Authors: Christopher Sherlock
He rolled the second body over. The face seemed curiously familiar. His hand touched the closed eyelids and pulled them back.
He knew this man. Not as an enemy but as a close friend.
The cry rang out through the stark, silent beauty of the early morning landscape. It rose and fell, sometimes fading away almost to nothing, then rising again with renewed force. Not a woman’s cry. The cry of a man crouched over the body of his comrade.
The man got up and moved to another body. For a moment the horrified scream penetrated the silence again. The man rose and ran up the side of the incline. He pulled up another body from amongst the rocks. He turned the bloody face to his own and screamed again.
‘
No! No! No!’
He collapsed to the ground sobbing, and his tears ran into the dry earth.
Rayne dug with his bare hands, like an animal. As the day progressed he buried each of the four bodies and above each mound of soft earth he mounted a simple cross of two sticks bound together with cord.
When at last they were all buried, he staggered up the heap of boulders and hoisted himself on top of the rock that commanded the whole area. He sat on the rock, watching the setting sun, and sat there still as the darkness closed in around him. The first light of the new moon came up, as if to offer him a sign of hope.
In a single day his joy in the excitement of war had been replaced by a sense of its absolute futility. Africa, the continent he loved so much, had spoken to him in the most savage way possible. As he dug the graves, he had thought of turning his pistol on himself. But he would not take the easy way out. That was against his nature.
A faint wind blew up and pulled against the folds of his combat jacket. It seemed to clean the air around him, recharge his lungs, give him renewed energy, before it died as mysteriously as it had come, to be replaced by the familiar sounds of the African night.
After a while Rayne heard the sound which had so disturbed him the night before. Now he could recognise the pattern of breathing and put the hideous face to it; he could understand the strange shuffling noises and the long, pregnant silences. Grimly he waited on the top of the rock for his moment of revenge.
It was not a long wait. After the blackness of the previous night, the bright moonlight made the hyena bolder, and he came early, moving quickly across the clearing to the mound of earth.
Without looking round, he unearthed the body, already becoming high with the stench of putrefaction.
He stopped and looked up to the new moon for a moment, as if to say a silent prayer before the feast that lay in store for him. He would live well for the next few weeks. There would be no need for travelling or taking risks; he would get stronger, perhaps his damaged leg would get a little better. His mouth tingled in anticipation of eating that flesh again; his dark red tongue ran across his lips.
Then he heard the noise that spelt death, and turned to spring away. The flash followed instantaneously from the rock above the clearing.
He let out a desperate yelp as the bullet tore through the soft fur of his chest and buried itself deep within. He fell on his side, his head flopping in the dust. The struggle for survival was over
.
. .
Rayne felt the noise of the shot ring through his skull. He had killed again - this time to prevent the savage desecration of the body of his best friend.
He had known all four of these men, Selous Scouts like himself, members of one of the crack units of the Rhodesian Army - men to whom daring exploits were everyday events. At twenty-five, and though he was a South African volunteer, not a Rhodesian, Rayne had been made a captain. He had given these men orders, had fought and laughed alongside them. These men would have died to save his life.
They all knew the risks of the Pseudo Groups, of course. That was the risk you took when you became a Selous Scout. You disguised yourself as the enemy; you blackened your face and your hands, you grew a beard; you became a ZANLA freedom fighter. You moved into the bush, made contact with the men from ZANLA who accepted you as fellow warriors. And then you killed them.
Of course, if they saw through your disguise, you were dead. But apparently no one in high command had thought about what happened when Pseudo Groups confronted each other - when the disguise was so good that you each thought the other was the enemy, and then you shot at each other to kill and you killed your own men. That was when the logic of the thing fell away.
Rayne wished they’d thought of a password, or some other subtle means of communication. But as in all wars, at the moment of crisis it was every man for himself. You only thought about what you should have done after things had gone horribly wrong.
At least they would never know who had really killed them.
They were better off than he was. He had to live with the fact that he’d killed four of his friends, his own men.
He had shot Ron in the mouth. Ron with the pretty, smiling wife and the two children. He had sawn through Mac’s guts with an avalanche of bullets. Mac was the one who always made them laugh when things were bad. Mike had just got engaged. He’d blown away Mike’s shoulder and then shot him in the throat. And he’d blown out Alan’s guts with a grenade. Alan, with two brothers already dead in the bush war and his father a bitter old man.
How could he go back into Rhodesia? Tell Ron’s wife that he’d killed her husband, and his three-year-old son that his dad wasn’t coming home to the farm? They’d bloody understand. He knew they’d accept it and that would be the hardest part of all, living with their understanding. In the last forty-eight hours he’d leapt an abyss and landed a different man on the other side.
For some bizarre reason he remembered a piece of poetry he’d learnt at boarding school in Natal. He recited it aloud, hoping to regain some sanity.
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
After that he fell silent, listening to the sounds that came from the darkness of Africa. Eventually he fell asleep, a solitary body on a piece of stone in the hell-hole that was Mozambique.
He woke up sweating, the sun burning down on him. The rifle lay under his right hand, so hot it almost scorched his skin. He climbed down from the rock and back into the clearing below. His leg was murderously painful.
Rayne moved swiftly, taking one of their packs and most of their ammunition. Then he disappeared into the bush, moving in a zig-zag pattern and covering his tracks constantly. He was close to collapse; the wound in his thigh was still oozing blood, and it made him sick to look at it. But the fear that, in this weakened state, he might run into a genuine ZANLA group, pushed him on. He had to get out of Mozambique, and fast.
Five days later Rayne swam painfully across the Gairezi River, north of Ruda in the Honda Valley. He had covered some eighty- five kilometres, mostly at night, avoiding any contact with local people.
He had been in constant danger. There were ZANLA forces scattered over the entire area and also frequent patrols by Mozambique’s own armed force FRELIMO. Either of these groups would shoot him on sight or worse, capture him and subject him to the horrors of interrogation. Several times, in fact, he had almost walked into a party of soldiers but years of experience had taught him how to melt into the bush at the first sight of the enemy.
The days had passed in a blur. The evenings and nights he had spent staggering wearily onward, the mornings and afternoons had been spent ‘resting’ - lying wide awake, listening for the sounds of enemy patrols. These were the worst times, for over and over again his mind replayed the ambush.
For Rayne, killing had always been something he’d done to the enemy. Its justification was that the enemy would otherwise kill him; he never thought about the men he killed. But now he had killed his friends, murdered them in cold blood. The guilt of it would never leave him. He felt sick to the depths of his soul. And how would he ever explain what had happened? Would anyone believe him? They would think he was out of his mind.
Rayne shivered, his clothes and his body still wet from his swim across the river. It was very dark; the moon was hidden by the trees, making it hard for him to see ahead. Above the usual sounds of the bush at night he strove to listen for the slightest noise that was out of the ordinary. He knew he should move off the path but he was just too tired, his eyelids would droop, stay closed for a fraction of a second too long . . . Only will-power kept him lifting one leg after the other along the narrow path.
He heard a noise in front of him, but his arms refused to respond. He held up his rifle ineffectually. Before he realised it a man was facing him, pointing a rifle directly at him. Then something struck him from behind and he keeled over, crashing to the man’s feet.
They had been lying in wait since dusk. The path was a favourite route used by ZANLA terrorists coming in from Mozambique - terrorists determined to make an attack in the Thrasher operational area on the eastern border of Rhodesia.
It was thirteen long war-weary years since Ian Smith had signed Rhodesia’s historic Unilateral Declaration of Independence. In so doing he had severed all Rhodesia’s links with the British Crown, thus ending an eighty-year association that had begun when Cecil Rhodes’ famous Pioneer Column hoisted the British flag in Salisbury in 1890.
The reason for the Declaration was simple. Rhodesia wanted Independence based on her 1961 constitution, which entrenched the rights of the white minority. This was unacceptable to the British government, and so Ian Smith had taken the decision to go it alone.
In 1966 the United Nations applied selective sanctions to Rhodesia in an effort to force the white government to make moves towards handing over power to the black majority. Four years later, in retaliation, the white government of Rhodesia declared the country a Republic. To black Rhodesians this seemed the appalling culmination of years of political frustration - but then came the offer of assistance. Two countries, China and Russia, were ready to provide military equipment, money and training. With this help, black terrorist groups began to make an impact. To the west were the ZIPRA forces based in Zambia and Botswana and attacking the western flank of Rhodesia in the operational areas designated Tangent and Splinter. The ZIPRA freedom fighters came mostly from the Matabele tribe. To the east were the ZANLA forces, primarily of the Mashona tribe, based in Mozambique and attacking the eastern side of Rhodesia in the operational areas known as Thrasher and Hurricane. Rhodesia was effectively surrounded except for a small area to the south, the border with South Africa. Apart from the air routes, this was her only lifeline.
What Rayne had walked into was an ambush laid for ZANLA terrorists by the Rhodesian Light Infantry, a crack battalion that was rated by international military experts to be amongst the finest in the world. In this instance the object of the ambush was to capture rather than kill. If a terr talked he would provide vital information about compatriots operating in the area.
The terr they’d caught coming up the path in the early hours of this morning was obviously pretty badly hurt. He had a serious leg wound, and a stab wound in one shoulder. That would give them plenty to work on during the interrogation. He must have lost his sense of direction, too. Why else would he be staggering across the Rhodesian border instead of returning to Mozambique? They could tell he was in a bad way because he had heard them coming but had been unable to retaliate.
They had disarmed him and tied his hands behind his back. He was carrying a Browning pistol that he must have taken from a soldier or a farmer. He was white, not black as they had first thought. A white disguised as a black. Maybe a Russian or a Cuban. If he was Russian it would be a rare capture; the Russians usually only took high-command positions in the cities.
The terr opened his eyes and smiled at them.
‘
I’ve made it.’