A Time to Die c-13 Read online

  Slowly they went forward into the grass. It reached above their heads, enclosing them so closely they could see no more than two or three paces ahead.

  The lion's blood was painted on the grass and the stems were pushed over by the passage of his body, so the trail was easy to follow. The blood on the grass gave Sean and Matatu the exact height of the wound, and the feces mixed with the blood told them the bowels had been penetrated. It was a mortal wound, but death would be slow and agonizing.

  Within twenty yards of entering the grass Matatu paused and indicated the puddle of dark, tarry blood. "He stopped here," he whispered.

  Sean nodded. "He won't have gone far," he guessed. He's waiting for us, Matatu, and when he comes, you run back behind me. Do you hear me?"

  Matatu grinned at him. They both knew he would not obey.

  Matatu had never run; he would stand the charge as he always did.

  "All right, you silly little bugger." Sean was tense. "Get on with it."

  &

  "You Silly little bugger," Matatu repeated happily. He knew Sean only called him that when particularly proud of him or pleased with him.

  They moved along the blood spoor, pausing every three or four paces while Sean lobbed pebbles into the grass ahead of them.

  When there was no response, they moved cautiously forward again.

  Behind him Sean could hear the click, click of the safety catch on the Rigby. Riccardo was snapping it on and off as they advanced, a nervous gesture that betrayed his agitation. Although the sound irritated him, Sean felt a stir of admiration for the man.

  This was probably one of the most dangerous activities in which a man could engage. They don't come much worse than a gutshot lion in close cover. This was Sean's job, but for Riccardo it was a once-in-a-lifetime test, and he had not failed it yet.

  Sean tossed another pebble into the grass ahead and listened to it rattle on the branch of a low tree.

  As they went on, Sean thought about fear. For some men fear was a crippling and destroying emotion, but for those like Sean it was an addiction. He loved the sensation of fear. It was like a drug flowing through his veins, heightening all his senses, so he could feel the checkering on the polished walnut stock of the rifle under his fingers and the brush of each blade of grass against his bare legs. His vision was so enhanced that he saw it all through a crystal lens that magnified and dramatized each image. He could taste the very air he breathed and smell the crushed grass under his feet and the blood of the lion they were following. He was vividly, vibrantly alive, and he gave himself up to fear, as an addict would to a syringeful of heroin.

  He tossed another pebble into the ebony thicket that stood like an island in the sea of grass just ahead of them. It fell through the branches, rattling and crackling, and the lion growled from the depths of the thicket.

  The fear of death was so pleasurable as to be almost unbearable, an emotional orgasm, stronger than any woman had ever given him, and he slid the safety catch off the rifle and said, exultation in his voice, "He's coming, Matatu. Run!" Time slowed down, another phenomenon produced by fear.

  From the corner of his eye he saw Riccardo Monterro step up beside him, taking his place in the firing line, and he knew what it was costing him.

  "Good man!" he said loudly, and at the sound of his voice, the branches of the ebony thicket shook as a heavy body rushed through them. Suddenly there was a terrifying, growling, grunting uproar coming straight at them.

  Matatu stood perfectly still, like a guardsman on parade.

  Matatu had never run. Sean stepped up on one side of him and Riccardo on the other, and they lifted their rifles and aimed into the wall of grass as that thing rushed in on them, flattening the tall stems with its charge, roaring now, blasts of sound that were like a physical assault on their senses.

  The grass opened in their faces and a huge, tawny body hurled itself on them.

  They fired together, and the crash of gunfire drowned the enraged roaring. Sean fired the second barrel, the two shots sounding as one, and the huge 750-grain bullet tore into the charging animal, stopping it as though it had run into a cliff. Riccardo was working the bolt of the Rigby, and a rolling echo of gunfire filled the air around them.

  The dead animal fell at their feet, and they stood with rifles raised, staring down at the bleeding carcass, dazed by the swiftness and the savagery and the beat of gunfire in their heads.

  In the silence Shadrach stepped forward. Like Matatu, he had stood his ground. Now he stooped to the carcass, then jerked back and shouted aloud what they had not yet fully realized.

  "It's not the lion!"

  As he said it, the lion charged. He came straight at them out of the thicket as his mate had done but even more swiftly, driven by the agony in his belly and the black rage that filled him. He came grunting like a locomotive at full throttle, and they were unprepared, their rifles unloaded, bunched up too closely around the carcass of the lioness, and Shadrach was between them and the lion.

  The lion came bursting out of the tall grass in full charge and seized Shadrach in his jaws, biting into his hip. The momentum of its charge carried it into the knot of men standing close behind Shadrach.

  It knocked them all off their feet. Sean went over backward, crashing into the earth on his shoulder blades and the back of his neck with stunning force. He was holding the rifle in front of his chest, instinctively trying to protect it from damage as he went down, and the engraved barrels slammed into his sternum as he hit the earth. Pain shot through his chest, but he held on to the weapon and rolled onto his side.

  Ten feet away the lion was savaging Shadrach. It had him pinned under its massive paws as it mauled his hip and upper leg.

  "Thank God it's not a leopard," Sean thought as he broke open the rifle to reload. A leopard will not fix on one man if it attacks a group of hunters. It will bound from one to the other in rapid succession, maiming and killing all of them with dazzling speed.

  Furthermore, a leopard's main prey is the baboon, so it knows precisely how to dispatch a primate. It goes instinctively for the head, taking off the scalp and top of the skull, while its back legs kick down the belly, stripping out the intestines with hooked yellow claws very quickly, very efficiently.

  "Thank God it's not a leopard." The great beast was fixed on Shadrach, pinning him with its claws, worrying the leg, and with each growl a scarlet spray of blood puffed out of its jaws. The Matabele gun bearer was screaming and beating ineffectually at the huge maned head with both clenched fists.

  Sean saw Riccardo in the grass beyond them, scrambling to his knees and crawling toward where the Rigby rifle had been thrown.

  "Don't shoot, Capo!" Sean yelled at him. In a melee like this one, an inexperienced man with a loaded rifle was many times more dangerous than the attacking animal. The bullets of the Rigby would crack through the lion's body and smash into anybody beyond.

  Sean had two spare cartridges held between the fingers of his left hand. It was the old hunter's trick for the fast reload, and he slid the two cartridges into the empty breeches and snapped the action shut.

  The lion was chewing on Shadrach's lower body. Sean could hear the bone crunch and crackle like dry toast under those dreadful fangs. His nostrils were full of the fetid, gamy smell of the lion, of dust and the reek of blood of man and beast.

  Beyond them he saw that Riccardo had the rifle. He was on his knees, his face ashen with shock, cramming cartridges into the breech of the Rigby.

  "Don't shoot!" Sean yelled again. The lion was directly between them.

  A bullet that hit the animal would come straight on to him.

  It takes a special technique to shoot an attacking animal off a prostrate man without killing them both. It was deadly dangerous to run up to them and shoot down into the animal's body with the man lying under it.

  Sean made no effort to rise to his feet. He rolled like a log, cushioning the rifle, flipping over three times, the maneuver that was second nature fr
om his Scout training. Now he was lying alongside the lion, almost touching him. He thrust the rifle into his lower ribs, aiming upward, and fired. It needed only one of those 750-grain bullets.

  The shot lifted the lion clear of Shadrach's body, tossing it lightly aside. The bullet tore out of his back between the shoulders and went straight on up into the sky.

  Sean dropped the rifle and knelt over Shadrach, taking him in his arms, and looked down on the leg. The fangs had inflicted penetrating stiletto wounds. From hip to knee the black flesh was riddled.

  "Matatu!" Sean snapped. "In the Toyota. The medicine box.

  Get it." And the tracker vanished into the grass.

  Riccardo crawled to Sean's side and looked at the leg. "Sweet Mother Mary," he said softly. "It's the femoral." Bright arterial blood was pumping out of the deepest wound in a jet, and Sean reached into it, thrusting his fingers into the hot flesh.

  He got a grip on the slippery, rubbery, pulsing worm with thumb and forefinger and pinched with all his strength.

  "Hurry, Matatu! Run, you little bugger, run!" he bellowed.

  It was less than three hundred yards to the Toyota, and Matatu ran like a frightened fawn. He was back within minutes. Job was with him carrying the white chest with the red cross on its lid, and he opened it.

  "In the instrument roll," Sean told Job brusquely. "Hemostats."

  Job passed him the stainless steel clamps, and Sean fastened them onto the ruptured artery and taped them against the thigh.

  His hands were wet and bright with blood, but he and Job had done this work fifty times during the bush war, and his movements were swift and confident.

  "Rig up a drip set," he ordered Job. "We'll give him a bag of Ringer's lactate to start with. Rig it."

  As he spoke he was screwing the nozzle onto a tube of Betadyne.

  He slid the nozzle as deeply as it would go into one of the puncture wounds in Shadrach's thigh and squeezed the thick iodine paste into it until it forced itself out of the mouth of the wound like tobacco-yellow toothpaste. Shadrach lay without protest or any sign of pain, watching them as they worked, replying to Job in monosyllables when he spoke to him in Sindebele.

  "Drip set is ready," Job said.

  Without a word Sean took the cannula out of his hands. Shadrach was his man, his responsibility. He would allow no one else to do this, not even Job. He twisted Shadrach's arm, exposing the inside of the elbow, and worked up a vein with a skilled milking motion. He hit it with the needle at the first attempt and nodded to Job to let the plasma flow.

  "Hey, Shadrach!" Sean's grin was remarkably convincing as he laid a blood-smeared palm briefly against the Matabele's cheek. "I think you poisoned that old lion good. He eats your leg and he's dead-poof! Like that!" Shadrach chuckled. It amazed Riccardo to hear it, even though he had fought and worked with tough men before. "Give Shadrach one of your cigars, Capo," Sean suggested, and he began to strap the leg with clean white tape from the medicine chest to stop the residual bleeding.

  Once he had strapped the leg, he went over the rest of Shadrach's body quickly. He smeared Betadyne into all the rents and tears left by the lion's claws.

  "We can't afford to overlook the merest scratch," he grunted.

  "That old lion has been feeding on putrid carcasses. His teeth and mouth are a reeking pit of infection, and there is rotten meat packed in the grooves of his claws. Gangrene kills most of the victims of a mauling."

  Still not satisfied, Sean injected a full ampulet of penicillin into the transfusion bag. That would swamp the body with antibiotic.

  Sean nodded and stood up. It had taken him less than thirty minutes. Studying the bandages and the drip set Job was holding over Shadrach's supine form, Riccardo doubted a trained doctor Could have worked more swiftly or efficiently.

  "I'm going to fetch the Toyota," Sean told them. "But I'll have to bring it around by way of the ford. That will take a little time, and it will be dark by the time I get back." He could have sent Job to fetch the truck, but he wanted to get the girl to himself. "There are spare blankets in the chest. Keep him wrapped and warm." He looked down at Shadrach. "Little scratch like that. I want you back at work pretty damn quick, otherwise I'll dock it off your wages."

  He picked up the.577 and strode back through the grass to the riverbank. As he trudged through the sandy watercourse, his anger at last came upon him, more powerful for being so long delayed.

  Claudia was sitting alone in the front seat of the Toyota as he came up the bank. She Invoked forlorn and abandoned, but he felt no twinge of pity. She stared aghast at his blood-caked hands.

  Sean placed the,.57 in the gun rack without looking at her, then spilled water from the jerry can over his hands and scrubbed them together, washing off most of the blood. He climbed into the driver's seat and started the Toyota, swung it in a tight circle, and sent it back along the track that followed the river downstream.

  "Aren't you going to tell me what happened?" Claudia asked at last. She had meant to sound unrepentant and full of bravado, but it came out in a small subdued voice.

  "All right," Sean agreed. "I'll tell you. Instead of a quick, merciful kill there was total chaos and confusion. The lioness charged us first. We shot her by mistake in the long grass. Not that we would have had much option anyway. She was coming all the way." Sean switched on the headlights, for the sun was gone and the forest darkening. "Okay, so now the lioness is dead. Her cubs are still unweaned, so they're goners, all three of them. They'll starve to death inside a week."

  "Oh no!" Claudia whispered.

  "Then the lion charged after his mate. He caught us all ends up.

  We weren't ready for him, and he got Shadrach down. He almost chewed his leg off. The bone is shattered from hip to knee. He may lose the whole leg, I don't know. Perhaps he'll get lucky and just end up with a permanent limp. Any way you look at it, he's not going to be a tracker anymore. I'll find him a job as a skinner or camp servant, but he's a Matabele warrior and menial work is going to break his heart."

  "I'm so sorry."

  "You're sorry?" Sean asked. His voice low and furious. "Shadrach is my friend and my companion. He has saved my life more times than I can count, and I've done the same for him. We have fought a war together, we have slept under the same blanket, eaten from the same Plate, trekked ten thousand miles together in the heat and the dust and the rain. He is more than a friend. I have two brothers, same mother and father, but Shadrach means more to me than either of them. Now you tell me you're sorry. Well, thanks a lot, ducky. That's a great comfort."

  "You have every right to be angry. I understand. "You understand?" he asked. "You understand nothing. You are an arrogant ignoramus from a different hemisphere.

  You are a citizen of the land of the quick fix, and you come and try your simplistic naive solutions here in Africa. You try to save a single animal from his destiny, and you end up by killing a female, sending her three cubs to lingering death, and condemning one Of the finest men you'll ever meet to the LIFE of a cripple."

  "What more can I sayT" she asked. "I was wrong."

  "At this late hour your newfound humility is most touching."

  His low voice lashed her. "Sure, you were wrong. Just as you and your people are wrong to try and starve an African nation of thirty million souls into acceptance of another one of your naive solutions. When the damage you have inflicted is beyond repair, Will you again say, "I'm sorry, I was wrong" and walk away and leave my land and my people to bleed and suffer?"

  "What can I do?"

  "We have thirty days of safari remaining," he said bitterly. "I want you to keep out of my hair for that time. The only reason I don't cancel the show right now and send you packing back to your Eskimos and your human rights is that I just happen to think your father is a pretty fine man. From now on you are under sufferance. One more peep out of you and you are on the next plane back to Anchorage. Do I make myself clear?"