Star of Africa

Chapter 55

They came stalking through the thicket with a soft footfall that would have been perceptible only to the senses of the keenest predator. Or the keenest prey. These were men who had grown up in the wilds, most likely never seen a city or walked on a pavement or ridden on a train. They belonged to this place, and they could move through it without sound or trace.

Many years ago, Ben had been taught how to hunt such men. He’d spent many more years honing the skills his teachers had conferred on him. In his mind’s eye, the screen of thorn bushes and tall yellowed grasses and gnarled trees and branches that made visibility impossible didn’t exist. He could sense the approaching men as clearly as if he were in an empty, featureless desert landscape observing the enemy through high-powered binoculars from two miles away. He could smell them, reach out and touch their fear and desperation.

‘Get down,’ he whispered. He dropped into a press-up position, knuckles and toes in the dirt, legs out straight behind him, his chest pressed deep into the long grass, neck craned upward in the direction of the incoming enemy. Jeff and Tuesday did the same, both instantly disappearing from sight in the grass to his left.

A second and a half later, a ragged volley of gunshots rang out. Half a dozen nine-millimetre pistols all blazing away at once, four or five sharp reports from each of them in rapid succession, pumping fire into the bushes as fast as their shooters could squeeze the triggers. The swarm of bullets burned a scything sweep through the thicket that was chest-high to a man standing, clipping leaves from twigs and chopping stalks of grass, singing off tree trunks iron-hardened by heat and sun. Sizwe and his friends were firing blind into the thicket in the hope of hitting something or flushing out their opponents.

Tactically, it was the behaviour of frightened, inexperienced men. The Africans were afraid. But they were even more afraid of what would happen to their women and children if they failed.

The gunfire fell silent. Ben sensed the Africans spreading out. They would be listening hard for signs that one of their bullets had found its mark. A cry of pain, the crackle of twigs as a man fell dead or rolled in agony on the ground. The more they spread out, the less they would chance another blind volley, for fear of hitting one of their own group.

Ben waited, perfectly still. To his left, unseen in the grass, he could feel the presence of Jeff Dekker and Tuesday Fletcher doing the same. He gripped the handle of his machete a little more tightly. It was a crude affair of probable Far Eastern manufacture, two roughly shaped slabs of cheap wood riveted together either side of the untempered tang of the blade. The blade was thick and heavy to compensate for the weakness of the steel. An unsophisticated instrument. More axe than sword, its single sharpened edge fashioned by some underpaid Chinese factory worker with an angle-grinder and its back edge a spine of rusty metal an eighth of an inch wide. Ben rotated the handle between his fingers and went on waiting.

He did not have to wait long for what he anticipated would happen next.

The Africans were growing more nervous by the second. Nervous of the hungry big cat they fully expected to come charging at them out of the thicket at any moment with the taste of human blood still slathered on its lips. Even more nervous of the unseen, unheard enemy that had shown no response to their opening gambit.

And Ben knew very well from long experience that nervous men unaccustomed to being in life and death situations often found it hard to remain still in a moment of serious do-or-die crisis, with legs like jelly and pounding hearts flushing adrenalin through their bodies and every muscle taut and twitching with fight-or-flight reflex. The mad itch to go bolting and yelling either towards or away from anything that moved was virtually irrepressible. That was how Ben knew that the flitting shape of a man he’d just glimpsed stalking through the thicket, no more than a ripple in the long grass ten yards dead ahead of where he lay crouched and ready, was about to break cover at the first sign of movement.

Ben pressed his left knee to the ground so that he could take some weight off his left hand. The hand clutching the stone. In a quick, small flick of the wrist he tossed the stone a few feet to his right, where it fluttered the bushes.

And got exactly the response he expected.

The African who came bursting out of the cover of the long grass was Uwase, Sizwe’s brother. With a wild roar of pent-up fear and aggression and a crackle of undergrowth he came bounding and leaping with his pistol thrust out in front of him in both fists, blasting a salvo of shots at the spot where the stone had landed. His rushing, panic-stricken charge took him within three feet of where Ben lay hidden.

All Ben had to do was sweep his feet out from under him with the thick blunt edge of the machete, and let the African’s momentum do the rest.

The blade caught Uwase’s ankle just below the shin, in the crook of his ankle. It wasn’t a hard enough blow to break bones, but Ben delivered it with more than enough force to send him sprawling on his face with a yell of pain and surprise. Uwase didn’t have time to react before Ben was on him, pinning him hard in the grass, an elbow in his face to stun him and the sharp edge of the machete against his throat.

All too fast for Sizwe to even aim his pistol as he burst out of the bushes in pursuit of his brother.

Ben said, ‘Stop.’ And Sizwe stopped.

‘Drop the gun,’ Ben said. And Sizwe dropped the gun.

‘Call the others, so I can see them,’ Ben said. But Sizwe didn’t have to. Gasimba, Mugabo, Ntwali and Rusanganwa all stepped out, pistols hesitantly half-raised as they looked to Sizwe for guidance.

‘Tell them to drop their guns too,’ Ben said. Sizwe gestured to his friends. The pistols fell into the dirt with dull thumps.

To Ben’s left, Jeff and Tuesday were back on their feet, tense and silent. Uwase struggled and tried to throw Ben off him, but Ben had him tight. The crude blade hard against his throat. Ground to an edge by some Chinaman in a factory thousands of miles away. Not shaving sharp, by any means. But plenty sharp enough. That much had already been demonstrated too many times that day.

‘Do not hurt my brother,’ Sizwe said. There was no pleading in his voice, only stoic pride.

‘Kill or be killed,’ Ben said. ‘No mercy, no quarter. That’s what Khosa said. But it doesn’t have to be like that, Sizwe.’

‘You and me fight!’ Sizwe roared.

‘Like champions,’ Ben said. ‘Single combat. May the best man win. Is that your idea?’

‘This is the only way.’

Ben stood up, hauling Uwase up with him. He shoved Uwase away, scooped up Uwase’s fallen pistol and tossed it to Jeff. Jeff transferred his machete from right hand to left and aimed the pistol in a swinging back-and-forth arc, covering all six men with a look on his face that said, ‘Don’t make me.’

‘You want to fight me?’ Ben said to Sizwe. ‘Then you’ll need a weapon. Take mine. I don’t want it.’ He flipped the machete, caught it by the tip of the blade and threw it. It twirled through the air with a hiss and speared point-first into a tree trunk four inches from Sizwe’s left ear and stuck there, juddering.

Those four inches had been a deliberate aim-off, and Sizwe knew it very well. ‘You could have killed me,’ he said slowly.

‘Nearest I’m going to get,’ Ben replied. ‘Now it’s your turn. Give it your best shot.’

‘Don’t be fucking stupid, Ben,’ Jeff said from behind the gun.

‘Stay out of it,’ Ben said. ‘I owe him that much.’

Sizwe looked at Ben, then looked at the machete buried in the trunk. He hesitated. Then grasped the handle and twisted and wrenched the blade free. He took a step towards Ben with the machete raised.

‘I’ll shoot him,’ Jeff said.

‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Ben warned him.

Sizwe came on another step, then another. His face was contorted with confused rage. Ben didn’t move.

Sizwe faltered. The blade sank as if it had suddenly become much too heavy for him to hold. He let it droop weakly to his side and then slip from his fingers and clang dully to the ground as he stood there, chest heaving, not from physical effort but from the emotional turmoil that was tearing him apart inside. ‘I cannot kill a man who does not fight back,’ he said, looking at Ben with the crazed, bloodshot eyes of a torture victim.

‘Then don’t do it,’ Ben said. ‘There has to be a better way than for innocent men to gut each other.’

Uwase said, ‘What way is there for us? We cannot all win this fight.’

‘Better that than we all lose,’ Ben said. ‘You trust Khosa to keep his side of the deal?’

Sizwe shook his head, mournfully. ‘No. Everyone has heard of this man. There are many stories of the things he does. He will never stop until there is no more blood to spill.’

‘Unless we can make him stop,’ Ben said. ‘Nobody else has to die. Only those who deserve it. If we work together, we can beat him.’

‘What are you thinking, mate?’ Jeff asked, lowering the pistol.

‘I’m keen to hear it myself,’ Tuesday said.

Rusanganwa said, ‘Why should we trust you? You said we would make a deal. Now many are dead.’

Ben felt the knife go deep with those words. ‘We won’t get a second chance at this. We do it once, and we do it right.’

Sizwe said, ‘Tell us your plan.’