Free The Leopard Hunts in Darkness by Wilbur Smith Page B

you.’
    The kanka were the jackals, the security forces, and Craig guessed the leader would be proud of his battle scars.
    Comrade Lookout caressed his cheek. ‘A bayonet. They thought I was dead and they left me for the hyena.’
    ‘Your leg?’ Dollar asked in return. ‘From the war also?’
    An affirmative would tell them that he had fought against them. Their reaction was unpredictable, but Craig paused only a second before he nodded. ‘I trod on one of our own
mines.’
    ‘Your own mine!’ Lookout crowed with delight at the joke. ‘He stood on his own mine!’ And the others thought it was funny, but Craig detected no residual resentment.
    ‘Where?’ Peking wanted to know.
    ‘On the river, between Kazungula and Victoria Falls.’
    ‘Ah, yes,’ they nodded at each other. ‘That was a bad place. We crossed there often,’ Lookout remembered. ‘That is where we fought the Scouts.’
    The Ballantyne Scouts had been one of the elite units of the security forces, and Craig had been attached to them as an armourer.
    ‘The day I trod on the mine was the day the Scouts followed your people across the river. There was a terrible fight on the Zambian side, and all the Scouts were wiped out.’
    ‘Hau! Hau!’ they exclaimed with amazement. ‘That was the day! We were there – we fought with Comrade Tungata on that day.’
    ‘What a fight – what a fine and beautiful killing when we trapped them,’ Dollar remembered with the killing light in his eyes again.
    ‘They fought! Mother of Nkulu kulu – how they fought! Those were real men!’
    Craig’s stomach churned queasily with the memory. His own cousin, Roland Ballantyne, had led the Scouts across the river that fateful day. While Craig lay shattered and bleeding on the
edge of the minefield, Roland and all his men had fought to the death a few miles further on. Their bodies had been abused and desecrated by these men, and now they were discussing it like a
memorable football match.
    Craig poured more whisky for them. How he had loathed them and their fellows – ‘terrs’, they called them, terrorists – loathed them with the special hatred reserved for
something that threatens your very existence and all that you hold dear. But now, in his turn, he saluted them with the mug, and drank. He had heard of RAF and Luftwaffe pilots meeting after the
war and reminiscing as they were doing, more like comrades than deadly enemies.
    ‘Where were you when we rocketed the storage tanks in Harare and burned the fuel?’ they asked.
    ‘Do you remember when the Scouts jumped from the sky onto our camp at Molingushi? They killed eight hundred of us that day – and I was there!’ Peking recalled with pride.
‘But they did not catch me!’
    Yet now Craig found that he could not sustain that hatred any longer. Under the veneer of cruelty and savagery imposed upon them by war, they were the true Matabele that he had always loved,
with that irrepressible sense of fun, that deep pride in themselves and their tribe, that abounding sense of personal honour, of loyalty and their own peculiar code of morals. As they chatted,
Craig warmed to them, and they sensed it and responded to him in turn.
    ‘So what makes you come here, Kuphela? A sensible man like you, walking without even a stick into the leopard’s cave? You must have heard about us – and yet you came
here?’
    ‘Yes, I have heard about you. I heard that you were hard men, like old Mzilikazi’s warriors.’
    They preened a little at the compliment.
    ‘But I came here to meet you and talk with you,’ Craig went on.
    ‘Why?’ demanded Lookout.
    ‘I will write a book, and in the book I will write truly the way you are and the things for which you are still fighting.’
    ‘A book?’ Peking was suspicious immediately.
    ‘What kind of book?’ Dollar backed him.
    ‘Who are you to write a book?’ Lookout’s voice was openly scornful. ‘You are too young. Book-writers are great and learned