a single little battle, Colonel Courtney, but tomorrow we will have won the war.' China's voice was harsh with bitter self-righteousness.
'How do you know my name?' Sean asked with amusement.
'You are famous, Colonel, or should I say infamous. Under you, this pack of killer dogs is even more dangerous than when the murderous Ballantyne himself was leading it.'
'Thank you for the pretty compliment, my old China, but aren't you claiming victory a little prematurely?'
'The side which controls the countryside by night wins the war.
'Mao Tse-tung.' Sean smiled. 'A most appropriate quotation for one of your kind.'
'We control the Countryside at last, we have you bottled up in your villages and towns. Your white farmers are losing heart, their women are sick of war. The black peasants are openly sympathetic to our cause. Britain and the world are against you. Even South Africa, your only ally, is growing disenchanted with the struggle.
Soon, very soon..
They argued as they ran, and despite himself Sean could not suppress a grudging admiration for his prisoner. He was quick witted his command of English impressive and his grasp of politics and military tactics even more so. He was physically strong and fit.
Sean could feel the wiry muscle in his arm as he supported him, and few other men with a burst eardrum could have sustained the pace of the march.
'He would make a superb Scout,' Sean thought. 'If we could turn him' Many of his most valuable men were former guerrillas, captured and skillfully turned by Rhodesian intelligence.
So as they ran on he studied Comrade China with renewed interest. He was probably a few years younger than Sean. He had refined Nilotic features, more Ethiopian than Shana, a narrow high-bridged nose and chiseled lips rather than the broadly negroid. Even the morphine could not dim the intelligence of his large dark eyes. He was a handsome man, and of course he would be tough and utterly ruthless. He would not have reached his rank were he not.
'I want him,' Sean decided. 'My God, he would be worth another full regiment to us.' And he tightened his grip on the man's arm, a proprietorial gesture. 'This little darling is going to get the full treatment.'
The vanguard ran into a Frelimo patrol in the middle of the morning and brushed them aside, hardly slackening their pace to do so. The corpses in their blotched Frelimo camouflage lay beside the track as they trotted past.
They came up with the troop convoy a little after midday. The trucks were guarded by Eland armored cars, and they had cans of ice- cold Castle beer in the cool boxes. The Scouts had covered forty-two miles in just over seven hours, and the beer tasted like nectar.
Sean gave a can to Comrade China. 'Sorry about your ear,' he told him, and saluted him with the beer can.
'I would have done the same to you.' China smiled, but his eyes were inscrutable. 'To our next meeting?' he suggested the toast.
'Until we meet again,' Sean agreed, and handed him over to a guard detail under a white sergeant. Then he climbed into the Command armored car to lead the final stage of withdrawal.
Sean extricated his column and had them back across the border ten and a half hours after the attack began. Ian Smith, the prime minister, came on the radio net in person to congratulate him and inform him of his decoration, a bar to his Silver Cross.
Sean didn't learn about Comrade China's escape until the column went into laager that evening. Apparently China had slit the canvas hood of the troop truck and slipped through it while his guard was dozing. Undeterred by his manacles, he had dropped off the speeding truck, screened by the dust boiling out from the back wheels, and rolled into the head-high elephant grass along the verge.
Two months later Sean had seen an intelligence report that placed China in command of the successful attack that had wiped out a supply convoy on the Mount Darwin road.
'Yes, Matatu, I remember it all very well,' Sean answered his question. He made one more steep turn above the site of the old terrorist base before he returned the Beechcraft to straight and level flight on a southerly heading.
He did not, however, fly as far southward as the railway line that linked the port of Beira to the landlocked Zimbabwean border.
This was a focus for all the military and rebel activity in the area, and the countryside would be swarming with Frelimo and Zimbabwean troops, all armed with RPG rockets and eager to get a shot at an unmarked low-flying aircraft with no flight authorization.
'At least,' Sean told Job, 'it looks like a possibility.'
Job agreed. 'The border opposite our camp seems undefended and deserted.'
'Worth a try for half a million?' Sean asked. Job just grinned at him.
'One more little chore before we go home,' Sean told them.
It required precise navigation and an eye for the terrain, but Sean crossed back into the Zimbabwean side, and by flying low they were able to pick out the spot where the previous day they had first come across the poachers' tracks; from that point, with Matatu craning his head to see down and calling directions, they found the tableland and valley where they had come up with the band of poachers and taken them under fire. From the air the distances seemed much shorter than they had on foot.
Matatu directed Sean along the trail the old bull had made toward the border. It seemed his gift for direction and terrain was not impaired by being high above the ground, and Sean was following their course on The map he held in his lap.
'We are crossing bact into Mozambique now.' Sean was scribbling notes on the map.
'That way. Matatu leaned over the back of the seat and pointed out a more northerly track. Sean knew better than to argue with him and turned a few degrees left.
Minutes later Matatu demanded he turn slightly south again.
'Little bugger is actually sensing the old bull's trail, he is thinking like the elephant,' Sean marveled. At that moment Matatu gave a squeak of triumph and pointed urgently out of the side window.
As they flashed across another dry river-bed, Sean glimpsed the tracks trodden in the soft sand. They were so deep that they were filled with shadow, a string of dark beads on the white background. Even Sean, who for twenty years had watched Matatu work, was amazed. On instinct alone, Matatu had followed the bull to this river crossing.
It was a supernatural feat.
Sean circled the tracks, his port wingtip pointing directly at them, so steep was his turn.
'Which way now?' he called to the back seat. Matatu tapped his shoulder and pointed downstream. Without demur, Sean followed the gnarled black finger.
there he is!' Job shouted suddenly. Matatu shrieked with laughter and clapped his hands, bouncing in his seat like a child at a pantomime.
A mile ahead the river ran into a wide vlei that still held water from the last rains. The elephant's humped back showed above the tops of the tall reeds that surrounded the pool, like a gray whale in a sea of green.
As they raced low toward him, the elephant heard the Beechcraft's engine. He lifted his head and spread his ears wide, turning to face them, and they saw his tusks, those legendary shafts of black ivory raised to the sky. The beauty of their curved symmetry struck Sean all over again.
There was just a glimpse of them as they flashed overhead, but the image was printed vividly on his mind's eye. Half a million dollars and those tusks-he had risked his LIFE a hundred times for much lesser prizes.
'Going back for another look?' Job asked, twisting his head to try and see back over the tailplane.
'No.' Sean shook his head. 'We don't want to disturb him more than necessary. We know where to find him. Let's go home.'
'It's MY half-million dollars you're so gaily throwing around,' Claudia told her father.
'How do you work that out?' Riccardo asked. He was lying on his camp bed dressed in a pair of silk pajama bottoms, his chest and feet bare. Claudia noticed that most of his body hair was still crisp, curly and black, with only a patch of fuzzy gray in the center of his chest.
'My inheritance,' she explained sweetly. 'You're blowing my inheritance, Papa.'
Riccardo chuckled. She had the sass of a divorce lawyer, coming bursting into his tent to renew the argument he thought he had finalized in the mess tent over breakfast.
'If I'm not going to get it in your will, the very least you can do is let me enjoy it with you now.'
'According to the last audit, young lady, you will have a little over thirty-six million coming to you after taxes, after I've allowed myself this small extravagance. I hasten to add that every cent is tied up in a trust fund that not even the most crafty lawyers will ever break. I don't want you handing out my hard -earned loot to one of your bleeding-heart charities.' 'Papa, you know the money has never interested me. What interests me is coming with you on this crazy jaunt after the elephant.
I came to Africa with you on the understanding that I was to be included in everything. That was our bargain.'
