Leopard Hunts in Darkness

The bull ran onto the point. It went into him with the sucking sound of a foot in mud, and the blade was swallowed by living flesh. It went in until the fingers of Peter's right hand on the shaft followed the blade into the wound and spurting blood drenched him to the shoulder.

Peter released his grip on the assegai, and pirouetted away, sptrming clear while the bull bucked stiff4 egged against the long steel in his chest cavity. He tried to follow Peter round, but came up short and stood with his thick stubby forelegs braced, staring at the naked man with a glaze spreading over his eyes.

Peter Fungabera posed before him, with both arms lifted gracefully. "Ha, earth-shaker! "he called in Shana. "Ha, you sky thunder!" The bull made two Plunging strides forward and some thing burst inside him. Blood erupted in a double gush from his flaring nostrils. He opened his jaws and bellowed, and blood shot up his throat in a frothing bright cascade and drenched his chest. The great bull reeled, fighting to keep his balance.

"Die, spawn of the black gods!" Peter taunted. "Feel the steel of a future king and die!" The bull went down. The earth jumped beneath their feet as the weight of him struck.

Peter Fungabera stepped up to the huge bossed head in which the smouldering eyes were fading. He went down on one knee and, with his cupped hands, scooped up the rich hot blood as it streamed from the bull's gaping mouth, and he lifted his hands to his mouth and drank the blood like wine. it streamed down his arms and dribbled from his chin, and Peter laughed, a sound that made even the Russian's vinegary blood chill.

"I have drunk your living blood, oh great bull. Now your strength is mine! he shouted, as the bull arched his back in the final spasm of death.

eter Fungabera had showered and changed into mess kit. His trousers were black with a burgundy watered silk side stripe. His short bumfteezer jacket was in the regiment's same distincti e burgundy-red with black silk lapels. His white shirt was starch4 ranted and wing collared with a black1 bow-tie and he wore a double row of miniature decorations.

The camp servants had set a table under the spread branches of a mhoba-hobo tree, on the edge of an open vlei of short lush green grass, out of sight and earshot of the main camp. On the table was a bottle of Chivas Regal whisky and another of vodka, a bucket of ice and two crystal glasses.

Colonel Nikolai Bukharin sat opposite Peter. His long loose cotton shirt hung outside his baggy Cossack pant's and was belted at the waist. His feet were thrust into boots of soft glove-leather. He leaned forward and filled the glasses, and then passed one to Peter.

This time there was no flamboyant tossing back of liquor. They drank slowly, watching the African sky turn mauve and smouldering gold.

The silence was the companionable accord of two men who have risked their lives together and have each found the other worthy, a comrade to die with, or an adversary to fight to the death.

At last Colonel Bukharin placed his glass back on the table with a click.

"And so, my friend, tell me what you want, "he invited.

"I want this land," said Peter Fungabera simply.

"All of it? "the colonel asked.

"All of it "Not just Zimbabwe?"

"Not just Zimbabwe."

"And we are to help you take it?"

"Yes."

"In exchange?"

"My friendship."

"Your friendship unto death?" the colonel suggested drily. "Or until you have what you want and find a new friend?" Peter smiled. They spoke the same language, they understood each other.

"What tangible signs of this eternal friendship will you give us?" the Russian insisted.

"A poor little country like mine," Peter shrugged, "a few strategic minerals nickel, chrome, titanium, beryllium a few ounces of gold." The Russian nodded sagely. "They will be useful to us." "Then, once I am the Monomatapa of Zimbabwe, my eyes will become restless, naturally-, "Naturally." The Russian watched his eyes. He did not like black men, this racist bigotry was a common Russian trait, he did not like their colour nor their smell but this one!

"My eyes might turn southwards," Peter Fungabera said softly. Ha!

Colonel Bukharin hid his glee behind a doleful expression. This one is different!

"The direction in which your own eyes have been focused all along," Peter went on, and the Russian could have chortled.

"What will you see in the south, Comrade General?"

"I will see a people enslaved and ripe for emancipation."

"And what else?" w ill see the gold of the Witwatersrand and the Free State fields, I will see the diamonds of Kimberley, the uranium, the platinum, the silver, the copper in short, I will see one of the great treasure houses of this earth."

"Yes?" the Russian probed with delight. This one is quick, this one has brains, and this one has the courage that it would take.

"I will see a base that' divides the western world, a base that controls both the south Atlantic and the Indian oceans, that sits upon the oil lines between the Gulf and Europe, between the Gulf and the Americas." The Russian held up a hand. "Where will these thoughts lead you?"

"It will be my duty4 to see this land to the south elevated to its true place i the community of nations, in the in tutelage of and under the protection of that greatest of all lovers of freedom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." ed, still watching his eyes. Yes, this The Russian nodd black man had seen the design behind it all. The south was the grand prize, but to win it they needed to take it in the strangler's grasp. To the east they already had Mozambique, to the west Angola was theirs and Namibia would soon be also. They needed only the north to isolate the prize. The north was Zimbabwe, like the strangler's thumb on the windpipe, and this man could deliver it to them.

Colonel Bukharin sat forward in his canvas camp-chair and became businesslike and brisk.

"OpportunityP "Economic chaos, and intertribal warfare, the breakdown of central government." Peter Fungabera counted them off on his fingers.

"The present government is meeting you more than halfway in creating its own economic breakdown," the Russian observed, "and you are already doing fine work in fanning tribal hatreds."

"Thank you, comrade."

"However, the peasants must begin to starve a little before they become manageable-"

"I am pushing in the Cabinet for the nationalization of the white-owned farms and ranches. Without the white farmers I can produce you a goodly measure of starvation," Peter Fungabera smiled.

"I hear you have already made a start. I congratulate you on the recent acquisition of your own estate, King's Lynn?

That is the name is it not?"

"You are well informed, Colonel."

"I

take pains to ensure that I am. But when the moment comes to seize the reins of state, what kind of man will the people look to?"

"A strong man," Peter answered without hesitation. "One whose ruthlessness has been demonstrated."

"As yours was during the chimurenga, and more recently in Matabeleland." A man of charisma and presence, a man well known to the:4 people."

"The women sing your praises in the streets of Harare, not a single day passes without your image on the television screens or your name on the front page of the newspapers."

"A man with force behind him."

"The Third Brigade," the Russian nodded, "and the blessing of the people of the USSR. However," he paused significantly, 'two questions need answers, Comrade General."

"Yes?"

"The first is a mundane and distasteful question to raise between men such as you and I money. My paymasters become restless. Our expenses have begun to exceed by a considerable amount the shipments of ivory and animal products that you have sent us-" He held up his hand again to forestall argument. It was an old man's hand, dappled with withered dark spots and crisscrossed with prominent blue veins. "I know that we should do these things merely for the love of freedom, that money is a capitalist obscenity, but nothing is perfect in this world. In short, Comrade General, you are reaching the limits that Moscow has set on your credit."

"I understand," Peter Fungabera nodded. "What is your second question?"

"The Matabele tribe. They are a warlike and difficult people. I know that you have been forced to stir up enmity, to cause dissension and strife and to bring upon the present government the disapproval of the Western powers by your campaign in Matabeleland. But what happens afterwards?

How do you control them once you yourself have seized power?

(I " est ions with a single name, Peter answer both qu Fungabera. replied.

"Me name?"

"Tungata Zebiwe."

"Ha! Yes! Tungata Zebiwe. The Matabele leader. You had him put away. I presumed that by now he had been liquidated."

"I am holding him in great secrecy and safety at one of my rehabilitation centres near here."

"Explain."

"Firstly, the money."

"From what we know, Tungata Zebiwe is not a rich man," the Russian demurred.

"He has the key to a fortune which might easily exceed two hundred million US dollars." The Russian raised a silver eyebrow in the gesture of disbelief that Peter was coming to know well, and which was beginning to irritate him.

"Diamonds," he said.

"The mother country is one of the world's largest Producers. "The Russian spread his hands disparagingly.

"Not industrial rubbish, not black boart, but gem stones of the first water, large stones, huge stones, some of the finest ever mined anywhere." The Russian looked thoughtful. "if it is true-"

"It is true! But I will not explain further. Not yet."

"Very well. At least I can hold out some sort of promise to the money-sucking leeches in our treasury department?

And the second question. The Matabele? You cannot plan to 0 blite rate them, man, woman and child?" Peter Fungabera shook his head regretfully. "No. Though it would be the better way, America and Britain would not allow it. No, my answer is Tungata Zebiwe again. When I take over the country, he will reappear it will be almost miraculous. He will come back from the dead. The Mota

,

bele tribe will go wild with joy and relief They will follow him, they will dote upon him, and I will make him my vice-president."

"He hates you. You destroyed him. If you ever free him, he will seek to revenge that."

"No," Peter shook his head. "I will send him to you. You have special clinics for difficult cases, do you not? Institutes where a mentally sick man can be treated with drugs and other techniques to make him rational and reasonable once more?" This time the Russian actually began to chortle, and he poured himself another vodka, shaking with silent laughter. When he looked up at Peter, there was respect in those pale eyes for the first time.

"I drink to you, Monomatapa of Zimbabwe, may you reign a thousand years!" He set down his glass and turned to stare down the long open vlei to the distant waterhole. A herd of zebra had down to drink. They were nervous and skitti come st, for the lions lie in ambush at the water. At last they waded in, knee, deep and in a single rank, dipped their lips to touch the surface in unison. They formed an overlapping frieze of identical heads like an infinity of mirror images until the old stallion sentinel snorted in nervous alarm and the pattern exploded in foaming water and wildly galloping forms.

"The treatment of which you speak is drastic." Colonel Bukharin watched the zebra herd tear away into the forest.

"Some patients do not survive it. Those that do are-" he searched for the word" altered."

"Their minds are destroyed." Peter said it for him.

"In plain terms yes," the colonel nodded.

"I need his body, not his brain. I need a puppet, not a human being."

"We can arrange that. When will you send him to us?" The diamonds first," Prter rep lied.

"Of course, the diamd Ids first. How long will that take?" Peter shrugged-_'.1,&t long."

"When you are ready I will send a doctor to you, with the appropriate medications. We can bring this Tungata Zebiwe out on the same route as the ivory: Air Zimbabwe to Danes-Salaam and one of our freighters from there to Odessa." "Agreed."

"You say that he is being held near here? I would like to see him."

ri

"Is it wise?"

"Indulge me, pleaseP From Colonel Bukharin it was an order rather than a request.

ungata Zebiwe stood in the flat white glare of the noonday sun. He stood facing a whitewashed wall that caught the sun's rays and flung them back likea huge mirror. He had stood there since before the rise of the sun, when the frost had crusted the sparse brown grass at the edge of the parade ground.

Tungata was stark naked, as were the two men that flanked him. All three of them were so thin that every rib showed clearly, and the crests of their spines stood out like the beads of a rosary down the centre of their backs.

Tungata had his eyes closed to slits to keep out the glare of sunlight off the wall, but he concentrated on a mark in the plaster to counter the effects of giddy vertigo which had already toppled the men on each side of him more than once. Only heavy lashing by the guards had forced them to their feet again. They were still swaying and reeling as they stood.

"Courage, my brothers," Tungata whispered in Sinde, bele. "Do not let the Shana dogs see you beaten." He was determined not to collapse, and he stared at the dimple in the wall. It was the mark of a bullet strike, painted over with lime wash They lime washed the wall after every execution they were meticulous about it.

"Anwnzi," husked the man on his right, "water! "Do not think of it," Tungata. ordered him. "Do not speak of it, or it will drive you mad." The heat came off the wall in waves that struck with physical weight.

"I am blind," whispered the second man. "I cannot see."

The white glare had seared his eyeballs like snow blindness.

"There is nothing to see but the hideous faces of Shana Tungata told him. "Be thankful for your blindness, apes, friend." Suddenly from behind them brusque orders were shouted in Shana and then came the tramp of feet from across the parade ground.

"They are coming," whispered the blinded Matabele, and Tungata. Zebiwe felt a vast regret arising within him.

Yes, they were coming at last. This time for him.

During every day of the long weeks of his imprisonment, he had heard the tramp of the firing-squad crossing the parade ground at noon.

This time it was for him. He did not fear death, but he was saddened by it. He was sad that he had not been able to help his people in their terrible distress, he was saddened that he would never see again his woman, and that she would never bear him the son for whom he longed. He was sad that his life which had promised so much would end before it had delivered up its fruits, and he thought suddenly of a day long ago when he had stood at his grandfather's side and looked out over the maize fields that had been scythed by a brief and furious hail-storm.

"All that work for nothing, what a waste!" his grandfather had murmured, id Tungata repeated his words softly to himself as ru* hands turned him and hustled him to the wooden stake-'set in the ground before the wall.

They tied his wrists to the stake and he opened his eyes fully. His relief ftorn the glare of the wall was soured by the sight of the rank of armed men who faced him.

They brought the two other naked Matabele from the wall. The blind one fell to his knees, weak with exposure and terror, and his bowels voided involuntarily. The guards laughed and exclaimed with disgust.

"Stand up!" Tungata ordered him harshly. "Die on your feet likea true son of Mashobane! The man struggled back to his feet.

"Walk to the stake," Tungata ordered. "It is a little to your left." The man went, groping blindly, and found the stake.

They bound him to it.

There were eight men in the firing-squad and the commander was a captain in the Third Brigade. He went slowly down the rank of executioners, taking each rifle and checking the load. He made little jokes in Shana that Tungata could not follow, and his men laughed. Their laughter had an unrestrained quality, like men who had taken alcohol or drugs. They had done this work before, and enjoyed it. Tungata had known many men like them during the war; violence and blood had become their addictions.

The captain came back to the head of the rank, and from his breast-pocket took a sheet of typescript which was grubby and dog-eared from much handling. He read from it, stumbling over the words and mispronouncing them likea schoolboy, his English only barely intelligible.

"You have been condemned as enemies of the state and the people," he read. "You have been declared incorrigible.

Your death warrant has been approved by the vice president of the Republic of Zimbabwe-" Tungata Zebiwe lifted his chin and began to sing. His voice soared, deep and beautiful, drowning out the thin tones of the Shana captain: "The Moles are beneath the earth, "Are they dead?" asked the daughters of Mashobane." He sang the ancient fighting song of the Matabele, and at the end Of the first verse he snarled at the two condemned men who flanked him.

sing! Let the Shana jackals hear the Matabele lion grow And they sang with him: "Like the black mamba from under a stone We milked death with a fang of silver steel-" Facing them, the captain gave an order, and as one man the squad advanced a right foot and lifted their rifles.

Tungata sang on, staring into their eyes, defying them, and the men beside him fed on his courage and their voices firmed. A second order and the rifles were levelled. The eyes of the executioners peered over the sights, and the three naked Matabele sang on in the sunlight.

Now, marvellously, there was the sound of other voices, distant voices, lifted in the war song. They came from the prison huts beyond the parade ground. Hundreds of imprisoned Matabele were singing with them, sharing the moment of their deaths, giving them strength and comfort.

The Shana captain lifted his right hand, and in the last instants of his life Tijngata's sadness fell away to be replaced by a soaring pride. These are men, he thought, with or without me they will resist the tyrant.

The captain brought his hand down sharply, as he bellowed the command. "Fire! The volley was simultaneous. The line of executioners swayed to the sharp recoil of rifles and the blast dinned in on Tungata's eardrums so that he flinched involuntarily.

He heard the vicious slap of bullets into living flesh, and from the corners of his vision saw the men beside him jerk as though from the blows of invisible sledgehammers, and then fall forward against their bonds. The song was cut off abruptly on their lips. Yet the song still poured from Tungata's throat and he stood erect.

The riflemen lowered their weapons, laughing and nudging each other as though at some grand joke. From the prison huts the war song had changed to the dismal ululation of mourning, and now at last Tungata's voice dried and he faltered into silence.

He turned his head and looked at the men beside him.

They had shared the volley between them, and their torsos Were riddled with shot. Already the flies were swarming to the wounds.

Now suddenly Tungata's knees began to buckle, and he felt his sphincter loosening. He fought his body, hating its weakness. Gradually, he brought it under control.

The Shana captain came to stand in front of him and said in English, "Good joke, hey? Heavy, man, heavy!" and grinned delightedly.

Then he turned and shouted, "Bring water, quickly!" A trooper brought an enamel dish, brimming with clear water, and the captain took it from him. Tungata could smell the water. It is said that the little Bushmen can smell water at a distance of many miles, but he had not truly believed it until now. The water smelled sweet as a freshly sliced honeydew melon, and his throat convulsed in a spasmodic swallowing reflex. He could not take his eyes off the dish.

The captain lifted the dish with both hands to his own lips and took a mouthful, then he rinsed his mouth and gargled with it noisily. He spat the mouthful and grinned at Tungata, then held the dish up before his face. Slowly and deliberately he tipped the dish and the water spilled into the dust at Tungata's feet. It splashed his legs to the knees. Each drop felt cold as ice chips and every cell Of Tungata's body craved for it with a strength that was almost madness. The captain inverted the dish and let the last drops fall.

"Heavy, man!" he repeated mindlessly, and turned to shout an order at his men. They doubled away across the parade ground, leaving Tungata alone with the dead and the flies.

They came for him at sunset. When they cut his wrist bonds, he groaned involuntarily at the agonizing rush of fresh blood into his swollen hands, and fell to his knees.

His legs could not support him. They had to half-carry him to his hut.

The room was bare, except for an uncovered toilet bucket in the corner and two bowls in the centre of the baked-mud floor. One dish contained a pint of water, the other a handful of stiff white maize cake. The cake was heavily oversalted. On the morrow, he would pay for eating it in the heavy coin of thirst, but he had to have strength.

He drank half the water and set the rest aside for the morning, and then he stretched out on the bare floor Residual heat beat down on him from the corrugated iron roof, but by morning he knew he would be shivering with cold. He ached in every joint of his body, and his head pounded with the effects of the sun and the glare until he thought his skull would pop likea ripe cream of tartar pod on a baobab tree.

Outside in the darkness beyond the wire, the hyena packs disputed the feast that had been laid for them. Their cries and howls were a lunatic bedlam of greed, punctuated by the crunch of bone in great jaws.

Despite it all, Tungata slept, and woke to the tramp of feet and shouted orders in the dawn. Swiftly he gulped down the remains of the' Water to fortify himself, and then squatted over the bucket. His body had so nearly played him false the day before. He would not let it happen today.

The door was flung open.

"Out, you Matabele dog! Out of your stinking kennelP They marched him back to the wall. There were three other naked Matabele facing it already. Irrelevantly he noticed that they had lime washed the wall. They were very conscientious about that. He stood with his face two feet from the pristine white surface and steeled himself for the day ahead.

They shot the three other prisoners at noon. This time Tungata could not lead them in the singing. He tried, but his throat closed up on him. By the middle of the afternoon, his vision was breaking up into patches of darkness and stabbing white light. However, every time his legs collapsed and he fell forward against his bound wrists, the. pain in his shoulder sockets as his am-Ls twisted upwards revived him.

The thirst was unspeakable.

The patches of darkness in his head became deeper and lasted longer, the pain could no longer revive him completely. Out of one of the dark areas a voice spoke.

"My dear fellow," said the voice. "This is all terribly distasteful to me." The voice of Peter Fungabera drove away the darkness and gave Tungata new strength. He struggled upright, lifted his head and forced his vision to clear.

He looked at Peter Fungabera's face and his hatred came to arm him. He cherished his hatred as a life-giving force.

Peter Fungabera was in fatigues and beret. He carried his swagger-stick in his right hand. At his side was a white man whom Tungata had never seen before. He was tall and slim and old. His head was freshly shaven, his skin ruined with cicatrices and his eyes were a strange pale shade of blue that Tungata found as repulsive and chilling as the stare of a cobra. He was watching Tungata with clinical interest, devoid of pity or other human sentiment.

"I regret that you are not seeing Comrade Minister Zebiwe at his best," Peter told the white man. "He has lost a great deal of weight, but not here-, With the UP of the swagger stick Peter Fungabera lifted the heavy black bunch of Tungata's naked genitalia.

"Have you ever seen anything like that?" he asked, using the swagger-stick with the same dexterity as a chopstick.

Bound to the stake, Tungata could not pull away. it was the ultimate degradation, this arrogant mauling and examination of his private parts.

"Enough for three ordinary men," Peter estimated with mock admiration, and Tungata glared at him wordlessly.

The Russian made an impatient gesture and Peter nodded.

"You are right. We are wasting time." He Rlanced at his wrist-watch and then turned to the captain who was close by, waiting with his squad.

"Bring the prisoner up to the fort." They had to carry Tungata.

eter Fungabera's quarters in the blockhouse on the central rock kopje were spartanly furnished, but the dirt floor had been freshly swept and sprinkled with water. He and the Russian sat on one side of the trestle, table that served as a desk. There was a wooden bench on the opposite side, facing them.

The guards helped Tungata to the bench. He pushed their hands away and sat upright, glaring silently at the two men opposite him. Peter said something to the captain in Shana, and they brought a cheap grey blanket and draped it over Tungata's shoulders. Another order, and the captain carried in a trot' on which stood a bottle of vodka and another of whisky, two glasses, an ice-bucket and a pitcher of water.

Tungata did not look at the water. It took all his selfcontrol, but he kept his eyes on Peter Fungabera's face.

"Now, this is much more civilized," Peter said. "The Comrade Minister Zebiwe speaks no Shana, only the primitive Sindebele dialect, so we will use the language common to all of us English." He poured vodka and whisky and as the ice clinked into the glasses Tungata winced, but kept his gaze fixed on Peter Fungabera.

"This is a briefing," Peter explained. "Our guest," he indicated the old white man, "is a student of African history. He has read, and remembered, everything ever written about this country. While you, my dear Tungata, are a sprig of the house of Kurnalo, the old robber chiefs of the Matabele, who for a hundred years raided and terrorized the legitimate owners of this land, the Mashona people.

Therefore both of you might already know something of what I am about to relate. If that is so, I beg your indulgence." He sipped his whisky, and neither of the other two moved or spoke.

"We must go back a hundred and fifty years," said Peter, to when a young field commander of the Zulu King Chaka, a man who was the king's favourite, failed to render up to Chaka the spoils of war. This man's name was Mzilikazi, son of Mashobane of the Kumalo sub tribe of Zulu, and he was to become the first Matabele. In passing, it is interesting to note that he set a precedent for the tribe which he was to found. Firstly, he was a master of rapine and plunder, a famous killer. Then he was a thief. He stole from his own sovereign. He failed to render to Chaka the king's share of the spoils. Then Mzilikazi was a coward, for when Chaka sent for him to face retribution, he fled." Peter smiled at Tungata. "Killer, thief and coward that was Mzilikazi, father of the Matabele, and that description fits every member of the tribe from then until the present day.

Killer! Thief! Coward!" He repeated the insults with relish, and Tungata watched his face with eyes that glowed.

"So this paragon of manly virtues, taking with him his regiment of renegade Zulu warriors, fled northwards. He fell upon the weaker tribes in his path, and took their herds and their young women. This was the Umfecane, the great killing. It is said that one million defenceless souls perished under the Matabele assegais. Certainly Mzilikazi left behind him an empty land, a land of bleached skulls and burned-out villages.

"He blazed this path of destruction across the continent until he met, coming from the south-west, a foe more bloodthirsty, more avaricious even than he, the white men, the Boers. They shot down Mzilikazi's vaunted killers like rabid dogs. So Mzilikazi, the coward, ran again. Northwards again." Peter gently agitated the ice cubes in his glass, a soft tinkling that made Tungata. blink, but he did not look down at the glass.

"Bold Mzilikazi crossed the Limpopo river and found a pleasant land of sweet grass and clear waters. It was inhabited by a gentle, pastoral people, descendants of a race who had built great cities of stone, a comely people whom Mzilikazi contemptuously named the "eaters of dirt" and referred to as his cattle. He treated them like cattle, killing them for sport, or husbanding them to provide his indolent warriors with slaves. The young women of Mashona, if they were nubile, were mounted for pleasure and used as breeding-stock to provide more warriors for his murderous imp is but then you know all this."

"The broad facts, yes," the old white man nodded. "But not your interpretation of them. Which proves that history is merely propaganda written by the victors." Peter laughed. J leadn't heard it put that way before.

However, it's true. Now, we, the Shana, are the ultimate victors, so it is our right to redraft history."

"Go on," the white man invited.

"I find this instructive."

"Very well. In the year 1868, as white men measure time, Mzilikazi, this great fat debauched and diseased killer, died. It is amusing to recall that his followers kept his corpse fifty-six days in the heat of Matabeleland before committing it to burial, so he stank in death as powerfully as he did in life. Another endearing Matabele trait." He waited for Tungata. to protest, and when he did not, went on.

"One of his sons succeeded him, Lobengula, "the one who drives like the wind", as fat and devious and bloodthirsty as his illustrious father. However, at almost the Iran same time as he took the chieftainship of the Matabele, two seeds were sown that would soon grow into great creeping vines that would choke and finally bring the fat bull of Kumalo crashing to earth." He paused for effect, likea practised storyteller, and then held up one finger. "Firstly, far to the south of his plundered domains, the white men had found on a desolate kopie in the veld, a little shiny pebble, and secondly from a dismal island far to the north, a sickly young white man embarked on a ship, seeking clean dry air for his weak lungs.

"The kopje was soon dug away by the white ants, and became a hole a mile across and four hundred feet deep.

The white men called it Kimberley, after the foreign secretary in England who condoned its theft from the local tribes.

"The sickly white man was named Cecil John Rhodes, and he proved to be even more devious and cunning and unprincipled than any Matabele king. He simply ate up the other white men who had discovered the kopje of shiny stones. He bullied and bribed and cheated and wheedled until he owned it all. He became the richest man in the world.

"However, the winning of these shiny pebbles called for enormous amounts of physical tabour by tens of thousands of men. Whenever there is hard work to be done, where does the white man in Africa look?" Peter chuckled and left his rhetorical question unanswered.

"Cecil Rhodes offered simple food, a cheap gun and a few coins for three years of a black man's life. The black 338 file, men, unsophisticated and naive, accepted those wages, and made their master a multi-millionaire many times over.

"Amongst the black men who came to Kimberley were amadoda of the Matabele. They had been sent the young by Lobengula have I mentioned that Lobengula was a thief? His instruction to his young men was to steal the shiny pebbles and bring them back to him. Tens of thousands of Matabele made the long journey southwards to the diamond diggings and they brought back diamonds.

"The diamonds they picked were the largest and the brightest, the ones that showed up most clearly in the washing and processing. How many diamonds? One Matabele whom the white police caught had swallowed 348 carats of diamonds worth;E3000 in the coin of those days say 000,000 in today's terms. Another had slit open his thigh and pouched in his own flesh a single diamond that weighed 200 carats." Peter shrugged. "Who can say what its present value might have been? Perhaps E2,000,000." The old white man who had been aloof, even disinterested, during the first part of this recital, was now leaning forward intently, his head twisted to watch Peter Fungo, hera's lips.

"Those were the few that the white police caught, but there were thousands upon thousands of Matabele diamond-smugglers who were never caught. Remember, in the early days of the 4iggings, there was virtually no control over the black labourers, they came and went as the fancy moved them. So some stayed a week before drifting away, others worked a full three-year contract before leaving, but when they went, the shiny pebbles went with them in their hair, in the heels of their new boots, in their mouths, in their bellies, stuffed up their anuses or in the vaginas of their women the diamonds went out in thousands upon thousands of carats.

"Of course, it could not last. Rhodes introduced the compound system. The labourers were locked up in barbed wire compounds for the full three years of their contract.

Before they left they were stripped naked, and placed in special quarantine huts for ten days, during which time their heads and pudenda were shaved, and their bodies minutely examined by the white doctors, their rear ends were thoroughly probed and any recently healed scars sounded, and if necessary, reopened with a surgeon's scalpel.

They were given massive doses of castor oil, and finely meshed screens were placed under the latrines so that their droppings could be washed and processed as though they were the blue earth of the diggings. However, the Matabele we re crafty thieves, and they still found ways to get the stones out of the compounds. The river of diamonds had been reduced to a trickle, but the trickle went northwards still to Lobengula.

"Again you ask, how many? We can only guess. There was a Matabele named Baro, the Axe, who left Kimberley with a belt of diamonds around his waist. You have heard of Baro, son of Gandang, my dear Tungata. He was your great-grandfather. He became a notorious Matabele induna, and slew hundreds of defenceless Mashona during WHO his depredations. The belt of diamonds that he laid before Lobengula, so legend tells us, weighed the equivalent of ten ostrich eggs. As a single ostrich egg has the same capacity as two dozen domestic hens" eggs, and even allowing for legend's exaggerations, we come to a figure in excess of five million pounds sterling in today's inflated currency.

"Another source tells us that Lobengula had five pots full of first -water diamonds. That is five gallons of diamonds, enough to rock the monopoly of De Beers" central diamond-selling organization.

"Yet another verbal history talks of the ritual khambisile that Lobengula held for his indunas, his tribal counsellors.

Khombisile is the Sindebele word for a showing, or putting on display," Peter explained to the white man, and then went on. "In the privacy of his great hut, the king would strip naked and his wives would anoint his bloated body with thick beef grease. "Then they would stick diamonds onto the grease, until his entire body was covered in a mosaic of precious stones, a living sculpture covered with a hundred million pounds' worth of diamonds.

"So that is the answer to your question, gentlemen.

Lobengula probably had more diamonds than have ever been assembled in one place at one time, other than in the vaults of De Beers" central selling organization in London.

"While this was happening, Rhodes, the richest man in the world, sitting in Kimberley and obsessed with the concept of empire, looked northwards and dreamed. Such was the strength of his obsession that he began to speak of my north". In the end, he took it as he had done the diamond diggings of Kimberley a little at a time. He sent his envoys to negotiate with Lobengula. a concession to prospect and exploit the minerals of his domains, which included the land of the'Mashona.

"From the white queen in England, Rhodes obtained approval for the formation of a Royal Charter Company, and then he sent a private army of hard and ruthless men to occupy these concessions. Lobengula had not expected anything like this. A few, men digging little holes, yes, but not an army of brutal adventurers.

"The white men "Firstly, Lobengula* tested to no avail.

pro pressed him harder and harder, until they forced him to a fatal error of judgement. Lobengula, feeling his very existence threatened, assembled his imp is in a warlike display.

This was the provocation for which Rhodes and his henchmen had worked and planned. They fell upon Lobengula in a savage and merciless campaign. They machine-gunned his famous imp is and shattered the Matabele nation. Then they galloped to Lobengula's kraal at GuBulawayo. However, Lobengula, that wily thief and coward, had already fled northwards, taking with him his wives, his herds, what remained of his fighting imp is and his diamonds.

"A small force of white men pursued him for part of the way, until they ran into a Matabele ambush and were slaughtered to a man. More white men would have followed Lobengula, but the rains came and turned the veld to mud and the rivers to torrents. So Lobengula escaped with his treasure. He wandered on northwards without a goal, until the will to go on deserted him.

"In a wild and lonely place, he called Gandang, his half brother to him. He entrusted to him the care of the nation, and, coward to the very end, ordered his witch doctor to prepare a poisonous potion and drank it down.

"Gandang sat his body upright in a cave. Around his body he placed all Lobengula's possessions: his assegais and regimental plumes and furs, his sleeping-mat and head stool his guns and knives and beer-pots and his diaMOnds. Lobengula's corpse was wrapped in a sitting osition in the green skin of a leopard and at his feet were placed the five gallon beer-pots of diamonds. Then the entrance to the cave was carefully sealed and disguised, and Gandang led the Matabele nation back to become the slaves of Rhodes and his Royal Charter Company.

"You ask when this occurred? It was in the rainy season of the year 1894. Not long ago barely ninety years ago. IN_ "You ask where? The answer is very close to where we now sit. Probably within twenty miles, of us. Lobengula travelled directly northwards from GuBulawayo and had almost reached the Zambezi river before he despaired and committed suicide.

"You ask if any living man knows the exact location of the treasure cave? The answer is yes!" Peter Fungabera stopped, and then exclaimed, "Oh, do forgive me, my dear Tungata, I have neglected to offer you File 342 any refreshment." He called for another glass, and when it came, filled it with water and ice and, with his own hands, carried it to Tungata.

Tungata held the glass in both hands and drank with careful control, a sip at a time.

"Now, where was ! Peter Fungabera returned to his chair behind the desk.

"You were telling us about the cave," the white man with the pale eyes could not resist.

"Ah, yes, of course. Well, it seems that before Lobengula died, he charged this half-brother of his, Gandang, with the guardianship of the diamonds. He is supposed to have told him, "There will come a day when my people will need these diamonds. You and your son and his sons will keep this treasure until that day."

"So the secret was passed on in the Kumalo family, the so-called royal family of the Matabele. When a chosen son reached his manhood he was taken by his father or his grandfather on a pilgrimage." Tungata. was so reduced by his ordeal that he felt weak and feverish, his mind-floated and the iced water in his empty stomach seemed to drug him, so that fantasy became mixed with reality, and the memory of his own pilgrimage to Lobengula's tomb was so vivid that he seemed to be reliving it as he listened to Peter Fungabera's voice.

It had been during his-first year as an undergraduate at the University of Rhodelia. He had gone home to spend the long vacation with his grandfather. Gideon Kumalo was the assistant headmaster at Khami Mission School, just outside the town of Bulawayo.

"I have a great treat for you," the old man had greeted him, smiling through the thick lenses of his spectacles. He still had a little of his eyesight left, though within the following five years he would lose the last vestiges of it.

"We are going on a journey together, Vundla." It was the old man's pet name for him. VundLa, the hare, the clever lively animal always beloved by the Africans. The slaves had taken him with them in legend to America in the form of Bret Rabbit.

The two of them took the bus northwards, changing half a dozen times at lonely trading, stores or remote crossroads, sometimes waiting for forty-eight hours at a stop, when their connection was delayed. However, the delay did not rankle. They made a picnic of it, sitting at night round their camp-fire and talking.

What marvelous stories old grandfather Gideon could tell. Fables and legends and tribal histories, but it was the histories that fascinated Tungata. He could hear them repeated fifty times without tiring of them: the story of Mzilikazi's exodus from Zululand, and the umfecane, the war with the Boers, and the crossing of the Limpopo river.

He could recite the names of the glorious imp is and the men who had commanded them, the campaigns they had waged and the battle honours they had won.

Most especially, he learned from the old man the history 0 f the "Motes who burrowed under a mountain', the impi that had been founded and commanded by his great grandfather, Baro the Axe. He learned to sing the war songs and the praise songs of the Moles, and he dreamed that in a perfect world he would himself have commanded the Moles one day, wearing the regimental head-band of mole-skin and the furs and the feathers.

So the pair, the greybeard with failing eyesight and the stripling, travelled together for five leisurely companionship-filled days, until at the old man's request, the rackety, dusty old bus set them down on a rutted dirt track in the forest.

"Mark this spot well, Vundla," Gideon instructed. "Here, the water-course with the fall of rock, and the kopje over there shaped likea sleeping lion this is the starting point.

*I "They set off northwards through the forest, following a Succession of landmarks that the old man made him recite in the form of a rhyming poem. Tungata found he could still recite it without hesitation: The beginning is the lion that sleeps, follow his gaze to the crossing place of the e rant-" It was another three days" travel at Gideon's reduced "pace before he toiled up the steep hillside with Tungata handing him over the worst places, and they stood before the tomb of Lobengula at last.

Tungata remembered kneeling before the tomb, sucking blood from the self-inflicted cut on his wrist and spitting the blood on the rocks that blocked the entrance and Yrandfaffier the terrible oath -of secrecy after hisL repeating guardianship. Of course neither the old man nor the and oath had mentioned diamonds or treasure. Tungata. had merely sworn to guard the secret of the tomb, passing it to his chosen son, until the day when "The children of Mashobane cry out for succour , and the stones are burst open to free the spirit of Lobengula, and it shall come forth like fire Lobengula's fire! After the ceremony the old man had lain down in die shade of the ficus tree that grew beside the entrance, and, exhausted by the long joupey, had slept until nightfall.

Tungata had remained awake examining the tomb and the area around it. He had found certain signs that had led him to a conclusion that he did not confide to his grandfather, not then nor during the journey homewards.

He had not wanted to alarm and disturb Gideon, his love for him was too great and protective.

Peter Fungabera's voice intruded on his reverie, jerking him back to the present.

"In fact, we are privileged to have with us at this very moment an illustrious member of the Kumalo clan, and the present guardian of the old robber's tomb, the honourable Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe." The white man's pale, cruel eyes riveted him, and Tungata stiffened on the hard wooden bench. Tungata tried his voice, and found that even the small quantity of water that he had taken had eased his throat. His voice was deep and measured, only slightly ragged at the edges.

"You delude yourself, Fungabera." He made the name in to an insult, but Peter's smile never slipped. "I know nothing of this nonsense that you have dreamed up, and even if I did-" Tungata did not have to finish the sentence.

"You will find my patience inexhaustible Peter promised him. "The diamonds have lain there ninety years. A few more weeks will not spoil them. I have brought with me a doctor to supervise your treatment. We will find " just how much you can bear before your Matabele courage fails you. On the other hand, you have the option at any time to make an end to this un leasantness. You can elect to P take us to Lobengula's burial site, and immediately after you have done so, I will arrange to have you flown out of the country to any destination of your choice-" Peter Paused before adding the final sweetener to his proposition and with you will go the young woman who so gallantly defended you in the courtroom, Sarah Nyoni." This time there was a flash of emotion behind the contemptuous mask of Tungata's features.

2, "Oh yes," Peter nodded. "We have her safely taken care of." "Your lies need no denial. If you had her, you would have used her already." Tungata forced himself to believe that Sarah would have obeyed him. She had read and understood the hand, sign that he had flashed to her across the courtroom as he was being led away. "Take cover! Hide yourself. You are in danger!" he had ordered her and she Ld acknowledged and agreed. She was safe, he had to leve that, it was all he had to believe in.

"We shall see," Peter Fungabera promised.

Not that it matters." Tungata had to try and protect her, now that it was clear that the Shana were hunting for Sarah. "She is a mere woman do what you will to her. It will mean little to me." Fungabera raised his voice. "Captain!" The guard commander came immediately. "Take the prisoner back to his quarters. His treatment will be ordered and supervised by the doctor. Do you understand?" When they were alone, Colonel Bukharin said quietly, "He will not be easy. He has physical strength and something else beyond that. Some men simply will not bend, even under the most extreme coercion."

"It may take a little time, but in the end-"

"I am not so certain," Bukhariri sighed morosely. "Do you v indeed have the woman you spoke of, this Sarah Nyoni?" Peter hesitated. "Not yet. She has disappeared, but again, it's only a matter of time. She cannot hide for ever."

"Time," Colonel Bukharin repeated. "Yes, there is a time for everything, but your time is passing. This thing must be done soon, or not at all."

ics'l

"Days only, not wee Peter promised, but his voice had become thin and Colopel Bukharin, the consummate hunter of men, sensed his Advantage.

"This Zebiwe is a hard man, I am not sure he will respond th to the treatment at our clinic. I do not like is business of a diamond treasure. it smacks too much of a story for young boys. And I do not like the fact that you have let this Matabele woman elude you. This whole business begins to depress me."

"You are unduly pessimistic everything is going well. I need just a little time to prove it to you."

"You already know that I cannot remain here much longer, I must return to Moscow. And what must I tell them there that you are digging for treasure?" Bukharin threw up both hands. "They will believe that I am turning senile."

"A month," Peter Fungabera said. "I need another month."

"Today is the tenth. You have until the last day of the month to deliver both money and the man to us "That is cutting it too fine," Peter protested.

"On the first of next month, I will return. If on that date you cannot deliver, I will recommend to my superiors that this entire project be aborted." he adder was almost six feet long and seemed as gross as a pregnant sow. It was coiled upon itself in a corner of the mesh cage, and the patterning of its scales was in soft purples and golds, in russet and madder, all the colours of autumn enclosed in perfect diamonds each of which was outlined in the black of mourning.

However, the colours and patterns were not sufficiently Spectacular to divert attention from. the creature's hideous head. It was the size of a Poisonous gourd, but shaped like the ace of spades, flattening and tapering to the snout with its nostril slits. The adder's eyes were bright as beads of polished jet and its tongue was bifurcated and feathery light as it slipped in and out between the grinning lips.

"I can claim no credit for this," said Peter Fungabera.

"The good doctor is responsible for this little entertainment." He smiled at Tungata. "It is many days since last we spoke, and frankly, your time is up. So is mine. I must have your agreement today or else it does not matter. After today you are expendable, Comrade Zebiwe." Tungata was strapped to a sturdy chair of red Rhodesian teak. The mesh cage stood on the table before him.

"You were once in the Game Department," Peter Fun, gab era went on.

"So you will recognize this reptile as bit is gabonica, the Gaboon adder. It is one of the most venomous of African snakes, its toxicity exceeded only by the mamba.

However, its sting is more agonizing than either mamba or cobra. It is said that the pain drives men mad before they die. "stick He touched the cage with the tip of his swagger and the adder struck at him. The coils propelled the monstrous head across the cage in a liquid blur of movement, half its gross body serialized by the power of the strike; the jaws gaped to expose the butter-yellow lining of the throat, and the long recurved fangs were gleaming white as polished porcelain, as it crashed into the wire mesh with a force that shook the table. Even Peter Fungabera. jumped back involuntarily, and then chuckled apologetically.

"I cannot stand snakes," he explained. "They make my flesh crawl.

What about you, Comrade Minister?"

"Whatever you are planning, it is a bluff, Tungata answered. His voice was weaker now. Since their last meeting, he had spent many days at the wall in the sun.

His body seemed to have shrunk until it was too small for his head. His skin had a grey tone, and looked dusty and dry. "You cannot afford to let that thing sting me. I expect you have removed the poi " sacs." won "Doctor." Peter FuRgabera turned to the regimental doctor who sat at the far end of the table. He rose immediately and left the room.

"We were quite fortunate to find a specimen of the Gaboon," Peter Fungabera went on conversationally. "They are really rather rare, as you know." The doctor returned. He now wore thick gloves that reached to his elbows, and carried a large striped bush rat the size of a kitten. The rat squealed piercingly and struggled in his gloved hands.

Gingerly the doctor opened the door in the top of the mesh cage, dropped the rat through it and immediately snapped the sprung door closed. The " little animal scampered around the cage, testing the mesh walls with its nose and whiskers until suddenly it saw the adder in the corner. It leaped high an,l landed on stiff legs and then retreated into the opposite corner and crouched there, staring across the cage.

The adder began to uncoil, its scales glowing with al unearthly loveliness as it slid silently over the sanded floor.

towards the cornered rat. An unnatural stillness overcame the small animal. Its nose no longer twitched and wriggled.

It sank down on its belly, fluffed out its fur and watched with mesmeric fascination as repulsive death slid inexorably towards it.

Two feet from the rat the adder stopped, its neck arched into a taut "S" and then, so swiftly that the eye could not record it, it struck.

The rat was hurled back against the mesh, and immediately the adder withdrew, its coils flowing back upon itself Now there were tiny droplets of blood on the rat's russet fur, and its body began to pulsate rapidly. The limbs twitched and jumped without coordination and then, abruptly, it squealed, a shrill cry of unbearable agony, and rolled over on its back in the final convulsion of death.

The doctor lifted the carcass out of the cage with a pair of wooden tongs and carried it from the room.

"Of course," said Peter Fungabera. "You have many times the body mass of that rodent. With you it would take much longer." The doctor had returned and with him were the guard captain and two troopers.

"As I said, the doctor has designed the apparatus. I think he has done excellent work, given the limited materials and shortage of time." They lifted Tungata's chair and placed him closer to the cage. One of the troopers carried another smaller mesh cage. It was shaped like an oversized fencing helmet, and it fitted over Tungata's head, closing snugly around his throat. From the front of the encompassing helmet protruded a mesh tube that resembled the thickened and shortened trunk of a deformed elephant.

The two troopers stood behind Tungata's chair and forced him forward until the open tube of mesh aligned WIth the door of the adder's cage. Dexterously the Shana doctor clipped the tube of Tungata's helmet and the cage together.

"When the door of the cage is raised, you and the Gaboon will be sharing the same livin space." Tungata stared down the mesh tube to the door at its extremity.

"But we can stop this at any time you say the word."

"Your father was a dung-eating Shana hyena," said Tungata softly.

"We will induce the adder to leave its cage and join you in yours by applying heat to the far wall. I do advise you to be sensible, Comrade. Take us to bid Lobengula's tomb."

"The king's tomb is sacred-" Tungata broke off. He was weaker than he had realized. It had slipped out. Up to now he had stubbornly denied the existence of the tomb.

"Good," said Peter happily. "At least we have now agreed that there is a tomb. Now agree to take us there, and this will all end. A safe flight to another land, for you and the woman--2

"I spit on you, Fungabera, and I spit on the diseased whore that was your mother."

"Open the cage, "ordered Fungabera.

It rattled up in its runners and Tungata stared down the tube as though down the barrel of a rifle. The adder was coiled on the far side of the cage, staring back at him with those bright black eyes.

"There is still time, Comrade."

Tungata did not trust his voice to speak again. He J steeled himself, and stared into the adder's eyes, trying to dominate it.

"Proceed," said Peter, and one of the troopers placed a small charcoal brazier on the table. Tungata could feel the heat from it even where he sat. Slowly the soldier pushed the glowing stove closer to the far mesh of the cage, and the adder hissed explosively and uncoiled its body. To escape the heat, it began to slither towards the opening of the mesh tube.

"Quickly, Comrade," Peter urged him. "Say you will do it. There are only seconds left. I can still close the door." Tungata felt the sweat prickle as it burst out on his forehead and slid down his naked back. He wanted to shout a curse at Peter Fungabera, to consign him to a fate as horrid as this, but his pulse was pounding in his own ears, deafening him.

The adder hesitated at the mouth of the tube, reluctant to enter.

"There is still time," Peter whispered. "You do not deserve such a loathsome death say it? Say you will do id" Tungata had not realized how huge the adder was. Its eyes were only eighteen inches from his, and it hissed again as loudly as a punctured truck tyre, a vast exhalation of air that dinned in his eardrums. The trooper pushed the glowing charcoal brazier hard u against the mesh, and the adder thrust its head into the opening of the tube and its belly scales made a dry rasping sound against the wire.

"It's not too late yet." Peter Fungabera unbuckled the % flap of his holster and drew his pistol. He placed the muzzle against the wire, only inches from the adder's head. "Say the word, and I will blow its head off."

"Damn You to your own stinking Shana hell," whispered Tungata. He could smell the adder now, not a strong odour, a faint mousy sweetness tinged with corruption. It nauseated him. He felt vomit rise and scald the back of his throat. He swallowed it down and began to struggle against the straps that held him. The cage shook with his efforts, but the two troopers h8d his shoulders, and the great adder, alarmed by his movements, hissed again and arched its neck into the "S" of the strike.

Tungata stopped struggling and forced himself to remain still. He could feel his sweat pouring down his body, trickling coldly down his flanks and puddling under him on the seat of his chair.

Gradually the adder uncocked its neck, and crept forward towards his face. Six inches from his eyes, and Tungata sat still as a statue in his own sweat and loathing and horror. It was so close now that he could not focus on it. It was merely a blur that filled all his vision and then the adder shot out its tongue and explored his face with feather-light strokes of the black forked tongue.

Every nerve in Tungata's body was screwed up to snapping point, and his weakened body was overdosed with adrenalin so that he felt he was suffocating. He had to cling to consciousness. with all his remaining strength or he would have slipped over the edge into the black void of oblivion.

The adder moved on slowly. He could feel the cool slippery touch of coils across his cheek, under his ear, around the back of his n%k, and then, in a final orgasm of horror, he realized th4 the huge reptile was throwing coil after coil of its body about his head, enveloping him, covering his mouth and his nose. He dared not scream nor move, and the seconds drew out.

"He likes you," Peter Fungabera's voice had thickened with excitement and anticipation. "He's settling down with you Tungata swivelled his eyes and Peter was on the periphery of his field of vision, blurred by the fine mesh of the cage.

"We can't have that," Peter gloated, and Tungata saw his hand reach out towards the charcoal brazier. For the first time Tungata noticed that a thin steel rod, likea poker, had been thrust into the burning charcoal. "When Peter drew it out, the tip glowed red hot.

"This is your absolutely final chance to agree," he said.

"When I touch the creature with this, it will go crazy." He waited for a reply. "You cannot speak, of course. If you agree, just blink your eyes rapidly." Tungata stared fixedly at him through the mesh, trying to convey to him the universe of hatred that he experienced.

""Ah well, we tried," said Peter Fungabera. "Now you have only yourself to blame." He slipped the point of the glowing poker through the mesh and touched the adder with it. There was a sharp hiss of searing flesh, a tiny puff of stinking smoke and the adder went berserk.

Tungata felt the coils enfold his head, pumping and swelling, and then the great body whipped and slashed, filling the confined space of the cage with crazy uncoordi, noted convulsions. The cage banged and jarred and clattered, and Tungata lost control, he heard himself screaming, as terror engulfed him.

Then the snake's head filled his vision. Its jaws flared open, and its bright yellow throat gaped at him, as it struck into his face. The force of the strike stunned him. It hit him in the cheek below the eye, a heavy punch that jarred him so his teeth clashed together and he bit through his own tongue. Blood filled his mouth and he felt the long curved fangs snag into his flesh like fishhooks tugging and jerking, as they spurted jets of deadly toxin into his flesh and then, mercifully, darkness took him and Tungata slumped unconscious against the straps that held him. -V, ou've killed him you bloody idiod" Peter Fungo, hera's voice was s I brill and petulant with panic.

"No, no." The doctor was working quickly.

With the help of the troopers, he pulled the mesh helmet off Tungata's head. One of the troopers hurled the maimed adder against the wall and then crushed its head under the butt of an AK 47. "No. He's passed out, that's all. He was weak from the wall." Between them they lifted Tungata. and carried him to the camp-bed against the far wall. With exaggerated care they laid him on it, and swiftly the doctor checked his pulse.

"He's all right." He filled a disposable syringe from a glass ampoule, and shot it into Tungata's sweat-slicked upper arm. "I've given him a stimulant ah, there! The doctor's relief was obvious. "There! He is coming round already." The doctor swabbed the deep punctures in Tungata's cheek from which watery lymph was oozing.

There is always risk of infection from these bites," the d doctor explained anxiously. "I will inject an antibiotic." Tungata moaned arid muttered, and then began to struggle weakly. The troopers restrained him, until he came fully conscious and then they helped him into a sitting position. His eyes focused with difficulty on Peter Fungabera, and his confusion was obvious.

"Welcome back to the land of the living, Comrade." Peter's voi nc ce was o O? more smooth and richly modulated.

"You are now one the privileged few who have had a glimpse of the beyond." The doctor still fussed over him, but Tungata's eyes never left Peter Fungabera's face.

"You do not understand," Peter said, "and nobody can blame you for that. You see, the good doctor hM removed the creature's poison sacs, as you suggested he might have." Tungata shook his head, unable to speak.

"The rat!" Peter spoke for him. "Yes, of course, the rat.

That was rather clever. Whilst he was out of the room the doctor gave it a little injection. He had tested the dosage on other rodents to get the correct delay. You were right, my dear Tungata, we aren't ready to let you go just yet.

Maybe next time, or the time after that you will the ver know for certain. Then of course, we might miscalculate.

There might, for instance, have been a little residual tori-.

in that adder's fangs-" Peter shrugged. "It's all very delicatu this time, next time who knows? How long can yot, keep it up, Comrade, before your mind snaps?"

"I can keep it up as long as you can," Tungata whispered huskily. "I give you my oath on that."

"Now, now, no rash promises," Peter scolded him mildly.

"The next little production that I am planning involves my puppies you have heard Fungabera's puppies, every night you have heard them. I am not sure how we can control them. It will be interesting you could easily lose an arm or a foot it only takes one snap of those jaws." Peter played with his swagger-stick, rolling it between his fingers. "The choice is yours, and of course it only takes one word from you to end it all." Peter held up one hand. "No, please don't tax yourself. There is no need to give an answer now. We'll let you have another few days at the wall to recuperate from this ordeal, and then-" t unga. a had lost track of time. He could not remember how many days he had spent at the wall, how many men he had seen executed, how many nights he had lain and listened to the hyena.

He found it difficult to think further ahead than the next bowl of water. The doctor had judged the amount required to keep him alive with precision. Thirst was a torment that never ceased, not even when he slept, for his nightmares now were filled with images of water lakes and running streams which he could not reach, rain that fell all around him and did not touch him, and raging, intolerable thirst.

Added to the thirst, Peter Fungabera's threat of delivering him to the hyena pack festered in his imagination and became more potent for every day that it was delayed.

Water and hyena they were beginning to drive him beyond the borders of sanity. He knew that he could not hold out much longer, and he wondered confusedly why he had held out this long. He had to keep reminding himself that Lobengula's tomb was all that was keeping him alive. While he had the secret, they could not kill him. He did not entertain for even a moment the hope that Peter Fungabera would keep his promise of sending him to safety once he led them to the tomb.

He had to stay alive, it was his duty. As long as he lived, there was still hope, however faint, of delivery. He knew that with his death his people would sink deeper into the tyrant's coils. He was their hope of salvation. It was his duty to them to live, even though death would now be a blessing and a release, he could not die. He must live on.

He waited in the icy darkness of pre-dawn, his body too stiff and weak to rise. This day they would have to carry him to the wall, or to whatever they had planned for him.

He hated that thought. He hated to show such weakness in front of them.

He heard the cam A guards, the orders i sound of blows and the cries of a prisoner in the adjoining cell being dragged to the execution wall.

Now soon they would come for him. He reached out for the water bowl and his disappointment hit him in a cold gust as he remembered that the previous evening he had not been able to control himself. The bowl was empty. He crouched over it and licked the enamel likea dog, in case a drop remained of the precious fluid. It was dry.

stir. The march of the less violence, the The bolts shot back and the door was flung open. The day had begun. Tungata tried to rise. He lurched up onto his knees. A guard entered and placed a large dark object on the threshold and then quietly withdrew. The door was bolted again and Tungata was left alone.

This had never happened before. Tungata was stupefied and uncomprehending. He crouched in the darkness and waited for something more to happen, but nothing did. He heard the other prisoners being led away, and then silence beyond the door of his cell.

The light began to strengthen and cautiously he examined the object that had been left by the guard. It was a plastic bucket, and in the dawn light the contents shimmered.

Water. A full gallon of water. He crawled to it and examined it, not yet beginning to hope. Once before, they had tricked him. They had doctored his water bowl and he had gulped down a mouthful before he realized that it was heavily laced with salt and bitter alum. The thirst that lowed had driven him delirious and shaking as though fol in malarial crisis.

Gingerly he dipped his forefinger into the liquid in the bucket and tasted a drop. It was sweet, clean water. He made a little whining sound in his throat, and scooped the empty bowl full of the precious fluid. He tilted back his head and poured the water down his throat. He drank with a terrible desperation, expecting that at any moment the oar would crash open and a guard would kick the bucket over.

He drank until his empty belly bulged, and pangs of colic stabbed through it. Then he rested for a few minutes, feeling the fluid flowing into his desiccated tissues, feeling them recharge with strength, and then he drank again, and rested and drank again. After three hours he urinated copiously in the toilet bucket for the first time in as long as he could remember.

When they finally came for him at noon, he could stand UP unaided and curse them with fluency and artistry.

r They led him towards the execution wall, and he felt almost cheerful. With his belly sloshing with water, he knew he could resist them for ever. The execution stake had no terror for him any longer. He had stood there too long and too often. He welcomed it as a part of the routine which he understood. He had reached the point where he feared only the unknown.

Halfway across the parade ground he realized that something was different. They had built a new structure facing the wall. A neatly thatched sun-shelter. Under the shelter two chairs were set and a table had been laid for lunch.

Seated at the table was the dreadfully familiar figure of Peter Fungabera. Tungata had not seen him for days, and his new-found courage faltered, weakness came back over him. He felt a rubbery give to his knees and he stumbled.

What had they planned for today? If only he knew, he could meet it. The uncertainty was the one truly unbearable torture.

Peter Fungabera was lunching and he did not even look up as Tungata was led' past the thatched shelter. Peter ate with his fingers in the African manner, taking the stiff white maize cake and moulding it into bite-sized balls, pressing a depression into it with his thumb and then filling it with a sauce of stewed greens and salted kapenta fish from Lake Kariba. The smell of the food flooded Tungata's mouth with I liva, but he trudged on towards so execution stake.

the wall and the There was only one other victim today, he noticed, narrowing his eyes against the glare. He was already strapped to one of the stakes. Then, with a small shock of surprise, Tungata realized that it was a woman.

She was naked a young woman. Her skin had a soft velvety sheen in the sunlight, like polished amber. Her body was graciously formed, her breasts symmetrical and firm, their aureolas were the colour of ripe mulberries, the nipples upturned and out-thrust. Her legs were long and Willowy, the bare feet small and neat. Bound as she was, she could not cover herself Tungata sensed her shame at her naked sex, nestled dark and fluffy in the juncture of her thighs likea tiny animal with separate life. He averted his eyes, looked up at her face and at last he despaired.

It was all over. The guards released his arms, and he tottered towards the young woman at the stake. Though her eyes were huge and dark with terror and shame, her first words were for him. She whi ered softly in Sindebele, SP "My lord, what have they done to you?"

"Sarah." He wanted to reach over and touch her dear and lovely face, but he would not do so under the lewd gaze of his guards.

"How did they find you?" He felt very old and frail. It was all over.

"I did as you commanded," she told him in soft apology.

"I went into the hills, but then a message reached me one of my children from the school was dying dysentery and no doctor. I could not ignore the call."

"Of course, it was a lie," he guessed flatly.

"It was a lie," she admitted. "The Shana soldiers were waiting for me. Forgive me, lord."

"It does not matter any longer," he answered.

"Not for me, lord," she pleaded. "Do not do anything for me. I am a daughter of Mashobane. I can bear anything these Shana animals can do to me." He shook his head sadly, and at last reached out and touched her lips with the tips of his fingers. His hand was trembling like that of a drunkard. She kissed his fingers.

He dropped his hand and, turning, trudged wearily back to the thatched shelter. The soldiers made no effort to prevent him.

Peter Fungabera looked up as he approached and motioned to the empty canvas chair. Tungata sat down and his body slumped.

"First," Tungata said, "the woman must be untied and clothed." Peter gave the order. They covered her and led her away to one of the hutments.

My lord-" she strained back against their grip, her face turned piteously to him.

"She must not be ill-treated in any way."

"She has not been," Peter said. "She will not be, unless you make it necessary." He pushed a bowl of maize cake towards Tungata. He ignored it.

"She must be taken out of the country and delivered to a representative of the international Red Cross in Francistown."

"There is a light aircraft waiting at Tuti airfield. Eat, Comrade, we must have you strong and well."

"When she is safe, she will speak to me radio or telephone and give me a code-word that I will arrange with her before she leaves."

"Agreed." He poured hot sweet tea for Tungata.

"We will be left alone together to agree on the code."

"You may speak to her, of course," Peter nodded. "But in the middle of this parade ground. None of my men will be closer than a hundred yards to you, but there will be a machine-gun trained upon you at all times. I will allow you precisely five minutes with the woman." have failed you," Sarah said, and Tungata had forgotten how beautiful she was. His whole being ached with longing for her.

"No," he told her, "it was inevitable. There is no blame to you. It was for duty, not for yourself that you came out of hiding My lord, what can I do now?" Listen," he said, and spoke quietly and quickly. "Some of my trusted people have escaped from the scourge of Fungabera's Third Brigade you must find them. I believe they are in Botswana." He gave her the names and she repeated them faithfully. "Tell them-2 She memorized all that he told her, and repeated it to him perfectly.

From the corner of his eye Tungata saw the guards at the edge of the parade ground start towards where they stood alone in the centre. Their five minutes together was up.

"When you are safe, they will allow us to speak on the radio. To let me know that all is well, you will repeat to me, "Your beautiful bird has flown high and swiftly".

Repeat it."

"Oh my lord, "she choked.

"Repeat id" She obeyed, and then flung herself into his arms. She I j clung to him, and he to her.

"Will I ever see you again?"

"No,"he told her. "You must forget me."

"Never!" she cried. "Not if I live to be an old woman never, my lord." The guards dragged them apart. A Land-Rover drove out onto the parade ground. They hustled Sarah into it.

The last he saw of her was her face in the rear window, looking back at him her beautiful beloved face.

n the third day, they came to fetch Tungata from his cell and take him up to Peter Fungabera's command post on the central kopie.

"The woman is ready to speak to you. You will converse only in English. Your conversation will be recorded." Peter indicated the transistor tape deck beside the radio apparatus. "If you do attempt to slip in any Sindebele message, it will be translated later."

id

"The code we have arranged is in Sindebele, Tungata told him. "She will have to repeat it."

"Very well. That is acceptable, but nothing else." He looked Tungata over critically. "I am delighted to see you looking so well again, Comrade, a little good food and rest have worked wonders." Tungata wore faded suntans, but they were freshly laundered and pressed. He was still gaunt and wasted, but his skin had lost the dusty grey look and his eyes were clear and bright. The swelling of the adder bite on his cheek had abated, and the scab covering it looked dry and healthy.

Peter Fungabera nodded to the guard captain and he passed the radio microphone to Tungata and pressed the record" button on the tape deck.

"This is Tungata Zebiwe."

"My lord, this is Sarah." Her voice was scratchy and distorted by static, but he would have known it anywhere.

The ache of longing filled his chest.

"Are you safe?"

"I am in Francistowti. The Red Cross are caring for me."

"Do you have a message?" She replied in Sindebele. "Your beautiful bird has flown high and swiftly." Then she added, "I have met others here.

Do not despair." That is good I want' you to-" Peter Fungabera reached across and took the microphone from his hand. "Excuse me, Comrade, but I am paying for the call." He held the microphone to his lips and depressed the transmit button. "Transmission ends," he said, and broke the connection.

He tossed the microphone casually to the guard captain.

"Have the tape translated by one of the Matabele trusties and bring me a copy immediately." Then he turned back to Tungata.

Your little holiday is over, Comrade, now you and I have work to do. Shall we go?" aw long would he be able to draw out the search for Lobengula's grave, Tungata wondered. Fo, every hour he could gain would have value -another hour of life, another hour of hope.

"It is almost twenty years since my grandfather took me to visit the site. My memory is unclean"

"Your memory is as brilliant as that sun up there," Peter told him. "You are renowned for your ability to remember places and faces and names, Comrade, you forget that I have heard you speak in the Assembly, without notes.

Besides which, you will have a helicopter to ferry you directly to the site."

"That will not work. The first time I went was on foot. I must go back the same way. I would not recognize the landmarks from the air." So they went back along the dirt roads that Tungata and old Gideon had bussed over so many years before, and the Tungata genuinely could not find the starting place fall of rocks in the old river course and the kopje shaped like an elephant's head. They spent three days searching, with Peter Fungabera becoming more and more short tempered and disbelieving, before they stopped at the tiny village and trading-store that was the last reference point that Tungata could remember.

"Haul The old road. Yes, the bridge was washed away many years ago. It was never used again. Now the new road goes so and so-" They found the overgrown track at last and four hours later reached the dry river-bed. The old bridge had cot lapsed into a heap of shattered concrete already overgrown with lianas, but the rock wall upstream was exactly as Tungata had remembered it and he experienced a pang of nostalgia. Suddenly old Gideon seemed very close to him, so much so that he glanced around and made a small sign with his right hand to appease the ancestral spirits and whispered, "Forgive me, Babo, that I am going to betray the oath." Strangely the presence that he sensed was benign and fondly indulgent, as Old Gideon had always been. "The lies this way." They left the Land-Rover at the broken path bridge and continued on foot.

Tungata. led with two armed troopers at his back. He set an easy pace, that chafed Peter Fungabera who followed behind the guards. As they went, Tungata could allow his imagination to wander freely. He seemed to be part of the exodus of the Matabele people of almost a hundred years before, an embodiment of Gandang, his great-great-grandfather, faithful and loyal to the end. He felt again the despair of a defeated people and the terror of the hard riding white pursuit that might appear at any instant from the forest behind them, with their chattering three, legged machine-guns. He seemed to hear the lament of the women and the small children, the lowing of herds as they faltered and fell in this hard and bitter country.

When the last of the draught oxen were dead, Gandang had ordered the warriors of his famous Inyati regiment into the traces of the kingy's remaining wagon. Tungata imagined the king, obese and diseased and doomed, sitting up on the rocking wagon box staring into the forbidding north, a man caught up in the millstones of history and destiny and crushed between them.

"And now the final betrayal," Tungata thought, bitterly.

"I am leading these Shana animals to disturb his rest once again." Three times, deliberately, he took the wrong path, drawing it out to the very limit of Peter Fungabera's patience. The third time, Peter Fungabera. ordered him stripped naked and his wrists and ankles bound together, then he had stood over him with a cured hippo-hide whip, the vicious kiboko that the Arab slave-traders had in traduced to Africa, and he thrashed Tungata likea dog until his blood dripped into the sandy grey earth.

It was the shame and humiliation of the beating rather than the pain that had made Tungata turn back and pick up his landmarks again. When he reached the hill at last, II;, it appeared ahead of them with all the suddenness that Tungata recalled so vividly from his first visit.

They had been following a deep gorge of black rock, polished by the roaring torrential spates of the millennia.

The depths were studded with stagnant green pools in which giant whiskered catfish stirred the scummy surface as they rose to feed, and lovely swallow-tailed butterflies floated in the heated air above, gems of scarlet and iridescent blue.

They came around a bend in the gorge, clambering over boulders the size and the colour of elephants, and abruptly the surrounding cliffs opened and the forest fell back.

Before them, likea vast monument to dwarf the pyramids of the pharaohs, the hill of Lobengula rose into the sky.

The cliffs were sheer and daubed with lichens of twenty different shades of yellow and ochre and malachite. There was a breeding colony of vultures in the upper ledges, the parent birds sailing gracefully out over the heated void, tipping their wings in the rising thermals as they banked and spiralled.

"There it is," Tungata murmured. "Thabas Nkosi, the hill of the king." The natural pathway to the summit followed a fault in the rock face where limestone overlaid the country rock.

At places it was steep and daunting and the troopers, weighted with packs and weapons, glanced nervously over the drop and hugged the inner wall of rock as they edged upwards, but Peter Fungabera and Tungata climbed easily and surefooted over even the worse places, leaving the escort far below.

"I could throw him over the edge," Tungata thought, "if I can take him unawares." He glanced back and Peter was ten paces below him. He had the Tokarev pistol in his right hand and he smiled likea mamba.

"No," he warned, and they understood each other with, out further words. For the moment Tungata put away the thought of vengeance and went on upwards. He turned a corner in the rock and they came out onto the crown of the hill, five hundred feet above the dark gorge.

Standing a little apart, both of them sweating lightly in the white sunlight, they looked down into the deep wide valley of the Zambezi. On the edge of their vision, the wide waters of the man-made lake of Kariba glinted softly through the haze of heat and blue smoke from the first bush-fires of the dry season. The troopers came off the path with transparent relief, and Peter Fungabera looked expectantly at Tungata.

"We are ready to go on, Comrade."

"There is not much further to go," Tungata answered him.

Over the crest of the cliff the rock formation had eroded and broken up into buttress and tumbled ramparts, the trees that had found purchase in the cracks and crevices had intertwined their root systems over the rock-face like mating serpents, while their stems were thickened and deformed by the severe conditions of heat and drought.

Tungata led them through the broken rock and tortured forest, into the mouth of a ravine. At the head of the ravine grew an ancient Natalensis, the strangler fig ficus tree, its fleshy limbs of blotched yellow loaded with bunches of bitter fruit. As they approached it a flock of brown parrots, green wings flagged with bright yellow, that had been feasting on the wild figs, exploded into flight. At the base of the ficus tree, the cliff was segmented, and the roots had found the cracks and forced them apart.

Tungata stood before the cliff and Peter Fungabera, suppressing an exclamation of impatience, glanced at him and saw his lips were moving silently, in a prayer or entreaty. Peter Fungabera began to examine the cliff ace more carefully, and realized with rising excitement that the racks in the rock were too regular to be natural.

"Here!" he shouted to his troopers, and when they hurried forward, he pointed out one of the blocks in the face, and they set to work on it with bayonets and bare hands.

Within fifteen minutes of sweaty labour, they had worked the block free, and it was now clear that the face was in reality a wall of carefully fitted masonry. In the depths of the aperture left by the block, they could make out a second wall of masonry.

"Bring the prisoner," Peter ordered. "He will work in the front rank." By the time it was too dark to go on, they had opened an aperture just wide enough for two men to work shoulder to shoulder in the outer wall, and had begun on the inner wall. In the forefront, Tungata was able to confirm what he had guessed on his first visit to the tomb so long ago the signs that he had noticed then and concealed from old grandfather Gideon were even more apparent on the inner wall of the tomb. They helped salve his conscience and ease the pain of oath-breaking.

r Reluctantly Peter Fungabera called a halt on the work for the night. Tungata's hands were raw from contact with the rough blocks and he had lost a fingernail where it had been trapped and torn off in a slide of masonry. He was 9 handcuffed to one of the Third Brigade troopers for the night, but even this could not keep him from dreamless exhaustion-drugged sleep. Peter Fungabera had to kick both him and his guard awake the next morning.

it was still dark and they ate their meagre rations of cold maize cake and sweet tea in silence. They had barely gulped it down before Peter Fungabera ordered them back to the masonry wall.

Tungata's torn hands were clumsy and stiff. Peter Fungabera stood behind him in the opening and when he faltered slashed him with the kiboko, around the ribs, in the soft and sensitive flesh below the armpit. Tungata growled likea wounded lion and lifted a hundredweight block out of the wall.

The sun cleared the crown of the hill, and its golden rays illuminated the cliff-face. With a branch of dead wood, Tungata and one of the Shana troopers levered up another lump of rock, and as it began to move, there was a rumble and a harsh grating and the inner wall collapsed towards them. They jumped clear and stood coughing in the swirl of dust, peering into the aperture that they had made.

The air from the cave stank likea drunkard's mouth, stale and sour, and the darkness beyond was forbidding and menacing.

"You first," Peter Fungabera ordered, and Tungata hesitated. He was overcome with a superstitious awe. He was an educated and sophisticated man, but beneath that, he was African. The sfirits of his tribe and his ancestors guarded this place. He looked at Peter Fungabera and knew that he was experiencing the same dread of the supernatural, even though he was armed with a flashlight, whose batteries he had conserved zealously for this moment.

"Move!" Fungabera ordered. His harsh tone could not disguise his disquiet, and Tungata, to shame him, stepped cautiously over the rock fall into the cave.

He stood for a while until his eyes adjusted to the gloom and he could make out the configuration of the cave. The floor beneath his feet was smooth and worn, but it sloped downwards at a steep angle. Obviously this cave had been the lair of animals and the home of primitive man for tens of thousands of years before it became the tomb of a king.

Peter Fungabera, standing behind Tungata, played the beam of his flashlight over walls and roof. The roof was crusted with the soot of ancient cooking-fires, and the smooth walls were rich with the art of the little yellow Bushmen who had lived here. There were depictions of the wild game that they had hunted and observed so minutely: herds of black buffalo, and tall, dappled giraffe, rhinoceros and homed antelope in glowing colours, all delightfully caricatured. With them the pygmy artist had drawn his own people, sticklike figures with buttocks as pronounced as a camel's hump and imperial erections to boast of their manhood. Armed with bows, they pursued the herds across the rock wall.

Peter Fungabera. flicked the torch beam over this splendid gallery and then held it steady into the inner recesses of the cave where the throat narrowed and the rocky passage turned upon itself and was shrouded in darkness and mysterious shadow far below them.

"Forward!" he ordered, and Tungata moved cautiously down the sloping floor of the chamber.

They reached the throat of the cave and were forced to stoop under the low roof. Tungata turned the corner of the rocky passage and went on for fifty paces before he stopped J9 short.

He had come out into a capacious cavern with a domed roof twenty feet above their heads. The floor was level, but cluttered with rock fallen from above. Peter Fungabera flashed his beam around the cavern.

Against the far wall was a ledge the height of a man's shoulder and he held the beam on a jumble of objects that were stacked upon it.

For a moment Tungata was puzzled, and then he recognized the shape of a wagon wheel of a design from a hundred Years before, a wheel taller than the oxen that drew it; then he made out the wagon bed and the frames.

The vehicle had been broken down into its separate parts and carried up to the cave.

"Lobengula's wagon," he whispered. "His most cherished possession, the one his warriors pulled when the oxen failed--2 Peter Fungabera prodded him with the barrel of the Tokarev and they picked their way forward through the litter of fallen rock.

There were rifles, stacked like wheat, sheaves old Lee Enfields part of the payment that Cecil Rhodes had made to Lobengula for his concessions. Rifles and a hundred gold sovereigns every month the price of a land and a nation sold into slavery, Tungata recalled bitterly. There were other objects piled upon the ledge, salt-bags of leather, stools and knives, beads and ornaments and snuff-horns and broad-bladed assegais.

Peter Fungabera exclaimed with avarice and impatience. "Hurry. W must find his corpse, the diamonds will be with the body." Bones! They gleamed in the torchlight. A pile of them below the ledge.

A skull! It grinned mirthlessly up at them, a cap of matted wool still coveriqg the pate.

"That's him! cried Peter jubilantly. "There is the old -to his knees beside the skeleton.

devil." He dropped Tungata stood aloof. After the first pang of alarm, he had realized that it was the skeleton of a small and elderly man, not much larger than a child, with teeth missing in the front upper jaw. Lobengula had been a big man with fine flashing teeth. Everyone who had met him in life had commented on his smile. This skeleton was still decked in the gruesome paraphernalia of the witch-doctor's trade: beads and shells and bones, plugged duiker-horns of medicine and skulls of reptiles belted about the bony waist.

Even Peter recognized his mistake, and he jumped to his feet.

"This isn't him!" he cried anxiously. "They must have sacrificed his witch-doctor and placed him here as a guardian." He was playing the torch wildly about the cave.

"Where is he?" he demanded. "You must know. They must have told you." Tungata remained silent. Above the skeleton of the witch, doctor the ledge jutted out, rather likea large pulpit of rock. The king's possessions were laid out neatly around this prominence, the human sacrifice laid below it. The entire focus of the cavern was on this spot. It was the logical and natural position in which to place the king's corpse. Peter Fungabera sensed that also and slowly turned th e beam back to it.

The rock pulpit was empty.

"He isn't here," Peter whispered, his voice tense with disappointment and frustration. Tobengula's body is gone! The signs that Tungata had noticed at the outer wall, N the place where the masonry wall had been opened and U1 resealed with less meticulous workmanship, had led him to the correct conclusion. The old king's tomb had obviously been robbed many years previously. The corpse had long ago been spirited away and the tomb resealed to hide the traces of this desecration.

Peter Fungabera clambered up onto the rock pulpit, and searched it frantically on his hands and knees. Standing back impassively, Tungata marvelled at how ludicrous greed could render even such a dangerous and impressive man as Peter Fungabera. He was muttering incoherently t 0 himself as he strained the dusty detritus; from the floor through his hooked fingers.

"Look! Look here! He held up a small dark object, and Tungata stepped closer. In the torchlight he recognized that it was a shard from a clay pot, a piece of the rim decorated in the traditional diamond pattern used on the Matabele beer-pots.

"A beer-pot." Peter turned it in his hands. "One of the diamond pots broken!" He dropped the fragment and scratched in the dirt, stirring up a soft cloud of dust that undulated in the torch beam.

Here!" He had found something else. Something smaIller. He held it up between thumb and forefinger. It was the size of a small walnut.

He turned the torch beam full upon it, and immediately the light was shattered into the rainbow hues of the spectrum. Shafts of coloured light were reflected into Peter Fungabera's face, like sunlight off water.

"Diamond," he breathed with religious awe, turning it slowly in his fingers so that it shot out arrows and blades of light.

It was an uncut stone, Tungata realized, but the crystal had formed in such symmetry and each plane was so perfect as to catch and reflect even the meagre beam of the torch.

"How beautiful!" Peter murmured, bringing it closer still to his face.

This diamond was a perfect natural octahedron and its colour, even in artificial light, was clear as snowmelt in a mountain stream.

"Beautiful," Peter Fungabera repeated, and then gradually his face lost its drelmy, gloating expression.

"Only one!" he whispered. "A single stone dropped in haste, when there Ishould have been five beer-pots brimming with diamonds." His eyes swivelled from the diamond to Tungata. The torch was held low, and it cast weird shadows across his face, giving him a demoniacal look.

knew," he accused. "I sensed all along you were "You hiding something back. You knew the diamonds had been taken, and you knew where." Tungata shook his head in denial, but Peter Fungabera ri was working himself into a fury. His features contorted, his mouth worked soundlessly and a thin white froth coated his lips.

"You knew!" He launched himself from the ledge with all the fury of i a wounded leopard.

"You'll tell me!" he shrieked. "In the end you'll tell me." He hit Tungata in the face with the barrel of the Tokarev.

"Tell me!" he screamed. "Tell me where they are!" And the steel thudded into Tungata's face as ie struc again k and again.

"Tell me where the diamonds are! The barrel crunched against Tungata's cheekbone, split- i ting the flesh, and he fell to his knees.

Peter Fungabera pulled himself away, and braced himself against the rock ledge to contain his own ri".

"No," he told himself. "That is too easy. He's going to suffer __2 He folded his own arms tightly across his chest to restrain himself from attacking Tungata again.

"In the end you will tell me you will plead with me to allow you to take me to the diamonds. You'll plead with me to kill you-2 abes in the fornicating woods," said Morgan Oxford.

"That's what you two are! By God, you have dropped us in this cesspool as well, right up to the eyebrows." Morgan Oxford had flown down from Harare as soon as he had heard that a Botswana border patrol had brought Craig and Sally-Anne in from the desert.

"Both the American ambassador and the Brits have had notes from Mugabe. The Brits are hopping up and down and frothing at the mouth also. They know nothing about you, Craig, and you are a British subject. I gather that they'd like to lock you up in the tower and chop your head off.1 Morgan stood at the foot of Sally-Anne's hospital bed.

He had declined the chair that Craig offered him.

you, Missy, the ambassador has asked me to As inform you that he would like to see you on the next plane back to the States."

"He can't order me to do that." Sally-Anne stopped his flow of bitter recriminations. "This isn't Soviet Russia, and I'm a free citizen." "You won't be for long. No, by God, not if Mugabe gets his hands on you! Murder, armed insurrection and a few other charges-"

"Those are all a frame-up!"

"You and your boyfriend here left a pile of warm bodies behind you like empty beer cans at a labour-day picnic.

Mugabe has started extradition proceedings with the Botswana government-"

"We are political refugees," Sally-Anne flared.

"Bonny and Clyde, sweetheart, that's the way the Zimbabweans are telling it."

Sally' Anne Craig intervened mildly. "You are not supposed to get yourself excited-"

"Excited!" cried So4yAnne. "We've been robbed and beaten, threatenedowith rape and a firing squad and now the official representative of the United States of America, the country of which I happen to be a citizen, barges in here and calls us criminals."

"I'm not calling you anything," Morgan denied flatly.

"I'm just warning you to get your cute little ass out of Africa and all the way home to mommy."

"He calls us criminals, and then patronizes me with his male chauvinistic--2

"Throttle back, Sally-Anne." Morgan Oxford held up hand wearily. "Let's start again. You are in big trouble one we are in big trouble. We've got to work something out."

"Now will you sit down?" Craig pushed the empty chair towards him and Morgan slumped into it and lit a Chesterfield.

"How are you, anyway?" he asked.

"I thought you'd never ask, sweetheart," Sally' Anne snapped tersely.

"She was badly desiccated. They suspected renal failure, but they've had her on a drip and liquids for three days.

She is okay that end. They were also worried about the crack on her head but the X,rays are negative, thank God.

it was only a mild concussion. They have promised to discharge her tomorrow morning."

"So she's fit to travel?"

"I thought your concern was too touching-" 41 _,oak, Sally' Anne this is Africa. If the Zimbabweans get hold of you, there will be nothing we can do to help.

It's for your own good. You've got to get out. The ambassador-" "Screw the ambassador," said Sally-Anne with relish, "and screw you, Morgan Oxford."

"I can't speak for His Excellency," Morgan grinned for the first time, "but for myself, when can we begin?" And even Sally-Anne laughed.

Craig took advantage of the softening of attitudes.

"Morgan, you can rely on me to see she does the right thing-_2 Immediately Sally-Anne puffed up in the high bed, preparatory to fending off another chauvinistic onslaught, but Craig gave her a tiny frown and shake of the head and she subsided reluctantly. Morgan turned on Craig instead.

"As for you, Craig. How the hell did they find out you the agency?" Morgan demanded.

4, were working for

"Was ! Craig looked stunned. "If I was, nobody told me."

"Who the hell do you think Henry Pickering is anyway Santa Claus?"

"He my, he is- a vice-president of the World Bank!"

"Babes," moaned Morgan, "babes in the tupping woods." He braced up. "Well, anyway, that is over. Your contract is terminated. If there was anything sooner than immediately, that would be the date of termination."

"I sent Henry a full report three days ago-"

"Yeah!" Morgan nodded resignedly. "About Peter Fungabera being the Moscow candidate. Peter is a Shana, the Ruskies would never touch him. just so you put it out of your head, General Fungabera is a Russian-hater from way back and we have a very good relationship with Peter Fungabera very good indeed. Enough said."

"For God's sake, Morgan. Then he is playing a double game. I had it from his own aide. Captain Timon Nbebi!"

"Who is now conveniently dead," Morgan reminded him. "If it makes you feel better, we've put your report into the computer with a" D-minus credibility rating. Henry Pickering sends you his sincere thanks." Sally-Anne cut in, "Morgan, you have seen my photographs of the burned villages, the dead children, the devastation caused by the Third Brigade-"

"Like the man said,ftgs to make omelettes," Morgan interrupted. "Natur4y we don't like the violence, but Fungabera is anti-Russian. The Matabele are pro-Russian.

We have to support the anti-communist regimes, even if we don't like some of their methods there are women and aking a beating in El Salvador. So does that me in that we must stop aid to that country? Must we back out of any situation where our people aren't sticking precisely to the rules of the Geneva Convention? Grow up, Sally-Anne, this is the real world." There was silence in the tiny ward, except for the pinking of the galvanized iron roof as it expanded in the noon heat. On the parched brown lawn beyond the window, the walking patients were, dressed in a uniform of pink bath robes stamped across the back with the initials of the Botswana Health Department.

"That's all you came to tell usr Sally-Anne asked at last.

"Isn't it enoughr Morgan stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. "There is one other thing, Craig. Henry Pickering asked me to tell you that the Land Bank of Zimbabwe has repudiated its suretyship for your loan. Their grounds are that you have been officially declared an enemy of the people. Henry Pickering asked me to tell you they will be looking to you for repayment of capital and interest. Does this make sense to your "Unfortunately," Craig nodded glumly.

"He said he would try to work something out with you when you reach New York, but in the meantime they have been forced to freeze all your bank accounts and serve your publishers with a restraining order to withhold all future royalty payments."

"That figures."

"Sorry, Craig. It sounds real tough." Morgan held out his hand. "I liked your book, I really did, and I liked you. I'm just sorry it all had to end this way." Craig walked with him as far as the green Ford with diplomatic registration plates that Morgan Oxford was driving.

"Will you do me one last favourr "If I can." Morgan looked suspicions.

"Can you see that a package is delivered to my publisher in New Yorkr And when Morgan's suspicions were unabated, "It's only the final pages of my i -Lew manuscript, give you my word." Hill Okay, then," said Morgan Oxford dubiously. "I'll see he gets it." Craig fetched the British Airways bag from the hired Land-Rover at the far end of the car park. "Look after it," he pleaded. "It's my heart's blood and my hope of salvation." He watched the green Ford drive away and went back into the hospital building.

"What was all that about the banks and loansr Sally Anne asked as he entered her ward.

"It means that when I asked you to marry me I was a millionaire." Craig came back to sit on the edge of her bed.

"Now I'm just about as broke as anybody who has no assets and owes a couple of million bucks can be."

"You've got the new book. Ashe Levy says it's a winner."

"Darling, if I wrote a bestseller every year for the rest of my life, I would just about keep level with the interest payments on what I owe to Henry Pickering and his banks." She stared at him.

"So what I am trying to say is this my original offer is up for review, you've got a chance to change your mind.

You don't have to marry me."

"Craig," she said. "Lock the door and pull the shutters."

"You've got to be joking not here, not now! It's probably a serious offence in this country, illicit cohabitation or something." Listen, mister, when you are wanted for murder and armed insurrection, a little bit of illicit nip and tuck with your future husband, even, if he is a pauper, sits lightly on the conscience." raig picked Sally -Anne up from the hospital the following morning. She wore the same jeans, shirt and trainers as she had when she was admitted.

"Sister had them washed and mended-" she stopped as she saw the Land-Rover. "What's this? I thought we were broke."

"The computer hasn't had the happy news yet, they are still honouring my American Express card."

"Is that kosher?"

"When you owe five big Ms, lady, another couple al hundred bucks sits pretty lightly on the conscience." lie grinned at her as he turned the ignition key and when the engine fired, said cheerfully, "Eat your heart out, Mr. Hertz."

"You're taking it very well, Craig." She slid across the seat closer to him.

"We are both alive that is cause for fireworks and general rejoicing. As for the money well, I don't think I aire. When I've got money was truly cut out to be a million I spend all my time worrying about losing it. It saps mi energy. Now that I've lost it, I feel free again in a funny sort of way."

"You're happy to have lost everything you ever owned?" She turned sideways in the seat to look at him. "Even for you, that's cuckoo!" I'm not happy, no," he denied the charge. "What I truly regret is losing King's Lynn and Zambezi Waters.

We could have made something wonderful out of them, you and I. I regret that very much and I regret Tungata Zebiwe."

"Yes. We destroyed him." Both of them were sobered and saddened. "If there, was only something we could do for him."

"Not a damned thing." Craig shook his head. "Despite Timon's assurances, we don't know that he is still alive, and even if he is, we don't have the faintest idea where he is, or how to find him." They rattled across the railway lines and into the main street of Francistown.

""Jewel of the north"," said Craig. "Population two thousand, main industry consumption of alcoholic beverage, reason for existing uncertain." He parked outside the single hotel. "As you can see, total population now in permanent residence in the public bar." However, the young Botswana receptionist was pretty and efficient.

"Mr. Mellow, there is a lady waiting to see you," she called, as Craig entered the lobby. Craig did not recognize his visitor, not until Sally-Anne ran forward to embrace her.

"Sarah!" she cried. "How did you get here? How did you find usT Craig's room had two single beds with a dressing-table between them, a threadbare imitation Persian rug on the shiny red-painted cement floor and a single wooden chair.

The two girls sat on one bed, with their legs curled up under them in that double-jointed feminine attitude.

"They told me at the Red Cross that you had been found in the desert and brought in by the police, Miss Jay."

"My name is Sally' Anne Sarah." Sarah smiled softly in acknowledgement. "I wasn't sure if you would want to see me again, not after the trial. But then my friends here told me how you had been ill-treated by Fungabera's soldiers. I thought you might have realized that I was right all along, that Tungata Zebiwe was not a criminal and that he needs friends now." She turned towards Craig. "He was your friend, Mr. Mellow. He told me Rout you. He spoke of you with respect and great feeling. He was afraid for you, when he heard that you had returned to Zimbabwe. He realized that you wanted to take up your family land in Matabeleland, and he knew there were going to be terrible troubles and that you would be caught up in them. He said that you were too gentle for the hard times that were coming. He called you "Pupho", the dreamer, the gentle dreamer, but he said that you were also stubborn and obstinate. He wanted to save you from being hurt again. He said, "Last time he lost his leg this time he could lose his life. To be his friend, I must make myself his enemy. I must drive him out of Zimbabwe."

it Craig sat in the sttaight-backed wooden chair and remembered his stormy meeting with Tungata when he had come to him for assistance in acquiring King's Lynn.

Had it been an act, then? Even now he found that hard tory so believe. Tungata's passion had been so real, his fit convincing.

41 am sorry, Mr. Mellow. These are very rude things that I am saying about you. I am telling you only what Tungata said. He was your friend. He still is your friend."

"It doesn't really matter any more, what he thought of me, "Craig murmured. "Sam is probably dead by now."

"No!" For the first time Sarah raised her voice, her tone vehement, almost angry. "No, do not say that, never said that! He is alive. I have seen and spoken to him. They can never kill a man like thad" The chair creaked under Craig as he leaned forward eagerly. "You have seen him? When?"

"Two weeks ago."

"Where? Where was he?"

"Tuti at the camp."

"Sam alive!" Craig changed as he said it. TIte despondent slump of his shoulders squared out, he held his head at more alert angle and his eyes were brighter, more eager.

He wasn t really looking at Sarah. He was looking at the wall above her head, trying to marshal the torrent of emotions and ideas that came at him, so he did not see that Sarah was weeping.

It was Sally-Anne who put a protective and comforting arm about her, and Sarah sobbed. "Oh, my lord Tungata.

The things they have done to him. They have starved and beaten him. He is likea village cur, all bones and scars.

He walks likea very old man, only his eyes are still proud." Sally-Anne hugged her wordlessly. Craig jumped up from the chair and began to pace. The room was so small, he crossed it in four strides, turned and came back. Sally Anne dug in her pocket and found a crumpled tissue for Sarah.

"When will the Cessna be ready?" Craig asked, without pausing in his stride. His artificial leg made a tiny click each time he swung it forward.

"It's been ready since last week. I told you, didn't ! Sally-Anne replied distractedly, fussing over Sarah.

"What is her all-up capacity?"

"The Cessna? I've had six adults in her, but that was a squeeze. She's licensed for-" Sally' Anne stopped. Slowly her head turned from Sarah towards him and she stared at him in total disbelief.

"In the love of all that's holy, Craig, are you out of your mind?" "Range fully loaded?" Craig ignored the question.

"Twelve hundred nautical miles, throttle setting for maximum endurance but you can't be serious."

"Okay." Craig was thinking aloud. "I can get a couple of drums in the Land-Rover. You can land and refuel on a pan right on the border I know a spot near Panda Matengal five hundred kilometres north of here. That is the closest point of entry-"

"Craig, do you know what they'd do if they caught us?" Sally-Anne's voice was husky with shock.

Sarah had the tiss& over her nose, but her eyes swivelled between thL* two of them as they spoke.

"Weapons," Cra I ig muttered. "We'd need arms. Morgan Oxford? No, damn it, he's written us off."

"Guns?" Sarah's voice was muffled by tears and tissue.

"Guns and grenades," Craig agreed. "Explosives, whatever we can get."

"I can get guns. Some of our people have escaped. They are here in Botswana. They had guns hidden in the bush from the war."

"What kind? "Craig demanded.

"Banana guns and hand grenades."

"AKs," Craig rejoiced. "Sarah, you are a star."

"Just the two of us?" Sally-Anne paled as she realized th at he truly meant it. "Two of us, against the entire Third Brigade is that what you are thinking about?" A "No, I'm coming with you." Sarah put aside the tissue.

"There will be three of us."

"Three of us, gread" said Sally-Anne.

"Three of us bloody marvelous!" ack and stood in front of them.

Craig came b "Number one: we are going to draw up a map of Tuti camp. We are going to put down every detail we can remember." He started pacing again, unable to stand still.

"Number two: we meet with Sarahs friends and see how much help they can give us. Number dime: Sally-Anne takes the commercial flight down to Johannesburg and brings back the Cessna how long will that takeP 11 can be back in three days." Colour was coming back into Sally-Anne's cheeks. "That's if I decide to gaP okay! Fine!" Craig rubbed his hands together. "Now we M can start on the map." Craig ordered sandwiches and a bottle of w me to be sen t to the room and they worked through until 2 am.

when Sarah left them with a promise to return at breakfast time. Craig folded the map carefully and then he and Sally-Anne climbed into one of the narrow beds together, but they were so keyed up that neither of them could sleep.

"Sam was trying to protect me," Craig marvelled. "He was doing it for me, all along."

"Tell me about him," Sally-Anne whispered and she lay against his chest and listened to him talk of their friendship. When at last he fell silent, she asked softly, "So you are serious about this thing?"

"Deadly serious, but will you do it with me?"

"It's crazy," she said. "It's plain dumb but let's do it then." he sooty black smoke from the beacon fires of oil rags that Craig had set climbed straight up in two columns into the clear desert sky. Craig and Sarah stood together on the bonnet of the Land' Rover staring into the south. This was the dry wild land of northeastern Botswana. The Zimbabwe border was thirty kilometres east of them, the flat and plain between pimpled with camel.

thorn trees and blotched with the leprous white salt pans

The mirage shimmered and tricked the eye so that the stunted trees on the far side of the pan seemed to swim and change shape like dark amoeba under a microscope. A spinning dust devil jumped up from the white pan surface, and swirled and swayed sinuously as a belly dancer, rising two hundred feet into the hot air until it collapsed again as suddenly as it had risen.

The sound of the Cessna engine rose and fell and rose again on the heat-flawed air. "There!" Sarah pointed out the mosquito speck, low on the horizon.

Craig made a last anxious appraisal of his makeshift landing, strip He had lit the beacon fires at each end of it as soon as they had pick el tip the first throb of the Cessna's motor. He had driven the Land-Rover back and forth between the beacons to mark the hard crust at the edge of the pan. Fifty metres out, the surface was treacherously soft.

Now he looked back at the approaching aircraft. Sally Anne was banking low over the baobab trees, lining up with the strip he had set out for her. She made a prudent precautionary pass along it, her head twisted in the cockpit window as she examined it, then she came around again and touched down lightly, and taxied towards the Land Rover.

"You were gone for ever." Craig seized her as she jumped down from the cockpit.

"Three days," she protested with her feet off the ground.

"That's for ever, "he said and kissed her.

He set her down but kept one arm around her as he led her to the Land-Rover. After she had greeted Sarah, Craig introduced her to the two Matabele who were squatting in the shade of the Land-Rover.

They rose courteously to meet her.

"This is Jonas, and this is Aaron. They led us to the arms cache and they are giving us all the help they can." They were reserved and unsmiling young men with old eyes that had seen unspeakable things, but they were willing and quick.

They pumped the Avgas from the forty-four-gallon drums on the back of the Land-Rover directly into the Cessna's wing tanks, while Craig stripped out the seats from the rear of the cockpit to reduce weight and give them cargo space.

Then they began loading. Sally-Anne weighed each item of cargo on the spring balance that she had bought for the purpose, and entered it on her loading table. The ammunition was the heaviest part of the load. They had eight thousand rounds of 7.62 men ball Ps. Craig had broken bulk and repacked it in black plastic garbage -bags to save weight and space. It had been buried for years and many of the rounds were so corroded as to be useless.

However, Craig had "hand-sorted it, and test-fired a few rounds from each case without a single misfire.

Most of the rifles had also been corroded and Craig had worked through the nights by gas lantern, stripping and cannibalizing until he had twenty-five good weapons.

There were also five Tokarev pistols and two cases of fragmentation grenades which seemed in better condition than the rifles. Craig had set off one grenade from each case, popping them down an ant-bear hole to a satisfactory Crump and cloud of dust. That had left forty-eight from the original rift),. Craig packed them in five cheap canvas haversacks that he had bought from a general dealer in Francistown.

The rest of the equipment he had also purchased in Francistown, Wire-cutters and bolt-cutters, nylon rope, pan gas that Jonas and Aaron sharpened to razor edges, flashlights and extra batteries, canteens and water bottles and a dozen or so other items which might prove useful.

Sarah had been appointed medical orderly and had made up a first-aid kit with items purchased at the Francistown pharmacy. The food rations were spartan. Raw maize meal packed in five, kilo plastic bags, the best nourishment-to weight ratio available, and a few bags of coarse salt.

"Okay, that's it," Sally-Anne called a halt to the loading.

"Another ounce and we won't get off the ground. The rest of it will have to wait for the second trip." When darkness fell, they sat around the campfire and gorged on the steaks and fresh fruit that Sally-Anne had brought with her from Johannesburg.

"Eat hearty, my children," she encouraged them. "It could be a long time." Afterwards Craig and Sally' Anne carried their blankets away from the fire, out oCearshot of the others, and they lay naked in the war me desert air and made love under the silver sickle of the moon, both of them poignantly aware that it might be for the last time.

They ate breakfast in the dark, after the moon had set and before the first glimmering of the dawn. They left Jonas and Aaron to guard the Land-Rover and help with loading and refuelling for the second trip and Sally-Anne taxied out to the end of the strip when it was just light enough to make out the tracks.

Even in the cool of night it took the overloaded Cessna for ever to unstick, and they climbed away slowly towards the glow of the sunrise.

"Zimbabwe border," Sally-Anne murmured. "And I still can't believe what we are doing." Craig was perched up beside her on the bags of ammuition, while Sarah was curled up likea salted anchovy on n I top of the load behind them.

Sally-Anne banked slightly as she picked up her landmarks from the map on her lap. She had laid out a course cross the railway line fifteen miles south of the coal, to in ming town of Wankie, and then to cross the main road a few miles beyond, avoiding all human habitation. The " I terrain below them changed swiftly, the desert falling away d with open glades of gold I and becoming densely foreste en grass. There were some high fair-weather cumulus clouds in the north, otherwise the sky was clear. Craig squinted ahead down the track of the rising sun.

"There is the railway." e closed the throttle and they descended Sally-Ann sharply. Fifty feet above the treetops they roared over the deserted railway tracks, and minutes later crossed the main to ad. They had a glimpse of a truck crawling along the blue, grey tarmac ribbon, but they crossed behind it and were visible to it for only seconds. Sally-Anne pulled a face.

"Let's hope they make nothing of us there must be quite a bit of light aircraft traffic around here." She glanced at her wristwatch. "Expected time of arrival, forty minutes."

"All right," Craig said. "Let's go over it one more time.

You drop Sarah and me, then clear out again as quickly as possible. Back to the pan. Reload and refuel. Two days from now you come back. If there is a smoke-signal, yot, land. No signal and you head back to the pan. Give it tw( more days and then the last trip. If there is no smoke signal on the second trip, that's it. You head out and don't come back." She reached out and took his hand. "Craig, don't even say it. Please, darling, come back to me." They held hands for the rest of the trip, except for the brief moments when she needed both for the controls.

"There it is!" The Chizarira river was a dark green python across the vast brown land, and there was a glint of water through the trees.

"Zambezi Waters just up there." They were keeping well clear of the camps that they had built with so much loving labour, but both of them stared longingly upstream to where the dreaming blue hills studded the line of the horizon.

Sally-Anne dropped lower and still lower until she was shaving the treetops, and then she turned slowly back in a wide circle, keeping the hills between them and the buildings on Zambezi Waters.

"There it is," Craig called, and pointed out under the par t wingtip, and they had a glimpse of white beads at the edge of the trees.

"They are still there! The bones of Craig's poached rhinoceros had been picked over by the scavengers and bleached by the sun.

Sally-Anne, ran her Jnding-check, and then lined tip for the nsrrow strip of grassland along the head of the gorge, where she had landed before, "Just pray the wart hog and ant-bear haven't been digging around, she murmured, and the overloaded Cessna wallowed sluggishly and the stall warning bleeped and flashed intermittently at the reduced power setting.

Sally-Anne dropped in steeply over the tree-tops and touched down with a jarring thud. The Cessna pitched and bounced over the rough ground, but maximum safe braking and the coarse grass wrapping the undercarriage pulled them up quickly, and Sally-Anne let out her breath.

Thank you, Lord." They offloaded with frenzied haste, piling everything in a heap and spreading over it the green nylon nets designed for shading young plants from the sun that Craig had found in Francistown.

Sally' Anne and Craig looked at each other Then miserably.

"Oh God, I hate this," she said.

"Me too so go! Go quickly, damn it." They kissed and she broke away and ran back to the cockpit. She taxied to the end of the clearing, flattening the grass, and then came back at full throttle in her own tracks. The lightened aircraft leapt into the air, and the last he saw of her was her pale face in the side windowing back towards him, and then the tree-tops cut them turn off from each other.

Craig waited until the last vibration of the engine died away and the silence of the bush closed in again. Then he picked up the rifle and haversack and slung them over his shoulders. He looked at Sarah. She wore denims and blue canvas shoes. She carried the food bag and water bottles, with a Tokarev bolstered on her belt.

"Ready?" She nodded, fell in behind him, and stayed with the forcing pace he set. They reached the kopie in the early part of the afternoon, and from the summit Craig looked towards the camps of Zambezi Waters on the river.

This would be the dangerous part now, but he lit the then, taking Sarah with him, moved out signal fire and and set up an ambush on the approach path, just in case the smoke signal brought unwanted visitors.

He and Sarah lay up in good cover, and neither of them moved nor spoke for three hours. Only their eyes were sweeping the slopes below and above and the bush busy, all around.

Even so, they were taken unawares. The voice was a harsh, raw whisper in Sindebele, close very close by.

"Ha! Kuphela. So you have brought my money." Comrade Lookout's scarred visage peered at them. He had crept up to within ten paces without alerting them. "I thought you had forgotten us." but hard and dangerous work,"

"No money for you Craig told him.

here were three men with Comrade Lookout, lean, wolflike men. They extinguished the signal fire and then spread back into the bush in an extended scouting order, that would cover their march.

"We must go," Comrade Lookout explained. "Here in the open the Shana kanka press us like hunting dogs. Since we last met, we have lost many good men. Comrade Dollar has been taken by them.."

"Yes." Craig remembered him, beaten and bedraggled, giving evidence against him on that terrible night at King's Lynn.

They marched until two hours after darkness, northwards into the bad and broken land along the escarpment of the great river. The*way was cleared for them and u guarded by the sco & who were always invisible in the forest ahead. Only their bird calls guided and reassured them.

They came at last to the guerrilla camp. There were women at the small smokeless cooking-fires and one of them ran to embrace Sarah as soon as she recognized her.

"She is my aunt's youngest daughter," Sarah explained.

She and Craig spoke only Sindebele to each other now.

The camp was an uncomfo series of rude caves, hacked out rtable and joyless place, a of the steep bank of a dried water-course and screened by the overhang of the trees. It had a temporary air about it. There were no luxuries and no items of equipment that could not be packed within minutes and carried on a man's back. The guerrilla women z were as unsmiling as their men.

"We do not stay at one place," Comrade Lookout kanka see the signs from the air if we do.

explained. "The Even though we never walk the same way, not even to the latrines, in a short time our feet form pathways and that is what they look for. We must move again soon.

The women brought them food and Craig realized how hungry and tired he was, but before he ate he opened his pack and gave them the cartons of cigarettes he had carried se embittered men smile as in. For the first time he saw the they passed a single butt around the circle.

"How many men in your group?"

"Twenty-six. Comrade Lookout puffed on the cigarette and passed it on. "But there is another group nearby.

Twenty-six was enough, Craig brooded. If they could exploit the element of surprise, it would be just enough.

They ate with their fingers from the communal pot and then Comrade Lookout allowed them to share another cigarette.

"Now, Kuphela, you said you had work for us." Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe is the prisoner

4the of the Shana."

"This is a terrible thing. It is a stab in the heart of the Matabele people but even here in the bush we have known of this for many months. Did you come to tell us something that all the world knows?"

"They are holding him alive at Tuti."

"Tuti. Haul" Comrade Lookout exclaimed violently and every man spoke at once.

"How do you know this?"

"We heard he was killed-"

"This is old women's talk--2 Craig called across to where the women sat apart.

"Sarah!" She came to them.

"You know this woman? "Craig asked.

"She is my wife's cousin."

"She is the teacher at the mission." "She is one of us."

"Tell them," Craig ordered her.

They listened in attentive silence, while Sarah related her last meeting with Tungata, their eyes glittering in the firelight, and when she had finished, they were silent.

Sarah rose quietly and went back to the other women, and Comrade Lookout turned to one of his men.

"Speak" he invited.

e Th one chosen to give his opinion first was the youngest, the most junior. The others would speak in their ascending order of seniority. It was the ancient order of council and it would take time.

Craig composed himself to patience, this was the tmpo of Africa.

After midnight Comrade Lookout summed up for them.

"We know the woman. She is trustworthy and we believe what she tells us. Comrade Tungata is our father. His blood is the blood of kings, and the stinking Shana hold him.

On this we are all agreqJ." He paused. "But there are some who would try to wrest him from the Shana child, rapers and others who say we are too few, and that we have only one rifle between two men, and only five bullets for each rifle. So we are divided." He looked at Craig. "What do you say, Kuphela?" 41 say that I have brought you eight thousand rounds of ammunition and twenty-five rifles and fifty grenades," said Craig. "I say that Comrade Tungata is my friend and my brother. I say that if there are only women and cowards alone with here and no men to go with me, then I will go this woman, Sarah, who has the heart of a warrior,-and I I will find men somewhere else." Comrade Lookout's face puckered up with affront, uIled out of true by the scar, and his tone was reproachful.

p "Let there be no more talk of women and cowards, Kuphela. Let there be no more talking at all. Let us rather go to Tuti and do this thing that must be done. That is what I say." hey lit the smoke signal as soon as they heard the ished it immediately Sally Cessna, and extingu to acknowledge.

Anne flashed her landing lights Comrade Lookout's guerrillas had cut the grass in the clearing with pan gas and filled in the holes and rough spots, so Sally-Anne's landing was confident and neat.

Eli The guerrillas unloaded the rest of the ammunition and the weapons in disciplined silence, but they could not conceal their grins of delight as they handed down the bags of ammunition and the haversacks of grenades, for these were the tools of their trade. The loads disappeared swiftly into the forest. Within fifteen minutes Craig and the empty Sally-Anne were left alone under the wing of Cessna.

"Do you know what I prayed for?" Sally-Anne asked. "I able to find the gang, and if prayed that you wouldn't be you did, that they would refuse to go with you, and that you had been forced to abort and had to come back with me."

"You aren't very good at praying, are you?" "I don't know. I'm going to get in a lot of practice in the next few days."

"Five days," Craig corrected her. "You come in again on Tuesday morning."

"Yes," she nodded. "I will take off in the dark, and be over Tuti airfield at sunrise that's at 05.22 hours."

"But you are not to land until I signal that we have secured the strip. Now, for the love of God, don't run yourself short of fuel to get back to the pan. If we don't show up, don't stay on hoping."

"I will have three hours" safe endurance over Tuti. That means you will have until 08-30 hours to get there."

"If we don't make it by then, we aren't going to make it.

It's time for you to go now, my love." I know, Sally-Anne said, and made no move.

"I have to go," he said.

"I don't know how I'm going to live through the next few days, sitting out there in the desert, not knowing a thing, just living with my fears and imagination." He took her in his arms and found she was trembling.

"I'm so very afraid for you," she whispered against his throat.

4see you Tuesday morning, "he told her. "Without fail."

"Without faffl" she agreed, and then her voice quavered.

"Come back to me, Craig. I don't want to live without you.

Promise me you'll come back."

"I promise." He kissed her.

"There now, I feel much better." She gave him that cheeky grin of hers, but it was all soft around the edges.

She climbed up into the cockpit and started the engine.

"I love you." Her lipiformed the words that the engine drowned, and she svAng the Cessna round with a burst of throttle and did not look back.

m the front t was only sixty miles on the map and fro seat of an aircraft it had not looked like hard going.

On the ground it was different.

They were crossing the grain of the land; the watershed dropped away from their right to their left, towards the escarpment of the Zambezi valley. They were forced to ack of hills and the intervening valleys follow the switchb so they were never on level ground.

The guerrillas had hidden their own women in a sate place, and only reluctantly consented to Sarah accompanying the raiding pare, but she carried a full load and kept up with the hard pace that Comrade Lookout set for them.

The ironstone hills soaked up the heat of the sun and at them, as they toiled up the steep bounced it back hillsides and dropped again into the next valley. The descents were as taxing as the climbs, the heavy load-, the backs of their legs jarring their spines and straining and their Achilles tendons. The old elephant trails that pebbles they were following were littered with round rolled under foot like hall washed out by the rains that bearings and made each pace fraught with danger.

One of the guerrillas fell, and his ankle swelled up so that they could not get his boot back on his foot. The m and left him to find his distributed his load amongst the own way back to where they had left the women.

i bees plagued them dit ring the day, The tiny mo pan clouding around their mouths and nostrils and eyes in their persistent search for moisture and in the nights the mosquitoes from the stagnant pools in the valleys took over from them. At one stage of the trek they passed fly-belt, and the silent, light through the edge of the -ie torment, settling so softh footed tsetse-flies joined ri that the, victim was unaware until a red-hot needle stabbeJ

7 into the soft flesh at the back of the, ear, or under the armpit.

Always there was danger of attack. Every few miles either the scouts out ahead or the rear-guard dragging the trail behind them would signal an alert, and they would be forced to dive into cover and wait with finger on trigger until the all-clear signal was passed down the line.

it was slow and gruelling and nerve-racking two full days" marching from freezing dawn through burning noon into darkness again, to reach Sarah's father's village.

Vusamanzi was his name and he was a senior magician, soothsayer and rainmaker of the Matabele tribe. Likeall his kind, he lived in isolation, with only his wives and immediate family around him. However great their respect for them, ordinary mortals avoided the practitioners of the dark arts; they came to them only for divination or treatment, paid the goat or beast that was the fee, and hurried thankfully away again.

Vusamanzi's village was some miles north of Tuti Mission Station. It was a prosperous little community on a hilltop, with many wives and goats and chickens and fields of maize in the valley.

The guerrillas lay up" in the forest below the kopje, and they sent Sarah in to make certain all was safe and to warn the villagers of their presence. Sarah returned within an hour, and Craig and Comrade Lookout went back to the village with her.

Vusamanzi had earnqa his name, "Raise the Waters', from his reputed ah9ity to control the Zambezi and its tributaries. As a much younger man he had sent a great flood to wash away the village of a lesser chief who had cheated him of his fees, and since then a number of others who had displeased him had drowned mysteriously at fords or bathing holes. It was said that at Vusamanzi's behest the surface of a quiet pool would leap up suddenly in a hissing wave as the marked victim approached to drink or bathe or cross, and he would be sucked in. No living man had actually witnessed this terrible phenomenon but never an did not have much ffieless, Vusamanzi, the magici trouble with bad debts from his patients and clients.

Vusamanzi's hair was a cap of pure white and he wore a small beard, also white dressed out to a spade shape in the fashion of the Zulus. Sarah must have been a child of his old age, but she had inherited her fine looks from him, for he was handsome and dignified. He had put aside his only a simple loin-cloth and his body was regalia.

He vote straight and lean, and his voice, when he greeted Craig IR courteously, was deep and steady.

Clearly Sarah revered him, for she took the beer-pot from one of his junior wives and knelt to offer it to him herself. In her turn, Sarah obviously had a special place in the old man's affections, for he smiled at her fondly, and when she sat at his feet, he fondled her head casually as he listened attentively to what Craig had to tell him. Then he sent her to help his wives to prepare food and beer and take it down to the guerrillas hidden in the valley before he turned back to Craig.

4the man you call Tungat a Zebiwe, the Seeker after justice, was born Samson Kumalo. He is in direct line of succession from Mzilikazi, the first king and father of our people. He is the one upon whom the prophecies o t. e ancients descend. On the night he was taken by the Shons Idlers, I had sent for him to appraise him of his responsiso bility and to make him privy to the secrets of the kings. It he is still alive, as my daughter tells us he is, then it is the duty of every Matabele to do all in his power to seek his m. The future of our people tests with him. How can free do I assist you? You have only to ask."

"You have already helped us with food," Craig thanked him. "Now we need information."

"Ask, Kuphela. Anything that I can tell you, I will." and the camp of the "The road between Tuti Mission soldiers passes close to this place. Is that correct?"

isi

"Beyond those hills," the old man pointed.

"Sarah tells me that every week the trucks come along this road on the same day, taking food to the soldiers and the prisoners at the camp."

"That is so. Every week, on the Monday late in the afternoon, the trucks pass here loaded with bags of maize and other stores. They return empty the following morning.

"How many trucks?"

"Two or, rarely, three."

"How many soldiers to guard them?"

"Two in front beside the driver, three or four more in the back. One stands on the roof with a big gun that shoots fast." A heavy machine-gun, Craig translated for himself. "The soldiers are very watchful and alert and the trucks drive fast."

"They came last Monday, as usual?" Craig asked.

As usual," Vusarnanzi nodded his cap of shiny white wool. He must believe then that the routine was still in operation, Craig decided, and bet everything on it.

"How far is it to the mission station from here?" he as cec.

"From there to there." The witch-doctor swept his arm through a segment of the sky, about four hours of the sun's passage. Reckoned as the pace of a man on foot, that was approximately fifteen mil4;s.

"And from here to the camp of the soldiers?" Craig went on.

Vusamanzi shrugged. "The same distance."

"Good." Craig unrolled his map, they were equidistant between the two points. That gave him a fairly accurate fix. He began calculating times and distances and scribbling them in the margin of the map.

"We have a day to wait." Craig looked up at last. "The men will rest and ready themselves."

"My women will feed them,"Vusamanzi agreed.

"Then on Monday I will need some of your people to -help me." "There are only women here," the old man demurred.

"I need women young women, comely women," Craig told him. - "he next morning, leaving before dawn, Craig and Comrade Lookout, taking a runner with them, reconnoitred the stretch of road that lay just beyond the line of low hills. It was as Craig remembered it, a crude track into which heavy trucks had ground deep ruts, but the Third Brigade had cleared the brush on both sides to reduce the risk of ambush.

A little before noon they reached the spot where Peter Fungabera had stopped during their first drive to Tuti, the causeway where the road crossed the timber bridge across and where they had eaten that lunch of the green river baked maize cobs.

Craig found that his memory was accurate. "Me approaches to the bridge, firstly down the steep slope of the valley and then across the narrow earthen causeway, must force the supply convoy to slow down and engage low ear. It was the perfect spot for an ambush, and Craig sent the runner back to Vusamanzi's village to bring up the rest of the force. While they waited, Craig and Comrade t over their plans and adapted them to the Lookout well actual terrain.

"The main attack would take place at the bridge, but if that failed, they must have a backup plan to prevent die through. As soon as the main force of convoy getting guerrillas arrived, Craig sent Comrade Lookout with five men along the road beyond the bridge. Out of sight from the bridge, they felled a large mhoba-hobo tree so that it fell across the track, as an effective roadblock. Comradu Lookout would command here, while Craig coordinated the attack at the bridge, "Which are the men who speak Shana?" Craig demanded.

"This one speaks it likea Shana, this one not as well."

"They are to be kept out of any fighting. We cannot risk losing them," Craig ordered. "We will need them for the camp."

"I will hold them in my hand, "Comrade Lookout agreed.

"Now the women." Sarah had chosen three of her half-sisters from the village, ranging in age from sixteen to eighteen years.

They were the prettiest of the old witch-doctor's multitudinous daughters, and when Craig explained their role to them, they giggled and hung their heads, and covered their mouths with their hands and went through all the other motions of modesty and maidenly shyness. But they were obviously relishing the adventure hugely, nothing so exciting and titillating had happened to them in all their young lives.

"Do the understand?" Craig asked Sarah. "It will be dangerous they must do exactly as they are told."

"I will be with them," Sarah assured him. "All the time tonight as well, especially tonight." This last was for the benefit of the girls. Sarah had been fully aware of mutual ogling between her sisters and the young guerrillas. She shooed them away, stilWiggling, to the rough shelter of thorn branches that She had made them build for themselves, and settled herself across the entrance.

"The thorns are sharp enough to keep out a man-eating lion, Kuphela," she had told Craig, "but I do not know about a buck with an itchy spear and a maid determined to scratch it for him. I will have little sleep tonight." In the end, Craig spent a sleepless night as well. He had the dreams again, those terrible dreams that had almost driven him mad during his long slow convalescence from the minefield and the loss of his leg. He was trapped in them, unable to escape back into consciousness) until Sarah shook him awake, and when he came awake, he was shaking so violently that his teeth chattered and sweat had soaked his shirt as though he had stood under a warm shower.

Sarah understood. Compassionately, she sat beside him and held his hand until the tremors stilled, and then they talked the night away, keeping their voices to a whisper so as not to disturb the camp. They talked of Tungata and Sally' Anne and what each of them wanted from life and their chances of getting it.

"When I am married to the Comrade Minister, I will be able to speak for all the women of Matabele. Too long they have been treated like chattels by their men. Even now a trained nursing sister and teacher, must eat at the women's fire. After this, there will be another campaign to wage. A fight to win for the women of my tribe their rightful place and to have their true worth recognized." Craig found his respect for Sarah beginning to match his liking. She was, he realized, a fitting woman for a man managed to like Tungata Zebiwe. While they talked, he subdue his fear for the morrow, and the night passed so iftly that he was surprised when he checked his wristSW watch.

"Four o'clock. Time to move," he whispered. "Thank you, Sarah. I am not a brave man. I needed your help." ent and for a She rose to her feet with a lithe movern moment stood looking down at him. "You do yourseP injustice. I think you are a very brave man," she said softh and went to rouse her sisters.

he sun was high, and Craig lay in the cleft between two black water-polished boulders on the far bank of the stream. The AK 47 was propped in front of him, covering the causeway and the far banks on each side of the timber bridge. lie had paced out the ranges. It was one hundred and twenty yards from where he lay to the end of the handrail. Cff a dead rest, he could throw in a six-inch group at that range.

"Please let it not be necessary," he thought, and once more ran a restless eye over his stake-out. There were four guerrillas under the bridge, stripped to the waist. Although their rifles were propped against the bridge supports close at hand, they were armed with the five-foot elephant bows. Craig had been dubious of these weapons until he had watched a demonstration. The bows were of hard, elastic wood, bound with strips of green kudu hide which had been allowed to dry and shrink on the shaft until they were hard as iron. The bowstring was of braided sinew, almost as tough as monofilament nylon. Even with all his strength, Craig had been unable to draw one of the bows to his full reach. The pull must have been well over one hundred pounds. To draw it required calloused fingertips and specially developed muscle in chest and arm.

The arrowheads were bar bless mild steel, honed to a needle-point for penetration, and one of the guerrillas had stood off thirty paces anck;unk one of these arrows twenty inches into the fleshy fibrous trunk of a baobab tree. They had been forced to cut it free with an axe. The same arrow would have flown right through an adult human being, from breast to backbone with hardly a check, or pierced the chest cavity of a full-grown bull elephant from side to side.

So there were now four bowmen under the bridge, and ten other men crouching in knee-deep water below the bank. Only the tops of their heads showed, and they were screened from anyone on the far side by the sharp drop-off of the bank, and the growth of fluffy-topped reeds.

The engine beat of the approaching trucks altered, as and they changed gear on the up-slope before cresting dropping down this side to the causeway and the bridge.

Craig had walked down that slope himself looking for giveaway signs, all his old training in the Rhodesian police coming back to him, looking for litter or disturbed vegetaion, for the shine of metal, for footprints on the white t sandbanks of the river or the verge of the road, and he had found no give-away signs.

"We must do it now," said Sarah. She and her sisters were squatting behind the rock at his side. She was right it was too late to alter anything, to make any other rrangements. They were committed.

a "Go," he told her and she stood up and let the denim drop to the sand. Quickly shirt slip off her shoulders and her younger sisters followed her example, letting drop their loin-cloths as they stood.

All four of them were naked, except for the tiny beaded aprons suspended from their waists by a string of beads.

The aprons hung down over their mons pubis but bounced up revealingly with every movement as they ran down to the water's edge. Their plump young buttocks were bared, swelling enticingly below the hour-glass nip of their waists.

Tough!" Craig called after them. "Play games." They were totally unashamed of their nudity. In the rural areas the beaded apron was still the traditional casual dress of the unsophisticated unmarried Matabele girl. Even Sarah had worn it until she had gone in to the town to begin her schooling.

They splashed each other. The water sparkled on the il glossy dark skins, and their laughter had an excited, breathless quality that must attract any man. Yet, Craig saw that his guerrillas were unaffected. They had not even Is turned their heads to watch. They were professions at4 work, all their attention focused on the dangerous job in hand.

The lead truck crested the far rise. It was a five, ton Toyota, similar to the one that had pursued them across the Botswana border, It was painted the same sandy colour.

There was a trooper behind the ring-mounted heavy machine-gun on the cab. A second truck, heavily laden and armed, came over the rise behind it.

"Not a third. Please, only two," Craig breathed, and cuddled the butt of the AK 47 into his shoulder. The barrel was festooned with dried grass to disguise its shape, and his own face and hands were thickly smeared with black clay from the river-bank.

There were only two ti -ucks. They came trundling out onto the causeway and Sarah and her sisters stood knee deep in the green waters below the handrail of the bridge and waved to them. The lead truck slowed, and the girls swung their hips, shrieked with provocative laughter and joggled their wet and shiny breasts.

There were two men in the cab of the lead truck, One was a subaltern, Craig could make out his cap, badge and the glitter of his shoulder pips even through the dusty windscreen. He was grinning and his teeth were almost as bright as his badges. He spoke to the driver and, with a squeal of brakes, the lead truck pulled up on the threshold of the bridge. The second truck was forced to pull up behind it.

The young officeroo ned the door and stood on the Pc running board. The'troopers in the back of the truck and the heavy machinegunner craned forward, grinning and calling ribald comment. The girls, following Sarah's example, sank down coyly to cover their lower bodies and answered the suggestions and comments with dissembling coyness. Some of the troopers in the second truck, not to be out-done, jumped down and came forward to join the.

fun.

One of the older girls made a slyly obscene gesture ith w thumb and forefinger and there was an appreciative bellow of raunchy masculine laughter from the bank. The young officer replied with an even more specific gesture, and the rest of his troopers left the trucks and crowded up behind him. Only the two heavy machine gunners were still at their posts.

Craig darted a glance at the underside of the bridge. On their bellies the bowmen were wriggling up the far side of bank, keeping the timber baulks of the bridge between the them and the bunch of troopers.

In the river Sarah stood up. She had loosened the string of her apron, and now carried the minuscule garment in her hand, swinging it with artful provocation. She waded towards the men on the bank, with the water swirling around her thighs, and the laughter choked off as they stared at her. She walked slowly, the pull of water exaggerating the churning movement of her pelvis. She was sleek A and beautiful as a wet otter, the sunlight on her body gave it a plastic sheen, an unearthly glow, and even from where he lay, Craig could feel the jocular mood of the men watching her thicken with lust, and begin to steam with the stirring of sexual fury.

Sarah paused below them, cupped her hands under her breasts and lifted them, pointing her nipples up at them.

Now they were totally concentrated upon her, even the machine-gunners high up on the ring mounts of the trucks were rapt and enchanted.

Behind them the four bowmen had slid up under the lee of the causeway. They were not more than ten paces from the side of the leading truck as they came up onto their knees in unison and drew. The bows arched, their right hands came back to touch their lips, wet muscle bulged in their backs as they sighted along the shafts, and then one after the other they let their arrows fly.

There was no sound, not even the softest fluting, but the of the machine-gunners slid gently forward and hung Over the side of the cab with head and arms dangling. The other arched his back, his mouth wide open but no sound coming from it, and tried to reach back over his own shoulder to the shaft that stood stiffly out between his shoulder-blades. Another arrow hit him, a hand's breadth lower, and he convulsed in agony and dropped from view.

n-Le bowmen changed their target and the silent arrows flew into the bunch of troopers on the river-bank and a man screamed. In the same instant the guerrillas hiding below the bank burst from the water, and went up through the reeds, just as the troopers whirled to face the bowmen.

The naked guerrillas took them from behind, and this time Craig heard the explosive grunts as they swung the long, bladed pan gas likea tennis-player hitting a hard forehand volley. A pan ga blade cleaved through the subaltern's burgundy-red beret and split his skull to the chin.

Sarah whirled and raced back, gathering the other girls.

One of the younger ones was screaming as they floundered over the submerged sandbanks.

There was a single shot, and then all the troopers were down, scattered along the edge of the bank, but the guerrillas were still working over them, swinging and chopping and hacking.

"Sarah," Craig called to her as she reached the bank.

"Get the girls back into the bush! " She snatched up her shirt, and pushed her s4ters ahead of her, shepherding them away.

Carrying the AK, "Craig ran across the bridge. The guerrillas were already stripping and looting the dead men.

They worked with the dexterity of much practice, wrist, watches first and then the contents of pockets and webbing pouches.

"Was anyone hit?" Craig demanded. That single shot had worried him, but there were no casualties. Craig gave them two minutes to finish with the corpses, and then sent a patrol back to the crest to cover them against surprise.

He turned back to the dead Shana. "Bury them!" They had , and they prepared the mass grave the previous afternoon dragged the naked bodies away There was blood down the side of one truck where the machine-gunner had hung. "Wash that off!" One of the guerrillas dipped a canteen of water from the river. "And FJ wash off those uniforms." They would dry out in an hour or less.

Sarah returned before the burial party had finished. She was fully dressed again.

the girls back to the village, they know the "I have sent country well. They will be safe."

"You did well," Craig told her and climbed into the cab of the leading truck. The keys were in the ignition.

from out of the thick bush The burial party returned and Craig called in his pickets. The guerrilla detailed to drive the second truck started it, and then the rest of them climbed aboard. The two trucks crossed the bridge and growled up the far slope. The entire operation had taken less than thirty, five minutes. They reached the felled mhoba,hobo tree and Comrade Lookout stepped into the track and directed them off the road. Craig parked in thick cover, and immediately a gang of guerrillas covered both gan vehicles with cut branches, and another gang be unloading the cargo, and clearing the roadblock.

There were two-hundred, pound sacks of maize meal, of canned meat, blankets, medicines, cigarettes, cases to the ammunition, soap, sugar, salt all of it priceless guerrillas. It was all carried away, and Craig knew it would be hidden and retrieved later whenever the opportunity occurred. There were a dozen kit bags containing the dead troopers" personal gear, a treasure trove of Third Brigade uniforms, even two of the famous burgundy berets. While the guerrillas dressed in these uniforms, Craig checked the time. It was a little after five o'clock.

Craig had noted that the radio operator at Tuti camp started the generator and made his routine report at seven o'clock every evening. He checked the radio in the leading truck. It had a fifteen-amp output, more than enough to reach Tuti camp, but not sufficient power to reach Harare headquarters. That was good.

He called Comrade Lookout and Sarah to the cab and they went over their notes. Sally' Anne would be over Tuti airstrip at 5.20 a.m. tomorrow morning, and she could stay in the circuit until 8.30 a.m. Craig allowed three hours for the journey from Tuti camp back to the airstrip at the mission station that would take into account any minor delays or mishaps. Ideally they should leave the camp at 2.30 a.m but not later than 5 a.m.

That meant they should time their arrival at the gates of the camp for midnight, or close to it. Two and a half hours to secure the position, refuel the trucks from the storage tank, release the prisoners, find Tungata and start back.

"All right," Craig said, "I want each group to go over their duties. First you, Sarah-"

"I take my two with the bolt-cutters, and we go straight t o Number One hutment-" He had given her two men.

Tungata might be so weak as to be unable to walk unassisted. Number One hutment was set a little apart from the others behind its own wire and was obviously used as the highest secu cell. Sarah had seen them lead My Tungata from it to their last meeting on the parade ground.

"When we find hi im we bring him back to the assembly point at the main gate. If he can walk on his own I will leave my two men to open the other cells and release the prisoners."

"Good." She had it perfectly.

"Now the second group."

"Five men for the perimeter guard towers--2 Comrade Lookout went through his instructions.

7i

"That's it then." Craig stood up. "But it all depends on one thing. I've said this fifty times already, but I'm going to say it again. We must get the radio before they can transmit. We have about five minutes from the first shot totes for the operator to realize what is do it, two minu happening, two minutes to start the electric generator and run up to full power, another minute to make his contact pass the warning. If that with Harare headquarters and " He checked his watch.

happens, we are all dead men.

"Five minutes past seven we can make the call now.

Where is your man who speaks Shana" Carefully Craig coached the man in what he had to say, and was relieved to find him quick-witted.

"I tell them that the convoy is delayed on the road. One but it will be repaired. We of the trucks has broken down, will arrive much later than usual, in the night, "he repeated.

"That's it."

"If they begin asking questions, I reply, "Your message not understood. Your transmission breaking up and unreadable."

I repeat, "Arriving late", and then I sign off." Craig stood by anxiously while the guerrilla made the radio transmission, listening to the unintelligible bursts of Shana from the operator at Tuti camp, but he was unable to detect any trace of suspicion or alarm in the static distorted voice.

The guerrilla imposter signed off and handed the mi croP phone back to Craig. "He says it is understood. They expect us in the night." "Good. Now we can eat and rest." However, Craig could not eat. His stomach was queasy ith tension for the night ahead and from reaction to the w ghastly violence at the bridge. Those pan gas wielded with pentup hatred, had inflicted hideous mutilation. Many times during the long bush war he had witnessed death in some of its most unlovely forms, but had never become accustomed to it, it still made him sick to the guts.

here is too much moon," Craig thought as he peered out from under the canvas canopy of the leading truck. It was only four days from full and it to shadows de so high and so bright as to cast hard-edged on the earth. The truck lurched and jolted over the rough tracks and dust filtered up and clogged his throat.

He had not dared to ride in the cab, not even with his face blackened. A sharp eye would have picked him out readily. Comrade Lookout sat up beside the driver, dressed in the subaltern's spare uniform complete with beret and shoulder-flashes. Beside him was the Shana-speaker wearing the second beret. The heavy machine-guns were loaded and cocked, each served by a picked man, and eight others dressed in looted uniforms rode up on the coach work in plain view, while the remainder crouched with Craig under the canvas canopy.

"So far, everything is going well," Sarah murmured.

"So far," Craig agreed. "But I prefer bad starts and happy endings-" There were three taps on the cab, beside Craig's head.

That was Comrade Lookout's signal that the camp was in sight.

"Well, one way or the other, here we go." Craig twisted round to peer through the pee -hole he had cut in the canvas hood. p He could make out the watchtowers of the camp, looking like oil-rigs againk the moon-bright sky, and there was a glint of barbed wire Then quite suddenly the sky lit up. The floodlights -on their poles around the perimeter of the camp glowed and then bloomed with stark white light.

The entire compound was illuminated with noon-day brilliance.

"The generator," Craig groaned. "Oh, Christ, they've Started the generator to welcome us in." Craig had made his first mistake. He had planned for everything to happen in darkness, with only the truck headlights to dazzle and confuse the camp guards. And yet, he now realized how logical and obvious it was for the guards to light up the camp to check the arrival of the convoy and to facilitate the unloading.

They were committed already. They could only ride on into the glare of floodlights, and Craig was helpless, pinned by the lights beneath the canopy, not even able to communicate with Comrade Lookout in the cab in front of him. Bitterly reviling himself for not having planned for this contingency, he kept his eye to the peepholes The guards were not opening the gates, there was the sandbagged machine-gun emplacement to one side of the guard house, and Craig could see the barrel of the weapon traversing slowly to keep them covered as they approached.

The guard was turning out, four troopers and a noncommissioned officer, falling in outside the guardroom.

The sergeant stepped in front of the leading truck as it drove up to the gate and held up one hand. As the truck pulled up he came round to the offside window, asked a question in Shana, and the bereted guerrilla answered him easily. But immediately the sergeant's tone altered, clearly the reply had been incorrect. His voice rose, became hectoring and strident. He was outside Craig's limited le of vision, but Craig saw the armed guard react. They circ began to unsling their rifles, started to spread out to cover the truck, the bluff was over before it had begun.

Craig tapped the leg of the uniformed guerrilla standing above him. It was the signal, and the guerrilla lobbed the t grenade that he was holding in his right hand with the pin already drawn. It went up in a high, lazy parabola and dropped neatly into the machine-gun emplacement.

At the same instant, Craig said quietly to the man on either side of him, "Kill them." They thrust the muzzles of their AKs through the firing slits in the canopy and the range was less than ten paces.

The volley ripped into the unprepared guards before they could bring up their weapons. The sergeant raced back towards the guard-room door, but Comrade Lookout leaned out of the cab with the Tokarev pistol in a stiffarined double grip and shot him twice in the back.

As the sergeant sprawled, the grenade burst behind the sandbags, and the barrel of the heavy machinegun swivelled aimlessly towards the sky as the hidden gunner was torn by flying shrapnel.

"Drive" Craig stuck his head and shoulders through the slit in the canopy, and yelled at the driver through the open window of the cab. "Smash through the gate!" The powerful diesel of the Toyota bellowed, and the truck surged forward. There was a rending crash, and the vehicle bucked and shuddered, checked for an instant, and then roared into the brightly lit compound, dragging a tangle of barbed-wire and shattered gate-timbers behind it.

Craig scrambled up beside the machine-gunner on the cab.

t(Dri the left-" He directed his fire at the barrack room of adobe and thatch beside the gate. The machine-gunner fired a long burst into the knot of halfnaked troopers as they spilled out of the front door.

"Guard tower on the right." They were receiving fire from the two guards in the tower. It hissed and cracked around their heads like the lash of a stock whip. The machine-gunner traversed and elevated, and the belted *'nmunition fed into the clattering breech and empty ca*s poured in a glittering stream from the ejector slide. Splinters of timber and glass flew from the walls and windows of the tower, and the two guards were picked up and flung backwards by the solid strike of shot.

"Number One hutment just ahead," Craig warned Sarah with a shout. She and her two men were crouched at the tailboard, and as the Toyota slowed, they jumped over and hit the ground running. Sarah carried the bolt-cutters and the two guerrillas ran ahead of her, jinking and dodging and firing from the hip. truck, onto the running, Craig slid over the side of the board and clung to the cab- r. "We have

"Drive for the kopie,"he shouted at the drive to take the radio!" ahead, but they had to The fortified kopie lay directly the white cross the wide, brightly lit parade ground, with washed wall at the far end, to reach the foot of " the kopie.

Craig glanced backwards. Sarah and her team had reached the hutment and were working on the wire with the bolt-cutters. Even as he watched, they completed their ing and broke through, disappearing into the building.

open for the second truck. It was roaring around He looked taking on each guard the perimeter, just inside the wire, fire into tower as they came to it, and pouring suppressing it with the heavy machinegun. They had knocked out four towers already, only two more to gonades dragged his attenThe bright flash of bursting gre son hutment.

tion to the barracks abutting the main pri had dropped a group of guerrillas to The second truck Craig could see them crouched below attack these barracks.

grenades through the the sills of the barracks, Popping darting forward, windows, and then, as they exp laded bright as moths in the floodlights, towards the main prison hutment.

In the first few minutes they had taken control of the entire camp. They had knocked out the towers, devastated the guard house and both barrack blocks it was all he looked and then theirs. He felt a surge of triumph ahead across the parade ground to the kopie. Evmthing but the koVje, and as he thought it, a line of white tracer stretched out towards him from the sandbagged upper slopes of the rocky hillock. it looked likea string of bright white fire-beads, at first coming quite slowly but acceleratthey closed, and suddenly there was ing miraculously as flying dust and the shriek of ricochets all around them and the jarring crashing of shot into the metal body of the racing truck.

The truck swerved wildly, and Craig screamed at. the driver as he clung desperately to the projecting rear-view mirror.

"Keep going we have to get the radioP The driver wrestled with the wrenching, bucking steering-wheel, and the nose of the truck swung back towards the kopje just as the second burst of machine-gun fire hit it. The windscreen exploded in flying diamond chips, and the driver was hurled against the door of the cab, his chest shot half-away. The truck slowed as his foot slipped from the accelerator pedal.

Craig hit the handle and yanked the door open. The driver's body slid out of the seat and tumbled over side

Craig swung himself into his place and jammed his foot flat on the accelerator. The truck lunged forward again.

Beside Craig, Comrade Lookout was firing his AK through the gaping hole where the windscreen had been shot away, and overhead the heavy machinegun returned the fire from the kopje with a fluttering ear-numbing clatter. The streams of opposing tracer fire seemed to meet and mingle in the air above the bare earth of the parade ground, and then Craig saw something else.

From one of the embrasures in the sandbagged walls at the foot of the hill, a lhck blob, the size of a pineapple, flew towards them on0a tiny tail of flame. He knew instantly what it was, but he didn't even have time to shout a warning as the RPO-7 rocket missile hit them.

It hit low into the front end of the truck, that was all that saved them the main blast was absorbed by the solid engine block, but nevertheless, it tore the front end off the truck and stopped it as though it had run into an ironstone cliff. The Toyota somersaulted over its ruined front wheel assembly, hurling Craig out of the open cab door.

Craig crawled up onto his knees, and the machinegun 0 n the hill traversed back towards him. A stream of bullets showered him with chunks of hard, dried clay from the surface of the parade ground and he fell flat again.

There were stunned and wounded guerrillas scattered M around the wrecked Toyota, one man was trapped under it, his legs and pelvis crushed by the steel side and he was screaming likea rabbit in a wire snare.

"Come on," Craig shouted in Sindebele. "Get to the wall the wall run for the wall." He jumped up and started to run. The whitewashed execution wall was off to their right-hand side, seventy ards away, and a handful of men heard him and ran with y him.

4 The machine-gun came hunting back, the whip-crack of passing shot around his head made Craig reel likea drunkard, but he steadied himself and the man just ahead of him went down, both legs shot from under him. As Craig passed him, he rolled on his back and threw his AK up at Craig.

"Here, Kuphela, take it. I am dead." Craig snatched the rifle from the air without missing a step.

"You are a man," he called to the downed guerrilla, and sprinted on. Ahead of him, Comrade Lookout reached the shelter of the wall, but the machine-gunner on the kopje traversed back towards Craig, kicking up curtains of dust and lumps of clay as the stream of bullets reached out for him.

Craig went for the corner of the wall feet first, sliding likea baseball player for home base, and shot flew close around him. He kept rolling until he hit the wall and lay in a tangle of limbs, fighting for breath. Only Comrade Lookout and two others had made it to the wall the rest of them were dead in the truck or lying broken and crumpled on the open ground between.

"We have to get that gun," he gasped, and Comrade Lookout gave him a twisted grin.

"Go to it, Kuphela we will watch you with great interest." Another RPG rocket missile slammed into the wall, deafening them and covering them with a fine haze of white dust.

Craig rolled on his side and checked the AK 47. It had a full magazine. Comrade Lookout passed him another full magazine from the haversack on his shoulder, and Craig had the Tokarev pistol on his belt and two remaining grenades buttoned into his breast pockets.

He darted another quick glance around the corner of the wall and instantly a burst of machine-gun fire kicked and jarred into the brickwork around his head. He rolled back. It was only a hundred yards or so to the foot of the kopje, but it could as well have been a hundred miles.

They were pinned helplessly, and the gunner up there on the hill commanded the entire compound. Nobody could move under the floodlights without drawing instant fire or a rocket from the RPG launcher.

Craig looked anxiously for the second truck, but sensibly the driver must have parked it behind one of the buildings as soon as the RPG opened up. There was no sign of any of the other guerrillas, they were all under cover, but they had taken more casualties than they could afford.

"It can't end like this-" Craie was consumed by his own sense of frustration and helpi essness. "We've got to get that gun!" The gun up on the hill, without a target, fell silent and then suddenly in the silence Craig heard the singing in, low at first, just a few voices, but swelling and growing strong: "Why do you weep, widows of Shangani When the three-legged guns laugh so loudly?" Then the ancient fighting chant crashed into tl)Q silence, flung out by hundreds of throats.

"Why do you weep, little sons of the Moles, When your fathers did the. king bidding?" And then from the prison huts they came, a motley army of naked figures, some of them staggering wih weakness, others running strongly, carrying stones aud bricks, and poles torn from the roofs of their prison. A few, a very few, had picked up the weapons of the dead guards, but all of them were singing with wild defiance as they charged the hill and the machinegun.

"Oh, Christ!" whispered Craig. "It's going to be a mass, acre." In the front rank of the throng brandishing an AK 47 came a tall gaunt figure, looking likea skeletal caricature of death itself, and the army of starvelings and gaol, sweepings rallied to him. Even altered as he was, Craig would have recognized Tungata Zebiwe anywhere this side of hell.

"Sam, go back!" he shouted, using the name by which is friend, but Tungata came on bee ss he had known h and beside Craig Comrade Lookout said phlegmatically, "They will draw fire, that will be our chance." "Yes, be ready," Craig answered. Lookout was right. They must not let them die in vain and, as he spoke, the machine-gun opened up.

"Waid" Craig grabbed Comrade Lookout's arm. "He must change belts soon." And while he waited for the gun to fire away its first belt, he watched the terrible havoc it is playing amongst the throng of released prisoners.

The stream of tracer seemed to wash them away lit, k a fire hose, but as the front rank fell, so the men beEi,id raced forward into the gaps, and still Tungata Zebiwe was coming on, outdistancing his fellows, firing the AK as lie ran and the gunner on the hilltop singled him out and swung the machine-gun onto him so that he was wreathed in smoking dust, still miraculously untouched as the machine-gun abruptly fell silent.

"Gun empty! "Craig shouted. "Go! Go! Go! They launched themselves, like sprinters off the blocks, and the open ground seemed to stretch ahead of Craig to the ends of the earth.

Another rocket missile howled over their heads, and Craig ducked on the run, but it was high, aimed in panic.

It flew across the parade ground and it hit the silver bulk fuel storage tank next to the guard barracks. The fuel went up with a vast whooshing detonation. The flames shot up two hundred feet in the air, and Craig felt the hot breath of the blast sweep over him, but he kept running and firing.

He had been losing ground steadily to Comrade Lookout and the other guerrillas, his bad leg hampering him in the race for the hill, but while he ran he was counting in his head. A good man might need ten seconds to change ammunition boxes and reload the machinegun. Since leaving the sheltering wall seven seconds had passed eight, nine, ten it must' come now! And there were still twenty paces to cover.

Comrade Lookout reached the sandbagged fortifications and shinned up and over.

Then something hit Craig a crushing hammer-blow and he was thrown violently to- the ground as bullets flew all around him. He rolled ov'e4r and came up again running, but the gunner had seen him go down and swung the machine-gun away, back to the charging mob of released prisoners.

Hit but unharmed, Craig ran on as strongly as before, and he realized that he had taken it in the leg, the artificial leg. He wanted to laugh, it was so ridiculous and he was so terrified.

"You can only do that to me once," he thought, and IT hi

4f suddenly he had reached the foot of the kopie. He jumped up, found a hold on the top of the sandbag parapet wit one hand, and heaved himself up and over. He dropped onto the narrow, deserted firing platform on the other side.

"The radio he fixed his will upon it, "got to get the radio." And he jumped down into the communication trench and ran down it to the bend in the passage. Thei@ was the sound of a scuffle, and a cry ahead of him, and is Comrade Lookout was straight he came around the corner, ening up from the body of the Third Brigade trooper who had been manning the RPG.

"Go for the gun," Craig ordered him. "I'll take the radio room.

Craig climbed up the sandbagged passageway, Passing en quartered on his last visit.

the dugout where he had be "Now, first on the left-" He dived into the opening, brushing aside the curtain of hessian, and he heard the radio operator in his dugout at the end of the passage shouting frantically. Craig hurled himself down the narrow passage, and paused in the doorway.

Too late. His stomach turned over in a despairing convulsion. The radio operator, dressed only in a vest and the bench underpants, was hunched over the radio set on by the far wall of the dugout. He was holding the his microphone to his mouth with both hands, shouting warning into it in English, repeating it for the third time, ig hesitated, the acknowledgement boomed and, as Cra from the speaker, also spoken in clear English.

said the voice of the "Message received and understood," erat or at Brigade headquarters in Harare. "Hold on! We op will reinforce you immediately-" Craig fired a long burst of the AK, and his bulb sing and ripp, smashed into the radio, shattering the hou The unarn the wiring out of it in a glittering tangle.

microphone and cOw el radio operator dropped the against the sandbag wall, staring at Craig, blubbering with terror. Craig swung the AK onto him, but could not force himself to fire.

Instead, the burst of automatic fire came from the passageway behind Craig, startling him, and then for an instant the operator was pinned to the wall by striking bullets and he slid down into a huddle on the floor.

"You always were too soft, Pupho," said the deep voice beside Craig and he turned and looked up at the gaunt naked figure that towered over him, into the scarred and desiccated visage, into the dark, hawk-fierce eyes.

"Sam! Craig said weakly. "By God, it's good to see you again.

he first truck had its entire front section wrecked by the RPG while the rear wheels of the second truck had been destroyed by heavy machine-gun fire. The fuel tanks of both vehicles were registering empty.

As briefly as he could Craig explained to Tungata the plans for getting out of the country.

"Eight o'clock is the deadline. If we don't make it back to the airstrip by then, the only way out will be on foot."

"It's thirty miles to the airstrip," Tungata mused. "There is no other vehicle here. Fungabera took the Land-Rover when he left two days ago."4

"I can pull the rear heels out of the wrecked truck but fuel! Sam, we need fuel." They both looked towards the blazing tank. The flames were still towering into the night sky and clouds of dense, black smoke rolled across the parade ground. In the light of the flames, the dead men lay in windrows where the machine-gun had scythed them down, but there were no surviving prison guards either. They had been torn to pieces and beaten to bloody pulp by their prisoners. How many dead, Craig wondered, and shied away from the answer, for every death was his direct responsibility.

Tungata was watching him. He was now dressed in random items of clothing gleaned from the lockers of the barrack room, most of it too small for his huge frame, and the prison stench still hung around him likea cloak.

"You were always like this," Tungata told him softly, "after an unpleasant task. I remember the elephant culls you would not eat for days afterwards."

"I'll drain the one tank into the other," said Craw quickly. He had forgotten how perceptive Tungata was.

He had recognized Craig's remorse. "And I will get them started on changing the wheels. But, you must find fuel for us, Sam. You mustP Craig turned and limped towards the nearest truck, thankful to be able to evade Tungata's scrutiny.

Comrade Lookout was waiting for him. "We lost fourteen men, Kuphela,"he said.

"I am sorry." God! How inadequate "They had to die one day," the guerrilla shrugged. "What do we do now?" There were heavy wheel-wrenches in the toolboxes of the trucks, and enough men to lift the rear end ho i chock it with timber baulks while they worked. ig supervised the swopping of rear axle and wheels, while at the same time he rolled up his trouser leg and stripped off his leg. The machine-gun bullet had ripped through his aluminium shin, leaving a ragged exit hole in the calf, but ed the sharp the articulated ankle was undamaged.

He tapp, petals of torn metal down neatly with a hammer from tl,toolbox, and strapped the leg back in place. "Now, you JL hold together a little longer," he told it firmly, gave the an affectionate pat and took the wheel-wrench away frc Comrade Lookout who had already cross, threaded two the nuts on the rear wheel of the truck.

An hour later Tungata came striding up to where Craig and his gang were lowering the truck's body onto its cannibalized rear axle. Craig was black to the elbows with thick grease. Sarah hurried to keep up with Tungata. Next to him she seemed slim and girlish, despite the rifle she carried.

"No fuel,"Tungata said. "We've searched the camp."

"I reckon we have fifteen lit res Craig straightened up and wiped the sweat off his face with his shirt-sleeve. It left a smear of grease down his cheek. "That might take us twenty miles. If we are lucky." He checked his watch. "Three o'clock where did the time go? Sally-Anne will be overhead in just over two hours. We aren't going to make it-"

"Craig, Sarah has told me what you have done, the risks, the planning, all of it-"Tungata said quietly.

"We haven't got time for that now, Sam."

"No," he agreed. "I must speak to my people, then we can go." The prisoners who had survived the slaughter on the parade ground gathered around him as Tungata stood on the bonnet of the truck. Their faces were upturned towards him, lit by the harsh glare of the floodlights.

"I must leave you," Tungata told them, and they groaned, "but my spirit stays with you, it remains with you until the day that I return.

And I swear to you on the beard of my father and by the milk that I drank from my mother's breast, that I shall return to you."

"Babo!" they called to hint "You are our father."

"The Shana kanka will be here very soon. You must go into the bush, carry with you all weapons and food you can find and go with these men." Tungata pointed to the little group of guerrillas around Comrade Lookout. "They will lead you to a safe place, and you will wait until I return in strength to lead you to what is rightfully yours." Tungata.

held his arms extended in blessing. "Go in peace, my friends!" They reached up to touch him, some of them weeping like children. Then, in little groups, they began to drift away towards the gate of the compound and the darkness beyond.

Comrade Lookout was the last to go. He came to Craig and smiled that cold white wolfish smile.

"Though you were in the forefront of the fighting, you did not kill a single Shana not here nor at the bridge," he said. "Why is that, Kuphela?"

41 leave the killing to you," Craig told him. "You are better at it than I am."

"You are a strange man, oh writer of books but we are grateful to you. If I live that long I will boast to my grandchildren of the things we did together this day."

"Goodbye, my friend," said Craig, and held out his hand and when they shook hands it was with the double grip of palm and wrist and palm, a salute of deep significance.

Then Comrade Lookout turned and loped away, carrying his rifle at the trail and the night swallowed him. The three of them, Craig, Tungata and Sarah, stood by the cab of the truck and the loneliness held them mute.

Craig spoke first. "Sam, you heard the radio operator speaking to his headquarters. You know that Fungabera will have already sent in reinforcements. Are there any troopers between here and Harare?" (I do not think so," Tungata shook his head. "A few men at Karoi, but not a large enough force to respond to an attack like this."

"All right let's say that it took them an hour to assemble and despatch a force. It will take them another five hours to reach Tuti-" he looked at Tungata for confirmation, and he nodded.

"They will hit the mission at approximately six and Sally-Anne should be overhead at five. It will be close, especially if we have to make the last few miles on foot let's get moving." While the others climbed up into the cab, Craig took a last look around the devastated compound. The flames had died down, but smoke drifted over the deserted hutments and across the parade ground where the dead men lay. The scene was still brightly lit by the floodlights.

"The lights-" Craig said aloud. There was something about the lights that worried him. The generator? Yes, that was it something about the generator that he must think Of.

"That's it! he whispered aloud, and jumped up into the cab. "Sam, the generator-" He started the motor, and put the truck into a roaring Turn. The engine room was at the back of the hill, part of the central complex protected by sandbags and by the fortifications on the high ground above it. Craig parked the truck close to the steps that led down into the power house, and he ran down and burst into it.

The generator was a twenty-five-kilowatt Lister, a big squat green machine, and its fuel tank was bolted on steel brackets to the wall above it. Craig tapped the side of the tank and it gave back a reassuring dull tone.

run!" Craig breathed. "Forty glorious gallons, at least! he road twisted likea dying python and the truck, her fuel-tank humming, was unwieldy and stiff on the turns. 4Craig had to wrench the wheel into them with both arms. The up hills were steep and the speed bled away to a walking pace as Craig changed down through the gears. Then they roared down the far side, too fast for safety, the empty truck bouncing them about unmercifully as they hit the deep ruts.

Craig almost missed the causeway at the bridge, and they lurched out over the drop with the edge crumbling away under the big double back wheels before he swerved back and they went lumbering over the narrow timber bridge.

"Time?" he asked, and Sarah checked her watch in the dashboard lights.

"Four fifty-three." Craig glanced away from the bright tunnel of the headlights and for the first time he could see the silhouette of the tree-tops against the lightening sky. At the top of the slope he pulled into the verge and switched on the radio set. He searched the channels slowly, listening for military traffic, but there was only the buzz of static.

"If they are in range, they are keeping mum." He switched off the set and pulled out into the track again, mary el ling at the swiftness of the African dawn. Below them in the valley, the landscape was emerging out of the fleeing night, the great, dark, forested plain leading from the foot of the hills down to the mission station stretched below them.

"Ten miles," said Tungata.

"Another half an hour," Craig replied and sent the Toyota bellowing down the last hills. Before they reached the bottom, it was light enough for him to switch off the headlights. "No point drawing attention to ourselves." Suddenly he sat up straighter, alarmed by the change in the engine note of the truck; it was harsher and louder.

"Oh God, not that, not now," he whispered, and then realized that he was hearing the sound not of the Toyota, but of another motor outside the cab. It was growing louder, closer, more compelling. He rolled down the side window and stuck his head out into the cool rush of the wind.

Sally-Anne's Cessna was roaring down from behind them, only fifty feet above the road, sparkling blue and silver in the first rays of the sun.

Craig let out a whoop of joy and waved wildly.

Swiftly the Cessna overhauled them and drew level.

Sally-Anne's beloved face looked down at him from the cockpit. She had a pink scarf around her head, and those thick dark eyebrows framed her eyes. She was laughing, as she recognized Craig, and she waved and mouthed at him, "Go for id" Then she was roaring past, climbing, waggling the wings of the Cessna from side to side, heading for the airstrip.

They burst out of the forest, racing through the maize fields that surrounded the tiny mission village. The tin roofs of the church and the schoolhouse glittered in the sunrise. From the huts beside the road, a few sleepy villagers, yawning and scratching, came out to watch them pass through.

Craig slowed the truck, and Sarah shouted through the window, "Soldiers coming! Big trouble! Warn everybody!

Go into the bush! Hide!" Craig had not thought that far ahead. The retaliation of the Third Brigade on the local population would be horrific. He accelerated through the village and the airstrip was a kilometer ai head the tattered windsock undulating on its pole at the far end. The Cessna was circling low overhead. Craig saw Sally-Anne lower her undercarriage and start her turn onto final approach for the landing.

"Look!" said Tungata harshly, and another aircraft came roaring in, from their 1it-hand side, low and fast, another much larger, twin-$ngined machine. Craig recognized it immediately.

It was an old Dakota transport, a veteran of the desert war in north Africa, and the bush war in Rhodesia. It was sprayed with non-reflective anti-missile grey paint and it was now decorated with the Zimbabwe Air Force round els The main hatch just abaft the wing root was open, and there were men poised in the opening. They were dressed in camouflage jump smocks and helmets. The bulky bundles of their parachutes dangled below their buttocks. Two of them were in the hatchway, but others crowded up close behind them.

"Paras!" shouted Craig, and the Dakota banked steeply towards them and passed them so low that the blast from the propellers churned the tops of the standing maize in the field beside them. As the aircraft flashed past them, Craig and Tungata simultaneously recognized one of the men in the hatchway.