Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur - Страница 118

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"Let's hope they make nothing of us there must be quite a bit of light aircraft traffic around here." She glanced at her wristwatch. "Expected time of arrival, forty minutes."

"All right," Craig said. "Let's go over it one more time.

You drop Sarah and me, then clear out again as quickly as possible. Back to the pan. Reload and refuel. Two days from now you come back. If there is a smoke-signal, yot, land. No signal and you head back to the pan. Give it tw( more days and then the last trip. If there is no smoke signal on the second trip, that's it. You head out and don't come back." She reached out and took his hand. "Craig, don't even say it. Please, darling, come back to me." They held hands for the rest of the trip, except for the brief moments when she needed both for the controls.

"There it is!" The Chizarira river was a dark green python across the vast brown land, and there was a glint of water through the trees.

"Zambezi Waters just up there." They were keeping well clear of the camps that they had built with so much loving labour, but both of them stared longingly upstream to where the dreaming blue hills studded the line of the horizon.

Sally-Anne dropped lower and still lower until she was shaving the treetops, and then she turned slowly back in a wide circle, keeping the hills between them and the buildings on Zambezi Waters.

"There it is," Craig called, and pointed out under the par t wingtip, and they had a glimpse of white beads at the edge of the trees.

"They are still there! The bones of Craig's poached rhinoceros had been picked over by the scavengers and bleached by the sun.

Sally-Anne, ran her Jnding-check, and then lined tip for the nsrrow strip of grassland along the head of the gorge, where she had landed before, "Just pray the wart hog and ant-bear haven't been digging around, she murmured, and the overloaded Cessna wallowed sluggishly and the stall warning bleeped and flashed intermittently at the reduced power setting.

Sally-Anne dropped in steeply over the tree-tops and touched down with a jarring thud. The Cessna pitched and bounced over the rough ground, but maximum safe braking and the coarse grass wrapping the undercarriage pulled them up quickly, and Sally-Anne let out her breath.

Thank you, Lord." They offloaded with frenzied haste, piling everything in a heap and spreading over it the green nylon nets designed for shading young plants from the sun that Craig had found in Francistown.

Sally' Anne and Craig looked at each other Then miserably.

"Oh God, I hate this," she said.

"Me too so go! Go quickly, damn it." They kissed and she broke away and ran back to the cockpit. She taxied to the end of the clearing, flattening the grass, and then came back at full throttle in her own tracks. The lightened aircraft leapt into the air, and the last he saw of her was her pale face in the side windowing back towards him, and then the tree-tops cut them turn off from each other.

Craig waited until the last vibration of the engine died away and the silence of the bush closed in again. Then he picked up the rifle and haversack and slung them over his shoulders. He looked at Sarah. She wore denims and blue canvas shoes. She carried the food bag and water bottles, with a Tokarev bolstered on her belt.

"Ready?" She nodded, fell in behind him, and stayed with the forcing pace he set. They reached the kopie in the early part of the afternoon, and from the summit Craig looked towards the camps of Zambezi Waters on the river.

This would be the dangerous part now, but he lit the then, taking Sarah with him, moved out signal fire and and set up an ambush on the approach path, just in case the smoke signal brought unwanted visitors.

He and Sarah lay up in good cover, and neither of them moved nor spoke for three hours. Only their eyes were sweeping the slopes below and above and the bush busy, all around.

Even so, they were taken unawares. The voice was a harsh, raw whisper in Sindebele, close very close by.

"Ha! Kuphela. So you have brought my money." Comrade Lookout's scarred visage peered at them. He had crept up to within ten paces without alerting them. "I thought you had forgotten us." but hard and dangerous work,"

"No money for you Craig told him.

here were three men with Comrade Lookout, lean, wolflike men. They extinguished the signal fire and then spread back into the bush in an extended scouting order, that would cover their march.

"We must go," Comrade Lookout explained. "Here in the open the Shana kanka press us like hunting dogs. Since we last met, we have lost many good men. Comrade Dollar has been taken by them.."

"Yes." Craig remembered him, beaten and bedraggled, giving evidence against him on that terrible night at King's Lynn.

They marched until two hours after darkness, northwards into the bad and broken land along the escarpment of the great river. The*way was cleared for them and u guarded by the sco & who were always invisible in the forest ahead. Only their bird calls guided and reassured them.

They came at last to the guerrilla camp. There were women at the small smokeless cooking-fires and one of them ran to embrace Sarah as soon as she recognized her.

"She is my aunt's youngest daughter," Sarah explained.

She and Craig spoke only Sindebele to each other now.

The camp was an uncomfo series of rude caves, hacked out rtable and joyless place, a of the steep bank of a dried water-course and screened by the overhang of the trees. It had a temporary air about it. There were no luxuries and no items of equipment that could not be packed within minutes and carried on a man's back. The guerrilla women z were as unsmiling as their men.

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