The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (49 page)

The mirage shimmered and tricked the eye so that the stunted trees on the far side of the pan seemed to swim and change shape like dark amoeba under a microscope. A spinning dust devil jumped up
from the white pan surface, and swirled and swayed sinuously as a belly dancer, rising two hundred feet into the hot air until it collapsed again as suddenly as it had risen.

The sound of the Cessna engine rose and fell and rose again on the heat-flawed air. ‘There!’ Sarah pointed out the mosquito speck, low on the horizon.

Craig made a last anxious appraisal of his makeshift landing-strip. He had lit the beacon fires at each end of it as soon as they had picked up the first throb of the Cessna’s motor. He
had driven the Land-Rover back and forth between the beacons to mark the hard crust at the edge of the pan. Fifty metres out, the surface was treacherously soft.

Now he looked back at the approaching aircraft. Sally-Anne was banking low over the baobab trees, lining up with the strip he had set out for her. She made a prudent precautionary pass along it,
her head twisted in the cockpit window as she examined it, then she came around again and touched down lightly, and taxied towards the Land-Rover.

‘You were gone for ever.’ Craig seized her as she jumped down from the cockpit.

‘Three days,’ she protested with her feet off the ground.

‘That’s for ever,’ he said and kissed her.

He set her down but kept one arm around her as he led her to the Land-Rover. After she had greeted Sarah, Craig introduced her to the two Matabele who were squatting in the shade of the
Land-Rover.

They rose courteously to meet her.

‘This is Jonas, and this is Aaron. They led us to the arms cache and they are giving us all the help they can.’

They were reserved and unsmiling young men with old eyes that had seen unspeakable things, but they were willing and quick.

They pumped the Avgas from the forty-four-gallon drums on the back of the Land-Rover directly into the Cessna’s wing tanks, while Craig stripped out the seats from the rear of the cockpit
to reduce weight and give them cargo space.

Then they began loading. Sally-Anne weighed each item of cargo on the spring balance that she had bought for the purpose, and entered it on her loading table. The ammunition was the heaviest
part of the load. They had eight thousand rounds of 7.62 mm ball Ps. Craig had broken bulk and repacked it in black plastic garbage-bags to save weight and space. It had been buried for years and
many of the rounds were so corroded as to be useless. However, Craig had hand-sorted it, and test-fired a few rounds from each case without a single misfire.

Most of the rifles had also been corroded and Craig had worked through the nights by gas lantern, stripping and cannibalizing until he had twenty-five good weapons. There were also five Tokarev
pistols and two cases of fragmentation grenades which seemed in better condition than the rifles. Craig had set off one grenade from each case, popping them down an ant-bear hole to a satisfactory
crump and cloud of dust. That had left forty-eight from the original fifty. Craig packed them in five cheap canvas haversacks that he had bought from a general dealer in Francistown.

The rest of the equipment he had also purchased in Francistown. Wire-cutters and bolt-cutters, nylon rope, pangas that Jonas and Aaron sharpened to razor edges, flashlights and extra batteries,
canteens and water bottles and a dozen or so other items which might prove useful. Sarah had been appointed medical orderly and had made up a first-aid kit with items purchased at the Francistown
pharmacy. The food rations were spartan. Raw maize meal packed in five-kilo plastic bags, the best nourishment-to-weight ratio available, and a few bags of coarse salt.

‘Okay, that’s it,’ Sally-Anne called a halt to the loading. ‘Another ounce and we won’t get off the ground. The rest of it will have to wait for the second
trip.’

When darkness fell, they sat around the camp-fire and gorged on the steaks and fresh fruit that Sally-Anne had brought with her from Johannesburg.

‘Eat hearty, my children,’ she encouraged them. ‘It could be a long time.’

Afterwards Craig and Sally-Anne carried their blankets away from the fire, out of earshot of the others, and they lay naked in the warm, desert air and made love under the silver sickle of the
moon, both of them poignantly aware that it might be for the last time.

They ate breakfast in the dark, after the moon had set and before the first glimmering of the dawn. They left Jonas and Aaron to guard the Land-Rover and help with loading and refuelling for the
second trip and Sally-Anne taxied out to the end of the strip when it was just light enough to make out the tracks.

Even in the cool of night it took the overloaded Cessna for ever to unstick, and they climbed away slowly towards the glow of the sunrise.

‘Zimbabwe border,’ Sally-Anne murmured. ‘And I still can’t believe what we are doing.’

Craig was perched up beside her on the bags of ammunition, while Sarah was curled up like a salted anchovy on top of the load behind them.

Sally-Anne banked slightly as she picked up her landmarks from the map on her lap. She had laid out a course to cross the railway line fifteen miles south of the coalmining town of Wankie, and
then to cross the main road a few miles beyond, avoiding all human habitation. The terrain below them changed swiftly, the desert falling away and becoming densely forested with open glades of
golden grass. There were some high fair-weather cumulus clouds in the north, otherwise the sky was clear. Craig squinted ahead down the track of the rising sun.

‘There is the railway.’

Sally-Anne closed the throttle and they descended sharply. Fifty feet above the tree-tops they roared over the deserted railway tracks, and minutes later crossed the main road. They had a
glimpse of a truck crawling along the blue-grey tarmac ribbon, but they crossed behind it and were visible to it for only seconds. Sally-Anne pulled a face.

‘Let’s hope they make nothing of us – there must be quite a bit of light aircraft traffic around here.’ She glanced at her wrist-watch. ‘Expected time of arrival,
forty minutes.’

‘All right,’ Craig said. ‘Let’s go over it one more time. You drop Sarah and me, then clear out again as quickly as possible. Back to the pan. Reload and refuel. Two days
from now you come back. If there is a smoke-signal, you land. No signal and you head back to the pan. Give it two more days and then the last trip. If there is no smoke-signal on the second trip,
that’s it. You head out and don’t come back.’

She reached out and took his hand. ‘Craig, don’t even say it. Please, darling, come back to me.’

They held hands for the rest of the trip, except for the brief moments when she needed both for the controls.

‘There it is!’

The Chizarira river was a dark green python across the vast brown land, and there was a glint of water through the trees.

‘Zambezi Waters – just up there.’

They were keeping well clear of the camps that they had built with so much loving labour, but both of them stared longingly upstream to where the dreaming blue hills studded the line of the
horizon.

Sally-Anne dropped lower and still lower until she was shaving the tree-tops, and then she turned slowly back in a wide circle, keeping the hills between them and the buildings on Zambezi
Waters.

‘There it is,’ Craig called, and pointed out under the port wingtip, and they had a glimpse of white beads at the edge of the trees.

‘They are still there!’ The bones of Craig’s poached rhinoceros had been picked over by the scavengers and bleached by the sun.

Sally-Anne ran her landing-check, and then lined up for the narrow strip of grassland along the head of the gorge where she had landed before.

‘Just pray the warthog and ant-bear haven’t been digging around,’ she murmured, and the overloaded Cessna wallowed sluggishly and the stall warning bleeped and flashed
intermittently at the reduced power setting.

Sally-Anne dropped in steeply over the tree-tops and touched down with a jarring thud. The Cessna pitched and bounced over the rough ground, but maximum safe braking and the coarse grass
wrapping the undercarriage pulled them up quickly, and Sally-Anne let out her breath.

‘Thank you, Lord.’

They offloaded with frenzied haste, piling everything in a heap and spreading over it the green nylon nets designed for shading young plants from the sun that Craig had found in Francistown.

Then Sally-Anne and Craig looked at each other miserably.

‘Oh God, I hate this,’ she said.

‘Me too – so go! Go quickly, damn it.’

They kissed and she broke away and ran back to the cockpit. She taxied to the end of the clearing, flattening the grass, and then came back at full throttle in her own tracks. The lightened
aircraft leapt into the air, and the last he saw of her was her pale face in the side window turning back towards him, and then the tree-tops cut them off from each other.

Craig waited until the last vibration of the engine died away and the silence of the bush closed in again. Then he picked up the rifle and haversack and slung them over his shoulders. He looked
at Sarah. She wore denims and blue canvas shoes. She carried the food bag and water bottles, with a Tokarev holstered on her belt.

‘Ready?’

She nodded, fell in behind him, and stayed with the forcing pace he set. They reached the kopje in the early part of the afternoon, and from the summit Craig looked towards the camps of Zambezi
Waters on the river.

This would be the dangerous part now, but he lit the signal fire and then, taking Sarah with him, moved out and set up an ambush on the approach path, just in case the smoke signal brought
unwanted visitors.

He and Sarah lay up in good cover, and neither of them moved nor spoke for three hours. Only their eyes were busy, sweeping the slopes below and above and the bush all around.

Even so, they were taken unawares. The voice was a harsh, raw whisper in Sindebele, close – very close by.

‘Ha! Kuphela. So you have brought my money.’ Comrade Lookout’s scarred visage peered at them. He had crept up to within ten paces without alerting them. ‘I thought you
had forgotten us.’

‘No money for you – but hard and dangerous work,’ Craig told him.

T
here were three men with Comrade Lookout, lean, wolflike men. They extinguished the signal fire and then spread back into the bush in an extended
scouting order, that would cover their march.

‘We must go,’ Comrade Lookout explained. ‘Here in the open the Shona
kanka
press us like hunting dogs. Since we last met, we have lost many good men. Comrade Dollar has
been taken by them.’

‘Yes.’ Craig remembered him, beaten and bedraggled, giving evidence against him on that terrible night at King’s Lynn.

They marched until two hours after darkness, northwards into the bad and broken land along the escarpment of the great river. The way was cleared for them and guarded by the scouts who were
always invisible in the forest ahead. Only their bird calls guided and reassured them.

They came at last to the guerrilla camp. There were women at the small smokeless cooking-fires and one of them ran to embrace Sarah as soon as she recognized her.

‘She is my aunt’s youngest daughter,’ Sarah explained. She and Craig spoke only Sindebele to each other now.

The camp was an uncomfortable and joyless place, a series of rude caves, hacked out of the steep bank of a dried water-course and screened by the overhang of the trees. It had a temporary air
about it. There were no luxuries and no items of equipment that could not be packed within minutes and carried on a man’s back. The guerrilla women were as unsmiling as their men.

‘We do not stay at one place,’ Comrade Lookout explained. ‘The
kanka
see the signs from the air if we do. Even though we never walk the same way, not even to the
latrines, in a short time our feet form pathways and that is what they look for. We must move again soon.’

The women brought them food and Craig realized how hungry and tired he was, but before he ate he opened his pack and gave them the cartons of cigarettes he had carried in. For the first time he
saw these embittered men smile as they passed a single butt around the circle.

‘How many men in your group?’

‘Twenty-six.’ Comrade Lookout puffed on the cigarette and passed it on. ‘But there is another group nearby.’

Twenty-six was enough, Craig brooded. If they could exploit the element of surprise, it would be just enough.

They ate with their fingers from the communal pot and then Comrade Lookout allowed them to share another cigarette.

‘Now, Kuphela, you said you had work for us.’

‘The Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe is the prisoner of the Shona.’

‘This is a terrible thing. It is a stab in the heart of the Matabele people – but even here in the bush we have known of this for many months. Did you come to tell us something that
all the world knows?’

‘They are holding him alive at Tuti.’

‘Tuti. Hau!’ Comrade Lookout exclaimed violently and every man spoke at once.

‘How do you know this?’

‘We heard he was killed—’

‘This is old women’s talk—’

Craig called across to where the women sat apart.

‘Sarah!’ She came to them.

‘You know this woman?’ Craig asked.

‘She is my wife’s cousin.’

‘She is the teacher at the mission.’

‘She is one of us.’

‘Tell them,’ Craig ordered her.

They listened in attentive silence, while Sarah related her last meeting with Tungata, their eyes glittering in the firelight, and when she had finished, they were silent. Sarah rose quietly and
went back to the other women, and Comrade Lookout turned to one of his men.

‘Speak!’ he invited.

The one chosen to give his opinion first was the youngest, the most junior. The others would speak in their ascending order of seniority. It was the ancient order of council and it would take
time. Craig composed himself to patience, this was the tempo of Africa.