Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (143 page)

“I will pay you a great deal for the teeth of this elephant,” Chetti Singh whispered seductively, but Pirri shook his head firmly.

“Offer him a thousand dollars,” Cheng said in English, but Chetti Singh frowned at him.

“Leave this to me, he cautioned. We don’t want to ruin the trade with impatience.” He turned back to Pirri and said in Swahili, “I will give you ten bolts of pretty cloth which the women love, and fifty handfuls of glass beads, enough to make a thousand virgins spread their thighs for you.”

Pirri shook his head. “It is the sacred heartland,” he said. “The Mother and the Father will be angry if I hunt there.”

“In addition to the cloth and beads, I will give you twenty iron axe-heads and ten fine knives with blades as long as your hand.” Pirri wriggled his whole body like a puppy.

“It is against law and custom. My tribe will hate me and drive me out.”

“I will give you twenty bottles of gin,” Chetti Singh said. “And as much tobacco as you can lift from the ground.” Pirri massaged his crotch frantically and rolled his eyes.

“As much tobacco as I can carry!” His voice was hoarse. “I cannot do it. They will call out the Molimo. They will bring down the curse of the Mother and Father.”

“And I will give you a hundred silver Maria Theresa dollars.” Chetti Singh reached into the pocket of his bush jacket and brought out a handful of silver coins. He juggled them in one hand, jingling them together and making them sparkle in the sunlight.

For a long moment Pirri stared at them hungrily. Then he let out a shrill yelp and sprang in the air and drew his machete.

Chetti Singh and Cheng stepped back nervously, expecting him to attack them, but instead, Pirri whirled and, with the blade held high above his head, rushed at the wall of the forest and swung a hissing stroke at the first bush. Shouting with anger and temptation, he hacked and slashed at the forest growth. Leaves and twigs flew, and branches were sliced through. Slabs of bark and white wood rained down from the bleeding trunks under his onslaught.

At last Pirri stopped and rested on his blade, his muscular chest heaving, sweat pouring down his face and dripping into his beard, sobbing with exertion and self-loathing. Then he straightened up and came back to where Chetti Singh stood and said, “I will kill this elephant for you, and bring you his teeth. then you will give me all those things you promised me, not forgetting the tobacco.”

Chetti Singh drove the Landrover back along the rudimentary forest track. it took almost an hour for them to reach the main corduroy roadway on which the convict gangs were working, and over which the great ore-carriers and the logging trucks rumbled and roared.

As they left the overgrown logging track and joined the heavy flow of traffic towards Sengi-Sengi, Chetti Singh turned to grin at the man beside him. “That takes care of the gift for your father. Now we must apply all our ingenuity and brains to a little gift for me, the head of Doctor Daniel Armstrong on a silver platter, with an apple in his mouth.”

Chapter 31

Daniel had been waiting for this moment, praying for it. He was high on the command deck of the MOMU and it was raining. The air was blue and thick with falling rain, and visibility was down to fifty feet or less. Bonny was sheltering in the command cabin at the end of the platform, keeping her precious video equipment out of the rain. The two Hita guards had gone down to the lower deck and for a moment Daniel was alone on the upper deck.

Daniel had become hardened to the rain. Since arriving at Sengi-Sengi he seemed always to be wearing wet clothing. He was standing now in the angle of the steel wall of the command cabin and the flying bridge, only partially shielded from the driving rain. Every now and then a harder gust would throw heavy drops into his face and force him to slit his eyes.

Suddenly the door to the command cabin opened and Ning Cheng Gong came out on to the flying bridge. He had not seen Daniel and he crossed to the forward rail under cover of the canvas sun awning and leaned on the rail, peering down at the great shining excavator blades that were tearing into the earth seventy feet below his perch.

It was Daniel’s moment. For the first time they were alone and Cheng was vulnerable. “This one is for Johnny,” he whispered, and crossed the steel plates of the bridge on silent rubber soles. He came up behind Cheng. All he had to do was stoop and seize his ankles. A quick lift and shove, and Cheng would be hurled over the rail and dropped into the deadly blades. It would be instantaneous and the chopped and dismembered corpse would be fed into the tube mills and pounded to paste and mixed with hundreds of tons of powdered earth.

Daniel reached out to do it, but before he could touch him he hesitated involuntarily, suddenly appalled at what he was about to do. It was cold-blooded, calculated murder. He had killed before as a soldier, but never like this, and for a moment he was sick with self-loathing. “For Johnny,” he tried to convince himself, but it was too late.

Cheng whirled to face him. He was quick as a mongoose confronted by a cobra. His hands came up, the stiff-fingered blades of the martial arts expert, and his eyes were dark and ferocious as he stared into Daniel’s face.

For a moment they were poised on the edge of violence, then Cheng whispered, “You missed your chance, Doctor. There will not be another.”

Daniel backed away. He had let Johnny down with such weakness. In the old days it would not have happened. He would have taken Cheng out swiftly and competently and rejoiced at the kill. Now the Taiwanese was alerted and even more dangerous.

Daniel turned away, sickened by his failure, and then he started. One of the Hita guards had come up the steel ladder silently as a leopard. He was leaning against the rear rail of the bridge with his maroon beret cocked over one eye and the Uzi submachine-gun on his hip pointed at Daniel’s belly. He had been watching it all.

That night Daniel lay awake until after midnight, unnerved by the narrowness of his escape and sickened by the savage streak in himself that allowed him to pursue such a brutal vengeance. Yet even this attack of conscience did not shake his determination to act as the vehicle of justice and in the morning he awoke to find his lust for revenge undiminished, and only his temper and his nerves shaky and uncertain. This led directly to his final bust-up with Bonny Mahon.

It began when she was late to start the day’s assignment, and kept him waiting in the teeming rain for almost forty minutes before she finally sauntered out to meet him. “When I said five o’clock, I didn’t mean in the afternoon,” he snarled at her, and she grinned at him, all rosy and smug.

“What do you want me to do, commit hara-kiri, Master?” she asked.

He was about to let fly a verbal broadside, when he realised that she must have come directly from Taffari’s bed without bathing, for he caught a whiff of the musky odour of their lovemaking on her, and had to turn away. He felt so furious that he could not trust himself not to strike her. “For Chrissake, Armstrong, get a hold on yourself,” he cautioned himself silently, “you’re going to pieces.”

They worked in brittle antagonism for the rest of the morning, filming the bulldozers and chainsaws as they cleared the mining track for the monstrous MOMU to waddle down.

It was heavy going in the mud and rain, and dangerous with falling tree trunks and powerful machinery working all around them. This did nothing to improve his mood but Daniel managed to keep a check on his tongue until just before noon when Bonny announced that she had run out of tape and had to break off to return to the main camp to fetch new stock from the cold rooms.

“What kind of half-baked cameraman runs out of stock in the middle of a shoot?” Daniel wanted to know, and she rounded on him.

“I know what’s eating you up, lover boy. It’s not shortage of film, it’s shortage of good rich fruitcake. You hate me for what Ephrem is getting and you’re not. It’s the old green-eyed monster.”

“You’ve got an inflated idea of the value of what you sit on,” Daniel came back as angrily.

It escalated rapidly from there until Bonny yelled into his face, “Nobody talks to me like that, Buster. You can stick your job and your insults up your left earhole, or in any other convenient orifice.” And she sloshed and slipped in the red mud back to where the Landrover was parked.

“Leave the camera in the Landrover,” Daniel shouted after her. It was all hired video equipment. “You’ve got your return ticket to London and I’ll send you a cheque for what I owe you. You’re fired.”

“No, I’m not, lover boy. You’re way too late. I resigned! And don’t you forget it.” She slammed the door of the Landrover and raced the engine. All four wheels spinning wildly and throwing up sheets and clods of red mud, Bonny tore up the track and left him glaring after her. His bad temper increased as he belatedly thought of a dozen other clever retorts that he should have thrown at her while he had the chance.

Bonny was as angry, but her mood was longer-lasting and more vindictive. She racked her imagination for the cruellest revenge she could conjure up, and just before she reached the main camp at Sengi-Sengi it came to her in a creative flash. “You are going to regret every single lousy thing you said to me, Danny boy,” she promised aloud, grinning mercilessly. “You aren’t going to shoot another tape in Ubomo, not you, nor any other cameraman that you hire to replace me. I’m going to make damned double sure of that.”

Chapter 32

His body was long and supple. In the dim light beneath the mosquito-net his skin shone like washed coal, still damp with the sweat of love. Ephrem Taffari lay on his back on the rumpled white sheet and she thought he was probably the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

Slowly she lowered her head and laid her cheek against his naked chest. It was smooth and hairless, and his dark skin felt cool. She blew softly on his nipple and watched it pucker and harden in response. She smiled. She felt aglow with well-being. He was a wonderful lover, better than any white man she had ever had.

There had never been anyone else like him. She wanted to do something for him. “There is something I must tell you, she whispered against his chest, and with one lazy hand he stroked the thick glistening coppery bush of hair back off her face.”

“What is it?” he asked, is voice so and deep and replete, almost uninterested.

She knew she would have his complete attention again with her next statement, and she delayed the moment. It was too sweet to waste. She wanted to draw every last possible enjoyment from it. it was double pleasure, her revenge on Daniel Armstrong and her offering to Ephrem Taffari which would prove to him her loyalty and her worth.

“What is it?” he repeated. He took a handful of her hair and twisted it just hard enough to hurt. He was a master in inflicting pain, and her breath caught with masochistic pleasure.

“I’m telling you this to show you how completely I am yours, how much I love you,” she whispered. “After tonight you’ll never be able to doubt where my loyalties lie.”

He chuckled and shook her head gently from side to side, his fingers still locked in her hair, still hurting exquisitely. “Let me judge that, my little red lily. Tell me this terrible thing.”

“It is a terrible thing, Ephrem. On the instructions of Daniel Armstrong I filmed the forced removal of the villagers from Fish Eagle Bay to make way for the new casino.”

Ephrem Taffari stopped breathing. For twenty beats of his heart under her ear he held his breath. Then he let it out softly, and his pulse rate was slightly elevated as he said quietly, “I don’t know what you arc talking about. Explain this to me.”

“Daniel and I were on top of the cliff when the soldiers came to the village. Daniel ordered me to film them.”

“What did you see?”

“We saw them bulldoze the village and burn the boats. We saw them load the people into the trucks and take them away.” She hesitated.

“Go on,” he ordered. “What else did you see?”

“We saw them kill two people. They clubbed an old man to death and they shot another when he tried to escape. They threw their bodies on the fire.”

“You filmed all that?” Ephrem asked, and there was something in his tone that made her suddenly uncertain and afraid.

“Daniel forced me to film it.”

“I do not know anything about these events, this atrocity. I gave no orders,” he said, and with a surge of relief she believed him.

“I was sure you didn’t know about it.”

“I must see this film. It is evidence against those who perpetrated this atrocity. Where is the film?”

“I gave it to Daniel.”

“What did he do with it?” Ephrem demanded, and now his voice was terrible.

“He said that he had lodged it with the British Embassy in Kahali. The ambassador, Sir Michael Hargreave, is an old friend of his.”

“Did he show the film to the ambassador?” Ephrem wanted to know.

“I don’t think so. He said that it was dynamite, that he wouldn’t use it until the time was ripe.”

“You and Armstrong are-the only ones who know about it, who know that the film exists?”

She hadn’t thought of it that way, and now it gave her an uneasy feeling. “Yes, I suppose so. Unless Daniel has told anybody. I haven’t.”

“Good.” Ephrem released her hair and stroked her cheek. “You are a good girl. I am grateful to you. You have proved your friendship to me.”

“It is more than friendship, Ephrem. I have never felt about another man the way I feel for you.”

“I know, he whispered,” and lifted her head and kissed her on the lips. “You are a wonderful woman. My own feelings for you grow stronger all the time.” Gratefully she pressed her own full body to his sleek feline length. “We must get that film back from Sir Michael. It could do untold damage to this country and to me as the president.”

“I should have told you sooner,” she said. “But only now I realise how much I love you.”

“It is still not too late,” he assured her. “I will speak to Armstrong in the morning. I will give him my word that the guilty persons will be brought to justice. He must give me the film to be used in evidence.”