A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 172

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Matatu was at the base of the tree, sixty feet below where he sat. He gesticulated up at Sean.

"Listen!" he signaled. "Danger!" Sean felt his pulse trip and accelerate. Matatu did not use the danger signal lightly. He cocked his head and listened, but it was almost a full minute before he heard it. As a bushman Sean's senses, especially eyesight and hearing, were honed and acute, but compared to Matatu he was a blind mute.

As he heard and recognized the sound at last, even though it was faint and far away, Sean's pulse jumped again and he swiveled round in the fork of the branch and looked back northward, in the direction from which they had come.

Apart from a few high streaks of cirrostratus cloud, the morning sky was empty blue. Sean put up his binoculars and searched it, looking low along the horizon, close to the tops of the tall hardwood trees. The distant sound, increasing in volume, gave him a direction in which to search until suddenly the shape appeared in the field of his binoculars and he felt the slide of dread in his guts.

Like some gigantic and noxious insect, the Hind cruised, humpbacked, nose low, above the forest tops. It was still some miles distant but coming on directly toward Sean's treetop perch.

General China sat in the flight engineer's seat under the forward canopy of the Hind and looked ahead through the armored windshield. This early in the morning the air had a aystalline lucidity through which the rays of the low sun lit every detail of the landscape below him with a radiant golden light.

Although he had already flown many hours in the captured machine, he had not yet grown accustomed to the extraordinary sense of power his seat under the forward canopy aroused in him.

The earth and everything in it lay below him; he could look down on mankind and know he held the power of LIFE and death over them.

He reached out now and gripped the control lever of the Gatling cannon. The pistol grip, fitted neatly into his right hand, and as the heel of his hand depressed the cocking plunger, the remote aiming screen fit on the control panel directly in front of him. As he moved the control lever, traversing, depressing, or elevating, the multiple barrels of the cannon faithfully duplicated each movement and the image of the target was reflected on the screen.

With the slightest pressure of his forefinger he could send a dense stream of cannonihell hosing down to obliterate any target he chose. By simply troving a switch on the weapons console, he could select any oftlTe Hind's alternative armaments, the rockets in their pods or the banks of missiles.

It had not taken China long to master the complex weapons control system, for the basic training he had received in the Siberian guerrilla training camp so long ago, at the beginning of the Rhodesian war of liberation, had stood him in good stead down the years. However, this was the most awe-inspiring firepower he had ever had at his fingertips and the most exhilarating vantage point from which to deploy it.

At a single word of command he could soar aloft like an eagle in a thermal or plunge like a stooping peregrine, he could hover on high or dance lightly on the leafy tops of the forest. The power this machine had bestowed upon him was truly godlike.

At first there had been serious problems to surmount. He could not work with the captured Russian pilot and crew. They were sullen and unreliable. Despite the threat of horrible death that hung over them, he realized they would seize the first opportunity to escape or to sabotage his precious new Hind. One of the Russian ground crew need only drain the lubricant from a vital part of the machine, loosen a bolt, or burn out a section of wiring, and neither China nor any of his Renamo would have the technical expertise to recognize the sabotage attempt until it was too late. In addition, the Russian pilot had from the very beginning made communication between them difficult. He had played dumb and deliberately misunderstood China's commands. Trading on the knowledge that China could not do without him, he had become progressively more defiant and recalcitrant.

China had solved that problem swiftly. Within hours of the destruction of the Russian squadron and the capture of the Hind, he had radioed a long coded message to a station two hundred miles further north across the national boundary between Mozambique and Malawi. The message had been received and decoded at the headquarters of a large tea plantation on the slopes of Mlanje Mountain, the proprietor of which was a member of the central committee of the Mozambique National Resistance and the deputy director of Renamo intelligence. He had telexed China's report and requests directly to the director general of the central committee at his headquarters in Lisbon, and within six hours a crack Portuguese military helicopter pilot with many thousands of hours flying experience and two skilled aeronautical engineers were aboard a TAP airliner bound for Africa. From Nairobi they changed to an Air Malawi commercial flight scheduled directly for Blantyre, the capital of Malawi. There a driver and Land-Rover from the tea plantation were waiting to whisk them out to the private airstrip on the tea estate.

That night the tea company's twin-engine Beechcraft made a midnight crossing of Lake Cabora Bossa, a perilous journey the pilot had undertaken many times before, and a single red flare guided him to the secret bush strip General China's men had hacked out of the wilderness just west of the Gorongosa Mountains.

A double line of Renamo guerrillas, each holding aloft a burning torch of paraffin-soaked rags, provided a flare path. The Beechcraft pilot landed smoothly and without shutting down his engines deposited his passengers, turned and taxied back to the end of the rough airstrip, then roared away, climbed clear, and turned northward again into the night.

There had been a time not long ago when such a complicated route for bringing in men and materiel would not have been necessary. Only a year previously China s request would have been radioed southward, rather than north, and the delivery vehicle, instead of a small private aircraft, would have been a Puma helicopter with South African air force markings.

In those days when the Marxist President of Frehmo, Samara Machel, had hosted the guerrillas of the African National Congress and allowed them to use Mozambique as a staging post for their limpet mine and car bomb terrorist attacks on the civilian population of South Africa, the South Africans had retaliated by giving their full support to the Rename, forces that were attempting to topple Machel's Frefirno government.

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