me shoot them for you.' Sean had seen Matatu fire only one shot in his entire life, when as a joke Sean had let him fire the double.577. it had lifted Matatu clear off his feet and deposited him ten feet away.
You couldn't hit one of them even at this range, you bloodthirsty little bugger.' Sean grinned down at him, then once more concentrated all his attention on the Hind. The magnitude of the prize he had taken began to dawn upon him.
The Hind would be a magnificent escape vehicle. He, Claudia, Job, and Matatu could get out of here with first-class tickets. Then reality overtook him, and his spirits dropped. He had never flown a helicopter, did not even have the vaguest notion of how to do so.
All he knew was that it required a delicate and expert touch on the controls and was entirely different from piloting a fixed-wing aircraft.
He looked back calculatingly at the Russian pilot. Despite the acne and his unprepossessing appearance, he thought he detected a stubborn, proud streak in the man's pale eyes, and he knew that the air force officers were among the elite of the Soviet armed forces. The Russian was almost certainly a fanatical patriot.
'Not much chance of getting you to act as ferry pilot,' he guessed. Then he spoke aloud: 'all right, gentlemen, let's get out of here.' He indicated the exit from the emplacement, and under the barrel of the AKM they trooped toward it obediently. As the Russian pilot passed, Sean stopped him and lifted the Tokarev pistol from the holster at his hip. 'You won't need that, Ivan,' he said, and tucked the pistol into his own belt.
There was a fortified workshop almost abutting the Hind's emplacement. It had been excavated into the hillside and roofed with poles and sandbags. Sean herded the Russians down into it, then looked around him.
The battle had fizzled out, though a few desultory shots and the pop and bang of burning ammunition could still be heard.
Through the drifts of smoke and dust, he saw the Shanganes of the Renamo force rounding up the prisoners and searching for loot and booty. He recognized some of the missile crews. Once the Hinds had been destroyed, they must have abandoned their Stingers and rushed up the hill to join the sack of the laager.
He saw one of themWayoneting a Frelimo prisoner in the buttocks and legs and roaring with laughter as the man squirmed in the dirt, kic0big aridocontorting his body in an attempt to avoid the point of the blade. Other Renamo were emerging from the dugouts, rifles slung over their shoulders and arms full of booty.
Sean was accustomed to the ethics of irregular troops in Africa, but this blatant in discipline annoyed him. He snarled at them, and it was a measure of the force of his personality and the authority he wielded over them that even in the heady moments of victory they obeyed him with alacrity. The Renamo who had been torturing his prisoner paused only to dispatch the maimed victim with a bullet in the back of the neck before hurrying t o Sean's bidding.
'Guard these white prisoners,' Sean ordered them. 'If harm comes to them, General China will roast your testicles on a slow fire and make you eat them,' he warned.
Without looking back he strode through the laager, reasserting his command, getting his triumphant howling shrieking Shanganes back to sanity. He saw Sergeant Alphonso ahead of him.
'We can't carry much loot away. Let the men take their pick, and then I want limpet mines in the storerooms after everything has been drenched with avgas from the drums,' he ordered Sergeant Alphonso. He glanced at his wristwatch. 'We can expect Frelimo to counterattack the laager within the hour. I want to be gone by then.'
'No!' Alphonso shook his head. 'General China has moved three companies in between us to hold the Frelimo counterattack.
He has ordered you to hold this position until he arrives.'
Sean pulled up short and stared at Alphonso. 'What the hell are you talking about? China is two days' march away on the river!'
Alphonso grinned and shook his head. 'General China will be here in an hour. He followed us with five companies of his best troovs. He has never been more than an hour behind us, not since we lit the river.'
'How do you know this?' Sean demanded.
Alphonso grinned again and patted the radio on the back of the trooper who stood beside him. 'I spoke to the general ten minutes ago, as soon as we killed the last of the Russian hen shaw
'Why didn't you tell me before this, you bastard?' Sean growled.
'The general ordered me not to. But now he has ordered me to tell you that he is very pleased with the killing of the hen shaw and he says that you are like a son to him. When he arrives he will reward you.'
'AB right.' Sean changed his orders. 'If we have to hold the laager, get your men into the perimeter defenses. We win use the 12.7-men heavy machine guns.'
Sean broke off as a Shangane trooper came running up the hill toward him.
'Nkosi!' The man panted. As soon as he saw his face, Sean knew it was bad news.
'The woman?' he demanded, seizing the messenger's arm. 'Is the white woman hurt?'
The Shangane shook his head. 'She is safe. She sent me to you.
It's the Matabele, Captain Job. He is 4it.'
'How bad?' Sean was already starting to run, and he shouted the question over his shoulder.
'He's dying,' the Shangane called after him. 'The Matabele is dying.'
Sean knew where to look; he himself had selected the copse of knob-thorn acacia as Job's attack position. The first rays of the morning sun were turning the tops of the knob- thorns to gold as Sean ran down the hill. With the help of two Shanganes, Claudia had moved Job onto soft level ground beneath one of the trees. She had propped his head on one of the backpacks and had a field dressing over the wound.
She looked up and cried, 'Oh, Sean, thank God!' Her shirt was drenched with drying blood, and she saw Sean's expression. 'Not my blood,' she assured him. 'I'm all right.'
Sean transferred all his attention to Job. His face was a sickly blue- gray color, and the flesh seemed to have melted from his skull like hot tar.
Sean touched his check, and his skin was cold as death. Frantically he searched for a pulse in the wrist of Job's good arm.
Although it was faint and rapid, his relief was intense.
'He's lost huge quantities of blood,' Claudia whispered. 'But I've contained the bleeding now.'
'He's in shock,' Sean muttered. 'Let me have a look.'
'Don't lift that dressing,' Claudia warned him quickly. 'It's ghastly.
He was hit on the point of the shoulder by a cannon shell.
It's just mangled flesh and bone chips. His arm is hanging by a shred of muscle and sinew.'
'Take Matatu with you,' Sean cut in brusquely. 'Go up to the laager. Find where they had their first aid post. The Russians will have a decent stock. Find it. I want plasma and a drip set. Dressings and bandages, those are the most urgent. But if you can find antiseptic and painkillers-' Claudia scrambled to her feet. 'Sean, I was so worried about you! I saw-' A
'You don't get ri4 of me that easy.' He did not look up from Job's face. 'Now off you go, and get back here as quick as you can.
Matatu, go with Donna, look after her.'
The two of them went at a run. Until they returned with medical supplies, Sean was helpless. But for something to keep himself occupied he wet his bandanna from the water bottle and began to sponge the blood and dirt from Job's face. Job's eyelids fluttered open, and Sean saw that he was conscious.
'Okay, Job, I'm here. Don't try and talk.'
Job closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, he swiveled them downward. He was too weak to move his head, yet he was trying to look down at his body, trying to check the extent of his injuries. It was always the first reaction.
'Is it lung blood I'm losing? Are both my feet still here, both my hands-?'
'Right arm and shoulder,' Sean told him. 'Twelve-point-seven millimeter cannon nicked you. Just a little bitty scratch. You are going to make it, lad, written guarantee. Would I lie to you?'
A faint smile tugged up the corners of Job's mouth, and he lowered one eyelid in a conspiratorial wink. Sean felt his heart begin to break. He knew he had lied. Job wasn't going to make it.
'Relax,' he ordered cheerfully. 'Lie back and enjoy it, as the bishop said to the actress. I'm in charge here now.'
And Job closed his eyes.
Claudia picked out the medical dugout by the Red Cross insignia at the entrance. There were two Shangane Renamo looting the interior, ransacking it for booty, but Claudia shrieked at them so violently that they slunk away guiltily.
The labels on the cartons of medical supplies were all in Russian Cyrillic script. Claudia had to rip the lids open and check the contents of each. She found boxes that contained a dozen plastic bags of clear plasma each and gave two of them to Matatu. The drip sets were on the shelf below. Field dressings and bandages were easy, but she was flummoxed by the tubes of ointments and pill bottles. However, the contents of one tube were yellow-
