The Angels Weep

"God," he said. "I had forgotten how lovely you are." "Let's walk." She couldn't look at him, but when he took her hand, she could not bring herself to pull her fingers out of his.

Neither of them spoke again until they reached the river.

They stood on the bank and watched a little girl in a white dress and pink ribbons feeding breadcrumbs to the ducks.

"I had to tell you first," she said. "I owed you that at least."

She felt him go very still beside her, but still she could not look at him, yet she could not withdraw her hand from his.

"Before you say anything, I want to tell you again what I told you before. I love you, Jan." "Oh, Craig." "Do you believe me?" She nodded and swallowed.

"All right, then, now you tell me what you called me to hear."

"Roland has asked me to marry him." His hand began to tremble.

"And I said yes." "Why, Jan?" She jerked her hand away at last.

"Damn you, why do you always have to do it?" "Why?" he persisted. "I know you love me. Why are you going to do it?" "Because I love him more," she said, still angry. "If you were me, who would you marry?"

"When you put it that way," he agreed. "I suppose you are right."

Now at last she looked at him. He was very pale. "Roly always was the winner. I hope you will be very happy, Jan.) "Oh, Craig, I'm so sorry." "Yes, I know. So am I. Can we just leave it now, Jan. There is nothing more to say." "Yes, there is. Roland is coming to see you this evening. He is going to ask you to be his best man." Roland Ballantyne perched on the edge of the operations table. It was an enormous relief map of RMatabeleland. The disposition of the security force elements was shown by small movable counters and their strength by a numbered card set into each counter like a menu-holder. Every branch of the force had its own colour the Ballantyne Scouts were maroon. They were shown as 250 in Thabas Indunas barracks, but there was still a patrol of fifty near the Gwaai, involved in the hot pursuit of the survivors of the previous day's contact.

On the opposite side of the operations table Wing Commander Douglas Hunt-Jeffreys slapped the wooden pointer into the palm of the other hand. "All right," he nodded. "This is for heads of staff only. Let's go over it from the beginning, please." There were just the two of them in the operations room, and the red security light above the steel door was burning.

"Code name Buffalo," Roland said. "The object of operation is the elimination of Josiah Inkunzi and/or one or all of his chiefs of staff. - Tebe, Chitepo and Tungata." "Tungata?"Hunt-Jeffreys asked. "A new one, "Roland explained. "Go on, please." "We will cut them at the safe house in Lusaka, at some date after the fifteenth of November when we expect Inkunzi to return from a visit to Hungary and East Germany."

"You will be able to get intelligence of his return?" Douglas asked, and when Roland nodded, "Can you let me know your source?" "That is not even for you, Dougie, my boy." "Very well, as long as you will be certain that Inkunzi is in residence before you move." "From now on let's call him Buffalo." "How will you go in?" "We will go in overland.

A column of Land-rovers with Zambian police markings and all personnel will wear Zambian police uniforms." Douglas raised an eyebrow. "Geneva Convention?" "Legitimate ruse of war," Roland countered. "They'll shoot you if they catch you." "They would do that anyway, uniforms or not. The answer will be not to let any of our lads get caught." "All right, you go in by road which one?" "Livingstone to Lusaka." "A long haul through hostile territory, and our air force has blown the bridges at Kaleya." "There is an alternative route upstream, there will be a guide waiting to take us through the bush to reach it." "So you have covered that bridge, but how do you cross the Zambezi?" "There is a drift below Kazungula." "Which you have checked, of course?" "On a dummy run. We took a vehicle across, using winch and floats, in nine minutes flat. We will have the entire task force across in under two hours. There is a track that will take us out onto the great north road fifty K's north of Livingstone." "What about re-supply?" "The guide at Kaleya is a white maize farmer, he has fuel on his farm, and we will back up with helicopters." "I take it you will use the helicopters to evacuate if you are forced to abort the operation?" Roland nodded. "That's it, Dougie old bean. Pray it's not necessary." "Let's go on to personnel then. How many will you use?"

"Forty-five Scouts, that includes S'am-Major and myself, and ten specialists." "Specialists?" "We expect to find a pile of documents in Buffalo's HQ. Probably so much that we will not be able to bring it all back. We need at least four intelligence experts to evaluate on the spot, what to keep and what to burn. You pick them for us." "The other specialists?" "Medicos, two of them. Henderson and his aide. We have used them before." "Good, who else?" "Blast bunnies, to clear the house of booby-traps, to set our own when we leave, and to blow the bridges behind us on our way home." "Armourers from Salisbury?" "I can get two good lads here in Bulawayo, one is a cousin of mine." "Fine, let me have a list of names." Douglas carefully withdrew the stub of his cigarette from the ivory holder, crushed it out, and replaced it-with a fresh tube from the packet of Gold Leaf.

"What about a site for the quarantine camp?" he asked. "Have you given it some thought?" "There is the Wankie Safari Lodge on the Dett vlei. It's two hours" drive from the Zambezi, and it has been on a caretaker basis since the Wankie strip was abandoned." "Five-star comfort the Scouts are getting soft." Douglas grinned mockingly.

"Okay, I'll see that you get it." Douglas made a note and then looked up. "Now let's go over the dates. How soon can you be ready to go?"

"Fifteenth of November. That gives us eight weeks to assemble the equipment, and rehearse the raid-".

"It probably also fits in rather well with the date of your wedding, doesn't it?" Douglas tapped the ivory holder against his teeth, and delighted in Roland Bailantyne's quick flare of temper.

"The timing of the raid has nothing to do with my private affairs, it will be dictated entirely by Buffalo's movements. In any event, my wedding will take place a week before the start of quarantine. Janine and I will spend our honeymoon at the Victoria Falls Hotel which is only two hours" drive from the camp at Wankie Safari Lodge. She will fly back to Bulawayo on the airway's scheduled flight, and I will go into quarantine directly from Vic Falls." Douglas lifted a defensive hand and grinned mockingly. "I say, do keep your hair on, old man. just a civil enquiry, that's all. By the way, I think my wedding invitation must have been lost in the post.-" But Roland had returned to his list, and was studying it with all his attention.

Douglas Hunt-Jeffreys lay on the ample bed in the cool shuttered bedroom, and examined the naked woman who slept beside him. At first she had seemed a most unpromising subject, with her pale acne-scarred face and disconcerting staring eyes behind horn-rimmed spectacles, her abrupt, aggressive, almost mannish manner, and the smouldering intensity of the political militant. But stripped of her shapeless sweater and baggy skirts, of her thick woollen socks and crude leather sandals, she had a slim pale, almost girlish, body, with fine small breasts that Douglas found very much to his taste. When she removed the spectacles, her staring eyes softened into appealing unfocused myopia, and under Douglas" skilful lips and fingers, she unloosed a tumultuous physical response which had at first astonished and then delighted him. He found he could induce in her an epileptic passion, a state in which she was almost catatonic and totally susceptible to his will, her depravity limited only by the range of Douglas" fertile imagination.

"A murrain on beautiful women," he smiled contentedly to himself.

"It's the ugly little ducklings who are the absolute ravers!" They had met in the middle of the morning, and now it was careful not to disturb her, Douglas checked his gold Rolex it was two o'clock in the afternoon. Even for Douglas, a marathon performance.

"Poor lamb is exhausted." He craved a cigarette, but decided to give her ten minutes more. There was no hurry. He could afford to lie a little longer and leisurely review this case.

Like many good controllers, Douglas had found that a sexual relationship with his female agents, and occasionally even With some of his male agents, was an effective tool of manipulation, a short-cut to the dependencies and loyalties that were so desirable in his trade.

This case was a perfect example. Without the physical lever Doctor Leila St. John would be a difficult and unpredictable subject, whereas with it she had become one of his best agents ever.

Douglas Hunt-Jeffreys by a fluke of war was a born Rhodesian. His father had come out to Africa at the beginning of Hitler's war to command the Royal Air Force training station at Gwelo. He had met and married a local girl, and Douglas had been delivered in 1941 by the Air Force doctor. The family had returned to England at the end of his father's tour of duty, and Douglas had followed the well-worn family path to Eton, and then on to the Royal Air Force.

After that there had been an unusual diversion in his" career, and he found himself in British military intelligence. Back in 1964, when Ian Smith came to power in Rhodesia, and started making the first threatening noises about breaking with Britain in a unilateral declaration of independence, Douglas Hunt-Jeffreys had been the perfect choice of an agent to place in the field. He had returned to Rhodesia, taking up his Rhodesian nationality, joined the Rhodesian Air Force and began immediately to mole his way up the ladder of command.

He was now chief co-ordinator for British intelligence throughout the territory, and Doctor Leila St. John was one of his recruits.

Naturally, she had no idea as to who was her ultimate employer, any suggestion of military intelligence, no matter to which country it belonged, would have sent her scampering up the nearest tree like a frightened cat. Douglas grinned lazily at his own imagery. Leila St. John believed herself to be a member of a small courageous group of left-wing guerrillas, intent on wresting the land of her birth from its racialist fascist conquerors and delivering it unto the joys of Marxist communism.

On the other hand, the concern of Douglas Hunt-Jeffreys and his government was to arrive at the swiftest settlement acceptable to the United Nations and to the United States, France, West Germany and their other Western allies, and to withdraw from an embarrassing, untidy and costly situation with what dignity and despatch they could still muster, preferably leaving in charge the least objectionable of the African guerrilla leaders.

British and American intelligence appraisals showed that Josiah Inkunzi, despite all his extreme left-wing rhetoric and the military assistance which he had solicited and received from communist China and the Soviet bloc countries, was a pragmatist. From the Western viewpoint, he was far and away the least of many much greater evils, his elimination would clear the way for a horde of truly vicious Marxist monsters to take over and lead the nation-to-be Zimbabwe into the clutches of the big red bear.

A secondary consideration was that a successful Rhodesian assassination coup on Inkunzi would bolster the slowly flagging fighting resolve of the Rhodesian UDI government, and would render Ian Smith and his gang of right-wing cabinet ministers even less amenable to reason than they had been to date. No, it was absolutely essential that Josiah Inkunzi's life be protected at all costs, and Douglas Hunt Jeffreys tickled the sleeping woman gently.

"Wake up, pussy cat," he said. "It's time to talk." She sat up and stretched, and then groaned softly and touched herself cautiously.

"Ah!" she murmured huskily. "I ache all over, inside and out, and it feels good." "Light each of us a cigarette," he ordered, and she fitted one into his ivory holder with practised dexterity, lit it and placed it between his lips.

"When do you expect the next courier from Lusaka?" He blew a spinning smoke-ring that broke on her bosom like mist on a hilltop.

"Overdue," she said. "I told you about the Umlimo." "Oh, yes," Douglas nodded. "The spirit medium." "The arrangements to move her are all in hand, and Lusaka is sending a high party official, probably a commissar, to take charge of the transfer. He will arrive at any time." "It seems a lot of trouble to go to for a senile old witch, doctor." "She is the spiritual leader of the Matabele people," Leila told him fiercely, "her presence with the guerrilla army would be of incalculable value to their morale." "Yes, I understand, you explained the superstitions to me." Douglas stroked her cheek soothingly and she subsided gradually. "So they are sending a commissar. That's good, though it always puzzles me how they move back and forth across the border, in and out of the towns, and from one end of the country to the other, with so little trouble." "To the. average white man, one black face looks the same as every other," Leila explained. "There is no system of passes or passports, every village is a base, nearly every black person an ally. As long as they do not carry arms or explosives, they can use the buses and railways, and pass through the road-blocks with impunity." "All right," Douglas agreed. "Just as long as what I have for you gets back to Lusaka as soon as possible." "By next week at the latest," Leila promised.

"The Ballantyne Scouts are setting up a full-scale operation to cull Inkunzi and his staff at the safe house in Lusaka." "Oh my God, no! "Leila gasped with shock.

"Yes, I'm afraid so, unless we can warn him. Now here are the details. Memorize them, please." The rackety old bus came down the winding road through the hills, leaving behind it a long greasy black smear of diesel fumes which drifted sluggishly aside on the small breeze. The roof racks were piled with bundles tied with rope and pieces of string, with cardboard boxes and cheap suitcases, with squawking chickens in cages of plaited bark and bent green twigs, and with other less readily identifiable packages.

The driver slammed on his brakes when he saw the road-block ahead, and the chattering and laughter of his passengers died into an uneasy silence. As soon as the bus stopped, the black passengers poured out of the forward entrance, and under the direction of the waiting armed police separated into groups according to their sex, men to one side, women and their children to the other. In the meantime, two black constables climbed aboard to, search the empty bus for fugitives hiding under the seats or for hidden weapons.

Comrade Tungata Zebiwe was amongst the huddle of male passengers.

He was dressed in a floppy hat, a ragged shirt and short khaki trousers, on his feet were filthy tennis shoes, and his big toes protruded through the stained canvas uppers. He seemed typical of the unskilled itinerant labourers who made up the great bulk of the country's labour force, he was safe, just as long as the police check was cursory, but he had every reason to believe that this one would not be.

After crossing the Zambezi drifts in darkness, and negotiating the cordon sanitaire, he had made his way south through the abandoned strip and reached the main road near the collieries at Wankie. He was travelling alone, and carrying forged employment papers to show that he had been discharged two days previously from employment as a labourer at the collieries. It should have been enough to take him through any ordinary road-block.

However, two hours after he had boarded the crowded bus and when they were approaching the outskirts of Bulawayo, he realized suddenly that there was another ZIPRA courier amongst the passengers. She was a Matabele woman in her late twenties, who had been in the training camp with him in Zambia. She was also dressed like a peasant girl, and had an infant strapped upon her back in the traditional fashion. Tungata. studied her surreptitiously as the bus roared southwards, hoping that she might not be carrying incriminating material. If she was, and if she was picked up at a road-block, then every other passenger in the bus would be subjected to full security scrutiny, which included fingerprints, and as a former Rhodesian government employee, Tungata's fingerprints were on the files.

The woman, although his ally and comrade, was a deadly danger to him now. She was a totally unimportant pawn, a mere courier, and she was -expendable, but what was she carrying at the moment? He watched her surreptitiously, looking for any indication of her status, and then suddenly his attention focused on the infant strapped to the girl's back. With a swoop of dread in the pit of his stomach, Tungata realized the worst. The woman was active. If they took her, they would almost certainly take Tungata also.

Now, he lined up with the other male passengers for the body search by the black police members, on the far side of the bus the women passengers were forming a separate line. Women police would search them to the skin. The girl courier was in fifth place in the line, she was joggling the sleeping infant on her back, and its tiny head waggled from side to side. Tungata could wait no longer.

Abruptly he pushed his way to the front of the queue, and spoke "urgently but quietly to the black sergeant in charge of the search.

Then Tungata pointed deliberately at. the girl in the women's line.

The girl saw the accuser's finger pointed at her, she looked about her, and then broke from the line and started to run.

"Stop her!" the sergeant bellowed, and the running girl loosed the strap of cloth that held the infant to her back and let the tiny black baby fall to the earth. Freed of her burden, she raced for the line of thick thorn bush along the verge of the road. However, the road-block had been laid to prevent just such an escape, and two police constables rose from concealment at the edge of the bush. The girl doubled back, but they had her trapped and a heavy blow with a gun-butt knocked her sprawling in the grass. They dragged her back, struggling and kicking, spitting and snarling, like a cat, and as she passed Tungata, she shrieked at him.

"Traitor, we will eat you! jackal, you will die-" Tungata stared at her with bovine indifference.

One of the constables picked up the naked infant from where the girl had abandoned it, and he exclaimed immediately.

"It's cold." He turned the body gingerly, and the tiny limbs sprawled lifelessly. "It's dead!" The constable's voice was shocked, and then he started again. "Look! Look at this!" The child's body had been gutted like that of a fish. The cut ran upwards from its groin, across its stomach, through the sternum of the chest to the base of the little throat and the wound had been closed with sacking twine and crude cobbled stitches. The white police captain, with a sickly expression on his face, snipped the stitches and the body cavity bulged open. It was packed with ropes of brown plastic explosive.

"All right." The captain stood up. "Hold them all. We will run a full check on every one of the bastards." Then the captain came to Tungata. "Well done, friend." He clapped Tungata's shoulder. "You can claim your reward from the main police station. Five thousand dollars that's good, hey! You just give them this." He scribbled on his notebook and tore off the sheet, "That's my name and rank. I will witness your claim. One of our Lan dRovers will be going into Bulawayo in a few minutes I'll see you get a lift into town." Tungata submitted docilely to the customary search by the guards at the gates to Khami Mission Hospital. He was still dressed in his labourer's rags, and carrying the forged discharge from the Wankie collieries.

One of the guards glanced at the work papers. "What is wrong with you?" "I have a snake in my stomach." Tungata clasped his hands over the offending organ. A snake in the stomach could mean anything from colic to duodenal ulcers.

The guard laughed. "The doctors will cut out your mamba for you, go to the out-patients department." He pointed out the side entrance, and Tungata went up the driveway with an ungainly sloppy gait.

"The Matabele sister at the out-patient desk recognized him with a flicker of surprise, then her expression went dead-pan and she made out a card for him and waved him to one of the crowded benches. A minute or two later the black sister rose from the desk and crossed to the door marked "Duty Doctor." She went in and closed the door behind her.

When she came out again, she pointed at Tungata. "You next!" she said.

Tungata shambled across the hall and went in through the same door. Leila St. John came joyfully to meet him, as soon as he closed the door behind him.

"Comrade Commissar!" she whispered, and embraced him. "I was so worried!" She kissed him on each cheek, and as she stepped back, Tungata had changed character from dull-witted peasant to deadly warrior, tall and dangerously cold-faced.

"You have clothes for me?" Behind the movable screen, Tungata changed swiftly and stepped out again buttoning the white laboratory-coat. On his lapel he wore a plastic dog-tag that identified him as "DOCTOR G. J. KUMALO', which placed him immediately above idle suspicion.

"I would like to know what arrangements you have made," he said, and seated himself facing Leila St. John across her desk.

"I have had the Umlimo in our geriatric ward since she was brought in by her followers from the Matopos Reservation about six months ago."

"What is her physical condition?" "She is a very old lady ancient, is perhaps the better word. I see no reason to doubt her claim that she is 120 years old. She was already a young woman when Cecil Rhodes" freebooters rode into Bulawayo and hunted King Lobengula to his death."

"Her condition, please." "She was suffering from malnutrition, but I have had her on a nutritional drip and she is much stronger, though she cannot walk, nor is she in control of her bowels and bladder. She is an albino, and she suffers from a type of skin allergy, but I have been able to prescribe an antihistamine ointment which has given her a great deal of relief. Her hearing and eyesight are failing, but her heart and other vital organs are remarkably strong for her age. Moreover, her brain is sharp and clear. She appears to be totally lucid." "So she can travel?"Tungata insisted.

"She is eager to do so. It is her own prophecy that she must cross the great waters before the spears of the nation prevail."

Tungata made an impatient gesture, and Leila St. John interpreted it.

"You do not set any store by the Umlimo, and her predictions, do you, Comrade?" "Do you, Doctor?" he asked.

"There are areas which our sciences have not yet penetrated.

She is an extraordinary woman. I don't say I believe everything about her, but I am aware of a force within her." "It is our estimate that she will be extremely valuable as a propaganda weapon. The great majority of our people are still uneducated and superstitious. You still have not answered my question, Doctor. Can she travel?" "I think she can. I have prepared medications for her to take on the journey.

I have also made out medical certificates, which should'e sufficient to see her safely through any security checks as far as the border with Zambia. I will provide one of my best medical orderlies, a black male nurse, to travel with her. I would go myself, but it would attract too much attention." Tungata was silent for a long time, his hard handsome features rapt in thought. He had such a presence of command and authority that Leila found herself waiting almost timidly for his next words, eager to respond whether they were command or question.

However, when he spoke, it was to muse softly. "The woman is as valuable dead as alive, and dead she would be easier to handle, I presume you could preserve her body in formaldehyde or something of that nature." Despite herself, Leila was shocked, and yet strangely awed by the ruthlessness, excited by the man's deadly resolve.

"I pray that won't be necessary," she whispered, staring at him.

She had never met a man like this.

"I will see her first, then I will decide," Tungata said quietly.

"I wish to do so immediately." There were three weird crones squatting outside the door of the private, ward on the top floor in the south wing of the hospital. They were dressed in the dried skins of wild cat and jackal and python, and hung about the neck and waist with bottles and gourds and stoppered buckhoms, with dried goat-bladders and bone rattles, with phials and the leather bags that contained their divining bones.

"These are the old woman's followers," Leila St. John explained, "they will not leave her." "They will," said Tungata softly, "when I decide that they will One of them hopped towards him, whining and snivelling, reaching out to touch his leg with filth-encrusted fingers, and Tungata spurned her aside with his foot, and opened the door to the private ward. He went in, and Leila followed him and closed the door behind them. It was a small room with bare tiled floor and the walls were painted with a white gloss paint. There was a bedside locker with a stainlm-steel tiny of medicines and instruments upon it. The bed was on castors with an adjustable handle and screw at the foot. The head of the bed-frame was raised and the frail figure under the single sheet seemed no larger than a child. There was the glass bowl of a drip suspended above the bed, and a transparent plastic tube snaked down from it.

The Umlimo was asleep. Her un pigmented skin was a dusty pinkish grey, crusted with dark scabs that extended up over the pale bald scalp. The skin that covered her skull was so thin and fragile that the bone seemed to shine through it like a water-worn pebble beneath the surface of a mountain stream, but from her brow down to the edge of the white sheet beneath her chin, the skin was impossibly wrinkled and folded, like that of some prehistoric relic from the age of the great reptiles. Her mouth was open, the scabbed lips trembled with each breath, and there was a single yellow worn tooth left in the desiccated grey gums. She opened her eyes. They were pink as those of a white rabbit, sunk deeply in folds of grey skin, swimming in their own gummy mucus.

"Greetings, old Mother." Leila went to her and touched the age-ravaged cheek. "I have a visitor for you," she said in perfect Sindebele.

The old woman made a small keening sound in her throat, and she began to shake, her entire body taken by convulsions, as she stared at Tungata.

"Calm yourself, old Mother." Leila was concerned. "He will not harm you." The old woman lifted one arm from under the sheet. it was skeletal, the elbow-joint enlarged "and distorted by arthritic processes, the hand was a claw, with lumpy knuckles and twisted fingers. She pointed them at Tungata.

"Son of kings," she wailed her voice surprisingly clear and strong, "father of kings. king that will be, when the falcons return.

Bayete, he that will be king, Bayete!" It was a royal salute, and Tungata went rigid with shock. His own skin-tone changed to dark grey, and little blisters of sweat burst out upon his brow. Leila St. John fell back until she was against the wall. She stared at the frail old woman in the high steel bed. Spittle frothed on the thin scabbed lips, and the pink eyes rolled back into the ancient skull, yet the wailing voice rose higher.

"The falcons have flown afar. There will be no peace in the kingdoms of the Mambos or the Monomatopas until they return. He who brings the stone falcons back to roost shall rule the kingdoms." Her voice rose to a shriek. "Bayete, Nkosi nkulu. Hail, Mambo. Live for ever, Monomatopa." The Umlimo greeted Tungata with all the titles of the ancient rulers, and then collapsed against the soft white pillows.

Leila hurried back to her side, and placed her fingers over the sticklike wrist.

"She's all right," she said after a moment, and looked up at Tungata. "What do you want me to do?" He shook himself like a man awakening from deep sleep, and with the sleeve of his white coat, wiped the icy sweat of superstitious dread from his forehead.

"Look after her well. Make sure she is ready to leave by morning. We will take her north across the great river," he said.

Leila St. John backed up her small Fiat into the ambulance bay beside the casualty department, and screened from curious eyes, Tungata slipped through the back door and crouched down between the seats.

Leila spread a mohair travelling-rug over him and drove down to the main gates. She spoke briefly to one of the guards, and then swung the Fiat onto the branch road that led to the superintendent's residence.

She spoke without looking back or moving her lips.

"No sign of security forces, not yet. It looks as though your arrival has gone unnoticed, but we will take no chances." She parked in the lean-to garage which had been added to the old stone-walled building, and while she unloaded her valise and a pile of files from the seat, she made certain they were still not observed. The garden was screened from the road and the thatched church by trellised creepers and -flowering shrubs.

She opened the side door to the house, and said, "Please keep low, and go in as quickly as you can." He ducked out of the Fiat, and she followed him into the living-room. The shutters and curtains were drawn and it was half-dark.

"My grandmother built this house after the original was burned down during the 1896 troubles. Fortunately she took precautions against the troubles of the future." Leila crossed the floor of sawn Rhodesian teak, the highly polished surface of which was strewn with tanned animal skins and hand-woven rugs in bold patterns and primary colours.

She entered the walk-in stone fireplace and drew aside the black grate. The floor of the fireplace was of slate flags, and she used the fire irons to prise and lift one of these. When Tungata stepped up beside her, he saw that she had exposed a square vertical shaft, into one wall of which were set stone steps.

"This was where Comrade Tebe was hiding that night?" Tungata asked. When the Scouts, the kanka, could not find him?" "Yes, he was here. It would be best if you went down now." He dropped nimbly down the shaft and found himself in darkness. Leila closed the slate hatch and came down beside him. She groped along the wall and turned a switch. A bare electric bulb lit on the roof of the tiny stone cell.

There was a deal table on which were stacked a few well-thumbed books, pushed beneath it was a low stool and there was a narrow truckle-bed against the far wall. A chemical toilet stood at its foot.

"Not very comfortable," she apologized. "But nobody will find you here." "I have had less luxurious accommodation," he assured her. "Now let us go over your arrangements." She had the medical certificates ready on the table, and she sat on the stool and wrote down his requirements for the transportation of the Umlimo as he dictated them.

When she had finished, he said, "Memorize that and destroy it."

"Very well." He watched while she went over the list carefully and then looked up.

"Now, there is a message for you to take to Comrade Inkunzi,"she said. "It is from our friend in high places." "Give it to me,"he nodded.

"Ballantyne's Scouts, the kanka, they are planning a special operation. It is to destroy Comrade Inkunzi and his staff. Your own name is high on their list." Tungata's expression did not change.

"Do you have any details of their plans?" "All the details," she assured him. "This is what they will do-" She spoke slowly and deliberately for almost ten minutes, and he did not interrupt her.

Even when she had finished, he was silent for many minutes, lying flat on his back on the bed, staring up at the electric bulb. Then she saw that his jaws clenched and that a smoky red tide seemed to have spread over his eyeballs. His voice, when he spoke, was thick with loathing.

"Colonel Roland Ballantyne. If we could get him! He is responsible for the deaths of over three thousand of our people he and his kanka. In the camps they speak his name in whispers, as though he were some sort of demon. His name alone turns our bravest men to cowards. I have seen him and his butchers at work. Oh, if we could only take him." He sat up and glared at her. Perhaps. His voice was choked and slurred as though he was drunk with hatred. "Perhaps this is our chance." He reached out and took Leila by the shoulders. His fingers dug deeply into her flesh and she winced and tried to draw away. He held her without effort.

"This woman of his. You say that she will fly from the Victoria Falls? Can you get me the date, the number of the flight, the exact time?" She nodded, afraid of him now, terrified by his strength and fury.

"We have somebody in the airway booking-office," she whispered, no longer trying to escape the agony of his grip. "I can get it for you."

"The bait," he said, "the tender lamb that will lure the leopard into the trap." She brought him food and drink down the stone shaft and waited while Tungata ate.

For a while he ate in silence, then abruptly he returned to the subject of the Umlimo.

"The stone falcons, he started, "you heard what the old woman said?" She nodded and he went on, "Tell me what you know of these things." "Well, the stone falcons are the emblem on the flag. They are minted on the coinage of this country." "Yes, go on." "They are ancient carvings of bird figures. They were discovered in the ruins of Zimbabwe by the early white adventurers, and stolen by them. There is a legend that Lobengula tried to prevent them, but they were taken south." "Where are they now?"Tungata demanded.

"One of them was destroyed by fire when Cecil Rhodes" house at Groote Schuur was burned down, but the others, I'm not absolutely certain, but I think they are at Cape Town in South Africa."

"Whereabouts?" "In the museum, there." He grunted and went on eating steadily. When the bowl and mug were empty he pushed them aside and stared at her again with those smoky eyes.

"The words of the old woman, "he began and then paused. "The prophecy of the Umlimo," she went on for him, "that the man who returned the falcons would rule this land, and that you were that man."

"You will tell nobody what she said do you understand me?" (I will tell nobody, "she promised.

"You know that if you do, I will kill you." "I know that," she said simply, and gathered the bowl and mug and replaced them on the tray.

She stood before him waiting, and when he did not speak again, she asked, "Is there anything else?" He went on staring at her, and she dropped her eyes. "Do you wish me to stay?" "Yes,"he said, and she turned to the light switch.

"Leave the light," he ordered. "I want to see your whiteness."

The first time she cried out, it was in fear and pain, the second time and the uncounted times after that was in mindless, incoherent transports of ecstasy.

Douglas Ballantyne had selected a dozen of the finest slaughter-beasts from the herds of King's Lynn and Queen's Lynn. The prime carcasses had hung in the cold room for three weeks until they were perfect. They were being barbecued whole on the open coal pits at the bottom of the gardens. The kitchen servants of Queen's Lynn worked in relays, turning the spits and basting the sizzling golden carcasses amidst clouds of fragrant steam.

There were three bands to provide continuous music. The caterers had been flown in with all their equipment from Johannesburg, and paid suitable danger-money for entering the war zone. The gardens of every homestead for fifty miles around had been ransacked for flowers and the marquees were filled with banks of floral decorations, of roses and poinsettia and dahlia in fifty blazing shades of colour.

Bawu Ballantyne had chartered a special aircraft to bring the liquor up from South Africa. There was a little over four tons" weight of fine wines and spirits. After searching his political conscience, Bawu had even decided to suspend his personal sanctions against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for the duration of the wedding festivities, and had included one hundred case's of Chivas Regal whisky in the shipment. This was his most valuable contribution to the preparations, but there had been others.

He had transferred some of his most potent and cherished Claymore mines across from the King's Lynn de fences and added them to the decorations in the Queen's Lynn gardens.

"You can never be too careful," he explained darkly, when taxed with it. "If there is a terr attack during the ceremony-" He made the motion of pressing a button, and the entire family shuddered at the thought of a mushroom-shaped cloud hanging over Queen's Lynn. It had taken all their combined powers of persuasion to get him to remove his pets.

He had then sneaked into the kitchens and added an extra six bottles of brandy to the mix for the wedding cake. Fortunately Valerie had made a final tasting and when she got her breath back, ordered the chef to bury it and start a new batch. From then on Bawu was banned from the kitchens in disgrace, and Douglas had drawn up a roster of family members to keep him under surveillance during the great day.

Craig had the first shift from nine in the morning when the two thousand invited guests started arriving until eleven when Craig would hand over to a cousin and assume his other duties as Roland's best man.

Craig had helped the old man dress in his uniform from the Kaiser's war. A local tailor had been brought out to King's Lynn to make the alterations, and the results' were surprising. Bawu looked dapper and spry with his Sam Browne belt and swagger stick and the double row of coloured ribbons on his chest.

Craig was proud of him as he took up his position on the front veranda, and looked over the crowded lawns, lifting his swagger-stick in acknowledgement of the affectionate cries of "Hello, Uncle Bawu', brushing out his gleaming silver moustaches and tipping the peak of his cap at a more debonair angle over one eye.

"Damn me, boy," he told Craig. "This whole business makes me feel quite romantic again. I haven't been married myself for nearly twenty years. I have a good mind to give it one last whirl." "There is always the widow Angus," Craig suggested, and his grandfather was outraged.

"That old crow!" "Bawu, she is rich and only fifty." "That's old, boy. Catch "em young and train "em well. That's my motto." Bawu winked at him. "Now how about that one?" His choice was twenty-five years old, twice divorced already, wearing an unfashionable mini-skirt and casting a bold eye about her.

"You can introduce me." Bawu gave his magnanimous permission. -I, think the prime minister wants to see you, Bawu." Craig searched desperately for a distraction, before the pert little bottom under the mini-skirt was soundly pinched. Craig had seen the old man flirting before. He left Bawu, gin and tonic in hand, giving Ian Smith a few tips on international diplomacy.

"You have to remember that these fellows, Callaghan and his friends, are working class, Ian, my boy, you cannot treat them like gentlemen. They wouldn't understand that-" And the prime minister, worn and tired and wan with his responsibilities, one eyelid drooping, his curly sandy hair receding, tried to hide his smile as he nodded.

"Quite right, Uncle Bawu, I'll remember that." Craig felt safe to leave him for ten minutes, sure that the old man's opinions of the British Labour government were good for at least that long, and he made his way swiftly through the crowds to where Janine's parents stood with a small group at the end of the veranda.

He insinuated himself unobtrusively into the circle, and studied Janine's mother out of the corner of his eye. It gave him a hollow aching feeling to recognize the same features, the jawline and deep forehead blurred only marginally by the passage of time. She had the same slanted eyes with the same appealing cat-like cast to them. She caught his gaze and smiled at him.

"Mrs. Carpenter, I'm a good friend of Janine's. My name is Craig Mellow." "Oh yes, Jan wrote about you in her letters." Her smile was warm, and her voice had haunting echoes of her daughter's. Craig found himself babbling away to her, and could not prevent it until softly and compassionately she said. "She told me you were such a nice person.

I am sorry, I truly am." "I don't understand?" Craig stiffened. "You love her very much, don't you!" He stared at her miserably, unable to reply, and she touched his arm in understanding.

"Excuse me," he blurted. "Roland will be ready to dress, I must go." He stumbled and almost fell on, the veranda steps. "By God, Sonny, where have you been? I thought you were going to let me go into contact on my own," Roland shouted from the shower. "Have you got the ring?" They waited side by side, under the bower of fresh flowers in front of the makeshift altar which also was smothered with flowers.

Roland wore full-dress uniform. the maroon beret with Bazo's head cap-badge, the colonel's crowns on his shoulders, the silver cross for valour on his breast, white gloves on his hands and the gilt and tasselled sword at his waist.

In his simple police uniform, Craig felt gauche and drab, like a sparrow beside a golden eagle, like a tabby cat beside a leopard, and the waiting seemed to go on for ever. Through it all, Craig clung to a hopeless notion that it was still not going to happen that was the only way he could hold his despair at bay.

Then there was the triumphant swell of the bridal march, and down both sides of the carpeted aisle from the house, the crowds stirred and hummed with excitement and anticipation. Craig felt his soul begin the final plunge into cold and darkness, he could not bring himself to look around. He stared straight ahead at the face of the priest. He had known him since childhood, but now he seemed a stranger, his face swam and wavered in Craig's vision.

Then he smelled Janine, even over the scent of the altar flowers he recognized her perfume, and he almost choked on the memories it evoked. He felt the train of her dress brush against his ankle, and he moved back slightly and turned so that he could see her for the last time.

She was on her father's arm. The veil covered her hair, and misted her face, but beneath its soft folds, he could see her eyes, those great slanted eyes, the dark indigo of a tropical sea, shining softly as she looked up at Roland Ballantyne.

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this church, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony-" Now Craig could not take his eyes from her face. She had never looked so lovely. She wore a crown of fresh Violets, the exact colour of her eyes. He still hoped that it would not happen, that something would prevent it.

"Therefore if any man can show any just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak-" He wanted to call out, to stop it. He wanted to shout, "I love her, she is mine," but his throat was so dry and painful that he could not draw breath enough through it. Then, it was happening.

"I, Roland Morris, take thee, Janine Elizabeth, to have and to hold from this day forward-" Roly's voice was clear and strong and it raked Craig's soul to its very depths. After that, nothing else mattered. Craig seemed to be standing a little away from it all, as though all the laughter and joy was on the other side of a glass partition, the voices were strangely muted, even the light seemed dulled as though a cloud had passed across the sun.

He watched from the back of the crowd, standing under the jacaranda trees, while Janine came out onto the veranda still carrying her bouquet Of violets, dressed in her blue going-away ensemble. She and Roland were still hand in hand, but now he lifted her onto a table-top and there were feminine shrieks of excitement as Janine poised to toss her bouquet.

In that moment, she looked over their heads, and saw Craig. The smile stayed on her lovely wide mouth, but something moved in her eyes, a dark shadow, perhaps of pity, perhaps even regret, then she threw the bouquet, one of her bridesmaids caught it, and Roland swept her down and away. Hand in hand, the two of them ran down the lawns to where the helicopter waited with its rotor already turning. They ran laughing, Janine clutching her wide brimmed straw hat, and Roland trying to shield her from the storm of confetti that swirled around them.

Craig did not wait for the machine to bear them away. He returned to where he had left the old Land-rover at the back of the stables. He drove back to the yacht. He stripped off his uniform, threw it onto the bunk, and pulled on a pair of silk jogging shorts. He went into the galley and from the refrigerator hooked out a can of beer. Sipping the froth, he went back into the saloon. A loner all his life, he had believed himself immune to the tortures of loneliness, and now he knew he had been mistaken.

By this time there was a stack of over fifty exercise books upon the saloon table, each of them filled from cover to cover with his pencilled scrawl. He sat down and selected a pencil from the bunch stuck into an empty coffee mug like porcupine quills. He began to write, and slowly the corrosive agony of loneliness receded and became merely a slow dull ache.

On Monday morning, when Craig walked into police headquarters, on his way through to the armoury, the member-in-charge called him into his office.

"Craig, I've got movement papers for you. You are being detached on special assignment." What is it?" "Hell, I don't know. I just work here. Nobody tells me anything, but you are ordered to report to the area commander, Wankie, on twenty-eighth-" The inspector broke off and studied Craig's face. "Are you feeling okay, Craig?" "Yes, why do you ask?" "You are looking bloody awful." He considered for a few moments. "I tell you what, if you sneak away from here on the twenty-fifth, you could give yourself a couple of days" break before reporting to your new assignment." "You are the only star in my firmament, George." Craig grinned lopsidedly, and thought to himself, "That's all I need, three days with nothing to do but feel sorry for myself." The Victoria Falls Hotel is one of those magnificent monuments to the great days of Empire. Its walls are as thick as those of a castle, but painted brilliant white. The floors are of marble, with sweeping staircases and colonnaded porticos, the ceilings are cathedral-high with fancy plaster-work and gently revolving fans. The terraces and lawns stretch down to the very brink of the aby's through which the Zambezi river boils in all its fury and grandeur, Spanning the gorge is the delicate steel tracery of the arched bridge of which Cecil Rhodes ordered, "I want the spray from the falls to wet my train as it passes on its way to the north." The spray hangs in a perpetual snowy mantle over the chasm, twisting and folding upon itself as the breeze picks at it, and always there is the muted thunder of falling water like the sound of storm surf heard from afar.

When David Livingstone, the missionary explorer, first stood on the edge of the gorge and looked down into the sombre sunless depths, he said, "Sights such as these must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight." The Livingstone suite, which looks out upon this view, was named after him.

One of the black porters who carried up their luggage told Janine proudly, "King Georgey slept here and Missy Elizabeth, who is now the queen, with her sister Margaret when they were little girls." Roly laughed. "Hell, what was good enough for King Georgey!" and he grossly overtipped the grinning porters and fired the cork from the bottle of champagne that waited for them in a silver ice-bucket.

They walked hand in hand along the enchanted path beside the Zambezi river, while the timid little spotted bushbuck scuttled away into the tropical undergrowth and the vervet monkeys scolded them from the tree-tops. They ran laughing hand in hand through the rain forests, under the torrential downpour of falling spray, Janine's hair melted down her face, and their sodden clothing clung to their bodies.

When they kissed, standing on the edge of the high cliff, the rock trembled under their feet and the turmoil of air displaced by the volume of tumbling water buffeted them and flung the icy spray into their faces.

They cruised on the placid upper reaches of the river in the sunset, and they chartered a light aircraft to fly over the serpentine coiling and uncoiling gorge in the noon, and Janine clung to Roland in delicious vertigo as they skimmed the rocky lip of the gorge. They danced to the African steel band, under the stars, and the other guests who recognized Roland's uniform watched them with pride and affection.

"One of Ballantyne's Scouts," they told each other, "they are very special, the Scouts." And they sent wine to their table in the manorial dining-room to mark their appreciation.

Roland and Janine lay late in bed in the mornings and had their breakfast sent up to them. They played tennis and Roland lobbed his service and returned to her forehand. They lay in the sunlight beside the Olympic-sized pool and anointed each other with sun cream In their brief bathing suits they were magnificently healthy clean young animals, and so obviously in love that they seemed charmed and set apart. In the evenings they sat under the umbrella spread of the great trees on the terrace and drank Pimms No. I cup, and experienced a marvelous sense of defiance in flaunting themselves to the full view of their mortal enemies on the far side of the gorge.

Then one day at dinner, the manager stopped at their table.

"I understand that you are leaving us tomorrow, Colonel Ballantyne. We shall miss you both." "Oh no!" Janine shook her head laughingly. "We are staying until the twenty-sixth." "Tomorrow is the twenty-sixth, Mrs. Ballantyne." he head porter had all their luggage piled at the hotel entrance and Roland was settling their bill. Janine waited for him under the portico. Suddenly she started as she recognized the battered old open Lan dRover that swung in through the gates, and parked in one of the open slots at the end of the lot.

Her first reaction, as she watched the familiar gawky figure untangle his long legs and flick the hair out of his eyes as he climbed out, was quick anger.

"He's come on purpose," she thought. "Just to try and spoil it all." Craig came ambling towards her with his hands thrust into his pockets, but when he was less than a dozen paces from where she stood, he recognized her and his confusion was obviously unfeigned.

Jan, he blushed furiously. "Oh my God, I didn't know you'd be here." She felt her anger recede. "Hello, Craig dear. No, it was a secret, until now." "I'm so dreadfully sorry-" "Don't be, we are leaving anyway."

"Sonny boy," Roland came out of the doorway behind Janine and went to throw a brotherly arm around Craig's shoulders. "You are ahead of time. How are you?" "You knew I was coming?" Craig looked even more confused.

"I knew," Roland admitted, "but not so soon. You were supposed to report on the twenty-eighth." "George gave me a couple of days." Since that first startled exchange, Craig had not looked at Janine again. "I thought I would spend them here." "Good boy, you will need the rest.

You and I are going to be doing a bit of work together. I tell you what, Sonny, let's have a quick drink. I'll explain it to you some of it anyway." "Oh, darling," Janine cut in swiftly, "we don't have time. I'll miss the flight." She could not bear the hurt and confusion in Craig's eyes another moment.

"Darn it, I suppose you are right." Roland checked his watch.

"It will have to keep until I see you the day after tomorrow, Sonny," and at that moment the airways" bus drove into the hotel driveway.

Roland and Janine were the only passengers in the mini-bus out to the airport.

"Darling, when will I see you again?" "Look, I can't say for sure, Bugsy, that depends on so many things." "Will you telephone me or write even?" "You know I can't." "I know, but I will be at the flat, just in case." "I wish you would go out to live at Queen's Lynn that's where you belong now." "My job." "The hell with your job. Ballantyne wives don't work." "Well, see here, Colonel, sir, this Ballantyne wife is going on working until-" "Until?" he asked.

"Until you give me something better to do." "Like what?" "Like a baby." "Is that a challenge?" "Oh please, Colonel, sir, do take it as one." At the airport there was a cheerfully rowdy young crowd, all the men in uniform, come to see the aircraft leave. Most of them knew Roland and they plied him and Janine with drinks. It made the last minutes more bearable. Then suddenly they were standing at the gate and the air hostess was calling for boarding.

"I shall miss you so,"Janine whispered. "I shall pray for you."

He kissed her and held her so fiercely that she almost lost her breath.

"I love you, "Roland said. "You never said that before." "No," he agreed. "Not to anybody before. Now, go, woman before I do something stupid." She was the last in the straggling line of passengers that climbed the boarding-ladder into the elderly Viscount aircraft parked on the hard stand. She wore a white blouse with a daffodil-yellow skirt and flat sandals. There was a matching yellow scarf around her hair and a sling-bag over her shoulder. In the doorway of the aircraft at the top of the boarding-ladder, she looked back, shading her eyes as she searched for Roland, and when she found him she smiled and waved and then stepped through the fuselage door.

The door closed and the boarding-ladder wheeled away. The Rolls-Royce Dart turbo-prop engines whined and fired, and the silver Viscount, with the flying Zimbabwe bird emblem on its tail, taxied downwind to its holding point.

Cleared for take-off, it lumbered back down the runway, and climbed slowly into the air. Roland watched it bank onto its southerly heading for Bulawayo, and then went back into the airport building, showed his pass to the guard at the door and climbed the steps to the control tower.

"What can we do for you, Colonel?" the assistant controller at the flight planning desk greeted him.

"I am expecting a helicopter flight coming in from Wankie to pick me up--" "Oh, you are Colonel Ballantyne yes, we have your bird on the plot. They were airborne twelve minutes ago. They will be here in an hour and ten minutes." While they were talking, the flight-controller at the picture windows was speaking quietly with the pilot of the departing Viscount.

"You are cleared to standard departure, unrestricted climb fifteen thousand feet. Over now to Bulawayo approach on "18 comma six.

Goodday!" "Understand standard departure unrestricted climb to flight level-" The pilot's calm, almost bored voice broke off and the side-band hummed for a few seconds. Then the voice came back crackling with urgency. Roland spun away from the flight planning desk, and strode to the controller's console. He gripped the back of the controller's chair and through the tall windows stared up into the sky.

The high fair-weather clouds were already turning pink with the oncoming sunset, but the Viscount was out of sight, somewhere out there in the south. Roland's face was hard and terrible with anger and fear, as he listened to the pilot's voice grating out of the radio speakers.

"The portable surface-to-air missile-launcher, designated SAM-7, is a crude-looking weapon almost indistinguishable from the bazooka anti-tank rocket launcher of World War II. It looks like a five-foot section of ordinary drainpipe, but the exhaust end is slightly flared into the mouth of a funnel. At the point of balance, there is a shoulder-plate below the barrel and an aiming and igniting device like a small portable AM radio set attached to the upper surface of the barrel.

The weapon is operated by two men. The loader simply places the missile in the exhaust breech of the barrel and, making sure the fins engage the slots, pushes it forward until its rim engages the electrical terminals and locks it into the firing-position. The missile weighs a little less than ten kilos. It has the conventional rocket shape, but in the front of the nose cone is an opaque glass eye, behind which is located the infra-red sensor. The tail-fins are steerable, enabling the rocket to lock onto and follow a moving target.

The gunner settles the barrel across his shoulder, places the earphones on his head, and switches, on the power pack In the earphones he hears the cyclic tone of his audio-warning. He tunes this down below the background infra-red count, so that it is no longer audible.

The weapon is now loaded and ready to fire. The gunner searches out his target through the cross-hatched gun-sight. As soon as an infra-red source is detected by the missile's sensor, the audio warning begins to sound and a tiny red bulb lights up in the eye-piece of the gun-sight to confirm that the missile is "locked-on. It remains only for the gunner to press the trigger in the pistol-type grip and the missile launches itself in relentless pursuit of its prey, steering itself to track it accurately through any turns or changes of altitude.

Tungata Zebiwe had held his cadre in position for four days.

Apart from himself, there were eight of them and he had chosen each of them with extreme care. They were all veterans of proven courage and determination, but, more importantly, they were all of superior intelligence and capable of operating under their own initiative.

Every one of them had been trained in the use of the SAM-7 missile launcher in both roles of loader and gunner, and each of them carried one of the finned missiles in addition to their AK 47 assault rifles, and the usual complement of grenades and AP mines. Any two of them could make the attack, and had been thoroughly briefed to do so.

The wind direction would dictate the departure track of any aircraft leaving the main runway of Victoria Falls airport. Wind velocity would also affect the aircraft's altitude as it passed over any specific point on the extended centre-line and crosswind legs of its outward track. Fortunately for Tungata's calculations, the prevailing northeasterly wind had been blowing at a steady fifteen knots during the entire four days in which they had been in position.

He had chosem a small kopje, thickly wooded enough to give them good cover, but not so thick that it impeded the view over the surrounding tree-tops. From the peak in the early mornings, before the heat-haze and dust thickened, Tungata had been able to see the stationary silver cloud of spray that marked the Victoria Falls on the northern horizon.

Each afternoon they had practised the attack drill. Half an hour before the expected time of departure of the scheduled Viscount flight from Victoria Falls to Bulawayo, Tungata had moved them into position. six men in a ring below the summit to guard against surprise attack by security forces, and three men above them in the actual attack group.

Tungata himself was the gunner, and his loader and backup loader had both been chosen for the acuteness of their hearing and the sharpness of their eyesight. On each of the three preceding afternoon drills, they had been able to hear the turbo-prop Rolls-Royce Dart engines minutes after takeoff. They were in climb power-setting, and the whine was distinctive, it drew the eye to the tiny crucifix shape of the aircraft against the blue.

On the first afternoon, the Viscount had climbed almost directly over their kopje, at not more than eight thousand feet in altitude, and Tungata had locked on and tracked it until it passed out of sight and then out of hearing. The second afternoon the aircraft had passed at about the same altitude, but five miles to the east of their position.

That was extreme range for the missile. The audio-signal had been weak and intermittent, and the lock-on -bulb had glowed only fitfully.

Tungata had to admit to himself that an attack would probably have failed. The third day the Viscount had been east of them again, three miles out. It would have been a good kill, so that the odds seemed to be about two to one in their favour.

This fourth day he moved the attack team into position on the summit fifteen minutes early, and tested the SAM launcher by aiming it at the lowering sun. It howled in his ears at the excitation of that immense infra-red source. Tungata switched off the power pack and they settled down to wait, all their faces lifted to the sky.

His loader glanced at his wristwatch and murmured, "They are late." Tungata hissed at him viciously. He knew they were late, and already the doubts were crowding in flight delayed or cancelled, even a leak in their own security, the kanka might already be on their way.

"Listen!" said his loader, and seconds later he heard it also, the faint whistling whine in the northern sky.

"Ready!" he ordered, and settled the shoulder-plate into position and switched on the power pack The audio-warning had been pre-set, but he checked it again.

"Load!"he said. He felt the missile go into the breech and weight the barrel slightly tail-heavy. He heard the clunk of the rim seating itself against the terminals.

"Loaded!"his No. 2 confirmed and tapped his shoulder. He traversed left and right, making certain he was firmly settled, and his loader spoke again. "Nansi! There!" He extended his arm over Tungata's left shoulder, and pointed upwards with his forefinger.

Tungata searched, and then caught the high silver spark as the sunlight reflected off burnished metal.

"Target identified!" he said, and heard his two loaders move aside softly to avoid the backblast of the rocket.

The tiny speck grew swiftly in size, and Tungata saw that it was tracking to pass less than half a mile to the west of the hillock, and that it was at least a thousand feet lower than it had been on the preceding afternoons. It was in a perfect position for attack. He picked it up in the cross, wires of the gun-sight, and the missile howled lustfully in his earphones, a wicked sound like a wolf-pack hunting at full moon. The missile had sensed the infra-red burn from the exhausts of the Rolls-Royce engines. In the gun-sight the lock-on bulb burned like a fiery red Cyclops" eye, and Tungata pressed the trigger.

There was a stunning whoosh of sound, but almost no recoil from the weapon across his shoulder as it exhausted through the funnel vent in the rear. He was enveloped for micro-seconds in white fumes and whirling dust, but when they were whipped away by their own velocity, he saw the little silver missile going upwards into the blue on the feather of its own rocket vapours. It was like a hunting falcon bating from the gloved fist, going up to tower above its quarry. Its speed was dazzling, so that it seemed to dwindle miraculously into nothingness, and there was only the faint drumming rumble of its rocket-burn.

Tungata knew that there was no time for a second launch. By the time they could re-load, the Viscount would be well out of range.

They stared up at the tiny shiny aircraft and the seconds seemed to flow with the slow viscosity of honey.

Then there was a little flick of liquid silver that distorted the perfect cruciform of the aircraft's wing profile. It popped open like a ripe cotton pod, and the Viscount seemed to lurch and yaw, then steady again. Seconds later they heard the crack of the strike to confirm what they had seen, and a hoarse roar of triumph burst up out of Tungata Zebiwe's throat.

As he watched, the Viscount banked into a gentle turn, then abruptly something large and black detached itself from the port wing, and fell away towards the earth. The aircraft dropped its nose sharply, and the engine noise rose into a shrill wild whine.

Standing in the control tower, staring out through the floor-to-ceiling non-reflective glass window into the mellow evening sky, and listening to the rapid tense exchanges between the flight controller and the Viscount pilot, Roland Ballantyne was held in a paralysing-vice of helplessness and rage.

"Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is Viscount 782, do you copy, tower?" "Viscount 782, what is the nature of your emergency?" "We have taken a missile strike on our port engine housing. We are engine out."

"Viscount 782, I query your assessment." The pilot's tension and stress flared. "Damn you, tower, I was in "Nam. It's a SAM hit, I tell you.

I have activated -the fire-extinguishers and we still have control. I am initiating a one hundred and eighty-degree turn!" "We will have all emergency standby here, Viscount 782. What is your position?" "We are eighty nautical miles outbound." The pilot's voice cracked. "Oh God!

The port engine has gone. It's fallen clean out of her." There was a long silence. They knew the pilot was fighting for control of the crippled machine, fighting the asymmetrical thrust of the remaining engine which was trying to flip the Viscount over into a graveyard spiral, fighting the enormous weight transfer caused by the loss of the port engine. In the cOntrol tower they were all frozen in silent agony, and then the radio speaker crackled and croaked. "Rate of descent three thousand feet a minute. Too fast. I can't hold her. We are going in. Trees, too fast. Too many trees. This is it! Oh mother, this is it!" Then there was no more.

In the control tower Roland sprang back to the flight planning desk, and snapped at the assistant controller. "Rescue helicopters!"

"There's only one helicopter within three hundred miles. That's your one coming in from Wankie." "The only one, are you sure?" "They have all been pulled out for a special op. in the Vumba mountains, yours is the only one in this zone." "Get me in touch with it," he ordered, and took the microphone from the controller as soon as contact was established.

"This is Ballantyne, we have lost a Viscount with forty-six crew and passengers, "he said.

"I copied the transmissions," the helicopter pilot answered.

"You are the only rescue vehicle, what is your ETA?" "I'm fifty minutes out." "What personnel do you have aboard?" "I have Sergeant-Major Gondele and ten troopers." Roland had planned to rehearse night jump-landings during the return to Wankie. Gondele and his Scouts would be in full combat gear, and they would have Roland's personal pack and weapons aboard.

"I'll be waiting on the tarmac for your pick-up. We will have a doctor with us, , he said. "This is Cheetah One standing by." Janine Ballantyne had the aisle seat, in the second last row on the port side of the Viscount. In the window seat was a teenage girl with braces on her teeth and her hair in pigtails. The girl's parents were in the seats directly in front of her.

"Did you go to the crocodile farm?" she demanded of Janine.

"We didn't get around to it,"Janine admitted.

"They have got a huge big croc there, he's five metres long. They call him Big Daddy," the girl bur bled

The Viscount had stabilized in its climb attitude, and the seatbelt lights went out. From the seat behind Janine the blue-uniformed hostess stood up and went forward along the aisle.

Janine glanced across the aisle, across the two empty seats, through the Perspex porthole. The lowering sun was a big sullen red ball, wearing a moustache of purple cloud. The forest roof was a sea of dark green that spread away in all directions below them, its monotony broken by an occasional pimple of higher ground.

"My daddy bought me a T-shirt with Big Daddy on it, but it's in my case-" There was a shattering crash, a great swirling silver cloud obscured the portholes, and the Viscount lurched so wildly that Janine was hurled painfully against her safety-belt. The air hostess was flung upwards against the roof of the cabin, and she fell back like a broken doll and lay twisted across the back of one of the empty seats.

There was a cacophony of shrieks and screams from the passengers and the girl clung desperately to Janine's arm, shrilling incoherently.

The cabin tilted sharply but smoothly as the aircraft banked, and then suddenly the Viscount plunged forward and swung viciously from side to side.

The safety-belt held Janine in her seat, but it felt like an insane roller-coaster ride down the sky. Janine leaned over and hugged the child to try and still her piercing screams. Although her head was being whipped from side to side, Janine got a glimpse out of the porthole, and saw the horizon turning like the spokes of a spinning-wheel, and it made her feel giddy and nauseated. Then abruptly she focused on the silver wing of the aircraft below her.

Where the streamlined engine-nacelle had been was a ragged hole.

Through it she could see the fluffy roof of the forest. The torn wing was flexing and twisting, she could see the wrinkles appearing in the smooth metal skin. Her ears were popping and creaking with the violent pressure-change, and the trees were rushing towards her in a sombre green blur.

She tore the child's arms from around her neck and forced her head down into her own lap. "Hold your knees," she shouted. "Keep your face down." And she did herself what she had ordered.

Then they hit, and there was a deafening rending, roaring, crashing tumult. She was flung mercilessly about in her seat, tumbled and battered, blinded and stunned and hammered by flying pieces of debris.

It seemed to go on for ever. She saw the roof above her clawed away and blinding sunlight struck her for an instant. Then it was gone, and something hit her across one shin. Clearly, above all the other sounds, she heard her own bone break, and the pain shot up her spine into her skull. End over end she was hurled, and then another blow in the back of the neck and her vision exploded into shooting sparks of light through a black singing void.

When she recovered consciousness, she was still in her seat, but hanging upside down from her safety-strap. Her face felt engorged with the blood that had flowed into it, and her vision wavered and swam like a heat mirage. Her head ached. It felt as though a red-hot nail was being driven into the centre of her forehead with a sledgehammer.

She twisted slowly, and saw that her broken leg was hanging down in front of her face, the toe pointing where the heel should have been.

"I will never walk again," she thought, and the horror of it braced her. She reached for the release on the buckle of her safety-belt, and then remembered how many necks are broken from a release in the upside-down position. She hooked her elbow through the arm of her seat, and then lifted the release. Her hold on the seat flipped her as she fell and she landed on her hip with her broken leg twisted under her. The pain was too much and she lost consciousness again.

It must have been hours later that she woke again for it was almost dark. The silence was frightening. It took her many groggy seconds to realize where she was, for she was looking at grass and tree trunks and sandy earth.

Then she realized that the fuselage of the Viscount had been severed just in front of her seat, as though by a guillotine, the tail section was all that was left around her. Over Janine's head the body of the child who had been her seating partner still hung by its strap.

Her arms dangled below her head, and her blonde pigtails pointed at the earth. Her eyes were wide open, and her face contorted with the terror in which she had died.

Janine used her elbows to crawl out of the shattered fuselage, dragging her leg behind her and she felt the coldness and nausea of shock sweep over her. Still on her stomach, she retched and vomited until she was too weak to do anything else but let herself sink back into the darkness in her head. Then she heard a sound in the silence, faint at first, but growing swiftly in volume.

It was the wackety-wackety-wack of a helicopter's rotors. She looked up at the sky, but it was shrouded by the roof of the forest overhead, and she realized that the last rays of daylight had gone and the swift African night was rushing down upon the earth.

"Oh please!" she screamed. "Here I am. Please help me!" But the sound of the helicopter grew no louder, it seemed to pass only a few hundred metres from where she lay under the concealing trees, and then the sound of its rotors receded as swiftly as the darkness came on, and at last there was silence.

"A fire," she thought. "I must start a signal fire." She looked a-round her wildly, and almost within reach of where she lay was the crumpled body of the blonde girl's father who had been in the seat in front of her. She crawled to him, and touched his face, running her finger lightly over his eyelids. There was no flicker of response.

She sobbed and drew back, and then steeled herself and returned once more to search the dead man's pockets. The disposable Bic plastic cigarette-lighter was in the side pocket of his jacket. At the first flick it gave her a pretty yellow flame, and she sobbed again this time with relief.

Roland Ballantyne sat in the co-pilot's seat of the Super Frelon helicopter and peered down at the tree-tops only two hundred feet below him. It was so dark that the occasional clearing in the forest was a mere pale leprous patch. There was no definition in the tree-tops, they were a dark amorphous mattress. Even when the light had been stronger, the chances of spotting the wreckage below the tree-tops had been remote. Of course there was the possibility that part of a wing or tail-section had torn off and been left hanging high up, and in easy view. However, they could not trust to that.

At first they were looking for damage to the tree-tops, a blaze of lopped branches or the telltale white splotches of torn bark and raw wet wood. They were looking for a signal flare, or for smoke or the chance reflection of the late sun off bare metal, but then the light started to go. Now they were flying in desperation, waiting for, but not really believing, they would see a signal flare or a torch or even a fire. Roland turned to the pilot and shouted in the rackety cabin.

"Landing lights. Switch them on!" They will overheat and burn out in five minutes," the pilot bellowed back. "No good!" "One minute on, and one minute off to cool again," Roland told him. "Try it." The pilot reached for the switch and below them the forest was lit with the cruel bluish white glare of the phosphorous lamps. The pilot dropped even closer to the earth.

The shadows below the trees were stark and black. In one clearing they trapped a small herd of elephant. The animals were monstrous and unearthly in the flood of light, with their tentlike ears extended in alarm. Then the helicopter bore on and plunged them back into utter darkness.

Back and forth they flew, covering the corridor which the Viscount must have followed on her outward track, but that was one hundred nautical miles long and ten wide, one thousand square miles. It was full night now, and Roland glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. It was nine o'clock, almost four hours since the Viscount had gone in. If there were survivors, they would be dying now, from the cold and shock, from loss of blood and internal injuries, while here in the main cabin of the Super Frelon there was a doctor, with twenty quarts of plasma, with blankets with the chance of life.

Grimly Roland stared down into the brilliant circle of white light as it danced over the tree-tops like the spotlight over a theatrical stage, and there was a cold and desolate despair in him that seemed slowly to numb his limbs and paralyse his resolve. He knew she was down there, so close, so very close, and yet he was helpless.

Suddenly he bunched his right fist and slammed it into the metal partition at his side. The skin smeared from his knuckles and the pain shot up his arm to the shoulder, but the pain was a stimulant, and in it he found his anger again. He cupped the anger to him, the way a man shelters a candle-flame in a high wind.

In the seat beside him the pilot checked the time-lapse on his stopwatch and then switched off the landing lights to cool them. The blackness that followed was more intense for the brilliance that had preceded it. Roland's night-sight was destroyed, his vision filled with wriggling insects of starred light, and he was forced to cover his eyes with his hands for a few seconds to rest them and let them re-adjust.

So he did not see the tiny dull red spark down below him that showed through the forest tops for the smallest part of a second, and then was left behind as the Super Frelon roared back on the next leg of its search pattern.

Janine had gathered a pile of dried grass and twigs, and built them up into a cone ready for the flame of the lighter. It had been difficult work. She had dragged iherself slowly backwards on her buttocks and hands, with her broken leg sliding along after her as she gathered the kindling from the nearest bushes. Each time her leg caught or twisted over an irregularity of the torn earth, she almost fainted again with the pain.

Once she had the fire ready, she had laid the plastic lighter beside it, and fallen back to rest. Almost immediately the night cold struck through her thin clothing and she began to shiver uncontrollably. It required an enormous effort of will to force herself to move again, but she started back towards the shattered tail-section of the Viscount. It was still just light enough to make out the trail of devastation that the main forward-section of the aircraft had smashed through the forest.

There were pieces of metal and burst luggage and bodies littered down this dreadful pathway, although the main wreckage, carried on by its own weight, was not in sight from where she lay.

Once again Janine called, "Is anybody there, is anybody else alive?" But the night was silent. She dragged herself on. The lighter tail-section in which Janine had been seated must have struck one of the larger trees as the fuselage broadsided, and it had been sheered off neatly. The whiplash of impact had broken the necks of the passengers around her only the fact that Janine had been leaning forward with her face pressed into her lap had saved her.

Janine reached the severed tail end, and raised herself to peer in, avoiding looking at the body of the teenage girl which still hung upside-down from her inverted seat. The storage cupboards forward of the aircraft's galley had broken open and in the gloom she could make out a treasure-house of blankets and canned food and drink. She dragged herself inchingly towards it. The feel of a woollen blanket around her shoulders was a blessed boon, and then thirstily she drank two cans of bitter lemon before searching further through the spilled and jumbled contents of the storage cupboard.

She found the first-aid kit and splinted and strapped her leg as best she could. The relief was immediate. There were disposable syringes and a dozen ampoules of morphine in the kit. The prospect of a surcease from agony was an acute temptation, but she knew it would dull her and inactivity or the inability to respond swiftly would be mortally dangerous in the long hours of darkness that lay ahead. She was still playing with the temptation when she heard the helicopter again.

It was coming swiftly towards her. she dropped the syringe and lunged clumsily towards the gaping hole in the fuselage. She tumbled out onto the dusty earth, a fall of almost three feet, and the pain of her leg anchored her for seconds. Then, through it, she heard the whistle and throbbing beat of the helicopter coming towards her.

She clawed her fingers into the earth, and bit into her bottom lip until she tasted blood in her mouth to subdue the pain as she dragged herself towards the pile of kindling. By the time she reached it, the helicopter engine was a vast roaring in her head, and the sky above the forest was lightening with a bluish-white glow. She flicked the plastic lighter, and held the tiny flame to the dried grass. It flared up swiftly. She lifted her face to the sky and in the light of the fire and the growing glare of the landing-lights, her cheeks were smeared with dust and dried blood from the cut in her scalp, and wet with the new tears of mingled agony and hope that slid from under her swollen eyelids.

"Please," she prayed. "Oh sweet merciful God, please let them see me." The landing-lights grew stronger, dazzling, blinding and then suddenly went out. Darkness struck her like a club. The sound of the helicopter passed over her, and she felt the buffeting down-draught of air from the rotors. For a brief instant she saw the black shark-like shape of it silhouetted against the stars and then it was gone, and the sound of the spinning rotors sank swiftly into silence. in that silence she heard her own wild shrieks of despair. "Come back! You can't leave me! Please come back!" She recognized the hysteria in her own voice, and thrust her fist into her mouth to gag it, but still the savage uncontrollable sobs racked her whole body, and the coldness Of the night was made unbearable by the icy grip that despair had upon her.

She crawled closer to the fire. She had been able to gather only a few handfuls of twigs. It would not last long, but the cheerful yellow and orange flames gave her a brief warmth and a moment of comfort in which to regain control. She gave one last choking gasping sob and bit down upon it. She closed her eyes and counted slowly to ten, and felt herself steadying.

She opened her eyes, and across the fire from her, at the level of her own eyes, she saw a pair of canvas jungle boots. Slowly, she lifted her eyes and shaded them from the fire with one hand. She made out the form of a man, a tall man, and the flickering light of the fire lit his face. He was looking down at her with an expression she could not fathom, perhaps it was compassion.

"Oh, thank you, God,"Janine whispered. "Oh, thank you." She began to drag herself towards the man. "Help me," she croaked. "My leg is broken please help me." Standing on the peak of the kopje, Tungata Zebiwe watched the stricken aircraft tumble down the sky like a high-flying duck hit by shot. He threw the empty rocket-launcher aside, and he lifted both hands above his head, fists clenched, and shook them in triumph to the heavens. " "It is done," he roared, "they are dead!" His face was swollen with the raging blood of the berserker, and his eyes were smoky like the glow of slag upon the tip, when it comes red-hot from the blast furnace.

Behind him his men shook their weapons above their heads, caught up like Tungata in the divine killing madness of the victors, the atavistic instinct come down from their forefathers who had formed the fighting bull, and raced in on the horns to the stabbing.

As they watched, the Viscount fell towards the forest top, and then at the very last moment it seemed to check. The nose of the tiny silver machine came up out of its death dive, and for a fleeting few seconds it seemed to fly parallel with the earth, but still sinking fast. Then it touched the tree-tops, and was instantly snatched from view, but the crash site was so close that Tungata had been able to hear, if only very faintly, the shattering impact of metal against trees and earth.

"Mark it!" Tungata sobered. "Comrade, the hand-bearing compass!

Get a fix on it!" He re-measured the distance with his eye. "About six miles, we can be there by dark." They moved out from the base of the kopje in their running formation, in the haft and spearhead, the flanks covering the bearers of the heavy equipment and the point breaking trail and clearing for ambush. They moved fast, at a pace just below a jog-trot that would carry them seven kilometres, to the hour. Tungata was running the point himself, and every fifteen minutes he halted and went down on one knee to check the bearing on the hand-compass. Then he was up, and with an overhead pump of his -fist signalled the advance. They went on, swiftly and relentlessly.

As the light started to fade, they heard the helicopter, and Tungata gave the sidearm cut-out signal that dropped them into cover. The helicopter passed a mile to the east, and he got them up and took them on for ten minutes more, before stopping again.

He brought in his wing-men, and told them quietly, "We are here, the machine is lying within a few hundred metres of us." They looked around them at the forest, the tall twisted columns of tree trunks seemed to reach as high as the darkening heaven. Through a chink in the leafy roof of the forest the evening star was a bright white prick of light.

"We will go into extended line," Tungata told them, "and sweep along the line of bearing." "Comrade Commissar, if we stay too late, we will not be able to reach the river tomorrow. The kanka will be here at first light," one of his men pointed out diffidently.

"We will find the wreck," Tungata said. "Do not even" think otherwise. That is why we have done this. To lay a trail for the kanka to follow. Now let us begin the search." They moved like grey wolves through the forest, Tungata keeping them in line and on direction with a code of bird whistles like those of a nightjar. They went southwards for twenty minutes by his watch, and then he pivoted his line, and they went back, moving silently, bowed under their packs, but with the AK 47 rifles held at high port across their chests.

Twice more Tungata pivoted his line, and they searched back and forth, and the minutes drained away. It was past nine O'clock, there was a limit to how much longer he dared remain in the area of the wreck. His man had been right. First light would bring the avengers swarming out of the skies.

"One hour more," he told himself aloud. "We will search one hour more." Yet he knew that to leave without laying a hot scent for the jackals to follow was to abandon the most important part of the operation. He had to entice Ballantyne and his kanka to the killing ground that he had chosen so carefully. He had to find the wreck, and leave something there for the kanka that would madden them, that would bring them rushing after him without regard to any of the consequences.

He heard the helicopter then, still far off, but coming back swiftly. Then he saw the glow of its landing-lights on the tree-tops, and he gave the signal to put his line into cover. The helicopter passed within half a kilo metre of where they lay. Its glaring eye confused and jumbled up the shadows beneath the trees, making them run across the forest floor like ghostly fugitives.

Abruptly the light was quenched, but the memory of it left a hot red spot on the retina of Tungata's eyeballs. They listened to the engine beat dwindle, and then Tungata whistled his men to their feet, and they went forward once more. Within two hundred paces Tungata stopped again, and sniffed the dank cold air of the forest.

Wood smoke! His heart jumped against his ribs, and he gave the soft warbling bird-call that presaged danger. He slipped out of the shoulder-straps of his heavy backpack and lowered it gently to earth.

Then the line went forward again, moving lightly and silently. Ahead of Tungata something large and pale loomed from the darkness. He flicked his flashlight on. It was the nose-section of the Viscount, the wings sheared off it, the fuselage shattered. It lay on its side, so that he could flash his beam through the windscreen into the cockpit. The dead crew were still strapped into their seats. Their faces were bloodless pale, their eyes staring and glassy.

The line of guerrillas moved on quickly down the swath that the machine had hacked from the forest for itself. It was strewn with wreckage and debris, with clothing from the burst luggage-hold, with books and newspapers that fluttered aimlessly in the small night breeze. In the litter, the corpses seemed strangely peaceful and relaxed. Tungata turned his flashlight into the face of a grey-haired middleaged woman. She lay on her back with no visible injury.

Her skirts were' tucked modestly down below her knees, and her hands relaxed at her sides. However, her false teeth had been flung from her mouth and it gave her the look of an ancient crone.

He passed her and went on. His men were stopping every few paces to hunt swiftly through the clothing of the dead, or to examine an abandoned handbag or briefcase. Tungata wanted a live one. He needed a live one, and the dead were scattered all about him.

"The smoke, "he whispered. "I smelled smoke." And then ahead of him, at the very edge of the forest line, he saw a pretty little flower of flame, flickering and wavering in the gentle movement of-air. He changed his grip on the rifle and slipped the selector onto semi-automatic fire. From the shadows he searched the area around the fire carefully and then stepped up to it. His jungle boots made no sound.

There was a woman lying beside the fire. She wore a thin yellow skirt, but it was stained with blood and dirt. The woman lay with her face in her arm. Her whole body was racked with gasping sobs. Her one leg below the skirt was roughly bound up with wooden splints and field bandages. Slowly she raised her head. In the feeble firelight her eyes were dark as those of a skull, and the pale skin, like her clothing, was smeared with blood and dirt. She raised her head very slowly until she was looking up at him, and then words came tumbling out of her swollen lips.

"Oh, thank you, God," she blurted, and began to crawl towards Tungata, the leg slithering along behind her. "Oh, thank you. Help me!" Her voice was so hoarse and broken that he could barely understand the words. "My leg is broken please help me!" She reached out and clasped his ankle.

"Please," she blubbered, and he squatted down beside her. "What is your name?" he asked very gently, and his tone touched her, but she could not think could not even remember her own name.

He started to stand, but she reached out in dreadful fear of being left alone again. She seized his hand.

"Don't go, please! My name, - I'm Janine Ballantyne." He patted her hand, almost tenderly, and he smiled. The quality of that smile warned her. It was savagely, joyfully triumphant. She snatched her hand away and pushed herself to her knees. She looked wildly about her. Then she saw the other dark figures that crowded out of the night around her. She saw their faces, the white gleam of teeth as they grinned down at her. She saw the guns in their-hands and the glittering stare in their eyes.

"You," she gasped. "It's you!" "Yes, Mrs. Ballantyne,"Tungata said softly. "it is us He stood up and spoke to the men about him. "I give her to you. She is yours. Use her but do not kill her. On your own lives, do not kill her I want to leave her here alive." Two of the men stepped forward and seized Janine's wrists. They dragged her away from the fire, behind the tail-section of the wreckage. The other comrades laid down their rifles and followed them. They were laughing and bickering quietly over the order of preference and beginning to loosen their clothing.

At first the screams from the darkness were so shrill and harrowing that Tungata turned away and squatted over the fire, feeding it with twigs to distract himself, but very soon there were no more screams, only the soft sound of sobbing, and the occasional sharper cry immediately muffled.

It went on for a long time, and Tungata's early disquiet was submerged and controlled. There was no passion or lust in this thing.

It was an act of violence, of extreme provocation to a deadly enemy, an act Of war, without guilt or compassion, and Tungata was a warrior.

One by one his men came back to the fire, adjusting their clothing. Strangely, they were subdued and stony-faced.

"Is it over?" Tungata looked up, and one of them stiffed and half rose," looking enquiringly at Tungata. Tungata nodded.

"Be quick then," he said. "It is only seven hours to first light." Not all of them went back behind the wreckage, but when they were ready to move out, Tungata did so. Ballantyne's woman's naked white body was curled in the foetal position. She had chewed her lips until they were raw meat, and she blubbered softly and monotonously through them.

Tungata squatted beside her and took her face in his hands and twisted it up until he could look into her eyes. He shone his flashlight into them. They were the eyes of a wounded and terrified animal, perhaps she had already crossed over the line between sanity and madness. He could not be certain, so he spoke slowly as though to a retarded child.

"Tell them my name is Tungata Zebiwe, the Seeker after what has been Stolen the Seeker after Justice, after Vengeance," he said, and he stood up.

She tried to roll away from him, but pain stopped her and as she covered her groin with both hands he saw the thin spurt of fresh blood from between her fingers. He turned from her and picked up her stained yellow skirt from where it had been tossed over a bush. As he strode back to the fire, he stuffed the skirt into his pocket.

Eungela!" he said. "All right, it is done. Move out!" t midnight the pilot yelled across at Roland Ballantyne. "We are almost out of fuel, we must go back. They have a tanker waiting for us on the apron." For a few moments Roland did not seem to understand. In the greenish reflection of the instrument panel his face was expressionless, but his mouth was a thin cruel slash and his eyes were terrible.

"Go quickly, "he said. "And get back here quickly." On the tarmac the Scouts" own doctor, Paul Henderson, was waiting to take over from the GP that Roland had picked up at Victoria Falls. Once he was aboard, Roland led Sergeant-Major Gondele a little apart from the other troopers.

"If only we could know which way the bastards are headed," he murmured. "Are they going south, or are they heading back for the river? Are they going to try the drifts and if so, which one?" Esau Gondele recognized in him the need to talk, to say something merely to take his mind off the horror of what awaited them out there in the dark forest.

"We won't be able to follow them with the bird, "he said. "The forest is too thick. They would hear us from five miles and disappear." "We canyt follow with the chopper," Roland agreed. "They have got a SAM-7 with them. They would chop us out of the sky. The helicopter could be suicide only way is to cut their spoor and go after them on foot." "They will have a night's start, a full night."

Esau Gondele shook the great black cannonball of his head doubtfully.

"The cat cannot resist mauling the dead bird," Roland said. "Perhaps they have not yet started to run, perhaps they are drunk with blood, perhaps we can still take them." "Ready to go!" the pilot shouted as the fuel-tanker started up and backed away from the Super Frelon, and they ran back to the open port in the fuselage and scrambled aboard.

The helicopter lifted swiftly, not wasting time in climbing, and roared away low over the dark bush.

At ten minutes to five o'clock the following morning, long before the sun had pushed up above the horizon, but when the light was already strong enough to make out shapes and colours, Roland slapped the pilot's shoulder and pointed to port. The pilot banked the Super Frelon sharply in that direction. It was a broken branch, the underside of the leaves were lighter in colour than those around it, it had been a flag to catch Roland's eye. Then there was another fleck of white, the raw stump of freshly broken branch sticking into the morning light. The pilot checked the Frelon, and they hovered fifty feet above it. They were staring down through the leafy canopy, and something white fluttered in the down-draught of the rotors.

"Go down!" Roland shouted, and as they sank lower, suddenly it was all there, broken wreckage and the debris of the dead, blowing aimlessly about in the windstorm of the rotors.

"There is a clearing!" Roland pointed, and as the helicopter settled towards it, the Scouts spilled out of her, jumping from fifteen feet to the earth and immediately spreading out into a defensive perimeter. Then Roland deployed them into a line of skirmishers and they went forward into the swath-line in quick rushes, ready to meet enemy fire. Within minutes they had cleared the area.

"Survivors!" Roland snapped. "Search for survivors!" They went back down the swath, and in the dawn light the carnage was horrific.

Beside each corpse a Scout paused briefly, but they were cold and stiff and the men went on. Roland reached the nose-section, and glanced through the windscreen. There was nothing to do for the crew until the long green plastic body-bags arrived. He turned back, searching frantically, looking for a scrap of bright yellow, the colour of Janine's skirt.

"Colonel!" There was a faint shout from the forest edge. Roland sprinted towards it. Sergeant-Major Gondele was standing by the shattered tail-section of the aircraft.

"What is it?" Roland demanded harshly, and then saw her.

EsauGondele had covered Janine's naked body with a blue airways blanket from the wreck. She lay curled under it like a sleeping child with just her tousled head showing. Roland dropped on his knee and gently lifted the corner of the blanket. Her eyes were closed with swollen purple bruises and her lips were raw chewed flesh. For seconds he did not recognize her, and when he did, he believed that she was dead. He laid his open palm upon her cheek, and the skin was moist and warm.

She opened her eyes. They were mere slits in the abused flesh.

She looked up at him, and the dull lifeless eyes were more frightening than her torn and battered flesh. Then the eyes came alive with terror. Janine screamed, and there was the ring of madness in the sound.

"Darling." Roland caught her up in his arms, but she fought him wildly, still screaming. Her eyes were mad and staring. Fresh blood oozed from the cracked scabs on her lips.

"DoctorP Roland yelled. "Here! On the double!" and it took all his strength to hold her. She had thrown off the blanket, and naked she kicked and lashed out at him.

Paul Henderson came at the run, and tore open his pack. He filled a syringe and muttered, "Hold her" still!" as he swabbed her skin. He pressed in the needle and squeezed the clear contents of the syringe into her arm. She went on fighting and screaming for almost a minute and then gradually quietened and relaxed.

The doctor took her from Roland's arms, and nodded to his assistant. The young medic orderly held up a blanket as a screen and the doctor laid Janine on another.

"Get out of here," he snapped at Rolland, and began his examination.

Roland picked up his rifle and stumbled to the tail-section of the Viscount. He leaned against it, and his breathing was hoarse and ragged, but slowly it eased and he pushed himself upright.

"Colonel, sir." Esau Gondele appeared beside him. "We have picked up their spoor, incoming and outgoing." "How long ago?" "Five hours at the least, probably longer." "Be ready to move out. We are going after them. "Roland turned away from him. He needed to be alone just a little longer, he was not yet entirely under control.

Two of the Scouts came from the helicopter at a trot, carrying one of the yellow plastic body-moulded stretchers between them.

"Colonel!" Paul Henderson tucked the blue blanket carefully around Janine's body and then he and the orderly lifted her tenderly onto the yellow stretcher and tightened the straps to hold her. While the orderly prepared the plasma drip, the doctor led Roland a little aside.

"It's not very good news, "he said, softly.

"What did they do to her?" Roland asked, and Paul Henderson told him. Roland gripped the stock of the rifle so hard that his arms began to shudder and the muscle in his forearms stood out in ridges and hard knots.

"She is bleeding internally," Henderson finished. "I have to get her into theatre very quickly. A theatre that can handle this type of surgery, Bulawayo." "Take the helicopter," Roland ordered brusquely.

They ran with the stretcher to the Super Frelon. The orderly holding the drip-bottle high.

"Colonel," Henderson looked back. "She is still conscious. If you want-" He did not finish. The little group waited for Roland beside the fuselage, not certain whether to load the stretcher aboard.

With a strange reluctance, Roland walked heavily towards them.

The enemy had used his woman. She was one thing that was sacred. How many of them? The thought made him check, and he had to force himself to go on to where she lay on the stretcher. He looked down at her.

Only her face showed above the blanket. It was grotesquely swollen, and her mouth was a raw red ruin. Her once lustrous hair was stiff with filth and dried blood, but her eyes were clear. The drug had driven back the madness, and now she was looking up at him. Only the eyes were the same, dark indigo blue.

Painfully her damaged lips framed a word, but no sound came. It was his name she was trying to say.

"Roland!" And his revulsion rushed upon him, he could not hold it back. How many of them had taken her that way, a dozen, more? She had been his woman, but that had been destroyed. He tried to fight it, but he felt nauseated, and quick cold sweat chilled his face. He tried to force himself to stoop over her, to kiss that terribly battered face, but he could not. He could not speak nor move, and slowly the light of recognition went out in her eyes. It was replaced by that dull empty look he had seen before, and then she closed the livid swollen lids over them and rolled her head slowly away from him.

"Take good care of her," Roland muttered hoarsely, and they lifted the stretcher into the helicopter. Paul Henderson turned to him, his face twisted with pity and helpless anger, and he laid his hand on Roland's arm.

"Roly, it wasn't her fault," he said.

"If you say anything more, I might kill you." Roland's voice was thickened and coarsened by disgust and hatred. Paul Henderson turned from him and clambered into the machine. Roland made a wind-up signal to the pilot in the bubble windscreen above him, and the big clumsy aircraft lifted noisily into the sky.

"Sergeant-Major," Roland called. "Take, the spoor!" and he did not look back as the helicopter rose high into the pink dawn and then swung away southwards.

They went in deep formation, so that if they ran into an ambush, the tail could circle and outflank the attackers to free the head.

They went at storming speed, much too fast for safety, going hard as marathon runners. Within the first hour Roland had ordered his Scouts to strip their packs. They abandoned everything but the radio set, their weapons and water-bottles and fir staid kits, and Roland pushed the pace still harder.

He and Esau Gondele took turns at point, the one dropping back each hour as the other came forward. They lost the spoor twice in stony ground but each time picked it up on the first cast ahead. It was running true and straight, and they had quickly made the number of the chase as nine men. Within two hours Roland knew each of them as individuals by the spoor they left behind them, the one with a nick in his left heel, flat-foot, long-one with a gap of over a metre in his stride, and each of the others with more subtle characteristics to differentiate them. He knew them, and he hungered for them.

"They are going for the drifts," Esau Gondele grunted as he came up and took over the point from Roland. "We should radio ahead and set a patrol for them." "There are twelve drifts, forty miles. A thousand men wouldn't do it." Roland wanted them for himself, all nine of them.

One look at his face and Esau Gondele realized that. He picked up the run of the spoor. They were crossing an open glade of golden grass.

The chase had left a sweep line through the grass the stems still bent in the direction of their flight, and the sunlight reflected at a different intensity from these. It was like following a highway. They went down it at a swinging easy run, and ahead of him Esau Gondele saw some of the grass stems springing upright again. They were that close already, and it wasn't yet noon. They had cut at least three hours off the lead that the ZIPRA cadres had upon them.

"We can catch them before the river we can have them for ourselves," Esau Gondele thought fiercely, and resisted the temptation to lengthen his stride. They could move no faster, an inch more on his stride would put a term on their endurance, whereas at this pace they could run the sun down and the moon up.

At two in the afternoon they lost the spoor again. They were on a long low ridge of black ironstone, and the ground took no prints. As soon as Esau Gondele lost contact, the line stopped dead, and went into a defensive attitude, only Roland moved up and knelt out on his flank, keeping good separation so that a single burst could not take them both.

"How does it look?" Roland brushed the tiny mopani bees from his eyes and nostrils. They-were maddeningly persistent in their hunt for moisture.

"I think they are going straight in." "If they are going to twist, this is the place to do it," Roland answered, he wiped his face on his forearm and the greasy camouflage paint came away in a dirty brown and green smear.

"If we cast ahead again we may lose half an hour," Esau Gondele pointed out, "three kilometres." "If we run blind we may lose more than that, we may never make them again." Roland looked around thoughtfully at the mopani forest along the ridge. "I don't like it," he decided at last. "We will make a cast." The two of them circled out beyond the ridge, and as Esau Gondele had warned, it cost them half an hour of their gain, but they did not make the cut. There was no spoor on the direct line that they had been following, the chase had turned.

"They can only have followed the ridge, we have a one only choice. East is away from the drifts, I don't believe they would chance it. We will run the western ridge blind," Roland decided, and they turned and went on harder than before, for they were rested and they had the lost half-hour to make up. Roland ran with doubt gnawing his guts, and rocky black ironstone crunching under his boots.

Esau Gondele was far out on his right flank, on the softer earth below the ridge, watching for the point where the chase left it and turned northwards towards the river again if it ever did.

Roland could not cover the southern edge of the ridge as well, the ironstone belt was too wide. It would mean splitting his meagre forces. The south side was his blind side. If they had doubled, or turned eastwards, then he had lost them. The thought of that was unbearable. He clenched his jaws until they ached and it felt as though his teeth might splinter, and he checked his watch they had been on the ridge forty-eight minutes. He was making the conversion of time to distance in his head when he saw the birds.

There were four of them, two brace of sand grouse and they were flighting in that peculiar quick-winged slant that made their intention unmistakable.

"They are going down to water," Roland said aloud, and marked their descent below the tree-tops before signalling to Esau Gondele.

The water was a pothole in the mopani, a relic of the last rains.

Twenty metres in diameter, most of it black mud, trampled by the game herds to the consistency of putty. The nine sets of man-prints were perfectly cast in it, going directly to the puddle of muddy water in the centre, and then once again heading directly northwards towards the river. They were onto the chase again, and Roland's hatred burned up brightly once more.

"Drain your bottles," he ordered. There was no profit in adulterating what remained of their sweet water with that filthy coffee-coloured liquid in the pan. They drank greedily and then one man collected their bottles and went out across the mud to refill them.

Roland would not risk more of his troopers than was necessary. out there on the exposed pan.

It was almost four o'clock by the time they were ready to take the spoor again, and by Roland's reckoning, they were still ten miles from the river.

"We can't let them get across, Sergeant-Major," he told him quietly. "From now on we won't hold back, push all out." The pace was too hard, even for superbly trained athletes such as they were. If they ran into contact now, they would be blown, almost helpless during the long minutes it would take to recover but they reached the Kazungula road un-challenged.

There had been no security patrol over the gravel surface for at least four hours. They found where the chase had taken the precaution of reconnoitring the road and sweeping away the signs of their crossing. That had cost them precious minutes, and the Scouts were within an ace of contact. The patch of earth where one of the terrorists had urinated was still muddy wet. The sandy earth had not had time to absorb it, nor the sun to evaporate it. They were minutes behind. It was folly to go in at the run, but as they crossed the road, Roland repeated, "All out!" And when he saw the flicker of Esau Gondele's eyes as he looked back, Roland went on, "Take number two, I will lead." He led at full run, hurdling the low thorn scrub in his path, relying only on his own speed to survive the first volley when they made the contact, knowing that even if the terrs took him out he could leave Esau Gondele and his men to finish it for him. Survival no longer was important to Roland, all that mattered was to make the contact and destroy them, as they had destroyed Janine.

Yet when he saw the flash of movement and colour in the scrub ahead of him, he went belly-down from full run. and made two quick rolls to the side, to spoil the aim. He was onto the target an instant later, and fired a short burst, one light touch on the trigger and the FN hammered into his shoulder. Then as the echoes fled there was complete silence. No return fire, and his Scouts were down in cover behind him, not firing until they had a target.

He signalled Esau Gondele. "Stay and cover me!" and went up on his feet, keeping low, rushing forward, jinking and twisting.

He dropped to the ground again beside a thorn bush In the thorny branches above his head was the thing that had drawn his fire. It flapped again on the hot little breeze off the river. It was a woman's skirt, soft fine cotton, bright buttercup yellow, but stained with dried blood and dirt.

Roland reached up and tore the skirt off the thorns, he bundled it in his fist and pressed his face into the cloth. Her perfume still lingered, very faintly but unmistakably. Roland found himself on his feet running forward with all his strength, with all his hatred, driven on by a madness that was at last out of control.

Ahead of him through the trees he saw the warning markers along the edge of the cordon sanitaire. The little red-painted skulls seemed to taunt him, to goad him on. He did not check as he passed them, nothing was going to stop him now, ahead of him stretched the minefield. Something smashed into the back of Roland's knees, and he was thrown to earth, the wind driven from his lungs, but immediately he was trying to struggle up. Esau Gondele tackled him again, dragged him back from the edge, and they swayed together, straining chest to chest.

"Let me go! "Roland panted. "I have to,-" Esau Gondele got his right arm free and crashed his fist into Roland's face, into his cheek, knocking his head across, half-stunning him, then taking instant advantage of his shock by twisting his arm up between his shoulder-blades and dragging him back. Clear of the minefield, he threw Roland to earth again, and dropped down beside him, pinning him with one massive black arm.

"You crazy bastard, you'll get us all killed, "he snarled into Roland's face. "You were into it already just one more step-" Roland stared at him uncomprehendingly, like a sleeper waking from a nightmare.

"They have gone through the cordon," Esau hissed at him. "They have got clear. It's finished. They have gone." "No, Roland shook his head. "They haven't got away. Get the radio up here. We can't let them get away." Roland used the security network, the calling channel was 129.7 megahertz.

"All units, this is Cheetah One come in, any station," he called quietly, but with the edge of desperation in his voice. The power on the set was only four watts, and Victoria Falls was thirty miles or so downriver. The only reply was the hum and burr of static.

He switched to the aviation frequencies, and tried Vic Falls approach on 126.9. Still no reply, he clicked over to tower and keyed the microphone.

"Tower, this is Cheetah One. Come in, please." There was a whisper, scratchy and faint.

"Cheetah One, this is Victoria Falls tower, you are transmitting on a restricted frequency." "Tower, we are a unit of Ballantyne's Scouts, we are in hot pursuit." "Cheetah One, is your chase the gang that Sammed the Viscount?" "Tower, that's affirmative!" "Cheetah One, you have our full co-operation." "I need a chopper to lift us over the cordon sanitaire. Do you have one on the plot?" "Negative, Cheetah One. One fixed-wing aircraft available." "Stand by." Roland lowered the microphone, and stared out across the minefield. It was so narrow.

It would take twenty seconds to cross it, but it might have been the Sahara.

"If they send a vehicle to pick us up we can fly from Vic Falls and make a para.-jump on the far bank," Esau Gondele muttered beside his ear.

"No good. It will take two hours-" Roland broke off. "By God, that's it!" He thumbed the key of the microphone. "Tower, this is Cheetah One." "Go ahead, Cheetah One." "There is a police armourer at Victoria Falls Hotel. Name, Sergeant Craig Mellow. I want him dropped on my position soonest possible to open the minefield. Telephone the hotel." "Stand by, Cheetah One." Tower's thin whisper faded and they lay in the sun and sweated, burned up by the heat and their hatred.

"Cheetah One, we have Mellow. He is already en route to the field. We will make the delivery with a silver Beechcraft Baron. RUAC markings. Give us a position and a recognition." "Tower, we are on the cordon sanitaire, estimate thirty miles upstream from the falls. We will give you a white phosphorous grenade "Roger, Cheetah One. I understand white smoke marker. In view of SAM danger, we can only make one pass at low level. Expect delivery in twenty minutes." "Tower, we are running out of daylight, tell them to hurry it up, for God's sake, those bastards are going to get clean away. Esau Gondele had the grenade-launcher fitted to the muzzle of his FN rifle. They heard the faint beat of Erwin aircraft engines coming from downstream, and Roland touched Esau's arm.

"Ready?" he asked.

The sound of the engines built up swiftly. Roland raised himself into a kneeling position and stared into the east. He saw the flash of silver just on the tree-tops and he tapped Esau's shoulder.

"Now!" There was the crack of the blank cartridge and the grenade lobbed up and over in a lazy parabola, fired away from the minefield towards the Kazungula road. The grenade exploded, and a column of white smoke leaped above the brown sun-seared bush. The small twin-engine aircraft banked gently towards the marker, and then steadied again.

The passenger door had been removed, leaving a square opening above the wing root. In the opening crouched a familiar lanky figure with the cross-webbing of the parachute harness coming out of his crotch over his chest and shoulders. The bulky chute package dangled low against the back of his legs. He wore a paratrooper's helmet and goggles, but his legs were brown and bare and his feet were thrust into plain suede velskoen.

The Beechcraft was very low perhaps too low. Roland felt a stab of anxiety, Sonny was no Scout. He had done his eight jumps for his paratrooper wings, but they were standard jumps from four thousand feet. The Beechcraft was barely two hundred feet above the bush. The pilot was taking no chances with incoming SAM fire.

"Make another pass," Roland shouted. "You are too low." He crossed his arms overhead, waving them off, but as he did it the wind-battered figure in. the hatch of the Beechcraft dropped head-first over the trailing edge of the silver wing. The tail seemed to slash at him like an executioner's axe, skimming his back, and the long ribbon of the rip-cord flirted out behind him, still attached to the speeding machine like an umbilical cord.

Craig dropped like a stone towards the earth, and watching him Roland felt his breath jam in his throat. Abruptly the silk streamed from the chute pack, flared open with an audible snap like a whiplash and Craig was plucked violently erect, his legs rodding out stiffly under him, almost touching the earth. For a long second he seemed to be suspended there like a man on the gallows, and then he dropped and rolled on his back with his feet together but high above him. Another roll and he was on his feet, sawing the parachute cords to collapse the blooming silk mushroom.

Roland let his breath out. "Bring him in,"he ordered.

Two of the Scouts hustled Craig forward, with a grip on each arm, forcing him to crouch and run. He dropped beside Roland who greeted him harshly. "You have to get us through, Sonny, as quick as you can."

"Roly, was Janine on the Viscount?" "Yes, damn you, now get us through." Craig had opened his light pack, and was assembling his tools, probe-and side-cutters and rolls of coloured. tape, steel tape-measure and hand-compass.

"Is she alive?" Craig could not look at Roland's face for the answer, but he started to tremble as he heard it.

"She's alive, but only just-" "Thank God, oh thank God," Craig whispered, and Roland studied his face thoughtfully.

"I didn't realize that you felt that way, Sonny." "You never were very perceptive." At last Craig looked up at him defiantly. "I loved her from the first moment I saw her." "All right, then you will want to get these bastards as much as I do. Open that field, and hurry."

Roland signalled and his Scouts moved up quickly and lay along the edge of the minefield, their weapons pointing forward. Roland turned back to Craig.

"Ready?" Craig nodded.

"You know the pattern?" "You'd better pray I do." "Get in there, Sonny," Roland ordered, and Craig stood up and walked into the minefield and started to work with the probe and the tape-measure.

Roland contained his impatience for less than five minutes, then he called, "Christ, Sonny, we have two hours of daylight how long is this going to take?" Craig did not even look around. He was stooped like a potato harvester, probing the earth gently, and the sweat had soaked through the back of his khaki shirt in a long dark stain.

"Can't you hurry it up?" With all the concentration of a surgeon clamping off an artery, Craig snipped the piano-wire trip of a Claymore mine, and then laid the coloured tape on the earth behind him, as he moved forward a pace. It was their thread through the labyrinth that Craig was laying.

Craig probed again. He had chosen an unfortunate point to enter the pattern on an overlap of two separate systems. Ordinarily he would have retraced his steps along the coloured. tape, and begun again at another point on the perimeter, but that could cost him precious time, perhaps as much as twenty minutes.

"Craig, you are bloody standing still," Roland called. "Christ, man, have you lost your nerve?" Craig flinched at the accusation. He should have checked the pattern to his left, there should be an AP at a 30,degree angle from the last one he had found, and a twenty-four, inch gap between them, if he had correctly read the pattern. To check it would mean two minutes" work.

"Move, damn you, Mellow!" Roland's voice lashed him. "Don't just stand there. Move!" " Craig steeled himself, the chance was three-to-one in his favour. He stepped forward one pace, and gingerly put his weight onto his left foot. It was firm. He took another pace, placing his right foot with the delicacy of a cat stalking a bird, firm again. Now the left foot, a droplet of sweat fell from his brow into his eye, flooding it and half-blinding him. He blinked it away and completed the step. Safe again.

There must be a Claymore mine on his right now. His legs were trembling, but he lowered himself into a squat. The wire, it wasn't there! He had mis-read the pattern. He was blind in the middle of the field, living on chance. He blinked his eyes rapidly, and then with a surge of relief he picked up the almost invisible wire exactly where it should have been. It seemed to quiver with tension like his own nerves. He reached out with the side-cutters, and had almost touched the wire when Roland's voice spoke just at his shoulder.

"Don't waste time-" Craig started violently and jerked his hand away from the deadly wire. He looked back. Roland had followed the coloured tape marker, he had come out into the minefield, and he was down on one knee with his FN rifle across his thigh only a pace behind Craig. His face was masked with a thick layer of camouflage paint, like some primitive warrior from another time, savage and monstrous.

"I am going as fast as I dare." Craig used his thumb to squeeze the heavy drops of nervous sweat from his eyebrows. "You aren't," Roland told him flatly. "You have been in here almost twenty minutes, and you haven't moved twenty paces. It will be dark before we get through if you chicken it." "Damn you! "Craig whispered hoarsely.

"Yes," Roland encouraged. "Get mad. Get fighting mad." Craig reached forward and snipped the trip-wire. It made a tiny quivering spring like a guitar string lightly plucked with a fingernail.

"That's it, Sonny. Move!" Roland's voice was at his back, a low monotonous litany.

"Think of those bastards, Sonny. They are out there, running like rabid jackals. Think of them getting away." Craig moved forward, taking each pace more firmly.

"They killed everybody on that Viscount, Craig. Everybody, men and women and children. Everybody except. her." Roland did not use her name. "They left her alive. But when I found her, she couldn't speak, Sonny. She could only scream and struggle like a wild animal."

Craig stopped dead, and looked back. His face was icy pale.

"Don't stop, Sonny. Keep going." Craig stooped and probed quickly. The AP was there, exactly where it should be. He went forward into the corridor with quick short steps and Roland's dry cold whisper was in his ear.

"They had raped her, Sonny, all of them. Her leg was broken in the crash, but that didn't stop them. They got on top of her, like rutting animals one after the other." Craig found himself running forward up the invisible corridor, merely counting his paces not using the tape, measure to check the length of it not using the compass to measure the angle of the turn.

At the end he fell flat and stabbed frantically into the earth with the probe, but Roland's voice was there behind him.

"When they had all finished, they started again," he whispered.

"But this time they rolled her over and sodomized her, Sonny-" Craig heard himself sob with each stroke of the probe. He hit the casing of a mine lying just under the surface, and the force of the blow jarred his arm. He dropped the probe and scratched with his fingers into the earth, exposing the circular top of the AP mine. It was the size of one of those old-fashioned tins of fifty Players Navy Cut cigarettes.

Craig lifted it out of its cavity, set it aside and went forward, but Roland's whisper followed relentlessly.

"One after the other they did it to her, Sonny, all except the last one. He couldn't manage it twice, so he took his bayonet and pushed that up her instead." "Stop it, Roly! For Chrissake, stop it!" "You say you love her, Sonny then hurry, for her sake, hurry!"

Craig found the second AP mine and plucked it from the earth, he hurled it away from him down the length of the minefield and it bounced and rolled like a rubber ball before disappearing into a clump of grass.

It did not explode. Craig clawed his way forward, stabbing the probe ferociously as though into the heart of one of them, and he found the third mine, the last one in the ninety-degree corner of the corridor.

It was open all the way to the opposite perimeter of the minefield, where there would be two Claymore trip-wires. Craig jumped to his feet and ran down the corridor, with violent death only inches on each side of his flying feet. He was almost blinded by his own tears, and he sobbed in time to his run. He reached the end of the corridor and stopped. Only the trip-wires now, only the trip-wires of the Claymores and they would be through the cordon sanitaire.

"Well done, Sonny," Roland's voice close behind, "well done, you've got us through." Craig changed the side-cutters into his right hand and took one step more. He felt it move under the sole of his right foot, the almost infinitesimal give, as though he had stepped on a subterranean mole, run and it had collapsed.

"It shouldn't have been there," he thought despairingly, and time seemed to be suspended.

He heard the click of the primer. It sounded like the release of a camera-shutter, but muted by the thin layer of sand over it.

"The wild one," he thought, and still time was frozen. He had time to think. "It's the wild one in the pattern." And nothing happened, just that click. He felt a spring of hope. "It's dud, it's a misfire." He was going to get away with it.

Then the mine exploded under his right foot. It felt as though someone had hit him with a full swing of a crow-bat under the sole.

There was no pain, just that stunning slam of shock into his foot, driven up his spine until his jaws clashed and he felt his tongue split between his teeth, bitten clean through.

No pain, just the deafening implosion of the shock-wave into his eardrums, as though somebody had held a double-barrelled shotgun, close to his head and fired both barrels together.

No pain, just the blinding rush of dust and smoke past his face, and then he was flung into the air as though he were the plaything of a callous giant, and he came down again on his belly. The wind driven from his lungs, so he wheezed for breath, his mouth filled with blood from his bitten tongue. His eyes were stinging from flying grit and smoke. He wiped them clear and Roland's face was in front of his, hazy and wavering like a heat mirage. Roland's lips were moving, but Craig could not hear the words. His ears buzzed viciously from the blast.

"It's all right, Roly," he said, and his own voice was almost lost in the singing memory of the explosion. "I'm all right," Craig repeated.

He pushed himself up and rolled into a sitting position. His left leg stuck straight out ahead of him, the inside of the calf was lacerated and discoloured purple black from the explosion, and blood oozed from out of the opening of his short khaki pants, shrapnel must have flown up into his buttocks and lower belly, but the velskoen was still on his left foot. He tried to move his foot and it responded immediately, waggling at him reassuringly.

But there was something wrong. He was dazed and groggy, his ears still dinning, yet through it he realized there was something dreadfully wrong and then gradually it dawned on him.

There was no right leg, just the short fat stump of it sticking out of the leg of his pants. The heat of the explosion had cauterized the raw end of the stump, and seared it white-, the dead bloodless white of frostbite. He stared at it, and knew it was a trick of his eyesight, because he could feel his leg was still there. He tried to move the missing foot, and he felt it move, but there was nothing there.

"Roly." Even through the din in his ears, he heard the high hysterical tone of his own voice. "Roly, my leg. Oh God, my leg!

It's gone!" Then at last the blood came, bursting through the hear seared flesh in bright arterial spurts.

"Roly, help me!" Roland stepped over him, squatting with a foot on each side of Craig's body, his back to Craig, screening him from his own mutilated lower body. Roland unrolled the canvas wallet that contained his field medical kit, and strapped the tourniquet from it around the stump. The haemorrhage shrivelled and he bound the field-dressing over the stump. He worked quickly, with the dexterity of practice and experience, and the second that he finished, he swivelled to look into Craig's pale dusty sweat-streaked face.

"Sonny, the Claymores. Can you do the Claymores? For her sake, Sonny, try!" Craig stared at him. "Sonny for Janine," Roland whispered, and pulled him up into a sitting position. "Try! For her sake, try!" "Side-cutters!" Craig mumbled, staring with great hurt eyes at the blood-soaked turban that wrapped his stump. "Find my side-cutters!" Roland pressed the tool into his hand. "Turn me onto my belly, "Craig said.

Roland rolled him carefully, and Craig began to slide himself forward, walking his elbows in the torn dusty earth, he dragged his one remaining leg over the shallow crater left by the exploding AP mine, and then stopped and reached forward. There was the guitar twang, as the first trip-wire parted in the jaws of the cutter, and, laboriously as a maimed insect squashed under a gardener's heel, Craig dragged himself onto the very edge of the minefield. For the last time he reached out. His hand was shaking wildly, and he seized his own wrist with his left hand to steady it, sobbing with the effort he guided the open jaws of the cutter over the hair-thin steel wire, and bore down.

It went with a ping, and Craig dropped the tool.

"Okay, it's open," he sobbed, and Roland pulled the lanyard out of the vee of his shirt, and lifted the whistle to his lips. He blew a single crisp blast, and pumped his arm over his head.

"Let's go!" The Scouts came through the minefield at a run, keeping their rigid ten-pace separation, following the zigzag of the tape that Craig had laid down the corridor to guide them. As each one of them came to where Craig still lay on his belly, they jumped lightly over his back and melted away into the open bush, beyond the minefield, spreading out into their running formation. Roland lingered a second longer at Craig's side.

"I can't spare anyone to stay with you, Sonny." He laid the medical kit beside his head. "There is morphine for when it gets too bad." He laid something else beside the medical kit. It was a hand-grenade. "The terrs may get to you before our boys do. Don't let them take you. A grenade is messy, but effective." Then Roland leaned forward and kissed Craig on the forehead. "Bless you, Sonny!" he said, and then he was on his feet going forward again at a run ". Within seconds, the thick riverine Zambezi bush had swallowed him, and slowly Craig lowered his face into the crook of his arm.

Then, at last, the pain came at him like a ravening lion.

Commissar Tungata Zebiwe crouched in the bottom of the slit trench, and listened to the husky voice speaking from the portable radio.

"They are through the minefield, coming down to the river.

His observers were on the north bank of the Zambezi, in carefully prepared positions from which they could sweep the opposite bank and the small heavily wooded islands that split the shallows of the wide river-course.

"How many?"Tungata asked into the microphone. "No count yet." Of course, they would be mere flickers of movement in the darkening bush, impossible to get a head count, as they came forward in overlapping covering rushes. Tungata looked up at the sky, there was less than an hour before dark, he estimated, and felt a fresh onslaught of the doubts that had beset him ever since he had brought his cadre through the drifts almost three hours before.

Could he entice the pursuers into crossing the river? Without that the destruction of the Viscount and all else that he had so far achieved would be halved in propaganda and psychological value against the enemy. He had to bring the Scouts across into the carefully prepared killing-ground. He had carried the woman's skirt and left it on the edge of the cordon sanitaire for just that purpose, to bring them on.

Yet he recognized that it would be an irrational act for any commander to take a small force across such a natural barrier as the Zambezi at the close of day with darkness only minutes away, into hostile territory against an enemy of unknown strength who must anticipate his arrival and who had been able to prepare for it at leisure. Tungata could not expect them to come he could only hope.

It would depend chiefly upon who had command of the pursuers. The bait that he had laid to draw them in would be only truly effective on one man, the multiple rape and mutilation of the woman, the bloodied skirt would have their full effect only upon Colonel Roland Ballantyne himself. Tungata tried objectively to assess the chances that it was Ballantyne himself commanding the pursuit.

He had been at Victoria Falls Hotel, ZIPRA agents had made a positive identification. The woman had called herself Ballantyne, the Scouts were the nearest and most effective force in the area. Surely they must be the first to the site of the wreck, and surely Ballantyn would be with them. Tungata had to allow himself a better than even chance that his operation was working as planned.

Tungata's first confirmation that the pursuit was close had been a little before four o'clock that afternoon, when there had been one short burst of automatic fire from the south bank. At that moment, Tungata's cadre had just completed the crossing of the drift. They were still soaked and lying panting, like hunting-dogs too hard run, and Tungata had been chilled to realize how close the Scouts had been behind them, despite the many hours" start they had had and the fierce pace that Tungata had forced on his men. Twenty minutes more and they would have been caught on the south bank at the cordon sanitaire, and Tungata cherished no illusions as to what that would have meant. His men were the elite of the ZIPRA forces, but they were no match for Ballantyne's Scouts. On the south bank they would have been doomed, but now that they were across the Zambezi, the advantage had swung dramatic cally. Tungata's preparations to receive the pursuing force had taken fully ten days, and had been carried out with the full co-operation of the Zambian army and police force.

The radio crackled again and Tungata lifted the microphone to his lips and acknowledged curtly. The observer's voice was lowered, as though he feared it might carry to the dangerous quarry across the river.

"They have not attempted the crossing. Either they are waiting for dark, or they are not coming." "They must come," Tungata whispered to himself, and then he keyed the microphone.

"Put up the flare," he ordered.

"Stand by!" the observer answered, and Tungata lowered the microphone and looked up expectantly into the purple and rose of the evening sky. It was a risk, but then it had all been a risk, from the very moment they crossed the Zambezi carrying the SAM-7 launcher.

The signal flare streaked up into the sunset, and five hundred feet above the river it burst into a crimson ball of fire. Tungata watched it begin to sink gracefully towards the earth again, He found that he had driven his fingernails into the flesh of his palms with the strength of his grip upon the radio microphone.

The flare, fired so tantalizingly close to the river bank, from just behind the first line of trees on the north bank, could frighten them off and make them abandon the pursuit, or it could have the effect that Tungata hoped for. It could convince them how close they were to their quarry, and precipitate the cat-like reflex to follow anything that flees.

Tungata waited and the seconds dragged by. He shook his head, facing at last the prospect of failure, feeling the chill of it begin in the pit of his stomach and beginning to spread. Then the radio crackled, and the observer's voice was strained and hoarse. They are coming! "he said.

Tungata snatched the microphone to his lips. "All units. Hold your fire. This is Comrade Tungata. Hold your fire." He had to pause then, his relief mixed with dread that at this last moment one of his nervous guerrillas might spring the trap prematurely. He had six hundred men deployed on the killing-ground, only regimental strength was sufficient for a detachment of kanka. With his own eyes Tungata had seen them fight, and anything less than odds of twenty to one in his favour would not be acceptable.

He had achieved his numerical advantage, but in his own great numbers there was a concealed danger. Control was weakened, not all of his men were warriors of quality, amongst them there must be many of those who were nervous and susceptible to the mysterious aura, the almost superstitious awe, that surrounded the legend of Ballantyne's Scouts, "All field commanders, "he kept repeating into the microphone, "hold your fire. This is Commissar Comrade Tungata. Hold your fire. "Then he lowered the microphone and made one long last careful study of the ground in front of him.

The north bank of the river was almost a mile from where he waited. It was marked by a palisade of taller trees, the twisted trunks of great strangler figs and tall mkusi, their branches laden with trailing lianas, and higher even than these were the elegant bottle palms, their spiky fronds silhouetted against the blushing sunset. There was no glimpse of the river through this wall of lush growth.

Then abruptly the line of forest ended on this wide meadow-like opening. It was one of the Zambezi flood plains. In the rainy season, when the river burst its banks, this area would be inundated and transformed into a shallow lagoon filled with water-lilies and reeds, but now it had dried out, and the reeds had witted and fallen, no longer providing cover for a pursuer, or a fugitive.

One of Tungatas main concerns had been to keep the soft surface of this wide pan uncontaminated by spoor and footprints. There had been a regiment encamped along its fringes for almost ten days now, a regiment digging the trench system and batteries for the mortars. just one man wandering across the pan would have left a warning to the pursuers, but it had been kept clean.

The only spoor out there was that of the wild buffalo herds, of the dainty red puku antelope, and the tracks of nine men, the same tracks that led from the crash site of the Viscount, and which Tungata and his cadre had laid only three hours previously. These tracks emerged from the fringe of riverine bush and ran down the centre of the open flood plain to the higher forested ground on this side.

The carrier band of Tungata's radio hummed to life and the whisper of his observer warned, "They are halfway across the drift." Tungata imagined the line of dark heads above the sunset-pink waters, looking like a string of beads on a bodice of velvet.

"How many?"Tungata asked. "Twelve." Tungata felt a quick drop of disappointment. So few? He had hoped for more. He hesitated for a heartbeat before he asked. "Is there a white officer?" "Only one man in camouflage paint, he is at the head of the line." "It's Ballantyne," Tungata told himself. "It's the great jackal himself, it must be him."

Again the voice spoke from the radio. "They are across, into the trees. We have lost sight." Now, would they commit themselves to cross the flood plain? Tungata focused his night-glasses on the treeline.

The specially ground and coated lens picked up every available ray of light but still even through the lens the shapes of the trees and bushes beneath them were becoming indistinct. The sun had gone, and the last colours of the sunset were fading, the first stars were pricking the dark canopy of the night sky.

"They are still in the trees." It was a different voice on the radio, deeper and harsher. One of the second line of observers covering the southernmost fringe of the pan.

Tungata gave another order into the microphone. "Unscreen the fire!" he said quietly, and seconds later there was a tiny yellow glow of a camp-fire in the treeline furthest from the river. As Tungata. stared at it through the night-glasses, a human figure passed in front of the low flames. It gave the perfect illusion of a quiet camp amongst the trees, where an unsuspecting quarry exhausted from the long chase, but believing themselves safe at last, were resting and preparing the evening meal. But -was it too obvious a lure, Tungata wondered anxiously, was he relying too much upon the unbalanced rage of the pursuers?

His self-doubts were answered almost immediately. The gruff voice on the radio said suddenly, "They have left the trees, they are crossing the pan." It was too dark now to make out anything at that range. He had to rely on the sighting of his forward posts, and he turned the luminous dial of his wristwatch so that he could see the sweep of the second-hand. The pan was one and a half kilometres across, at a run the Scouts would take approximately four minutes to cross it.

Without taking his eyes off the dial, Tungata spoke into the microphone. "Mortars, stand by with star-shell." "Mortars, standing by!" The second-hand completed its circuit of the dial, and started around again.

"Mortars, fire!" Tungata ordered.

From the forest behind him came that hollow clunking sound of three-inch mortars, and Tungata heard the flute of the mortar bombs rising swiftly overhead. Then suddenly, at the zenith of their trajectory, the star shells burst.

They hung suspended on their tiny parachutes, and their light was a harsh electric blue. The open flood plain was illuminated like some gigantic sports stadium. The tiny group of running men in the centre were trapped in the naked glare, and their shadows on the earth beneath them seemed black and weighty as solid ironstone.

They went down instantly but there was no cover. Even though they were flattened against the earth, their bodies formed sharply defined hummocks. But they were almost immediately obliterated by the leaping sheets of dust and flying clods of earth that sprang up around them like a bank of pale whirling fog. Tungata had six hundred men in the treeline surrounding the pan. All of them were firing now, and the hurricane of automatic fire swept over the huddled figures in the middle of the open pan.

From the mortar batteries set farther back in the forest, the bombs rose high over Tungata's head and then dropped into the open pan.

The crack of their explosions added a sharp counterpoint to the background thunder of small-arms fire, and the mortar bursts jumped up like pale dust-devils in the light of the star-shells.

Nothing could live out there. The Scouts must long ago all be torn to shreds by shot and shrapnel, but still it went on and on, minute after minute, while more star-shells crackled into eye-searing bright sizzling blue light overhead.

Tungata panned his binoculars slowly over the drifting screen of dust and smoke. He could see no sign of life and at last he shifted the microphone to order the cease fire But before he could speak, he saw movement, directly in front of his position, not two hundred paces distant, and out of the curtain of dust came two ghostly figures.

They came at a run, side by side, seeming to wade through the thick swamp of mortar-smoke and dust, and they appeared monstrous and inhuman in the stark light of the star-shells. One of them was a huge Matabele. He had lost his helmet and his head was round and black as a cannonball, his open mouth was a pink cave lined with ivory teeth, and his bull bellow rose above even that storm of gunfire. The other was a white man, the top of his battle dress torn half off his body, exposing the pale flesh of chest and shoulders, but his face was daubed with fiendish streaks of dark green and brown paint.

The two of them were firing as they came on, and Tungata felt a stir of the superstitious dread that he had despised in his own troops, for they seemed immune to the storm of bullets through which. they charged.

"Kill them!"Tungata heard his own voice screaming, and a burst of FN fire from one of them kicked the top of the bank of loose earth in front of his slit trench.

Tungata ducked and ran to the gunner behind the heavy machine-gun at the end of the trench.

"Aim carefully," he shouted, and the gunner fired a long thunderous burst, but the two figures ran on towards them unscathed.

Tungata pushed the man away from the gun and took his place. For infinite seconds he peered over the sights, making the tiny adjustments to the gun's elevation, and then he fired.

The tall Matabele was driven backwards, as though he had been hit by a runaway automobile, and then he seemed to disintegrate, breaking up like a straw man in a high wind as the bullets tore him to pieces.

He melted into the surface of the pan.

The second man came on, running and firing, screaming an incoherent challenge, and Tungata swung the machinegun onto him. He paused for a micro-second to make certain of his aim, and he saw the flash of hard white flesh through the gunsight, and the diabolically painted face above it.

Tungata fired, and the heavy gun pounded briefly in his hand, then jammed and was silent.

Tungata was frozen, completely in the grip of supernatural dread, for the man was still coming on. He had dropped his FN rifle, and half his shoulder was shot away. The shattered arm dangled uselessly at his side, but he was on his feet coming straight at Tungata.

Tungata jumped to his feet and pulled the Tokarev pistol from the webbing holster on his side. The man was almost at the trench now, not ten paces away, and Tungata pointed the pistol at him. He fired and saw the bullet strike in the centre of the naked white chest. The man dropped to his knees, no longer able to come forward, but straining to do so, reaching out towards his enemy with his one remaining arm, no sound coming out of the open blood-glutted mouth.

This close, despite the thick mask of camouflage paint, Tungata recognized him from that never-forgotten night at Khami Mission. The two men stared at each other for a second longer, and then Roland Ballantyne fell forward onto his face.

Slowly the great storm of gunfire from around the rim of the pan shrivelled and died away. Tungata Zebiwe climbed stiffly out of the trench and went to where Roland Ballantyne lay. With his foot he rolled him down the bank of earth onto his back, and with a sense of disbelief saw the eyelids quiver and then open slowly. In the light of the star shells the green eyes that stared up at him still seethed with rage and hatred.

Tungata squatted beside the man, and said softly in English, "Colonel Ballantyne, I am very pleased to meet you again." Then Tungata leaned forward, placed the muzzle of the Tokarev against his temple, just an inch in front of his ear hole and fired a bullet through Roland Ballantyne's brain.

The paraplegic section of St. Giles" Hospital was a haven, a sanctuary into which Craig Mellow retreated gratefully.

He was more fortunate than some of the other inmates. He suffered only two journeys along the long green-painted corridor, the wheels of the trolley on which he lay squeaking un rhythmically and the masked impersonal faces of the theatre sisters hovering above his, down through the double swing doors at the end, into the stink of asepsis and anaesthetic.

The first time they had built him a fine stump, with a thick cushion of flesh and skin around it to take the artificial limb. The second time they had removed most of the larger fragments of shrapnel that had peppered his crotch and buttocks and lower back. They had also searched, unsuccessfully, for some mechanical reason for the complete paralysis of his body below the waist.

His mutilated flesh recovered from the surgery with the rapidity of that of a healthy young animal, but the leg of plastic and stainless steel stood unused beside his bedside locker, and his arms thickened with muscle from lifting himself on the chain handles and from manipulating the wheelchair.

Swiftly he found his special niches in the sprawling old building and gardens. He spent much of his day in the therapeutic workshop working from the wheelchair. He stripped his old Land-Rover completely and rebuilt the engine, grinding the crankshaft and re boring the block.

Then he converted it to hand controls, fitted handles and adapted the driver's seat to make it easier to swing his paralysed lower body in and out. He built a rack for the folding wheelchair where once the gun racks had been behind the front seat, and he re sprayed the body a lustrous maroon colour.

When he finished work on the Land-Rover, he began designing and machining stainless-steel and bronze fittings for the yacht, working hour after hour on the lathes and drilling presses. While his hands were busy he found he could crowd out the haunting memories, so he lavished care and total concentration on the task, turning out small masterpieces in wood and metal.

In the evenings he had his reading and his writing, though he never read a newspaper, nor watched the television set in the hospital common room. He never took part with the other patients in any discussion of the fighting or of the complicated peace negotiations which commenced with such high hopes and broke down so regularly. That way, Craig could pretend to himself that the wolves of war were not still hunting across the land.

Only at night he could not control the tricks his mind and memory played upon him, and once again he sweated with terror in an endless minefield, with Roly's voice whispering obscenities in his ears, or he saw the electric glare of star-shells in the night sky above the river and heard the storm of gunfire. Then he would wake screaming, with the night nurse beside him, concerned and compassionate.

"It's all right, Craig, it was just one of your feemies. It's all right." But it was not all right, he knew it would never be all right.

Aunty Valerie wrote to him. The one thing that tortured her and Uncle Douglas was that Roland's body had never been recovered. They had heard a horror story through the security forces" intelligence that Roland's bullet-riddled corpse had been put on public display in Zambia and that the guerrillas in the training camps had been invited to spit and urinate upon it to convince themselves that he was truly dead.

Afterwards the body had been dumped into one of the pit latrines of the guerrilla training camp.

She hoped Craig would understand that neither she nor Uncle Douglas felt up to visiting him at present, but if there was anything he needed, he had only to write to them.

On the other hand, Jonathan Ballantyne came to visit Craig every Friday. He drove his old silver Bentley and brought a picnic basket with him. It always contained a bottle of gin and half a dozen tonics.

He and Craig shared it, in a sheltered nook at the end of the hospital gardens. Like Craig, the old man wanted to avoid the painful present, and they found escape together into the past. Each week Bawu brought one of the old family journals, and they discussed it avidly, Craig trying to glean every one of the old man's memories of those far-off days.

Only twice did they break their accord of forgetfulness and silence. Once Craig asked, "Bawu, what has happened to Janine?"

"Valerie and Douglas wanted her to go and live at Queen's Lynn, when she was released from hospital, but she wouldn't go. As far as I know, she is still working at the museum. The next week it was Bawu who paused as he was about to climb back into the Bentley, and said, When they killed Roly, that was the first time I realized that we were going to lose this war." "Are we going to lose, Bawu?" "Yes, said the old man, and drove away leaving Craig in the wheelchair staring after the Bentley.

At the end of the tenth month at St. Giles', Craig was sent for a series of tests that lasted four days. They X-rayed him and stuck electrodes to his body, they tested his eyesight and his reaction time to various stimuli, they scanned the surface of his skin for heat changes that would show nervous malfunction, they gave him a lumbar puncture and sucked out a sample of his spinal fluid. At the end of it, Craig was nervous and exhausted. That night he had another nightmare. He was lying in the minefield again, and he could hear Janine. She was in the darkness ahead of him. They were doing to her what Roland had described and she was screaming for him to help her.

He could not move. When he woke at last, his sweat had formed a tepid puddle in the red rubber under sheet

The next day -the doctor in charge of his case told him, "You -did wonderfully in your tests, Craig, we are really proud of you. Now I am going to start a new course of treatment, I am sending you to Doctor Davis." Dr. Davis was a young man with an intense manner and a disconcerting directness in his stare. Craig took an immediate dislike to him, sensing that he would seek to destroy the cocoon of peace which Craig had almost succeeded in weaving about himself. It was only after he had -been in Davis" office for ten minutes that Craig realized that he was a psychiatrist.

"Look here, Doctor, I'm not a funny bunny." "No, you are not, but we think you might need a little help, Craig." "I am fine. I don't need help." "There is nothing wrong with your body or nervous system, we want to find out why you have no function in your lower body."

"Listen, Doctor, I can save you a lot of trouble. The reason I can't move my stump and my one good kicker is that I stepped on an AP mine and it blew pieces of me all over the scenery." "Craig, there is a recognized condition, once they used to call it shell-shock.-" "Doctor." Craig interrupted him. "You say there is nothing wrong with me?" "Your body has healed perfectly." "Fine, why didn't somebody tell me before?"

Craig wheeled his chair down the corridor to his room. It took him five minutes to pack his books and papers, then he wheeled himself out to the shiny maroon Land-Rover, slung his valise into the back, dragged himself up into the driver's seat, loaded the wheelchair into the rack behind him and drove out to the yacht.

In the St. Giles" workshop he had designed and put together a system of pulley and hand winches to lift himself easily up the high side of the hull to deck-level. Now the other modifications to the yacht absorbed all his energy and ingenuity. Firstly he had to install grab handles to pull himself around the deck and cockpit and below decks. He sewed leather patches on the seat of his trousers and skidded around on his backside, as he adapted the galley and the head, lowered the bunk and rebuilt the chart-table to his new requirements.

He worked with music blaring out from the speakers and a mug of gin within easy reach. music and liquor helped to chase away unwanted memories.

The yacht was a fortress. He left it only once a month, when he went into town to pick up his police pension cheque, and to stock up his larder and his supply of writing-paper.

On one of these trips he found a second-hand typewriter, and a "teach yourself to type" paperback. He screwed the carriage of the machine to a corner of the chart-table where it would be secure even in a gale at sea, and he began converting the mess of handwritten exercise books into neat piles of typescript, his speed built up with practice until he could make the keys chatter in time to the music.

Dr. Davis, the psychiatrist, tracked him down at last, and Craig called down to him from the cockpit of the yacht. "Look here, Doc, I realize now that you were right, I am a raving homicidal psychopath.

If I were you, I wouldn't put a foot on that ladder." After that Craig rigged up a counter-balance so that he could pull the ladder up after him like a drawbridge. He let it down only for Bawu and each Friday they drank gin and built a little world of fantasy and imagination in which they both could hide.

Then Bawu came on a Tuesday. Craig was up on the foredeck reinforcing the stepping of the mainmast. The old man climbed out of the Bentley, and Craig's happy cry of welcome died on his lips. Bawu seemed to have shrivelled up. He looked ancient and fragile, like one of those unwrapped mummies in the Egyptology section of the British Museum. In the back of the Bentley was the Matabele cook from King's Lynn who had worked for the old man for forty years. Under Bawu's direction, the Matabele unloaded two large crates from the boot of the Bentley, and placed them in the goods lift.

Craig winched the crates up, and then lowered the lift for the old man. In the saloon Craig poured gin into the glasses, avoiding looking at his grandfather, embarrassed for his sake.

Bawu was truly an old man at last. His eyes were rheumy and unfocused, his mouth slack so that he mumbled and sucked noisily at his lips. He spilled a dribble of gin down his shirt-front and didn't realize that he had done so. They sat in silence for a long time, the old man nodding to himself and making small incoherent grunts and burbles. Then suddenly he said. "I've brought you your inheritance," and Craig realized that the crates on the deck must contain the journals that they had haggled over. "Douglas wouldn't know what to do with them anyway." "Thank you, Bawu." "Did I ever tell you about the time Mr. Rhodes held me upon his lap?" Bawu asked with a disconcerting change of direction. Craig had heard the story fifty times before.

"No, you never did. I'd love to hear it, Bawu." "Well, it was during a wedding out at Khami Mission must have been "95 or "96." The old man bumbled on for ten minutes, before he lost the thread of the story entirely and lapsed into silence again.

Craig refilled the glasses, and Bawu stared at the opposite bulkhead, and suddenly Craig realized that tears were running down the withered old cheeks.

"What is it, Bawu?"he demanded with quick alarm. Those slow painful tears were a terrible thing to watch.

"Didn't you hear the news?" the old man asked. "You know I never listen to the news." "It's. over, my boy, all over. We have lost.

Roly, you, all those young men, it was all for nothing we have lost the war. Everything we and our fathers fought for, everything we won and built, it's all gone. We have lost it all over a table in a place called Lancaster House." Bawu's shoulders were shaking quietly, the tears still streaming down his face. Craig dragged himself across the saloon and lifted himself onto the bench beside him. He took Bawu's hand and held it. The old man's hand was thin and light and dry, like the dried bones of a dead seabird.

The two of them, old and young, sat holding hands like frightened children in an empty house.

On the following Friday, Craig crawled out of his bunk early and did his housekeeping in anticipation of Bawu's regular visit. The previous day he had laid in half a dozen bottles of gin, so there was unlikely to be a drought, and he broke the seal on one of them and set it ready with the two glasses polished to a shine. Then he put the first three hundred pages of the typescript next to the bottle.

"It will cheer the old man up." He had taken months to pluck up his courage sufficiently to tell Bawu what he was attempting. Now that another person was about to be allowed to read his typescript, Craig was seized by conflicting emotions, firstly by dread that it would all be judged as valueless, that he had wasted time and hope upon something of little worth, and secondly by a sharp resentment that the private world that he "had created upon those blank white sheets was to be invaded by a trespasser, even one as beloved as Bawu.

"Anyway, somebody has to read it sometime," Craig consoled himself and dragged himself down to the heads. While he sat on the chemical toilet he could see his own face in the mirror above the hand-basin.

For the first time in months he truly looked at himself. He had not shaved in a week, and the gin had left soft putty-coloured pouches under his eyes. The eyes themselves were hurt and haunted by terrible memories, and his mouth was twisted like that of a lost child on the verge of tears.

He shaved, and then switched on the shower and sat under it revelling in the almost-forgotten sensation of hot suds. Afterwards, he combed his wet hair over his face and with the scissors trimmed it straight across the line of his eyebrows, then he scrubbed his teeth until the gums bled. He found a clean blue shirt, and then slid along the companionway, hoisted himself to deck-level, lowered the boarding-ladder, and found a place in the sun with his back against the coping of the cabin to wait for Bawu.

He must have dozed, for the sound of an automobile engine made him start awake, but it was not the whisper of the old man's Bentley, but the distinctive throb of a Volkswagen Beetle. Craig did not recognize the drab green vehicle, not the driver who parked it under the mango trees, and came hesitantly towards the yacht.

She was a dumpy little figure, of that indeterminate age that plain girls enter in their late twenties, and which carries them through to old age. She walked without pride, slumping as though to hide her breasts and the fact that she was a woman. Her skirt was bulky around her thick waist, and the low sensible shoes almost drew attention away from the surprisingly lovely lines of her calves and the graceful ankles.

She walked with her arms folded across her chest as though she was cold, even in the hot morning sunlight. She peered shortsightedly at the path through horn-rimmed spectacles, and her hair was long and lank, hanging straight and lustre less to hide her face, until she stood below the yacht side and looked up at Craig. Her skin was bad, like that of a teenager who was on junk food, and her face was plump, but with an unhealthy soft look, and a sick-room pallor.

Then she lifted the horn-rimmed spectacles from her face. The frames left little red indentations on each side of her nose, but the eyes, those huge slanted cat's-eyes with the strange little cast in them, those eyes so dark indigo blue as to be almost black they were unmistakable.

Jan, "Craig whispered. "Oh God, Jan, is it you?" She made a heartbreakingly feminine gesture of vanity pushing the lank dull hair off her face, and dropped her eyes, standing awkwardly pigeon-toed in the dowdy skirt.

Her voice barely carried up to him. "I'm sorry to bother you. I know how you must feel about me, but can I come up, please?" "Please, Jan, please do." He dragged himself to the rail and steadied the ladder for her.

"Hello," he grinned at her shyly, as she reached the deck level

"Hello, Craig." "I'm sorry, I'd like to stand up, but you'll have to get used to talking down to me." "Yes,"she said. "I heard." "Let's go down to the saloon. I'm expecting Bawu. It will be like old times." She looked away. "You've done a lot of work, Craig." "She's almost finished," he told her proudly.

"She's beautiful." Janine went down from the cockpit into the saloon, and he lowered himself after her.

"We could wait for Bawu," Craig said, as he placed a tape on the machine, instinctively avoiding Beethoven and selecting Debussy for a lighter happier sound. "Or we could have a drink right now." He grinned to cover his uneasiness and discomfort. "And quite frankly I need one right away." Janine did not touch her glass, but sat staring at it. "Bawu told me you were still working at the museum." She nodded, and Craig felt his chest constricted with helpless pity for her.

"Bawu will be here-" He searched desperately for something to say to her.

"Craig, I came to tell you something. The family asked me to come to you, they wanted somebody whom you knew to break the news." Now she looked up from the glass, "Bawu won't be coming today," she said. "He won't be coming ever again." After a long time Craig asked softly, "When did it happen?" "Last night, while he was sleeping. It was his heart." "Yes," Craig murmured. "His heart. It was broken I knew that." "The funeral will be tomorrow at King's Lynn, in the afternoon.

They want you to be there. We could go together, if you don't mind?"

The weather changed during the night, and the wind went up into the southeast bringing with it the thin cold drizzling guti rain.

They laid the old man down amongst his wives and children and grandchildren in the little cemetery at the back of the hills. The rain on the freshly turned red earth piled beside the open grave made it seem as though the earth were bleeding from a mortal wound.

Afterwards, Craig and Janine drove back to Bulawayo in the Land-Rover.

"I'm staying at the same flat," Janine said, as they drove through the park. "Will you drop me there, please?" if I am alone now, I'll just get sad drunk," Craig said. "Won't you come back to the yacht, just for a little while, please?" Craig heard the pleading in his own voice.

"I'm not very good around people any more," she said. "Nor am I," Craig agreed. "But you and I aren't just people, are we?" Craig made coffee for both of them, and brought it through from the galley. They sat opposite each other, and he found it difficult not to stare at her.

"I must look a sight," she said, abruptly, and he did not know how to answer her. "You will always be the most beautiful woman I have ever known!

"Craig, did they tell you what happened to me?" "Yes, I know."

"Then you must know that I am not really a woman any more. I will never be able to let a man, any man, touch me again." "I can understand that." "That's one of the reasons that I. never tried to see you again." "What are the other reasons?" he asked.

"That you would not wish to see me, to have anything to do with me." "That I don't understand." Janine was silent again, huddled on the bench seat, hugging herself with that protective gesture.

"Roly felt that way," she blurted. "After they were finished with me. When he found me there beside the wreck, when he realized what they had done to me, he could not even bear to touch me, not even to speak to me." "Jan-" Craig started, but she cut him off.

"It's all right, Craig. I didn't tell you to hear you deny it for me. I told you so that you would know about me. So that you would know that I have nothing left to offer a man that way." "Then I can tell you that, like you, I have nothing to offer a woman that way."

There was quick and real pain in her eyes. "Oh Craig, my poor Craig I didn't realize I thought it was just one leg.- "On the other hand, I can offer someone friendship and caring, and just about everything else." He grinned at her. "I can even offer a shot of gin." "I thought you didn't want to get drunk." She smiled back at him gently. "I said sad drunk, but we should give Bawu a little wake. He would have liked that." They sat facing each other across the saloon table, chatting in desultory fashion, both of them beginning to relax as the gin warmed them and gradually they recaptured some of that long-lost camaraderie that they had once enjoyed.

Janine explained her reasons for not accepting the invitation of Douglas and Valerie to live at Queen's Lynn. "They look at me with such pity, that I start to feel it all over again. It would be like going into a state of perpetual mourning." He told her about St. Giles', and the way he had absconded. "They say it's not my legs, but my head that prevents me from walking. Either they are crazy or I am I prefer to think that it's them." He had two steaks in the refrigerator, and he grilled them on the gas while she made a dressing for the salad, and while they worked he explained all the modifications that he had made to the layout of the yacht.

"With the roller boom, I would be able to shorten or make sail without leaving the cockpit," he chatted on. "I bet that I could manage her single-handed. It's a pity I'm not ever going to have the chance." "What do you mean?" She stopped with an onion in one hand and a knife in the other.

"My darling is never going to feel the kiss of salt water on her bottom," he explained. "They have impounded her." "Craig, I don't understand." "I applied to the exchange control authorities for a permit to ship her to the coast. You know what they are like, don't you?" "I've heard they are pretty rough," she answered.

"Rough? That's like calling Attila the Hun unkind. If you try to get out of the country, even as a legal emigrant, they allow you to take out only a thousand dollars" worth of goods or cash. Well, they sent an inspector round and he valued the yacht at two hundred and fifty thousand. If I want to take it out, I have to make a cash deposit of a quarter of a million dollars, a quarter of a million! I have a little over ten thousand dollars between me and prostitution, so until I come up with another two hundred and forty thousand, here I sit." "Craig, that's cruel. Couldn't you appeal? I mean in your special circumstances?" She stopped herself when she saw the little arrowhead of a frown appear between his eyes. Craig brushed over the reference to his disability.

"You can see their point of view, I suppose. Every white man in the country wants to get out before the big black baddies take over.

We would strip the country bare if there was no control." "But, Craig, what are you going to do?" "Stay here, I suppose. I don't have much alternative. I'll sit here and read His cock's Voyaging Under Sail and Mellor's Cruising Safe and Simple." "I wish there was something I could do to help." "There is. You can lay the table and hook a bottle of wine out of the cupboard." Janine left more than half her steak, and drank little of the wine, then she wandered across the saloon to examine his collection of tapes..

Taganini's Capricci," she murmured, "now I know you are a masochist." And then her attention was attracted to the neat square pile of the typescript on the shelf beside the tapes.

"What is this?" She turned the first few sheets, and then looked up at him. Those beautiful blue eyes in the once beautiful face, that was now swollen and distorted with fat and speckled about the chin with angry little blemishes, made his heart plunge. "What is it?" And then, seeing his expression, "Oh, I'm sorry. It's none of my business."

"No!" he said, quickly. "It's not that. It's just that I don't really know what it is-" He couldn't call it a book, and it would be pretentious to call it a novel. "It's just something I have been fiddling with." Janine riffled the edges of the sheets. The pile was over twelve inches deep. "It doesn't look like fiddling," she said, "To me it looks like deadly earnest!" "It's a story I have been trying to write down." may I read it?" she asked, and he felt panic rising in him. "Oh, it wouldn't interest you." "How do you know?" She lugged the huge typescript to the table. "May I read it?" He shrugged helplessly, "I don't think you will get far, but if you would like to try-" She sat down and read the first page.

"It's still very rough, you must make allowances, "he said.

"Craig, you still don't know when to shut up, do you?" she said, without looking up. She turned the page.

He took the plates and glasses through to the galley and washed them, then he made coffee and brought the pot to the saloon table.

Janine did not look up. He poured her a mug, and she did not look up from the page.

After a while he left her and slid through to his cabin. He stretched out on the bunk, and picked up the book he was reading from the bedside table. It was Crawford's Mariners" Celestial No6gation, and he began to wrestle distractedly with zenith distances and azimuth angles. He woke with Janine's hand on his cheek. She jerked her fingers away as he sat up hurriedly.

"What time is it?"he asked groggily.

"It's morning, I have to go. I didn't sleep all night. I don't know how I will get through work today." "Will you come back? "he demanded, coming full awake.

"I have to, I have to finish reading. I would take it with me, but I'd need a camel to carry it, it's so big." She stood over the bunk looking down at him, with a strange speculation in those slanted dark blue eyes.

"It's difficult to believe that was written by somebody I thought that I knew," she mused softly. "I realize that I really knew very little about you at all." She glanced at her watch. "Oh, my gosh! I have to fly!" She parked the VW under the mango trees beside the yacht a little after five o'clock that evening.

"I have brought the steaks," she called, "and the wine." She came up the ladder and ducked down into the saloon. Her voice floated up to him in the cockpit, "But you'll have to cook them. I can't spare the time, I'm afraid." By the time he got down into the saloon, she was already seated and completely engrossed in the massive typescript.

It was long past midnight when she turned the last page. When she had finished it, she sat quietly with her hands clasped in her lap, staring at the pile of paper silently.

Then when she looked up at him at last, her eyes were bright and wet with tears.

"It's magnificent," she said quietly. "It will take me a little time before I can get over it enough to talk about it rationally, and then I will want to read it again." The following evening, she brought a fat Cornish chicken. "It's range-fed," she told him. "One more steak and you would start growing horns." She made a coq all yin and while they ate, she demanded an explanation of the characters in his typescript.

"Was Mr. Rhodes really a homosexual?" "There doesn't seem to be any other explanation," he defended himself. "So many great men are hounded to greatness by their own imperfections." "What about Lobengula? Was his first love really a captured white girl? Did he commit suicide? And Robyn Ballantyne tell me more about her, did she impersonate a man to enrol in medical school? How much of that is true?" "Does it matter?" Craig laughed at her. "It's just a story, the way it might have been. I was just trying to portray an age, and the mood of that age." "Oh, yes, it does matter," she said seriously. "It matters very much to me. You have made it matter. It is as though I am a part of it you have made me a part of it all." That night when it grew late, Craig said simply, "I made up the bunk in the forward cabin, it seems silly for you to drive all that way home." She stayed, and the following evening she brought a valise which she unpacked into the stowage of the forward cabin, and they settled slowly into a routine. She had first use of the shower and heads in the morning while he made the breakfast. He did the cleaning and made up the bunks while she did the shopping and any other errands for him during her lunch break When she arrived back at the yacht in the evenings, she would change into a tee-shirt and jeans, then help him with the work on the yacht. She was particularly good at sanding and varnishing, she had more patience and dexterity than Craig did.

At the end of the first week, Craig suggested, "It would save you a bundle if you gave up that flat of yours." "I'll pay you rent," she agreed, and when he protested, "Okay, then, I get the food and liquor agreed?" That night just after she had doused the gaslight in her cabin, she called through the dark saloon to his stern cabin.

"Craig, do you know, this is the first time that I feel safe since-" She did not finish.

"I know how you feel," he assured her. "Goodnight, Skipper." Yet it was only a few nights later that he came awake to her screams. They were so anguished, so tormented and heartrending, that for seconds he could not move, then he tumbled from his bunk and sprawled on the deck in his haste to get to her. He fumbled and found the switch to the fluorescent tube in the saloon, and then clawed himself down the companionway.

In the reflected light from the saloon, he saw her crouched in one corner of the cabin. Her bedclothes were hanging in untidy festoons from the bunk, her nightdress was tucked up around her naked thighs and her fingers formed a cage across her terrified contorted face.

He reached for her. "Jan, it's all right. I'm here!" He wrapped both arms around her, to try and still those dreadful cries of terror.

Immediately she turned into a maddened animal, and she flew at him.

Her nails slashed down his forehead, and had he not jerked away, he would have lost his eye, the bloody parallel wounds ended in his eyebrow, and thick dark blood oozed into his -eye, half-blinding him.

Her strength was out of all proportion to her size, he could not hold her, and the harder he tried, the wilder she became. She sank her teeth into his bare forearm, leaving a crescent-shaped bite-mark deep in his flesh.

He rolled away from her, and instantly she crawled back into the corner, and crouched there, keening and blubbering to herself, staring at him with glittering unseeing eyes. Craig felt his skin crawl and itch with dread and his own horror. Once again he tried to reach her, but at first advance she bared her teeth like a rabid dog and snarled at him.

He rolled out of the cabin and dragged himself into the saloon.

Frantically he searched through the tapes and found Beethoven's "Pastoral." He pressed it into the slot and turned the volume up to the maximum. The magnificent music swamped the yacht.

Slowly the sounds from her cabin dwindled into silence, and then hesitantly Janine came into the companionway of the saloon. She held her arms crossed over her chest, but the madness was gone from her eyes.

"I had a dream," she whispered, and came to sit at the table.

"I'll make some coffee, "he said.

In the galley he bathed his scratches and bites with cold water, and took the coffee through to her.

"The music-" she started, and then she saw his torn face. "Did I do that?" "It doesn't matter," he said.

"I'm sorry, Craig," she whispered. "But you must not try to touch me. You see I am a little bit mad also. You mustn't try to touch me."

Comrade Tungata Zebiwe, Minister for Trade, Tourism and Information in the Cabinet of the newly elected government of Zimbabwe, walked briskly along one of the narrow gravel pathways that meandered through the lush gardens of State House. His four bodyguards followed him at a respectful distance. They were all former members of his old ZIPRA cadre, each of them hardened veterans whose loyalty had been tested a hundred times. Now, however, they had changed the camouflage dungarees of the bush war for dark business suits and sunglasses, the new uniform of the political elete.

The daily pilgrimage on which Tungata. was intent had become a ritual of his household. As one of the senior Cabinet ministers, he was entitled to luxurious quarters in one of the annexes of State House. It was an easy and congenial walk from there, through the gardens, past State House itself, to the indaba tree.

State House was a sprawling edifice with white walls and gables, arched in the tradition of the great homes of the Cape of Good Hope.

It had been built on the instructions of that arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. His taste for the big and barbaric showed in the design, and his sense of history in his choice of the site for State House. It was built on the spot where Lobengula's kraal had once stood before it was destroyed by Rhodes" marauders when they rode in to take possession of this land.

Beyond the great house, not two hundred paces from its wide verandas, stood a tree, a gnarled old wild plum enclosed and protected by a fence of iron palings. This tree was the object of Tungata's pilgrimage. He stopped in front of the iron palings, and his bodyguards hung back so as not to intrude on this private moment.

Tungata stood with his feet apart and his hands clasped lightly behind his. back. He was dressed in a navy blue suit with a light chalk stripe. One of a dozen that Gieves and Hawkes of Savile Row had tailored for him during his last visit to London. It fitted his wide rangy shoulders to perfection and subtly emphasized his narrow waist and the length of his legs. He wore a snowy white shirt under it, his tie was maroon with the tiny buckle and bridle logo of Gucci picked out in blue. His shoes were by the same Italian house, and he wore his expensive Western clothes with the same ilan as his forefathers had worn the blue heron's feathers and royal leopard pelts.

He removed the gold-rimmed aviator-type Polaroid glasses from his face, and as part of his personal ritual, read the inscription on the plaque that was riveted to the palings.

"Beneath this tree Lobengula, the last King of the Matabele, held his court and sat in judgement." Then he looked up into the branches, as though in search of his ancestor's spirit. The tree was dying of old age, some of the central branches were black and dry, but from the rich red soil at its base new shoots were bursting into vibrant life.

Tungata saw the significance of that and he murmured to himself, "They will grow as strong as the great tree once was and I also am a shoot of the old king's stock." There was a light tread on the gravel path behind Tungata. He frowned as he turned, but the frown cleared as he saw who it was.

"Comrade Leila," he greeted the white woman with the pale intense face.

"I am honoured that you call me that, Comrade Minister," Leila came directly to him and held out her hand.

"You and your family have always been true friends of my people," he told her simply, as he took her hand. "Beneath this tree your grandmother, Robyn Ballantyne, met often with Lobengula, my great great-uncle. She came at his invitation to give him advice and counsel." "Now, I come at your invitation, and you must believe that I will always be yours to command." He released her hand and turned back to the tree, his voice had a quiet reflective quality.

"You were with me when the Umlimo, the spirit medium of our people, made her final prediction. I thought it was right that you should be there when that prediction is brought to fruition." "The stone falcons have returned to roost," Leila St. John agreed softly.

"But that is not all the Umlimo's prophecy. She foresaw that the man who brought the falcons back to Zimbabwe would rule the land as once did the Mambos and Monomatopas, as once did your ancestors Lobengula and great Mzilikazi." Tungata turned slowly to face her once more.

"That is a secret that you and I share, Comrade Leila." "It will remain our secret, Comrade Tungata, but you and I both know that there will be need during the difficult years that lie ahead for a man as strong as Mzilikazi was strong." Tungata did not reply. He looked up into the branches of the ancient tree, and his lips moved in a silent supplication. Then he replaced the gold-rimmed glasses over his eyes, and turned back to Leila.

"The car is waiting, "he said.

It was a black bullet-proofed Mercedes 500. There were four police motorcycle outriders and a second smaller Mercedes for his bodyguards. The small convoy drove very fast, with the police sirens shrieking and wailing, and the colourful little ministerial pennant fluttering on the front of Tungata's Mercedes.

They went down the three-kilo metre-long jacaranda lined driveway that Cecil Rhodes had designed as the approach to his State House, and then crossed the main commercial section of Bulawayo, flying through the red lights at the junctions to the geometrical grid of roads and avenues, past the town square where the wagons had laagered during the rebellion when Bazo's imp is had threatened the town, down along the wide avenue that bisected the meticulously groomed lawns of the public gardens, and at last turned off sharply and drew up in front of the modern three-storey museum building.

There was a red carpet laid down the front steps of the museum and a small gathering of dignitaries, headed by the Mayor of Bulawayo, the first Matabele ever to hold that position, and the curator of the museum.

"Welcome, Comrade Minister, on this historic occasion." They escorted him down the long corridor to the public auditorium. Every seat was already filled, and as Tungata entered, the entire gathering stood and applauded him, the whites in the gathering outdoing the Matabele as a positive demonstration of their goodwill.

Tungata was introduced to the other dignitaries on the speakers" platform. "This is Doctor Van der Walt, curator of the Southern African Museum." He was a tall balding man with a heavy South African accent. Tungata shook hands with him briefly and unsmilingly. This man represented a nation that had actively opposed the people's republican army's march to glory. Tungata turned to the next in line.

She was a young white woman, and she was immediately familiar to Tungata. He stared at her sharply, not quite able to place her. She had gone very pale under his scrutiny, and her eyes were dark and terrified as those of a hunted animal. The hand in his was limp and cold, and trembled violently still Tungata could not decide where he had seen her before.

"Doctor Carpenter is the curator of the Entomological Section."

The name meant nothing to Tungata, and he turned away from her, irritated by his own inability to place her. He took his seat in the centre of the platform facing the auditorium, and the South African Museum's curator rose to address the gathering.

"All the credit for the successful negotiation of the exchange between our two institutions must go to the honourable minister who today honours us with his presence." He was reading from a typed sheet, clearly anxious to have done with speaking and sit down again. "It was at Minister Tungata Zebiwe's initiative that discussions first took place, and he sustained these during the difficult period when we appeared to be making little or no progress. Our great problem was in setting a relative value on two such diverse exhibits. On one hand you had one of the world's most extensive and exhaustive collections of tropical insects, representing many decades of dedicated collecting and classification, while on the other hand we had these unique artefacts from an unknown civilization." Van der Walt seemed to be warming to his subject enough to look up from his prepared script. "However, it was the honourable minister's determination to regain for his new nation a priceless part of its heritage that at last prevailed, and it is to his credit entirely that we are gathered here today." When at last Van der Walt sat down again, there was a polite splattering of applause, and then an expectant silence as Tungata Zebiwe rose to his feet. The minister had an immense presence, and without yet uttering a word, he transfixed them with his smoky unwavering gaze.

"My people have a saying that was passed down from the wise ones of our tribe," he started in his deep rumbling voice. "It is this. The white eagle has stooped on the stone falcons and cast them to earth.

Now the eagle shall lift them up again and they will fly afar. There shall be no peace in the kingdoms of the Mambos or the Monomatopas until they return. For the white eagle will war with the black bull until the stone falcons return to roost." Tungata paused a moment, letting his words hang between them, heavy with portent. Then he went on. "I am sure all of you here know the story of how the bird statues of Zimbabwe were seized by Rhodes" plunderers, and despite the efforts of my ancestors to prevent it, how they were carried away southwards across the Limpopo river." Tungata left the podium and strode to the curtained-off section at the back of the speakers" platform. "My friends, my comrades," he turned to face them once more.

"The stone falcons have returned to roost!" he said, and drew aside the curtains.

There was a long breathless silence and the audience stared avidly at the serried rank of tall soapstone carvings that was revealed.

There were six of them, and they were those that Ralph Ballantyne had lifted from the ancient stone temple. The one that his father had taken on his first visit to Zimbabwe thirty years before had burned in the pyre of Groote Schuur. These six were all that remained.

The soapstone -from which each of the birds was carved was of a greenish satiny texture. Each bird' crouched on top of a plinth that was ornamented by a pattern of intermeshed triangles like the teeth in a shark's jaw. The statues were not identical. some of the columns supported crocodiles and lizards that crawled up towards the bird image that surmounted it.

Some of the statues had been extensively damaged, chipped and eroded, but the one in the centre of the line was "almost perfect. The bird was a stylized raptor, with its long blade like wings crossed over its back. The head was proud and erect, the cruel beak hooked and the blind eyes haughty and unforgiving. It was a magnificent and evocative work of primitive art, and the crowded auditorium rose as one person in spontaneous applause.

Tungata Zebiwe reached out and touched the head of the central bird. His back was turned to his audience so that they could not see his lips move, and the applause drowned his whisper.

"Welcome home," he whispered. "Welcome home to Zimbabwe. Bird of my destiny." you do not want to go!" Janine was shaking "Now with fury. "After all the pains I have gone to, to arrange this meeting.

Now you simply do not want to go!" "Jan, it's a waste of time." "Thank you!" She put her face closer to his. "Thank you for that. Do you realize what it would cost me to face that monster again, but I was prepared to do it for you, and now it's a waste of time." "Jan, please-" "Damn you, Craig Mellow, it's you who are a waste of time, you and your endless cowardice." He gasped and drew away from her.

"Cowardice," she repeated deliberately. "I say that, and I mean it.

You were in too much of a blue funk to send that bloody book of yours to a publisher. I had literally to tear it away from you and send it off." She broke off, panting with anger, searching for words sharp enough to express her fury.

"You are afraid to face life, afraid to leave this cave you have built for yourself, afraid to take the chance of somebody rejecting your book, afraid to make any effort to float this thing you have built." With a wide, extravagant gesture she indicated the yacht. "I see it now, you don't really want to get onto the ocean, you prefer to hide here, swilling gin and covering yourself with dreams. You don't want to walk, you prefer to drag yourself around on your backside it's your excuse, your grand cast-iron excuse to dodge life." Again she had to stop for breath, and then she went on. "That's right, put that little-boy look on your face, make those big sad eyes, it works every time, doesn't it? Well, not this time, buster, not this time. They have offered me the job of curator at the South African Museum. I'm to see the collection safely installed in its new home, and I'm going to take it. Do you hear me, Craig Mellow? I'm going to leave you to crawl around on the floor because you're too damned scared to stand up." She flung herself out of the saloon and into the forward cabin.