Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (101 page)

A head like a log, black and gnarled and shiny with wetness, pushed through the lilies. Its beady saurian eyes were set on protruding barklike knobs and it grinned at Sali with ragged fangs protruding over uneven lips. The wreath of lily blossoms draped across its hideous brow gave the creature a sardonic menace.

Suddenly the great tail broke the surface, double-ridged and crested as it threshed the surface to foam, driving the long scaly body forward with astonishing speed.

Sali screamed.

Isaac stood at the control console and drove the long hull deeper into the papyrus. The tough fibrous stems wrapped around the propeller shaft and slowed the boat, bringing it to a gradual standstill.

They ran to the bows and, grabbing handfuls of papyrus, dragged themselves forward until abruptly they burst into a small patch of open water. Directly in front of the bows there was an enormous disturbance in the water. Sheets of spray were thrown into the sunlight, and splattered over their heads.

In the foam an enormous scaly body rolled and roiled, flashing its butter yellow belly, the long tail cockscombed with sharp scales thrashing the water white.

For an instant a human arm was flung upwards. It was a gesture of entreaty, of terrified supplication. Isaac leaned over the side and seized the wrist. The skin was wet and slippery but Isaac reinforced his grip with both hands and leaned back with all his weight. He could not hold Sali and the weight of the reptile together. The wrist began to slip through his grip until one of the rangers leapt to his side and grabbed Sali’s arm at the elbow.

Together, inch by inch, they dragged the man’s body from the water. He was stretched out between the men at one end and the dreadful reptile below the surface like a man on the torture rack.

The other ranger leaned out over the gunwale and fired a burst of automatic fire into the water. The high-velocity bullets exploded on the surface as though they had hit a steel plate and had no effect except to send needles of spray into the eyes of Isaac and the ranger at the rail.

“Stop it,” Isaac panted at him. “You’ll hit one of us!”

The ranger dropped the rifle and seized Sali’s free arm.

Now there were three men taking sides in the gruesome tug-of-war. Slowly they dragged Sali’s body from the water, until the reptile’s huge scaly head was exposed.

Its fangs were buried in the front of Sali’s belly. The crocodile’s teeth lack shearing edges. It dismembers its prey by locking on and then rolling its entire body in the water to twist off a limb or a hunk of flesh. As they held Sali stretched over the gunwale, the creature flicked its tail and rolled. Ssali’s belly was ripped open. The crocodile heaved backwards with its fangs still locked in his flesh and stripped Sali’s entrails out of him.

With the release of the strain at one end, the three men were able to heave Sali’s body on board. However, the crocodile still held its grip. Although his writhing form lay on the deck, Sali’s entrails were stretched over the side, a glistening fleshy tangle of tubes and ribbons like some grotesque umbilical cord that linked him to his fate.

The crocodile jerked again with the full weight and strength of the long tail. The ribbon of guts snapped and Sali screamed for the last time and died on the bloody deck.

For a while there was silence in the boat broken only by the hoarse panting of the three men who had tried to rescue him.

They stared in horrified fascination at Sali’s mutilated corpse until Isaac Mtwetwe whispered softly, “I could not have chosen a more fitting death for you.” He spoke in formal ceremonial Shana. “Go not peacefully, O Sali, evil one, and may all your foul deeds accompany you on your journey.”

Chapter 9

“There were no prisoners, Isaac told Daniel Armstrong.”

“Did you say none?” Daniel shouted. The telephone connection was scratchy and faint, with heavy atmospheric interference from the thunderstorm raging further down the valley.

“None, Danny,” Isaac raised his voice. “Eight dead ones, but the rest of the gang were either eaten by crocs or escaped back into Zambia.”

“What about ivory,” Isaac? “Did they have tusks with them?”

“Yes, they were all carrying ivory, but it was lost in the river when the canoes went down.”

“Damn it to hell,” Daniel muttered. It would be much more difficult now to convince the authorities that the bulk of the ivory was taken out from Chiwewe in the refrigerator trucks. The trail to Ning Cheng Gong was growing colder with every hour that passed.

“There is a police unit on its way from here to the headquarters camp at Chiwewe,” he told Isaac.

“Yes, Danny. They are here at the moment. I’m going to join them as soon as I have made arrangements to fly my wounded ranger out to Harare. I want to see what these bastards did to Johnny Nzou.”

“Listen, Isaac, I’m going to follow up the only lead I’ve got on who was responsible for this business.

“Be careful, Danny. These people don’t mess about. You could get badly hurt. Where are you headed?”

“I’ll see you around, Isaac.” Daniel avoided the question. He dropped the telephone back on its cradle and went out to the Landcruiser. He sat behind the wheel and thought about it. He realised that this was merely a respite. Pretty soon now the Zimbabwean police were going to want to talk to him again, a little more seriously than before. There was only one place to be, and that was outside the country. In any event that was where the trail was leading him.

He drove down to the customs and immigration post and parked in the lot before the barrier. Naturally, he had his passport with him and the papers for the Landcruiser were all in order. The departure formalities took less than half an hour, which by African standards was almost record time.

Daniel drove out across the steel-girdered bridge that spanned the Zambezi and he was aware that he was not entering paradise. Zambia was, after Uganda and Ethiopia, one of the poorest and sorriest countries on the African continent. Daniel grimaced. A cynic might put that down to the fact that it had been independent from British colonial rule longer than most others. There had been more time for the policies of structured chaos and ruination to take full effect.

Under private ownership the great mines of the Copper-belt had once been amongst the most profitable on the continent, rivalling even the fabulous gold mines further south. After independence, President Kenneth Kaunda had nationalised them and instituted his Africanisation policy. This amounted to firing those skilled and experienced engineers and managers who did not have black faces, a kind of affirmative action.

Within a few short years he had miraculously transformed an annual profit of many hundreds of millions into a loss of the same magnitude.

Daniel steeled himself for his encounter with Zambian officialdom.

“Can you tell me if a friend of mine passed through here last night on his way to Malawi,” he asked the uniformed officer who sauntered out of the customs building to search his Landcruiser for contraband.

The man opened his mouth to protest his outrage at being asked to divulge official information but Daniel forestalled him by producing a five-dollar bill. The Zambian currency, the kwacha, named for the dawn of freedom from colonial oppression had once held value equivalent to the US dollar. Numerous subsequent devaluations had readjusted the official exchange rate to 30:1. The black-market rate was closer to 300:1. The customs officer’s scruples evaporated. He was looking at a month’s salary.

“What is your friend’s name?” he asked eagerly.

“Mr. Chetti Singh. He was driving a large truck with a cargo of dried fish.”

“Wait.” The officer disappeared into the station and was back within minutes. “Yes…” he nodded. “Your friend passed through after midnight.” He showed no further interest in searching the Landcruiser and stamped Daniel’s passport. His step was jaunty as he returned to his post.

Daniel felt a little chill of unease as he left the border post and headed northwards towards Lusaka, the territory’s capital. In Zambia, the rule of law ended at the edge of the built-up areas. In the bush the police manned their road-blocks, but were never so foolhardy as to respond to appeals for assistance from travellers on the lonely rutted roads.

During twenty-five years of independence, the roads had fallen into an interesting state of disrepair. In some places the potholes through the eroded tarmac were almost knee deep. Daniel kept the speed down to twenty-five miles an hour and weaved his way around the worst patches as though he were negotiating a minefield.

The countryside was lovely. He drove through magnificent open forests and glades of golden grass known as damboes. The hills and kopjes seemed to have been built in antiquity by a giant’s hand. The walls and turrets of stone were tumbled and eroded into spectacular chaos. The numerous rivers were deep and clear.

Daniel came to the first of the road-blocks. A hundred yards from the barrier Daniel slowed down to a crawl and kept both hands on the wheel. The police were jumpy and trigger-happy.

As he stopped, a uniformed constable wearing mirrored sunglasses thrust the barrel of a sub-machinegun through the window and greeted him arrogantly. “Hello, my friend.” His finger was on the trigger and the muzzle was pointed at Daniel’s belly. “Get out!”

“Do you smoke?” Daniel asked. As he stepped down into the road he produced a packet of Chesterfield cigarettes and thrust it into the constable’s hand. The constable withdrew the barrel of the machine pistol while he checked that the packet was unopened. Then he grinned and Daniel relaxed slightly.

At that moment another vehicle drew up behind Daniel’s Landcruiser. It was a truck owned by one of the hunting safari companies. The back was piled with camp stores and equipment, and the gunbearers and trackers sat on top of the load. At the driving-wheel was the professional hunter, bearded, tanned and weatherbeaten. Beside him his client seemed urbane and effete despite his new safari jacket and the zebra skin hatband around his stetson.

“Daniel!” The hunter leaned out of the side window. “Daniel Armstrong,” he shouted happily.

Then Daniel remembered him. They had met briefly three years previously while Daniel was filming the documentary on hunting safaris in Africa,
Man is the Hunter
. For a moment he couldn’t remember the fellow’s name, but they had shared a bottle of Haig at a campfire in the Luangwa valley. Daniel remembered him as a blow-hard, with a reputation more as a hard drinker than a hard hunter. He had consumed more than his fair share of the Haig, Daniel recalled.
Stoffel
. The name came back to him with relief. He needed an ally and a protector now. The hunters of the safari companies were a class of minor aristocracy in the deep bush.

“Stoffel van der Merwe,” he cried.

Stoffel climbed down from the truck, big and beefy and grinning. Like most professional hunters in Zambia, he was an Afrikaner from South Africa. “Hell, man, it’s good to see you again.” He covered Daniel’s hand with a hairy paw. “They giving you any uphill here?”

“Well…” Daniel let it hang there, and Stoffel rounded on the police constable.

“Hey, Juno, this man is my friend. You treat him good, you hear me?”

The constable laughed agreement. It always amazed Daniel to watch how well Afrikaners and blacks got along on a personal level once politics were left out of it; perhaps it was because they were all of them Africans and understood each other. They had been living together for almost three hundred years, Daniel smiled to himself; by this time they damned well should. “You want your meat, don’t you?” Stoffel went on to tease the constable. “You give Doctor Armstrong here a hard time and no meat for you.”

The hunters had their regular routes to and from the hunting concessions in the remote bush, and they knew the guards manning the road-blocks by name. Between them they had set up a regular tariff of bonsela. “Hey!” Stoffel turned to shout at his trackers on top of the truck. “Give Juno here a leg of fat buffalo. Look how skinny He’s getting. We have to feed him up a bit.”

From under the tarpaulin cover they dragged out a haunch of buffalo, still in its thick black skin, dusty and buzzing with bluebottle flies. The hunters had access to unlimited supplies of game meat, legally hunted and shot by their clients. “These poor bastards are starved for protein,” Stoffel explained to his client as the American sportsman came to join them. “For a leg of buffalo he would sell you his wife; for two he would sell you his soul; for three he would probably sell you the whole bloody country. And any one of those. would be a bad bargain!” He roared with laughter and introduced his client to Daniel. “This is Steve Conrack from California.”

“I know you, of course,” the American interjected. “Great honour to meet you, Doctor Armstrong. I always watch your stuff on TV. Just by chance I’ve got a copy of your book with me. I’d love an autograph for my kids back home. They’re great fans of yours.”

Inwardly Daniel winced at the price of fame but when the client returned from the truck with a copy of one of his earlier books, he signed the fly-leaf.

“Where are you headed?” Stoffel asked. “Lusaka? Let me go ahead and run interference for you, otherwise anything could happen. It could take you a week or all eternity to get there.”

The police guard, still grinning, lifted the barrier and saluted them as they drove through. From there onwards their progress was a royal procession, with lumps of raw meat appearing regularly from under the tarpaulin. “Roses, roses all the way, and buffalo steaks strewn in our path like mad.” Daniel grinned to himself and put his foot down to keep up with the safari truck. They were driving through the fertile plains that were irrigated from the Kafue River. This was an area of sugar and maize and tobacco production and the farms were owned almost entirely by white Zambians. Prior to independence, the farmers had vied with each other to beautify their properties.

From the main road the white-painted homesteads had glistened, set like pearls in the green and lovingly tended home paddocks. The fences had been meticulously maintained and sleek cattle had grazed within view of the road.