The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 167

With a strange reluctance, Roland walked heavily towards them.

The enemy had used his woman. She was one thing that was sacred. How many of them? The thought made him check, and he had to force himself to go on to where she lay on the stretcher. He looked down at her.

Only her face showed above the blanket. It was grotesquely swollen, and her mouth was a raw red ruin. Her once lustrous hair was stiff with filth and dried blood, but her eyes were clear. The drug had driven back the madness, and now she was looking up at him. Only the eyes were the same, dark indigo blue.

Painfully her damaged lips framed a word, but no sound came. It was his name she was trying to say.

"Roland!" And his revulsion rushed upon him, he could not hold it back. How many of them had taken her that way, a dozen, more? She had been his woman, but that had been destroyed. He tried to fight it, but he felt nauseated, and quick cold sweat chilled his face. He tried to force himself to stoop over her, to kiss that terribly battered face, but he could not. He could not speak nor move, and slowly the light of recognition went out in her eyes. It was replaced by that dull empty look he had seen before, and then she closed the livid swollen lids over them and rolled her head slowly away from him.

"Take good care of her," Roland muttered hoarsely, and they lifted the stretcher into the helicopter. Paul Henderson turned to him, his face twisted with pity and helpless anger, and he laid his hand on Roland's arm.

"Roly, it wasn't her fault," he said.

"If you say anything more, I might kill you." Roland's voice was thickened and coarsened by disgust and hatred. Paul Henderson turned from him and clambered into the machine. Roland made a wind-up signal to the pilot in the bubble windscreen above him, and the big clumsy aircraft lifted noisily into the sky.

"Sergeant-Major," Roland called. "Take, the spoor!" and he did not look back as the helicopter rose high into the pink dawn and then swung away southwards.

They went in deep formation, so that if they ran into an ambush, the tail could circle and outflank the attackers to free the head.

They went at storming speed, much too fast for safety, going hard as marathon runners. Within the first hour Roland had ordered his Scouts to strip their packs. They abandoned everything but the radio set, their weapons and water-bottles and fir staid kits, and Roland pushed the pace still harder.

He and Esau Gondele took turns at point, the one dropping back each hour as the other came forward. They lost the spoor twice in stony ground but each time picked it up on the first cast ahead. It was running true and straight, and they had quickly made the number of the chase as nine men. Within two hours Roland knew each of them as individuals by the spoor they left behind them, the one with a nick in his left heel, flat-foot, long-one with a gap of over a metre in his stride, and each of the others with more subtle characteristics to differentiate them. He knew them, and he hungered for them.

"They are going for the drifts," Esau Gondele grunted as he came up and took over the point from Roland. "We should radio ahead and set a patrol for them." "There are twelve drifts, forty miles. A thousand men wouldn't do it." Roland wanted them for himself, all nine of them.

One look at his face and Esau Gondele realized that. He picked up the run of the spoor. They were crossing an open glade of golden grass.

The chase had left a sweep line through the grass the stems still bent in the direction of their flight, and the sunlight reflected at a different intensity from these. It was like following a highway. They went down it at a swinging easy run, and ahead of him Esau Gondele saw some of the grass stems springing upright again. They were that close already, and it wasn't yet noon. They had cut at least three hours off the lead that the ZIPRA cadres had upon them.

"We can catch them before the river we can have them for ourselves," Esau Gondele thought fiercely, and resisted the temptation to lengthen his stride. They could move no faster, an inch more on his stride would put a term on their endurance, whereas at this pace they could run the sun down and the moon up.

At two in the afternoon they lost the spoor again. They were on a long low ridge of black ironstone, and the ground took no prints. As soon as Esau Gondele lost contact, the line stopped dead, and went into a defensive attitude, only Roland moved up and knelt out on his flank, keeping good separation so that a single burst could not take them both.

"How does it look?" Roland brushed the tiny mopani bees from his eyes and nostrils. They-were maddeningly persistent in their hunt for moisture.

"I think they are going straight in." "If they are going to twist, this is the place to do it," Roland answered, he wiped his face on his forearm and the greasy camouflage paint came away in a dirty brown and green smear.

"If we cast ahead again we may lose half an hour," Esau Gondele pointed out, "three kilometres." "If we run blind we may lose more than that, we may never make them again." Roland looked around thoughtfully at the mopani forest along the ridge. "I don't like it," he decided at last. "We will make a cast." The two of them circled out beyond the ridge, and as Esau Gondele had warned, it cost them half an hour of their gain, but they did not make the cut. There was no spoor on the direct line that they had been following, the chase had turned.

"They can only have followed the ridge, we have a one only choice. East is away from the drifts, I don't believe they would chance it. We will run the western ridge blind," Roland decided, and they turned and went on harder than before, for they were rested and they had the lost half-hour to make up. Roland ran with doubt gnawing his guts, and rocky black ironstone crunching under his boots.

Esau Gondele was far out on his right flank, on the softer earth below the ridge, watching for the point where the chase left it and turned northwards towards the river again if it ever did.

Roland could not cover the southern edge of the ridge as well, the ironstone belt was too wide. It would mean splitting his meagre forces. The south side was his blind side. If they had doubled, or turned eastwards, then he had lost them. The thought of that was unbearable. He clenched his jaws until they ached and it felt as though his teeth might splinter, and he checked his watch they had been on the ridge forty-eight minutes. He was making the conversion of time to distance in his head when he saw the birds.