The Angels Weep (76 page)

‘Oh no!’ Janine shook her head laughingly.
‘We are staying until the twenty-sixth.’

‘Tomorrow is the twenty-sixth, Mrs
Ballantyne.’

T
he head porter
had all their luggage piled at the hotel entrance and Roland was
settling their bill. Janine waited for him under the portico.
Suddenly she started as she recognized the battered old open
Land-Rover that swung in through the gates, and parked in one of
the open slots at the end of the lot.

Her first reaction, as she watched the familiar gawky figure
untangle his long legs and flick the hair out of his eyes as he
climbed out, was quick anger.

‘He’s come on purpose,’ she thought.
‘Just to try and spoil it all.’

Craig came ambling towards her with his hands thrust into his
pockets, but when he was less than a dozen paces from where she
stood, he recognized her and his confusion was obviously
unfeigned.

‘Jan,’ he blushed furiously. ‘Oh my God, I
didn’t know you’d be here.’

She felt her anger recede. ‘Hello, Craig dear. No, it
was a secret, until now.’

‘I’m so dreadfully sorry—’

‘Don’t be, we are leaving anyway.’

‘Sonny boy,’ Roland came out of the doorway behind
Janine and went to throw a brotherly arm around Craig’s
shoulders. ‘You are ahead of time. How are you?’

‘You knew I was coming?’ Craig looked even more
confused.

‘I knew,’ Roland admitted, ‘but not so soon.
You were supposed to report on the twenty-eighth.’

‘George gave me a couple of days.’ Since that
first startled exchange, Craig had not looked at Janine again.
‘I thought I would spend them here.’

‘Good boy, you will need the rest. You and I are going
to be doing a bit of work together. I tell you what, Sonny,
let’s have a quick drink. I’ll explain it to you
– some of it anyway.’

‘Oh, darling,’ Janine cut in swiftly, ‘we
don’t have time. I’ll miss the flight.’ She
could not bear the hurt and confusion in Craig’s eyes
another moment.

‘Damn it, I suppose you are right.’ Roland checked
his watch. ‘It will have to keep until I see you the day
after tomorrow, Sonny,’ and at that moment the
airways’ bus drove into the hotel driveway. Roland and
Janine were the only passengers in the mini-bus out to the
airport.

‘Darling, when will I see you again?’

‘Look, I can’t say for sure, Bugsy, that depends
on so many things.’

‘Will you telephone me or write even?’

‘You know I can’t.’

‘I know, but I will be at the flat, just in
case.’

‘I wish you would go out to live at Queen’s Lynn
– that’s where you belong now.’

‘My job—’

‘The hell with your job. Ballantyne wives don’t
work.’

‘Well, see here, Colonel, sir, this Ballantyne wife is
going on working until—’

‘Until?’ he asked.

‘Until you give me something better to do.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like a baby.’

‘Is that a challenge?’

‘Oh please, Colonel, sir, do take it as one.’

At the airport there was a cheerfully rowdy young crowd, all
the men in uniform, come to see the aircraft leave. Most of them
knew Roland and they plied him and Janine with drinks. It made
the last minutes more bearable. Then suddenly they were standing
at the gate and the air hostess was calling for boarding.

‘I shall miss you so,’ Janine whispered. ‘I
shall pray for you.’

He kissed her and held her so fiercely that she almost lost
her breath.

‘I love you,’ Roland said.

‘You never said that before.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Not to anybody before.
Now, go, woman – before I do something stupid.’

She was the last in the straggling line of passengers that
climbed the boarding-ladder into the elderly Viscount aircraft
parked on the hard stand. She wore a white blouse with a
daffodil-yellow skirt and flat sandals. There was a matching
yellow scarf around her hair and a sling-bag over her shoulder.
In the doorway of the aircraft at the top of the boarding-ladder,
she looked back, shading her eyes as she searched for Roland, and
when she found him she smiled and waved and then stepped through
the fuselage door. The door closed and the boarding-ladder
wheeled away. The Rolls-Royce Dart turbo-prop engines whined and
fired, and the silver Viscount, with the flying Zimbabwe bird
emblem on its tail, taxied downwind to its holding point.

Cleared for take-off, it lumbered back down the runway, and
climbed slowly into the air. Roland watched it bank onto its
southerly heading for Bulawayo, and then went back into the
airport building, showed his pass to the guard at the door and
climbed the steps to the control tower.

‘What can we do for you, Colonel?’ the assistant
controller at the flight planning desk greeted him.

‘I am expecting a helicopter flight coming in from
Wankie to pick me up—’

‘Oh, you are Colonel Ballantyne – yes, we have
your bird on the plot. They were airborne twelve minutes ago.
They will be here in an hour and ten minutes.’

While they were talking, the flight-controller at the picture
windows was speaking quietly with the pilot of the departing
Viscount.

‘You are cleared to standard departure, unrestricted
climb fifteen thousand feet. Over now to Bulawayo approach on 118
comma six. Goodday!’

‘Understand standard departure unrestricted climb to
flight level—’

The pilot’s calm, almost bored voice broke off and the
side-band hummed for a few seconds. Then the voice came back
crackling with urgency. Roland spun away from the flight planning
desk, and strode to the controller’s console. He gripped
the back of the controller’s chair and through the tall
windows stared up into the sky.

The high fair-weather clouds were already turning pink with
the oncoming sunset, but the Viscount was out of sight, somewhere
out there in the south. Roland’s face was hard and terrible
with anger and fear, as he listened to the pilot’s voice
grating out of the radio speakers.

T
he portable
surface-to-air missile-launcher, designated SAM-7, is a
crude-looking weapon almost indistinguishable from the bazooka
anti-tank rocket launcher of World War II. It looks like a
five-foot section of ordinary drainpipe, but the exhaust end is
slightly flared into the mouth of a funnel. At the point of
balance, there is a shoulder-plate below the barrel and an aiming
and igniting device like a small portable AM radio set attached
to the upper surface of the barrel.

The weapon is operated by two men. The loader simply places
the missile in the exhaust breech of the barrel and, making sure
the fins engage the slots, pushes it forward until its rim
engages the electrical terminals and locks it into the
firing-position. The missile weighs a little less than ten kilos.
It has the conventional rocket shape, but in the front of the
nose cone is an opaque glass eye, behind which is located the
infra-red sensor. The tail-fins are steerable, enabling the
rocket to lock onto and follow a moving target. The gunner
settles the barrel across his shoulder, places the earphones on
his head, and switches on the powerpack. In the earphones he
hears the cyclic tone of his audio-warning. He tunes this down
below the background infra-red count, so that it is no longer
audible.

The weapon is now loaded and ready to fire. The gunner
searches out his target through the cross-hatched gun-sight. As
soon as an infra-red source is detected by the missile’s
sensor, the audio warning begins to sound and a tiny red bulb
lights up in the eye-piece of the gun-sight to confirm that the
missile is ‘locked-on’. It remains only for the
gunner to press the trigger in the pistol-type grip and the
missile launches itself in relentless pursuit of its prey,
steering itself to track it accurately through any turns or
changes of altitude.

Tungata Zebiwe had held his cadre in position for four days.
Apart from himself, there were eight of them and he had chosen
each of them with extreme care. They were all veterans of proven
courage and determination, but, more importantly, they were all
of superior intelligence and capable of operating under their own
initiative. Every one of them had been trained in the use of the
SAM-7 missile-launcher, in both roles of loader and gunner, and
each of them carried one of the finned missiles in addition to
their AK 47 assault rifles, and the usual complement of grenades
and AP mines. Any two of them could make the attack, and had been
thoroughly briefed to do so.

The wind direction would dictate the departure track of any
aircraft leaving the main runway of Victoria Falls airport. Wind
velocity would also affect the aircraft’s altitude as it
passed over any specific point on the extended centre-line and
crosswind legs of its outward track. Fortunately for
Tungata’s calculations, the prevailing northeasterly wind
had been blowing at a steady fifteen knots during the entire four
days in which they had been in position.

He had chosen a small kopje, thickly wooded enough to give
them good cover, but not so thick that it impeded the view over
the surrounding tree-tops. From the peak in the early mornings,
before the heat-haze and dust thickened, Tungata had been able to
see the stationary silver cloud of spray that marked the Victoria
Falls on the northern horizon.

Each afternoon they had practised the attack drill. Half an
hour before the expected time of departure of the scheduled
Viscount flight from Victoria Falls to Bulawayo, Tungata had
moved them into position: six men in a ring below the summit to
guard against surprise attack by security forces, and three men
above them in the actual attack group.

Tungata himself was the gunner, and his loader and backup
loader had both been chosen for the acuteness of their hearing
and the sharpness of their eyesight. On each of the three
preceding afternoon drills, they had been able to hear the
turbo-prop Rolls-Royce Dart engines minutes after takeoff. They
were in climb power-setting, and the whine was distinctive, it
drew the eye to the tiny crucifix shape of the aircraft against
the blue.

On the first afternoon, the Viscount had climbed almost
directly over their kopje, at not more than eight thousand feet
in altitude, and Tungata had locked on and tracked it until it
passed out of sight and then out of hearing. The second afternoon
the aircraft had passed at about the same altitude, but five
miles to the east of their position. That was extreme range for
the missile. The audio-signal had been weak and intermittent, and
the lock-on bulb had glowed only fitfully. Tungata had to admit
to himself that an attack would probably have failed. The third
day the Viscount had been east of them again, three miles out. It
would have been a good kill, so that the odds seemed to be about
two to one in their favour.

This fourth day he moved the attack team into position on the
summit fifteen minutes early, and tested the SAM launcher by
aiming it at the lowering sun. It howled in his ears at the
excitation of that immense infra-red source. Tungata switched off
the powerpack and they settled down to wait, all their faces
lifted to the sky.

His loader glanced at his wristwatch and murmured, ‘They
are late.’

Tungata hissed at him viciously. He knew they were late, and
already the doubts were crowding in – flight delayed or
cancelled, even a leak in their own security, the
kanka
might already be on their way.

‘Listen!’ said his loader, and seconds later he
heard it also, the faint whistling whine in the northern sky.

‘Ready!’ he ordered, and settled the
shoulder-plate into position and switched on the powerpack. The
audio-warning had been pre-set, but he checked it again.

‘Load!’ he said. He felt the missile go into the
breech and weight the barrel slightly tail-heavy. He heard the
clunk of the rim seating itself against the terminals.

‘Loaded!’ his No. 2 confirmed and tapped his
shoulder.

He traversed left and right, making certain he was firmly
settled, and his loader spoke again. ‘
Nansi
!
There!’ He extended his arm over Tungata’s left
shoulder, and pointed upwards with his forefinger. Tungata
searched, and then caught the high silver spark as the sunlight
reflected off burnished metal.

‘Target identified!’ he said, and heard his two
loaders move aside softly to avoid the back-blast of the
rocket.

The tiny speck grew swiftly in size, and Tungata saw that it
was tracking to pass less than half a mile to the west of the
hillock, and that it was at least a thousand feet lower than it
had been on the preceding afternoons. It was in a perfect
position for attack. He picked it up in the cross-wires of the
gun-sight, and the missile howled lustfully in his earphones, a
wicked sound like a wolf-pack hunting at full moon. The missile
had sensed the infra-red burn from the exhausts of the
Rolls-Royce engines. In the gun-sight the lock-on bulb burned
like a fiery red Cyclops’ eye, and Tungata pressed the
trigger.

There was a stunning whoosh of sound, but almost no recoil
from the weapon across his shoulder as it exhausted through the
funnel vent in the rear. He was enveloped for micro-seconds in
white fumes and whirling dust, but when they were whipped away by
their own velocity, he saw the little silver missile going
upwards into the blue on the feather of its own rocket vapours.
It was like a hunting falcon bating from the gloved fist, going
up to tower above its quarry. Its speed was dazzling, so that it
seemed to dwindle miraculously into nothingness, and there was
only the faint drumming rumble of its rocket-burn.

Tungata knew that there was no time for a second launch. By
the time they could re-load, the Viscount would be well out of
range. They stared up at the tiny shiny aircraft and the seconds
seemed to flow with the slow viscosity of honey.