The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 143

"Tomorrow you are going in," she said, and took the cloth cap from her head.

He had never seen her hair before. It fell to her waist, as thick and black and liquid as a spill of crude oil.

"You will not see me again, "she said, and unbuttoned the front of her uniform. Her body was the colour of butter, hard and immensely powerful, but what startled and intrigued Tungata was that her pubic hair was as straight as that upon her head, without any kinking or curling. It excited him inordinately.

"Come," she said, and led him to the thin mattress on the dirt floor of the hut.

They did not use the drifts on the return but they crossed the Zambezi in dugout canoes at the point where the river flowed into the immensity of Lake Kariba. In the moonlight the stark silhouettes of the drowned trees were silver and tortured as the limbs of lepers against the starry sky.

There were forty-eight of them in the cadre, under a political commissar and two young but battle-tempered captains. Tungata was one of the four section-leaders with ten men under him. Each of them, even the commissar, carried a sixty-kilo load beneath which they toiled like pregnant hunchbacks. There was no place for food in their packs, so they lived on lizards and bush rats, and the half-incubated eggs of wild birds. They competed with the hyena and vulture at lion kills for the putrefying scraps, and at night they visited the kraals of the black peasant farmers and emptied the grain bins.

They crossed the Chizarira Hills and struck southwards through trackless forest and waterless wilderness until they hit the Shangani river. They followed it southwards still, passing within a few kilometres of the lonely monument in the mopani forest which marks the spot where Allan Wilson and his patrol made their last heroic but futile stand against the impi of Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, brother of the last Matabele. king, Lobengula.

When they came to the lands of the white farmers, their work began. On the dirt roads they laid the heavy land mines that they had carried so far upon their backs. Freed of this onerous burden, they attacked the isolated white homesteads.

They hit four farmhouses in a single week, secure in the knowledge that the security forces were no longer moving to the rescue of a beleaguered homestead during the hours of darkness because they were aware that the attackers mined all the approach roads before commencing an attack. So the guerrillas had all night to finish the job and escape.

The technique was highly developed by this time. At dusk they poisoned the dogs and cut the ring-wire. Then they fired rockets into the windows and doorways and rushed the breaches they had made. At two farms they were held off by a dogged defence, but at the other two they penetrated. The horrors that they left behind them were a deliberate provocation to the rescuers who would come in at first light. What they found might drive the security forces to take out their shock and rage and frustration on the local black population, and in doing so drive them into the ZIPRA camp.

At last, after six weeks in the field, low on ammunition and explosives, they began to pull back, laying ambushes as they withdrew.

They abandoned the first ambush after two fruitless days. However, at the second ambush on a remote country road, they were lucky.

They trapped a white farmer who was rushing his wife, suffering from a peritonitis following a burst appendix, to the local hospital.

The farmer had his two teenage daughters in the vehicle with him. He almost broke through the ambush, but as the armoured vehicle passed Tungata's position, he jumped up and ran into the road behind it. He hit it in the soft rear section with an armour-piercing RPG7 rocket at point-blank range.

The farmer and his eldest daughter were killed in the blast, but his sick wife and the younger daughter were still alive. The political commissar let the "boys" have the dying women. They queued up and took them in the road beside the shattered vehicle, one after the other.

When Tungata did not join the line, the commissar condescended to explain, "When a honey guide leads you to the hive, you must leave him a piece of the comb. Since the beginning of history, rape has always been one of the rewards of the conquerors. It makes them fight better, and it will madden the enemy." They left the road that night and moved back into the hills, back towards the lake and sanctuary.

Ballantyne's Scouts caught them in the middle of the following afternoon. There was very little warning. just a tiny Cessna 210 spotter plane circling high overhead, and while the commissars and the captains were still shouting the orders to deploy and set up a perimeter, the Scouts came in.

The delivery vehicle was an ancient twin-engined Dakota that had seen service in the Western Desert during World War II. It was painted with grey non-reflective paint to thwart the infra-red seekers of SAM-7 missiles. It flew so low that it seemed to scrape the ragged rocky crests of the kopjes, and as its shadow momentarily blotted out the sun, the fighting men spewed out of the gaping belly-port.

The olive-green umbrellas of their parachutes popped open only seconds before they hit the ground. As the silk flared, they were down. They landed on their feet, and even before the parachutes settled softly in billowing folds, they had snapped their harnesses and were running forward, firing.

"The commissar and both veteran captains were killed within the first three minutes, and the Scouts swept forward, rolling up the green panic-stricken guerrillas against the foot of the kopje. Tungata, acting without conscious thought, gathered the men closest to him and led them in a desperate counter-attack down a shallow don ga that bisected the line of Scouts.

He heard the Scout commander give the order on the bull-horn.

"Green and red, hold on your position, blue, clean out that gulley."

The distorted voice echoed against the hills, but Tungata recognized it. He had last heard it at Khami Mission on the night Constance was murdered. It turned him cold "and clear thinking.

He judged his moment finely, and then pulled out of the don ga under the whipping crackle of the FNs. His calm steadied the men with him, and he started the running defence as Wan Lok had taught him.