The guerrillas unloaded the rest of the ammunition and the weapons in disciplined silence, but they could not conceal their grins of delight as they handed down the bags of ammunition and the haversacks of grenades, for these were the tools of their trade. The loads disappeared swiftly into the forest. Within fifteen minutes Craig and Sally-Anne were left alone under the wing of the empty Cessna.
‘Do you know what I prayed for?’ Sally-Anne asked. ‘I prayed that you wouldn’t be able to find the gang, and if you did, that they would refuse to go with you, and that you had been forced to abort and had to come back with me.’
‘You aren’t very good at praying, are you?’
‘I don’t know. I’m going to get in a lot of practice in the next few days.’
‘Five days,’ Craig corrected her. ‘You come in again on Tuesday morning.’
‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘I will take off in the dark, and be over Tuti airfield at sunrise – that’s at 05.22 hours.’
‘But you are not to land until I signal that we have secured the strip. Now, for the love of God, don’t run yourself short of fuel to get back to the pan. If we don’t show up, don’t stay on hoping.’
‘I will have three hours’ safe endurance over Tuti. That means you will have until 08.30 hours to get there.’
‘If we don’t make it by then, we aren’t going to make it. It’s time for you to go now, my love.’
‘I know,’ Sally-Anne said, and made no move.
‘I have to go,’ he said.
‘I don’t know how I’m going to live through the next few days, sitting out there in the desert, not knowing a thing, just living with my fears and imagination.’
He took her in his arms and found she was trembling.
‘I’m so very afraid for you,’ she whispered against his throat.
‘See you Tuesday morning,’ he told her. ‘Without fail.’
‘Without fail!’ she agreed, and then her voice quavered. ‘Come back to me, Craig. I don’t want to live without you. Promise me you’ll come back.’
‘I promise.’ He kissed her.
‘There now, I feel much better.’ She gave him that cheeky grin of hers, but it was all soft around the edges.
She climbed up into the cockpit and started the engine.
‘I love you.’ Her lips formed the words that the engine drowned, and she swung the Cessna round with a burst of throttle and did not look back.
It was only sixty miles on the map and from the front seat of an aircraft it had not looked like hard going. On the ground it was different.
They were crossing the grain of the land; the watershed dropped away from their right to their left, towards the escarpment of the Zambezi valley. They were forced to follow the switchback of hills and the intervening valleys so they were never on level ground.
The guerrillas had hidden their own women in a safe place, and only reluctantly consented to Sarah accompanying the raiding party, but she carried a full load and kept up with the hard pace that Comrade Lookout set for them.
The ironstone hills soaked up the heat of the sun and bounced it back at them, as they toiled up the steep hillsides and dropped again into the next valley. The descents were as taxing as the climbs, the heavy loads jarring their spines and straining the backs of their legs and their Achilles tendons. The old elephant trails that they were following were littered with round pebbles washed out by the rains that rolled under foot like ball-bearings and made each pace fraught with danger.
One of the guerrillas fell, and his ankle swelled up so that they could not get his boot back on his foot. They distributed his load amongst them and left him to find his own way back to where they had left the women.
The tiny mopani bees plagued them during the day, clouding around their mouths and nostrils and eyes in their persistent search for moisture, and in the nights the mosquitoes from the stagnant pools in the valleys took over from them. At one stage of the trek they passed through the edge of the fly-belt, and the silent, light-footed tsetse-flies joined the torment, settling so softly that the victim was unaware until a red-hot needle stabbed into the soft flesh at the back of the ear, or under the armpit.
Always there was danger of attack. Every few miles either the scouts out ahead or the rear-guard dragging the trail behind them would signal an alert, and they would be forced to dive into cover and wait with finger on trigger until the all-clear signal was passed down the line.
It was slow and gruelling and nerve-racking – two full days’ marching from freezing dawn through burning noon into darkness again, to reach Sarah’s father’s village. Vusamanzi was his name and he was a senior magician, soothsayer and rainmaker of the Matabele tribe. Like all his kind, he lived in isolation, with only his wives and immediate family around him. However great their respect for them, ordinary mortals avoided the practitioners of the dark arts; they came to them only for divination or treatment, paid the goat or beast that was the fee, and hurried thankfully away again.
Vusamanzi’s village was some miles north of Tuti Mission Station. It was a prosperous little community on a hilltop, with many wives and goats and chickens and fields of maize in the valley.
The guerrillas lay up in the forest below the kopje, and they sent Sarah in to make certain all was safe and to warn the villagers of their presence. Sarah returned within an hour, and Craig and Comrade Lookout went back to the village with her.
Vusamanzi had earned his name, ‘Raise the Waters’, from his reputed ability to control the Zambezi and its tributaries. As a much younger man he had sent a great flood to wash away the village of a lesser chief who had cheated him of his fees, and since then a number of others who had displeased him had drowned mysteriously at fords or bathing holes. It was said that at Vusamanzi’s behest the surface of a quiet pool would leap up suddenly in a hissing wave as the marked victim approached to drink or bathe or cross, and he would be sucked in. No living man had actually witnessed this terrible phenomenon – but nevertheless, Vusamanzi, the magician, did not have much trouble with bad debts from his patients and clients.
Vusamanzi’s hair was a cap of pure white and he wore a small beard, also white, dressed out to a spade shape in the fashion of the Zulus. Sarah must have been a child of his old age, but she had inherited her fine looks from him, for he was handsome and dignified. He had put aside his regalia. He wore only a simple loin-cloth and his body was straight and lean, and his voice, when he greeted Craig courteously, was deep and steady.
Clearly Sarah revered him, for she took the beer-pot from one of his junior wives and knelt to offer it to him herself. In her turn, Sarah obviously had a special place in the old man’s affections, for he smiled at her fondly, and when she sat at his feet, he fondled her head casually as he listened attentively to what Craig had to tell him. Then he sent her to help his wives to prepare food and beer and take it down to the guerrillas hidden in the valley before he turned back to Craig.
‘The man you call Tungata Zebiwe, the Seeker after Justice, was born Samson Kumalo. He is in direct line of succession from Mzilikazi, the first king and father of our people. He is the one upon whom the prophecies of the ancients descend. On the night he was taken by the Shona soldiers, I had sent for him to appraise him of his responsibility and to make him privy to the secrets of the kings. If he is still alive, as my daughter tells us he is, then it is the duty of every Matabele to do all in his power to seek his freedom. The future of our people rests with him. How can I assist you? You have only to ask.’
‘You have already helped us with food,’ Craig thanked him. ‘Now we need information.’
‘Ask, Kuphela. Anything that I can tell you, I will.’
‘The road between Tuti Mission and the camp of the soldiers passes close to this place. Is that correct?’
‘Beyond those hills,’ the old man pointed.
‘Sarah tells me that every week the trucks come along this road on the same day, taking food to the soldiers and the prisoners at the camp.’
‘That is so. Every week, on the Monday late in the afternoon, the trucks pass here loaded with bags of maize and other stores. They return empty the following morning.’
‘How many trucks?’
‘Two or, rarely, three.’
‘How many soldiers to guard them?’
‘Two in front beside the driver, three or four more in the back. One stands on the roof with a big gun that shoots fast.’ A heavy machine-gun, Craig translated for himself. ‘The soldiers are very watchful and alert and the trucks drive fast.’
‘They came last Monday, as usual?’ Craig asked.
‘As usual,’ Vusamanzi nodded his cap of shiny white wool. He must believe then that the routine was still in operation, Craig decided, and bet everything on it.
‘How far is it to the mission station from here?’ he asked.
‘From there to there.’ The witch-doctor swept his arm through a segment of the sky, about four hours of the sun’s passage. Reckoned as the pace of a man on foot, that was approximately fifteen miles.
‘And from here to the camp of the soldiers?’ Craig went on.
Vusamanzi shrugged. ‘The same distance.’
‘Good.’ Craig unrolled his map, they were equidistant between the two points. That gave him a fairly accurate fix. He began calculating times and distances and scribbling them in the margin of the map.
‘We have a day to wait.’ Craig looked up at last. ‘The men will rest and ready themselves.’
‘My women will feed them,’ Vusamanzi agreed.
‘Then on Monday I will need some of your people to help me.’
‘There are only women here,’ the old man demurred.
‘I need women – young women, comely women,’ Craig told him.
The next morning, leaving before dawn, Craig and Comrade Lookout, taking a runner with them, reconnoitred the stretch of road that lay just beyond the line of low hills. It was as Craig remembered it, a crude track into which heavy trucks had ground deep ruts, but the Third Brigade had cleared the brush on both sides to reduce the risk of ambush.
A little before noon they reached the spot where Peter Fungabera had stopped during their first drive to Tuti, the causeway where the road crossed the timber bridge across the green river, and where they had eaten that lunch of baked maize cobs.
Craig found that his memory was accurate. The approaches to the bridge, firstly down the steep slope of the valley and then across the narrow earthen causeway, must force the supply convoy to slow down and engage low gear. It was the perfect spot for an ambush, and Craig sent the runner back to Vusamanzi’s village to bring up the rest of the force. While they waited, Craig and Comrade Lookout went over their plans and adapted them to the actual terrain.
The main attack would take place at the bridge, but if that failed, they must have a back-up plan to prevent the convoy getting through. As soon as the main force of guerrillas arrived, Craig sent Comrade Lookout with five men along the road beyond the bridge. Out of sight from the bridge, they felled a large mhoba-hoba tree so that it fell across the track, as an effective road-block. Comrade Lookout would command here, while Craig coordinated the attack at the bridge.
‘Which are the men who speak Shona?’ Craig demanded.
‘This one speaks it like a Shona, this one not as well.’
‘They are to be kept out of any fighting. We cannot risk losing them,’ Craig ordered. ‘We will need them for the camp.’
‘I will hold them in my hand,’ Comrade Lookout agreed.
‘Now the women.’
Sarah had chosen three of her half-sisters from the village, ranging in age from sixteen to eighteen years.
They were the prettiest of the old witch-doctor’s multitudinous daughters, and when Craig explained their role to them, they giggled and hung their heads, and covered their mouths with their hands and went through all the other motions of modesty and maidenly shyness. But they were obviously relishing the adventure hugely, nothing so exciting and titillating had happened to them in all their young lives.
‘Do they understand?’ Craig asked Sarah. ‘It will be dangerous – they must do exactly as they are told.’
‘I will be with them,’ Sarah assured him. ‘All the time – tonight as well, especially tonight.’ This last was for the benefit of the girls. Sarah had been fully aware of mutual ogling between her sisters and the young guerrillas. She shooed them away, still giggling, to the rough shelter of thorn branches that she had made them build for themselves, and settled herself across the entrance.
‘The thorns are sharp enough to keep out a man-eating lion, Kuphela,’ she had told Craig, ‘but I do not know about a buck with an itchy spear and a maid determined to scratch it for him. I will have little sleep tonight.’
In the end, Craig spent a sleepless night as well. He had the dreams again, those terrible dreams that had almost driven him mad during his long slow convalescence from the minefield and the loss of his leg. He was trapped in them, unable to escape back into consciousness, until Sarah shook him awake, and when he came awake, he was shaking so violently that his teeth chattered and sweat had soaked his shirt as though he had stood under a warm shower.
Sarah understood. Compassionately, she sat beside him and held his hand until the tremors stilled, and then they talked the night away, keeping their voices to a whisper so as not to disturb the camp. They talked of Tungata and Sally-Anne, and what each of them wanted from life and their chances of getting it.
‘When I am married to the Comrade Minister, I will be able to speak for all the women of Matabele. Too long they have been treated like chattels by their men. Even now I, a trained nursing sister and teacher, must eat at the women’s fire. After this, there will be another campaign to wage. A fight to win for the women of my tribe their rightful place and to have their true worth recognized.’
Craig found his respect for Sarah beginning to match his liking. She was, he realized, a fitting woman for a man like Tungata Zebiwe. While they talked, he managed to subdue his fear for the morrow, and the night passed so swiftly that he was surprised when he checked his wrist-watch.
‘Four o’clock. Time to move,’ he whispered. ‘Thank you, Sarah. I am not a brave man. I needed your help.’
She rose to her feet with a lithe movement and for a moment stood looking down at him. ‘You do yourself injustice. I think you are a very brave man,’ she said softly and went to rouse her sisters.
The sun was high, and Craig lay in the cleft between two black water-polished boulders on the far bank of the stream. The AK 47 was propped in front of him, covering the causeway and the far banks on each side of the timber bridge. He had paced out the ranges. It was one hundred and twenty yards from where he lay to the end of the handrail. Off a dead rest, he could throw in a six-inch group at that range.
‘Please let it not be necessary,’ he thought, and once more ran a restless eye over his stake-out. There were four guerrillas under the bridge, stripped to the waist. Although their rifles were propped against the bridge supports close at hand, they were armed with the five-foot elephant bows. Craig had been dubious of these weapons until he had watched a demonstration. The bows were of hard, elastic wood, bound with strips of green kudu hide which had been allowed to dry and shrink on the shaft until they were hard as iron. The bowstring was of braided sinew, almost as tough as monofilament nylon. Even with all his strength, Craig had been unable to draw one of the bows to his full reach. The pull must have been well over one hundred pounds. To draw it required calloused fingertips and specially developed muscle in chest and arm.
The arrowheads were barbless mild steel, honed to a needle-point for penetration, and one of the guerrillas had stood off thirty paces and sunk one of these arrows twenty inches into the fleshy fibrous trunk of a baobab tree. They had been forced to cut it free with an axe. The same arrow would have flown right through an adult human being, from breast to backbone with hardly a check, or pierced the chest cavity of a full-grown bull elephant from side t
o side.
So there were now four bowmen under the bridge, and ten other men crouching in knee-deep water below the bank. Only the tops of their heads showed, and they were screened from anyone on the far side by the sharp drop-off of the bank, and the growth of fluffy-topped reeds.
The engine beat of the approaching trucks altered, as they changed gear on the up-slope before cresting and dropping down this side to the causeway and the bridge. Craig had walked down that slope himself looking for give-away signs, all his old training in the Rhodesian police coming back to him, looking for litter or disturbed vegetation, for the shine of metal, for footprints on the white sand-banks of the river or the verge of the road, and he had found no give-away signs.
‘We must do it now,’ said Sarah. She and her sisters were squatting behind the rock at his side. She was right – it was too late to alter anything, to make any other arrangements. They were committed.
‘Go,’ he told her and she stood up and let the denim shirt slip off her shoulders and drop to the sand. Quickly her younger sisters followed her example, letting drop their loin-cloths as they stood.
All four of them were naked, except for the tiny beaded aprons suspended from their waists by a string of beads. The aprons hung down over their mons pubis but bounced up revealingly with every movement as they ran down to the water’s edge. Their plump young buttocks were bared, swelling enticingly below the hour-glass nip of their waists.
‘Laugh!’ Craig called after them. ‘Play games.’
They were totally unashamed of their nudity. In the rural areas the beaded apron was still the traditional casual dress of the unsophisticated unmarried Matabele girl. Even Sarah had worn it until she had gone in to the town to begin her schooling.
They splashed each other. The water sparkled on their glossy dark skins, and their laughter had an excited, breathless quality that must attract any man. Yet, Craig saw that his guerrillas were unaffected. They had not even turned their heads to watch. They were professionals at work, all their attention focused on the dangerous job in hand.