the Father. I cannot kill this elephant in the heartland.
I will pay you a great deal for the teeth of this elephant, Chetti Singh whispered seductively, but Pirri shook his head firmly. Offer him a thousand dollars, Cheng said in English, but Chetti Singh frowned at him.
Leave this to me, he cautioned. We don't want to ruin the trade with impatience. He turned back to Pirri and said in Swahili, I will give you ten bolts of pretty cloth which the women love, and fifty handfuls of glass beads, enough to make a thousand virgins spread their thighs for you. Pirri shook his head. It is the sacred heartland, he said.
The Mother and the Father will be angry if I hunt there. in addition to the cloth and beads, I will give you twenty iron axe-heads and ten fine knives with blades as long as your hand. Pirri wriggled his whole body like a puppy. It is against law and custom. My tribe will hate me and drive me out. I will give you twenty bottles of gin, Chetti Singh said.
And as much tobacco as you can lift from the ground. Pirri massaged his crotch frantically and rolled his eyes. As much tobacco as I can carry!
His voice was hoarse. I cannot do it. They will call out the Molimo.
They will bring down the curse of the Mother and Father. And I will give you a hundred silver Maria Theresa dollars. Chetti Singh reached into the pocket of his bush jacket and brought out a handful of silver coins. He juggled them in one hand, jingling them together and making them sparkle in the sunlight.
For a long moment Pirri stared at them hungrily. Then he let out a shrill yelp and sprang in the air and drew his machete.
Chetti Singh and Cheng stepped back nervously, expecting him to attack them, but instead, Pirri whirled and, with the blade held high above his head, rushed at the wall of the forest and swung a hissing stroke at the first bush. Shouting with anger and temptation, he hacked and slashed at the forest growth.
Leaves and twigs flew, and branches were sliced through. Slabs of bark and white wood rained down from the bleeding trunks under his onslaught.
At last Pirri stopped and rested on his blade, his muscular chest heaving, sweat pouring down his face and dripping into his beard, sobbing with exertion and self-loathing. Then he straightened up and came back to where Chetti Singh stood and said, I will kill this elephant for you, and bring you his teeth. then you will give me all those things you promised me, not forgetting the tobacco. Chetti Singh drove the Landrover back along the rudimentary forest track. it took almost an hour for them to reach the main corduroy roadway on which the convict gangs were working, and over which the great ore-carriers and the logging trucks rumbled and roared.
As they left the overgrown logging track and joined the heavy flow of traffic towards Sengi-Sengi, Chetti Singh turned to grin at the man beside him. That takes care of the gift for your father. Now we must apply all our ingenuity and brains to a little gift for me, the head of Doctor Daniel Armstrong on a silver platter, with an apple in his mouth.
Daniel had been waiting for this moment, praying for it.
He was high on the command deck of the MOMU and it was raining. The air was blue and thick with falling rain, and visibility was down to fifty feet or less. Bonny was sheltering in the command cabin at the end of the platform, keeping her precious video equipment out of the rain. The two Hita guards had gone down to the lower deck and for a moment Daniel was alone on the upper deck.
Daniel had become hardened to the rain. Since arriving at Sengi-Sengi he seemed always to be wearing wet clothing. He was standing now in the angle of the steel wall of the command cabin and the flying bridge, only partially shielded from the driving rain.
Every now and then a harder gust would throw heavy drops into his face and force him to slit his eyes.
Suddenly the door to the command cabin opened and Ning Cheng Gong came out on to the flying bridge. He had not seen Daniel and he crossed to the forward rail under cover of the canvas sun awning and leaned on the rail, peering down at the great shining excavator blades that were tearing into the earth seventy feet below his perch.
It was Daniel's moment. For the first time they were alone and Cheng was vulnerable. This one is for Johnny, he whispered, and crossed the steel plates of the bridge on silent rubber soles. He came up behind Cheng.
All he had to do was stoop and seize his ankles. A quick lift and shove, and Cheng would be hurled over the rail and dropped into the deadly blades. It would be instantaneous and the chopped and dismembered corpse would be fed into the tube mills and pounded to paste and mixed with hundreds of tons of powdered earth.
Daniel reached out to do it, but before he could touch him he hesitated involuntarily, suddenly appalled at what he was about to do.
It was cold-blooded, calculated murder. He had killed before as a soldier, but never like this, and for a moment he was sick with self-loathing. For Johnny, he tried to convince himself, but it Was too late. Cheng whirled to face him.
He was quick as a mongoose confronted by a cobra. His hands came up, the stiff-fingered blades of the martial arts expert, and his eyes were dark and ferocious as he stared into Daniel's face.
For a moment they were poised on the edge of violence, then Cheng whispered, You missed your chance, Doctor. There will not be another.
Daniel backed away. He had let Johnny down with such weakness. In the old days it would not have happened. He would have taken Cheng out swiftly and competently and rejoiced at the kill. Now the Taiwanese was alerted and even more dangerous.
Daniel turned away, sickened by his failure, and then he started.
One of the Hita guards had come up the steel ladder silently as a leopard. He was leaning against the rear rail of the bridge with his maroon beret cocked over one eye and the Uzi submachine-gun on his hip pointed at Daniel's belly. He had been watching it all.
That night Daniel lay awake until after midnight, unnerved by the narrowness of his escape and sickened by the savage streak in himself that allowed him to pursue such a brutal vengeance. Yet even this attack of conscience did not shake his determination to act as the vehicle of justice and in the morning he awoke to find his lust for revenge undiminished, and only his temper and his nerves shaky and uncertain.
This led directly to his final bust-up with Bonny Mahon. It began when she was late to start the day's assignment, and kept him waiting in the teeming rain for almost forty minutes before she finally sauntered out to meet him. When I said five o'clock, I didn't mean in the afternoon, he snarled at her, and she grinned at him, all
