Authors: Christopher Sherlock
Afterwards she’d been a lot keener to leave South Africa. Rayne thought the accident might have been sabotage though that was never confirmed officially.
He and Penelope had graduated in the same year. She scraped through, and he had the highest average of any student in the previous ten years. He had gone on to study further, she’d left for New York, to take up a lucrative modelling contract, and had never looked back.
Rayne looked at the picture in the paper again and smiled ruefully to himself. There certainly weren’t going to be any women like that where they were going. He felt an enormous void between his former existence as a law student and what he was now. How would it be if he met Penelope again? Would the same animal magnetism be there? He felt a stab of guilt for his disloyalty to Sam. She was the only woman who had really understood him. And he had let her down.
The noise of the flaps going down, ready for landing, pulled him from such thoughts.
‘
Well, here we are. It’s all stations go.’ Michael’s voice was confident. Rayne wondered if it would still be confident in a week’s time.
Lois was at the airport to meet them. He’d bought a used Land Rover to ferry them all to the base camp. After a brief exchange of greetings they sped off north into the night.
The high humidity of the Natal coastal belt hit them immediately. Rayne’s London clothes became uncomfortable in the sticky heat. Lois was ideally dressed in a wide-collared open- neck white shirt, khaki shorts and leather sandals.
‘
No one’s been poking around or asking any questions, Lois?’ He had to shout above the noise of the Land Rover engine.
‘
Nothing at all. As far as the locals are concerned you’re a group of businessmen arriving for a sales conference. We’re too far away from anywhere to attract much attention.’
Rayne had chosen the location of the camp himself. He’d been there on holiday when he was much younger and had realised even then that it was the perfect hide-out. The only thing he feared was that the local African population might get curious, especially if they heard them testing their weapons. No, they’d probably steer well clear. In South Africa it was always a good policy to stick to one’s own business.
‘
Have you got everything I wanted, Lois?’
‘
You name it, I’ve got it. The stuff is all unused. Pistols. Assault rifles. Grenades. Rocket-launchers.’
‘
And the other piece of equipment I mentioned?’
‘
Yes. That too.’
Rayne smiled. Lois had proved his worth.
The inside of the Land Rover was dark except for the warm glow of the instruments on the dashboard. Outside, lush vegetation flashed by. For a few moments Rayne imagined that they were travelling through a green tunnel that led on for ever through the darkness.
Lois drove with his foot flat, the white speedometer needle dancing between a hundred and a hundred and twenty kilometres per hour. The men sat in silence, each locked into his own particular thoughts and worries.
The comfortable, tranquil towns of the Natal east coast sped past. It was hard to imagine that much further north along this coastline the atmosphere was so completely different. In Mozambique, as Rayne knew all too well, tranquillity was the last thing they would find.
After two hundred kilometres they passed the turn to Richard’s Bay, and the road moved inland to avoid the giant mass of water that was Lake St Lucia. The country grew more isolated. The area to their right was Tongaland, over nine thousand square kilometres of almost uninhabited wilderness. Further along, Lois swung the Land Rover off the main road and onto a single-lane sandy track which deteriorated steadily as they journeyed along it.
Rayne looked round in satisfaction as they arrived at the thatched huts that were to be their home for the next week. The place looked just like a holiday retreat. A few boats were lying around, garden furniture was set out on the freshly mown lawn, a pile of bottles surrounded the waste bins. Lois and the other men had not been idle. Of course he would have to wait till first light to make sure that everything was a hundred per cent all right, but Rayne was sure that from the air no one would be in the least suspicious.
Lois showed them to their huts. Rayne and Michael’s hut was neat, if somewhat on the spartan side. The mosquito coil glowed pleasantly in the darkness, its distinctive smell gradually filling the whole room.
‘
Good God, Rayne, how the hell does anyone live here?’ The Colonel’s voice echoed against the darkness.
‘
Not many people do. In fact, because of the mosquito and the tsetse fly, this part of the world used to be virtually uninhabitable. That’s why I made you and the others start taking those tablets. There are actually only two species of mosquito that carry malaria, and they aren’t particularly prevalent here, but it doesn’t do to take risks. If you take your anti-malaria tablets all the time you’re here, you’re in no danger at all.’
The Colonel smiled grimly in the dark. ‘In future,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll be taking my holidays in the South of France.’
Sam
Sam was furious. Every time she thought about it she became angry. He’d hurt her even more deeply than she could have imagined. Now, as she angrily strode through the bush, she tried to blot him out of her mind. A branch of a tree came up without warning and hit her in the face, and she shouted, ‘Fuck you! Just fuck off!’
How could he have been such an absolute bastard - after all the promises he’d made! She’d come out here to forget him, but instead she was feeling even worse. She had immersed herself in her work - that was why she was here, on this small farm to the north of Umtali, two hundred kilometres south-east of Salisbury. Today she had gone out from the farmhouse on her own, a highly dangerous thing to do. But she didn’t care. She felt reckless after what Rayne had done to her.
The farm’s setting was idyllic. Not far to the east were the mountains that marked the border between Rhodesia and Mozambique; the whole Umtali valley was a Garden of Eden, warm and fertile, filled with luxuriant vegetation. Yet in this perfect place life had become a hell for the inhabitants. They were in a no-man’s-land, caught between the Rhodesian forces and the ZANLA guerrillas who infiltrated across the Mozambique border only thirty kilometres away. Many of the farmers had fled, opting for the safety of the town of Umtali and letting their crops go to ruin. People drove everywhere in convoy, eyes constantly scanning the dirt roads for land-mines.
For the rural black African population there was no way out of the war. The guerillas demanded that they inform on their white employees, and if the tribesmen didn’t cooperate they were tortured or killed. If they did cooperate, they didn’t fare much better at the hands of the Rhodesian police. Every farm that was still occupied was linked up to the Agric-Alert system, which enabled isolated farmers to stay in constant touch with their closest police headquarters. A break in contact would automatically lead to an alert, and an immediate police or army investigation.
Sam had long been wanting to do a story on the life of the farmers on Rhodesia’s eastern frontier, and now her editor had thought a piece on how hard the Rhodesians were having it might be newsworthy. That was all the prodding she had needed - given the mood she was in - and she had set off looking for the distraction that the story would bring. But it had all been rather depressing. The scenery and the beautiful locations should have compensated her for the despair of the people, but instead it threw their condition into even worse relief for her. Everyone wanted the war over, but everyone knew that it would continue for months, whatever the outcome of the elections.
Sam thought of the beautiful jacaranda and flame trees that lined the streets of Umtali. They made the place look sleepy and secure. Set amid stunning mountain ranges, it was rated one of the most beautiful towns in the whole of Africa. The day before, she had taken the scenic route to the south of Umtali to see the Vumba Mountains, and had marvelled at the spectacular vegetation, especially the blood-red leaves of the musasa trees. She knew that in her native America the place would have been swarming with tourists; instead, in Rhodesia, it was completely deserted.
She had seen the fabulous farm Cloudlands, too, which had been donated to the people of Rhodesia by Lionel Cripps and the Bunga Forest. She had walked through the trees in the late afternoon drizzle, trying to imagine what it must have been like to live in the place when there was no threat of death and only the promise of immense wealth and prosperity. She thought what a timeless quality the forest had, like the sea which you know will keep on crashing against the shoreline in just the same way long after you have departed . . .
Still remembering yesterday’s expedition, Sam turned round to start walking back to the farmhouse. It was no wonder the white farmers on the borders were bitter and bewildered, she thought. They were caught up in changes they could not understand. They believed that with the elections, and the new government of Bishop Muzorewa, they would be able to settle back into the life they had once thought would go on forever. Little did they realise that this was only another, passing phase in the history of their troubled land. The black people, so long dominated by the white races, wanted power for themselves - and not merely power which was handed over to them at secondhand by a white government abroad. Too many of the black leaders now knew that their only option was a bloody one; they had learned this lesson from the successive white governments that had imprisoned and oppressed them for more than twenty years . . .
Noticing the light was beginning to fade, Sam suddenly felt apprehensive. The farmer she’d been interviewing had told her she was crazy to go for a walk on her own. Heart beating hard for no apparent reason, she broke into a half-run. She began to breathe a little easier as she glimpsed the farmhouse through the trees, but the feeling of relief didn’t last long.
When she’d left the farmhouse there had been quite a few men working nearby, but now the area round the homestead seemed strangely deserted. For a moment she thought she glimpsed someone in the bush, but then she realised she must have imagined it. Closer to the farmhouse, she was startled by a loud bang that sounded like a shotgun. Another bang came moments later, and then a loud burst of automatic rifle fire.
To her horror Sam realised that the farm must be under attack by a ZANLA unit. To run back to the farmhouse would be suicide. They would have seen her car. What was she going to do?
She ran towards the bush without even thinking, the branches tearing at her clothes while more automatic fire sounded in the distance. Now she was nearing the top of the hill where the ground was more open, and she kept to the edge of the trees, turning back every so often to make sure she was not being followed.
She must get out of the valley and over to the other side of the ridge, then she could make her way back west until she hit the main road from Watsomba to Umtali. There, she calculated, she could hide and wait until a convoy came along. She had heard on the radio that morning that the army was well in control of the operational area Thrasher, where she was now. It could only be a matter of time before the security forces were on the scene.
She could not know that her host, Stuart Gregg, had become worried that she was walking too far away from the farm buildings and had walked after her with his shotgun. Too late he had realised that something was amiss - that all his farmworkers had disappeared, a sure sign there were terrs in the area. He had already started to run back to the farm when he saw the shadowy forms amongst the trees. He kept going, weaving from side to side, hoping to present a bad target. He fired once, cutting one man down. He was within fifty metres of the front door when the first burst of fire from an AK-47 hit him in the legs.
Desperately he had tried to leopard-crawl to the open back door, but he hadn’t stood a chance. A second spurt of fire caught him in the back. He reared up and fired his shotgun, killing another terr. Then a bullet struck him in the forehead and he slumped over. Another casualty of the border conflict, his hopes and dreams gone forever, waiting to be collected when his six o’clock alert call did not come in at the police station . . .
The guerillas trooped past the dead body into the farmhouse. They were looking for anything of value they could take with them. They ripped the telephone out of its socket and smashed it to pieces. There was no fear in these men. They had little enough to lose - certainly no home like this to return to. Many of them had left home years before to lead a guerrilla’s life in the bush and fight for the cause they believed in.