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Myrna reloaded again. A window shattered and holes suddenly appeared in the wallpaper beside her chair. She felt no stabbing pain, no stinging sensation. She looked down. Blood was beginning to seep through the blue denim of her jeans.

A heavy booming sound erupted from upstairs and she knew Jenny was shooting down into the yard with the captain’s .44 Magnum.

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The next African was more cautious. He fired a quick burst around the door and waited before he entered. Not receiving any return fire, he became overconfident and ventured inside. The double-O buckshot blew away his left arm. For several moments he stared dazedly at the limb lying at his feet, the fingers still twitching. The blood pumped from his empty sleeve and spilled on the carpet. Still in a trance, the soldier slowly sank to his knees and knelt there, moaning softly as his life’s fluids leaked away.

With one hand Myrna fumbled with Lucifer. Three bullets from her last assailant had shattered her right forearm and wrist. Awkwardly, she broke open the breech and ejected the spent shells. Her every movement seemed immersed in glue. The new shells slipped between her sweating fingers and fell past her reach.

“Mama?”

Myrna looked up. Jenny was standing in the middle of the stairway, the revolver hanging loosely in one hand, the front of her blouse soaked with crimson.

“Mama … I’m hurt.”

Before Myrna could reply, another figure entered the room. Jenny tried to raise her gun. Her effort came slowly and too late. The newcomer fired first and she sagged and rolled down the stairs like a ragged, cast-off doll.

Myrna could only sit there and grip Lucifer. The loss of blood was sapping her energy and blurring her vision. She gazed vacantly at the man standing over her. Through the growing fog she could see him place the tip of the rifle an inch from her forehead.

“Forgive me,” he said.

“Why?” she asked vaguely. “Why did you do this terrible thing?”

The cold dark eyes held no answer. For Myrna, the bougainvillea blossoms outside on the veranda exploded in a blaze of fuchsia and then blinked into blackness.

Somala walked among the dead, staring numbly at the faces forever frozen in shock and confusion. The raiders had ruthlessly killed nearly all the workers and their families in the compound. No more than a handful could have escaped into the bush. The feed in the barn and the equipment housed in the shed had been set on fire, and flames were already flickering orange fingers from the upstairs window of the Fawkes house.

Operation Wild Rose I 73

How strange, Somala thought. The raiders policed the battleground and retrieved their own dead as quietly as ghosts. The movements had been efficient and deliberate. There was no hint of panic at the distant sound of the approaching helicopter units of the South African Defence Forces. The raiders simply melted into the surrounding brush as stealthily as they came.

Somala returned to the baobab tree for his gear and began trotting toward the township. His only thoughts were focused on rounding up the men of his section and reporting back to their camp across the Mozambique border. He did not look back at the dead strewn about the form. He did not see the gathering vultures. Nor did he hear the shot from the gun whose bullet tore into the flesh of his back.

The drive from Pembroke back to Umkono was a total blank to Patrick Fawkes. His hands turned the wheel and his feet worked the pedals in stiff mechanical movements. His eyes were unblinking and glazed as he assaulted the steep grades and on blind instinct hurled the four-wheel-drive around the hairpin curves.

He had been in a small chemist’s shop, buying Jenny’s bath oil, when a sergeant from the Pembroke constabulary tracked him down and stammered out a sketchy outline of the tragedy. At first Fawkes refused to believe it. Only after he reached Shawn Francis, the Irish-born constable of Umkono, over the Bushmaster’s mobile radio did he come to accept the worst.

“You’d better come home, Patrick,” Francis’s strained voice crackled over the speaker. The constable spared Fawkes the details, and Fawkes did not demand them.

The sun was still high when Fawkes came within sight of his farm. Little remained of the house. Only the fireplace and a section of the veranda still stood. The rest was no more than a pile of cinders. Across the yard, rubber tires on the tractors smoldered on their steel rims and emitted thick black smoke. The farm workers still lay where they’d fallen in the compound. Vultures were picking at the carcasses of his prize cattle.

Shawn Francis and several Defence Force soldiers were huddled

around three forms lying under blankets when Fawkes braked to a stop in the yard. Francis came over to him as he leaped out of the mud-streaked Bushmaster. The constable’s face was pale granite.

“God in hell!” cried Fawkes. He gazed into Francis’s eyes, searching for a small ray of light. “My family. What of my family?”

Francis fought to get the words out, then gave up and dipped his head in the direction of the blanket-covered bodies. Fawkes pushed past him and stumbled across the yard but was caught short by the stout arms of the constable, which suddenly encircled him about the chest.

“Leave them be, Patrick. I’ve already identified them.”

“Dammit, Shawn, that’s my family lying there.”

“I beg you, my friend, do not look.”

“Let me go. I must see for myself.”

“No!” said Francis, grimly hanging on, knowing he was no match for Fawkes’s massive strength. “Myrna and Jenny were badly burned in the fire. They’re gone, Patrick. The loved ones you knew are no more. Remember them alive, not as they are in death.”

Francis could feel the tenseness slowly drain from Fawkes’s muscles and the constable loosened his hold.

“How did it happen?” asked Fawkes quietly.

“No way of describing in detail. All your workers have either been driven off or killed. There are no wounded to tell the tale.”

“Somebody must know … must have seen …”

“We’ll find a witness. One will turn up by morning. I promise.”

The grim conversation halted while a helicopter whirled to the ground and the soldiers tenderly lifted the bodies of Myrna, Jenny, and Patrick Junior inside the cargo cabin and strapped them down. Fawkes made no move to go to them. He only stood there and watched with great sadness in his eyes as the helicopter lifted off and headed toward the mortuary in Umkono.

“Who is responsible?” Fawkes said to Francis. “Tell me who murdered my wife and children and my workers and burned my farm.”

“One or two CK-eighty-eight plastic cartridges, the charred remains of an arm inside the house with a Chinese watch on the wrist, prints in the dirt from military-soled boots. Circumstantial as it is, the evidence points to the AAR.”

“What do you mean, ‘one or two cartridges’?” Fawkes snapped. “The bloody bastards should have left a whole mountain of them.”

Francis made a helpless gesture with his hands. “Typical of an AAR

Operation Wild Rose I 75

raid. They always police the area right after an attack. Makes it tough to tag them with any hard evidence. They plead innocent to any international investigation of terrorism while pointing a hypocritical finger at the other liberation organizations. If it hadn’t been for our Alsatian dogs, we never would have uncovered the spent shells or perhaps even the arm.

“The raiders’ tracks come and go from the bush through the cane fields and up to the house. I figure they shot down the guards during a shift change, while the gate was open, breaking the electrical charge. Pat Junior was killed over by that burnt-out tractor. Myrna and Jenny were lying a few feet apart in the parlor. All had been mercifully shot. Patrick, for what little comfort it’s worth, there was no indication of rape or mutilation.”

Constable Francis paused to take a drink from a canteen. He offered it to Fawkes, who simply shook his head.

“Take a swig, Patrick. It’s whisky.”

Fawkes refused again.

“My office received a distress message over the radio from Jenny. She said that Pat had been shot and that men in bush fatigues were attacking the farm. She and Myrna must have put up one hell of a fight. We found four separate bloodstains in the yard behind the house. And you can see for yourself that what’s left of the veranda floor is filled with bloody trails. Jenny’s last words were, ‘Good Lord, they’re shooting the children in the compound.’

“We assembled our forces and came on as quickly as the whirlybirds could get us here. Thirteen minutes was all it took. By then everything was ablaze and the raiders had vanished. Two platoons and a helicopter are tracking them through the bush now.”

“My people,” murmured Fawkes, pointing at the still figures sprawled around the compound. “We can’t leave them lying here for the vultures.”

“Your neighbor Brian Vogel is coming with his workers to bury them. They should be here any time. Until then, my men will keep the scavengers away.”

Fawkes was like a man wandering lost in a dream as he walked up the steps to the veranda. He could not yet grasp the immensity of the tragedy. He still half expected to see his three loved ones standing framed by the bougainvillea. And his mind very nearly formed a picture of them as they were, waving happily to him when he left for Pembroke.

The veranda was painted in gore. Puddled streaks traveled from the

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smoking embers down the steps to the yard, where they abruptly ended. It looked to Fawkes as if three or maybe four bodies had been dragged from the house before it was torched. The blood had coagulated and turned crusty under the afternoon sun. Fat iridescent flies hummed and waded about the trails in swarms.

Fawkes leaned against the lattice and felt the first uncontrollable tremor of shock. The house he had built for his family was nothing but blackened, grotesque ruins incongruously heaped in the middle of the trimmed lawn and the beds of gladiola and fire lilies that stood virtually unmarked. Even the memory of how it had looked was beginning to twist and distort. He sank down on the steps and covered his face with his hands.

He was still sitting there half an hour later when Constable Francis came over and gently nudged him.

“Come, Patrick, let me take you to my place. There is nothing to be gained by staying here.”

Francis led the unresisting Fawkes to the Bushmaster and tenderly deposited him in the passenger’s seat.

As the vehicle passed through the gate, Fawkes stared straight ahead, did not look back. He knew he would never see or set foot on his farm again.

Although it seemed as though his head had barely hit the pillow, Hiram Lusana had been asleep for seven hours when he was roused by the knock at his door. The wristwatch on the bed table read six o’clock. He cursed, rubbed the sleep from his coffee-brown eyes, and sat up.

“Come in.”

The knock came again.

“I said, Come in,” he grunted loudly.

Captain John Mukuta entered the room and stood stiffly at attention. “Sorry to wake you, sir, but section fourteen has just returned from its reconnaissance of Umkono.”

“So what’s the emergency? I can study their report later.”

Mukuta’s eyes remained fixed on a spot on the wall. “The patrol experienced trouble. The section leader was shot and lies critically wounded in the hospital. He insists on reporting to you and no one else.”

•— Operation Wild Rose I 77

“Who is he?”

“His name is Marcus Somala.”

“Somala?” Lusana’s brow knitted. He got out of bed. “Tell him I’m coming.”

The captain saluted and left, softly closing the door behind him, pretending not to have noticed the second shape curled beneath the satin sheets.

Lusana reached over and pulled away the top sheet. Felicia Collins slept like a statue. Her short Afro hair gleamed in the half light and her lips were puffy and parted. Her skin was the color of cocoa and her conical breasts, with their dark, full nipples, heaved with each deep breath.

He smiled and left the sheet off. Still half asleep, he weaved into the bathroom and splashed handfuls of cold water on his face. The eyes that stared back from the mirror were streaked with red. The face around them was lined and haggard from a night heavily laced with liquor and sex. He tenderly patted the battle-worn features with a towel, returned to the bedroom, and dressed.

Lusana was a small, wiry man, medium boned and lighter skinned than any man in the army of Africans he commanded. “American tan” is what they called it behind his back. And yet any remarks about his color or his offhand stateside manner were not uttered out of disrespect. His men looked up to him with a primitive sort of awe of the supernatural. He had the air of assurance that most lightweight fighters have in their early careers; some might call it an air of arrogance. He took a last fond look at Felicia, sighed, and walked across the camp to the hospital.

The Chinese doctor was pessimistic.

“The bullet entered from the rear, tore away half his lung, shattered a rib, and exited below the left breast. It is a miracle the man is still alive.”

“Can he talk?” Lusana asked.

“Yes, but each word drains his strength.”

“How long-“

“-has he to live?” .

Lusana nodded.

“Marcus Somala has an incredibly strong constitution,” the doctor said. “But I doubt if he can last out the day.”

“Can you give him something to stimulate his senses, if even for only a few minutes?”

The doctor looked thoughtful. “I suppose speeding up the inevitable

SIP*”

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will not matter.” He turned and murmured instructions to a nurse, who left the room.

Lusana looked down at Somala. The section leader’s face was drawn and his chest rose shallowly with spasmodic breaths. A maze of plastic tubing hung from a rack above the bed and ran into his nose and arms. A large surgical dressing was taped across his chest.

The nurse returned and carefully handed the doctor a hypodermic. He inserted the needle and pushed evenly on the plunger. In a few moments Somala’s eyes fluttered half open, and he moaned.