‘Who?’ he croaked.
‘Please not to talk, we must get you and the lady to hospital at Francistown pretty bloody quickly. Plenty people die in desert – you goddamned lucky.’
‘You aren’t General Fungabera?’ he whispered. ‘Who are you?’
‘Botswana police, border patrol. Sergeant Simon Mafekeng at your honour’s service, sir.’
As a boy, before the great patriotic war, Colonel Nikolai Bukharin had accompanied his father on the wolf hunts, hunting the packs that terrorized their remote village in the high Urals during the long harsh winter months.
Those expeditions into the vast gloomy Taiga forest had nurtured in him a deep passion for the hunt. He enjoyed the solitude of wild places and the primeval joy of pitting all his senses against a dangerous animal. Eyesight, hearing, smell, and the other extraordinary sense of the born hunter that enabled him to anticipate the twists and evasions of his quarry – all these the colonel still possessed in full strength, despite his sixty-two years. Together with a memory for facts and faces that was almost computerlike, they had enabled him to excel at his work, had seen him elevated to the head of his department of the Seventh commissariat where he had hunted professionally the most dangerous game of all – man.
When he hunted boar and bear on the great estates reserved for the recreations of high officers of the GRU and KGB, he had alarmed his comrades and the gamekeepers by scorning to fire from the prepared hides and by going on foot alone into the thickest cover. The thrill of great physical danger had satisfied some deep need in him.
When the assignment on which he was now engaged had been channelled through to his office on the second floor of the central headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square, he had recognized its importance immediately, and taken control of it personally. With careful cultivation, that first potential was gradually being realized, and when the time had come for Colonel Bukharin at last to meet his subject face to face on the ground over which they would manoeuvre, he had chosen the cover which best suited his tastes.
Russians, especially Russians of high rank, were objects of hostile suspicion in the new republic of Zimbabwe. During the chimurenga, the war of independence, Russia had chosen the wrong horse and given her support to Joshua Nkomo’s ZIPRA – the Matabele revolutionary wing. As far as the government in Harare was concerned, the Russians were the new colonialist enemy, while it was China and North Korea who were the true friends of the revolution.
For these reasons, Colonel Nikolai Bukharin had entered Zimbabwe on a Finnish passport, bearing a false name. He spoke Finnish fluently, as he did five other languages, including English. He needed a cover under which he could freely leave the city of Harare, where his every move would be watched over, and go out into the unpopulated wilderness where he could meet his subject without fear of surveillance.
Although many of the other African republics under pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had banned big-game hunting, Zimbabwe still licensed professional hunters to operate their elaborate safaris in the designated ‘controlled hunting areas’. These were large earners of foreign exchange for the embattled economy.
It amused the colonel to pose as a prosperous timber merchant from Helsinki, and to indulge his own love of the hunt in this decadent manner reserved almost exclusively for the financial aristocrats of the capitalist system.
Of course, the budget that had been allocated for this operation could not stand such extravagance. However, General Peter Fungabera, the subject of the operation, was a wealthy and ambitious man. He had made no difficulties when Colonel Bukharin had suggested that they use a big-game hunting safari as a cover for their meeting, and that General Fungabera should be allowed the honour of acting as host and of paying the thousand dollars der diem that the safari cost.
Standing in the centre of the small clearing now, Colonel Bukharin looked at his man. The Russian had deliberately wounded the bull. Nikolai Bukharin was a fine shot with pistol, rifle and shotgun, and the range had been thirty yards. If he had chosen, he could have placed a bullet in either of the bull’s eyes, in the very centre of the bright black pupil. Instead he had shot the animal through the belly, a hand’s width behind the lungs so as not to impair its wind, but not far enough back to damage the hindquarters and so slow it down in the charge.
It was a marvellous bull, with a mountainous boss of black horn that would stretch fifty inches or more around the curve from point to point. A fifty-inch bull was a trophy few could match, and as he had drawn first blood it would belong to the colonel no matter who delivered the coup de grâce. He was smiling at Peter Fungabera as he poured vodka into the silver cup of his hip-flask.
‘Na Zdorovye!’ he saluted Peter, and tossed it down without blinking, refilled the silver cup and offered it to him.
Peter was dressed in starched and crisply ironed fatigues with his name tag on the breast, and a khaki silk scarf at his throat, but he was bare-headed with no insignia to sparkle in the sunlight and alarm the game.
He accepted the silver cup and looked over the rim at the Russian. He was as tall as Peter, but even slimmer, erect as a man thirty years younger. His eyes were a peculiarly pale, cruel blue. His face was riven with the scars of war and of other ancient conflicts, so that it was a miniature lunar landscape. His skull was shaven, the fine stubble of hair that covered it was silver and sparkled in the sunlight like glass fibres.
Peter Fungabera enjoyed this man. He enjoyed the aura of power that he wore like an emperor’s cloak. He enjoyed the innate cruelty of him that was almost African, and which Peter understood perfectly. He enjoyed his deviousness, the layering of lies and truths and half-truths, so that they became indistinguishable. He was excited by the sense of danger that exuded from him so powerfully that it had almost an odour of its own. ‘We are the same breed,’ Peter thought, as he lifted the silver cup and returned the salute. He drank down the pungent spirit at one swallow. Then, breathing carefully so as not to show the smallest sign of distress, he handed back the cup.
‘You drink like a man,’ Nikolai Bukharin admitted. ‘Let us see if you hunt like one.’
Peter had guessed correctly. It had been a test: the vodka and the buffalo bull, both of them. He shrugged to show his indifference, and the Russian beckoned to the professional hunter who stood respectfully out of earshot.
The hunter was a Zimbabwe-born white man, in his late thirties, dressed for the part in wide-brimmed hat and khaki gilet with heavy-calibre cartridges in the loops across his breast. He had a thick curly dark beard and an extremely unhappy expression on his face, as befits a man who is about to follow a gun-shot buffalo bull into dense riverine bush.
‘General Fungabera will take the .458,’ Colonel Bukharin said, and the hunter nodded miserably. How had this strange old bastard managed to make a muck-up of a sitting shot like that? He had been shooting like a Bisley champion up to now. Christ, but that bush looked really nasty. The hunter suppressed a shiver and snapped his fingers for the number two gunbearer to bring up the heavy rifle.
‘You will wait here with the bearers,’ said the Russian quietly.
‘Sir!’ the hunter protested quickly. ‘I can’t let you go in alone. I’d lose my licence. It’s just not on—’
‘Enough,’ said Colonel Bukharin.
‘But, sir, you don’t understand—’
‘I said, enough!’ The Russian never raised his voice, but those pale eyes silenced the younger man completely. He found suddenly that he was more afraid of this man than of losing his licence, or of the wounded bull in the bush ahead. He subsided and stepped back thankfully.
The Russian took the .458 from the gunbearer, shot the bolt back to check that it was loaded with soft-tipped bullets, and then handed it to Peter Fungabera. Peter took it from him, smiling slightly, hefted it, then handed it back to the gunbearer. Colonel Bukharin raised one silver eyebrow and smiled also. The smile was mockery shaded with contempt.
Peter spoke sharply in Shona to the bear
er, ‘Eh he, mambo!’
The man ran, and snatched another weapon from one of the other back bearers. He brought it back to Peter, clapping softly to show his respect.
Peter weighed this new weapon in his hands. It was a short-shafted stabbing assegai. The handle was of hardwood bound with copper wire. The blade was almost two feet long and four inches broad. Carefully Peter shaved the hairs off the back of his thumb with the edge of the silver blade, then, deliberately, he shrugged off his jacket and stripped his trousers and jungle boots.
Dressed only in a pair of olive-green shorts and carrying the stabbing assegai, he said, ‘This is the African way, Colonel.’ The Russian was no longer smiling. ‘But I do not expect a man of your years to hunt the same way.’ Peter excused him courteously. ‘You may use your rifle again.’
The Russian nodded, conceding the exchange. He had lost that one, but now let’s see if this black mujik can make good his boast. Bukharin looked down at the spoor. The great hoof prints were the size of soup plates, and the thin watery gouts of blood were tinged with greenish-yellow dung from the ruptured bowels.
‘I will track,’ he said. ‘You will watch for the break.’
They moved off easily, with the Russian five paces ahead, stooped attentively to the blood spoor, and Peter Fungabera drifting behind him, the assegai held underhand, and his dark eyes covering the bush ahead with a steady rhythmic sweep, trained eyes not expecting to see the whole animal, searching for the little things, perhaps the shine of a wet muzzle or the drooping curve of a great horn.
Within twenty paces the bush closed in around them. It was sultry green as a hothouse, dank vegetation pressing breathlessly around them. The air stank of the rotting leaf mould that deadened their footfalls. The silence was oppressive, so that the drag of a thorny branch across the Russian’s leather leggings sounded loud as a truck engine. He was sweating; perspiration soaked his shirt in a dark patch between the shoulder-blades and sparkled like dewdrops on the back of his neck. Peter could hear his breathing, deep and harsh, but knew instinctively that it was not fear that worked in the Russian, but the pervading excitement of the hunter.
Peter Fungabera did not share it. There was a coldness in him where his own fear should have been. He had trained himself to that during the chimurenga. This was a necessary task, this thing with the assegai. It was to impress the Russian only, and with all fear and feeling anaesthetized by the coldness, Peter Fungabera prepared himself. He felt his muscles charging, felt the tension build in his sinews and nerves until he was like an arrow, notched against the curve of the long-bow.
With his eyes he swept the bush directly in the run of the spoor only lightly, and concentrated his main attention on the flanks. This beast that they were hunting was the most cunning of all the dangerous game of Africa, except perhaps the leopard. But it was possessed of the brute strength of a hundred leopards. The lion will growl before he charges, the elephant will turn under the punishment of heavy bullets in the chest, but the Cape buffalo comes in silence, and only one thing will stop his charge – and that is death.
A big, metallic-blue fly settled on Peter Fungabera’s lip and crawled into his nostril. So complete was his concentration that he did not feel it, or brush it away. He watched the flanks, he concentrated the very essence of his being on the flanks.
The Russian checked, examining the change in the spoor, the plant of solid hooves, the puddle of loose bloody dung. This was where the bull had stood, after his first wild run. Peter Fungabera could imagine him, standing massive and black, with his nose held high, looking back towards the hunters with the spreading agony in his guts and liquid faeces from his torn intestines beginning to ooze uncontrollably down his quarters. Here he had stood and listened and heard their voices, and the hatred and anger had begun to seethe in him. Here the killing rage had begun. He had dropped his head, and gone on, humping his back against the agony in his bowels, sustained by the rage within him.
The Russian glanced back at Peter, and they did not have to speak. In unison they moved forward.
The bull was acting on an atavistic memory: everything he did had been done countless times before by his ancestors. From that first wild gallop as he received the bullet, the stop to listen and peer back, the gathering of great muscles, and now the more sedate trot, angling to present his haunches to the fitful breeze so that the scent of the hunters would be borne down to him, great armoured head swinging from side to side as he began the search for the ambush point, it was all part of a pattern.
The bull crossed a narrow clearing ten paces across, forced his head into the wall of glossy green leaves on the far side, leaving it smeared with fresh bright blood, and went on another fifty yards. Then he turned sharply aside, and started back in a wide circle. Now he moved with deliberate stealth, insinuating his bulk gently through the intertwined creeper and branch a single pace at a time – until he came back to the clearing again.
Here he stopped, hidden on the far edge of the clearing, covering from the side his own bloody tracks across the narrow opening, his body screened entirely by dense growth, and a terrible stillness settled upon him. He let the stinging flies feast on his open wound without shuddering his skin or swinging his tail. He did not twitch either of his large, cup-shaped ears but strained them forward. Not even his eyes blinked as he peered back along the blood spoor and waited for the hunters to come.
The Russian stepped lightly into the clearing, his gaze darting ahead to where blood-painted branches hung on the far side and a huge body had forced its way through into the forest beyond. He started forward quietly. Peter Fungabera followed him, watching the flanks, moving like a dancer, his body glowing with a light sheen of sweat, the flat, hard muscle in his chest and arms changing shape at his slightest movement.
He saw the bull’s eye. It caught the light like a new coin, and Peter froze. He snapped the fingers of his left hand, and the Russian froze with him. Peter Fungabera stared at the bull buffalo’s eye, not quite sure what he was seeing, but knowing that it was in the right place – thirty yards out on the left. If the bull had doubled, that was where he would be.
Peter blinked his eyes, and suddenly the image cleared. He was no longer focused only on the eye, and so he could see the curve of one horn held so still that it could have been a branch. He saw the crenellations of the boss meeting above the bull’s eye, and now he looked into the eye itself – and it was like a glimpse into hell.
The bull charged. The forest burst open before his rush, branches crackled and broke, the leaves shook and fluttered as though struck by a hurricane and the bull came out into the clearing. He came out crabbing sideways, a deceptive but characteristic feint that had lulled many a hunter until the sudden direct lunge at the end.
He came fast. It seemed impossible that any beast so enormous could move so fast. He was broad and tall as a granite kopje, his back and shoulder crusted with dried mud from the wallow, and there were obscene silvery bald patches on his shoulders and neck, criss-crossed with the long-healed scars of thorn and lions’ claws.
From his open jaws drooled silver ropes of saliva, and tears had tracked wet lines down his hairy cheeks. A man could barely have encompassed that neck with both arms, or matched the spread of those horns with arms extended. In the skin folds of his throat hung bunches of blue ticks like ripe grapes, and the rank bovine smell of him was choking in the hothouse of the forest.
He came on, majestic in his killing rage, and Peter Fungabera went out to meet him. He passed in front of the Russian just as Colonel Bukharin swung up the stubby heavy-calibre rifle, screening the shot, forcing him to throw the barrel up towards the sky. Peter moved like a dark forest wraith, crossing the bull at the opposite angle to his crabbing charge, taking him off balance so that the bull hooked at him like a boxer punching as he moves away, not timing the swing of horns, not sighting true, and Peter swayed away from it with his upper body only, letting the curved point hiss past his ribs by the breadth of a hand and t
hen swaying back as the bull’s head was flung high at the finish of the stroke.
In that instant the bull was open, from his reaching chin to the soft folds of skin between his forelegs, and Peter Fungabera put the full weight of his body and all the momentum of his run behind the silver blade.
The bull ran onto the point. It went into him with the sucking sound of a foot in mud, and the blade was swallowed by living flesh. It went in until the fingers of Peter’s right hand on the shaft followed the blade into the wound and spurting blood drenched him to the shoulder. Peter released his grip on the assegai, and pirouetted away, spinning clear while the bull bucked stiff-legged against the long steel in his chest cavity. He tried to follow Peter round, but came up short and stood with his thick stubby forelegs braced, staring at the naked man with a glaze spreading over his eyes.
Peter Fungabera posed before him, with both arms lifted gracefully. ‘Ha, earth-shaker!’ he called in Shona. ‘Ha, you sky thunder!’
The bull made two plunging strides forward and something burst inside him. Blood erupted in a double gush from his flaring nostrils. He opened his jaws and bellowed, and blood shot up his throat in a frothing bright cascade and drenched his chest. The great bull reeled, fighting to keep his balance.
‘Die, spawn of the black gods!’ Peter taunted. ‘Feel the steel of a future king – and die!’
The bull went down. The earth jumped beneath their feet as the weight of him struck.
Peter Fungabera stepped up to the huge bossed head in which the smouldering eyes were fading. He went down on one knee and, with his cupped hands, scooped up the rich hot blood as it streamed from the bull’s gaping mouth, and he lifted his hands to his mouth and drank the blood like wine. It streamed down his arms and dribbled from his chin, and Peter laughed, a sound that made even the Russian’s vinegary blood chill.
‘I have drunk your living blood, oh great bull. Now your strength is mine!’ he shouted, as the bull arched his back in the final spasm of death.