Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (95 page)

As he slipped behind the wheel of the Landcruiser and ordered Jock to climb aboard, he glanced at his wristwatch. it was almost ten o’clock, nearly four hours since he had passed Cheng and the trucks on the escarpment road. Could he catch them before they reached the main highway and disappeared?

He realised that it had been so carefully planned that they must have worked out an escape route and some means of disposing of the ivory.

He started the Landcruiser and hit the gear-lever. “You aren’t going to get away with it, you dirty bastard!”

In many places the recent storm waters had scoured the escarpment road, gouging knee-deep gulleys across the tracks and exposing boulders the size of cannonballs. Daniel pushed the Landcruiser over them so violently that Jock seized the grab handle on the dashboard for support. “Slow down, Danny, damn it. You’ll kill us both. Where the hell are we going? What’s the rush?” In as few words as possible Daniel told him the bare outlines. “You can’t touch an ambassador,” Jock grunted as the bouncing truck slammed the words out of him. “If you’re wrong, they’ll crucify you, man.”

“I’m not wrong,” Daniel assured him. “On top of Johnny’s note, I feel it in my guts.”

The rain waters had rushed down the slope of the escarpment, but when they reached the floor of the valley they slowed and piled up upon themselves.

Only hours before, Daniel had crossed and re-crossed a dry river-bed at the foot of the escarpment. Now he pulled up on the approach to the ford and stared down the beam of the headlights.

“You’ll never get through there,” Jock muttered with alarm.

Daniel left the motor running and jumped down into ankledeep mud. He ran to the edge of the crazy water. It was the colour of creamed coffee, racing past in a muddy blur, carrying small tree-trunks and uprooted bushes with it. It was almost fifty yards across.

One of the trees growing beside the ford draped its branches out over the torrent, in places just touching the swirling waters with its lowest twigs. Daniel grabbed the main branch for support and let himself down into the river. He edged out across the flood and it took all the strength of his arms to prevent himself from being swept away.

The drag of the water was overpowering and his feet were continually lifted clear of the bottom. However, he worked himself out to the deepest section of the river.

It was as deep as his lowest rib. The branch to which he was clinging was creaking and bowing like a fishing-rod to the strain as he began to work his way back to the bank. He emerged from the torrent with water streaming down his lower body, his sodden clothing clinging to his legs and his boots squelching.

“It’ll go,” he told Jock, as he clambered back into the cab.

“You’re crazy mad,” Jock exploded. “I’m not going in there.”

“Okay! Fine! You’ve got just two seconds to get out,” Daniel told him grimly, and changed the gearing of the Toyota into four-wheel drive and low ratio.

“You can’t leave me here,” Jock howled. “The place is lousy with lions. What happens to me?”

“That’s your problem, mate. Are you coming or going.”

“Okay, go ahead! Drown us!” Jock capitulated and grabbed the sides of his seat.

Daniel rolled the Landcruiser down the steep approach to the ford, and into the brown waters. He kept her rolling at an even pace and within a few yards the water was above the level of the wheels, but still the nose of the truck was tilted steeply downwards as the bottom fell away. There was a whoosh of steam as water rushed through the engine compartment and swamped the hot metal of the block.

The headlights were obscured as they sank below the surface, becoming two luminous glows in the turgid water. A bow wave rose ahead of the bonnet, as the water came up to the level of the windshield. A petrol engine would have swamped and stalled, but the big diesel pushed them stolidly forward into the flood. Water was pouring in around the door posts. They were calf-deep where they sat.

“You really are crazy,” Jock yelled, and put his feet up on the dashboard. “I want to go home to mother!” Now even the Landcruiser was faltering as the air trapped in the body floated her high and her spinning tires lost traction on the rock-strewn bottom. “Oh, my God!” Jock cried, as a huge up-rooted tree came hurtling down upon them out of the darkness.

It crashed into the side of the truck, hitting one of the windows, and slewing the whole chassis around. They were hurled downstream, spinning slowly under the weight of the floating tree. As they made one full revolution the mortal embrace of the tree mass was broken. Released from its grip, they floated free, but they were sinking fast as the trapped air was expelled from the Landcruiser’s body. Water began to seep in, and soon they were sitting waist-deep.

“I’m getting out,” Jock yelled, and threw his weight against the door. it won’t budge. He was panicking, as the pressure of water held the door tightly closed.

Then suddenly Daniel felt the wheels touch bottom again.

The flood had swept them into a bend of the river and pushed them in against the far bank. The engine was still running. The modified airintake pipe and filter reached up as high as the cab roof. Daniel had installed it for just such an emergency. In the shallows, the wheels caught at the jagged rock bottom and heaved the Landcruiser’s bulk forward. “Come on, darling,” Daniel pleaded. “Get us out of here.”

And the sturdy truck responded. She shuddered and bounced and tried to drag herself from the waters. The headlights pushed through the surface and blazed out suddenly, lighting the far bank. The flood had cast them up on the shelving mudbank and the truck canted steeply nose-up as her spinning front wheels clawed up the slope.

Ahead of them was a low spot in the riverbank. The Landcruiser slipped and slewed and crabbed up it, the engine roaring, ferociously tearing out small bushes that had survived the flood and ploughing deep ruts in the soft earth, until suddenly her lugged tires gained full purchase and hurled her for-ward up out of the flood. Sheets of water streamed from her bodywork like a surfacing submarine and the big diesel engine bellowed triumphantly as they roared into the mopane forest.

“I’m alive,” Jock whispered. “Hallelujah!”

Daniel turned parallel with the riverbank, weaving the Landcruiser back and forth between the tree-trunks of the standing mopane until they bumped over the verge on to the roadway. He kicked her out of low ratio and gunned the motor. They sped away towards the Mana Pools turn-off.

“How many more like that?” Jock asked with trepidation.

For the first time since Johnny’s death Daniel smiled, but it was a grim little smile. “Only four or five, he answered. A Sunday afternoon stroll. Nothing to it.”

He glanced at his watch. Cheng and the refrigerator trucks had almost four hours start on them. They must have got through the fords before the drainage of storm waters off the slope of the escarpment had flooded them. The earth beneath the mopane trees was melted like warm chocolate by the rain. This black cotton soil was notorious for bogging down vehicles when it was wet. The Landcruiser slithered and laboured and left deep glutinous ruts behind the churning wheels.

“Here’s the next river.” Daniel warned, as the road gradient altered and thick dark riverine bush pressed in close on each side of the narrow track. “Get your life-jacket on.”

“I can’t stand another one like the last.” Jock turned to him, pale-faced in the glow of the instrument panel. “I promise ten ‘Hail Mary’s’ and fifty ‘Our Father’s’.

“The price is right, it’ll be a breeze,” Daniel assured him as the headlights lit the ford.

In Africa a flash flood drops almost as abruptly as it rises. The rain had stopped almost two hours earlier, and the slope of the valley was by now almost drained. There was a high-water mark on the far bank of the river almost six feet above the present surface of the shrunken waters, to show how swiftly they had subsided. This time the Landcruiser made light of the crossing. The waters did not even cover the headlights before she triumphantly climbed the far bank.

“The power of prayer,” Daniel grunted. “Keep it up, Jock. We’ll make a believer of you yet.” The next river had fallen even lower, to the level of the tops of the wheels, and Daniel did not bother to change gear ratios as they splashed through. Forty minutes later, Daniel parked the truck at the front door of the warden’s bungalow at Mana Pools Camp.

While Jock leaned on the horn button and sounded a long urgent peal, Daniel pounded with both fists on the warden’s door. The warden came stumbling out onto the screened verandah, dressed only in a pair of underpants. “Who is it?” he called in Shana. “What the hell is going on?” He was a lean, muscled forty-year-old named Isaac Mtwetwe.

“Isaac? It’s me,” Daniel called. “There’s big trouble, man. Get your arse into gear. You’ve got work to do.”

“Danny?” Isaac shaded his eyes against the glare of the Landcruiser’s headlights. “Is that you, Danny?” He flashed his torch into Daniel’s face. “What is it? What has happened?”

Daniel answered him in fluent Shana. “A big gang of armed poachers has hit Chiwewe camp. They wiped out Johnny Nzou and his family, and the entire camp staff.”

“Good God!” Isaac came fully awake. “My guess is that they’re from the Zambian side,” Daniel went on. “I reckon they’re heading back to cross the Zambezi about twenty miles downstream from here. You’ve got to get your antipoaching team there to head them off.”

Swiftly Daniel gave him all the other information he had gleaned, the estimated size of the gang, their weapons, the time that they had left Chiwewe and their probable line and speed of march. Then he asked, “Did the refrigerator trucks come through here from Chiwewe on their return to Harare?”

“At about eight o’clock,” Isaac confirmed. “They just got through before the rivers flooded. There was a civilian with them, a Chinese in a blue Mercedes. One of the trucks was towing him. The Mercedes was no good in the mud.” Isaac was dressing as he spoke. “What are you going to do, Danny? I know Johnny Nzou was your friend. If you come with us you might get a shot at these swine.” Although they had fought on opposite sides during the bush war, he knew Daniel’s reputation.

However, Daniel shook his head. “I am going on after the trucks, and that Mercedes.”

“I don’t understand.” Isaac looked up from lacing his boots and his tone was puzzled.

“I can’t explain now, but it’s all part of Johnny’s murder. Trust me.” Daniel couldn’t tell Isaac about the ivory and Ambassador Ning, not until he had proof. “Trust me,” he repeated, and Isaac nodded.

“Okay, Danny, I’ll get those murdering swine for you before they get away across the river,” he promised. “You go ahead. Do what you have to do.”

Daniel left Isaac on the Zambezi bank, assembling his strike force of anti-poacher rangers and embarking them into the twenty-foot fast assault craft. There was a big ninety horsepower Yamaha onboard on the stern. Like the rest of them, the boat was a veteran of the bush war.

Daniel drove on westwards into the night, following the track that ran parallel to the Zambezi. Now the tyre tracks of the convoy were even more deeply ploughed into the muddy earth. In the headlights they looked as fresh as if they had been laid only minutes before.

Certainly they had been made since the last downpour of rain. The pattern of the treads was clearly moulded in black cotton clay of the roadway. Obviously one of the trucks was still towing the Mercedes. Daniel could pick out the scuff-marks where the tow rope had touched the earth at intervals. The tow would slow them down considerably, Daniel thought with satisfaction. He must be gaining on them rapidly now.

He peered ahead eagerly, half expecting to see the red glow of the Metcedes’s tail-lights appear out of the darkness, and he reached out to touch the AK 47 rifle propped between the seats.

Jock noticed the gesture and warned him softly, “Don’t do anything stupid, Danny. You don’t have any proof, man. You can’t just go, blowing the ambassador’s head off on suspicion. Cool it, man.”

It seemed that they were further behind the convoy than Daniel had hoped. It was after midnight when they intersected the Great North Road, the metalled highway that crossed the Chirundu bridge over the Zambezi to the north, and to the south climbed the escarpment of the valley on its serpentine route to Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe.

Daniel pulled the Landcruiser into the verge at the road junction. He jumped out with the Maglite in his hand. In all probability the convoy would have turned south towards Harare.

They couldn’t have hoped to get two huge government trucks loaded with fresh game meat and ivory through both the Zimbabwean and Zambian customs posts, not even with the dispensation of the most princely bribes.

Daniel found confirmation of his deduction almost immediately. The tires of the trucks and the Mercedes had been caked with clinging black clay. They left clear tracks on the tarmac of the highway. The tracks gradually faded out as the last vestiges of clay were spun off the tires, but for almost a mile further the moulded bars of mud from between the treads of the tires, littered the tarmac like squares of chocolate.

“South,” said Daniel, as he climbed back behind the drivingwheel. “They’re heading south, and we’re catching up with them every minute.” He pushed the Landcruiser hard and kicked in the Fairey overdrive. The speedometer needle touched 90 miles per hour and the heavy tires whined shrilly on the black tarmac surface of the highway. “They can’t be much further ahead,” Daniel muttered. As he said it he saw the glow of headlights in front of them.

He touched the stock of the AK rifle again, and Jock glanced at him nervously. “For Chrissake, Danny. I don’t want to be an accessory to bloody murder. They say Chikurubi prison isn’t exactly five-star accommodation.” The lights were closer now and Daniel switched on the Landcruiser’s powerful spotlights, then exclaimed with disappointment.

He had expected to see the distinctive hull of the refrigerator truck standing up tall and polar white in the beam of the spotlight. Instead he found a vehicle that he had never seen before. It was a gigantic MAC truck, a twenty-tonner, towing an equally large eight-wheel trailer. Both the hull of the truck and the body of the trailer were covered by heavyduty green nylon tarpaulin and roped down with a hook-and-eye arrangement that securely protected the cargo. This massive road-rig was pulled off the highway and parked in a lay-by at the roadside facing back northwards towards Chirundu Bridge.