Free African Sky by Tony Park

stories of his people around the campfire, as the lions called to each other in the night. ‘One day, my boy,’ his father had said in their language, not English, ‘we will take back our country from the rooineks . We will have vengeance for your mother and the countless other thousands of innocents who were slaughtered by the British. You will play your part, mark my words.’
    Indeed he would. His father would have been proud of him. He was a soldier now, in a war against his people’s enemies. He wore no uniform, though he had in Spain and Crete. He had studied and he had learned, about his chosen profession and, more importantly, about the vision for the new world order. It would work in Africa, as it was working in Europe. But it needed men of iron will to make it happen. Men who could endure hardship, and kill when necessary to protect an ideal.
    He saw the vultures circling. Maybe they would find the body of the Englishman, maybe not. It didn’t matter. He mounted his horse and headed east. Even riding, it would be two more days’ travelling, at least, before he crossed the border. He eyed the Mauser rifle in the holster on the beast’s flank. It was loaded and ready. Before he met his enemies there would be other dangers on this journey – lion, leopard, elephant wary of men who still hunted them for their ivory, black rhino who had a similar dislike of humans. He wasn’t scared of the bush, but he was always wary and respectful of it. The other horse, tethered to his own mount, trailed behind. Strapped to its sides was the cargo, so precious, so important to his dream. He had nursed it halfway around the world.
    The aircraft was long gone, much to his relief. He figured he would be off the pan and in amongst the mopani forests along the border of Bechuanaland and Southern Rhodesia by nightfall. If more aircraft came, to search for the Englishman, he would be hidden from view from the air. He relished the quiet emptiness of the saltpan and he rode on, towards the finalisation of his mission.

5
    B ryant hated hospitals. The familiar odour of urine barely disguised by disinfectant sent a shiver up his back. He remembered the pain and the nightmares after the crash. He suppressed the memories as he followed Hayes and Lovejoy down a long corridor and turned left, following the sign to the morgue.
    His mother had died because there was no doctor or hospital within fifty miles of the property on which his parents had lived. Rhodesia had surprised him in terms of the facilities that were available, even in this remote corner of Africa. The air training scheme had spurred development in some areas but, by and large, there was a pretty good level of services for both the blacks and the whites. Sometimes, if he squinted a little, to blur his vision, and let the heat and dust wash over his skin, and the buzz of the flies fill his ears, he could almost be back in Australia.
    It wasn’t even as though he saw that many black faces around Bulawayo – at least, not in the town centre. The men on his troopship on the first trip over, had joked that they would be confronted by spear-wielding Zulus and bare-breasted African maidens, but he’d seen virtually nothing of traditional African culture or customs. What he’d learned of it had come from Kenneth Ngwenya. In town the shopkeepersand office workers and, here at the hospital, the doctors and nurses were all of British stock. Most of the African civilians he saw were uniformed messengers, maids, cleaners or, like the chap he could see through a window in the corner of the hospital grounds dressed in patched overalls, gardeners. He was watering a flowerbed in a corner of the hospital’s front yard, desperately trying to coax some colour from the ruddy earth. The man reminded Bryant he was, in fact, a long way from home.
    It was an odd place, he thought. Rhodesia. So very British in some ways, but, like Australia, a world away