Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur (книга бесплатный формат .TXT) 📗
"Read what is in here." Craig proffered the attache case.
"And then you tell me."
"Wait here, please." Morgan accepted the case.
Jonas and Aaron led the two captives towards the aircraft and the Americans came forward to receive them.
Peter Fungabera was still bound at the wrists with the nylon straps from the helicopter. He seemed to have shrunk in physical stature, he was no longer an impressive debonair figure. The cloak of defeat weighed him down.
His skin had a grey tone and he did not lift his eyes as he came level with Tungata Zebiwe.
It was Tungata who reached out and seized his jaw in one hand, pressing his fingers into his cheeks, forcing his mouth open and twisting his head up so he could look into his face. For long seconds he stared into Peter Fungabera's eyes, and then contemptuously he pushed him away, so that Peter staggered and might have fallen had not one of the Americans steadied him.
"At the bottom of nearly every bully and tyrant lurks a coward," Tungata said in that deep rumbling voice. "You did right when you stopped me killing him, Pupho, a clean drop from the sky is too good for the likes of him. He goes now to a juster fate. Take him out of my sight, for he sickens me to the gut." Peter Fungabera and the Russian were led into the interior of the Lockhee4'and Craig and his party settled down to wait. It wasoa long wait. They sat in the shade thrown by the Land-Rover and chatted in a desultory distracted fashion, breaking off every now and then as the squawk and warble from the radio in the Lockheed carried to where they sat.
"They're talking to Washington," Craig guessed, "via satellite." It was after ten o'clock before Morgan came down the ramp again, accompanied by one of his colleagues.
IT his is Colonel Smith," he told them and the way he said it, he didn't mean to be taken literally. "We have appraised the items you have delivered to us, and we conclude, at this stage, anyway, that they are genuine."
"That's very generous of you," Craig deadpanned.
"Minister Tungata Zebiwe, we would be very grateful if you could spare us a deal of your valuable time. There are persons in Washington very anxious to talk to you. It will be to our mutual benefit, I assure you."
"I would like this young lady to accompany me. "Tungata indicated Sarah.
"Yes, of course." Morgan turned to Craig and Sally, Anne. "In your case it's not an invitation, it's an order you're coming with us." "What about the helicopter, and the Land-Rover?" Craig asked.
"Don't worry about them. Arrangements will be made to have them returned to their rightful owners." hree weeks later, at the United Nations building, a file was handed to the head of the Zimbabwe delegation. It contained excerpts from the three green files, and transcripts of the debriefing of General Peter Fungabera by persons unnamed. The file was rushed to Harare, and as a direct result an urgent request was made by the Zimbabwe government for the repatriation of General Fungabera. Two senior inspectors of the Zimbabwe police Special Branch flew to New York to escort the general home.
When the Pan Am flight landed at Harare, General Fungabera descended the boarding staircase from the firstclass section of the Boeing handcuffed to one of the police inspectors. There was a closed van waiting on the tarmac.
There was no media coverage of his return.
He was driven directly to Harare central prison, where sixteen days later he died in one of the interrogation cells.
His face, when his corpse was spirited out of the rear entrance to the main prison block, was so altered as to be unrecognizable.
A little after midnight that same night, a ministerial black Mercedes went off the road at speed on a lonely stretch of country road outside the city and burst into flames. There was one occupant. By his dental bridgework, the charred body was identified as that of General Peter Fungabera, and five days later he was buried wid-i full military honours in "Heroes" Acre', the cemetery for the patriots of the Chimurenga on the hills overlooking Harare.
n Christmas Day at ten o'clock in the morning, Colonel Bukharin left his escort of American military police at the allied guardhouse at Checkpoint Charlie and set out across the few hundred yards to the East Berlin side of the frontier.
Bukharin wore an American military-issue greatcoat over his safari clothes, and a knitted fisherman's cap on his bald head.
Halfway across, he passed a middle-aged man in a cheap suit coming in the opposite direction. The man might once have been plump, for his skin seemed too large for his skull and it had the grey, lifeless tone of long captivity.
They glanced at each other in curiously as they passed.
"A life for a life," thought Bukharin, and suddenly he felt very tired. He walked at last with an old man's short hobbled gait over the icy tarmac.
There was a black sedan waiting for him beyond the frontier buildings. There were two men in the back seat F
and one of them climbed out as Bukharin approached. He wore a long civilian raincoat and a wide-brimmed hat in the style much favoured by the KGB'Bukharin?" he asked. His tone was neutral but his eyes were cold and relentless.
When Bukharin nodded, he jerked his head curtly.
Bukharin slid into the rear seat and the man followed him in and slammed the door. The interior was overheated and smelled of garlic, last night's vodka, and unwashed socks.
The sedan pulled away and Bukharin lay back and closed his eyes. It was going to be bad, he thought, it might even be worse than he had anticipated.
enry Pickering hosted the luncheon in the private dining suite of the World Bank overlooking Central Park.
