The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (34 page)

‘General Fungabera did not have to order those,’ Timon shook his head. ‘Those were copy-cat murders. The bush is still full of wild men from the war. They hide their weapons
and come into the towns, some even have regular jobs, but at the weekend or on a public holiday, they return to the bush, dig up their rifles and go on the rampage. They are not political
dissidents, they are armed bandits and the white families are the juiciest, softest targets, rich and helpless, deprived of their weapons by Mugabe’s government so they cannot defend
themselves.’

‘And it all plays right into Peter Fungabera’s hands. Any bandit is labelled a political dissident, any grisly robbery an excuse to continue the purge, held up to the world as proof
of the savagery and intractability of the Matabele tribe,’ Craig continued for him.

‘That is correct, Mr Mellow.’

‘And he has already murdered Tungata Zebiwe—’ Craig felt old and tired with regret and guilt for his old comrade ‘ – you can be sure of that!’

‘No, Mr Mellow.’ Timon shook his head. ‘I do not believe that Zebiwe is dead. I believe General Fungabera wants him alive. He has some plans for him.’

‘What plans?’ Craig demanded.

‘I do not know for certain, but I believe Peter Fungabera is dealing with the Russians.’

‘The Russians?’ Craig showed his disbelief.

‘He has had secret meetings with a stranger, a foreigner, a man who I believe is an important member of Russian intelligence.’

‘Are you sure, Timon?’

‘I have seen the man with my own eyes.’

Craig thought about that for a few seconds, and then reverted to his original question.

‘Okay, leave the Russians for the moment – where is Tungata Zebiwe? Where is Fungabera holding him?’

‘Again, I do not know, I’m sorry, Mr Mellow.’

‘If he is alive, then may the Lord have mercy on his soul,’ Craig whispered.

He could imagine what Tungata must be suffering. He was silent for a few minutes and then he changed the line of questioning.

‘General Fungabera has seized my property for himself, not for the state? I am correct in believing that?’

‘The general wanted that land very badly. He spoke of it often.’

‘How? I mean, even quasi-legally, how will he work it?’

‘It is very simple,’ Timon explained. ‘You are an admitted enemy of the state. Your property is forfeited. It will be confiscated to the state. The Land Bank will repudiate the
suretyship for your loan under the release clause which you signed. The custodian of enemy property will put up your shares of Rholands Company for sale by private tender. General Fungabera’s
tender will be accepted – his brother-in-law is custodian of enemy property. The tender price will be greatly advantageous to the general.’

‘I bet,’ said Craig bitterly.

‘But why should he go to such lengths?’ Sally-Anne demanded. ‘He must be a millionaire many times over. Surely he has enough already?’

‘Miss Jay. For some men there is no such thing as enough.’

‘He cannot hope to get away with it, surely?’

‘Who is there to prevent him doing so, Miss Jay?’ And when she did not reply, Timon went on, ‘Africa is going back to where it was before the white man intruded. There is only
one criterion for a ruler here and that is strength. We Africans do not trust anything else. Fungabera is strong, as Tungata Zebiwe was once strong.’ Timon glanced at his wrist-watch.
‘But we must eat. I think we will have a long day ahead of us.’

He pulled off the track, and drove the Land-Rover into a patch of second-growth scrub. He climbed onto the bonnet and arranged branches to cover the vehicle, hiding it from detection from the
air, and then opened the case of emergency rations from the locker under the passenger seat. There was water in the tank under the floorboards.

Craig filled a metal canteen with sand and soaked the sand with gasoline from the reserve tank. It made a smokeless burner on which to brew tea. They ate the unappetizing cold rations with
little conversation.

Once Timon turned up the volume on the radio to listen to a transmission, then shook his head.

‘Nothing to do with us.’ He came back to squat beside Craig.

‘How far to the border, do you reckon?’ Craig asked with a mouth full of cold, sticky bully beef.

‘Forty miles, or a little more.’

The radio crackled to life again, and Timon jumped up, and stooped over it attentively.

‘There is a unit of the Third Brigade just a few miles ahead of us,’ he reported. ‘They are at the mission station at Empandeni. There has been action against dissidents, but
they had dealt with them and they are moving out. Perhaps this way. We must be careful.’

‘I will check that we are hidden from the road.’ Craig stood up. ‘Sally-Anne, douse the fire! Captain, cover me!’

He picked up the AK 47 and ran back to the track. Critically he examined the patch of scrub that concealed the Land-Rover and then brushed over his own tracks and those of the vehicle with a
leafy twig, and carefully straightened the grass that the Land-Rover had flattened where it left the road. It wasn’t perfect, but it would bear a cursory examination from a speeding vehicle,
he thought, and then there was a faint vibration on the windless air. He listened. The sound of truck motors, strengthening. Craig ran back to the Land-Rover and climbed into the front seat beside
Timon.

‘Put your rifle back in the rack,’ Timon said, and when Craig hesitated, ‘Please do as I say, Mr Mellow. If they find us, it will be useless to fight. I will have to try and
talk our way through. I couldn’t explain if you were armed.’

Reluctantly Craig passed the weapon back to Sally-Anne. She racked it and Craig was left feeling naked and vulnerable. He clenched his fists in his lap. The sound of motors grew swiftly, and
then over them the voices of men singing. The song grew louder, and despite his tension Craig felt the hair prickle on the nape of his neck to the peculiar beauty of African voices raised in
song.

‘Third Brigade,’ Timon said. ‘That is the “Song of the Rain Winds”, the praise song of the regiment.’

Neither of them replied, and Timon hummed the tune to himself, and then began to sing softly. He had a startlingly true and thrilling voice.

Timon translated from the Shona for their benefit, and now Craig could see the grey dust of the trucks smoking up above the scrub, and the singing was close and clear.

There was a flash of reflected sunlight off metal, and then through the foliage Craig caught quick glimpses of the passing convoy. There were three trucks, painted a dull sand colour, and the
backs were crowded with soldiers in battle camouflage and bush hats, their weapons held ready at the high port position. On the cab of the last truck rode an officer, the only one of them wearing
the red beret and silver cap-badge. He looked directly at Craig, and seemed very close, the screen of foliage suddenly very sparse. Craig shrank back in his seat.

Then, thankfully, the convoy was past, the rumble of engines and the singing dwindling, the pale dust settling.

Timon Nbebi exhaled a long breath. ‘There will be others,’ he cautioned, and, with his fingers on the ignition key, waited until the silence was complete once again. Then he started
the Land-Rover, reversed out of the scrub and turned back onto the track.

He swung the Land-Rover in the opposite direction from the convoy, and they drove over the rugged tracks that the trucks had imprinted deeply into the sandy earth. They drove for another twenty
minutes before Timon ducked down abruptly in his seat, to peer up at the sky through the windshield.

‘Smoke,’ he said. ‘Empandeni is just ahead. Will you have your camera ready, Miss Jay? I believe the Third Brigade will have left something for you.’

They came to the maize fields that surrounded the mission village. The maize stalks had dried, the cobs in their yellow sheaths were beginning to droop heavily, ready for the harvest. There had
been women working in the fields. One of them lay beside the track. She had been shot in the back as she ran, the bullet had exited between her breasts. The unweaned child that she carried on her
back had been bayoneted, many times. The flies rose up in a blue hum as they passed and then settled again.

Nobody spoke. Sally-Anne reached into her camera-bag and brought out her Nikon. She was bloodless grey under her freckles.

The other women lay further from the road, mere bundles of gay cloth, heavily stained. There were possibly fifty huts in the village, all of them were burning, the thatched roofs torching up to
the clear blue morning sky. They had thrown most of the corpses into the burning huts, leaving black puddles drying where they had fallen and drag marks in the dust. The smell of seared flesh was
very strong, it coated the roofs of their mouths like congealed pork fat. Craig’s stomach heaved, and he covered his mouth and nose with his hand.

‘These are dissidents?’ Sally-Anne whispered. Her lips were icy white. The motor drive of her Nikon whirred as she shot through the open window.

They had killed the chickens, the loose feathers rolled on the light breeze, like the stuffing from a burst pillow.

‘Stop!’ Sally-Anne ordered.

‘It is dangerous to stay,’ said Timon.

‘Stop,’ Sally-Anne repeated.

She left the door open, and went among the huts. Working swiftly, changing roll after roll of film with practised nimble fingers, while her white lips trembled and her eyes behind the lens were
huge with horror.

‘We must move on,’ said Timon.

‘Wait.’ Sally-Anne moved quickly forward, doing her job like the professional she was. She moved behind a group of huts. The smell of burning flesh nauseated Craig, and the heat from
the fires came at him in great furnace gusts as the breeze veered.

Sally-Anne screamed and the two men jumped from the Land-Rover and ran, cocking their rifles, diverging to give each other covering fire, Craig finding his old training returning instinctively.
He came around the side of a hut.

Sally-Anne stood in the open, no longer able to use her camera. A naked black woman lay at her feet. The woman’s upper body was that of a comely, healthy young woman, below her navel she
was a pink skinless monstrosity. She had dragged herself back out of the fire into which they had thrown her. There were places on her lower body where the burning was not deep, here the flesh was
piebald pink and weeping lymph. Then in other places the bone was exposed; her hip-bone, charred black as charcoal, protruded obscenely from the scorched meat of her pelvic area. The lining of her
stomach had burned through and her entrails bulged from the opening. Miraculously, she was still alive. Her fingers raked the dust with a repetitive, mechanical movement. Her mouth opened and
closed convulsively, making no sound, and her eyes were wide open, aware and suffering.

‘Go back to the Land-Rover, please, Miss Jay,’ Timon Nbebi said. ‘There is nothing you can do to help her.’

Sally-Anne stood stiffly, unable to move. Craig put his arms around her shoulders and turned her away. He led her back towards the Land-Rover.

At the corner of the burning hut Craig glanced back. Timon Nbebi had moved up close to the maimed woman, he stood over her with the AK 47 held ready on his hip, his whole attention was focused
upon her and his face was almost as riven with suffering as was the woman’s.

Craig took Sally-Anne around the hut. Behind them there was the whip-crack of a single shot, muted by the crackle of flames all around them. Sally-Anne stumbled and then caught her balance. When
they reached the Land-Rover, Sally-Anne leaned against the cab and doubled over slowly. She vomited in the dust and then straightened up and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

Craig took the bottle of cane spirit from the cubby hole. There was an inch of the clear liquor remaining. He gave it to Sally-Anne and she drank it like water. Craig took the empty bottle back
from her, and then abruptly and savagely hurled it into the burning hut.

Timon Nbebi came around the hut. Wordlessly he climbed behind the steering-wheel and Craig helped Sally-Anne into the rear seat. They drove slowly through the rest of the village, their heads
turning from side to side as each fresh horror was revealed.

As they passed the little church of red brick, the roof collapsed in upon itself, and the wooden cross on the spire was swallowed in a belch of sparks and flames and blue smoke. In the bright
sunlight the flames were almost colourless.

T
imon Nbebi used the radio the way a navigator uses an echo sounder to find the channel through shoal water.

The Third Brigade road-blocks and ambushes were reporting over the VHF net to their area headquarters, giving their positions as part of their routine reports, and Timon pin-pointed them on his
map.

Twice they avoided road-blocks by taking side-tracks and cattle paths, groping forward carefully through the acacia forest. Twice more they came to small villages, mere cattle stations, homes of
two or three Matabele families. The Third Brigade had preceded them, and the crows and vultures had followed, picking at the partially roasted carcasses in the warm ashes of the burned-out
huts.

They kept moving westwards, when the tracks allowed. At each prominence that afforded a view ahead, Timon parked in cover and Craig climbed to the crest to scout ahead. In every direction he
looked, the towering blue of the sky above the wide horizon was marred by standing columns of smoke from burning villages. Westwards still they crawled, and the terrain changed swiftly as they
approached the edge of the Kalahari Desert. There were fewer and still fewer features. The land levelled into a grey, monotonous plain, burning endlessly under the high merciless sun. The trees
became stunted, their branches heat-tortured as the limbs of cripples. This was a land able to support only the most rudimentary human needs, the beginning of the great wilderness. Still they edged
westwards into it.