Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur - Страница 113

The rock pulpit was empty.

"He isn't here," Peter whispered, his voice tense with disappointment and frustration. Tobengula's body is gone! The signs that Tungata had noticed at the outer wall, N the place where the masonry wall had been opened and U1 resealed with less meticulous workmanship, had led him to the correct conclusion. The old king's tomb had obviously been robbed many years previously. The corpse had long ago been spirited away and the tomb resealed to hide the traces of this desecration.

Peter Fungabera clambered up onto the rock pulpit, and searched it frantically on his hands and knees. Standing back impassively, Tungata marvelled at how ludicrous greed could render even such a dangerous and impressive man as Peter Fungabera. He was muttering incoherently t 0 himself as he strained the dusty detritus; from the floor through his hooked fingers.

"Look! Look here! He held up a small dark object, and Tungata stepped closer. In the torchlight he recognized that it was a shard from a clay pot, a piece of the rim decorated in the traditional diamond pattern used on the Matabele beer-pots.

"A beer-pot." Peter turned it in his hands. "One of the diamond pots broken!" He dropped the fragment and scratched in the dirt, stirring up a soft cloud of dust that undulated in the torch beam.

Here!" He had found something else. Something smaIller. He held it up between thumb and forefinger. It was the size of a small walnut.

He turned the torch beam full upon it, and immediately the light was shattered into the rainbow hues of the spectrum. Shafts of coloured light were reflected into Peter Fungabera's face, like sunlight off water.

"Diamond," he breathed with religious awe, turning it slowly in his fingers so that it shot out arrows and blades of light.

It was an uncut stone, Tungata realized, but the crystal had formed in such symmetry and each plane was so perfect as to catch and reflect even the meagre beam of the torch.

"How beautiful!" Peter murmured, bringing it closer still to his face.

This diamond was a perfect natural octahedron and its colour, even in artificial light, was clear as snowmelt in a mountain stream.

"Beautiful," Peter Fungabera repeated, and then gradually his face lost its drelmy, gloating expression.

"Only one!" he whispered. "A single stone dropped in haste, when there Ishould have been five beer-pots brimming with diamonds." His eyes swivelled from the diamond to Tungata. The torch was held low, and it cast weird shadows across his face, giving him a demoniacal look.

knew," he accused. "I sensed all along you were "You hiding something back. You knew the diamonds had been taken, and you knew where." Tungata shook his head in denial, but Peter Fungabera ri was working himself into a fury. His features contorted, his mouth worked soundlessly and a thin white froth coated his lips.

"You knew!" He launched himself from the ledge with all the fury of i a wounded leopard.

"You'll tell me!" he shrieked. "In the end you'll tell me." He hit Tungata in the face with the barrel of the Tokarev.

"Tell me!" he screamed. "Tell me where they are!" And the steel thudded into Tungata's face as ie struc again k and again.

"Tell me where the diamonds are! The barrel crunched against Tungata's cheekbone, split- i ting the flesh, and he fell to his knees.

Peter Fungabera pulled himself away, and braced himself against the rock ledge to contain his own ri".

"No," he told himself. "That is too easy. He's going to suffer __2 He folded his own arms tightly across his chest to restrain himself from attacking Tungata again.

"In the end you will tell me you will plead with me to allow you to take me to the diamonds. You'll plead with me to kill you-2 abes in the fornicating woods," said Morgan Oxford.

"That's what you two are! By God, you have dropped us in this cesspool as well, right up to the eyebrows." Morgan Oxford had flown down from Harare as soon as he had heard that a Botswana border patrol had brought Craig and Sally-Anne in from the desert.

"Both the American ambassador and the Brits have had notes from Mugabe. The Brits are hopping up and down and frothing at the mouth also. They know nothing about you, Craig, and you are a British subject. I gather that they'd like to lock you up in the tower and chop your head off.1 Morgan stood at the foot of Sally-Anne's hospital bed.

He had declined the chair that Craig offered him.

you, Missy, the ambassador has asked me to As inform you that he would like to see you on the next plane back to the States."

"He can't order me to do that." Sally-Anne stopped his flow of bitter recriminations. "This isn't Soviet Russia, and I'm a free citizen." "You won't be for long. No, by God, not if Mugabe gets his hands on you! Murder, armed insurrection and a few other charges-"

"Those are all a frame-up!"

"You and your boyfriend here left a pile of warm bodies behind you like empty beer cans at a labour-day picnic.

Mugabe has started extradition proceedings with the Botswana government-"

"We are political refugees," Sally-Anne flared.

"Bonny and Clyde, sweetheart, that's the way the Zimbabweans are telling it."

Sally' Anne Craig intervened mildly. "You are not supposed to get yourself excited-"

"Excited!" cried So4yAnne. "We've been robbed and beaten, threatenedowith rape and a firing squad and now the official representative of the United States of America, the country of which I happen to be a citizen, barges in here and calls us criminals."