Vixen 03

12

Captain Patrick McKenzie Fawkes, Royal Navy retired, paced the floor of his veranda with the same intensity he had once exhibited on the deck of a ship when approaching home port. He was a giant of a man, standing a shade over six feet six in his bare feet and supporting a frame that exceeded two hundred eighty pounds. His eyes were somber gray, tinted dark as the water of the North Sea under a November storm. Every sand-colored strand of hair was brushed neatly in place, as were the whitening filaments of his King George V beard. Fawkes might have passed for an Aberdeen sea captain, which is exactly what he was before becoming a Natal farmer.

"Two days!" he exclaimed in a booming Scots accent. "I canna afford to take two days away from the farm. It's inhuman; aye, that's what it is, inhuman." Miraculously. the tea in the cup he waved refused to slop over the brim.

"If the Minister of Defence personally asked to meet with you, the least you can do is oblige."

"But damn, woman, he does not know what he's asking." Fawkes shook his head. "We're in the midst of clearing new acreage. That prize bull I purchased in Durban last month is due to arrive tomorrow. The tractors need maintenance. No, I canna go."

"You'd best be getting the four-wheel-drive warmed up." Myrna Fawkes laid down her needlework and gazed up at her husband. "I've already packed your things and made a lunch to keep you in a good humor until you meet the Minister's train at Pembroke."

Fawkes towered over his wife and scowled. It was a wasted gesture. In twentyfive years she had yet to buckle before him. Out of stubbornness he tried a new tack.

"It would be negligent of me to leave you and the kids alone, what with all them damned heathen terrorists sneaking through the brush and murdering God-fearing Christians right and left."

"Aren't you confusing an insurgency with a holy war?"

"Why, just the other day," Fawkes pushed on, "a farmer and his missus was ambushed over at Umoro."

"Umoro is eighty miles away," his wife said matter-of-factly.

"It could happen here just as well."

"You will go to Pembroke and you will visit with the Defence Minister." The words that came from the woman seemed chiseled in stone. "I have better things to do than sit around on the veranda all morning and palaver with you, Patrick Fawkes. Now get on your way, and stay out of them Pembroke saloons."

Myrna Fawkes was not a woman to ignore. Though she was lean and tiny, she possessed the toughness of two good men. Fawkes seldom knew her when she wasn't dressed in one of his outsized khaki shirts and blue jeans tucked into midcalf boots. She could do almost anything he could do: deliver a calf, ramrod their army of native workers, repair a hundred and one different pieces of mechanical hardware, nurse the sick and injured women and children in the compound, cook like a French chef. Strangely, she had never learned to drive a car or ride a horse and made no bones about not caring to bother. She kept her sinewy body in shape by miles of everyday walking.

"Don't fret for us," she continued. "We have five armed guards. jenny and Patrick junior can both shoot the head off a mamba at fifty meters. I can call up the constable by radio in case of trouble. And don't forget the electrified fence. Even if guerrillas get through that, there's still old Lucifer to contend with." She motioned toward a Holland & Holland twelve-gauge shotgun that rested against the door frame.

Before Fawkes could grunt a last-ditch reply, his son and daughter drove up in a British Bushmaster and parked by the steps of the veranda.

"She's filled with petrol and ready to go, Captain," Patrick junior shouted. He was two months past twenty and wore the face and slimness of his mother, but in height he loomed three inches over his father. His sister, a year younger, big boned and large breasted, smiled gaily from a face sprinkled with freckles.

"I'm all out of bath oil, Papa," jenny said. "Will you please remember to pick me up some when you're in Pembroke?"

"Bath oil," Fawkes groaned. "It's a damned conspiracy. My whole life is one great conspiracy engineered by my own flesh and blood. You think you can get along without me? Then so be it. But in my log you're all a bloody lot of mutineers."

Kissed by a laughing Myrna and herded by his son and daughter, Fawkes reluctantly boarded the four-wheel-drive. As he waited for the guard to open the gate, he turned and looked back at the house. They were still standing on the steps of the veranda, framed by a lattice bursting with bougainvillea blossoms. The three of them waved and he waved back. And then he was shifting the Bushmaster through the gears as he swung onto the dirt road, pulling a small dust cloud behind.

Somala watched the captain's departure, closely noting the procedure of the guard as he turned the electricity off and on when opening and closing the gate. The motions were accomplished mechanically. That was good, Somala thought. The man was bored. So much the better if the time came for an assault.

He angled the binoculars toward the dense elephant grass smudged with thick clumps of shrub that made up the snaking boundaries of the farm. He almost missed it. He would have missed it if his eye hadn't caught a lightning-quick glint from the sun 's reflection. His instinctive reaction was to blink and rub his eyes. Then he looked again.

Another black man was lying on a platform above the ground, partially obscured by the fernlike leaves of an acacia tree. Except for slightly younger features and a shade lighter skin, he could have passed for Somala The intruder was dressed in identical camouflage combat fatigues and carried a Chinese CK-88 automatic rifle with cartridge bandolier — the standard issue of a soldier in the African Army of Revolution. To Somala it was like gazing into a distant mirror.

His thoughts were confused The men of his section were all accounted for. He did not recognize this man. Had his Vietnamese advisory committee sent a spy to observe his scouting efficiency? Surely his loyalty to the AAR was not in question. Then Somala experienced a creeping chill up the nape of his neck.

The other soldier was not watching Somala. He was staring through binoculars at the Fawkes house.