The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (50 page)

After midnight Comrade Lookout summed up for them. ‘We know the woman. She is trustworthy and we believe what she tells us. Comrade Tungata is our father. His blood is the blood of kings,
and the stinking Shona hold him. On this we are all agreed.’ He paused. ‘But there are some who would try to wrest him from the Shona child-rapers, and others who say we are too few,
and that we have only one rifle between two men, and only five bullets for each rifle. So we are divided.’ He looked at Craig. ‘What do you say, Kuphela?’

‘I say that I have brought you eight thousand rounds of ammunition and twenty-five rifles and fifty grenades,’ said Craig. ‘I say that Comrade Tungata is my friend and my
brother. I say that if there are only women and cowards here and no men to go with me, then I will go alone with this woman, Sarah, who has the heart of a warrior, and I will find men somewhere
else.’

Comrade Lookout’s face puckered up with affront, pulled out of true by the scar, and his tone was reproachful.

‘Let there be no more talk of women and cowards, Kuphela. Let there be no more talking at all. Let us rather go to Tuti and do this thing that must be done. That is what I say.’

T
hey lit the smoke signal as soon as they heard the Cessna, and extinguished it immediately Sally-Anne flashed her landing lights to acknowledge.
Comrade Lookout’s guerrillas had cut the grass in the clearing with pangas and filled in the holes and rough spots, so Sally-Anne’s landing was confident and neat.

The guerrillas unloaded the rest of the ammunition and the weapons in disciplined silence, but they could not conceal their grins of delight as they handed down the bags of ammunition and the
haversacks of grenades, for these were the tools of their trade. The loads disappeared swiftly into the forest. Within fifteen minutes Craig and Sally-Anne were left alone under the wing of the
empty Cessna.

‘Do you know what I prayed for?’ Sally-Anne asked. ‘I prayed that you wouldn’t be able to find the gang, and if you did, that they would refuse to go with you, and that
you had been forced to abort and had to come back with me.’

‘You aren’t very good at praying, are you?’

‘I don’t know. I’m going to get in a lot of practice in the next few days.’

‘Five days,’ Craig corrected her. ‘You come in again on Tuesday morning.’

‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘I will take off in the dark, and be over Tuti airfield at sunrise – that’s at 05.22 hours.’

‘But you are not to land until I signal that we have secured the strip. Now, for the love of God, don’t run yourself short of fuel to get back to the pan. If we don’t show up,
don’t stay on hoping.’

‘I will have three hours’ safe endurance over Tuti. That means you will have until 08.30 hours to get there.’

‘If we don’t make it by then, we aren’t going to make it. It’s time for you to go now, my love.’

‘I know,’ Sally-Anne said, and made no move.

‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘I don’t know how I’m going to live through the next few days, sitting out there in the desert, not knowing a thing, just living with my fears and imagination.’

He took her in his arms and found she was trembling.

‘I’m so very afraid for you,’ she whispered against his throat.

‘See you Tuesday morning,’ he told her. ‘Without fail.’

‘Without fail!’ she agreed, and then her voice quavered. ‘Come back to me, Craig. I don’t want to live without you. Promise me you’ll come back.’

‘I promise.’ He kissed her.

‘There now, I feel much better.’ She gave him that cheeky grin of hers, but it was all soft around the edges.

She climbed up into the cockpit and started the engine.

‘I love you.’ Her lips formed the words that the engine drowned, and she swung the Cessna round with a burst of throttle and did not look back.

I
t was only sixty miles on the map and from the front seat of an aircraft it had not looked like hard going. On the ground it was different.

They were crossing the grain of the land; the watershed dropped away from their right to their left, towards the escarpment of the Zambezi valley. They were forced to follow the switchback of
hills and the intervening valleys so they were never on level ground.

The guerrillas had hidden their own women in a safe place, and only reluctantly consented to Sarah accompanying the raiding party, but she carried a full load and kept up with the hard pace that
Comrade Lookout set for them.

The ironstone hills soaked up the heat of the sun and bounced it back at them, as they toiled up the steep hillsides and dropped again into the next valley. The descents were as taxing as the
climbs, the heavy loads jarring their spines and straining the backs of their legs and their Achilles tendons. The old elephant trails that they were following were littered with round pebbles
washed out by the rains that rolled under foot like ballbearings and made each pace fraught with danger.

One of the guerrillas fell, and his ankle swelled up so that they could not get his boot back on his foot. They distributed his load amongst them and left him to find his own way back to where
they had left the women.

The tiny mopani bees plagued them during the day, clouding around their mouths and nostrils and eyes in their persistent search for moisture, and in the nights the mosquitoes from the stagnant
pools in the valleys took over from them. At one stage of the trek they passed through the edge of the fly-belt, and the silent, light-footed tsetse-flies joined the torment, settling so softly
that the victim was unaware until a red-hot needle stabbed into the soft flesh at the back of the ear, or under the armpit.

Always there was danger of attack. Every few miles either the scouts out ahead or the rear-guard dragging the trail behind them would signal an alert, and they would be forced to dive into cover
and wait with finger on trigger until the all-clear signal was passed down the line.

It was slow and gruelling and nerve-racking – two full days’ marching from freezing dawn through burning noon into darkness again, to reach Sarah’s father’s village.
Vusamanzi was his name and he was a senior magician, soothsayer and rainmaker of the Matabele tribe. Like all his kind, he lived in isolation, with only his wives and immediate family around him.
However great their respect for them, ordinary mortals avoided the practitioners of the dark arts; they came to them only for divination or treatment, paid the goat or beast that was the fee, and
hurried thankfully away again.

Vusamanzi’s village was some miles north of Tuti Mission Station. It was a prosperous little community on a hilltop, with many wives and goats and chickens and fields of maize in the
valley.

The guerrillas lay up in the forest below the kopje, and they sent Sarah in to make certain all was safe and to warn the villagers of their presence. Sarah returned within an hour, and Craig and
Comrade Lookout went back to the village with her.

Vusamanzi had earned his name, ‘Raise the Waters’, from his reputed ability to control the Zambezi and its tributaries. As a much younger man he had sent a great flood to wash away
the village of a lesser chief who had cheated him of his fees, and since then a number of others who had displeased him had drowned mysteriously at fords or bathing holes. It was said that at
Vusamanzi’s behest the surface of a quiet pool would leap up suddenly in a hissing wave as the marked victim approached to drink or bathe or cross, and he would be sucked in. No living man
had actually witnessed this terrible phenomenon – but nevertheless, Vusamanzi, the magician, did not have much trouble with bad debts from his patients and clients.

Vusamanzi’s hair was a cap of pure white and he wore a small beard, also white, dressed out to a spade shape in the fashion of the Zulus. Sarah must have been a child of his old age, but
she had inherited her fine looks from him, for he was handsome and dignified. He had put aside his regalia. He wore only a simple loin-cloth and his body was straight and lean, and his voice, when
he greeted Craig courteously, was deep and steady.

Clearly Sarah revered him, for she took the beer-pot from one of his junior wives and knelt to offer it to him herself. In her turn, Sarah obviously had a special place in the old man’s
affections, for he smiled at her fondly, and when she sat at his feet, he fondled her head casually as he listened attentively to what Craig had to tell him. Then he sent her to help his wives to
prepare food and beer and take it down to the guerrillas hidden in the valley before he turned back to Craig.

‘The man you call Tungata Zebiwe, the Seeker after Justice, was born Samson Kumalo. He is in direct line of succession from Mzilikazi, the first king and father of our people. He is the
one upon whom the prophecies of the ancients descend. On the night he was taken by the Shona soldiers, I had sent for him to appraise him of his responsibility and to make him privy to the secrets
of the kings. If he is still alive, as my daughter tells us he is, then it is the duty of every Matabele to do all in his power to seek his freedom. The future of our people rests with him. How can
I assist you? You have only to ask.’

‘You have already helped us with food,’ Craig thanked him. ‘Now we need information.’

‘Ask, Kuphela. Anything that I can tell you, I will.’

‘The road between Tuti Mission and the camp of the soldiers passes close to this place. Is that correct?’

‘Beyond those hills,’ the old man pointed.

‘Sarah tells me that every week the trucks come along this road on the same day, taking food to the soldiers and the prisoners at the camp.’

‘That is so. Every week, on the Monday late in the afternoon, the trucks pass here loaded with bags of maize and other stores. They return empty the following morning.’

‘How many trucks?’

‘Two or, rarely, three.’

‘How many soldiers to guard them?’

‘Two in front beside the driver, three or four more in the back. One stands on the roof with a big gun that shoots fast.’ A heavy machine-gun, Craig translated for himself.
‘The soldiers are very watchful and alert and the trucks drive fast.’

‘They came last Monday, as usual?’ Craig asked.

‘As usual,’ Vusamanzi nodded his cap of shiny white wool. He must believe then that the routine was still in operation, Craig decided, and bet everything on it.

‘How far is it to the mission station from here?’ he asked.

‘From there to there.’ The witch-doctor swept his arm through a segment of the sky, about four hours of the sun’s passage. Reckoned as the pace of a man on foot, that was
approximately fifteen miles.

‘And from here to the camp of the soldiers?’ Craig went on.

Vusamanzi shrugged. ‘The same distance.’

‘Good.’ Craig unrolled his map, they were equidistant between the two points. That gave him a fairly accurate fix. He began calculating times and distances and scribbling them in the
margin of the map.

‘We have a day to wait.’ Craig looked up at last. ‘The men will rest and ready themselves.’

‘My women will feed them,’ Vusamanzi agreed.

‘Then on Monday I will need some of your people to help me.’

‘There are only women here,’ the old man demurred.

‘I need women – young women, comely women,’ Craig told him.

T
he next morning, leaving before dawn, Craig and Comrade Lookout, taking a runner with them, reconnoitred the stretch of road that lay just beyond
the line of low hills. It was as Craig remembered it, a crude track into which heavy trucks had ground deep ruts, but the Third Brigade had cleared the brush on both sides to reduce the risk of
ambush.

A little before noon they reached the spot where Peter Fungabera had stopped during their first drive to Tuti, the causeway where the road crossed the timber bridge across the green river, and
where they had eaten that lunch of baked maize cobs.

Craig found that his memory was accurate. The approaches to the bridge, firstly down the steep slope of the valley and then across the narrow earthen causeway, must force the supply convoy to
slow down and engage low gear. It was the perfect spot for an ambush, and Craig sent the runner back to Vusamanzi’s village to bring up the rest of the force. While they waited, Craig and
Comrade Lookout went over their plans and adapted them to the actual terrain.

The main attack would take place at the bridge, but if that failed, they must have a back-up plan to prevent the convoy getting through. As soon as the main force of guerrillas arrived, Craig
sent Comrade Lookout with five men along the road beyond the bridge. Out of sight from the bridge, they felled a large mhoba-hoba tree so that it fell across the track, as an effective road-block.
Comrade Lookout would command here, while Craig coordinated the attack at the bridge.

‘Which are the men who speak Shona?’ Craig demanded.

‘This one speaks it like a Shona, this one not as well.’

‘They are to be kept out of any fighting. We cannot risk losing them,’ Craig ordered. ‘We will need them for the camp.’

‘I will hold them in my hand,’ Comrade Lookout agreed.

‘Now the women.’

Sarah had chosen three of her half-sisters from the village, ranging in age from sixteen to eighteen years.

They were the prettiest of the old witch-doctor’s multitudinous daughters, and when Craig explained their role to them, they giggled and hung their heads, and covered their mouths with
their hands and went through all the other motions of modesty and maidenly shyness. But they were obviously relishing the adventure hugely, nothing so exciting and titillating had happened to them
in all their young lives.

‘Do they understand?’ Craig asked Sarah. ‘It will be dangerous – they must do exactly as they are told.’

‘I will be with them,’ Sarah assured him. ‘All the time – tonight as well, especially tonight.’ This last was for the benefit of the girls. Sarah had been fully
aware of mutual ogling between her sisters and the young guerrillas. She shooed them away, still giggling, to the rough shelter of thorn branches that she had made them build for themselves, and
settled herself across the entrance.