The Sunbird

too late.

The knife slashed across the tensed throat, slitting it deeply beneath the line of the jaw. The blood burst forth like a ruptured garden hose, it sprayed out in a red fountain that drenched both Timothy and me. It pumped in great liquid jets that splashed against the foot of the cabin, then dribbled in thick cords and strings to the floor. The engineer was keening a high wailing sound like steam from a kettle, and the air from his lungs burst from the severed windpipe in a pink froth, that spattered the radio set.

The Tannoy was squawking, ‘Reverse your course! Conform to me! Conform to me immediately, or I will fire into you.’

Timothy was cursing as he wrestled the microphone out of my hands: I was screaming and fighting against the ropes.

‘You animals! You filthy murdering bloody animals.’

One of the gang lifted his machine-pistol to hit me in the face, but Timothy knocked his arm away.

‘Get him out of here!’ He jerked his head towards the still twitching, kicking corpse of the engineer - and they dragged him out into the cargo hold.

‘Mirage is attacking!’ shouted Roger, from the cockpit, and we saw it coming from ahead of us, a silvery flash as it bore in on a head-on interception course.

Timothy snatched the microphone to his mouth. I saw that his face was speckled with the engineer’s blood.

‘Hold your fire!’ he shouted. ‘We have hostages aboard.’

‘Attack!’ I screamed, tearing and jerking at my bonds. ‘They’ll murder us anyway! Open fire!’

The Mirage jet pulled up steeply ahead of us, without opening fire, and howled a few feet over our heads. The Dakota rocked violently in the slipstream. I was still screaming and struggling to tear myself loose. I wanted to get at them. The steel chair was rocking from side to side. I got my feet against the side of the fuselage and heaved with all my strength. The seat buckled a little, and again the guard lifted his machine-pistol.

‘No,’ shouted Timothy. ‘We need him alive. Tell Mary to bring the morphine.’

The Mirage sheered off, then circled to take up station a hundred feet off our starboard wingtip, I could see the pilot staring helplessly across the gap at us.

‘You have spoken to Dr Kazin,’ Timothy warned the pilot of the jet. ‘And we have four other hostages. We have already executed one white hostage and we will not hesitate to execute another if you take any further hostile action.’

‘They’re going to kill us anyway,’ I shouted, but Timothy broke the contact.

It took five of them to hold me still for the hypodermic, but at last they got it into my arm, and though I tried to resist the drug, I felt myself going muzzy and misty. I tried to maintain my struggle, but my movements became lethargic and uncoordinated and slowly I drifted off into unconsciousness. My last waking memory was hearing Timothy giving Roger a new course to fly.

Pain and thirst woke me. My mouth was thick and scummy and my head was a mass of solid blinding agony. I tried to sit up and cried out aloud.

‘Are you all right, Doctor? Take it easy.’ Roger van Deventer’s voice, and I focused my eyes on him.

‘Water?’ I asked.

‘Sorry, Doc.’ He shook his head, and I looked around the bare whitewashed room. Four wooden bunks and a lavatory bucket were all the furnishings, and the door was barred and grilled. The three Bantu ground crew sat on one of the bunks across the room, looking lost and unhappy.

‘Where are we?’ I whispered.

‘Zambia. Some sort of military camp. We landed an hour ago-’

‘What happened to the Air Force jet?’

‘It turned back when we crossed the Zambezi. Nothing they could do.’

And there was nothing we could do, either. For five days we sat in the airless, oven-like room with its stinking bucket, until on the fifth day our guards came to fetch me. With much shouting and many unnecessary shoves and blows I was marched down a corridor and into a sparsely furnished office whose main furnishing was a portrait of Chairman Mao. Timothy Mageba rose from behind the desk and motioned my guards to leave.

‘Sit down, Doctor, please.’ He wore paratrooper camouflage, and the bars and stars of a Colonel in the Chinese People’s Army.

I sat on the wooden bench, and my eyes fastened on the half-dozen bottles of Tusker beer that stood on a tray. The bottles were bedewed with cold, and I felt my throat contracting.

‘I know how fond you are of a bottle of cold beer, Doctor.’ Timothy opened one of the bottles, and offered it to me, I shook my head.

‘No, thank you. I don’t drink with murderers.’

‘I see.’ He nodded, and I saw the little shadows of regret in those dark brooding eyes. He lifted the bottle to his own lips and drank a mouthful. I watched him thirstily.

‘The engineer,’ he said, ‘the execution, it was not intended. I did not mean it to happen. Please understand that, Doctor.’

‘Yes. I understand. And when the smoke of our burning land blackens the skies, and the stink of our dead sickens even your dark spirits, will you cry out, I did not mean it to happen?’

Timothy turned away and went to stand at the window, looking out over a parade ground where squads of uniformed Bantu drilled under a dazzling sun.