The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 141

• Предыдущая
• 141/183
• Следующая

There is a key to the pattern, but it is very difficult to discover and often there are deliberate flaws in it. It requires great skill and iron courage to enter the field and pick up the pattern, to identify exactly at which point one has come in, and to anticipate the sequence. The Claymores are different and need other tricks." "What tricks are those?" "You will see when our guide comes." But he did not come at dawn.

At noon Tebe said, "We can only wait. It is certain death to go into the field alone." There was no food or water, but he would not let the children move. "It is something they would have had to learn anyway." He shrugged. "Patience is our weapon The guide came in the late afternoon. Even Tungata did not know he was close until he was amongst them.

"How did you find us?" "I cast along the edge of the road until I found where you had crossed." The guide was not much older than any of the hijacked schoolchildren, but his eyes were those of an old man for whom life had no surprises left.

"You are late,"Tebe accused.

"There is a Rhodesian ambush on the drifts," the guide shrugged.

"I had to go around." "When can you take us through?" "Not until the dew falls." The guide lay down beside Tungata. "Not until the morning." "Will you explain to me the pattern of the mines?" Tungata asked, and the boy glanced across at Tebe. He nodded his permission.

"Think of the veins in the leaf of the mopani," the guide began, and drew the lines in the dust. He talked for almost an hour with Tungata nodding and asking an occasional question.

When he had finished speaking, the boy laid his head on his folded arms and did not move again until dawn the following morning. It was a trick that they all learned, the trick of instant sleep and instant awakening. Those who did not learn it never lasted very long.

As soon as the light was strong enough, the guide crawled to the edge of the field. Tungata followed him closely. In his right hand the guide carried a sharpened spoke from a bicycle wheel, in the other a bunch of yellow plastic strips cut from a cheap shopping-bag. He crouched low against the earth, his head cocked like a sparrow.

"The dew," he whispered. "Do you see it?" and Tungata started. just a few paces in front of them a string of sparkling diamond drops seemed suspended in the air a few inches above the earth." The almost invisible trip-wire of a Claymore was lit up for them by its necklace of dew and by the first low rays of the sun. The guide marked it with a yellow strip and began to probe with the bicycle spoke. Within seconds he hit something in the loose friable earth, and with gentle fingers swept clear the grey circular top of an AP mine. He stood with it between his toes and reached out to probe again. He worked with amazing speed, and found three more mines.

"So, we have found the key," he called to Tungata who lay at the edge of the field. "Now we must be quick, before the dew dries." The young guide crawled boldly down the passageway to which he had discovered the entrance. He marked two more Claymore trip-wires before he reached the invisible turn in the passage. Here he probed again, and as soon as he confirmed the pattern, turned into the next zigzag.

It took him twenty-six minutes to open and mark the passage through to the far edge of the field. Then he came back and grinned at Tungata. "Do you think you can do it now?" "Yes," Tungata replied without conceit, and the boy's cocky grin faded.

"Yes, I think you could but always watch for the wild one. They put it there on purpose. There is no way to guard against it, except care." He and Tungata took the children through in groups of five, making them hold hands. At each Claymore, Tungata or the guide stood with a foot on each side of the trip-wires to make certain not one of them touched it as they passed.

On the last journey through, when Tungata was less than a dozen paces from safety, but while he was straddling the final trip-wire, they all heard the throb of an aircraft engine. It was coming up-river from the direction of the Victoria Falls, and it grew rapidly in volume. Tungata and the last three children were in the open. The temptation to run was almost irresistible.

"Do not move," the young guide called desperately. "Stay still, crouch down." So they knelt in the middle of the open minefield, and the fine steel wire with its single plastic strip marker ran through the crotch of Tungata's legs. He was an inch away from violent death.

The aircraft noise built up swiftly, and then it roared over the tree-tops between them and the river. It was a silver-painted Beechcraft Baron with the letters "RUAC" in black upon the fuselage.

"Rhodesian United Air Carriers," the guide identified it. "They take rich capitalist pig tourists to see the Smoke that Thunders." The machine was so low and close that they could see the pilot chatting to the woman passenger beside him, and then the plane banked away and was hidden again by the fronds of the ivory-nut palms growing along the banks of the Zambezi river. Slowly Tungata straightened up. He found his shirt was sticking to his body with perspiration.

"Move," he said to the child beside him. "But carefully." At the Victoria Falls the entire Zambezi river plunges over a precipitous ledge, and falls in a turmoil of thundering spray into the narrow gorge far below, giving it the African name "the Smoke that Thunders."

A few miles up-river from this incredible phenomenon, the drifts begin. For forty miles, up as far as the little border post at Kazungula, the wide river tumbles through rapids and then spreads into dawdling shallows. There are twelve places at which oxen can drag a wagon through to the north bank, or a man can wade across if he is willing to chance the Zambezi crocodiles, some of which weigh a ton and can tear the leg off a buffalo and swallow it whole.

"They have an ambush on the drifts," the skinny little guide told Tungata. "But they cannot guard them all. I know where they were this morning, but they may have moved. We will see." "Go with him," Tebe ordered, and Tungata accepted it as a mark of trust.

That morning he learned from the little guide that to survive it was necessary to use all the senses, not merely the ears and the eyes.

• Предыдущая
• 141/183
• Следующая