A Time to Die, page 23
‘She loves you,’ he had said, and the rest trailed away unintelligibly. ‘She loves you.’ The meaningless words of a dying man, the wanderings of a diseased brain. Riccardo could have been harking back to any one of the hundreds of women who had filled his life.
Sean lifted his hand out of the water. It was clean, the blood washed away.
‘She loves you.’ He could have been trying to tell Sean of one particular woman.
Sean looked up from his wet hand and stared ahead. Her memory had been with him these last few days, always there in the recesses of his conscience yet coming to the fore at unexpected moments. Often while thinking of the great elephant, he had suddenly smiled at something she had said. This morning during the final stages of the hunt he had reached outboard from the canoe, and picked the bloom of a water lily. He had held it to his face and smelled the perfume, felt the silky touch of the petals on his lip and thought of Claudia Monterro.
Now he stared ahead and for the first time admitted to himself how much he looked forward to seeing her again. It seemed that she was all that could cancel out his grief for her father. He thought about the sound of her voice and the way she held her head when she was about to challenge him. He smiled at the bright specks of anger he could so readily kindle in her eyes, and the way she pursed her lips when she was trying to prevent herself laughing at one of his own digs.
He thought about the way she walked, and the way she felt when he had carried her in his arms, and he remembered the texture of her skin like the petals of the water lily when he touched her under pretext of helping or guiding her.
‘We are absolutely and completely wrong for each other,’ he smiled, and the melancholy of a few moments previously loosened its grip. ‘If Capo was talking about her, then he had definitely gone completely round the bend.’ But his anticipation was honed to a sharper edge.
He looked up at the sky. The sun had set. It would be dark in a short while. Even as he watched, Venus as the evening star appeared with a miraculous suddenness and twinkled low down in the west. One after another, the fixed stars followed her entrance, popping through the darkening canopy of night in strict order of their magnitude.
Sean looked up at the stars and he thought of Claudia, and he wondered why she evoked such contrary feelings in him. He compared her to some of the other women he had known, and realized how shallow and fleeting those experiences had been. Even his marriage had been inconsequential, a wild impulse based on simple-minded lust. It had been swiftly consummated, satiated and terminated, a disastrous mistake which he had never repeated. He could only vaguely remember what the woman who had been his wife looked like now.
He thought about Claudia and realized with a small shock that her image was so clear in his mind that he could almost count the individual lashes around those big honey-brown eyes, and the tiny laughter lines at the corners of her mouth. Suddenly he very much wanted to be with her again, and as he acknowledged that fact he began to worry.
‘I must have been crazy to leave her alone,’ he thought, and as he stared ahead into the dark swamps a multitude of horrid chances that might have befallen her began to plague him.
‘Job is with her,’ he tried to console himself. ‘But I should have stayed to care for her and sent Job with Capo.’ Even though he realized that had been impossible, still he fretted.
He felt the canoe check under him as Pumula rested on his pole, hinting at permission to stop for the night.
‘I’ll take her for a while,’ Sean said. ‘We’ll keep going until we get back to the village.’
While Pumula and Matatu curled up in the bilges, Sean stood in the stern and swayed to the monotonous thrust and reach of the punt pole. He steered by the cross and the pointers, reckoning true south at the intersection of their extended centre lines.
The papyrus stems hissed softly against the hull in strict rhythm to his thrusts, and soon the work became so repetitive and automatic that he could let his mind wander, and all those wanderings seemed to return in the end to Claudia Monterro at the centre.
He thought about her bereavement, how although she had been expecting it, yet it would still devastate her. He composed the words he would use to tell her and then to comfort her. She knew of his own feelings for her father, and the companionship that they had shared in the hunting veld. She knew of their mutual regard for each other.
‘I am the right person to help her through the first sorrow. I knew him so well. I will help her to remember all that was good about him.’
He should have dreaded bearing the sad tidings, but instead he found himself looking forward to taking the role of her comforter and protector.
‘Perhaps we will be able to drop the postures of antagonism that we have both forced upon ourselves. Instead of accentuating our differences, perhaps we’ll be able to explore what we have in common.’ He found himself lengthening and quickening his stroke with the punt pole and he had to force himself to slow down.
‘You won’t last the night at that pace,’ he thought, but his eagerness to be with her kept him going long after fatigue demanded a halt.
Hour after hour he kept it up, until Pumula woke of his own accord and came to spell him, but Sean slept fitfully and was back in the stern as the coming of day turned the eastern sky to a murky ruby and then to pale lemon, and the water fowl flighted overhead, their wings whistling softly as they stabbed at the dawn.
Two hours later, Sean sent Matatu up the punt pole and he had not reached the top before he pointed gleefully ahead. However, it was early afternoon before the prow of the canoe knifed through the last dense stand of papyrus and ran ashore on the sand below the burnt village.
Sean leapt onto dry land and strode through the ruins of the village, trying not to break into a run.
‘Job should have kept a better watch,’ he thought angrily. ‘If we can arrive unseen . . .’ he did not finish the thought. Just ahead was the thicket in which they had built Claudia’s shelter, and Sean stopped abruptly.
It was too quiet. His sixth sense of danger warned him. Something was wrong. He went down fast and hard, falling flat and rolling quickly into cover with the .577 held in front of him.
He lay and listened. The silence was a physical weight. He wet his lips and imitated the clucking sound of a francolin, one of the Scouts’ assembly calls that Job would recognize. There was no reply. He went forward at a leopard crawl, and then stopped again. Something sparkled in the short grass just in front of his face. He picked it up and felt his stomach chill.
It was the empty brass case of a 7.62mm cartridge, and it was head-stamped in Cyrillic script, Soviet military issue for firing in the AK assault rifle. Sean held it to his nose, and smelt the burnt powder. It had been fired very recently. He glanced around him quickly and saw other empty shells lying in the grass, evidence of a fierce fire-fight.
He rolled to his feet and was running, jinking and twisting as he sprinted towards the thicket to throw off the aim of a hidden gunman.
As he reached the edge of the thicket, he dropped to earth again, flicking over as he hit the ground. Immediately, he saw the corpse, it lay face down under a low thorn bush only a few yards ahead. It was a black man. The body had been stripped of clothing and boots.
‘Job!’ The name ripped from his throat. He crawled forward, until he lay side by side with the body. A single bullet had ploughed out of the man’s back, and the flies crawled over the wound. The blood had dried to a black crust and he smelt the whiff of corruption.
‘Dead twenty-four hours,’ he estimated, and rose to his knees. No further need for caution now. Gently he lifted the dead head. The corpse’s neck was stiff with rigor mortis and he grunted with vast relief and let the head drop with a thud. The man was a stranger.
‘Job!’ he called. ‘Claudia!’ It was a despairing cry, and he ran forward to the lean-to in which he had left her. It was deserted.
‘Job!’ He looked around him wildly. ‘Claudia!’
There was another naked black body lying at the edge of the clearing, and he ran to it. It was another stranger, a skinny little runt of a man with the top shot off his skull. He was also starting to stink, his belly blowing up like a shiny black balloon.
‘Two of the bastards,’ Sean said bitterly. ‘Nice shooting, Job.’
Matatu had followed Sean and was checking the lean-to. He left it and began to work out in circles, darting back and forth like a gun dog quartering for a sitting grouse. Sean and Pumula stood and watched him, not joining his search so that they would not trample the sign.
Within minutes Matatu scurried back.
‘They are the same shifta who followed us before. There are fifteen of them, they surrounded the hut and came in at a rush. Job shot these two with the 30/06 banduki.’ He offered Sean the empty cartridge cases. ‘There was much struggling, but they took them.’
‘The memsahib?’ Sean dreaded the reply.
‘Ndio,’ Matatu replied in Swahili. ‘Yes, they took her also. She is still limping, but they led her away, one on each side. She was fighting them all the way. Job was hurt, and so was Dedan. Perhaps they were beaten, and I think their arms are bound. They walk unsteadily.’ Matatu pointed towards the corpses. ‘They stripped their dead of uniforms and boots and banduki and then went back.’ He pointed along the isthmus.
‘When?’ Sean asked.
‘Yesterday, early. Perhaps they rushed the camp at dawn.’
Sean nodded grimly, but inside he cried, ‘Claudia, oh God, if they touch you, I’ll rip their guts out.’
‘Hot pursuit,’ he said aloud. ‘Let’s go!’
Pumula ran back to grab the equipment and water-bottles from the canoe, and Sean was still shrugging into the shoulder-straps of his pack when he started to run. The near exhaustion of the long night of poling the canoe faded away. He felt strong and angry and indefatigable.
Within the first mile, they settled into the pursuit pace of a Scout raiding party. The spoor was still cold and Sean dispensed with any precautions against ambush. He relied entirely on Matatu to pick up any sign of a booby trap or anti-personnel mine that might have been laid on the tracks to hinder pursuit, but apart from that they went in single file at a speed not much below that of an Olympic marathon.
Claudia’s image seemed to dance ahead of Sean and winged his feet.
Fifteen of them, Matatu had said, and they would be tempted by Claudia’s sweet white body. There were no signs yet that they had stopped to have sport with her. He accepted without reservation Matatu’s interpretation that they had crept up on the camp in the dawn, and taken it at a rush, willing to accept casualties without inflicting them. It seemed that they had wanted prisoners rather than kills. Other than a few blows with a rifle butt, it looked as though both Dedan and Job had come through it unscathed, but it was Claudia who had his full concern.
They were forcing her to march on her injured leg. That would only aggravate the knee, and perhaps cause permanent damage. If she slowed them down too much, they would start to become impatient and threatening. It all depended on just how much they needed a white prisoner as a hostage, probably as a bargaining chip with western governments. It depended on who they were, Frelimo or Renamo or free-lance bandits, it depended on how much control there was over them, on who commanded them, and how strong was his authority, but any way he considered it, Sean knew that Claudia was in terrible danger.
Did they realize that there was a pursuit? They must have read the sign going into the village and known that three men – no, four with Capo – were missing from the original party. The answer was, yes. They probably anticipated a pursuit by this group. That would make them nervous and excitable.
Claudia would be no great advocate for her own safety. He could just imagine her arguing with them, demanding her human and legal rights, refusing to follow their orders. Despite his concern, he grinned without humour, as he thought about it. They probably believed they had caught a pussy-cat, but they would soon realize that they had instead a full-grown female tiger on their hands.
His grin faded. He was certain she would deal with them in precisely the fashion best designed to antagonize them and jeopardize her chances of survival. If the leader of the group was a weak man, she would push him to the point where he had to demonstrate his authority to his own men. African society was patriarchal and he would resent a woman who refused to bow to his will. If they were the same group that had wiped out the village they had amply demonstrated their brutality.
‘Just for once, ducky, button those lovely lips of yours,’ he pleaded with her silently.
Ahead of him, Matatu checked his run and made a sweeping gesture, and Sean pulled up.
‘Here they rested.’ Matatu pointed to where the group had sat in the shade of a grove of young mopane.
There were the crushed butts of black cigarettes in the dust, and Matatu pointed to the raw white slashes on the mopane from which branches had been chopped. The smaller twigs had been trimmed from them and discarded. The leaves on these were already wilted, confirming Matatu’s estimate of time, yesterday morning.
The cutting of branches puzzled Sean for a moment and then Matatu explained. ‘They have built a mushela for the mem.’ And Sean nodded with relief. Claudia on her injured leg had been holding up the march, but rather than ridding themselves of her through the simple expedient of a bullet in the back of the head, they had built a litter of mopane poles on which to carry her. That was a welcome development, and it changed Sean’s estimate of Claudia’s chance of survival. They had placed a higher value on her than Sean had dreaded they might.
However, the most crucial period would have come yesterday evening when they decided to camp for the night. Her captors would have had a full day to study her, to ogle her body and puff up their imagination and their courage. Sean found he could not bear to face the possibility of what might have happened to her if the leader had lost control of his men.
‘Come on, Matatu,’ he growled. ‘You are wasting time.’ If it had happened at all, it would have happened last night. He was already too late but still every second of delay galled him.
The spoor led them back up the isthmus retracing their own route across the dry flood plains heading towards the south. The trail was broad and easy to follow, fifteen men and their captives making no attempt at anti-tracking. Matatu read the spoor and reported that they were forcing Dedan and Job to carry the litter with Claudia on it, and Sean was happy that the two of them were able to do so. Whatever injuries they had sustained in the attack must have been superficial, and he could be certain that Job would employ every ruse to slow down the march, and allow them to catch up.
Even as he thought it, Matatu exclaimed and pointed to the marks in the soft earth where Job had dropped his end of the litter and sprawled theatrically on his hands and knees, only crawling up after he had been surrounded and hectored by his captors.
‘Good man,’ Sean grunted without checking his stride. ‘But don’t push them too far.’ It was a delicate game Job was playing.
At pursuit speed they were overhauling the clumsy and slow-moving group so rapidly that Sean was beginning to hope they might catch up with them before nightfall.
‘That’s going to be interesting,’ he decided. ‘Three of us with only the .577 against fifteen thugs armed with AKs.’
So far they had found no booby traps set for them. It was usually terr tactics to mine their own spoor and Sean pondered their failure to do so. These could be untrained bandits, or they might lack the light plastic anti-personnel mines, or they could be unaware of the pursuit or, worst thought, they could be planning some surprises later.
‘We’ll deal with that one also when we come to it.’
Matatu pulled up again. ‘They cooked here last night.’ He pointed to the remains of a camp-fire, and there were the marks where they had sat while they rested and ate. A few black safari ants were scurrying about the site foraging for the scraps of food that they had spilled and there were more cigarette butts.
‘Search,’ Sean ordered. ‘Job will have tried to get a message to us.’ While Matatu and Pumula went over the area carefully but quickly, Sean glanced at his watch: 1600 hours, they had been going just over three hours, they still had plenty of daylight and a good chance to catch them before dark.
‘Here is where they put the mem’s litter.’ Matatu pointed out the marks in the earth. ‘Here she stood.’
Sean studied her footprints, smaller, neater and narrower than the boot prints of her captors. When she walked she had favoured her leg, dragging the toe.
‘Did you find anything?’ he demanded roughly. ‘Did Job leave a message?’
‘Nothing.’ Matatu shook his head.
‘All right. We’ll drink now,’ he ordered, and handed out salt tablets from his pack. He didn’t have to caution them to self-control. Three swallows each from the bottles, and then they screwed the stoppers tightly closed. They had paused for less than five minutes.
‘Let’s go,’ said Sean.
An hour later, they found where the raiders had slept that night. The fact that they had moved on after eating and not slept beside their cooking-fire told Sean that they were trained troops.
‘Search again,’ Sean ordered. Any information that Job could have left for them would be valuable.
‘Nothing,’ Matatu reported back a few minutes later, and Sean felt a prick of disappointment.
‘All right. Keep going,’ he ordered, and was about to turn away when something made him pause and he glanced around the camp-site.
‘Where did the memsahib sleep?’ he demanded.
‘There.’ Matatu pointed. Somebody, probably Job, had cut an armful of leaves and grass for her mattress. Her body had flattened the pile. Sean squatted beside it, and carefully sifted through it, searching for any clues.
There was nothing. He lifted away the last few leaves and was beginning to rise to his feet. He was disappointed, the feeling that she had left something for him had been very powerful.
