Free Lion Resurgent by Stuart Slade

from the magazine. He shook his head. Nothing really surprised him anymore.
    “Look here Captain. A double barreled blaster.” Two of the infantrymen were laughing. They’d found a body carrying a weird construction, a stockless Arisaka rifle taped to the side of what looked like an RPG rocket launcher.
    “Do you think this one had enough magazines taped together?” The figure stretched out on the ground had six of the Arisaka magazines taped together in what the moddervoete called the 69 position.
    Geldenhuys looked at the body carefully. “Perhaps he should have used some of the tape to close his flies, hey boys?” The observation got him a roar of laughter.
    “Sir, over here.” This voice wasn’t laughing. Geldenhuys looked across the center of the kamp. The villagers were beginning to come out of their huts. Some women carrying babies were at the front; everybody was moving slowly and carefully, keeping their hands well in view. Sensible of them. Staff Sergeant de Wilzem was moving over to speak with them, or try to at any rate. There was a patois, a mixture of Portuguese, Afrikaans and English, that served for most purposes. Geldenhuys hoped it would here.
    De Wilzem spoke for a moment then gestured to some of his men. They ran over to a kraal, one whose stink spoke of the pigs that lived there. The village headman was pointing at the enclosed sty that formed the back wall as Geldenhuys and van Huis joined them. Two of de Wilzem’s men and some of the villagers started clearing the dung- and urine-soaked straw away, moving carefully in case of anything venomous hiding in the mess. It wasn’t just snakes that could give a man a bite that would put his life in danger. This time, there wasn’t anything threatening other than the stink and filth. Before long, the digging had exposed a small wooden patch in the back wall of the kraal. It was cunningly concealed. The tiny hiding hole and pit were lost within the structure of the kraal and the smell meant that nobody would look too closely. The moddervoete ripped the boards away and shone flashlights into the pit. Crouched in the bottom, so closely jammed in that they couldn’t move, were the missing missionaries. Cheers rose from the South Africans as all seven were dragged out from the foul pit. They were suffering from spider bites and scorpion stings, but they were alive.
    “They hid us. The villagers hid us.” The head of the missionary group, a man called Houghan, was speaking to Geldenhuys, shakily, still unable to believe that he was alive and safe.
    “You think you are a brave man because you are a soldier, jongmens?” Lehmkuhl spoke quietly to Dippenaar who was watching the scene with horrified fascination. “With your uniform and your tank around you? With your comrades to cover your onderkant? Well, jongmens, look at what real bravery is. Those poor bastaards there have nothing to fight with. Perhaps some farm tools, if they are lucky and if the militias haven’t stolen them. If the militias found they had hidden those people, the entire village would have been wiped out and their deaths would not have been pretty. Yet hide them they did because they thought it was the right thing to do. And then they lived with it, for who knows how long, afraid every day that something would give them away or one of the other villagers would try to buy his life by revealing the secret. Those people have more guts than you or I ever will. And don’t forget they saved those people, not us. We screwed up. The officers won’t admit it but we did. Our clever plan all went wrong and it was those villagers who pulled our nuts out of the fire as well. So remember this next time some siviele tells you that the stams up here aren’t worth anything.”
    The missionaries were being pushed, none too gently, into the back of one Ratel. It was a tight fit, but it was just possible and it was a whole world better than the hiding place they had just left. Around them, the