‘Let the last be the best of all the game,’ he thought, and in the utter darkness of pre-dawn, he heard a sound at once both thrilling and terrifying, the shrill high whine of a mighty turbo engine, howling like a man-eating wolf in the night. It was joined almost at once by another and then another. The Hind squadron was starting engines, warming up for their first sortie in the dawn.

  Sean checked his watch and the luminous dial showed eleven minutes before five. It was almost time. Without thinking, he unclipped the curved banana magazine from under the AKM rifle and replaced it with another from the pouch of spare magazines on his webbing. That habitual gesture gave him the comfort of long familiarity, and beside him, Matatu seeing him do it stirred expectantly. The dawn wind came softly as a lover and stroked Sean’s cheek.

  He turned his head towards the east and held up his hand with fingers spread. He could just make out the silhouette of his fingers against the coming dawn. It was what the Matabele called ‘the time of the horns’, when a herdsman could first see the horns of his cattle against the sky.

  ‘Shooting light in ten minutes,’ Sean reminded himself, and knew how long it would take those minutes to pass.

  One after the other, the Hinds shut down their engines to an idle. The ground crews would be completing the refuelling and rearming, the flying crews would be going aboard.

  Sean had to judge it exactly, the light must be just right. The Hinds would probably not use landing lights, and missile gunners must be able to see them clearly against the dawn.

  The light bloomed swiftly. Sean closed his eyes and counted slowly to ten before he opened them again. Now he could make out the stark outline of the crest of the hill, like a cut-out in black cardboard, the lace-work of the msasa trees stood out against the purple sky, swaying gracefully to the dawn breeze.

  ‘Shoot!’ he said, and tapped the shoulder of the mortar man beside him. The trooper leaned forward holding the mortar bomb in both hands and dropped it into the mouth of the mortar tube. The charge in the tail ignited and with a polite pop hurled the signal bomb five hundred feet into the sky above the hilltop. It exploded in a twinkling red flare of lights.

  Claudia Monterro followed Job down off the ridge, keeping so close behind him that she need only reach out her hand to touch him. Job carried one of the missile launchers across his shoulders, and behind Claudia the number two of their team was bowed beneath the weight of the spare rocket tubes.

  The footing was loose and dangerous, while quartz pebbles as treacherous as ball-bearings rolled under foot. It pleased her that she was as steady and sure-footed as any of them over this difficult ground.

  Nevertheless, she was sweating in the night chill as they reached the bottom of the slope and crept forward towards the perimeter of the laager. There was a time, only a few short weeks ago, when she would have felt inept and awkward in these circumstances, but now she orientated herself by the beacon of the evening star above the hilltop and responded instantly to Job’s signals, picking her footfalls and anti-tracking almost instinctively.

  They reached the dense copse of trees which was their attack position, and crept in amongst them. Claudia helped Job set up the Stinger ready for firing and then found herself a comfortable perch at the base of one of the trees to wait out the night.

  Job left her there with just the Shangane number two loader for company, and he disappeared into the darkness like a hunting leopard. She was unhappy to see him go, but not long ago she would have been panic-stricken. She realized what a measure of self-reliance and fortitude she had been forced to learn in these last few weeks.

  ‘Papa will be proud of me,’ she smiled to herself, using the future tense as though her father still existed. ‘Of course he does,’ she assured herself. ‘He’s still out there somewhere looking out for me. How else would I have made it this far?’ His memory was a comfort, and as she thought about him, he became confused in her mind with Sean, so that they seemed to merge into a single entity as though her father had somehow achieved a new existence in her lover. It was a good feeling that alleviated her loneliness, until suddenly Job returned as silently and abruptly as he had left.

  ‘All the other sections are in position,’ he whispered, as he settled down beside her. ‘But it’s going to be a long night. Try and get some sleep.’

  ‘I’ll never be able to sleep,’ she answered, keeping her voice so low that he had to lean close to her to catch the words. ‘Tell me about Sean Courtney, I want to know everything you know about him.’

  ‘Sometimes he’s a hero, and sometimes he’s a complete bastard.’ Job thought about it. ‘But most of the time, he’s something in between.’

  ‘Then why have you stayed with him so long?’

  ‘He’s my friend,’ Job answered simply, and then slowly, haltingly, he began to tell her about Sean, and they talked the night away.

  Claudia listened avidly, encouraging him with quiet questions. ‘He was married, wasn’t he, Job?’ Or, ‘Why did he leave his home? I have heard that his family is enormously wealthy. Why did he choose this life?’

  So the night passed, and in those hours they became friends, the first true friend she had found in Africa, and in the end he said to her in that beautiful deep African voice, ‘I shall miss him, more than I can tell.’

  ‘You speak as though the two of you are parting, and that isn’t so. It will be the same.’

  ‘No,’ Job denied. ‘It will never be the same. He will go with you now. Our time together has ended, yours is beginning.’

  ‘Don’t hate me for it, Job.’ She reached out to touch his arm in appeal.

  ‘You two will be good together,’ he said. ‘I think your journey with him will be as good as mine has been. My thoughts will go with you, and I wish you both great joy in each other.’

  ‘Thank you, Job,’ she whispered. ‘You will always be our friend.’

  Job lifted his arm and with fingers spread held his open hand against the dawn.

  ‘The time of the horns,’ he murmured softly. ‘Soon now.’ And as he said it, a flower of bright crimson fire burst open in the sky above the hill.

  As the signal flare burst in the dawn sky, the battle was born. Sean always thought of it as the birth of a living thing, a monster which he could only try to direct but which had a life and a will of its own, a terrible thing which swept them all up and carried them along willy nilly.

  He had placed the RPG 7 rocket-launchers in the hands of his two best remaining gunners, but the expert marksmen had all gone to man the Stingers. The first rocket flew low, striking the earth twenty feet in front of the nearest fuel tanker; it burst in a vivid yellow flash and Sean saw one of the Frelimo sentries cartwheel bodily into the air. The second rocket was high, missing the tanker by six feet, reaching the top of its trajectory five hundred yards out and then dropping into the forest beyond, its detonation screened by trees and scrub.

  ‘Aim, you Shangane oxen!’ Sean bellowed at them, and he was up and running as he realized his mistake in not taking the first crucial shot himself.

  The Frelimo sentries were screaming and scattering around the fuel tankers and from the perimeter of the laager a 12.7mm cannon opened up, sluicing gaudy strings of fiery tracer across the sky.

  The rocketeer was fumbling to reload the RPG 7, but he was panicky and unsure in the dark. Sean snatched the launcher off his shoulder and with two deft movements had removed the protecting nose cap of the missile and cleared the safety-pin. He swung the launcher over his shoulder and dropped on one knee, aiming at the nearest tanker.

  ‘All the time in the world,’ he reminded himself, and waited for the puff of the morning breeze on his cheek to abate. The RPG 7 was wildly inaccurate in a crosswind for the push of the wind on its tail-fins would turn its nose into wind.

  The breeze dropped and Sean centred the sights on the fuel tanker. The range was just on three hundred metres, the limit of the rocket’s accuracy, and he fired. The missile sped true, and the side of the tanker erupted in a tall sheet of volatile Avgas. The sky filled with flames.

  Sean snarled at the rocketeer beside him and the man fumbled another missile out of his pack, the cardboard propellant tube already attached to it.

  Burning Avgas illuminated the southern slope of the hill like noonday. Sean was kneeling in the open and the gunner on the 12.7mm swung his aim onto him.

  The earth around Sean dissolved into billowing clouds of dust and flying clods, and the rocketeer ducked.

  ‘Come on, you yellow bastard!’ Sean completed the loading sequence unaided, making no effort to avoid the aim of the 12.7mm gunner.

  He lifted the launcher on to his shoulder, and aimed at the second fuel tanker. It was lit up by the flames as though it were a stage effect, but as he was on the point of firing, the tanker was obscured by a dancing curtain of yellow dust and the volley of cannon fire passed so close to Sean’s head that his eardrums creaked and popped as though he were in a decompression chamber.

  He held his fire for three seconds and then as the curtains of dust blew open he fired through them, and the second tanker burst, blown clear of the railway lines by the explosion of its lethal cargo.

  Burning Avgas flowed down the slope like the lava of a miniature Vesuvius, and Sean threw the launcher at the rocketeer’s chest. ‘Hit them on the head with the bloody thing!’ he yelled at him. ‘That’s the only damage you are going to do with it!’

  The mortar men were making better practice. Sean had sighted their weapons for them and they bobbed and weaved over the short mortar tubes as they dropped the finned projectiles into the open mouths. A steady stream of bombs lobbed high into the dawn sky and then rained down into the hilltop laager.

  Sean watched the effect of the bursts with a dispassionate, professional eye.

  ‘Good,’ he murmured. ‘Good.’ But they had only been capable of carrying thirty bombs for each of the mortars; they weighed almost two kilos each and they would be expended in a few short minutes. They must rush the perimeter while the exploding bombs distracted the Frelimo gunners. He hefted the AKM rifle and slipped the safety-catch.

  ‘Go!’ Sean yelled, and blew a short series of blasts on his whistle. ‘Go!’

  The Shanganes came to their feet in a single cohesive movement, and swept down the hill, but there were only twenty of them, a puny line of running men, brightly lit by the flames. The 12.7mm gunners on the hill fastened on them, and the tracer flew in clouds about them, thick as a locust plague.

  ‘Shit!’ Sean laughed aloud in terror. ‘What a way to go!’

  One of the Frelimo guns had picked Sean out of the sweep line and was concentrating his fire on him, but Sean was plunging down hill with long flying strides and the gunner was shooting high and a little behind. Shot flashed past Sean so close he could feel the wind of it tugging at his tunic. Impossibly, he lengthened his stride, and beside him Matatu giggled shrilly, keeping pace with him down the hill.

  ‘What’s so goddamned funny, you silly little bugger!’ Sean yelled at him furiously, and they hit the level ground beside the burning fuel tankers. The Frelimo gunner’s field of fire was blanketed by the rolling screen of black smoke, and in the respite Sean marshalled his sweep line of racing Shanganes, pivoting them on the centre and directing them at the perimeter of the laager, pumping his right fist overhead to urge them on.

  They used the smoke to cover themselves for the next two hundred metres of their charge. The dawn breeze was spreading it, sooty black and dense and low along the ground.

  A Frelimo sentry staggered out of the smoke ahead of Sean. He wore faded and tattered denim jeans and grubby tennis shoes, he had lost his weapon and a rocket splinter must have hit him in the eye. The eye was dislodged from its socket and hung out on his cheek like a huge wet grape, dangling and bouncing on the thick cord of the optic nerve as the man jerked his head.

  Without breaking his stride, Sean hit him in the belly with a tap of three from the AKM, firing from the hip. He jumped over the body as it hit the ground.

  They came out of the smoke, still in sweep line. Sean glanced along the line and realized incredulously that they had not yet taken a single casualty, the twenty Shanganes were spread out and going hard, offering only fleeting targets through the smoke and flame to the disorientated Frelimo machine-guns.

  At that moment, he saw the single strand of wire and the line of round metal discs on short steel droppers only a dozen paces ahead of him. The discs were each emblazoned with a stylized skull and crossbones in scarlet that caught the ruddy glow of the flames, and almost before he realized it, they were into the minefield that guarded the perimeter of the laager.

  Two seconds later, the Shangane running on Sean’s right-hand side triggered an anti-personnel mine. From the waist down his body was obscured by the dust and flash of the explosion and he dropped to the earth with both of his legs blown to bloody stumps below the knees.

  ‘Keep going!’ Sean screamed. ‘We are nearly through!’ And now his fear was a grotesque black beast upon his back that weighed him down and choked his breathing. To be maimed was a terror far beyond that of death, and the ground beneath his feet was sown with the steel capsules of terrible mutilation.

  Matatu ducked in front of Sean, forcing him to check his stride. ‘Follow me, my Bwana!’ he piped in Swahili. ‘Tread where I have trodden.’ And Sean obeyed, shortening his stride to that of the little mannikin.

  So Matatu ran him through the last fifty paces of the minefield, and Sean knew that he had never witnessed such a display of raw courage and devotion of one human being to another. Two more Shangane went down before they were through, their legs blown away beneath them. They left them lying in puddles of their own blood and minced flesh and jumped over the single strand of wire that marked the far side of the minefield.

  Even in the terror and exhilaration of the moment, Sean felt his eyelids scalding with the strength of his gratitude and love for the little Ndorobo. He wanted to pick him up like a child’s toy and hug him. Instead he gasped at him, ‘You’re so damned skinny it wouldn’t have gone off even if you had stepped on one.’ And Matatu twinkled with delight and ran at Sean’s side as he charged the 12.7mm machine-gun in its sandbagged emplacement that lay dead ahead of them.

  Sean was firing the AKM from the hip, short raking bursts, and he could see the head of the Frelimo gunner in the embrasure of the parapet of sandbags.

  The gunner swivelled the barrel of the heavy machine-gun onto him, aiming for his belly and he was so close that Sean could see his eyes reflecting the red light of the fires as he sighted over it. The instant before he fired, Sean hurled himself forward, dropping under the shot like a runner sliding for the base plate; bullets whipped over his head and the muzzle blast beat in his eardrum, but he rolled forward and came up hard against the parapet, flattening himself against it, so close that he could have reached out and touched the muzzle of the machine-gun.

  Sean unhooked the fragmentation grenade from his belt, drew the pin, and popped it into the embrasure beside him as though he were posting a letter.

  He smiled as he heard the Frelimo gunner scream something unintelligible in Portuguese.

  ‘Happy birthday!’ he said, and the grenade exploded, blowing out through the opening in an exhalation of flame and fumes.

  Sean jumped up and rolled over the top of the parapet. There were two men in the emplacement, writhing and wriggling on the floor, and half a dozen others had abandoned the position and were sprinting away up the hill, unarmed and screaming with panic.

  Sean left Matatu to finish the two wounded men on the floor with his skinning knife, while he seized the abandoned 12.7mm machine-gun and manhandled it to the rear wall of the emplacement. He aimed it up the hill at the fleeing Frelimo and fired a long traversing burst. Two of the runners dropped in their tracks and grinning happily, crooning to himself with the fun of it, Matatu dragged a steel box of spare ammunition belts across the bloody floor, and helped Sean reload.

  With a fresh belt of 250 rounds loaded, Sean traversed the heavy machine-gun and his fire lashed the hillside above him, tracer swirling through the groups of running Frelimo and scattering them.

  It seemed to Sean as though more than half the Shangane had survived the minefield and the bloody charge and assault. Roaring wildly with triumph, they were pursuing and harrying the routed defenders.

  The barrel of the heavy machine-gun was so hot that it crackled like a horseshoe fresh from the blacksmith’s forge.

  ‘Come on!’ Sean abandoned it and jumped onto the rear parapet, ready to follow his Shanganes deeper into the laager and to begin wrecking the Russian service installations.

  As he stood poised on the parapet, backlit by the burning fuel tankers, a monstrous apparition appeared in the dawn sky ahead of him. Rising on its glittering rotor, turbos shrieking, a Hind gunship lifted out of its sandbagged emplacement not two hundred metres from where Sean stood. It looked like some prehistoric behemoth. Supernatural and other-worldly, it rotated ponderously until the mirrored eyes of the canopy stared at Sean and the multiple cannon barrel in the turret below its nose pointed at him like an accuser’s finger.

  Sean reached down and seized Matatu by the scruff of his neck and hurled him to the floor of the emplacement, and then threw himself full length on top of him, knocking the breath out of the little man just as a gale of cannon fire dissolved the parapet wall and turned it to clouds of driving dust and gravel.

  The suddenness of it all was what shocked Claudia most. One moment the stillness and tranquil darkness of dawn and the next the glare and cacophony of battle, the sky lit by the brilliance of leaping flame and glittering floods of tracers, her ears pounded by bursting mortars, shells and grenades and the blasts of machine-gun fire.

  It took long moments for her eyes to adjust to the intensity of light, and to orientate herself to the swift kaleidoscope of the battle. Job had pointed out to her the point on the perimeter of the laager through which Sean would lead the assault and she searched it anxiously. The tiny figures of running men on the exposed slope of the hill were lit by the flames of burning Avgas which cast dark spiderlike shadows that scampered ahead of each man. There were so many of them, little black ants scurrying about, and with a jolt of horror she watched some of them fall and lie very still in the confusion of movement and light and sound.