Elephant Song - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн бесплатно полностью без .TXT) 📗
and over-excited, behaving like green troops after their first taste of fire. Some of them were cheering and firing at the distant figures of Taffari and his guards. They were well out of range, and it was a dangerous waste of their precious stocks of ammunition.
There was no point in trying to get them under control. He had to attack before they lost their wild spirits, and before Taffari reached the MOMU and organised its defence. Come on! Daniel shouted. Omeru!
"The Sun has Risen. He led them out on to the open ground, and they followed him in a rabble, cheering wildly. Omeru! they yelled.
Daniel had to keep the momentum going.
The mud was ankle-deep in places, knee-deep in others.
They passed the abandoned Landrovers. Ahead of them Daniel saw Taffari reach the MOMU and haul himself up one of the steel boarding ladders. As they ploughed on through the mud, their progress slowed to a plodding walk.
Taffari was organising his men as they came aboard the MOMU. They were taking cover behind the massive steel machinery. Bullets started slashing amongst the attackers, plugging into the mud, cracking around their heads. The man beside Daniel was hit. He went down face first in the mud.
The attack slowed, bogging down in the mud. The Hita on the MOMU were lodging in, hidden behind steel bulkheads.
They were shooting accurately, and more of Daniel's men were falling.
The attack stalled, some of the Uhali broke and started to stumble back towards the forest. Others crouched behind the stranded Landrovers. They were not soldiers. They were clerks and truck-drivers and university students faced by crack paratroopers in an impregnable steel fortress. Daniel could not blame them for breaking, even though the revolution was dying in the mud with them.
He could not go on alone. Already the Hita had singled him out.
Their fire was concentrating on him. He stumbled back to the nearest Landrover and crouched behind its chassis.
He saw the crew of the MOMU desert their stations and huddle helplessly on the lower platform. One of the Hita paratroopers gestured to them imperiously and with obvious relief they swarmed down the steel ladder and dropped into the mud like sailors abandoning a sinking ocean liner.
The engine of the MOMU was still running. The excavators were chewing into the earth, but now with no direction the gigantic rig was wandering out of its formation. The crews of the other rigs in the line saw what was happening and they too abandoned their posts and streamed overboard, trying to escape the bursts of gunfire that rattled and clanged against the steel plating.
It was a stand-off. Taffari's men had command of the MOMU and Daniel's commando were stalled in the mud unable to advance or retreat.
He tried to think of some way to break the impasse. He could not expect his shattered and demoralised survivors to mount another charge.
Taffari had fifteen or twenty men up there, more than enough to hold them off.
At that moment he became aware of another eerie sound, like the mewling of seagulls or the cry of lost souls. He looked back and at first saw nothing. Then something moved at the edge of the forest. At first he could not make it out. It was not human, surely?
Then he saw other movement. The forest was coming alive.
Thousands of strange creatures, as numerous as insects, like a column of safari ants on the march. They were red in their myriads, and the wild plaintive cry rose louder and more urgently from them as they swarmed out of the forest into the open.
Suddenly he realised what he was seeing. The gates of the labour camps were open. The guards had been overwhelmed and the Uhali slaves had risen out of the mud. They were red with it, coated with it, naked as corpses exhumed from the grave, starved to stick-like emaciation.
They swarmed forward in their legions, in their thousands, women and men and children, sexless in their coating of mud, only their white and angry eyes glaring in the muddy red masks of their faces. Omeru! they cried, and the sound was like a stormy sea on a rocky headland.
The fire of the Hita paratroopers was blanketed by the roar of their voices. The bullets of the AK 47 assault rifles made no impression on the densely packed ranks, where one man fell a dozen more swarmed forward to replace him. On the MOMU fortress the Hita guards were running out of ammunition. Even at this distance Daniel could sense their panic. They threw aside their empty rifles, the barrels hot as though from the furnace.
Unarmed they climbed the steel ladders to the highest platform of the ungainly yellow rig. Helplessly they stood at the railing and watched the naked red horde reach the machine and climb up towards them.
Daniel recognized Ephrem Taffari amongst the Hita on the upper deck.
He was trying to speak to the slaves, spreading his arms in an oratorical gesture, trying to reason with them. In the end, when the front rank was almost upon him Taffari drew his pistol and fired down into them. He kept firing as they engulfed him.
For a time Daniel lost him in the struggling red mass of naked humanity.
He was like a fly absorbed by a gigantic jelly fish. Then he saw Taffari again, lifted high above the heads of the mob by hundreds of upraised arms. They passed him forward struggling wildly.
Then they hurled him from the top of the MOMU.
Ephrem Taffari turned in the air, ungainly as a bird trying to fly with a broken wing. He dropped seventy feet, into the spinning- silver blades of the excavator head. The blades sucked him in and in a single instant chopped him to a paste so fine that his blood did not leave so much as a stain on the wet earth.
Daniel stood up slowly.
On the MOMU they were killing the Hita paratroopers, tearing them to pieces with their bare hands, swarming over them screaming and exulting.
Daniel turned away. He started back -towards where he had left Kelly.
His progress was slow. Men of the commando clustered around him, shaking his hand, thumping him on the back, laughing and shouting and singing.
There was still some desultory small-arms fire in the forest.
The administrative offices were on fire. Flames leapt high, crackling and pouring out black smoke. A roof collapsed.
People were trapped in there, burning to death. The mob raged everywhere, chasing the guards and officials and engineers and clerks of the company, black and Taiwanese, anybody connected with the hated oppressor. They caught them and killed them, kicking and beating them as they writhed on the earth, hacking at them with spades or machetes, throwing their dismembered bodies into the flames. It was savage. It was Africa.
Daniel turned away from the horror. One man could not stop the orgy.
They had suffered too long; their hatred was too fierce. He left the track and went into the forest to find Kelly.
He had not gone a hundred yards before he saw a small figure running towards him through the trees. Sepoo! he called, and the pygmy darted to his side and seized his arm and shook it. Kara-Ki! he screeched incoherently, there was a gash in his scalp and he was bleeding heavily.
Where is she? Daniel demanded.
What has happened to her? Kara-Ki! He has taken her. He has taken her into the forest.
