The rain had quenched the flames, although a few tendrils of smoke still drifted like pale wraiths in the lights.
The ground around the huts was sown with dozens of tiny objects which caught the headlights and sparkled like diamond chips. Daniel knew what they were, but he stepped down from the truck and picked one of them out of the mud. It was a shiny brass cartridge case. He held it to the light and inspected the familiar Cyrillic head stamp in the brass. 7. 62
mm, of East European manufacture, it was the calibre of the ubiquitous AK 47 assault rifle, staple of violence and revolution throughout Africa and the entire world.
The gang had shot up the compound, but had left no corpses. Daniel guessed that they had thrown the dead into the cottages before torching-them. The breeze shifted towards him so that he caught the full stench of the burned huts and had his suspicions confirmed.
Underlying the smell of smoke was the odour of scorched flesh and hair and bone.
He spat out the taste of ir and walked down between the huts.
Johnny! he shouted into the night. Johnny, are you there? But the only sound was the creak and pop of the doused flames and the sough of the breeze in the mango trees that brought the raindrops pattering down from the branches.
He flicked the torch left and right as he passed between the huts, until he saw the body of a man lying in the open. Johnny' he shouted, and ran to him and fell on his knees beside him.
The body was horribly burned, the khaki Parks uniform burned half away, and the skin and flesh sloughing off the exposed torso and the side of the face. The man had obviously dragged himself out of the burning hut into which they had thrown him, but he was not Johnny Nzou.
He was one of the junior rangers.
Daniel jumped up and hurried back to the track.
Did you find him? Jock asked, and Daniel shook his head. Christ, they've murdered everybody in the camp. Why would they do that?
Witnesses' Daniel started the truck. They wiped out all the witnesses.
Why? What do they want? It doesn't make sense. The ivory. That's what they were after. But they burned down the warehouse! After they cleaned it out. He swung the Toyota back on to the track and raced up the hill.
Who were they, Danny? Who did this? How the hell do I know?
Shifta? Bandits? Poachers? Don't ask stupid questions. Daniel's anger was only just beginning. Up until now he had been numbed by the shock and the horror. He drove back past the dark bungalow on the hill and then down again to the main camp.
The warden's office was still standing intact; although when Daniel played the beam of the torch over the thatched roof he saw the blackened area on which someone had thrown a burning torch. Well-laid thatch does not burn readily, however, and the flames had not caught fairly or perhaps had been extinguished by the rain before they could take hold.
The rain stopped with the suddenness which is characteristic of the African elements. One minute it was falling in a furious cascade that limited the range of the headlights to fifty yards, and the next it was over. Only the trees still dripped, but overhead the first stars pricked through the dispersing thunder clouds that were being carried away on the rising breeze.
Daniel barely noticed the change. He left the truck and ran up on to the wide verandah.
The exterior wall was decorated with the skulls of the animals of the Park. Their empty eye-sockets and twisted horns in the torch-beam gave a macabre touch to the scene and heightened Daniel's sense of doom as he strode down the long covered verandah. He now realised that he should have searched here first, instead of rushing up to the bungalow.
The door of Johnny's office stood open and Daniel paused on the threshold and steered himself before he stepped through.
A snowstorm of papers covered the floor and desk. They had ransacked the room, sweeping the stacks of forms off the cupboard shelves and hauling the drawers out of Johnny's desk, then spilling out the contents. They had found Johnny's keys and opened the old green-painted door to the Milner safe that was built into the wall.
The keys were still in the lock but the safe was empty.
Daniel's torch-beam darted about the room and then settled on the crumpled form that lay in front of the desk. Johnny, he whispered.
Oh, Christ, no! I thought that while I was waiting for the refrigerator truck to be repaired, I might as well go down to the water-hole at Fig Tree Pan. Ambassador Ning's voice interrupted Johnny Nzou's concentration, but he felt no resentment as he looked up from his desk.
In Johnny's view one of his major duties was to make the wilderness accessible to anybody who had an interest in nature. Ning Cheng Gong was certainly one of those. Johnny smiled at his accoutrements, the field guide and the binoculars.
He rose from his desk, glad of the excuse to escape from the drudgery of paperwork and went with the Ambassador out on to the verandah and down to his parked Mercedes, where he stood and chatted to him for a few minutes, making suggestions as to where he might get a glimpse of the elusive and aptly named gorgeous bush shrike that Cheng wanted to observe.
When Cheng drove away, Johnny walked down to the vehicle workshops where ranger Gomo was stripping and reassembling the alternator of the unserviceable truck. He was dubious about Gama's ability to effect the repair. In the morning he would probably have to ring the warden at Mana Pools and ask him to send a mechanic to do the job.
One consolation was that the elephant meat would keep indefinitely in the cold storage of the hull. The truck's refrigerating equipment was plugged in now to the camp generator and the thermometer registered twenty degrees below freezing when Johnny checked it. The meat would be processed and turned into animal feed by a private contractor in Harare.
Johnny left ranger Gomo to his labour over the dismembered alternator and went back to his own office under the Casia trees. No sooner had he left the workshop than Gomo looked up and exchanged a significant glance with David, the other black ranger. The alternator he was tinkering with was a worn out piece of equipment that he had retrieved from the scrap heap in Harare for just this purpose. The truck's original alternator, in perfect working
