The Leopard Hunts In Darkness Part 13

"Good morning, Mr. Mellow. I admire punctuality." He glanced down at Craig's hold-all. "And the ability to travel lightly." He fell in beside Craig and they went out through the tall rolling doors onto the hardstand.

There were two elderly Canberra bombers parked before the hangar. Now the pride of the Zimbabwe airforce, they had once mercilessly blasted the guerrilla camps beyond the Zambezi. Beyond them stood a sleek little silver and blue Cessna 210, and Peter Fungabera headed towards it just as Sally-Anne appeared from under the wing. She was engrossed in her walk-around checks and Craig realized she was to be their pilot. He had expected a helicopter and a military pilot.

She was dressed in a Patagonia wind-cheater, blue jeans and soft leather mosquito boots. Her hair was covered by a silk scarf. She looked professional and competent as she made a visual check of the fuel level in the wing tanks and then jumped down to the tarmac.

"Good morning, General. Would you like to take the right-hand seat?"

"Shall we put Mr. Mellow up front? I have seen it all before." "As you wish," she nodded coolly at Craig. "Mr. Mellow," and climbed up into the c.o.c.kpit. She cleared with the tower and taxied to the holding point, pulled on the hand brake and murmured, "Too much pork for good Hebrew e at ion causes trouble." As a conversational opener it took some following.

Craig was startled, but she ignored him and only when her hands began to dart over the controls setting the trim, checking masters, mags and mixture, pus.h.i.+ng the pitch fully fine, did he understand that the phrase was her personal acronym for pre-take-off, and the mild misgivings that he had had about female pilots began to recede.

After take-off, she turned out of the circuit on a northwesterly heading and engaged the automatic pilot, opened a large-scale map on her lap and concentrated on the route. Good flying technique, Craig admitted, but not much for social intercourse.

"A beautiful machine," Craig tried. "Is it your own?"

"Permanent loan from the World Wildlife Trust," she answered, still intent on the sky directly ahead.

"What does she cruise at?"

"There is an air-speed indicator directly in front of you, Mr. Mellow," she crushed him effortlessly.

It was Peter Fungabera who leaned over the back of Craig's seat and ended the silence.

"That's the Great d.y.k.e," he pointed out the abrupt geological formation below them. "A highly mineralized intrusion chrome, platinum, gold-" Beyond the d.y.k.e, the farming lands petered out swiftly and they were over a vast area of rugged hills and sickly green forests that stretched endlessly to a milky horizon.

"We will be landing at a secondary airstrip, just this side of the Pongola Hills. There is a mission-station there and a small settlement, but the area is very remote. Transport will meet us there but it's another two hours" drive to the camp," the general explained.

"Do you mind if we go down lower, General?" Sally Anne asked, and Peter Fungabera chuckled.

"No need to ask the "reason. Sally-Ainne is educating me in the importance of wild animals, and their conservation." Sally' Anne eased back the throttle and went down.

The heat was building up and the light aircraft began to bounce and wobble as it met the thermals coming up from the rocky hills. The area4 below them was devoid of human habitation and cultivation.

"G.o.dforsaken hills," the general growled. "No permanent water, sour grazing and fly." However, Sally-Anne picked out a herd of big beige hump-backed eland in one of the open vleis beside a dry river-bed, and then, twenty miles further on, a solitary bull elephant.

She dropped to tree-top level, pulled on the flaps and did a series of steep slow turns around the elephant, cutting him off from the forest and holding him in the open, so he was forced to face the circling machine with ears and trunk extended.

"He's magnific end she cried, the wind from the open window buffeting them and whipping her words away. "A hundred pounds of ivory each side," and she was shooting single-handed through the open window, the motor drive on her Nikon whirring as it pumped film through the camera.

They were so low that it seemed the bull might grab a wingtip with his reaching trunk, and Craig could clearly make out the wet exudation from the glands behind his eyes. He found himself gripping the sides of his seat.

At last Sally-Anne left him, levelled her wings and climbed away. Craig slumped with relief.

"Cold feet, Mr. Mellow? Or should that be singular, foot?" "b.i.t.c.h," Craig thought. "That was a low hit." But she was talking to Peter Fungabera over her shoulder.

"Dead, that animal is worth ten thousand dollars, tops.

Alive, he's worth ten times that, and he'll sire a hundred bulls to replace him."

"Sally-Anne is convinced that there is a large-scale poaching ring at work in this country. She has shown me some remarkable photographs and I must say, I am beginning to share her concern."

"We have to find them and smash them, General," she insisted.

"Find them for me, Sally-Anne, and I will smash them.

You already have my word." Listening to them talking, Craig felt again an oldfas.h.i.+oned emotion that he had been aware of the very first time he had seen these two together. There was no missing the accord between them, and Fungabera was a das.h.i.+ngly handsome fellow. Now he darted a glance over his shoulder, and found the general watching him closely and speculatively, a look he covered instantly with a smile.

"How do you feel about the issue, Mr. Mellow?" he said, and suddenly Craig was telling him about his plans for Zambezi Waters on the Chizarira. He told them about the black rhinoceros and the protected wilderness areas surrounding it, and he told them how accessible it was to Victoria Falls, and now Sally-Anne was listening as intently as the general. When he finished, they were both silent for a while, and then the general said, "Now, Mr. Mellow, you are making good sense. That is the kind of planning that this country desperately needs, and its profit potential will be understood by even the most backward and unsophisticated of my people."

"Wouldn't Craig be easier, General?"

"Thank you, Craig my friends call me Peter." Half an hour later Craig saw a galvanized iron roof flash in the sunlight dead ahead, and Sally-Anne said, "Tuti Mission Station," and began letting down for a landing.

She banked steeply over the church and Craig saw tiny figures around the cl.u.s.ter of huts waving up at them.

The strip was short and narrow and rough, and the wind was across, but Sally-Anne crabbed in and kicked her straight at the moment before touch-down, then held the port wing down with a twist of the wheel. She was really very good indeed, CraigWiealized.

There was a saq-coloured army Land-Rover waiting under a huge manila tree off to one side of the strip, and three troopers saluted Peter Fungabera with a stamping of boots that raised dust and a slapping of rifle-b.u.t.ts. Then while Craig helped Sally-Anne tie down the aircraft, they loaded the meagre baggage into the Land' Rover

As the Land-Rover drew level with the mission schoolhouse beside the church, Sally-Anne asked, "Do you think they have a girls" room here?" and Peter tapped the driver on the shoulder with his swagger-stick and the vehicle stopped.

Goggle-eyed black children crowded the veranda and the school-mistress came out to greet Sally-Anne as she climbed the steps, and gave her a little curtsey of welcome.

The teacher was about the same age as Sally' Anne with long slim legs under her simple cotton skirt. Her dress was surgically clean and crisply ironed, and her white gym shoes were spotless. Her skin was glossy as velvet, and she had the typical moon face, s.h.i.+ning teeth and gazelle eyes of the Nguni maiden, but there was a grace in her carriage, an alert and intelligent expression and a sculpturing of her features that was truly beautiful.

She and Sally-Anne talked for a few moments and then she led the white girl through the door.

"I think you and I should understand each other, Craig." Peter watched the two girls disappear. "I have seen you looking at Sally Anne and me. Let me just say, I admire Sally-Anne's accomplishments, her intelligence and her initiative however, unlike many of my peers, miscegenation has no attraction for me whatsoever. I find most European women mannish and overbearing, and white flesh insipid. If you will pardon my plain speaking."

"I am relieved to hear it, Peter, "Craig smiled.

"On the other hand, the little schoolteacher there strikes me as you are the word master give me a word for her, please."

"Toothsome." "Good "Nubile."

"Even better," Peter chuckled. "I really must find time to read your book." And then he was serious again as he went on, "Her name is Sarah. She has four A levels and a high school teacher's diploma; she has qualifications in nursing, she is beautiful and yet modest, respectful and dutiful with traditional good manners did you see how she did not look directly at us men? that would have been forward." Peter nodded approval. "A modern woman with oldfas.h.i.+oned virtues. Yet her father is a witch-doctor who dresses in skins, divines by throwing the bones, and does not wash from one year to the next. Africa," he said. "My wonderful, endlessly fascinating ever-changing never changing Africa." The two young women returned from the outhouses behind the school and were chatting animatedly to each other, while Sally-Anne clicked away with her camera, capturing images of the children with their teacher who seemed not much older than they.

The two men watched them from the Land-Rover.

"You strike me as a man of action, Peter and I cannot believe you lack the bride-price?" Craig asked. "X%at are you waiting for?" "She is Matabele, and I am Mashona. Capulet and Montague," Peter explained simply. "And that is an end of it." The children, led by Sarah, sang them a song of welcome from the veranda and then at Sally-Anne's request recited the alphabet and the multiplication tables, while she photographed their intent expressions. When she climbed back into the Land-Rover, they trilled their farewells and waved until the billowing dust hid them.

The track was rough and the Land-Rover bounced over the deep ruts formed in the rainy season in black glutinous mud and dried nAto the consistency of concrete.

Through gaps in the forest they glimpsed blue hills on the northern horizon, sheer and riven and uninviting.

"The Pongola Hills," Peter told them. "Bad country." And then as they neared their destination, he began telling them what they might expect when at last they arrived.

"These rehabilitation centres are not concentration camps but are, as the name implies, centres of reeducation and adaptation to the ordinary world." He glanced at Craig. "You, as well as any of us, know that we have lived through a dreadful civil war. Eleven years of h.e.l.l, that have brutalized an entire generation of young people. Since their early teens, they have known no life without an automatic rifle in their hands, they have been taught nothing but destruction and learned nothing except that a man's desires can be achieved simply by killing anybody who stands in his way." Peter Fungabera was silent for a few moments, and Craig could see that he was reliving his own part in those terrible years. Now he sighed softly.