will live like a eunuch for the rest of his life, without ever knowing the comfort of a woman's body. I fear for you, Raleigh, fruit of my loins. I fear that your own vow will be a heavy burden for all your life.' He sighed again. 'But since I cannot persuade you, what can I do to ease the rocky pathway for you?' 'You know that many of the young people are leaving this country?' Raleigh asked.
'Not only the young ones,' Hendrick nodded. 'Some of the high command have gone also. Oliver Tambo has fled and Mbeki and Joe Modise with many others.' 'They have gone to set the first phase of the revolution afoot.' Raleigh's eyes began to shine with excitement. 'Lenin himself taught us that we cannot move immediately to the communist revolution.
We must achieve the phase of national liberation first. We have to create a broad front of liberals and churchmen and students and workers under the leadership of the vanguard party. Oliver Tambc has gone to create that vanguard party - the anti-apartheid movemenl in exile - and I want to be part of that spearhead of the revolution.
'You wish to leave the country of your birth?' Hendrick stared all him in bewilderment. 'You wish to leave me and your family?' 'It is my duty, Father. If the evils of this system are ever to be destroyed, we will need the help of that world out there, of all the united nations of the world.' 'You are dreaming, my son,' Hendrick told him. 'Already that world, in which you place so much trust and hope, has forgotten Sharpeville. Once again money from the foreign nations, from America and Britain and France, is pouring into this country. Every day the country prospers --' 'America has refused to supply arms.' 'Yes,' Hendrick chuckled ruefully. 'And the Boers are making their own. You cannot win, my son, so stay with me.' 'I must go, my Father. Forgive me, but I have no choice. I must go, but I need your help.' 'What do you want me to do?' 'There is a man, a white man, who is helping the young ones to escape.' Hendrick nodded. 'Joe Cicero.' 'I want to meet him, Father.' 'It will take a little time, for he is a secret man, this Joe Cicero.' It took almost two weeks. They met on a municipal bus that Raleigh boarded at the central depot in Vereeniging. He wore a blue beret, as he had been instructed, and sat in the second row of seats from the back.
The man who took the seat directly behind him lit a cigarette and as the bus pulled away, said softly, 'Raleigh Tabaka.' Raleigh turned to look into a pair of eyes like puddles of spilled engine oil.
'Do not look at me,' Joe Cicero said. 'But listen carefully to what I tell you --' Three weeks later Raleigh Tabaka, carrying a duffel bag and authentic seaman's papers, went up the gangplank of a Dutch freighter that was carrying a cargo of wool to the port of Liverpool. He never saw the continent disappear below the watery horizon for he was already below decks at work in the ship's engine room.
Scan did the deal at breakfast on the last day of the safari. The client owned seventeen large leather tanneries in as many different states and half the real estate in Tucson, Arizona. His name was Ed Liner and he was seventy- two years of age.
'Son, I don't know why I want to buy myself a safari company.
I'm getting a little long in the tooth for this big game stuff,' he grumbled.
'That's bullshit, Ed,' Sean told him. 'You nearly walked me off my feet after that big jumbo, and the trackers all call you Bwana One-Shot.' Ed Liner looked pleased with himselfu He was a wiry little man with a ruff of snowy hair around his brown-freckled pate. 'Give me the facts again,' he invited. 'One last time.' Sean had been working on him for three weeks, since the first day of the safari, and he knew Ed had the figures by heart, but he repeated them now.
'The concession is five hundred square miles, with a forty-mile frontage on the south bank of Lake Kariba --' As he listened, Ed Liner stroked his wife as though he were caressing a pet kitten.
She was his third wife and she was just two years younger than Sean, but fifty years younger than her husband. She had been a dancer at the Golden Egg in Vegas, and she had a dancer's legs and carriage, with big innocent blue eyes and a curling cloud of blond hair.
She watched Sean with a vicious little curl to her cupid-bow lips as he made his pitch. Sean had been working on her just as assiduously as he had on her husband, thus far with as little success.
'All you've got, honey,' she had told Sean, 'is a pretty face and a hungry dick. The woods are full of those. Daddy Eddie has got fifty million bucks. It's no contest, sonny boy.' The camp table was set under a magnificent wild fig tree on the banks of the Mara river. It was a bright African morning. The plain beyond the river was golden with winter grass, and studded with flat-topped acacia trees. The herds of wildebeest were dark shadows on the gold and a giraffe was feeding from the upper branches of the nearest acacia, his long graceful neck swaying against the brittle blue of the sky, his hide paved with bold rectangles of red brown. From up-river there came the bellowing sardonic laughter of a bull hippo, while from the branches of the fig tree above them the golden weaver birds dangled upside down from their woven basket nests, fluttering and shrilling to entice the drab brown females to move in and take up residence. Legend had it that both Hemingway and Ruark had camped at this very spot and breakfasted beneath this same wild fig.
'What do you think, Sugar Sticks. Ed Liner ran his bony brown fingers down the inside of his wife's thighu She wore wide-legged khaki culottes and from where Sean sat he could see a little re, blond pubic curl peeking out from under the elastic of her panties 'Do you think we should give old Sean here a half million bucks t set up our very own safari outfit down in the Zambezi valley o Rhodesia?' 'You know best, Daddy Eddie,' she affected a cute little- girl voice and she batted her long eyelashes at him and turned so that he: bosom strained the buttons of her khaki shirt.
'Just think of it,' Sean invited. 'Your very own hunting concession to do with as you want.' He watched her carefully as he went on 'You could shoot the full quota all yourself if you wanted, as many animals as you wanted.' Despite her curls and pouting lips, Lan Liner had as vicious a sadistic streak as any man Sean had ever hunted with. While Ed had chosen only to take the lion and elephant that he had paid for, Lana had killed every single animal she was entitled to.
and then had killed those her husband had refused.
She was a passable shot, and derived as much pleasure from cutting down one of the dainty little Thompson's gazelle with her .300 Weatherby magnum as she had when she dropped her black-maned Masai lion with a perfect heart shot. He had seen the sexual radiance in her immediately after each kill, heard her rapid breathing and seen the pulse beat in her throat with excitement, and his philanderer's instinct had assured him that Lana Liner was vulnerable to him only in those few minutes after she had seen the bullet strike and the blood flash.
'As much hunting as you want, whenever you want it,' Sean tempted her, and saw the excitement in her baby blue eyes.
She ran the tip of her, tongue over her scarlet lips and said in her breathless little-girl voice, 'Why don't you buy it for my rthday, Daddy Eddie.' 'Goddamm!' Ed laughed. 'Why not! Okay, son, you've got yourself a deal. We'll call it Lana Safaris. I'll get my lawyers to draw up the papers soon as we get home to Tucson.' Sean clapped his hands, and shouted at the kitchen tent. 'Maramba! Letta champagne hapa. Pacey! Pacey!' and the camp waiter in his long
