95
Carver was busy working out the best way of getting out of the Land Rover. It was a right-hand-drive vehicle, so the door on his side was now pressed against the ground. There was a fist-sized hole in the windscreen directly in front of him and the rest of the glass was so cracked that one good kick would get rid of it. First, though, he had to find a way of delivering that kick, which would mean unstrapping himself and freeing his legs from the well in front of the driver’s seat. Justus would have the easier way out if he could somehow open the passenger-side window or door and scramble up through that. Zalika would be able to do the same at the back.
Somehow, though, Carver felt that he should be the first one out of the vehicle. He was painfully aware that anyone for miles around would have heard the sound of the crash – a crash that was entirely his fault. He had got them into this mess. Time he started getting them out of it.
Justus, however, had other ideas. He was wriggling in his seat, trying to reach the handle that would wind down his window. He finally got hold of it and started turning it as fast as he could.
Then a low, purring growl reverberated round the inside of the Land Rover. Suddenly Justus began working the handle the other way. The lion was just outside. They could hear it snuffling at the upturned car, pawing the ground.
‘Oh God, oh God … come on …’ he muttered as Zalika shrieked, ‘For God’s sake, close that f*cking window!’
Just then there was a thud up above him. The lion had jumped up and was now pacing along the overturned bodywork and peering in through the windows.
Zalika screamed. She unclipped her harness and fell down to the bottom of the car, away from the marauding animal. Justus lowered himself more carefully and crouched down next to Carver.
By now, Carver had drawn the pistol that Parkes had given him and pointed it up at the side of the car. ‘Watch out,’ he said. ‘Fire in the hole.’
He punched half-a-dozen holes in the side of the car as he fired at where the great cat was standing. From outside came a squeal of pain. The lion half-jumped, half-fell down to the ground, gave another agonized grunt, then disappeared into the night.
For an entire minute, no one moved. But there were no more sounds from outside. No sign of the animal’s return.
‘Right,’ said Carver. ‘Time to go.’
‘But the lion is still out there,’ Justus protested. ‘And as long as it is alive it is dangerous.’
‘Yeah, the lion and Moses Mabeki. He’s out there somewhere, too, and I’m not waiting for him to find us.’
‘He might not find us,’ said Zalika. ‘Why don’t we wait a bit longer, just to make sure the lion has really gone away?’
Carver was about to reply when he stopped, tilted his head to one side and whispered, ‘Listen.’
The only sound to be heard in the Land Rover was very faint, but unmistakable: a helicopter, still a fair way off but getting closer all the time.
‘Right, that does it,’ said Carver. ‘I don’t care how many lions are prowling around outside, we’re getting out of here.’
96
Moses Mabeki was up at the front of the helicopter in the co-pilot’s seat, his eyes focused on the ever-moving pool of light created by the searchlight as it swept across the ground just a couple of hundred feet below. They were passing over hillier country now, where the shadows cast by the broken landscape made it harder than ever to see anything down below. His frustration was mounting. The border with South Africa was barely a mile away now. There was a very real possibility that Carver had eluded him and, just as bad, taken the Stratten girl beyond his reach. He was almost at the point where he would have to admit defeat.
And then something caught his eye. At first, he could not say exactly what it was, just an anomaly in the landscape. He tapped the pilot on his shoulder. ‘Go back,’ he said, pointing down at the ground behind them. ‘I saw something.’
The pilot brought the chopper round through a one-eighty turn and retraced their course, more slowly now.
‘There!’ said Mabeki triumphantly, pointing down at the ground where the abandoned Land Rover lay. ‘I knew it! Get us down. As close to that car as possible.’
Barely a minute later, Mabeki was standing at the crash site, running his hands over the punctured flank of the Land Rover, contemplating the significance of shots fired from inside the car and wondering where the blood coagulating in drips and smears across the metal had come from.
‘Lion,’ said one of his men. ‘Big lion. See here.’
He flashed a torch at paw-prints the size of a large dinner-plate pressed into the earth around the car.
For a moment, Mabeki was nervous. ‘Lion? Where did it go?’
The man looked down at the prints and the drops of blood scattered among them. Then he pointed away down the hillside, to the northwest. ‘That way,’ he said.
‘And the people in the car?’
The man spent a few seconds examining the side of the hill before returning to Mabeki. ‘That way.’
He was pointing back up the hill, towards the trail that ran about twenty feet above their heads. Towards the South African border.
‘Excellent,’ said Mabeki. ‘Then let us follow them at once.’
Lobengula had indeed walked away to the northwest, but had not gone very far before lying down to ease the pain of his wounds, his huge frame melting invisibly into the undergrowth. In full sunlight, even an experienced tracker would have had a hard time spotting him. At night it was impossible.
The rounds fired by the M11 pistol would not have been recommended for the job by any reputable lion-hunter, and their trajectory had been impeded by the metal barrier through which they had flown, distorting their shape en route, before three of them hit Lobengula. So none of his wounds was fatal; not immediately so, at any rate. He had one round caught between two ribs, both of which were cracked as a result. Another had punctured his lower intestine. The third had worked its way into the muscle of his upper left hind leg, which he was now attempting to lick better. He was in severe pain, which increased with every breath or stride that he took.
But Lobengula had been a fighter all his life. This was not the first time he had been wounded. Countless claws had drawn blood from his flesh before now, but none of them had finished him. And he was not finished yet. Slowly, wincing with pain, he pulled himself to his feet and went on his way again.
97
Carver was working out the odds. They were not far from the border now, as little as half a mile, maybe. All three of them were armed: Carver and Justus with their M4s and Zalika with Carver’s pistol, which he had reloaded with a fresh magazine. But the going was getting tougher and their pace was slowed by the injury to Justus’s ankle. He had found a sturdy length of fallen branch to use as an impromptu crutch and was not making the slightest sound of complaint. But Carver only had to look at the sweat bathing his face and the silent gasps and screwed-up eyes when he took an especially agonizing step to know that Justus was in trouble. The helicopter had landed barely three minutes after they had left the Land Rover. It would take Mabeki a while, a very short while, to work out what had happened and pick up their trail. But after that, he and his men would surely be moving at a faster pace. Somehow, Carver had to buy them some time.
They had been walking through a thicket of trees and bushes. At its far end, they emerged into a small open space, perhaps thirty feet across, that stood at the foot of a low cliff. Straight ahead of them, the cliff was bisected by a narrow gully that cut into the rock, rising as it went. At the base of the cliff, by the mouth of the gully, lay a scattered pile of large boulders – the result, presumably, of some long-ago rock fall. They made a perfect defensive position. This, Carver decided, was where he would make his stand.
He stopped and turned to face Justus and Zalika. ‘I’m staying here,’ he said. ‘You two go on to the border. It’s only a few hundred yards now, just the far side of this hill. All you have to do is keep going, and no matter what happens, or what you hear, don’t turn back.’
‘No!’ cried Zalika. ‘You can’t do that. Come with us.’
‘No point. They’ll just get all of us.’
‘Then leave me behind,’ said Justus. ‘I am the one slowing you down. I should stay.’
‘No,’ said Carver firmly. ‘I promised I’d get you back to your kids. I’m not breaking that promise. Just give me your spare magazines and I’ll be fine. Mabeki can’t have many men with him. The chopper wasn’t big enough. But they’re coming this way. So go. Go now. And don’t look back.’
Zalika stepped forward, as if to embrace him, but Carver pushed her away. ‘No time for goodbyes. Just go.’
The two hesitated for a moment, then left.
Carver settled down behind one of the rocks. He wasn’t too concerned. He had a decent amount of ammunition. His position offered him plenty of cover and would force his enemies to come at him across an open, moonlit clearing. Unless Mabeki had suddenly rustled up an entire platoon in the middle of the African bush it shouldn’t be too hard to hold them off for long enough to let Zalika and Justus escape. After that he just had to find a way to disengage from the firefight and sneak away before anyone noticed he was gone. It was tricky, but not impossible. First, though, he had to cover the others’ retreat. He reckoned he still had two or three minutes before Mabeki and his men arrived.
The first shots came much sooner than that. Two rounds, pistol fire, reverberating around the rocks – from behind his position. Christ, had they got behind him? Were the other two under attack?
Carver twisted round and peered back down the gully. There was something moving there, a deeper shadow in the darkness. It grew bigger and more defined until Carver could make out a figure carrying a handgun with arms extended, ready to fire, walking towards him. His finger tightened on the trigger.
And then he realized it was Zalika. He exhaled slowly, closing his eyes for a second as he contemplated how close he had come to shooting her. As he lowered the M4, he took his left hand off the forward grip and made a downward, pressing gesture with it, indicating that she should get down, under cover of the rock.
She kept walking.
‘Zalika!’ he hissed. ‘What are you doing? Where’s Justus?’
She did not bother to whisper, but in a calm, steady voice said, ‘Put your gun down. Put it down, or I shoot.’
98
Carver did nothing. It wasn’t out of any kind of bravado. He simply couldn’t believe what he’d just heard.
‘Put the gun down,’ Zalika repeated. ‘On the ground. Now.’
Very slowly, calmly, keeping his eyes on hers, he did as he was told.
‘Now kick it away from you.’
Again Carver obeyed her. He could make out every detail of her face in the clear moonlight as she stood over him, pointing the gun down at his chest, the threat of the bullet pinning him to the spot like a butterfly on a pin. Now it was his turn to repeat himself: ‘What are you doing? Where’s Justus?’
‘He’s dead,’ she said, so flatly, with such impersonal detachment, that he hardly recognized it as her voice at all. And then: ‘I shot him.’
The information was so unexpected, so wrong, that Carver could not make sense of it. ‘What do you mean, you shot him? Why the hell did you do that?’
Zalika looked almost surprised that it was not obvious to him. ‘Why do you think? Because I had to stop him getting to the border. Just like I’m going to stop you.’
Still the words she spoke made no sense to him. ‘Are you mad? We’ve got to get to the border. Mabeki’s going to be here any minute. That’s the only way of escaping him.’
‘But I don’t want to escape him,’ she said, her voice beginning to rise as she taunted him. ‘Don’t you get it? All this time, you’ve been thinking he’s the kidnapper. But he’s not. You are. Those men back there, the ones you killed, they weren’t there to keep me in. They were there to keep you out. I wasn’t a prisoner. I wanted to be there, to be with Moses at last after all these years. That was why I had no clothes on when you found me. I was waiting for him.’
Carver had sleepwalked into a looking-glass world, where up was down, wrong was right and all his hopes turned out to be delusions. It seemed now that everything she had ever said to him was a lie that had meant the exact opposite of what he had believed. Everything she had done had been for totally different reasons to the ones he had assumed. He’d been fool enough to care about Zalika Stratten. He’d risked his life to save her. Had she really not wanted to be saved?
He made one last effort to try to preserve his own view of reality.
‘Mabeki abducted you when we were in Hong Kong. He held a gun to your head. I saw him do it.’
‘And I let him,’ she said. ‘Then, when we’d got outside, I ran to the van he had waiting, and they drove me away. I’d wanted to stay at the house, so that we could kill you together, Moses and me. But he said that was too risky. He wanted to be sure I was all right. And he’d already worked out a plan for dealing with you. All the time I was in that van I just prayed that he would get away from you safely, so that he could join me. And I prayed that you were dead, Sam. I prayed for that with all my heart.’
‘And everything between us, that was …’
‘Just a way of getting you to Hong Kong, so that you would kill the Gushungos, and then we would kill you.’
‘So it was you all along, selling us out, telling Mabeki everything.’
‘Oh yes.’ She smiled. ‘And it was him all along, telling me about the Gushungos. There were no old ladies at that church in Hong Kong. I didn’t have to spend hours checking out their house. Anything I ever wanted to know, Moses just told me. We never met. But we talked on the phone, sent emails. He’s even my Facebook friend. Fake name and picture, of course.’ She laughed at the deceitful absurdity. ‘It’s been going for years. Did Wendell ever tell you how he got his bright idea to get rid of the Gushungos?’
‘No.’
‘Then I will. I went up to him one day and said, “I want revenge” in my best blank, moody, kidnap-victim voice. That got him thinking, just like Moses said it would. After that, all I had to do was drop the occasional hint and … well, here we are.’
Carver had a limited appetite for self-pity. The pain he felt was rapidly mutating into a cold, detached anger. ‘Well I hope you’re pleased with yourself. This country’s lost the chance to be free. And your uncle’s dead. Shot in the back. Did you know that?’
‘Of course.’
‘And it doesn’t bother you? Wendell Klerk rescued you, gave you a home … the guy loved you like a daughter, and this is how you repay him?’
‘Loved me? Is that what you think? He loved money. All I was to him was a way of keeping his precious business alive when he was gone. He only paid you to come after me in Mozambique because it was cheaper than paying the ransom.’
‘That’s not true. I know it’s not. And how can you say you want to be with Moses Mabeki? The man’s a psychopath. He killed your family. He tried to rape you. I saw him in that room, by your bed, half-undressed …’
Zalika’s laugh was derisive, contemptuous of his stupidity. ‘It wasn’t rape. It was the most glorious moment of my life. I’d been in love with Moses since I was a little girl. I was willing to do anything, endure anything if it meant being with him. Finally, all my dreams were about to come true. Plain little Zalika, Mummy’s problem child, the girl who wasn’t pretty enough, or sweet enough, who couldn’t get a boyfriend, who had to spend her whole life being compared to her wonderful, handsome, charming older brother … Finally I was going to get my man. And that’s when Uncle Wendell’s hired hooligan has to come charging through the door … And look what you did to him! Moses was so beautiful. He was like a God. But you took all that away from me. You bastard! I hate you! Every night we were together, I only got through it by telling myself I was doing it for him.’
She was unravelling, thought Carver. All the secret resentments she’d stored up for years were pouring out, toxic delusions that had driven everything she’d ever done.
‘For Christ’s sake, Zalika, listen to yourself,’ he said. ‘You’ve fallen in love with your captor. It’s normal, the Stockholm Syndrome – happens to hostages, kidnap victims, even people who’ve been tortured. But we can get you help.’
‘Help? I don’t want help!’ she screamed. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me!’
‘He killed your family,’ Carver said, emphasizing each word.
‘Yes, he did. He killed my bitch of a mother and the brother I hated.’
‘He killed your father, too. Did you hate him?’
For the first time he saw a sign of weakness in the wall of loathing and self-pity she’d built round her soul. ‘My father … my father was a thief,’ Zalika said. ‘He owned land stolen from the people. He got rich by keeping Malembans poor.’
‘Mabeki told you that, did he?’
‘He explained it to me, yes, but—’
‘And that was a good enough reason for your father to die?’
‘There was no choice. That’s how it had to be. I didn’t like it, but Moses explained it and I believed him. I loved him. I still love him. And he loves me. He wants me by his side when he fulfils his destiny. He was born to rule Malemba. I was born to be his woman.’
‘You deluded little bitch. You had everything and you threw it away. You betrayed the people who loved you, and for what? If you think Moses Mabeki loves you, you’re as mad as he is. He just wants to f*ck you. F*ck your family, f*ck your class, f*ck your race … it’s not exactly subtle, is it? And once he’s done it, he’ll kill you, just like he killed the best of your people. Count on it.’
‘You’re wrong! You’re wrong! He’s coming for me now. Then I’m giving you to him. I’m going to watch him take you apart, piece by piece. And then we’ll be together, the two of us, and—’
The sentence ended there. Zalika had seen something beyond Carver. She smiled, her whole face transformed by an expression of pure delight … and then the joy was replaced by shocked surprise as a burst of semi-automatic gunfire hammered out, puncturing her body with a three-shot ellipsis of wounds that flowered diagonally across her chest, exited explosively out of her back and flung her to the floor of the little ravine.
‘She was deluded,’ said Moses Mabeki, walking past Carver and stopping when he reached Zalika Stratten’s body. ‘A useful idiot who had outlived her usefulness. It would have been amusing to have had her, of course – had her again, I should say. But there are some things more satisfying than mere sex. I had total control of her. I determined whether she lived or died. Far better.’
It was then that Carver truly hated Moses Mabeki: hated him for the way he had perverted, exploited and then discarded a girl whose only real sin was to have loved him – or rather, loved a dream of what he might once have been. Carver hated himself, too, for not finishing this when he first had the chance. So much suffering could have been avoided, for the want of one more bullet.
‘She was right too, though,’ Mabeki said. ‘I will take my time killing you. Get to your feet.’
Carver began to move. And then he frowned. There was something else moving out there, coming towards them down the same path Zalika had trodden. But this shadow was much larger.
Carver raised a finger and pointed past Mabeki. ‘Behind you,’ he said.
Mabeki raised his eyebrows and sighed. ‘Please, don’t insult my intelligence.’
And then there was a roar so loud that it seemed to reverberate inside Carver’s body, liquefying his guts and filling him with a primal caveman terror that overrode all his years of training and combat.
Mabeki’s eyes widened. He spun round. And the old lion Lobengula summoned up the remnants of his strength, leapt from fifteen feet away and hit Mabeki with the full force of his massive body.
99
Moses Mabeki screamed as the lion clamped his foreclaws on either side of his stomach, holding him tight in a terrible dance of death. Then his mouth opened, and even where he lay Carver was engulfed in the hot, fetid stench of rotten meat that hung on that carnivore breath.
Frantically, Carver rolled to one side, then scrambled away as the lion drove Mabeki to the ground, the gun falling from his hand as his outflung wrist snapped against the rock that had been Carver’s shelter.
The massive, savagely regal head lowered over Mabeki whose screams rose to an even higher pitch. The great curved fangs tore into his shoulder and the base of his neck, ripping and gnawing at his flesh while the fur round the old lion’s mouth became matted with hot, fresh blood.
From the far side of the rock came the sound of men shouting. Mabeki must have gone on ahead, wanting his own, personal moment of triumph. Now the rest of his people were catching up. More shots were fired. Carver heard the ricochets of bullets against the rock walls of the defile.
The lion paused for a moment, raised his head and looked with perfect feline night-vision towards the source of the disturbance. Again he roared, and now the men’s earlier bravado was replaced by cries of panic and the sound of running feet as they raced one another to escape the presence of the man-eater.
The lion returned to his long-awaited feast. Mabeki’s screams were now just barely audible whimpers. Carver looked on, mesmerized. This was the same beast that he had encountered less than ten minutes earlier. He could see the fresh bullet wounds in its flank and haunches.
And then, just a couple of feet beyond its twitching, hairy-tufted tail, Carver noticed his gun, lying discarded on the ground. He had to reach it without catching the lion’s attention. With infinite care, keeping his movements as slow and imperceptible as possible, Carver wriggled his way across the ground.
Lobengula had switched his attention to Mabeki’s right arm. Placing his front paws on Mabeki’s chest, to keep it still and give himself some leverage, he dug his teeth in just above the man’s elbow and shook his head to wrench the limp, unmoving arm out of the elbow joint, growling contentedly to himself as it did so.
Carver kept moving. He was almost there. Slowly, slowly, he reached out his hand and felt his fingertips touch the stock of the gun.
The lion’s tail gave another impatient twitch, the brushy end swishing by just inches from his outstretched fingertips. Carver tightened his grip and gently pulled the gun towards him.
Lobengula was relishing the taste and feel of fresh, blood-warmed meat. His wounds were forgotten. There was nothing on his mind but the feast he had in store.
And then, out of the corner of his eye he noticed something moving by the tip of his tail. He raised his head from his meal and looked round.
Carver didn’t wait to be attacked himself. He just switched his M4 to automatic fire and emptied an entire magazine into the lion’s body and head. There was a part of him that felt sad, almost ashamed at the slaughter of such a magnificent beast. But there was another, far greater part of him that had no intention whatever of being the second course. There was a horrible moment when it seemed that even this might not be enough, when the lion’s fighting spirit was so great that he attempted to charge through the torrent of bullets. But just as he seemed to be gathering himself for one last leap a round must have hit his heart, for his legs crumpled beneath him and he fell, stone dead, to the ground.
But even if the lion was dead, Moses Mabeki was not. His neck and shoulder had been opened up like a corpse on the dissecting table and his arm had been severed from his body, yet somehow the lion had missed his heart and his airpipe and he was still breathing. Just.
‘Help me,’ he whispered. ‘For the love of God, please help me.’
So now, all of a sudden, you discover religion, Carver thought.
He discarded the empty magazine from his M4 and rammed in a fresh one. Mabeki was lying at his feet, his car-crash face and his twisted mouth and the white bones and torn muscles of his ripped and blood-soaked body clearly visible.
‘Sure,’ said Carver, ‘I’ll help you.’
Then he pressed the trigger, and once again he did not let go until the magazine was empty.
When the killing was done, an emptiness came over him. He looked at all the bodies and wondered what the hell the point of any of it had been. Zalika’s lovely face was still untouched, and as she lay there in the pale-blue moonlight it was almost possible that she was waiting for him to come and wake her with a kiss. But hers was a sleep that would never end. Carver put a third magazine into his M4, more out of habit than anything else, and walked away down the gully.
He’d gone about a hundred metres when he heard the groan up ahead. Carver’s walk became a jog, then a run, then a flat-out sprint.
Justus was alive. Zalika hadn’t killed him. And Carver was going to get him across the border if it was the last thing he ever did.