Land-Rover and climbed into the front seat beside Timon.
'Put your rifle back in the rack,' Timon said, and when Craig hesitated, 'Please do as I say, Mr. Mellow. If they find us, it will be useless to fight. I will have to try and talk our way through. I couldn't explain if you were armed.' Reluctantly Craig passed the weapon back to Sally Anne She racked it and Craig was left feeling naked and vulnerable. He clenched his fists in his lap. The sound of motors grew swiftly, and then over them the voices of men singing. The song grew louder, and despite his tension Craig felt the hair prickle on the nape of his neck to the peculiar beauty of African- 4voices raised in song.
'Third Brigade,' Timon said. 'That is the 'Song of the Rain Winds', the praise song of the regiment.' Neither of them replied, and Timon hummed the tune to himself, and then began to sing softly. He had a startlingly true and thrilling voice.
'When the nation bunts, the rain winds bring relief, When the cattle are drought-stricken, the rain winds lift them up, When your children cry with thirst, the rain winds slake them, We are the winds that bring the rain, We are the good winds of the nation.' Timon translated from the Shana for their benefit, and now Craig could see the grey dust of the trucks smoking up above the scrub, and the singing was close and clear.
There was a flash of reflected sunlight off metal, and then through the foliage Craig caught quick glimpses of the passing convoy. There were three trucks, painted a dull sand colour, and the backs were crowded with soldiers in battle camouflage and bush hats, their weapons held ready at the high port position. On the cab of the last truck rode an officer, the only one of them wearing the red beret and silver cap badge He looked directly at Craig, and seemed very close, the screen of foliage suddenly very sparse. Craig shrank back in his seat.
Then, thankfully, the convoy was past, the rumble of engines and the singing dwindling, the pale dust settling.
Timon Nbebi exhaled a long breath. 'There will be others,' he cautioned, and, with his fingers on the ignition key, waited until the silence was complete once again.
Then he started the Land-Rover, reversed out of the scrub and turned back onto the track.
He swung the Land-Rover in the opposite direction from the convoy, and they drove over the rugged tracks that the trucks had imprinted deeply into the sandy earth.
They drove for another twenty minutes before Timon ducked down abruptly in his seat, to peer up at the sky through the windshield.
'Smoke,' he said. 'Empandeni is just ahead. Will you have your camera ready, Miss Jay? I believe the Third Brigade will have left something for you.' They came to the maize fields that surrounded the mission village. The maize stalks had dried, the cobs in their yellow sheaths were beginning to droop heavily, ready for the harvest. There had been women working in the fields. One of them lay beside the track. She had been shot in the back as she ran, the bullet had exited between her breasts. The unweaned child that she carried on her back had been bayoneted, many times. The flies rose up in a blue hum as they passed and then settled again.
Nobody spoke. Sally-Anne reached into her camera-bag and brought out her Nikon. She was bloodless grey under her freckles.
The other women lay further from the road, mere bundles of gay cloth, heavily stained. There were possibly fifty huts in the village, all of them were burning, the thatched roofs torching up to the clear blue morning sky.
They had thrown most of the corpses into the burning huts, leaving black puddles drying where they had fallen and drag marks in the dust. The smell of seared flesh was very strong, it coated the roofs of their mouths like congealed pork fat. Craig's stomach heaved, and he covered his mouth and nose with his hand.
'These are dissidents?'. Sally-Anne whispered. Her lips were icy white. The motor drive of her Nikon whirred as she shot through the open window.
They had killed the chickens, the loose feathers rolled on the light breeze, like the stuffing from a burst pillow.
'Stop!' Sally-Anne ordered.
'It is dangerous to stay, 'id Timon.
'Stop,' Sally' Anne repeated.
She left the door open, and went among the huts.
Working swiftly, changing roll after roll of film with practised nimble fingers, while her white lips trembled and her eyes behind the lens were huge with horror.
'We must move on,' said Timon.
'Wait.' Sally-Anne moved quickly forward, doing her job like the professional she was. She moved behind a group of huts. The smell of burning flesh nauseated Craig, and the heat from the fires came at him in great furnace gusts as the breeze veered.
Sally Anne screamed and the two men jumped from the Land-Rover and ran, cocking their rifles, diverging to give each other covering fire, Craig finding his old training returning instinctively. He came around the side of a hut.
Sally-Anne stood in the open, no longer able to use her camera. A naked black woman lay at her feet. The woman is upper ocy was that of a comely, healthy young woman, below her navel she was a pink skinless monstrosity. She had dragged herself back out of the fire into which they had thrown her. There were places on her lower body where the burning was not deep, here the flesh was piebald pink and weeping lymph. Then in other places the bone was exposed; her hipbones charred black as charcoal, protruded obscenely from the scorched meat of her pelvic area. The lining of her stomach had burned through and her entrails bulged from the opening. Miraculously, she was still alive. Her fingers raked the dust with a repetitive, mechanical movement. Her mouth opened and closed convulsively, making no sound, and her eyes were wide open, aware and suffering.
'Go back to the Land' Rover please, Miss Jay,' Timon Nbebi said. 'There is nothing you can do to help her.' Sally-Anne stood stiffly, unable to move. Craig put his arms around her shoulders and turned her away. He led her back towards the Land-Rover.
At the corner of the burning hut Craig glanced back.
Timon Nbebi had moved up close to the maimed woman, he stood over her with the AK 47 held ready on his hip, his whole attention was focused upon her and his face was almost as riven with suffering as was the woman's.
Craig took Sally-Anne around the hut. Behind them there was the whip-crack of a single shot, muted by the crackle of flames all around them. Sally' Anne stumbled and then caught her balance. When they reached the Land' Rover Sally-Anne leaned against the cab and doubled over slowly. She vomited in the dust and then straightened up and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
Craig took the bottle of cane spirit from the cubby hole.
There was an inch of the clear liquor remaining. He gave it to Sally-Anne and she drank it like water. Craig took the empty bottle back from her, and then abruptly and savagely hurled it into the burning hut.
Timon Nbebi came around the hut. Wordlessly he climbed behind the steering, wheel and Craig helped Sally Anne into the rear seat. They drove slowly through the rest of the village, their heads turning from side to side as each fresh horror was revealed.
As they passed the little church of red brick, the roof collapsed in upon itself, and the wooden cross on the spire was swallowed in a belch of sparks and flames and blue smoke. In the bright sunlight the flames were almost colourless.
imon Nbebi used the radio the way a navigator uses an echo sounder to find the channel through shoal water.
The Third Brigade roadblocks and ambushes were reporting over the VHF vast to their area headquarters, giving their positions a* part of their routine reports, and Timon pin-pointed them on his map.
Twice they avoided road-blocks by taking side-tracks and cattle paths, groping forward carefully through the acacia forest. Twice more they came to small villages, mere cattle stations, homes of two or three Matabele families.
The Third Brigade had preceded them, and the crows and vultures had followed, picking at the partially roasted carcasses in the warm ashes of the burned-out huts.
They kept moving westwards, when the tracks allowed.
At each prominence that afforded a view ahead, Timon parked in cover and Craig climbed to the crest to scout ahead. In every direction he looked, the towering blue of the sky above the wide horizon was marred by standing columns of smoke from burning villages. Westwards still they crawled, and the terrain changed swiftly as they approached the edge of the Kalahari Desert. There were fewer and still fewer features. The land levelled into a grey, monotonous plain, burning endlessly under the high merciless sun. The trees became stunted, their branches heat-tortured as the limbs of cripples. This was a land able to support only the most rudimentary human needs, the beginning of the great wilderness. Still they edged westwards into it.
The sun made its noon and slid down the sky, and they had made good a mere thirty miles since dawn. Still at least another twenty miles to reach the border, Craig estimated from the map, and all three of them were exhausted from the unremitting strain and the heat in the unlined metal cab.
In the middle of the afternoon, they stopped again for a few minutes. Craig brewed tea, Sally-Anne went behind a low clump of thorn scrub nearby and squatted out of view, while Timon hunched over the radio.
'There are no more villages ahead, Timon said as
