The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (59 page)

It was dark by the time that he whistled Tungata down from the hillside. Each of them shouldered a bundle and they started back.

When they intersected the footpath, they spent nearly half an hour sweeping their tracks, and hiding any sign of their detour from the path.

‘You think it will hold good in daylight?’ Craig said doubtfully. ‘We don’t want to signpost the wreck.’

‘It’s the best we can do.’

They stepped it out on the path, pushing hard, and despite their heavy, uncomfortable packs, they shaved an hour off their return time and reached the cavern just after dawn.

Sally-Anne said nothing when Craig stepped into the cavern. She merely stood up from the fire, came to him and pressed her face against his chest. Sarah bobbed the traditional curtsey to Tungata
and brought him the beer-pot, letting him refresh himself before bothering him with greetings. Only after he had drunk did she kneel beside him, clap her hands softly and whisper in Sindebele,
‘I see you, my lord, but dimly, for my eyes are filled with tears of joy!’

T
he Shona sergeant had been on foot patrol for thirty-three hours without rest. The previous morning they had made a brief and indecisive contact
with a small band of the escapees they were hunting, an exchange of fire that had lasted less than three minutes, then the Matabele guerrillas had pulled out and splintered into four groups. The
sergeant had gone after one group with five men, followed them until dark and then lost them on the rocky rim of the Zambezi valley. He was bringing in his patrol now for re-supply and new
orders.

Despite the long patrol and the trauma of a good contact and hot pursuit, the sergeant was still vigilant and alert. There was an elastic spring in his stride, his head turned restlessly from
side to side as he moved down the footpath, and the whites of his eyes under the brim of his jungle hat showed clear and sharp.

Suddenly he gave the urgent hand signal for deployment, and as he changed the AK 47 from one hip to the other to cover his left flank and dropped into cover, he heard his men spread and go down
behind, covering him and backing him. They lay in the elephant grass beside the track, searching and waiting while the sergeant examined the small sign that had alerted him. It was a bunch of long
grass on the opposite side of the path: the stems had been broken and then lifted carefully to try to disguise the break, but they had sagged slightly again. It was the type of sign a man might
make when leaving the path to set up an ambush beside it.

The sergeant lay for two minutes, and when there was no hostile fire, he doubled forward ten paces and then went flat again, rolling twice to throw off an enemy’s aim, and he waited two
minutes longer.

Still no fire – and he came up cautiously, and went forward to the damaged clump of grass. It was man sign: a small band of men had left the path here or joined it, and they had swept
their spoor. A man only took this much trouble if he was anticipating pursuit. The sergeant whistled up his tracker and put him to the spoor.

The tracker worked out from the path, casting ahead, and within minutes he reported, ‘Two men, wearing boots. One of them walks with a slight favour to his left leg. They were headed down
the valley.’ He touched one of the footprints in a sandy patch. An ant-lion had built its tiny cone-shaped trap in the toe of the spoor, giving the tracker an accurate timing.

‘Six to eight hours,’ said the tracker, ‘during the night. They went on the path, but we cannot follow them, their spoor has been covered by others.’

‘If we cannot find where they are going, then we will see where they came from,’ said the sergeant. ‘Backtrack them!’

Three hours later, the sergeant walked up to the wreck of the Cessna.

C
raig slept for a few hours and then by the light of the paraffin lantern began modifying the oxygen equipment for use underwater. The central part
of his primitive oxygen rebreathing set was the bag. For this he used one of the inflatable life-jackets. Oxygen from the steel bottle was introduced into the bag through the oneway valve of the
mouthpiece, the connection made with a length of flexible tubing.

As he worked, Craig explained, ‘At a depth of forty feet underwater, the pressure will be greater than two atmospheres – you remember your high school physics: thirty-three feet of
water equals one atmosphere, plus the pressure of the air above it – two atmospheres, right?’

His interested audience of three made affirmative sounds.

‘Right! So for me to be able to breathe freely, the oxygen has to be fed into my lungs at the same pressure as the surrounding water – the oxygen in the bag is under the same ambient
pressure as I am,
et voilá!’

‘My old daddy always used to say, it’s brains what counts!’ Sally-Anne applauded him.

‘The chemicals in these two canisters remove the water vapour and carbon dioxide from the air that I exhale, and the purified oxygen goes back into the bag via this tube, and I breathe it
again.’

He was sealing the new connections to the bag with epoxy cement from the repair kit.

‘As I use up the oxygen in the bag, I keep topping it up with fresh oxygen from the steel bottle strapped on my back. Like this—’ he cracked the tap of the
black-and-white-coded bottle and there was an adder hiss of escaping gas.

‘There are a few problems, of course—’ Craig began work on altering the shape of the face-mask to give him a watertight fit.

‘Such as?’ Sally-Anne asked.

‘Buoyancy,’ Craig answered. As I use up the oxygen in the bag I will become less buoyant, and the steel bottle will pull me down like a stone. When I top up the bag I’ll tend
to shoot up like a balloon.’

‘How will you beat that?’

‘I will weight myself with rocks to get down to the tomb entrance, and once I’m there, I’ll rope myself down to stay there.’

Craig was making up a back-pack on which were suspended the two canisters and the oxygen bottle. Carefully he positioned the steel bottles so that he could reach the tap over his shoulder.

‘However, buoyancy isn’t the big problem,’ he said.

‘You’ve got more?’ Sally-Anne demanded.

‘As many as you ask for,’ Craig grinned. ‘But did you know that pure oxygen breathed for an extended period at more than two atmospheres absolute, that is at any depth below
thirty-three feet, becomes a deadly gas, as lethal as the carbon monoxide in the exhaust fumes of an automobile?’

‘What can you do about that?’

‘Not much,’ Craig admitted. ‘Except limit the duration of each dive, and monitor my own reactions very carefully while I am working at the wall of the tomb.’

‘Can’t you work out how much safe time you will have before it starts to poison—’

Craig interrupted. ‘No, the formula would be too complicated and there are too many variables to calculate, from my body mass to the exact water depth. Then there is a cumulative effect of
the poisoning. Each successive dive will become more risky.’

‘Oh my God, darling.’ Sally-Anne stared at him.

‘We will keep the dives short, and we will work out a series of signals,’ Craig reassured her. ‘You will give me a rope signal from the surface every minute, and if I
don’t reply or if my reply is not immediate and decisive, you will haul me out. The poisoning is insidious but gradual, it will affect my reactions to the signal before I go out completely.
It gives us a little leeway.’

He set the bulky equipment carefully aside, close to the fire, so that the warmth would hasten the setting of the epoxy cement.

‘As soon as the joints are sealed, we can test it, and then go for the bank.’

‘How long?’

‘It’s twenty-four-hour epoxy.’

‘So long?’

‘Rest will increase my resistance to the effects of oxygen poisoning.’

T
he forest was too dense to allow the helicopter to alight. It hovered above the tree-tops, and the flight engineer on the winch lowered General
Peter Fungabera into a hole in the mat of dark green vegetation below them.

Peter turned slowly on the thin steel cable, and the down-draught from the rotors fluttered his camouflage battle-smock about his torso. Six feet above the earth, he slipped out of the padded
sling and dropped clear, landing neatly as a cat. He returned the salute of the Shona sergeant who was waiting for him, cleared the drop area quickly and looked up as the next man was lowered from
the hovering helicopter.

Colonel Bukharin was also dressed in camouflage and jump helmet. His scarred face seemed impervious to the tropical sun, it was bloodless and almost as pale as those cold arctic eyes. He
shrugged off the helping hands of the Shona sergeant and strode on up the valley. Peter Fungabera fell in beside him and neither man spoke until they reached the crumpled and shattered fuselage of
the Cessna.

‘There is no doubt?’ Bukharin asked.

‘The registration, ZS-KYA. You must remember I have flown in this aircraft,’ Peter Fungabera replied, as he went down on one knee to examine the belly of the fuselage. ‘If
further proof is needed,’ he touched the neat puncture in the metal skin, ‘machine-gun fire from directly below.’

‘No corpses?’

‘No.’ Peter Fungabera straightened up, and leaned into the cockpit. ‘No blood, no indication that any of the occupants was injured. And the wreck has been stripped.’

‘It could easily have been looted by local tribesmen.’

‘Perhaps,’ Peter agreed. ‘But I don’t think so. The trackers have examined the sign, and this is their reconstruction. After the crash twelve days ago, four people left
the site, two of them women, and one of the men with an unbalanced gait. Then within the last thirty-six hours, two men returned to the wreck. They are certain it was the same two – the boot
prints match, and one of them has the same favour to his left leg.’

Bukharin nodded.

‘On the second visit the wreck was stripped of much loose equipment. The two men left the area carrying heavy packs and joined the footpath that crossed the head of the valley about six
miles from here. There the tracks have been confused and covered by other traffic.’

‘I see,’ Bukharin was watching him. ‘Now tell me your other conclusions.’

‘There are two black and two white persons. With my own eyes I saw them at Tuti airstrip. The one black is undoubtedly Minister Tungata Zebiwe – I recognized him.’

‘Wishful thinking? He is your one last hope of making good our bargain.’

‘I would know that man anywhere.’

‘Even from an aircraft?’

‘Even then.’

‘Go on,’ Bukharin invited.

‘The other black person I did not recognize. Nor did I get a good enough view to positively identify either of the whites, but the pilot is almost certainly an American woman named Jay.
Although the aircraft belongs to the World Wildlife Trust, she had the use of it. The other white is probably her lover, a British writer of sensational fiction, who has an artificial leg,
accounting for the unbalanced tracks. These three are unimportant and expendable. The only one of importance is Zebiwe. And now we know that he is still alive.’

‘We also know that he has eluded you, my dear General,’ Bukharin pointed out.

‘I do not think he will continue to do so much longer.’ Peter Fungabera turned to the sergeant who was standing attentively behind him. ‘You have done well. Very well, so
far.’

‘Mambo!’

‘I believe that this Matabele dog and his white friends are being hidden and fed by the local people.’

‘Mambo!’

‘We will question them.’

‘Mambo!’

‘We will start with the nearest village, which is it?’

‘The village of Vusamanzi lies beyond this valley and the next.’

‘You will move in and surround it. Nobody must leave or escape, not a goat, not a child.’

‘Mambo!’

‘When you have secured the village, I will come to supervise the interrogation.’

C
raig and Tungata made three climbs down to Lobengula’s pool at the foot of the grand gallery, carrying the makeshift diving gear, the spare
oxygen bottles, the underwater lamps that Craig had made up with the batteries and globes scavenged from the life-jackets, firewood and fur blankets to warm Craig after each dive, and provisions to
avoid the necessity of climbing back to the upper cavern for meals.

After discussion it was agreed that the two girls would take turns at remaining in the upper cavern, to meet the messengers from Vusamanzi’s village and to carry down a warning to the
others in the event of a Shona patrol stumbling on the entrance.

Before testing the diving equipment, Craig and Tungata made a careful survey of the route down to the pool, choosing the positions on which they would fall back if they were ever forced to
defend the inner recesses of the cave system against a Shona attack. Although neither of them mentioned it, they were both acutely aware that there was no final position, no ultimate escape hole
from the mountain depths, and that any defence must end at the icy waters of the pool.

Tungata made the only open acknowledgement of this when, in plain sight of the other three, he took four 7.62 bullets for the Tokarev pistol, wrapped them in a scrap of goat-skin, and wedged
them in a crack in the limestone wall beside the pool. The two girls watched him with sickly fascination, and though Craig made a show of checking his breathing equipment, they all understood. This
was the final assurance against torture and slow mutilation, one bullet for each of them.

‘Okay!’ Craig’s voice was overloud for the silence of the gallery. ‘I’m going to see how efficiently this contraption is going to drown me.’

Tungata lifted the set and Craig knelt and slipped his head through the yoke of the life-jacket. Sally-Anne and Sarah settled the bottle and canisters on his back, and then strapped them in
place with strips of canvas cut from the seat covers. Craig checked the knots. If the set ever failed, he must be able to jettison it in a hurry.

At last he hopped into the pool, shuddered at the cold as he fitted the mask over his mouth and nose, secured the strap behind his head and half-filled his chest bag with oxygen. He gave the
three on the bank a thumbs-up sign, and lowered himself below the surface.