserved for the recreations of high officers of the GRU and KGB, he had alarmed his comrades and the gamekeepers by scorning to fire from the
prepared hides and by going on foot alone into the thickest cover. The thrill of great physical danger had satisfied some deep need in him.

When the assignment on which he was now engaged had been channelled through to his office on the second floor of the central headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square, he had recognized its importance
immediately, and taken control of it personally. With careful cultivation, that first potential was gradually being realized, and when the time had come for Colonel Bukharin at last to meet his
subject face to face on the ground over which they would manoeuvre, he had chosen the cover which best suited his tastes.

Russians, especially Russians of high rank, were objects of hostile suspicion in the new republic of Zimbabwe. During the
chimurenga
, the war of independence, Russia had chosen the wrong
horse and given her support to Joshua Nkomo’s ZIPRA – the Matabele revolutionary wing. As far as the government in Harare was concerned, the Russians were the new colonialist enemy,
while it was China and North Korea who were the true friends of the revolution.