not responsible.'
'Agreed.'
'Then I want a written acknowledgement of debt for the full amount, binding on your estate in the event of your death.'
'Give me the paper.'
'You are crazy, Capo, do you know that?'
'Sure.' Riccardo grinned. 'But what about you?'
'Oh, I was born crazy.' Sean laughed with him as they shook hands, and then he sobered. 'I want to fly a reconnaissance along the border to make sure there are no surprises waiting for us. If all is clear, we'll cross tonight. It will mean forced marches and traveling light. I want to be in and out in under ten days.'
Riccardo nodded. Sean told him, 'Get some rest now. You are going to need it.'
He was about to turn away when he caught Claudia's furious gaze. 'I'll radio Reema to send down another charter flight to pick you up tomorrow. She'll wangle you on the first commercial flight back to Anchorage.'
Claudia seemed about to reply when Riccardo laid his hand over hers. 'Okay,' he said. 'She'll go. I'll see to it.'
'Damn right she'll go,' Sean said. 'She certainly isn't coming into Mozambique with us.'
Sean taped over the identification markings on the Beechcraft's wings and fuselage, obliterating them from the scrutiny of any ground observer. He made certain the tape was so firmly adhered to the metalwork that the slipstream could not strip it away. While he worked, Job checked the emergency stores aboard the aircraft in case they were forced down. Rather than the heavy double barreled rifle, he loaded Sean's lightweight 30/06 with the black fiberglass stock.
They took off and Sean banked onto an easterly heading, keeping barely fifty feet above the treetops. He flew with the map on his lap, checking each landmark as it appeared ahead of them. Job sat beside him in the right-hand seat, while Matatu was in the seat behind Job. Even after all these years, Matatu was terrified of flying and still occasionally suffered from airsickness. Sean refused to allow him to sit in the seat behind him.
'Silly little bugger will puke down the back of my neck again.'
So Job had to run that risk.
They reached the border and turned northward along it, searching for troop movements or any evidence of human presence. They found nothing, and thirty minutes later they saw the sheen of water on the horizon, an inland sea formed by the man-made dam on the Zambezi River.
'Cabora Bossa,' Sean grunted. The hydroelectric scheme, one of the biggest and most expensive in Africa, had been built by the Portuguese before they relinquished the colony to self- government.
Although the South Africans would have taken all the power the project could supply, transporting it southward across the grids to their great mines at Palabora in the Transvaal, and although the revenue would have gone a long way toward alleviating Mozambique's desperate economic plight, Cabora Bossa no longer sold a single kilowatt of electricity. The southbound power lines were so continually being sabotaged by the rebel forces, and the government troops were so demoralized that they made little attempt to protect the repair crews from attack. Thus it had been years since a repair had even been attempted.
'By now the turbines are probably just piles of rust. Score another sweeping triumph for African Marxism.' Sean chuckled and dropped a wing to turn 180 degrees and head back southward.
On this leg he flew deeper into Mozambique, setting a zigzag course to cover more ground, once again searching for occupied villages or mobile military units.
They found only the patterns of old cultivated lands, now gone back to weed and bush, and burned-out deserted villages with no sign of human life around the shells of roofless huts.
Sean intersected the road running between Vila de Monica and Cabora Bossa and flew along it for ten miles. He was so low he could see the ruts and potholes in the surface and weeds growing in the wheel tracks. No vehicle had used it for months, perhaps years. The culverts and bridges had been destroyed by explosives and the bodies of mined vehicles, burned out and rusted, littered the verges.
He turned back toward the west and the border now, searching for a place that all three of them remembered so well. As they came up ahead, Sean recognized the symmetrical hillocks they called Inhlozane, 'The Maiden's Breasts,' and south of them the confluence of two minor rivers, now reduced to strings of green pools in wide sand beds.
Job pointed ahead. 'There it is.' In the back seat, Matatu forgot his fear and discomfort to cackle with laughter and clutch Sean's shoulder.
'Inhlozane. Do you remember, Bwana?'
Sean banked steeply over the junction of the two rivers, circling them, all three of them peering down. They could make out no trace of the old guerrilla camp. The last time they had been here was in the spring of'1976 and they had come as scouts--Ballantyne's Scouts.
Under interrogation, a prisoner had revealed the existence of a major guerrilla training camp in this area, and the Rhodesian high command had sent one of the Vampire jets over on a high photographic run. The camp had been cunningly concealed and every artifice of camouflage employed. However, the Rhodesian evaluators were highly skilled, most of them ex-R.A.F personnel. It is possible to camouflage the dugouts and hutments used by hundreds of men and women, but the pathways between them are the telltales. Thousands of feet moving daily between barracks and lecture huts, between mess halls and latrines, going out to forage for firewood or carrying water from the river, beat pathways that from the air look like the veins in a dead leaf.
'Between two and two and a half thousand,' the air force photographic reconnaissance squadron leader had told the briefing. 'They have been there for approximately six months, so training is almost complete. They are probably just waiting for the rains to break before beginning a major offensive.'
A simultaneous incursion by two thousand trained terrorists would have strained the Rhodesian security forces' capabilities to breaking point.
'Preemptive strike,' General Peter Walls, the Rhodesian commander in chief, had ordered. 'I want a battle plan prepared within twenty-four hours.' The code name chosen for the attack was 'Popeye.'
Rivalry between the Selous Scouts and the Ballantyne Scouts was fierce, and Sean had been jubilant when he had been given the ground attack role of 'Popeye' in preference to the Selous lads.
They had gone in with the slow, ancient Dakotas, crowded on the benches along the fuselage, fifty men and their equipment to an aircraft, sitting on their parachutes. There were almost equal numbers of black and white troopers, but they were homogeneous in their camouflage paint. They had jumped from three hundred feet, just high enough for the parachutes to flare before they hit the ground. When they jumped from that height, they jokingly referred to themselves as 'meat bombs.'
The jump area was twelve miles from the guerrilla training camp, ninety-six miles inside the Mozambican border. They were on the ground an hour before sunset. All three hundred Scouts were assembled and ready to move out by nightfall.
They had made the approach march by moonlight, each man carrying a pack that weighed almost a hundred pounds, most of that weight made up of ammunition for the RPD machine guns.
They had reached the fork of the river after midnight and prepared their ambush position along the south bank, overlooking the dry river-bed and its shallow green pools and facing the training camp on the far bank.
With Job beside him, Sean crept along the bank, checking every position personally, speaking to his men in whispers, calling them by name. They had lain for the rest of the night behind their machine guns, and small sounds and smells of the wood smoke and cooking food had drifted across to them on the night breeze.
At dawn a bugle had sounded reveille in the dark forest that hid the camps, and they had seen the obscure movement of many persons in the gloom beneath the trees.
Twenty minutes later, Precisely at the moment of good shooting light, the Vampires had come whistling in from the west and dropped their napalm cansters. Towering bans of orange flame shot through with evil black smoke had erupted into the sky, palling the sunrise; the heat and the chemical stink of the napalm came rolling down to where the scouts lay in ambush. The VamPires had deliberately dropped their loads of napalm along the northern perimeter of the camp, sealing off that escape route with a wall of fire. The Canberra bombers came in twenty seconds behind the Vampires, and their bomb loads were fragmentation and high explosive. They fell into the camp with jarring crumping detonations, sending up fountains of dirt and debris, and the trainee guerrillas who survived came out of the forest, screaming and howling in a panic-stricken mob.
The napalm had cut them off from the north, and they poured into the river-bed and came running directly at the waiting machine guns. Sean let them come, studying them with a detached interest.
There were almost as many women as men, but it was difficult to differentiate between the sexes. They wore no uniform; some were in khaki shorts and T-shirts with portraits of guerrilla leaders or Political slogans printed on the chests. Others wore blue denim or bush jackets, and some were bare-chested and in their underwear.
Nearly all of them were young, in their
