The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (51 page)

‘The thorns are sharp enough to keep out a man-eating lion, Kuphela,’ she had told Craig, ‘but I do not know about a buck with an itchy spear and a maid determined to scratch
it for him. I will have little sleep tonight.’

In the end, Craig spent a sleepless night as well. He had the dreams again, those terrible dreams that had almost driven him mad during his long slow convalescence from the minefield and the
loss of his leg. He was trapped in them, unable to escape back into consciousness, until Sarah shook him awake, and when he came awake, he was shaking so violently that his teeth chattered and
sweat had soaked his shirt as though he had stood under a warm shower.

Sarah understood. Compassionately, she sat beside him and held his hand until the tremors stilled, and then they talked the night away, keeping their voices to a whisper so as not to disturb the
camp. They talked of Tungata and Sally-Anne, and what each of them wanted from life and their chances of getting it.

‘When I am married to the Comrade Minister, I will be able to speak for all the women of Matabele. Too long they have been treated like chattels by their men. Even now I, a trained nursing
sister and teacher, must eat at the women’s fire. After this, there will be another campaign to wage. A fight to win for the women of my tribe their rightful place and to have their true
worth recognized.’

Craig found his respect for Sarah beginning to match his liking. She was, he realized, a fitting woman for a man like Tungata Zebiwe. While they talked, he managed to subdue his fear for the
morrow, and the night passed so swiftly that he was surprised when he checked his wrist-watch.

‘Four o’clock. Time to move,’ he whispered. ‘Thank you, Sarah. I am not a brave man. I needed your help.’

She rose to her feet with a lithe movement and for a moment stood looking down at him. ‘You do yourself injustice. I think you are a very brave man,’ she said softly and went to
rouse her sisters.

T
he sun was high, and Craig lay in the cleft between two black water-polished boulders on the far bank of the stream. The AK 47 was propped in
front of him, covering the causeway and the far banks on each side of the timber bridge. He had paced out the ranges. It was one hundred and twenty yards from where he lay to the end of the
handrail. Off a dead rest, he could throw in a six-inch group at that range.

‘Please let it not be necessary,’ he thought, and once more ran a restless eye over his stake-out. There were four guerrillas under the bridge, stripped to the waist. Although their
rifles were propped against the bridge supports close at hand, they were armed with the five-foot elephant bows. Craig had been dubious of these weapons until he had watched a demonstration. The
bows were of hard, elastic wood, bound with strips of green kudu hide which had been allowed to dry and shrink on the shaft until they were hard as iron. The bowstring was of braided sinew, almost
as tough as monofilament nylon. Even with all his strength, Craig had been unable to draw one of the bows to his full reach. The pull must have been well over one hundred pounds. To draw it
required calloused fingertips and specially developed muscle in chest and arm.

The arrowheads were barbless mild steel, honed to a needle-point for penetration, and one of the guerrillas had stood off thirty paces and sunk one of these arrows twenty inches into the fleshy
fibrous trunk of a baobab tree. They had been forced to cut it free with an axe. The same arrow would have flown right through an adult human being, from breast to backbone with hardly a check, or
pierced the chest cavity of a full-grown bull elephant from side to side.

So there were now four bowmen under the bridge, and ten other men crouching in knee-deep water below the bank. Only the tops of their heads showed, and they were screened from anyone on the far
side by the sharp drop-off of the bank, and the growth of fluffy-topped reeds.

The engine beat of the approaching trucks altered, as they changed gear on the up-slope before cresting and dropping down this side to the causeway and the bridge. Craig had walked down that
slope himself looking for giveaway signs, all his old training in the Rhodesian police coming back to him, looking for litter or disturbed vegetation, for the shine of metal, for footprints on the
white sand-banks of the river or the verge of the road, and he had found no give-away signs.

‘We must do it now,’ said Sarah. She and her sisters were squatting behind the rock at his side. She was right – it was too late to alter anything, to make any other
arrangements. They were committed.

‘Go,’ he told her and she stood up and let the denim shirt slip off her shoulders and drop to the sand. Quickly her younger sisters followed her example, letting drop their
loin-cloths as they stood.

All four of them were naked, except for the tiny beaded aprons suspended from their waists by a string of beads. The aprons hung down over their
mons pubis
but bounced up revealingly with
every movement as they ran down to the water’s edge. Their plump young buttocks were bared, swelling enticingly below the hour-glass nip of their waists.

‘Laugh!’ Craig called after them. ‘Play games.’

They were totally unashamed of their nudity. In the rural areas the beaded apron was still the traditional casual dress of the unsophisticated unmarried Matabele girl. Even Sarah had worn it
until she had gone in to the town to begin her schooling.

They splashed each other. The water sparkled on their glossy dark skins, and their laughter had an excited, breathless quality that must attract any man. Yet, Craig saw that his guerrillas were
unaffected. They had not even turned their heads to watch. They were professionals at work, all their attention focused on the dangerous job in hand.

The lead truck crested the far rise. It was a five-ton Toyota, similar to the one that had pursued them across the Botswana border. It was painted the same sandy colour. There was a trooper
behind the ring-mounted heavy machine-gun on the cab. A second truck, heavily laden and armed, came over the rise behind it.

‘Not a third. Please, only two,’ Craig breathed, and cuddled the butt of the AK 47 into his shoulder. The barrel was festooned with dried grass to disguise its shape, and his own
face and hands were thickly smeared with black clay from the river-bank.

There were only two trucks. They came trundling out onto the causeway and Sarah and her sisters stood knee-deep in the green waters below the handrail of the bridge and waved to them. The lead
truck slowed, and the girls swung their hips, shrieked with provocative laughter and joggled their wet and shiny breasts.

There were two men in the cab of the lead truck. One was a subaltern, Craig could make out his cap-badge and the glitter of his shoulder pips even through the dusty windscreen. He was grinning
and his teeth were almost as bright as his badges. He spoke to the driver and, with a squeal of brakes, the lead truck pulled up on the threshold of the bridge. The second truck was forced to pull
up behind it.

The young officer opened the door and stood on the running board. The troopers in the back of the truck and the heavy machine-gunner craned forward, grinning and calling ribald comment. The
girls, following Sarah’s example, sank down coyly to cover their lower bodies and answered the suggestions and comments with dissembling coyness. Some of the troopers in the second truck, not
to be out-done, jumped down and came forward to join the fun.

One of the older girls made a slyly obscene gesture with thumb and forefinger and there was an appreciative bellow of raunchy masculine laughter from the bank. The young officer replied with an
even more specific gesture, and the rest of his troopers left the trucks and crowded up behind him. Only the two heavy machine-gunners were still at their posts.

Craig darted a glance at the underside of the bridge. On their bellies the bowmen were wriggling up the far side of the bank, keeping the timber baulks of the bridge between them and the bunch
of troopers.

In the river Sarah stood up. She had loosened the string of her apron, and now carried the minuscule garment in her hand, swinging it with artful provocation. She waded towards the men on the
bank, with the water swirling around her thighs, and the laughter choked off as they stared at her. She walked slowly, the pull of water exaggerating the churning movement of her pelvis. She was
sleek and beautiful as a wet otter, the sunlight on her body gave it a plastic sheen, an unearthly glow, and even from where he lay, Craig could feel the jocular mood of the men watching her
thicken with lust, and begin to steam with the stirring of sexual fury.

Sarah paused below them, cupped her hands under her breasts and lifted them, pointing her nipples up at them. Now they were totally concentrated upon her, even the machine-gunners high up on the
ring mounts of the trucks were rapt and enchanted.

Behind them the four bowmen had slid up under the lee of the causeway. They were not more than ten paces from the side of the leading truck as they came up onto their knees in unison and drew.
The bows arched, their right hands came back to touch their lips, wet muscle bulged in their backs as they sighted along the shafts, and then one after the other they let their arrows fly.

There was no sound, not even the softest fluting, but one of the machine-gunners slid gently forward and hung over the side of the cab with head and arms dangling. The other arched his back, his
mouth wide open but no sound coming from it, and tried to reach back over his own shoulder to the shaft that stood stiffly out between his shoulder-blades. Another arrow hit him, a hand’s
breadth lower, and he convulsed in agony and dropped from view.

The bowmen changed their target and the silent arrows flew into the bunch of troopers on the river-bank – and a man screamed. In the same instant the guerrillas hiding below the bank burst
from the water, and went up through the reeds, just as the troopers whirled to face the bowmen. The naked guerrillas took them from behind, and this time Craig heard the explosive grunts as they
swung the long-bladed pangas, like a tennis-player hitting a hard forehand volley. A panga blade cleaved through the subaltern’s burgundy-red beret and split his skull to the chin.

Sarah whirled and raced back, gathering the other girls. One of the younger ones was screaming as they floundered over the submerged sandbanks.

There was a single shot, and then all the troopers were down, scattered along the edge of the bank, but the guerrillas were still working over them, swinging and chopping and hacking.

‘Sarah,’ Craig called to her as she reached the bank. ‘Get the girls back into the bush!’ She snatched up her shirt, and pushed her sisters ahead of her, shepherding them
away.

Carrying the AK, Craig ran across the bridge. The guerrillas were already stripping and looting the dead men. They worked with the dexterity of much practice, wrist-watches first and then the
contents of pockets and webbing pouches.

‘Was anyone hit?’ Craig demanded. That single shot had worried him, but there were no casualties. Craig gave them two minutes to finish with the corpses, and then sent a patrol back
to the crest to cover them against surprise. He turned back to the dead Shona. ‘Bury them!’ They had prepared the mass grave the previous afternoon, and they dragged the naked bodies
away.

There was blood down the side of one truck where the machine-gunner had hung. ‘Wash that off!’ One of the guerrillas dipped a canteen of water from the river. ‘And wash off
those uniforms.’ They would dry out in an hour or less.

Sarah returned before the burial party had finished. She was fully dressed again.

‘I have sent the girls back to the village, they know the country well. They will be safe.’

‘You did well,’ Craig told her and climbed into the cab of the leading truck. The keys were in the ignition.

The burial party returned from out of the thick bush, and Craig called in his pickets. The guerrilla detailed to drive the second truck started it, and then the rest of them climbed aboard. The
two trucks crossed the bridge and growled up the far slope. The entire operation had taken less than thirty-five minutes. They reached the felled mhoba-hoba tree and Comrade Lookout stepped into
the track and directed them off the road. Craig parked in thick cover, and immediately a gang of guerrillas covered both vehicles with cut branches, and another gang began unloading the cargo, and
clearing the road-block.

There were two-hundred-pound sacks of maize meal, cases of canned meat, blankets, medicines, cigarettes, ammunition, soap, sugar, salt – all of it priceless to the guerrillas. It was all
carried away, and Craig knew it would be hidden and retrieved later whenever the opportunity occurred. There were a dozen kit bags containing the dead troopers’ personal gear, a treasure
trove of Third Brigade uniforms, even two of the famous burgundy berets. While the guerrillas dressed in these uniforms, Craig checked the time. It was a little after five o’clock.

Craig had noted that the radio operator at Tuti camp started the generator and made his routine report at seven o’clock every evening. He checked the radio in the leading truck. It had a
fifteen-amp output, more than enough to reach Tuti camp, but not sufficient power to reach Harare headquarters. That was good.

He called Comrade Lookout and Sarah to the cab and they went over their notes. Sally-Anne would be over Tuti airstrip at 5.20 a.m. tomorrow morning, and she could stay in the circuit until 8.30
a.m. Craig allowed three hours for the journey from Tuti camp back to the airstrip at the mission station – that would take into account any minor delays or mishaps. Ideally they should leave
the camp at 2.30 a.m., but not later than 5 a.m.

That meant they should time their arrival at the gates of the camp for midnight, or close to it. Two and a half hours to secure the position, refuel the trucks from the storage tank, release the
prisoners, find Tungata and start back.

‘All right,’ Craig said, ‘I want each group to go over their duties. First you, Sarah—’