The Leopard Hunts In Darkness Part 70

"Guard tower on the right." They were receiving fire from the two guards in the tower. It hissed and cracked around their heads like the lash of a stock whip. The machine-gunner traversed and elevated, and the belted *'nmunition fed into the clattering breech and empty ca*s poured in a glittering stream from the ejector slide. Splinters of timber and gla.s.s flew from the walls and windows of the tower, and the two guards were picked up and flung backwards by the solid strike of shot.

"Number One hutment just ahead," Craig warned Sarah with a shout. She and her two men were crouched at the tailboard, and as the Toyota slowed, they jumped over and hit the ground running. Sarah carried the bolt-cutters and the two guerrillas ran ahead of her, jinking and dodging and firing from the hip. truck, onto the running, Craig slid over the side of the board and clung to the cab- r. "We have

"Drive for the kopie,"he shouted at the drive to take the radio!" ahead, but they had to The fortified kopie lay directly the white cross the wide, brightly lit parade ground, with washed wall at the far end, to reach the foot of " the kopie.

Craig glanced backwards. Sarah and her team had reached the hutment and were working on the wire with the bolt-cutters. Even as he watched, they completed their ing and broke through, disappearing into the building.

open for the second truck. It was roaring around He looked taking on each guard the perimeter, just inside the wire, fire into tower as they came to it, and pouring suppressing it with the heavy machinegun. They had knocked out four towers already, only two more to gonades dragged his attenThe bright flash of bursting gre son hutment.

tion to the barracks ab.u.t.ting the main pri had dropped a group of guerrillas to The second truck Craig could see them crouched below attack these barracks.

grenades through the the sills of the barracks, Popping darting forward, windows, and then, as they exp laded bright as moths in the floodlights, towards the main prison hutment.

In the first few minutes they had taken control of the entire camp. They had knocked out the towers, devastated the guard house and both barrack blocks it was all he looked and then theirs. He felt a surge of triumph ahead across the parade ground to the kopie. Evmthing but the koVje, and as he thought it, a line of white tracer stretched out towards him from the sandbagged upper slopes of the rocky hillock. it looked likea string of bright white fire-beads, at first coming quite slowly but acceleratthey closed, and suddenly there was ing miraculously as flying dust and the shriek of ricochets all around them and the jarring cras.h.i.+ng of shot into the metal body of the racing truck.

The truck swerved wildly, and Craig screamed at. the driver as he clung desperately to the projecting rear-view mirror.

"Keep going we have to get the radioP The driver wrestled with the wrenching, bucking steering-wheel, and the nose of the truck swung back towards the kopje just as the second burst of machine-gun fire hit it. The windscreen exploded in flying diamond chips, and the driver was hurled against the door of the cab, his chest shot half-away. The truck slowed as his foot slipped from the accelerator pedal.

Craig hit the handle and yanked the door open. The driver's body slid out of the seat and tumbled over side

Craig swung himself into his place and jammed his foot flat on the accelerator. The truck lunged forward again.

Beside Craig, Comrade Lookout was firing his AK through the gaping hole where the windscreen had been shot away, and overhead the heavy machinegun returned the fire from the kopje with a fluttering ear-numbing clatter. The streams of opposing tracer fire seemed to meet and mingle in the air above the bare earth of the parade ground, and then Craig saw something else.

From one of the embrasures in the sandbagged walls at the foot of the hill, a lhck blob, the size of a pineapple, flew towards them on0a tiny tail of flame. He knew instantly what it was, but he didn't even have time to shout a warning as the RPO-7 rocket missile hit them.

It hit low into the front end of the truck, that was all that saved them the main blast was absorbed by the solid engine block, but nevertheless, it tore the front end off the truck and stopped it as though it had run into an ironstone cliff. The Toyota somersaulted over its ruined front wheel a.s.sembly, hurling Craig out of the open cab door.

Craig crawled up onto his knees, and the machinegun 0 n the hill traversed back towards him. A stream of bullets showered him with chunks of hard, dried clay from the surface of the parade ground and he fell flat again.

There were stunned and wounded guerrillas scattered M around the wrecked Toyota, one man was trapped under it, his legs and pelvis crushed by the steel side and he was screaming likea rabbit in a wire snare.

"Come on," Craig shouted in Sindebele. "Get to the wall the wall run for the wall." He jumped up and started to run. The whitewashed execution wall was off to their right-hand side, seventy ards away, and a handful of men heard him and ran with y him.

4 The machine-gun came hunting back, the whip-crack of pa.s.sing shot around his head made Craig reel likea drunkard, but he steadied himself and the man just ahead of him went down, both legs shot from under him. As Craig pa.s.sed him, he rolled on his back and threw his AK up at Craig.

"Here, Kuphela, take it. I am dead." Craig s.n.a.t.c.hed the rifle from the air without missing a step.

"You are a man," he called to the downed guerrilla, and sprinted on. Ahead of him, Comrade Lookout reached the shelter of the wall, but the machine-gunner on the kopje traversed back towards Craig, kicking up curtains of dust and lumps of clay as the stream of bullets reached out for him.

Craig went for the corner of the wall feet first, sliding likea baseball player for home base, and shot flew close around him. He kept rolling until he hit the wall and lay in a tangle of limbs, fighting for breath. Only Comrade Lookout and two others had made it to the wall the rest of them were dead in the truck or lying broken and crumpled on the open ground between.

"We have to get that gun," he gasped, and Comrade Lookout gave him a twisted grin.

"Go to it, Kuphela we will watch you with great interest." Another RPG rocket missile slammed into the wall, deafening them and covering them with a fine haze of white dust.

Craig rolled on his side and checked the AK 47. It had a full magazine. Comrade Lookout pa.s.sed him another full magazine from the haversack on his shoulder, and Craig had the Tokarev pistol on his belt and two remaining grenades b.u.t.toned into his breast pockets.

He darted another quick glance around the corner of the wall and instantly a burst of machine-gun fire kicked and jarred into the brickwork around his head. He rolled back. It was only a hundred yards or so to the foot of the kopje, but it could as well have been a hundred miles.

They were pinned helplessly, and the gunner up there on the hill commanded the entire compound. n.o.body could move under the floodlights without drawing instant fire or a rocket from the RPG launcher.

Craig looked anxiously for the second truck, but sensibly the driver must have parked it behind one of the buildings as soon as the RPG opened up. There was no sign of any of the other guerrillas, they were all under cover, but they had taken more casualties than they could afford.

"It can't end like this-" Craie was consumed by his own sense of frustration and helpi essness. "We've got to get that gun!" The gun up on the hill, without a target, fell silent and then suddenly in the silence Craig heard the singing in, low at first, just a few voices, but swelling and growing strong: "Why do you weep, widows of Shangani When the three-legged guns laugh so loudly?" Then the ancient fighting chant crashed into tl)Q silence, flung out by hundreds of throats.

"Why do you weep, little sons of the Moles, When your fathers did the. king bidding?" And then from the prison huts they came, a motley army of naked figures, some of them staggering wih weakness, others running strongly, carrying stones aud bricks, and poles torn from the roofs of their prison. A few, a very few, had picked up the weapons of the dead guards, but all of them were singing with wild defiance as they charged the hill and the machinegun.

"Oh, Christ!" whispered Craig. "It's going to be a ma.s.s, acre." In the front rank of the throng brandis.h.i.+ng an AK 47 came a tall gaunt figure, looking likea skeletal caricature of death itself, and the army of starvelings and gaol, sweepings rallied to him. Even altered as he was, Craig would have recognized Tungata Zebiwe anywhere this side of h.e.l.l.

"Sam, go back!" he shouted, using the name by which is friend, but Tungata came on bee ss he had known h and beside Craig Comrade Lookout said phlegmatically, "They will draw fire, that will be our chance." "Yes, be ready," Craig answered. Lookout was right. They must not let them die in vain and, as he spoke, the machine-gun opened up.

"Waid" Craig grabbed Comrade Lookout's arm. "He must change belts soon." And while he waited for the gun to fire away its first belt, he watched the terrible havoc it is playing amongst the throng of released prisoners.

The stream of tracer seemed to wash them away lit, k a fire hose, but as the front rank fell, so the men beEi,id raced forward into the gaps, and still Tungata Zebiwe was coming on, outdistancing his fellows, firing the AK as lie ran and the gunner on the hilltop singled him out and swung the machine-gun onto him so that he was wreathed in smoking dust, still miraculously untouched as the machine-gun abruptly fell silent.

"Gun empty! "Craig shouted. "Go! Go! Go! They launched themselves, like sprinters off the blocks, and the open ground seemed to stretch ahead of Craig to the ends of the earth.

Another rocket missile howled over their heads, and Craig ducked on the run, but it was high, aimed in panic.

It flew across the parade ground and it hit the silver bulk fuel storage tank next to the guard barracks. The fuel went up with a vast whoos.h.i.+ng detonation. The flames shot up two hundred feet in the air, and Craig felt the hot breath of the blast sweep over him, but he kept running and firing.

He had been losing ground steadily to Comrade Lookout and the other guerrillas, his bad leg hampering him in the race for the hill, but while he ran he was counting in his head. A good man might need ten seconds to change ammunition boxes and reload the machinegun. Since leaving the sheltering wall seven seconds had pa.s.sed eight, nine, ten it must' come now! And there were still twenty paces to cover.

Comrade Lookout reached the sandbagged fortifications and s.h.i.+nned up and over.

Then something hit Craig a crus.h.i.+ng hammer-blow and he was thrown violently to- the ground as bullets flew all around him. He rolled ov'e4r and came up again running, but the gunner had seen him go down and swung the machine-gun away, back to the charging mob of released prisoners.

Hit but unharmed, Craig ran on as strongly as before, and he realized that he had taken it in the leg, the artificial leg. He wanted to laugh, it was so ridiculous and he was so terrified.

"You can only do that to me once," he thought, and IT hi

4f suddenly he had reached the foot of the kopie. He jumped up, found a hold on the top of the sandbag parapet wit one hand, and heaved himself up and over. He dropped onto the narrow, deserted firing platform on the other side.

"The radio he fixed his will upon it, "got to get the radio." And he jumped down into the communication trench and ran down it to the bend in the pa.s.sage. was the sound of a scuffle, and a cry ahead of him, and is Comrade Lookout was straight he came around the corner, ening up from the body of the Third Brigade trooper who had been manning the RPG.

"Go for the gun," Craig ordered him. "I'll take the radio room.

Craig climbed up the sandbagged pa.s.sageway, Pa.s.sing en quartered on his last visit.

the dugout where he had be "Now, first on the left-" He dived into the opening, brus.h.i.+ng aside the curtain of hessian, and he heard the radio operator in his dugout at the end of the pa.s.sage shouting frantically. Craig hurled himself down the narrow pa.s.sage, and paused in the doorway.

Too late. His stomach turned over in a despairing convulsion. The radio operator, dressed only in a vest and the bench underpants, was hunched over the radio set on by the far wall of the dugout. He was holding the his microphone to his mouth with both hands, shouting warning into it in English, repeating it for the third time, ig hesitated, the acknowledgement boomed and, as Cra from the speaker, also spoken in clear English.

said the voice of the "Message received and understood," erat or at Brigade headquarters in Harare. "Hold on! We op will reinforce you immediately-" Craig fired a long burst of the AK, and his bulb sing and ripp, smashed into the radio, shattering the hou The unarn the wiring out of it in a glittering tangle.

microphone and cOw el radio operator dropped the against the sandbag wall, staring at Craig, blubbering with terror. Craig swung the AK onto him, but could not force himself to fire.