Catacombs (10 page)

Raymond raised his eyebrows and got up from the table.

"What sort of pain? As if your chest is being crushed?"

Colonel Ukumtara, now very short of breath, stared at him.

"Yes . . . that's it."

Raymond examined him. The colonel's skin felt clammy.

"Does the pain seem to radiate from your chest? Is there numbness in either arm?"

"What's happening . . . I'm sick . . . the fever . . ."

"Erika, would you fetch my medical bag for me? It's just there, in the bedroom–now, Colonel, you must lie down. On the floor. Let me loosen the strap of this shoulder holster. Also I want these boots off." When he had Ukumtara prostrate with a small pillow under his head, Raymond took his blood pressure and listened to the chambers of his heart. He looked bleakly at Erika. The colonel was moaning with fear.

"You mustn't excite yourself. Your blood pressure is low, your pulse rapid. No, it's not the fever. I suspect you've had a heart attack, how severe I can't say."

"Aieeeeee!"

Raymond held him firmly. "I'm sure we can save you. But you have to do what I tell you and keep calm. Erika, I need from the hospital storeroom sodium bicarbonate, epinephrine, dopamine, and five hundred milligrams of calcium chloride. Also an oxygen supply, enough to last until we reach Mbeya hospital. Father Varnhalt, see if you can get the Peugeot station wagon started, and send at once for Sergeant Mchanga."

By the time Erika returned at a jog from the storeroom, there were soldiers on the veranda of the bungalow and Father Varnhalt had brought the mission's station wagon around. Three hundred thousand miles old, it stood rattling and shaking in a cloud of noxious carbonized smoke, one headlight blinking amber with every faulty stroke of the pistons. Inside, cockroaches had consumed everything edible.

Erika knew they could never hope to cross the Mbeya Range in the pathetic rusted wagon, but the colonel was just too long to transport lying down in a Land-Rover.

Colonel Ukumtara was semiconscious; he had vomited up much of his dinner. Raymond pumped drugs into him and clapped an oxygen mask on his face. Four soldiers carried the colonel outside to the Peugeot and placed him inside. His feet stuck out past the tailgate. Raymond motioned for Erika to get behind the wheel. He crouched in the back with his patient. There was no room for anyone else in the wagon.

"Where are you taking him?" Sergeant Mchanga asked.

"To the airplane."

"But–

"Yes, I know, there's a risk; it's also the fastest way. This man is very ill. Don't just stand there, open the gates, Sergeant. Erika, get going!"

Sergeant Mchanga issued orders at the top of his voice; the gates were unlocked. Erika coaxed the balky wagon across the mission yard to the track outside, which in the light of the scimitar moon was a pale-red slash through sparse
miombo
.

"How is he?"

"Fair," Raymond muttered. He looked back at the lights of the mission as she negotiated the bumps and ruts down to the landing strip. The blue-and-white Beechcraft Bonanza was sitting at the near end, at a slight tilt over the port wheel. Erika pulled up a few feet from the right wingtip and lay on the Peugeot's horn, which wasn't as loud as the noise the engine was making. She couldn't see the pilot, a former Rhodesian tea planter named Weed, in the cabin, and apparently he hadn't heard them approaching.

Erika got out, stepped up on the wing of the Bonanza, and opened the door.

Weed, a small man, was slumped in the right-hand seat, the remains of a sandwich on the seat beside him. There was a nearly empty bottle of the '62 Bordeaux in his lap. He had drunk some of it, because he was out cold and snoring. The rest of the wine had soaked into his clothes.

The plane settled as Raymond added his weight to the wing and looked over her shoulder.

"Move aside," he said to Erika. He dragged the pilot from the cabin. On the ground he shook Weed vigorously, but saw only the cloudy whites of his eyes and heard a few protesting groans.

"What'll we do?" Erika said.

"Get in and start the engine, Erika, there's no time to lose."

Erika threw out the garbage and settled herself in the reeking cabin while Raymond made Weed comfortable in the front seat of the Peugeot. She flipped on inside lights, consulted the manual for basic information about the plane and ran through a preflight check. It looked like a dream to fly, once she had it off the ground. The tanks were three-quarters full. She turned the engine over.

Raymond reappeared on her right, leaning into the cabin.

"Can you do it?" he said loudly.

"Yes! But we'll have to pull out the seats to make room for–

"Colonel Ukmntara isn't going. Good-bye, Erika. Good luck."

"What?"

"Take off. Now. Get us the help we need, Erika. I can't manage anymore, not by myself."

"Raymond, what about the colonel? Won't he die?" She realized with a slight shock that she had never seen Raymond smile before; she had thought he couldn't.

"There's nothing wrong with his heart. I put something in his food–a mild bush poison to produce the symptoms you observed. The rest was suggestion: simple witchcraft. Never underestimate its power. Because the colonel may have convinced himself that it's his time to die, I could have my hands full trying to pull him through."

"You've been planning this? What about Weed?"

"I also doctored the wine."

"Raymond, my God, I thought–"

"You couldn't have done it yourself; they wouldn't let you past the gates." He grasped her shoulder reassuringly. "I know you wanted to take Bobby; but there was no way to work it out without arousing suspicion. He understands. Now you're free. But hurry."

"What will happen to you?"

"Nothing. I responded properly to a genuine emergency. You stole the plane while my back was turned."

He smiled again and closed the cabin door, jumped from the wing, and stood clear. For a few moments Erika was too stunned to make a move.

Free.

Her heart began to pound. She fastened the harness. and tried to recall what she knew about taking off in a single-engine plane with a main tire pancaked.

Erika carefully pivoted the Bonanza, wincing at the heaviness she felt to port. She pointed the nose at the tight thicket of trees at the end of the eighteen hundred-foot salt-pan strip and turned on the lights. She needed full power before the roll. The plane began to tremble in place as the tach needle crept up the dial to 3000 rpm. Then she eased off the brakes and built up speed, gripping the yoke too hard in her anxiety; it had been almost a year since she'd logged any flying time.

She applied hard right rudder to get the weight off the deteriorating tire, added fifteen degrees flaps for additional lift, moved the nose trim up with her left thumb, felt the handling smooth out–and then she was airborne, clearing, with not much room to spare, the trees and a small flock of roosting ivututu birds spooked from thorny heights by the noise of the plane.

One of the ungainly birds, big as a goose, shot up against the undercarriage behind the nose gear. There was a considerable impact and the Bonanza shuddered, but then it climbed steadily higher and there seemed to be no harm done. Except to the hapless bird.

Erika looked back through wide windows at the banked lights of Kingdom Mission, and said a prayer that those who were alive tonight would still be living when she returned. She climbed to five thousand feet, leaving the landing gear down: The reduction in air speed was at least twenty knots, but she was afraid that the shredded tire might damage the gear door, leaving her with no options when it came time to land in Nairobi. She could either balance on two wheels on a concrete runway or attempt a gear-up landing on grass; but if the Bonanza's gear became stuck halfway, then any landing would end in a potentially fatal crash.

Erika came right to zero four zero. Ahead of her, beyond the rash of lights that identified Chunya town, an outpost on the road to the soda works at Lake Rukwa, was an earthly void, part of the great central plain of Tanzania: an area of torrent courses, virgin bush, and semiarid savanna the size of Belgium. Nearly all of it was infested with tsetse fly, and seldom visited by man.

A peak was rising up out of the range of hills beneath the airplane. Erika detoured around it and got out the charts, made contact with the radio beacon in Mbeya. She plotted a heading that would take her parallel to the eastern branch of the Great Rift Valley all the way to Nairobi. At 65 percent power the flight would last a little less than four hours, leaving her with ample fuel reserves.

Erika put the Bonanza on automatic pilot. Then she let herself drift, focusing on jet magnitude, stars in her eyes, a vision of the heavens ceaselessly busy, as colorful as bees in a hive.

About twenty minutes later, when she made a routine instrument check, Erika saw that she was in trouble.

Oil pressure had dropped and there was a corresponding rise in the cylinder-head temperature. She immediately lowered the speed to 150 knots.

Erika remembered the ivututu she had collided with. Father Varnhalt had told her that the rare birds had a talismanic reputation in the Rukwa Valley: the power of life and death over human beings. Her mouth was dry from the altitude. She watched the gauges. Half her oil was gone. There was no chance that she could reach Nairobi without repairs. She had, at best, fifteen minutes to put the Bonanza down before the cylinder head cracked.

Erika consulted the charts. She was just over the Rungwa Game Reserve and at the western edge of Ruaha National Park, a vast and virtually unpopulated tract. The nearest airport was at Iringa, a plantation town about 120 miles east of her present position. Even if she trimmed for slow flight, she had little hope that she could make it. But ahead of her lay nothing but darkness and certain disaster. Erika's teeth chattered in the thin cold air as she made the course correction.

She saw, to the east, a long pulse of yellow light, like a crooked tube of decaying neon. At first she thought it was heat lightning low on the horizon. But it didn't fade away after a second or two. As she flew closer, she realized she was looking at a bush fire.

The fire, burning between the forks of a sand river that must have been spring fed in this dry area, had consumed several hundred acres of savanna. Trees were exploding in its path. There seemed to be hundreds of animals in panic flight along the wide, flame-orange channels of the river. Rhino, waterbuck, zebra, buffalo; sleek and desperate cats of all kinds. Some had fallen; they lay motionless in shallow pools of water.

A light plane had appeared, cutting across the advancing wave of animals. It circled in front of the fire, avoiding dangerous drafts generated by the heat, and flew downstream at near-stall speed, about fifty feet above the left-hand channel.

Erika thought, if there's a plane there's a camp of some kind, a landing strip.

She came around to the right in a 360-degree turn of her own, at an altitude of a thousand feet. Then she saw what was happening, and turned sick with outrage.

They were poachers. There was a man braced in the open doorway of the Piper Super Cub, firing an automatic weapon. He seemed to be after rhino this time. The carcasses of elephants and big cats already littered the intermittent watercourse, out of reach of the billowing fire. On this pass three of the ponderously swift rhinos, raked and slaughtered, went down in blood-spattered waves.

Then the Piper's pilot pulled up sharply, and flew directly at Erika.

She took evasive action. He was either stupid or half blind. It hadn't occurred to him that there might be another plane in the vicinity this time of the night.

Erika flew low across the river channels and the hordes of animals and saw how much killing had already taken place. By daybreak the skinners would be busy along the edges of the blackened, cooling savanna, taking pelts and tusks and the valuable "horns" of the rhinoceros, which were ground up and sold as an aphrodisiac in Asian countries.

She sensed, rather than saw, the other plane. Turned her head quickly. The Piper was closing in, to the left and a little above her. They couldn't have missed the fact that it was government property she was flying. Maybe they thought she was a warden.

Against the firelit sky she had a glimpse of the tall man in the doorway, long black hair streaming rakishly away from his forehead. His expression was intense. As if he had brought her magic, he held in his hands a marvel of live flame, replica of the holocaust below.

Bullets beat shockingly against the fuselage, they smudged windows on either side of the cabin with punctuated frost. Erika flung herself sidelong and hauled back on the yoke, heading for the stars. Her breath was like a block of granite in her chest, pinning her to the seat. Forgetting about the threatened cylinder head, she flew at full speed, climbing at over nine hundred feet per minute, outdistancing, even with a dirty plane, the slower Cub.

There was no more gunfire. But things started going wrong, too fast.

Erika leveled off and looked around at the receding fire, now a crawl of ochre in the blooming bush. Her field of vision was restricted by the crazy-cracked windows and she couldn't locate the other plane. Then she thought she saw the running lights, at a much lower altitude, back by the river. With so little time to waste they had returned to their slaughter, having decided that she was in distress and would have a long walk home from the bush–if she survived the inevitable forced landing.