The Sunbird Read online

  I snatched for a fresh magazine, looking ahead, to estimate how much longer we must receive fire. MacDonald was just entering the forest, there were big trees on either side of the path indicating the passage. I saw the loose earth in the path ahead of MacDonald swept neatly, and I knew then why they had held their fire until it served to drive us into the trap.

  I opened my mouth to scream a warning, but it was lost in the continuous clamour of gunfire and engine roar.

  MacDonald hit the landmines they had laid for us across our old tracks and the detonation was a burst of bright white light that seared the retina of the eye. The concussion slammed painfully into my eardrums, and MacDonald’s Land-Rover reared like a wounded lion. Its front end was smashed in, one of the wheels spinning lazily through the air. It toppled backwards, crushing the occupants beneath it. The second Land-Rover drove into it at thirty miles an hour. There was a rending screeching sound of metal as the two came together.

  ‘Look out!’ shouted Louren and the sergeant swung the wheel violently to avoid colliding with the mass of wrecked vehicles. Our Land-Rover hung over on two wheels then flopped over on its side. We were thrown out onto the rocky earth.

  There was a silence that lasted for three or four seconds. A stunned silence, even the enemy frozen by the suddenness of the havoc they had created. We were perhaps fifty yards from the river-bed where Timothy’s men lay. The intervening ground was sparsely studded with fever trees. These and the bodies of the vehicles gave us a little cover.

  I had lost my rifle and as I groped for it I found Xhai huddled next to me. I had one glimpse of his terrified face, as I crawled towards Louren.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  For answer he pointed. ‘Look!’ Twenty feet away Alastair MacDonald lay on his back with the full weight of the Land-Rover lying across his pelvis. He was pushing at the mass of metal with weak fluttering hands. He moaned then softly.

  I stood up to go to him, and at that moment the guns opened again. flailing us, rattling and clanging against the Land-Rovers, lashing billows of dust and storms of stone fragments, ricocheting with the sound of tearing silk - and Louren dragged me down.

  I was aware of movement beside me and as I turned towards it little Xhai wailed softly like a restless baby. I put out my hand to calm him, but my touch galvanized him. He jumped to his feet, his dark amber eyes ablaze with terror, and he ran.

  ‘Wait, little brother,’ I shouted, and I scrambled up to follow him. Louren grabbed and held me and I watched as Xhai ran out into that hell storm.

  He drew all their fire immediately. They hunted him, hosing bullets at him. He ran like a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights, making no attempt to hide. I struggled in Louren’s grip.

  ‘No!’ I shouted. ‘Leave him! No! No!’ And they hit him, knocking him down so he rolled across the stony earth like a small brown ball. He came up on his feet again, still running but his left arm was shot away above the elbow, holding only by a tatter of wet flesh and it bounced loosely against his flank. They hit him again, squarely this time, between the shoulder blades and he went down hard and skidded on his face. He lay very still and small in the harsh white sunlight. I was quiet in Louren’s grip, while around me the surviving troopers crawled into position to return the enemy fire. Louren rolled away from me, lying prone and fired a burst around the tailboard of the overturned Land-Rover.

  The storm of bullets returned to sweep over us, and MacDonald was still moaning. Nobody could reach him across that bullet-swept space. I knelt on the hard earth staring at Xhai’s frail little body, and I felt the hot winds of my rage blow through my soul. They came from deep and far, crescendoed and overwhelmed my reason.

  I jumped up and ran to the mined Land-Rover, I tore the pin from the mounting and hefted the heavy machine-gun out of its seating. Then I threw four loops of cartridge-belt over my shoulders, draping myself with death as though it were an Hawaiian lei. Then, with the gun on my hip, I went after them, running towards the river-bed, straight at the centre of their line.

  I heard myself screaming, and the violent disruption of the air around me as shot passed close, buffeted my ears and fanned my face with a hot dry wind. I ran screaming and the gun shook my body as though it were a giant fist. The spent cartridge cases spewed from the breech in a glittering stream, ringing like silver bells as they bounced off the stony earth. I saw the lip of the bank dissolve in spurting, swirling clouds of dust as I traversed it, saw one of them hit and flung backwards.

  Their fire was shrivelling, I saw movement in the reeds as they ran. One of them leapt to his feet and fired a burst. Beside me slabs of white bark exploded from the trunk of a fever tree, and I swivelled the gun onto him. He was in camouflage battledress, a pudding-basin helmet of steel on his head and he crouched over his weapon, the muzzle winked its hot red eye at me and I wondered that it could miss me at such close range.

  One of my bullets caught him in the mouth, spinning his helmet away and the contents of his skull blew out of the back of his head in a pink cloud. He dropped below the bank.

  ‘Follow him! Cover him!’ I heard Louren yelling somewhere behind me, but I did not care. I reached the bank of the river and looked down into the dry bed. They were running, panicky, for the far bank and I turned the gun on them. Watching as they fell, with the white sand dancing in sudden soft fountains amongst them. I was still screaming.

  The last loop of cartridges flipped off my shoulder and fed into the hungry breech of my weapon. The gun went dead and useless in my hands, and I hurled it after them. Rage and sorrow had driven me far beyond the boundaries of reason and fear. I stood unarmed and unafraid and from the far bank Timothy Mageba turned back towards me. He had a pistol in his right fist, and he aimed at me. I felt the passage of the bullet close beside my head.

  ‘Murderer!’ I screamed, and he fired again, twice. It was as though the angels of death had draped their wings around me, shielding me, for I did not even hear the bullets. I saw him glaring at me, those terrible smoky eyes, the great cannon-ball head like that of some wounded beast at bay.

  Then suddenly Louren was beside me, he threw up his rifle and snapped a shot at Timothy. I think Louren may have nicked him, for I saw him wince and stagger slightly, but then he was gone into the thick scrub that covered the high ground on the far bank. The police troopers went past us, moving forward in line of skirmishers down the bank and across the river-bed where the dead men lay. They fired a few rounds into the bush, then Louren called them back.

  Louren turned to stare at me with a look of disbelief. ‘They didn’t touch you,’ he said with wonder. ‘Not a single bullet - my God, Ben, my God!’ He shook his head. ‘You frightened me, you crazy bastard. You frightened the hell out of me.’ He put his arm around my shoulder and led me back to the vehicles.

  MacDonald was still moaning softly. We lifted the side of the Land-Rover, Louren and I between us. MacDonald screamed as the troopers drew him out from under the vehicle. His legs were twisted at an odd angle and his face was very pale, his tan a dirty brown over it and little beads of sweat dewed his upper lip.

  I left Louren to administer morphine and try to splint the badly shattered bone, and I went across to where Xhai still lay.

  The entry hole was a blue black pucker in the centre of his back, there was no bleeding from it. Yet he lay in a puddle of thick gelatinous blood, and I knew what hideous damage the exit of the bullet from his chest must have caused. I did not turn him over. I could not bring myself to do it, but his head was twisted sideways and I squatted beside him. With my fingertips I closed the lids over those staring Chinese eyes.

  ‘Go in peace, little brother,’ I whispered.

  ‘Come on, Ben. They’ll be back. We must hurry,’ Louren called.

  Two of our troopers were dead, and the sergeant rolled them in their blankets.

  ‘The bushman also,’ I told him. He hesitated, but then he saw my expression and went quickly.

  We rolled the third vehicl
e back onto its wheels and while the troopers lifted our dead and wounded aboard, Louren and I checked it out. Two of the tyres were shot through, the petrol tank was riddled, the steering box was severed by a bullet and another had shattered the engine sump cover. Oil poured from it, stinking in the heat.

  Quickly Louren placed the sergeant and the three remaining troopers in a defensive perimeter amongst the fever trees and we pushed the crippled Land-Rover into the lee of the wrecked vehicles giving ourselves some cover to work behind.

  There was a tool box in MacDonald’s Land-Rover. We changed the wheels as quickly as a pair of Grand Prix mechanics, cannibalizing from the wrecks. As we tightened the last wheel bolts the sniping began. It was long range, from the far ridge a quarter of a mile away. They had learned their lesson well, and kept a respectful distance now. Our troopers answered, blazing away with the two heavy machine-guns to discourage them further.

  In the middle of a fire fight Louren and I worked, greasy to the elbows. Smearing skin from knuckles on sharp steel in our haste, burning blisters into our skin on the red-hot manifold and exhaust system.

  We pulled the sump cover off the capsized Land-Rover, and lay on our backs with hot oil dripping into our faces as we bolted it back onto our vehicle. The gasket was torn, it would leak, but it would hold oil long enough to get us clear.

  Louren changed the steering-box, while I found a cake of soap in my pack and plugged the bullet holes in the fuel tank. As we worked, I blessed the Chinese artisans who had manufactured those shoddy weapons on the far ridge, with their limited range and accuracy.

  We refuelled and replaced the engine oil, standing by necessity fully exposed to the marksmen on the hill, forcing ourselves to work methodically and trying to shut from our ears the terrifying sound of passing shot.

  Louren jumped into the driver’s seat, and pressed the starter; it whirled dismally, on and on, and I closed my eyes tight and prayed. Louren released the starter button and in the silence I heard him swearing with bitter vehemence. He tried again, the battery was weakening now, the whirring of the engine slowed and faltered.

  A stray bullet smashed the windscreen spraying us with glittering glass fragments. Louren was still swearing. In despair I glanced at the setting sun, only half an hour or so of daylight left. In the darkness the hyenas would come down from the ridge. As though they had read my thoughts the fire from up there intensified. I heard a bullet whine away off the metal of the Land-Rover. Louren jumped out of the driver’s seat and opened the bonnet again; as he worked I shouted across to Ndabuka.

  ‘Why aren’t you firing, Sergeant? You are letting them have target practice. Keep their heads down, dammit!’

  ‘The ammunition is almost finished, sir,’ he called back, and a coldness closed about my guts. No ammunition, and darkness coming on fast.

  Louren slammed the bonnet closed, and ducked back into the driver’s seat. He looked at me through the shattered windscreen.

  ‘Say another prayer, Ben. The last one was no damned good.’ And he pressed the starter. It wheezed wearily but the engine would not turn.

  ‘We’ve had it, Ben,’ Louren told me. ‘Both the other batteries are kaput.’

  ‘Sergeant - all of you. Shove,’ I shouted. ‘Come on, help me.’

  They ran to me at the rear of the Land-Rover.

  ‘Try her in second,’ I shouted at Louren, and a burst of bullets kicked around my legs stinging them with fragments of stone.

  We threw our combined weight on the Land-Rover and it bumped over rough ground, back towards the river.

  ‘Now,’ I shouted at Louren. The Land-Rover juddered and slowed and we hurled ourselves against it, keeping it moving against compression.

  It fired once. ‘Keep going!’ I gasped. And abruptly the engine roared into life and we howled with triumph.

  ‘Climb on,’ Louren yelled and swung the Land-Rover back towards the trail, but I ran beside him.

  ‘Matches!’ I panted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Give me your matches, damn you.’ I snatched them from his hand and ran to the tangled wreckage. Gasoline was dribbling from one of the ruptured tanks and I flicked a match at it. The sucking, roaring torrent of flame licked across my face singeing my eyelashes away, and I turned and ran after the Land-Rover, scrambling in over the tailboard, falling face forward onto the pile of dead and wounded men in the back.

  Louren smashed a new route through a belt of scrub thorn, avoiding the mined trail, and then angled back to pick it up farther out.

  The firing from the ridge died away as the forest blanketed us. I watched the column of black sooty smoke climbing up into the flushed evening sky, pleased that I had denied them the spoils of victory, and suddenly I found myself shaking like a man in high fever. Icy waves of shock and reaction engulfed me.

  ‘Are you all right, Ben?’ Louren called to me.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ I answered and looked down at the pathetic blanket-wrapped bundles at my feet.

  All that night we crawled southwards, jolting and bumping over the rough ground, often losing the track and having to search for it, shivering in the cold of an African night when the wind blew through the shattered windscreen.

  In a dawn that was grape-purple and smoky blue I asked Louren to stop the Land-Rover. The troopers helped me to dig a shallow grave in the sandy bottom land between two kopjes. I lifted Xhai out of the Land-Rover still wrapped in the dark grey police blanket and he was as light as a sleeping child in my arms. I laid him in the earth and we stood around in a circle and looked down at him. Blood had soaked through the blanket and dried in a black stain.

  I nodded at the troopers. ‘All right. Cover him.’ They did it quickly and went back to the Land-Rover. It was still cold, and I shivered in my thin cotton shirt. Up on the kopje an old bull baboon barked, his cry boomed across the valley.

  I followed the troopers back to the Land-Rover and climbed up beside them. As we drove on I looked back, and saw a herd of buffalo moving out of the bush. They were grazing, heads down and tails swinging towards Xhai’s grave. This was where my brother belonged, with the animals in the wilderness he loved.

  ‘I’m very much afraid that they have slipped back across the river,’ the assistant commissioner of police told me. ‘There is nothing we would have liked more than to get our hands on this fellow Mageba.’

  We had flown out with MacDonald in the police helicopter to Bulawayo two days before. Louren had left me to help the Rhodesian police as best I could while he sent for the Lear and went on direct to Johannesburg. Now I was having a final debriefing at police headquarters, while a charter flight stood by to take me back to the City of the Moon.

  The assistant commissioner was a tall man with a military set to his shoulders, and a brush of closely cropped grey hair. His face was seamed and furrowed and burned darkly by a thousand suns. There were ribbons on his chest that I recognized, the emblems of courage and honour.

  ‘He is top of our list of the chaps we’d like to meet, actually. A nasty piece of work, but then you’d know that as well as anybody.’ And he turned those steely grey eyes on to me, giving me the feeling that I was being interrogated.

  ‘I know him,’ I agreed. My part in the hi-jacking incident was common knowledge.

  ‘What do you make of the man?’

  ‘He is an intelligent man, and he has a presence. There is something about him.’ I tried to find the words to describe him. ‘He’s the type of man who sets out to get what he wants, and the type that other men will follow.’

  ‘Yes,’ the assistant commissioner nodded. ‘That’s a fair summation of our own intelligence. Since he joined them there has been an escalation of hostile activity from our friends across the river.’ He sighed, and massaged his iron-grey temples. ‘I thought we might have got him this time. They left their dead unburied, and made a run for the river. We could only have missed them by minutes.’

  He walked down with me to where a police car waited under the
jacaranda trees with their clouds of purple blossom.

  ‘What news have you of MacDonald?’ I asked as we stood beside the police car.

  ‘He will be all right. They saved both legs.’

  ‘I am glad.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the assistant commissioner. ‘He is a good type. Wish we had more of them. By the way, Doctor, we would rather you kept mum about this business. We don’t like to make too much fuss about these incidents. Rather playing into their hands, you know. Gives them the publicity they want.’

  We shook hands and he turned and strode back into the building. As we drove through the busy streets and I saw the smiles on the faces around me, I wondered why anybody should want to destroy this society - and if they succeeded, with what would they replace it?

  It seemed natural to think then of the City of the Moon. A great civilization, a nation which held dominion over an area the size of Europe, a people who built great cities of stone and sent their ships in trade to the limits of the known world. All that remained of them were the few poor relics which we had so laboriously gleaned. No other continent was so fickle in the succour it gave to men, to raise them up so swiftly and then to pluck them down and devour them so that they were denied even a place in her memory. A cruel land, a savage and merciless land. It was a wonder that so many of us loved her so deeply.

  My return to the City of the Moon was disappointing. After the events of the last few days it was an anti-climax. It seemed that the others had hardly noticed my absence.

  ‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ Sally asked over the typewriter and a pile of translation sheets.

  ‘Well, it was interesting.’

  ‘That’s good. What happened to your eyelashes?’ she asked and without waiting for an answer began pounding the keyboard with two fingers, biting her tongue with concentration, pausing only to push her hair off her cheek with the back of one hand.