Catacombs (25 page)

Toby had a bitter lump in his throat he couldn't swallow. For the first time he faced the dreadful prospect that his father might be dead.

Sunni sat close in the Fiat on the way back to the hotel. She was in a very loving mood. She didn't take her eyes off Toby, but she didn't pressure him. Gradually he choked out his story.

"No wonder you're so upset! My Lord! What are you going to do?"

"I just don't know. You're looking pale again, luv, are you going to be ill?"

"I'm not sick at all, actually. I'm–two months pregnant."

"Oh, that's good. I'm glad it's nothing serious."

"Toby!"

Toby shot another look at her, then veered to the curb, stalling the engine. He put his arms around Sunni and held her tightly.

"I won't be twenty until next month," she sobbed. "I haven't done my junior year yet. I was going to ride in the Penn National this fall!"

"Oh, you'll have loads of time for all that after the baby comes," he said soothingly.

"You mean you really want it?"

"Don't be absurd; not want our baby?"

"But we're not even married yet, Tobe. You know, that's not a big deal for me, I'll be happy just being with you, but my mother, wow, I wouldn't know where to put my face if–"

"Not to worry. How long before you, I mean, when it's obvious and all that?"

"Oh, another couple of months, I guess."

"Loads of time, then," Toby said, and kissed her. But he was looking grim again. "Time for Dad to be at the wedding."

"And he will be there, Toby," she said fervently. "I just know he will."

RUAHA NATIONAL PARK

Tanzania

May 14

W
hen Erika was certain that Oliver had left for the day to pursue his primitive mining activities on the escarpment, she packed in the flight bag what few provisions she could carry and left the lodge, heading along the dry bed of the sand river in what she thought was a northeasterly direction.

For several days, for Oliver's benefit, she had languished, complaining of aches and pains and keeping to her bronze bed-ship in the empty, echoing upstairs. She seemed too weary or despondent to lift her head when he came with the meals, which he continued painstakingly to prepare. Oliver's solicitude was further enhanced by the fact that she no longer spoke of sending him for help, or of leaving herself. Erika ate, because every scrap of food he brought was essential for building strength, and when Oliver had the confidence to return to his work, she labored at exercises, knowing that she couldn't fail again.

No matter how long it took she had to stay on her feet, keep walking until she reached a settlement and transportation to the outside.

As she began seriously to work on her endurance, she was just able to walk up and down the mahogany staircase without palpitations and rubber knees; within two days she could jog down the stairs, around the rotunda and up again. She rejoiced and doubled her efforts, ignoring the sharp pains in her sides, persistent leg cramps, and nausea.

Five days: Erika felt that she couldn't delay any longer and tried to assess her chances realistically.

Her training might carry her, at best, across four to six miles of moderately difficult terrain per day, with a long rest at midday and shorter intervals after that, until nightfall. She thought she could survive, with minimum precautions, at least three nights in the bush.

She felt guilty about raiding Oliver's meager stores. He had set up his own quarters in the kitchen of Von Kreutzen's palace, a vast shadowy two-story room equipped with a couple of squat tons of rusted wood-burning stoves, stone barbecue pits with flues, a deep well beneath the tarred but badly deteriorated floorboards. Oliver had sealed off, with more of the quilted packing material from the storage compartment of the wrecked airplane, a dark recess in the kitchen that had once been a pantry.

There he lounged, nightly or during those infrequent hours when he didn't feel like working, on a camp cot, his kerosene lantern lit. He smoked his pipe and listened attentively to a cheap transistor radio that received little more than faint strains of music through gusts of static. Over his cot was a fading color photo in a plastic frame of some tall grinning soccer players, each with a ball under one arm. He kept his valued possessions in a metal footlocker: well-oiled tools and guns and a razor-sharp
panga
. Most of the food was here with him–tinned goods on a shelf; unidentifiable haunches of black and purple meat, smoke cured and hanging from the ceiling. The atmosphere, with or without Oliver's own finely powdered pungency, was stifling.

Erika used Oliver's
panga
to slice a dozen strips of jerky from the hams, which she rolled in plastic. She helped herself to three small tins of condensed milk, some tea bags, biscuits, sugar cubes, salt; after a brief grapple with her conscience, she also appropriated a Swiss Army officer's knife that was loaded with handy cutting and boring tools in miniature. Right now she needed it more than Oliver did.

Rummaging through the rest of his belongings, she also came across a little tin of yellow grease, like Vaseline, which she knew would help keep the biting flies off. Matches, a metal cup, an enameled saucepan, his best blanket, an eight-inch square of metal grill, a soiled green ranger's cap, and she was ready to go. Her clothing and shoes were just adequate for a long tramp. Even in a dry year, by keeping to the riverbed she would find water when she required it and, just as important, shade much of the way. If she ran out of food, she could eat termite grubs or grasshoppers; she'd done it before.

Erika didn't give a second thought to the prospect of spending a night in the wilderness. She had learned long ago just how to make a smokeless slow burning fire in the earth, and sit cross-legged with the blanket thrown over her from head to toe, warmed and dozing.

At first, exhilarated by a sense of escape, of purpose nearing fulfillment, she was inspired to go quickly: and the going was relatively easy. The riverbed in most places was about thirty yards wide, with a few pools of water linked by slow moving trickles that glittered in the golden light of early morning. There were modest boulders and a couple of fallen trees and steaming clumps of dung from visitors earlier than she.

For a time Erika followed a well-beaten elephant walk that meandered through the drying-out vegetation and acacia trees denuded of bark and lower branches by elephant or impala. Soon she came across a family of a dozen elephants digging wells, plastering themselves with mud at the riverbank; they would follow this mudpack with a dry coating of blown dust or sand, then rub ponderously against a handy rock or termite hill to rid themselves of skin parasites. Erika moved slowly and cautiously downwind of the herd and soon left them behind.

After a while the river ran narrowly between hills, often sinking beneath the surface. In these places the high sagebrush was thicker, dust covered. Erika paused on a flat, tipped rock to catch her breath and smear her wet exposed skin with a thin coating of grease. There was life all around her, but little that was visible to the untrained eye. A bateleur eagle in the sky, a vulture, some blacksmith plovers. In the massed trees overhead blue monkeys chattered. She had picked up a piece of solid straight limb from a rotting tree to use as a staff, to probe likely thickets for snakes before passing through. But she knew the snake menace in Africa sometimes was exaggerated. They were everywhere–cobras, vipers–and deadly; they were also among the most timid of creatures and would slither away from the swishing sound of a staff in tall grass or bush. She avoided altogether tall dense brush where animals might be sleeping. This was also lion country, leopard country. She hadn't seen one, and didn't wish to.

By noon the droning heat had sapped some of her confidence. She had expended too much energy and was trembling. She had no firm idea of how far she had traveled; at times the river twisted and turned and all but doubled back on itself.

Erika stopped near running water, inspected the weeds carefully for snails that could carry bilharzia. She made a twig fire in a circle of stones, set water to boil, stripped, and bathed. She dried naked in the sun while drinking several cups of tea with milk and lots of sugar.

The will to push on was strong again, but Erika forced herself to rest, in the shade of the blanket suspended from three makeshift posts. The rock on which she lay was far from comfortable, but the flight bag made an adequate pillow. She went soundly to sleep. When she awoke, she estimated an hour had passed.

Groaning, stiff in every joint, she crept to her feet, packed, and resumed her journey.

O
n the scarp behind Von Kreutzen's shooting palace, Oliver had labored day after day for several weeks in a narrow rift, chiseling out a speckled vein of gold-bearing ore. In an area where the lode was most prominently exposed, it was also nearly inaccessible. The rift ran diagonally across a broad facing at an angle of thirty degrees. It was only about four feet wide at the surface, tapering to inches at the bottom. He was forced to work head down, clinging to the sun-struck facing by his toes and the fingers of one hand, swinging his miner's hammer in short awkward strokes, pausing to work partly dislodged ore chunks free with his skinned and bleeding fingers.

Under these conditions some sort of accident was inevitable. A sliver of rock flew from his hammer and lodged in a corner of his left eye. The pain was excruciating. If he hadn't tied the hammer to his wrist with a strip of leather he would have dropped in into the cleft of the rock face. Oliver withdrew and sat up, the left eye closed. With a copious flow of tears the pain was lessened, but not much.

Oliver wearily gathered his tools and dropped them into a rush basket, on top of thirty pounds of ore he had found worth collecting. He made his way down to the lodge, hoping that Erika would be able to locate the bit of rock piercing his eyeball and remove it for him.

The sun was in the west, the shadows of afternoon lengthening. His pet mongoose, roused from a nap inside a stone urn at the entrance to the lodge, slipped between Oliver's legs and bounded up the stairs to Erika's room. Oliver followed at a slower pace, hurting, a hand over his eye, and discovered that she was gone.

He looked around and saw that the flight bag and all of her clothing was missing. He squealed in dismay and ran back down the stairs to the kitchen. A fast inventory of stores and personal belongings convinced Oliver that she had a trek in mind.

Tears ran down his cheek; he trembled. The .mongoose stood on the edge of the cot, fur ruffled, distressed by Oliver's continuing, anguished squeals and erratic behavior. Oliver snatched up the
panga
, then put it down and searched for a pad of cotton, which he soaked in a medicinal oil from a vial he kept in a leatherette case at the bottom of the footlocker. He fastened the pad over his suppurating eye with strips of soiled adhesive tape he'd been saving. Then he tested the edge of his
panga
by whacking off a sizable hunk of a tough hanging haunch. The mongoose pounced on the strip of dried meat, sank his teeth into it, and shook it as if he had a viper by the throat

Oliver left him behind and bolted outside. He had no trouble picking up Erika's trail. He set off along the riverbed at a steady bowlegged jog, wearing only his thong sandals, his good eye searching out her track. She couldn't have been easier to follow if she'd been riding in a big red bus.

B
y late afternoon Erika was resting after every thirty steps, though the river channel had become broad and flat. She resisted sitting while she tried to get her breath, afraid she wouldn't have the power to force herself to her feet again. She had abrupt, fascinating hallucinations. She heard a railroad train. She saw a lawn filled with people playing croquet. She smelled her father's favorite pipe tobacco. Hugo, her first great love, looked up from the hood of a 1937 V-12 Hispano-Suiza he was waxing, smiled, and waved. When she moved she felt curiously dazzled, out of contact with the earth and her surroundings.

Erika knew she should have stopped for good long ago; but an image in her mind of almost limitless distances to overcome caused her heart to constrict in fright. She hoped for a second wind, an elemental push, enough strength to maintain her for a final mile before dusk. Tomorrow . . . but she was too dispirited to make plans, to think beyond the next short bend of the river.

Dispirited, and addled. At some point, after one of her frequent pauses, she had simply walked off without the flight bag, leaving everything vital to survival but the blanket, which earlier she had rolled up and wore suspended across her back by a string of tough creeper vine.

The loss was devastating, yet she could not make up her mind to backtrack and retrieve the bag. Erika was unreasonably afraid of what lay behind her: the dark, lost time, some incomprehensible evil like a blot on her trail, which she had felt for the last hour or so.

She stood swaying between mirror-like pools of water, the sun glaring down on her from a prison house of trees; she cried wretchedly, one hand shaking out of control. She heard a chattery crackle of semiautomatic rifle fire, a shout. She imagined it was Chips Chapman, calling for help . . . then she heard her mother crooning lullabies. And another, unmistakably British voice, calling, if not to her, to someone nearby.

Heedless of the likelihood that she was being deceived by a fresh hallucination, Erika plunged ahead, through water, shifting sand, low scrub, demanding of her punished body reserves of energy and nerve. Black spots swarmed before her eyes, formed a curtain of premature night through which she continued to fight her way, stumbling, dragging her feet, falling.