The Leopard Hunts In Darkness Part 65

"AKs," Craig rejoiced. "Sarah, you are a star."

"Just the two of us?" Sally-Anne paled as she realized th at he truly meant it. "Two of us, against the entire Third Brigade is that what you are thinking about?" A "No, I'm coming with you." Sarah put aside the tissue.

"There will be three of us."

"Three of us, gread" said Sally-Anne.

"Three of us b.l.o.o.d.y marvelous!" ack and stood in front of them.

Craig came b "Number one: we are going to draw up a map of Tuti camp. We are going to put down every detail we can remember." He started pacing again, unable to stand still.

"Number two: we meet with Sarahs friends and see how much help they can give us. Number dime: Sally-Anne takes the commercial flight down to Johannesburg and brings back the Cessna how long will that takeP 11 can be back in three days." Colour was coming back into Sally-Anne's cheeks. "That's if I decide to gaP okay! Fine!" Craig rubbed his hands together. "Now we M can start on the map." Craig ordered sandwiches and a bottle of w me to be sen t to the room and they worked through until 2 am.

when Sarah left them with a promise to return at breakfast time. Craig folded the map carefully and then he and Sally-Anne climbed into one of the narrow beds together, but they were so keyed up that neither of them could sleep.

"Sam was trying to protect me," Craig marvelled. "He was doing it for me, all along."

"Tell me about him," Sally-Anne whispered and she lay against his chest and listened to him talk of their friendship. When at last he fell silent, she asked softly, "So you are serious about this thing?"

"Deadly serious, but will you do it with me?"

"It's crazy," she said. "It's plain dumb but let's do it then." he sooty black smoke from the beacon fires of oil rags that Craig had set climbed straight up in two columns into the clear desert sky. Craig and Sarah stood together on the bonnet of the Land' Rover staring into the south. This was the dry wild land of northeastern Botswana. The Zimbabwe border was thirty kilometres east of them, the flat and plain between pimpled with camel.

thorn trees and blotched with the leprous white salt pans

The mirage shimmered and tricked the eye so that the stunted trees on the far side of the pan seemed to swim and change shape like dark amoeba under a microscope. A spinning dust devil jumped up from the white pan surface, and swirled and swayed sinuously as a belly dancer, rising two hundred feet into the hot air until it collapsed again as suddenly as it had risen.

The sound of the Cessna engine rose and fell and rose again on the heat-flawed air. "There!" Sarah pointed out the mosquito speck, low on the horizon.

Craig made a last anxious appraisal of his makeshift landing, strip He had lit the beacon fires at each end of it as soon as they had pick el tip the first throb of the Cessna's motor. He had driven the Land-Rover back and forth between the beacons to mark the hard crust at the edge of the pan. Fifty metres out, the surface was treacherously soft.

Now he looked back at the approaching aircraft. Sally Anne was banking low over the baobab trees, lining up with the strip he had set out for her. She made a prudent precautionary pa.s.s along it, her head twisted in the c.o.c.kpit window as she examined it, then she came around again and touched down lightly, and taxied towards the Land Rover.

"You were gone for ever." Craig seized her as she jumped down from the c.o.c.kpit.

"Three days," she protested with her feet off the ground.

"That's for ever, "he said and kissed her.

He set her down but kept one arm around her as he led her to the Land-Rover. After she had greeted Sarah, Craig introduced her to the two Matabele who were squatting in the shade of the Land-Rover.

They rose courteously to meet her.

"This is Jonas, and this is Aaron. They led us to the arms cache and they are giving us all the help they can." They were reserved and unsmiling young men with old eyes that had seen unspeakable things, but they were willing and quick.

They pumped the Avgas from the forty-four-gallon drums on the back of the Land-Rover directly into the Cessna's wing tanks, while Craig stripped out the seats from the rear of the c.o.c.kpit to reduce weight and give them cargo s.p.a.ce.

Then they began loading. Sally-Anne weighed each item of cargo on the spring balance that she had bought for the purpose, and entered it on her loading table. The ammunition was the heaviest part of the load. They had eight thousand rounds of 7.62 men ball Ps. Craig had broken bulk and repacked it in black plastic garbage -bags to save weight and s.p.a.ce. It had been buried for years and many of the rounds were so corroded as to be useless.

However, Craig had "hand-sorted it, and test-fired a few rounds from each case without a single misfire.

Most of the rifles had also been corroded and Craig had worked through the nights by gas lantern, stripping and cannibalizing until he had twenty-five good weapons.

There were also five Tokarev pistols and two cases of fragmentation grenades which seemed in better condition than the rifles. Craig had set off one grenade from each case, popping them down an ant-bear hole to a satisfactory Crump and cloud of dust. That had left forty-eight from the original rift),. Craig packed them in five cheap canvas haversacks that he had bought from a general dealer in Francistown.

The rest of the equipment he had also purchased in Francistown, Wire-cutters and bolt-cutters, nylon rope, pan gas that Jonas and Aaron sharpened to razor edges, flashlights and extra batteries, canteens and water bottles and a dozen or so other items which might prove useful.

Sarah had been appointed medical orderly and had made up a first-aid kit with items purchased at the Francistown pharmacy. The food rations were spartan. Raw maize meal packed in five, kilo plastic bags, the best nourishment-to weight ratio available, and a few bags of coa.r.s.e salt.

"Okay, that's it," Sally-Anne called a halt to the loading.

"Another ounce and we won't get off the ground. The rest of it will have to wait for the second trip." When darkness fell, they sat around the campfire and gorged on the steaks and fresh fruit that Sally-Anne had brought with her from Johannesburg.

"Eat hearty, my children," she encouraged them. "It could be a long time." Afterwards Craig and Sally' Anne carried their blankets away from the fire, out oCearshot of the others, and they lay naked in the war me desert air and made love under the silver sickle of the moon, both of them poignantly aware that it might be for the last time.

They ate breakfast in the dark, after the moon had set and before the first glimmering of the dawn. They left Jonas and Aaron to guard the Land-Rover and help with loading and refuelling for the second trip and Sally-Anne taxied out to the end of the strip when it was just light enough to make out the tracks.

Even in the cool of night it took the overloaded Cessna for ever to unstick, and they climbed away slowly towards the glow of the sunrise.

"Zimbabwe border," Sally-Anne murmured. "And I still can't believe what we are doing." Craig was perched up beside her on the bags of ammuition, while Sarah was curled up likea salted anchovy on n I top of the load behind them.

Sally-Anne banked slightly as she picked up her landmarks from the map on her lap. She had laid out a course cross the railway line fifteen miles south of the coal, to in ming town of w.a.n.kie, and then to cross the main road a few miles beyond, avoiding all human habitation. The " I terrain below them changed swiftly, the desert falling away d with open glades of gold I and becoming densely foreste en gra.s.s. There were some high fair-weather c.u.mulus clouds in the north, otherwise the sky was clear. Craig squinted ahead down the track of the rising sun.

"There is the railway." e closed the throttle and they descended Sally-Ann sharply. Fifty feet above the treetops they roared over the deserted railway tracks, and minutes later crossed the main to ad. They had a glimpse of a truck crawling along the blue, grey tarmac ribbon, but they crossed behind it and were visible to it for only seconds. Sally-Anne pulled a face.

"Let's hope they make nothing of us there must be quite a bit of light aircraft traffic around here." She glanced at her wrist.w.a.tch. "Expected time of arrival, forty minutes."

"All right," Craig said. "Let's go over it one more time.

You drop Sarah and me, then clear out again as quickly as possible. Back to the pan. Reload and refuel. Two days from now you come back. If there is a smoke-signal, yot, land. No signal and you head back to the pan. Give it tw( more days and then the last trip. If there is no smoke signal on the second trip, that's it. You head out and don't come back." She reached out and took his hand. "Craig, don't even say it. Please, darling, come back to me." They held hands for the rest of the trip, except for the brief moments when she needed both for the controls.

"There it is!" The Chizarira river was a dark green python across the vast brown land, and there was a glint of water through the trees.

"Zambezi Waters just up there." They were keeping well clear of the camps that they had built with so much loving labour, but both of them stared longingly upstream to where the dreaming blue hills studded the line of the horizon.

Sally-Anne dropped lower and still lower until she was shaving the treetops, and then she turned slowly back in a wide circle, keeping the hills between them and the buildings on Zambezi Waters.

"There it is," Craig called, and pointed out under the par t wingtip, and they had a glimpse of white beads at the edge of the trees.

"They are still there! The bones of Craig's poached rhinoceros had been picked over by the scavengers and bleached by the sun.

Sally-Anne, ran her Jnding-check, and then lined tip for the nsrrow strip of gra.s.sland along the head of the gorge, where she had landed before, "Just pray the wart hog and ant-bear haven't been digging around, she murmured, and the overloaded Cessna wallowed sluggishly and the stall warning bleeped and flashed intermittently at the reduced power setting.

Sally-Anne dropped in steeply over the tree-tops and touched down with a jarring thud. The Cessna pitched and bounced over the rough ground, but maximum safe braking and the coa.r.s.e gra.s.s wrapping the undercarriage pulled them up quickly, and Sally-Anne let out her breath.

Thank you, Lord." They offloaded with frenzied haste, piling everything in a heap and spreading over it the green nylon nets designed for shading young plants from the sun that Craig had found in Francistown.

Sally' Anne and Craig looked at each other Then miserably.