The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (23 page)

The Mercedes was less than half a mile ahead. Occasionally they could see the glow of its tail-lights as it climbed the road up one of the heavily wooded hills.

Peter Fungabera checked the odometer. ‘We’ve come twenty-three miles. The turn-off to the Sanyati and Tuti is only two miles ahead.’ He tapped Timon on the shoulder with the
swagger-stick. ‘Pull over. Call the unit at the junction.’

Craig found himself shivering as much from excitement as the cold. With the engine still running, Timon called ahead to the road-junction where the forward observation team was concealed.

‘Ah! That’s it!’ Timon could not keep the elation from his voice. ‘Bada has turned off the main road, General. The target truck has stopped and is parked two miles from
the crossroads. It has to be a pre-arranged meeting, sir.’

‘Get going,’ Peter Fungabera ordered. ‘Follow them!’

Now Timon Nbebi drove fast, using the glow of his parking lights to hold the verge of the road.

‘There’s the turning!’ Peter snapped, as the unmade road showed dusty pale out of the dark.

Timon slowed and swung onto it. A sergeant of the Third Brigade stepped out of the darkness of the encroaching bush. He jumped up onto the footboard and managed to salute with his free hand.

‘They passed here a minute ago, General,’ he blurted. ‘The truck is just ahead. We have set up a road-block behind it and we will block here as soon as you are passed, sir. We
have them bottled up.’

‘Carry on, Sergeant,’ Peter nodded, then turned to Timon Nbebi. ‘The road drops steeply down from here to the drift. Have the trucks cut their engines as soon as we are
rolling. We’ll coast down.’

The silence was eerie after the growl of heavy engines. The only sound was the squeak of the Land-Rover’s suspension, the crunch of the tyres over gravel, and the rustle of the wind around
their ears.

The twists in the rough track sprang at them out of the night with unnerving speed, and Timon Nbebi wrenched the wheel through them as they careered down the first drop of the great escarpment.
The two trucks were guided by their tail-lights. They made monstrous black shapes looming out of the darkness close behind. Sally-Anne reached out for Craig’s hand as they were thrown
together into the turns, and she hung on to it tightly all the way down.

‘There they are!’ Peter Fungabera snarled abruptly, his voice roughened with excitement.

Below them they saw the headlights of the Mercedes flickering beyond the trees. They were closing up swiftly. For a few seconds the headlights were blanketed by another turn in the winding road,
and then they burst out again – two long beams burning the pale dust surface of the track, to be answered suddenly by another glaring pair of headlights facing in the opposite direction, even
at this range, blindingly white. The second pair of headlights flashed three times, obviously a recognition signal, and immediately the Mercedes slowed.

‘We’ve got them,’ Peter Fungabera exulted, and switched off the parking lights.

Below them a canopied truck was trundling slowly from the verge where it had been parked in darkness, into the middle of the road. Its headlights flooded the Mercedes which pulled to a halt. Two
men climbed out of the Mercedes and crossed to the cab of the truck. One of them carried a rifle. They spoke to the driver through the open window.

The Land-Rover raced silently in complete darkness towards the brightly lit tableau in the valley below. Sally-Anne was clinging to Craig’s hand with startling strength.

In the road below, one of the men began to walk back towards the rear of the parked truck, and then paused and looked up the dark road towards the racing Land-Rover. They were so close now that
even over the engine noise of the Mercedes and truck, he must have heard the crunch of tyres.

Peter Fungabera switched on the headlights of the Land-Rover. They blazed out with stunning brilliance and at the same moment he lifted an electronic bull-horn to his mouth.

‘Do not move!’ his magnified voice bellowed into the night, and came crashing back in echoes from the close-pressed hills. ‘Do not attempt to escape!’

The two men whirled and dived back towards the Mercedes. Timon Nbebi started the engine with a roar and the Land-Rover jerked forward.

‘Stay where you are! Drop your weapons!’

The men hesitated, then the armed one threw down his rifle and they both raised their hands in surrender, blinking into the dazzle of headlights.

Timon Nbebi swung the Land-Rover in front of the Mercedes, blocking it. Then he jumped down and ran to the open window and pointed his Uzi submachine-gun into the interior.

‘Out!’ he shouted. ‘Everybody out!’

Behind them the two trucks came to a squealing halt, clouds of dust boiling out from under their double rear wheels. Armed troopers swarmed out of them, rushing forward to club down the two
unarmed men onto the gravel of the road. They surrounded the Mercedes, tearing open the doors and dragging out the driver and another man from the back seat.

There was no mistaking the tall, wide-shouldered figure. The headlights floodlit his dark, craggy features and exaggerated the rocky strength of his lantern jaw. Tungata Zebiwe shrugged off the
grip of his captors, and glared about him, forcing them to fall back involuntarily.

‘Back, you yapping jackals! Do you dare touch me?’

He was dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt. His cropped head was round and black as a cannon ball.

‘Do you know who I am?’ he demanded. ‘You’ll wish your twenty-five fathers had taught you better manners.’

His arrogant assurance drove them back another pace, and they looked towards the Land-Rover. Peter Fungabera stepped out of the darkness behind the headlights, and Tungata Zebiwe recognized him
instantly.

‘You!’ he growled. ‘Of course, the chief butcher.’

‘Open the truck,’ Peter Fungabera ordered, without taking his eyes off the other man. They stared at each other with such terrible hatred, that it rendered insignificant everything
else around them. It was an elemental confrontation, seeming to embody all the savagery of a continent, two powerful men stripped of any vestige of civilized restraint, their antagonism so strong
as to be barely supportable to them.

Craig had jumped down from the Land-Rover and started forward, but now he stopped beside the Mercedes in astonishment. He had not expected anything remotely like this. This almost tangible
hatred was not a thing of that moment, it seemed that the two of them would launch themselves at each other like embattled animals, tearing with bare hands at each other’s throats. This was a
passion of deep roots, a mutual rage based on a monumental foundation of long-standing hostility.

From the back of the captured truck the troopers were hurling out bales and crates. One of the crates burst open as it hit the road, and long yellow shafts of ivory glowed like amber in the
headlights. A trooper hooked open one of the bales and pulled out handfuls of precious fur, the golden dappled skin of leopard, the thick red pelts of lynx.

‘That’s it!’ Peter Fungabera’s voice was choking with triumph and loathing and vindictive gloating. ‘Seize the Matabele dog!’

‘Whatever this is will rebound on your own head,’ Tungata growled at him, ‘you son of a Shona whore!’

‘Take him!’ Peter urged his men, but they hesitated, held at bay by the invisible aura of power that emanated from this tall imperial figure.

In the pause, Sally-Anne jumped down from the Land-Rover, and started towards the treasure of fur and ivory lying in the road. For a second she screened Tungata Zebiwe from his captors, and he
moved with a blur of speed, like the strike of an adder, almost too fast to follow with the eye.

He seized Sally-Anne’s arm, twisted and lifted her off her feet, holding her as a shield in front of him as he ducked low and scooped up the discarded rifle from the dust at his feet. He
had chosen the moment perfectly. They were all crowded in upon each other. The troopers pressed so closely that none of them could fire without hitting one of their own.

Tungata’s back was protected by the Land-Rover, his front by Sally-Anne’s body.

‘Don’t shoot!’ Peter Fungabera bellowed at his men. ‘I want the Matabele bastard for myself.’

Tungata swung the barrel of the rifle up under Sally-Anne’s armpit, holding it by the pistol grip single-handed, and he aimed at Peter Fungabera, as he fell back towards the Land-Rover,
dragging Sally-Anne with him. The Land-Rover’s engine was still running.

‘You’ll not escape,’ Peter Fungabera gloated. ‘The road is blocked, I have a hundred men. I’ve got you, at last.’

Tungata slipped the rate-of-fire selector across with his thumb and dropped his aim to Peter Fungabera’s belly. Craig was standing diagonally behind his left shoulder, he saw the slight
deflection of the rifle barrel at the instant before Tungata fired. Craig realized that he had deliberately aimed an inch to one side of Peter’s hip. The clattering roar of automatic fire was
deafening, and the group of men leapt apart as they went for cover.

The rifle rode up high in Tungata’s single-handed grip. Bullets smashed into the parked truck, leaving dark rents through the bodywork, each surrounded by a halo of bright bare metal.
Peter Fungabera hurled himself aside, spinning away along the truck body to fall flat in the road and wriggle frantically behind the truck wheels.

Gunsmoke and dust shrouded the blazing headlights, and troopers scattered, blanketing each other’s field of fire, while in the chaos, Tungata lifted Sally-Anne bodily and threw her into
the passenger-seat of the Land-Rover. In the same movement, he vaulted up into the driver’s seat, threw the vehicle into gear and the engine roared as it leapt forward.

‘Don’t shoot!’ Peter Fungabera shouted again, there was a desperate urgency in his voice. ‘I want him alive!’

A trooper jumped in front of the Land-Rover, in a futile attempt to stop it. The impact sounded like a lump of bread-dough dropped on the kneading board, as the bonnet hit him squarely in the
chest and he fell. There was a series of jolting bumps as he was dragged under the chassis, then he rolled out into the road and the Land-Rover was boring away up the dark hill.

Without conscious thought, Craig jerked open the driver’s door of the abandoned ministerial Mercedes and slipped into the seat. He locked the wheel into a hard 180-degree turn and gunned
her into it. The Mercedes’ tail crabbed around, tyres spinning and he hit the high earth bank a glancing blow with the right front wing that swung her nose through the last few degrees of the
turn. Craig lifted his foot off the accelerator, met the skid, centred the wheel, and then trod down hard. The Mercedes shot forward, and through the open window he heard Peter Fungabera shout,
‘Craig! Wait!’

He ignored the call, and concentrated on the first sharp bend of the escarpment road as it flashed up at him. The Mercedes’ steering was deceptively light, he almost over-steered and the
off-wheels hammered over the rough verge. Then he was through the bend and ahead the red tail-lights of the Land-Rover were almost obscured in their own boiling white dust cloud.

Craig dropped the automatic transmission to sports mode, the engine shrieked and the needle of the rev-counter spun up into the red sector above 5000, and she arrowed up the hill, gaining
swiftly on the Land-Rover.

It was swallowed by the next turn, and the dust blinded Craig so that he was forced to lift his right foot and grope through the turn, again he almost missed it and his rear wheels tore at the
steep drop, inches from disaster before he took her through.

He was getting the feel of the machine, and four hundred yards ahead he had a brief glimpse of the Land-Rover through the dust. His headlights spotlit Sally-Anne. She was half-twisted over the
side, trying to climb out and throw herself from the fleeing vehicle, but Tungata shot out a long arm and caught her shoulder, plucking her back and forcing her down into the seat.

The scarf flew off her head, winging up like a nightbird to be lost in the darkness, and her thick dark hair broke out and tangled about her head and face. Then dust obscured the Land-Rover
again – and Craig felt his anger hit him in the chest with a force that made him choke. In that moment, he hated Tungata Zebiwe as he had never hated another human being in his life before.
He took the next bend cleanly, tracking neatly through and pouring on full power again at the moment he was clear.

The Land-Rover was three hundred yards ahead, the gap shrinking at the rush of the Mercedes, then Craig was braking for the next twist of the road and when he came out the Land-Rover was much
closer. Sally-Anne was craning around, looking back at him. Her face was white, almost luminous, in the headlights, her hair danced in a glossy tide around it, seeming at moments almost to smother
her, and then the next bend snatched her away. Craig followed them into it, meeting the brake of the tail as she floated in the floury dust and then as he came through he saw the road-block
ahead.

There was a three-ton army truck parked squarely across the road, and the gaps between it and the bank had been filled with recently felled thorn trees. The entwined branches formed a solid
mattress and the heavy trunks had been chained together. Craig saw the steel links glinting in the headlights. That barrier would stop a bulldozer.

Five troopers stood before the barrier, waving their rifles in an urgent command to the Land-Rover to halt. That they hadn’t already opened fire made Craig hope that Peter Fungabera had
reached them on the radio, yet he felt a nauseating rush of anxiety when he saw how vulnerable Sally-Anne was in the open vehicle. He imagined a volley of automatic fire tearing into that lovely
young body and face.

‘Please don’t shoot,’ he whispered, and pressed so hard on the accelerator that the cup of his artificial leg bit painfully into his stump. The nose of the Mercedes was fifty
feet from the Land-Rover’s tail and gaining.

A hundred yards from the solid barrier across the road was a low place in the right-hand bank. Tungata swerved into it and the ugly blunt-nosed vehicle flew up it, all four wheels clawing as it
went over the top and tore like a combine-harvester into the high yellow stand of elephant grass beyond.