When he tried to withdraw it from the pocket, his fingertips were numb and it slipped from his hand, but instead of clattering on the hard earth, the pistol dropped soundlessly onto a fold of the blanket and he saw with a rush of relief that the action was cocked and the safety catch engaged. Alphonso had loaded it, ready for instant use.
Behind him China's voice still echoed from the radio set: 'Perhaps you have corrupted me, Colonel. Perhaps I am acqumng your decadent European ways, but for the first time I understand your passion. Perhaps it is simply that at last the game is big enough to excite me. I wonder how you must feel at this change of role, Colonel. You are the game and I am the hunter. I know where you are, but you don't know where I am. Perhaps I am closer than you believe possible. Where am 1, Colonel? You must guess. You must run and hide. When will we meet, and how?'
oh settled his fingers carefully around the butt of the Tokarev.
He lifted it and was surprised by the effort it required. He placed his thumb upon the slide of the safety catch, but it would not budge. He felt panic rising in him. His hand was too weak and numb to move the slide forward into the firing position.
'I do not prorruse you 'fair chase,' Colonel. I will hunt you in my own African way, but it will be good sport. I promise you that at least.'
Job exerted all his strength and felt the slide of the safety catch begin to move under hiNhumb.
'The time is nowtighteen hundred hours Zulu. I will call you on this frequencya't the same time tomorrow, Colonel-that is, if we have not already met. Until then watch the sky, Colonel Courtlook behind you. You do not know from which direction I they, will come. But be sure I will come!'
There was a faint click as China unkeyed his microphone. Sean reached over and switched off the radio set to conserve the battery.
None of them spoke or moved, until another, sharper metallic click broke the silence. To Sean the sound was unmistakable, the sound of a safety catch being disengaged, and he reacted instinctively, pushing Claudia flat and whirling round to face it.
For a moment he was paralyzed. Then he screamed, 'No! Job, for Christ's sake! NO!' and hurled himself forward like a sprinter from the blocks.
Job was lying on his side facing Sean, but well beyond his reach.
Sean drove himself across the space that separated them, but he seemed to be wading through honey, sticky and slow, it impeded his movements. He watched Job raise the pistol, and he tried to prevent him by the force of his gaze. They were looking into each other's eyes, Sean trying to dominate and command her, but Job's eyes were sad, filled with a deep regret and yet unwavering.
Sean saw him open his lips and heard the muzzle of the pistol click against his teeth as Job thrust it deeply into his mouth and closed his lips around the muzzle, like a child sucking a Popsicle.
Sean reached out desperately, straining with all his strength to reach Job's pistol hand and rip the stubby black barrel out of his mouth. His fingertips had just touched Job's wrist when the pistol fired. The sound was muffled, damped down by the flesh and bone of Job's skull.
In his extremity of effort, Sean's vision was enhanced to unnatural clarity, and it seemed that time had been suspended so that everything happened very slowly, like a movie reel run at half speed.
Job's head altered shape. It swelled before Sean's eyes like a rubber Halloween mask filled with high-pressure gas. His eyelids flew wide open, and for an instant his eyeballs bulged from their sockets, exposing a wide rim of white around their dark irises, then rolling upward into his skull.
His shattered head changed shape again, elongating backward, stretching his skin tightly over his cheekbones and flattening his nostrils as the bullet drew the contents of his skull out through the back of his head, whiplashing his neck to its full stretch so that even in the aftermath of the shot, Sean heard the vertebrae creak and click.
Job was jerked backward, his arm flung away from his head in a debonair salute, the Tokarev pistol still gripped in his clenched fist, but Sean was quick enough to catch him before his mutilated head hit the hard earth.
He caught Job in his arms and held him to his chest with all his strength. His body was heavy and hot with fever, but slack and plastic as though it contained no bone. It seemed to overflow Sean's enfolding arms, and he held him hard. Job's muscles shivered and shuddered, and his legs kicked in a macabre little jigging movement. Sean tried to hold him still.
'Job,' he whispered, and he reached up behind him and cupped his hand over the back of his head, covering the terrible exit wound as though he were trying to hold it together, to press the spilled contents back into the ruptured skull.
'You fool,' he whispered. 'You shouldn't have done it.' He laid his own cheek against Job's and held him like a lover.
'We would have made it. I would have got you out.' Still hugging Job's quiescent body, he began to rock him gently, murmuring to him softly, pressing his cheek to Job's, his eyes closed tightly.
'We have come so far together, it wasn't fair to end it here.'
Claudia came to them and went down on one knee beside Sean.
She reached out to touch his shoulder and searched desperately for something to say, but there were no words and she stopped her hand before she touched him. Sean was oblivious of her and everything else around him.
His grief was so terrible that she felt she should not watch it. It was too private, too vulnerable, and yet she could not tear her eyes from his face. Her own feelings were entirely overshadowed by the magnitude of Sean's sorrow. She had developed a deep affection for Job, but it was as nothing compared to the love she now saw laid naked before her.
It was as though that pistol shot had destroyed a part of Sean himself, and she experienced no sense of shock or surprise when he began to weep. Still holding Job in his arms, Sean felt the last involuntary tremors of dying nerves and muscle grow still and the first chill of death sap the heat from this body he hugged so tightly to his chest.
The tears seemed to well up from deep inside of Sean. They came up painfully, burning all the way, scalding his eyelids when at last they forced their way between them and rolled slowly down his darkly weathered cheeks into his beard.
Even Alphonso could. not watch it. He stood up and walked away into the thorn scrhb, but Claudia could not move. She went on kneeling beside Stan, and her own tears rose in sympathy with his. Together they wept for Job.
Matatu had heard the shot from a mile out, where he was guarding their rear, lying up on their back-spoor to watch for a following patrol. He came in quickly and from the bush at the perimeter of the camp watched for only a few seconds before he deduced exactly what had happened. Then he crept in quietly and crouched behind Sean. Like Claudia, he respected Sean's mourning, waiting for him to master its first unbearably bitter pangs.
Sean spoke at last, without looking round, without opening his eyes.
'Matatu,' he said.
'N,&,.0w,='Go and find the burial place. We have neither tools nor time to dig a grave, yet he is a Matabele and he must be buried sitting up, facing the direction of the rising sun.'
'Ndio, Bwana. ' Matatu slipped away into the darkling forest.
At last Sean opened his eyes and laid Job gently back upon the gray wool blanket. His voice was steady, almost conversational.
'Traditionally we should bury him in the center of his own cattle kraal.' He wiped the tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand and went on quietly, 'But we are wanderers, Job and I, he had no kraal nor cattle to call his own.'
She was not certain Sean was speaking to her, but she replied, 'The wild game were his cattle, and the wilderness his kraal. He will be content here.'
Sean nodded, still without looking at her. 'I am grateful that you understand.'
He reached down and closed Job's eyelids. His face was undamaged except for the chips from his front teeth, and with a fold of the blanket Sean wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.
Now he looked peaceful and at rest. Sean rolled him on his side and began to wrap him in the blanket, using the nylon webbing and the rifle slings to bind his body tightly into a sitting position with his knees up under his chin.
Matatu returned before he had finished. 'I have found a good place,' he said. Sean nodded without looking up from his task.
Claudia broke the silence. 'He gave his life for us,' she said quietly. 'Greater love hath no man.' It sounded so trite and unworthy of the moment that she wished she had not said it, but Sean nodded again.
'I was never able to square the account with him,' he said.
'And now I never will.'
He was finished. Job was trussed securely into the gray blanket, only his head exposed.
Sean stood up and went to his own small personal pack. He took out the only spare shirt it contained and came back to where Job lay. He knelt beside him again. 'Good-bye, my brother. It was a good road we traveled. I only wish we could have reached the end of it together,' he said softly, and leaned forward and kissed Job's forehead. He did it so unaffectedly that it seemed completely natural and right.
