21
Carver’s movement caught Killaman’s eye. He did not panic. He had come there to watch a football match a couple of days earlier and knew the layout of the ground and its buildings. Nor was he going to be forced into anything hasty or ill-considered by the sound of the helicopter engine. He had already factored that element into his calculations.
Lying on the ground, he summoned Silent Death to drag himself across the dirt towards him, then explained what he wanted. ‘They are in the building nearest us, the home changing room. See it?’
Silent Death followed his commander’s pointing finger and nodded.
‘Good,’ said Killaman. ‘So this is what you must do.’
A few seconds later, Killaman’s ragtag platoon started blazing away at Carver’s position again, forcing him to stay hidden as Silent Death rose from the ground and padded away, body bent almost double, jogging off the side of the football pitch and making a sweeping flanking movement round the back of the buildings.
In the changing room, Justus was trying to keep Zalika Stratten from descending into total nervous collapse. Her whole body was shaking, and though she seemed to be trying to speak between her sobs, it was impossible to make out what she was saying.
‘It’s all right, Miss,’ he kept repeating. ‘Not long now. Soon have you out of here.’
If this had been his own daughter, he would have wrapped her in his arms and stroked her hair to calm her. But he did not dare do that now. Just the touch of a man could send this girl over the brink.
There was a reason Silent Death had acquired his name. Even among men who took great pride in their ability to melt into the scenery, move undetected and attack without warning, his talents stood out. Tonight, however, his prey had no means of seeing him, and with so many gunshots and the ever-increasing clatter of a helicopter engine to cover them, a herd of elephants could have walked up to the building unheard. Carver, positioned in the porch, had no idea that one of the enemy was just a few feet behind him, moving round the back of the shack and climbing with feline agility up its wall.
Silent Death reached the roof and looked down through the skylight into the changing room. He pulled the pin from the grenade Killaman had given him and dropped it through the broken glass, on to the concrete floor of the changing room. Then he slid to the edge of the roof and jumped back down to the ground.
‘Grenade!’ shouted Justus as the metal sphere, not much bigger than a cricket ball, skittered across the concrete.
He grabbed Zalika, all previous inhibitions dropped in an instant.
Justus knew he had less than four seconds to save their lives. But faced with mortal danger, the mind has a remarkable ability to slow the passage of time, and it seemed to Justus that he had an age in which to consider his options.
He saw at once that the grenade was intended not to kill them – Zalika was too valuable for that – but to drive them out into the open, where she could be recaptured. There was no point trying to throw the grenade back out through the skylight. The risk of missing the gap in the broken glass was too great.
That left only one option.
With one hand clinging to his gun and the other wrapped round Zalika, Justus ran for the shower cubicle. He took three quick strides and then dived, throwing them both through the gap in the breezeblock partition. The air was driven from his lungs as they hit the tiled floor. Gasping for breath, Justus rolled away from the opening, still clinging on to the girl.
The grenade exploded, filling the empty changing room with white-hot shards of shrapnel that destroyed the wooden bench and cut into the breezeblock walls like a million deadly wasp stings.
The shower room was sheltered from the worst of the blast. Even so, it left Justus deafened and dazed. His mind, so sharp and fast just seconds before, now seemed incapable of functioning at all, and his eyesight was dulled by the thick cloud of choking dust that filled the air.
Outside, Silent Death scampered back up the wall of the building and contemplated the hole where the skylight had been before the grenade blew it away. Watching out for the ragged, saw-like edges of the shredded corrugated iron, he clambered across the roof and slipped noiselessly down through the hole into the fog of dust.
Justus did not hear him come. He simply saw the outline of a gun-barrel emerging through the dust by the entrance to the shower, followed by a man’s arm. Operating now on pure fighting instinct, without any conscious thought Justus wrenched his shotgun free from the weight of Zalika’s body, raised it one-handed and fired.
The concentrated blast of a twelve-gauge cartridge ripped Silent Death’s left hand clean away, taking his AK-47 with it. Now he was not so silent. He screamed in pain, though the high-pitched cry of agony was little more than a whisper to Justus’s battered eardrums.
Justus scrambled to his feet, pumped another round into the chamber of his gun and stepped over to the gap in the breezeblock partition. Through the slowly clearing cloud of dust he could see Silent Death bent over, his right hand clinging to a ragged stump of arm from which a geyser of blood was pumping.
Justus put him out of his misery with a second round that hit Silent Death in the chest, lifted him off his feet and flung him against the wall like a doll thrown by an angry child.
From outside there came the sound of another detonation, followed by the angry chatter of small-arms fire.
Justus hurried back to find Zalika slowly rising from the floor. He could see her eyes widen as she spotted the severed hand, still clinging to its weapon, lying on the floor. He got down on his haunches and looked directly at her.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asked.
Zalika shook her head.
‘Good.’
Justus helped her to her feet and led her back into the ruined changing room. In the faint moonlight there was no colour anywhere, just a ghost world of black and grey. Zalika’s hand went to her mouth at the sight of the intruder: his lolling head; his staring sightless eyes; the dark gaping hole that had been punched into his body.
The two of them made their way towards the door.
Justus opened it a fraction and peered out through the crack, expecting to see Carver waiting for him in the porch.
There was no one there.
Somewhere out in the darkness a man was screaming. Not far away a blazing flare was belching crimson smoke across the field. The helicopter’s approach was getting louder with every second.
But Samuel Carver had gone.
22
Seconds after Killaman sent Silent Death on his mission, he arranged a distraction to keep Carver’s attention away from anything that might be happening in the building behind him. He sent a man running directly across Carver’s line of fire. His orders were simple: run like hell till you are level with the porch, throw yourself to the ground, then fire at the man in the doorway, who will now be completely exposed to your shots.
The man started running.
Carver took aim like a punter at a shooting gallery and hit his target before he could dive to the ground.
A second man ran the gauntlet.
He had flung himself forward, like a rugby three-quarter diving for the try-line, when Carver’s shot caught him in the side, ploughing into his intestines. He lay on the ground, screaming in agony and crying out for his mother.
After that, there were no more runners.
Through the man’s screams, Carver could hear Morrison’s voice in his earpiece again: ‘We got problems. First, you are in severe danger of being outflanked.’
‘I’d noticed.’
‘Second, there is a man on the ground, behind the first line of troops, carrying an RPG. He hits us, we’re f*cked.’
‘Can you get him first?’
‘Too risky. You will have to do it.’
‘Where is this guy?’
‘Right in the middle of the field, the centre circle, behind the first line of men.’
‘And where are you?’
‘Holding pattern, six hundred metres out.’
‘Then come on in.’
‘Nah way, man.’
‘Just do it, now. That’s an order.’
If Morrison had any reply to that, Carver didn’t hear it. From behind him came the echoing blast of a grenade going off in a confined space. What the bloody hell had happened in there?
There was no time to answer that question now. The chopper would come in at around fifty metres a second. Anyone who knew how to operate an RPG would wait until it was between one and two hundred metres away, almost impossible to miss, before they opened fire. That gave Carver an absolute maximum of ten seconds, probably less. Saving the chopper was his immediate priority. And that meant no distractions.
He took the emergency flare, pulled the tag and hurled it out on to the field, throwing blind. The moment it was gone, he took out his last grenade, counted two, stepped out of the porch, thanked God for the hellish red smoke now drifting between him and the enemy, and threw.
He ducked back inside the porch. Half a second later, the grenade detonated.
Before the sound of the explosion had died away, Carver was up and running.
A modern anti-personnel grenade will kill any unprotected human within a five-metre radius, and either kill or severely wound anyone within fifteen. Carver had therefore given himself a thirty-metre-wide window of opportunity.
He was going flat out, forgetting the pain from his rib, the choking billows of chemical smoke from the flare and the weight of the weapon in his hands. He paused, turned to face a threat, raised the MP5 and fired twice at a shadowy target. Then he was off and running again.
Carver burst out of the smoke and saw a knot of men ahead of him, apparently unharmed by the grenade. They were shouting, bringing their guns to bear on him. Behind them he could just make out the grenade-tipped barrel of the RPG, and beyond that the outline of the helicopter coming in low and flat over a copse of trees.
He did not stop running, shooting as he went. He was beyond any rational thought, entirely caught up in the frenzy of battle. He was dimly aware that he’d taken a hit in his left arm, though there was no pain there as yet.
He saw two of the men in front of him go down.
He sensed rather than heard the click as the firing pin of his gun came down on an empty chamber.
He felt the cracking of broken bones as he smashed the stock of the MP5 into the face of the last man standing between him and the grenade-launcher.
And then he was throwing himself with an inarticulate scream of rage at the man crouching on one knee holding the RPG, and a jet of flame was shooting from the rear end of its barrel, scorching Carver’s skin as he hit the man and his weapon. He knocked them both to the ground, smashing his own head against the metal body of the launcher and sending the RPG shooting low across the football field before it hit the modest little stand and blew it to smithereens.
Over the next few seconds, Carver lay dazed and winded on the ground, battered by the downdraft that told him the helicopter was landing. He was aware of the RPG operator wriggling out from under him and running away as fast as his legs would carry him. He did not, however, see Killaman emerge from the tangle of bodies behind him, drag himself upright, pull out the flick-knife and stagger towards his unprotected back.
23
Before the skids of the helicopter’s undercarriage had hit the ground, Justus was racing across the open ground towards it, urging Zalika to keep pace with him as he went. He tried to keep his body between hers and anyone who might still be out there, but only a few wild, aimless shots were fired in their direction. The downdraft had cleared away the smoke from the flare and it looked as though whoever had been attacking them had lost the will to fight.
Flattie Morrison was standing in the open doorway of the helicopter firing bursts at the retreating figures to speed them on their way. He stopped shooting and reached one hand down to help Zalika up into the passenger compartment.
Justus was next in line. He turned his head to look back across the football pitch.
‘Get in!’ Morrison shouted.
Justus ignored him. Instead he sprinted away from the chopper, back towards the remaining whispers of smoke.
Morrison made Zalika comfortable, then, still standing, turned back to follow Justus’s progress.
Now he knew what his old comrade had seen. Right in the middle of the pitch a black-clad body Morrison instantly recognized as Carver’s was lying face-down, moving slightly, as though retching or gasping for air.
Behind the body, another man was staggering towards it with a knife.
Two more steps and the knife would be plunged into Carver’s defenceless back. Justus stopped some forty or fifty metres away from the knifeman, raised his shotgun, took aim and fired; pumped more rounds into his chamber; pulled the trigger until his magazine was empty and his target blown away.
Morrison gave a wry smile. His wartime lessons had clearly left their mark: fire till the last round is gone. And only then ask questions.
Justus jogged up to the knifeman’s dead body, gave it a quick look, then bent down and helped Carver to his feet. He draped Carver’s right arm across his shoulder and the two of them staggered back across the field.
Morrison raised his gun and swept it from side to side, looking for any possible threats to the two men, but none came. The field behind them was empty, save for the bodies of the dead and those too wounded to walk, crawl or drag themselves away.
Now Justus and Carver were by the helicopter door, and Morrison was taking Carver and hauling him aboard.
So he only had one hand on his gun. And his eyes were focused on Carver, not the field.
He did not see the man lying not far from the changing-room building – the man Carver had hit and wounded barely a minute earlier – summon up the last of his strength, raise himself to his elbows, point his gun and fire.
‘F*ck,’ said Flattie Morrison, almost in surprise.
Then he keeled forward, half in and half out of the helicopter, blood seeping across the back of his shirt.
Justus raised his gun, holding it like a pistol, but there was no need to fire. The wounded man had already slumped back to the ground.
Justus dropped the shotgun and grabbed hold of Morrison’s body. By the time he had dragged it inside the cabin, the pilot had already taken off and was heading for the hills and the safe embrace of the Zambezi river gorge.
Carver looked round the cabin. Zalika was strapped into one of the seats, still disoriented but physically unharmed. Morrison was either dead, or about to be. Justus looked exhausted, caught by the comedown that hits a fighting man when the adrenalin has drained away. He raised a hand and smiled weakly when Carver caught his eye.
‘Nice work,’ said Carver.
Then he, too, slumped back, mentally and physically spent but – the only thing that mattered – still alive.
24
The first light of dawn was glowing on the eastern flanks of Table Mountain as the executive jet began its approach into Cape Town. The doctor Wendell Klerk had sent with it had formally pronounced Flattie Morrison dead before they took off from Tete. In the first hour of the flight he had administered sedatives to Zalika Stratten and done what he could to stitch up the wound in Carver’s left bicep, and ease the pain in his ribs.
Before the sedatives had sent her under, Zalika had asked to speak to Carver.
In the cramped aisle of the passenger compartment, he crouched down beside the head of the settee on which she had been laid out.
‘I just wanted to say thank you,’ she began.
‘That’s all right. I’m sorry it turned out the way it did. You shouldn’t have had to go through something like that. But we didn’t have a choice. We had to move in when we did.’
She reached up and gripped Carver’s wrist. Her voice was an urgent whisper and there was an anxious, pleading look in her sapphire eyes. ‘I understand. But please, I’m begging you, please don’t tell my uncle, you know, that Moses took his clothes off and … you know. It’s just, well, it’s not something I want to talk about.’ Carver said nothing. He thought of the report he was due to write, accounting for all of his actions. He’d attacked ahead of schedule, and that would be hard to explain if he didn’t mention that Mabeki had been about to sexually assault Zalika. But surely she had the right to some privacy. If she didn’t want people to know, why should he make an issue of it?
‘Don’t worry,’ Carver said, ‘I won’t tell a soul. Ever. That’s a promise.’
She looked at him with sleepy eyes and nodded, as if satisfied he was telling the truth. Then she sank back down on to the settee. Her eyelids slowly fell shut. And as she drifted off to sleep, Carver was sure that he could detect, for the very first time, the faintest hint of contentment on Zalika Stratten’s face.
When Carver arrived in Cape Town, the news of Zalika Stratten’s rescue had not yet hit the South African media. But the Cape Times was running a story from Sindele. A Malemban government spokesman had announced that all the Stratten family properties in Malemba had been appropriated by the state, including their many farms and the Stratten Reserve. The farmlands would, the spokesman said, be divided between thousands of war veterans and their families. The reserve, however, would continue to operate as a tourist attraction and a valuable source of foreign currency. ‘In honour of its importance to the economy, and the great value that he places upon our country’s natural heritage, President Gushungo, the Father of the Nation himself, will personally supervise the transfer of the reserve into the people’s hands. He will be using the Strattens’ former estate house, and the land around it, as his personal headquarters during this process.’ When questioned, the spokesman assured reporters that the President’s occupation of what had been, arguably, the most beautiful private home in Malemba was a purely temporary issue. In time, it too would be handed over for the benefit of all the people of Malemba.
As Carver was driven away to give Wendell Klerk his account of Zalika’s rescue, his mind turned to Justus Iluko. They’d said goodbye at Tete airport.
‘Thanks,’ Carver had said, ‘you know …’
He hadn’t spelled it out. Both men knew that Justus had saved his life. There was no need to make a big deal about it.
‘No problem,’ Justus had replied.
‘Keep in touch, yeah?’
‘Sure,’ the Malemban had said, though his smile suggested he thought it was pretty unlikely.
Carver had given him a contact number anyway, and Justus had responded with the address of his family farm. It hadn’t seemed significant at the time. But now, sitting in the limo riding into Cape Town from the airport, Carver realized he’d been given a chance to show his appreciation for everything Justus had done.
Carver’s first thought was simply to wire him a hundred grand in US dollars – just a fraction of his own fee for the job. But it didn’t take five seconds’ thought to realize that in a small rural community in Malemba that kind of money would cause as many problems as it solved. People would look on their newly rich neighbour with a festering mixture of envy, greed and resentment. Far better to give him, say, ten up front, but then set up a discreet trust fund for the children to make sure they got a good education. Justus would prefer that too: those kids meant everything to him. Carver made a mental note to call his banker as soon as he got back to Geneva.
Shortly after dawn, the first police arrived in Chitongo and set to work examining the building where Zalika Stratten had been held, the warehouse and its surroundings, and the area around the football pitch. A uniformed constable was picking his way through a group of four bodies, all lying within metres of one another, when he stopped and frowned as a fractional movement caught his eye. He got down on his knees next to a body and leaned over it, his head tilted so that one ear was just above the body’s mouth. Then he gasped, jumped back up to his feet and shouted out, ‘Doctor, doctor! Over here! One of them is still alive!’