A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 176

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He also hated to admit failure or weakness to one he knew would exploit it ruthlessly, but still he craved and lusted after that fabulous machine.

"The help of a brother is always welcome," he contradicted pleasantly, "especially a brother who rides the skies in his own hen shaw " He went on swiftly, "Perhaps there is some small service that I can offer in return for your help?"

"Crafty rogue," China thought, admiring his style. "He knows I haven't come here out of compassion. He knows I want something." And both of them retreated, in the African manner, behind another screen of pleasantries and trivialities, coming back only circuitously and almost flirtatiously to the main subject.

"I laid a trap for Frelimo," Tippoo Tip boasted. "I pulled back from the Save forests." In truth he had been driven out of those infinitely valuable indigenous forests only after hard fighting, in the face of the most determined Frelimo attacks since the beginning of the long campaign.

"That was cunning of you," China agreed, letting the razor edge of sarcasm flash in his tone. "What a trap to leave the forests to Frehmo and how stupid of them to fall for it."

The Save forests were a treasure house-seventy-foot-tall lead woods also known as ivory tusk trees for their dense, finely grained timber; magnificent Rhodesian mahogany, which yielded logs five feet in diameter; and the most rare and valuable of all African trees, the tamboti, or African sandalwood, with its richly figured and scented timber.

Probably nowhere on the continent was there such a concentration of these precious hardwoods. They constituted the last natural resource of this ravaged land. First the great elephant herds had been wiped out, then the rhinoceros and the buffalo had been machine-gunned from the air. The Soviets and North Koreans had plundered the vast natural prawn beds and fisheries of the rich warm Mozambican current along the eastern coast, while foreign adventurers with Frefimo licenses and approval had decimated the crocodile population of Lake Cabora Bossa. Only the forests still remained intact.

Even more so than the other newly independent African states, the government of Mozambique was desperately short of foreign exchange. For over a decade they had been fighting a drawn-out guerrilla war that had bled their economy white. Those forests were the last assets they had to sell for hard cash.

"They have moved in with labor battalions, twenty, perhaps thirty thousand slaves," Tippoo Tip told China.

I'So many?" China asked with interest. "Where did they find them?"

They have swept the last peasants off the land. They have raided the refugee camps, gathered the vagrants and the unemployed from the slumsAand streets of Maputo. They call it the "Democratic People'# Full Employment Programme," and the men and women work, from dawn to sundown for ten Frelimo escudos a day, and the single meal they are fed costs them fifteen Frelimo escudos." Tippoo Tip threw back his head and laughed, more in admiration than amusement. "Sometimes Frelimo is not so stupid," he admitted. "The labor battalions pay five escudos a day for the privilege of cutting the government timber, a most admirable arrangement"

"And you have allowed Frelimo to do this?" China asked. It was not the plight of the labor battalions that concerned him. A single sixty-foot log of tamboti was valued at approximately fifty thousand U.S. dollars, and the forests extended for hundreds of thousands of acres.

"Of course I allow them to do this," Tippoo Tip agreed. "They cannot move the timber out until the roads and the railway are reconstructed, and until then they are piling the logs in dumps along the old line of rail. My scouts count each log that is added to the stockpile." Tippoo Tip took a grubby plastic-covered notebook from the pocket of his kudu-skin vest and showed China the down in blue ballpoint pen on the back figures he had neatly noted page China kept his face impassive as he read the total, but his eyes glittered behind the gold-rimmed sunglasses. That sum of dollars was sufficient to finance the war chests of both armies for a further five years, enough to buy the alliance of nations or to elevate a warlord to the estate of president-for-life over the entire small nation.

"The time is almost ready for me to return to the forests of Save and collect the harvest Frelimo has gathered in, ready for me."

"How would you export this harvest? A log of tamboti weighs a hundred tons. Who would buy it from you?"

Tippoo Tip clapped his hands and shouted to one of his aides, who was squatting in the shade of the building across the street.

The guerrilla jumped up and hurried to where the two generals sat.

He knelt to unroll a field map on the cracked concrete floor of the veranda between their stools and placed lumps of broken concrete on the corners of the map to hold it flat. Tippoo Tip and China leaned forward to study it.

"Here are the forests." Tippoo Tip traced out the boundaries of the vast area between the Save and Limpopo rivers, directly south of their own position. "Frelfino have set up their timber yards here and here and here."

"Go on," China encouraged him.

"The most southerly dump is only thirty miles from the north bank of the Limpopo, thirty miles from the South African border."

"The South Africans have disavowed us-they have signed an accord with Chissano and Frelimo," China pointed out.

"Treaties and accords are merely pieces of paper." Tippoo Tip waved them aside. "Here we are discussing half a billion U.S.

dollars" worth of timber. I have already received assurances from our erstwhile allies in the south that if I can make good delivery, they will arrange transport to their border and payment in Lisbon or Zurich." He paused. "Frelimo has cut and stacked the goods for me. It remains only for me to collect and deliver."

"And my new helicopter gunship will assist your collection?"

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