The Angels Weep

There is only one way to go into an ambush, and that is flat out. Get through it as fast as possible, remembering always that they usually laid it out at least half a kilo metre deep. Even at 150 K's an hour, that meant receiving fire for twelve seconds. In that time a good man with an AK 47 can get off three magazines of thirty rounds each.

Yes, the way to go in was fast but, of course, a land mine was a beast of an entirely different colour. When they boosted one of those sweethearts with ten kilos of plastic, it kicked you and your vehicle fifty feet in the air and shot your spine out through the top of your skull. So although Craig lounged comfortably on the hard leather seat, his eyes scoured the road ahead. This late in the day there had been traffic through ahead Of him, and he drove for the diamond tracks -in the dust, but he watched for an extraneous tuft of grass, an old cigarette packet or even a pat of dried cow-dung that could conceal the marks of a dig in the road. Of course, this close to Bulawayo he was in more danger from a drunken driver than from terrorist activity, but it was wise to nurture the habit.

Craig glanced sideways at his passenger, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. The man swivelled in his seat and reached into the cool box in the back. He brought out two cans of Lion beer with the dew on them, and while he did so, Craig flicked his attention back to the road.

Craig Mellow was twenty-nine years old, although the floppy thatch of dark hair blowing all over his forehead, the innocent candour of his hazel eyes, and the vulnerable slant to his wide gentle mouth gave him the air of a small boy who expects to be unjustly reprimanded at any moment. He still wore the embroidered green shoulder flashes of a ranger in the Department of Wildlife and Nature Conservation on his khaki bush-shirt.

Beside him Samson Kumalo pulled the tabs off the beer cans. He wore the same uniform, but he was a tall Matabele with a deep intelligent forehead and a hard smood-shaven lantern jaw. He ducked as a spurt of froth flew from the cans, and then handed one of them to Craig and kept one for himself. Craig saluted him with his can and swigged a mouthful, then licked the white moustache from his upper lip, and put the Land-Rover to the twisting road up the Khami hills.

Before they reached the crest, Craig dropped the empty can into the plastic trash-bag that hung from the dash, and slowed the Land-Rover, looking for the turn-off.

Tall yellow grass hid the small faded sign.

KHAMI ANGLICAN MISSION Staff Cottages. No through road.

It was at least a year since Craig had last driven this road and he almost missed it.

"Here it is!" Samson warned him, and he swung sharply onto the secondary track. It jinked through the forest, then came abruptly to the long straight avenue of spathodea trees that led down to the staff village. The trunks were thicker than a man's chest, and the dark green branches met overhead. At the head of the avenue, almost screened by the trees and the long grass, was a low whitewashed wall with a rusty wrought-iron gate. Craig pulled onto the verge and switched off the engine.

"Why are we stopping here?" Samson asked.

They always spoke English when they were alone, just as they always spoke Sindebele when anyone else was listening, just as Samson called him "Craig" in private and "Nkosi" or "Mambo" at all other times. It was a tacit understanding between them, for in this tortured war-torn land, there were those who had taken Samson's fluent English as the mark of a "cheeky mission boy', and recognized by the easy intimacy between the two men that Craig was that thing of doubtful loyalties, a kaffir-lover.

Kaffir" is derived from the Arabic word for an infidel. During the nineteenth century, it denoted members of the southern African tribes. Without any derogatory bias it was employed by statesmen, eminent authors, missionaries and champions of the native peoples.

Nowadays its use is the sure mark of the racial bigot.

"Why are we stopping at the old cemetery?" Samson repeated.

"All that beer." Craig climbed out of the Land-Rover and stretched. "I have to pump ship." He relieved himself against the battered front wheel, then went to sit on the low wall of the graveyard, swinging his long bare sun-browned legs. He wore khaki shorts and suede desert boots without socks, for the barbed seeds of arrow grass stick in knitted wool.

Craig looked down onto the roofs of Khami Mission Station that lay below the wooded hills. Some of the older buildings, dating back to before the turn of the century were thatched, although the new school and hospital were tiled with red terra cotta However, the rows of low-cost housing in the compound were covered with unpainted corrugated asbestos. They made an unsightly grey huddle beside the lovely green of the irrigated fields. They offended Craig's aesthetic sense, and he looked away.

"Come on, Sam, let's get cracking-" Craig broke off and frowned.

"What the hell are you doing?" Samson had gone through the wrought-iron gate into the walled cemetery and was urinating casually on one of the gravestones.

"Jesus, Sam, that's desecration." "An old family custom." Samson shook himself and zipped up. "My Grandpa Gideon taught it to me," he explained, and then switched into Sindebele. "Giving water to make the flower grow again," he said.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" "The man that lies down there killed a Matabele girl called Imbali, the Flower," said Samson. My grandfather always pees on his grave whenever he passes this way."

Craig's shock was gradually replaced by curiosity. He swung his legs over the wall, and went to stand beside Samson.

"Sacred to the memory of General Mungo St. John, Killed during the Matabele Rebellion of 1896." Craig read the inscription aloud. "Man hath no greater love than this that he lay down his life for another.

Intrepid sailor, brave soldier, faithful husband and devoted father.

Always remembered by his widow Robyn and his son Robert." Craig combed the hair out of his eyes with his fingers, "Judging by his advertising, he was one hell of a guy." "He was a bloody murderer he, as much as any one man could, provoked the rebellion." "Is that so?"

Craig passed on to the next grave, and read that inscription.

"Here lie the mortal remains of DOCTOR ROBYN ST JOHN, nee BALLANTYNE Founder of Khami Mission, Departed this life April 16th 193I, aged 94 years. Well done thou good and faithful servant." He glanced back at Samson. "Do you know who she was?" "My grandfather calls her Nomusa, the Girl-Child of Mercy. She was one of the most beautiful people who ever lived." "Never heard of her either." "You should have, she was your great-great-grandmother." "I have never bothered much with the family history. Mother and father were second cousins, that's all I know. Mellows and Ballantynes for generations back I've never sorted them all out." "A man without a past, is a man without a future"," Samson quoted.

"You know, Sam, sometimes you get up my nose." Craig grinned at him. "You've got an answer for everything." He walked on down the row of old graves, some of them with elaborate headstones, doves and groups of mourning angels, and they were decked with faded artificial flowers in domes of clear glass. Others were covered with simple concrete slabs in which the lettering had eroded to the point of illegibility.

Craig read those he could.

"ROBERT ST JOHN Aged 54 years Son of Mungo and Robyn." "JUBA KUMALO Aged 83 years Fly little Dove." And then he stopped as he saw his own surname.

"VICTORIA MELLOW Nee CODRINGTON Died 8th April 1936 aged 63 years Daughter of Clinton and Robyn, wife of Harold." "Hey Sam, if you were right about the others, then this must have been my great-grandmother."

There was a tuft of grass growing out of a crack through the slab, and Craig stooped and plucked it out. And as he did so, he felt a bond of affinity with the dust beneath that stone. It had laughed and loved and given birth that he might live.

"Hi there, Gran, he whispered. "I wonder what you were really like?" "Craig, it's almost one o'clock," Sam interrupted him. "Okay, I'm coming." But Craig lingered a few moments longer, held by that unaccustomed nostalgia. "I'll ask Bawu," he decided and went back to the Land-Rover.

He stopped again outside the first cottage of the village. The small yard was freshly raked and there were petunias in tubs on the veranda.

"Look here, Sam," Craig began awkwardly. "I don't know what you're going to do now. You could join the police, like I am doing.

Perhaps we could work it that we were together again." Perhaps, "Sam agreed expressionlessly.

"Or I could talk to Bawu about getting you a job at King's Lynn."

"Clerk in the pay office?" Sam asked.

"Yea! I know." Craig scratched his ear. "Still, it's something."

"I'll think about it, "Sam murmured.

"Hell, I feel bad, but you didn't have to come with me, you know.

You could have stayed in the department." "Not after what they did to you." Sam shook his head. "Thanks, Sam." They sat silently for a while, then Sam climbed down and lugged his bag out of the back of the Land-Rover.

"I'll come out and see you as soon as I'm fixed up. We'll work something out," Craig promised. "Keep in touch, Sam." "Sure." Sam held out his hand, and they shook briefly. "Hamba gashle, go in peace," Sam said.

"Shala gashle. Stay in peace."

Craig started the Land-Rover and swung back the way they had come.

As he drove up the avenue of spathodea, he glanced in the rear-view mirror. Sam was standing in the centre of the road with his bag on one shoulder, watching him go. There was a hollow feeling of bereavement in Craig's chest. The two of them had been together for so long.

"I'll work something out," he repeated determinedly. raig slowed at the top of the rise as he always did here, anticipating his first glimpse of the homestead, but when it came it was with that little shock of disappointment. Bawu had stripped the thatch off the room and replaced it with dull grey corrugated asbestos sheet. It had to be done, of course, an RPG-7 rocket fired into the thatch from outside the perimeter and the whole building would have gone up like the fifth of November. Still Craig resented the change, just as he did the loss of the beautiful jacaranda trees. They had been planted by Bawu's grandfather, old Zouga Ballantyne who built King's Lynn back in the early 1890s. In spring their gentle rain of blue petals had carpeted the lawns, but they had been cut down to open a field of defensive fire around the house, and in their place now stood the ten-foot security fence of diamond mesh and barbed wire.

Craig drove down into the shallow dip below the main homestead towards the complex of offices, storerooms and tractor workshops which were the heart of the vast sprawling ranch. Before he was halfway down, a lanky figure appeared in the high doorway of the workshop, and stood with arms akimbo watching him approach.

"Hello, Grandpa." Craig climbed out of the Land-Rover, and the old man frowned to cover his pleasure.

"How many times have I got to tell you, "Don't call me that!" You want people to think I'm old? "Jonathan Ballantyne was burned and dessicated by the sun to the consistency Of biltong, the dark strips of dried venison that were such a Rhodesian delicacy.

It seemed that if you were to cut him, dust and not blood would pour from the wound, but his eyes were still a brilliant twinkling green and his hair was a dense white shock that fell to his collar at the back of his neck. It was one of his many conceits. He shampooed it every day, and brushed it with a pair of silver-backed brushes that stood on the table beside his bed.

"Sorry, Bawu." Craig reverted to his Matabele name, the Gadfly, and seized the old man's hand. It was mere bone covered by cool dry skin, but the grip was startlingly strong.

"So you got yourself fired again," Jonathan accused. Although his teeth were artificial, they were a neat fit, filling out the wizened cheeks, and he kept them so sparkling white as to match his hair and silvery moustache. Another of his conceits.

"I resigned, "Craig denied. "You got fired." "It was close," Craig admitted. "But I beat them to it. I resigned." Craig was not really surprised that Jonathan already knew of his latest misfortune. Nobody knew how old Jonathan Ballantyne was for certain, the outside estimate was a hundred years, though eighty-plus was Craig's guess, but still nothing got by him.

"You can give me a lift up to the house. "Jonathan swung up easily onto the high passenger seat, and with relish began pointing out the additions to the defence of the homestead.

"I have put in twenty more Claymores on the front lawn."

Jonathan's Claymore mines were ten kilos of plastic explosive packed inside a drum of scrap-iron suspended on a pipe tripod. He could fire them electrically from his bedroom.

Jonathan was a chronic insomniac, and Craig had a bizarre mental picture of the old man spending every night sitting bolt upright in his nightshirt with his finger on the button praying for a terrorist to come within range. The war had added twenty years to his life.

Jonathan hadn't had such a good time since the first battle of the Somme, where he had won his MC one lovely autumn morning by grenading three German machine-gun nests in quick succession. Secretly Craig believed that the first thing any ZIPRA* guerrilla recruit was taught when he began his basic training Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army. was to give King's Lynn and the crazy old man who lived there the widest possible berth.

As they drove up through the gates in the security fence and were surrounded by a mixed pack of fearsome Rottweilers and Dobermann pinschers, Jonathan explained the latest refinements to his battle plan.

"If they come from behind the kopje, I'll let them get into the minefield, then take them in enfilade,-" He was still explaining and gesticulating as they climbed the steps to the wide veranda and he finished the briefing by adding darkly and mysteriously, I have just invented a secret weapon, I'm going to test it tomorrow morning. You can watch." "I'd enjoy that, Bawu," Craig thanked him doubtfully. The last tests that Jonathan had conducted had blown all the windows out of the kitchens and flesh-wounded the Matabele cook.

Craig followed Jonathan down the wide shady veranda. The wall was hung with hunting trophies, the horns of buffalo and kudu and eland, and on each side of the double glass doors leading to the old dining-room, now the library, stood a pair of enormous elephant tusks, so long and curved that their tips almost met at the level of the ceiling above the doorway.

As he went through the door, Jonathan absentmindedly stroked one of them. There was a spot on the thick yellow curve that had been polished shiny by the touch of his fingers over the decades.

"Pour us each a gin, my boy," he ordered. Jonathan had stopped drinking whisky on the day that Harold Wilson's government had imposed sanctions on Rhodesia. It was Jonathan's single-handed retaliatory attempt at disrupting the economy of the British Isles.

"By God, you've drowned it," he complained, as he tasted the concoction, and dutifully Craig took his glass back to the imbuia cocktail cabinet and stiffened the gin component.

"That's a little better." Jonathan settled himself behind his desk and placed the Stuart crystal tumbler in the centre of his leather and brass-bound blotter.

"Now,"he said. "Tell me what happened this time. "And he fixed Craig, with those bright green eyes.

"Well, Bawu, it's a long story. I don't want to bore you." Craig sank down into the deep leather armchair and became intensely interested in the furnishings of the room which he had known since childhood. He read the titles on the spines of the morocco-bound books on the shelves, and studied the massed display of blue silk rosettes which the prize Afrikander bulls of King's Lynn had won at every agricultural show south of the Zambezi river.

"Shall I tell you what I heard? I heard you refused to obey the legitimate order of your superior, to wit the head game warden, and that thereafter you perpetrated a violence upon that worthy, or more specifically that you punched him in the head Giving him the excuse to dismiss you for which he had probably been searching desperately since the first day you arrived in the Park." "The reports are exaggerated." "Don't give me that little-boy grin of yours, young man.

This is not a matter of levity," Jonathan told him sternly. "Did you refuse to partake in the elephant cull, or did you not?" "Have you ever been on a cull, Jon-Jon?" Craig asked softly. He only used his grandfather's pet name in moments of deep sincerity. "The spotter plane picks a likely herd, say fifty animals, and radio talks us onto them. We go in the last mile or so on foot at a dead run. We get in very close, ten paces, so we are shooting uphill. We use the 458s to cannon them. What we do is pick out the old queens of the herd, because the younger animals love and respect them so much that they won't leave them. We hit the queens first, head shots, of course, that gives us plenty of time to work on the others. We are pretty good at it by now. We drop them so fast that the heaps have to be pulled apart by tractors afterwards. That leaves the calves. It's interesting to watch a calf trying to lift its dead mother back onto her feet again with its tiny trunk." "It has to be done, Craig," said Jonathan quietly. "The parks are overstocked by thousands of animals." But Craig seemed not to have heard.

"If the orphan calves are too young to survive, we hit them also, but if they are the right age, we round them up and sell them to a nice old man who takes them away and resells them to a zoo in Tokyo or Amsterdam, where they will stand behind bars with a chain around the foot and eat the peanuts that the tourists throw them." "It has to be done, "Jonathan repeated.

"He was taking kickbacks from the animal-dealers," Craig said.

"So that we were ordered to leave orphans that were so young they only had a fifty-fifty chance of survival ". So that we looked for herds with high percentages of small calves. He was taking bribes from the dealers." "Who? Not Tomkins, the head warden?" Jonathan exclaimed.

"Yes, Tomkins." Craig stood up and took both their glasses to refill.

"Have you got proof?" "No, of course I haven't," Craig replied irritably. "If I had I would have taken it straight to the minister."

"So you just refused to cull." Craig flopped back in the chair, long bare legs sprawled and hair hanging in his eyes.

"That's not all. They are stealing the ivory from the cull. We are supposed to leave the big bulls, but Tomkins ordered us to hit anything with good ivory, and the tusks disappear." "No proof on that either, I suppose? "Jonathan asked drily.

"I saw the helicopter making the pick-up." "And you got the registration letters?" "They were masked," Craig shook his head, "but it was a military machine. It's organized." "So you punched Tomkins?"

"It was beautiful," said Craig dreamily. "He was on his hands and knees trying to pick up his teeth that were scattered all over the floor of his office. I never worked out what he was going to do with them." "Craig, my boy, what did you hope to achieve? Do you think it will stop them, even if your suspicions are correct?" "No, but it made me feel a lot better. Those elephant are almost human. I became pretty fond of them." They were both silent for a while and then Jonathan sighed. "How many jobs is that now, Craig?" "I wasn't keeping score, Bawu." "I can't believe that anybody with Ballantyne blood in his veins is totally lacking in either talent or ambition. Christ, boy, we Ballantynes are winners, look at Douglas, look at Roland--2

"I'm a Mellow, only half a Ballantyne." "Yes, I suppose that accounts for it. Your grandfather frittered away his share in the Harkness Mine, so when your father married my jean he was almost a pauper. Good God, those shares would be worth ten million pounds today." "That was during the great depression of the Thirties a lot of people lost money then." "We didn't the Ballantynes didn't." Craig shrugged. "No, the Ballantynes doubled up during the depression." "We are winners," Jonathan repeated. "But what happens to you now? You know my rule, you don't get a penny more from me." "Yes, I know that rule, Jonjon." "You want to try working here again? It didn't pan out so well last time, did it?" "You are an impossible old bastard," said Craig fondly. "I love you, but I'd rather work for Idi Amin than for you again." Jonathan looked immensely pleased with himself. His image of himself as tough, ruthless and ready to kill, was another of his conceits. He would have been deeply insulted if anybody had called him easy-going or generous. The large anonymous donations he made to every charity, deserving or otherwise, were always accompanied by blood-curdling threats to anybody revealing his identity.

"So what are you going to do with yourself this time?" "Well, I was trained as an armouRer when I did my national service, and there is an armourer's berth open in the police. The way I see it, I'm going to be called up again anyway, so I might as well beat them to it and enlist." "The police," Jonathan mused, "that does have the virtue of being one of the few things you haven't tried yet. Get me another drink." While Craig poured gin and tonic, Jonathan put on his fiercest expression to cover his embarrassment and growled, "Look here, boy, if you are really short, I'll bend the rule this once, and lend you a few dollars to tide you over. Strictly a loan though." "That's very decent of you, BaWu, but a rule is a rule." "I make "em, I break "em," Jonathan glared at him. "How much do you need?" "You know those old books you wanted?" Craig murmured, as he put the old man's glass back in front of him, and an expression of intense cunning came into Jonathan's eyes which he tried in vain to conceal.

"What books? "His innocence was loaded. "Those old journals." "Oh, those!" And despite himself Jonathan glanced at the bookshelves beside his desk upon which were displayed his collection of family journals.

They stretched back over a hundred years, from the arrival of his grandfather, Zouga Ballantyne, in Africa in 1860 up to the death of Jonathan's father, Sir Ralph Ballantyne, in 1929, but the sequence was broken by a few missing years, three volumes which had come down on Craig's side of the family, through old Harry Mellow, who had been Sir Ralph's partner and dearest friend.

For some perverse reason that Craig could not even understand himself, he had up until now resisted all the old man's blandishments and attempts to get his hands on them. It was probably because they were the one small lever he had on Jonathan that he had held out since they had come into his possession on his twenty-first birthday, the only item of any value in the inheritance from his long-dead father.

"Yes, those," Craig nodded. "I thought I might let you have them." "You must be hard pressed." The old man tried not to let his glee shine through.

"Even more than usual," Craig admitted. "You waste,-" "Okay, Bawu.

We've been down that road before," Craig stopped him hurriedly. "Do you want them?" "How much? "Jonathan demanded suspiciously. "Last time you offered me a thousand each." "I must have been soft." "Since then there has been a hundred per cent inflation-2 Jonathan loved to haggle.

It enhanced his image of himself as hard and ruthless. Craig reckoned he was worth ten million. He owned King's Lynn and four other ranches.

He owned the Harkness Mine which after eighty years in production was still producing 50,000 ounces of gold a year, and he had assets outside this beleaguered country, prudently stashed away over the years in Johannesburg, London and New York. Ten million was probably conservative, Craig realized, and set himself to bargain as hard as the old man.

At last they reached a figure with Jonathan grumbling, "They're worth half of that." "There are two other conditions, Bawu. "And immediately Jonathan was suspicious again.

"Number one, you leave them to me in your will, the whole set, Zouga Ballantyne's and Sir Ralph's journals, all of them." "Roland and Douglas-" "They are going to get King's Lynn and the Harkness and all the rest that's what you told me." "Damn right," he growled. "They won't blow it all out the window like you would." "They can have it," Craig grinned easily. "They are Ballantynes as you say, but I want the journals." "What is your second condition? "Jonathan demanded. "I want access to them now." "What do you mean?" "I want to be able to read and study any of them whenever I want to." "What the hell, Craig, you have never given a damn about them before. I doubt you have even read the three you own." "I've glanced through them," Craig admitted "shamefacedly.

"And now?" "I was up at Kharni Mission this morning, in the old cemetery. There is a grave there, Victoria Mellow." Jonathan nodded.

"Aunty Vicky, Harry's wife, go on." "I had this strange feeling as I was standing there. Almost as though she was calling to me." Craig plucked at the thick forelock over his eyes and could not look at his grandfather. "And suddenly I wanted to find out more about her, and the others." They were both silent for a while, and then Jonathan nodded.

"All right, my boy, I accept your conditions. Both sets will be yours one day, and until then you can read them whenever you wish to."

Jonathan had seldom been so pleased with a bargain. He had completed his sets after thirty years, and if the boy was serious about reading them, he had found a good home for them. The Lord knew, neither Douglas nor Roland was interested, and in the meantime perhaps the journals might draw Craig back to King's Lynn more often. He wrote out the cheque and signed it with a flourish, while Craig went out to the Land-Rover and dug the three leather-bound manuscripts from the bottom of his kit bag

"I suppose you will spend it all on that boat," Jonathan accused as he came in from the veranda.

"Some of it," Craig admitted. He placed the books in front of the old man.

"You are a dreamer." Jonathan slid the cheque across the desk.

"Sometimes I prefer dreams to reality." Craig scrutinized the figures briefly, then buttoned the pink cheque into his top pocket.

"That's your trouble," said Jonathan.

"Bawu, if you start lecturing me, I'm going to head straight back to town." Jonathan held up both hands in capitulation. "All right," he chuckled. "Your old room is the way you left it, if you want to use it." "I have an appointment with the police recruiting officer on Monday, but I'll stay the weekend, if that's okay?" "I'll ring Trevor this evening and fix the interview." Trevor Pennington was the assistant commissioner of police. Jonathan believed in starting at the top.

"I wish you wouldn't, jon jon "Don't be daft, "Jonathan snapped.

"You must LeaRN to use every advantage, my boy, that's the way life works." Jonathan- picked up the first of the three volumes of manuscript and gloatingly stroked it with his gnarled brown fingers.

"Now, you can leave me alone for a while, "he ordered, as he unfolded his wire-framed reading-glasses and perched them on his nose.

"They are playing tennis across at Queen's Lynn, I will see you back here for sun downers Craig glanced back from the doorway, but Jonathan Ballantyne was hunched over the book, transported by the entries in yellow faded ink back to his childhood.

AltHough it shared a common seven-mile boundary with King's Lynn, Queen's Lynn was a separate ranch. Jonathan Ballantyne had added it to his holdings during the great depression of the 1930s, paying five cents on the dollar of its real worth. Now it formed the eastern spread of the Rholands Ranching Company.

It was the home of Jonathan's only surviving son, Douglas Ballantyne, and his wife Valerie. Douglas was the managing director of both Rholands and the Harkness Mine. He was also Minister of Agriculture in Ian Smith's UDI government, and with any luck he might be away on mysterious government or company business.

Douglas Ballantyne had once given Craig his honest appraisal. "At heart you are a bloody hippie, Craig, you should get your hair cut and start bracing up, you can't go on dawdling through life and expecting Bawu and the rest of the family to carry you for ever." Craig pulled a sour face at the memory as he drove down past the stockyards of Queen's Lynn, and smelled the ammonia cal tang of cow-dung.

The huge Afrikander beasts were a uniform deep chocolate red, the bulls hump-backed and with swinging dewlaps that almost brushed the earth. This breed had made Rhodesian beef almost as renowned as the marbled beef of Kobe. As Minister of Agriculture it was Douglas Ballantyne's. duty to see that, despite sanctions, the world was not deprived of this delicacy. The route that it took to the tables of the great restaurants of the world was via Johannesburg and Cape Town, where it perforce changed its name, but the connoisseurs recognized it and asked for it by its noyn de guerre, their taste-buds probably piqued by the knowledge that they were eating forbidden fruits.

Rhodesian tobacco and nickel and copper and gold all went out the same way, while petrol and diesel oil made the return trip. The popular bumper sticker said simply, "Thank you, South Africa." Beyond the stock-pens and veterinary block, once again protected by the diamond mesh and barbed-wire security fence, lay the green lawns and banks of flowering shrubs and the blazing Pride of India trees of the gardens of Queen's Lynn. The windows had been covered with grenade screens and the servants would drop steel bullet-proof shutters into their slots before sunset, but here the de fences had not been built with the same gusto as Bawu had shown at King's Lynn. They fitted unobtrusively into the gracious surroundings.

The lovely old house was very much as Craig remembered it from before the war, rosy red brick and wide cool verandas. The jacaranda trees that lined the long curved driveway were in full flower, like a mist bank of pale ethereal blue, and there were at least two dozen cars parked beneath them, Mercedes and jaguars, Cadillacs and BMWs, their paintwork hazed with the red dust of Matabeleland. Craig concealed his venerable Land-Rover behind the tumble of red and purple bougainvillaea creeper, so as not to lower the tone of a Queen's Lynn Saturday. From habit he slung an FN rifle over his shoulder and wandered around the side of the house. from ahead there came the sound of children's voices, gay as songbirds, and the genial scolding of their black nannies, punctuated by the sharp "Pock! Pock!" of a long rally from the tennis courts.

Craig paused at the head of the terraced lawns. Children spilled and tumbled and chased each other in circles like puppies over the green grass. Nearer the yellow clay courts, their parents sprawled on spread rugs or sat at the shaded white tea-tables, under the brightly coloured umbrellas. They were bronzed young men and women in tennis whites, sipping tea or drinking beer from tall frosted glasses, calling ribald comment and advice to the players upon the courts. The only incongruous note was the row of machine pistols and automatic rifles beside the silver tea set and cream scones.

Someone recognized Craig and shouted, "Hi Craig, long time no see," and others waved, but there was just that faint edge of condescension in their manner reserved for the poor relative. These were the families with great estates, a closed club of the wealthy in which, for all their geniality, Craig would never have full membership.

Valerie Ballantyne came to meet him, slim-hipped and girlishly graceful in her short white tennis skirt. "Craig, you are as thin as a bean pole." He always brought out the maternal instincts in any female between eight and eighty. "Hello, Aunty Val." She offered him a smooth cheek that smelled of violets. Despite her delicate air, Valerie was president of the Women's Institute,served on the committees of a dozen schools, charities and hospitals, and was a gracious, accomplished hostess.

"Uncle Douglas is in Salisbury. Smithy sent for him yesterday.

He will be sorry to have missed you." She took his arm. "How is the Game Department?" "It will probably survive without me." "Oh, no, Craig, not again!" "Fraid so, Aunty Val." He didn't really feel up to a discussion of his career at that moment. "Do you mind if I get myself a beer?" There was a group of men around the long trestle-table that did service as a bar. The group opened to let him in, but the conversation went straight back to a discussion of the latest raid that the Rhodesian security forces had made into Mozambique.

"I tell you, when we hit the camp, there was food still cooking on the fires, but they had run for it. We caught a few stragglers, but the others had been warned." "Bill is right, I had it from a colonel in intelligence, no names-no pack drill, but there is a bad security leak.

A traitor near the top, the terrs are getting up to twelve hours" warning." "We haven't had a really good kill since last August when we took six hundred." The eternal war talk bored Craig. He sipped his beer and watched the play on the nearest court.

It was mixed doubles, and at that moment they changed ends.

Roland Ballantyne came around the net with his arm around his partner's waist. He was laughing, and his teeth were startlingly white and even in the deep tan of his face. His eyes were that peculiar Ballantyne green, like creme de menthe in a crystal glass, and although he wore his hair short, it was thick and wavy, bleached to honey-gold by the sun.

He moved like a leopard, with a lazy gliding gait, and the superb physical condition that was a prerequisite of any member of the Scouts glossed the muscles of his forearms and bare legs. He was only a year older than Craig, but his assurance always made Craig feel gawky and callow in comparison. Craig had once heard a girl he admired, a young lady usually Was& and affectedly unimpressed, describe Roland Ballantyne as the most magnificent stud on show.

Now Roland saw him, and waved his racquet. "Don't be vague, call for Craig!" he greeted him across the court, and then said something inaudible to the girl beside him. She chuckled and looked at Craig.

Craig felt the shock begin in the pit of his stomach and ripple outwards like a stone dropped into a still pool. He stared at her, petrified, unable to drag his eyes off her face. She stopped laughing, and for a moment longer returned his gaze, then she broke out of the circle of Roland's arm and went to the baseline, bouncing the ball lightly off her racquet and Craig was certain that her cheeks had flushed a shade pinker than the game had previously rouged them.

Still he could not take his eyes off her. She was the most perfect thing he had ever seen. She was tall, she reached almost to Roland's shoulder and he was six one. Her hair was cropped into a glossy cap of curls, that changed colour as the sunlight played upon it, from the burnished iridescence of obsidian to the rich dark glow of a noble burgundy wine held to the candlelight.

Her face was squarish, with a firm, perhaps stubborn, line to the jaw, but her mouth was wide and tender and humorous. Her eyes were wide-spaced and slanted to such a degree that they seemed just a touch squint. It gave her a vulnerable appealing air, but when she glanced at Roland, they took on a wicked taunting glint.

"Let's blast them, pardner," she called, and the lift of her voice raised little goose bumps on Craig's forearms.

The girl turned her shoulders and hips away, tossed the yellow ball high as she went up on tiptoe and then swung back into the overhead stroke. The racquet sprang sharply and the ball blurred low across the net, and spurted white chalk from the centre line.

She crossed the court with quick dainty steps, and caught the return on the volley. She tucked it away in the corner, and then glanced at Craig.

"Shod" he called, his voice ringing hollowly in his own ears, and a little satisfied smile puckered the corner of her mouth.

She turned away and stooped to recover a loose ball. Her back was turned towards Craig, her feet slightly apart and she did not bend her knees. Her legs were long and shapely, and as her short pleated skirt popped up, he had a fleeting glimpse of thin lacy panties and the buttocks in them so neat and hard and symmetrical that he was reminded of a pair of ostrich eggs gleaming in the Kalahari sunlight.

Craig dropped his eyes guiltily as if he had played the peeping Tom. He felt light-headed and strangely breathless. He forced himself not to look back at the court, but his heart was pounding as though he had just run a crosscountry, and the conversation around him seemed to be in a foreign language, relayed through a faulty transmitter. It did not make sense.

It seemed hours later that a hard muscular arm was thrown around his shoulders, and Roland's voice in his ear.

"You're looking well, old son." At last Craig allowed himself to look around.

"The terrs haven't caught you yet, Roly?" "No way, Sonny, "Roland hugged him. "Let me introduce you to a girl who loves me." Only Roland could make a remark like that sound witty and sophisticated. "This is Bugsy. Bugsy, this is my favourite cousin, Craig, the well-known sex maniac." "Bugsy?" Craig looked into those strangely tilted eyes. "It doesn't suit you." He realized that they were not black, but a dark indigo blue.

Janine," she said. "Janine Carpenter." She held out her hand. It was slim and warm and moist from the game. He did not want to release it.

"I warned you," Roland laughed. "Stop molesting the girl and come and have a set with me, Sonny." "I haven't got togs." "All you need is shoes. We are the same size, I'll send a servant for a spare pair." raig hadn't played for over a year. The lay-off seemed to have worked wonders. He had never played so well. The ball came off the sweet spot of his racquet so fast and clean that it felt as though he had clean missed it, and the top-spin pulled it down onto the baseline as though it were a magnet.

Effortlessly, he passed Roland on either side, and then dropped the ball so short that it left him stranded in mid court He hit first-time serves that nicked the line, and returned shots that usually he would not have bothered to chase, then he rushed the net and slaughtered Roland's best forehand.

He was loving it, so involved with the marvelous unaccustomed sense of power and of his own invincibility, that he had not even noticed that the stream of Roland Ballantyne's easy banter had long ago dried up until he won another game and Roland said, "Five games to love." Something in his tone reached Craig at last, and for the first time since they had begun playing, he really looked at Roland's face.

It was a swollen ugly red. His jaw clenched so that there were lumps of muscle below his ears. His eyes were murderous green, and he was dangerous as a wounded leopard.

Craig looked away from him as they changed sides and he saw that their game had fascinated everybody. Even the older women had left the tea-tables and come down to the fence. He saw Aunty Val, with a nervous little smile on her lips. From hard experience, she recognized her son's mood.

Craig saw the sniggering smiles on the faces of the men. Roland had won his tennis half-blue at Oxford, and he had been Matabeleland singles champion three years running. They were enjoying this as much as Craig had been up until then.

Suddenly Craig felt appalled at his own success. He had never beaten Roland at anything, not a single contest of any sort, not even monopoly nor darts, not once in twenty nine years. The elasticity and strength went out of his legs, and he stood on the baseline, just a long-legged gangling boy again, dressed in faded khaki shorts and worn tennis shoes without socks. He gulped miserably, pushed the hair out of his eyes, and crouched to receive service.

Across the net Roland Ballantyne was a tall athletic figure. He glared at Craig. Craig knew he was not seeing him, he was seeing an adversary, something to be destroyed.

"We Ballantynes are winners," Bawu had said. "We have got the instinct for the jugular." Roland seemed, impossibly, to grow even taller, and then he served. Craig began to move left, saw it was the wrong side and tried to change. His long legs tangled and he sprawled on the yellow clay. He stood up, retrieved his racquet, and went across to the other court. There was a bloody smear on his knee.

Roland's next service crashed in, and he did not get a touch of his racquet to it.

When his turn came, he hit one into the net, and the next one off the wood. Roland broke his service three times in a row, and it went on like that.

"Match point," Roland said. He was smiling again, gay and handsome and genial as he bounced the ball at his feet, and lined up for his final service. Craig felt that old heavy feeling in his limbs, the despair of the born loser.

He glanced off court. Janine Carpenter was looking directly at him, and in the instant before she smiled encouragingly, Craig saw the pity in those dark indigo eyes, and abruptly he was angry.

He sockM Roland's service, double-handed, into the corner, and had it come back as hard. He crossed with his forehand, and Roland was grinning as he drove it back. Again Craig caught it perfectly, and even Roland was forced to lob. It came down from on high, floating helplessly, and Craig was under it, poised and coldly angry, and he hit it with all his weight and strength and despair. It was his best shot.

After that he had nothing to follow. Roland trapped it on the bounce, before it could rise, and he punched it tantalizingly past Craig's right hip while he was twisted hopelessly off balance by the power of his own stroke.

Roland laughed, and vaulted easily over the net.

"Not bad, Sonny." He put his arm patronizingly around Craig's shoulders. "I'll know not to give you a start in future he said and led Craig off the court.

Those who had been gloatingly anticipating Roland's humiliation a few minutes before now crowded slavishly around him.

"Well played, Roly." "Great stuff." And Craig slipped away from them. He picked a clean white towel off the pile and wiped his neck and face. Trying not to look as miserable as he felt, he went to the deserted bar, and fished a beer out of the bath of crushed ice. He swallowed a mouthful, and it was so tart that it made his eyes swim.

Through the tears he realized suddenly that Janine Carpenter was standing beside him.

"You could have done it," she said softly. "But you just gave up." "Story of my life." He tried to sound gay and witty, like Roland, but it came out flat, and self-pityingly.

She seemed about to speak again, then shook her head and walked away.

Graig used Roland's shower and when he came out with the towel around his waist, Roland was in front the full-length mirror adjusting the angle of his beret. his beret was dark maroon with a brass cap-badge above the left ear. The badge was a brutish human head, with the forehead of a gorilla and the same broad flattened nose. The eyes were crossed grotesquely and the tongue, protruded from between negroid lips, like a Maori carving of a war idol.

"When old Great-grandpa Ralph recruited the Scouts during the rebellion," Roland had once explained to Craig, "one of his better-known exploits was to catch the leader of the rebels, and to hang him from the top of an acacia tree. We have taken that as our regimental emblem. - Bazo's hanged head. How do you like it?"

"Charming," Craig had given his opinion. "You always did have such exquisite taste, Roly." Roland had conceived the Scouts three years previously when the sporadic warfare of the earlier days had begun to intensify into the merciless internecine conflict of the present time.

His original idea had been to gather a force of young white Rhodesians who could speak fluent Sindebele and reinforce them with young Matabele who had been with their white employers since childhood, men whose loyalty was unquestionable. He would train black and white elements into an elite strike-force that could move easily through the tribal trust areas amongst the peasant farmers, speaking their language and understanding their ways, able to impersonate innocent tribesmen or.

ZIPRA terrorists at will, able to meet the enemy at the border or drop onto him from the sky and take him on at the most favourable terms.

He had gone to General Peter Walls at Combined Services Headquarters. Of course, Bawu had made the usual phone calls to clear the way, and Uncle Douglas had put a word in Smithy's ear during a cabinet meeting. They had given Roland -the go-ahead, and so Ballantyne's Scouts had been reborn, seventy years after the original troop was disbanded.

In the three years since then, Ballantyne's Scouts had cut their way into legend. Six hundred men who had been officially credited with two thousand kills, who had been five hundred miles over the border into Zambia to hit a ZIPRA training base, men who had sat at the village fires in the tribal trust lands listening to the chatter of the women who had just returned from carrying baskets of grain to the ZIPRA cadres in the hills, men who laid their ambushes and maintained them for five straight days, burying their own excrement beside them, waiting patiently and as unmoving as a leopard beside the water-hole, waiting for yet another good kill.

Roland turned from the mirror as Craig came into the bedroom. The pips of a full colonel sparkled on his shoulders, and over his heart the cluster of the silver cross was pinned below his dog-tab on the crisply ironed khaki bush-shirt.

"Help yourself to what you need, Sonny he invited, and Craig went to the built-in cupboard and selected a pair of flannels and a white cricket sweater with the colours of Oriel College around the neck. It seemed like coming home to be wearing Roland's cast-offs again, he had always been a year behind him. "Mom tells me you've been fired again."

"That's right." Craig's voice was muffled by the sweater over his head.

"There's a billet for you with the Scouts." "Roly, I don't fancy the idea of putting piano wire around somebody's neck and plucking his head off." "We don't do that every day," Roland grinned. "Personally, I much prefer a knife, you can also use it to slice biltong when you aren't slitting throats. But seriously, Sonny, we could use you.

You talk the lingo like one of them, and you are a real buff at blowing things up. We are short of blast bunnies." "When I left King's Lynn I swore an oath that I would never work for anyone in the family again."

"The Scouts aren't family." "You are the Scouts, Roly." "I could have you seconded, you know that?" "That wouldn't work." "No," Roland agreed. "You always were a stubborn blighter. Well, if you change your mind, let me know." He knocked a cigarette half out of its soft pack and then pulled it the rest of the way with his lips. "What do you think of Bugsy?" The cigarette waggled as he asked the question, and he flicked his gold Ronson to it.

"She's all right," Craig said cautiously.

"Only all right?" Roland protested. "Try magnificent, try sensational, wonderful, super-great wax lyrical, for you're talking about the woman I love." "Number one thousand and ten on the list of the women you have loved, Craig corrected.

"Steady, old son, this one I am going to marry." Craig felt a coldness come over his soul, and he turned away to comb his damp hair in the mirror.

"Did you hear what I said? I'm going to marry-her." "Does she know?" "I'm letting her ripen a little before I tell her." "Ask her, don't you mean ask her?" "Old Roly tells "em, he doesn't ask "em. You are supposed to say, "Congratulations, I hope you will be very happy."" "Congratulations, I hope you will be very happy." "That's my boy. Come on, I'll buy you a drink." They went down the long central corridor that bisected the house but before they reached the veranda, a telephone rang in the lobby and they heard Aunty Val's voice. "I'll fetch him. Hold the line please," and then louder, "Roland, darling, it's Cheetah for you." Cheetah was the call-sign of Scout base. "I'm coming, Mom." Roland strode into the lobby and Craig heard him say, "Ballantyne," and then after a short silence, "are you sure it's him?

By Christ, this is the chance we have been waiting for. How soon can you get a chopper here? On its way? Good! Throw a net around the place, but don't go in until I get there. I want this baby myself."

When he came back into the corridor, he was transformed. It was the same look as he had given Craig across the net, cold and dangerous and without mercy.

"Can you get Bugsy back to town for me, Sonny? We are going into a contact." "I'll look after her." Roland strode out onto the veranda.

The last of the tennis guests were dispersing towards their vehicles, gathering up nannies and children as they went, shouting farewells and last-minute invitations for the coming week. There was a time when a gathering like this would not have broken up until after midnight, but now nobody drove the country roads after 4 p.m the new witching hour.

Janine Carpenter was shaking hands and laughing with a couple from the neighbouring ranch.

"I'd love to come over," she said, and then she looked up and saw Roland's expression. She hurried to him.

"What is it?" "We are going in. Sonny will look after you. I'll call you." He was searching the sky, already remote and detached, and then there was the whack, whack, whacking of helicopter rotors in the air and the machine came bustling in low over the kopje. She was painted in dull battle-brown, and there were two Scouts standing in the open belly port, one white and one black, both in bush camouflage and full webbing.

Roland ran down the lawns to meet her as she sank, and before she touched he jumped to link arms with his Matabele sergeant, and swung up into the cabin of the helicopter. As the machine rose and beat away, nose low over the kopje, Craig caught a last glimpse of Roland. He had already replaced the beret with a soft bush hat, and his sergeant was helping him into his camouflage battle-smock.

"Roly said I was to see you home. I take it you live in Bulawayo?" Craig asked, as the helicopter disappeared and the sound of its rotors dwindled. It seemed to take an effort for her to bring her attention back to him.

"Yes, Bulawayo. Thanks." "We won't make it this evening, not before ambush hour. I was going to stay over at my grandpa's place."

"Bawu?" "You know him?" "No, but I'd love to. Roly has kept me in fits with stories about him. Do you think there'd be a bed for me also?"

"There are twenty-two beds at King's Lynn." She perched on the seat of the old Land-Rover beside him, and the wind made her hair shimmer and flutter.

"Why does he call you Bugsy?" Craig had to raise his voice above the engine noise.

"I'm an entomologist," she shouted back. "You know, bugs and things." "Where do you work?" The cool evening air flattened her blouse against her chest, and she was very obviously not wearing a bra.

She had small finely shaped breasts and the cold made her nipples stand out in little dark lumps under the thin cloth. It was difficult not to gawk.

"At the museum. Did you know that we have the finest collection of tropical and sub-tropical insects in existence, better than the Smithsonian or the Kensington Natural History Museum?" "Bully for you."

"Sorry, I can be a bore." "Never." She smiled her thanks, but changed the subject. "How long have you known Roland?" "Twenty-nine years."

"How old are you?" "Twenty-nine." "Tell me about him." "What's to tell about somebody who is perfect?" "Try to think of something," she encouraged him.

"Head boy at Michaelhouse. Captain of rugger and cricket. Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, Oriel scholar. Blues for rowing and cricket, half-blue for tennis, colonel in the Scouts, silver cross for valour, heir to twenty-million-plus dollars. You know, all the usual things."

Craig shrugged.

"You don't like him, "she accused.

"I love him, "he said. "In a funny sort of way." "You don't want to talk about him any more?" "I'd rather talk about you." "That suits me, what do you want to know?" He wanted to make her smile again.

"Start at the time you were born and don't. miss anything out." "I was born in a little village in Yorkshire, my daddy is the local veterinarian." "When? I said not to miss anything." She slanted her eyes mischievously. "What is the local expression for an indeterminate date some time before the rinderpest?" "that was in the 1890s."

"Okay," she smiled again. "I was born some time after the rinderpest."

It was working, Craig realized. She liked him. She smiled more readily, and their banter was light and easy. Perhaps it was just wistful imagination, but he thought he detected the first sexual awareness in her manner, the way she held her head and moved her body, the way she then abruptly he thought of Roland and felt the cold slide of despair.

Jonathan Ballantyne came out onto the veranda of King's Lynn, took one look at her, and went immediately into his role of the lustful rogue.

He kissed her hand. "You are the prettiest young lady that Craig has ever come up with by a street." Some perverse streak made Craig deny it. "Janine is Roly's friend, Bawu." "Ah," the old man nodded.

"I should have known. Too much class for your taste, boy." Craig's marriage had lasted a little longer than one of his jobs, just over a year, but Bawu had not approved of Craig's choice, had said so before the wedding and after it, before the divorce and after it and at every opportunity since then.

"Thank you, Mr. Ballantyne." Janine slanted her eyes at Jonathan.

"You may call me Bawu. "Jonathan gave her his ultimate accolade, made an arm for her and said, "Come and see my Claymore mines, my dear." Craig watched them go off on a tour of the de fences another sure sign of Bawu's high favour.

"He has three wives buried up on the kopje," Craig muttered ruefully, "and is still as randy as an old goat." Craig woke to his bedroom door cracking back on its hinges, and Jonathan Ballantyne's cry.

"Are you going to sleep all day? It's four-thirty already."

"Just because you haven't slept for twenty years, Bawu." "Enough of your lip, boy today's the big day. Get that pretty little filly of Roland's and we'll all go down to test my secret weapon." "Before breakfast?" Craig protested, but excited as a child invited to a picnic, the old man had gone already.

It was parked at a prudent distance from the nearest building.

The cook had threatened to resign if there were any more experiments conducted within blast range of his kitchen. It stood on the edge of a field of ripening seed maize, and it was surrounded by a small crowd of labourers and tractor drivers and clerks.

"What on earth is it?" Janine puzzled, as they crossed the ploughed land towards it, but before anyone could reply, a figure in greasy blue overalls detached itself from the crowd and hurried towards them.

"Mister Craig, thank goodness you are here. You've got to stop him." "Don't be a blithering old idiot, Okky,"Jonathan ordered. Okky van Rensburg had been chief mechanic on King's Lynn for twenty years.

Behind his back Jonathan boasted that Okky could strip down a John Deere tractor, and build up a Cadillac and two Rolls Royce Silver Clouds out of the spare parts. He was a wiry grease-stained little monkey of a man. He ignored Jonathan's injunction to silence.

"Bawu's going to kill himself, unless somebody stops him." He wrung his scarred blackened hands pitifidly.

But already Jonathan was donning his helmet and fastening the strap under his chin. It was the same tin helmet that he had worn on that day in 1916 that he won his Military Cross, and the dent in the side had been made by a shard of German shrapnel. There was an unholy gleam in his eyes as he advanced upon the monstrous vehicle.

"Okky has converted a three-ton Ford truck," he explained to Janine, "lifted the chassis," as though it were on stilts, the vehicle's body stood high above the huge lugged tyres, "put in deflectors here," he pointed out the heavy steel vee-shaped plates under the cab that would split the blast of a land mine "armoured the cab," the body looked like a tiger tank, with steel hatches, a driver's slit and gun ports for a heavy Browning machine-gun, "but look what we have got on top!" At a glance it could have been mistaken for the conning tower of a nuclear submarine, and Okky was still wringing his hands.

"He's got twenty galvanized steel pipes filled with plastic explosive and thirty pounds of ball-bearings each." "Good Lord, Bawu."

Even Craig was horrified. "The damn things will explode!" "He has set them in blocks of concrete," Okky moaned, "and aimed them out on each side just like the cannons on one of Nelson's ships of the line. Ten on each side." "A twenty-gun Ford," Craig breathed with awe.

"When I run into an ambush, I just press the button and boom, a broadside of three hundred pounds of ball, bearings into the bastards," Jonathan gloated openly. "A whiff of grape, as old Bonaparte said."

"He's going to blow himself to hell,"Okky moaned.

"Oh, do stop being an old woman," Jonathan told him. "And give me a leg up." "Bawu, this time I really do agree with Okky." Craig tried to stop him, but the old man went up the steel ladder with the agility of a vervet monkey, and posed dramatically in the hatchway, like the "commander of a panzer division.

"I'll let off one broadside at a time, the starboard side first."

Then his eyes lit on Janine. "Would you like to be my co-pilot, my dear?" "That is astonishingly civil of you, Bawu, but I think I'll get a better view from the irrigation ditch over there." "Then stand back everyone." Jonathan made a wide imperious gesture of dismissal, and the Matabele labourers and drivers who had been witnesses to. Jonathan's previous test took off like a brigade of Egyptian infantry departing from the Six-day War. Some of them were still running as they crossed the ridge of the kopje.

Okky reached the irrigation ditch half a dozen paces ahead of Craig and Janine, and then the three of them cautiously lifted their heads above the bank. Three hundred yards away, the grotesque Ford stood in monumental isolation in the middle of the ploughed land, and from the hatchway Jonathan gave them a cheery wave, and then disappeared.

They covered their ears with both hands and waited. Nothing happened.

"He's chickened out," Craig said hopefully, and the hatch opened again. Jonathan's helmeted head reappeared, his face red with outrage.

"Okky, you son of a bitch, you disconnected the wiring," he roared. "You are fired, do you hear me? Fired!".

"Third time he has fired me this week," Okky muttered morosely.

"It was the only way I could think of to stop him." "Hold on, my dear," Jonathan addressed himself to Janine. "I'll have it connected up in a jiffy." "Don't worry on my account, Bawu" she yelled back, but he had disappeared again.

The minutes passed, each one a separate eternity, and, their hopes gradually rose again.

"It's not going to work." "Let's get him out of there." "Bawu, we are coming to get you," Craig cupped his hands and bellowed. "And you'd better come quietly." He rose slowly out of the ditch, and at that moment the armoured Ford disappeared in a huge boiling cloud of smoke and dust. A sheet of white flame licked over the field of standing maize, scything it flat as though some monstrous combine-harvester had swept across it, and they were enveloped by such an appalling blast of sound, that Craig lost his balance and fell back into the ditch on top of the other two.

Frantically they scrambled to untangle themselves in the bottom of the ditch, and then looked out fearfully again across the ploughed field. The dreadful silence was broken only by the singing in their own ears, and the dwindling yelps of the old man's pack of savage Rottweilers and Dobermann pinschers as they fled in utter panic back up the road towards the homestead. The field was obscured by a dense curtain of drifting blue smoke and red-brown dust.

They climbed up out of the ditch and stared into the smoke and dust, and the breeze blew it gently aside. The Ford lay upon its back.

All four of its massive lugged tyres were pointing to the heavens as though in abject surrender.

"Bawu!" Craig cried and raced towards it. The gaping mouths of the pipe cannons were still oozing oily wreaths of smoke, but there was no other movement.

Craig wrestled the steel hatch open, and crawled into it on his hands and knees. The dark interior stank of acrid plastic explosive burn. " "Bawu!" He found him crumpled in the bottom of the cab, and he knew instantly that the old man was in extremis. The whole shape of his face had altered, and his voice was an unintelligible blur.

Craig caught him up in his arms and tried to drag him towards the hatch, but the old man fought him off with desperate strength, and at last Craig understood what he was saying.

"My teeth, blown my bloody teeth oud" He was back on his hands and knees searching desperately. "Mustn't let her see me, find them, boy, find them." Craig found the missing plates under the driver's seat, and with them once more in place, Jonathan shot out of the hatchway and confronted Okky van Rensburg furiously.

"You made it top-heavy, you Withering old idiot." "You can't talk to me like that, Bawu, I don't work for you any longer. You fired me."

"You're hired," bellowed Jonathan. "Now get that thing right way up again." Twenty sweating, singing Matabele heaved the Ford slowly upright and at last it flopped over onto its wheels again.

"Looks like a banana," Okky remarked with obvious satisfaction.

"The recoil of your cannons has bent it almost double. You'll never get that chassis straight again." "There is only one way to straighten it," Jonathan announced and began tightening the strap of his tin helmet again.

What are you going to do, Jon-Jon?" Craig demanded anxiously. , "Fire the other broadside, of course," said Jonathan grimly.

"That will knock it straight again." But Craig seized one of his arms, Okky the other, and Janine murmured soothingly to him as they led him away to the waiting Land-Rover.

"Can you imagine Bawu reaching for the cigarette lighter and hitting the wrong button while driving down Main Street," Craig chortled, "and letting that lot go through the front doors of the City Hall?" They giggled over it the whole way back to town, and as they drove in past the lovely lawns of the municipal gardens, Craig suggested easily, "Sunday evening in Bulawayo, you could suffer a nervous breakdown from the mad gaiety of it. Let me cook you one of my famous dinners on the yacht, and save you from it." "The yacht?"Janine was instantly intrigued. "Here? Fifteen hundred miles from the nearest salt water?" "I. will say no more," Craig declared. "Either you come with me, or you will forever be consumed by unsatisfied curiosity." "A fate worse than death," she agreed. "And I have always been a good sailor. Let's go!" Craig took the airport road but before they left the builtup area, he turned into one of the older sections of the town. Between two rundown cottages was an empty plot. It was screened from the road by the dense greenery of a row of ancient mango trees. Craig parked the Land-Rover under one of the mango trees, and led her deeper into an unkempt jungle of bougainvillaea and acacia trees, until she stopped abruptly and exclaimed. "You weren't kidding.

It's a real yacht." "They don't come any realer than that," Craig agreed proudly. "Livranos-designed, forty-five feet overall length, and every plank laid by my own lily-whites." "Craig, she's beautiful!"

"She will be one day when I finish her." The vessel stood on a wooden cradle, with baulks of timber chocking the sides. The deep keel and ocean-going hull lifted the stainless steel deck-railings fifteen feet above Janine's head as she ran forward eagerly.

"How do I get up?" "There is a ladder round the other side." She scrambled up onto the deck, and called down. "What is her name?" "She hasn't got one yet." He climbed up into the cockpit beside her. "When will you launch her, Craig?? ""The good Lord knows," he smiled. "There is a mountain of work to be done on her yet, and every time I run out of money, everything comes to a grinding halt." He was unlocking the hatch as he spoke, and the moment he swung it open Janine ducked down the companionway. "It's cosy down here." "This is where I live." He climbed down into the saloon after her and dropped his kit bag on the deck. "I've finished her off below decks, the galley is through there. Two cabins each with double bunks, a shower and a chemical toilet." "It's beautiful," Janine repeated, running her fingers over the varnished teak joinery, and then bouncing experimentally on the couches.

"Beats paying rent, "he agreed. "What remains to be done?" "Not much- engine, winches, rigging, sails, only about twenty thousand dollars" worth. However, I have just soaked Bawu for almost half of that." He lit the gas refrigerator and then selected a tape and put it on the player.

Janine listened to the liquid purling piano for a few moments and then said, "Ludwig van B of course?" "Of course, who else?" Then with slightly less assurance, she said, "The Path& tique Sonata?" "Oh, very good." He grinned as he found a bottle of Zonnebloem Riesling in one of the cupboards, "and the artiste?" "Oh, come on!" "Give it a shot."

"Kentner?" "Not bad, but it's Pressler." She pulled a face to show her mortification, and he drew the cork and half filled the glasses with pale golden wine.

"Here's looking at you, kid." She sipped and murmured, "Mmm!

That's good." "Dinner!" Craig dived back into the cupboard. "Rice and canned stuff. The potatoes and onions are three months old, growing sprouts already." "Macrobiotic" she said. "Good for you. Can I help?"

They worked happily shoulder to shoulder in the tiny galley, and every time they moved they brushed against each other. She smelled of scented soap, and when he looked down on top of her head, her curly hair was so dense and lustrous that he had an almost uncontrollable urge to bury his face in it. Instead he went to look for another bottle of wine.

He emptied four assorted cans into the pot, chopped onions and potatoes over the mixture and spooned in curry powder. He served it on a bed of rice.

"Delicious,"Janine declared. "What do you call it?" "Don't ask embarrassing questions." "When you launch her, where will you sail her?" Craig reached over her head and brought down a chart and an Indian Ocean Pilot from the bookshelves.

"All right." He pointed out a position on the chart. "Here we are anchored in a secluded little cove on an island in the Seychelles. If you look out the porthole you will see the palm trees and the beaches whiter than sugar. Under us the water is so clear that we seem to be floating in air.".

Janine looked out of the porthole. "You know what you are right! There are the palm trees and I can hear guitars." When they finished eating they pushed the dishes aside, and pored over the books and charts.

"Where next? How about the Greek islands?" "Too touristy." She shook her head. "Australia and the Barrier Reef?" "Beauty!" She mimicked an Aussie accent. "Can I go topless, sport?" "Bottomless too, if you want." "Rude boy." The wine had flushed her cheeks, and put a sparkle in her eyes. She slapped his cheek lightly, and he knew he could kiss her then but before he moved, she said, "Roland told me you were a dreamer."

The name stopped him dead. He felt the coldness in his chest, and suddenly he was angry with her for spoiling the mood of the moment. He wanted to hurt her as she had just hurt him.

"Are you sleeping with him?" he asked, and she swayed back and stared at him with shock. Then her eyes slanted like those of a cat, and the rims of her nostrils turned bone white with fury.

"What did you say?" His own perversity would not let him turn back from the precipice, and he stepped out over it.

"I asked if you were sleeping with him." "Are you sure you want to know?" "Yes." "All right, the answer is "yes", and it's bloody marvelous. Okay?" "Okay,"he said miserably.

"Now you can take me home, please." They drove in complete silence except for her terse directions, and when he parked outside the three-storey block of apartments, he noticed that they were called Beau Vallon, the same as the Seychelles beach over which they had fantasized.

She climbed out of the Land-Rover. "I'm grateful for the lift," she said, and walked up the paved path towards the entrance of the building.

Before she reached it, she turned and came back. "Do you know that you are a spoilt little boy?" she asked. "And that you give up on everything, just like you did on the tennis court." This time she disappeared into the entrance of the building without looking back.

When he got back to the yacht, Craig put the charts and books away, then he cleaned the dishes, dried them, and stacked them in their racks. He thought he had left a bottle of gin in one of the cupboards, but he couldn't find it. There wasn't even any of the wine left. He sat in the saloon with the gaslight hissing softly over his head, and he felt numb and empty. There was no point in going to his bunk. He knew he would not sleep.

He unlaced the kit bag the leather-bound journal that Jonathan had loaned him was on top. He opened it and began to read. It had been written in 1860. The writer was Zouga Ballantyne, Craig's great-great-grandfather.

After a while, Craig no longer felt numb and empty, for he was on the quarterdeck of a tall ship, running southwards down the green Atlantic towards a savage enchanted continent.

Samson Kumalo stood in the centre of the dusty track and watched Craig's beaten-up old Land-Rover growl away up the avenue of spathodea trees. When it took the turn past the old cemetery and disappeared, he picked up his bag and opened the garden gate of the staff cottage. He walked around the side of the building, and stopped below the back porch.

His grandfather, Gideon Kumalo, sat on a straight-backed kitchen chair. The walking-stick, carved like a twisted serpent, was propped between his feet and both his hands rested on the head. He was asleep, sitting upright in the uncomfortable chair in the blaze of the white sunlight.

"It is the only way I can get warm, "he had told Samson. His hair was white and fluffy as cotton wool, the little goatee beard on the tip of his chin trembled with each gentle snore of his breathing. His skin seemed so thin and delicate, that it might tear like ancient parchment, and it was the same very dark amber colour. The network of wrinkles that covered it was cruelly exposed by the direct glare of the sun.

Careful not to block the old man's sunlight, Samson climbed the steps, set his bag aside and sat on the half-wall in front of him. He studied his face, and felt again that gentle suffocating feeling of love. it was more than the duty that any Matabele boy was taught to show to his elders, it went beyond the conventions of parental affection, for between the two of them was an almost mystical bond.

For almost sixty years Gideon Kumalo had been the assistant headmaster at Khami Mission School. Thousands of young Matabele boys and girls had grown up under his guidance, but none had been as special to him as his own grandson.

Suddenly the old man started and opened his eyes. They were milky-blue and sightless as those of a newborn puppy. He tilted his head at a blind listening angle. Samson held his breath and sat motionless, fearful that Gideon might have at last lost the sense of perception which was almost miraculous. The old man turned his head slowly the other way, and listened again. Samson saw his nostrils flare slightly as he sniffed the air.

"Is it you?" he asked in a rusty voice, like the squeak of an un oiled hinge. "Yes, it is you, Vundla." The hare has always played a prominent place in African folklore, the original of the legend of Br'er Rabbit that the slaves took to America with them. Gideon had nicknamed Samson after the lively clever little animal. "Yes, it is you, my little Hare!" "Babo!" Samson let his breath out and went down on one knee before him. Gideon groped for his head and caressed it.

"You have never been away," he said. "For you live always in my heart." Samson thought he might choke if he tried to speak. Silently he reached and took the thin fragile hands and held them to his lips.

"We should have a little tea," Gideon murmured. "You are the only one who can make it to my taste." The old man had a sweet tooth, and Samson placed six heaped teaspoons of brown sugar into the enamel mug before he poured the brew from the blackened tin kettle into it.

Gideon cupped his hands around the mug, sipped noisily, and then smiled and nodded.

"Now tell me, little Hare, what has happened to you? I feel something in you, an uncertainty, like a man who has lost the path and seeks to find it again." He listened while Samson spoke, sipping and nodding. Then when he finished talking, he said. "It is time you came back to the Mission to teach. You told me once that you could not teach the young people about life until you learned yourself. Have you learned yet?" "I do not know, Babo. What can I teach them? That death stalks the land, that life is as cheap as a single bullet?" "Will you always live with doubts, my dear grandson, must you always look for the questions that have no answers! If a man doubts everything, then he will attempt nothing. The strong men of this world are the ones who are always certain of their own rightness." "Then perhaps I wIill never be strong, Grandfather." They finished the pot of tea and Samson brewed another. Even the melancholy of their conversation could not dim their pleasure in each other, and they basked in it until at last Gideon asked. "What time is it?" "Past four o'clock." "Constance will be off duty at five. Will you go down to the hospital to meet her?"

Samson changed into jeans and a light blue shirt, and left the old man on the porch. He went down the hill. At the gate of the high security fence that enclosed the hospital, he submitted to the body-search by the uniformed guards, and then went up past the post-operative wards, outside which the convalescent patients in blue dressing gowns sat on the lawn in the sunlight. Many of them had limbs missing, for the Khami Hospital received many of the victims of land-mine explosion and other war injuries. All the patients were black. Khami Hospital was graded as African only.

At the reception desk in the main entrance hall, the two little Matabele nurses recognized him and chittered like sparrows with pleasure. Gently Samson tapped them. for the current gossip of the Mission Station, the marriages and births, the deaths and courtships of this close-knit little community. He was interrupted by a. sharp authoritative voice.

"Samson, Samson Kumalo!" and he turned to see the hospital superintendent striding purposefully down the wide corridor towards him.

Doctor Leila St. John wore a white laboratory-coat with a row of ballpoint pens in the top pocket, and a stethoscope dangling from her neck. Under the open coat was a shapeless maroon sweater "and a long skirt of crumpled Indian cotton in a gaudy ethnic design. Her feet were in thick green men's socks, and open sandals which buckled at the side. Her dark hair was stringy and lank, tied with leather thongs into two tails that stuck out on each side of her head above her prominent ears.

Her skin was unnaturally pale, inherited from her father, Robert St. John. It was pock-marked with the cicatrices of ancient acne. Her horned-rimmed spectacles were square and mannish, and a cigarette dangled from the corner of her wide thin lips. She had a prim, serious old-fashioned face, but the gaze of her green eyes was direct and intense as she stopped in front of Samson and took his hand firmly.

"So the prodigal returns to run off with one of my best theatre sisters, I have no doubt." "Good evening, Doctor Leila." "Are you still playing "boy" to your white settler?" she demanded. Leila St. John had spent five years in detention in Gwelo political prison at the pleasure of the Rhodesian government. She had been there at the same time as Robert Mugabe who, from exile, now led the ZANU wing of the liberation army.

"Craig Mellow is a third-generation Rhodesian on both sides of his family. He is also my friend. He is not a settler." "Samson, you are an educated and highly capable man.

All around you the world is melting in the crucible of change, history is being forged on the anvil of war. Are you content to waste the talents that God gave you and let other lesser men snatch the future from you?" "I do not like war, Doctor Leila. Your father made me a Christian." "Only mad men do, but what other way is there to destroy the insensate violence of the capitalist imperialist system?

What other way to meet the noble and legitimate aspirations of the poor, the weak and the politically oppressed?" Samson glanced swiftly around the entrance hall, and she smiled.

"Don't worry, Samson. You are amongst friends here. True friends." Leila St. John glanced at her wristwatch. "I must go. I will tell Constance to bring you to dinner. We will talk again." She turned abruptly away, and the heels of her scuffed brown sandals clacked on the tiled floor as she hurried towards the double swing doors marked "OutPatients."

Samson found a seat on one of the long benches outside these doors, and waited amongst the sick and lame, the coughing and sniffing, the bandaged and the bleeding. The sharp antiseptic smell of the hospital seemed to permeate his clothes and skin.

Constance came at last. One of the nurses must have warned her, for her head turned eagerly from side to side "and her dark eyes shone excitedly as she searched for him. He savoured the pleasure of seeing her for a moment or two longer before standing up from his seat on the bench.

Her uniform was crisply starched and ironed, the white apron stark upon the pink candy stripes, and her cap was perched at a jaunty angle.

The badges of her grades theatre sister, midwifery, and the others gleamed on her breast. Her hair was pulled up tightly and plaited into intricate patterns over her scalp, an arrangement which took many patient hours to perfect. Her face was round and smooth as a dark moon, the classical Nguni beauty with huge black eyes and sparkling white teeth in her welcoming smile.

Her back was straight, her shoulders narrow but strong. Her breasts under the white apron were good, her waist narrow and her hips broad and fecund. She moved with that peculiar African grace, as though she danced to music that she alone could hear.

She stopped in front of him. "I see you, Samson," she murmured.

Suddenly shy, she dropped her eyes.

"I see you, my heart," he replied as softly. They did not touch each other, for a display of passion in public was against custom and would have been distasteful to both of them.

They walked slowly up the hill together towards the cottage.

Although she was not a blood relative of Gideon Kumalo, Constance had been one of his favourite students before his failing eyesight drove him into retirement. When his wife died, Constance had gone to live with him, to care for him and keep his house. It was there she had met Samson.

Though she chattered easily enough, relating the small happenings that had taken place in his absence, Samson sensed some reserve in her, and twice she glanced back along the path with something of fear in her eyes.

"What is it that troubles you?" he asked, as they paused at the garden gate.

"How did you know-" she began, and then answered herself. "Of course you know. You know everything about me What is it that troubles you?" " "The "boys" are here," Constance said simply, and Samson felt the chill on his skin so that the goose pimples rose upon his forearms.

The "boys" and the "girls" were the guerrilla fighters of the Zimbabwe revolutionary army.

"Here?" he asked. "Here at the Mission?" She nodded.

"They bring danger and the threat of death upon everybody here," he said bitterly.

"Samson, my heart," she whispered. "I have to tell you. I could shirk my duty no longer. I have-joined them at last. I am one of the "girls" now." They ate the evening meal in the central room of the cottage, which was kitchen, dining-room and sitting-room in one.

In place of a table-cloth, Constance covered the scrubbed deal table with sheets of the Rhodesian Herald newspaper. The columns of newsprint were interspersed with columns of blank paper, the editor's silent protest against the draconian decrees of the government censors.

In the centre of it she placed a large pot of maize meal, cooked stiff and fluffy white and beside it a small bowl of tripes and sugar beans.

Then she filled the old man's bowl, placed it in front of him, and put his spoon in his hand, sitting beside him throughout the meal, she tenderly directed his hand and wiped up his spillage.

From the wall the small black and white television set gave them a fuzzy image of the newscaster.

"In four separate contacts in Mashonaland and Matabeleland, twenty-six terrorists have been killed by the security forces in the past twenty-four hours. In addition, sixteen civilians were killed in crossfire and eight others were reported killed in a land-mine explosion on the Mrewa road. Combined Operations Headquarters regret to announce the death in action of two members of the security forces.

The dead were Sergeant John Sinclair of the Ballantyne Scouts--" Constance stood up and switched off the television set, then sat down again and spooned a little more meat and beans into Gideon's bowl.

"It is like a soccer match," she said with a bitterness that Samson had never heard in her voice. "Each evening they give us the score. Terrorists 2. security forces 26, we should fill in the coupons for the pools." Samson saw that she was crying, and could think of nothing to say for her comfort.

"They give us the names and ages of the white soldiers, how many children they leave, but the others are only "terrorists", or 4black civilians". Yet they have mothers and fathers and wives and children also." She sniffed up her tears. "They are Matabele as we are, they are our people. Death has become so easy, so commonplace in this land, but the ones that do not die, those will come to us here our people, with their legs torn from their bodies or their brains damaged so that they become drooling idiots." "War is always crueller when the women and children are in it," Gideon said in his dusty old voice. "We kill their women, they kill ours." There was a soft scratching at the door, and Constance stood up and went quickly to it. She switched out the electric light before she opened it. Outside it was night, but Samson saw the silhouettes of two men in the darkened doorway. They slipped into the room, and there was the sound of the door closing. Then Constance switched on the light.

Two men stood against the wall. One glance was enough for Samson to know who they were. They were dressed in jeans and denim shirts, but there was an animal alertness about them, in the way they moved, in their quick bright restless eyes.

The elder of the two nodded at the other, who went quickly into the bedrooms, searched them swiftly and then came back to check the curtains over the windows, to make certain there was no chink between them. Then he nodded at the other man, and slipped out of the door again. The elder man sat down on the bench opposite Gideon Kumalo. He had finely boned features, with an Arab beakiness to his nose, but his skin was almost purple-black and his head was shaven bald.

"My name is Comrade Tebe," he said quietly. "What is your name, old father?" "My name is Gideon Kumalo. "The blind man looked past his shoulder, his head cocked slightly.

"That is not the name your mother gave you, that is not how your father knew you." The old man began to tremble, and he tried three times to speak before the words came out.

"Who are you? "he whispered.

"That is not important," the man said. "We are trying to find who you are. Tell me, old man, have you ever heard the name Tungata Zebiwe? The Seeker after what has been Stolen, the Seeker after Justice?" Now the old man began to shake so that he knocked the bowl from the table and it rang in narrowing circles on the concrete floor at his feet.

"How do you know that name?" he whispered. "How do you know these things?" "I know everything, old father. I even know a song. We will sing it together, you and I. And the visitor began to sing in soft, but thrilling baritone. "Like a mole in the earth's gut, Bazo found the secret way-" It was the ancient battle hymn of the "Moles" impi, and the memories came crashing back upon Gideon Kumalo. In the way of very old men, he could remember in crystal detail the days of his childhood while the events of the previous week were already becoming hazy. He remembered a cave in the Matopos Hills and his father's never-forgotten face in the firelight, and the words of the song came back to him. "The moles are beneath the earth.

"Are they dead?" asked the daughters of Mashobane." Gideon sang in his scratchy old man's voice, and as he sang, the tears welled up out of his milky blind eyes, and ran unheeded down his cheeks.

"Listen pretty maids, do you not hear Something stirring, in the darkness?" When the song was ended, the visitor sat in silence while Gideon wiped away his tears. Then he said softly, "The spirits of your ancestors call you, Comrade Tungata Zebiwe." "I am an old man, blind and feeble, I cannot respond to them." "Then you must send somebody in your place," said the stranger. "Someone in whose veins runs the blood of Bazo the Axe, and Tanase the witch." Then the stranger turned slowly towards Samson Kumalo who sat at the head of the table, and he looked directly into Samson's eyes.

Samson stared back at him flatly. He was angry. He had known instinctively why the stranger had come. There were few Matabele who were university graduates, or who had his other obvious gifts. He had known for a long time now how badly they wanted him, and it had taken all his ingenuity to avoid them. Now at last they had found him and he was angry at them and at Constance. She had led them to him. He had noticed the way she had kept glancing up at the door during the meal.

He knew now that she had told them that he was here.

On top of his anger he felt a weight of weary resignation. He knew that he could no longer resist them. He knew the risks that it would involve, not for himself alone. These were hard men, tempered in blood to a cruelty that was hard to imagine. He understood why the stranger had spoken first to Gideon Kumalo. It was to mark him. If now Samson refused to bend to them, then the old man was in terrible peril.

"You must send someone in your place." It was the age-old bargain, a life for a life. If Samson refused the bargain, he knew the old man's life was forfeit, and that even then that would not end the affair. They wanted him, they would have him.

"My name is Samson Kumalo," he said. "I am a Christian, and I abhor war and cruelty." "We know who you are," said the stranger. "And we know that in these times there is no place for softness." The stranger broke off as the door was pushed open a slit, and the second stranger who had been on watch outside in the night put his head into the room and said urgently, "Kanka!"Just the one word, "Jackals!" and he was gone. Swiftly the elder stranger stood up, drew a 7.62mm. Tokarev pistol from the waistband of his jeans, and at the same time switched out the light. In the darkness he whispered close to Samson's ear." "The Bulawayo bus station. Two days from today at eight o'clock in the morning." Then Samson heard the latch of the door click, and the three of them were alone. They waited in the darkness for five minutes before Constance said, "They have gone." She switched on the light and began collecting the dishes and balling up the newsprint that had served as a table-cloth.

"Whatever alarmed the "boys" must have been a false alarm. The village is quiet. There is no sign of the security forces." Neither of the men answered and she made mugs of cocoa for them.

"There is a film on television at nine o'clock, The Railway Children." "I'm tired," Samson said. He was still angry with her.

"I am tired also," Gideon whispered, and Samson helped him towards the front bedroom. He looked back from the doorway and Constance gave him such a pathetically appealing glance that he felt his anger towards her falter.

He lay in the narrow iron bed across from the old man, and in the darkness listened to the small sounds from the kitchen as Constance cleaned up and set out-the breakfast for the next morning. Then the door to her small back bedroom closed.

Samson waited until the old man began to snore before he rose silently. He draped the rough woollen blanket over his naked shoulders, left the bedroom and went to Constance's room. The door was unlocked. It swung open to his touch and he heard her sit up quickly in the bed.

"It is me," he said quietly.

"I was so afraid you would not come." He reached out and touched her naked skin. It was cool and velvety soft. She took his fingers and drew him down towards her, and he felt the last vestige of his resentment shrivel away.

"I am sorry," she whispered.

"It does not matter," he said. "I could not have hidden for ever." "You will go?" "If I do not then they will take my grandfather, and that will not satisfy them." "That is not the reason you will go.

You will go for the same reason that I did. Because I had to." The smooth length of her body was as naked as his own. When she moved, her breasts jostled against his chest, and he felt the heat beginning to flow through her.

"Are they taking you into the bush? "he asked.

"No. Not yet. I am ordered to remain here. There is to be work for me here." "I am glad." He brushed her throat with his lips. In the bush her chances would be very slim. The security forces were maintaining a kill-ratio of over thirty to one.

"I heard Comrade Tebe give- you an hour and a place. Do you think they will use you in the bush?" "I do not know. I think they will take me for training first." "This may be our last night together for a long time," she whispered, and he did not reply but traced her spine in its valley of velvety pliant muscle down to the deep cleft of her buttocks.

"I want you to place a son in my womb," she whispered. "I want you to give me something to cherish while we are apart." "It is an offence against law and custom." "There is no law in this land except the gun, there is no custom except that which we care to observe."

Constance rolled under him and clasped him within her long hard limbs.

"Yet in the midst of all this death we must preserve life. Give me your child, my heart, give him to me tonight, for there may be no other nights for us." Samson woke in a blaze of nightmare. Light flooded the tiny room, striking through the threadbare curtain over the single window and casting harsh moving shadows on the bare whitewashed wall.

Constance clung to him. Her body still hot and moist from their loving, and her eyes soft with sleep. From outside a monstrous distorted voice blared orders.

"This is the Rhodesian army. All people are to come out of their houses immediately. Do not run. Do not hide. No innocent person will be harmed. Come out of your houses immediately. Hold up your hands.

Do not run. Do not attempt to hide." "Get dressed," Samson told Constance. "Then help me with the old man." She staggered, still half-asleep, to the corner cupboard and pulled a plain pink cotton shift down over her nude body. Then, barefoot, she followed Samson to the front bedroom. He was dressed only in a pair of khaki shorts and he was helping Gideon to rise. Outside the cottage the loudhailers were screeching in their metallic stentorian voices.

"Come out immediately. Innocent people will not be harmed. Do not run." " Constance spread a woollen blanket over the old man's shoulders, then between them they led him through the living-room to the front porch. Samson unlocked the door and stepped out, holding both hands high, palms forward, and the blinding white beam of a searchlight fixed on him, so that he was forced to protect his face with one hand. "Bring Grandfather." Constance led the old man out of the front door and the three of" them stood close together in a pathetic huddle, blinded by the light and confused by the repeated bellow of the loud-hailer.

"Do not run. Do not attempt to hide." The row of staff cottages had been surrounded. The searchlights beamed out of the darkness and picked out the little family groups of the teachers and nursing staff and their families as they clung together for comfort, most of them covered only with flimsy night-clothes or hastily draped blankets.

From the impenetrable darkness behind the searchlight, figures emerged, moving like panthers, alert and predatory. One of them vaulted over the veranda railing and flattened against the wall, using Samson's body to shield himself from the doorway and the windows.

"Three of you. Is that all?" he demanded in Sindebele. He was a lean, powerful-looking man in battle-smock and jungle hat. His face and hands were painted with night camouflage so it was impossible to tell whether he was black or white.

"Only three, "Samson replied.

The man had an FN rifle on his hip, the barrel swinging slightly to cover them all.

"If there is anybody in the building, say so quickly, otherwise they will be killed." "There is nobody." The soldier called an order and his troopers went in simultaneously through the back and front doors and side windows. They swept through the cottage in seconds, working as a skilled team, covering each other. Satisfied that it was clear, they scattered back into the darkness and left the three on the veranda.

"Do not move," screeched the loudhailers. "Stay where you are."

In the darkness under the spathodea trees Colonel Roland Ballantyne took the unit reports as they came in. With each negative show, his frustration increased. Their information had been good and the scent hot. It was a scent he had followed often before. Comrade Tebe was one of their prime targets. He was a ZIPRA commissar who had been operating within, Matabeleland for almost seven months now. They had been as close to him as this on three other occasions. It always seemed to be the same. The tip from one of the informers or from a member of the Scouts operating under civilian cover. Tebe was in such and such a tide. They would move up silently and surround it, methodically closing every bolt-hole. Then in the darkness and bleakest hour of the night they would go in and sweep. Once they had taken two of his lieutenants, but Tebe was not with them. The regimental sergeant-major of the Scouts, Esau Gondele, had questioned the two terrorists while Roland watched. By dawn neither of them were able to stand up any longer but they had not spoken.

"Use the chopper," Roland ordered.

They hovered at two thousand feet while Sergeant-Major Gondele hung the most defiant terrorist from the belly hatch, holding him by the webbing belt looped under his armpits.

"Tell me, MY friend, where we will find your Comrade Tebe." The man twisted his head up sideways and tried to spit at Esau Gondele, but the down-draught of the spinning rotors had blown his spittle away.

The sergeant-major had glanced at Roland, and when he nodded, opened his fist. The terrorist had fallen two thousand feet, turning slowly end over end. Perhaps he was past screaming or perhaps it was his final defiance, but he was utterly silent during the drop.

Sergeant-Major Gondele had reached for the second terrorist and looped a webbing under his armpits. As he lowered him out of the hatch, his bound feet dangling two thousand feet above the golden Matabele grasslands, the man had looked up and said, "I will tell you."

However, they had held out for just thirty minutes too long. When the Scouts hit the safe house in Hillside Location, Comrade Tebe had moved again.

Roland Ballantyne's frustration was corrosive. The week before, Comrade Tebe had left an explosive device in a supermarket chariot. It had killed seven people, all of them female, two of them under ten years of age. Roland wanted him very badly, so badly that when he realized that once again he had escaped, a kind of heavy black feeling closed down over half his mind.

"Bring the informer," he ordered, and Esau Gondele spoke softly into the portable radio. Within minutes they heard the Land-Rover coming up the hill, and its headlights flickered-through the trees of the forest.

"All right, Sergeant-Major. Get these people lined up." There were sixty or so of them lined up along the verge of the road in front of the long row of staff cottages. The searchlights trapped them in a stark and merciless glare. Colonel Roland Ballantyne vaulted up onto the back of the Land-Rover and held the bull-horn to his lips. He spoke in perfect colloquial Sindebele.

"The evil ones have been amongst you. They have left the stink of death on this village. They have come here to plan destruction, to kill and cripple you and your children. You should have come to us that we might protect you. Because you were afraid to ask for our help, you have brought even greater hardship upon yourselves." The long line of black people, men and women and children still in their night-clothes, stood stolidly and stoically as cattle in the crush.

They were caught between the millstones of the guerrillas on one side and the security forces on the other. They stood in the white searchlights and listened.

"The government is your father. Like a good father it seeks to protect its children. However, there are stupid children amongst you.

Those who conspire with the evil ones, those who feed them and give them news and warn them when we come. We know these things. We know who warned them." At Roland's feet, sitting on the cross-bench of the Lan dRover was a human figure. It was draped from head to foot in a single sheet of cloth so that it was impossible to tell whether it was a man or a woman. There were eye-holes cut in the hood of the cloth.

"We will now smell out the evil ones amongst you, those who give comfort to the dead-bringers," Roland told them. The Land-Rover rolled slowly along the line of villagers, and as it drew level with each man or woman, the soldier shone his flashlight into the person's face at a range of only a few feet. In the open back of the vehicle, the mysteriously robed and masked figure stared out of the eye-holes in the sheet. The dark eyes gleamed in the reflected light of the flashlight as they examined each face.

The veiled informer sat un movingly as the Land-rover came on at a walking pace down towards where Samson and Constance supported the old man between them.

Without moving his lips, Samson asked her, "Is it safe, do they know" you?" "I do not know, "she answered him.

"What can we do-" but by that time-the Land-Rover was drawing level with where they stood, and- Constance did not have time to reply.

In the rear of the vehicle, the masked figure moved for the first time. A long black arm shot out from under the sheet, and pointed directly into Constance's upturned face. Not a word was spoken, but two of the camouflaged Scouts stepped out of the darkness behind her and seized her arms.

"Constance!" Samson ran forward and reached for her. A rifle-butt smashed into his back at the level of his kidneys and flaming agony tore up his spine and burst against the roof of his skull. He dropped to his knees.

Pain distorted his vision, and the flashlight shone into his face, blinding him. He pushed himself upright with a violent effort, but found that the muzzle of an FN rifle was pressed into his stomach.

"We don't want you, my friend. Do not interfere in what does not concern you." The Scouts were leading Constance away. She went docilely. She seemed very small and helpless between the two tall soldiers in full battle-dress. She turned and looked back at Samson.

Her great soft eyes clung to his face and her lips moved.

Then for an instant the body of the Land-Rover blocked the beam of the searchlight. Darkness enveloped the group, and a second later when the searchlight caught them again, Constance had broken away from her captors and she was running.

"No!" screamed Samson in terrible agony. He knew what was about to happen. "Stop, Constance, stop." She flew like a lovely moth in the light, the pink of her dress flitting between the trunks of the spathodea trees, and then the bullets ripped chunks of white wet wood from the trees about her, and she was no longer swift and graceful, it was as though the moth's wings had been shredded by a spiteful child.

Four soldiers carried her body back, each of them holding a leg or an arm. Constance's head hung back almost to touch the ground, and the blood from her nostrils and mouth running down her cheeks was thick and black as treacle in the searchlights. They tossed her up into the back of the Land-Rover, where she lay in a tangle of dark limbs like a gazelle shot on the hunting veld.

Samson Kumalo walked down the main street of Bulawayo. The cool of the night still lingered and the Sshadows of the jacaranda trees threw tiger stripes across the blue macadam surface. He mingled easily with the lazy flow of humanity along the sidewalk, and he made no effort to avert his face as he passed a BSA police constable in his blue and khaki uniform and pith helmet on the corner of the park.

While he waited for the traffic lights, he watched the faces about him. the flat incurious expression of the Matabele, their eyes veiled defensively, the bright young white matrons in pretty floral dresses, going about their shopping with a handbag on one shoulder and a machine-pistol on the other. There were very few white men in the streets, and most of those too old for military service the others were all uniformed and armed.

The traffic that crossed the intersection in front of him was mostly military. Since the imposition of economic sanctions, the gasolene ration had been reduced to a few lit res a month. The farmers coming into town for the day drove the ungainly mine-proofed machines with blast-deflectors and armoured bodies.

Samson was aware for the first time since Constance's death of the true extent of his hatred as he watched their white faces. Before today there had been a numbness in him that was anaesthetic, but that was fading.

He carried no luggage, for a parcel would immediately have attracted attention and invited a body-search. He wore jeans and a short-sleeved shirt and gym shoes no jacket that might have concealed a weapon, and like the other Matabele around him, his face was blank and expressionless. He was armed only with his hatred.

The lights changed and he crossed the road unhurriedly and turned down towards the bus station. Even this early it was crowded. There were patient queues of peasants waiting to make the journey back to the tribal trust lands. All of them were loaded with their purchases, bags of meal and salt, tins of cooking-oil or paraffin, bundles of material and cardboard boxes of other luxuries, of matches and soap and candles. They squatted under the iron roofs of the shelters, chattering and laughing, chewing roasted maize cobs, drinking Coca-Cola, some of the mothers feeding their infants from the breast, or scolding their toddlers.

Every few minutes a bus would draw up in greasy clouds of diesel exhaust, to discharge a horde of passengers, and immediately they were replaced from the endless queues. Samson leaned against the wall of the public latrines. It was the most central position, and he settled himself to wait.

He did not at first recognize Comrade Tebe. He wore a filthy tattered blue overall with "COHEN'S BUTCHERY" embroidered across the back in red letters. His careless stoop disguised his height, and an expression of moronic goodwill made him appear harmless.

He passed Samson without a glance in his direction, and entered the latrine. Samson waited a few seconds before he followed him. The toilet' reeked of cheap tobacco smoke and stale urine. It was crowded and Comrade Tebe jostled against Samson and slipped a blue cardboard ticket into his hand.

In one of the cabinets Samson examined it. It was a single third-class ticket, Bulawayo to Victoria Falls. He took his place in the Victoria Falls queue five places behind Tebe. The bus was thirty-five minutes late, and there was the usual rush to heave luggage up onto the roof racks and find a seat.

Tebe was in a window seat three rows ahead of Samson. He never looked round while the heavily loaded red bus lumbered out through the northern suburbs. They passed the long avenue of jacaranda trees that Cecil Rhodes had planted and which led up to the gabled State House on the hill above the town where once the royal kraal of Lobengula, King of the Matabele, had stood. They passed the turn-off to the airport and reached the first road-block.

Every passenger was forced to dismount and identify his luggage.

It was opened and searched by the constables manning the road-block, and then a random selection of men and women was made for body-searching. Neither Samson nor Tebe was amongst those selected and fifteen minutes later the bus was reloaded and allowed to pass.

As they roared on northwards, the acacia and savannah swiftly gave way to stately forest. Samson crouched on the hard bench and watched it pass. Ahead of him Tebe appeared to be sleeping. A little before noon they reached the stop for St. Matthew's Mission on the Gwaai river at the edge of the Sikumi Forest Reserve. Most of the passengers fetched their luggage down from the roof-racks and trudged away along the web of footpaths that led into the forest.

"We will stop here one hour," the uniformed driver told the others. "You can make a fire and cook your meal." Tebe caught Samson's eye and sauntered away towards the little general dealer's store at the crossroads. When Samson followed him, into the building, he did not at first find Tebe. Then he saw the door behind the counter was ajar, and the proprietor made a small gesture of invitation towards it. Tebe was waiting for him in the back room amongst the piles of maize sacks and dried skins, the cartons of carbolic soap and the crates of cold drinks.

He had shed the ragged overalls, and with them the character of the indolent labourer.

"I see you, Comrade Samson,"he said quietly. "That is my name no longer," Samson answered. "What is your name?" "Tungata Zebiwe." "I see you, Comrade Tungata,"Tebe nodded with satisfaction. "You worked in the Game Department. You understand guns, do you not?" Tebe did not wait for an answer. He opened one of the metal bins of ground meal that stood against the rear wall. He brought out a long bundle wrapped in a green plastic agricultural fertilizer bag and dusted off the powdery white meal. He undid the twine that secured it and handed the weapon that it contained to Tungata Zebiwe, who recognized it instantly. In the early days of the bush war, the security forces had mounted a publicity campaign to tempt informers to report the presence of guerrilla weapons in their villages. They had used television spots and newspaper advertisements. In the remote tribal trust areas they had made massive aerial drops of illustrated pamphlets, all offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of a single one of these.

It was a 7.62mm. automatic Kalashnikov (AK) assault rifle. Tungata took it in his hands and found it surprisingly heavy for its size.

Unlike most NATO weapons, it was made not of metal-stamped components, but of milled steel. butt and stock were of laminated wood.

"These are the magazines." The Rhodesians called it the Banana gun because of these characteristic curved magazines. "Loading the mags," Tebe demonstrated, pushing the short light brass cartridges down into the mouth with his thumb. "Try it." Tungata was immediately competent, he had the second magazine loaded with its full thirty rounds in as many seconds.

"Good," Tebe nodded again, the wisdom of his choice confirmed.

"Now to load the rifle. Like this." He pressed the forward end of the magazine into the receiver slot and then tilted the rear end upwards.

There was a click as the catch engaged.

In less than three minutes Tebe had demonstrated why the AK was the preferred weapon of guerrilla troops the world around. Its ease of operation and its robust construction made it ideal for the task. With a racial sneer, the Rhodesians called it the only "kaffir-proof" weapon in the shop.

"Selector up as far as it will go and it's safe,"Tebe finished the demonstration. "Fully down is semi-automatic. In between is fully automatic." He showed Tungata the two Cyrillic letters stamped in the block. "AB," he said. "Russian for "Automatic". Take it." He handed it to Tungata, and he watched while he loaded and cocked and unloaded swiftly and neatly. "Yes, good. Remember the gun is heavy but it climbs quickly in automatic. Take a firm grip.".

Tebe rolled the weapon into a cheap grey blanket from which it could be freed instantly.

"The owner of this store is one of us," Tebe said. "He is even now loading supplies for us onto the bus. It is time for me to tell you why we are here, and where we are going." When Tungata and Tebe left the general dealer's store and sauntered towards the parked bus, the children had already arrived. There were almost sixty of them, the boys in khaki shirts and short pants, and the girls in blue gyrnslips with the green sash of St. Matthew's Mission School around their waists.

All of -them were bare-footed. They were chattering and giggling with excitement at this unexpected outing, this delightful release from the tedium of the schoolroom. Tebe had said they were the Standard VIII pupils, which meant their average age would be fifteen years. All the girls appeared to be pubescent, full-breasted under the coarse cloth of their school uniforms. Under the direction of their class teacher, a young bespectacled Matabele, they were lining up beside the dusty red bus in an obedient and orderly manner. As soon as he saw Tebe, the teacher hurried to meet him.

"It is as you ordered, Comrade." "What did you tell the fathers at the Mission?" "That it was a field exercise. That we would not return until after dark, Comrade." "Get the children into the bus."

"Immediately, Comrade." The bus' driver with his peaked cap perched authoritatively on his head, began to protest the influx of young passengers, none of them with a ticket, until Tebe stepped up behind him and pressed the Tokarev pistol into his ribs. Then he turned the pale grey of last night's camp-fire ashes and subsided into his seat.

The children scrambled for seats beside the windows, and then looked up with expectant shining faces.

"We are going on an exciting journey," the bespectacled teacher told them. "You must do exactly as you are told. Do you understand?"

"We understand," they replied in dutiful chorus.

Tebe touched the bus-driver on the shoulder with the barrel of the pistol.

"Drive northwards towards the Zambezi river and the Victoria Falls," he ordered softly. "If we should meet a security road-block, stop immediately and behave as you always do. Do you hear?" "Yes," mumbled the driver.

"I hear you, Comrade, and I will obey," Tebe prompted him.

"I hear YOU, Comrade, and I will obey." "If you do not, then you will be the very first to die. I give you my word on it." Tungata sat on the bench seat at the very rear of the bus, with the blanket-wrapped AK on the floorboards at his feet. He had counted the children and made a list. There were fifty-seven of them, of which twenty-seven were girls. As he asked their names, he made his estimate of each one's brightness and leadership potential and marked the best on the list with a star. He was pleased that the bespectacled teacher confirmed his choice. He had selected four of the boys and a girl.

She was fifteen years old, her name was Miriam and she was a slim pretty child with a quick smile and bright intelligent gaze. There was something in her that reminded him of Constance, and she sat beside him on the bench seat so that he could watch her respond to the first session of indoctrination.

While the bus roared on northwards beneath the marvel, ious vaulted roof of the forest, along the straight smooth macadamized highway, Comrade Tebe stood beside the driver's seat facing the upturned fresh young faces.

"What is my name?" he asked-, and then he told them, "I am Comrade Tebe. What is my name?" "Comrade Tebe," they cried.

"Who is Comrade Tebe? Comrade Tebe is your friend and your leader." "Comrade Tebe is our friend and our leader." Question and answer repeated again and again. "Who is Comrade Tungata?" "Comrade Tungata is our friend and our leader." The children's voices took on a strident fervour, and there was a mesmeric glitter in their eyes.

"What is the revolution?" "The revolution is power to the people," they shrieked, like Western children of the same age at a pop concert.

"Who are the people?" "We are the people." "Who is the power?" "We are the power." They swayed in their seats, transported into a state of ecstasy. By this time most of the girls were crying with wild joy.

"Who is Comrade Inkunzi?" "Comrade Inkunzi is father of the revolution." "What is the revolution?" "The revolution is power to the people." The catechism began again, and impossibly they were carried even higher on the wings of political fanaticism. Tungata, himself strangely roused, wondered at the skill and ease with which it was orchestrated. Higher still and higher Tebe carried them, until Tungata found himself shrieking with them in a wonderful catharsis of the hatred and grief which had festered within him since Constance's murder. He was shaking like a man in fever, and when the bus lurched and threw Miriam's slim barely matured -body against him, he found himself instantly and painfully sexually aroused. It was strange, almost religious, madness that overwhelmed them all, and at the end Comrade Tebe gave them the song.

"This is the song which you will sing as you go into battle, it is the song of your glory, it is the song of the revolution." They sang it in their- sweet true children's voices, the girls harmonizing and clapping in spontaneous rhythm. "There are guns across the border And your murdered fathers stir. There are guns across the river And your slave-born children weep. There is a bloody moon arising How long will freedom sleep?" Now at last Tungata felt the tears break from his own eyes and pour in scalding streams down his face.

"There are guns in Angola And a whisper on the wind. There are guns in Maputo And a rich red crop to reap. There's a bloody moon arising How long will freedom sleep?" It left them stunned and exhausted, like the survivors of some terrible ordeal. Comrade Tebe spoke quietly to the bus-driver, and they turned off the main road onto a barely noticeable track into the forest. The bus was forced to slow down to a crawl, as it followed the serpentine track that jinked around the bigger trees and dipped through dry riverbeds. It was dark by the time they stopped. The track had petered out and most of the children were asleep. Tungata went down the bus waking them and moving them out.

The boys were sent to find firewood and the girls set to preparing a simple meal of maize meal and sweet tea. Tebe led Tungata aside and explained to him.

"We have entered the liberated area, the Rhodesians no longer patrol this strip of territory. From here we go on foot. It will be two days to the drifts. You will march in the rear of the column, be alert for deserters. Until we reach the river, there is always the danger from the faint-hearted. Now I will deal with the driver." Tebe led the subdued and terrified man away from the camp, with an arm around his shoulders. He returned alone twenty minutes later, by which time most of the children had eaten and had curled up like puppies on the bare earth beside the fires.

The girl Miriam came to them shyly with a bowl of maize cake and the two men sat close together while they ate. Tebe spoke with his mouth full. "You think them babes." He indicated the sleeping schoolchildren. "Yet they learn swiftly and believe what they are taught without question. They have no concept of death, therefore they know no fear. They obey, and when they die there is no loss of trained men who cannot be replaced. The Simbas used them in the Congo, the VietCong used them against the Americans, they are the perfect fodder on which the revolution is nurtured." He scraped out the bowl. "If any of the girls is to your liking, you may use her. That is one of their duties." Tebe stood up. "You will take the first watch. I will relieve you at midnight." Still chewing, he walked away. At the nearest fire he squatted down beside where Miriam lay 7and whispered something to her. She stood up immediately, and followed him trustingly out of the firelight.

Later, when Tungata patrolled the perimeter of the sleeping camp, he heard a strangled little wail of pain from the darkness where Tebe and the girl lay. Then there was a sound of a blow, and the cry choked off into gentle sobbing. Tungata moved around to the opposite side of the camp, where he did not have to listen.

Before dawn Tungata drove the bus to the brink of the steep watercourse, and then, yelling with delight, the boys pushed it over the edge. The girls helped them gather branches and heap them over the vehicle until it was hidden from even a low-flying helicopter.

They moved out northwards at first light. Tebe took the point, keeping half a kilo metre ahead of the column. The schoolmaster stayed with the children, enforcing the complete silence Tebe had ordered.

Before they had covered a mile, he was sweating through the back of his shirt and his spectacles were misted over. Tungata came up behind them, carrying the AK at the trail, avoiding the footpath, staying in the dappled forest shade, stopping every few minutes to listen, and once every hour doubling back to lie beside the path and make certain they were not followed.

None of the skills of the game-ranger had deserted him. He found himself completely at ease, and in a strange sort of way he was happy.

The future had taken care of itself. He was committed at last. There were no longer any doubts, no guilty sense of duty neglected, and the warrior blood of Gandang and Bazo flowed strongly in his veins.

At noon they rested for an hour. There were no fires and they ate cold maize cake and washed it down with muddy water from a water-hole in the mopani. The water tasted of the urine of the elephants who had bathed in it during the night. When Miriam brought his ration to Tungata, she could not look into his face, and when she walked away she moved carefully, as though favouring an injury.

In the afternoon they began to descend towards the Zambezi river, and the character of the bush altered. The grand forests gave way to more open savannah, and there was profuse sign of wild game. Circling out behind the column, Tungata surprised a solitary old sable antelope bull, with ebony and salt-white body and elegant back-swept horns. He stood noble and proud. Tungata felt a strange affinity with him, and when he took the wind and went away at a gallop, he left Tungata feeling enriched and strengthened.

Tebe halted the column in the middle of the afternoon and told them, "We will be marching -all night. You must rest now." Then for Tungata he drew a sketch-map in the dust with a twig.

"This is the Zambezi. Beyond it is Zambia. They are our allies.

That is where we go. To the west is Botswana and the waterless land.

We are moving parallel to its border, but before we reach the Zambezi we must cross the road between Victoria Falls and Kazungula. The Rhodesians patrol it. We must cross it in darkness. Then beyond it, along this bank of river the Rhodesians have laid their cordon sanitaire. It is a minefield to prevent us using the drifts. It is necessary to reach it at dawn," "How do we cross the minefield?" "Our people will be waiting for us there to take us through. Now rest."

Tungata woke with a hand on his shoulder, and was instantly alert.

"The girl," Tebe whispered. "The girl Miriam, she has run." "Did the schoolteacher not stop her?" "She told him she was going to relieve herself." "She is not important,"Tungata suggested. "Let her go." "She is not important," Tebe agreed. "But the example to the others is important. Take the spoor, "he ordered.

Miriam must have known the geography of this extreme northwestern corner of Matabeleland. Instead of going back, she had struck boldly northwards on the line of their march, clearly she was hoping to reach the Kazungula road while it was still light, and then she would go in to one of the Rhodesian patrols.

"How wise we were to follow her," Tebe whispered, as soon as the line of the spoor was evident. "The bitch would have called the kanka down on us within an hour." The girl had made no attempt to hide her spoor, and Tungata followed it at a run. He was superbly fit, for he had worked beside Craig Mellow in the bloody elephant culls, and ten miles was barely far enough to roughen his breathing. Comrade Tebe matched him stride for stride, leopard-quick and with cruel bleak eyes searching ahead.

They caught Miriam two miles before she reached the road. When she saw them behind her, she simply gave up. She sank onto her knees, and trembled so uncontrollably that her teeth rattled in her jaw. They stood over her, and she could not look up at them.

"Kill her," Tebe ordered softly.

Tungata had known instinctively that it would happen this way, and yet his soul turned leaden and icy.

"We never give an order twice," Tebe said, and Tungata changed his grip on the stock of the AK.

"Not with the rifle,"Tebe said. "The road lies just beyond those trees. The Rhodesians could be here in minutes." He took a clasp-knife from his pocket and handed it to Tungata. Tungata propped his rifle against a mopani trunk, and opened the knife. He saw that the point of the blade had been snapped off, and when he tested the edge with his thumb, he found that Tebe had deliberately dulled the edge by rubbing it against a stone.

He felt appalled and sickened by what he was expected to do, and the manner in which he was expected to do it. He tried to hide his emotions, for Tebe was watching him curiously. He understood that he had been set a test, trial by cruelty, and Tungata knew that if he failed it, then he was as doomed as was the child, Miriam. Still stony-faced, Tungata pulled the leather belt from the loops of his jeans and used it to strap the girl's wrists together behind her back.

He stood behind her so that he did not have to look into the dark terrified eyes. He placed his knee between her shoulder-blades and pulled her chin back to expose the slender throat. Then he glanced once more at Tebe for a reprieve. There was no mercy there, and he began to work.

It took some minutes, with the damaged blade and the child struggling wildly, but at last the carotid artery erupted and he let her fall forward on her face. He was panting and bathed in his own rancid-smelling sweat, but the last vestiges of his previous existence as Samson Kurnalo were burned away. At last he was truly Tungata Zebiwe, the Seeker after what has been Stolen the Seeker after Vengeance.

He broke a bunch of leaves off the nearest mopani sapling and scrubbed his hands with it. Then he cleansed the blade by stabbing it into the earth. When he handed the knife back to Comrade Tebe, he met his eyes unflinchingly, and saw in them a spark of compassion and understanding.

"There is no going back now," Tebe said, softly. "At last you are truly one of us." They reached the road a little after midnight, and while the schoolmaster held the children in a quiet group in a copse beside it, Tebe and Tungata swept the verges for a kilo metre in both directions, in case the Rhodesians had laid an ambush. When they found it clear, they took the children across at the point which Tungata had chosen where hard gravel approaches would hold no signs. Then Tungata went back and carefully swept the road surface with a broom of grass.

They reached the cordon sanitaire before the light. The minefield was forty miles long and one hundred yards deep. It contained over three million explosive devices, of various types, from the Claymores on trip-wires, to the plastic antipersonnel mines which would take off a limb, but would seldom kill outright. The object was to leave the enemy with a casualty to succour and nurse, a casualty who would never again be a fighting warrior.

The edge of the minefield was marked by a line of enamel discs set on stakes or nailed to the trunks of trees. They bore a red skull and crossbones device and the words "Danger Minefield." Tebe ordered the children to lie flat in the dense brown grass, and to draw the stalks over them as concealment from the air. Then they settled to wait and Tebe explained to Tungata. "The AP mines are laid in a certain pattern.

There is a key to the pattern, but it is very difficult to discover and often there are deliberate flaws in it. It requires great skill and iron courage to enter the field and pick up the pattern, to identify exactly at which point one has come in, and to anticipate the sequence. The Claymores are different and need other tricks." "What tricks are those?" "You will see when our guide comes." But he did not come at dawn.

At noon Tebe said, "We can only wait. It is certain death to go into the field alone." There was no food or water, but he would not let the children move. "It is something they would have had to learn anyway." He shrugged. "Patience is our weapon The guide came in the late afternoon. Even Tungata did not know he was close until he was amongst them.

"How did you find us?" "I cast along the edge of the road until I found where you had crossed." The guide was not much older than any of the hijacked schoolchildren, but his eyes were those of an old man for whom life had no surprises left.

"You are late,"Tebe accused.

"There is a Rhodesian ambush on the drifts," the guide shrugged.

"I had to go around." "When can you take us through?" "Not until the dew falls." The guide lay down beside Tungata. "Not until the morning." "Will you explain to me the pattern of the mines?" Tungata asked, and the boy glanced across at Tebe. He nodded his permission.

"Think of the veins in the leaf of the mopani," the guide began, and drew the lines in the dust. He talked for almost an hour with Tungata nodding and asking an occasional question.

When he had finished speaking, the boy laid his head on his folded arms and did not move again until dawn the following morning. It was a trick that they all learned, the trick of instant sleep and instant awakening. Those who did not learn it never lasted very long.

As soon as the light was strong enough, the guide crawled to the edge of the field. Tungata followed him closely. In his right hand the guide carried a sharpened spoke from a bicycle wheel, in the other a bunch of yellow plastic strips cut from a cheap shopping-bag. He crouched low against the earth, his head cocked like a sparrow.

"The dew," he whispered. "Do you see it?" and Tungata started. just a few paces in front of them a string of sparkling diamond drops seemed suspended in the air a few inches above the earth." The almost invisible trip-wire of a Claymore was lit up for them by its necklace of dew and by the first low rays of the sun. The guide marked it with a yellow strip and began to probe with the bicycle spoke. Within seconds he hit something in the loose friable earth, and with gentle fingers swept clear the grey circular top of an AP mine. He stood with it between his toes and reached out to probe again. He worked with amazing speed, and found three more mines.

"So, we have found the key," he called to Tungata who lay at the edge of the field. "Now we must be quick, before the dew dries." The young guide crawled boldly down the passageway to which he had discovered the entrance. He marked two more Claymore trip-wires before he reached the invisible turn in the passage. Here he probed again, and as soon as he confirmed the pattern, turned into the next zigzag.

It took him twenty-six minutes to open and mark the passage through to the far edge of the field. Then he came back and grinned at Tungata. "Do you think you can do it now?" "Yes," Tungata replied without conceit, and the boy's cocky grin faded.

"Yes, I think you could but always watch for the wild one. They put it there on purpose. There is no way to guard against it, except care." He and Tungata took the children through in groups of five, making them hold hands. At each Claymore, Tungata or the guide stood with a foot on each side of the trip-wires to make certain not one of them touched it as they passed.

On the last journey through, when Tungata was less than a dozen paces from safety, but while he was straddling the final trip-wire, they all heard the throb of an aircraft engine. It was coming up-river from the direction of the Victoria Falls, and it grew rapidly in volume. Tungata and the last three children were in the open. The temptation to run was almost irresistible.

"Do not move," the young guide called desperately. "Stay still, crouch down." So they knelt in the middle of the open minefield, and the fine steel wire with its single plastic strip marker ran through the crotch of Tungata's legs. He was an inch away from violent death.

The aircraft noise built up swiftly, and then it roared over the tree-tops between them and the river. It was a silver-painted Beechcraft Baron with the letters "RUAC" in black upon the fuselage.

"Rhodesian United Air Carriers," the guide identified it. "They take rich capitalist pig tourists to see the Smoke that Thunders." The machine was so low and close that they could see the pilot chatting to the woman passenger beside him, and then the plane banked away and was hidden again by the fronds of the ivory-nut palms growing along the banks of the Zambezi river. Slowly Tungata straightened up. He found his shirt was sticking to his body with perspiration.

"Move," he said to the child beside him. "But carefully." At the Victoria Falls the entire Zambezi river plunges over a precipitous ledge, and falls in a turmoil of thundering spray into the narrow gorge far below, giving it the African name "the Smoke that Thunders."

A few miles up-river from this incredible phenomenon, the drifts begin. For forty miles, up as far as the little border post at Kazungula, the wide river tumbles through rapids and then spreads into dawdling shallows. There are twelve places at which oxen can drag a wagon through to the north bank, or a man can wade across if he is willing to chance the Zambezi crocodiles, some of which weigh a ton and can tear the leg off a buffalo and swallow it whole.

"They have an ambush on the drifts," the skinny little guide told Tungata. "But they cannot guard them all. I know where they were this morning, but they may have moved. We will see." "Go with him," Tebe ordered, and Tungata accepted it as a mark of trust.

That morning he learned from the little guide that to survive it was necessary to use all the senses, not merely the ears and the eyes.

The two of them moved in on the approaches to the nearest drift. They moved an inch at a time, searching and listening, sweeping the dense riverine scrub and the tangled lianas beneath the water-fattened trunks of the forest. The guide's touch alerted Tungata, and they lay shoulder to shoulder on a bed of damp leaf-mould, utterly still but tense as coiled adders. It was only minutes later that Tungata realized that beside him the guide was snuffling the air. When he placed his lips on Tungata's ear, his whisper was a breath only.

"They are here." Gently he drew Tungata back, and when they were clear he asked. "Did you smell them?" Tungata shook his head, and the guide grinned. "Spearmint. The white officers cannot understand that the smell of toothpaste lingers for days." They found the next drift unguarded, and waited for darkness to take the children across, making them hold hands to form a living chain. On the far bank the guide would not let them rest. Although the children were shivering with cold in their sodden clothing, he forced them on.

"We are in Zambia at last, but we are not yet safe," he warned.

"The danger is as great here as it is on the south bank. The kanka cross at will, and if they suspect us, they will come in hot pursuit."

He kept them marching all that night, and half the following day, by which time the children were dragging and whining with hunger and fatigue. In the afternoon, the path brought them suddenly out of the forest to the wide cut of the main railway-line, and beside the track were half a dozen crude huts of canvas and rough-hewn poles. In the siding stood two cattle trucks.

"This is the ZIPRA recruiting-post," the guide explained. "For the moment you are safe." In the morning while the children were embarking into one of the cattle trucks, the skinny guide came to Tungata.

"Go in peace, Comrade. I have an instinct for those who will survive, and for those who will die in the bush. I think you will live to see the dream of glory fulfilled." And he shook hands, the alternate grip of palm and thumb which was the sign of respect. "I think we will meet again, Comrade Tungata." He was wrong. Months later, Tungata heard that the skinny little guide had walked into an ambush at the drifts. With half his stomach shot away, he had crept into an ant bear hole and kept them off until his last round was fired. Then he had pulled the pin of a grenade and held it to his own chest.

The camp was two hundred miles north of the Zambezi. There were fifteen hundred recruits housed in the thatched barracks. Most of the instructors were Chinese. Tungata's instructor was a young woman named Wan Lok. She was short and broad, with the sturdy limbs of a peasant.

Her face was flat and sallow, her eyes slitted and bright as those of a mamba, and she wore a cloth cap over her hair, and a baggy cotton uniform like a suit of pyjamas.

On the first day she made them run forty kilometres in the heat, carrying a forty-kilo pack. Equally burdened, she kept easily ahead of the strongest runners, except when she doubled-back to harangue and chivy on the stragglers. By that evening Tungata was no longer supercilious and scornful of being taught by a woman.

They ran every day after that, then they drilled with heavy wooden poles, and learned the discipline of Chinese shadow-boxing. They worked with the AK assault rifles until they could field-strip them while blindfolded and reassemble them in under fifteen seconds. They worked with the RPG-7 rocket-launchers and the grenades. They worked with bayonet and trench-knife. They learned to lay a land mine and how to boost it with plastic explosive to destroy even a mine-proofed vehicle. They learned how to set a mine under the black top of a macadamized highway by tunnelling in from the verge. They learned to lay out an ambush on a forest path, or along a main road. They learned how to make a running defence in front of a superior fire force while delaying and harassing it, and they did all this on a daily ration of a scoop of maize meal and a handful of dried kapenta, the smelly little fish from Lake Kariba, that looked like English whitebait.

Zambia, their host country, had paid a high price for supporting their cause. The railway-line to the south that crossed the bridge over the Victoria Falls had been closed since 1973, and Rhodesian task forces had attacked and destroyed the bridges into Tanzania and Maputo, which were land-locked Zambia's only remaining lifeline to the outside world. The rations offered the guerrillas were sumptuous fare compared to those of the average Zambian citizen.

Starved to the leanness of greyhounds, and worked to the hardness of iron, half their nights were spent in the political rallies, the endless chanting and singing, and shouted massed responses to the commissar's catechism.

"What is the revolution?" "The revolution is power to the people."

"Who are the people?" "Who is the power?" After midnight they were allowed to stagger away to the thatched barracks and sleep until the instructors woke them again at four o'clock in the morning.

After three weeks, Tungata was taken to the sinister isolated hut beyond the camp periphery. Surrounded by instructors and political commissars, he was stripped naked and forced to "struggle." While they shrieked the foulest abuse at him, calling him "running dog of the racist capitalists" and "counter-revolutionary" and "imperialist reactionary', Tungata was driven to strip his soul as bare as his body.

He shouted aloud his confessions, he told them how he had worked with the capitalist tyrants, how he had denied his brethren, how he had doubted and back-slid and harboured reactionary and counter-revolutionary thoughts, how he had lusted for food and sleep, and had betrayed the trust of his comrades. They left him utterly exhausted and broken on the floor of the hut, then Wan Lok took him by the hand, as though she were his mother and he her child, and led him stumbling and weeping back to the barracks.

The next day he was allowed to sleep until noon and awoke feeling serene and strong. In the evening at the political rally, he was called to take his place in the front rank amongst the section-leaders.

A month later, Wan Lok summoned him to her sleeping hut in the instructors" compound. She stood before him, a dumpy squat figure in her rumpled cotton uniform.

"Tomorrow you are going in," she said, and took the cloth cap from her head.

He had never seen her hair before. It fell to her waist, as thick and black and liquid as a spill of crude oil.

"You will not see me again, "she said, and unbuttoned the front of her uniform. Her body was the colour of butter, hard and immensely powerful, but what startled and intrigued Tungata was that her pubic hair was as straight as that upon her head, without any kinking or curling. It excited him inordinately.

"Come," she said, and led him to the thin mattress on the dirt floor of the hut.

They did not use the drifts on the return but they crossed the Zambezi in dugout canoes at the point where the river flowed into the immensity of Lake Kariba. In the moonlight the stark silhouettes of the drowned trees were silver and tortured as the limbs of lepers against the starry sky.

There were forty-eight of them in the cadre, under a political commissar and two young but battle-tempered captains. Tungata was one of the four section-leaders with ten men under him. Each of them, even the commissar, carried a sixty-kilo load beneath which they toiled like pregnant hunchbacks. There was no place for food in their packs, so they lived on lizards and bush rats, and the half-incubated eggs of wild birds. They competed with the hyena and vulture at lion kills for the putrefying scraps, and at night they visited the kraals of the black peasant farmers and emptied the grain bins.

They crossed the Chizarira Hills and struck southwards through trackless forest and waterless wilderness until they hit the Shangani river. They followed it southwards still, passing within a few kilometres of the lonely monument in the mopani forest which marks the spot where Allan Wilson and his patrol made their last heroic but futile stand against the impi of Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, brother of the last Matabele. king, Lobengula.

When they came to the lands of the white farmers, their work began. On the dirt roads they laid the heavy land mines that they had carried so far upon their backs. Freed of this onerous burden, they attacked the isolated white homesteads.

They hit four farmhouses in a single week, secure in the knowledge that the security forces were no longer moving to the rescue of a beleaguered homestead during the hours of darkness because they were aware that the attackers mined all the approach roads before commencing an attack. So the guerrillas had all night to finish the job and escape.

The technique was highly developed by this time. At dusk they poisoned the dogs and cut the ring-wire. Then they fired rockets into the windows and doorways and rushed the breaches they had made. At two farms they were held off by a dogged defence, but at the other two they penetrated. The horrors that they left behind them were a deliberate provocation to the rescuers who would come in at first light. What they found might drive the security forces to take out their shock and rage and frustration on the local black population, and in doing so drive them into the ZIPRA camp.

At last, after six weeks in the field, low on ammunition and explosives, they began to pull back, laying ambushes as they withdrew.

They abandoned the first ambush after two fruitless days. However, at the second ambush on a remote country road, they were lucky.

They trapped a white farmer who was rushing his wife, suffering from a peritonitis following a burst appendix, to the local hospital.

The farmer had his two teenage daughters in the vehicle with him. He almost broke through the ambush, but as the armoured vehicle passed Tungata's position, he jumped up and ran into the road behind it. He hit it in the soft rear section with an armour-piercing RPG7 rocket at point-blank range.

The farmer and his eldest daughter were killed in the blast, but his sick wife and the younger daughter were still alive. The political commissar let the "boys" have the dying women. They queued up and took them in the road beside the shattered vehicle, one after the other.

When Tungata did not join the line, the commissar condescended to explain, "When a honey guide leads you to the hive, you must leave him a piece of the comb. Since the beginning of history, rape has always been one of the rewards of the conquerors. It makes them fight better, and it will madden the enemy." They left the road that night and moved back into the hills, back towards the lake and sanctuary.

Ballantyne's Scouts caught them in the middle of the following afternoon. There was very little warning. just a tiny Cessna 210 spotter plane circling high overhead, and while the commissars and the captains were still shouting the orders to deploy and set up a perimeter, the Scouts came in.

The delivery vehicle was an ancient twin-engined Dakota that had seen service in the Western Desert during World War II. It was painted with grey non-reflective paint to thwart the infra-red seekers of SAM-7 missiles. It flew so low that it seemed to scrape the ragged rocky crests of the kopjes, and as its shadow momentarily blotted out the sun, the fighting men spewed out of the gaping belly-port.

The olive-green umbrellas of their parachutes popped open only seconds before they hit the ground. As the silk flared, they were down. They landed on their feet, and even before the parachutes settled softly in billowing folds, they had snapped their harnesses and were running forward, firing.

"The commissar and both veteran captains were killed within the first three minutes, and the Scouts swept forward, rolling up the green panic-stricken guerrillas against the foot of the kopje. Tungata, acting without conscious thought, gathered the men closest to him and led them in a desperate counter-attack down a shallow don ga that bisected the line of Scouts.

He heard the Scout commander give the order on the bull-horn.

"Green and red, hold on your position, blue, clean out that gulley."

The distorted voice echoed against the hills, but Tungata recognized it. He had last heard it at Khami Mission on the night Constance was murdered. It turned him cold "and clear thinking.

He judged his moment finely, and then pulled out of the don ga under the whipping crackle of the FNs. His calm steadied the men with him, and he started the running defence as Wan Lok had taught him.

They were in contact for three hours, in contact with Oite battle-hardened troops, and Tungata kept his little band in hand and they counterattacked and laid AP mines behind them and held at every natural strongpoint, until it was dark. Then Tungata broke off the contact and pulled his men out. By that time there were only eight of them left and three of these were wounded.

Seven days later, in the morning before the dew dried, Tungata opened a passage through the cordon sanitaire, probing with a bayonet until he found, the key to the pattern, and he took his men across the drifts. There were only five of them left. None of the wounded had been able to stand the pace, and Tungata had personally finished them with the commissar's Tokarev pistol to save them being interrogated by the pursuers.

In the town of Livingstone, on the north bank of the Zambezi opposite the Victoria Falls, Tungata reported to ZIPRA headquarters, and the commissar was astonished.

"But you were all killed. The Rhodesians claimed on the television.-" A driver in a black Mercedes with the party flag fluttering on the bonnet took Tungata up to the Zambian capital of Lusaka, and there in a safe house on a quiet street he was ushered into a sparsely furnished room where a man sat alone at a cheap pine desk.

"Babo!" Tungata recognized him immediately. "Nkosi nkulu! Great Chief)" The man laughed, a throaty bellow of sound. "You may call me that when we are alone, but at other times you must call me Comrade Inkunzi." Inkunzi was the Sindebele word for a bull. It suited the man admirably. He was huge, with a chest like a beer-keg and a belly like a sack of grain. His hair was thick and white, all the things that the Matabele venerate, physical size and strength and the hair of age and wisdom.

"I have watched you with interest, Comrade Tungata. Indeed, it was I that sent to fetch you." "I am honoured, Babo." "You have richly repaid my faith." The big man settled lower in his chair and linked his fingers over the bulk of his stomach. He was silent for a while, studying Tungata's face, then abruptly he asked, "what is the revolution?" The reply, so often repeated, came instantly to Tungata's lips.

"The revolution is power to the people." Comrade Inkunzi's delighted bull-bellow crashed out again.

"The people are mindless cattle," he laughed. "They would not know what to do with power if anyone was fool enough to let them have it! No, no! It is time you learned the true answer." He paused, and he was no longer smiling. "The truth is that the revolution is power to the chosen few. The truth is that I am the head of those few, and that you, Commissar Comrade Tungata, are now one of them." Craig Ballantyne parked the Land-Rover and switched off the engine. He twisted the rear-view mirror on its goose-neck and used it to adjust the angle of his peaked uniform cap. Then he looked around at the elegant new building that housed the museum. It stood in the middle of the botanical gardens, surrounded by tall palms and green lawns and bright beds of geraniums and sweet-peas.

Craig realized that he was putting off the moment and clenched his jaw determinedly. He left the Land-Rover in the car park and climbed the front steps of the museum.

"Good morning, Sergeant. "The girl at the enquiries desk recognized the three stripes on the sleeve of his khaki and navy blue police uniform. Craig still felt vaguely ashamed of his rapid promotion.

"Don't be damned silly, boy," Bawu had growled when he protested at the family influence. "It's a technical appointment, Sergeant Armourer." " Craig gave the girl his boyish grin, and her expression warmed instantly. "I'm looking for Miss Carpenter." "I'm sorry. I don't know her." The girl looked unhappy at having to disappoint him.

"But she works here, "Craig protested. "Janine Carpenter." "Oh, she brightened. "You mean Doctor Carpenter. Is she expecting you?"

"Oh, I'm sure she knows I'm coming, "Craig assured her. "She is in Room 2." Up the stairs, turn left, through the door that says "Staff Only", and it's the third door on the right. Craig pushed the door open at the invitation of "Enter!" that greeted his knock. It was a long narrow room with skylights and fluorescent tubes overhead and the walls lined as high as the ceiling with shallow drawers, each with a pair of bright brass handles.

Janine stood at the bench table which ran down the centre of the room. She was dressed in blue jeans and a brightly checked lumberjack's woollen shirt.

"I didn't know you wore glasses," Craig said. They gave her an air of owlish erudition, and she whipped them off her face and hid them behind her back.

"Well!"she greeted him. "What do you want?" "Look," he said, "I just had to find out what an entomologist does. I had this bizarre picture of you wrestling with tsetse flies and beating locusts to death with a club." He closed the door quietly behind him and kept talking as he sidled up to the table beside her. "I say, that looks interesting!"

She was like an affronted cat, back arched and every hair upon it erect, but slowly she relaxed.

"Slides," she explained reluctantly. "I am setting up microscopic slides." And then with fresh irritation in her voice, "You know, you show the typical prejudice of the ignorant and uninformed layman. As soon as anyone mentions insects, you immediately think of pests like locusts and disease-carriers like tsetse flies." "Is that wrong?" "Hexapoda is the largest class of the largest animal phylum, Arthropoda. It has literally hundreds of thousands of members, most of which are beneficial to man, and the pests are in the vast minority."

He wanted to take her up on the "vast minority" as a contradiction in terms, but his good sense for once prevailed. Instead he said, "I never thought of that. How do you mean beneficial to man?" "They pollinate plants, they scavenge and control pests, and they serve as food-" She was away, and after a few minutes, Craig's interest was no longer feigned. Like any dedicated specialist, she was fascinating while talking in her chosen field. Once she realized that he was a receptive and sympathetic audience, she became even more articulate.

The banks of shallow drawers contained the collection which she had boasted on their first meeting was the finest in the world. She showed Craig microscopic feather winged beetles of the family Pdhidae which were a mere one hundredth of an inch long and compared them" to the monstrous African Goliath beetles. She showed him insects of exquisite jewelled beauty and others of repulsive ugliness. She showed him insects that imitated orchids and flowers and sticks and tree bark and snakes. There was a wasp that used a pebble as a tool, and a fly that, like a cuckoo, placed its eggs in the nest of another. There were ants that kept aphids as milk cows and farmed crops of fungus.

She showed him insects that lived in glaciers and others that lived in the depths of the Sahara, some that lived in seawater and even larvae that existed in pools of crude Petroleum where they devoured other insects trapped in the glutinous liquid.

She showed him dragonflies with twenty thousand eyes and ants. that could lift a thousand times their own body weight, she explained bizarre forms of nutrition and reproduction, and such was her rapture that she forgot her -vanity and put the horn-rimmed spectacles back on her nose. She looked so cute that Craig wanted to hug her.

At the end of two hours, she removed the spectacles and faced him defiantly. "Okay," she said. "So I am primarily the curator of the collection of Hexapoda, but at the same time I am also a consultant to the Departments of Agriculture, Wildlife and Nature Conservation and Public Health. That's what entomologists do, mister now what the hell do you do?" "What I do is I go around inviting entomologists to lunch." "Lunch?" She looked vague. "What is the time? My God, you've wasted my entire Saturday morning!" "T-bone steaks," he wheedled. "I have just been paid." "Perhaps I am lunching with Roly,"she told him cruelly. "Roly is in the bush." "How do you know that?" "I phoned Aunty Val at Queen's Lynn to check." "You crafty blighter." She laughed for the first time. "Okay, I give up. Take me to lunch." The steaks were thick and juicy and the beer was icy cold, with dew running down the glass. They laughed a lot and at the end of the meal he asked, "What do entomologists do on Saturday afternoons?" "What do police sergeants do? "she countered.

"They go sleuthing up their family antecedents in weird and wonderful places want to come along?" She knew all about the Land-Rover by now, so she put a silk scarf around her head and dark glasses over her eyes to protect them from the wind, and Craig restocked the cool box with crushed ice and beer. They drove out into the Rhodes Matopos National Park, into the enchanted hills where once the Umlimo had held sway and the Matabele had come for succour and sanctuary in the times of tribal disasters. The beauty of the place struck Janine to the heart.

"The hills look like those wonderful fairy castles along the banks of the Rhine." In the valleys there were herds of wild antelope, sable and kudu, as tame as sheep. They barely lifted their heads as the Land-Rover passed and then returned to graze.

It seemed that they had the hills to themselves, for few others would risk being alone on these dirt-surfaced roads in the very stronghold of Matabele tradition, but when Craig parked the Land-Rover in a shady grove beneath a massive bald dome of granite, an old Matabele guardian in the suntans and slouch hat of the Park Board came down to meet them and escort them as far as the gates that bore the inscription. "Here are buried men who deserve well of their country."

They climbed to the summit of the hill and there, guarded by stone sentinels of natural granite and covered by a heavy bronze plaque, they found the grave of Cecil John Rhodes.

"I know so little about him,"Janine confessed.

"I don't think anybody knew much about him," Craig said. "He was a very strange man, but when they buried him, the Matabele gave him the royal salute. He had some incredible power over other men." They went down the far side of the hill to the square mausoleum of stone blocks with its bronze frieze of heroic figures.

"Allan Wilson and his men," Craig explained, "they exhumed their bodies from the battlefield on the Shangani, and reburied them here."

On the north wall of the memorial were the names of the dead and Craig ran his finger down the graven roll of honour and stopped at one name.

"The Rev. Clinton Codrington," he read it aloud. "He was my great-great-grandfather, a strange man, and his wife, my great-great-grandmother was a remarkable woman indeed. The two of them, Clinton and Robyn, founded the Mission Station at Khami. A few months after he was killed by the Matabele, she married the commander of the column who had ordered Clinton to his death, an American chap called St. John. I bet there was some interesting hanky panky there! A bit of hithering and thithering, a touch of to-ing and fro-ing "They used to do it even in those days?" Janine asked. "I thought it was a recent invention." They wandered on around the side of the hill and came to another grave. Over the grave stood a misshapen and dwarfed ms asa tree that had taken precarious hold in a fault in the solid granite. Like the one on the summit, this grave also was covered by a heavy plate of weathered bronze, but the inscription read. "Here lies the body of SIR RALPH BALLANTYNE, FIRST PRIME MINISTER OF SOUTHERN

RHODESIA.

He deserves we'll of his country." "Ballantyne,"she said. "Must be an ancestor of Roly's." "A mutual ancestor of both of ours," Craig agreed. "Our great-grandfather, Bawu's papa. This is the real reason why we have driven out here." What do you know about him?" "A great deal, actually. I have just finished reading his personal journals.

He was quite a lad. If they hadn't knighted him, they would probably have had to hang him. By his own secret confessions, he was an unqualified rogue, but a colourful one." "So that is where you get it from," she laughed. "Tell me more "Funny things." he was a sworn enemy of that other old rogue up there." Craig pointed up the hill towards Cecil Rhodes" grave. "And here they are buried almost side by side. Great-grandpa Ralph writes in his journal that he discovered the Wankie coal field but Rhodes cheated him out of it. He swore an oath to destroy Rhodes and his Company, he actually wrote that down! I'll show you! And he boasts that he succeeded. In 1923 the rule of Rhodes" British South Africa Company came to an end. Southern Rhodesia became a British colony, old Sir Ralph was its prime minister. He had made good his threat." They sat down, side by side, on the curbstone of the grave and he told her the-funniest and most interesting of the stories that he had read in the secret journals, and she listened with fascination.

"It's strange to think that they are a part of us and we a part of them," she whispered. "That everything that is happening now had its roots in what they did and said." "Without a past there is no future," Craig repeated the words of Samson Kumalo, then went on, "that reminds me, I have something else I want to do before we go back to town." This time Craig did not have to be warned of the hidden turn-off, and he swung onto the track that led past the cemetery, down the avenues of spathodea trees to the whitewashed staff cottages of Khami Mission.

The first cottage in the row was deserted. There were no curtains in the windows and when Craig climbed up onto the porch and peered in, he saw the rooms were bare.

"Who are you looking for?" Janine asked, when he came back to the Land-Rover.

"A friend "A good friend?" "The best friend I ever had." He drove on down the hill to the hospital and parked again. He left Janine in the Land-Rover and went into the lobby. A woman came striding to meet him. She wore a white laboratory coat, and her unnaturally pale face was set in a belligerent frown. (I hope you haven't come here to harass and frighten our people," she began. "Here police mean trouble." "I'm sorry," Craig glanced down at his uniform. "It's a private matter. I am looking for a friend of mine. His family lived here. Samson Kumalo-" "Oh," the woman nodded.

"I recognize you now. You were Sam's employer. Well, he's gone."

"Gone? Do you know where?" "No," flatly, and unhelpfully. "His grandfather, Gideon-" "He's dead." "Dead?" Craig was appalled. "How?"

"He died of a broken heart when your people murdered someone who was dear to him. Now, if there is nothing more You want to know, we don't like uniforms." By the time they reached town it was late afternoon. Craig drove directly to his Yacht without asking her Bpermission, and when he parked under the mango trees, Janine made no comment, but climbed out and walked beside him to the ladder way

Craig put a tape on the recorder and opened a bottle of wine, then he brought down Sir Ralph's leather-bound journal that Bawu had loaned him, and they sat side by side on the bench in the saloon and pored over it. The faded ink and pencil drawings that decorated the margins delighted Janine, and when she came to a description of the locust plagues of the 1890s, she was captivated.

"The old geezer had a good eye." She studied his drawing of a locust. "He might have been a trained naturalist, just look at the detail." She glanced up at him sitting close beside her. He looked like a puppy, an adoring puppy. She deliberately closed the leather-bound book without taking her eyes from his. He leaned closer to her, and she made no effort to pull away. He covered her lips with his own, and felt them soften and part. Her huge slanted eyes closed, and the lashes were long and delicate as butterflies" wings.

After a long time she whispered huskily, "For God's sake, don't say anything stupid. just keep right on doing what you are doing at the moment." He obeyed, and it was she who broke the silence. Her voice was shaky.

"I hope you had enough forethought to make the bunk wide enough for two." Still he said nothing, but lifted her up in his arms and took her to see for herself.

"Do you know, I didn't realize it could be like that. "There was wonder in his voice, as he stared down at her, leaning on one elbow.

"It was so good and natural and easy." She traced a fingertip over his bare chest, drawing little circles around his nipples. "I like a hairy chest," she purred.

"I mean you know, I always felt it was such a solemn thing to do after vows and declarations." "The sound of organ music?" she giggled. "If you'll excuse the expression." "That's another thing," he said. "The only time I have ever heard you giggle is when you are doing it, or when you have just done it." "That's the only time I ever feel like giggling," she agreed, and giggled again. "Do be a pet and get the wineglasses." "Now what is so funny?" he demanded from the companion way.

"Your bottom is white and baby smooth no, don't cover it." While he hunted in the galley cupboard, she called from the cabin, "Do you have a tape of the "Pastoral"." "I think so." "Put it on, pet." Why? "will tell you when you come back to bed." She was sitting at the head of the bunk, stark naked in the lotus position. He put one of the wineglasses in her hand, and after a short struggle managed to twist his own long legs into the lotus and sat facing her.

"So tell me,"he invited.

"Don't be dense, Craig I mean isn't that just a perfect accompaniment?" Another great storm of music and love swept over them, leaving them clinging helplessly to each other, and in the aching silence that followed, she tenderly stroked back the sweat-damp hair that had fallen into his eyes.

It was too much for him. "I love you, "he blurted out. "Oh God, I love you so!" Almost roughly she pushed him aside, and sat up.

"You are a sweet funny boy, and a gentle considerate lover, but you do have an ungodly talent for saying stupid things at the wrong time." In the morning, she said, "You made dinner, so I'll make breakfast," and went to the galley wearing only one of his old shirts.

She had to roll the sleeves up and the tails dangled below her knees.

"You've got enough eggs and bacon to open your own restaurant were you expecting a visitor?" "Not expecting, but hoping," he called back from the shower. "Make mine sunny side up!" After breakfast she helped him install the big glittering stainless-steel winches on the maindeck. It needed someone to hold the gusset plates in position while he drilled and bolted through from the other side.

"You are very handy, aren't you?" she said. They had to shout at each other, for he was working below deck while she was perched on the edge of the cockpit.

"It's kind of you to notice." "So I suppose you are a first-class armourer." "I'm pretty good." "Do you do what I suspect, fix up guns?"

"One of my duties." "How can you bring yourself to do it? Guns are so evil." "That is the typical prejudice of the ignorant and uninformed layman." He turned her own words against her. "Firearms are on one level highly functional and useful tools, and on another level they can be magnificent works of art. Man has always lavished some of his most creative instincts on his weapons." "But the way men use them!" she protested.

"For instance, they were used to prevent Adolf Hitler gassing the entire Jewish nation, "he pointed out.

"Oh come on, Craig. What are they being used for out there in the bush at this very moment?" "Guns aren't evil, but some of the men who use them are. You could say the same about spanners. " He tightened the bolts on the winch and stuck his head out of the hatch. "That's enough for today on the seventh day He rested how about a beer?"

Craig had rigged a speaker in the cockpit and they lolled in the sun and drank beer and listened to the music.

"Look, Jan, I don't know a tactful way to put this, but I don't want you seeing anyone else, do you know what I mean?" "There you go again." Her eyes slanted and crackled like blue ice. "Do shut up, Craig!" "I mean after what has happened between us," he ploughed on doggedly. "I think we should-" "Look, dear boy, you have a choice make me mad again, or make me giggle again, what's it going to be." At lunchtime on Monday, she came up to police headquarters, and they ate his ham sandwiches while he showed her around the armoury, and despite herself, she was intrigued by the exhibits of captured weapons and explosives. He explained the operation of the various types of mines and how they could be detected and disarmed.

"You have to hand it to the terrs," Craig admitted. "The swine carry those things in on their backs, two hundred miles or so through the bush. just try and pick that up, and you'll see what I mean." At last he took her through to a small back room. "This is my special project. It's called T & I, trace and identify." He gestured at the charts that covered the walls and the big boxes of empty cartridge-cases piled beside the workbench. "After each contact with terrs our armourers sweep the area and pick up every used cartridge.

Firstly they are checked for fingerprints. So if the terr has a record, then we can identify him immediately. If he has polished his rounds before loading or if we have no record of his fingerprints we can still trace exactly which rifle fired the cartridge." He led her to the bench, and let her look into the low power microscope that stood on it.

"The firing-pin in each rifle strikes an indentation into the cap of the cartridge which is as individual as a fingerprint. We can follow the career of each active terr in the field. We can make accurate estimates of how many there are and which are the hot ones." "The hot ones?" She looked up from the microscope.

"Out of every hundred terrs in the field, ninety or so of them hole up in good cover near a village which can supply them with food and young girls, and they try to keep out of danger and contact with our forces. But the hot ones are different. They are the tigers, the fanatics, the killers, these charts show their first team." He led her to the wall.

"Look at this one. We call him Primrose because his firing-pin leaves a mark like a flower. He has been in the bush for three years, and been in contact ninety-six times. That is almost once every ten days, he must be made of steel." Craig ran his finger down the chart.

"Here is another, we call him Leopard Paw, you can see why by the print of his rifle. He is a newcomer, his first time across the river, but he hit four farms and ran an ambush, then he went into contact with Roly's Scouts. Not many of them survive that, Roly's boys are incredible. They wiped out most of the cadre, but Leopard Paw fought like a veteran and got away with a bunch of his men. Roly's combat report says he lost four men to AP mines that Leopard Paw put down as he ran, and another six in the actual fighting ten men. That's the heaviest casualties the Scouts have ever taken in any one contact."

Craig tapped the name on the chart. "He is the hot one. We are going to hear more of this lad." Janine shuddered. "It's awful all this death and suffering. When will it ever end?" "It started when man first stood up on his hind legs, it's not going to end tomorrow. Now let's talk about dinner tonight, I'll pick you up at your flat at seven, okay." She telephoned him at the armoury a little before five o'clock.

"Craig, don't come for me this evening." "Why not?" "I won't be there." "What has happened?" "Roly is back from the bush." Craig did a little work on the foredeck of the yacht, placing the cleats for the jib sheets, but when it was too dark, he went below, and wandered around disconsolately. She had left her dark glasses on the table beside the bunk, and a lipstick on the edge of the wash-basin. The saloon still smelled of her perfume, and the two wineglasses stood together in the sink.

"I think I will get drunk," he decided, but he had no tonic, and gin with plain water tasted awful. He tipped it into the sink, and put the "Pastoral" on the tape, but the images it conjured up were too painful. He hit the "stop" button.

He picked Sir Ralph's leather-bound journal off the table, and flicked through it. He had read it twice, he should have gone out to King's Lynn at the weekend, Bawu would have been expecting him to come for the next journal in the series. He started to read it again, and it was an immediate opiate for the loneliness.

After a while he searched in the drawer of the chart-table and found the ruled exercise book which he had used for drawing the layout of the cabins and galley. He tore out the used pages, and there were still over a hundred unused sheets. He sat down at the saloon table with an HB pencil from the navigation set, and stared at the first empty sheet for almost five minutes. Then he wrote. "Africa crouched low on the horizon, like a lion in ambush, tawny and gold in the early sunlight, seared by the cold of the Benguela Current.

"Robyn Ballantyne stood by the ship's rail and stared towards it-" Craig re-read what he had written, and felt a strange excitement, something he had never experienced before. He could actually see the young woman. He could see the way she stood with her chin lifted eagerly and the wind snapping and tangling her hair.

The pencil started to race across the empty page, and the woman moved in his mind and spoke aloud in his ears. He turned the page and wrote on, then, almost before he realized it, the exercise book was filled with his pointed pea ky handwriting and outside the porthole by his head the day was lightening.

Ever since Janine Carpenter could remember, there had always been horses in her father's stables at the Eback of the veterinary dispensary. When she was eight her father had taken her out for the first time with the local hunt. Just after her twenty-second birthday, a few months before she had left home for Africa, she had been awarded her hunt buttons.

The mount that Roland Ballantyne had given her was a beautiful chestnut filly without any other marking. She was curried to a gloss so that she shone in the sunlight like wet red silk. Janine had ridden her often before. She was fleet and strong, and there was an accord between them.

Roland rode his stallion. It was an enormous black beast he called "Mzilikazi" after the old king. The veins stood out under the skin of his shoulders and belly like living serpents. The great black bunch of his testicles was crudely and overpoweringly masculine. When he laid back his ears and bared his teeth, the mucous membrane in the corner of his savage eyes was the colour of blood. There was an arrogance and menace in him that frightened Janine, and yet excited her also. Horses and rider were of a pair.

Roland Ballantyne wore brown whipcord breeches and high boots boned to glossy perfection. The short sleeves of the crisp white shirt were stretched tightly across the hard smooth muscle of his upper arms.

Janine was certain that he always wore white to contrast against the deep tan of his face and arms. She thought he was impossibly handsome, and that cruel and ruthless streak in him made him all the more attractive than mere good looks alone could ever do.

Last night in the bed in her bachelor flat she had asked him, "How many men have you killed?" "As Many as necessary," he had replied, and though she thought that she hated war and death and suffering, it excited her in a way she could not control. Afterwards he had laughed easily and said, "You are a kinky little bitch, did you know that?" She had hated him for understanding and she had been desperately ashamed, and so angry that she had gone for his eyes with her nails. He had held her down effortlessly, and still chuckling he had whispered in her ear until she lost control again.

Now when she looked up at him riding beside her, she felt the lingering fear of him and the goose-flesh on her arms and the hard ball of excitement in the pit of her stomach.

They rode up to the top of the hills, and he reined the stallion down. It danced in a tight little circle, picking up its hooves delicately and tried to nuzzle her filly, but Roland pulled its head away and pointed at the horizons that fell away into blue distances in every direction.

"Everything you can see from here. Every blade of grass, every grain of earth, all of it belongs to the Ballantynes. We fought for it, we won it it's ours and anyone who wants to take it away from us will have to kill me first." The idea of anyone or anything doing that was ludicrous. He was a young god, one of the immortals.

He dismounted and led the horses to one of the tall ms asa trees.

He tied them, and then reached up and lifted her down from the saddle.

He walked her to the edge of the precipice, and held her against him, her back to his chest, so that she could look out and see it all.

"There it is!" he said. "Just look at it." It was beautiful, rich golden grasslands and graceful trees, waters that flowed in the small clear streams or shone like mirrors where the dam walls held them back, the tranquil herds of big red cattle, as red as the rich earth beneath their hooves, and arched above it all the high cloud-dappled blue of the African sky.

"It needs a woman to love it as I love it," he said, "A woman to breed fine sons to cherish it, to hold it as I will hold it." She knew what he was going to say then, and now that it was about to happen, she felt numbed and confused. She felt herself beginning to tremble against him.

"I want you to be that woman," Roland Ballantyne said, and she began to weep uncontrollably.

The NCOs of Ballantyne's Scouts clubbed together to give their colonel and his new lady an engagement party.

They held it in the sergeants" mess at the Thabas Indunas barracks. The officers and the wives of the regiment were all invited so that when Roland and Janine drove up in the Mercedes, there was a packed crowd waiting on the front veranda to meet them. Led by Sergeant-Major Gondele, they launched into a rollicking but un tuneful rendition of "For they are jolly good fellows."

"Damn good thing you don't fight like you sing, "Roland told them.

"Your backsides would have more holes than a sieve by now." He treated them with a rough paternal severity and affection, the total easy assurance of the dominant male, and they worshipped him openly. Janine understood that. She would have been surprised if it were otherwise.

What did surprise her was the brotherhood of the Scouts. The way that officers and men, black and white, were held together by an almost tangible bond of trust and accord.

She sensed that it was something stronger than even the strongest family ties, and later when she spoke to Roland about it, he replied simply, "When your life depends on another man, you come to love him."

They treated Janine with enormous respect, almost awe. They called her "Donna" if they were Matabele and "Ma'am" if they were white, and she responded immediately to them.

Sergeant-Major Gondele personally fetched her a gin that would have stunned an elephant, and looked hurt when she asked for a little more tonic. He introduced her to his wife. She was a pretty plump daughter of a senior Matabele tribal chief, "which makes her a sort of princess, Roly explained. She had five sons, the exact number that Janine and Roly had decided upon, and she spoke excellent English, so she and Janine were immediately in deep and earnest conversation, from which Janine was at last distracted by a voice at her elbow.

"Doctor Carpenter, may I apologize for being late." It was said in the perfectly modulated tones and classless accents of a BBC announcer or a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Janine turned to face an elegant figure in the uniform of a wing commander of the Rhodesian Air Force.

"Douglas Hunt Jeffreys he said, and offered her a narrow, almost femininely smooth hand. "I was desolated by the prospect of not meeting the lovely lady of the gallant colonel." He had the cultured vacuous features of a dilettante, and the uniform, no matter that it was perfectly tailored, looked out of place on his narrow shoulders.

"The whole regiment has been in a complete tizzy since we heard the monumental tidings." She knew instinctively that despite his appearance and his choice of words, he was not a gay. It was the way he held her hand, and the subtle glance that dropped down her body like a silken robe, and then came back to her face. She found her interest titillated, he was like a razor-blade wrapped in velvet. If she needed confirmation of his heterosexuality, it was the way in which Roland reappeared almost immediately at her side when he realized to whom she was speaking.

"Dougie, my old fruit," Roland's smile had a white sharkish quality.

"Bonsoir, mon brave." The wing commander took the ivory cigarette-holder from between his teeth. "I must say I didn't expect you to show such exquisite taste. Doctor Carpenter is utterly ravishing. I do approve, dear boy. I truly do." "Dougie has to approve everything we do," Roland explained. "He's our liaison with Combined Ops." "Doctor Carpenter and I have just discovered that we were almost neighbours, we are members of the same hunt, and she was at school with my little sister. I cannot understand how we haven't met before." Janine realized then, almost with disbelief, that Roland Ballantyne was jealous of her and this man. He took her arm, just above the elbow and with a light pressure steered her away.

"You will excuse us, Douglas. I want Bugsy to meet some of the lads-" "Bugsy, forsooth!" Douglas Hunt-Jeffreys shook his head in pained disbelief. "These colonials are all of them barbarians. "And he wandered away to find another gin and tonic.

"You don't like him?" Janine could not resist stirring Roland's jealousy a little.

"He's good at his job, "Roland said shortly. "I thought he was rather cute." "Perfidious Albion,"he replied. What does that mean?"

"He is a porn." "So am I," she said with a slight edge -beneath her smile. "And if you go back just a little, you are a porn my also, Roland Ballantyne." "The difference is you and I are good poms. Douglas Hunt-Jeffreys is a prick." "One of those. Oh goody! "And he laughed with her.

"If there is one thing of which I approve wholeheartedly, it's a blatant self-confessed nymphomaniac," he said.

"Then we are going to get on very well together, you and I." She hugged his arm in a gesture of reconciliation, and he led her to a group of young men at the end of the bar. With their cropped heads and fresh faces they looked like under, graduates, only their eyes held that flat pebbly look, she remembered Hemingway had called them "machine-gunners" eyes."

"Nigel Taylor, Nandele Zama, Peter Sinclair," Roland introduced them. "These lads almost missed the party. They only got back from the bush two hours ago. This morning they had a good contact near the Gwaai, twenty-six kills." Janine hesitated over her choice of words, and then said faintly, "That's nice," rather than "Congratulations', both of which seemed grossly inappropriate for the passing of twenty-six human lives. It seemed to suffice, however.

"Will you be riding the colonel this evening, Donna?" the young Matabele sergeant asked eagerly, and Janine looked hurriedly to Roland for clarification. Even in such a close family environment it seemed a rather personal enquiry.

"Mess tradition," Roland grinned at her discomfort. "At midnight Sergeant-Major and I race down to the main gates and back. Princess Gondele will be his jockey, and I am afraid you will be rather expected to do the honours for me." "You are not as fat as Princess," the young Matabele ran An appraising eye over Janine, "I'm going to bet ten dollars on you, Donna." "Oh goodness. I do hope we don't let you down." By midnight the excitement was frenetic, of the peculiar quality that grips men who live their daily lives in mortal danger and who know that this stolen hour of joyous existence may be their last. They thrust bunches of banknotes into the hands of the adjutant who was official holder of bets, and crowded around their fancies to bolster them with raucous encouragement.

Princess and Janine were in stockinged feet with their skirts, tucked up and tucked into their panties like little girls at the seaside, standing on a chair on each side of the main doors to the mess. Outside, the tarmac road down to the main gates was lit by the headlights of army vehicles parked along the verge, and lined with the overflow from the mess bar, all of them full of gin and rowdy enthusiasm.

On the bar Sergeant-Major Gondele and Roland were stripped down to breeches and jungle boots. Esau Gondele was a black giant, his shaven head like a cannonball, and his shoulders lumpy with muscle. Beside him even Roland looked like a boy, his chest untouched by the sun was very smooth and white.

"You trip me this time, S'am-Major, and I'll tear your head off," he warned, and Esau patted his shoulder soothingly.

"Sorry, boss. You ain't ever going to get close enough to trip."

The adjutant took the last bets, and then mounted to the bar-top rather unsteadily with a service pistol in one hand and a glass in the other.

"Shut up, all of you. At the gun the two competitors will each consume a quart bottle of beer. When the bottle is empty they will be free to take up one of these beautiful young ladies." There was a storm of wolf-whistles and clapping.

"Do shut up, chaps!" The adjutant swaying precariously on the bar-top tried to look stern.

"We all know the rules." "Get on with it." The adjutant made a gesture of resignation, pointed the pistol at the ceiling, and pulled the trigger. There was a crash of shot and one of the roof lights went out. The adjutant's bald head was showered with fragments of the shattered bulb.

"I say, I forgot to change to blanks," he murmured distractedly, but nobody took any further interest in him. Sergeant-Major Gondele and Roland both had their heads thrown back, the base of the black bottles pointed at the roof, and their throats pulsed regularly as the frothing beer gushed down them. Gondele finished a second before Roland, leaped from the' counter emitted a great beer belch, and swept a squealing Princess up onto his shoulders. He was out of the doors before Janine could wrap her bare legs around Roland's neck.

Roland scorned the veranda stairs, and vaulted over the far railing. It was a four-foot drop to the lawn below, and Janine, a veteran of the hunt, only stayed on his shoulders by a fierce grip in his hair and a miracle of balance, but they had cut two yards off the big Matabele's lead. They stayed close behind him down the long curving drive, jungle boots pounding on the black tarmac with Roland grunting at each stride, and Janine bouncing and swaying on his shoulders. The spectators howled" and leaned on the horns of the parked trucks so the noise was pandemonium.

They reached the main gates, and the black sentry recognized Roland and gave him a flourishing salute.

"At ease!" Roland told him as he turned in Gondele's wake.

"If you get a chance, pull Princess off," he panted to Janine.

"That's cheating," she protested breathlessly. "This is war, baby." Gondele was breathing like a bull, lumbering up the hill with the headlights glistening on his burnished muscles, and still two paces behind him Roland ran with quick light steps. Janine could feel the strength flowing out of his body like electricity, but it was not that alone that started whittling the inches off Gondele's lead. It was that same rage to win that she had seen grip him on the courts at Queen's Lynn.

Then suddenly they were running side by side, straining their hearts and bodies beyond mere physical strength. It was at the end a contest of Wills, a trial of who could bear the agony longest.

Janine looked across at Princess, and saw in her set expression that she expected Janine to foul her, both knew it was within the rules and she had heard Roland order Janine to do so.

"Don't worry," Janine called to her, and got a flashing smile as a reward.

Shoulder to shoulder the two men came around the bend of the driveway, the lawn stretched to meet them, and beneath her Janine felt Roland make some' almost mystical call on reserves that should not have existed. It was to her unthinkable that anyone could make such effort to win a childish contest a normal man could not have done it, a totally sane man would not have done it. There was a wildness, a madness in Roland Ballantyne that frightened and at the same time elated her.

In the glare of the headlights and the roar of the crowd, Roland Ballantyne simply burned off the bigger stronger man and left him floundering half a dozen yards behind him as he leaped up the stairs, crashed through the mess doors and dropped Janine onto the bar-top.

His face was swollen and ugly red as he thrust it inches from hers. "I told you to do something," he snarled hoarsely. "Don't you ever disobey me again, ever!" And in that moment she was truly afraid of him.

Then he went to Esau Gondele and the two of them threw their arms around each other and sobbed with laughter and exhaustion and staggered in a circle trying to lift each other off their feet. The adjutant thrust a roll of bank-notes into Roland's hand. "Your winnings, sir," he said, and Roland slapped it onto the bar counter. "Come on, lads, help me drink it up," he wheezed, still fighting for breath.

Esau Gondele took one sip of his beer and then poured the rest over Roland's head.

"Sorry, Nkosi," he roared. "But I've always wanted to do that."

"This is, my dear, just a typical homely evening with Ballantyne's Scouts." Janine looked around to find Douglas Hunt-Jeffreys beside her, with the ivory cigarette-holder between his teeth. "Some time when the varsity tugger club atmosphere palls, and your intended is away in the bush, you might find a little civilized company makes a pleasant change." "The only thing about you that interests me is what makes you think I might be interested." "It takes one to recognize one, darling."

"You are impertinent. I could tell Roland." "You could," he agreed.

"But then I always like to live dangerously. Goodnight, Doctor Carpenter, I hope we meet again." They left the mess after two in the morning. Despite the alcohol he had taken, Roland drove as he always did, very fast and well. When they reached her apartment, he carried her up the stairs, despite her muted protests. "You will wake everybody in the building!" "If they sleep so lightly just wait until I get you upstairs. They will be sending you lawyers" letters, or get-well cards. " After he had made love to her, he fell instantly asleep.

She lay next to him and watched his face in the orange and red flashes of the neon sign on the roof of the service station across the street. In relaxation he was even more beautiful than awake, but she found herself thinking suddenly of Craig Mellow, of his funniness and his gentleness.

"They are so different," she thought. "And yet I love them both now, each in a different way." It troubled her so that she fell asleep only as the dawn swamped the neon flashes on the bedroom curtains.

Roland seemed to waken her immediately. "Breakfast, wench," he ordered. "I've got a meeting at nine o'clock at Combined Ops." They sat on her balcony, amongst her miniature forest of pot plants, and ate scrambled eggs and wild mushrooms.

"I know it's usually the bride's prerogative, Bugsy, but can we set a date for around the end of next month?" "So soon? Can you tell me why?" "Not all of it but after that we will be going into quarantine, and I might be out of circulation for a while!

"Quarantine?" She laid down her fork.

"When we start planning and training for a special operation we go into total isolation. There have been too many security leaks lately.

Too often our boys have walked into a sucker punch. We have got a big one coming up, and the whole group will be quarantined in a special camp, nobody, not even myself, will be allowed outside contact, not even with parents or wives, until after the operation." "Where is this camp?"."I cannot tell you, but if we spend the honeymoon at Victoria Falls as you wanted, it will suit me just fine. You can fly back here afterwards and I can go straight into quarantine." "Oh, darling, it's so soon. There will be so many arrangements to make. I don't know if Mummy and Daddy can get out here by then." "Telephone them." "All right," she agreed. "But I hate the thought of you having to leave so soon afterwards." "I know. It won't always be that way." He looked at his watch. "Time to go. I'll be a little late this evening, I want to talk to Sonny. I hear he's living in that boat of his again." She tried to cover her shock.

"Sonny? Craig, why do you want to see him?" When Roland told her why, she could think of nothing to say. She went on staring at him in appalled silence.

Janine telephoned him at the police armoury as soon as she reached the museum.

"Craig, I have to see you." "Wonderful, I'll make the dinner."

"No, no immediately. You must get away." He laughed. "I've only had this job a few months. Even for me it will be a record." "Tell them your mother is sick." "I'm an orphan." "I know, darling, but this is life and death." "What did you call me?" "It slipped out." "Say it again." "Craig, don't be an idiot." "Say it." "Darling." "Where and when?" "Half an hour at the bandstand in the gardens, and Craig it's bad news." She hung up without letting him talk again. She saw him first. He came at a lope, like a Saint Bernard puppy, with legs too long and his hair sticking out under the peak of his cap, a frown of worry crumpling up his face, but when he saw her sitting on the steps of the white, painted bandstand, the frown smoothed and his eyes lit with that special soft look that today she found too painful to bear.