‘Speak!’ Peter Fungabera commanded.
Vusamanzi stood on one leg, his neck twisted to one side at the pull of the rope. His damaged foot began to swell, like a balloon being inflated, to three times its natural size, the skin stretched black and shiny as an overripe fruit on the point of splitting open.
‘Speak!’ Peter Fungabera ordered the second time, and the mourning cries of the women drowned him out.
‘Break his other foot!’ he nodded to the sergeant.
As the rifle-butt shattered the complex of small bones in Vusamanzi’s right foot, he fell sideways against the rope, and the sergeant stepped back, grinning at the contortions of the old man as he tried frantically to relieve the pressure of the rope by taking his weight on his mutilated feet.
All the women were screaming now, and the children’s cries swelled the anguished chorus. One of the old women, the senior wife, broke the line and ran forward with both thin arms outstretched towards her husband of fifty years.
‘Leave her!’ Peter Fungabera ordered the guards who would have restrained her. They stepped aside.
The frail old woman reached her husband and tried to lift him, crying out her love and her compassion, but she did not have the strength even for Vusamanzi’s emaciated body. She succeeded only in relieving the pressure on his larynx enough to prolong the agonies of his strangulation. The old man’s mouth was open, hunting for air, and white froth coated his lips. He was making a harsh, cawing sound, and the old wife’s antics were ludicrous.
‘Listen to the Matabele rooster crow, and his ancient hen cackle!’ Peter Fungabera smiled, and his troopers guffawed delightedly.
It took a long time, but when at last Vusamanzi hung still and silent with his face twisted up to the sky, his wife sank to the earth at his feet and rocked her body rhythmically as she began the keen of mourning.
Peter Fungabera walked back to the Russian, and Bukharin lit another cigarette and murmured, ‘Crude – and ineffective.’
‘There was never any chance with the old fool. We had to get him out of the way, and set the mood.’ Peter dabbed at his chin and forehead with the tail of his scarf. ‘It was effective, Colonel, just look at the faces of the women.’
He tucked the scarf back into the neck of his smock and strolled back to the women.
‘Ask them where the enemies of the state are hidden.’ But as the translator began to speak, the old woman sprang to her feet and rushed back to face them.
‘You saw your lord die without speaking,’ she screeched. ‘You heard his command. You know that he will return!’
Peter Fungabera altered the grip on his swagger-stick and with little apparent effort drove the point of it up under the old woman’s ribs. She screamed and collapsed. Her spleen, enlarged by endemic malarial infection, had ruptured at the blow.
‘Get rid of her,’ Peter ordered, and one of the troopers seized her ankles and dragged her away behind the huts.
‘Ask them where the enemies of the state are hidden.’
Peter walked slowly along the rank, looking into their faces, evaluating the degree of terror that he saw in each pair of black Matabele eyes. He took his time over the selection, coming back at last to the youngest mother, barely more than a child herself, her infant strapped upon her back with a strip of patterned blue cloth.
He stood in front of her and stared her down, then, when he judged the moment, he reached out and took her wrist. He led her gently to the centre of the open square, where the remains of the watch-fire still burned.
He kicked the smouldering ends of the logs together, and, still holding the girl, waited until they burst into flames again. Then he twisted the girl’s arm, forcing her to her knees. Slowly silence fell over the other women, and they watched with deadly fascination.
Peter Fungabera loosened the blue cloth and lifted the infant off the girl’s back. It was a boy. A chubby infant, with skin the colour of wild honey, his little pot-belly was gorged with his mother’s milk, and there were creases of fat like bracelets, at his wrists and ankles. Peter tossed him up lightly and as he fell seized one ankle. The child shrieked with shocked outrage, dangling upside down from Peter’s fist.
‘Where are the enemies of the state hidden?’
The child’s face was swelling and darkening with blood.
‘She says she does not know.’
Peter Fungabera lifted the child high above the flames.
‘Where are the enemies of the state?’
Each time he repeated the question he lowered the infant a few inches.
‘She says she does not know.’
Suddenly Peter lowered the little wriggling body into the very heart of the flames, and the child squealed with a totally new sound. Peter lifted it clear of the flames after a second and dangled it in front of its mother’s face. The flames had frizzled away the child’s eyelashes and the tight little criss-curls from its scalp.
‘Tell her that I will roast this little piglet slowly and then I will force her to eat it.’
The girl tried to snatch her child back, but he kept it just beyond her reach. The girl started screaming a single phrase, repeating it over and over again, and the other women sighed and covered their faces.
‘She says she will lead you to them.’
Peter Fungabera dropped the infant into her arms and strolled back to the Russian. Colonel Bukharin inclined his head slightly in grudging admiration.
Forty feet down Craig hung suspended before the wall of the tomb. He had anchored his waist strap to a lump of limestone, and by the feeble yellow light of the lamp from one of the life-jackets was carefully examining the masonry for a weak point of entry. Using his hands to supplement his water-distorted vision, he found that there was no break or aperture, but that the foot of the wall was composed of much larger lumps of limestone than the top. Probably the availability of large rocks within easy portability of the tomb had been exhausted as the work progressed and the old witch-doctor and his apprentices had fallen back on smaller material, and yet the smallest was larger than a man’s head.
Craig seized one of these and struggled to dislodge it. His hands had been softened by the water, and a tiny puff of blood clouded the water as his skin split on the sharp edge of the stone, but there was no pain for the cold had numbed him.
Almost immediately the bloodstain in the water was obscured by a darker shadow as the dirt and debris that had lain so long undisturbed swirled into suspension at his efforts. Within seconds he was totally blinded as the water was filthied, and he switched off the lamp to conserve the battery. Small particles of dirt irritated his eyes, and he closed them tightly, working only by sense of touch.
There are degrees of darkness, but this was total. It was a darkness that seemed to have physical weight and it crushed down upon him, emphasizing the hundreds of feet of solid rock and water above him. The oxygen he drew into his mouth had a flat chemical taste, and every few breaths a spurt of water would find its way around the ill-fitting seal of his mask and he choked upon it, forcing himself not to cough, for a coughing fit might dislodge the mask entirely.
The cold was like a terminal disease, sapping and destroying him, affecting his judgement and reactions, making it more and more difficult to guard against the onset of oxygen poisoning, and each signal on the rope from the surface seemed to be an eternity after the last. But he worked at the wall with a grim determination, beginning to hate the long-dead ancestors of Vusamanzi for their thoroughness in building it.
By the time his half-hour shift finally ended, he had pulled down a pile of rock from the head of the wall and had tunnelled a hole three or four feet into the masonry just wide enough to accommodate his upper body with its bulky oxygen equipment strapped to it, but there was still no indication as to just how much thicker the wall was.
He cleared the rock he had dislodged, kicking it down the incline of the chute and letting it fall away into the depths of the grand gallery. Then, with soaring relief, he untied th
e anchor rope and slid down after it and began the long ascent to the surface of the pool.
Tungata helped him clamber out of the water onto the slab, for he was weak as a child and the equipment on his back weighed him down. Tungata pulled the set off over his head, while Sarah poured a mug of black tea and ladled sticky brown sugar into it.
‘Sally-Anne?’ he asked.
‘Pendula is standing guard in the upper cavern,’ Tungata answered.
Craig cupped his hands around the mug, and edged closer to the smoky little fire, shaking with the cold.
‘I have started a small hole in the top of the wall and gone into it about three feet, but there is no way of guessing how thick it is or how many more dives it will need to get through it.’ He sipped the tea. ‘One thing we have overlooked: I will need something to carry the goodies, if we find them.’ Craig crossed his fingers and Sarah made her own sign to ward off misfortune. ‘The beer-pots are obviously brittle – old Insutsha broke one – and they will be awkward to carry. We will have to use the bags I made from the canvas seat covers. When Sarah goes up to relieve Pendula, she must send them down.’
As the numbness of cold was dispelled by the fire and hot tea, so the pain in his head began. Craig knew that it was the effect of breathing high-pressure oxygen, the first symptom of poisoning. It was like a high-grade migraine, crushing in on his brain so that he wanted to moan aloud. He fumbled three pain-killers from the first-aid kit and washed them down with hot tea.
Then he sat in a dejected huddle and waited for them to take effect. He was dreading his return to the wall so strongly that it sickened his stomach and corroded his will. He found that he was looking for an excuse to postpone the next dive, anything to avoid that terrible cold and the suffocating press of dark waters upon him.
Tungata was watching him silently across the fire, and Craig slipped the fur cape off his shoulders and handed the empty mug back to Sarah. He stood up. The headache had degraded to a dull throb behind his eyes.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, and Tungata laid a hand on his upper arm and squeezed it before he stooped to lift the oxygen set over Craig’s head.
Craig quailed at this new contact with the icy water, but he forced himself into it, and the stone he held weighted him swiftly into the depths. In his imagination the entrance to the tomb no longer resembled an eyeless socket, but rather the toothless maw of some horrible creature from African mythology, gaping open to ingest him.
He entered it and swam up the inclined shaft, and anchored himself before the untidy hole he had burrowed into the wall. The sediment had settled, and in the glow of his lamp the shadows and shapes of rock crowded in upon him, and he wrestled with another attack of claustrophobia, anticipating the clouds of filth which would soon render him blind. He reached out and the rock was brutally rough on his torn hands. He prised a lump of limestone free, and a small slide of the surrounding stones sent sediment billowing around his head. He switched off his lamp and began the cold blind work again.
The rope signals at his waist were his only contact with reality and finite time – somehow they helped him to control his mounting terror of the cold and darkness. Twenty minutes, and his headache was breaking through the drugs with which he had subdued it. It felt as though a blunt nail was being driven with hammer blows into his temple, and as though the iron point was cutting in behind his eyes.
‘I can’t last another ten minutes,’ he thought. ‘I’m going up now.’ He began to turn away from the wall and then just managed to prevent himself.
‘Five minutes,’ he promised himself. ‘Just five minutes more.
He forced his upper body into the opening, and the steel oxygen cylinder struck a rock and rang like a bell. He groped around the edges of a triangular-shaped rock that had been frustrating his efforts for the past few minutes. Once again he wished for a short jemmy bar to get into that crack and break it open. His fingers ached as he used them instead, getting them in under the rock, and then he wedged himself against the sides of the hole and began to jerk at it, slowly exerting more strength with each heave, until his back was bunched with muscle and his belly ached with the effort.
Something moved and he heard rock grate on rock. He heaved again and the crack closed on his fingers and he screamed with pain into his mask. But the pain of his crushed fingertips unlocked reserves of strength he had not yet tapped. He flung all of this against the rock and it rolled, his fingers came free and there was a rumbling, clanking roar of falling sliding stone blocks.
He lay in the hole and hugged his injured fingers to his chest, whimpering into his mask, half-drowning in the water that flooded in when he screamed.
‘I’m going up now,’ he decided. ‘That’s it. I’ve had enough.’ He began to wriggle out of the aperture, gingerly putting out one hand to push himself backwards. He felt nothing. In front of him, his hand was waving around in the open. He lay still, the water sloshing in his mask, trying to make a decision. Somehow he knew that if he pulled out now and surfaced, he would not be able to force himself to enter the pool again.
Once again he groped ahead, and when he touched nothing, he inched forward and reached out again. His anchor-line held him and he slipped the knot, crept forward a little further and the pack on his back jammed up under the stone roof. He rolled half onto his side, and was able to free it. Still he could touch nothing ahead of him. He was through the wall, and a sudden superstitious dread seized him.
He pulled back and the pack hit the roof again, and this time it jammed solidly. He was stuck fast, and immediately he began to fight to be free. His breathing hunted, beating the mechanical efficiency of the valves in his mask so that he could get no more oxygen and as he starved, his heart began to race and the pulse in his ears deafened him.
He could not go backwards, and he kicked with his one good leg, and with his stump got a purchase against smooth rock. He pushed forward with both legs – and, in a sudden rush similar to the moment of childbirth, he slid forward through the hole in the wall of the tomb into the space beyond.
He groped wildly about him and one hand hit the smooth wall of the shaft at his side, but now he was free of his anchor and the buoyancy of the bag on his chest bore him helplessly upwards. He threw up both hands to prevent his head striking the roof of the shaft, and to grab a handhold. Under his numb fingertips the rock was slippery as soaped glass, and as he ascended, so the oxygen in the bag expanded with the release of pressure and he went up more swiftly, only the signal rope at his waist slowing his headlong upward rush. As he struggled to stabilize himself, the excess oxygen poured out of the sides of the mask, and panic at last rode him completely. He was swirled aloft in total terrifying darkness.
Suddenly he burst out through the surface and lay on his back bobbing around like a cork. He tore the mask off his face and took a lungful of air. It was clean, but faintly tainted with the smell of bat guano. He lay on the surface and sucked it down gratefully.
The rope tugged rapidly at his waist. Six tugs repeated. It was the code question from Tungata. ‘Are you all right?’ His uncontrolled ascent must have ripped rope off the coil that lay between Tungata’s feet and thoroughly alarmed him. Craig signalled back to reassure him and fumbled with the switch of his lamp.
The dim glow of light was dazzling to his eyes that had been blinded so long and they smarted from the irritation of the muddied waters. He blinked around him.
The passage had come up at a sharply increased angle from the masonry wall, until it was now a vertical shaft. The old witch-doctors had been forced to chip niches in the walls and build in a ladder of rough-hewn timber to enable them to make the ascent. The poles of the ladder were secured with bark rope and were latticed up the open shaft above Craig’s head, but the light of his lantern was too feeble to illuminate the top of the steep shaft. The ladder disappeared into the gloom.
Craig paddled to the side and steadied himself with a handhold on the primitive wooden ladder while he assembled his thought
s and figured out the lay of the shaft and its probable shape. He realized that by returning to water level, he must have ascended forty feet after his access through the wall. He must have travelled an approximately U-shaped journey – the first leg was down the grand gallery, the bottom of the U was along the shaft to the wall, and the last leg was up the steeper branch of the shaft to return to water level again.
He tested the timber ladderwork, and though it creaked and sagged a little, it bore his weight. He would have to jettison the diving-gear and leave it floating in the shaft while he climbed up the rickety ladder, but first he must rest and regain full control of himself. He put both hands to his head and squeezed his temples, the pain was scarcely bearable.
At that moment, the rope at his waist jerked taut – three tugs, repeated. The urgent recall – the signal for mortal danger – something was desperately wrong, and Tungata was sending a warning and a plea for help.
Craig crammed the mask back onto his face and signalled, ‘Pull me up!’
The rope came taut and he was drawn swiftly below the surface.
The young Matabele mother was allowed to keep her infant strapped to her back, but she was manacled by her wrist to the wrist of the Third Brigade sergeant.
Peter Fungabera was tempted to use the helicopter to speed the pursuit and recapture of the fugitives, but finally he made the decision to go in on foot, silently. He knew the quality of the men he was hunting. The beat of a helicopter would alert them and give them a chance to slip away into the bush once again. For the same reasons of stealth, he kept the advance party small and manageable – twenty picked men, and he briefed each of them individually.
‘We must take this Matabele alive. Even if your own life is the exchange, I want him alive!’
The helicopter would be called in by radio as soon as they had good contact, and another three hundred men could be rushed up to seal off the area.
The small force moved swiftly. The girl was dragged along by the big Shona sergeant, and, weeping with shame at her own treachery, she pointed out the twists and forks of the barely distinguishable path.