Elephant Song - Smith Wilbur - Страница 102

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Red dust blew in a slow sullen cloud out across the blue lake waters, carried on the mountain breeze from up-country.  Let me have a look through your telephoto lens, he asked Bonny, and she handed him the camera.  Swiftly Daniel zoomed the lens to full power and picked up the approaching column of vehicles.  Army trucks, he told her.  And transporters I'd say those were bulldozers on the transporters.  He handed her back the camera, and Bonny studied the approaching column.

Some kind of army exercise?  she guessed.  Are we allowed to film it?

Anywhere else in Africa I wouldn't take the chance of pointing a camera at anything military, but here we've got President Taffari's personal firman.  Shoot away!  Quickly Bonny set up the light tripod she used only for longrange telephoto shots and zoomed in on the approaching military convoy.

Meanwhile, Daniel moved to the edge of the cliff and looked down on the beach.  Captain Kajo and the sailors from the gunboat were stretched out on the sand.  Kajo was probably sleeping off the previous evening's debauch.  Where he lay he was out of sight of the village.

Daniel strolled back to watch Bonny at work.

The convoy was already approaching the outskirts of the village.  A mob of children and stray dogs ran out to greet it.

The children skipped along beside the trucks, laughing and waving, while the dogs yapped hysterically.  The vehicles drew up in the open ground in the centre of the village which was both soccer pitch and village square.

Soldiers in camouflage uniform, armed with AK 47 rifles, jumped down and formed up into their platoons on the soccer ground.

A Hita officer climbed on to the cab of the leading truck and began to harangue the villagers through a bull-horn.  The sound of his electronically distorted voice carried intermittently to the crest of the cliff on which Daniel was standing.  He lost the sense of some of the Swahili as the breeze rose and fell, but the gist of it was clear.

The officer was accusing the villagers of harbouring political dissidents, obstructing the economic and agricultural reforms of the new government, and engaging in counter-revolutionary activities.

While he was speaking, a squad of soldiers trotted down to the beach and rounded up the children and fishermen there.  They herded them back to the village square.

The villagers were becoming agitated.  The children hid amongst the skirts of the women and the men were protesting and gesticulating at the officer on the cab of the truck.  Now soldiers began moving through the village, ordering people out of the thatched huts.  One old man tried to resist being dragged from his home, and a soldier clubbed him with the butt of an AK 47.  He fell in a huddle on the dusty earth and they left him there and moved on, kicking open the doors of the huts and shouting at the occupants.  On the beach another group of soldiers was meeting the incoming fishing fleet and prodding the fishermen ashore at bayonet point.

Bonny never looked up from the viewfinder of her camera.  This is great stuff!  God, this is the real thing.  This is Emmy Award territory, I kid you nodDaniel did not reply.  Her gloating excitement should not have offended him as much as it did.  He was " a journalist himself.  He understood the need to find fresh and provocative material to stir the jaded emotions of a television audience reared on a diet of turmoil and violence, but what they were witnessing here was as obscene as scenes of SS troopers clearing out the ghettoes of Europe.

The soldiers were beginning to load the fisherfolk on to the waiting trucks, women were screaming and trying to find their own children in the throng.  Some villagers had managed to collect a pathetic bundle of possessions, but most of them were empty-handed.

The two yellow bulldozers rolled down off their low trailer beds with engines pulsing and blue diesel smoke blowing from the exhaust stacks.

One of them swung in a tight circle with a track locked, and lowered the massive frontal blade.  Gleaming in the afternoon sunlight the blade sliced into the wall of the nearest but and the thatched roof collapsed.

Beauty!  Bonny murmured.  I couldn't have staged it better.

That was an incredible shot!  The women were wailing and ululating, that peculiar chilling sound of African grief.  One of the men broke away and ran towards the cover of the nearest field of sorghum.  A soldier shouted a warning at him, but he put his head down and ran faster.  A short burst of automatic rifle-fire popped like a string of fire-crackers and the man collapsed and rolled in the dust and lay still.

A woman screamed and ran towards the fallen body carrying an infant strapped in a shawl on her back and an older child in her arms.  A soldier barred her path with a bayoneted rifle and turned her back towards the truck.  I got it!

Bonny exulted.  The whole thing.  The shooting and all.  It's in the can.

Shit, this is great!  The soldiers were drilled and ruthless.  It all went very quickly.  Within half an hour the entire populace of the village had been rounded up, except for the fishermen still out on the lake.  The first truck, fully loaded, pulled away, heading back the way it had come.

The huts were collapsing one after the other as the two bulldozers moved down the rows.  God, I hope I don't run out of film, Bonny muttered anxiously.  This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance.  Daniel had not spoken since the operation had begun.  He was part of Africa.  He had seen other villages wiped out.  He remembered the guerrilla camp in Mozambique.  Since then he had seen Renamo rebels work over a village, and he had witnessed forced removals by the minions of apartheid in South Africa, but he had never grown hardened to the suffering of the African people.  He was sick to his guts as he watched the rest of the little drama unfold.

The remaining fishing-boats ran in unsuspectingly to the beach, where the soldiers were waiting to drag the crews ashore.  The last truckload of villagers rolled away in a column of red dust, and as soon as it was out of sight, one of the yellow bulldozers waddled down on to the beach and swept the abandoned fishing-boats into a pile, like firewood kindling.

Four soldiers brought the body of the old man and the one who had tried to escape, carrying them by ankles and wrists, dead heads lolling backwards.  They tossed them on to the funeral pyre of shattered hulls and torn sails.  One of the soldiers hurled a lighted torch of thatch on to the top of the pile.  The flames took hold and burned so fiercely that the soldiers were driven backwards, holding up their hands to protect their faces.

The bulldozers crawled back and forth over the remains of the huts, flattening them under the steel tracks.  A whistle shrilled and the soldiers formed up quickly and re-embarked into the waiting troop-carriers.  The yellow bulldozers crawled back on to their transporters, and the entire column wound away.

After they had gone, the only sound was the hushed whisper of the evening breeze along the cliff face and the distant crackle of the flames.  Well, Daniel tried to keep his tone neutral, the site is clear for the new casino.  Taffari's investment in happiness for his people is secure.  . . his voice broke.  He could not go on.  The bastard!  he whispered.  The murderous bloody bastard.  He found that he was shaking with anger and outrage.  It required an immense effort of will to bring his emotions under control.  He strode to the edge of the cliff overlooking the beach.  The gunboat was still anchored out in the deeper water in the middle of the bay and the Zodiac was drawn up on the beach with one of the soldiers guarding it, but Captain Kajo and the other sailor were no longer asleep on the sand.  it was obvious that they had been awakened by the sound of gunfire and activity in the destroyed village.

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