spilled out of her, jumping from fifteen feet to the earth and immediately spreading out into a defensive perimeter. Then Roland deployed them into a line of skirmishers and they went forward into the swath-line in quick rushes, ready to meet enemy fire. Within minutes they had cleared the area.
'Survivors!' Roland snapped. 'Search for survivors!' They went back down the swath, and in the dawn light the carnage was horrific.
Beside each corpse a Scout paused briefly, but they were cold and stiff and the men went on. Roland reached the nose-section, and glanced through the windscreen. There was nothing to do for the crew until the long green plastic body-bags arrived. He turned back, searching frantically, looking for a scrap of bright yellow, the colour of Janine's skirt.
'Colonel!' There was a faint shout from the forest edge. Roland sprinted towards it. Sergeant-Major Gondele was standing by the shattered tail-section of the aircraft.
'What is it?' Roland demanded harshly, and then saw her.
EsauGondele had covered Janine's naked body with a blue airways blanket from the wreck. She lay curled under it like a sleeping child with just her tousled head showing. Roland dropped on his knee and gently lifted the corner of the blanket. Her eyes were closed with swollen purple bruises and her lips were raw chewed flesh. For seconds he did not recognize her, and when he did, he believed that she was dead. He laid his open palm upon her cheek, and the skin was moist and warm.
She opened her eyes. They were mere slits in the abused flesh.
She looked up at him, and the dull lifeless eyes were more frightening than her torn and battered flesh. Then the eyes came alive with terror. Janine screamed, and there was the ring of madness in the sound.
'Darling.' Roland caught her up in his arms, but she fought him wildly, still screaming. Her eyes were mad and staring. Fresh blood oozed from the cracked scabs on her lips.
'DoctorP Roland yelled. 'Here! On the double!' and it took all his strength to hold her. She had thrown off the blanket, and naked she kicked and lashed out at him.
Paul Henderson came at the run, and tore open his pack. He filled a syringe and muttered, 'Hold her' still!' as he swabbed her skin. He pressed in the needle and squeezed the clear contents of the syringe into her arm. She went on fighting and screaming for almost a minute and then gradually quietened and relaxed.
The doctor took her from Roland's arms, and nodded to his assistant. The young medic orderly held up a blanket as a screen and the doctor laid Janine on another.
'Get out of here,' he snapped at Rolland, and began his examination.
Roland picked up his rifle and stumbled to the tail-section of the Viscount. He leaned against it, and his breathing was hoarse and ragged, but slowly it eased and he pushed himself upright.
'Colonel, sir.' Esau Gondele appeared beside him. 'We have picked up their spoor, incoming and outgoing.' 'How long ago?' 'Five hours at the least, probably longer.' 'Be ready to move out. We are going after them. 'Roland turned away from him. He needed to be alone just a little longer, he was not yet entirely under control.
Two of the Scouts came from the helicopter at a trot, carrying one of the yellow plastic body-moulded stretchers between them.
'Colonel!' Paul Henderson tucked the blue blanket carefully around Janine's body and then he and the orderly lifted her tenderly onto the yellow stretcher and tightened the straps to hold her. While the orderly prepared the plasma drip, the doctor led Roland a little aside.
'It's not very good news, 'he said, softly.
'What did they do to her?' Roland asked, and Paul Henderson told him. Roland gripped the stock of the rifle so hard that his arms began to shudder and the muscle in his forearms stood out in ridges and hard knots.
'She is bleeding internally,' Henderson finished. 'I have to get her into theatre very quickly. A theatre that can handle this type of surgery, Bulawayo.' 'Take the helicopter,' Roland ordered brusquely.
They ran with the stretcher to the Super Frelon. The orderly holding the drip-bottle high.
'Colonel,' Henderson looked back. 'She is still conscious. If you want-' He did not finish. The little group waited for Roland beside the fuselage, not certain whether to load the stretcher aboard.
With a strange reluctance, Roland walked heavily towards them.
The enemy had used his woman. She was one thing that was sacred. How many of them? The thought made him check, and he had to force himself to go on to where she lay on the stretcher. He looked down at her.
Only her face showed above the blanket. It was grotesquely swollen, and her mouth was a raw red ruin. Her once lustrous hair was stiff with filth and dried blood, but her eyes were clear. The drug had driven back the madness, and now she was looking up at him. Only the eyes were the same, dark indigo blue.
Painfully her damaged lips framed a word, but no sound came. It was his name she was trying to say.
'Roland!' And his revulsion rushed upon him, he could not hold it back. How many of them had taken her that way, a dozen, more? She had been his woman, but that had been destroyed. He tried to fight it, but he felt nauseated, and quick cold sweat chilled his face. He tried to force himself to stoop over her, to kiss that terribly battered face, but he could not. He could not speak nor move, and slowly the light of recognition went out in her eyes. It was replaced by that dull empty look he had seen before, and then she closed the livid swollen lids over them and rolled her head slowly away from him.
'Take good care of her,' Roland muttered hoarsely, and they lifted the stretcher into the helicopter. Paul Henderson turned to him, his face twisted with pity and helpless anger, and he laid his hand on Roland's arm.
'Roly, it wasn't her fault,' he said.
'If you say anything more, I might kill you.' Roland's voice was thickened and coarsened by disgust and hatred. Paul Henderson turned from him and clambered into the machine. Roland made a wind-up signal to the pilot in the bubble windscreen above him, and the big clumsy aircraft lifted noisily into the sky.
'Sergeant-Major,' Roland called. 'Take, the spoor!' and he did not look back as the helicopter rose high into the pink dawn and then swung away southwards.
They went in deep formation, so that if they ran into an ambush, the tail could circle and outflank the attackers to free the head.
They went at storming speed, much too fast for safety, going hard as marathon runners. Within the first hour Roland had ordered his Scouts to strip their packs. They abandoned everything but the radio set, their weapons and water-bottles and fir staid kits, and Roland pushed the pace still harder.
He and Esau Gondele took turns at point, the one dropping back each hour as the other came forward. They lost the spoor twice in stony ground but each time picked it up on the first cast ahead. It was running true and straight, and they had quickly made the number of the chase as nine men. Within two hours Roland knew each of them as individuals by the spoor they left behind them, the one with a nick in his left heel, flat-foot, long-one with a gap of over a metre in his stride, and each of the others with more subtle characteristics to differentiate them. He knew them, and he hungered for them.
'They are going for the drifts,' Esau Gondele grunted as he came up and took over the point from Roland. 'We should radio ahead and set a patrol for them.' 'There are twelve drifts, forty miles. A thousand men wouldn't do it.' Roland wanted them for himself, all nine of them.
One look at his face and Esau Gondele realized that. He picked up the run of the spoor. They were crossing an open glade of golden grass.
The chase had left a sweep line through the grass the stems still bent in the direction of their flight, and the sunlight reflected at a different intensity from these. It was like following a highway. They went down it at a swinging easy run, and ahead of him Esau Gondele saw some of the grass stems springing upright again. They were that close already, and it wasn't yet noon. They had cut at least three hours off the lead that the ZIPRA cadres had upon them.
'We can catch them before the river we can have them for ourselves,' Esau Gondele thought fiercely, and resisted the temptation to lengthen his stride. They could move no faster, an inch more on his stride would put a term on their endurance, whereas at this pace they could run the sun down and the moon up.
At two in the afternoon they lost the spoor again. They were on a long low ridge of black ironstone, and the ground took no prints. As soon as Esau Gondele lost contact, the line stopped dead, and went into a defensive attitude, only Roland moved up and knelt out on his flank, keeping good separation so that a single burst could not take them both.
'How does it look?' Roland brushed the tiny mopani bees from his eyes and nostrils. They-were maddeningly persistent in their hunt for moisture.
'I think they are going straight in.' 'If they are going to twist, this is the place to do it,' Roland answered, he wiped his face on his forearm and the greasy camouflage paint came away in a dirty brown and green smear.
'If we cast ahead again we may lose half an hour,' Esau Gondele pointed out, 'three kilometres.' 'If we run blind we may lose more than that, we may never make them again.' Roland looked around thoughtfully at the mopani forest
