Rage (76 page)

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Authors: Wilbur Smith

BOOK: Rage
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Abruptly the figure threw the fur blanket aside and stood up, crouching under the low roof of the shelter.
Sean saw it was a woman, one of the Mau Mau camp followers, but for Sean just as cruel and depraved as any of her menfolk. She stepped out into the open beside the dead fire wearing only a short kilt of some pale material. Her breasts were high and pointed and her skin smooth and glossy as newly mined anthracite in the soft dawn light.
She came directly towards where Sean lay, and though her gait was still clumsy and unsteady with sleep, he saw that she was young and comely. A few more paces and she would stumble over him, but then she stopped again and yawned and her teeth were very white, gleaming in the soft grey light.
She lifted her kilt around her waist and squatted facing Sean, spreading her knees and bowing her head slightly to
watch herself as she began to urinate. Her water splashed noisily and the sharp ammoniacal tang of it made Sean's nostrils flare.
She was so close that he did not have to lift the Gibbs to his shoulder. He shot her in the stomach. The heavy rifle bounded in his grip and the bullet picked the girl up and while she was in the air it broke her in half, blowing a hole through her spine into which her own head would have fitted, and she folded up, loose and floppy as a suit of discarded clothing as she fell back onto the muddy forest floor.
Sean fired the second barrel as one of the other Mau Mau bolted out of the nearest shelter. The Gibbs made a sound like the slamming of a great steel door, and the man was hurled back into the shelter with half his chest torn away.
Sean had two more cartridges held between the fingers of his left hand, and as he opened the breech of the Gibbs the spent brass cases pinged away over his shoulder and he slid the fresh cartridges into the empty breeches and closed the rifle again in the same movement.
The Bren and the Stirling were firing now. Their muzzle flashes were bright and pretty as fairy lights in the gloom, twinkling and sparkling, and the bullets went
frip! frip! frip!
amongst the leaves and sang shrilly as they ricocheted into the forest.
Sean shot again and the Gibbs cannoned down another naked figure, knocking him flat against the soft earth as though he had been run down by a locomotive. And again he shot, but this one was a snap shot and the Mau Mau jinked just as the Gibbs thundered. The bullet hit him in the shoulder joint and blew his right arm off so it hung by a tatter of torn flesh and flapped against his side as he spun around. Raymond's Stirling buzzed and cut him down.
Sean reloaded and shot left and right, clean kills with
each barrel and by the time he had reloaded again the camp was silent, and the Bren and the Stirling had ceased firing.
Nothing moved. All three men were deadly natural shots, and the range was point-blank. Sean waited a full five minutes. Only a fool walked directly up to dangerous game no matter how dead it appeared to be. Then he rose cautiously to his knees with the rifle at high port across his chest.
The last Mau Mau broke. He had been feigning dead in the far shelter, and he had judged his moment finely, waiting until the attackers relaxed and began to move. He flushed like a jack rabbit and shot into the bamboo on the far side of the clearing. Alistair's Bren was blanketed by the wall of the nearest shelter but he fired nevertheless and the bullets futilely thrashed the hut. From the river bank Ray had a clearer shot, but he was a fraction of a second slow, the cold had brought out the malaria in his blood and his hand shook. The bamboo absorbed the light 9 mm bullets as though he had fired into a haystack.
For the first ten paces the running Mau Mau was screened from Sean's view by the wall of the nearest hut, and then Sean caught only a flickering glimpse of him as he dived into the bamboo, but already Sean was on him, swinging the stubby double barrels as though he were taking a right-hand passing shot on a driven francolin. Although he could no longer see his quarry in the dense bamboo, he continued his swing on the line of the man's run, instinctively leading him. The Gibbs gave its angry bellow and red flame blazed from the muzzle.
The huge bullet smashed into the wall of bamboo, and at Sean's side Matatu shouted gleefully, ‘
Piga!
Hit!' as he heard the bullet tell distinctly on living flesh.
‘Take the blood spoor!' Sean commanded and the little Ndorobo loped across the clearing. But it was not necessary:
the Mau Mau lay where he had dropped. The bullet had ploughed through bamboo, leaf and stem, without being deflected an inch from its track.
Ray and Alistair came into the camp, weapons ready, and picked over the bodies. One of the other Mau Mau women was still breathing, though bloody bubbles seethed on her lips, and Ray shot her in the temple with the Stirling.
‘Make sure none of them got away,' Sean ordered Matatu in Swahili.
The little Ndorobo made a quick circuit of the encampment to check for out-going spoor, and then came back grinning. ‘All here.' He gloated. ‘All dead.' Sean tossed the Gibbs to him and drew the ivory-handled hunting-knife from the sheath on his belt.
‘Damn it, laddie,' Ray Harris protested as Sean walked back to where the body of the first girl lay. ‘You are the bloody end, man.' He had seen Sean do this before and although Ray Harris was a hard, callous man who for thirty years had made his living out of blood and gunfire, still he gagged as Sean squatted over the corpse and stropped the blade on the palm of his hand.
‘You are getting soft, old man.' Sean grinned at him. ‘You know they make beautiful tobacco pouches,' he said, and took the dead girl's breast in his hand, pulling the skin taut for the stroke of the knife blade.
S
hasa found Garry in the boardroom. He was always there twenty minutes before any of the other directors arrived, arranging his piles of computer print-out sheets and other notes around him and going over his facts and figures for one last time before the meeting began. Shasa and Centaine had argued before appointing Garry to the board of Courtney Mining.
‘You can ruin a pony by pushing him too hard too soon.'
‘We aren't talking about a polo pony,' Centaine had replied tartly. ‘And it's not a case of pushing. He's got the bit between his teeth, to continue your chosen metaphor, Shasa, and if we try and hold him back we will either discourage him or drive him out on his own. Now is the time to give him a bit of slack rein.'
‘But you made me wait much longer.'
‘You were a late-blooming rose, and the war and all that business held you up. At Garry's age you were still flying Hurricanes and chasing around Abyssinia.'
So Garry had gone on the board, and like everything else in his life he had taken it very seriously indeed. Now he looked up as his father confronted him down the length of the boardroom.
‘I heard you have been borrowing money on your own bat,' Shasa accused.
Garry removed his spectacles, polished them diligently, held them up to the light and then replaced them on his large Courtney nose, all to gain time in which to compose his reply.
‘Only one person knows about that. The manager of the Adderly Street branch of Standard Bank. He could lose his job if he blabbed about my personal business.'
‘You forget that both Nana and I are on the board of the Standard Bank. All loans of over a million pounds come up before us for approval.'
‘Rand,' Garry corrected his father pedantically. ‘Two million rand – the pound is history.'
‘Thanks,' Shasa said grimly. ‘I'll try to move with the times. Now how about this two million rand you have borrowed?'
‘A straightforward transaction, Dad. I put up my shares in the Shasaville township as collateral, and the bank lent me two million rand.'
‘What are you going to do with it? That's a small fortune.' Shasa was one of the few men in the country who
would qualify that amount with that particular adjective, and Garry looked mildly relieved.
‘As a matter of fact, I have used half a million to buy up fifty-one per cent of the issued shareholding of Alpha Centauri Estates, and loaned the company another half million to get it out of trouble.'
‘Alpha Centauri?' Shasa looked mystified.
‘The company owns some of the prime property on the Witwatersrand and here in the Cape Peninsula. It was worth almost twenty-six million before the crash at Sharpeville.'
‘And now it's worth zero,' Shasa suggested, and before Garry could protest, ‘What have you done with the other million?'
‘Gold shares – Anglos and Vaal Reefs. At the fire sale prices I paid for them they are returning almost twenty-six per cent. The dividends will pay the interest on the entire bank loan.'
Shasa sat down in his seat at the head of the boardroom table and studied his son carefully. He should have been conditioned by now, but Garry still managed to surprise Shasa. It was an imaginative but neatly logical coup, and if it had not been his own son, Shasa would have been impressed. As it was, he felt duty bound to find flaws in it.
‘What about your Shasaville shares – you are taking an awful chance?'
Garry looked puzzled. ‘I don't have to explain it to you, Pater. You taught me. Shasaville is tied up. We can't sell or develop aggressively until land values recover, so I've used my shares to take full advantage of the crash.'
‘What if land values never recover?' Shasa demanded relentlessly.
‘If they don't, it will mean the country is finished anyway. I will lose my share of nothing which is nothing. If they do recover, I will be in profit by twenty or thirty million.'
Shasa picked at that for a while and then changed his angle of attack. ‘Why didn't you come to me to borrow the money, instead of going behind my back?'
Garry grinned at him and tried to smooth down the crest of wiry black hair that stuck up on his crown. ‘Because you would have given me a list of five hundred reasons why not, just as you are doing now. Besides, I wanted to do this one on my own. I wanted to prove to you that I'm not a kid any more.'
Shasa twiddled the gold pen on the pad in front of him and when he could think of no other criticism, he grumbled, ‘You don't want to get too damned clever for your own good. There is a line between good business sense and outright gambling.'
‘How do you tell the difference?' Garry asked. For a moment Shasa thought he was being facetious and then he realized that as usual Garry was deadly serious. He was leaning forward eagerly waiting for his father to explain, and he really wanted to know.
Shasa was saved by the entry of the other senior directors: Centaine on the arm of Dr Twentyman-Jones and David Abrahams arguing amiably but respectfully with his father, and thankfully he let the subject drop. Once or twice during the meeting he glanced down the table at Garry, who was following all the discussion with a rapt expression, the light from the picture window reflecting a miniature image of the crest of Table Mountain in the lenses of his spectacles. When all the business on the agenda had been completed and Centaine had started to rise to lead them through to the executive dining-room, Shasa arrested them.
‘Madame Courtney and gentlemen, one additional piece of business. Mr Garry Courtney and I have been discussing the general state of the property market. We both feel that property and equities are very much undervalued at the moment and that the company should take advantage of
this fact, but I'd like him to tell you in his own words and to put forward certain proposals. Would you oblige us please, Mr Courtney?'
It was Shasa's own way of giving the lad a jolt and cutting him back a little. In the six months since his elevation, Garry had never been called upon to address the full board and now Shasa dropped it on him without warning and sat back with vindictive relish in his wingbacked leather chairman's throne and folded his arms.
At the bottom of the table Garry blushed furiously, and glanced longingly at the stinkwood door, his only escape, before giving the traditional salutation to his fellow directors.
‘Ma-Ma-dame Courtney and ge-ge-gentlemen.' He stopped and threw his father a pitiful look of appeal, but when he received a stern uncompromising frown in return, he took a deep breath and launched into it. He stumbled once or twice, but when first Abe Abrahams and then Centaine shot cutting questions at him, he forgot about his stutter and talked for forty-five minutes.
At the end they were silent for a while, and then David Abrahams said, ‘I should like to propose that we appoint Mr Garrick Courtney to prepare a list of specific proposals to follow up the presentation that he has just made to this meeting, and to report back to us at an extraordinary meeting early next week, at a time convenient to all members of the board.'
Centaine seconded, and it was adopted unanimously, and then David Abrahams ended, ‘I should like the minutes to record the board's gratitude to Mr Courtney for his lucid address and to thank him for bringing these considerations to the board's attention.'
The glow of achievement and recognition lasted Garry all the way down in the elevator to the basement garage where his MG stood in his private parking bay beside Shasa's Jaguar. It stayed with him all the way down
Adderley Street to the lonely skyscraper of the Sanlam building which stood on the open ground of the foreshore that had been reclaimed from the sea. Even going up in the lift to the twentieth floor of the Sanlam building he still felt tall and important and decisive. Only when he entered the reception area of Gantry, Carmichael and Associates did the vital glow begin to fade, and his stiff van Heusen collar bit painfully into the corded muscles of his bull neck.
The two pretty young girls at the desk showed him the full amount of deference due to one of the partnership's important clients, but by this time Garry was too nervous to take advantage of the chair he was offered and he wandered around the lobby pretending to admire the tall vases of proteas while surreptitiously checking his image in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors behind the floral display.
He had paid forty guineas off the peg for the double-breasted suit in his favourite Prince of Wales check, but the swell of his chest muscles made the lapels flare unevenly and the material rucked up around his biceps. He yanked at the cuffs in an attempt to smooth the sleeves, and then abandoned that effort and instead concentrated on trying to press his hair flat with the heel of his palm. He started guiltily as he saw in the mirror the door to the partners' sanctum open and Holly Carmichael come striding into the reception lobby.
As Garry turned to face her, all his recent bravado and confidence collapsed around him and he gawked at her. It was impossible but she was even more poised and chic than the vivid image of her he had carried with him since their last meeting.
Today she was wearing a blue and white striped Chanel suit with a pleated skirt that swirled around her calves, allowing just a flash of her perfect rounded knees as she came towards him. Her lightly tanned legs in sheer nylon had the patina of polished ivory, and her ankles and her wrists in the cuffs of the Chanel suit were elegantly turned,
her feet and hands narrow and yet perfectly proportioned to her long willowy limbs.
She was smiling and Garry felt the same sensual vertigo that he sometimes experienced after bench-pressing five times his own bodyweight of iron. Her teeth were opalescent, and as her mouth formed his name and smiled he watched it with breathless fascination.
She was as tall as he was, but he knew he could lift her with one hand and he quivered at the almost sacrilegious thought of taking this divine creature in his hands.
‘Mr Courtney, I hope we haven't kept you waiting.' She took his arm, and led him towards her office. He felt like a performing bear on a chain beside her grace and lightness. The light touch of her fingers on his arm burned like a branding iron.
Her hair was streaked with a shading of all the colours of blonde from platinum to dark burnt honey, and it fell in a lustrous cascade to just above the padded shoulders of the Chanel suit, and every time she moved her head he caught the perfume of those shining tresses and his stomach muscles contracted.
Her fingers were still on his biceps and she was talking directly into his face, still smiling. Her breath smelled like a flower and her mouth was so beautiful and soft and red that he felt guilty looking at it, as though he were spying on some secret and intimate part of her body. He tore his eyes from her mouth and raised them to her eyes. His heart jumped against his ribs like a maniac in a padded cell for one eye was sky blue and the other violet flecked with gold. It gave her face a striking asymmetry, not exactly a squint but a disconcerting myopic imbalance and Garry's legs felt as weak as if he had run ten miles.
‘I have something for you at last,' Holly Carmichael said, and led him into her office.
The long room reflected her own extraordinary style, which had attracted Garry to her work long before he had
met her. He had first seen an example of it in the
Institute of Architects Yearbook
. Holly Carmichael had won the 1961 Award of the Institute for a beach house on the dunes overlooking Plettenburg Bay that she had designed as a holiday home for one of the Witwatersrand insurance magnates. She used wood and stone and material in a blend that was at the same time modern and classical, that married space and shape in a natural harmony that excited the eye and yet gave solace to the soul.
Her office was decorated in soft mulberry and ethereal blue, functional and yet both restful and unmistakably feminine. The delicate pastel drawings on all four walls were her own work.
In the centre of the floor on a low table stood a miniature-scale reproduction of the Shasaville estate, as she visualized it after development was complete. Holly led Garry to it and stood back while he circled it slowly, studying it from every angle.
She watched the change come over him.
All the gawkiness was gone. Even the shape of his body seemed to change. It was imbued with the same kind of massive grace as that of the bull in the arena tensing for the charge.
Holly researched the background of all her clients, in order to better anticipate their requirements. With this one she had taken special care. The word in the marketplace was that, despite appearances, Garrick Courtney was a formidable presence and had already demonstrated his acumen and courage by procuring the Shasaville title and a controlling interest in Alpha Centauri Estates.
Her accountant had drawn up an approximate list of his assets which included, along with his property interests, considerable equity in blue-chip gold companies and the Courtney mining shares which he had acquired from his family when he was appointed to the board of that company.
More significant was the prevailing view that both Centaine and Shasa Courtney had given up on his brothers, and decided that Garrick Courtney was their hope for the future. He was the heir apparent to the Courtney millions and nobody knew the sum total of those – two hundred million, five hundred million – not inconceivably a billion rand. Holly Carmichael shivered slightly at the thought.

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