A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 110

It was coated with a thick layer of red dust. He yanked open the door on the driver's side and sneezed in the dust, but saw with relief that the key was still in the ignition.

He reached in and turned it. Nothing happened. The ignition light stayed dark and the needles on the dashboard instruments never flickered.

"I disconnected the batteries," Alphonso told him.

Sean grunted. "Bright lad, but how the hell did you know to do that?"

"Before the war I was a bus driver in Vila da Monica," Alphonso explained. It was odd to think' he had ever had such a prosaic occupation.

"All right," Sean said. "Then you can help me get this one started. Is there a toolbox?"

Each of the trucks w.& equipped with two spare tires, a hand pump, a toolbox, a to aulin, and a long-range fuel tank. Once rp Sean had reconnect8d the battery of the first truck, there was sufficient charge to produce a dull red glow in the ignition lamp on the dashboard and to raise the needle of the fuel gauge to the "half" position but insufficient to kick the engine over.

"Find the crank handle," Sean ordered. It was secured behind the passenger seat in the cab. Two hefty Shanganes swung the engine over with such gusto that it fired and stuttered, then burst into a steady roar. Thick blue exhaust smoke filled the cavern, and Sean lifted his foot off the accelerator pedal. Two of the tires were flat and had to be pumped by hand. While this was being done, the troopers cleared the last of the rocks and tree trunks from the mouth of the cave and with the transmission in four-wheel drive Sean reversed sharply down the incline and bounced and jolted over the rough ground.

When the truck hung up on the boulders of the riverbank and the wheels spun without purchase, twenty men flung their combined weight on it and by brute force shoved it through. The Unimog crashed over the lip of the bank and into the river-bed.

Sean drove it clear and parked under the opposite cliffs. He left the engine running to charge the depleted battery, and they climbed back to the cavern and started work on the second truck.

Apart from flat tires and batteries, they found no serious defects in any of the vehicles. One after the other, they coaxed the engines to life, then manhandled them down into the river-bed. It was the middle of the afternoon by the time all three trucks were lined up on the white river sand.

"Get the men to change uniforms now," Sean ordered. "Tell them to leave their other gear in the cave."

Joking and laughing, they stripped off their Renarno tiger stripes and donned the British-pattern battle dress of the Zimbabwean Army. While they were busy, Sean went over the vehicles again. He found the army registration papers in a plastic wallet in the cubbyholes of each of the Unimogs.

"Hope we never have to show them," he grumbled to Job.

"They are probably listed as stolen or destroyed."

He opened the caps on the fuel tanks and physically checked the contents of each. "Enough to get us to Grand Reef and back to Saint Mary's," he estimated, "with not much to spare."

He ordered the windscreen and side windows of the cabs to be cleaned but the body work to be left as it was, caked with mud and dust.

It gave them the appearance of a patrol returning from a sortie into the deep bush and, more important, partially obscured the military markings and registration numbers.

Once the men had changed into disguise and cached their Renamo uniforms, Sean and Job inspected each man and his equipment minutely before allowing him to board one of the Unimogs.

It was almost five o'clock before they were ready to leave. Both Job and Alphonso had heavy-vehicle driver's licenses, and one of the Renamo troopers, who gloried in the name of Ferdinand da Costa, claimed driving experience. Sean took the passenger seat beside him to check his performance.

Job drove the leading truck, while Alphonso was in the middle and Sean and the learner driver in the rear. Apart from a heavy foot on the accelerator pedal, Ferdinand da Costa proved himself an adequate driver, but Sean took the wheel from him at the difficult places.

In line astern, they churned through the heavy sand, following in the wheel ruts of Job's Unimog, winding up the river course for half a mile before they reached the first obstacle.

It required the combined efforts of all forty men to heave and shove the trucks up the first rocky chute in the river-bed, and even then they had to cut twenty-foot-long mo pane poles and use them as levers to prize the wheels up over the larger boulders.

The powerful truck motors bellowed in high revolutions, blue diesel smoke billowed from the exhausts, and Sean remarked to Job, "An open invitation to every Frelimo within twenty miles to join the party." Then he checked his wristwatch. "We are failing behind our schedule."

They tried to make up time along the easier stretches of the river course, but the sunset and darkness caught them still almost twenty kilometers from the main east-to-west road between the sea and the border post at Urntah.

Nightfall made the journey more arduous. Sean dared not use the trucks" headlights, and they had to proceed in darkness alleviated only by starlight and a moon in its last quarter.

It was after midnight before they could at last leave the river-bed by negotiating a low spot in the bank. With four men walking ahead of the lead truck to guide it around ant bear holes and other concealed obstacles, they struck out directly southward and within two hours had intersected the overgrown disused track Alphonso had told Sean about.

Sean called a halt. They spread the field map on the hood of the lead truck and by flashlight studied it anxiously.

"We are here," Alphonso told him. "This track runs up to an old asbestos mine; it was abandoned by the Portuguese in 1963 at the start of the Frelir& war."