Cry Wolf [047-011-4.8]
By: Wilbur Smith
Category: fiction action adventure
Synopsis:
'Run,' he shouted. 'Keep running.' And he turned back to
face the crippled animal as it launched itself from the ledge into the
bed of the river. It was only then that Jake realized that he still
carried a full bottle of Scrubbs Ammonia in his hand. The lion came
bounding swiftly through the shallow stagnant pool towards him. Despite
the wounds, it followed with lithe and sinuous menace. it was so close
that he could see each stiff white whisker in the curled upper lip and
hear the rattle of air in its throat. He let it come on, for to turn
and run was suicide. At the last moment he reared back like a baseball
pitcher and hurled the bottle.
Jake Barton is an American engineer, Gareth Swalles (a stylish
Englishman with a nose for a quick deal. Both have always moved from
one escapade to another. Now, as Mussolini prepares to annihilate the
people of Ethiopia, the two adventurers come up against Vicky
Camberwell, the beautiful but fiery reporter bent on espousing their
cause. Striking a bargain with a beleaguered Ethiopian prince, the
trio dares to run gauntlet guns and a batch of run-down armoured cars
in a final, desperate gamble for freedom..
To Jake Barton, machinery was always feminine with all the female's
fascination, wiles and bitchery.
So when he first saw them standing in a row beneath the spreading dark
green foliage of the mango trees, they became for him the iron
ladies.
There were five of them, standing aloof from the other heaps of
worn-out and redundant equipment that His Majesty's Government was
offering for sale. Although it was June and the cooler season between
the monsoons, yet the heat on this cloudless morning in Dares Salaam
was mounting like a force-fed furnace and Jake went thankfully into the
shade of the mangoes to stand closer to the ladies and begin his
examination.
He glanced around the enclosed yard, and noticed that he seemed to be
the only one interested in the five vehicles.
The motley crowd of potential buyers was picking over the heaps of
broken shovels and Picks, the rows of battered wheelbarrows and the
other mounds of unidentifiable rubbish.
He turned his attention back to the ladies, as he slipped off the light
tropical moleskin jacket he wore and hung it on the branch of a mango
tree.
The ladies were aristocrats fallen on hard times, their hard but rakish
lines were dulled by the faded and scratched paintwork and the
cancerous blotches of rust that showed through. The foxy-faced fruit
bats that hung inverted in the mango branches above them had splattered
them with their dung, and oil and grease had oozed from their elderly
joints and caked with dust in unsightly black streaks and blobs.
Jake knew their lineage and their history and as he laid aside the
