The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (54 page)

He started the motor, and put the truck into a roaring turn. The engine room was at the back of the hill, part of the central complex protected by sandbags and by the fortifications on the high
ground above it. Craig parked the truck close to the steps that led down into the power house, and he ran down and burst into it.

The generator was a twenty-five-kilowatt Lister, a big squat green machine, and its fuel tank was bolted on steel brackets to the wall above it. Craig tapped the side of the tank and it gave
back a reassuring dull tone.

‘Full!’ Craig breathed. ‘Forty glorious gallons, at least!’

T
he road twisted like a dying python and the truck, her fuel-tank brimming, was unwieldy and stiff on the turns. Craig had to wrench the wheel into
them with both arms. The uphills were steep and the speed bled away to a walking pace as Craig changed down through the gears. Then they roared down the far side, too fast for safety, the empty
truck bouncing them about unmercifully as they hit the deep ruts.

Craig almost missed the causeway at the bridge, and they lurched out over the drop with the edge crumbling away under the big double back wheels before he swerved back and they went lumbering
over the narrow timber bridge.

‘Time?’ he asked, and Sarah checked her watch in the dashboard lights.

‘Four fifty-three.’

Craig glanced away from the bright tunnel of the headlights and for the first time he could see the silhouette of the tree-tops against the lightening sky. At the top of the slope he pulled into
the verge and switched on the radio set. He searched the channels slowly, listening for military traffic, but there was only the buzz of static.

‘If they are in range, they are keeping mum.’ He switched off the set and pulled out into the track again, marvelling at the swiftness of the African dawn. Below them in the valley,
the landscape was emerging out of the fleeing night, the great, dark, forested plain leading from the foot of the hills down to the mission station stretched below them.

‘Ten miles,’ said Tungata.

‘Another half an hour,’ Craig replied and sent the Toyota bellowing down the last hills. Before they reached the bottom, it was light enough for him to switch off the headlights.
‘No point drawing attention to ourselves.’

Suddenly he sat up straighter, alarmed by the change in the engine note of the truck; it was harsher and louder.

‘Oh God, not that, not now,’ he whispered, and then realized that he was hearing the sound not of the Toyota, but of another motor outside the cab. It was growing louder, closer,
more compelling. He rolled down the side window and stuck his head out into the cool rush of the wind.

Sally-Anne’s Cessna was roaring down from behind them, only fifty feet above the road, sparkling blue and silver in the first rays of the sun.

Craig let out a whoop of joy and waved wildly.

Swiftly the Cessna overhauled them and drew level. Sally-Anne’s beloved face looked down at him from the cockpit. She had a pink scarf around her head, and those thick dark eyebrows framed
her eyes. She was laughing, as she recognized Craig, and she waved and mouthed at him, ‘Go for it!’ Then she was roaring past, climbing, waggling the wings of the Cessna from side to
side, heading for the airstrip.

They burst out of the forest, racing through the maize fields that surrounded the tiny mission village. The tin roofs of the church and the schoolhouse glittered in the sunrise. From the huts
beside the road, a few sleepy villagers, yawning and scratching, came out to watch them pass through.

Craig slowed the truck, and Sarah shouted through the window, ‘Soldiers coming! Big trouble! Warn everybody! Go into the bush! Hide!’

Craig had not thought that far ahead. The retaliation of the Third Brigade on the local population would be horrific. He accelerated through the village and the airstrip was a kilometre ahead,
the tattered windsock undulating on its pole at the far end. The Cessna was circling low overhead. Craig saw Sally-Anne lower her undercarriage and start her turn onto final approach for the
landing.

‘Look!’ said Tungata harshly, and another aircraft came roaring in, from their left-hand side, low and fast, another much larger, twin-engined machine. Craig recognized it
immediately.

It was an old Dakota transport, a veteran of the desert war in north Africa, and the bush war in Rhodesia. It was sprayed with non-reflective anti-missile grey paint and it was now decorated
with the Zimbabwe Air Force roundels. The main hatch just abaft the wing root was open, and there were men poised in the opening. They were dressed in camouflage jump smocks and helmets. The bulky
bundles of their parachutes dangled below their buttocks. Two of them were in the hatchway, but others crowded up close behind them.

‘Paras!’ shouted Craig, and the Dakota banked steeply towards them and passed them so low that the blast from the propellers churned the tops of the standing maize in the field
beside them. As the aircraft flashed past them, Craig and Tungata simultaneously recognized one of the men in the hatchway.

‘Fungabera!’ Tungata snapped. ‘It’s him!’

As he said it, Tungata threw open the door at his side and clambered up the outside of the cab to reach the ring-mounted machine-gun. Despite his size and weakness, he was so quick that he
reached the gun and swung it and got off a long burst before the Dakota was out of range. Tracer flew under the Dakota’s port wing, close enough to alarm the pilot, and make him throw the
aircraft into a tight climbing turn.

‘They are climbing up to drop altitude!’ Craig shouted.

Surely Fungabera had seen and recognized the blue and silver Cessna. He would have realized that it was the escape plane and that the truck was heading for a rendezvous at the airstrip. His
paratroopers could be more swiftly deployed by dropping, than by landing the Dakota. He was going to drop in and seize the airstrip with his paras before the Cessna could take off again. A thousand
feet was safe drop altitude, but these were crack troopers. The Dakota levelled out on its drop run, five hundred feet, Craig estimated, and they were going to make the drop down the length of the
airstrip.

The Cessna was just coming in over the fence at the far end of the strip. As Craig glanced back at her Sally-Anne touched down and then taxied at speed down the strip towards the racing
Toyota.

Above the airstrip the tiny figure of a man fell clear of the lumbering Dakota and the green silk parachute flared open almost instantly. He was followed in rapid succession by a string of other
paras, and the sky was filled with a forest of sinister mushrooms, poisonous green and swaying gently in the light morning breeze, but sinking towards the parched brown turf of the airstrip.

The Cessna reached the end of the strip and swung around sharply in a 180-degree turn. Only then did Craig realize that Sally-Anne had been far-seeing enough to assess the danger and urgency,
and that she had landed with the wind behind her, accepting the hazard of the higher approach speed and the longer roll-out in order to be able immediately to turn back into the wind for her
take-off which would be with a full load, and under attack from the paras.

On the cab, Tungata was firing up into the sky, measured controlled bursts, hoping more to intimidate the descending paras than to inflict casualties. A man dangling on swinging
parachute-shrouds makes an almost impossible target.

Sally-Anne was leaning out of the open cockpit door, shouting and waving them on, already she was running up her engine to full power, holding the Cessna on the wheel brakes. They bumped over
the verge of the runway and Craig swung the Toyota into a brake-squealing skid, parking so as to screen and protect the aircraft and themselves while they made the transfer.

‘Get out,’ he yelled at Sarah, and she jumped down and ran to the aircraft. Sally-Anne grabbed her arm and helped her swing up and tumble into the back seat.

On the cab, Tungata fired a last burst with the heavy machine-gun. The first three paras were down, their green parachutes rolling softly in front of the light breeze, and Tungata’s
bullets kicked dust amongst them. Craig saw one of the paras fall and drag away loose and lifeless on his shrouds. Craig grabbed the AK 47 and the bag of spare ammunition and shouted,
‘Let’s go, Sam. Let’s go!’

They ran to the Cessna, and Tungata, weak and sick, fell at the steps, and Craig had to drag him to his feet and shove him up.

Sally-Anne let go the brakes before Tungata was aboard, and Craig ran beside the Cessna as it gathered speed. Tungata fell into the back seat beside Sarah, and Craig jumped up and got a hold.
Though he was hampered by the AK rifle and bag, he dragged himself into the front seat beside Sally-Anne.

‘Get the door closed!’ Sally-Anne screamed, without looking at him, all her attention on the strip ahead. The dangling seat-belt was jammed in the door and Craig wrestled with it as
they built up to rotation speed. Craig managed to extricate the strap and slam the door closed. When he looked up, he saw paratroopers sprinting forward from the edge of the strip to intercept the
Cessna.

It did not need the shiny general’s star on the front of his helmet to identify Peter Fungabera. The set of his shoulders, the way he carried his head, and the fluid catlike grace of his
run were all distinctive. His men were spread out behind him – they were almost directly ahead of the Cessna, only four or five hundred paces ahead.

Sally-Anne rotated and the Cessna lifted its nose, bounced lightly and became airborne. Peter Fungabera and his line of paratroopers disappeared from view under the nose and engine section as
the Cessna climbed away, but the aircraft would have to pass directly over the top of their heads at little more than a few hundred feet.

‘Oh mother!’ Sally-Anne spoke in almost conversational tones. ‘This is it!’ And as she said it, the instrument panel in front of Craig exploded, covering him with fine
chips of glass like sugar crystals. Hydraulic fluid sprayed over the front of his shirt.

Machine-gun fire came in through the floor of the cabin and tore out through the thin metal roof so that the interior was filled with a gale of swirling wind as the slipstream found the
holes.

In the back seat, Sarah cried out, and the body of the machine was racked and jarred by the storm of AK 47 bullets. Craig felt the seat under him jump as bullets smacked into the metal frame.
Jagged punctures appeared miraculously in the wing roots just outside his window.

Sally-Anne shoved the control wheel forward and the Cessna dived back towards the airstrip again with a gut-swooping rush, ducking under the maelstrom of machine-gun fire and giving them a
moment’s respite. The brown earth came up at them, and Sally-Anne caught the Cessna’s suicidal dive and held it off, but the wheels hit the surface and they bounced wildly thirty feet
back into the air. Craig saw two paratroopers dive to the side as the plane raced towards them.

The wild dive towards the earth had pushed their speed way up, so that Sally-Anne could instantly throw the Cessna into a maximum rate turn, the port wingtip brushing the earth. Her face was
contorted and the muscle stood proud in her forearms with the effort of holding the Cessna’s nose up in the turn and preventing her from going in. Ahead of them on the left-hand side of the
airstrip, only a hundred yards or so from the verge, stood a single tree with dense, wide-spread branches. It was a marula, ninety feet tall.

Sally-Anne levelled out for an instant and flew for the marula, her wingtip almost touched its outermost branches, and immediately she threw the Cessna into an opposite turn, neatly placing the
tree between them and the line of paratroopers on the airstrip behind them.

She kept at ground level, her undercarriage brushing the tops of the maize plants in the open fields, glancing up in the rear-view mirror above her head to keep the marula tree exactly behind
the Cessna’s tail, blanketing the paratroopers’ field of fire.

‘Where is the Dakota?’ Craig asked, raising his voice above the rush of wind through the cabin.

‘It’s going in to land,’ Tungata called, and, twisting in his seat, Craig had a glimpse of the big grey machine going in low over the tree-tops behind them, lined up for the
airstrip.

‘I can’t get the undercarriage up.’ Sally-Anne was thumbing the rocker switch but the three green eyes of the undercarriage warning light still glared at her from the console.
‘We have damage there, it’s stuck.’

The forest beyond the open fields rushed towards them and as she eased back on the control wheel to lift the Cessna over the tree-tops, a hydraulic lead burst under the shot-ruptured engine
housing and hydraulic fluid sprayed in viscous sheets over the windscreen.

‘Can’t see!’ Sally-Anne cried, and pulled open her side window, flying by reference to the horizon under her wing-tip.

‘We’ve got no instruments,’ Craig checked the shattered panel. ‘Airspeed’s gone, rate of climb, artificial horizon, altimeter, gyro compass—’

‘The undercarriage—’ Sally-Anne interrupted him. ‘Too much drag, it will cut down our range – we’ll never make it back!’

She was still climbing, but gradually starting to come around onto her course, using the compass in its glass oil-bath above her head, when the engine stuttered, almost cut – and then
surged again in full power.

Quickly Sally-Anne adjusted pitch and power-settings.

‘That sounded like fuel starvation,’ she whispered. ‘They must have hit a fuel line.’ She switched the fuel-tank selector cock from ‘starboard’ to
‘both’ and then glanced up at Craig and grinned. ‘Hi there! I missed you something awful.’

‘Me too.’ He reached across and squeezed her thigh.

‘Time check.’ Businesslike again.

‘05.17 hours,’ Craig told her and looked overside. The brown snake of the Tuti road was angling away towards the north, and they were crossing the first line of hills –
Vusamanzi’s village would be out there a few miles beyond the road.

The engine missed again, and Sally-Anne’s expression was taut with apprehension.