Eagle in the Sky Read online

  Johan Akkers crouched over the steering wheel, with the black hat pulled down to his eyebrows, and his face was grey and glistening with sweat, and he saw Conrad blocking the river bed.

  ‘Stop!’ Conrad shouted, hefting the rifle. ‘Stop or I shoot!’

  The truck was swaying and sliding, the engine screamed in tortured protest. Akkers began to laugh, Conrad could see the open mouth and the shaking shoulders. There was no slackening in the truck’s roaring, rocking charge.

  Conrad lifted the rifle and sighted down the stubby double barrels. At that range he could have put a bullet through each of Johan Akkers’ deep-set eyes, and the man made no effort to duck or otherwise avoid the menace of the levelled rifle. He was still laughing, and Conrad could clearly see the teeth lying loosely on his gums. He steeled himself with the truck fifty feet away, and racing down upon him.

  It takes a peculiar state of mind before one man deliberately and cold-bloodedly shoots down another. It must either be the conditioned reflex of the soldier or law-enforcement officer, or it must be the terror of the hunted, or again it must be the unbalanced frenzy of the criminal lunatic.

  None of these was Conrad Berg. Like most big, strong men, he was essentially a gentle person. His whole thinking was centred on protecting and cherishing life – he could not pull the trigger.

  With the truck fifteen feet away, he threw himself aside, and Johan Akkers swung the wheel wildly, deliberately driving for him.

  He caught Berg a glancing blow with the side of the truck, hurling him into the earthen bank of the stream. The truck went past him, slewing out of control. It hit the bank farther down the stream in a burst of earth and loose pebbles, swaying wildly as Akkers fought the bucking wheel. He got it under control again, jammed his foot down on the accelerator and went roaring on down the river bed, leaving Conrad lying in the soft sand below the bank.

  As the truck hit him, Conrad felt the bone in his hip shatter like glass, and the breath driven from his lungs by the heavy blow of metal against his rib cage.

  He lay in the sand on his side and felt the blood well slowly into his mouth. It had a bitter salt taste, and he knew that one of the broken ribs had pierced his lung like a lance and that the blood sprang from deep within his body.

  He turned his head and saw the radio set lying ten paces away across the river bed. He began to drag himself towards it and his shattered leg slithered after him, twisted at a grotesque angle.

  ‘David,’ he whispered into the microphone. ‘I couldn’t stop him. He got away,’ and he spat a mouthful of blood into the white sand.

  David picked the truck up as it came charging up the river bank below the concrete bridge of the Luzane, bounced and bumped over the drainage ditch and swung on to the road. It gathered speed swiftly and raced westwards towards Bandolier Hill and the highway. Dust boiled out from behind the green chassis, marking its position clearly for David as he turned two miles ahead of it.

  After crossing the Luzane the road turned sharply to avoid a rocky outcrop, and then ran arrow-straight for two miles, hedged in with thick timber and undulating like a switchback, striking across the water shed and the grain of the land.

  As David completed his turn he lowered his landing. gear, and throttled back. The Navajo sank down, lined up on the dusty road as though it was a landing-strip.

  Directly ahead was the dust column of the speeding truck. They were on a head-on course, but David concentrated coldly on bringing the Navajo down into the narrow lane between the high walls of timber. He was speaking quietly to Debra, reassuring her and explaining what he was going to attempt.

  He touched down lightly on the narrow road, letting her float in easily, and when she was down he opened the throttles again, taking her along the centre of the road under power but holding her down. He had speed enough to lift the Navajo off, if Akkers chose a collision rather than surrender.

  Ahead of them was another hump in the road, and as they rolled swiftly towards it the green truck suddenly burst over the crest, not more than a hundred yards ahead.

  Both vehicles were moving fast, coming together at a combined speed of almost two hundred miles an hour, and the shock of it was too much for Johan Akkers.

  The appearance of the aircraft dead in the centre of the road, bearing down on him with the terrible spinning discs of the propellers was too much for nerves already run raw and ragged.

  He wrenched the wheel hard over, and the truck went into a broadside dry skid. It missed the port wing-tip of the Navajo as it went rocketing off the narrow road.

  The front wheels caught the drainage ditch and the truck went over, cartwheeling twice in vicious slamming revolutions that smashed the glass from her windows and burst the doors open. The truck ended on its side against one of the trees.

  David shut the throttles and thrust his feet hard down on the wheel brakes, bringing the Navajo up short.

  ‘Wait here,’ he shouted at Debra, and jumped down into the road. His face was a frozen mask of scar tissue, but his eyes were ablaze as he sprinted back along the road towards the wreckage of the green truck.

  Akkers saw him coming, and he dragged himself shakily to his feet. He had been thrown clear and now he staggered to the truck. He could see his rifle lying in the cab, and he tried to scramble up on to the body to reach down through the open door. Blood from a deep scratch in his forehead was running into his eyes blinding him, he wiped it away with the back of his hand and glanced around.

  David was close, hurdling the irrigation ditch and running towards him. Akkers scrambled down from the battered green body, and groped for the hunting knife on his belt. It was eight inches of Sheffield steel with a bone handle, and it had been honed to a razor edge.

  He hefted it under-handed, in the classic grip of the knife-fighter, and wiped the blood from his face with the palm of his free hand.

  He was crouching slightly, facing David, and the haft of the knife was completely covered by the huge bony fist.

  David stopped short of him, his eyes fastened on the knife, and Akkers began to laugh again. It was a cracked falsetto giggle, the hysterical laughter of a man driven to the very frontiers of sanity.

  The point of the knife weaved in the slow mesmeric movement of an erect cobra, and it caught the sunlight in bright points of light. David watched it, circling and crouching, steeling himself, summoning all the training of paratrooper school, screwing up his nerve to go in against the naked steel.

  Akkers feinted swiftly, leaping in, and when David broke away, he let out a fresh burst of high laughter.

  Again they circled, Akkers mouthing his teeth loosely, sucking at them, giggling, watching with those muddy green eyes from their deep, close-set sockets. David moved back slowly ahead of him, and Akkers drove him back against the body of the truck, cornering him there.

  He came then, flashing like the charge of a wounded leopard. His speed and strength were shocking, and the knife hissed upwards for David’s belly.

  David caught the knife hand at the wrist, blocking the thrust and trapping the knife low down. They were chest to chest now, face to face, like lovers, and Akkers’ breath stank of unwashed teeth.

  They strained silently, shifting like dancers to balance each other’s heaves and thrusts.

  David felt the knife hand twisting in his grip. The man had hands and arms like steel, he could not hold him much longer. In seconds it would be free, and the steel would be probing into his belly.

  David braced his legs and twisted sideways. The move caught Akkers off-balance and he could not resist it. David was able to get his other hand on to the knife arm, but even with both hands he was hard put to hold on. They swayed and shuffled together, panting, grunting, straining, until they fell, still locked together, against the bonnet of the truck. The metal was hot and smelled of oil.

  David was concentrating all his strength on the knife, but he felt Akkers’ free hand groping for his throat. He ducked his head down on his shoulders, pressing his chin ag
ainst his chest, but the fingers were steel hard and powerful as machinery. They probed mercilessly into his flesh, forcing his chin up, and settling on his throat, beginning to squeeze the life out of him.

  Desperately David hauled at the knife arm, and found it more manageable now that Akkers was concentrating his strength on strangling him.

  The open windscreen of the truck was beside David’s shoulder, the glass had been smashed out of it, but jagged shards of it still stood in the metal rim, forming a crude but ferocious line of saw-teeth.

  David felt the fingers digging deep into his throat, crushing the gristle of his larynx and blocking off the arteries that fed his brain. His vision starred and then began to fade darkly, as though he were pulling eight Gs in a dogfight.

  With one last explosive effort David pulled the knife arm around on to the line of broken glass, and he dragged it down, sawing it desperately across the edge.

  Akkers screamed and his strangling grip relaxed. Back and forth David sawed the arm, slashing and ripping through skin and fat and flesh, opening a wound like a ragged-petalled rose, hacking down into the nerves and arteries and sinews so that the knife dropped from the lifeless fingers and Akkers screamed like a woman.

  David broke from him and shoved him away. Akkers fell to his knees still screaming and David clutched at his own throat massaging the bruised flesh, gasping for breath and feeling the flow of fresh blood to his brain.

  ‘God Jesus, I’m dying. I’m bleeding to death. Oh sweet Jesus, help me!’ screamed Akkers, holding the mutilated arm to his belly. ‘Help me, oh God, don’t let me die. Save me, Jesus, save me!’

  Blood was streaming and spurting from the arm, flooding the front of his trousers. As he screamed his teeth fell from his mouth, leaving it a dark and empty cave in the palely glistening face.

  ‘You’ve killed me. I’ll bleed to death!’ he screamed at David, thrusting his face towards David. ‘You’ve got to save me – don’t let me die.’

  David pushed himself away from the truck and took two running steps towards the kneeling man, then he swung his right leg and his whole body into a flying kick that took Akkers cleanly under the chin and snapped his head back.

  He went over backwards and lay still and quiet, and David stood over him, sobbing and gasping for breath.

  For purposes of sentence Mr Justice Barnard of the Transvaal division of the Supreme Court took into consideration four previous convictions – two under the Wildlife Conservation Act, one for aggravated assault, and the fourth for assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm.

  He found Johan Akkers guilty of twelve counts under the Wildlife Conservation Act, but considered these as one when sentencing him to three years at hard labour without option of a fine, and confiscation of firearms and motor vehicles used in commission of these offences.

  He found him guilty of one count of aggravated assault, and sentenced him to three years at hard labour without option.

  The prosecutor altered one charge from attempted murder to assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm. He was found guilty as charged on this count, and the sentence was five years’ imprisonment without option.

  On the final charge of murder he was found guilty and Justice Barnard said in open court:

  ‘In considering sentence of death on this charge, I was obliged to take into account the fact that the accused was acting like an animal in a trap, and I am satisfied that there was no element of premeditation—’

  The sentence was eighteen years’ imprisonment, and all sentences were to run consecutively. They were all confirmed on appeal.

  As Conrad Berg said from his hospital bed with one heavily plastered leg in traction, and a glass of Old Buck gin in his hand, ‘Well, for the next twenty-eight years we don’t have to worry about that bastard – I beg your pardon, Mrs Morgan.’

  ‘Twenty-nine years, dear,’ Jane Berg corrected him firmly.

  In July the American edition of A Place of Our Own was published, and it dropped immediately into that hungry and bottomless pool of indifference wherein so many good books drown. It left not a sign, not a ripple of its passing.

  Bobby Dugan, Debra’s new literary agent in America, wrote to say how sorry he was – and how disappointed. He had expected at least some sort of critical notice to be taken of the publication.

  David took it as a personal and direct insult. He ranted and stormed about the estate for a week, and it seemed that at one stage he might actually journey to America to commit a physical violence upon that country – a sort of one-man Vietnam in reverse.

  ‘They must be stupid,’ he protested. ‘It’s the finest book ever written.’

  ‘Oh, David!’ Debra protested modestly.

  ‘It is! And I’d love to go over there and rub their noses in it,’ and Debra imagined the doors of editorial offices all over New York being kicked open, and literary reviewers fleeing panic-stricken, jumping out of skyscraper windows or locking themselves in the women’s toilets to evade David’s wrath.

  ‘David, my darling, you are wonderful for me,’ she giggled with delight, but it had hurt. It had hurt very badly. She felt the flame of her urge to write wane and flutter in the chill winds of rejection.

  Now when she sat at her desk with the microphone at her lips, the words no longer tumbled and fought to escape, and the ideas no longer jostled each other. Where before she had seen things happening as though she were watching a play, seen her characters laugh and cry and sing, now there was only the dark cloud banks rolling across her eyes – unrelieved by colour or form.

  For hours at a time she might sit at her desk and listen to the birds in the garden below the window.

  David sensed her despair, and he tried to help her through it. When the hours at the desk proved fruitless he would insist she leave it and come with him along the new fence lines, or to fish for the big blue Mozambique bream in the deep water of the pools.

  Now that she had completely learned the layout of the house and its immediate environs, David began to teach her to find her way at large. Each day they would walk down to the pools and Debra learned her landmarks along the track; she would grope for them with the carved walking-stick David had given her. Zulu soon realized his role in these expeditions, and it was David’s idea to clip a tiny silver bell on to his collar so that Debra could follow him more readily. Soon she could venture out without David, merely calling her destination to Zulu and checking him against her own landmarks.

  David was busy at this time with the removal of Conrad’s game fence, as he was still laid up with the leg, and with building his own fences to enclose the three vulnerable boundaries of Jabulani. In addition there was a force of African rangers to recruit and train in their duties. David designed uniforms for them, and built outposts for them at all the main access points to the estate. He flew into Nelspruit at regular intervals to consult Conrad Berg on these arrangements, and it was at his suggestion that David began a water survey of the estate. He wanted surface water on the areas of Jabulani that were remote from the pools, and he began studying the feasibility of building catchment dams or sinking bore-holes. His days were full and active, and he became hard and lean and sunbrowned. Yet always there were many hours spent in Debra’s company.

  The 35-mm colour slides that David had taken of the buffalo herd before Johan Akkers had decimated it, were returned by the processing laboratory and they were hopelessly inadequate. The huge animals seemed to be standing on the horizon, and the ox-peckers on their bodies were tiny grey specks. This failure spurred David, and he returned from one trip to Nelspruit with a 600-mm telescopic lens.

  While Debra was meant to be working, David set up his camera beside her and photographed the birds through her open window. The first results were mixed. Out of thirty-six exposures, thirty-five could be thrown away, but one was beautiful, a grey-headed bush shrike at the moment of flight, poised on spread wings with the sunlight catching his vivid plumage and his sparkling eye.

  David wa
s hooked by the photography bug, and there were more lenses and cameras and tripods, until Debra protested that it was a hobby which was completely visual, and from which she was excluded.

  David had one of his inspirations of genius. He sent away for pressings of June Stannard’s bird song recordings – and Debra was enchanted. She listened to them intently, her whole face lighting with pleasure when she recognized a familiar call.

  From there it was a natural step for her to attempt to make her own bird recordings, which included the tinkle of Zulu’s silver bell, the buzz of David’s Land-Rover, the voices of the servants arguing in the kitchen yard – and faintly, very faintly, the chatter of a glossy starling.

  ‘It’s no damned good,’ Debra complained bitterly. ‘I wonder how she got hers so clear and close.’

  David did some reading, and built a parabolic reflector for her. It did not look particularly lovely, but it worked. Aimed at a sound source it gathered and directed the sound waves into the microphone.

  From the window of Debra’s study they became more adventurous and moved out. He built permanent and comfortable hides beside the drinking places at the pools, and when his rangers reported a nesting site of an interesting bird species, they would build temporary blinds of thatch and canvas – sometimes on tall stilts – where David and Debra spent many silent and enjoyable hours together, shooting film and catching sound. Even Zulu learned to lie still and silent with his bell removed on these occasions.

  Slowly they had begun to build up a library of photographs and recordings of a professional standard – until at last David plucked up sufficient courage to send to African Wild Life Magazine a selection of a dozen of his best slides. Two weeks later, he received a letter of acceptance, with a cheque for a hundred dollars. This payment represented a return of approximately one-twentieth of one per cent of his capital outlay on equipment. David was ecstatic, and Debra’s pleasure almost as great as his. They drank two bottles of Veuve Clicquot for dinner, and under the spell of excitement and champagne their love-making that night was particularly inventive.