Authors: Wilbur Smith
His observers were on the north bank of the Zambezi, in
carefully prepared positions from which they could sweep the
opposite bank and the small heavily wooded islands that split the
shallows of the wide river-course.
‘How many?’ Tungata asked into the microphone.
‘No count yet.’
Of course, they would be mere flickers of movement in the
darkening bush, impossible to get a head count, as they came
forward in overlapping covering rushes. Tungata looked up at the
sky, there was less than an hour before dark, he estimated, and
felt a fresh onslaught of the doubts that had beset him ever
since he had brought his cadre through the drifts almost three
hours before.
Could he entice the pursuers into crossing the river? Without
that, the destruction of the Viscount and all else that he had so
far achieved would be halved in propaganda and psychological
value against the enemy. He had to bring the Scouts across into
the carefully prepared killing-ground. He had carried the
woman’s skirt and left it on the edge of the
cordon
sanitaire
for just that purpose, to bring them on.
Yet he recognized that it would be an irrational act for any
commander to take a small force across such a natural barrier as
the Zambezi at the close of day with darkness only minutes away,
into hostile territory against an enemy of unknown strength who
must anticipate his arrival and who had been able to prepare for
it at leisure. Tungata could not expect them to come – he
could only hope.
It would depend chiefly upon who had command of the pursuers.
The bait that he had laid to draw them in would be only truly
effective on one man, the multiple rape and mutilation of the
woman, the bloodied skirt would have their full effect only upon
Colonel Roland Ballantyne himself. Tungata tried objectively to
assess the chances that it was Ballantyne himself commanding the
pursuit.
He had been at Victoria Falls Hotel, ZIPRA agents had made a
positive identification. The woman had called herself Ballantyne,
the Scouts were the nearest and most effective force in the area.
Surely they must be the first to the site of the wreck, and
surely Ballantyne would be with them. Tungata had to allow
himself a better than even chance that his operation was working
as planned.
Tungata’s first confirmation that the pursuit was close
had been a little before four o’clock that afternoon, when
there had been one short burst of automatic fire from the south
bank. At that moment, Tungata’s cadre had just completed
the crossing of the drift. They were still soaked and lying
panting, like hunting-dogs too hard run, and Tungata had been
chilled to realize how close the Scouts had been behind them,
despite the many hours’ start they had had and the fierce
pace that Tungata had forced on his men. Twenty minutes more and
they would have been caught on the south bank at the
cordon
sanitaire
, and Tungata cherished no illusions as to what that
would have meant. His men were the élite of the ZIPRA
forces, but they were no match for Ballantyne’s Scouts. On
the south bank they would have been doomed, but now that they
were across the Zambezi, the advantage had swung dramatically.
Tungata’s preparations to receive the pursuing force had
taken fully ten days, and had been carried out with the full
co-operation of the Zambian army and police force.
The radio crackled again and Tungata lifted the microphone to
his lips and acknowledged curtly. The observer’s voice was
lowered, as though he feared it might carry to the dangerous
quarry across the river.
‘They have not attempted the crossing. Either they are
waiting for dark, or they are not coming.’
‘They must come,’ Tungata whispered to himself,
and then he keyed the microphone.
‘Put up the flare,’ he ordered.
‘Stand by!’ the observer answered, and Tungata
lowered the microphone and looked up expectantly into the purple
and rose of the evening sky. It was a risk, but then it had all
been a risk, from the very moment they crossed the Zambezi
carrying the SAM-7 launcher.
The signal flare streaked up into the sunset, and five hundred
feet above the river it burst into a crimson ball of fire.
Tungata watched it begin to sink gracefully towards the earth
again. He found that he had driven his fingernails into the flesh
of his palms with the strength of his grip upon the radio
microphone.
The flare, fired so tantalizingly close to the river bank,
from just behind the first line of trees on the north bank, could
frighten them off and make them abandon the pursuit, or it could
have the effect that Tungata hoped for. It could convince them
how close they were to their quarry, and precipitate the cat-like
reflex to follow anything that flees.
Tungata waited and the seconds dragged by. He shook his head,
facing at last the prospect of failure, feeling the chill of it
begin in the pit of his stomach and beginning to spread. Then the
radio crackled, and the observer’s voice was strained and
hoarse:
‘They are coming!’ he said.
Tungata snatched the microphone to his lips. ‘All units.
Hold your fire. This is Comrade Tungata. Hold your
fire.’
He had to pause then, his relief mixed with dread that at this
last moment one of his nervous guerrillas might spring the trap
prematurely. He had six hundred men deployed on the
killing-ground, only regimental strength was sufficient for a
detachment of
kanka
. With his own eyes Tungata had seen
them fight, and anything less than odds of twenty to one in his
favour would not be acceptable.
He had achieved his numerical advantage, but in his own great
numbers there was a concealed danger. Control was weakened, not
all of his men were warriors of quality, amongst them there must
be many of those who were nervous and susceptible to the
mysterious aura, the almost superstitious awe, that surrounded
the legend of Ballantyne’s Scouts.
‘All field commanders,’ he kept repeating into the
microphone, ‘hold your fire. This is Commissar Comrade
Tungata. Hold your fire.’ Then he lowered the microphone
and made one long last careful study of the ground in front of
him.
The north bank of the river was almost a mile from where he
waited. It was marked by a palisade of taller trees, the twisted
trunks of great strangler figs and tall mkusi, their branches
laden with trailing lianas, and higher even than these were the
elegant bottle palms, their spiky fronds silhouetted against the
blushing sunset. There was no glimpse of the river through this
wall of lush growth.
Then abruptly the line of forest ended on this wide
meadow-like opening. It was one of the Zambezi flood plains. In
the rainy season, when the river burst its banks, this area would
be inundated and transformed into a shallow lagoon filled with
water-lilies and reeds, but now it had dried out, and the reeds
had wilted and fallen, no longer providing cover for a pursuer,
or a fugitive.
One of Tungata’s main concerns had been to keep the soft
surface of this wide pan uncontaminated by spoor and footprints.
There had been a regiment encamped along its fringes for almost
ten days now, a regiment digging the trench system and batteries
for the mortars. Just one man wandering across the pan would have
left a warning to the pursuers, but it had been kept clean.
The only spoor out there was that of the wild buffalo herds,
of the dainty red puku antelope, and the tracks of nine men, the
same tracks that led from the crash site of the Viscount, and
which Tungata and his cadre had laid only three hours previously.
These tracks emerged from the fringe of riverine bush and ran
down the centre of the open flood plain to the higher forested
ground on this side.
The carrier band of Tungata’s radio hummed to life and
the whisper of his observer warned, ‘They are halfway
across the drift.’
Tungata imagined the line of dark heads above the sunset-pink
waters, looking like a string of beads on a bodice of velvet.
‘How many?’ Tungata asked.
‘Twelve.’
Tungata felt a quick drop of disappointment. So few? He had
hoped for more. He hesitated for a heartbeat before he asked:
‘Is there a white officer?’
‘Only one man in camouflage paint, he is at the head of
the line.’
‘It’s Ballantyne,’ Tungata told himself.
‘It’s the great jackal himself, it must be
him.’
Again the voice spoke from the radio. ‘They are across,
into the trees. We have lost sight.’
Now, would they commit themselves to cross the flood plain?
Tungata focused his night-glasses on the treeline. The specially
ground and coated lens picked up every available ray of light
– but still even through the lens the shapes of the trees
and bushes beneath them were becoming indistinct. The sun had
gone, and the last colours of the sunset were fading, the first
stars were pricking the dark canopy of the night sky.
‘They are still in the trees.’ It was a different
voice on the radio, deeper and harsher. One of the second line of
observers covering the southernmost fringe of the pan.
Tungata gave another order into the microphone.
‘Unscreen the fire!’ he said quietly, and seconds
later there was a tiny yellow glow of a camp-fire in the treeline
furthest from the river. As Tungata stared at it through the
night-glasses, a human figure passed in front of the low flames.
It gave the perfect illusion of a quiet camp amongst the trees,
where an unsuspecting quarry exhausted from the long chase, but
believing themselves safe at last, were resting and preparing the
evening meal. But was it too obvious a lure, Tungata wondered
anxiously, was he relying too much upon the unbalanced rage of
the pursuers?
His self-doubts were answered almost immediately. The gruff
voice on the radio said suddenly, ‘They have left the
trees, they are crossing the pan.’
It was too dark now to make out anything at that range. He had
to rely on the sighting of his forward posts, and he turned the
luminous dial of his wristwatch so that he could see the sweep of
the second-hand. The pan was one and a half kilometres across, at
a run the Scouts would take approximately four minutes to cross
it.
Without taking his eyes off the dial, Tungata spoke into the
microphone. ‘Mortars, stand by with star-shell.’
‘Mortars, standing by!’
The second-hand completed its circuit of the dial, and started
around again.
‘Mortars, fire!’ Tungata ordered.
From the forest behind him came that hollow clunking sound of
three-inch mortars, and Tungata heard the flute of the mortar
bombs rising swiftly overhead. Then suddenly, at the zenith of
their trajectory, the star-shells burst.
They hung suspended on their tiny parachutes, and their light
was a harsh electric blue. The open flood plain was illuminated
like some gigantic sports stadium. The tiny group of running men
in the centre were trapped in the naked glare, and their shadows
on the earth beneath them seemed black and weighty as solid
ironstone.
They went down instantly – but there was no cover. Even
though they were flattened against the earth, their bodies formed
sharply defined hummocks. But they were almost immediately
obliterated by the leaping sheets of dust and flying clods of
earth that sprang up around them like a bank of pale whirling
fog. Tungata had six hundred men in the treeline surrounding the
pan. All of them were firing now, and the hurricane of automatic
fire swept over the huddled figures in the middle of the open
pan.
From the mortar batteries set farther back in the forest, the
bombs rose high over Tungata’s head and then dropped into
the open pan. The crack of their explosions added a sharp
counterpoint to the background thunder of small-arms fire, and
the mortar bursts jumped up like pale dust-devils in the light of
the star-shells.
Nothing could live out there. The Scouts must long ago all be
torn to shreds by shot and shrapnel, but still it went on and on,
minute after minute, while more star-shells crackled into
eye-searing bright sizzling blue light overhead.
Tungata panned his binoculars slowly over the drifting screen
of dust and smoke. He could see no sign of life – and at
last he shifted the microphone to order the ceasefire. But before
he could speak, he saw movement, directly in front of his
position, not two hundred paces distant, and out of the curtain
of dust came two ghostly figures.
They came at a run, side by side, seeming to wade through the
thick swamp of mortar-smoke and dust, and they appeared monstrous
and inhuman in the stark light of the star-shells. One of them
was a huge Matabele. He had lost his helmet and his head was
round and black as a cannonball, his open mouth was a pink cave
lined with ivory teeth, and his bull bellow rose above even that
storm of gunfire. The other was a white man, the top of his
battledress torn half off his body, exposing the pale flesh of
chest and shoulders, but his face was daubed with fiendish
streaks of dark green and brown paint.
The two of them were firing as they came on, and Tungata felt
a stir of the superstitious dread that he had despised in his own
troops, for they seemed immune to the storm of bullets through
which they charged.
‘Kill them!’ Tungata heard his own voice
screaming, and a burst of FN fire from one of them kicked the top
of the bank of loose earth in front of his slit trench.
Tungata ducked and ran to the gunner behind the heavy
machine-gun at the end of the trench.
‘Aim carefully,’ he shouted, and the gunner fired
a long thunderous burst, but the two figures ran on towards them
unscathed.
Tungata pushed the man away from the gun and took his place.
For infinite seconds he peered over the sights, making the tiny
adjustments to the gun’s elevation, and then he fired.