The Leopard Hunts In Darkness Part 78

They closed in with elaborate caution, circling the area and casting for in going spoor, checking with infinite patience that the wreck had not been discovered and staked, out Finally, when they walked up, they discovered that it was undisturbed and exactly as they had left it.

Tungata climbed back up the side of the valley, and stood guard with the AK 47, while Craig began stripping the equipment they had come for. The four inflatable lifejackets were under the seats, as Sally-Anne had told him.

They were of excellent quality, impregnated nylon, each with a carbon dioxide cartridge for inflation and a non return valve on the mouthpiece for topping up. Attached to the bosom cushions were a whistle and blessings upon the manufacturer a light globe powered by a long-life battery. Under the pilot seat was a thousand more blessings a repair kit for the jackets, with scissors and sc.r.a.per and two tubes of epoxy cement.

The steel oxygen bottles were bolted into a rack behind the rear bulkhead of the pa.s.senger compartment. There were three of them, each of two-litre capacity. From them flexible plastic tubing carried along behind the panelling to each seat, and terminated in a face-mask with two builtin valves. The user inhaled pure oxygen and exhaled a mixture of unused oxygen, water vapour and carbon dioxide. This was pa.s.sed through the exit valve and ran through the two metal canisters under the floorboards. The first canister contained silica gel which removed the water vapour, the second canister was packed with soda lime which removed the carbon dioxide, and the purified oxygen was cycled back to the face-masks. When the pressure of pure oxygen in the system fell to that of ambient atmosphere, it was automatically supplemented from the three steel bottles. The flexible tubing was fitted with top-quality aluminium couplings, T-pieces and bends, all of the bayonet-fitting type.

Working as carefully as time would permit, Craig stripped out the system and d-len converted the heavy duty canvas seat-covers into carry bags. He packed the salvaged equipment into them, making up two heavy bundles.

It was dark by the time that he whistled Tungata down from the hillside. Each, of them shouldered a bundle and they started back.

When they intersected the footpath, they spent nearly half an hour sweeping their tracks, and hiding any sign of their detour from the path.

"You think it will hold good in daylight?" Craig said doubtfully. "We don't want to signpost the wreck."

"It's the best we c.aA do." They stepped it out on the path, pushing hard, and despite their heavy, uncomfortable packs, they shaved an hour off their return time and reached the cavern just after dawn.

Sally-Anne said nothing when Craig stepped into the cavern. She merely stood up from the fire, came to him and pressed her face against his chest. Sarah bobbed the traditional curtsey to Tungata and brought him the beer-pot, letting him refresh himself before bothering him with greetings. Only after he had drunk did she kneel beside him, clap her hands softly and whisper in Sindebele, see you, my lord, but dimly, for my eyes are filled with tears of joyP he Shana sergeant had been on foot patrol for t lirty-t Aree. Iours wit-lout rest. previous morning they had made a brief and indecisive contact with a small band of the escapees they were hunting, an exchange of fire that had lasted less than three minutes, then the Matabele guerrillas had pulled out and splintered into four groups. The sergeant had gone after one group with five men, followed them until dark and then lost them on the rocky rim of the Zambezi valley. He was bringing in his patrol now for resupply and new orders.

Despite the long patrol and the trauma of a good contact and hot pursuit, the sergeant was still vigilant and alert.

There was an elastic spring in his stride, his head turned restlessly from side to side as he moved down the footpath, and the whites of his eyes under the brim of his jungle hat showed clear and sharp.

Suddenly he gave the urgent hand signal for deployment, and as he changed the AK 47 from one hip to the other to cover his left flank and dropped into cover, he heard his men spread and go down behind, covering him and backing him. They lay in the elephant gra.s.s beside the track, searching and waiting while the sergeant examined the small sign that had alerted him. It was a bunch of long gra.s.s on the opposite side of the path: the stems had been broken and then lifted carefully to try to disguise the break, but they had sagged slightly again. It was the type of sign a man might make when leaving the path to set up an ambush beside it.

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 gra.s.s. 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 antic.i.p.ating 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 antlion 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, th8 4sergeant walked up to the wreck of the Cessna.

raig 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 voild!"

"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 likea stone. When I top up the bag I'll tend to shoot up likea balloon." "How will you beat that?" J 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 backpack 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 ma.s.s to the exact water depth. Then there is a c.u.mulative effect %f the poisoning. Each successive dive will become mar risky."

"Oh my G.o.d, darling." Sally-Anne stared at him.

"We will keep the dives short, and we will work out a series of signals," Craig rea.s.sured 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." he forest was too dense to allow the helicopter to alight. It hovered above the tree-tops, and the flight engineer on the winch lowered Genenil Peter Fungabera into a hole in the mat of dark green vegetation below them.

Peter turned slowly on the thin steel cable, and th 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 Shana 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 Shana 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 c.o.c.kpit. "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."