She was so close that he did not have to lift the Gibbs to his shoulder.
He shot her in the stomach. The heavy rifle bounded in his grip and the bullet picked the girl up and while she was in the air it broke her in half, blowing a hole through her spine into which her own head would have fitted, and she folded up, loose and floppy as a suit of discarded clothing as she fell back onto the muddy forest floor.
Sean fired the second barrel as one of the other Mau Mau bolted out of the nearest shelter. The Gibbs made a sound like the slamming of a great steel door, and the man was hurled back into the shelter with half his chest torn away.
Sean had two more cartridges held between the fingers of his left hand, and as he opened the breech of the Gibbs the spent brass cases pinged away over his shoulder and he slid the fresh cartridges into the empty breeches and closed the rifle again in the same movement.
The Bren and the Stirling were firing now. Their muzzle flashes were bright and pretty as fairy lights in the gloom, twinkling and sparkling, and the bullets wentfrip!frip!frip! amongst the leaves and sang shrilly as they ricocheted into the forest.
Sean shot again and the Gibbs canhoned down another naked figure, knocking him flat against the soft earth as though he had been run down by a locomotive. And again he shot, but this one was a snap shot and the Mau Mau jinked just as the Gibbs thundered.
The bullet hit him in the shoulder joint and blew his right arm off so it hungby a taller of torn flesh and flapped against his side as he spun around. Raymond's Stirling buzzed and cut him down.
Sean re10aded and shot left and right, clean kills with each barrel and by the 'time he had reloaded again the camp was silent, and the Bren and the Stirling had ceased firing.
Nothing moved. All three men were deadly natural shots, and the range was point blank. Sean waited a full five minutes. Only a fool walked directly up to dangerous game no matter how dead it appeared to be. Then he rose cautiously to his knees with the rifle at high port across his chest.
The last Mau Mau broke. He had been feigning dead in the far shelter, and he had judged his moment finely, waiting until the attacker relaxed and began to move. He flushed like a jack rabbit and shot into the bamboo on the far side of the clearing. Alistair's Bren was blanketed by the wall of the nearest shelter but he fired nevertheless and the bullets futilely thrashed the hut. From the river bank Ray had a clearer shot, but he was a fraction of a second slow, the cold had brought out the malaria in his blood and his hand shook. The bamboo absorbed the light 9 men bullets as though he had fired into a haystack.
For the first ten paces the running Mau Mau was screened from Sean's view by the wall of the nearest hut, and then Sean caught only a flickering glimpse of him as he dived into the bamboo, but already Sean was on him, swinging the stubby double barrels as though he were taking a right-hand passing shot on a driven francolin. Although he could no longer see his quarry in the dense bamboo, he continued his swing on the line of the man's run, instinctively leading him. The Gibbs gave its angry bellow and red flame blazed from the muzzle.
The huge bullet smashed into the wall of bamboo, and at Sean's side Matatu shouted gleefully, 'Pigat Hit!' as he heard the bullet tell distinctly on living flesh.
'Take the blood spoor!' Sean commanded and the little Ndorobo loped across the clearing. But it was not necessary: the Mau Mau lay where he had dropped. The bullet had ploughed through bamboo, leaf and stem, without being deflected an inch from its track.
Ray and Alistair came into the camp, weapons ready, and picked over the bodies. One of the other Mau Mau women was still breathing, though bloody bubbles seethed on her lips, and Ray shot her in the temple with the Sten.
'Make sure none of them got away,' Sean ordered Matatu in Swahili.
The little Ndorobo made a quick circuit of the encampment to check for out-going spoor, and then came back grinning. 'All here.' He gloated. 'All dead.' Sean tossed the Gibbs to him and drew the ivory-handled hunting-knife from the sheath on his belt.
'Damn it, laddie,' Ray Harris protested as Sean walked back to where the body of the first girl lay. 'You are the bloody end, man.' He had seen Sean do this before and although Ray Harris was a hard, callous man who for thirty years had made his living out of blood and gunfire, still he gagged as Sean squatted over the corpse and stropped the blade on the palm of his hand.
'You are getting soft, old man.' Sean grinned at him. 'You know they make beautiful tobacco pouches,' he said, and took the dead girl's breast in his hand, pulling the skin taut for the stroke of the knife blade.
Shasa found Garry in the boardroom. He was always there twenty minutes before any of the other directors arrived, arranging his piles of computer print-out sheets and ,other notes around him and going over his facts and figures for one last time before the meeting began.
Shasa and Centaine had argued before appointing Garry to the boarA of Courtney Mining.
'You can ruin a pony by pushing him too hard too soon.' 'We aren't talking about a polo pony,' Centaine had replied tartly.
'And it's not a case of pushing. He's got the bit between his teeth, to continue your chosen metaphor, Shasa, and if we try and hold him back we will either discourage him or drive him out on his own.
Now is the time to give him a bit of slack rein.' 'But you made me wait much longer.' 'You were a late-blooming rose, and the war and all that business held you up. At Garry's age you were still flying Hurricanes and chasing around Abyssinia.' So Garry had gone on the board, and like everything else in his life he had taken it very seriously indeed. Now he looked up as his father confronted him down the length of the boardroom.
'I heard you have been borrowing money on your own bat,' Shasa accused.
Garry removed his spectacles, polished them diligently, held them up to the light and then replaced them on his large Courtney nose, all to gain time in which to compose his reply.
'Only one person knows about that. The manager of the Adderly Street branch of Standard Bank. He could lose his job if he blabbed about my personal business.' 'You forget that both Nana and I are on the board of the Standard Bank. All loans of over a million pounds come up before us for approval.' 1Rand,' Garry corrected his father pedantically. 'Two million rand - the pound is history.' /'Thanks,' Shasa said grimly. 'I'll try to move with the times. Now how about this two million rand you have borrowed?' 'A straightforward transaction, Dad. I put up my shares in the Shasaville township as collateral, and the bank lent me two million rand.' 'What are you going to do with it? That's a small fortune.' Shasa was one of the few men in the country who would qualify that amount with that
