African Dawn (12 page)

‘One thousand, two thousand, three thousand,’ he screamed. The count was to give the static line time to do its work, but the act of shouting was also a means of keeping focused and of venting some of that adrenaline. He looked up. The lines were twisted. It was the little
okes
who made the best parachutists. They kept their short arms and legs tucked neatly in against their body, but Braedan was pushing six-four, and he was weighed down with muscle. He spun, as usual, on exit. He grabbed the risers and held them apart while he kicked his legs in a pedalling motion.

They'd jumped from less than eight hundred feet. He had fewer than thirty seconds under canopy. Braedan used up most of that kicking the twists out of his lines, and just had time to set himself up for a hard, fast landing. The wind, the remnants of last night's storm, was stiff. He could tell the speed and the direction by the pall of black smoke from the farmhouse. Something reached for his heart and squeezed.

Braedan had turned into the wind, and although he pulled down on his rear risers, to flare the front of the canopy above him, the oncoming breeze was faster than his forward motion, so he was moving backwards when he hit the ground. He executed a back-right landing as best he could, to stop himself from ploughing the field with the barrel of his FN, which was strapped under his harness on his left side. He was arms and legs akimbo, as usual, but he was unhurt. He pulled down on a riser to collapse the chute and stop himself from being dragged along the furrows. Braedan released his straps and rolled out of his harness.

The stick formed up on him and each reported he was OK, with no injuries. They jogged across the uneven ground towards the ominous smoking signal pyre of the Bryant farmhouse. Braedan yanked back on the cocking handle of the FN, chambering a round, and flipped up the rear sight. His weapon was ready for action.

‘Someone's moving,’ Al Platt, the forward scout, called. ‘From the trees, not the house.’

Braedan instinctively pulled the butt of the FN tighter into his shoulder and raised the barrel, but lowered it when he saw it was a woman.

The dawn light showed her silver-blonde hair. She was slight and short and the FN loose at her side looked longer than her. The woman wiped her eyes with the back of her free hand.

‘Over here!’ she waved. ‘Hurry.’

The stick broke into a run.

She planted the butt of the rifle in the grass at her feet and sniffled. ‘My granddaughter … my husband …’

‘It's all right, ma'am, we're here to help,’ Braedan said. ‘Take your time.’

She sniffed again, then glared at him. ‘There is
no
time.’ She took a deep breath to steady herself. ‘My husband is over there,’ she pointed to the line of plantation gums. ‘He's been hit. Bullet … through the left calf. I've patched him up. My granddaughter has been abducted. You have to hurry, she's only ten years old!’

‘Shit,’ said Al.

Her face was blackened with soot and streaked with dried tears, which started to well again as she said the words.

Braedan silenced Al with a look. ‘When, Mrs Bryant? Do you have any idea how many of them there were?’ Braedan remembered the house, and the wedding where a black kid had got in trouble for fondling the daughter. It was a short-lived scandal. Mrs Bryant's son was air force. Braedan's recollections were vague, though, as his family had moved to Salisbury when his dad gave up farming and took a job with the Rhodesian Railways. ‘Mug's game, farming,’ his old man had said.

Philippa closed her eyes for a second, squeezing out the tears. ‘An hour ago. We radioed the Agric Alert at three-thirty am. I don't know how many there were … four at least, I should think. RPG. Mortar somewhere out there.’ She waved in the distance, towards the trees. ‘So that'll be another two, I expect.’

Jesus, Braedan thought, they'd been in contact for an hour. The husband – Braedan couldn't remember his name, but recalled he was Australian – must have followed them.

‘Mr Bryant … we need to see to him, ma'am.’

She blinked as though trying to focus on his face. ‘I know you …’

Braedan nodded. ‘
Ja
. Yes, ma'am, a long time ago, but …’ They needed to get going. She was distraught, and in shock.

‘Sharon Quilter-Phipps's boy … Nate? Tate?’

‘Tate's my brother, ma'am. I'm Braedan,’ he said quickly. Braedan didn't have time to waste thinking about his useless bunny-hugging brother, waterskiing on Lake Kariba when he wasn't out picking wild flowers in his national parks and wildlife uniform. Joining the parks service had exempted Tate from military service, even though their country was fighting for its bloody survival.

‘My husband's over here,’ Mrs Bryant said, gathering her wits again and leading them on.

Al and Wally Collins, good men, moved ahead into the trees and took up firing positions behind stout trunks without being told, while Braedan and Andy Hunter, the stick's rifleman-medic, knelt beside the ashen-faced man lying on the ground. He was wearing pyjama bottoms and a cable-knit jersey. The left leg of his pants was ripped open and his leg was bleeding.

Andy introduced himself to Paul Bryant and began to unwrap the bandage his wife had applied. ‘Nice work,’ he said, looking up at Pip.

‘Get me up and get me some trousers, Pip,’ Paul said to his wife. ‘I'm ready to go after them. Get the Dodge.’

Braedan surveyed the terrain. There was no way they'd be able to follow the gooks in a vehicle. The bush beyond the ploughed lands was too thick.

‘Fresh spoor,’ Collins called from up ahead. ‘The girl's with them, barefoot, and at least one of the gooks is bleeding.’

Andy was re-tightening the bandage. ‘You're going to be fine, Mr Bryant. Ma'am,’ he said, looking up at Pip, who looked lost, ‘I'm going to leave you some painkillers and fresh bandages.’

‘I'm coming with you,’ Pip said.

‘Come,’ Braedan said to Andy. ‘Mrs Bryant, you need to stay here with your husband, hey. We can move faster on foot by ourselves. You've already radioed for an ambulance, yes?’

She nodded.

‘
Lekker
. We'll move Mr Bryant over there, to the farm shed. You can wait for the ambulance there. Are you OK for ammo?’

Pip looked at him vacantly. Braedan unbuttoned one of the pouches on his chest webbing and pulled out an FN magazine. He handed it to her, and she took it, staring at the camouflage painted tin box of bullets.

Braedan and Andy picked up Paul and carried him to the tin-roofed shed and workshop where the Bryants garaged their tractors. They laid him on a pile of empty mealie bags.

Braedan put his left hand on Mrs Bryant's shoulder. She was a short woman and she seemed almost childlike as she looked up into his eyes. ‘Your husband will be fine, Mrs Bryant. Stay here with him.’

She reached for him and gripped his arm, hard. ‘Promise me you'll find her.’

‘Yes, Mrs Bryant. We will.’ Seriously, however, he doubted their chances.

‘And if you do find them, Braedan, and she's … if they've hurt her … kill them for me.’

He nodded. That he most certainly could do, if they caught up with the gang. ‘I promise.’

Andy, who carried a radio in addition to his medical supplies, radioed a sitrep to the Dakota that had dropped them and was still orbiting overhead. The Dakota pilot relayed the message and confirmed a civilian ambulance was on its way to the farm, and that two helicopters, including a K-Car, had been scrambled from Wankie.

Braedan and Andy left the Bryants and picked up Platt and Collins as they swept through the plantation. Wankie was more than three hundred kilometres away, so the choppers would be some time arriving. The local police were probably organising a PATU stick, but the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit volunteers would have to be roused from their farms and jobs. For now, Braedan and his men were the only hope the little girl had.

*

Comrade Beria grabbed a handful of the girl's blonde hair and dragged her to her feet. The little bitch kept falling over deliberately, he was sure, to try to slow them.

She screamed into the gag, a bandana Beria had tied tightly around her mouth. He'd fill it with something else as soon as they were safe. She struggled against him and he slapped her across the right side of her face hard enough to nearly knock her down again. He saw the raw terror in her eyes and he grinned. Until he had the settlers' land he would make do with one of their women. They would have to kill her, eventually, which was a pity.

For now, though, they needed to keep moving, and to make matters worse, Comrade Jesus Christ was dying.

Beria had laughed when the youngster had joined them. What a
Chimurenga
name to pick! The boy, who fancied himself an intellectual, said his choice of nom de guerre was ironic, as he did not believe in religion, but he was prepared to die for his cause. Beria had never been religious. When others his age were wasting time in missionary school, Beria was beating ZANU cadres bloody in street brawls and fucking any woman he could find. There was no time for schooling or religion in a time of war. Beria had been fighting all his life. They'd tried to teach him in the juvenile gaol he'd spent time in, but the real lessons to be learned there were breaking and entering and new ways of inflicting pain.

After six months in the boys' training centre, he'd been released to the care of his mother, but with her blessing had spent most of his time on the streets, acting as a lookout for the ZIPRA men, watching for the security forces when they dared enter the township, and fighting the ongoing war against their ZANU enemies.

He'd nearly beaten a ZANU man to death in a brawl in Gwelo. A few of them had caught the bus from Bulawayo, and the fight had been worth the price of the ticket. Gwelo, in the midlands, was neither fully Ndebele nor fully Shona, which made it territory worth fighting for by both the main parties in the struggle. He'd had to be pulled off the hapless Shona youth, and Comrade Beria hadn't even smelled the tear gas as he'd kicked and kicked at the boy's head. Rather than earning him a reprimand, his tenacity and commitment had propelled him to the front of the line of young men waiting to be sent out of Rhodesia for revolutionary training.

He'd felt the rage several times since then, in shebeen brawls, and even in the camp in Russia, where he'd earned his nickname, Beria, which he'd subsequently kept as his
Chimurenga
name. They all had ‘war names’ to protect their real identities from the
kanka
and from each other. If a man were captured and tortured by the settlers he couldn't reveal the true identity of his comrades if he didn't know it.

He'd hated Russia, but the communists had taught him how to kill properly. The instructors joked about the black students behind their backs, and when they went into the city, on leave from the camps, the Russian people stared at them as though they were exhibits in a zoo. Beria had learned the Russian word for ‘monkey’ early on in the year he'd spent in that freezing, grey, dead place. The only warmth in Russia came from between the legs of their women. The men might mock them, but their women soon learned that no pathetic, limp-membered, vodka-swilling Russian could match an African warrior's spear.

There had been a fifteen-year-old girl in Leningrad who had begged for his manhood, but Beria had been disciplined by his instructors when the girl's family found out what she was up to and made a formal complaint. Few citizens had the temerity to complain about anything the military did, but the instructors had seized on the opportunity to beat him, and told him to stay away from Russian children. Beria had taken his punishment, but when next on leave had followed the senior instructor, a sergeant, the man who had called him ‘monkey’ while beating him, and stuck a knife up under the man's ribs and into his heart when he'd staggered out from a bar. Beria had dragged the huge bear of a sergeant into a darkened alley and held his gloved hand over the man's mouth while he watched the blood flood from him. Beria had pulled off his ski mask so the man could know, in his last minutes, how well his student had learned the art of killing.

The local police had begun an investigation and questioned Beria and the other Rhodesians about the sergeant's death, but the Africans had completed their course and were heading back to the liberation struggle. Nothing came of it.

One of the other instructors, a friendlier, older Russian, had given him the name Beria on the rifle range. ‘You are best shot and best student in unarmed combat. You could be great – a killer of the same order as the great Comrade Leventy Beria,’ he'd told him.

Beria had cared little for the history of the Russian Revolution that he and the other recruits had been spoon-fed. ‘Who is Leventy Beria?’ he'd asked the instructor.

The man had grinned. ‘Beria was Stalin's right-hand man – head of the secret police. Beria was responsible for elimination of many thousands of enemies of the state. You could be this man.’

Comrade Beria smiled. He liked the name. It was certainly a better name than Jesus Christ, who was now busy dying for his people. They were moving too slowly. ‘Hold her,’ Beria said to Nighttime Moto. Moto meant ‘fire’, but there was none of this in this man's body. The man had a squint, and he took the bound girl's arm as if he thought he might break it. ‘
Hold
her!’ Beria grabbed the child's neck and she uttered a muffled squeal as Moto grabbed her harder.

Beria was surrounded by incompetents. He would be better, he thought, acting alone. He slung his AK-47 and moved back to where another of his band was struggling along with Jesus Christ hanging off his shoulder.

Jesus Christ's intestines had begun pushing out of the hole in his gut. The man had stuffed his own floppy bush hat in his mouth to muffle the sound of his crying. Christ was brave, but he was doomed. He looked at Beria with wide, pain-filled eyes. ‘Leave him … set him down,’ Beria said to the man who had been carrying Jesus.

The bearer did as he was told and Jesus winced in renewed pain as he was laid at the foot of a big marula tree. He shook his head and spat the hat from his mouth, his eyes suddenly wide as he saw Beria unsling the AK-47. Beria smiled and shook his head. ‘No, comrade,’ he said. ‘I would not do that to one who is so brave.’ He rested the AK against the trunk of the tree. ‘Leave us,’ he said to the other man. ‘Go join the others, keep moving. I am afraid we have to leave the
saviour
here to the mercy of the enemy. They will take you to hospital.’