The lead truck crested the far rise. It was a five-ton Toyota, similar to the one that had pursued them across the Botswana border. It was painted the same sandy colour. There was a trooper behind the ring-mounted heavy machine-gun on the cab. A second truck, heavily laden and armed, came over the rise behind it.
‘Not a third. Please, only two,’ Craig breathed, and cuddled the butt of the AK 47 into his shoulder. The barrel was festooned with dried grass to disguise its shape, and his own face and hands were thickly smeared with black clay from the river-bank.
There were only two trucks. They came trundling out onto the causeway and Sarah and her sisters stood knee-deep in the green waters below the handrail of the bridge and waved to them. The lead truck slowed, and the girls swung their hips, shrieked with provocative laughter and joggled their wet and shiny breasts.
There were two men in the cab of the lead truck. One was a subaltern, Craig could make out his cap-badge and the glitter of his shoulder pips even through the dusty windscreen. He was grinning and his teeth were almost as bright as his badges. He spoke to the driver and, with a squeal of brakes, the lead truck pulled up on the threshold of the bridge. The second truck was forced to pull up behind it.
The young officer opened the door and stood on the running board. The troopers in the back of the truck and the heavy machine-gunner craned forward, grinning and calling ribald comment. The girls, following Sarah’s example, sank down coyly to cover their lower bodies and answered the suggestions and comments with dissembling coyness. Some of the troopers in the second truck, not to be out-done, jumped down and came forward to join the fun.
One of the older girls made a slyly obscene gesture with thumb and forefinger and there was an appreciative bellow of raunchy masculine laughter from the bank. The young officer replied with an even more specific gesture, and the rest of his troopers left the trucks and crowded up behind him. Only the two heavy machine-gunners were still at their posts.
Craig darted a glance at the underside of the bridge. On their bellies the bowmen were wriggling up the far side of the bank, keeping the timber baulks of the bridge between them and the bunch of troopers.
In the river Sarah stood up. She had loosened the string of her apron, and now carried the minuscule garment in her hand, swinging it with artful provocation. She waded towards the men on the bank, with the water swirling around her thighs, and the laughter choked off as they stared at her. She walked slowly, the pull of water exaggerating the churning movement of her pelvis. She was sleek and beautiful as a wet otter, the sunlight on her body gave it a plastic sheen, an unearthly glow, and even from where he lay, Craig could feel the jocular mood of the men watching her thicken with lust, and begin to steam with the stirring of sexual fury.
Sarah paused below them, cupped her hands under her breasts and lifted them, pointing her nipples up at them. Now they were totally concentrated upon her, even the machine-gunners high up on the ring mounts of the trucks were rapt and enchanted.
Behind them the four bowmen had slid up under the lee of the causeway. They were not more than ten paces from the side of the leading truck as they came up onto their knees in unison and drew. The bows arched, their right hands came back to touch their lips, wet muscle bulged in their backs as they sighted along the shafts, and then one after the other they let their arrows fly.
There was no sound, not even the softest fluting, but one of the machine-gunners slid gently forward and hung over the side of the cab with head and arms dangling. The other arched his back, his mouth wide open but no sound coming from it, and tried to reach back over his own shoulder to the shaft that stood stiffly out between his shoulder-blades. Another arrow hit him, a hand’s breadth lower, and he convulsed in agony and dropped from view.
The bowmen changed their target and the silent arrows flew into the bunch of troopers on the river-bank – and a man screamed. In the same instant the guerrillas hiding below the bank burst from the water, and went up through the reeds, just as the troopers whirled to face the bowmen. The naked guerrillas took them from behind, and this time Craig heard the explosive grunts as they swung the long-bladed pangas, like a tennis-player hitting a hard forehand volley. A panga blade cleaved through the subaltern’s burgundy-red beret and split his skull to the chin.
Sarah whirled and raced back, gathering the other girls. One of the younger ones was screaming as they floundered over the submerged sandbanks.
There was a single shot, and then all the troopers were down, scattered along the edge of the bank, but the guerrillas were still working over them, swinging and chopping and hacking.
‘Sarah,’ Craig called to her as she reached the bank. ‘Get the girls back into the bush!’ She snatched up her shirt, and pushed her sisters ahead of her, shepherding them away.
Carrying the AK, Craig ran across the bridge. The guerrillas were already stripping and looting the dead men. They worked with the dexterity of much practice, wristwatches first and then the contents of pockets and webbing pouches.
‘Was anyone hit?’ Craig demanded. That single shot had worried him, but there were no casualties. Craig gave them two minutes to finish with the corpses, and then sent a patrol back to the crest to cover them against surprise. He turned back to the dead Shona. ‘Bury them!’ They had prepared the mass grave the previous afternoon, and they dragged the naked bodies away.
There was blood down the side of one truck where the machine-gunner had hung. ‘Wash that off!’ One of the guerrillas dipped a canteen of water from the river. ‘And wash off those uniforms.’ They would dry out in an hour or less.
Sarah returned before the burial party had finished. She was fully dressed again.
‘I have sent the girls back to the village, they know the country well. They will be safe.’
‘You did well,’ Craig told her and climbed into the cab of the leading truck. The keys were in the ignition.
The burial party returned from out of the thick bush, and Craig called in his pickets. The guerrilla detailed to drive the second truck started it, and then the rest of them climbed aboard. The two trucks crossed the bridge and growled up the far slope. The entire operation had taken less than thirty-five minutes. They reached the felled mhoba-hoba tree and Comrade Lookout stepped into the track and directed them off the road. Craig parked in thick cover, and immediately a gang of guerrillas covered both vehicles with cut branches, and another gang began unloading the cargo, and clearing the road-block.
There were two-hundred-pound sacks of maize meal, cases of canned meat, blankets, medicines, cigarettes, ammunition, soap, sugar, salt – all of it priceless to the guerrillas. It was all carried away, and Craig knew it would be hidden and retrieved later whenever the opportunity occurred. There were a dozen kit bags containing the dead troopers’ personal gear, a treasure trove of Third Brigade uniforms, even two of the famous burgundy berets. While the guerrillas dressed in these uniforms, Craig checked the time. It was a little after five o’clock.
Craig had noted that the radio operator at Tuti camp started the generator and made his routine report at seven o’clock every evening. He checked the radio in the leading truck. It had a fifteen-amp output, more than enough to reach Tuti camp, but not sufficient power to reach Harare headquarters. That was good.
He called Comrade Lookout and Sarah to the cab and they went over their notes. Sally-Anne would be over Tuti airstrip at 5.20 a.m. tomorrow morning, and she could stay in the circuit until 8.30 a.m. Craig allowed three hours for the journey from Tuti camp back to the airstrip at the mission station – that would take into account any minor delays or mishaps. Ideally they should leave the camp at 2.30 a.m., but not later than 5 a.m.
That meant they should time their arrival at the gates of the camp for midnight, or close to it. Two and a half hours to secure the position, refuel the trucks from the storage tank, release the prisoners, find Tungata and start back.
‘All right,’ Craig said, ‘I want each group to go over their duties. First
you, Sarah—’
‘I take my two with the bolt-cutters, and we go straight to Number One hutment—’ He had given her two men. Tungata might be so weak as to be unable to walk unassisted. Number One hutment was set a little apart from the others behind its own wire and was obviously used as the highest security cell. Sarah had seen them lead Tungata from it to their last meeting on the parade ground.
‘When we find him, we bring him back to the assembly point at the main gate. If he can walk on his own I will leave my two men to open the other cells and release the prisoners.’
‘Good.’ She had it perfectly.
‘Now the second group.’
‘Five men for the perimeter guard towers—’ Comrade Lookout went through his instructions.
‘That’s it then.’ Craig stood up. ‘But it all depends on one thing. I’ve said this fifty times already, but I’m going to say it again. We must get the radio before they can transmit. We have about five minutes from the first shot to do it, two minutes for the operator to realize what is happening, two minutes to start the electric generator and run up to full power, another minute to make his contact with Harare headquarters and pass the warning. If that happens, we are all dead men.’ He checked his watch. ‘Five minutes past seven – we can make the call now. Where is your man who speaks Shona?’
Carefully Craig coached the man in what he had to say, and was relieved to find him quick-witted.
‘I tell them that the convoy is delayed on the road. One of the trucks has broken down, but it will be repaired. We will arrive much later than usual, in the night,’ he repeated.
‘That’s it.’
‘If they begin asking questions, I reply, “Your message not understood. Your transmission breaking up and unreadable.” I repeat, “Arriving late”, and then I sign off.’
Craig stood by anxiously while the guerrilla made the radio transmission, listening to the unintelligible bursts of Shona from the operator at Tuti camp, but he was unable to detect any trace of suspicion or alarm in the static-distorted voice.
The guerrilla imposter signed off and handed the microphone back to Craig. ‘He says it is understood. They expect us in the night.’
‘Good. Now we can eat and rest.’
However, Craig could not eat. His stomach was queasy with tension for the night ahead and from reaction to the ghastly violence at the bridge. Those pangas, wielded with pent-up hatred, had inflicted hideous mutilation. Many times during the long bush war he had witnessed death in some of its most unlovely forms, but had never become accustomed to it, it still made him sick to the guts.
There is too much moon,’ Craig thought as he peered out from under the canvas canopy of the leading truck. It was only four days from full and it rode so high and so bright as to cast hard-edged shadows on the earth. The truck lurched and jolted over the rough tracks and dust filtered up and clogged his throat.
He had not dared to ride in the cab, not even with his face blackened. A sharp eye would have picked him out readily. Comrade Lookout sat up beside the driver, dressed in the subaltern’s spare uniform complete with beret and shoulder-flashes. Beside him was the Shona-speaker wearing the second beret. The heavy machine-guns were loaded and cocked, each served by a picked man, and eight others dressed in looted uniforms rode up on the coachwork in plain view, while the remainder crouched with Craig under the canvas canopy.
‘So far, everything is going well,’ Sarah murmured.
‘So far,’ Craig agreed. ‘But I prefer bad starts and happy endings—’
There were three taps on the cab, beside Craig’s head. That was Comrade Lookout’s signal that the camp was in sight.
‘Well, one way or the other, here we go.’ Craig twisted round to peer through the peep-hole he had cut in the canvas hood.
He could make out the watchtowers of the camp, looking like oil-rigs against the moon-bright sky, and there was a glint of barbed-wire. Then quite suddenly the sky lit up. The floodlights on their poles around the perimeter of the camp glowed and then bloomed with stark white light. The entire compound was illuminated with noon-day brilliance.
‘The generator,’ Craig groaned. ‘Oh, Christ, they’ve started the generator to welcome us in.’
Craig had made his first mistake. He had planned for everything to happen in darkness, with only the truck headlights to dazzle and confuse the camp guards. And yet, he now realized how logical and obvious it was for the guards to light up the camp to check the arrival of the convoy and to facilitate the unloading.
They were committed already. They could only ride on into the glare of floodlights, and Craig was helpless, pinned by the lights beneath the canopy, not even able to communicate with Comrade Lookout in the cab in front of him. Bitterly reviling himself for not having planned for this contingency, he kept his eye to the peep-hole.
The guards were not opening the gates, there was the sandbagged machine-gun emplacement to one side of the guard house, and Craig could see the barrel of the weapon traversing slowly to keep them covered as they approached. The guard was turning out, four troopers and a non-commissioned officer, falling in outside the guardroom.
The sergeant stepped in front of the leading truck as it drove up to the gate and held up one hand. As the truck pulled up he came round to the offside window, asked a question in Shona, and the bereted guerrilla answered him easily. But immediately the sergeant’s tone altered, clearly the reply had been incorrect. His voice rose, became hectoring and strident. He was outside Craig’s limited circle of vision, but Craig saw the armed guard react. They began to unsling their rifles, started to spread out to cover the truck, the bluff was over before it had begun.
Craig tapped the leg of the uniformed guerrilla standing above him. It was the signal, and the guerrilla lobbed the grenade that he was holding in his right hand with the pin already drawn. It went up in a high, lazy parabola and dropped neatly into the machine-gun emplacement.
At the same instant, Craig said quietly to the man on either side of him, ‘Kill them.’
They thrust the muzzles of their AKs through the firing slits in the canopy and the range was less than ten paces. The volley ripped into the unprepared guards before they could bring up their weapons. The sergeant raced back towards the guard-room door, but Comrade Lookout leaned out of the cab with the Tokarev pistol in a stiff-armed double grip and shot him twice in the back.
As the sergeant sprawled, the grenade burst behind the sandbags, and the barrel of the heavy machine-gun swivelled aimlessly towards the sky as the hidden gunner was torn by flying shrapnel.
‘Drive!’ Craig stuck his head and shoulders through the slit in the canopy, and yelled at the driver through the open window of the cab. ‘Smash through the gate!’
The powerful diesel of the Toyota bellowed, and the truck surged forward. There was a rending crash, and the vehicle bucked and shuddered, checked for an instant, and then roared into the brightly lit compound, dragging a tangle of barbed-wire and shattered gate-timbers behind it.
Craig scrambled up beside the machine-gunner on the cab.
‘On the left—’ He directed his fire at the barrack room of adobe and thatch beside the gate. The machine-gunner fired a long burst into the knot of half-naked troopers as they spilled out of the front door.
‘Guard tower on the right.’
They were receiving fire from the two guards in the tower. It hissed and cracked around their heads like the lash of a stock whip. The machine-gunner traversed and elevated, and the belted ammunition fed into the clattering breech and empty cases poured in a glittering stream from the ejector slide. Splinters of timber and glass flew from the walls and windows of the tower, and the two guards were picked up and flung backwards by the solid strike of shot.
‘Number One hutment just ahead,’ Craig warned Sarah with a shout. She and her two men were crouched at the tailboard, and as the Toyota slowed, they jumped over and hit the ground running. Sarah carried the bolt-cutters and the two guerrillas ran
ahead of her, jinking and dodging and firing from the hip.
Craig slid over the side of the truck, onto the running-board and clung to the cab.
‘Drive for the kopje,’ he shouted at the driver. ‘We have to take the radio!’
The fortified kopje lay directly ahead, but they had to cross the wide, brightly lit parade ground, with the whitewashed wall at the far end, to reach the foot of the kopje.
Craig glanced backwards. Sarah and her team had reached the hutment and were working on the wire with the bolt-cutters. Even as he watched, they completed their opening and broke through, disappearing into the building.
He looked for the second truck. It was roaring around the perimeter, just inside the wire, taking on each guard tower as they came to it, and pouring suppressing fire into it with the heavy machine-gun. They had knocked out four towers already, only two more to go.
The bright flash of bursting grenades dragged his attention to the barracks abutting the main prison hutment. The second truck had dropped a group of guerrillas to attack these barracks. Craig could see them crouched below the sills of the barracks, popping grenades through the windows, and then, as they exploded, darting forward, bright as moths in the floodlights, towards the main prison hutment.
In the first few minutes they had taken control of the entire camp. They had knocked out the towers, devastated the guard house and both barrack blocks – it was all theirs. He felt a surge of triumph, and then he looked ahead across the parade ground to the kopje. Everything but the kopje, and as he thought it, a line of white tracer stretched out towards him from the sandbagged upper slopes of the rocky hillock. It looked like a string of bright white fire-beads, at first coming quite slowly but accelerating miraculously as they closed, and suddenly there was flying dust and the shriek of ricochets all around them and the jarring crashing of shot into the metal body of the racing truck.
The truck swerved wildly, and Craig screamed at the driver as he clung desperately to the projecting rear-view mirror.