A Time to Die, page 14
Riccardo Monterro sat down on the bed and his voice was suddenly very weary.
‘When did he tell you?’
‘Six weeks ago.’ She sat down beside him. ‘That is why I agreed to come to Africa with you. I didn’t want to be apart from you for one day of the time we have left. That is why I am coming with you into Mozambique.’
‘No.’ He shook his head, ‘I can’t let you.’
‘Then I will tell Sean that at any moment it may reach your brain.’
She did not have to elaborate. Andrews had been most graphic as he described the many possible directions the disease could take. If it went to the lungs, it would be death by suffocation, but if it affected the brain or nervous system, it would be either general paralysis or total derangement.
‘You wouldn’t,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘The last thing in my life that I really want. You wouldn’t deny it to me?’
‘Without a qualm,’ she repeated his own words. ‘If you refuse me my right to be with you for every one of these last days, and to be with you at the end as is the duty of a loving daughter.’
‘I can’t let you.’ He let his face sink into the cup of his hands, a gesture of defeat that hurt her, and it required all her resolve to keep her tone firm.
‘And I can’t let you die alone,’ she replied.
‘You don’t understand how much I want this thing, it’s the last thing in my life. The old bull and I will go together. You don’t understand, if you did you wouldn’t prevent me.’
‘I’m not preventing you,’ she said gently. ‘I want you to have it, if you will let me come with you.’ As she said it, they both became aware of a faint vibration in the air, and they looked up together.
‘The Beechcraft,’ Riccardo murmured, ‘Sean is on his way back to the airstrip.’ He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘He’ll be here within the hour.’
‘And what will you tell him?’ Claudia asked. ‘Will you tell him that I am coming with you?’
‘No!’ Sean let out a bellow. ‘No bloody fear! Forget the idea, Capo. She can’t come and that’s absolutely bloody final!’
‘For half a big M, I get to call the shots,’ Riccardo told him quietly. ‘I say she’s coming, so she’s coming.’
They were standing beside the Toyota. Riccardo and Claudia had met Sean as he drove into camp. Sean drew a breath and glared at father and daughter as they stood side by side confronting him. He saw that both their expressions were set and determined.
Sean had been on the point of bellowing again, but with an effort he checked himself. ‘Be reasonable, Capo.’ He moderated his tone. ‘You know it’s impossible.’
They stared at him grimly, closed against argument or reason.
‘It’s war out there. I can’t take her.’
‘Claudia comes with us.’
‘The hell she does.’
‘What are you making a fuss about, is it because I am a woman?’ Claudia spoke for the first time. ‘There is nothing a man can do that I can’t.’
‘Can you pee standing up?’ He wanted to disconcert her, make her lose her temper, but she ignored the crude jibe and went on as though he had not spoken.
‘You’ve seen me hike, I can stand the heat and the tsetse fly, I’m as good as my father.’
He turned from her deliberately and spoke to Riccardo.
‘As her father you can’t allow it. Can you imagine what would happen to her if she were caught by a gang of Renamo cutthroats?’
He saw Riccardo flinch, but Claudia had seen it also and before he could weaken, she took his hand and spoke up firmly.
‘Either I go, or nobody goes, and you can kiss your half a million good-bye, Colonel Sean Courtney.’
That was the key, the half-million dollars. She had him, and they both knew it. He couldn’t afford to pass it by, but he made one last effort.
‘Is she in charge around here, Capo? Do I take my orders from you or from her?’
‘That won’t work either.’ Claudia tried to keep her tone placatory, although she longed to tear into him with tooth and nail. That crude sally of his rankled. ‘My father and I are agreed on this. Both of us go, or we call the deal off. Isn’t that right, Papa?’
‘I’m afraid that’s it, Sean.’ Riccardo looked tired and discouraged. ‘It’s not negotiable. If you want your money, you take Claudia along with us.’
Sean turned on his heel and strode away towards his own tent, but after a few paces, he stopped and stood with his hands on his hips.
Sean’s shouts had attracted the camp servants, and they hovered around the mess tent and peered out of the doorway and windows of the kitchen hutments, apprehension mingled with curiosity.
‘What the hell are you all gawking at?’ Sean roared. ‘Have you got no work to do around here?’ And they disappeared with alacrity.
Sean turned and walked slowly back to where the two of them stood beside the Toyota.
‘Okay,’ he agreed, staring coldly at Claudia. ‘Cut your own throat, but don’t come to me for a bandage.’
‘I won’t, that’s a promise.’ Her voice was honey dripping, more irksome to him than straightforward gloating would have been, and they both knew that their declared truce was at an end.
‘We’ve got some paperwork to do, Capo.’ Sean led the way to the mess tent without looking back at them.
With two fingers, Sean typed out the indemnity statements on his old portable Remington, one for Riccardo and one for his daughter. Each began; ‘I acknowledge that I am fully aware of the danger and the illegality . . .’ Then he typed an acknowledgement of debt for Riccardo to sign and called Job and the chef to witness the signature. He sealed all the copies in an envelope addressed to Reema at the Harare office and locked it in the small steel safe at the back of the mess tent.
‘Let’s do it, then,’ he said.
The poaching expedition would consist of the three whites, Job, Matatu, Pumula and the stocky, bearded tracker who had picked up Tukutela’s spoor at the river-crossing. His name was Dedan.
‘It’s too many, but each of those tusks weighs 130 pounds,’ Sean explained. ‘Matatu is too small to act as a porter. We need four big men to bring them back.’
Before the equipment was loaded into the Toyota, Sean ordered it laid out, and he opened and checked each pack. Claudia protested when he opened her personal pack. ‘That is an invasion of my privacy!’
‘So take me to the supreme court, ducky,’ he challenged as he went through it remorselessly, throwing out most of the tubes and bottles of cosmetics, allowing her only three tubes of moisturizer and sunscreen.
‘One change of underwear,’ he ordered, discarding half a dozen pairs of panties. ‘But you’ll need two more pairs of thick socks. Get them.’
He pulled out her box of Tampax. ‘Everything a man can do, and then some,’ he remarked coldly. ‘You don’t need the box, it takes up too much space. Pack them loose.’ Her poorly suppressed fury gave him a sour pleasure.
By the time he had finished, they were down to the barest essentials, and the packs were carefully weighed and apportioned depending on the strength and physical condition of each bearer. Sean, Job, Pumula and Dedan carried sixty pounds each, Riccardo and Matatu forty, while Claudia was down to twenty-five pounds.
‘I can carry more,’ she protested. ‘Give me forty, the same as Matatu,’ Sean did not bother to answer her.
‘And what’s more, I eat half as much as any of you!’ But he had already turned away to supervise the loading of the Toyota.
There were still four hours of daylight remaining when they left Chiwewe camp, but Sean drove the first section very fast, jouncing them around in their seats. It was partly an expression of his objection to Claudia’s presence but mostly an urgent desire to be at the jump-off point before nightfall.
As he drove, he spoke in a tightly controlled voice. ‘Before we commence this guided tour of the Mozambiquan paradise of the proletariat, this shining gem of African socialism, will you bear with me while I give you a few facts and figures.’ Nobody protested, so he went on. ‘Until 1975 Mozambique was a Portuguese colony. For almost five hundred years it had been under Portuguese control and had been a reasonably happy and prosperous community of some fifteen million souls. The Portuguese, unlike the British or German colonists, had a relaxed attitude towards miscegenation and the result was a large mulatto population, and an official policy of “Assimilado” under which any person of colour, if he attained certain civilized standards, was considered to be white and enjoyed Portuguese nationality. It all worked very well, as indeed did most colonial administrations, especially those of the British.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Claudia demurely. ‘That’s limey propaganda.’
‘Limey?’ Sean smiled thinly. ‘Careful, your prejudice is showing, nonetheless your average Indian or African living today in a former British colony is a damned sight worse off now than he was then. Certainly that goes one hundred times more for your average black man living in Mozambique.’
‘At least they are free,’ Claudia cut in, and Sean laughed.
‘This is freedom? An economy managed under the well-known socialist principles of chaos and ruination which has resulted in a negative growth rate of up to ten per cent per annum for every year since the Portuguese withdrawal, a foreign debt amounting to double the gross national product, a total breakdown in the educational system, only five percent of children regularly attending a recognized school, one doctor per forty-five thousand persons, only one person in ten with access to purified drinking water, infant mortality at 340 per 1000 births. The only worse countries in the world are Afghanistan and Angola, but as you say, at least they are free. In America, where everybody eats three huge meals a day, freedom may be a big deal, but in Africa a full belly counts for a hell of a lot more.’
‘It can’t be as bad as that,’ she protested.
‘No,’ he agreed, ‘It’s a lot worse. I haven’t mentioned two other factors, the civil war and Aids. When the Portuguese were pushed out, they handed over to a dictator named Samora Machel and his Frelimo party. Machel was an avowed Marxist. He didn’t believe in the nonsense of elections, and his rule was directly responsible for the present condition of the country, and for the emergence of the National Mozambiquan Resistance or as it is known to its friends and admirers, Renamo. Nobody knows much about it, what its objectives are, who its leaders are, all we know is that it controls most of the country, especially the north, and that it is made up of a pretty ruthless bunch of characters.’
‘Renamo is a South African front organization, directed, supplied and controlled from Pretoria,’ Claudia helped him out. ‘Committed to the overthrow of sovereign government and the destabilization of the southern continent.’
‘Well done, ducky,’ Sean nodded approval. ‘You’ve been studying the wisdom and erudition of the Organization of African Unity and the non-aligned nations. You have even mastered their jargon. If only South Africa had the military and technological capability to commit half the skulduggery it is accused of, it would not be simply the most powerful country in Africa, it would be running the entire world.’
‘I keep forgetting you are one of them, which is silly of me. You don’t attempt to conceal your bigotry. The simple fact is that your government and apartheid are the scourge and the curse of Africa.’
‘Of course, we are responsible for everything, the Aids epidemic, the famines of Ethiopia and Angola and Mozambique, the breakdown of government in Uganda and Zambia, the corruption in Nigeria and Zaire, it’s all a dirty South African plot. We even killed Samora Machel, we fed vodka to the Russian crew of his Tupolev jet and with our incredibly sophisticated technology, lured them over the border. Machel hit one of our racist mountains with such force that his brains and major organs were instantly expelled from his body, nevertheless our apartheid doctors kept him alive long enough to torture state secrets out of him. That is the truth as determined by UNO and OAU.’
‘Shut up,’ said Riccardo Monterro. ‘I’ve had enough. Shut up, both of you.’
‘Sorry,’ Sean grinned at him. ‘I get carried away. I just wanted to let you know what to expect when we cross the border. We can just hope that we aren’t going to meet any of the lads from either Frelimo or Renamo, there is not a lot to choose between them. They both shoot the same bullets.’
The thought made the back of his own neck prickle, and he felt his mood lighten. He was going into mortal danger again, and the thrill of it began. Somehow having the girl with him no longer irked but rather heightened that anticipation, and he felt his resentment of her begin to fade. He was glad she was here rather than jetting back to Alaska. Sean drove on in a silence that gripped them all, even the men standing braced against the roll-bar in the back of the Toyota. The closer they came to the border, the deeper the silence became.
At last Sean turned and looked over his shoulder, and Job nodded in agreement.
‘This is it, ladies and gentlemen,’ Sean said quietly. ‘All change!’ He let the Toyota trundle to a halt where the track crossed a stony ridge.
‘Where are we?’ Riccardo asked.
‘As close as we can safely get to the border, about three miles. From here, it’s shanks’ pony.’
Riccardo swung one leg out of the truck, but Sean said sharply, ‘Hold it, Capo, step onto that slab of rock, leave no tracks.’
One at a time, each carrying their own pack, they alighted from the truck, at Sean’s instruction stepping precisely in the footsteps of the person in front. Matatu was the last off, and he came backwards brushing over the sign with a switch of dried grass, wiping out every trace of their departure from the truck.
The chef had come with them to drive the truck back to the camp.
‘Go in peace, Mambo!’ he called to Sean as he pulled away.
‘Fat hope,’ Sean laughed, and sent him off with a wave. Then to Job, ‘Anti-tracking, let’s go!’
Neither Riccardo nor Claudia had ever watched anti-tracking procedure, for while hunting they had always run free in pursuit. The formation for anti-tracking was Indian file, Job leading and everyone else stepping in his footprints. Behind them all, Matatu, the old maestro, was covering the sign, replacing a pebble lichen-side up, stroking a blade of grass into its original position, flicking at the earth with his grass switch, picking up a leaf dislodged from a low-hanging branch or the bruised blade of grass on which a foot had trodden.
Job avoided the game paths and soft ground, choosing always the line of march which was most obscure and yet moving surprisingly fast, so that within half an hour, Claudia felt the chill of fresh sweat between her shoulder-blades and at the cleavage of her shirt-front.
Job led them to the top of a low kopje, and Sean motioned them to conceal themselves below the skyline with the sunset behind them.
Watching them work, Riccardo remarked softly, ‘Pumula and Dedan seem to know what they are doing.’ The two of them had moved out to guard the flanks without being ordered to do so.
‘Yes,’ Sean settled down between him and Claudia, using the same low bush for cover. ‘They were both non-coms in the Scouts, they’ve done this before.’
‘Why are we stopping here?’ Claudia asked.
‘We are sitting on the border,’ Sean explained, ‘and we’ll spend the last of the daylight studying the ground ahead. As soon as the moon comes up, we’ll move in. You can relax until then.’
He lifted his Zeiss binoculars and stared through them; a few yards away Job lay on his belly and focused his own pair of binoculars in the same direction. They lowered the binoculars from time to time to blink their vision clear or polish an imaginary speck from the lens. Claudia had noticed how they protected and looked after these most essential tools of their craft, but apart from that, their concentration on the terrain ahead was absolute, and ended only when the last gleam of the sunset faded. Then Sean buttoned the binoculars into his top pocket and turned to her.
‘Time for your make-up,’ he said. For a moment she did not understand and then she felt the greasy touch of camouflage cream on her cheek and instinctively pulled away.
‘Hold still,’ he snapped. ‘Your white face shines like a mirror. It’s good for insects and sunburn also.’
He daubed her face and the backs of her hands.
‘Here comes the moon.’ Sean finished working on his own camouflage and screwed the top back on the tube of cream. ‘We can go in now.’
Sean changed the formation once again, putting out flankers. Job and Pumula, while he led the centre and, once again, Matatu brought up the rear, diligently sweeping their tracks.
Once Sean stopped and checked Claudia’s equipment. A loose buckle on her pack had been tapping regularly in time with her stride, a noise so small that she had not noticed it.
‘You sound like the charge of the Light Brigade,’ he breathed in her ear, as he adjusted it.
‘Arrogant bastard,’ she thought, and they went on in silence, an hour and then another hour without pausing. She never knew the exact moment when she crossed the border. The moonlight through the forest was silvery, and the shadows of the trees flickered over Sean’s broad shoulders ahead of her.
Gradually the silence and the moonlight gave the march a dream-like unreality, and she found herself mesmerized by it, her movements were like those of a sleep-walker, so that when Sean stopped abruptly she bumped into him and might have fallen had he not whipped a hard muscular arm Around her and held her.
They stood frozen, listening, staring into the dark forest. After almost five minutes Claudia moved slightly to free herself from his arm, but instantly his grip tightened and she submitted to it. Out on the right flank. Job gave a bird call, and noiselessly Sean sank to the ground drawing her down with him, and her nerves strained tighter as she realized that there must be real danger out there. Now his arm no longer annoyed her. Instinctively she relaxed and pressed a little closer to him. It felt good.
Another soft bird call from the darkness, and Sean put his lips to her ear.
