A Time to Die

Matatu had reached the culvert ahead of them, and he signaled them frantically to hurry. They staggered forward under Job's weight and were in the open, when on the embankment above them there was a sudden crunch of footsteps in the gravel and a sound of voices.

Trying to keep low, they kept going at a clumsy run. They reached the culvert and carried Job into the dark concrete tunnel.

ly a few yards behind them, Claudia was running doubled over on and Sean reached back with his free hand and dragged her in out of the pale moonlight into the blessed darkness of the culvertk They leaned against the concrete wan, stooped below the curved roof, trying to quiet their breathing, all of them panting wildly from the charge through the mud and sand of the stream bottom. K The footsteps and voices above them grew louder and finally stopped almost directly overhead. It sounded like a man and a an. The Frelimo garrison had either brought their own camp worn followers with them or had found lady friends in the refugee camps that had sprung up along the guarded railway fine.

s There was a spirited argument going on out there, the man" voice slurred with drink and the woman's shrill and shrewish as she protested and haggled. At last they heard the man's voice raised in exasperation. "Dollar shwni, ten dollars," he said. Immediately the woman's voice softened and cooed agreement.

Then there was the sound of feet sliding in gravel and a few pebbles rattled down the embankment in the streambed. "They are coming down here!" Claudia breathed in horror, and they instinctively drew back deeper into the dark culvert.

"Quiet!" Sean whispered, and stooped to case Job out of the canvas sling and prop him against the wall of the culvert.

As he drew the trench knife from the sheath on his webbing, two figures appeared in the mouth of the culvert, silhouetted by the moonlight. They were clinging together and laughing softly, the woman half supporting the man as they staggered forward. Sean gripped the knife underhand, the point of the blade belly high, ready to receive them, but they advanced only a few paces into the intimate darkness of the tunnel, then turned to face each other, still giggling and whispering, both of them outlined against the moonlit exterior.

The Freffino sentry pushed the woman against the wall and propped his rifle beside her while he fumbled to open his own clothing. The woman leaned back against the wall and with a Practiced gesture lifted the front of her skirt above her waist.

Laughing and muttering drunkenly, the sentry reeled against her and she used one hand to steady and guide him, the other still holding up her skirt.

If Claudia had reached out a hand, she could have touched the couple, but they were locked together, oblivious of all around them. The man began to push against her, his voice rising as he exhorted himself to greater effort, his movements becoming more frenzied. The woman clucked like a rider urging a mount forward, and the Frelimo went from a canter to a full gallop, pounding away with abandon.

Suddenly the man threw his head back, stiffening into rigidity, and crowed like an asthmatic rooster. Slowly he drooped and the woman laughed and pushed him away briskly. Stiff laughing, she smoothed down her skirt and seized the man's arm. The two of them staggered out into the sandy river-bed and disappeared around the corner of the culvert. The sounds of their scrambled ascent up the embankment dwindled, and Sean slid the knife back into its sheath on his belt and said softly, "That's what we call a tumble in the jungle!"

Claudia giggled with nervous relief. "Two seconds flat. atj t Th us has to be a new world record," she whispered, and Sean hugged her briefly.

"Shall we also be friends?" he whispered. "Sorry I snarled at you "I was being a dismal Jane. I deserved it. You won't have any more moaning and whining from me."

"Stay close." He turned back to grope for Job and found he had slid weakly down the wall and was sitting on the sandy floor of the culvert.

As he stooped to help him to his feet, Sean's fingers touched his shoulder. The bandage Was damp, and his smile faded. "Me bleeding had started again. 4

"Nothing we can do about it now," he thought, and gently eased Job to his feet.

"How are you doing, old son?"

"No worries." Job's whisper was scratchy and faint.

Sean touched Matatu's shoulder, and he obeyed the unspoken command, instantly creeping out the far side of the culvert and disappearing into the scrub on the stream bank

A few minutes later the soft whistle of a night bird carried to them as Matatu gave the all clear. Sean sent Claudia ahead and gave her a full five minutes to get across the open ground of the cut line.

Let's go." Sean looked up from the luminous dial Of his Rolex, d and they lifted Job into the sling seat and started forward into the moonlight. The next hundred paces seemed like the slowest and longest Sean had ever covered, but at last they were into the forest beyond the cut line, and Claudia was waiting for them there.

"We made it!" she whispered joyfully.

three hundred "We sure have. The first mile was a romp, only they kept going more to go," he answered grimly, and Counting their paces against the second hand of his wristwatch, Sean estimated they were averaging two miles an hour. Ahead of tu selected the easiest going. He was always out of sight them, Mota them. At interin the forest ahead; only his soft bird calls guided vals Sean checked their heading against the stars, catching glimpses of the Southern Cross and its brilliant pair of Pointers through the forest canopy ahead of them.

y stopped once again and When the dawn paled the stars, the drink for the first time, two swallows each Sean allowed them to dia carried.

Then he turned from one of the water bottles that Clau his attention to Job's shoulder. The dressing was soaked with fresh blood, and Job's face was as gray as the ashes of a cold camp fire.

His eyes had sunk into dark sockets and his lips were dry and cracked, his breath whistling softly through them- The pain and king a dreadful toll.

loss of blood were to.

nd the bandage. He and Claudia exchanged Gently Sean unwou a quick glance. The destruction of tissue was horrifying, and the field dressing was caked into the wound cavity. Sean realized that would tear the flesh to which it had if he tried to remove it, he adhered and probably restart the bleeding. He leaned forward and grinned at him, a skull-like twitching back sniffed the wound. Job of the lips. "Steak tartare?" he asked weakly.

him, but he 41All it needs is a little garlic." Sean grinned back at had caught the first sickly whiff of corruption. He squeezed another half tube of iodine paste over the original field dressing, then stripped the plastic packaging from a fresh dressing and placed it over the wound.

Claudia held it in place as he rewrapped it with a new bandage from the medical pack. He rolled the blood-soaked bandage and stuffed it into a side pocket. He would wash it out at the first water they came to.

"We must keep going," he told Job. "We've got to get well clear of the railway line. Are you up to it?"

Job nodded, but Sean could see the dread in his eyes. Every step they moved him was an agony.

I'm going to give you another shot of antibiotic-I can give you a jolt of morphine at the same time?"

Job shook his head. "Keep it for when it gets really bad." He grinned again, a grimace that tugged at Sean's heart. He could not meet Job's eyes. "Show us your best side," he said, and made a performance of pulling down the trousers of Job's battle dress and darting the hypodermic needle into one of his glossy black buttocks. Claudia averted her gaze modestly and Job whispered, "It's okay, Claudia, you are allowed to look. Just don't touch, that's am."

"You're as bad as Sean," she said primly. "Downright vulgar, both of you."

They lifted Job back into the nylon sling seat and went on. By midmorning mirages shimmered and rose in glassy whirlpools from the rocky kopjes over which they were trekking, and tiny mo pane flies hovered in a fine mist around their heads, crawling into their nostrils and ears and eyes with infuriating persistence.

With heat came thirst and their sweat dried on their shirts and left irregular outlines in white salt on the cloth.

When they stopped at noon in the sparse dappled shade of an African teak, Sean knew they had all had enough and the worst heat of the day was still to come. They laid Job on a hastily cut mattress of dried grass, and he lapsed almost immediately into a state that was more coma than sleep, snoring softly through his dry, swollen lips.

IMe carrying sling had rubbed the skin from both Sean's shoulders, for he and Alphdnso had changed sides at each of the hourly stops. The harsh nylon straps had galled Alphonso as badly, and he muttered sullenly as he examined his injuries, "Before this I hated the Matabele simply because they are a flea-infested, thieving bunch of venereal apes. Now I have another reason to hate them."

Sean tossed him the tube of iodine paste. "Smear the muti on your grievous injuries, en stuff the empty tube in your garrulous mouth," he advise&Alphonso went off, still muttering, to find a place to lie downs.

Sean and Claudia found a hollow screened by a low hook-thorn bush a short distance from where Job lay. Sean spread their blankets to make a nest for them and settled into it thankfully. "I'm hushed."

"How hushed?" Claudia asked, and knelt over him to nibble his ear.

"Not that hushed," he qualified, and pulled her down beside him.

At sunset Sean cooked a pot of maize-meal porridge on a tiny smoker ess fire while Alphonso rigged the aerial and tuned the radio to the Renamo command frequency. There was a clutter of garbled, broken-up traffic on their wavelength, probably Frehmo transmissions, but at last they heard their call sign through the jumble. -Ngulube! Warthog! Come in, Ngulube! This is Banana Tree."

Alphonso acknowledged and made a fictitious position report that placed them still far north of the railway line, on a march back to the river area. Banana Tree acknowledged and signed off.

"They fell for it," Sean gave his opinion. "UDoks like the Shangane deserters haven't reached base and blown the whistle on us, not yet anyway."

In the last of the daylight, they ate the meal of maize porridge and Sean studied his field map and marked in his dead-reckoning position. According to the map, the hilly ground seemed to extend for another thirty miles or so, then descended gently to a more level plain on which a number of small villages and cultivated lands were marked; beyond that was the first natural barrier, an s their route.

other wide river that ran west to east directly acros He called Alphonso across and asked him, "The southern division of Renamo under General Tippoo Tip-do you know where his area begins, where his main forces are deployed?"

"Like us, they move all the time to confuse Frelinio. Sometimes they are here, other times down here near the Rio Save." He shrugged. "Renanio is wherever the fighting is."

"And Frelimo? Where are they?"

"They chase after Renamo and then run like frightened rabbits when they catch them," he guffawed. "To us now, it doesn't matter who is who and where they are. Everybody we meet down here is going to try and kill us."

"Great intelligence report," Sean thanked him, and folded the map into its plastic wallet.

Quickly they finished the frugal meal, and Sean stood up. "All right, Alphonso. Let's get Job up and moving."

Alphonso belched softly, then grinned wickedly. "He's your Matabele dog. If you want him, you carry him, I've had enough."

Sean hid his dismay behind a neutral expression. "You are wasting time," he said softly. "Get on your feet!" Alphonso only belched again and held his eyes, still grinning.

Slowly Sean reached down to the trench knife in its sheath. Just as deliberately Alphonso reached and touched the Tokarev pistol tucked into his belt. They stared at each other.

"Sean, what is it?" Claudia asked anxiously. "What is going on?"

She had not understood the exchange in Shangane, but the tension was palpable.

"He's refusing to help me carry Job," he replied.

"You can't carry him alone, can you?" Claudia said anxiously.

"Alphonso will help-" ,--or I'll kill him!" Sean replied in Shangane.

Alphonso laughed out loud. He stood up and shook himself like a dog, turned his back on Sean, and picked up his radio pack, Sean's AKM rifle, and most of the water bottles. "I'll carry these," he chuckled, shaking his head at the joke. "You can carry your Matabele." He ambled away southward along the fine of march.

Sean dropped his hand from the hilt of the knife and looked across at Job. He was watching quietly from his mattress of grass, and Sean snarled at him, "If you say it, I'll kick your black arse for your "I didn't say nothing." Job tried to smile, but it was a weak, transient grimace.

"Good," said Sean grimly, and picked up the nylon sling seat and straps. "Claudia, give us a hand here."

Between them they got Job on his feet. Sean rigged the nylon slings around his waist and under his crotch like a parachute harness and looped them over his shoulders. Then he supported Job with an arm around his waist.

"One more river, there's one more river to cross," he sang hoarsely and un tunefully and grinned at Job. They moved forward. Although Job's feet touched the ground and he tried to take as much of his own weight as possible, he was mainly supported by the straps that crossed over Sean's shoulders and they were locked together like a pair in a harness.

Within the first hundred paces they had established some sort of rhythm, but still their progress was unsteady and painfully slow, set by Job's uncertain footsteps. There could be no attempt at stealth or anti tracking fair Sean had to pick the easiest and most obvious route.

Theystuck to the open game trails, that complex network that like th4Tveins in a dried leaf meshes the African veld.

Behind them Claudia followed laden with the medical pack and the rest of the water bottles, but even so she carried a leafy branch with which she tried to sweep away their tracks. Her efforts might conceal their passing from a casual observer, but a Frelimo tracker would follow them as though he were on the MI motorway. It was hardly worth the effort, but Sean did not discourage her, for he knew how important it was to her to feel she was pulling her weight and making a useful contribution to their escape.

Sean counted their paces against the second hand of his wristwatch and estimated that they were down to less than a mile an hour. Eight miles a day was all the progress they could hope for.

He started to divide that into three hundred but gave up before he reached the depressing answer.

Both Matatu and Alphonso had disappeared into the cornbreturn forest ahead of them, and Sean glanced at his watch again.

They had been going only a little over thirty minutes, but already their momentum was winding down. Job's weight was heavier, the straps cutting painfully into the flesh of Sean's shoulders, and Job's footsteps were dragging and catching on every irregularity of the game path.

I, I'm cutting down to thirty-minute stages," Sean told Job.

"We'll take five minutes now."

When Sean lowered him to a sitting position against the hole of a tree, Job leaned his head back against the rough bark and closed his eyes. His breathing sobbed in his chest, and droplets of sweat made slow runners down his cheeks. Like tiny black pearls, the drops reflected the color of his skin.

Sean let the five minutes run over to ten, then told Job cheerfully, "On your feet, soldier, let's eat some ground."

Getting Job up on his feet again was torture for both of them, and Sean realized that in trying to be gentle on him, he had allowed Job to rest too long. The wound had begun to stiffen.

The next thirty-minute stage endured so long that Sean was convinced his watch had stopped. He had to check the sweep of the second hand to reassure himself.

When at last he lowered him to a sitting position, Job grimaced.

"Sorry, Sean, cramps. Left calf."

Sean squatted in front of him and felt the knots of tortured muscle in Job's leg. While he massaged it, he spoke quietly to Claudia. "There are salt tablets in the medic pack, front pocket."

Job swallowed them, and Claudia held the water bottle to his lips.

After two swallows he pushed it away.

More," Claudia urged him, but he shook his head.

"Don't waste it," he murmured.

"How's that feel?" Sean gave his calf a couple of hard slaps.

"Good for another few miles."

"Let's go," Sean said. "Before it seizes up again."

It amazed Claudia how the two of them kept going through the night with only those five-minute breaks and the frugal drafts from the water bottles.

"Three hundred miles of this," she thought. "It simply is not possible. Flesh and blood can't take it. It will kill both of them."

A little before dawn, Matatu popped up like a small black shadow out of the forest and whispered to Sean.

"He has found a water hole about two or three miles ahead," Sean told them. "Can you make it, Job?"

The sun had risen and cleared the tops of the trees, and the day's heat was building up like a stoked furnace. When Job collapsed and hung suspended at Sean's side, dangling with his full weight on the cross straps, they were still half a mile from the water hole.

Sean lowered him to the ground and sat beside him. He was so exhausted himself that for a few minutes he could not find the energy to talk or move.

"Well, at least you picked a good place to pass out," he congratulated Job a in hoarse whisper. They were in a patch of thick thorn bush that would give them shade and cover for the rest of the day.

The made a bed of cut grass for Job in the shade and settled him on it. He was only half conscious, his speech slurred and andering and his eyes continually slipping out of focus. Claudia tried to feed him, but he turned his face away. However, he drank thirstily when at last Matatu and Alphonso returned from the water hole with all the water bottles refilled. After he had drunk he lapsed back into coma, and they waited out the heat of the day in the thorn patch.

Sean and Claudia lay in each other's arms, for she had become so accustomed to falling asleep in his embrace. She realized that Sean was near the end of his tether. She had never imagined he could be so finely stretched, that even his strength, which she had come to believe was inexhaustible, had a limit upon it.

When she woke a little after noon, he lay like a dead man beside her and she studied his face lovingly, almost greedily. His beard was full and beginning to curl, and she picked out two curly silver hairs in the dense bush. His features were punt, all trace of fat and superfluous flesh burnedlaway, and there were lines and weathered creases in his skin that she had never noticed before. She studied them as though 6 LIFE history were chiseled into them like cuneiform writing on a tablet she could read. "God, but I love him," she thought, amazed at the depth of her own feelings. His skin was burned to the color of dark mahogany by the sun, yet it retained a luster like that of fine leather, well used but polished with care over the years, "like Papa's polo boots." She smiled at the simile, but it was somehow apt. She had watched her father in his dressing room lovingly applying dubbin to the leather with his fingers and polishing it to a dull glow with his own bare palm.

"Boots!" she whispered. "That's a good name for you," she told Sean as he slept, and she remembered how her father's boots had flexed and wrinkled at the ankle, almost as supple as silk as he stepped up into the stirrup. "Wrinkled just like you, my old boot."

She smiled and kissed the lines in his forehead softly so as not to wake him.

She realized then to just what an extent the memory of her father had been absorbed in this man who lay for once like a child in her arms. The two men seemed to have merged in one body, and she could concentrate all her love in a single place. Gently she moved Sean's sleeping head until it nestled against her shoulder, and she burrowed her fingers into the dense springing curls at the back of his head and rocked him gently.

Up to this moment, he had succeeded in evoking the full spectrum of her emotions, from anger to sensual passion---everything except tenderness. Now, however, it was complete. "My baby," she whispered as tenderly as a mother. For once she truly felt he belonged to her completely.

A soft groan shattered her fragile mood. She raised her head and glanced across at where Job lay beneath the thorn bush nearby, but he relapsed into silence once again.

She thought about the two of them, Job and Sean and their special masculine relationship in which she knew she could never share. She should have been jealous, but instead in some strange way it made her feel more secure. If Sean could be so constant and self-sacrificing in his love for another man, she hoped that she could expect the same constancy from him in their own different but even more intense relationship.

Job groaned again and began to thrash about restlessly. She sighed and then gently disentangled herself from Sean's sleeping form, stood up, and crossed to where Job lay.

A cloud of metallic green flies buzzed around the blood-soaked bandage that covered his shoulder. They settled on the soiled dressing and tasted it with their long proboscises, then rubbed their front legs together with delight. Claudia saw that they had laid their rice-grain eggs in thick rafts on the bloody cloth, and with an exclamation of disgust she fanned them away and scraped the loathsome white eggs from the folds of the bandage.

Job opened his eyes and looked up at her. She realized he was fully conscious once again, and she smiled encouragingly at him.

"Would you like another drink?"

"No." His voice was so low she had to lean closer to him. "You have to make him do it," he said.

"Who? Sean?" she asked.

Job nodded. "He can't go on like this. He's killing himself.

Without him none of you will survive. You must make him leave me here." She had begun to shake her head before he stopped speaking' No she said firmly. "He would never do it, and I wouldn't let him, even if he wanted to. We're in this together, pardner." She touched his arm. "Now, how about that drink?" He subsided, too weak to argue further. Like Sean, Job seemed to have deteriorated alarmingly in the last few hours. She sat beside him, fanning the flies away with an i1ala palm frond while the sun slid slowly down the western sky.

In the cool of the afternoon Sean stiffed and sat up, instantly wide awake, taking in his surroundings with a quick glance. The sleep had revived and fortified him.

"How is be?" he asked.

When she shook her head, he came to squat beside her. "We'll have to get him up again pretty soon."

"Give him a few more minutes," she pleaded. Then she went on, "Do you know what I've been thinking about while I've been sitting here?"

"Tell me," he invited, and put his arm around her shoulders.

"I've been thinking about that water hole out there. I've been fantasizing about pouring water over myself, washing my clothes, getting rid of this stink."

"Have you heard about NapoleonT" he asked.

"Napoleon?" She looked puzzled. "What does he have to do with bathing?"

"Whenever he returned from a campaign, he would send a galloper ahead of him to Josephine with the message "Je rent re the te have pas. "I'm coming home, don't bathe." You see, he liked his ladies the way he liked his cheese, full bodied. He would have loved you the way you are now!"

"You're disgusting.". She punched his shoulder, and Job groaned.

"Hey, there." Sea; turned his attention to him. "What's going down, monT"

"I'll take you up on your offer now,". Job whispered.

"Morphine?" Sean asked.

Job nodded. "Just a little shot, okay?"

"You've got it," Sean agreed, and reached for the medical pack.

After the injection Job lay with his eyes closed, and they watched the taut fines of pain around his mouth slowly relax.

"]setter?" Sean asked. Job smiled softly without opening his eyes. "We'll give you a few minutes more," Sean told him, "while we make the radio sched. with Banana Tree."

Sean stood up and went across to where Alphonso was already rigging the radio aerial.

this is Banana Tree." The response to Alphonso's first call was so strong and clear that Sean started.

Alphonso adjusted the gain and then thumbed the microphone and gave another fictitious position report, as though he were still on the return march to the river area.

There was a pause, filled only by the drone and crackle of static.

Then another voice came equally clear and loud. "Let me speak to Colonel Courtney!" The intonation was unmistakable, and Alphonso looked up at Sean.

"General China," he whispered. He offered Sean the microphone but Sean pushed it aside and frowned with concentration as he waited for the next transmission.

In the silence that followed, Claudia left Job's side and crossed quickly to Sean. She squatted beside him and he placed his arm around her protectively; both of them stared at the radio.

"The deserters," she said softly. "China knows."

"Listen!" Sean cautioned. They waited.

Very well. " China's voice again. "I can understand that you do not wish to reply. However, I will presume that you are listening, Colonel."

All their attention was on the radio, and Job opened his eyes. He had heard every word China spoke quite clearly, and he rolled his head.

Alphonso had left his pack and webbing piled on his blanket not ten paces from where Job lay. The butt of the Tokarev pistol protruded from the side pocket of the pack.

"You have yet to disappoint me, Colonel." China's voice was mellow and affable. "It would have been too simple and totally unsatisfying if you had merely blundered into the arms of the reception committee I had arranged for you at the Zimbabwean border."

Job eased himself up on his good elbow. There was no pain, merely a sensation of weakness and drowsiness. The morphine was working. It was difficult to think clearly. He focused all his attention on the pistol, and he wondered if Alphonso had chambered a round. He began to move toward it, extending his legs, digging in his heels, then lifting his buttocks clear, and jackknifing his legs.

He made no sound, and all the others were concentrating on the voice from the radio.

"So the game is still on, Colonel-or should we rather call it the hunt? You are a great hunter, a great white hunter. You glory in the pursuit of wild animals. You call it sport, and you pride yourself on what you term "fair chase." Job was halfway across the clearing. There was still no Pam, and he moved a little quicker. At any moment one of them might turn Ins way and see him.

"I have never understood your white man's passion for this pursuit. To me it always seemed so pointless. My people have always believed that if you want meat, you should kill it as efficiently and with as little effort as possible."

Job reached the pile of equipment on Alphonso's blanket and stretched out to touch the hilt of the pistol. When he tried to withdraw it from the pocket, his fingertips were numb and it slipped from his hand, but instead of clattering on the hard earth, the pistol dropped soundlessly onto a fold of the blanket and he saw with a rush of relief that the action was cocked and the safety catch engaged. Alphonso had loaded it, ready for instant use.

Behind him China's voice still echoed from the radio set: "Perhaps you have corrupted me, Colonel. Perhaps I am acqumng your decadent European ways, but for the first time I understand your passion. Perhaps it is simply that at last the game is big enough to excite me. I wonder how you must feel at this change of role, Colonel. You are the game and I am the hunter. I know where you are, but you don't know where I am. Perhaps I am closer than you believe possible. Where am 1, Colonel? You must guess. You must run and hide. When will we meet, and how?"

oh 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, but 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 prorruse 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 hiNhumb.

"The time is nowtighteen hundred hours Zulu. I will call you on this frequencya't the same time tomorrow, Colonel-that is, if we have not already met. Until then watch the sky, Colonel Courtlook behind you. You do not know from which direction I they, will come. But be sure I will come!"

There was a faint click as China unkeyed his microphone. 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 paralyzed. 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 her, 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 mouth and closed his lips around the muzzle, like a child sucking a Popsicle.

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 just 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 Halloween 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 irises, then rolling upward into his skull.

His shattered head changed shape again, elongating backward, 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 backward, his arm flung away from his head in a debonair salute, the Tokarev pistol still gripped in his clenched fist, 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. Job's muscles shivered and shuddered, and his legs kicked in a macabre little jigging movement. Sean tried to hold him still.

"Job," he whispered, and he 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 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 entirely overshadowed by the magnitude of Sean's sorrow. She had developed a deep affection for Job, but it was as nothing compared to the love 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 deep inside of Sean. 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 scrhb, but Claudia could not move. She went on kneeling beside Stan, 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.

"N,&,.0w,="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.

At last Sean opened his eyes and laid Job gently back upon the gray wool blanket. His voice was steady, almost conversational.

"Traditionally we should bury him in the center 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 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. 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 gray blanket, only his head 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. "Good-bye, my brother. It was a good road we traveled. 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, 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 inquiringly, 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 calm over his grave that would keep the hyenas 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 his tears had proved his strength rather than betrayed his weakness, and the 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. Ahead of them lay a wide alluvial plain.

Sean found a grove of4a trees to give them a little shade. While Claudia and Matatuprepared their meal, he slung his binoculars across his back, 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 hole 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 chalk-white eggs and Sean murmured soothingly to the bird 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 grot hey were models of elegance and beauty in the tesque in repose, sky and of natural flight, revered as gods by the air, masters of 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. 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 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 or planted for seasons. They were thick with the rank secondary growth many on in Africa. He recognized the that invades abandoned cultivate tall harsh stems of Hibiscus irritans, named for the sharp fine hairs that cover the leaves and that brush off on anyone that touches them. He saw castor-oil bush and cotton gone wild. There were also the orange-colored blossoms of wild cannabis, whose narcotic properties had 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 backpacks, 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, for which Sean was grateful. 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 ugh he scrutiblackened 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, and there was no sign of domestic stock, no chickens or goats, and no telltale tendrils of smoke rising from a cooking fire.

"Somebody, Frelimo or Renamo, has worked this area over pretty thoroughly," he thought, and 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 kilometers distant. His map was marked in kilometers, and Sean still liked to work in miles rather than the metric scale.

The larger village of Dombe should be a few kilometers 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 since 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 a most expended. By tomorrow they would need to begin foraging, and that would slow them up. On the other hand, if Dombe were still inhabited, it would certainly be either a Frelimo or 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 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 or 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 had named it. It flowed in across their border with the land that was to become Zimbabwe and down toward the ocean. It was broad and deep, an4 they would probably need some sort of craft to make the crossing'.

The last river, Rudyard Kipling's great gray-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees, was the final obstacle they would face. It was still three hundred kilometers 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, they would have 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 held sway and men did not walk every 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 signaled. "Danger!" Sean felt his pulse trip and accelerate. Matatu did not use the danger signal lightly. He cocked his head and listened, but 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 far away, Sean's pulse jumped again and he swiveled round in the fork of the branch and looked back northward, in the direction from which they had come.

Apart from a few high streaks of cirrostratus 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 hardwood 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, nose low, above the forest tops. It was still some miles distant but coming on directly toward Sean's treetop perch.

General China sat in the flight engineer's seat under the forward canopy of the Hind and looked ahead through the armored windshield. This early in the morning the air had a aystalline 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 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 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 fit on the control panel directly in front of him. As he moved the control lever, traversing, depressing, or elevating, the multiple barrels of the cannon faithfully duplicated each movement and the image of the target was reflected on the screen.

With the slightest pressure of his forefinger he could send a dense stream of cannonihell hosing down to obliterate any target he chose. By simply troving a switch on the weapons console, he could select any oftlTe Hind's alternative armaments, the rockets in their pods or the banks of missiles.

It had not taken China long to master the complex weapons control system, for the basic training he had received in the Siberian guerrilla training camp so long ago, at the beginning of the Rhodesian war of liberation, had stood him in good stead down the years. However, this was the most awe-inspiring firepower he had ever had at his fingertips and the most exhilarating vantage point from which to deploy it.

At a single word of command he could soar aloft like an eagle in a thermal or plunge like a stooping peregrine, he could hover on high or dance lightly on the leafy tops of the forest. The power this machine had bestowed upon him was truly godlike.

At first there had been serious problems to surmount. He could not work with the captured Russian pilot and crew. They were sullen and unreliable. Despite the threat of horrible death that hung over them, he realized they would seize the first opportunity to escape or to sabotage his precious new Hind. One of the Russian ground crew need only drain the lubricant from a vital part of the machine, loosen a bolt, or burn out a section of wiring, and neither China nor any of his Renamo would have the technical expertise to recognize the sabotage attempt until it was too late. In addition, the Russian pilot had from the very beginning made communication between them difficult. He had played dumb and deliberately misunderstood China's commands. Trading on the knowledge that China could not do without him, he had become progressively more defiant and recalcitrant.

China had solved that problem swiftly. Within hours of the destruction of the Russian squadron and the capture of the Hind, he had radioed a long coded message to a station two hundred miles further north across the national boundary between Mozambique and Malawi. The message had been received and decoded at the headquarters of a large tea plantation on the slopes of Mlanje Mountain, the proprietor of which was a member of the central committee of the Mozambique National Resistance and the deputy director of Renamo intelligence. He had telexed China's report and requests directly to the director general of the central committee at his headquarters in Lisbon, and within six hours a crack Portuguese military helicopter pilot with many thousands of hours flying experience and two skilled aeronautical engineers were aboard a TAP airliner bound for Africa. From Nairobi they changed to an Air Malawi commercial flight scheduled directly for Blantyre, the capital of Malawi. There a driver and Land-Rover from the tea plantation were waiting to whisk them out to the private airstrip on the tea estate.

That night the tea company's twin-engine Beechcraft made a midnight crossing of Lake Cabora Bossa, a perilous journey the pilot had undertaken many times before, and a single red flare guided him to the secret bush strip General China's men had hacked out of the wilderness just west of the Gorongosa Mountains.

A double line of Renamo guerrillas, each holding aloft a burning torch of paraffin-soaked rags, provided a flare path. The Beechcraft pilot landed smoothly and without shutting down his engines deposited his passengers, turned and taxied back to the end of the rough airstrip, then roared away, climbed clear, and turned northward again into the night.

There had been a time not long ago when such a complicated route for bringing in men and materiel would not have been necessary. Only a year previously China s request would have been radioed southward, rather than north, and the delivery vehicle, instead of a small private aircraft, would have been a Puma helicopter with South African air force markings.

In those days when the Marxist President of Frehmo, Samara Machel, had hosted the guerrillas of the African National Congress and allowed them to use Mozambique as a staging post for their limpet mine and car bomb terrorist attacks on the civilian population of South Africa, the South Africans had retaliated by giving their full support to the Rename, forces that were attempting to topple Machel's Frefirno government.

Then, to the dismay of the Rcnamo command, Samara Machel and P. W. Botha, the South African president, had signed an accord at the little town of Nkomati on the border between their two countries, the direct result of which had been a drastic reduction of South African aid to Renarno in exchange for the expulsion of the ANC terror squads from Mozambique.

With a wink and a nudge both sides had cheated on the agreement. Machel had closed The ANC offices in Maputo but allowed them to continue their terror campaign without official Frelimo support or approval, and the South Africans had cut back on their support of Renamo, but still the Pumas made their clandestine cross- rder flights.

The deck had been reshuffled when Samara Machel died in the wreck of his personal aircraft, an antiquated Tupelov which had been retired from airline service in the USSR and magnanimously given to Machel by his Russian allies. The Tupelov's instrumentation was decrepit, and oil the night of the crash both of the Russian pilots had been so full 631f vodka that they had neglected to file a flight plan. They were almost two hundred kilometers off course when they crashed on the South African border, actually striking on the Mozambique side and then by some improbable chance bouncing and sliding across into South Africa.

Despite the evidence of the flight recorder, the Tupelov's "black box," which contained a recording of the two Russian pilots" repeated requests for more vodka from the air hostess and an animated and anatomically precise discussion of exactly what they were going to do to her after they landed, the Russians and the Frelimo government insisted that the South Africans had lured Machel to his death. The Nkomati Accord had died with Machel on that remote African hillside, and the Pumas had resumed their cross-border flights, ferrying supplies to the Renamo guerrillas.

Then gradually news began to filter out of the Mozambican wilderness. At first a few dedicated missionaries emerged from the ush to describe the appalling destruction, the misery and starvation, and the atrocities that were being perpetrated by the ravaging Renamo, guerrilla armies over an area the size of France.

A few intrepid journalists managed to get into the battle zone, and one or two of them survived and emerged to relate their accounts of the holocaust that was raging. Some of their reports put the estimate of civilian casualties as high as half a million dead of starvation, disease, and genocide.

Refugees, tens of thousands of them, began to stream across the border into South Africa. Terrified, starving, riddled with disease, they told their harrowing stories. The South Africans realized to their horror that they had been nourishing a monster in Renanio.

At the same time, the more moderate Joaquim Chissano, who had replaced Samara Machel as president of the government of Mozambique and Frelimo, began making placatory overtures to South Africa. The two presidents met, and the Nkomati Accord was hurriedly revived, this time with honest intent. Overnight the flow of South African aid to Renarno was cut off.

This had all taken place only months before, and General China and his fellow Renamo commanders were angry, desperate men, their stores of food and weapons dwindling rapidly without prospect of resupply. Soon they would be reduced to surviving on plunder and loot, foraging and scavenging from a countryside already ravaged by twelve years of guerrilla warfare. It was inevitable that they would turn their fury on what remained of the civilian population and on any foreigner they could capture. The world was against them, and they were against the world.

Sitting up in the high seat of the Hind, General China let an this run through his mind. From here he seemed to have an overview of the chaos and confusion. The entire country was in a state of flux, and as always in a situation such as this, there was opportunity for the cunning and the ruthless to seize upon.

Of the Renanio field commanders, General China had proved himself over the years to be the most resourceful. With each victory and success he had established his power more firmly. His army was the most powerful of the three Renamo divisions. The external central committee was nominally the high command of the resistance movement, but paradoxically General China's pres J1i tige and influence were becoming progressively greater with each setback the movement suffered. More and more the central committee acceded to his wishes. The alacrity with which they had reacted to his request for a Portuguese pilot and engineers demonstrated. this most aptly. Of course, the destruction of the Russian squadron and the capture of the Hind had enormously inflated his prestige and importance, while possession of the extraordinary vehicle in which he now soared over the wilderness placed him in a unique position of power.

General China smiled contentedly and spoke into the microphone of his hard helmet. "Pilot, can you see the village yet?"

"Not yet, General. I estimate four minutes" more flying time."

The Portuguese pilot was in his early thirties, young enough still to have dash and fire but old enough to have accumulated experience and discretion. He was handsome in a swarthy olive-skinned fashion, with a drooping gunslinger mustache and the dark, bright eyes of a predatory bird. From the first he had handled the controls of the Hind with precision and confidence, and his skill had increased with each hour flown as he came to terms with every nuance of the Hind's flying characteristics.

The two Portuguese engineers had taken command of the Russian ground crew and supervised every move they made. One of the Hind's principal advantages was that it could be serviced and maintained in all conditions without the need for sophisticated equipment, and the chief engineer assured General China that the spares and tools he had captured at the laager were sufficient to keep the Hind airborne indefinitely The only shortages were of missiles for the Swatter system and assault rockets, but this was amply compensated for by almost a million rounds of 12.7-mm cannon shells they had captured in the laager.

It had taken 150 porters to carry the munitions away, while another 500 porters had each carried a twenty-five-liter drum of avgas.

Renamo used mainly women porters, trained since girlhood to carry weights on their cads That quantity of avgas was sufficient to keep the Hind flying for almost two hundred hours, and by then there would be a good chance of capturing a Frelimo fuel tanker, either on the railway line or on one of the roads nearer the coast that were still open to traffic.

However, General China's main concern at that moment was to keep the rendezvous he had arranged by radio with General Tippoo Tip, the commander of Renamo's southern division-General, I have spotted the village," the pilot said in China's headphones.

"All, yes, I see it," China answered. "Turn toward it, please."

As the Hind approached, Sean shifted his perch, creeping behind a densely leafed bough and flattening himself against the branch. Although he knew it was dangerous to turn his face toward the sky, he relied on the bush Of his beard and his deep tan to prevent the sun reflecting off his face, and he watched the helicopter avidly.

He realized that their ultimate survival depended on being able to elude this monster, and he studied its shape to estimate the view the pilot and his gunner commanded from behind their canopies.

It might be vital for Sean to know the blind spots of the flight engineer and the field of fire of his weapons.

He saw the cannon in the remote turret below the nose abruptly traverse left and right, almost as though the gunner were demonstrating them for him. Sean could not know that General China was merely gloating over his own power and playing with the weapon controls, but the movement illustrated the Gatling cannon s restricted field of fire.

The barrel could swing through an arc Of Only thirty degrees from lock to lock; beyond that the pilot was obliged to swivel the entire aircraft on its axis in order to bring the cannon to bear.

The Hind was very close now. Sean could make out every minute detail of the hull, from the crimson "Excellent Crew" arrow on the nose to the rows of rivet heads that stitched the titanium armor sheets. He looked for some weakness, some flaw in the massive armor, but in the few seconds before she was overhead, he saw she was impregnable, except for the air intakes to the turbo engines, like a pair of hooded eyes above the upper pilot's canopy. The intakes were screened by debris suppressors, bossed light metal discs that inhibited the dust and debris thrown up by the downdraft of the rotors when the helicopter hovered close to the ground from being sucked into the turbines. However, the debris suppressors were not so substantial as to prevent the Stinger missiles flying clearly into the intakes, and Sean saw that there was a gap around the edge of the metal boss wide enough for a man to stick his head through. At the correct angle and from very close range an expert marksman might just be able to aim a burst of machine-gun fire through that gap so as to damage the turbine vanes. Sean knew that even a chip from one of those vanes would unbalance the turbine and set up such vibrations in the engine that it would fly to pieces within seconds.

"A hell of a shot, and a hell of a lot of luck," Sean muttered, L staring upward through slitted eyes. Suddenly the ugh t reflected from the armored glass canopy altered so that he could see into the interior of the cockpit.

He recognized General China, despite the hard plastic flying helmet and the mirrored aviator glasses shielding his eyes, and hatred flushed fiercely through his guts. Here was the man on whom he could firmly set the blame for Job's death and all their other woes and hardships.

"I want you," Sean muttered. "God, how badly I want you."

China seemed to sense the force of his hatred, for he turned his head slightly and looked down directly at Sean's perch, staring at him evenly through the mirrored lens of his sunglasses. Sean shrank down upon the branch.

Abruptly the Hind banked away, exposing its blotched gray belly. The downdraft lashed the treetop, shaking the branches and throwing Sean about in the hurricane of disrupted air. He realized that it had been an illusion and that China had not spotted him in his treetop bower.

He watched the huge machine skitter away on its new heading.

A few miles distant the engine beat changed, the sound of the rotors whined in finer pitch, and the Hind hovered briefly above the forest and then sank from view.

Sean clambered down the tree. Matatu had doused the small cooking fire at the first sound of the Hind's approach, but the canteen of maize porridge had already cooked through.

"We'll eat on the march," Sean ordered.

Claudia groaned softly, but pulled herself to her feet. Every muscle in her legs and back ached with fatigue.

"Sorry, beautiful." Sean put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her. "China landed only a mile or two east of here, probably at Dombe.

We can be pretty sure he has troops there.

We've got to move on."

They ate the last handfuls of hot sticky salted maize porridge on the march and washed it down with water from the bottles that tasted of mud and algae. "From now on, we are living off the land," Sean told her. "And China is breathing down our necks."

The Hind hovered a hundred feet above the road that ran through the village of Dombe.

It was the only road, and the village was merely a collection of twenty or so small buildings that had long been abandoned. The glass was broken out of the window frames, and the whitewashed plaster had fallen from the adobe walls in leprous patches. Termites had devoured the roof timbers so that the corroded corrugated sheeting sagged from the roof. The buildings fronting onto the road had all once been small general dealers" stores, the ubiquitous dukes of Africa owned by Hindu traders. One faded sign hung at a drunken angle. PAT EL & PAT EL it proclaimed between the crimson trademarks of the Coca-Cola company.

The road itself was dirt-surfaced and littered with rubbish and debris.

Weeds grew rankly in the unused ruts.

"Take us down," China ordered, and the helicopter sank toward the roadway, lifting a whirlwind thick with dead leaves, scraps of paper, discarded plastic bags, and other rubbish.

There were men on the veranda of Patel & Patel and armed men among the derelict buildings, fifty or more, all heavily armed and dressed in an assortment of camouflage, military, and civilian clothing, the eclectic uniform of the African guerrilla.

The Hind settled to the rutted road and the pilot throttled back the turbos; the rotors slowed and the engine noise sank to a low whistle. General China opened the armored canopy, jumped lightly to the ground, and turned to face the group of men on the stoep of the general dealer's store.

"Tippoo Tip," he said, and opened his arms wide in fraternal greeting. "How good to see you again." He raised his voice above the engine whistle.

General Tippoo Tip came down the steps to meet him, his thick arms held wide as a crucifix. They embraced with the utmost insincerity of two fierce rivals who knew that one day they might have to kill each other.

"My old friend," said China, holding him at arm's length and smiling warmly and lovingly upon him.

Tippoo Tip was not his real name; he had taken it as his norn de guerre from one of the most notorious of the old Arab slave traders and ivory runners of the previous century. However, the name and its associations suited him to perfection, China thought as he looked down upon him. Here stood a rogue and brigand cast in the classic mold, a man to admire and to treat with great caution.

He was short, the top of his head on a level with China's chin, but everything else about him was massive. His chest was like that of a bull gorilla and his thick arms hung in similar fashion, so that his knuckles were at the level of his knees. His head was like one of those gigantic Rhodesian granite boulders balanced on the pinnacle of a rocky kopJe. He had shaved his pate, but his beard was a thick mattress of woolly black curls that hung onto his chest. The forehead and nose above it were broad and his lips full and fleshy.

He wore a gaily colored strip of cotton cloth bound around his forehead, while a vest of tanned kudu hide was open down the front to expose his naked chest. His chest was covered with black peppercorns of wool, and the naked arms protruding from the short sleeves were thick and roped with muscle.

He smiled back at China and his teeth were brilliant as mother of-pearl, in contrast to the smoky yellow whites of his eyes, which were laced with a network of veins. your presence has perfumed my day with the scent of mimosa blossoms" he said in Shangane, but his eyes slid Past China's face and returned to the huge helicopter from which he had disembarked. Tippoo Tip's envy was so unconcealed that China felt he could smell and taste it like burning sulfur in the air.

That machine had altered the fine trim and balance of the relationship between these two most powerful of all the Renamo warlords. Tippoo Tip could not keep his eyes off it. it was obvious he wanted to examine it more closely, but China took his arm and led him back toward the shade of the veranda. The pilot had not killed the engines, and as China and his host stepped out of the circle of ors he gunned the Hind and pulled on his collective. The the rot great machine rose and turned away.

Tippoo Tip twisted out of China's grip and shaded his eyes to watch it. His smoky yellow eyes were as hungry as though he were watching a beautiful naked woman performing an obscene act.

China let him yearn after it until it passed out of sight. He had sent the Hind away purposely because he knew and understood Tippoo Tip.

He knew that if the machine had remained, the temptation might have become too strong for him to resist, and treachery was as natural to both of them as breathing was to other men. The Hind was China's joker, his wild card.

Tippoo Tip shook himself and laughed for no apparent reason.

"They told me you had destroyed the squadron and captured one ong men and he is of those, and I said, "China is a lion am MY brother." Come, my brother," Cjiina agreed. "It is hot in the sun."

"There were stools rca4 for them on the veranda in the shade, and two of Tippoo Tip's young women brought them clay pots of beer, thick as gruel' and refreshingly tart. The girls were both in their teens, pretty little things with eyes like fawns. TipPoo Tip liked women and always surrounded himself with them. It was one of his weaknesses, China thought, and he smiled a cold, superior smile. He himself could take a boy or a girl with equal enjoyment, but only as a brief diversion and not as a necessity of life, and the women engaged his attention for only a fleeting moment before he turned back to his host.

The bodyguards had retired out of earshot, and Tippoo Tip waved the girls away.

"And you, my brother?" China asked. "How goes the battle? I hear that you have taken the head of Frelimo and pushed it down between their knees to give them a close-up view of their own fundament. Is that true?"

It was not true, of course. As commander of the southern division of Renamo, Tippoo Tip was closer to the capital and port of Maputo, the center of government power. He was therefore more compromised by the withdrawal of South African military assistance, and he stood in the front line of Frelimo counterattacks and reprisals. China knew that in the last few months Tippoo Tip had experienced heavy reversals and lost many men and much territory in the south, but now Tippoo Tip chuckled and nodded.

"We have eaten everything that Frelimo has sent against us.

Swallowed them without a belch or a fart."

They sparred lightly over the beer pots, smiling and laughing but watching each other like lions over a kill, on guard and ready at any instant to pounce or defend themselves, until at last China murmured, "I am pleased to hear that all goes so well with you. I had come to see if my Hind gunship could assist you against Frelimo." He spread his hands in a deprecating gesture. "But I see you have no need of help from me."

It was a Machiavellian ploy, and China watched as the point slid through Tippoo Tip's guard and his expression changed.

China knew it would have been a serious tactical error to ask a man like this for assistance. Tippoo Tip had the nose of a hyena for sineffing out weakness. Instead China had offered the bait of the Hind dangled it for an instant before his eyes, and then with craft; sleight of hand made it disappear again.

Tippoo blinked, and behind his grin he searched for a response.

He also hated to admit failure or weakness to one he knew would exploit it ruthlessly, but still he craved and lusted after that fabulous machine.

"The help of a brother is always welcome," he contradicted pleasantly, "especially a brother who rides the skies in his own hen shaw " He went on swiftly, "Perhaps there is some small service that I can offer in return for your help?"

"Crafty rogue," China thought, admiring his style. "He knows I haven't come here out of compassion. He knows I want something." And both of them retreated, in the African manner, behind another screen of pleasantries and trivialities, coming back only circuitously and almost flirtatiously to the main subject.

"I laid a trap for Frelimo," Tippoo Tip boasted. "I pulled back from the Save forests." In truth he had been driven out of those infinitely valuable indigenous forests only after hard fighting, in the face of the most determined Frelimo attacks since the beginning of the long campaign.

"That was cunning of you," China agreed, letting the razor edge of sarcasm flash in his tone. "What a trap to leave the forests to Frehmo and how stupid of them to fall for it."

The Save forests were a treasure house-seventy-foot-tall lead woods also known as ivory tusk trees for their dense, finely grained timber; magnificent Rhodesian mahogany, which yielded logs five feet in diameter; and the most rare and valuable of all African trees, the tamboti, or African sandalwood, with its richly figured and scented timber.

Probably nowhere on the continent was there such a concentration of these precious hardwoods. They constituted the last natural resource of this ravaged land. First the great elephant herds had been wiped out, then the rhinoceros and the buffalo had been machine-gunned from the air. The Soviets and North Koreans had plundered the vast natural prawn beds and fisheries of the rich warm Mozambican current along the eastern coast, while foreign adventurers with Frefimo licenses and approval had decimated the crocodile population of Lake Cabora Bossa. Only the forests still remained intact.

Even more so than the other newly independent African states, the government of Mozambique was desperately short of foreign exchange. For over a decade they had been fighting a drawn-out guerrilla war that had bled their economy white. Those forests were the last assets they had to sell for hard cash.

"They have moved in with labor battalions, twenty, perhaps thirty thousand slaves," Tippoo Tip told China.

I'So many?" China asked with interest. "Where did they find them?"

They have swept the last peasants off the land. They have raided the refugee camps, gathered the vagrants and the unemployed from the slumsAand streets of Maputo. They call it the "Democratic People'# Full Employment Programme," and the men and women work, from dawn to sundown for ten Frelimo escudos a day, and the single meal they are fed costs them fifteen Frelimo escudos." Tippoo Tip threw back his head and laughed, more in admiration than amusement. "Sometimes Frelimo is not so stupid," he admitted. "The labor battalions pay five escudos a day for the privilege of cutting the government timber, a most admirable arrangement"

"And you have allowed Frelimo to do this?" China asked. It was not the plight of the labor battalions that concerned him. A single sixty-foot log of tamboti was valued at approximately fifty thousand U.S. dollars, and the forests extended for hundreds of thousands of acres.

"Of course I allow them to do this," Tippoo Tip agreed. "They cannot move the timber out until the roads and the railway are reconstructed, and until then they are piling the logs in dumps along the old line of rail. My scouts count each log that is added to the stockpile." Tippoo Tip took a grubby plastic-covered notebook from the pocket of his kudu-skin vest and showed China the down in blue ballpoint pen on the back figures he had neatly noted page China kept his face impassive as he read the total, but his eyes glittered behind the gold-rimmed sunglasses. That sum of dollars was sufficient to finance the war chests of both armies for a further five years, enough to buy the alliance of nations or to elevate a warlord to the estate of president-for-life over the entire small nation.

"The time is almost ready for me to return to the forests of Save and collect the harvest Frelimo has gathered in, ready for me."

"How would you export this harvest? A log of tamboti weighs a hundred tons. Who would buy it from you?"

Tippoo Tip clapped his hands and shouted to one of his aides, who was squatting in the shade of the building across the street.

The guerrilla jumped up and hurried to where the two generals sat.

He knelt to unroll a field map on the cracked concrete floor of the veranda between their stools and placed lumps of broken concrete on the corners of the map to hold it flat. Tippoo Tip and China leaned forward to study it.

"Here are the forests." Tippoo Tip traced out the boundaries of the vast area between the Save and Limpopo rivers, directly south of their own position. "Frelfino have set up their timber yards here and here and here."

"Go on," China encouraged him.

"The most southerly dump is only thirty miles from the north bank of the Limpopo, thirty miles from the South African border."

"The South Africans have disavowed us-they have signed an accord with Chissano and Frelimo," China pointed out.

"Treaties and accords are merely pieces of paper." Tippoo Tip waved them aside. "Here we are discussing half a billion U.S.

dollars" worth of timber. I have already received assurances from our erstwhile allies in the south that if I can make good delivery, they will arrange transport to their border and payment in Lisbon or Zurich." He paused. "Frelimo has cut and stacked the goods for me. It remains only for me to collect and deliver."

"And my new helicopter gunship will assist your collection?"

China suggested.

"Assist, yes, although I could achieve the same result with my own forces."

"Perhaps, but a joint operation would be quicker and more certain," China told him. "We share the fighting and the spoils.

With my hen shaw and reinforcements from the north it would take a week or less to drive the Frelimo forces out of the forests."

Tippoo Tip pretended to consider the proposition, then nodded and said delicately, "Of course, I could reward you for your help, with a modest percentage of the value of the timber we capture."

""Modest" is not a word I greatly favor." China sighed. "I prefer the good socialist word "equal," let us say an equal share?"

Tippoo Tip looked pained and threw up his hands in protest.

"Be reasonable, my brother." For an hour longer they haggled and argued, slowly drawing closer to striking a bargain over the private distribution of a nation's wealth and the fate of tens of thousands of wretched individuals in the labor battalions.

"My scouts tell me that the people in the logging camps are near the end of their usefulness," Tippoo Tip remarked at one point.

"Frelimo has fed them on such rations that nearly all of them are sick and starving. They are dying by hundreds each day, and they are cutting half the timber that they were two months ago. Frelimo has run out of replacements for the logging gangs, and the whole business is running down. There is not much to be gained by waiting any longer. We should attack immediately, before the beginning of the rains."

China looked at his digital wristwatch, a badge of rank as significant as the star on his epaulettes. The Hind would be returning to pick him up within half an hour; he must conclude the negotiations and strike the bargain. Within minutes they had agreed on the last details of the combined operation. Then China mentioned casually, "There is one other matter." His tone alerted Tippoo Tip to the importance of the next request. He leaned forward on the stool and placed his hands, as broad and powerful as the paws of a grizzly bear, on his knees. "I am chasing a small party of white fugitives. It seems that they are attempting to reach the South African border." Briefly China sketched out a description of Sean's party and ended, "I want you to alert all your forces between here and the Limpopo to be on the lookout for them."

"A white man and a white woman, a young white woman. It sounds interesting, my brother," Tippoo Tip said thoughtfully.

"The man is the most important. The woman is an American and may have some value as a hostage, but otherwise she means little."

"To me a woman always has value," Tippoo Tip contradicted him. "Especially if she is white and young. I like a change of flesh occasionally. Let us make another bargain, my brother, once again equal shares. If I help you to capture these runaway whites, you P may have the man, but I will keep the woman. Is it agreed?"

China thought for a moment, then nodded. "Very well, you may have her, but I want the man alive and uninjured."

"That is exactly how I want the woman," Tippoo Tip chuckled.

"So again we are in accord." He stretched out his right hand, and China took it. Both of them knew as they stared into each other's eyes that the gesture was meaningless, that their agreement would be honored only as long as it favored both of them, and that it could be broken without warning by either of them as circumstances altered.

"Now tell me about this young white woman," Tippoo Tip invited. "Where was she last seen, and what are you doing to catch her?"

China returned immediately to the map spread between them, and Tippoo Tip took note of the new animation in his expression and the eagerness in his voice as he explained how Sean and his party had avoided the trap he had set on the border and how the Shangane deserters had reported their position and their intention of heading southward.

"We know their last definite position was here." China touched a spot just north of the railway line. "But that was three days ago.

They could be anywhere along here." He spread his hand and drew it down across the map. "One of the party is badly wounded, so they have probably not reached this far south. I have patrols, almost three hundred men quartering the ground south of the railway looking for their spoor, but I want you to lay a net, like this, in front of them. How many men can you spare?"

Tippoo Tip shrugged. "I have already placed three companies here along the Rio Save, keeping watch on the logging in the forests. There are five more companies spread across here, further north. If these whites are trying to reach the Limpopo border, they will have to pass right through my fines and the Frelimo, guards in the forest. I will radio my company commanders to be fully alert for them."

General China's tone was sharp and authoritative. "They must cover every trail, every river crossing. They must stake out a stop line with no gaps in it, and my sweep line coming down from the north will drive them onto it. But warn your section commanders that the white man is a soldier and a good one. He commanded the Ballantyne Scouts at the end of the war."

"Courtney," Tippoo Tip broke in. "I remember him well." He chuckled. "Of course; it was Courtney who led the raid on your base. No small wonder that you want him so badly. You and Colonel Courtney go back many years. You have a long memory, my brother."

"Yes." China nodded and touched the lobe of his deaf ear.

"Many years and a long memory, but then revenge is a dish that tastes best if it is eaten cold."

They both looked up as the sound of the Hind's turbos whistled in from the north of the village. China checked his wristwatch. The pilot was precisely on time for the pickup, and China felt his confidence in the young Portuguese reinforced. He stood up from the stool.

"We will maintain radio contact on 118.4 megahertz," he told Tippoo Tip. "Three schedules daily, Six A.M noon, and six in the evening." But Tippoo Tip was not looking at him-he was looking up longingly at the shape of the Hind as it hovered above the village like some mutated monster from a horror movie.

General China settled himself into the flight engineer's seat and closed the armored-glass canopy. He raised his right thumb toward where Tippoo Tip stood on the veranda of the derelict duka and as he returned the salute, the Hind rose vertically above the village and swung its nose toward the north.

"General, one of the patrols has been calling you urgently on the radio," the pilot said in China's earphones. "They are using the call sign "Twelve Red.""

"Very well, please switch to the patrol frequency," China ordered, and watched the digital display on the panel of his radio transmitter.

"Twelve Red, this is Banana Tree. Do you read?" he said into his helmet microphom'Twelve Red" was one of his crack scouting groups sweeping for spoor south of the railway line. Glancing at the map on his knee, China tried to guess the scouts" exact position. The section leader answered his call almost immediately.

"Banana Tree, this is Twelve Red. We have a confirmed contact.

China felt excitement and triumph rise in his chest, but he kept his voice level. "Report your position," he ordered, and as the section leader read out the coordinates China checked them on his field map and saw that the patrol was about thirty-five miles due north of the village.

"Have you got that, pilot?" he asked. "Get there as fast as you can. " As the engine tone of the Hind rose sharply he called, "Twelve Red, give us a red flare when you have us in sight."

Seven minutes later the flare arced up out of the forest almost directly under the Hind's nose, and the pilot slowed the machine and let it drift down toward the treetops.

The Renamo patrol had cleared a landing zone with their machetes and the pilot maneuvered the Hind into it and let her settle in a cloud of dust and debris. China saw with satisfaction that the scouts had thrown out a protective screen around the ing zone. They were crack bush fighters. He Icaped eagerly out of the cockpit, and the section leader came forward to salute him. He was a lean veteran, festooned with weapons, water bottles, and bandoliers of ammunition.

"They passed this way sometime yesterday," he reported.

"Are you sure it's them?" China demanded.

"The white man and woman." The section leader nodded. "But they buried something over there." He pointed with his chin. "We have not touched it, but I think it is a grave."

"Show me," China ordered, and followed him into the thorn thicket.

The section leader stopped beside a cairn of boulders.

"Yes, a grave," China said with finality. "Open it up."

The section leader snapped an order at two of his men and they laid aside their weapons and went forward. They kicked away the top stones and rolled them down the slope.

"Hurry!" China called. "Work faster!" And the ironstone boulders rang against each other and struck sparks as they were hurled aside.

"There is the corpse," the section leader called as Job's bundled head was exposed. He stepped forward and jerked aside the stained shirt that covered it.

"It's the Matabele." China recognized Job's features immediately.

"I didn't think he'd get this far. Dig him out and feed him to the hyenas," he ordered.

Two of the scouts reached down and seized Job's blanket wrapped shoulders. China watched with ghoulish interest. Mutilation of enemy dead was an ancient Nguni custom; the ritual disembowelment allowed the spirit of the vanquished to escape so it would not plague the victor. There was, however, a vindictive satisfaction in watching his men exhume the Matabele. He understood what grief this act would cause Sean Courtney, and he relished how he would describe it to him on his next radio transmission.

At that moment he spotted the short length of bark twine. It was twisted lightly around the blanket-wrapped shoulders of the corpse. a moment ie stare at it wit Purr len, as saw it tighten and heard the click of the grenade p he realized what it was, and he screamed a warning and hurled himself face forward to the earth.

The explosion crushed his eardrums and filled his head with pain. He felt the blast wave hit him, and something struck him in the cheek with numbing force. He rolled into a sitting position and for a moment thought that he had lost his eyesight; then the stars and Catherine wheels of light that filled his head dissipated, and with a rush of relief he realized he could see again.

Blood was streaming down the side of his face and dribbling from his chin onto the front of his battle dress shirt. He whipped the kerchief from around his neck and wadded it into the deep gash that a fragment from the grenade had opened across his cheekbone.

Unsteadily he came to his feet and stared down into the grave.

The grenade had gutted one of his men like a fish. He was kneeling and trying to push his bowels back into the hole, but the wet lining was sticking to his bare hands. The second guerrilla had been killed cleanly. The section leader sprang to China's side and tried to examine the gash in his cheek, but China struck his hands away.

"You white bastard!" His voice was shrill. "You will pay dearly for that, Colonel Courtney. I swear it to you."

The wounded guerrilla was still fumbling with his entrails, but they bulged out between his fingers. He was making a dreadful cawing bubbling sound that only increased General China's fury.

"Get that man out of here!" he screamed. "Take him away and shut him up!"

They dragged the wounded man away, but still China was not satisfied. He was shaking wildly with shock and fury, looking around for something on which to vent his rage.

"You men!" He pointed with a trembling finger. "Bring your pan gas Two guerrilla stan forward to obey. "Pull that Matabele dog out of his hole! Thit's right. Now use the pan gas Chop him into hyena food. ThIt's it. Small pieces, don't stop! Mincemeat! I want him turned into mincemeat!"

All that morning Matatu led them southward through the abandoned fields and past the deserted villages. The weeds and rank secondary growth gave them good cover, and they avoided the footpaths and skirted the burned -out huts.

Claudia was having difficulty keeping up. They had been going with only brief rests since the previous evening, and she was reaching the limits of her endurance. There was no sensation of pain.

Even the devilish little red-tipped thorns that left red weeping fines across the exposed skin of her arms merely tugged at her painlessly as she passed. Her steps were leaden and mechanical, and though she tried to keep the rhythm of the march, she felt herself running down like a clockwork toy. Slowly Sean drew ahead of her and she could not lengthen her stride to hold him. He glanced over his shoulder, saw how she was lagging, and slowed for her to catch up.

"I'm sorry," she blurted.

He glanced at the sky. "We have to keep going," he answered, and she toiled on behind him.

A little after midday they heard the Hind again. The sound of its engines were very faint and grew fainter still, dwindling away into the north.

Sean put out an arm to steady Claudia as she swayed on her feet.

"Well done," he told her gently. "I'm sorry I had to do that to you, but we've made good ground. China will never expect us to have got so far south. He has headed back northward, and we can rest now."

He led her to a cluster of low thorn acacia that formed a natural shelter. She sobbed with exhaustion as she sank to the hard ground and lay quietly as Sean squatted in front of her to remove her shoes and socks.

"Your feet have hardened up beautifully," he told her as he ! massaged them gently. "Not a sign of a blister. You're as tough as aScoutandtwiceasgutsy. "Shecouldn'tevenraiseasmj attic compliment. Sean pulled her sock over his hand, stuck one finger through the hole in the toe, and wiggled it like a ventriloquist's dummy.

"Okay. She walks good," he made the sock speak like Miss Piggy, "but, buster, you should see her in the sack."

Claudia giggled weakly, and he smiled down at her gently.

"That's better," he said. "Now go to sleep."

For a few minutes longer she watched him working on her sock.

"Which of your trollops taught you to dam?" she murmured drowsily.

"I was a virgin until I met you. Go to sleep."

"I hate her, whoever she was," Claudia said, and closed her eyes.

It seemed to her that she opened them again immediately, but the light had changed to soft shades of evening and the midday heat had cooled. She sat up.

Sean was cooking over a small fire of dry sticks, and he looked across at her. "Hungry?" he asked.

"Starving."

"Dinner." He brought the metal billy to her.

"What is it?" she asked suspiciously, peering down at the heap of scorched black sausages, each the size of her little finger.

"Don't ask," he said. "Eat."

Gingerly she picked one out and sniffed at it. It was still hot from the cooking fire.

"Eat!" he repeated, and to set an example popped one into his own mouth, chewed, and swallowed.

"Damned good," he gave his opinion. "Go ahead."

Carefully she bit into it. It squelched between her teeth and burst, filling her mouth with a warm custard that tasted like creamed spinach.

She forced it down.

"Have another."

"No thanks."

"They're full of protein. Eat."

"I couldn't."

"You won't last out the next march on an empty stomach. Open your mouth." He fed her and then himself alternately.

When the billy was empty, she asked again, "Now tell me, what have I been eating?" But he grinned and shook his head and turned the fire devouring his share to Alphonso, who was squatting across of the meal.

"Rig the radio," Sean ordered. "Let's hear if China has anything to say."

While Alphonso was busy stringing the radio aerial, Matatu slipped quietly into camp. He was carrying a cylinder of freshly peeled bark whose ends were stoppered with plugs of dried grass.

He and Sean exchanged a few words, and Sean looked serious.

"What is it?" Claudia asked with concern.

"Matatu has seen a lot of sign up ahead. It looks like there is a great deal of patrol activity, Frehmo or Renanio, he can't tell which."

That made Claudia uneasy, and she moved a little closer to where Sean sat and leaned against his shoulder. Together they listened to the radio, and again there seemed to be a much higher level of traffic, most of it in Shangane or African-accented Portuguese.

"There is something brewing," Alphonso grunted as he concentrated on the set. "They are moving patrols into a stop line."

"Renamo?" Sean asked, and Alphonso nodded.

"Sounds like General Tippoo Tip's men."

"What does he say?" Claudia asked, but Sean didn't want to alarm her further.

"Routine traffic," he bed. Claudia relaxed and watched Matatu at the cooking fire as he carefully un stoppered the bark cylinder and shook out its contents onto the coals. As she realized what he was cooking, she stiffened with horror.

"Those are the most disgusting-!" She couldn't finish, and she stared in awful fascination at the huge, hairy caterpillars writhing and wriggling on the coals. Their long reddish hair frizzled off in little puffs of smoke, and gradually the worms stopped moving and curled into little crisp black sausages.

Claudia let out a tiny strangled cry and clutched at Sean's arm as she recognized them. "They aren't-!" she gasped. "I didn't!

You didn't make me! Oh! No! I can't believe-!"

"Highly nutritious," Sean assured her, and Matatu, seeing the direction of her gaze, picked one of the caterpillars out of the coals and, passing it quickly from hand to hand to cool it, offered it to her with a magnanimous flourish.

"I think I'm going to throw up," Claudia said faintly, turning her face away. "I can't believe I actually ate one of those."

At that moment the radio crackled sharply and a voice spoke very faintly in a guttural language Claudia could not understand.

However, Sean's sudden interest in the transmission distracted her from her feelings of nauseous disgust and she asked, "What language is that?"

"Afrikaans," he replied shortly. "Quiet! Listen!" But the transmission faded out abruptly.

"Afrikaans?" she asked. "South African Dutch?"

441mat's right." Sean nodded. We must be getting within extreme range. That was almost certainly a South African military transmission, probably a border patrol on the Limpopo." Sean spoke briefly to Alphonso and then told Claudia, "He agrees.

South African border patrol. Alphonso says they sometimes Pick up skip transmissions like that even further north." Sean chocked his wristwatch. "Well, it doesn't look as though General China is going to entertain us this evening. We had better pack up and get ready to march." Sean had half risen when suddenly the radio burst into LIFE again. This time the voice was so clear they could hear every intake of General China's breath.

"Good evening, Colonel Courtney. Please forgive me for the late schedule, but I have had urgent business to attend to. Come in, please, Colonel Courtney."

In the silence that followed Sean made no move toward the microphone, and General China chuckled softly across the ether.

"Still at a loss for words, Colonel? Never mind. I'm sure you are listening, so I will congratulate you on the ground you have covered to date. Quite remarkable, especially in view Of Miss Monterro's brake upon your progress."

"Arrogant bastard," Claudia whispered bitterly. "He is everything and a male chauvinist pig to boot." me by surprise. We "Quite frankly, Colonel Courtney, you took have been forced to redeploy our stop lines further south to welcome you." Again there was a short silence, and suddenly General China's voice was full of malice. "You see, Colonel, we have found where you buried your Matabele." Claudia felt Sean stiffen beside her. The silence drew out until China spoke again. "We dug up the body and we were able to judge how long it had been in the earth by the extent of putrefaction." Sean began to tremble, and China went on affably. "A Matabele can stink like a dead hyena, and your friend was no exception. Tell me, Colonel, did you put that bullet in his head? Very'sensible thing to do. He wasn't going to make it anyway.". 4 "The swine! The bloody swine"" It was wrung out of Sean.

"Oh, and by the way, the booby trap didn't work. Very amateurish effort, I'm afraid." China laughed easily. "And don't worry about the Matabele. I made it easier for the hyenas. I put two of n to work on him with pan gas Bite-size chunks, Colonel, my me Matabele goulash!" snatched it to his mouth.

Sean lunged for the microphone and yelled into it. "You filthy "You depraved bloody animal!" he ghoul! By Christ, you'd better pray I never get my hand s on you!" He broke off, panting with the strength of his outrage.

"Thank you, Colonel." There was a smile in General China's voice.

"I was getting bored with talking to myself. It's good to be in contact again-I've missed you."

With a huge effort Sean resisted the temptation to reply and instead switched off the set. "Pack up." His voice was stiff trembling; with fury. "China will have us pretty well pinpointed after that little outburst. We've got to move fast now."

"Like we were dragging our heels before?" Claudia asked with resignation, but she stood up obediently.

Yet their progress was slower this night. Twice before midnight Matatu cautioned them to wait, warned by his animal sixth sense of danger ahead. Each time he went forward to scout the track and found the ambush that had been set for them, and each time they were forced to make a slow and stealthy detour to avoid the trap.

"General Tippoo Tip's men," Alphonso muttered. "He must be helping General China. There are men waiting for us on every path."

However, after midnight their luck changed for the better.

Matatu came across a well-used path running almost directly southward and discovered that only a short time before a large detachment of men had passed along it in the same direction they were headed.

"We'll use their spoor to cover our own." Sean seized the opportunity and put Matatu in the lead, with Claudia following him, while he and Alphonso took the drag, deliberately treading over the small, distinctive foot marks of the leading pair, obliterating them and losing them in the heavy sign the party of Tippoo Tip s men had left behind them.

They hurried along the path until Matatu's sharp ears picked out the tiny sounds the Renamo patrol was making as it moved forward in the silence of the night. Then they moderated their pace and trailed them at a discreet distance, letting the patrol run interference for them.

Keeping in contact with the enemy, maintaining the strict interval that was the fine between discovery and concealment, was a delicate and eerie business for which they had to rely completely on Matatu's hearing and night sight, but they were moving at almost double the pace they could have hoped for without this assistance.

A little before dawn the Renarno patrol stopped just ahead of them, and they crouched in the darkness and listened to them setting up an ambush on both sides of the pathway. Once the ambush party was settled in, Matatu led them on another detour to meet the path again further on, and they struck out southward once again.

"We have covered twenty-five miles by my reckoning," Sean murmured with grim satisfaction as the first delicate light of dawn paled the eastern stars. "But we cannot risk moving further in daylight. The country is crawling with Renamo. Matatu, find us a place to lie up for the day."

During that night march, they had moved into an area of wet vlei ground on the approaches to the Save River, and now Matatu led them deliberately into the tall swamp grass. They waded knee deep across the flood plains that guarded the river, picking their way between shallow open lagoons from which the mosquitoes rose in gray clouds. The water covered their tracks and Sean brought up the rear of the file, meticulously closing the swamp grass and brushing it upright behind him to disguise their passing.

A few hundred yards off the path Matatu discovered a small dry island only inches above the level of the floodwaters, and as he stepped onto it there was a violent upheaval in the reeds as a heavy body rushed through it.

Claudia screamed with shock, certain they had blundered into another murderous Renamo ambush. However, Matatu whipped out his skinning knife and with a shrill war cry dived into the grass; there was a wild commotion as he wrestled with a writhing, scaly body twice his own size.

Sean rushed forward to help him, and between them they clubbed and stabbed the creature and dragged it out of the grass onto the island. Claudia shuddered with horror as she realized it was a huge gray lizard, almost seven feet long, with a speckled yellow belly and a long whip of a tail that still twitched and lashed from side to side.

With squeaks of glee Matatu immediately began to peel off the scaly skin.

"What is it?"

"Matatu's favorite delicacy, leguan." Sean whetted the blade of his trench knife on thQ,palm of his hand and then helped Matatu butcher the monitor lizard.

The flesh from the tail was white as filets of Dover sole, but Claudia grimaced when Sean offered her a strip.

"You and Matatu would eat your own offspring," she accused.

"That from the girl who dines regularly on mo pane caterpillars!"

"Sean, I couldn't, I really couldn't force myself. Not raw."

"We haven't any dry wood for a fire, and you have eaten Japanese sashimi, haven't you? You told me you loved it."

"That's raw fish, not raw lizard!"

"Same difference. Think of it as a kind of African sashimi," he coaxed her gently. When at last she gave in and tasted it, she found it surprisingly palatable, and her hunger overcame her squeamishness.

For once there was no shortage of water, and they filled their bellies with sweet white meat and floodwater, then curled up on their blankets. With the tall swamp grass swaying over their heads to protect them from the burning sunlight and the eyes in the sky, Claudia felt secure and gave in to her fatigue.

Once in the middle of the day, she woke and lay in Sean's arms to listen to the sound of the searching Hind.

"China is working the riverbanks ahead of us," Sean whispered.

The sound of the Hind's turbos rose and fell as it turned on each leg of the search pattern, and Claudia felt her stomach muscles knotting and contracting as it grew louder, passing only a short distance south of where they lay, and then finally faded into silence.

"He's gone." Sean hugged her. "Get some sleep.

She woke again with a sense of panic on her, but when she tried to MO ve she found herself held down firmly and the palm of someone's hand clamped painfully across her mouth. She turned her eyes sideways, and Sean's face was close to hers.

"Quiet!" he breathed in her ear. "Not a peep out of you."

When she nodded, he released her and rolled over to look out through the screen of swamp grass. She did the same and peered out across the shallow waters of the lagoon.

At first she saw nothing. Then she heard someone singing. It was a sweet girlish treble softly piping a Shangane love song, and with it came the sound of light footfalls in the shallow lagoon water.

The singing came very close, so close that Claudia instinctively shrank nearer to Sean and held her breath.

Suddenly the singing girl stepped into the line of her vision through the aperture in the grass before Claudia's eyes. She was a slim, graceful lass, just past puberty, for though her features were sweet and childlike, her breasts were big and round as tsama melons. She wore only a ragged loincloth pulled up between her long, coltish legs and her skin glowed in the late afternoon sunlight like burnt molasses. She seemed as wild and fey as a spirit of the forest, and Claudia was instantly enchanted by her.

In her right hand the girl carried a light reed fishing spear with multiple barbed grains, and as she waded softly through the lucid warm waters she held the spear poised to strike.

Abruptly the song died on her lips and she froze for an instant, then lunged with the grace of a dancer. The shaft of the spear twitched in her hands, and with a happy little cry she lifted a long, slimy catfish clear of the water. It wriggled on the end of the spear, its wide whAered mouth gulping and grunting, and the girl clubbed its flattened skull and dropped it into the plaited-reed bag at her waist.

She washed the fish slime from her small pink-palmed hands, picked up the spear, and resumed her fishing, coming on directly toward where they lay in the patch of swamp grass. Sean reached out and squeezed Claudia's arm, cautioning her not to move, ut the black girl was already so close that with a few more paces she would stumble over them.

Suddenly she looked up, directly into Claudia's eyes. The two of them stared at each other for only a moment, then the girl whirled and darted away. In an instant Sean was up and racing after her, and from the grass on either side both Alphonso and Matatu rushed out to join the chase.

The girl was halfway across the lagoon before they caught up with her; she tried to dodge and double back, but each way she turned there was one of them ready to cut her off and at last she stood at bay, wild -eyed and panting with terror but holding the fishing spear determinedly in front of her. Her courage and spirit were wasted against the three men facing her; like a cat surrounded by Alsatians, she had no chance of escape.

Matatu feinted at her flank, and the instant she turned the point of the spear toward him Sean knocked it out of her hands and swept her up under his arm. He carried her kicking and clawing back to the island and dumped her on the dry land. She had lost both her straw bag and loincloth in the struggle, and she crouched naked and trembling, staring up at the men who surrounded her.

Sean spoke to her in soft, soothing tones, but at first she would not reply. Then Alphonso questioned her, and as soon as the girl realized that he was of her own tribe, she seemed to relax slightly.

After another few gently questions, she made a hesitant breathless response.

""What does she say?" Claudia could not restrain her concern for the child.

"She is living here in the swamps to hide from the soldiers," Sean answered. "Renamo killed her mother and Frelimo took her father and the rest of her family away to cut trees in the forest. She escaped."

They questioned the girl for almost an hour. How far ahead was the river? Was there a crossing? How many soldiers were there at the river? Where were the Frelimo cutting trees? As she replied to each question, the girl's terror abated. She seemed to sense Claudia's sympathy and looked toward her with a pathetic childlike trust.

"I speak English a little, miss," she whispered at last.

Claudia was startled. "How did you learn?"

"At the mission, before the soldiers came and burned it and killed the nuns."

"Your English is good." Claudia smiled at her. "What is your name, child?"

"Miriam, miss."

"Don't get too chummy," Sean warned Claudia grimly.

"She's a darling little thing."

Sean seemed about to reply but then thought better of it and looked up at the sunset instead. "Damn it, we have missed China's radio schedule. Let's get ready to move out. Time to get cracking."

It took only minutes for them to gird up for the march, and with her pack on her back Claudia asked, "What about the girl?"

"We'll leave her here," Sean said, but something in his voice and the way he looked away worried Claudia. She started to follow Sean as he stepped off the island into the water. Then she stopped and looked back. The black girl still squatted naked, staring after Claudia unhappily, but behind her stood Matatu, and he had the skinning knife in his right hand.

Realization dashed over Claudia like a huge wave of icy anger.

"Sean!" Her voice shook as she called him back. "What are you going to do to this child?"

"Don't worry about it," he told her brusquely.

"Matatu!" She began to tremble. "What are you going to do?"

And he grinned at her. "Are you going to-T" She drew her finger across her own throat, and Matatu nodded merrily and showed her the knife.

"Ndio, " he agreed. "Kufa. " She knew that Swahili word.

Matatu had used it whenever her father had shot down an animal and Matatu had slit its throat. Suddenly she was shaking with anger. She rounded on Sean.

"You're going to murder her!" Her voice was shrill with outrage and horror.

"Wait, Claudia, listen. We can't leave her here. If they catch her it would be suicide."

"You bastard!" she screamed at him. "You're as bad as any Renarno thug, as bad as China himself!"

"It's our lives, don't you understand? It's survival."

"I can't believe what I'm hearing!"

"This is a hard, cruel land. If we are to survive, we have to live by those standards. We can't afford the folly of compassion."

She wanted to attack him physically; she balled her fists in the effort of self-control, but her voice was still shrill. "Compassion and conscience are all that separate us from the animals." She drew a deep breath. "If you value what there is between us, you won't say anything more, you won't try to rationalize what you almost did to this child."

"You prefer to be captured by General China?" he demanded.

"Ms child, as you call her, won't hesitate to give them our exact whereabouts."

"Don't, Sean! I'm warning you, everything you say is causing damage to our relationship that can never be repaired."

"All right, then." Sean reached out to take her hands and draw her to him. "What do you want us to do with her? I'll do whatever you say. You want us to turn her loose to report to the first Renamo patrol that comes along, I'll do it."

Claudia was standing rigid in the circle of his arms, and though the strident edge was gone from her voice, it was cold and determined. "We'll take her with us."

Sean dropped his arms. "With us?"

"That's what I said. If we can't leave her, then that's the only solution."

Sean stared at her and she went on firmly, "You said you'd do whatever I say. You made me a promise."

He opened his mouth, then closed it and looked at the black girl.

She had understood some of the argument, enough to know that her LIFE was at stake and that Claudia was her champion, her savior. When Sean saw the expression on the child's face, suddenly he was filled with shame and self-disgust. It was an alien sensation.

During the bush war the Scouts had left no witnesses. This woman of his was turning him soft, he thought, then smiled and shook his head-or perhaps she was simply humanizing him.

"All right." He was still smiling. "The girl comes with us on condition that you forgive me."

Their kiss was bx*el, cool. Claudia's lips were tightly closed.

Sean understood it would take time for her to recover from her outrage.

She turned from Sean and lifted the black girl to her feet.

Miriam clung to her thankfully.

"Fetch her loincloth," Sean ordered Matatu. "And put your knife away. The girl is coming with us." Matatu rolled his eyes in disapproval. But he went to find the girl's single item of clothing.

While Miriam rewound the scrap of rag around her waist, Sergeant Alphonso leaned on his rifle and watched her with interest.

It was obvious that he was not unhappy with the decision to spare the girl. Claudia did not approve of his appraisal of her protegee, and she opened her small personal pack and dug out her one spare shirt, a camouflage Renamo sweatshirt from General China's stores.

The shirt hung half down MtriajVs thighs and satisfied Claudia's sense of decorum. The black girl was delighted, her terror of a few minutes before forgotten as she Preened in her new finery.

"Thank you, Donna, think you very much. You good lady."

"All right," Sean intervened. "The fashion show is over. Let's move out." And Alphonso took Miriam's arm.

only then did the girl realize she was being abducted, and she pulled away and broke into a passionate protest.

"Damn it!" Sean exploded. "Now we are really in trouble! "what is it?" Claudia demanded.

"She isn't alone. She's got others with her."

"I thought she had lost her parents!"

"That's right, but she's got a brother and sister hidden in the selves. Damn swamps. Two kids so young they can't fend for them it! Damn it!"

Sean repeated bitterly. "Now what the hell do we do?"

with us also," Claudia "We fetch the children and take them stated simply.

"Two brats! Are you crazy? We aren,t running an orphanage."

"Do we have to go over this one more time?" Claudia turned her back on him in exasperation and took Miriam's hand. "It's all right. You can trust me. We'll look after all of YOU."

The black girl quieted and stared at Claudia with a puppy's trust and adoration.

"I'ere are the children? We'll fetch them." hand into

"Come, Donna. I show you." Miriam led her by the the swamp.

It was almost dark when they reached the tiny island where Miriam had hidden the children in a clump of papyrus. When she parted the thick green stems, two pairs of huge dark eyes stared out at them like owlets from the nest.

"A boy." Claudia lifted him out. He was five or six years of age skinny and shivering with fright. "And a girl." She was younger: not more than four, and Claudia exclaimed as she touched her.

sick"" The little girl was too "She's burning up. This child is very weak to stand, and she lay curled like a dying kitten, trembling and mewling softly.

"Malaria," said Sean, and squatted beside the child. "She's riddled with it."

"We've got chloroquine in the medical pack." Claudia reached for it briskly.

"This is madness!" Sean growled. "We can't lumber ourselves with this bunch. It's a nightmare!"

"Do shut up!" Claudia snapped. "How many chloroquine do I give her? The instructions say, "For children under six years, consult a physician." Thanks a lot, we'll try two tablets."

As they worked over the child, Claudia asked Miriam, "What are their names? What do you call the children?"

The answer was so long and complicated that even Claudia looked daunted, but she recovered quickly. "I'll never pronounce that," she said finally. "We'll call them Mickey and Minnie."

"Walt Disney will sue," Sean warned, but she ignored him and wrapped Minnie in her own blanket.

"You'll have to carry her," she told Sean matter-of-factly.

"If the little bugger pees on me, I'll wring her neck," he protested.

"And Alphonso can carry Mickey."

ts were thor Sean could see that Claudia's maternal inst inc additional burden that oughly aroused, and his resentment of this had been thrust upon them was tempered by seeing how the new responsibilities had changed her. Claudia had sloughed off her exhaustion and lethargy and was more vigorous and incisive than she had been since Job's death.

Sean lifted the child's almost weightless little body onto his back and strapped it there with a strip of the blanket. The heat of the fever soaked through the blanket as though she were a hot-water bottle. However, it was a familiar experience to the child, who had been carried since infancy in this fashion, and she was immediately quiet and somnolent. "I still can't believe what's happening to me," Sean muttered. "A goddamned unpaid nursemaid at my age." But he plunged into the swamp once more.

Before the night had h#ll run out, Miriam proved to be an asset that far outweighed the additional burden she and the two children had placed on them. She knew the river area with the intimacy of a swamp creature. She went ahead with Matatu and guided him through the labyrinth of islands and lagoons, picking out the secret pathways that saved them hours of wearisome exploration.

A little after midnight, when Orion the great hunter stood directly overhead with his bow at full draw, Miriam led them out onto the bank of the Rio Save and pointed out the ford through which a man could wade to the far bank.

They rested, and the women tended the children and fed them morsels of leguan meat. The chloroquine had taken effect, and the little girl was cooler and less fretful. After a hurried meal the men concealed themselves in the reed beds and stared out across the black waters in which the stars were reflected like drowning fireflies.

"This is the most dangerous point," Sean whispered. "China was patrolling the river all day yesterday in the Hind, and he'll be back at first light. We don't dare waste time here. We have to get across and get clear before sunrise."

"They'll be waiting on the far side," Alphonso demurred.

"They'll be expecting us."

"That's right," Sean agreed. "They are here, but we know they are here. We'll leave the women on this side and go across to clear the far bank. We can't use firearms, it will have to be knives and wire. It's wet work tonight." He used the old Scout term for it.

"Sebenza enamanzi. In more ways than one, it will be wet work tonight."

Sean's wire was a four-foot length of stainless steel, the single strand he had cut from the winch cable of the Hercules aircraft before abandoning it. Job had carved two hardwood buttons and fixed them to either end of the wire to form grips. It rolled into a coil the size of a silver dollar and slipped easily into the grenade pocket of his webbing. Now Sean fished it out and unrolled it. He tested it, settling the wooden buttons between his fingers and jerking it tight, grunting with satisfaction at the familiar tension in the single resilient strand. Then he recoiled the wire and slipped it over his left wrist like a ban e.

The three of them stripped completely naked; wet clothing dripped water to alert an enemy or give him a hold in a hand-to hand struggle. Each of them wore his knife on a short cord around his bare neck.

Sean went to where Claudia waited with the children in the reeds. When he kissed her, her lips were soft and warm and she clung to him briefly.

"Have you forgiven me?" he asked. As answer UM again.

"Come back soon," she whispered.

The three men slid into the water soundlessly, keeping close contact, and dog-paddled quietly out from the bank, letting the current carry them well down below the ford.

They landed in a bed of papyrus on the south bank and slid ashore on their bellies. Sean's naked white body gleamed in the starlight. He rolled in the sticky black swamp mud until it coated every inch of his skin, then scooped a double handful and rubbed it over his face.

"Ready?" he asked quietly. He freed the trench knife in its sheath at his throat. "Let's go!"

They moved out away from the river and circled back upstream toward the ford. The swamps were confined to the north bank, while this side of the river was drier and the forests grew almost to the river's edge. They stayed in the shadows beneath the trees for concealment. As they drew closer to the ford they moved more cautiously, spreading out, Sean in the middle and Alphonso and Matatu on the flanks.

Sean smelled Renamo before he saw them, an odor of stale native tobacco smoke and dried sweat in unwashed clothing. He froze, listening and staring ahead with all his soul concentrated on it.

A little ahead of him in the darkness, a man coughed softly and cleared his throat, and Sean placed him accurately. He sank down and touched the earth, sweeping a clear spot with his fingertips for his next footstep, so no twig or dry leaf would betray him. One step at a time he moved forward until he had the Renamols head silhouetted against the starry sky. He was sitting behind an RPD machine gun on its bipod, staring out across the river.

Sean waited and the minutes drew out, five, then ten, each one a sep orate age. Then someone else yawned and stretched out on the left flank, and immediately an angry whisper cautioned him to silence.

"Three of them." Sean memorized each position and then withdrew as quietly and cautiously as he had come in.

On the edge of the forest Alphonso was waiting for him, and minutes later Matatu crept back to join them.

"Three," Alphonso whispered.

"Yes, three," Sean agreed.

"Four," Matatu contradicted them both. "There is another one just below the bank." h4latu missed nothing, and Sean accepted his estimate without reservation.

Only four Renamain the ambush. Sean was relieved. He had expected more, but China must be spreading his men thinly to cover every path and every ford of the river.

"No noise," Sean warned them. "One shot and we'll have the entire army doing a war dance on our backs. Matatu, you take the one you found below the bank. Alphonso, the one in the reeds who spoke. I'll take the two in the center." He slipped the wire bangle off his left wrist and unrolled it, once more stretching and testing it between his hands to get the feel of it.

"Wait until you hear my man blow before you strike yours." He reached out and lightly touched their shoulders, the ritual benediction, then they separated and drifted away into the night, back toward the river.

The machine gunner was exactly where Sean had left him, but as Sean moved in behind him a few scattered clouds obscured the stars, and Sean had to wait for them to clear. Every second's delay J increased the chance of discovery, and he was tempted to work only by sense of touch, but he restrained himself. As the sky cleared he was glad he had done so. The sentry had removed his cap and was scratching the back of his head; that raised hand would have blocked the wire and prevented a clean kill. There would have been a scream, gunshots, and every Renamo within miles would have come down on him.

He waited while the sentry relieved his itch and readjusted his cap. Then, as he dropped his hands, Sean reached forward and looped the wire noose around his throat in one swift wrap. In the same movement he hauled back with the full strength of both his arms and shot his right knee between the man's shoulder blades.

The wire sliced through flesh and windpipe as though they were Cheddar cheese. Sean felt the momentary check as the wire came up hard against the vertebrae of the neck, but he sawed with both hands, keeping all his weight on the wire, pushing with his knee.

The wire found the gap between the vertebrae and snicked clearly through it. The man's head fell forward and tumbled into his lap, and the man blew. The air from his lungs rushed out through the open windpipe in a soft sigh. It was the sound he had told Matatu and Alphonso to wait for. He knew they would be taking their victims at this moment, but there was no sound until the man Sean had killed flopped forward and his carotid artery discharged onto the earth with a regular hiss like milk from the teat jetting into a bucket under a milkmaid's practiced fingers.

The sound alerted the fourth Renamo, the only one still alive, and he called out in a puzzled tone, "What is it, Alves? What are you doing?"

The question guided Sean to him, and he had the knife out of its sheath, holding it underhand so the point went up at an acute angle under the man's fibs. Sean pinned Win down with his left hand, holding his throat closed to prevent him screaming, working the knife with his other hand, opening the wound, twisting and turning the blade with all the strength of his right wrist.

In thirty seconds it was over. The last tremors shook the body beneath him, and Sean released him and stood up. Matatu was already beside him, his skinning knife at the ready. The knife and his hands were wet. His own work was done and he had come to help Sean, but it was not necessary.

They waited for a full minute, listening for any alarm; perhaps there was another sentry even Matatu might have overlooked, but apart from the croaking of the frogs in the reed beds and the whine of mosquitoes there was no sound.

"Search them," Sean ordered. "Take whatever we can use."

One of the rifles, all of the ammunition, half a dozen grenades, spare clothing, all the food. They gathered it up swiftly.

"That's it," Sean said. "Dump the rest of it." They dragged the bodies down the bank and pushed them out into the current, then dropped the heavy machine gun and the rest of the discarded equipment into the deep water beyond the reeds.

Sean glanced at his watch. "We are running out of time. We must bring the others across."

Claudia, Miriam, and the children were still in the reed beds on the south bank where they had left them.

"What happened? We didn't hear anything." Claudia hugged Sean's naked wet chest with relief.

"Nothing to hear," Sean told her, and picked up the sleeping children, one on each arm.

They formed a human stanchion across the current, locking arms together, bracing each other against the heavy pull of the water that was as deep as Claudia's chin. Without this support the women would have been swept away. Even with it the crossing was arduous, and they dragged themselves onto the south bank near exhaustion.

Sean would not let them rest longer than the few minutes it took to dry Minnie and wrap her in a jacket they had looted from one of the dead Renarno; then he had them up again and chivvied them onward into the forest.

"We have to get clear of the river before sunrise. China will be back as soon as it is light."

General China picked out the group of men on the riverbank at two hundred feet. As the helicopter slanted in toward them, the downdraft of its rotors furred the surface of the Save River with a dark ruffle.

The Portuguese pilot set the machine down at the edge of the forest on the south bank. China clambered out of the weapons cockpit and went striding down toward the river. Although his face was an expressionless mask, his anger boiled behind it and glinted in his eyes. He took the dark glasses from his breast pocket and concealed his eyes behind the lenses.

The circle of men opened respectfully, and China stepped through and looked down at the disembodied human head that lay on the muddy bank. It had been washed up among the reeds, the freshwater crabs had nibbled at it, and the water had leached the exposed flesh white and clouded the open eyes to opaque marbles, but the clean cut that had severed the neck was as unmistakable as a handwritten signature.

"That's the white man's work," China said softly. "His Scouts called it "wet work'; the wire was their trademark. When did it hap penT "Last night." Tippoo Tip tugged at his beard with agitation.

There had been no survivors of the ambush party, no one of whom to make an example.

"You let them get through," China accused coldly. "You promised me they would never cross the river."

"These dogs!" Tippoo Tip snarled. "Those useless pigs!"

"They are your men," China pointed out. "And men take after those who command them. Their failure is your failure, General."

It was said in front of Tippoo Tip's own staff, and he growled with humiliation. He had made the promise and failed, and he shook with anger. He glared around at his men, loo a victim, but they dropped their eyes and their faces were abject and obsequious. There was no relief there.

Suddenly he drew back his foot and swung a vicious kick at the severed head. The steel toecap of his boot crushed in the pulpy waterlogged nose.

"Dog!" he shouted, and booted the head again, sending it rolling down the bank. He followed it, shouting with anger, aiming wild kicks at it, until it bounced like a football and plopped over the bank into the river.

He came back to General China, panting with rage.

"Very good, General." China applauded him ironically. "Very brave. What a pity you could not do the same to the white man."

"I had every crossing of the river guarded," Tippoo Tip started, then broke off as he noticed the crudely stitched gash on China's cheek for the first time. He grinned viciously. "You have been wounded. What misfortune. It wasn't the fault of the white man, was it? Surely not. You are too cunning to let him injure you, General China-apart from your ear, of course."

It was China's turn to bridle with fury. "If only I had my own men here. These stupid dogs of yours couldn't wipe their own backsides."

"One of your men is a stooge"" Tippoo Tip roared back at him.

"He's running with the white man. My men are not traitors. I have them in my hands." He showed those great paws, shaking them in China's face, and China closed his eyes for a moment and drew a deep breath. He realized they were on the brink of an irrevocable breach. A few more words like these and he would have no further cooperation from this great bearded ape. One day he would kill him, but he needed him today.

Today the most important thing in General China's world was getting his hands on the white man, alive if possible but dead if it had to be. Without Tippoo Tip's help, there was no chance of that.

His anger and retribution must wait for another time and opportunity.

"General Tippop Tip." His tone was conciliatory, almost humble. "Please forgive me. I let my disappointment run over my good sense. I know you did your best for me. We are both of us victims of our own people's incompetence. I ask you to ignore my bad manners."

Tippoo Tip was taken off balance as China had intended, and the angry words died in his open mouth.

"Even though these fools were unable to stop them, now at last we know exactly where they are. We have their fresh spoor and a full day in which to follow it. Let us make the most of this opportunity. Let's get this tiresome business over with. Then I, and my helicopter, will be entirely at your disposal for the more important task ahead of us."

He saw he had picked the right words. Tippoo Tip's rage gradually gave way to t at s Y, avaricious express n so well.

"I have already called up my best trackers," he agreed. "I'll have fifty of my men on their spoor within the hour, men who can run an eland off its feet. The white man will be in your hands before the sun sets this evening. This time there will be no mistake."

"Where are these trackers?" China demanded.

"I have radioed."

"I will send the helicopter to fetch them."

"That will save valuable time."

They watched the Hind rise and bear away northward, low across the darkly flowing waters of the Save River. As it disappeared they both turned to stare toward the south.

"You no longer control the territory south of the river," China pointed out. "These are the forests you so cunningly relinquished to the Frelinio." He pointed at the dense stands of hardwoods that stood tall against the southern sky.

"The river is my front line," Tippoo Tip conceded reluctantly.

"But the nearest Frehmo forces are still many miles further south.

My patrols cover this ground without interference from them. The men I am sending after the white man will catch him long before he. gets into Frelimo-held territory." Tippoo Tip broke off and pointed along the riverbank. "All, here they come." A long double file of heavily armed guerrillas came trotting down the footpath toward them. "Fifty of my best men. You will eat white chickens for dinner tonight.

Don't worry, my friend. They are as good as on your plate already."

The two platoons of Renamo halted and fell out on the bank, waiting for their trackers. China was a good judge of troops. He walked among them, and he recognized in them that eagerness and enthusiasm tempered by discipline and professionalism that is the peculiar mark of first-class bush fighters. For once he agreed with Tippoo Tip. These were hard men who could be relied on to get the job done. China beckoned the section leaders across to him.

"You know who you are chasing?" he asked, and they nodded.

"The white man is as dangerous as a wounded leopard, but I want him alive. Do you understand?"

"We understand, General."

"You have a radio. I want a report of your progress every hour on the command frequency."

"Yes, General."

"And when you have the quarry in sight, call me. I will come in the hen shaw I want to be there at the death."

The section leaders looked across the river, their expressions alert, and moments later, even with his impaired hearing, China picked up the whistle of the Hind's turbos returning from the north.

"If you do your job, you will be rewarded. But if you fail me, you will regret it. You will regret it deeply," China promised them.

As soon as the helicopter landed, the two trackers clambered down with alacrity from the small rear cabin. Tippoo Tip shouted at them and pointed to the outgoing spoor Sean and his party had left.

Watching the trackers begin their task, China was even more confident of the outcome. These two were good. They made a quick cast ahead, and then came back to the center and squatted over the spoor, whispering together softly, touching the faint tracks with the supple wands of wild willow they each carried, tent as a pair of bloodhounds taking the scent of the chase. When in they stood up again, a change had come over them. They were determined and businesslike. They turned to face the southern forests and went away at a run.

Behind them the two full platoons of camouflaged Renamo assault troopers fanned out into their running formation and set their pace to match the trackers.

"The white woman can never keep up that speed," Tippoo Tip exulted. "We will overtake them before they reach the Frelimo lines. We will have them before the end of this day. This time they'll not escape." He turned back to China. "Why don't we follow them in the helicopter?"

China hesitated. He did not want to explain the Hind's shortcomings. It was better to. let Tippoo Tip go on believing in its infallibility. He would not discuss with him the difficulty of bringing up sufficient fuel, 4he Hind's limited range even with full tanks, or the facts that his Portuguese engineer had warned him that the turbos were long overdue for service and that the pilot had already reported a malfunction and loss of power in the starboard engine.

"I will wait here," he said. "When your men catch up with the white man, they will call on the radio. That is when I will follow them."

China adjusted his dark glasses and sauntered across to the Hind. The pilot was waiting for him, leaning with assumed nonchalance against the camouflaged fuselage below the main cockpit.

"How is the engine behavine." China asked in Portuguese.

"It is beginning to surge and miss. It needs to be worked on."

"Fuel?"

"Main tanks are down to quarter. However, I still have the auxiliary."

"The convoy of porters with the fuel will be at our forward base by tomorrow morning. The engineer can work on her tonight, but I have to have her on standby until dark. I'll need her when they catch up with the runaways."

The pilot shrugged. "I'll fly her if you are willing to take the chance on that engine," he agreed.

"Keep a listening watch on the radio," China ordered. "With luck it will all be over in a few hours."

Sean realized Claudia could not maintain this pace much further.

She was running just ahead of him, so he could study the changes Mi in her that privation and hard living had brought about. She was I so lean and wispy that her scanty threadbare shirt flapped around ir her flanks, and the legs of her trousers had been reduced by thorns and razor-edged grass to a fringe of tatters that hung halfway down her thighs; below that, the length of her legs was exaggerated by their extreme thinness, yet somehow they had retained their elegant, high-bred lines. However, the thorns and sharp grass had wrought havoc on the exposed skin of her arms and legs. It looked as though she had been scourged by a cat-o'-nine-tails. Some of the scratches were healed, others scabbed over, but a few still bled.

Her hair had grown into a lank sweat-tangled mop that thumped between her prominent bony shoulder blades with each pace, and her back was so thin he could have counted the knobs of her vertebrae beneath her shirt. The perspiration had soaked through in a dark line down her spine, and hard exercise had firmed her buttocks into a pair of India-rubber balls in the sun bleached cotton pants; through a tiny three-cornered tear a tender flash of her white bottom winked at him with each pace. Her legs were floppy with exhaustion, throwing out sideways, and her ankles were loose and wobbled under her.

He would have to let her rest very soon, and yet she had not complained, not once in all the long tortured hours since they had left the river. He grinned fondly as he remembered the spoiled, arrogant bitch who had stepped off the Boeing at Harare airport so many eons ago. This was a different woman-tough, determined, and with a spirit as resilient as a Damascus steel blade. He knew she would never give up, she would keep going until she killed herself. He reached forward and tapped her shoulder.

"Ease up, wench. We'll take ten."

When she pulled up, she was unsteady on those long legs and he arm around her shoulders to steady her. "You're a ruddy put an marvel, do you know that?" He eased her down to sit with her back against one of the lead wood trees, and unscrewed the stopper on his water bottle, and passed it to her.

"Give Minnie to me. It's time for her chloroquine." Claudia's voice was husky with tiredness. Sean swung the little girl off his back and placed her in Claudia's lap.

"Remember, ten minutes, that's all."

Alphonso had taken the break to rig the radio. Mickey was squatting on one side of him, Miriam on the other. They watched with fascination as he tuned the set and began searching the bands.

There was the crackle and buzz of static followed by some faint extraneous snatches of Afrikaans, then an excited voice speaking in Shangane, very close and loud.

"Very close now," it said, and the reply came immediately.

"Keep going hard. Push them. Don't let them escape. Call me as soon as you catch them." That voice was unmistakable, and they did not need the acknowledgement to confirm it.

"Very well, General China."

The transmission ended, and Sean and Alphonso exchanged a quick hard frown.

"Very close," said the Shangane. "We can't outrun them."

"You might be able to get away," Sean said, "on your own."

Alphonso hesitated and looked sideways at Miriam. The Shantrusting eyes, and Algane maid returned his glance with open and scratched himself with embarrassment. "I'll phonso coughed stay," he muttered.

Sean laughed bitterly and said in English, "Join the club, mate.

That little witch didn't take long to hook you. These ruddy sheilas will be the death of all of us yet, you mark my words."

Alphonso frowned. He did not understand, and Sean switched back into Shangane. "Pack up the radio. If you are going to stand with us, we'd best find good place to do it. Your dung-eating Renamo brothers A* going to be with us very soon."

Sean turned and looked across at Matatu, who was instantly on his feet.

"That was China on the radio," he told him in Swahili.

"He hisses like a cobra." Matatu nodded.

"His men are on our spoor. They boast to him that they are very close.

Are there any more tricks we can use now, old friencr"

"Fire?" Matatu suggested, but without conviction.

Sean shook his head. "The wind is against us. We'd cook ourselves if we torched the forest."

Matatu hung his head. "If we keep the women and children with us, there are no more tricks," he admitted. "We are slow, and we leave a spoor that a blind man can follow in a moonless night." He shook his small, grizzled head miserably. "The only trick we have left is to fight them, and after that we are dead, my Bwana.

"Go back, Matatu. Find how close behind us they really are. We will go ahead and find a good place to fight them." He touched the little man's shoulder, then let him go. Sean watched him disappear g the tree trunks and then deliberately altered his expression before he turned to Claudia, striking a lighter, more carefree pose and putting a lift in his tone.

"How's our patient?" he asked. "She looks pretty chirpy to me."

"The chloroquine has done wonders." Claudia bounced the child on her lap and, as if to confirm her improvement, Minnie stuck her thumb in her mouth and smiled shyly around it at Sean.

He felt her smile tug at him with wholly unexpected poignancy.

Claudia laughed. "No female is immune to your fatal charms.

You've collected yourself another fan."

"Typical woman-all she really wants is a free ride." But he stroked the child's soft, woolly little head. "All right, sweetness, your horsey is ready to go."

Trustingly Minnie held out both arms, and he swung her up on to his back and strapped her there.

Claudia pulled herself stiffly to her feet and for a moment leaned against him. "Do you know something? You are a much nicer person than you pretend to be."

"Fooled you, didn't IT"

"I'd like to see you with a baby of your own," she whispered.

"Now you really terrify me. Let's go before you come up with any more crazy ideas like that one."

But the idea lingered with him as they ran on through the forest-a son of his own from this woman.

He had never even thought about that before, and then, as though to complement the idea, he felt a tiny hand reach across his shoulder from behind and touch his beard, stroking it as lightly as an alighting butterfly. Minnie was reciprocating the caress he had bestowed on her a few minutes earlier, and for a moment his throat closed up and made it difficult for him to breathe. He took her tiny hand in his. It was as silken and fragile as the wing of a hummingbird, and he was overcome with a feeling of terrible regret. Regret that there would never be a son-he accepted that at last--or a daughter. It was almost over. The hunting pack was very close behind. They could never outrun them. There was no escape; all they could hope for was a good pl in which to make the final stand. After that there was nothin'o escape, no future.

He was so wrapped up in Ins melancholy that he had run out into the open before he realized it. Claudia pulled up so sharply in front of him that he almost ran into her. He stopped at her side, d they looked about them with puzzled uncertainty.

an The forest had been laid waste. As far ahead as they could see, the great hardwoods had been swept away as though by a hurricane. Only the stumps remained, raw and bleeding gum as red as heart's blood.

The earth was torn and scarred where the huge trunks had come crashing down. Bright piles of sawdust remained where their branches had been stripped and the logs cut into lengths, and between the windrows of discarded branches and wilting boughs were the drag roads along which the precious timber had been hauled away.

Miriam stopped beside Sean. "This is where my people were forced to work," she said softly. "Frelimo came and took them to cut the trees. They chained them together and made them work until the meat was torn from the bones of their hands. They beat them like oxen and worked them until they fell and could not rise."

"How many people?" Sean asked. "So many trees have been destroyed."

"Perhaps a man or woman died for every tree," Miriam whispered "They took everybody, thousands upon tens of thousands."

She pointed to the horizon. "They work far south now, and they leave no tree standing."?

Sean felt the anger beginning to rise through his amazement.

This was destruction on a scale that affronted the law of nature and the sanctity of life itself. It was not just that those trees had taken three hundred years to reach their full majesty and had been destroyed with a few hours" callous work with the ax blades. It was more, much more. This forest was the source and fountain of myriad forms of life, inset and bird, mammal and reptile, of man himself. In this vast devastation all would perish.

It did not end there. With his own fate determined, with a term and a number of the hours that remained of his own life, Sean was overtaken by a prophetic melancholia. He realized that the destruction of this forest was symbolic of the predicament of the entire continent.

In a few fleeting decades, Africa had been overtaken by its own inherent savagery. The checks that had been placed on it by a century of colonialism had been struck off.

Chains perhaps those checks had been, but since being freed of them the peoples of Africa had been rushing headlong, with almost suicidal abandon, toward their own destruction.

Sean felt himself shaking with impotent rage at the folly of it and at the same time saddened, sickened almost unto death, by the terrible tragedy of it all.

"If I have to die," he thought, "then it's best to do so before I N see everything I love, the land, the animals, the people, all of it destroyed."

With his arm around Claudia's thin shoulders and the little black girl strapped on his back, he turned and looked back the way they had come. At that moment, Matatu came scampering out of the forest behind them. There was desperate urgency in his gait and the fear of death in his small wizened features. "They are very close, my Bwana. They have two trackers leading them. I watched them work-we will not throw them off.

They are good."

"How many troopers with them?" With an effort Sean cast off he oppressive mantle of dejection.

"As many as the grass on the plains of Serengeti," Matatu replied.

"They run like a pack of wild dogs on the hunt and they are hard men and fierce. Even the three of us will not stand too long against them."

Sean roused himself and looked around him. The cut line in which they stood was a natural killing ground, devoid of cover except for the knee-high stumps of hardwood. The open ground stretched two hundred meters wide to where the deadwood was piled in untidy windrows, the leaves long, withered, and browned, the branches forming a natural barricade.

"We'll make our stand there," Sean decided swiftly, and signaled Alphonso forward. They crossed the open ground at a run, bunched up with the two women in the middle. Miriam was drag her little brother along by one arm, and Alphonso ran protectively beside them. The big Shangane was heavily burdened with the radio and the packs of ammunition and stores they had picked UP from the ambush at the Save River, but he had also carried Mickey whenever the boy tired, setting him down on his feet for only short intervals. The three Shanganes, man, woman, and boy child, had very swiftly formed their own distinct core within the band, drawn together by tribal loyalties and natural physical attraction. Sean knew he could rely on Alphonso to take care of his trac own, and that allowed him to concentrate on his own particular charges, Claudia, Matatu, and now the little girl.

Alphonso needed no orders. Like Sean, he had a soldier's eye for terrain, and he ran unerringly toward a section of the tumble of discarded branches that formed a natural redoubt and that commanded the best field of fire across the cut line.

Swiftly they settled in, dragging some of the heavier branches into place to strengthen their position, laying out their weapons and spare ammunition, making their very limited preparations to stand off the first rush of the attackers.

Claudia and Miriam had taken the children a little further back to where a hollow in the earth and two especially large tree stumps formed some sort of shelter. His own preparations complete, Sean crossed to them quickly and, squatted beside Claudia.

"As soon as the shooting starts, I want you to take Miriam and the children and run for it," he told her. "Keep heading south." He broke off as he realized that she was shaking her head and her jaw was clenched obstinately.

"I've run far enough," she told him. "I'm staying with you." She laid her hand on his arm. "No, don't argue. It would be a waste of time."

"Claudia!"

"Please don't," she forestalled him. "There isn't much time left.

Don't spend it arguing."

She was right, of course, Sean knew. To try to run further on her own was pointless with two children to care for and a team of Renamo on her spoor. He nodded.

"All right," he agreed. He took the Tokarev pistol from his belt, cocked it, and carefully engaged the safety catch. "Take this."

"What's that for?" She stared at the weapon with distaste.

"I think you know what it's for."

"The same way as Job?"

He nodded. "It would be easier than going China's way."

She shook her head. "I couldn't," she whispered. "If there is no other way, at the end, won't you do it for me?"

"I'll try," he said. "But I don't think I'll have the guts. Here, take it, just in case." Reluctantly she accepted the pistol and tucked it into her belt.

"Now kiss me," she said.

Matatu's whistle interrupted their embrace. "I love you," Sean murmured in her calf.

"I'll love you she replied, "through all eternity."

He left her and crawled back into the piles of deadwood. At Matatu's side he sank down and peered out through the chink between two branches toward the edge of the forest.

For many minutes he saw nothing. Then there was a shadowy frit of movement among the holes of the standing hardwood, and Sean laid his right hand on the pistol grip of the AKM rifle and raised it until the butt stock touched his cheek.

The silence drew out in the languorous sunlit afternoon while they waited. No bird sang, no creature moved, until at last there was a muted bird whistle from the edge of the forest and a man shape detached itself and flitted into the opening, showing for just hi a small part of a second, then disappearing behind One Of the t ck tree stumps. As soon as it was gone another broke from the tree line a hundred meters further to the left and darted forward- This also disappeared, and almost immediately, out on the right, a one third Renamo guerrilla emerged.

"Three only," Sean murmured. They were not going to expose more men than that, and these were good. They advanced in fleeting rushes, never two together, widely spread out and wary as old torn-leopards coming in to the bait.

"What a pity," Sean thought. "We are only going to get one out he mark."

of this lot. I had hoped for a better killing to get us off t He concentrated on the advancing scouts, trying to pick the most dangerous of their enemies.

"Probably the one in the center," he decided, and almost immethe flick of the man's diately his choice was confirmed as he saw hand from behind the stump that hid him. He was signaling one that marked of the others forward, coordinating the advance, and him as the main man, the one to take out first.

"Let him come in close," Sean told himself. The AKM was no sniping rifle, and he didn't trust its accuracy over a hundred meters. He waited, willing the man in, watching for him over the sights of the rifle.

I The Renamo jumped up and kept coming. Sean saw that he was young, mid-twenties, with bandoliers of ammunition over both shoulders and a Rastafarian hairstyle, ribbons of camouflage rag braided into his hair. There was an Arabian cast to his features and an amber patina to his skin. He was a good-looking lad except that his left eye was a little askew and it gave his face a sly, knowing expression. ose enough. Sean Close enough to see the cast in his eye was el lined up carefully on the tree stump behind which the Renamo had disappeared. He drew a breath, exhaled half of it, and let the first joint of his right forefinger rest lightly on the trigger.

The Renamo popped up into his sights. Sean took him low, deliberately declining a clean kill. He knew what damage the 7.62IN men bullet would do as it plunged through his belly at over three thousand feet a second, and he knew from bitter experience just how unnerving it was to have one of your comrades lying in no-man's4and with his guts shot out, screaming for water and mercy. In the Scouts they called them "warblers," and a warbler in good voice could inhibit an attack almost as effectively as a RPD machine gun.

well-placed Sean heard the bullet hit the Renamo in the stomach, that meaty thump like a watermelon dropped on a stone floor, and he went down out of sight in the trash and debris.

Instantly there was a heavy volley of rifle fire from the edge of the forest, but it was obvious from the wild aim that they had not spotted Sean and the firing stuttered swiftly into silence. Renamo was conserving ammunition, a sure sign of their discipline and training. Second-rate African troops started firing at the beginning of a contact and kept shooting until their last round was expended.

"These lads know their business," Sean confirmed Matatu's estimate. "We aren't going to hold them long." The two guerrillas were still pinned down in the middle of the cut line, and there was a low, hollow groan from out there as the first pangs of the belly wound hit the downed man.

"Sing to us, Daddy-o!" Sean encouraged him. "Let your pals know how it hurts." But he was studying the forest edge, trying to get some hint of the next play before it developed.

"Now they'll make a pincer move to try to outflank us," he guessed. "But which flank, left or right?" As if in answer he saw a tiny blur of movement in the forest. One of them was moving right.

"Alphonso," Sean called softly. "They are going to try the right.

Stay here. Hold the center."

Sean crawled back until he was hidden by the high windrow of brush. Then he rose to his feet and ran doubled over, out to the right flank.

Four hundred meters out he dropped to his knees and crawled forward, finding another position facing the forest wall. He wriggled in behind a protective stump and marshaled his breathing, watching the tree fine, the AKM set on automatic fire and his thumb on the safety catch.

He had anticipated the. next move almost perfectly; the flanking movement came out of the forest only a hundred meters further to his right. A detachnVnt of eight troopers, they came all together, trying to reach the cover of the windrow in a single concerted rush, and Sean let them get halfway across the cut line.

"This is better, I should be able to get a brace out of this covey," he told himself. He had them in enfilade; his fire would be coming in from their flank and sweeping the line. He picked out the section leader, who was running slightly ahead of the line. Sean led him by a man's length so he would run into the stream of fire, took him at knee height because the AKM rode up brutally in automatic, and held the trigger down.

The section leader dropped as though he had fallen over a trip wire, and the two men following him ran into the same burst. Sean saw the bullets hit them. One of them took it in the shoulder, and a puff of dust flew from his camouflage tunic to mark the strike.

The other was a head shot, a clean hit in the temple, and as he went down his baseball cap fluttered from his head like a maimed dove.

"Three." Sean changed magazines, pleased with the result. He had expected one and hoped for two.

The rest of them had turned and were racing back for the forest, their attack broken completely. Sean got off another quick burst before they reached the trees and thought he saw one of them hunch his shoulders and lurch to the shot, but he kept going and disappeared.

Almost immediately there was another burst of firing back in the center, and Sean jumped up from behind his stump and ran back to help Alphonso.

As he ran, somebody opened up on him from the forest. Shot passed close to his head with that vicious whiplashing sound that made his adrenaline spurt hotly into his bloodstream. He ducked his head and ran on. He was enjoying himself, riding the curling wave of his terror.

In the center there was a sharp firefight raging. Renarno was trying to rush the open ground, and they were almost across when Sean fell flat in the brush near Alphonso and added the weight of his fire to the defense. The attack wavered and broke just short of the row of deadwood behind which they lay. The Renamo went ducking and dodging back between the tree stumps, the AK fire kicking up dust around them.

"Two!" Alphonso shouted across at Sean. "I put two of them down." But Matatu was tugging at Sean's arm and pointing out to the left flank. Sean was just able to get a glimpse of another group of Renamo cutting across the cut line and reaching cover on this side. The attacks on the right and center had been diversions. Now there were a dozen or so Renanio coming in behind them; within minutes they would be surrounded, pinned down helplessly.

"Alphonso, they have got in our rear," Sean called across.

"There was nothing we could do to stop them," Alphonso answered. "There are too many, we are too few."

"I am going back to hold the rear. I'll be with the women."

"They won't attack again," Alphonso told him flatly. "Now that they have us surrounded they will wait for the hen shaw to come." A burst of automatic fire raked the pile of deadwood, and they ducked instinctively.

"They are only shooting to hold us," Alphonso called. 11 ey Th don't have to risk losing more men."

"How long until the helicopter arrives? Sean wanted his own estimate confirmed.

"Not more than an hour," Alphonso told him with finality.

"Then it will all be over very quickly."

Alphonso was, right Against the Hind there was no defense, no more tricks to play.

"I'm leaving you here," Sean repeated, and he crawled back to the hollow in which the women were concealed.

Claudia had Minnie on her lap, but she looked up expectantly as Sean slid down the shallow side of the hollow.

"They've got in behind us," Sean told her shortly. "We are surrounded" He dumped the empty AK magazines in front of her.

"There are boxes of spare ammo, in AlPhonso's pack. You know how to fin these."

It would keep her busy. The next hour was going to be difficult to live through. Sean crawled to the back lip of the hollow and peered over the edge.

He saw something move in the dried brown leaves fifty paces ahead of him, and he fired a quick burst into the brush. His fire was returned from three or four positions in their rear. AK bullets cracked overhead, and behind him Minnie wailed with fright. The minutes dragged past slowly, the silence broken every few seconds by sporadic bursts of -holding fire from the Renanio positions.

Claudia crawled up beside Sean and stacked the replenished magazines at his right elbow.

"How many boxes leftT" he asked.

"Ten," she told him, and pressed a little closer to him.

It didn't really matter that there were only two hundred rounds remaining in Alphonso's pack. Scan looked up at the sky. Any moment now they woulil hear the whistle of the Hind's turbos. Claudia read his Aoughts, and she groped for his hand. Lying in the hot African sun, they held hands and waited. There was nothing left to say, nothing more they could do. No defense, however feeble. All that remained was to wait for the inevitable.

Matatu touched Sean's leg. It wasn't necessary to say anything.

Sean cocked his head and picked up the sound. It was higher and steadier than the soughing of the afternoon breeze in the forest tops.

Claudia squeezed his hand very hard, digging her fingernails into his palm. She had heard it also.

"Kiss me," she whispered. "One last time." And he laid the rifle down and roiled onto his side to take her in his arms. They strained together, holding with all their strength. if I have to die," Claudia whispered, -I'm glad it will be like an this." And Sean felt her press the loaded Tokarev into his h d.Good-bye, my darling," she said.

He knew he had to do it, but he did not know where he would find the courage.

The sound of the Hind s engines was rising into a high Penetrating shriek.

He slid the safety catch to the "off" position and lifted the Tokarev gently. Claudia's eyes were tightly closed, and she had turned her head half away. A little swear-damp tendril of dark hair hung down in front of her ear, and he could see the artery beating under the creamy skin of her temple that the curl had protected from the sun. It was the most difficult task he had ever set himself, but he raised the muzzle of the Tokarev to her temple.

There was a shattering explosion of a shell burst on the lip Of their shelter. Instinctively Sean pulled Claudia down to protect her. He thought for a moment that the Hind had opened fire, but that was impossible; it was still out of sight and range.

A further series of explosions crashed out in rapid succession, and Sean lowered the pistol and released Claudia. He rolled to the lip of the hollow and saw that a heavy barrage of fire was sweeping the Renamo positions. Mortar fire-Sean recognized the characteristic bursts of three-inch mortar shells and then the rushing the trees of the forest. The smoke trails of RIG rockets among rattling din of small arms drowned out even the sound of the approaching Hind. The entire situation had changed.

Suddenly they were in the midst of a battle, and Sean saw figures running wildly among the windrows and stumps, firing as they ran.

"Frelimo!" Matatu was tugging at Sean's arm and screeching with excitement. "Frehmo!"

Only then did Sean understand. Their desultory exchange of fire with the Renamo pursuers must have called up a large force of Frelimo troops who had been massed in the immediate vicinity, probably preparing to attack the Save River line.

Now the fifty Renamo guerrillas suddenly found themselves attacked by a vastly superior Frelimo force. Judging by the intensity of fire, Sean estimated that there were several hundred Frelimo out there in the forest, front line regular troops in battalion strength.

He saw the small party of Renamo who had cut them off abandon their positions among the deadwood of the cut line and scuttle away in wild disorder with mortar shells bursting among them.

Sean snatched up the AKM and helped them on their way with a long burst. One of the running men fell and flopped around into the brush like a beached catfish.

Then he spotted a sweep line of Frehmo infantry coming in from the left at a run. Their camouflage field dress was East German issue, the blotches of green and brown distinctly different from the Renamo tiger stripes.

Renamo or Frelimo were equally dangerous for them. Sean pulled Claudia down beside him.

"Don't move. The Frehmo probably don't know we are here.

They might just chase off the Renamo and overlook us. We've still got a chance."

Minnie was wailing loudly, terrified by the uproar. Sean called urgently to Miriam, "Keep her quiet. Stop her screaming."

The Shangane girl pulled the child down beside her and covered her mouth and nose with her hand, cutting off her wails abruptly.

Sean raised one eye above the lip of the hollow and saw the Frehmo sweep line still bearing down on them, tough-looking troopers, firing from the hip as they came. They would overrun the hollow within seconds. He raised the AKM. Their salvation had been fleeting; the only real change was that now they would be killed by Frehmo rather than by Renamo.

ie rai tie and aimed at the belly of the nearest of the oncoming Frelimo troopers, the target was blotted out by a tall curtain of flying dust, and from the sky above came the thunderous roll of a 12.7-men cannon. The Frelimo sweep line dissolved before Sean's eyes, blown away by the Hind's concentrated fire, and the dust rolled over the hollow in which they lay, concealing them from the air in those crucial seconds the Hind hovered above them.

Now all was chaos, two forces inextricably mixed up in the deep forest, mortar and rocket fire crashing through the trees, while over the battlefield the Hind hovered, sending in rockets and bursts of cannon fire to makithe confusion complete.

Sean slapped Matatu on the shoulder. "Fetch Alphonso," he ordered, and the' little Ndorobo disappeared into the dust and gunfire, to emerge only a minute later with the huge Shangane close behind him.

"Alphonso, get ready to make another run for it," Sean told him tersely. "Frelimo and Renamo are giving each other a full go out there. We'll try to sneak away before the Hind spots us." Sean broke off and sniffed the air, then raised himself quickly on his knees to look back.

Already the air around them was turning a dirty gray, and above the din of battle and the whine of turbos, Sean heard the first faint crackle of burning brush.

"Fire!" he snapped. "And it's upwind of us!"

One of the exploding rockets had ignited the rows of piled deadwood, and now a dense cloud of smoke rolled down over the hollow where they lay, stinging their eyes and making them cough and choke.

"Now we have no choice-it's run or cook." The crackle and roar of the flames were already drowning out the din of battle.

Dimly they heard the shrieks of wounded men caught up in the path of the surging fire.

"Let's go!" Sean swept Minnie onto his back, and the child locked both arms around his neck and clung to him like a little black flea. Sean pulled Claudia to her feet. Alphonso had Mickey sitting perched on his shoulders, his legs dangling over the bulky radio pack, and Miriam at his side, clinging to the arm that held his rifle.

The smoke rolled over them, thick as oil, and they ran with the wind, bunched up to keep contact with each other. The smoke filled their lungs and blotted out the sky, screening them from the fighting men in the forest around them and from the helicopter gunship that hovered above them. The fire raged close behind them, driving them on wildly but gaining on them with every second.

Sean felt the heat fan the back of his neck, and Minnie squeaked as a flying spark touched her cheek. Gasping for breath, Claudia stumbled and sank to her knees, but Sean hauled her to her feet and dragged her onward.

Sean was suffocating. Each breath burned all the way down into his lungs. They couldn't go much farther. The heat licked their skin, and flying sparks dashed against them. The child on Sean's back screamed in agony and pawed ineffectually at her tortured body as though assailed by a swarm of wasps. She lost her grip and Id have fallen, but Sean snatched her off his back and carried wou her under one arm.

Suddenly they were into another open cut fine. Only dead stumps surrounded them, standing like tombstones in the dense banks of rolling smoke, and the sandy earth beneath their feet had been plowed up by the teams of loggers.

"Down!" Sean pushed Claudia flat onto the ground and placed Minnie in her arms.

The child was struggling wildly. "Hold her still!" Sean shouted, and stripped off his shirt.

"Lie flat, facedown!" he ordered. Obediently Claudia rolled onto her stomach, holding Minnie under her. Sean wrapped the shirt around both their heads to filter out the smoke and sparks and soot. He tore the stopper out of his water bottle and soaked the shirt, splashing their hair and soaking their clothing.

Minnie was still shrieking and struggling, but Claudia held her down firmly. Sean knelt beside them and scooped loose sand over them, burying them under a mound of earth, like one of those beach games children play. The smoke was thinner closer to the earth, and they could still breathe. Alphonso had seen what he was doing and followed his example, burying Miriam and her little brother in the sand nearby.

Live sparks swirled through the blinding clouds of smoke and settled on Sean's bare skin. They stung like the poisonous bites of safari ants. Sean felt his beard begin to frizzle and his eyeballs drying out in the heat. He emptied his pack onto the ground and pulled the empty canvas bag over his head, poured the contents of the second water bottle over his torso, then fell on his back, scooped the loose sand over himself, and lay still.

With his head low to the ground the air was breathable, there was just sufficient oxygen in it to keep him conscious, but his head buzzed and swirled dizzily and the heat came at him in crushing blasts. He smelled the canvas bag over his head begin to smolder, and the thin layer of sand that covered his body scalded him like a pot fresh from the furnace. He heard the roar of the flames rise to a crescendo, and dry branches crackled like rifle fire in the inferno. The fire was in the windrows all around them, but the wind, generated by its own heat, drove it swiftly onward.

It swept past them, the roaring subsided, and for an instant the smoke clouds opened, allowing them a fleeting gasp of sweet air.

But the heat around them was still so fierce that Sean dared not shake off the protective layer of sand that covered his body.

Gradually the heat dissipated, and the gusts of cooler, sweeter air became more frequeot. Sean sat up and lifted the canvas pack from his head. His skin 15urned as though acid had been splattered upon it, and the brit red spots where sparks had touched him would soon be blisters.

He crawled to the mound of earth that covered Claudia and the child and scraped it away from their heads. The shirt had kept their mouths and noses clear, and when they sat up and shook off the sand, he saw that they had come off much better than either he or Alphonso had. The fire had run past them, but the air around them was still so thick with smoke the sky was tte out.

Sean hauled them to their feet. "We have to get well away before the smoke clears," he croaked. His throat felt as though he had swallowed a handful of crushed glass, and tears spilled down his sooty scorched cheeks.

Clinging together, picking their way through the blackened, smoldering landscape like a party of bedraggled soot-covered phantoms, they limped through the swirling fog of smoke. The earth was as hot as a flow of volcanic lava and scorched the soles of their boots, but they carried the children and avoided the piles of glowing ash.

Twice they heard the Hind above them. But although they peered up with red, weeping eyes, they caught not a glimpse of it through the drifting blue clouds, and there was no sign of pursuit by either Renamo or Frelimo. The opposing forces had been scattered and swept away by the flames.

"The little bugger has asbestos-lined feet," Sean muttered as he watched Matatu dance ahead of them through the thinning smoke.

On Sean's back, Minnie whimpered fretfully with the pain of her blisters, and at their first rest stop Sean gave her half an aspirin and a swallow from their one remaining bottle of water.

The sunset that evening filled the heavens with flaming crimsons and somber purples. They lay huddled together in the darkness, too exhausted and weakened by the smoke to post sentries, and their sleep was interrupted by bouts of painful, lung-tearing coughing.

In the dawn the wind veered into the south, but the smoke still hung over the land like a heavy river mist, reducing visibility to a few hundred feet.

Sean and Claudia treated the children first, smearing their blisters and burns with yellow iodine paste, and though Mickey bore it with the stoicism of a Shangane warrior, the little girl whined with the sting of the iodine and Sean had to take her on his lap and blow on her injuries to cool them.

Once the children were taken care of, the women tended their men. The burns on Sean's chest and back were all superficial, but Claudia treated them with a gentleness that reflected her gratitude and complete love.

Neither of them spoke of the moment when he had lifted the 110karev pistol to her temple. They probably never would, but both of them would be conscious of it forever more. It would always be there between them: for Sean the most horrific moment of his life, worse even than that of Job's death; for Claudia, an affirmation of his devotion to her. She knew he would have found the strength to do it, but she knew also that it would have cost him dearer than the sacrifice of his own life. She needed no more proof of his love.

The children needed water desperately; they were desiccated by the heat of the flames and the smoke. Sean gave half the remaining water to them and shared the remainder disproportionately among the adults, most of it to the two women and a bare taste to the men.

"Matatu," he said in a harsh, gravelly whisper, "if you don't find us water before nightfall, then we are as dead as if the hen shaw had blown us into dust with its cannons."

They limped on through the blackened, smoldering forest, and in the late afternoon Matatu led them to a shallow clay pan surrounded by the smoking stumps of burned-out trees. In the center of the pan, thick with black ash and the charred bodies of small creatures, snakes and rats and civet cats that had fled there for protection from the flames, was a puddle of filthy water.

Sean strained it through his shirt, and they drank it as though it were nectar, groaning with pleasure through their scorched and smoke-abraded throats. When they had drunk until their bellies ached, they scooped the water over their heads and let it soak their clothing, and they laughed weakly with the joy of it.

A mile beyond the water hole, they reached the fine at which the wind had changed and held the fire, driving it back on itself. They left behind them the devastation of black ash and smoldering stumps and camped that night among the confusion of withered dead branches, where the logging gangs had wrought almost as much destruction as the flames had.

For the first time since the fire Alphonso rigged the radio aerial, and they gathered around the set and listened for General China's taunts and threats. They all stiffened instinctively as they recognized his voice, but he was talking in Shangane and they could hear the sound of the helicopter's engines in the background. His trans missions were terse and enigmatic, and the replies from his subordinates were equally abrupt and businesslike.

"What do you think he is up to?" Sean asked Alphonso.

The Shangane shook his head. "It sounds like he is moving troops into fresh positions." But there was no conviction in his tone.

"He hasn't given up?" Sean said. "He may have lost our spoor in the burn, but I don't think he has given up."

"No," Alphonso agreed. "I know him well. He has not given up.

He will follow us all the way. General China is a man who hates well. He will not let us go."

very "We are in Frelimo-held territory now. Do you think he will follow us in here?"

Alphonso shrugged. "He has the hen shaw he does not have to worry too much about Frelimo. I think he will follow us wherever we go." General China made his last transmission, and it was obvious he was arranging for refueling. He had changed to Portuguese, and the reply seemed to be from a ground engineer in the same language. Alphonso translated.

"The porters have arrived. We now have reserves of two thousand liters."

China's voice: "What about the spare booster pump?"

(1 t's here, my General." The engineer again. "I can change it tonight."

"We must be airworthy again by first light tomorrow."

"I will have it ready by then. I guarantee it, General."

Very well, I'll be landing in a few minutes. Be ready to begin work immediately," China ordered. Then he signed off.

They listened for another ten minutes, until it was fully dark, but there were no further transmissions and Alphonso reached across to turn off the radio. On impulse Sean prevented him doing so and instead switched frequencies. almost at once he picked up the South African military traffic. It was much stronger now. They were that much closer to the border on the Limpopo River, and to Sean the sound of Afrikaans was a comfort and a promise.

After a few minutes Sean sighed and switched off the set. "Alphonso, you take the first sentry. Go!" he ordered.

With the threat of aerial surveillance reduced, Sean decided to resume daylight travel. Every mile they covered toward the south, the signs left by the logging gangs were fresher and more numerous.

On the third day after the fire, Matatu led them on a wide detour.

The hardwood stumps had been cut very recently and were still weeping sap. The leaves on the discarded branches piled in tall windrows had not dried out and were still green and pliant.

Matatu cautioned them to silence, and as they trudged on between the piled rows of trash, they heard, not far off, the whine of chain saws and the doleful work chant of the labor gangs.

The forest around them was full of human activity, and the soft soil carried the prints of thousands of bare feet and the skid marks of heavy logs being dragged and manhandled toward the rough logging roads.

However, so skillfully did Matatu shepherd them through the torn and despoiled forests that it wasn't until the fourth day of travel that they actually caught sight of any other human beings.

Leaving the others to eat and rest well concealed under a shaggy pile of newly cut branches, Sean and Matatu sneaked forward to the edge of a natur#l open glade in the forest, and through the binoculars Sean lay and watched the Frelimo logging gangs at work on the far side of the opening. Hundreds of black men and women, some of them no more than children, were toiling in teams, supervised by guards in Frelimo camouflage battle dress.

The guards all carried AK rifles slung on their shoulders, but they wielded the long hippo-hide whips, the savage African sjambok, which they plied on the naked backs and legs of their charges.

The snap of the lash on bare flesh and the agonized yelps carried across five hundred yards of open ground to where Sean and Matatu lay.

The labor gangs were piling the roughly trimmed logs into tall pyramid-shaped stacks, half of them straining and heaving on the heavy ropes while the others pushed against the huge timber baulks from the lower side. The guards urged them to greater effort, calling out the verses of the work chant to which the gangs responded with a deep melancholy chorus and a concerted heave on the heavy manila ropes.

While Sean watched through his binoculars, one of the huge logs was laboriously hoisted toward the pinnacle of the stack. But before it could be rolled securely into place, one of the ropes parted and the log slewed sideways and went bouncing and rumbling down the side of the pyramid. Wailing with terror, the labor gang broke and fled before it, but some of the weaker ones were not fast enough and the log steam rolled over them. Sean heard their shrill shrieks snuffed out and the crackle of their bones like dried twigs being fed through a clothes mangle.

It was too much even for a soldier's hardened stomach. He touched Matatu's shoulder and they crept away, back to where they had left the others.

That afternoon they passed close to the labor camps, a vast AI collection of primitive lean-to huts that stank of wood smoke, open latrines, and human misery.

"The cheapest African commodity these days is black flesh," Sean told Claudia grimly.

"If you told people back home about this, they simply wouldn't understand what you were talking about. It's just so contrary to our own experience, said Claudia.

At this time of day, the camps were almost deserted. All the able-bodied were at work in the forest and only the sick and the dying lay under the crude open shelters. Sean sent Matatu into the camp to scavenge, and he must have found one of the field kitchens and eluded the cooks, for he returned with a half sack of uncooked maize meal slung over his shoulder.

Huddled around the radio, they ate handfuls of maize porridge that evening, listening to General China's voice on the Renamo command frequency.

Once again after General China had made his last transmission ary frequency at nightfall, Sean switched to the South African mi lit and listened for almost half an hour, learning the voices and call signs of the various units within range. At last he felt he had identified the South African border headquarters. It was using the call sign "Kudu," that beautiful spiral-homed antelope of the bush veld

Sean waited patiently for a hill in the military traffic. Then he keyed the microphone and spoke in Afrikaans.

"Kudu, this is Mossie. This is a storm sending. Do you read me, Kudu?

This is Mossie!"

A storm sending was the call for a top-priority message. It was the radio procedure they had used back in the days of the Rhodesian bush war. He hoped the South African commander's military experience went back that far. In Afrikaans a "mossie" was a sparrow. It had been Sean's call sign in those far-off days.

A long silence followed Sean's transmission. The static echoed in the void of the stratosphere, and Sean thought his call had been lost. He lifted the microphone to call again just as the radio came to life.

"Station calling Kudu," said a voice heavy with suspicion. "Say again your call sign."

"Kudu, this is Mossie, I repeat, Mossie. Mike Oscar Sierra Sierra India Echo. I request a relay to General De La Rey, the deputy minister of law and order."

Lothar De La Rey had been Sean's control back in the seventies.

Since then he had risen to high political office "Kudu" would surely know who he was and hesitate to refuse a request for relay to such a source.

It was clear that "Kudu" must be thinking the same thoughts but taking longer to reach a decision. At last he called again.

"Mossie, stand by. We are relaying you to De La Rey."

Almost an hour later, long after dark, "Kudu" called again.

"Mossie, this is Kudu. De La Rey is unobtainable."

"Kudu, this is life and death. I will call you on this frequency every six hours until you reach De La Rey."

"Dood reg, Mossie. We'll keep a six-hour listening watch for you.

Totsiew.

They had abandoned their blankets when they fled before the fire, and tonight it was frosty. Sean and Claudia lay in each other's arms and whispered together softly.

"I didn't understand what you were saying on the radio. Who were you speaking with?" Claudia used the Americanism "with," and Sean corrected it as he replied.

I was speaking to a South African military base, probably on the border where we are headed."

"Will they give us assistance?" she asked hopefully.

"I don't know. They might if I can contact someone I know. I have asked them to try, but they can't get hold of him."

"Who?"

IL

d of the

"During the bush war, although I was in common Rhodesian Scouts, I was also reporting to the South African military intelligence," he explained.

"A spy?" she asked.

"No," he answered, too quickly. "The South Africans and the Rhodesians were allies, both on the same side. I am a South African, so I was neither a spy nor a traitor."

"A double agent, then?" she teased him.

"Call it whatever you like, but De La Rey was my South African control. Since the war I have continued sending him reports from time to time. Whenever I have been able to pick up pieces of information about ANC terrorist activity or sanctioneering moves by hostile governments, I pass it on to him."

"He owes you, does he?" she asked.

"He owes me plenty, besides which we are related. He's a cousin, a first cousin on my grandmother's side." Sean broke off as a small body insinuated itself between them. "Well, look who's here! If it isn't Minnie Mouse herself!"

Claudia wriggled around to make room for the child, and Minnie settled down happily in the warm cradle formed by their bodies and pillowed her head on Sean's arm. He drew the child's body a little closer.

"She's so cute." Claudia stroked the child's head. "I could just eat her up."

They were silent for so long Sean thought she had fallen asleep, but Claudia spoke again, softly and thoughtfully. "If we get out of here, do you think we could adopt Minnie?"

The simple question was fraught with snares and pitfalls. it presupposed a LIFE together thereafter, a settled existence with home and children and responsibilities, all the things Sean had avoided over a lifetime. It should have startled him, but instead it made him feel warm and comfortable.

The portable Honda generator clattered noisily, its light bulbs strung on poles around the grounded helicopter.

The engine hatches were open and the debris suppressors had been removed from over the turbo intakes. The Portuguese engineer in blue overalls supervised and checked every task performed by his Russian prisoners. He had very soon come to know and understand General China, and to appreciate just how vulnerable was his own position. During the short time he had been with the Renamo force he had on more than one occasion been a witness to the punishment General China dealt out to anyone who failed or offended him, and he was conscious now of those dark, fanatical eyes upon him as he worked.

It was after midnight, but General China had not yet retired to rest. He had been flying all the previous day, from first light to dusk, only landing to refuel the helicopter. A normal man would have been exhausted by now--certainly the Portuguese pilot had slouched off to his tent many hours before-but General China was indefatigable. He prowled around the helicopter, watching every move, every action, asking questions, demanding haste, as restless as though he were possessed by some dark passion.

"You must have her ready to fly at dawn," he repeated, it seemed for the hundredth time that night. Then he went striding back to the open canvas-roofed shelter he was using as his forward headquarters and pored over the large-scale map, once more studying his troop dispositions, brooding over them and muttering to himself.

On the map he had noted the features he had observed from the air, the location of the Frelimo logging camps and the rough roads they had hacked out of the forest. He had very soon realized the scope of the deforestation and the numbers employed in the forced labor battalions. He had swiftly realized the futility of trying to find such a small party among such multitudes. He knew any sign of Sean's progress would have been obliterated by the intense activity in the area. He dared not send trackers or a pursuit into the logging area. He had already lost almost forty men in the Frelimo attack and the subsequent fire.

"No, I must be patient," he told himself. He moved his hand down across the map. The Frehmo logging operation had not yet reached as far south as the hills that guarded the approaches to the Limpopo River basin; between the hills and the river the forest thinned out and gave way to open mo pane veld. It was a strip fifty kilometers wide, good ground for tracking the fugitives, ground they would be forced t4; traverse in order to reach the Limpopo and the border.

General China had decided to set his final stop fine there. All that day he had ferried in the fresh troops Tippoo Tip had placed at his disposal. In its rear cabin the Hind was able to carry men in full field kit, and they had made eleven sorties. They had hopped over the forest, fully laden with assault troops, and landed them along the fine of hills with orders to set up observation posts on each hill crest and to patrol the gaps between them. He now had almost 150 men in place to cut Sean Courtney off from the Limpopo General China stared at the map as though it were a portrait of the white man's face. Once again he experienced bitter disapPointment and frustration. He had almost had the white man in his grasp, pinned down by his pursuit troops, with no possible avenue of escape, and then had come the Frefimo intervention; the forest below him had been obliterated by the roiling clouds of smoke and the screaming of his men on the radio, crying for help as the flames engulfed them.