gasped. 'I didn't!
You didn't make me! Oh! No! I can't believe-!'
'Highly nutritious,' Sean assured her, and Matatu, seeing the direction of her gaze, picked one of the caterpillars out of the coals and, passing it quickly from hand to hand to cool it, offered it to her with a magnanimous flourish.
'I think I'm going to throw up,' Claudia said faintly, turning her face away. 'I can't believe I actually ate one of those.'
At that moment the radio crackled sharply and a voice spoke very faintly in a guttural language Claudia could not understand.
However, Sean's sudden interest in the transmission distracted her from her feelings of nauseous disgust and she asked, 'What language is that?'
'Afrikaans,' he replied shortly. 'Quiet! Listen!' But the transmission faded out abruptly.
'Afrikaans?' she asked. 'South African Dutch?'
441mat's right.' Sean nodded. We must be getting within extreme range. That was almost certainly a South African military transmission, probably a border patrol on the Limpopo.' Sean spoke briefly to Alphonso and then told Claudia, 'He agrees.
South African border patrol. Alphonso says they sometimes Pick up skip transmissions like that even further north.' Sean chocked his wristwatch. 'Well, it doesn't look as though General China is going to entertain us this evening. We had better pack up and get ready to march.' Sean had half risen when suddenly the radio burst into LIFE again. This time the voice was so clear they could hear every intake of General China's breath.
'Good evening, Colonel Courtney. Please forgive me for the late schedule, but I have had urgent business to attend to. Come in, please, Colonel Courtney.'
In the silence that followed Sean made no move toward the microphone, and General China chuckled softly across the ether.
'Still at a loss for words, Colonel? Never mind. I'm sure you are listening, so I will congratulate you on the ground you have covered to date. Quite remarkable, especially in view Of Miss Monterro's brake upon your progress.'
'Arrogant bastard,' Claudia whispered bitterly. 'He is everything and a male chauvinist pig to boot.' me by surprise. We 'Quite frankly, Colonel Courtney, you took have been forced to redeploy our stop lines further south to welcome you.' Again there was a short silence, and suddenly General China's voice was full of malice. 'You see, Colonel, we have found where you buried your Matabele.' Claudia felt Sean stiffen beside her. The silence drew out until China spoke again. 'We dug up the body and we were able to judge how long it had been in the earth by the extent of putrefaction.' Sean began to tremble, and China went on affably. 'A Matabele can stink like a dead hyena, and your friend was no exception. Tell me, Colonel, did you put that bullet in his head? Very'sensible thing to do. He wasn't going to make it anyway.'. 4 'The swine! The bloody swine'' It was wrung out of Sean.
'Oh, and by the way, the booby trap didn't work. Very amateurish effort, I'm afraid.' China laughed easily. 'And don't worry about the Matabele. I made it easier for the hyenas. I put two of n to work on him with pan gas Bite-size chunks, Colonel, my me Matabele goulash!' snatched it to his mouth.
Sean lunged for the microphone and yelled into it. 'You filthy 'You depraved bloody animal!' he ghoul! By Christ, you'd better pray I never get my hand s on you!' He broke off, panting with the strength of his outrage.
'Thank you, Colonel.' There was a smile in General China's voice.
'I was getting bored with talking to myself. It's good to be in contact again-I've missed you.'
With a huge effort Sean resisted the temptation to reply and instead switched off the set. 'Pack up.' His voice was stiff trembling; with fury. 'China will have us pretty well pinpointed after that little outburst. We've got to move fast now.'
'Like we were dragging our heels before?' Claudia asked with resignation, but she stood up obediently.
Yet their progress was slower this night. Twice before midnight Matatu cautioned them to wait, warned by his animal sixth sense of danger ahead. Each time he went forward to scout the track and found the ambush that had been set for them, and each time they were forced to make a slow and stealthy detour to avoid the trap.
'General Tippoo Tip's men,' Alphonso muttered. 'He must be helping General China. There are men waiting for us on every path.'
However, after midnight their luck changed for the better.
Matatu came across a well-used path running almost directly southward and discovered that only a short time before a large detachment of men had passed along it in the same direction they were headed.
'We'll use their spoor to cover our own.' Sean seized the opportunity and put Matatu in the lead, with Claudia following him, while he and Alphonso took the drag, deliberately treading over the small, distinctive foot marks of the leading pair, obliterating them and losing them in the heavy sign the party of Tippoo Tip s men had left behind them.
They hurried along the path until Matatu's sharp ears picked out the tiny sounds the Renamo patrol was making as it moved forward in the silence of the night. Then they moderated their pace and trailed them at a discreet distance, letting the patrol run interference for them.
Keeping in contact with the enemy, maintaining the strict interval that was the fine between discovery and concealment, was a delicate and eerie business for which they had to rely completely on Matatu's hearing and night sight, but they were moving at almost double the pace they could have hoped for without this assistance.
A little before dawn the Renarno patrol stopped just ahead of them, and they crouched in the darkness and listened to them setting up an ambush on both sides of the pathway. Once the ambush party was settled in, Matatu led them on another detour to meet the path again further on, and they struck out southward once again.
'We have covered twenty-five miles by my reckoning,' Sean murmured with grim satisfaction as the first delicate light of dawn paled the eastern stars. 'But we cannot risk moving further in daylight. The country is crawling with Renamo. Matatu, find us a place to lie up for the day.'
During that night march, they had moved into an area of wet vlei ground on the approaches to the Save River, and now Matatu led them deliberately into the tall swamp grass. They waded knee deep across the flood plains that guarded the river, picking their way between shallow open lagoons from which the mosquitoes rose in gray clouds. The water covered their tracks and Sean brought up the rear of the file, meticulously closing the swamp grass and brushing it upright behind him to disguise their passing.
A few hundred yards off the path Matatu discovered a small dry island only inches above the level of the floodwaters, and as he stepped onto it there was a violent upheaval in the reeds as a heavy body rushed through it.
Claudia screamed with shock, certain they had blundered into another murderous Renamo ambush. However, Matatu whipped out his skinning knife and with a shrill war cry dived into the grass; there was a wild commotion as he wrestled with a writhing, scaly body twice his own size.
Sean rushed forward to help him, and between them they clubbed and stabbed the creature and dragged it out of the grass onto the island. Claudia shuddered with horror as she realized it was a huge gray lizard, almost seven feet long, with a speckled yellow belly and a long whip of a tail that still twitched and lashed from side to side.
With squeaks of glee Matatu immediately began to peel off the scaly skin.
'What is it?'
'Matatu's favorite delicacy, leguan.' Sean whetted the blade of his trench knife on thQ,palm of his hand and then helped Matatu butcher the monitor lizard.
The flesh from the tail was white as filets of Dover sole, but Claudia grimaced when Sean offered her a strip.
'You and Matatu would eat your own offspring,' she accused.
'That from the girl who dines regularly on mo pane caterpillars!'
'Sean, I couldn't, I really couldn't force myself. Not raw.'
'We haven't any dry wood for a fire, and you have eaten Japanese sashimi, haven't you? You told me you loved it.'
'That's raw fish, not raw lizard!'
'Same difference. Think of it as a kind of African sashimi,' he coaxed her gently. When at last she gave in and tasted it, she found it surprisingly palatable, and her hunger overcame her squeamishness.
For once there was no shortage of water, and they filled their bellies with sweet white meat and floodwater, then curled up on their blankets. With the tall swamp grass swaying over their heads to protect them from the burning sunlight and the eyes in the sky, Claudia felt secure and gave in to her fatigue.
Once in the middle of the day, she woke and lay in Sean's arms to listen to the sound of the searching Hind.
'China is working the riverbanks ahead of us,' Sean whispered.
The sound of the Hind's turbos rose and fell as it turned on each leg of the search pattern, and Claudia felt her stomach muscles knotting and contracting as it grew louder, passing only a short distance south of where they lay, and then finally faded into silence.
'He's gone.' Sean hugged her. 'Get some
