The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

  The sergeant lay for two minutes, and when there was no hostile fire, he doubled forward ten paces and then went flat again, rolling twice to throw off an enemy’s aim, and he waited two minutes longer.

  Still no fire – and he came up cautiously, and went forward to the damaged clump of grass. It was man sign: a small band of men had left the path here or joined it, and they had swept their spoor. A man only took this much trouble if he was anticipating pursuit. The sergeant whistled up his tracker and put him to the spoor.

  The tracker worked out from the path, casting ahead, and within minutes he reported, ‘Two men, wearing boots. One of them walks with a slight favour to his left leg. They were headed down the valley.’ He touched one of the footprints in a sandy patch. An ant-lion had built its tiny cone-shaped trap in the toe of the spoor, giving the tracker an accurate timing.

  ‘Six to eight hours,’ said the tracker, ‘during the night. They went on the path, but we cannot follow them, their spoor has been covered by others.’

  ‘If we cannot find where they are going, then we will see where they came from,’ said the sergeant. ‘Backtrack them!’

  Three hours later, the sergeant walked up to the wreck of the Cessna.

  Craig slept for a few hours and then by the light of the paraffin lantern began modifying the oxygen equipment for use underwater. The central part of his primitive oxygen rebreathing set was the bag. For this he used one of the inflatable life-jackets. Oxygen from the steel bottle was introduced into the bag through the oneway valve of the mouthpiece, the connection made with a length of flexible tubing.

  As he worked, Craig explained, ‘At a depth of forty feet underwater, the pressure will be greater than two atmospheres – you remember your high school physics: thirty-three feet of water equals one atmosphere, plus the pressure of the air above it – two atmospheres, right?’

  His interested audience of three made affirmative sounds.

  ‘Right! So for me to be able to breathe freely, the oxygen has to be fed into my lungs at the same pressure as the surrounding water – the oxygen in the bag is under the same ambient pressure as I am, et voilá!’

  ‘My old daddy always used to say, it’s brains what counts!’ Sally-Anne applauded him.

  ‘The chemicals in these two canisters remove the water vapour and carbon dioxide from the air that I exhale, and the purified oxygen goes back into the bag via this tube, and I breathe it again.’

  He was sealing the new connections to the bag with epoxy cement from the repair kit.

  ‘As I use up the oxygen in the bag, I keep topping it up with fresh oxygen from the steel bottle strapped on my back. Like this—’ he cracked the tap of the black-and-white-coded bottle and there was an adder hiss of escaping gas.

  ‘There are a few problems, of course—’ Craig began work on altering the shape of the face-mask to give him a watertight fit.

  ‘Such as?’ Sally-Anne asked.

  ‘Buoyancy,’ Craig answered. ‘As I use up the oxygen in the bag I will become less buoyant, and the steel bottle will pull me down like a stone. When I top up the bag I’ll tend to shoot up like a balloon.’

  ‘How will you beat that?’

  ‘I will weight myself with rocks to get down to the tomb entrance, and once I’m there, I’ll rope myself down to stay there.’

  Craig was making up a back-pack on which were suspended the two canisters and the oxygen bottle. Carefully he positioned the steel bottles so that he could reach the tap over his shoulder.

  ‘However, buoyancy isn’t the big problem,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve got more?’ Sally-Anne demanded.

  ‘As many as you ask for,’ Craig grinned. ‘But did you know that pure oxygen breathed for an extended period at more than two atmospheres absolute, that is at any depth below thirty-three feet, becomes a deadly gas, as lethal as the carbon monoxide in the exhaust fumes of an automobile? ’

  ‘What can you do about that?’

  ‘Not much,’ Craig admitted. ‘Except limit the duration of each dive, and monitor my own reactions very carefully while I am working at the wall of the tomb.’

  ‘Can’t you work out how much safe time you will have before it starts to poison—’

  Craig interrupted. ‘No, the formula would be too complicated and there are too many variables to calculate, from my body mass to the exact water depth. Then there is a cumulative effect of the poisoning. Each successive dive will become more risky.’

  ‘Oh my God, darling.’ Sally-Anne stared at him.

  ‘We will keep the dives short, and we will work out a series of signals,’ Craig reassured her. ‘You will give me a rope signal from the surface every minute, and if I don’t reply or if my reply is not immediate and decisive, you will haul me out. The poisoning is insidious but gradual, it will affect my reactions to the signal before I go out completely. It gives us a little leeway.’

  He set the bulky equipment carefully aside, close to the fire, so that the warmth would hasten the setting of the epoxy cement.

  ‘As soon as the joints are sealed, we can test it, and then go for the bank.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘It’s twenty-four-hour epoxy.’

  ‘So long?’

  ‘Rest will increase my resistance to the effects of oxygen poisoning.’

  The forest was too dense to allow the helicopter to alight. It hovered above the tree-tops, and the flight engineer on the winch lowered General Peter Fungabera into a hole in the mat of dark green vegetation below them.

  Peter turned slowly on the thin steel cable, and the down-draught from the rotors fluttered his camouflage battle-smock about his torso. Six feet above the earth, he slipped out of the padded sling and dropped clear, landing neatly as a cat. He returned the salute of the Shona sergeant who was waiting for him, cleared the drop area quickly and looked up as the next man was lowered from the hovering helicopter.

  Colonel Bukharin was also dressed in camouflage and jump helmet. His scarred face seemed impervious to the tropical sun, it was bloodless and almost as pale as those cold arctic eyes. He shrugged off the helping hands of the Shona sergeant and strode on up the valley. Peter Fungabera fell in beside him and neither man spoke until they reached the crumpled and shattered fuselage of the Cessna.

  ‘There is no doubt?’ Bukharin asked.

  ‘The registration, ZS-KYA. You must remember I have flown in this aircraft,’ Peter Fungabera replied, as he went down on one knee to examine the belly of the fuselage. ‘If further proof is needed,’ he touched the neat puncture in the metal skin, ‘machine-gun fire from directly below.’

  ‘No corpses?’

  ‘No.’ Peter Fungabera straightened up, and leaned into the cockpit. ‘No blood, no indication that any of the occupants was injured. And the wreck has been stripped.’

  ‘It could easily have been looted by local tribesmen.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Peter agreed. ‘But I don’t think so. The trackers have examined the sign, and this is their reconstruction. After the crash twelve days ago, four people left the site, two of them women, and one of the men with an unbalanced gait. Then within the last thirty-six hours, two men returned to the wreck. They are certain it was the same two – the boot prints match, and one of them has the same favour to his left leg.’

  Bukharin nodded.

  ‘On the second visit the wreck was stripped of much loose equipment. The two men left the area carrying heavy packs and joined the footpath that crossed the head of the valley about six miles from here. There the tracks have been confused and covered by other traffic.’

  ‘I see,’ Bukharin was watching him. ‘Now tell me your other conclusions.’

  ‘There are two black and two white persons. With my own eyes I saw them at Tuti airstrip. The one black is undoubtedly Minister Tungata Zebiwe – I recognized him.’

  ‘Wishful thinking? He is your one last hope of making good our bargain.’

  ‘I would know that man anywhere.’

&nbs
p; ‘Even from an aircraft?’

  ‘Even then.’

  ‘Go on,’ Bukharin invited.

  ‘The other black person I did not recognize. Nor did I get a good enough view to positively identify either of the whites, but the pilot is almost certainly an American woman named Jay. Although the aircraft belongs to the World Wildlife Trust, she had the use of it. The other white is probably her lover, a British writer of sensational fiction, who has an artificial leg, accounting for the unbalanced tracks. These three are unimportant and expendable. The only one of importance is Zebiwe. And now we know that he is still alive.’

  ‘We also know that he has eluded you, my dear General,’ Bukharin pointed out.

  ‘I do not think he will continue to do so much longer.’ Peter Fungabera turned to the sergeant who was standing attentively behind him. ‘You have done well. Very well, so far.’

  ‘Mambo!’

  ‘I believe that this Matabele dog and his white friends are being hidden and fed by the local people.’

  ‘Mambo!’

  ‘We will question them.’

  ‘Mambo!’

  ‘We will start with the nearest village, which is it?’

  ‘The village of Vusamanzi lies beyond this valley and the next.’

  ‘You will move in and surround it. Nobody must leave or escape, not a goat, not a child.’

  ‘Mambo!’

  ‘When you have secured the village, I will come to supervise the interrogation.’

  Craig and Tungata made three climbs down to Lobengula’s pool at the foot of the grand gallery, carrying the makeshift diving gear, the spare oxygen bottles, the underwater lamps that Craig had made up with the batteries and globes scavenged from the life-jackets, firewood and fur blankets to warm Craig after each dive, and provisions to avoid the necessity of climbing back to the upper cavern for meals.

  After discussion it was agreed that the two girls would take turns at remaining in the upper cavern, to meet the messengers from Vusamanzi’s village and to carry down a warning to the others in the event of a Shona patrol stumbling on the entrance.

  Before testing the diving equipment, Craig and Tungata made a careful survey of the route down to the pool, choosing the positions on which they would fall back if they were ever forced to defend the inner recesses of the cave system against a Shona attack. Although neither of them mentioned it, they were both acutely aware that there was no final position, no ultimate escape hole from the mountain depths, and that any defence must end at the icy waters of the pool.

  Tungata made the only open acknowledgement of this when, in plain sight of the other three, he took four 7.62 bullets for the Tokarev pistol, wrapped them in a scrap of goat-skin, and wedged them in a crack in the limestone wall beside the pool. The two girls watched him with sickly fascination, and though Craig made a show of checking his breathing equipment, they all understood. This was the final assurance against torture and slow mutilation, one bullet for each of them.

  ‘Okay!’ Craig’s voice was overloud for the silence of the gallery. ‘I’m going to see how efficiently this contraption is going to drown me.’

  Tungata lifted the set and Craig knelt and slipped his head through the yoke of the life-jacket. Sally-Anne and Sarah settled the bottle and canisters on his back, and then strapped them in place with strips of canvas cut from the seat covers. Craig checked the knots. If the set ever failed, he must be able to jettison it in a hurry.

  At last he hopped into the pool, shuddered at the cold as he fitted the mask over his mouth and nose, secured the strap behind his head and half-filled his chest bag with oxygen. He gave the three on the bank a thumbs-up sign, and lowered himself below the surface.

  As he had anticipated, buoyancy was his first problem. The pull of the bag on his chest rolled him onto his back like a dead fish, and with the thrust of his one leg, he was unable to right himself. He paddled back to the slab, and began the irksome business of experimenting with rock weights to adjust his attitude in the water. In the end he found that the only way to do it was to hold an excessively heavy stone and let it draw him down head-first. However, as soon as he released the stone, he was borne irresistibly upwards.

  ‘At least the joints are watertight,’ he told them when he surfaced again. ‘And I’m getting oxygen. There is a lot of water leaking in around the edges of the mask, but I can purge that in the usual way.’ He demonstrated the trick of holding the mask at the top and forcing the accumulated water out of the bottom with a sharp exhalation of breath.

  ‘When are you going to go for the wall?’

  ‘I guess I’m as ready now as I’ll ever be,’ Craig admitted reluctantly.

  You must understand that I wish to be as a father to you,’ Peter Fungabera smiled gently. ‘I look upon you as my children.’

  ‘I can understand this Shona chattering as little as I can the barking of baboons from the hilltops,’ Vusamanzi replied courteously, and Peter Fungabera made a gesture of irritation as he turned to his sergeant.

  ‘Where is that translator?’

  ‘He will be here very soon, mambo.’

  Tapping his swagger-stick against his thigh, Peter Fungabera walked slowly down the ragged rank of villagers that his troopers had gathered in from their hoeing on the maize fields and had flushed from the huts. Apart from the old man, they were all women and children. Some of the women were as ancient as the witch-doctor, with white woolly pates and wizened dugs hanging to their waists, others were still capable of child-bearing with fat infants strapped to their backs, or standing naked at their knees; snot had dried white around the toddlers’ nostrils and flies crawled unnoticed on their lips and at the corners of their eyes, and they stared up at Peter as he passed with fathomless eyes. There were still younger women with firm full breasts and glossy skin, pre-pubescent girls and uncircumcised boys. Peter Fungabera smiled kindly at them, but they stared back at him without expression.

  ‘My Matabele puppies, we will hear you yap a little before this day is done,’ he promised softly, and turned at the end of the line. He walked back slowly to where the Russian waited in the shade of one of the huts.

  ‘You will get nothing out of the old one.’ Bukharin took the ebony cigarette-holder from between his teeth and coughed softly, covering his mouth with his hand. ‘He is dried up, beyond pain, beyond suffering. Look at his eyes. Fanatic.’

  ‘I agree, these sangoma are capable of self-hypnosis, he will be impervious to pain.’ Peter Fungabera shot back the cuff of his battle-smock and glanced impatiently at his watch. ‘Where is that translator?’

  It was another hour before the Matabele trusty from the rehabilitation centre was hustled up the path from the valley. He fell on his knees before Peter Fungabera, blubbering and holding up his manacled hands.

  ‘Get up!’ Then, to the sergeant, ‘Remove his manacles. Bring the old man here.’

  Vusamanzi was led into the centre of the village square.

  ‘Tell him I am his father,’ Fungabera ordered.

  ‘Mambo, he replies that his father was a man, not a hyena.’

  ‘Tell him that although I cherish him and all his people, I am displeased with him.’

  ‘Mambo, he replies that if he has made Your Honour unhappy, then he is well content.’

  ‘Tell him he has lied to my men.’

  ‘Mambo, he hopes for the opportunity to do so again.’

  ‘Tell him that I know he is protecting and feeding four enemies of the state.’

  ‘Mambo, he suggests that Your Honour is demented. There are no hidden enemies of the state.’

  ‘Very well. Now address all these people. Repeat that I wish to know where the traitors are hidden. Tell them that if they lead me to them, then nobody in the village will come to any harm.’

  The translator stood before the silent rank of women and children, and made a long and passionate plea, but when he ended, they stared back at him stolidly. One of the infants began to scream petulantly, and its mother swu
ng it under her arm and pressed her swollen nipple into its tiny mouth. There was silence again.

  ‘Sergeant!’ Peter Fungabera gave terse orders, and Vusamanzi’s hands were snatched behind his back and bound at the wrists. One of the troopers fashioned a hangman’s noose in a length of nylon rope and tossed the free end of the rope over one of the main supports of an elevated maize bin at the edge of the square. They stood Vusamanzi under the maize bin and dropped the noose over his head.

  ‘Now tell his people that when any one of them agrees to lead us to the traitors, this punishment will end immediately.’

  The translator raised his voice, but he had not finished before Vusamanzi called over him in a firm voice, ‘My curse upon any of you who speak to this Shona pig. I command silence upon you, no matter what is done – he who breaks it will be visited by me from beyond the grave. I, Vusamanzi, master of the waters, command this thing!’

  ‘Do it!’ Peter Fungabera ordered, and the sergeant inched in the slack of the rope. The noose closed around the old man’s neck, and gradually he was forced up onto his tiptoes.

  ‘Enough!’ Peter Fungabera ordered and they secured the free end of the rope.

  ‘Now, let them come forward and speak.’

  The translator moved down the rank of women, urging them and finally pleading unashamedly, but Vusamanzi glared at his women fiercely, unable to speak but still commanding them with all his will.

  ‘Break one of his feet,’ ordered Peter Fungabera, and the sergeant faced the old man and, with a dozen blows, using the butt of his rifle like a maize stamp, he crushed Vusamanzi’s left foot. As the women heard the brittle old bones snap like kindling for the hearth, they began to wail and ululate.