A Time to Die c-13 Page 9

  "Abundantly." There was a trace of spirit in her tone once more.

  Neither of them spoke again during the rough ride down to the ford and back up the far bank to the glade in which the bait tree stood.

  By that time Job and Matatu had a fire going. The glow of the flames guided Sean to where Shadrach lay, and he climbed out of the Toyota and went to him immediately.

  "How is the pain?" He squatted beside him.

  "It is a little thing," Shadrach replied, but Sean saw the lie in the gray tone of his skin and the sunken eyeballs, and he filled a disposable syringe from a glass ampule of morphine. He waited for the drug to take effect before they lifted Shadrach between them and laid him in the back of the truck.

  Job and Matatu had skinned both lions while they waited, and they loaded the bundle of green salted skins onto the hood, where it would cool in the night wind.

  "It's a hell of a lion," Sean told Riccardo. "You've got yourself a magnificent trophy!"

  Riccardo shook his head and said, "Let's get Shadrach back to camp.

  Sean drove with care, rolling the truck gently over the rougher spots, trying to protect Shadrach from the worst jolting. Claudia insisted on sitting in the back with Shadrach, cushioning his head on her lap. Riccardo sat up in front with Sean. He asked quietly, "What happens now?"

  "I'll radio Harare as soon as we get into camp. They'll have a private ambulance at the airport to meet him. I'll be gone a couple of days. I'll see Shadrach well taken care of and, of course, I'll have to put in a report to the government game department and try and square it."

  "I hadn't gotten around to thinking about that," Riccardo said.

  "We killed a lioness with cubs and had a man mauled. What will the government do?"

  Sean shrugged. "There is a better than even chance they'll pull my license and take the concession away from me."

  "Hell, Sean, I didn't realize. is there anything I can do?"

  "Not a thing, Capo, but thanks for the offer. You are out of it.It's between me and the department."

  "I could take full blame for the lioness, say I shot her."

  "No good." Sean shook his head. "No blame on the clients.

  That's departmental doctrine. Whatever you do, I am fully responsible."

  "If they pull your license-" Riccardo hesitated, and Sean shook his head again.

  "No, Capo, they won't cancel the safari. That's also departmental doctrine. Finish the safari. Don't offend the paying client.

  Government needs the hard currency you bring. Only after you have left, they'll bring out the ax for me. You are out of it. I'll be back in two days, and we'll hunt that big elephant together. You don't have to worry."

  "You make me sound like a selfish bastard. I'm worrying about you and your license, not about enjoying myself."

  "We'll both enjoy ourselves, Capo. After all, if I do lose my license, it will be the last time you and I ever hunt together."

  Claudia could overhear the conversation from where she sat in the back of the truck, and she knew why her father did not reply.

  He knew it was his last hunt, license or no license. Claudia had taken an emotional battering during the last few hours, and thinking about Riccardo now, she felt the tears well up and scald her eyelids. She fought them back. Then it was no longer worth the effort and she wept for all of them, for her father and the lioness and the cubs, for that beautiful male lion, and for Shadrach and his shattered leg.

  One of her tears fell onto Shadrach's upturned face, and he stared up at her in perturbation. She wiped the droplet from his cheek with her thumb, and her voice was thick and muffled with grief as she whispered to him, "It's going to be all right, Shadrach." Even she realized what a crass and famous lie that was.

  Sean had a scheduled radio contact with his office in Harare at ten every evening. The journey home was so slow that they reached camp with only minutes to rig the aerial and connect the radio to the Toyota's twelve-volt battery before the scheduled hour.

  The contact was good; one of the reasons for the late schedule was the better radio reception in the cool of the evening. Reema's voice, with its Gujurati intonation, came through dearly. She was a pretty Hindu girl who ran Sean's Harare office with ruthless efficiency.

  "We have a casevac." Sean used the terminology of the bush war for casualty evacuation. "I want an ambulance standing by to meet me."

  "Okay fine, Sean."

  "Set up a person-to-person telephone call with my brother Garrick in Johannesburg for ten A.M. tomorrow."

  "Will do, Sean."

  "Make an appointment for me to see the director of the game department tomorrow afternoon."

  "Director is in New York for the wildlife conference, Sean. The deputy director is in charge."

  Sean switched off the hand microphone while he swore bitterly.

  He had forgotten about the wildlife conference. Then he pressed the "transmit" button again.

  "Okay, Reema my love, get me an appointment with Geoffrey Manguza then."

  "Sounds serious, Sean."

  "We just invented the word."

  "What is your ETA? I'll have to file an emergency flight plan for you." The security authority was always so jittery about South African hot pursuit of terrorists into Zimbabwe or pre-emptive South African raids on terrorist facilities in Harare itself that it usually required flight plans to be filed forty-eight hours in advance.

  "Take off here in fifty minutes. ETA Harare twenty-three hundred hours. Pilot and two par," Sean told her.

  It was half an hour's drive from the camp to the airstrip. Riccardo and Claudia were in the Toyota when they drove out.

  Sean took the back seats out of the Beechcraft and placed a mattress on the floor for Shadrach. By this time Shadrach was feverish and restive. His temperature was 101, and the glands in his groin were as hard and lumpy as walnuts. Afraid of what he might find, Sean didn't want to look under the dressings on the leg, but one of the minor claw wounds on Shadrach's belly was definitely infected already, weeping watery pus and emitting the first faint odor of putrescence.

  Sean administered another dose of penicillin through the cannula of the drip set. Then he, Job, and two of the camp skinners gently lifted Shadrach into the aircraft and settled him on the mattress.

  Shadrach's wife was a sturdy Matabele woman with an infant strapped to her back with a length of trade cloth. They loaded her considerable baggage, and she clambered up and sat beside Shadrach on the mattress, placed the infant on her lap, opened her blouse, and gave the child her milk-engorged breast to suckle. Job filled the aircraft's empty luggage compartments with sacks of dried game meat, a valuable commodity in Africa. Then Job drove the Toyota to the far end of the runway to give Sean the headlights for takeoff.

  "Job will look after you while I'm away, Capo. Why don't you take the shotgun and go for dove and sand grouse down at the pools? Best wing shooting you'll ever have, better than white winged dove in Mexico," Sean suggested.

  "Don't worry about us. We'll be just fine."

  "I'll be back as soon as I possibly can. Tukutela won't be crossing before the new moon. I'll be back before then. It's a promise, Capo."

  Sean held out his hand, and as Riccardo took it he said, "You did good work with the lions, Capo, but then you were never short of bottom."

  "What kind of Limey word is that?" Riccardo asked. ""BottOM

  "How about a good Yankee word then? Cojones?"

  "That'll do." Riccardo grinned at him.

  Claudia was standing beside her father. Now she smiled hesitantly, almost shyly, and took a step forward as if to offer her hand. She had released her hair from its plait and brushed it out into a dense, dark mane around her head. Her expression was soft and her eyes big and dark and lustrous. In the Toyota headlights her classical Latin features went beyond the merely handsome, and Sean realized for the first time that she was truly beautiful. Despite her beauty and her penitent attitude, he kept his expression cold and forbidding, nodded at
her curtly, ignored the tentative offer to shake his hand, climbed up onto the wing of the Beechcraft, and ducked into the cockpit.

  Sean had cut the airstrip out of the brush himself and leveled it by dragging a bundle of old truck tires up and down it behind the Toyota. It was narrow, rough, and short, with a gradient falling toward the river. He lined up with the Beechcraft's tail backed into the bushes and, facing down the slope, stood on the brakes. He aimed at the lights of the Toyota at the far end of the strip while he ran up to full power on both engines and then let the brakes off.

  Just short of the trees at the end of the strip he pulled on the flaps and bounced the Beechcraft into the air. As always he crossed himself blasphemously with mock relief as he cleared the treetops and turned on course for Harare.

  During the flight he tried to plan his strategy. The director of the game department was an old friend, and Sean had successfully dealt with him in equally serious circumstances. The deputy, Geoffrey Manguza, however, was a horse of literally another color. The director was one of the few white civil servants still in charge of a department of government. Manguza would succeed him soon, the first black head of the game department.

  He and Sean had fought on opposite sides during the bush war, and Manguza had been an astute guerrilla leader and political commissar. The rumor was that he did not like the safari Concension owners, most of whom were white. The concept of private exploitation of state assets offended his Marxist principles, and he had shot too many white men during the war to have any great deal of liking or respect for them. It was going to be a difficult meeting. Sean sighed.

  Reema was waiting for him as he taxied in. A modern Indian woman, she had abandoned the said in favor of a neat pant-suit. She was not so modern, however, that she wished to choose her own husband. Her father and her uncles were working on that at the moment and had already come up with a likely candidate in Canada, a professor of Oriental religions at the University of Toronto.

  Sean hated them for it. Reema was a great asset to Courtney Safaris, and he knew he would never be able to replace her.

  She had the ambulance waiting on the tarmac beside the light aircraft hangars. Reema regularly bribed the guards at the main gate with dried game meat from the concession. In Africa, meat or the Promise of meat opens all gates.

  They followed the ambulance to the hospital in the Kombi.

  While Sean sat in the passenger seat glancing through the most urgent mail she had brought for his attention, Reema recited a list of the important developments during his absence.

  "Carter, the surgeon from Atlanta, canceled.. That was a twenty-one-day safari, and Sean glanced up sharply, but Reema soothed him. "I phoned the German soap manufacturer in Munich-Herr Buchner, the one we turned down in December? He jumped at it. So we are full, back to back, for the rest of the season.

  "How about my brother?" Sean interrupted. He didn't want to tell her it was touch and go that there was going to be an abrupt end to the season. "Your broth eris expecting your call, and as of six o'clock this morning the telephone was still working." In Zimbabwe that was something that couldn't be taken for granted.

  At the hospital there were at least fifty seriously ill patients awaiting admission ahead of them. The long benches were full of huddled, miserable humanity and the stretchers were blocking the aisles and doorways. The admissions clerks were in no great hurry and waved Shadrach's stretcher to a far corner.

  "Leave it to me," said Reema, and she took the senior admissions clerk by the elbow and led him aside with an angelic smile, talking to him sweetly.

  Five minutes later Shadrach's admission papers had been processed and he was being examined by an East German doctor.

  "How much did that cost?" Sean asked.

  "Cheap," Reema answered. "A bag of dried meat."

  Sean had picked up sufficient German from his safari clients to be able to discuss Shadrach's case with the doctor. The man was reassuring. Sean said good-bye to Shadrach.

  "Reema has your money. She will come to see you each day. If you need anything, tell her."

  "I will be with you in spirit when you hunt Tukutela," Shadrach said softly.

  Sean had to clear his throat before he could answer. "We will hunt many more elephant together, old friend." And he walked away quickly.

  The next morning, when at last he got through to Johannesburg, the telephone line was crackling with static.

  "Mr. Garrick Courtney is in a board meeting," the girl on the switchboard at Centaine House, the Courtney Group headquarters, told him. "But he gave orders to put your call through directly." In his mind's eye, Sean saw once again the boardroom paneled in figured walnut, the huge Pierneef canvases framed by the elaborate panels, and his brother Garry sitting at the head of the table in the chairman's high-backed throne, beneath the crystal chandelier his grandmother had imported from Murano in Italy.

  "Sean!" Garry's voice cut through the static, bold and assured.

  How he had changed from the puny little runt who used to Pee in his bed!

  The job could have been Sean's if he had wanted it and had been prepared to work for it. Sean was the eldest son, but he had not wanted the job. Still, he always experienced a twinge of resentment when he thought of Garry's Rolls and Lear jet and holiday home in the south of France.

  "Hello, Garry. How's it going", All well here," Garry told him. "What's the problem?" It was typical of their relationship that any contact meant there was a problem to solve.

  "I might need to put a bit of honey with the cheese," Sean told him diplomatically. It was their private code for money to Switzerland, and Garry would understand that Sean would be bribing somebody for something. It happened often enough.

  "Okay, Sean. Just give me the amount and the account number." Garry was Sean's partner in the safari company and held 40 percent of the shares.

  Garry, I'll call you sometime tomorrow. How's the rest of the family?" They chatted for a few minutes longer, and when he hung up Reema came through from the outer office.

  "I managed to get through to the game department at last."

  Reema had been trying all morning. "Comrade Manguza will see u at four-thirty this afternoon."

  GeOffreY Manguza was a tall Shana with a very black complexion and close-cropped hair. He wore silver-framed eyeglasses and a dark blue suit. However, his necktie was Hermes... Sean recognized the horse carriage logo-and his wristwatch was a Patek Philippe with, a black crocodile-skin strap. They were not your run-of-the-mill Marxist accessories, and Sean found that encouraging. However, the deputy director did not rise from behind his desk to welcome him.

  "Colonel Courtney," he greeted him unsmilingly, using Sean's Previous rank to let him know that he knew that Sean had commanded the Ballantyne Scouts, one of the elite Rhodesian groups, after Ballantyne, the founder of the regiment, had been killed in action. It was also a reminder that they had been enemies and might still be so.

  "I Prefer Plain "Mister, "" Sean smiled engagingly. "That other business is behind us now, Comrade Manguza. The deputy director inclined his head, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. "What can I do for you?"

  "Unfortunately, I have to report an unintentional transgression of the game regulations... " Geoffrey Manguza's expression hardened and remained like that while Sean described the accidental shooting of the lioness and Shadrach's subsequent mauling. When Sean finished by submitting the written report Reema had typed for him, Geoffrey Manguza let the document lie untouched on his desk top while he asked a few Pertinent and unsympathetic questions.