The Leopard Hunts in Darkness Page 23

  Then he jumped down off the veranda and, like a leopard, padded silently away into the night. His men followed him in Indian file at an easy swinging trot.

  ‘I give you my solemn promise,’ said the prime minister, ‘these so-called dissidents will be destroyed, completely destroyed.’

  His eyes behind the lenses of his spectacles had a steely, blind look. The poor quality of the television projection added haloes of ghost silhouettes to his head, but did not diminish his anger that seemed to spill over from the set and flood the living-room of King’s Lynn.

  ‘I’ve never seen him like that,’ said Craig.

  ‘He’s usually such a cold fish,’ Sally-Anne agreed.

  ‘I have ordered the army and the police force to move in to hunt down and apprehend the perpetrators of this terrible outrage. We will find them, and their supporters, and they will feel the full force of the people’s anger. We will not endure these dissidents.’

  ‘Good for him,’ Sally-Anne nodded. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever liked him very much – until now.’

  ‘Darling, don’t be too happy about it,’ Craig cautioned her. ‘Remember this is Africa, not America or Britain. This land has a different temper. Words have a different meaning here – words like “apprehend” and “hunt down”.’

  ‘Craig, I know that your sympathy is always with the Matabele, but this time surely—’

  ‘All right,’ he held up one hand in agreement, ‘I admit it. The Matabele are special, my family has always lived with them, we’ve beaten and exploited them, we’ve fought them and slaughtered them – and been slaughtered by them in return. Yet, also, we have cherished and honoured them and come to know them and, yes, to love them. I don’t know the Mashona. They are secretive and cold, clever and tricky. I can’t speak their language, and I don’t trust them. That’s why I choose to live in Matabeleland.’

  ‘You are saying the Matebele are saints – that they are incapable of committing an atrocity like this?’ She was getting irritable with him now, her tone sharpening, and he was quick to placate her.

  ‘Good God, no! They are as cruel as any other tribe in Africa, and a hell of a lot more warlike than most. In the old days when they raided a foreign tribe, they used to toss the infants in the air and catch them on the points of their assegais, and throw the old women in the watch-fires and laugh to see them burn. Cruelty has a different value in Africa. If you live here you have to understand that from the beginning.’

  He paused and smiled. ‘Once I was discussing political philosophy with a Matabele, an ex-guerrilla, and I explained the concept of democracy. His reply was, “That might work in your country, but it doesn’t work here. It doesn’t work here.” Don’t you see? That’s the crux. Africa makes and keeps her own rules, and I lay you a million dollars to a pinch of elephant dung that we’re going to see a few pretty things in the weeks ahead that you wouldn’t see in Pennsylvania or Dorset! When Mugabe says “destroy”, he doesn’t mean “take into custody and process under the laws of evidence”. He’s an African and he means precisely that – destroy!’

  That was on the Wednesday, and when Friday came round it was market day at King’s Lynn, the day to go into Bulawayo for shopping and socializing. Craig and Sally-Anne left early on that Friday morning. The new five-ton truck followed them, filled with Matabele from the ranch, taking advantage of the free ride into town for the day. They were dressed in their best, and singing with excitement.

  Craig and Sally-Anne came up against the road-block just before they reached the crossroads at Thabas Indunas. The traffic was backed up for a hundred yards, and Craig could see that most of the vehicles were being turned back.

  ‘Hold on!’ he told Sally-Anne, left her in the Land-Rover and jogged up to the head of the line of parked vehicles.

  The road-block was not a casual temporary affair. There were heavy machine-guns in sandbagged emplacements on both sides of the highway, and light machine-guns set back in depth beyond it to cover a breakthrough by a speeding vehicle.

  The actual barricade was of drums filled with concrete and spiked metal plates to puncture pneumatic tyres, and the guards were from the Third Brigade in their distinctive burgundy berets and silver cap-badges. Their striped camouflage battle-jackets gave them the tigerish air of jungle cats.

  ‘What is happening, Sergeant?’ Craig asked one of them.

  ‘The road is closed, mambo,’ the man told him politely. ‘Only military permit-holders allowed to pass.’

  ‘I have to get into town.’

  ‘Not today,’ the man shook his head. ‘Bulawayo is not a good place to be today.’

  As if to confirm this, there was a faint popping sound from the direction of the town. It sounded like green twigs in a fire, and the hair on Craig’s forearms lifted instinctively. He knew that sound so well, and it brought nightmarish memories from the war days crowding back. It was the sound of distant automatic rifle-fire.

  ‘Go back home, mambo,’ said the sergeant in a kindly tone. ‘This is not your indaba any more.’

  Suddenly Craig was very anxious to get the truckload of his people safely back to King’s Lynn.

  He ran back to the Land-Rover, and swung it out of the line of parked vehicles in a hard 180-degree turn.

  ‘What is it, Craig?’

  ‘I think it has started,’ he told her grimly, and thrust the accelerator flat to the floorboards.

  They met the King’s Lynn truck barrelling merrily along towards them, the women singing and clapping, their dresses fluttering brightly in the wind. Craig flagged them down, and jumped up onto the running-board. Shadrach, in the cast-off grey suit that Craig had given him, was sitting up in his place of honour beside the driver.

  ‘Turn around,’ Craig ordered. ‘Go back to Kingi Lingi. There is big trouble. Nobody must leave Kingi Lingi until it is over.’

  ‘Is it the Mashona soldiers?’

  ‘Yes,’ Craig told him. ‘The Third Brigade.’

  ‘Jackals and sons of dung-eating jackals,’ said Shadrach, and spat out of the open window.

  To say that thousands of innocent persons have been killed by the state security forces is a non-sense—’ The Zimbabwean minister of justice looked like a successful stockbroker in his dark suit and white shirt. He smiled blandly out of the television screen, his face shining with a light sheen of sweat from the brute arc lamps which only enhanced the coaly blackness of his skin. ‘One or two civilians have been killed in the crossfire between the security forces and the outlaw Matebele dissidents – but thousands! Ha, ha, ha!’ he chuckled jovially. ‘If thousands have been killed, then I wish somebody would show me the bodies – I know nothing about them.’

  ‘Well,’ Craig switched it off. ‘That’s all you are going to get from Harare.’ He checked his wrist-watch. ‘Almost eight o’clock, let’s see what the BBC has to say.’

  During the rule of the Smith regime, with its draconian censorship, every thinking man in central Africa had made sure he had access to a short-wave radio receiver. It was still a good rule to follow. Craig’s set was a Yaesu Musen, and he got the Africa service of the BBC on 2171 kilohertz.

  ‘The Zimbabwe government has expelled all foreign journalists from Matabeleland. The British High Commission has called upon the prime minister of Zimbabwe to express Her Majesty’s government’s deep concern at the reports of atrocities being committed by security forces—’

  Craig switched to Radio South Africa, and it came through sharp and clear ‘– the arrival of hundreds of illegal refugees across the northern border from Zimbabwe. The refugees are all members of the Matabele tribe. A spokesman for one group described a massacre of villagers and civilians that he had witnessed. “They are killing everybody,” he said. “The women and the children, even the chickens and the goats.” Another refugee said, “Do not send us back. The soldiers will kill us.”’

  Craig searched the bands and found the Voice of America.

  ‘The leader of the ZAPU party, the M
atabele faction of Zimbabwe, Mr Joshua Nkomo, has arrived in the neighbouring state of Botswana after fleeing the country. “They shot my driver dead,” he told our regional reporter. “Mugabe wants me dead. He’s out to get me.”

  ‘With the recent imprisonment and detention of all other prominent members of the ZAPU party, Mr Nkomo’s departure from Zimbabwe leaves the Matabele people without a leader or a spokesman.

  ‘In the meantime, the government of Mr Robert Mugabe has placed a total news blackout over the western part of the country, all foreign journalists have been expelled, and a request by the international Red Cross to send in observers has been refused.’

  ‘It’s all so familiar,’ Craig muttered. ‘I even have the same sick feeling in the bottom of my stomach as I listen to it.’

  The Monday was Sally-Anne’s birthday. After breakfast, they drove across to Queen’s Lynn together to fetch her present. Craig had left it in the care of Mrs Groenewald, the overseer’s wife, to preserve the secrecy and surprise.

  ‘Oh, Craig, it’s beautiful.’

  ‘Now you have two of us to keep you at King’s Lynn,’ he told her.

  Sally-Anne lifted the honey-coloured puppy in both hands and kissed his wet nose, and the puppy licked her back.

  ‘He’s a Rhodesian lion dog,’ Craig told her, ‘or now I suppose you’d call him a Zimbabwean lion dog.’

  The puppy’s skin was too big for him. It hung down in wrinkles over his forehead that gave him a worried frown. His back was crested in the distinctive ridge of his breed.

  ‘Look at his paws!’ Sally-Anne cried. ‘He’s going to be a monster. What shall I call him?’

  Craig declared a public holiday to mark the occasion of Sally-Anne’s birth. They took the puppy and a picnic lunch down to the main dam below the homestead, and lay on a rug under the trees at the water’s edge, and tried to find a name for the puppy. Sally-Anne vetoed Craig’s suggested ‘Dog’.

  The black-faced weaver birds fluttered and shrieked and hung upside-down from the basket-shaped nests above their heads, and Joseph had put a cold bottle of white wine in the basket. The puppy chased grasshoppers until he collapsed exhausted on the rug beside Sally-Anne. They finished the wine, and when they made love on the rug, Sally-Anne whispered seriously, ‘Shh! Don’t wake the puppy!’

  They drove back up the hills and Sally-Anne said suddenly, ‘We haven’t spoken about the troubles all day.’

  ‘Don’t let’s spoil our record.’

  ‘I’m going to call him Buster.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The first puppy I was ever given I called Buster.’

  They gave Buster his supper in the bowl labelled ‘Dog’ Craig had bought for him, and then made a bed in an empty wine crate near the Aga stove. They were both happily tired and that evening left the book and the photographs and went to bed immediately after their own meal.

  Craig woke to the sound of gun-fire. His residual war reflexes hurled him from the bed before he was fully awake. It was automatic rifle-fire, short bursts, very close, he noted instinctively, short bursts meant good, trained riflemen. They were down by the farm village, or the workshop. He judged the distance.

  He found his leg and clinched the strap, fully awake now, and his first thought was for Sally-Anne. Keeping low, beneath the sill level of the windows, he rolled back to the bed and dragged her down beside him.

  She was naked, and muzzy with sleep.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Here,’ he whipped her gown off the foot of the bed. ‘Get dressed, but keep down.’

  While she shrugged into the gown, he was trying to marshal his thoughts. There were no weapons in the house, except the kitchen knives and a small hand axe for chopping firewood on the back veranda. There was no sandbagged fall-back position, no defensive perimeter of wire and floodlights, no radio transmitter – none of even the most elementary defences with which every farm homestead had once been provided.

  Another burst of rifle-fire, and somebody screamed – a woman – the faint scream abruptly cut off.

  ‘What’s happening? Who are they?’ Sally-Anne’s voice was level and crisp. She was awake and unafraid. He felt a little lift of pride for her. ‘Are they dissidents?’

  ‘I don’t know, but we aren’t going to wait around to find out,’ he told her grimly.

  He glanced up at the new highly inflammable thatch overhead. Their best chance was to get out of the house and into the bush. To do that, they needed a diversion.

  ‘Stay here,’ he ordered. ‘Get your shoes on and be ready to run. I’ll be back in a minute.’

  He rolled under the window to the wall, and came to his feet. The bedroom door was unlocked and he darted into the passage. He wasted ten seconds on the telephone – he knew they would have cut the wires, and that was confirmed immediately by the dead echoless void in the earpiece. He dropped it dangling on the cord and ran through to the kitchens.

  There was only one diversion he could think of – light. He hit the remote-control switch of the diesel generator, and there was the faint ripple of sound from the engine room across the yard and the overhead bulbs glowed yellow and then flared into full brilliance. He tore open the fuse box above the control-board, tripped out the house-lights, and then switched on the veranda and front garden lights. That would leave the back of the house in darkness. They would make their break that way, he decided, and it would have to be quick. The attackers hadn’t hit the house yet, but they could only be seconds away.

  He ran back out of the kitchen, paused at the door of the lounge, and glanced through it to check the lighting in the front garden and veranda. The lawns were a peculiarly lush green in the artificial light, the jacaranda trees domed over them like the roof of a cathedral. The firing had ceased, but down near the labourers’ village a woman was keening, that doleful sound of African mourning. It made his skin creep.

  Craig knew that they would be coming up the hill already, and he was turning away to go back to Sally-Anne when he caught the flicker of movement at the edge of the light and he narrowed his eyes and tried to identify it. To know who was attacking would give him some small advantage, but he was wasting precious seconds.

  The movement was a running man, coming up towards the house. A black man, naked – no, he was wearing a loin-cloth. Not really running, but staggering and weaving drunkenly. In the veranda lights half his body glinted as though it had been freshly oiled, and then Craig realized that it was blood. The man was painted with his own blood, and it was falling in scattered drops from him like water from the coat of a retriever when it comes ashore with the duck in its jaws.

  Then a more intense shock of horror. Craig realized that it was old Shadrach, and unthinkingly went to help him. He kicked open the french doors of the lounge, went out onto the veranda at a run, and vaulted the low half-wall. He caught Shadrach in his arms just as he was about to fall, and lifted him off his feet. He was surprised at how light was the old man’s body. Craig carried him at a single bound onto the veranda and crouched with him below the low wall.

  Shadrach had been hit in the upper arm, just above the elbow. The bone had shattered, and the limb hung by a ribbon of flesh. Shadrach held it to his breast like a nursing infant.

  ‘They are coming,’ he gasped at Craig. ‘You must run. They are killing our people, they will kill you also.’

  It was miraculous that the old man could speak, let alone move and run with such a wound. Crouching below the wall he ripped a strip of cotton from his loin-cloth with his teeth and started to bind it around his own arm above the wound. Craig pushed his hand away and tied the knot for him.

  ‘You must run, little master,’ and before Craig could prevent him, the old man rolled to his feet and disappeared into the darkness beyond the floodlights.

  ‘He risked his life to warn me.’ Craig looked after him for a second, and then roused himself and, doubled over, ran back into the house.

  Sally-Anne was where he had left her, crouched below t
he window. Light fell through it in a yellow square, and he saw that she had tied back her hair and pulled on a T-shirt and shorts, and was lacing her soft, leather, training shoes.

  ‘Good girl.’ He knelt beside her. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Buster,’ she replied. ‘My puppy!’

  ‘For God’s sake!’

  ‘We can’t leave him!’ She had that stubborn look that he had already come to know so well.

  ‘I’ll carry you if I have to,’ he warned fiercely, and raising himself quickly he risked a last glance over the window-sill.

  The lawns and gardens were still brightly lit. There were the dark shapes of men coming up from the valley, armed men in disciplined extended order. For a moment he could not believe what he was seeing, and then he sagged with relief.

  ‘Oh, thank you, God!’ he whispered. He found that reaction had set in already. He felt weak and shivery, and he took Sally-Anne in his arms and hugged her.

  ‘It’s all right now,’ he told her. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  ‘What has happened?’

  ‘The security forces have arrived,’ he said. He had recognized the burgundy-coloured berets and silver cap-badges of the men closing in across the lawns. ‘The Third Brigade is here – we will be all right now.’

  They went out onto the front veranda to greet their rescuers, Sally-Anne carrying the yellow puppy in her arms, and Craig with his arm about her shoulders.

  ‘I am very glad to see you and your men, Sergeant,’ Craig greeted the non-commissioned officer who led the advancing line of troopers.

  ‘Please go inside.’ The sergeant made a gesture with his rifle, imperative if not directly threatening. He was a tall man, with long sinewy limbs, his expression was cold and neutral, and Craig felt his relief shrink. Something was wrong. The line of troopers had closed like a net around the homestead, while skirmishers came forward in pairs, covering each other, the classical tactics of the street fighter, and they went swiftly into the house, breaking through windows and side doors, sweeping the interior. There was a crash of breaking glass at the rear of the house. It was a destructive search.