Rage (80 page)

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Authors: Wilbur Smith

BOOK: Rage
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S
ean did the deal at breakfast on the last day of the safari. The client owned seventeen large leather tanneries in as many different states and half the real estate in Tucson, Arizona. His name was Ed Liner and he was seventy-two years of age.
‘Son, I don't know why I want to buy myself a safari company. I'm getting a little long in the tooth for this big game stuff,' he grumbled.
‘That's bullshit, Ed,' Sean told him. ‘You nearly walked me off my feet after that big jumbo, and the trackers all call you
Bwana
One-Shot.'
Ed Liner looked pleased with himself. He was a wiry little man with a ruff of snowy hair around his brown-freckled pate.
‘Give me the facts again,' he invited. ‘One last time.'
Sean had been working on him for three weeks, since the first day of the safari, and he knew Ed had the figures by heart, but he repeated them now.
‘The concession is five hundred square miles, with a forty-mile frontage on the south bank of Lake Kariba—' As he listened, Ed Liner stroked his wife as though he were caressing a pet kitten.
She was his third wife and she was just two years younger than Sean, but fifty years younger than her husband. She had been a dancer at the Golden Egg in Vegas, and she had a dancer's legs and carriage, with big innocent blue eyes and a curling cloud of blonde hair.
She watched Sean with a vicious little curl to her cupidbow lips as he made his pitch. Sean had been working on her just as assiduously as he had on her husband, thus far with as little success.
‘All you've got, honey,' she had told Sean, ‘is a pretty face and a hungry dick. The woods are full of those. Daddy Eddie has got fifty million bucks. It's no contest, sonny boy.'
The camp table was set under a magnificent wild fig tree on the banks of the Mara River. It was a bright African morning. The plain beyond the river was golden with winter grass, and studded with flat-topped acacia trees. The herds of wildebeest were dark shadows on the gold and a giraffe was feeding from the upper branches of the nearest acacia, his long graceful neck swaying against the brittle blue of the sky, his hide paved with bold rectangles of red brown. From upriver there came the bellowing sardonic laughter of a bull hippo, while from the branches of the fig tree above them the golden weaver birds dangled upside down from their woven basket nests, fluttering and shrilling to entice the drab brown females to move in and take up residence. Legend had it that both Hemingway and Ruark had camped at this very spot and breakfasted beneath this same wild fig.
‘What do you think, Sugar Sticks?' Ed Liner ran his bony brown fingers down the inside of his wife's thigh. She wore wide-legged khaki culottes and from where Sean sat he could see a little red-blonde pubic curl peeking out from under the elastic of her panties. ‘Do you think we should give old Sean here a half million bucks to set up our very own safari outfit down in the Zambezi valley of Rhodesia?'
‘You know best, Daddy Eddie.' She affected a cute little-girl voice, and she batted her long eyelashes at him and turned so that her bosom strained the buttons of her khaki shirt.
‘Just think of it,' Sean invited. ‘Your very own hunting concession, to do with as you want.' He watched her carefully as he went on. ‘You could shoot the full quota all yourself if you wanted, as many animals as you wanted.' Despite her curls and pouting lips, Lana Liner had a vicious a sadistic streak as any man Sean had ever hunted with. While Ed had chosen only to take the lion and elephant that he had paid for, Lana had killed every single animal she was entitled to, and then had killed those her husband had refused.
She was a passable shot, and derived as much pleasure from cutting down one of the dainty little Thompson's gazelle with her .300 Weatherby magnum as she had when she dropped her black-maned Masai lion with a perfect heart shot. He had seen the sexual radiance in her immediately after each kill, heard her rapid breathing and seen the pulse beat in her throat with excitement, and his philanderer's instinct had assured him that Lana Liner was vulnerable to him only in those few minutes after she had seen the bullet strike and the blood flash.
‘As much hunting as you want, whenever you want it,' Sean tempted her, and saw the excitement in her baby blue eyes.
She ran the tip of her tongue over her scarlet lips and
said in her breathless little-girl voice, ‘Why don't you buy it for my birthday, Daddy Eddie.'
‘Goddamm!' Ed laughed. ‘Why not! OK, son, you've got yourself a deal. We'll call it Lana Safaris. I'll get my lawyers to draw up the papers soon as we get home to Tucson.'
Sean clapped his hands, and shouted at the kitchen tent. ‘Maramba!
Letta
champagne
hapa. Pacey! Pacey!'
and the camp waiter in his long white kanza and red pill-box fez brought the green bottle on its silver tray, dewed with cold from the refrigerator.
They drank the wine and laughed in the morning sunlight, and shook hands and discussed the new venture until the gunbearer brought the hunting car around with the rifles in the racks and Matatu, the Ndorobo tracker, perched up on the back and grinning like a monkey.
‘I've had enough,' Ed said. ‘Guess I'll get packed up and ready to meet the charter plane when it comes in this afternoon.' Then he saw the pout of disappointment on Lana's red lips. ‘You go off with Sean, Sugar Sticks,' he told her. ‘Have a good hunt, but don't be late back. The charter flight is due to arrive at three, and we must get back to Nairobi before dark.'
Sean drove with Lana in the seat beside him. He had cut the sleeves out of his shirt to leave his upper arms bare, and they were sleek and glossy with muscle. Dark chest hair curled out of the V-neck of the shirt, and he wore his shining dark hair in a page-boy almost to his shoulders, but bound up around the forehead with a patterned silk bandana to keep it out of his eyes.
When he grinned at her, he was almost impossibly handsome, but there was a vindictive twist to his smile as he said, ‘Ready for a bit of sport, sport?' And she said, ‘Just as long as I get to do the shooting, sonny boy.'
They followed the track along the river bank, heading
back towards the hills. The Land-Rover was stripped and the windshield removed, and Matatu and the gunbearer in the raised back seat scanned the edges of the riverine bush and searched the track for sign of passage during the night.
Alarmed by the engine beat, a bushbuck family came dancing up the bank from the river, heading for the dense cover with the ewe and the lamb leading, followed by the ram, striped and spotted with cream on a dark chocolate ground, his corkscrew horns held high.
‘I want him,' Lana cried and reached over her shoulder for the Weatherby.
‘Leave him,' Sean snapped. ‘He won't go fifteen inches and you've got a better trophy already.'
She pouted at him sulkily, and he ignored her as the bushbuck scampered into the bush. Sean hit four-wheel drive and angled the Land-Rover down the bank of one of the Mara's tributaries, splashed and jolted through water as deep as the hubs and then roared up the far bank.
A small herd of Burchell's zebra cantered away ahead of them, stiff black manes erect, their vivid stripes shaded to nondescript grey at a distance, uttering their abrupt honking bark. Lana eyed them hungrily, but she had already shot the twenty zebra allowed on both her and Ed's licences.
The track swung back towards the river and through trees they had a view across the wide plains. The Masai Mara, which meant ‘the great spotted place of the Masai', and the grassland were blotched with herds of game and clumps of acacia.
‘Bwana,'
Matatu cried, and at the same instant Sean saw the sign. He braked the Land-Rover and with Matatu beside him went to examine the splashes of khaki-green dung and the huge round bovine prints in the soft earth of the track. The dung was loose and wet, and Matatu thrust his forefinger into one of the pats to test for body heat.
‘They drank at the river an hour before dawn,' he said.
Sean walked back to the Land-Rover and stood close to
Lana, almost touching her as he said, ‘Three old bulls. They crossed three hours ago, but they are feeding and we could catch them within an hour. I think they are the same three we saw the day before yesterday.' They had spotted the dark shapes in the dusk, from the opposite bank of the wide Mara river, but with insufficient daylight left for them to circle upstream to the ford and take up the chase. ‘If they are the same old mud bulls, one of them is a fifty-incher, and there aren't many of them that size around any more. Do you want to have a go?'
She jumped down from the Land-Rover, and reached for the Weatherby in the gun rack.
‘Not that popgun, Sugar Sticks,' Sean warned her. ‘Those are big mean old buff out there. Take Ed's Winchester.' The .458 threw a bullet more than twice as heavy as the 200-grain Nosler that the Weatherby fired.
‘I shoot better with my own piece than with Ed's cannon,' Lana said. ‘And only Ed is allowed to call me Sugar Sticks.'
‘Ed is paying me a thousand dollars a day for the best advice on Harley Street. Take the .458, and is it all right if I call you Treacle Pins, then?'
‘You can go screw, sonny boy,' Lana said and her baby voice gave the obscenity a strangely lascivious twist.
‘That's exactly what I had in mind, Treacle Pins, but let's go kill a buff first.'
She tossed the Weatherby to her gunbearer, and strode away from him with her hard round buttocks oscillating in the khaki culottes. ‘Just like the cheeks of a squirrel chewing a nut,' Sean thought happily, and took the big double-barrelled Gibbs down from the rack.
The spoor was gross, three big bull buffalo weighing over a ton each and scarring the earth with brazen hoofs and grazing as they went. Matatu wanted to run away with it, but Sean checked him. He didn't want to bring Lana up to the chase shaking and panting with fatigue, so they went
out on it at an extended walk, going hard but keeping within the girl's capabilities.
In the open acacia forest they reached the spot where the bulls had ceased feeding and bunched up, then struck determinedly towards the blue silhouette of distant hills, and Sean explained to Lana in a whisper, ‘This is where they were when the sun rose. As soon as it was light, they headed for the thick stuff. I know where they will lie up, we'll catch them with another half hour.'
Around them the forest closed in, and acacia gave way to the dense claustrophobic thorn and green jess. Visibility ahead dropped to a hundred and then fifty feet, and they had to crouch beneath the interlacing branches. The heat built up, and the dappled light was deceptive, filling the forest with strange shapes and menacing shadow. The stink of the buffalo seemed to steam around them in the heat, a rank gamy smell, and they found the flattened beds and smeared yellow dung where the bulls had lain down for the first time, and then stood up and moved on.
Ahead of them Matatu made the open-handed sign for ‘Very close', and Sean opened the breech of the Gibbs and changed the big brass .577 Kynoch cartridges for two others from his bullet pouch. He kept the original pair between the fingers of his left hand, ready for an instant reload. He could fire those four cartridges in half the time it would take even the most skilled rifleman to fire four from a magazine rifle. It was so silent and still in the jess that they could hear each other breathe, and the blood pounding in their own ears.
Suddenly there was a clatter, and they all froze. Sean recognized the sound. Somewhere just ahead of them a buffalo had shaken his great black head to drive away the plaguing flies, and one of his curved horns had struck a branch. Sean sank on to his knees signalling Lana to come up beside him, and together they crawled forward.
Suddenly and unexpectedly they came to a hole in the
jess, a tiny clearing twenty paces across, and the earth was trodden like a cattle kraal and littered with pancakes of old black dung.
They lay on the edge of the clearing and peered across into the tangled vegetation on the far side. The sunlight into the clearing dazzled them, and the shadow beyond it was confused and obscure.
Then the bull shook his head again, and Sean saw them. They were lying in a bunch, a mountainous mass of blackness in the shadows, and their heads overlapped so that the heavy bosses and curls of horn formed an inextricable puzzle. Though they were less than thirty paces away, it was impossible to separate one animal from the others, or one set of horns from the bunch.
Slowly Sean turned his head and laid his lips against Lana's ear. ‘I am going to get them up,' he whispered. ‘Be ready to take the shot as I call it.'
She was sweating and trembling. He could smell her fear and excitement, and it excited him also. He felt his loins thicken and stiffen, and for a moment he savoured the sensation, pressing his hips against the earth as though he had her body under him. Then deliberately he knocked the brass cartridges in his left hand against the steel barrels of the Gibbs. The sharp metallic sound was shocking in the silence.
Across the clearing the three bulls lumbered to their feet, and faced the sound. Their heads were lifted, drooling wet muzzles held high and the bosses of rough horn, black as ironstone, joined above their vicious piggy little eyes, the tips curving down and up again to the wide points, and their ears flared like trumpets.

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