loose on the dissenting Matabele faction.
'The white pilots came in their aeroplanes, and the white troops of the Rhodesian Regiment-' After the fighting the shunting, yards at Bulawayo station had been crowded with refrigerated trucks each packed from floor to roof with the bodies of the Matabele dead.
'The white soldiers did their work for them, while Mugabe and his boys ran back to Harare and climbed shaking and snivelling under their women's skirts. Then, after the white soldiers had taken our weapons, they crawled out again, shook off the dust of their retreat, and came strutting back like conquerors.'
'They have dishonoured our leaders,-2 Nkomo, the Matabele leader, had been accused of harbouring rebels and accumulating caches of weapons, and driven in disgrace by Mashona,dominated government into enforced retirement.
'They have secret prisons in the bush where they take our leaders,' Peking went on. 'There they do things to our men that do not bear talking of.'
'Now that we are deprived of weapons, their special units move through the villages. They beat our old men and women, they rape our young women, they take our young men away, never to be seen or heard of again.' Craig had seen a photograph of men in the blue and khaki of the former British South Africa police, so long the uniform of honour and fair play, carrying out interrogations in the villages. In the photograph they had a naked Matabele spreadeagled on the earth, an armed and uniformed constable standing with both booted feet and his full weight on each ankle and wrist to pin him, while two other constables wielded clubs as heavy as baseball bats.
They were using full strokes from high above the head, and raining blows on the man's back and shoulders and buttocks. The photograph had been captioned 'Zimbabwe Police interrogate suspect in attempt to learn whereabouts of American and British tourists abducted as hostages by Matabele dissidents'. There had been no photographs of what they did to the Matabele girls.
'Perhaps the government troops were looking for the hostages which you admit you seized,' Craig pointed out tartly. 'A little while ago you would have been quite happy to kill me or take me hostage as well.' 'The Shana began this business long before we took our first hostage,' Lookout shot back at him.
'But you are taking innocent hostages,' Craig insisted.
'Shooting white fame6-- 'What else can *e do to make people understand what is happening to' our people? We have very few leaders who have not been imprisoned or silenced, and even they are powerless. We have no weapons except these few we have managed to hide, we have no powerful friends, while the Shana have Chinese and British and American allies. We have no money to continue the struggle and they have all the wealth of the land and millions of dollars of aid from these powerful friends. What else can we do to make the world understand what is happening to us?' Craig decided prudently that this was neither the time nor the place to offer a lecture on political morality. and then he thought wryly, 'Perhaps my morality is oldfashioned, anyway.' There was a new political expediency in international affairs that had become acceptable: the right of impotent and voiceless minorities to draw violent attention to their own plight. From the Palestinians and the Basque separatists to the bombers from Northern Ireland blowing young British guardsmen and horses to bloody tatters in a London street, there was a new morality abroad. With these examples before them, and from their own experience of successfully bringing about political change by violence, these young men were children of the new morality.
Though Craig could never bring himself to condone these methods, not if he lived a hundred years, yet he found himself in grudging sympathy with their plight and their aspirations. There had always been a strange and sometimes bloody bond between Craig's family and the Matabele. A tradition of respect and understanding for a people who were fine friends and enemies to be wary of, an aristocratic, proud and warlike race that deserved better than they were now receiving.
There was an elitist streak in Craig's make-up that hated to see a Gulliver rendered impotent by Lilliputians.
He loathed the politics of envy and the viciousness of socialism which, he felt, sought to strike down the heroes and reduce every exceptional man to the common greyness of the pack, to replace true leadership with the oafish mumblings of trade-union louts, to emasculate all initiative by punitive tax schemes and then gradually to shepherd a numbed and compliant populace into the barbed-wire enclosure of Marxist totalitarianism.
These men were terrorists certainly. Craig grinned.
Robin Hood was also a terrorist but at least he had some style and a little class.
'Will you see Comrade Tungata?' they demanded with almost pitiful eagerness.
'Yes. I will see him soon.'
'Tell him we are here. Tell him we are ready and waiting.' Craig nodded. 'I will tell him.' They walked back with him to where he had left the Volkswagen, and Comrade Dollar insisted on carrying Craig's pack. When they reached the dusty and slightly battered VW, they piled into it with AK 47 barrels protruding from three windows.
'We will go with you,' Lookout explained, 'as far as the main Victoria Falls Road, for if you should meet another of our patrols when you are alone, it might go hard for you.) They reached the macadamized Great North Road well after darkness had fallen. Craig stripped his pack and gave them what remained of his rations and the dregs of the whisky. He had two hundred dollars in his wallet and he added that to the booty. Then they shook hands.
'Tell Comrade Tungata we need weapons, 'said Dollar.
'Tell him that, more than weapons, we need a leader.' Comrade Lookout gave Craig the special grip of thumb and palm reserved for trusted friends. 'Go in peace, Kuphela,' he said. 'Mat the leg that walks alone carry you far and swiftly.' 4 'Stay in peace, 'my friend, 'Craig told him.
'No, Kuphela, rather wish me bloody war!' Lookout's scarred visage twisted into a dreadful grin in the reflected headlights.
When Craig looked back, they had disappeared into the darkness as silently as hunting leopards.
-, 4-A
wouldn't have taken any bets about seeing you again,' Jock Daniels greeted Craig when he walked into the auctioneer's office the next morning. 'Did you make it up to the Chizarira or did good sense get the better of you?' I'm still alive, aren't ! Craig evaded the direct question.
'Good boy, 'Jock nodded. 'No sense messing with those Matabele shufta bandits the lot of them.'
'Did you hear from Zarich?' Jock shook his head. 'Only sent the telex at nine o'clock local time. They are an hour behind us.'
'Can I use your telephone? A few private calls?'
'Local? I don't want you chatting up your birds in New York at my expense.'
'Of course.'
'Right as long as you mind the shop for me, while I'm out.' Craig installed himself at Jock's desk, and consulted the cryptic notes that he had made from Henry Pickering's file.
His first call was to the American Embassy in Harare, the capital three hundred miles north-east of Bulawayo.
'Mr. Morgan Oxford, your cultural attache, please,' he asked the operator.
'Oxford.' The accent was crisp Boston and Ivy League.
'Craig Mellow. A mutual friend asked me to call you and give you his regards.'
'Yes, I was expecting you. Won't you come in here any time and say hello?'
'I'd enjoy that,' Craig told him, and hung up.
Henry Pickering was as good as his word. Any message handed to Oxford would go out in the diplomatic bag, and be on Pickering's desk within twelve hours.
His next call was to the office of the minister of tourism and information, and he finally got through to the minister's secretary. Her attitude changed to warm co-operation when he spoke to her in Sindebele.
'The comrade minister is in Harare for the sitting of Parliament,' she told him, and gave Craig his private number at the House.
Craig got through to a parliamentary secretary on his fourth attempt. The telephone system had slowly begun deteriorating, he noticed. The blight of all developing countries was lack of skilled artisans; prior to independence all linesmen had been white, and since then most of them had taken the gap.
This secretary was Mashona and insisted on speaking English as proof of her sophistication.
'Kindly state the nature of the business to be discussed.' She was obviously reading from a printed form.
'Personal. I am acquainted with the comrade minister.'
'Ah yes. P-e-r-s-o-n-n-e-l.' The secretary spelled it out laboriously as she wrote it.
'No that's p-e-r-s-o-n-a-I,' Craig corrected her patiently. He was beginning to adjust to the pace of Africa again.
'I will consult the comrade minister's schedule. You will be obliged to telephone again.' Craig consulted his list. Next was the government registrar of companies, and this time he was lucky. He was put through to an efficiiInt and helpful clerk who made a note of his requirem%nts.
'The Share Register, Articles and Memorandum of Association of the company trading as Rholands Ltd, formerly known as Rhodesian Lands and Mining Ltd.' He
