The Leopard Hunts In Darkness Part 72

They burst out of the forest, racing through the maize fields that surrounded the tiny mission village. The tin roofs of the church and the schoolhouse glittered in the sunrise. From the huts beside the road, a few sleepy villagers, yawning and scratching, came out to watch them pa.s.s through.

Craig slowed the truck, and Sarah shouted through the window, "Soldiers coming! Big trouble! Warn everybody!

Go into the bush! Hide!" Craig had not thought that far ahead. The retaliation of the Third Brigade on the local population would be horrific. He accelerated through the village and the airstrip was a kilometer ai head the tattered windsock undulating on its pole at the far end. The Cessna was circling low overhead. Craig saw Sally-Anne lower her undercarriage and start her turn onto final approach for the landing.

"Look!" said Tungata harshly, and another aircraft came roaring in, from their 1it-hand side, low and fast, another much larger, twin-$ngined machine. Craig recognized it immediately.

It was an old Dakota transport, a veteran of the desert war in north Africa, and the bush war in Rhodesia. It was sprayed with non-reflective anti-missile grey paint and it was now decorated with the Zimbabwe Air Force round els The main hatch just abaft the wing root was open, and there were men poised in the opening. They were dressed in camouflage jump smocks and helmets. The bulky bundles of their parachutes dangled below their b.u.t.tocks. Two of them were in the hatchway, but others crowded up close behind them.

"Paras!" shouted Craig, and the Dakota banked steeply towards them and pa.s.sed them so low that the blast from the propellers churned the tops of the standing maize in the field beside them. As the aircraft flashed past them, Craig and Tungata simultaneously recognized one of the men in the hatchway.

"Fungabera!" Tungata snapped. "It's him! As he said it, Tungata threw open the door at his side and clambered up the outside of the cab to reach the ring mounted machine-gun. Despite his size and weakness, he was so quick that he reached the gun and swung it and got off a long burst before the Dakota was out of range. Tracer flew under the Dakota's port wing, close enough to alarm the pilot, and make him throw the aircraft into a tight climbing turn.

"They are climbing up to drop alt.i.tude!" Craig shouted.

Surely Fungabera had seen and recognized the blue and silver Cessna. He would have realized that it was the escape plane and that the truck was heading for a rendezvous at the airstrip. His paratroopers could be more swiftly deployed by dropping, than by landing the Dakota. He was going to drop in and seize the airstrip with his par as before the Cessna could take off again. A thousand feet was safe drop alt.i.tude, but these were crack troopers. The Dakota levelled out on its drop run five hundred feet, Craig estimated, and they were going to make the drop down the length of the airstrip.

The Cessna was just coming in over the fence at the far end of the strip. As Craig glanced back at her Sally-Anne touched down and then taxied at speed down the strip towards the racing Toyota.

Above the airstrip the tiny figure of a man fell clear of the lumbering Dakota and the green silk parachute flared open almost instantly. He was followed in rapid succession by a string of other par as and the sky was filled with a forest of sinister mushrooms, poisonous green and swaying gently in the light morning breeze, but sinking towards the parched brown turf of the airstrip.

The Cessna reached the end of the strip and swung around sharply in a 180-degree turn. Only then did Craig realize that Sally-Anne had been far-seeing enough to a.s.sess the danger and urgency, and that she had landed with the wind behind her, accepting the hazard of the r approach speed and the longer roll-out in order to be able immediately to turn back into the wind for her take-off which would be with a full load, and under attack from the par as

On the cab, Tungata was firing up into the sky, measured controlled bursts, hoping more to intimidate the descending par as than to inflict casualties. A man dangling on swinging parachute-shrouds makes an almost impossible target.

Sally-Anne was leaning out of the open c.o.c.kpit door, shouting and waving-them on, already she was running up her engine to full power, holding the Cessna on the wheel brakes. They b.u.mped over the verge of the runway and Craig swung the Toyota into a brake-squealing skid, parking so as to screen and protect the aircraft and themselves while they Tade the transfer.

"Get out," he yelled4 at Sarah, and she jumped down and ran to the aircraft. 4;ally-Anne grabbed her arm and helped her swing up and tumble into the back seat.

On the cab, Tungata fired a last burst with the heavy machine-gun.

The first three par as were down, their green parachutes rolling softly in front of the light breeze, and Tungata's bullets kicked dust amongst them. Craig saw one of the par as fall and drag away loose and lifeless on his shrouds. Craig grabbed the AK 47 and the bag of spare ammunition and shouted, "Let's go, Sam. Let's go!" They ran to the Cessna, and Tungata, weak and sick, fell at the steps, and Craig had to drag him to his feet and shove him up.

Sally-Anne let go d-te brakes before Tungata was aboard, and Craig ran beside the Cessna as it gathered speed.

Tungata fell into the back seat beside Sarah, and Craig jumped up and got a hold. Though he was hampered by the AK rifle and bag, he dragged himself into the front seat beside Sally-Anne.

"Get the door closed!" Sally' Anne screamed, without looking at him, all her attention on the strip ahead. The dangling seat-belt was jammed in the door and Craig wrestled with it as they built up to rotation speed. Craig managed to extricate the strap and slam the door closed.

When he looked up, he saw paratroopers sprinting forward from the edge of the strip to intercept the Cessna.

It did not need the shiny general's star on the front of his helmet to identify Peter Fungabera. The set of his shoulders, the way he carried his head, and the fluid catlike grace of his run were all distinctive. His men were spread out be hind him they were almost directly ahead of the Cessna, only four or five hundred paces ahead.

Sally-Anne rotated and the Cessna lifted its nose, bounced lightly and became airborne. Peter Fungabera and his line of paratroopers disappeared from view under the nose and engine section as the Cessna climbed away, but the aircraft would have to pa.s.s directly over the top of their heads at little more than a few hundred feet.

"Oh mother!" Sally-Anne spoke in almost conversational tones. "This is id" And as she said-it, the instrument panel in front of Craig exploded, covering him with fine chips of gla.s.s like sugar crystals. Hydraulic fluid sprayed over the front of his shirt.

Machine-gun fire came in through the floor of the cabin and tore out through the thin metal roof so that the interior was filled with a gale of swirling wind as the slipstream found the holes.

In the back seat,. Sarah cried out, and the body of the machine was racked and jarred by the storm of AK 47 bullets. Craig felt the seat under him jump as bullets smacked into the metal frame. jagged punctures appeared miraculously in the wing roots just outside his window.

Sally-Anne shoved the control wheel forward and the Cessna dived back towards the airstrip again with a gut swooping rush, ducking under the maelstrom of machine-gun fire and giving them a moment's respite. The brown earth came up at them, and Sally-Anne caught the Cessna's suicidal dive and held it off, but the wheels. .h.i.t the surface and they bounced wildly thirty feet back into the air. Craig saw two paratroopers dive to the side as the plane raced towards them.

The wild dive towards the earth had pushed their speed way up, so that Sally-Anne could instantly throw the Cessna into a maximum rate turn, the port wingtip brushing the earth. Her face was contorted and the muscle stood proud in her forearms with the effort of holding the Cessna's nose up in the turn and preventing her from going in. Ahead of them on the left-hand side of the airstrip, only a hundred yards or so from the verge, stood a single tree with dense, widespread branches.

It was a morula, ninety feet tall.

Sally-Anne levelled out for an instant and flew for the morula, her wingt* almost touched its outermost branches, and y immediately she threw the Cessna into an opposite turn, neatly placing the tree between them and the line of paratroopers on the airstrip behind them.

She kept at ground level, her undercarriage brushing the tops of the maize plants in the open fields, glancing up in the rear-view mirror above her head to keep the morula tree exactly behind the Cessna's tail, blanketing the paratroopers" field of fire.

"Where is the Dakota?" Craig asked, raising his voice above the rush of wind through the cabin.

"It's going in to land," Tungata called, and, twisting in his seat, Craig had a glimpse of the big grey machine going in low over the tree-tops behind them, lined up for the airstrip.

"I can't get the undercarriage up." Sally-Anne was thumbing the rocker switch but the three green eyes of the undercarriage warning light still glared at her from the console. "We have damage there, it's stuck." The forest beyond the open fields rushed towards them and as she eased back on the control wheel to lift the Cessna over the tree-tops, a hydraulic lead burst under the shot-ruptured engine housing and hydraulic fluid sprayed in viscous sheets over the windscreen.

"Can't seeP Sally-Anne cried, and pulled open her side window, flying by reference to the horizon under her wingtip.

"We've got no instruments," Craig checked the shattered panel. "Airspeed's gone, rate of climb, artificial horizon, altimeter, gyro compa.s.s-"

"The undercarriage-" Sally-Anne interrupted him.

"Too much drag, it will cut down our range we'll never make it back!" She was still climbing, but gradually starting to come around onto her course, using the compa.s.s in its gla.s.s oil bath above her head, when the engine stuttered, almost cut and then surged again in full power.

Quickly Sally-Anne adjusted pitch and power-settings.

"That sounded like fuel starvation," she whispered. "They must have hit a fuel line." She switched the fuel-tank selector c.o.c.k from 'starboard" to "both" and then glanced up at Craig and grinned. "Hi there! I missed you something awful "Me too." He reached across and squeezed her thigh.

"Time check." Businesslikeagain.

"05-17 hours," Craig told her and looked over side The brown snake of the Tuti road was angling away towards the north, and they were crossing the first line of hills Vusamanzi's village would be out there a few miles beyond the road.

The engine missed again, and Sally-Anne's expression was taut with apprehension.

"Time?"she demanded again "05.27,"Craig told her.

"We will be out of sight of the airstrip by now. Out of earshot too."

"Fungabera won't know where we are, where we are heading." "They've got a helicopter gunship at Victoria Falls." Tungata leaned forward over the seats. "If they guess that we are heading for Botswana, they will send it down to intercept."

"We can outrun a helicopter," Craig guessed.

"Not with our undercarriage down," Sally-Anne contradicted him, and without another warning, the engine cut out completely.

It was suddenly eerily quiet, just the whistle of the wind through the bullet-holes in the fuselage, the propeller windmilling softly for a few seconds longer, and then with a jerk stopping dead and pointing skywards likea headsman s blade.

"Well," Sally-Anne said softly, "it's all immaterial now.