Elephant Song - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн бесплатно полностью без .TXT) 📗

Johnny and Mavis had named their only son after him, Daniel Robert Nzou.

After two daughters, Mavis had finally given birth to a son and both parents had been overjoyed.

Daniel Nzou had been four years old.  He lay on his back.  His eyes were open but sightlessly staring into the beam of the torch.

They had killed him in the old barbaric African way, in the same way that Chaka's and Mzilikazi's impis had dealt with the male children of a vanquished tribe.  They had seized little Daniel by the ankles and swung him head-first against the wall, crushing his skull and beating his brains out against the brickwork.

His splattering blood had daubed that crude mural on the white surface.

Daniel stooped over the little boy.  Despite the deformation of the crushed skull his resemblance to his father was still marked.  Tears prickled the rims of Daniel's eyelids and he stood up slowly and turned to the bedroom door.

It stood half open but Daniel dreaded pushing it all the way.

He had to force himself to do it.  The hinges of the door whined softly as it swung open.

For a moment Daniel stared down the beam of the Maglite as he let it play around the bedroom and then he reeled back into the passageway and leaned against the wall, gagging and gasping for breath.

He had witnessed scenes such as these during the days of the bush war, but the years had eroded his conditioning and softened the shell that he had built up to protect himself.  He was no longer able to look dispassionately on the atrocity that man is able to perpetrate on his fellows.

Johnny's daughters were older than their brother.  Miriam was-ten and Suzie almost eight.  They lay naked and spreadeagled on the floor at the foot of the bed.  They had both been raped repeatedly.  Their immature genitalia were a torn and bloody mush.

Mavis was on the bed.  They had not bothered to strip her entirely, but had merely pushed her skirts up around her waist.

Her arms were pulled up above her head and tied by the wrists to the wooden headboard.  The two little girls must have died of shock and loss of blood during the prolonged assault upon them.  Mavis had probably survived until they were finished with her, then they had put a bullet through her head.

Daniel forced himself to enter the room.  He found where Mavis kept her extra bed-linen in one of the built-in cupboards and covered each of the corpses with a sheet.  He could not bring himself to touch any of the girls, not even to close their wide staring eyes in which the horror and the terror was still deeply imprinted.

Sweet Mother of God, Jock whispered from the doorway.  Whoever did this isn't human.  They must be ravaging bloody beasts.  Daniel backed out of the bedroom and closed the door.  He covered Daniel Nzou's tiny body.

Have you found Johnny?  he asked Jock.  His voice was hoarse and his throat felt rough and abraded with horror and grief.  No.  Jock shook his head, then turned and fled down the passage.  He blundered out across the verandah and into the rain.

Daniel heard him retching and vomiting in the flowerbed below the step.

The sound of the other man's distress served to steady Daniel.  He fought back his own repugnance and anger and sorrow and brought his emotions back under control.  Johnny, he told himself.  Got to find Johnny-He went swiftly through the other two bedrooms and the rest of the house.  There was no sign of his friend, and he allowed himself the first faint hope.

He might have got away, he told himself.  He might have made it into the bush.  It was a relief to get out of that charnel house.  Daniel stood in the darkness and lifted his face to the rain.  He opened his mouth and let it wash the bitter bile taste from his tongue and the back of his throat.

Then he turned the torch-beam on to his feet and saw the clotted blood dissolve from his shoes in a pink stain.  He scrubbed the soles in the gravel of the driveway to clean them and then shouted to Jock Come on, we have to find Johnny!

In the Toyota he drove down the back of the hill to the domestic compound that housed the camp servants.  The compound was still enclosed with an earthen embankment and barbed-wire fence from the war days.

However the fence was in a ruinous state and the gate was missing.

They drove through the gateway and the smell of smoke was strong.  As the headlights caught them Daniel saw that the row of servants-cottages was burnt out.  The roofs had collapsed and the windows were empty.

The rain had quenched the flames, although a few tendrils of smoke still drifted like pale wraiths in the lights.

The ground around the huts was sown with dozens of tiny objects which caught the headlights and sparkled like diamond chips.  Daniel knew what they were, but he stepped down from the truck and picked one of them out of the mud.  It was a shiny brass cartridge case.  He held it to the light and inspected the familiar Cyrillic head stamp in the brass.  7. 62

mm, of East European manufacture, it was the calibre of the ubiquitous AK 47 assault rifle, staple of violence and revolution throughout Africa and the entire world.

The gang had shot up the compound, but had left no corpses.  Daniel guessed that they had thrown the dead into the cottages before torching-them.  The breeze shifted towards him so that he caught the full stench of the burned huts and had his suspicions confirmed.

Underlying the smell of smoke was the odour of scorched flesh and hair and bone.

He spat out the taste of ir and walked down between the huts.

Johnny!  he shouted into the night.  Johnny, are you there?  But the only sound was the creak and pop of the doused flames and the sough of the breeze in the mango trees that brought the raindrops pattering down from the branches.

He flicked the torch left and right as he passed between the huts, until he saw the body of a man lying in the open.  Johnny" he shouted, and ran to him and fell on his knees beside him.

The body was horribly burned, the khaki Parks uniform burned half away, and the skin and flesh sloughing off the exposed torso and the side of the face.  The man had obviously dragged himself out of the burning hut into which they had thrown him, but he was not Johnny Nzou.

He was one of the junior rangers.

Daniel jumped up and hurried back to the track.

Did you find him?  Jock asked, and Daniel shook his head.  Christ, they've murdered everybody in the camp.  Why would they do that?

Witnesses" Daniel started the truck.  They wiped out all the witnesses.

Why?  What do they want?  It doesn't make sense.  The ivory.  That's what they were after.  But they burned down the warehouse!  After they cleaned it out.  He swung the Toyota back on to the track and raced up the hill.

Who were they, Danny?  Who did this?  How the hell do I know?

Shifta?  Bandits?  Poachers?  Don't ask stupid questions.  Daniel's anger was only just beginning.  Up until now he had been numbed by the shock and the horror.  He drove back past the dark bungalow on the hill and then down again to the main camp.

The warden's office was still standing intact; although when Daniel played the beam of the torch over the thatched roof he saw the blackened area on which someone had thrown a burning torch.  Well-laid thatch does not burn readily, however, and the flames had not caught fairly or perhaps had been extinguished by the rain before they could take hold.

The rain stopped with the suddenness which is characteristic of the African elements.  One minute it was falling in a furious cascade that limited the range of the headlights to fifty yards, and the next it was over.  Only the trees still dripped, but overhead the first stars pricked through the dispersing thunder clouds that were being carried away on the rising breeze.