The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (36 page)

The salt-pan was close ahead, hundreds of bare acres shimmering silver in the path of the sun. Craig narrowed his eyes against the glare, and picked up the tracks where a small herd of zebra had
crossed the smooth surface. Their hooves had broken through the salt crust into the yellow mush beneath. It would bog any vehicle that attempted that deceptively inviting crossing.

‘Angle to miss the right edge of the pan – left! More! More! Okay, hold that,’ he shouted.

There was a narrow horn of salt-pan extending out towards them, perhaps he could tempt the pursuit to take the cut across it. He stared back over their own dust cloud and said,
‘Shit!’ softly.

The truck commander was too canny to try to cut across the horn. He was following them around, and a burst of machine-gun fire fell all around them. Three rounds crashed into the metal of the
cab, leaving jagged craters rimmed with shiny metal where the camouflage paint flaked off.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Okay!’ Sally-Anne called back, but the tone of her voice was no longer so cocky. ‘Craig, I can’t keep her going. I’ve got my foot flat and she is slowing down.
Something is binding up!’

Now Craig could smell red-hot metal from the damaged front end.

‘Timon, hand me up a rifle!’

They were still well out of range of the AK 47, but the burst he fired made him feel less helpless, even though he could not even mark the fall of his bullets. They roared around the horn of the
salt-pan, in the stink of hot metal and dust, and Craig looked ahead while he reloaded the rifle.

How far to the border now? Ten miles perhaps? But would a punitive patrol of the Third Brigade, given the ‘leopard’ code, stop at an international border? The Israelis and South
Africans had long ago set a precedent for ‘hot pursuit’ into neutral territory. He knew they would follow them to the death.

The Land-Rover lurched rhythmically now to her unbalanced suspension and for the first time Craig knew that they weren’t going to make it. The realization made him angry. He fired the
second magazine in short-spaced bursts, and at the third burst the Toyota swerved sharply and stopped in a billow of its own dust.

‘I got him!’ he bellowed exultantly.

‘Way to go!’ Sally-Anne shouted back. ‘Geronimo!’

‘Well done, Mr Mellow, jolly well done.’

The truck stood massively immobile while the wreaths of dust subsided around it.

‘Eat that!’ Craig howled. ‘Stick that up your rear end, you sons of porcupines!’ And he emptied the rifle at the distant vehicle.

Men were swarming around the cab of the truck like black ants around the carcass of a beetle, and the Land-Rover limped away from them gamely.

‘Oh, no,’ Craig groaned.

The silhouette of the truck altered as it turned back towards them, once again dust rose in a feathery tail behind it.

‘They are coming on!’

Perhaps he had fluked a hit on the driver, but whatever damage he had inflicted, it was not permanent. It had stopped them for less than two minutes and now, if anything, the truck was coming on
faster than before. As if to emphasize that fact, another burst of heavy machine-gun fire hit the Land-Rover with a crash.

In the cab, somebody screamed, and the sound was shrill and feminine. Craig went cold, not daring to ask, clinging to the roofrack, frozen with dread.

‘Timon’s been hit.’ Sally-Anne’s voice – and Craig’s heart raced with relief.

‘How bad?’

‘Bad. He’s bleeding all over.’

‘We can’t stop. Keep going.’

Craig looked desperately ahead, and there was a great nothingness stretched before him. Even the stunted trees had disappeared. It was flat and featureless, the reflection from the white pans
turned the sky milky pale and smudged the horizon so that there was no clear dividing line between earth and air, nothing to hold the eye.

Craig dropped his gaze, and shouted, ‘Stop!’

To enforce the order he stamped on the roof of the cab with all his strength. Sally-Anne reacted instantly, and locked the brakes. The crippled Land-Rover skidded broadside, and came up
short.

The cause of Craig’s urgency was an apparently innocuous little yellow ball of fur, not as big as a football. It hopped in front of the vehicle, on long kangaroo back legs, totally out of
proportion to the rest of its body, and then abruptly disappeared into the earth.

‘Spring hare!’ Craig called. ‘A huge colony, right across our front.’

‘Kangaroo rats!’ Sally-Anne leaned out of the window, the engine idling, turning her face up to his for guidance.

They had been fortunate. The spring hare was almost entirely nocturnal, the single animal outside the burrows was an exceptional warning in daylight. Only now, under close scrutiny, could Craig
make out the extent of the colony. There were tens of thousands of burrows, the entrances inconspicuous little mounds of loose earth, but Craig knew that the sandy soil beneath them would be
honeycombed with the interlinking burrows, the entire area undermined to a depth of four feet or so.

That ground would not bear the weight of a mounted man, let alone the Land-Rover. With the engine idling, Craig could clearly hear the roar of the truck behind them, and machine-gun fire
whiplashed over them, so close that Craig ducked instinctively.

‘Turn left!’ he shouted. ‘Back towards the pan.’

They turned at right-angles across the front of the approaching truck, machine-gun fire goading them on, Timon’s groans reaching Craig above the engine beat. He closed his ears to
them.

‘There is no way through!’ Sally-Anne called. The spring-hare burrows were everywhere.

‘Keep going,’ Craig answered her. The truck had swung to cut them off, closing very swiftly now.

‘There!’ Craig cried with relief. As he had guessed, the spring-hare colony stopped short of the salt-pan’s edge, avoiding the brackish seepage from the pan. There was a narrow
bridge through, and Craig guided Sally-Anne into it. Within five hundred paces they were over the bridge with the ground firm ahead. Sally-Anne pushed the Land-Rover to its limit, directly away
from the pursuit.

‘No! No!’ Craig called. ‘Turn right, hard right.’ She hesitated. ‘Do it, damn you!’ And suddenly she saw what he intended, and she spun the steering-wheel,
running back in the opposite direction across the front of the approaching truck.

Immediately the truck turned to head them off again, turning away from the pan, and from the bridge of firm ground through the subterranean maze of burrows. It was so close that they could see
the heads of the troopers in the open back, catch the colour of a burgundy-red beret and the bright spark of a silver cap-badge, hear the fierce, bloodthirsty yells, see an AK 47 rifle brandished
triumphantly.

Machine-gun fire ploughed up the earth ten feet ahead of the Land-Rover and they tore into the standing dust.

Craig was blazing away with the AK 47, trying to keep the driver’s attention off the ground ahead of the truck.

‘Please! Please, let it happen,’ he pleaded as he changed the magazine on the hot rifle. And the gods were listening. The truck went into the undermined ground at full bore.

It was like an elephant running into a pitfall. The earth opened and swallowed her down, and as she went in she toppled to one side hurling the load of armed men out of the back. When the dust
rolled aside, she was half buried, lying on her side. Human bodies were strewn around her, some of them beginning to drag themselves upright, others lying where they had been thrown.

‘That’s it!’ Craig shouted down. ‘They’ll need a bulldozer to get out of that.’

‘Craig!’ she called back. ‘Timon is in a bad way. Can’t you help him?’

‘Stop for a second.’

Craig dropped off the roof, and scrambled into the back seat, and immediately Sally-Anne drove on.

Timon was lying sprawled half off the seat, his head thrown back and pillowed against the door. He had lost his glasses. His breathing gargled in his throat, and the back of his battle-jacket
was a soggy mess of blood. Craig eased him cautiously back in the seat and unzipped his jacket.

He was appalled. The bullet must have come in through the metal cab, and been deformed by the impact into a primitive dum-dum. It had torn a hole the size of a demi-tasse coffee cup in
Timon’s back. There was no exit wound. The bullet was still in there.

There was a first-aid box clamped to the dashboard. Craig took out two field dressings, stripped the wrappers and wadded them over the wound. Hampered by the Land-Rover’s erratic and
violent motion, he strapped them tightly.

‘How is he?’ Sally-Anne took her eyes off the ground ahead for a moment.

‘He’s going to be okay,’ Craig said for Timon’s benefit, but to Sally-Anne he shook his head and mouthed a silent denial.

Timon was a dead man. It was merely a matter of an hour or two. Nobody could survive a wound like that. The smell of hot metal in the cab was suffocating.

‘I can’t breathe,’ Timon whispered, and sawed for breath.

Craig had hoped he was unconscious, but Timon’s eyes were focusing on his face. Craig knocked out the Perspex pane of the window above Timon’s head with his fist, to give him more
air.

‘My glasses,’ Timon said. ‘I can’t see.’

Craig found the steel-rimmed spectacles on the floor between the seats, and placed them on the bridge of his nose, hooking the side frames over his ears.

‘Thank you, Mr Mellow.’ Incredibly, Timon smiled. ‘It doesn’t look as though I’ll be coming with you, after all.’

Craig was surprised by the strength of his own regret. He gripped Timon’s shoulder firmly, hoping that physical contact might comfort him a little.

‘The truck?’ Timon asked.

‘We knocked it out.’

‘Good for you, sir.’

As he spoke, the cab filled with the smell of burning rubber and oil.

‘We’re on fire!’ Sally-Anne cried, and Craig whipped around in the seat.

The front end of the Land-Rover was burning, red hot metal from the damaged bearing had ignited the grease and rubber of the front tyre. Almost immediately the bearing seized up completely, and
although the engine roared vainly, they ground to a halt. The slipping clutch burned out, more smoke spewing out from under the chassis.

‘Switch off!’ Craig ordered and banged open the door, grabbing the fire-extinguisher from its rack on the doorpost.

He sprayed a white cloud of powder over the burning front end, snuffing out the flames almost instantly, and then unhitched and lifted the bonnet, scalding his fingers on hot metal. He sprayed
the engine compartment to prevent a resurgence of the fire, and then stood back.

‘Well,’ he said with finality. ‘This bus isn’t going anywhere any more!’

The silence after the engine roar and the gunfire was overpowering. The pinking of cooling metal from the body of the Land-Rover sounded loud as cymbals. Craig walked to the rear of the cab and
looked back. The bogged truck was out of sight behind them in the heat haze. The silence buzzed in his ears and the loneliness of the desert bore down upon him with a physical weight and substance,
seeming to slow his movements and his thinking.

His mouth felt chalky dry from the adrenalin hangover.

‘Water!’ He went quickly to the reserve tank under the seat, unscrewed the cap and checked the level.

‘At least twenty-five litres.’

There was an aluminium canteen hanging beside the AK 47 in the rack, left by one of the grave-diggers. Craig topped it up from the tank, and then took it to Timon.

Timon drank gratefully, gulping and choking in his haste to swallow. Then he lay back panting. Craig passed the canteen to Sally-Anne and then drank himself. Timon seemed a little easier, and
Craig checked the dressings. The bleeding was staunched for the moment.

‘The first rule of desert survival,’ Craig reminded himself, ‘stay with the vehicle.’

But it didn’t apply here. The vehicle would draw the pursuit like a beacon. Timon had mentioned spotter aircraft. On this open plain they would see the Land-Rover from thirty miles. Then
there was the second patrol coming down from the Plumtree border-post. They would be here in a few hours.

They couldn’t stay. They had to go on. He looked down at Timon, and understanding flashed between them.

‘You’ll have to leave me,’ Timon whispered.

Craig could not hold his eyes, or reply. Instead he climbed on to the roof again and looked back.

Their tracks showed very clearly on the soft earth, filled with shadows by the lowering angle of the sun. He followed them with the eye towards the hazy horizon, and then started with alarm.

Something moved on the very edge of his vision. For long seconds he hoped it was a trick of light. Then it swelled up again, like a wriggling caterpillar, floated free of earth on a lake of
mirage, changed shape once more, anchored itself to earth again and became a line of armed men, running in Indian file, coming in on their tracks. The men of the Third Brigade had not abandoned the
chase. They were coming on foot, trotting steadily across the plain. Craig had worked with crack black troops before, he knew that they could keep up that pace for a day and a night.

He jumped down and found Timon’s binoculars in the cubby beside the driver’s seat.

‘There is a foot patrol following us,’ he told them.

‘How many?’ Timon asked.

On the roof he focused the binoculars. ‘Eight of them – they took casualties when the truck overturned.’

He looked back at the sun. It was reddening and losing its heat, sinking into the ground haze. Two hours to sunset, he guessed.

‘If you move me into a good place, I’ll give you delaying fire,’ Timon told him. And as Craig hesitated, ‘Don’t waste time arguing, Mr Mellow.’

‘Sally-Anne, refill the canteen,’ Craig ordered. ‘Take the chocolate and high-protein slabs from the emergency rations. Take the map and the compass and these
binoculars.’

He was surveying the fields of fire around the stranded vehicle. No advantage to be wrung from that flat terrain. The only strong point was the Land-Rover itself. He knocked the drain plug out
of the bottom of the gasoline tank and let the remaining fuel run into the sandy soil, to prevent a lucky shot torching the vehicle and Timon with it. Swiftly he built a rudimentary screen around
the back wheels, placing the spare wheels and the steel toolbox to cover Timon’s flanks when they started to enfilade him.