The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (52 page)

‘I take my two with the bolt-cutters, and we go straight to Number One hutment—’ He had given her two men. Tungata might be so weak as to be unable to walk unassisted. Number
One hutment was set a little apart from the others behind its own wire and was obviously used as the highest security cell. Sarah had seen them lead Tungata from it to their last meeting on the
parade ground.

‘When we find him, we bring him back to the assembly point at the main gate. If he can walk on his own I will leave my two men to open the other cells and release the prisoners.’

‘Good.’ She had it perfectly.

‘Now the second group.’

‘Five men for the perimeter guard towers—’ Comrade Lookout went through his instructions.

‘That’s it then.’ Craig stood up. ‘But it all depends on one thing. I’ve said this fifty times already, but I’m going to say it again. We must get the radio
before they can transmit. We have about five minutes from the first shot to do it, two minutes for the operator to realize what is happening, two minutes to start the electric generator and run up
to full power, another minute to make his contact with Harare headquarters and pass the warning. If that happens, we are all dead men.’ He checked his watch. ‘Five minutes past seven
– we can make the call now. Where is your man who speaks Shona?’

Carefully Craig coached the man in what he had to say, and was relieved to find him quick-witted.

‘I tell them that the convoy is delayed on the road. One of the trucks has broken down, but it will be repaired. We will arrive much later than usual, in the night,’ he repeated.

‘That’s it.’

‘If they begin asking questions, I reply, “Your message not understood. Your transmission breaking up and unreadable.” I repeat, “Arriving late”, and then I sign
off.’

Craig stood by anxiously while the guerrilla made the radio transmission, listening to the unintelligible bursts of Shona from the operator at Tuti camp, but he was unable to detect any trace of
suspicion or alarm in the static-distorted voice.

The guerrilla imposter signed off and handed the microphone back to Craig. ‘He says it is understood. They expect us in the night.’

‘Good. Now we can eat and rest.’

However, Craig could not eat. His stomach was queasy with tension for the night ahead and from reaction to the ghastly violence at the bridge. Those pangas, wielded with pent-up hatred, had
inflicted hideous mutilation. Many times during the long bush war he had witnessed death in some of its most unlovely forms, but had never become accustomed to it, it still made him sick to the
guts.

‘T
here is too much moon,’ Craig thought as he peered out from under the canvas canopy of the leading truck. It was only four days from
full and it rode so high and so bright as to cast hard-edged shadows on the earth. The truck lurched and jolted over the rough tracks and dust filtered up and clogged his throat.

He had not dared to ride in the cab, not even with his face blackened. A sharp eye would have picked him out readily. Comrade Lookout sat up beside the driver, dressed in the subaltern’s
spare uniform complete with beret and shoulder-flashes. Beside him was the Shona-speaker wearing the second beret. The heavy machine-guns were loaded and cocked, each served by a picked man, and
eight others dressed in looted uniforms rode up on the coachwork in plain view, while the remainder crouched with Craig under the canvas canopy.

‘So far, everything is going well,’ Sarah murmured.

‘So far,’ Craig agreed. ‘But I prefer bad starts and happy endings—’

There were three taps on the cab, beside Craig’s head. That was Comrade Lookout’s signal that the camp was in sight.

‘Well, one way or the other, here we go.’ Craig twisted round to peer through the peep-hole he had cut in the canvas hood.

He could make out the watchtowers of the camp, looking like oil-rigs against the moon-bright sky, and there was a glint of barbed-wire. Then quite suddenly the sky lit up. The floodlights on
their poles around the perimeter of the camp glowed and then bloomed with stark white light. The entire compound was illuminated with noon-day brilliance.

‘The generator,’ Craig groaned. ‘Oh, Christ, they’ve started the generator to welcome us in.’

Craig had made his first mistake. He had planned for everything to happen in darkness, with only the truck headlights to dazzle and confuse the camp guards. And yet, he now realized how logical
and obvious it was for the guards to light up the camp to check the arrival of the convoy and to facilitate the unloading.

They were committed already. They could only ride on into the glare of floodlights, and Craig was helpless, pinned by the lights beneath the canopy, not even able to communicate with Comrade
Lookout in the cab in front of him. Bitterly reviling himself for not having planned for this contingency, he kept his eye to the peep-hole.

The guards were not opening the gates, there was the sandbagged machine-gun emplacement to one side of the guard house, and Craig could see the barrel of the weapon traversing slowly to keep
them covered as they approached. The guard was turning out, four troopers and a noncommissioned officer, falling in outside the guardroom.

The sergeant stepped in front of the leading truck as it drove up to the gate and held up one hand. As the truck pulled up he came round to the offside window, asked a question in Shona, and the
bereted guerrilla answered him easily. But immediately the sergeant’s tone altered, clearly the reply had been incorrect. His voice rose, became hectoring and strident. He was outside
Craig’s limited circle of vision, but Craig saw the armed guard react. They began to unsling their rifles, started to spread out to cover the truck, the bluff was over before it had
begun.

Craig tapped the leg of the uniformed guerrilla standing above him. It was the signal, and the guerrilla lobbed the grenade that he was holding in his right hand with the pin already drawn. It
went up in a high, lazy parabola and dropped neatly into the machine-gun emplacement.

At the same instant, Craig said quietly to the man on either side of him, ‘Kill them.’

They thrust the muzzles of their AKs through the firing slits in the canopy and the range was less than ten paces. The volley ripped into the unprepared guards before they could bring up their
weapons. The sergeant raced back towards the guard-room door, but Comrade Lookout leaned out of the cab with the Tokarev pistol in a stiff-armed double grip and shot him twice in the back.

As the sergeant sprawled, the grenade burst behind the sandbags, and the barrel of the heavy machine-gun swivelled aimlessly towards the sky as the hidden gunner was torn by flying shrapnel.

‘Drive!’ Craig stuck his head and shoulders through the slit in the canopy, and yelled at the driver through the open window of the cab. ‘Smash through the gate!’

The powerful diesel of the Toyota bellowed, and the truck surged forward. There was a rending crash, and the vehicle bucked and shuddered, checked for an instant, and then roared into the
brightly lit compound, dragging a tangle of barbed-wire and shattered gate-timbers behind it.

Craig scrambled up beside the machine-gunner on the cab.

‘On the left—’ He directed his fire at the barrack room of adobe and thatch beside the gate. The machine-gunner fired a long burst into the knot of half-naked troopers as they
spilled out of the front door.

‘Guard tower on the right.’

They were receiving fire from the two guards in the tower. It hissed and cracked around their heads like the lash of a stock whip. The machine-gunner traversed and elevated, and the belted
ammunition fed into the clattering breech and empty cases poured in a glittering stream from the ejector slide. Splinters of timber and glass flew from the walls and windows of the tower, and the
two guards were picked up and flung backwards by the solid strike of shot.

‘Number One hutment just ahead,’ Craig warned Sarah with a shout. She and her two men were crouched at the tailboard, and as the Toyota slowed, they jumped over and hit the ground
running. Sarah carried the bolt-cutters and the two guerrillas ran ahead of her, jinking and dodging and firing from the hip.

Craig slid over the side of the truck, onto the running-board and clung to the cab.

‘Drive for the kopje,’ he shouted at the driver. ‘We have to take the radio!’

The fortified kopje lay directly ahead, but they had to cross the wide, brightly lit parade ground, with the whitewashed wall at the far end, to reach the foot of the kopje.

Craig glanced backwards. Sarah and her team had reached the hutment and were working on the wire with the bolt-cutters. Even as he watched, they completed their opening and broke through,
disappearing into the building.

He looked for the second truck. It was roaring around the perimeter, just inside the wire, taking on each guard tower as they came to it, and pouring suppressing fire into it with the heavy
machine-gun. They had knocked out four towers already, only two more to go.

The bright flash of bursting grenades dragged his attention to the barracks abutting the main prison hutment. The second truck had dropped a group of guerrillas to attack these barracks. Craig
could see them crouched below the sills of the barracks, popping grenades through the windows, and then, as they exploded, darting forward, bright as moths in the floodlights, towards the main
prison hutment.

In the first few minutes they had taken control of the entire camp. They had knocked out the towers, devastated the guard house and both barrack blocks – it was all theirs. He felt a surge
of triumph, and then he looked ahead across the parade ground to the kopje.
Everything but the kopje
, and as he thought it, a line of white tracer stretched out towards him from the
sandbagged upper slopes of the rocky hillock. It looked like a string of bright white fire-beads, at first coming quite slowly but accelerating miraculously as they closed, and suddenly there was
flying dust and the shriek of ricochets all around them and the jarring crashing of shot into the metal body of the racing truck.

The truck swerved wildly, and Craig screamed at the driver as he clung desperately to the projecting rear-view mirror.

‘Keep going – we have to get the radio!’

The driver wrestled with the wrenching, bucking steering-wheel, and the nose of the truck swung back towards the kopje just as the second burst of machine-gun fire hit it. The windscreen
exploded in flying diamond chips, and the driver was hurled against the door of the cab, his chest shot half-away. The truck slowed as his foot slipped from the accelerator pedal.

Craig hit the handle and yanked the door open. The driver’s body slid out of the seat and tumbled overside. Craig swung himself into his place and jammed his foot flat on the accelerator.
The truck lunged forward again.

Beside Craig, Comrade Lookout was firing his AK through the gaping hole where the windscreen had been shot away, and overhead the heavy machine-gun returned the fire from the kopje with a
fluttering ear-numbing clatter. The streams of opposing tracer fire seemed to meet and mingle in the air above the bare earth of the parade ground, and then Craig saw something else.

From one of the embrasures in the sandbagged walls at the foot of the hill, a black blob, the size of a pineapple, flew towards them on a tiny tail of flame. He knew instantly what it was, but
he didn’t even have time to shout a warning as the RPG-7 rocket missile hit them.

It hit low into the front end of the truck, that was all that saved them – the main blast was absorbed by the solid engine block, but nevertheless, it tore the front end off the truck and
stopped it as though it had run into an ironstone cliff. The Toyota somersaulted over its ruined front wheel assembly, hurling Craig out of the open cab door.

Craig crawled up onto his knees, and the machine-gun on the hill traversed back towards him. A stream of bullets showered him with chunks of hard, dried clay from the surface of the parade
ground and he fell flat again.

There were stunned and wounded guerrillas scattered around the wrecked Toyota, one man was trapped under it, his legs and pelvis crushed by the steel side and he was screaming like a rabbit in a
wire snare.

‘Come on,’ Craig shouted in Sindebele. ‘Get to the wall – the wall – run for the wall.’

He jumped up and started to run. The whitewashed execution wall was off to their right-hand side, seventy yards away, and a handful of men heard him and ran with him.

The machine-gun came hunting back, the whip-crack of passing shot around his head made Craig reel like a drunkard, but he steadied himself – and the man just ahead of him went down, both
legs shot from under him. As Craig passed him, he rolled on his back and threw his AK up at Craig.

‘Here, Kuphela, take it. I am dead.’

Craig snatched the rifle from the air without missing a step.

‘You are a man,’ he called to the downed guerrilla, and sprinted on. Ahead of him, Comrade Lookout reached the shelter of the wall, but the machine-gunner on the kopje traversed back
towards Craig, kicking up curtains of dust and lumps of clay as the stream of bullets reached out for him.

Craig went for the corner of the wall feet first, sliding like a baseball player for home base, and shot flew close around him. He kept rolling until he hit the wall and lay in a tangle of
limbs, fighting for breath. Only Comrade Lookout and two others had made it to the wall – the rest of them were dead in the truck or lying broken and crumpled on the open ground between.

‘We have to get that gun,’ he gasped, and Comrade Lookout gave him a twisted grin.

‘Go to it, Kuphela – we will watch you with great interest.’

Another RPG rocket missile slammed into the wall, deafening them and covering them with a fine haze of white dust.

Craig rolled on his side and checked the AK 47. It had a full magazine. Comrade Lookout passed him another full magazine from the haversack on his shoulder, and Craig had the Tokarev pistol on
his belt and two remaining grenades buttoned into his breast pockets.