'A thousand, 'Comrade Lookout counter, offered
'Good friends should not argue over mere money,' Craig agreed. 'I have only six hundred dollars now, but the rest I will leave buried beneath the wild fig tree where we are camped.'
'We will find it,' Comrade Lookout assured him. 'And every month we will meet either here or there.' Lookout pointed out two rendezvous, both prominent hillocks well distanced from the river, their peaks only bluish silhouettes on the horizon. 'The signal of a meeting will be a small fire of green leaves, or three rifle shots evenly spaced.'
'It is agreed 'Now, Kuphela, leave the money in that ant, bear hole at your feet and take your woman back to camp.' Sally-Anne stayed very close beside him on the return, even taking his arm for reassurance every few hundred yards and looking back fearfully over her shoulder.
'My God, Craig, those were real shufta, proper dyed-in the-wool guerrillas. Why did they let us go?'
'The best reason in the world money.' Craig's chuckle was a little hoarse and breathless even in his own ears, and the adrenalin still buzzed in his blood. 'For a miserly thousand dollars a month, I have just hired myself the toughest bunch of bodyguards and gamekeepers on the market. Pretty good bargAn.' 'You're doing a deat with them?' Sally-Anne demanded.
'Isn't that dangerous? It's treason or something, surely?' 'Probably, we just have to make sure that nobody finds out about it, won't we?' he architect turned out to be another bargain. His designs were superb; the lodges would be built of natural stone, indigenous timber and thatch. They would blend unobtrusively into the chosen sites along the river. Sally' Anne worked with him on the interior layouts and the furnishings, and introduced charming little touches of her own.
During the next few months, Sally-Anne's work with the World Wildlife Trust took her away for long periods at a time, but on her travels she recruited the staff that they would need for Zambezi Waters.
irstly, she seduced a Swiss-trained chef away from one of the big hotel chains. Then she chose five young safari guides, all of them African-born, with a deep knowledge and love of the land and its wildlife and, most importantly, with the ability to convey that knowledge and love to others.
Then she turned her attention to the design of the advertising brochures, using her own photographs and Craig's text. 'A kind of dress rehearsal for our book,' she pointed out when she telephoned him from Johannesburg, and Craig realized for the first time just what he had taken on in agreeing to work with her. She was a perfectionist. It was either right or it wasn't, and to get it right she would go to any lengths, and force him and the printers to do the same.
The result was a miniature masterpiece in which colour was carefully coordinated and even the layout of blocks of rint balanced her illustrations. She sent out cop pies to all the African travel specialists around the world, from Tokyo to Copen aagen.
'We have to set an opening date,' she told Craig, 'and make sure that our first guests are newsworthy. You'll have to offer them a freebie, I'm afraid.'
'You aren't thinking of a pop star?' Craig grinned, and she shuddered.
J5
'I telephoned Daddy at the Embassy in London. He may be able to get Prince Andrew but I'll admit it's a big may be'. Henry Pickering knows Jane Fonda-'
'My God, I never realized what an up-market broad you are.'
'And while we are on the subject of celebrities, I think I can get a best-selling novelist who makes bad jokes and will probably drink more whisky than he is worth!' When Craig was ready to commence actual construction on Zambezi Waters, he complained to Peter Fungabera about the difficulty of finding labourers in the deep bush.
Peter replied, 'Don't worry, I'll fix that.' And five days later, a convoy of army trucks arrived carrying two hundred detainees from the rehabilitation centres.
'Slave labour, 'Sally-Anne told Craig with distaste.
However, the access road to the Chizarira river was completed in just ten days, and Craig could telephone Sally-Anne in Harare and tell her, 'I think we can confidently set the opening date for July lst.' 'That's marvelous, Craig.'
'When can you come, up again? I haven't seen you for almost a month.'
'It's only three weeks,' she denied.
'I have done another twenty pages on our book,' he offered as bait. 'We must go over it together soon.'
'Send them to me.'
'Come and get them.' A 'Okay,' she capitulated. 'Next week, Wednesday. Where will you be, King's Lynn or Zambezi Waters?'
'Zambezi Waters. The electricians and plumbers are finishing up. I want to check it out.' 'I'll fly up.' She landed on the open ground beside the river where Craig's labour gangs had surfaced a strip with gravel to make an all-weather landing ground and had even rigged a proper windsock for her arrival.
oe The instant she jumped down from the cockpit Craig could see that she was furiously angry.
'What is it?'
'You've lost two of your rhino.' She strode towards him.
'I spotted the carcasses from the air.'
'Where?' Craig was suddenly as angry as she was.
'In the thick bush beyond the gorge. It's poachers for certain. The carcasses are lying within fifty paces of each other. I made a few low passes, and the horns have been taken.'
'Do you think they are Charlie and Lady Di?' he demanded.
From the air Craig and Sally-Anne had done a rhino count, and had identified twenty, seven individual animals on the estate, including four calves and nine breeding pairs of mature animals to whom they had given names. Charlie and Lady Di were a pair of young rhinoceros who had probably just come together. On foot Craig and Sally Anne had been able to get close to them in the thick jessie bush that the pair had taken as their territory. Both of the animals carried fine horns, the male's much thicker and heavier. The front horn, twenty inches long and weighing twenty pounds, would be worth at least ten thousand dollars to a poacher. The female, Lady Di, was a smaller animal with a thinner, finely curved pair of horns, and she had been heavily pregnant when last they saw her.
'Yes. It's them. I'm sure of it.'
'There is some rough going this side of the gorge,' Craig muttered. 'We won't get there before dark.'
'Not with the Land-Rover,' SallyArme agreed, 'but I think I have found a place where I can get down. It's only a mile or so from the kill.' Craig unslung his rifle from the clips behind the driver's seat of the Land' Rover and checked the load.
'Okay. Let's go,'he said.
The poachers' kill was in the remotest corner of the estate, almost on the rim of the rugged valley wall that fell away to the great river in the depths. The landing-ground that Sally-Anne had spotted was a narrow natural clearing at the head of the river gorge, and she had to abort her first approach and go round again. At the second attempt, she sneaked in over the tree-tops, and hit it just right.
They left the Cessna in the clearing, and started down into the mouth of the gorge. Craig led, with the rifle cocked and ready. The poachers might still be at the kill.
The vultures guided them the last mile. They were roosting in every tree around the kill, like grotesque black fruit. The area around the carcasses was beaten flat and open by the scavengers, and strewn with loose vulture feathers. As they walked up, half a dozen hyena went loping away with their peculiar high, shouldered gait. Even their fearsomely toothed jaws had not been able completely to devour the thick rhinoceros hide, though the poachers had hacked open the belly cavities of their victims to give them easy access.
The carcasses were at least a week old, the stench of putrefaction was aggravated by that of the vulture dung which whitewashed the remains. The eyes had been picked from the sockets of the male's head, and the ears and cheeks had been gnawed away. As Sally-Anne had seen from the air, the horns were gone, the hack marks of an axe still clearly visible on the exposed bone of the animal's nose.
Looking down upqnoxhat ruined and rotting head, Craig found that he was shaking with anger and that the saliva had dried out in his mouth.
'If I could find them, I would kill them,' he said, and beside him Sally-Anne was pale and grim.
'The bastards she whispered, 'the bloody, bloody bastards.' They walked across to the female. Here also the horns had been hacked off and her belly cavity opened. The hyena had dragged the calf out of her womb, and devoured most of it.
Sally-Anne squatted down beside the pathetic remains.
'Prince Billy,' she whispered. 'Poor little devil.'
'There's nothing more we can do here.' Craig took her arm and lifted her to her feet. 'Let's go.' She dragged a little in his grip as he led her away.
from. the peak of the hill that Craig had arranged as the rendezvous with Comrade Lookout, they looked out across the brown land to where the river showed as a lush serpentine sprawl of denser forest almost at the extreme range of their vision.
Craig had lit the signal fire of smoking green leaves a little after noon, and had fed it regularly since then. Now the sky was turning purple and blue and the hush
