Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur (книга бесплатный формат .TXT) 📗
He thought about once being a millionaire, and the millions he now owed. From a man of substance he had been reduced in a single stroke to something worse than a pauper. He did not even own the bundle of paper in the British Airways bag. The manuscript would be forfeit, his creditors would take that also. He had nothing, nothing except this woman and his rage.
Then the image of General Peter Fungabera's face filled his imagination smooth as hot chocolate, handsome as mortal sin, as powerful and as evil as Lucifer and his rage grew within him, until it threatened to consume him.
He sat through the long night without sleep, hating with all the strength of his being. Every hour he went back to where Sally-Anne slept and squatted beside her. Once he adjusted the ground sheet over her, another time he touched the lump on her forehead lightly with his fingertips and she whimpered in her sleep, then he went back to his vigil.
Once he saw dark shapes out on the pan, and his stomach turned over queasily, but when he put Timon's binoculars on them, he saw they were pale-coloured gemsbok, huge desert gazelle, large as horses, the diamond-patterned face masks that gave them their name showing c or in the starlight. They passed silently up, wind of where he sat and merged into the night.
Orion hunted down the sky and faded at dawn's first glimmering. It was time to go on, but he lingered, reluctant to put Sally-Anne to the terrors and the trials that day wou Id bring, giving her just those last few minutes of oblivion.
Then he saw them and his guts and his loins filled with the molten lead of despair. They were still far out across the pan, a darkness too large to be one of the desert animals, a darkness that moved steadily towards him. The scrub brush that he had dragged must have been effective to delay them so long. But once he had abandoned it, they would have come on swiftly down the deeply trodden spoor.
Then his despair changed shape. If it had to come, it might as well be now, he thought, this was as good a place as any to make their last stand. The Shana must come across the open pan, he he had the slight advantage afforded by the batbk and the sparse cover of knee-high scrub, but little time in which to exploit them.
He ran back to where he had left his rucksack, keeping doubled over so as to show no silhouette against the lightening sky. He stuffed the five grenades down the front of his shirt, snatched up the roll of wire and the side cutters, and hurried back to the edge of the bank.
He peered out at the advancing patrol. They were in single file because the pan was so open, but he guessed they r would spread out into a skirmishing line as soon as they reached the bank, adopting the classic arrowhead running formation that would give them overlapping cover, and prevent them being enfiladed by ambush.
Craig began to place his fragmentation grenades on that assumption. He sited them along the top of the bank, that slight elevation would spread the blast out a little more.
He wired each grenade securely to the stem of a bush, twenty paces apart, and then used a haywire twist to secure a single strand to each of the split pins that held down the ands back one at a time firing-handles. "Then he led the str ere Sally-Anne slept and secured them to to A the flap of his rucksack.
He was down on his knees now, for the light was coming up strongly and the patrol was closer each minute.
He readied the fifth and last grenade, and this time wriggled back on his belly. The strands of wire were spread out fanlike from where he lay behind the screen of cut brush. He checked the load of the AK 47 and placed the spare magazines at his right hand.
it was time to wake her. He kissed her softly on the lips, and she wrinkled her nose and made little mewing sounds, then she opened her eyes and love dawned green in them for an instant, to be replaced by dismay as she remembered their circumstances. She started to sit up, but he held her down with an arm over her chest.
"They are here, "he warned her. "I'm going to fight." She nodded.
"Have you got Timon's pistol?" She nodded again, groping for it in the waistband of her jeans.
"You do know how to use it?"
"Yes."
"Keep one bullet for the end." She stared at him.
"Promise you won't hesitate."
"I promise, "she whispered.
He lifted his head slowly. The patrol was four hundred yards out from the edge of the pan, and as he had guessed, they were already spreading into the arrowhead hunting formation.
As they separated from a single amorphous blot in the poor light, he was able to count them. Five! His spirits dropped again sharply. Timon had not done as well as he had hoped for. He had culled out only three of the original pursuit. Five was too many for Craig. Even with all the advantages of surprise and concealment, it was just too many.
"Keep your face down," he whispered. "It can shine likea mirror." Obediently she dropped it into the crook of her arm. He pulled up his shirt to cover his own mouth and nose, and watched them come on.
Oh God, they are good, he thought. Look at them move! They have been going all night, and they are still as sharp and wary as lynx. The point was a tall Shana who moved likea reed in the wind. He carried his AK 47 low on the right hip, anct he was charged with a deadly intensity of concentration. Once the light of coming dawn caught his eyes and they flashed like distant cannon-fire in the blackness of his face. Craig recognized him as the main man.
His drags, two on each side of him, were sombre, stocky figures, full of dark men ate and yet subservient to the man who led. They reactM like puppets to the hand-signals that the tall Shana gave them. "They came on silently towards the edge of the pan, and Craig arranged the wires across the palm of his left hand and ran them out between his fingers.
Fifty paces from the bank the Shana stopped them with a cut-out signal, and the line froze. The Shana's head turned slowly from side to side as he surveyed the low bank and the scrub beyond it. He took five paces forward, stepping lightly, and stopped again. His head turned once more, back and forth and then back again. He had seen something. Craig instinctively held his breath as the seconds drew out.
