‘Go then, and carry out these orders, soldiers,’ he whispered, unable to hold his streaming tears at bay. ‘For the very last time … goodbye!’
‘Goodbye, sir!’ they both shouted ebulliently.
The General reached down and turned off the screen and microphone with shaking hands, and then held his face in his hands as tears ran down his cheeks.
‘Sir,’ Captain Biko gasped, his eyes wide with disbelief, ‘p-, permission to voice my opinion.’
‘Granted.’
The General’s voice was guttural and croaky, and lacked its characteristic weight of authority and power.
‘With all due respect, please, please reconsider what you’ve just done. You’re sending one of your most loyal and capable commanders to his death, along with a number of your finest troops! It’s, it’s a suicide mission, sir! They cannot hope to hold the city against the attackers with such small numbers! They will be killed, every soldier who remains in T’Kalagelellerani to fight the invaders will surely be killed! Sir, if we follow my plan we will certainly be able to crush them, and—’
‘You are not in charge here, boy!’ the General bellowed, jumping suddenly to his feet, his eyes aglow with a furious new madness. ‘Do not presume that you know better than me! Do not!’
His tone then became a bit more subdued, and the fury that had reared so suddenly up, like a startled horse, seemed to shrink back and then leave him. Age settled like tomb-dust over his face; a close crushing of the centuries, compacted like the ancient symmetry of Egyptian pyramid blocks, or the monoliths of Stonehenge. He turned away from the youth and stared out of the window, losing himself in a torrent of thoughts. While his eyes were focused on some unseen point in the far distance, his mind was already drifting away from the present, drawn once again into the tumultuous rapids of too many memories, an endless river that was ever churning and surging and swirling.
‘Sir, if I could—’
‘Get out,’ the General hissed, the sound blasting like compressed air from between his tightly clenched teeth. ‘Get out of this room, and do not come back here. Send someone else to bring me updates of the battle.’
‘Please—’
‘GET OUT!’
The roar seemed to emanate from the very depths of the General’s core; it shook the walls and the door with its booming resonance, reminiscent of the subsonic cry of some great leviathan from the depths of the ocean. Captain Biko needed no further persuasion; with a mumbled apology he hurried out of the room, almost falling over his own feet in his haste to escape.
After the young man had closed the door, the General lay down on his reed mat and wept.
***
‘How many a’ them motherfuckers are left up on the rooftop a’ the left tower?!’
Another burst of machine gun fire forced Colonel Rudd to scramble for cover behind a car-sized statue of a hippopotamus before he could get an answer to the question he had just barked.
‘Shit, at least one too many!’ he yelled hoarsely from behind the rock. ‘Take that sum’bitch out!’
The whirring drumroll of one of the miniguns opening up cannonaded through the forest, followed by the split-second eagle scream of a mortar coming down. The mortar dropped inside the walls of the ruins, and Colonel Rudd was close enough to feel the shock wave that rippled through the ground the moment it exploded.
‘Yee-haw! Right on target boys, right on fuckin’ target!’ he whooped into his radio. ‘Now double up them mortars! We’ve almost broken ‘em!’
The minigun was peppering the tower with such ferocity that the machine gunner on top of it was unable to shoot back. Colonel Rudd took this opportunity to dart out from behind his cover and rush through the thick brush to the outer wall, just below the tower.
‘You’re about t’ get one helluva nasty surprise, motherfucker,’ he whispered, pulling the pin out of a grenade.
He counted down under his breath then stepped back, took aim and tossed the grenade up onto the roof. His aim was perfect, and the height, while being a stretch, was just within the range of his strong throwing arm. Whoever was up there had no time to react; Rudd had timed the grenade with flawless precision, and it bounced once on the floor and then detonated. Colonel Rudd cackled with savage glee as he saw a body catapulted off of the roof from the force of the blast.
The body – that of a squat, thick-limbed teenage girl – spun and twisted in the air for a few seconds before crashing onto the sloped ground in the undergrowth a few metres away. Rudd drew his gold-plated Magnum .44, taking aim at the spot where the body had landed. A few wisps of smoke were snaking up from the crushed shrubs and jungle plants; the girl had probably been dead before she had hit the ground. Still, Rudd kept his finger pressed against the trigger; he had learned, over many years of warfare, that often what seemed like certain death was actually not so certain, and to make assumptions about an enemy’s death was to zip yourself up in your own body-bag.
‘Come on lil’ chicken, come on … we done cut your head off, I think, but you might still run around some.’
Then he heard it; a low, agonised moan emanating from the smoking depression in the foliage. He saw the leaves shift slightly – against all odds, there was movement. Life.
‘Not for much longer, sweetheart,’ he whispered as a dark thrill rippled through him.
He squeezed the trigger of the .44, and it kicked with all the fury of a hog-tied mountain lion in his hands. The impact of the huge round punched the body of the girl forward in a tumbling roll, but she hadn’t even stopped moving before Colonel Rudd had blasted two more .44 slugs into her. The heavy lead did its job; no trace of life now remained in that broken, shrapnel-riddled little body.
Inside the city, Colonel
