Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur (книга бесплатный формат .TXT) 📗

"Four fifty-three." Craig glanced away from the bright tunnel of the headlights and for the first time he could see the silhouette of the tree-tops against the lightening sky. At the top of the slope he pulled into the verge and switched on the radio set. He searched the channels slowly, listening for military traffic, but there was only the buzz of static.

"If they are in range, they are keeping mum." He switched off the set and pulled out into the track again, mary el ling at the swiftness of the African dawn. Below them in the valley, the landscape was emerging out of the fleeing night, the great, dark, forested plain leading from the foot of the hills down to the mission station stretched below them.

"Ten miles," said Tungata.

"Another half an hour," Craig replied and sent the Toyota bellowing down the last hills. Before they reached the bottom, it was light enough for him to switch off the headlights. "No point drawing attention to ourselves." Suddenly he sat up straighter, alarmed by the change in the engine note of the truck; it was harsher and louder.

"Oh God, not that, not now," he whispered, and then realized that he was hearing the sound not of the Toyota, but of another motor outside the cab. It was growing louder, closer, more compelling. He rolled down the side window and stuck his head out into the cool rush of the wind.

Sally-Anne's Cessna was roaring down from behind them, only fifty feet above the road, sparkling blue and silver in the first rays of the sun.

Craig let out a whoop of joy and waved wildly.

Swiftly the Cessna overhauled them and drew level.

Sally-Anne's beloved face looked down at him from the cockpit. She had a pink scarf around her head, and those thick dark eyebrows framed her eyes. She was laughing, as she recognized Craig, and she waved and mouthed at him, "Go for id" Then she was roaring past, climbing, waggling the wings of the Cessna from side to side, heading for the airstrip.

They burst out of the forest, racing through the maize fields that surrounded the tiny mission village. The tin roofs of the church and the schoolhouse glittered in the sunrise. From the huts beside the road, a few sleepy villagers, yawning and scratching, came out to watch them pass through.

Craig slowed the truck, and Sarah shouted through the window, "Soldiers coming! Big trouble! Warn everybody!

Go into the bush! Hide!" Craig had not thought that far ahead. The retaliation of the Third Brigade on the local population would be horrific. He accelerated through the village and the airstrip was a kilometer ai head the tattered windsock undulating on its pole at the far end. The Cessna was circling low overhead. Craig saw Sally-Anne lower her undercarriage and start her turn onto final approach for the landing.

"Look!" said Tungata harshly, and another aircraft came roaring in, from their 1it-hand side, low and fast, another much larger, twin-$ngined machine. Craig recognized it immediately.

It was an old Dakota transport, a veteran of the desert war in north Africa, and the bush war in Rhodesia. It was sprayed with non-reflective anti-missile grey paint and it was now decorated with the Zimbabwe Air Force round els The main hatch just abaft the wing root was open, and there were men poised in the opening. They were dressed in camouflage jump smocks and helmets. The bulky bundles of their parachutes dangled below their buttocks. Two of them were in the hatchway, but others crowded up close behind them.

"Paras!" shouted Craig, and the Dakota banked steeply towards them and passed them so low that the blast from the propellers churned the tops of the standing maize in the field beside them. As the aircraft flashed past them, Craig and Tungata simultaneously recognized one of the men in the hatchway.

"Fungabera!" Tungata snapped. "It's him! As he said it, Tungata threw open the door at his side and clambered up the outside of the cab to reach the ring mounted machine-gun. Despite his size and weakness, he was so quick that he reached the gun and swung it and got off a long burst before the Dakota was out of range. Tracer flew under the Dakota's port wing, close enough to alarm the pilot, and make him throw the aircraft into a tight climbing turn.

"They are climbing up to drop altitude!" Craig shouted.

Surely Fungabera had seen and recognized the blue and silver Cessna. He would have realized that it was the escape plane and that the truck was heading for a rendezvous at the airstrip. His paratroopers could be more swiftly deployed by dropping, than by landing the Dakota. He was going to drop in and seize the airstrip with his par as before the Cessna could take off again. A thousand feet was safe drop altitude, but these were crack troopers. The Dakota levelled out on its drop run five hundred feet, Craig estimated, and they were going to make the drop down the length of the airstrip.

The Cessna was just coming in over the fence at the far end of the strip. As Craig glanced back at her Sally-Anne touched down and then taxied at speed down the strip towards the racing Toyota.

Above the airstrip the tiny figure of a man fell clear of the lumbering Dakota and the green silk parachute flared open almost instantly. He was followed in rapid succession by a string of other par as and the sky was filled with a forest of sinister mushrooms, poisonous green and swaying gently in the light morning breeze, but sinking towards the parched brown turf of the airstrip.

The Cessna reached the end of the strip and swung around sharply in a 180-degree turn. Only then did Craig realize that Sally-Anne had been far-seeing enough to assess the danger and urgency, and that she had landed with the wind behind her, accepting the hazard of the r approach speed and the longer roll-out in order to be able immediately to turn back into the wind for her take-off which would be with a full load, and under attack from the par as

On the cab, Tungata was firing up into the sky, measured controlled bursts, hoping more to intimidate the descending par as than to inflict casualties. A man dangling on swinging parachute-shrouds makes an almost impossible target.

Sally-Anne was leaning out of the open cockpit door, shouting and waving-them on, already she was running up her engine to full power, holding the Cessna on the wheel brakes. They bumped over the verge of the runway and Craig swung the Toyota into a brake-squealing skid, parking so as to screen and protect the aircraft and themselves while they Tade the transfer.