A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 181

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"General Tippoo Tip's men," Alphonso muttered. "He must be helping General China. There are men waiting for us on every path."

However, after midnight their luck changed for the better.

Matatu came across a well-used path running almost directly southward and discovered that only a short time before a large detachment of men had passed along it in the same direction they were headed.

"We'll use their spoor to cover our own." Sean seized the opportunity and put Matatu in the lead, with Claudia following him, while he and Alphonso took the drag, deliberately treading over the small, distinctive foot marks of the leading pair, obliterating them and losing them in the heavy sign the party of Tippoo Tip s men had left behind them.

They hurried along the path until Matatu's sharp ears picked out the tiny sounds the Renamo patrol was making as it moved forward in the silence of the night. Then they moderated their pace and trailed them at a discreet distance, letting the patrol run interference for them.

Keeping in contact with the enemy, maintaining the strict interval that was the fine between discovery and concealment, was a delicate and eerie business for which they had to rely completely on Matatu's hearing and night sight, but they were moving at almost double the pace they could have hoped for without this assistance.

A little before dawn the Renarno patrol stopped just ahead of them, and they crouched in the darkness and listened to them setting up an ambush on both sides of the pathway. Once the ambush party was settled in, Matatu led them on another detour to meet the path again further on, and they struck out southward once again.

"We have covered twenty-five miles by my reckoning," Sean murmured with grim satisfaction as the first delicate light of dawn paled the eastern stars. "But we cannot risk moving further in daylight. The country is crawling with Renamo. Matatu, find us a place to lie up for the day."

During that night march, they had moved into an area of wet vlei ground on the approaches to the Save River, and now Matatu led them deliberately into the tall swamp grass. They waded knee deep across the flood plains that guarded the river, picking their way between shallow open lagoons from which the mosquitoes rose in gray clouds. The water covered their tracks and Sean brought up the rear of the file, meticulously closing the swamp grass and brushing it upright behind him to disguise their passing.

A few hundred yards off the path Matatu discovered a small dry island only inches above the level of the floodwaters, and as he stepped onto it there was a violent upheaval in the reeds as a heavy body rushed through it.

Claudia screamed with shock, certain they had blundered into another murderous Renamo ambush. However, Matatu whipped out his skinning knife and with a shrill war cry dived into the grass; there was a wild commotion as he wrestled with a writhing, scaly body twice his own size.

Sean rushed forward to help him, and between them they clubbed and stabbed the creature and dragged it out of the grass onto the island. Claudia shuddered with horror as she realized it was a huge gray lizard, almost seven feet long, with a speckled yellow belly and a long whip of a tail that still twitched and lashed from side to side.

With squeaks of glee Matatu immediately began to peel off the scaly skin.

"What is it?"

"Matatu's favorite delicacy, leguan." Sean whetted the blade of his trench knife on thQ,palm of his hand and then helped Matatu butcher the monitor lizard.

The flesh from the tail was white as filets of Dover sole, but Claudia grimaced when Sean offered her a strip.

"You and Matatu would eat your own offspring," she accused.

"That from the girl who dines regularly on mo pane caterpillars!"

"Sean, I couldn't, I really couldn't force myself. Not raw."

"We haven't any dry wood for a fire, and you have eaten Japanese sashimi, haven't you? You told me you loved it."

"That's raw fish, not raw lizard!"

"Same difference. Think of it as a kind of African sashimi," he coaxed her gently. When at last she gave in and tasted it, she found it surprisingly palatable, and her hunger overcame her squeamishness.

For once there was no shortage of water, and they filled their bellies with sweet white meat and floodwater, then curled up on their blankets. With the tall swamp grass swaying over their heads to protect them from the burning sunlight and the eyes in the sky, Claudia felt secure and gave in to her fatigue.

Once in the middle of the day, she woke and lay in Sean's arms to listen to the sound of the searching Hind.

"China is working the riverbanks ahead of us," Sean whispered.

The sound of the Hind's turbos rose and fell as it turned on each leg of the search pattern, and Claudia felt her stomach muscles knotting and contracting as it grew louder, passing only a short distance south of where they lay, and then finally faded into silence.

"He's gone." Sean hugged her. "Get some sleep.

She woke again with a sense of panic on her, but when she tried to MO ve she found herself held down firmly and the palm of someone's hand clamped painfully across her mouth. She turned her eyes sideways, and Sean's face was close to hers.

"Quiet!" he breathed in her ear. "Not a peep out of you."

When she nodded, he released her and rolled over to look out through the screen of swamp grass. She did the same and peered out across the shallow waters of the lagoon.

At first she saw nothing. Then she heard someone singing. It was a sweet girlish treble softly piping a Shangane love song, and with it came the sound of light footfalls in the shallow lagoon water.

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