upon his plans for Zambezi Waters and its wildlife, knowing that that was where her interest would centre.
'I was thinking I'd need a woman's touch in planning and laying out the camps, not just any woman, but one with an artistic flair and a knowledge and love of the African bush.'
'Craig, if that is meant to describe me, I'm on a grant from the World Wildlife Trust, and I owe them all my time.'
'It wouldn't take up much time,' he protested, 'just a consultancy. You could fly up for a day whenever you could fit it in.' He saw her weaken. 'And then, of course, once the camps were running, I'd want you to give a series of lectures and slide, shows of your photographs for the guests- I and he saw that he had touched the right key.
Likeany artist, she relished an opportunity to exhibit her work.
'I'm not making any promises,' she told him sternly, but they both knew she would do it, and Craig felt his new burden of responsibility tighten appreciably.
'You said you had news for me,' he reminded her at last, grateful for the chance to draw the evening out further.
But he was not prepared for her sudden change to deadly seriousness.
'Yes, I've got news,' she paused, seemed to gather herself, and then went on, 'I have picked up the spoor of the master poacher'
'My God! The bastard who wiped out those herds of jumbo? That is real news. Where? How?'
'You know that I have been up in the eastern highlands for the last ten days. What I didn't tell you is that I am running a leopard study in the mountains for the Wildlife Trust. I have people working for me in most of the jeopardy areas of the forest.
AVe are counting and mapping the ties of the recording their litters and kills, trying territo cats to estimate the effect of the new human influx on them a that sort of thing which me to one o my men.
He is a marvellously smelly old Shangane poacher, he must be eighty years old and his youngest wife is seventeen and presented him with twins last week. He is a complete rogue, with a tremendous sense of humour, and a taste for Scotch whisky two tots of Glenlivet and he gets talkative.
We were up in the Vumba mountains, just the two of us in camp, and after the second tot he let it slip that he had been offered two hundred dollars a leopard-skin. They would take as many as he could catch, and they would supply the steel spring traps. I gave him another tot, and learned that the offer had come from a very well-dressed young black, driving a government Land Rover. My old Shangane told the man he was afraid that he would be arrested and sent to gaol, but he was assured that he would be safe. That he would be under the protection of one of the great chiefs in Harare, a comrade minister who had been a famous warrior in the bush war and who still commanded his own private army.' There was a hard cardboard folder on the camp-bed.
Sally-Anne fetched it and placed it in Craig's lap. Craig opened it. The top sheet was a full list of the Zimbabwe Cabinet. Twenty-six names, each with the portfolio set out beside it.
'We can narrow that down immediately very few of the Cabinet did any actual fighting,' Sally-Anne pointed out. 'Most of them spent the war in a suite at the Ritz in London or in a guest dacha on the Caspian Sea.' She sat down on the cushion beside Craig, reached across and turned to the second sheet.
'Six names.' She pointed. 'Six field commanders.' still too many,' Craig murmured, and saw that Peter Fungabera's name headed the six.
'We can do better,' Sally-Anne agreed. 'A private army.
That must mean dissidents. The dissidents are all Matabele. Their leader would have to be of the same tribe.' She turned to the third sheet. On it was a single name.
'One of the most successful field commanders. Matabele.
Minister of Tourism, and the Wildlife Department comes under him. It's an old chestnut, but those set to guard a treasure, are too often those who loot it. It all fits.' Craig read the name aloud softly, 'Tungata Zebiwe,' and found that he didn't want it to be true. 'But he was with me in the Game Department, he was my ranger-'
'As I said, the keepers have more opportunity to despoil than any other.'
'But what would Sam do with the money? The master poacher must be coming millions of dollars. Sam lives a very frugal life, everybody knows that, no big house, no expensive cars, no gifts for women nor privately owned land no other expensive indulgences.'
'Except, perhaps, the most expensive of all,' Sally-Anne demurred quietly. Tower.' Craig's further protestation died unuttered, and she nodded. 'Power. Don't you see it, Craig? Running a private army of dissidents takes money, big, big money.' Slowly the pattern was shaking itself into place, Craig admitted. Henry Pickering had warned him of an approaching Soviet-backed coup. The Russians had supported the Matabele ZIPRA faction during the war, so their candidate would almost certainly be Matabele.
Still Craig resisted it, clinging to his memories of the man who had been his-friend, probably the finest friend of his entire lifetime.
He remembered the essential decency of the man he had then known as Samson Kumalo, the mission-educated Christian of integrity and high principles, who had resigned with Craig from the Game Department when they svspected their immediate superior of being involved in 4*poaching ring. Was he now the master poacher himself? The man of fine compassion who had helped Craig when he was crippled and broken to take his single possession, his yacht, with him when he left Africa. Was he now the power-hungry plotter?
'He is my friend, 'Craig said.
'He was. But he has changed. When last you saw him, he declared himself your enemy,' Sally' Anne pointed out.
'You told me that yourself.' Craig nodded, and then suddenly remembered the search of his deposit box at the hotel by the police on high orders. Tungata must have suspected that Craig was an agent of the World Bank, would have guessed that he had been detailed to gather information on poaching and power-plotting all that could have accounted for his unaccountably violent opposition to Craig's plans.
'I hate it,' Craig muttered. 'I hate the idea like hell, but I think that you just may be right.'
'I am sure of it.'
'What are you going to do?'
'I'm going to Peter Fungabera with what evidence I have.' 'He will smash Sam,' Craig said, and she came back quickly, 'Tungata is evil, Craig, a despoiler!' He is my friend.' He was your friend,' Sally' Anne contradicted him. 'You you don't know what don't know what he has become happened to him in the bush. War can change any human being. Power can change him even more radically.'
'Oh God, I hate it.' 'Come with me to Peter Fungabera. Be there when I put the case against Tungata Zebiwe.' Sally'Arme took his hand, a small gesture of comfort.
Craig did not make the mistake of returning her grip.
'I'm sorry, Craig.' She squeezed his fingers. 11 truly am,' she said, and then she took her hand away again.
eter Fungabera made time for them in the early morning, and they drove out together to his home in the Macillwane Hills.
A servant showed them through to the general's office, a huge sparsely furnished room that overlooked the lake and had once been the billiard room. One wall was covered with a blown-up map of the entire territory. It was flagged id with multi-coloured markers. There was a long table under the windows, covered with reports and despatches and parliamentary papers, and a desk of red African teak in the centre of the uncarpeted stone floor.
Peter Fungabera rose from the desk to greet them. He was barefooted, and dressed in a simple white loin-cloth tied at the hip. The bare skin of his chest and arms glowed as though it had been freshly oiled, and the muscles moved beneath it likea sackful of living cobras. Clearly Peter Fungabera kept himself in a warrior's peak of fighting condition.
'Excuse my undress,' he smiled as he came to greet them, 'but I really am more at ease when I can be completely African.' There were low stools of intricate carved ebony set in front of the desk.
'I will have chairs brought,' Peter offered. 'I have few white visitors here.'
'No, no.' Sally-Anne settled easily on one of the stools.
'You know I am always pleased to see you, but I am due in the House at ten -hundred hours-' Peter Fungabera hurried them.
'I'll come to it without wasting time,' Sally-Anne' agreed. 'We think we know who the master poacher is.' Peter had been about to seat himself at the desk, but now he leaned forward I'with his fists on the desktops and his gaze was sharp and dhnanding.
'You said I had trily to give you the name and you would smash him,' Sally-Anne reminded him, and Peter nodded.
'Give it to me,' he ordered, but Sally-Anne related her sources and her deductions, just as she had to Craig. Peter Fungabera heard her out in silence, frowning or nodding thoughtfully as he followed her reasoning. Then she gave her conclusion, the last name left on her list.
'Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe,' Peter Fungabera repeated softly after her, and at last he sank back onto his own chair and picked up his leather, covered swa-wer-stick from the desk. He stared over Sally-Anne's head at the map-covered wall, slapping the baton into the rosy pink palm of his
