African Dawn (6 page)

Makuti paused and sniffed the air. The stench was foul: acrid and burning. He had an instinctive fear of fire, inherited from his mother, and she, too, had caught the hated scent. In a valley behind the township was the humans' mountain of refuse.

Wooo-ooop. Wooo-ooop.

Makuti froze at the alien sound that echoed through the valley. His mother trotted away from both, and Makuti gladly followed. There was something terrifying about that sound.

Wooo-ooop. Wooo-ooop.

His mother crashed through a forest of mopane saplings, the new growth from a previous fire. In the valley she would have lived in thorn thickets and dense jessie bush, but these tiny trees with the butterfly-shaped leaves provided scant cover for such a big beast.

Wooo-ooop. Wooo-ooop.

The noise was following them. Makuti's ears were his best defence. Big and out of all proportion to his tiny body, it would be years until he grew into them, but with his naturally poor eyesight, and his hornless head, they were essential to his making it into adulthood alive.

He ran faster, to try to close the gap with his mother, but she only increased her pace. The mournful whooping changed to a high-pitched cackle. Whatever they were, they were laughing at his pathetic attempts to outrun them. Makuti glanced to the side and saw a dapple-coated phantom in the light of the moon, flashing between two tree trunks.

Wooo-ooop
, another taunted from behind him, while off to his other flank was a third laughing beast, silvery ropes of drool hanging from its bared fangs. They loped along, and when Makuti saw them his tiny heart beat faster.

He snorted in alarm, but his mother paid no attention. His nostrils were filled with the dust and old ash her great running feet stirred up. He heard them loping along on either side of him and caught their fetid smell on the wind that chased them uphill from the flooded valley. He tried to call another warning, but they were on him before he could draw a breath.

One spotted hyena, the youngest of the three, latched on to Makuti's stubby tail and yanked him off his rear legs. Another, the big matriarch of the clan, grabbed the little rhino's right ear in her jaws and tore his head to the ground. Makuti wailed in pain and terror as the third beast scurried to join the execution.

Makuti kicked out with his legs and shook his head as they rolled him over. His mother was a disappearing cloud of dust. She wouldn't know of his death until it was too late. Makuti squealed as the queen of the hyenas tore off the top of his ear and wolfed it down as the other one tried to fasten its jaws around his neck. Makuti tried to buck his way out of its reach, but the hyena merely shrieked with joy at his futile protests. The leader closed in again, to end the play and take her share of the meagre meal. Makuti dimly saw the third predator closing in on him before his head was yanked down again by teeth clamped to his good ear. He squealed in agony.

The ground shuddered to the rhythmic sound of great three-toed feet beating a war dance out on the dry earth as Makuti's mother returned for him. Makuti glanced up again in time to see the advancing hyena lifted off its feet and carried sideways in midair. Makuti's mother shook her head and tossed the gored hyena off her horn like a rag doll.

Makuti's mother bellowed and charged again, heading straight for the female who held her son pinned to the ground. The matriarch looked up and snarled, not surrendering her prize so easily. The second hyena, not so brave, tried to flee, but was stomped under Makuti's mother's foot.

The queen of the hyenas dragged little Makuti towards her, taunting his mother to come closer and risk trampling her offspring to death. Makuti's mother paused, tossed her head, then lowered her horn and charged, calling the hyena's bluff.

Makuti could do nothing. It seemed as if the queen might die defending her meal, but just before his mother's hooked horn impaled her, the hyena let go of his ear and bolted off into the night.

His mother paused, near breathless. She snorted and panted for a while, her nostrils flaring and head held high as she tested the air for fresh scent of an enemy. When she was satisfied the hyenas were no longer a threat, she turned and trotted away.

Makuti, bleeding from both ears and sore all over, followed her into the hills.

4

Rhodesia, 1969

T
he corporal looked down the long barrel of his FN rifle. He pulled the steel-plated butt deeper into his shoulder. There was no moon, and the river was the colour of his rifle, but its surface still shone enough to allow them to see the boats.

‘Now?’ whispered the private beside him in Shona, the language they shared in the section when they weren't talking to their white officers.

‘Hush, no. Wait until I tell you,’ the corporal replied.

‘Wait for it …’ said the white officer needlessly – the black African corporal knew his job well.

There were two rubber boats on the Zambezi River and the corporal could hear the soft splash of the oars in the water. A hippo grunted nearby, the sound echoing down the valley. The corporal sensed the private shifting nervously. He was new to the battalion, and new to the bush.

The terrorists in the boat called themselves freedom fighters; members of the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army, or ZIPRA. The corporal called himself a noncommissioned officer in the 1st Battalion of the Rhodesian African Rifles.

Ironically, culturally and linguistically the corporal probably had more in common with the men in the boat than he did with his comrades strung out in the bush on either side of him. He was an Ndebele, sometimes called the Matabele by the whites, a descendant of the Zulu
impies
that had ranged north and west into Rhodesia from South Africa in the previous century, slaughtering all who dared stand in their way. The ZIPRA men would all be from his home province, as that was where Joshua Nkomo recruited from. By contrast, the majority of the men in the RAR – the Rhodesian African Rifles – were drawn from the Karanga, one of the tribal groupings of the Shona, the traditional rivals of the corporal's people. The Karanga came from the area around Fort Victoria, but some of the men in the boats might very well be from Bulawayo, like the corporal. They might have even gone to school together or played together, but tonight they would try to kill each other.

‘If a firefighter fights fires,’ the white officer had said to him once, jokingly, ‘what does a freedom fighter fight?’

The corporal was smart enough to get the joke, but he had thought long and hard about it the night after, until he decided there was no point thinking about such things. He had a job, and he was good at it. These ZIPRA freedom fighters and their leaders in their political party, ZAPU, the Zimbabwe African People's Union, might talk loud about how they were going to take over Rhodesia, but militarily they were no match for the Rhodesian security forces.

The corporal came from a family who supported ZIPRA, but he had left home as a young man, ashamed by the fact his father had been imprisoned. His youthful decision to join the government's army had been nurtured by his instructors, superiors and peers. Also, he liked being on the winning side. He and the members of his section would win this fight, as they had won all their previous fights, and tomorrow they would eat and drink until they passed out. It was a warrior's life, and it was a good one. He looked through the circle on the flip-up rear sight and aimed at the centre of the black mass of men, who blended in with their boat. It was too far and dark to see their faces. He thought of them not as patriots, heroes or traitors – just as the enemy. Like the terrorists out there in the darkness the corporal also dreamed of a time when black men would be free to occupy any rank or any job in society, but he believed that promotion would come in time, and be awarded on merit, as was the case in the army.

‘Fire!’

The corporal squeezed the trigger. There was a splash as the first terr tumbled over the side of the boat, and screams of fear and panic erupted from the enemy. Round after round punctured skin and rubber. The first boat started to sink. He didn't look at the other craft – that was two section's target. The corporal saw an AK-47 raised high out of the water and a head break the surface. He fired again. The lightning of the muzzle flash obscured his target, but when he blinked and looked again there was no sign of man or rifle. He shifted his aim and found another target.

On either side of him was the crack of rifles firing and the occasional whiz of an incoming 7.62mm Russian-made bullet. Further down the line a Bren gun opened fire and sent up a neat line of silver water spouts on the river.

‘Forward!’ called the officer.

The corporal would have waited a while longer. They had a perfect field of fire, with any living enemy silhouetted against the sheen of the river. Why not stay put and watch for survivors struggling to shore? Any who floated under a boat, or lay in the shallows, would soon be food for the
ngwenya
, the countless crocodiles that lived in the waters of the lower Zambezi. But the officer was an inexperienced
mukiwa
and this was his first contact.

The corporal made a fist with his left hand and pushed his knuckles into the soft earth to raise himself up. He would follow the white man because that was his job. And he was good at it. ‘Come,’ he said to the private. ‘Now we finish the killing.’

Two shapeless lumps, the deflated remains of the boats, bobbed in the shallows. A man floated face up next to one of the rubber carcasses. ‘Check for wounded,’ the white officer said.

The corporal raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired a shot into the body.

‘Damn it, Corporal Ndlovu, I said check for wounded, not fire shots into every body.’

The corporal bobbed his head in acknowledgement, but there was no way he was going to wade out into that river to see if some terr was still breathing. As if to underscore his fear, the water rippled and the private stepped back from the edge of the Zambezi as the jagged ridges of a crocodile's tail momentarily broke the surface.

There was the smell of blood and innards and gunpowder in the air – the odour of war. This had been a one-sided affair so far and that was just fine by the corporal and his men. No one in war seeks a fair fight.

The private knelt beside a man who lay face down in the mud, checking his pulse. ‘Sir?’ he called to the white lieutenant. ‘This man, he is still alive.’

Corporal Ndlovu kept his rifle up to his shoulder and moved to another prone form and kicked it viciously in the ribs. The man was on his back, his eyes wide open. The corporal felt nothing for this man, who had died pursuing a foolish dream. The corporal heard a branch break in the thicket of jessie bush off to their right. He swung his rifle to check it closer, then the fire erupted.

The officer screamed and went down and the private dived behind the body of a terrorist. Ndlovu pumped two quick shots into the bush, in the direction of the muzzle flash. Another AK-47 started firing on automatic, tracer rounds rising high as the untrained marksman forgot to compensate for the weapon's tendency to climb. Ndlovu fired again, then got up.

He ran, dived and crawled to where his officer lay screaming. ‘Fire your rifle, boy!’ he yelled at the private, who was cowering behind the body of the wounded terrorist. Ndlovu rolled twice, leopard-crawled through the mud and took aim at the muzzle flashes again. He heard a yelp of pain from somewhere in the bush and one of the AKs stopped firing. The rest of the corporal's section had lagged behind when he, the officer and the private had moved forward to check the bodies in the river and on the bank. They were now exposed. Bullets from the living gunman's rifle
phutted
into the mud around him.

The corporal used his elbows and toes to inch backwards until he was within reach of the private. He grabbed the boy by the shoulder and shook him. ‘Fire your rifle, I need covering fire!’

The boy looked up, but then his head snapped backwards as a 7.62mm copper-jacketed round drilled a hole through his forehead. The corporal let go of him, slung his own rifle around his neck and rose to his knees. Bullets whizzed by him as he hefted the bleeding, screaming white man over his shoulder. Corporal Ndlovu grunted and pushed himself to his feet and started running along the edge of the Zambezi.

The AK-47 fire followed him, although by now the rest of the section were zeroing in on the lone terrorist. The Bren gun chattered and the FNs slammed away at the jessie bush. Ndlovu's bush hat fell off as he ran. He could see the flashes of his comrades' weapons and heard one of them cheering him on. He would make it.

The hit was like a steel poker being driven through the muscles of his right thigh. He dropped to the ground and the screaming officer's weight drove him hard into the dirt. He looked down at his leg and saw the blood, but he felt no pain. Bullets landed around him. It seemed the gunman was on a mission to kill him, and him alone. Ndlovu grabbed the yoke of the white man's canvas webbing strap and started dragging him through the blood-soaked dirt.

Ndlovu started to feel dizzy as the shock took hold of his body, and he pitched face-forward into the ground. He raised himself on one arm and reached for the officer, but there were other hands around him now, and the gunfire had stopped.

*

The Zambezi reminded Air Lieutenant George Bryant of the dully shining grey-green skin of a mamba. His Alouette helicopter tracked down the course of the river that divided Rhodesia from Zambia.

‘Cyclone seven, cyclone seven, I can hear your approach, over,’ an African voice said over the radio, addressing George by the generic call sign for a 7 Squadron helicopter.

George acknowledged the call. He knew the RAR stick's white officer had been wounded so he presumed the man calling the shots was an NCO.

‘You are close, I am going to fire a flare, over,’ the African soldier said.

George closed one eye as the red firework shot up into the sky and burst open. The incendiary floated slowly towards earth under its parachute as the valley was lit in eerie hues of boiling blood.

George saw the clearing by the river's edge and the flickering forms of men kneeling around others lying in the dirt. George slowed the Alouette and started to bring her in.

‘Tracer! Incoming fire,’ yelled Goulds, his technician, from the back.

George looked hard right and saw the glowing green blobs arcing at what seemed a ridiculously slow pace straight for him. George heaved on the controls and pulled the helicopter away from the landing zone. The deadly fireflies chased him.

‘FAF two, alpha one, we're taking small arms fire, over,’ George said into his radio mouthpiece, using his squadron call sign. He kept his voice as calm as he could, despite his racing heart.

‘Roger, alpha one,’ said the lieutenant back at Kariba Airport, whose military call sign was Forward Air Field – FAF – two. ‘Road uplift is en route to the patrol, return to base, over.’

‘Roger, FAF two,’ George said. He was relieved that someone else was making the decision. Since the Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, had unilaterally declared independence from Britain four years earlier, international sanctions had begun to bite. The Rhodesian Air Force's few helicopters were too valuable to put at unnecessary risk. Night flying was tricky enough, but when people were shooting at you it was downright terrifying. ‘How far away is the road party, over?’

‘Wait one, alpha one.’ George circled while he waited for the reply. The lieutenant eventually came back and said the convoy was about an hour away from the patrol. George relayed the message to the man on the ground and asked him if he could hang on that long.

‘Negative, cyclone seven,’ the man replied, ‘one of these men will die before then, over.’

George passed the sergeant's concerns back to Kariba tower.

‘What's the situation on the ground, alpha one, over?’

‘I still see plenty of muzzle flashes,’ said Goulds over the intercom.

George saw the gunfire on the ground. He knew the lieutenant was right and that he should return to base. Instead, he called FAF two and told them the situation was critical and he was going in to complete the hot extraction of the wounded men.

‘Jesus,’ said Goulds, but George ignored him.

He brought the Alouette around, and the clatter of the rotors attracted the menacing green comets again. He could see muzzle flashes winking on either side as the RAR soldiers and the terrs slugged it out.

George flared the nose of the Alouette and Goulds yelled out ‘Taking hits!’ as something clanged on the metal skin of the tail boom.

As the wheels of the Alouette touched down, RAR troopers appeared on either side of the cockpit. Goulds was dragging on one end of a poncho and helping the soldiers slide an ashen-faced man across the floor of the cargo area. Goulds took an IV bottle and hooked it to a webbing strap at the rear bulkhead. A burly African sergeant with a radio on his back opened the co-pilot's door and helped a young African man with a blood-soaked bandaged leg up into the vacant seat. The man's uniform sleeve bore the two stripes of a corporal. George looked over his shoulder and saw a third man, shrouded in a green waterproof poncho, being slid into the rear compartment.

‘All aboard, skip,’ Goulds said into the intercom.

The sergeant raised his hand in a salute as George started lifting off, then the big man was gone, lost in the dust of the Zambezi valley. George heard gunfire and looked around. Goulds had his personal weapon, an Israeli Uzi submachine gun, pointed out the door and was firing back at the tracer that followed them up into the sky and back towards Kariba.

George turned to the soldier beside him, whose face was illuminated by the ghostly green of the instrument panel. ‘Not long now, Corporal,’ he yelled over the engine noise. ‘We'll have you in hospital in …’

The man's eyes must have reflected George's. They stared at each other for long seconds before George had to turn back to the gauges in front of him. When he looked over again, the man was smiling, despite his obvious pain and weakness from blood loss. George held the stick between his knees for a moment and reached across to clasp the hand of his boyhood friend, Winston Ngwenya.

*

The next morning, after George had been carpeted by the squadron commander for endangering a valuable aircraft, he signed out an open-topped Land Rover and drove from the airport to Kariba Hospital.