A Time to Die, page 54
Job settled his fingers carefully around the butt of the Tokarev. He lifted it and was surprised by the effort it required. He placed his thumb upon the slide of the safety-catch, and it would not budge. He felt panic rising in him. His hand was too weak and numb to move the slide forward into the firing position.
‘I do not promise you “fair chase”, Colonel. I will hunt you in my own African way, but it will be good sport. I promise you that at least.’
Job exerted all his strength and felt the slide of the safety-catch begin to move under his thumb.
‘The time is now 1800 hours Zulu. I will call you on this frequency at the same time tomorrow, Colonel. That is if we have not already met. Until then watch the sky, Colonel Courtney, look behind you. You do not know from which direction I will come. But be sure, I will come!’
There was a faint click as China unkeyed his microphone and Sean reached over and switched off the radio set to conserve the battery. None of them spoke or moved, until another sharper metallic click broke the silence. To Sean the sound was unmistakable, the sound of a safety-catch being disengaged, and he reacted instinctively, pushing Claudia flat and whirling round to face it.
For a moment, he was paralysed and then he screamed, ‘No! Job, for Christ’s sake! No!!’ and hurled himself forward, like a sprinter from the blocks.
Job was lying on his side facing Sean, but well beyond his reach. Sean drove himself across the space that separated them, but he seemed to be wading through honey, sticky and slow, it impeded his movements. He watched Job raise the pistol, and he tried to prevent him by the force of his gaze. They were looking into each other’s eyes, Sean trying to dominate and command him, but Job’s eyes were sad, filled with a deep regret and yet unwavering.
Sean saw him open his lips and heard the muzzle of the pistol click against his teeth as Job thrust it deeply into his own mouth and closed his lips around the muzzle, like a child sucking a frozen lollipop. Sean reached out desperately, straining with all his strength to reach Job’s pistol hand and rip the stubby black barrel out of his mouth. His fingertips had only touched Job’s wrist when the pistol fired.
The sound was muffled, damped down by the flesh and bone of Job’s skull.
In his extremity of effort, Sean’s vision was enhanced to unnatural clarity and it seemed that time had been suspended so that everything happened very slowly, like a movie reel run at half speed.
Job’s head altered shape, it swelled before Sean’s eyes, like a rubber hallowe’en mask filled with high-pressure gas. His eyelids flew wide open and for an instant his eyeballs bulged from their sockets exposing a wide rim of white around their dark iris and then rolling upwards into his skull.
His shattered head changed shape again, elongating backwards, stretching his skin tightly over his cheekbones, and flattening his nostrils as the bullet drew the contents of his skull out through the back of his head, whiplashing his neck to its full stretch so that even in the aftermath of the shot, Sean heard the vertebrae creak and click.
Job was jerked backwards, his arm flung away from his head in a debonair salute with the Tokarev pistol still gripped in his clenched list, but Sean was quick enough to catch him before his mutilated head hit the hard earth.
He caught Job in his arms and held him to his chest with all his strength. His body was heavy and hot with fever, but slack and plastic as though it contained no bone. It seemed to overflow Sean’s enfolding arms, and he held him hard. He felt Job’s muscles shiver and shudder, and his legs kicked in a macabre little jigging movement and he tried to hold him still.
‘Job,’ he whispered, and reached up behind him and cupped his hand over the back of his head, covering the terrible exit wound, as though he were trying to hold it together, to press the spilled contents back into the ruptured skull.
‘You fool,’ he whispered. ‘You shouldn’t have done it.’ He laid his own cheek against Job’s, and held him like a lover.
‘We would have made it. I would have got you out.’ Still hugging Job’s quiescent body, he began to rock him gently, murmuring to him softly, pressing his cheek to Job’s, his eyes closed tightly.
‘We have come so far together, it wasn’t fair to end it here.’
Claudia came to them and went down on one knee beside Sean. She reached out to touch his shoulder and searched desperately for something to say, but there were no words, and she stopped her hand before she touched him. Sean was oblivious of her and everything else around him.
His grief was so terrible to see that she felt she should not watch it. It was too private, too vulnerable, and yet she could not tear her eyes from his face. Her own feelings were overshadowed entirely by the magnitude of Sean’s sorrow. She had developed a deep affection for Job, but it was as nothing compared to the love that she now saw laid naked before her.
It was as though that pistol shot had destroyed a part of Sean himself, and she experienced no sense of shock or surprise when he began to weep. Still holding Job in his arms, Sean felt the last involuntary tremors of dying nerves and muscle grow still and the first chill of death sap the heat from this body he hugged so tightly to his chest.
The tears seemed to well up from very deep inside of Sean and they came up painfully, burning all the way, scalding his eyelids when at last they forced their way between them and rolled slowly down his darkly weathered cheeks into his beard.
Even Alphonso could not watch it. He stood up and walked away into the thorn scrub, but Claudia could not move. She went on kneeling beside Sean, and her own tears rose in sympathy with his. Together they wept for Job.
Matatu had heard the shot from a mile out where he was guarding their rear, lying up on their back-spoor to watch for a following patrol.
He came in quickly and from the bush at the perimeter of the camp watched for only a few seconds before he deduced exactly what had happened. Then he crept in quietly and crouched behind Sean. Like Claudia, he respected Sean’s mourning, waiting for him to master its first unbearably bitter pangs.
Sean spoke at last, without looking round, without opening his eyes.
‘Matatu,’ he said.
‘Ndio, Bwana.’
‘Go and find the burial place. We have neither tools nor time to dig a grave, yet he is a Matabele and he must be buried sitting up facing the direction of the rising sun.’
‘Ndio, Bwana.’ Matatu slipped away into the darkling forest and at last Sean opened his eyes and laid Job gently back upon the grey wool blanket. His voice was steady, almost conversational.
‘Traditionally we should bury him in the centre of his own cattle kraal.’ He wiped the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand, and went on quietly, ‘But we are wanderers, Job and I, he had no kraal nor cattle to call his own.’
She was not certain that Sean was speaking to her, but she replied, ‘The wild game were his cattle, and the wilderness his kraal. He will be content here.’
Sean nodded, still without looking at her. ‘I am grateful that you understand.’
He reached down and closed Job’s eyelids. His face was undamaged except for the chips from his front teeth, and with a fold of the blanket, Sean wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth. Now he looked peaceful and at rest. Sean rolled him on his side and began to wrap him in the blanket, using the nylon webbing and the rifle slings to bind his body tightly into a sitting position, with his knees up under his chin.
Matatu returned before he had finished. ‘I have found a good place,’ he said, and Sean nodded without looking up from his task.
Claudia broke the silence. ‘He gave his life for us,’ she said quietly. ‘Greater love hath no man.’ It sounded so trite and unworthy of the moment that she wished she had not said it, but Sean nodded again.
‘I was never able to square the account with him,’ he said. ‘And now I never will.’
He was finished. Job was trussed securely into the grey blanket, only his head was exposed.
Sean stood up and went to his own small personal pack. He took out the only spare shirt it contained and came back to where Job lay. He knelt beside him again.
‘Goodbye, my brother. It was a good road we travelled. I only wish we could have reached the end of it together,’ he said softly, and leaned forward and kissed Job’s forehead. He did it so unaffectedly that it seemed completely natural and right.
Then with the clean shirt, he wrapped Job’s head, hiding the ghastly wound, and he picked him up in his arms and walked with him into the forest, cradling Job’s head against his shoulder.
Matatu led him to an abandoned ant-bear hole in the thorn forest nearby. It was the work of a few minutes to enlarge the entrance just enough to slide Job’s body down into it. With Matatu assisting him, Sean turned him until he was facing east, with his back to the evening star.
Before they covered the grave, Sean knelt beside it and took the fragmentation grenade from the pocket on his webbing. Matatu and Claudia watched as he cautiously rigged a booby trap with the grenade and a short length of bark twine. As he stood up, Claudia looked at him enquiringly, and he answered her shortly, ‘Grave robbers.’
Matatu helped him pack stones around Job’s shoulders to hold him in a sitting position. Then with larger boulders, they covered him completely, building a cairn over his grave that would keep the hyena out. When it was done, Sean did not linger. He had said his farewell. He walked away without looking back, and after a few moments Claudia followed him.
Despite her sorrow, in some strange way she felt privileged and sanctified by what she had witnessed. Her respect and love for Sean had been reinforced a hundredfold by the emotions he had displayed at the loss of his friend. She felt that his tears had proved his strength rather than betrayed his weakness, and that rare demonstration of love had only pointed up his manhood. From this terrible tragedy, she had learned more about Sean than she might otherwise have done in a lifetime.
They marched hard that night. Sean forged on as though he were trying to outrun his grief. Claudia did not try to slow him. Although she was now lean and fit as a coursing greyhound, she had to put out all her strength to stay with him, but she did not complain. By sunrise, they had covered almost forty miles from where they had buried Job, and ahead of them lay a wide alluvial plain.
Sean found a grove of tall trees to give them a little shade and while Claudia and Matatu prepared their meal, Sean slung his binoculars across his back and stuffed the field map into his back pocket and went to the base of the tallest tree.
Claudia watched him anxiously as he began to climb, but he was as nimble as a squirrel and as powerful as a bull baboon, using the brute strength of his arms to haul himself up the smooth stretches of the bole where there were no footholds.
When he neared the top of the tree, a white-backed vulture launched herself from her shaggy nest of dried branches and circled anxiously overhead while Sean settled into the fork of a branch only a few feet from the nest.
The vulture’s nest contained two large chalky-white eggs and Sean murmured soothingly to the bird still cruising high above. ‘Don’t worry, old girl. I’m not going to steal them.’ Sean did not share the popular distaste for these birds. They performed a vital function in cleansing the veld of carrion and disease, and while grotesque in repose, they were models of elegance and beauty in the air, masters of the sky and of natural flight, revered as gods by the ancient Egyptians and other peoples with a close affinity to nature.
Sean smiled up at the bird. The first smile that had bent his lips since Job had gone, and then he gave his full attention to the terrain spread out below him. The alluvial plain ahead had been intensively cultivated, only scattered groves of trees still stood between the open fields. Sean knew that these would mark the sites of the small family villages shown on his map. He turned his binoculars upon them.
He saw at once that the fields had not been tilled nor planted for many seasons. They were thick with the rank secondary growth that invades abandoned cultivation in Africa. He recognized the tall harsh stems of Hibiscus irritans named for the sharp fine hairs that cover the leaves and which brush off on anyone that touches them. He saw castor-oil bush and cotton gone wild, and the orange-coloured blossoms of wild cannabis, whose narcotic properties had first so delighted Jack Kennedy’s peace corps boys and girls and which over the years since then, had given solace to the hordes of other European and American youngsters who had followed them out to Africa equipped only with back-packs, dirty blue jeans, good intentions and a hazy belief in beauty, peace and the brotherhood of man. Recently fear of Aids had slowed their arrival to a trickle and Sean was grateful for that. He realized his thoughts were wandering and he pulled himself up and panned his binoculars slowly across the scene of desolation ahead.
He could just make out the roofless ruins of the villages. On some of the huts, the roof timbers were still intact but skeletal and blackened by flames; the thatch burned away. Though he scrutinized the area meticulously, he could make out no sign of recent human presence. The paths between the fields were all overgrown, there was no sign of domestic stock, no chicken nor goat and no tell-tale tendrils of smoke rising from a cooking-fire.
‘Somebody. Frelimo or Renamo, has worked this area over pretty thoroughly,’ he thought, and then looked away to the east to the distant blue hills of the interior. This early in the morning, the air was still clear and bright and he was able to recognize some of the features and cross-reference them to the topography of his field map. Within fifteen minutes he was able to mark in their position with reasonable accuracy and confidence.
They had made a little better progress than he had estimated. Those mountains out on the right-hand side were the Chimanimani; they formed the border between Mozambique and Zimbabwe but their nearest peaks were almost forty kilometres distant. His map was marked in kilometres, and Sean still liked to work in miles rather than the metric scale.
The larger village of Dombe should be a few kilometres out on his left flank, but he could pick out no indication of its exact whereabouts. He guessed that like the other family villages ahead, it had long ago been abandoned and allowed to return to bush and forest, in which case there would be little prospect of finding food there. With so many feeding from it, the small quantity of maize-meal they had been able to bring with them was almost expended. By tomorrow they would need to begin foraging and that would slow them up. On the other hand, if Dombe was still inhabited, it would certainly be either a Frelimo or a Renamo stronghold. Prudently he resolved to avoid any contact with all other humans. Nobody, not even Alphonso, could say which territory was held by the opposing forces and which was a destruction area devastated equally by both sides. Even those boundaries would be fluid and would alter on a daily, if not an hourly basis, like the amorphous body of an amoeba.
He looked directly southward along their intended route. In that direction, there were no features rising above the plain. This was a part of the littoral that stretched down to the shores of the Indian Ocean, and no mountain nor deep valley ruffled it. The only natural obstacles ahead were the dense hardwood forests, the rivers and the swamps that guarded the approaches to them.
The largest river was the Sabi, or the Rio Save as the Portuguese named it as it flowed in across their border with the land that was to become Zimbabwe and down towards the ocean. It was broad and deep and they would probably need some sort of craft to make the crossing.
The last river, Rudyard Kipling’s great grey-green, greasy Limpopo river, all set about with fever-trees, was the final obstacle they would face. It was still three hundred kilometres further south. Three national borders converged and met upon its banks, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and the Republic of South Africa. If they were able to reach that point then they had reached the northern boundary of the celebrated Kruger National Park, heavily guarded and patrolled by the South African military. Sean studied the map longingly – South Africa and safety, South Africa and home, where the rule of law still held sway and men did not walk each moment in the shadow of death.
A soft whistle brought him out of his reverie, and he looked down. Matatu was at the base of the tree, sixty feet below where he sat. He gesticulated up at Sean.
‘Listen!’ he signalled. ‘Danger!’ And Sean felt his pulse trip and accelerate. Matatu did not use the danger signal lightly. He cocked his head and listened, but still it was almost a full minute before he heard it. As a bushman Sean’s senses, especially eyesight and hearing, were honed and acute, but compared to Matatu, he was a blind mute.
As he heard and recognized the sound at last, even though it was faint and faraway. Sean’s pulse jumped again and he swivelled round in the fork of the branch and looked back northwards, in the direction from which they had come.
Apart from a few high streaks of cirro-stratus cloud, the morning sky was empty blue. Sean put up his binoculars and searched it, looking low along the horizon, close to the tops of the tall hard-wood trees. The distant sound, increasing in volume, gave him a direction in which to search, until suddenly the shape appeared in the field of his binoculars and he felt the slide of dread in his guts.
Like some gigantic and noxious insect, the Hind cruised humpbacked and nose low above the forest tops. It was still some miles distant, but coming on directly towards Sean’s tree-top perch.
General China sat in the flight engineer’s seat under the forward canopy of the Hind and looked ahead through the armoured windscreen. This early in the morning the air had a crystalline lucidity through which the rays of the low sun lit every detail of the landscape below him with a radiant golden light.
Although he had already flown many hours in the captured machine, he had not yet grown accustomed to the extraordinary sense of power that his seat under the forward canopy aroused in him. The earth and everything in it lay below him, he could look down on mankind and know that he held the power of life and death over them.
He reached out now and gripped the control lever of the Gatling-cannon. The pistol grip fitted neatly into his right hand, and as the heel of his hand depressed the cocking plunger, the remote aiming screen lit on the control panel directly in front of him. As he moved the control lever, traversing, depressing or elevating, so the multiple barrels of the cannon faithfully duplicated each movement and the image of the target was reflected on the screen.
