The Leopard Hunts In Darkness Part 52

"We must be well inside Botswana, the border road can't be far ahead. If we can find a Botswana police patrol-'

I.J.

he road was single width, two continuous ruts running north and south, jinking now and then to avoid a spring-hare colony or a soft pan. it was patrolled regularly by the Botswana police on anti, poaching and prevention of alleged entry duties.

Craig and Sally-Anne reached the road in the middle of the afternoon. By this time Craig had discarded the rifle and ammunition, and stripped the pack of all but essentials.

He had even considered for a while burying his ma.n.u.script for later retrieval. It weighed eight pounds, but Sally-Anne had dissuaded him in a hoa.r.s.e whisper.

The water bottle was empty. They had had their last drink, a blood-warm mouthful each, just before noon.

Their speed was reduced to little more than a mile an hour. Craig was no longer sweating. He could feel his tongue beginning to swell and his throat closing as the heat sucked the moisture out of him.

They reached the road. Craig's gaze was fastened grimly on the heat-smudged horizon ahead, all his being concentrated on lifting one foot and placing it ahead of the other.

They crossed the road vhthout seeing it, and kept going on into the desert. They were not the first to walk past the chance of succour and go on to death by thirst and exposure. They staggered onwards for two hours more before Craig stopped.

"We should have reacked the road by now, he whispered, and checked ee compa.s.s heading again. "The * I North isn't there." He was con compa.s.s must be wrong.

fused and doubting. "Damaged the b.l.o.o.d.y thing. We are too far south," he decided, and began the first aimless circle of the lost and totally disorientated, the graveyard spiral that precedes death in the desert.

An hour before sunset Craig stumbled over a dried brown vine growing in the grey soil. It bore only a single green fruit the size of an orange. He knelt and plucked it as reverently as if it had been the Cullinan diamond.

Mumbling to himself through cracked and bleeding lips, he split the fruit carefully with the bayonet. It was warm as living flesh from the sun.

"Gemsbok melon," he explained to Sally-Anne as she sat and watched him with dull, uncomprehending eyes.

He used the point of the bayonet to mash the white flesh of the melon, and then held the half sh.e.l.l to Sally Anne mouth. Her throat pumped in the effort of swallowing the clear warm juice, and she closed her eyes in ecstasy as it spread over her swollen tongue.

Working with extreme care, Craig wrung a quarter of a cupful of liquid from the fruit and fed it to her. His own throat ached and contracted at the smell of the liquid as he made her drink. She seemed to recharge with strength before his eyes, and when the last drop had pa.s.sed between her lips, she suddenly realized what he had done.

"You?" she whispered.

He took the hard rind and the squeezed, out pith, and sucked on them.

"Sorry." She was distraught at her own thoughtlessness, but he shook his head.

J1!".

"Cool soon. Night." He helped her up, and they stumbled onwards.

Time telescoped in Craig's mind. He looked at the sunset and thought it was the dawn.

"Wrong." He took the compa.s.s and hurled it from him.

It did not fly very far. "Wrong wrong way." He turned, and led Sally' Anne back.

Craig's head filled with shadows and dark shapes, some were faceless and terrifying and he shouted soundlessly at them to drive them away. Some he recognized. Ashe Levy rode past on the back of a huge s.h.a.ggy hyena, he was brandishing Craig's new ma.n.u.script, and his gold-rimmed spectacles glinted blindly in the sunset.

can't make a paperback sale," he gloated. "n.o.body wants it, baby, you're finished. One,book man, Craig baby that's you." Then Craig realized that it was not his ma.n.u.script, but the wine list from the Four Seasons.

"Shall we try the Carton Charlemagne?" Ashe taunted Craig. "Or a magnum of the Widow?"

"Only witch-doctors ride hyena," Craig yelled back, no sound issuing from his desiccated throat. "Always knew you were-" Ashe hooted with malicious laughter, spurred the hyena into a gallop and threw the ma.n.u.script in the air. The white pages fluttered to the earth like roosting egrets, and when Craig went down on his knees to gather them, they turned to handfuls of dust and Craig found he could not rise. Sally-Anne was down beside him and as they clung to each other, the night came down upon them.

When he woke it was morning, and he could not rouse Sally-Anne. Her breathing snored and sawed through her nose and open mouth.

On his knees he dug. the hole for a solar still. Though the soil was soft and friable, it went slowly. Laboriously, still on his knees, he gathered an armful of the scattered desert vegetation. It seemed there was no moisture in the woody growth when he chopped it finely with the bayonet, and laid it in the bottom of his hole.

He cut the top off thWempty aluminium water bottle, and placed the cup this formed in the centre of the hole.

It required enormous concentration to perform even these simple tasks. He spread the plastic ground sheet over the hole, and anch.o.r.ed the edges with heaped earth. In the centre of the sheet he gently laid a single round of ammunition, so that it was directly above the aluminium cup.

Then he crawled back to Sally-Anne and sat over her so that his shadow kept the sun off her face.

"It's going to be all right," he told her. "We'll find the road soon. We must be close--2 orn his throat, He did not realize that no sound came fr and that she would not have been able to hear him even if it had.

"That little t.u.r.d Ashe is a liar. I'll finish the book, you'll see. I'll pay off what I owe- We'll get a movie deal I'll buy King's Lynn. it will be all right. Don't worry, my darling." He waited out the baking heat of the morning, containing his impatience, and at noon by his wrist-watch he opened the still. The sun beating down on the plastic sheet had raised the temperature in the covered hole close to the boiling point. Evaporation from the chopped plants had sheet and run condensed on the under-side of the plastic down it towards the sag of the bullet. From there it had dripped into the aluminium cup.

He had collected half a pint. He took it up between both hands, shaking so violently that he almost spilled it.

He took a small sip and held it in his mouth. It was hot, but it tasted like honey and he had to use all his selfcontrol to prevent himself swallowing.

He leaned forward and placed his mouth over Sally Anne blackened and bleeding lips. Gently he injected id between them.

the lieu 11)rink, my sweet, drink it up." He found he was giggling stupidly as he watched her swallow painfully.

A few drops at a time he pa.s.sed the precious fluid from his own mouth into hers and she swallowed each sip more easily, He kept the last mouthful for himself and let it to his head like strong trickle down his throat. It went drink and he sat grinning stupidly through fat, scaly black le red, the abraen and sun-baked purp lips, his face swoll scab, and leis ions on his cheek covered with a crusty weeping his bloodshot eyes gummed up with dried mucus.

He rebuilt the still and lay down beside Sally-Anne. He covered his face from the sun with the tail torn from his shirt and whispered, "All right find help soon. Don't worry my love-" But he knew that this was their last day. He could not keep her alive for another.

Tomorrow they would die. It would be either the sun or the men of the Third Brigade but tomorrow they would die.

t sunset the still gave them another half cup of distilled water, and after they had drunk it, they fell into a heavy, deathlike sleep in each other's arms.

Something woke Craig, and for a moment he thought it was the night wind in the scrub. With difficulty he pushed himself into a sitting position, and c.o.c.ked his head to listen, not sure whether he was still hallucinating or whether he was truly hearing that soft rise and fall of sound. It must be nearly dawn, he realized, the horizon was a crisp dark line beneath the velvet drape of the sky.

Then abruptly the sound firmed, and he recognized it.

The distinctive beat of a four, cylinder Land-Rover engine.

The Third Brigade had not abandoned the hunt. They were coming on relentlessly, like hyenas with the reek of blood in their nostrils.

He saw a pair of headlights, far out across the desert, their pale beams swi Any and tilting as the vehicle covered mg the rough ground. He groped for the AK 47. He could not find it. Ashe Levy must have stolen it, he thought bitterly, taken it off with him on the hyena. "I never did trust the son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h." Craig stared hopelessly at the approaching headlights.

In their beams danced a little pixie-like figure, a diminutive yellow mannikin. "Puck," he thought. "Fairies. I never believed in fairies. Don't say that when you do, one dies.

Don't want to kill fairies. I believe in them." His mind was going, fantasy mixed with flashes of lucidity.