down the hill, her chin and her small pert breasts held high, and stood between Alphonso and Matatu.
'Now you, woman,' China spoke in Shangane, and Miriam stood up. She did not have a European's shame of nudity, and quickly she stripped herself naked. Holding her little brother's hand, she went down to join the others.
'And now, Colonel Courtney. The last is the best of all the game- Sean rose to his feet and carelessly threw aside his tattered Clothing.
'Very impressive, Colonel,' China taunted him. 'For a white man, that is.'
Sean stood and stared up at him impassively, but he was trying to judge the distance to the helicopter. Sixty yards, he estimated, much too far.
'Please come down into the open where I can keep an eye on you, Colonel. We don't want any misunderstanding now, do we?'
Sean took Minnie's hand and led her down the hill. The lump under the little girl's skirt wobbled from side to side like a Victorian bustle, and with her free hand she tugged at the waistband of her panties to prevent them being pulled down around her knees by the weight.
Ten, fifteen, twenty paces, Sean counted as he moved toward the hovering Hind. He could clearly see the pupils of General China's eyes-forty yards, still too far. He stopped beside Claudia, and they stood in a row, naked and vulnerable.
China gave an order in Shangane, and at the foot of the hill his men burst out of the forest and came swarming up the slope, whooping with triumph. The Portuguese pilot edged the huge machine in closer, then closer still, showing off his prowess at the controls.
Thi yards, twenty-five yards, Sean was concentrating on the my opening of the air intakes to the turbo engines. They were the size of garbage bins with the covers missing; he could just make out, deep in the circular openings, the velvety blur of the rotor blades spinning at incredible speed. The Hind steadied in the air and hung in front of them. In the cockpit General China twisted his head to peer down the hill at the line of advancing Renamo guerrillas. He was distracted, and Sean seized the moment.
He stooped slightly and jerked up the back of Minnie's skirt. In the same movement, he thrust his hand under the waistband of her underpants and closed his hand over the grenade. As it came out, he pulled the pin and let the firing handle fly free. He heard the pin fall on the primer. There was a delay of five seconds. He counted off three under his breath and then reared back like a baseball pitcher just as China looked back at him. He concentrated on the starboard engine intake and hurled the grenade. It went up in a flat arc, and he willed its flight, trying by sheer force of his mind to steer it into the small circle of the intake.
The grenade strucit the bottom of the intake rim and bounced on the edge, like a. million- dollar putt quivering on the lip. Then the tremendous draft of air created by the rotor blades sucked it in, and it popped into the throat of the open duct.
The grenade exploded as it hit the spinning blades, and the great turbo's energy was thrown out of balance, all its mighty power if- destruction.
directed upon itself in an orgy of se As Sean seized Claudia and Minnie under each arm and hurled them facedown, the Hind's engine tore itself to pieces in one fatal instant.
The Hind lurched heavily, throwing General China's aim off so that the burst he fired from the Gatling cannon flew almost straight into the sky, and the helicopter rolled onto its back.
Smoke and fragments of metal blew in a screaming cloud from its maimed engines.
It struck the side of the hill, bounced high, fell again, and cartwheeled down the slope, directly on top of the climbing line of Renarno. They broke and scattered, but most of them could not escape, and the shattered fuselage of the Hind rolled over them and swept them away down the slope.
At last the Hind slithered on its belly like a gigantic toboggan to the bottom of the kopJe and came up hard against the tree line.
Avgas, clear as water, fountained. from its ruptured main tanks and sprayed over the hull, sparkling in the sunlight.
Sean and Claudia rose shakily to their knees and watched the magnificent destruction in awe.
Then, incredibly, the canopy of the weapons cockpit opened like the half shell of an enormous oyster and General China crawled out from under it. The Hind's fuel sprayed high in the morning sunlight, as innocuous-seeming as a garden sprinkler, and fell on him in a gentle rain. It soaked his uniform and ran in thin rivulets down his face, but China pushed himself away from the shattered fuselage and set off down the hill at a shambling run.
He had not gone ten shaky paces when the Hind went up in a sheet of flame. The flames jumped the gap and ignited China's sodden uniform. It turned him into a human torch, and he ran on down the slope with yellow flames streaking out behind him. They could hear his screams even from the top of the hill, a high inhuman sound.
China did not reach the trees. He fell at the edge of the forest, and his burning flesh touched off the thick brown grass in which he lay. The hillside became his pyre, but still they could hear him screaming in the heart of the flames.
'Back!' Sean shouted, and his voice aroused them from their mesmerized horror. He hauled Claudia to her feet and picked Minnie up in his arms.
In a bunch they fled back into the circle of rocks that crowned the kopJe just as a renewed Renamo fusillade whined about them.
They lay behind the rocks, not yet bothering to cover their naked bodies, and watched the Hind burn and the flames sweep through the grass at the edge of the forest.
When the flames had passed, a dark charred mound lay on the blackened slope. It might have been merely a pile of discarded sacking, except that when the wind shifted, the odor of burned flesh carried up to them on the crest of the hill.
The shift in the wind carried a new sound to them, and Sean roused himself and looked toward the green Limpopo River on the horizon.
The Puma helicopter was still a dark speck out there, but it was coming on swiftly, the sound of its engines rising on the wind.
'Put your pants on, darling.' Sean hugged Claudia a little closer. 'It looks as though weve got company dropping in On us!'
The End
