The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 147

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"It's kind of you to notice." "So I suppose you are a first-class armourer." "I'm pretty good." "Do you do what I suspect, fix up guns?"

"One of my duties." "How can you bring yourself to do it? Guns are so evil." "That is the typical prejudice of the ignorant and uninformed layman." He turned her own words against her. "Firearms are on one level highly functional and useful tools, and on another level they can be magnificent works of art. Man has always lavished some of his most creative instincts on his weapons." "But the way men use them!" she protested.

"For instance, they were used to prevent Adolf Hitler gassing the entire Jewish nation, "he pointed out.

"Oh come on, Craig. What are they being used for out there in the bush at this very moment?" "Guns aren't evil, but some of the men who use them are. You could say the same about spanners. " He tightened the bolts on the winch and stuck his head out of the hatch. "That's enough for today on the seventh day He rested how about a beer?"

Craig had rigged a speaker in the cockpit and they lolled in the sun and drank beer and listened to the music.

"Look, Jan, I don't know a tactful way to put this, but I don't want you seeing anyone else, do you know what I mean?" "There you go again." Her eyes slanted and crackled like blue ice. "Do shut up, Craig!" "I mean after what has happened between us," he ploughed on doggedly. "I think we should-" "Look, dear boy, you have a choice make me mad again, or make me giggle again, what's it going to be." At lunchtime on Monday, she came up to police headquarters, and they ate his ham sandwiches while he showed her around the armoury, and despite herself, she was intrigued by the exhibits of captured weapons and explosives. He explained the operation of the various types of mines and how they could be detected and disarmed.

"You have to hand it to the terrs," Craig admitted. "The swine carry those things in on their backs, two hundred miles or so through the bush. just try and pick that up, and you'll see what I mean." At last he took her through to a small back room. "This is my special project. It's called T & I, trace and identify." He gestured at the charts that covered the walls and the big boxes of empty cartridge-cases piled beside the workbench. "After each contact with terrs our armourers sweep the area and pick up every used cartridge.

Firstly they are checked for fingerprints. So if the terr has a record, then we can identify him immediately. If he has polished his rounds before loading or if we have no record of his fingerprints we can still trace exactly which rifle fired the cartridge." He led her to the bench, and let her look into the low power microscope that stood on it.

"The firing-pin in each rifle strikes an indentation into the cap of the cartridge which is as individual as a fingerprint. We can follow the career of each active terr in the field. We can make accurate estimates of how many there are and which are the hot ones." "The hot ones?" She looked up from the microscope.

"Out of every hundred terrs in the field, ninety or so of them hole up in good cover near a village which can supply them with food and young girls, and they try to keep out of danger and contact with our forces. But the hot ones are different. They are the tigers, the fanatics, the killers, these charts show their first team." He led her to the wall.

"Look at this one. We call him Primrose because his firing-pin leaves a mark like a flower. He has been in the bush for three years, and been in contact ninety-six times. That is almost once every ten days, he must be made of steel." Craig ran his finger down the chart.

"Here is another, we call him Leopard Paw, you can see why by the print of his rifle. He is a newcomer, his first time across the river, but he hit four farms and ran an ambush, then he went into contact with Roly's Scouts. Not many of them survive that, Roly's boys are incredible. They wiped out most of the cadre, but Leopard Paw fought like a veteran and got away with a bunch of his men. Roly's combat report says he lost four men to AP mines that Leopard Paw put down as he ran, and another six in the actual fighting ten men. That's the heaviest casualties the Scouts have ever taken in any one contact."

Craig tapped the name on the chart. "He is the hot one. We are going to hear more of this lad." Janine shuddered. "It's awful all this death and suffering. When will it ever end?" "It started when man first stood up on his hind legs, it's not going to end tomorrow. Now let's talk about dinner tonight, I'll pick you up at your flat at seven, okay." She telephoned him at the armoury a little before five o'clock.

"Craig, don't come for me this evening." "Why not?" "I won't be there." "What has happened?" "Roly is back from the bush." Craig did a little work on the foredeck of the yacht, placing the cleats for the jib sheets, but when it was too dark, he went below, and wandered around disconsolately. She had left her dark glasses on the table beside the bunk, and a lipstick on the edge of the wash-basin. The saloon still smelled of her perfume, and the two wineglasses stood together in the sink.

"I think I will get drunk," he decided, but he had no tonic, and gin with plain water tasted awful. He tipped it into the sink, and put the "Pastoral" on the tape, but the images it conjured up were too painful. He hit the "stop" button.

He picked Sir Ralph's leather-bound journal off the table, and flicked through it. He had read it twice, he should have gone out to King's Lynn at the weekend, Bawu would have been expecting him to come for the next journal in the series. He started to read it again, and it was an immediate opiate for the loneliness.

After a while he searched in the drawer of the chart-table and found the ruled exercise book which he had used for drawing the layout of the cabins and galley. He tore out the used pages, and there were still over a hundred unused sheets. He sat down at the saloon table with an HB pencil from the navigation set, and stared at the first empty sheet for almost five minutes. Then he wrote. "Africa crouched low on the horizon, like a lion in ambush, tawny and gold in the early sunlight, seared by the cold of the Benguela Current.

"Robyn Ballantyne stood by the ship's rail and stared towards it-" Craig re-read what he had written, and felt a strange excitement, something he had never experienced before. He could actually see the young woman. He could see the way she stood with her chin lifted eagerly and the wind snapping and tangling her hair.

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