‘Very close now,’ it said, and the reply came immediately.

  ‘Keep going hard. Push them. Don’t let them escape. Call me as soon as you catch them.’ That voice was unmistakable and they did not need the acknowledgement to confirm it.

  ‘Very well, General China.’

  The transmission ended and Sean and Alphonso exchanged a quick hard frown.

  ‘Very close,’ said the Shangane. ‘We can’t outrun them.’

  ‘You might be able to get away,’ Sean said, ‘on your own.’

  Alphonso hesitated and looked sideways at Miriam. The Shangane maid returned his glance with open trusting eyes and Alphonso coughed and scratched himself with embarrassment.

  ‘I’ll stay,’ he muttered, and Sean laughed bitterly and said in English, ‘Join the club, mate. That little witch didn’t take long to hook you. These ruddy sheilas will be the death of all of us yet, you mark my words.’

  Alphonso frowned, he did not understand and Sean switched back into Shangane. ‘Pack up the radio. If you are going to stand with us, we’d best find a good place to do it. Your dung-eating Renamo brothers are going to be with us very soon.’

  Sean turned and looked across at Matatu, and instantly he was on his feet.

  ‘That was China on the radio,’ he told him in Swahili.

  ‘He hisses like a cobra,’ Matatu nodded.

  ‘His men are on our spoor, they boast to him that they are very close. Are there any more tricks we can use now, old friend?’

  ‘Fire?’ Matatu suggested, but without conviction, and Sean shook his head.

  ‘The wind is against us, we’d cook ourselves if we torched the forest.’

  Matatu hung his head. ‘If we keep the women and children with us, there are no more tricks,’ he admitted. ‘We are slow, and we leave a spoor that a blind man can follow in a moonless night.’ He shook his small grizzled head miserably. ‘The only trick we have left is to fight them, and after that we are dead, my Bwana.’

  ‘Go back, Matatu. Find how close behind us they really are. We will go ahead and find a good place to fight them.’ He touched the little man’s shoulder, and then let him go. Sean watched him disappear amongst the tree-trunks and then deliberately altered his expression before he turned to Claudia, striking a lighter more carefree pose and putting a lift in his tone.

  ‘How’s our patient?’ he asked. ‘She looks pretty chirpy to me.’

  ‘The chloroquine has done wonders.’ Claudia bounced the child on her lap and as if to confirm her improvement, Minnie stuck her thumb in her mouth and smiled shyly around it at Sean. He felt that smile tug at him with wholly unexpected poignancy.

  Claudia laughed. ‘No female is immune to your fatal charms. You have collected yourself another fan.’

  ‘Typical woman, all she really wants is a free ride.’ But he stroked the child’s soft woolly little head. ‘All right, sweetness, your horsey is ready to go.’

  Trustingly Minnie held out both arms and he swung her up on to his back and strapped her there.

  Claudia pulled herself stiffly to her feet and for a moment leaned against him. ‘Do you know something? You are a much nicer person than you pretend to be.’

  ‘Fooled you, didn’t I?’

  ‘I’d like to see you with a baby of your own,’ she whispered.

  ‘Now you really terrify me. Let’s go before you come up with any more crazy ideas like that one.’

  But the idea lingered with him as they ran on through the forest, a son of his own from this woman.

  He had never even thought about that before, and then, as though to complement the idea, he felt a tiny hand reach across his shoulder from behind and touch his beard, stroking it as lightly as an alighting butterfly. Minnie was reciprocating that caress he had bestowed on her a few minutes earlier and for a moment his throat closed up and made it difficult for him to breathe. He took her tiny hand in his, and it was silken and fragile as the wing of a hummingbird and he was overcome with a feeling of terrible regret. Regret that there would never be a son, he accepted that at last, nor a daughter. It was almost over. The hunting pack was very close behind. They could never outrun them. There was no escape, all they could hope for was a good place in which to make the final stand. After that there was nothing, no escape, no future.

  He was so wrapped up in his melancholy that he had run out into the open before he realized it. Claudia pulled up so sharply in front of him that he almost ran into her. He stopped at her side and they looked about them with puzzled uncertainty.

  The forest had been laid waste. For as far ahead as they could see the great hardwoods had been swept away as though by a hurricane. Only the stumps remained, raw and bleeding gum as red as heart’s blood. The earth was torn and scarred, where the huge trunks had come crashing down. Bright piles of sawdust remained where their branches had been stripped and the logs cut into lengths, and then between the windrows of discarded branches and wilting boughs were the drag roads along which the precious timber had been hauled away.

  Miriam stopped beside Sean. ‘This is where my people were forced to work,’ she said softly. ‘Frelimo came and took them to cut the trees. They chained them together and made them work until the meat was torn from the bones of their hands. They beat them like oxen and worked them until they fell and could not rise.’

  ‘How many people?’ Sean asked. ‘So many trees have been destroyed.’

  ‘Perhaps a man or woman died for every tree,’ Miriam whispered. ‘They took everybody, thousands upon tens of thousands.’ She pointed to the horizon. ‘They work far south now and they leave no tree standing.’

  Sean felt the anger beginning to rise through his amazement. This was destruction on a scale that affronted the law of nature and the sanctity of life itself. It was not just that those trees had taken three hundred years to reach their full majesty, and had been destroyed with a few hours’ callous work with the axe blades. It was more, much more. This forest was the source and fountain of myriad forms of life, insect and bird and mammal and reptile, of man himself. In this vast devastation, all would perish.

  It did not end there. With his own fate determined, with a term and a number of the hours that remained of his own life, Sean was overtaken by a prophetic melancholia. He realized that the destruction of this forest was symbolic of the predicament of the entire continent. In a few fleeting decades, Africa had been overtaken by its own inherent savagery. The checks that had been placed upon it by a century of colonialism had been struck off. Chains perhaps those checks had been, but once freed of them, the peoples of Africa were rushing headlong, with almost suicidal abandon, towards their own destruction.

  Sean felt himself shaking with impotent rage at the folly of it and at the same time saddened, sickened almost unto death, by the terrible tragedy of it all.

  ‘If I have to die,’ he thought, ‘then it’s best to do so before I see everything I love, the land, the animals, the people, all of it destroyed.’

  With his arm round Claudia’s thin shoulders and the little black girl strapped on his back, he turned and looked back the way they had come and, at that moment, Matatu came scampering out of the forest behind them.

  There was desperate urgency in his gait and the fear of death in his small wizened features.

  ‘They are very close, my Bwana. They have two trackers leading them. I watched them work, we will not throw them off. They are good.’

  ‘How many troopers with them?’ With an effort Sean cast off the oppressive mantle of dejection.

  ‘As many as the grass on the plains of Serengeti,’ Matatu replied. ‘They ran like a pack of wild dogs on the hunt and they are hard men and fierce. Even the three of us will not stand too long against them.’

  Sean roused himself and looked around him. The cut line in which they stood was a natural killing ground, devoid of cover except for the knee-high stumps of hardwood. The open ground stretched two hundred metres wide to where the dead wood was piled in untidy windrows, the leaves long withered and browned, the branches forming a natural barricade.

  ‘We’ll make our stand there,’ Sean decided swiftly and signalled Alphonso forward. They crossed the open ground at a run, bunched up with the two women in the middle. Miriam was dragging her little brother along by one arm. Alphonso ran protectively beside them. The big Shangane was heavily burdened with the radio and the packs of ammunition and stores they had picked up from the ambush at the Save river, nevertheless he had also carried Mickey whenever the boy tired, only setting him down on his own feet for short intervals. The three Shanganes, man, woman and boy child, had very swiftly formed their own distinct core within the band, drawn together by tribal loyalties and natural physical attraction. Sean knew he could rely on Alphonso to take care of his own, and that allowed him to concentrate on his particular charges, Claudia and Matatu and now the little girl.

  Alphonso needed no orders. Like Sean he had a soldier’s eye for terrain and he ran unerringly towards a section of the tumble of discarded branches that formed a natural redoubt, and which commanded the best field of fire across the cut line.

  Swiftly they settled in, dragging some of the heavier branches into place to strengthen the position, laying out their weapons and spare ammunition, making their very limited preparations to stand off the first rush of the attackers.

  Claudia and Miriam had taken the children a little further back to where a hollow in the earth and two especially large tree-stumps formed some sort of shelter. His own preparations complete, Sean crossed to them quickly, and squatted beside Claudia.

  ‘As soon as the shooting starts, I want you to take Miriam and the children and run for it,’ he told her. ‘Keep heading south.’ He broke off as he realized that she was shaking her head, and her jaw was clenched obstinately.

  ‘I’ve run far enough,’ she told him. ‘I’m staying with you.’ She laid her hand on his arm. ‘No, don’t argue. It would be a waste of time.’

  ‘Claudia!’

  ‘Please don’t,’ she forestalled him. ‘There isn’t much time left, don’t spend it arguing.’

  She was right, of course. To try and run further on her own was pointless, not with two children to care for and a team of fifty Renamo on her spoor. He nodded.

  ‘All right,’ he agreed, and took the Tokarev pistol from his belt, cocked it and carefully engaged the safety-catch. ‘Take this.’

  ‘What’s that for?’ She stared at the weapon with distaste.

  ‘I think you know what it’s for.’

  ‘The same way as Job?’

  He nodded. ‘It would be easier than going China’s way.’

  She shook her head. ‘1 couldn’t,’ she whispered. ‘If there is no other way, at the end, won’t you do it for me?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think I’ll have the guts. Here, take it, just in case.’ Reluctantly she accepted the pistol and tucked it into her belt.

  ‘Now kiss me,’ she said.

  Matatu’s whistle interrupted their embrace. ‘I love you,’ Sean murmured in her ear.

  ‘I’ll love you . . .’ she replied, ‘through all eternity.’

  He left her and crawled back into the piles of dead wood. At Matatu’s side he sank down and peered out through the chink between two branches towards the edge of the forest.

  For many minutes he saw nothing, and then there was a shadowy flit of movement amongst the boles of the standing hardwood, and Sean laid his right hand on the pistol grip of the AKM rifle and raised it until the buttstock touched his cheek.

  The silence drew out in the languorous sunlit afternoon while they waited. No bird sang, no creature moved, until at last there was a muted bird whistle from the edge of the forest and a man shape detached itself and flitted into the opening, showing for just a small part of a second and then disappearing behind one of the thick tree-stumps. As soon as it was gone another broke from the tree-line a hundred metres further to the left and darted forward. This one also disappeared and almost immediately, out on the right, a third Renamo guerrilla emerged.

  ‘Three only,’ Sean murmured, they were not going to expose more men than that and these were good. They advanced in fleeting rushes, never two together, widely spread out and wary as old tom-leopards coming in to the bait.

  ‘What a pity,’ Sean thought. ‘We are only going to get one out of this lot. I had hoped for a better killing to get us off the mark.’ He concentrated on the advancing scouts, trying to pick the most dangerous of their enemies.

  ‘Probably the one in the centre,’ he decided, and almost immediately had his choice confirmed as he saw the flick of the man’s hand from behind the stump that hid him. He was signalling one of the others forward, co-ordinating the advance, and that marked him as the main man, the one to take out first.

  ‘Let him come in close,’ Sean told himself. The AKM was no sniping rifle and he didn’t trust its accuracy over a hundred metres. He waited, willing the man in, watching for him over the sights of the rifle.

  The Renamo jumped up and kept coming. Sean saw that he was young, mid-twenties, with bandoliers of ammunition over both shoulders, and a Rastafarian hairstyle, ribbons of camouflage rag braided into his hair. There was an Arabian cast to his features, and an amber patina to his skin, a good-looking lad except that his left eye was a little askew and it gave his face a sly knowing expression.

  Close enough to see the cast in his eye was close enough. Sean lined up carefully on the tree-stump behind which the Renamo had disappeared and drew a breath, exhaled half of it and let the first joint of his right forefinger rest lightly on the trigger.

  The Renamo popped up into his sights. Sean took him low, deliberately declining a clean kill. He knew what damage the 7.62 bullet would do as it plunged through his belly at over three thousand feet a second, and he knew from bitter experience just how unnerving it was to have one of your comrades lying in no-man’s land with his guts shot out screaming for water and mercy. In the Scouts they called them ‘warblers’, and a warbler in good voice could inhibit an attack almost as effectively as a well-placed RPD machine-gun.

  Sean heard the bullet hit the Renamo in the stomach, that meaty thump like a watermelon dropped on a stone floor, and he went down out of sight in the trash and debris.

  Instantly there was a heavy volley of rifle fire from the edge of the forest, but it was obvious from the wild aim that they had not spotted Sean and the firing stuttered swiftly into silence. Renamo was conserving ammunition, a sure sign of their discipline and training. Second-rate African troops started firing at the beginning of a contact and kept shooting until their last round was expended.

  ‘These lads know their business,’ Sean confirmed Matatu’s estimate. ‘We aren’t going to hold them long.’ The two guerrillas were still pinned down in the middle of the cut line, and there was a low hollow groan from out there as the first pangs of the belly wound hit the downed man.

  ‘Sing to us, Daddy-oh!’ Sean encouraged him. ‘Let your pals know how it hurts.’ But he was studying the forest edge, trying to get some hint of the next play before it developed.

  ‘Now, they’ll make a pincer move to try to out-flank us,’ he guessed. ‘But which flank, left or right?’ And as if in answer he saw a tiny blur of movement in the forest. One of them was moving right.

  ‘Alphonso,’ Sean called softly. ‘They are going to try the right. Stay here. Hold the centre.’

  Sean crawled back, until he was hidden by the high windrow of brush. Then he rose to his feet, and ran doubled over, out to the right flank.

  Four hundred metres out he dropped to his knees and crawled forward, finding another position facing the forest wall. He wriggled in behind a protective stump and marshalled his breathing, watching the tree-line, the AKM set on automatic fire, and his thumb on the safety-catch.

  He had anticipated the next move almost perfectly, the flanking movement came out of the forest only a hundred metres further to his right. A detachment of eight troopers, they came all together, trying to reach the cover of the windrow in a single concerted rush, and Sean let them get halfway across the cut line.

  ‘This is better. I should be able to get a brace out of this covey,’ he told himself. He had them in enfilade, his fire would be coming in from their flank and sweeping the line. He picked out the section leader who was running slightly ahead of the line. Sean led him by a man’s length so that he would run into the stream of fire, taking him at knee height because the AKM rode up brutally in automatic and he held the trigger down.

  The section leader dropped as though he had fallen over a trip wire, and the two men following him ran into the same burst. Sean saw the bullets hit them. One of them took it in the shoulder, and a puff of dust flew from his camouflage tunic to mark the strike. The other was a head shot, a clean hit in the temple and as he went down his baseball cap fluttered from his head like a maimed dove.

  ‘Three.’ Sean changed magazines, pleased with the result. He had expected one and hoped for two.

  The rest of them had turned and were racing back for the forest, the attack broken completely. Sean got off another quick burst before they reached the trees, and thought he saw one of them hunch his shoulders and lurch to the shot, but he kept going and disappeared.

  Almost immediately there was another burst of firing back in the centre, and Sean jumped up from behind his stump and ran back to help Alphonso.

  As he ran somebody opened up on him from the forest. Shot passed close to his head with that vicious whiplashing sound that made his adrenalin spurt hotly into his bloodstream. He ducked his head and ran on. He was enjoying himself, riding the curling wave of his terror.

  In the centre there was a sharp fire-fight raging. Renamo was trying to rush the open ground, and they were almost across when Sean fell flat in the brush near Alphonso and added the weight of his fire to the defence. The attack wavered and broke, just short of the row of deadwood behind which they lay. The Renamo went ducking and dodging back between the tree-stumps with AK fire kicking up dust around them.