They set out for the Ruhaha river. As happened so often these days, Rosa marched at the head of the column. There was only the long braid of dark hair hanging down her back to show she was a woman, for she was dressed in bush jacket and long khaki cotton trousers that concealed the feminine fullness of her hips. She stepped out long-legged, and from her shoulder the loaded Mauser hung on its strap and bumped lightly against her flank at each pace.
The change in her was so startling as to leave Sebastian bewildered. The new hard line of her mouth, her eyes that gave off the dark hot glow of a fanatic, the voice that had lost the underlying ripple of laughter. She spoke seldom, but when she did, both Flynn and Sebastian were forced to hear her with respect. Sometimes listening to that flat deadly tone Sebastian could feel a prickle of horror under his skin.
They reached the landing-place and the jetty on the Ruhaha river and waited for the launch to return. It came three days later, heralding its approach by the soft chugging of its engine. When it came round the river bend, pushing briskly against the current, headed for the wooden jetty, they were lying in wait for it.
‘There he is!’ Sebastian’s voice was thick with emotion as he recognized the plump grey-clad figure in the bows.
‘The swine, oh, the bloody swine!’ and he jerked the bolt of his rifle open then snapped it shut.
‘Wait!’ Rosa’s hand closed on his wrist before he could lift the butt to his shoulder.
‘I can get him from here!’ protested Sebastian.
‘No. I want him to see us. I want to tell him first. I want him to know why he must die.’
The launch swung in broadside to the current, losing its way, until it came in gently to nudge the jetty. Two of the Askari jumped ashore, laying back on the lines to hold her while the Commissioner disembarked.
Fleischer stood on the jetty for a minute, looking back down the river. This action should have warned Flynn, but he did not see its significance. Then the Commissioner shrugged slightly and trudged up the jetty towards the boathouse.
‘Tell your men to drop their weapons into the river,’ said Flynn in his best German as he stood up from the patch of reeds beside the jetty.
Herman Fleischer froze in mid-stride, but his belly quivered and his head turned slowly towards Flynn. His blue eyes seemed to spread until they filled his face, and he made a clucking noise in his throat.
‘Tell them quickly, or I will shoot you through the stomach,’ said Flynn, and Fleischer found his voice. He relayed Flynn’s order to the Askari, and there were a series of splashes around the launch as it was obeyed.
Movement in the corner of his eye made Fleischer swing his head, and he was face to face with Rosa Oldsmith. Beyond her in a half circle stood Sebastian and a dozen armed Africans, but some instinct warned Fleischer that the woman was the danger. There was a merciless quality about her, some undefinable air of deadly purpose. It was to her he addressed his question.
‘What do you want?’ His voice was husky with apprehension.
‘What did he say?’ Rosa asked her father.
‘He wants to know what you want.’
‘Ask him if he remembers me.’
As he heard the question, Fleischer remembered her in her night-dress, kneeling in the fire-light, and with the memory came real fear.
‘It was a mistake,’ he whispered. ‘The child! I did not order it.’
‘Tell him …’ said Rosa, ‘tell him that I am going to kill him.’ And her hands moved deliberately on the Mauser, slipping the safety-catch across, but her eyes never left his face.
‘It was a mistake,’ Herman. repeated and he stepped backwards, lifting his hands to ward off the bullet that he knew must come.
At that moment Sebastian shouted behind Rosa, just one word.
‘Look!’
Around the bend of the Ruhaha river, only two hundred yards from where they stood, another launch swept into view. It came silently, swiftly and at its stubby masthead flew the ensign of the German navy. There were men in crisp white uniforms clustered around the Maxim machine gun in its bows.
Flynn’s party stared at it in complete disbelief. Its presence was as unbelievable as that of the Loch Ness monster in the Serpentine or a man-eating lion in St Paul’s Cathedral, and in the long seconds that they stood paralysed the launch closed in quickly on the jetty.
Herman Fleischer broke the spell. He opened his mouth and from the barrel of his chest issued a bellow that rang clearly across the water.
‘Kyller, they are Englishmen!’
Then he moved, with three light steps he danced sideways, incredibly quickly he moved his gross body from under the threatening muzzle of Rosa’s rifle and dived from the jetty into the dark green swirl of water below the boards.
The splash of his dive was immediately, followed by the tack, tack, tack of the launch’s machine gun – and the air was filled with the swishing crack of a hundred whips. The launch drove straight in towards them with the Maxim blazing on its prow. Around Flynn, and Rosa and Sebastian the earth erupted in a rapid series of dust fountains, a ricochet howled dementedly, one of the gun-boys spun on his heels in a brief dervish dance and then sprawled down the bank, with his rifle clattering on the wooden boards of the jetty, and the frozen party on the bank exploded into violent movement. Flynn and his black troopers ducked and dodged away up the bank, but Rosa ran forward. She reached the edge of the jetty unscathed through the hailstorm of Maxim fire, there she checked and aimed the Mauser at the wallowing body of Herman Fleischer in the water below her.
‘You killed my baby!’ Rosa shrieked, and Fleischer looked up at her and knew he was about to die. A Maxim bullet struck the metal of the rifle, tearing it from Rosa’s hands, and she staggered off balance, her arms windmilling as she tottered on the edge of the jetty.
Sebastian reached her as she fell. He caught her and swung her up on to his shoulder, whirled with her and bounded away up the bank, running with all the reserves of his strength unlocked by the key of his terror.
With ten of the gun-boys Sebastian took the rearguard; for that day and the next they skirmished back along the line of the retreat, briefly holding each natural defensive point until the Germans brought up the Maxim gun. Then they dropped back, retreating slowly while Flynn and Rosa made a straight run of it. In the second night Sebastian broke contact with the pursuers and fled north towards the rendezvous at the stream below the ruins of Lalapanzi.
Forty-eight hours later he reached it. In the moonlight he staggered into the camp, and Rosa threw off her blankets and came running to him with a low joyous cry of greeting. She knelt before him, unlaced and gently drew off each of his boots. While Sebastian gulped the mug of coffee and hot gin that Flynn brewed for him, Rosa bathed and tended the blisters that had burst on his feet. Then she dried her hands, stood and picked up her blankets.
‘Come,’ she said, and together they walked away along the bank of the stream. Behind a curtain of hanging creepers, on a nest of dry grass and blankets, while the jewelled night sky glowed above them, they gave each other the comfort of their bodies for the first time since the death of the child. Afterwards they slept entwined until the low sun woke them. Then they rose and went down the bank together naked into the stream. The water was cold when she splashed him, and she giggled like a little girl and ran through the shallows across the sandbank with the water bursting in a sparkling spray around her legs, drops of it glittering like sequins on her skin, her waist was the neck of a Venetian vase flaring down into full double rounds on her lower body.
He chased and caught her and they fell together and knelt facing each other, spluttering and laughing, and with each gust of laughter her bosom jumped and bounced. Sebastian leaned forward with the laughter drying in his throat and cupped them in his hands.
Instantly her own laughter ceased, she looked at him a moment, then suddenly her face hardened and she struck his hands away.
‘No!’ she hissed at him, and jumping to her feet she waded t
o where her clothing lay on the bank. Swiftly she covered her femininity, and as she strapped the heavy bandolier of ammunition around her body the last soft memory of their loving was gone from her face.
– 54 –
It was that stinking Rufiji water, Herman Fleischer decided, and moved painfully in his maschille as another cramp took him.
The hot hand of dysentery that closed on his stomach added to his mood of dark resentment. His present discomfort was directly linked to the arrival of Blücher in his territory, the indignities he had experienced at the hands of her captain, the danger he had run into in his brush with the English bandits at the start of this expedition, and since then the constant gruelling work and ever-present fear of another attack, the nagging of the engineer whom von Kleine had placed. over him – he hated everything to do with that cursed warship, he hated every man aboard her.
The jogging motion of the maschille bearers stirred the contents of his belly, making it gurgle and squeak. He would have to stop again, and he looked ahead for a suitable place in which to find privacy.
Ahead of him the caravan of porters was toiling along the shallow bottom of a valley between two sparsely wooded ridges of shale and broken rock.
The column was spread out in an untidy straggle half a mile long, for it comprised just under a thousand men.
In the van a hundred of them, stripped to loin-cloths and shiny with sweat, were wielding their long pangas on the scrub. The blades glinting as they rose and fell, the thudding of the blows muted in the lazy heat of afternoon. Working under the supervision of Gunther Raube, the young engineering officer from Blücher, they were cutting out the narrow track, widening it for the passage of the bulky objects that followed.
Dwarfing the men that swarmed around them, these four objects rolled slowly along, rocking and swaying over patches of uneven ground. Now and then halting as they came up against a tree stump or an outcrop of rock, before the animal exertions of two hundred black men could get them rolling again.
Three weeks previously they had beached the freighter Rheinlander in Dar es Salaam harbour and dismantled eight slabs of her plating. Then from the metal frames of her hull, Raube had shaped eight enormous wheel rims, fourteen feet in diameter; into each of these he had welded a sheet of 1½-inch plating ten foot square. Using. the freighter’s bollards as axles, he had linked these eight discs in four pairs. Thus each of these contraptions looked like the wheel and axle assembly of a gigantic Roman chariot.
Herman Fleischer had made a swift recruitment tour, and secured nine hundred able-bodied volunteers from the town of Dar es Salaam and its outlying villages. These nine hundred were now engaged in trundling the four sets of wheels southward towards the Rufiji delta. While they worked, Herman’s Askari stood by with loaded Mausers to discourage any of the volunteers from succumbing to an attack of homesickness; a malady which was fast reaching epidemic proportions, aggravated as it was by shoulders rubbed raw by contact with harsh sun-heated metal, and by palms whose outer layers of skin had been smeared away on the rough hemp ropes. They had been two weeks at their labours and they were still thirty torturous miles from the river.
Herman Fleischer squirmed again in his maschille as the amoebic dysentery gnawed at his guts.
‘Mother of a pig!’ he moaned, and then shouted at the bearers, ‘Quickly, take me to those trees.’ He pointed to a clump of wild ebony that smothered one of the side draws of the valley.
With alacrity, the maschille bearers swung off the path and trotted up the draw. Within the screen of wild ebony they paused while the Commissioner alighted from the hammock and hurried into the deepest recess of the bush to be alone. Then they drew themselves down with a communal sigh and gave themselves up to a session of African callisthenics.
When the Commissioner came out of retreat he was hungry. It was cool and restful in the shade, an ideal place to take his mid-afternoon snack. Raube would have to fend for himself for an hour or so. Herman nodded to his personal servant to set up the camp table and open the food box. His mouth was full of sausage when the first rifle shot clapped dully in the dusty dry air.
– 55 –
‘Where is he? He must be here. The scouts said he was here. Can you see him?’ Rosa Oldsmith spoke through lips that were chapped dry by sun and wind, white flakes of skin had come loose from the raw red patches of sunburn on her nose, and her eyes were bloodshot from the dust and the glare.
She lay on her stomach behind a bank of shale and coarse grass with the Mauser probing out in front of her.
‘Can you see him?’ she demanded again impatiently, turning her head towards her father.
Flynn grunted noncommittally, holding the binoculars to his eyes, panning them slowly down the length of the valley then back again to the head of the strange caravan.
‘There is a white man there,’ he said.
‘Is it Fleischer, is it?’
‘No,’ doubtfully Flynn gave the negative. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Look for him. He must be there somewhere.’
‘I wonder what the hell those things are.’
Flynn concentrated on the four huge sets of wheels. The lens of the binoculars magnified the heat distortion through the still air, making them change shape and size so that one second they were insignificant and the next they were monstrous.
‘Look for Fleischer. Damn those things, look for Fleischer,’ Rosa snapped at him.
‘He’s not with them.’
‘He must be. He must be there.’ Rosa rolled on her side and reached out to snatch the binoculars from Flynn’s hands. Eagerly she scanned the long column that moved slowly towards them up the valley.
‘He must be there. Please God, he must be there,’ she whispered her hatred through cracked dry lips.
‘We will have to attack soon. They are nearly in position now.’
‘We must find Fleischer.’ Desperately Rosa searched, her knuckles showing white through sun-brown skin as she clutched the binoculars.
‘We can’t let it go much longer. Sebastian is in position, he will be expecting my signal.’
‘Wait! You must wait.’
‘No. We can’t let them get closer.’ Flynn half lifted his body, and called softly.
‘Mohammed! Are you ready?’
‘We are ready.’ The reply came from farther down the slope where the line of riflemen lay.
‘Remember my words, oh, thou chosen of Allah. Kill the Askari first and the others will run.’
‘Your words ring in my ears with the brightness and the beauty of golden bells,’ Mohammed replied.
‘Up yours!’ said Flynn and unbuttoned the pocket flap of his tunic. He fumbled out the hand-mirror and held it slanted to catch the sun, deflecting a bright splinter of light towards the far slope of the valley. From the jumble of rock and bush there was an immediate answering flash as Sebastian acknowledged the signal.
‘Ah!’ Flynn breathed theatrical relief, ‘I was afraid our Bassie might have fallen asleep over there.’ And he picked up the Mauser from the rock in front of him.
‘Wait,’ pleaded Rosa. ‘Please wait.’
‘We can’t. You know we can’t – if Fleischer is down there then we’ll get him. If he isn’t, then waiting any longer isn’t going to help us.’
‘You don’t care,’ she accused. ‘You have forgotten about Maria already.’
‘No,’ said Flynn. ‘No, I haven’t forgotten,’ and he cuddled the Mauser into his shoulder. There was an Askari he had been watching. A big man who moved ahead of the column. Even at this range Flynn sensed that this man was dangerous. He moved with a leopard’s slouching awareness, head cocked and alert.
Flynn picked him up in the notch of the rear sight and rode the pip down his body, aiming low to compensate for the downhill shot, taking him in the belly. He gathered the slack in the trigger, squeezing it up gently. The Mauser cracked viciously and the recoil jumped back into his shoulder.
Incredulously Flynn saw the bul
let throw a jump of dust from the slope below the Askari. A clean miss at four hundred yards from a carefully aimed shot – By Christ, he was getting old.
Frantically he worked the bolt of the rifle, but already the Askari had ducked for cover, unslinging his rifle as he disappeared into a bank of grey thorn bush, and Flynn’s next shot ripped ineffectively into the coarse dry vegetation.
‘Damn it to hell!’ howled Flynn, and his voice was small in the storm of gun-fire that blew around him. From both slopes all his riflemen were shooting down into the solid pack of humanity that clogged the valley floor.
For startled seconds the mass of native bearers stood quiescent under the lash of the Mausers, each man frozen in the attitude in which the attack had caught him; bent to the giant wheels, leaning forward against the ropes, panga raised to strike at a branch, or merely standing watching while others worked. Every head lifted to stare up at the slopes from which Flynn’s hidden rifles menaced them, then with a sound like a rising wind a single voice climbed in a wail of terror, to be lost almost instantly in the babble from a thousand throats.
Without regard for Flynn’s orders to single out only the armed Askari, his men were firing blindly into the mass of men around the wheels, bullets striking with a meaty thump, thump, thump, or whining from rock to inflict the ghastly secondary wounds of a ricochet.
Then the bearers broke. Flowing back like flood water along the valley, carrying the Askari whose khaki uniforms bobbed with them like driftwood in the torrent.
Beside Flynn in the donga, Rosa was firing also. Her hands on the rifle incongruously feminine, fingers long and sensitive working the bolt as though it were the shuttle of a loom, weaving death, her eyes slitted behind the gunsight, her lips barely moving as they formed the name which had become her battle hymn.
‘Maria! Maria!’ With each shot she said it softly.