Vixen 03 Page 9

  "Somebody must know . . . must have seen ..."

  "We'll find a witness. One will turn up by morning. I promise."

  The grim conversation halted while a helicopter whirled to the ground and the soldiers tenderly lifted the bodies of Myrna, Jenny, and Patrick Junior inside the cargo cabin and strapped them down. Fawkes made no move to go to them. He only stood there and watched with great sadness in his eyes as the helicopter lifted off and headed toward the mortuary in Umkono.

  "Who is responsible?" Fawkes said to Francis. "Tell me who murdered my wife and children and my workers and burned my farm."

  "One or two CK-eighty-eight plastic cartridges, the charred remains of an arm inside the house with a Chinese watch on the wrist, prints in the dirt from military-soled boots. Circumstantial as it is, the evidence points to the AAR."

  "What do you mean, 'one or two cartridges'?" Fawkes snapped. "The bloody bastards should have left a whole mountain of them."

  Francis made a helpless gesture with his hands. "Typical of an AAR raid. They always police the area right after an attack.

  Makes it tough to tag them with any hard evidence. They plead innocent to any international investigation of terrorism while pointing a hypocritical finger at the other liberation organizations. If it hadn't been for our Alsatian dogs, we never would have uncovered the spent shells or perhaps even the arm.

  "The raiders' tracks come and go from the bush through the cane fields and up to the house. I figure they shot down the guards during a shift change, while the gate was open, breaking the electrical charge. Pat Junior was killed over by that burnt-out tractor.

  Myrna and Jenny were lying a few feet apart in the parlor. All had been mercifully shot. Patrick, for what little comfort it's worth, there was no indication of rape or mutilation."

  Constable Francis paused to take a drink from a canteen. He offered it to Fawkes, who simply shook his head.

  "Take a swig, Patrick. It's whisky."

  Fawkes refused again.

  "My office received a distress message over the radio from Jenny. She said that Pat had been shot and that men in bush fatigues were attacking the farm. She and Myrna must have put up one hell of a fight. We found four separate bloodstains in the yard behind the house. And you can see for yourself that what's left of the veranda floor is filled with bloody trails. Jenny's last words were, 'Good Lord, they're shooting the children in the compound.'

  "We assembled our forces and came on as quickly as the whirlybirds could get us here. Thirteen minutes was all it took. By then everything was ablaze and the raiders had vanished. Two platoons and a helicopter are tracking them through the bush now."

  "My people," murmured Fawkes, pointing at the still figures sprawled around the compound. "We can't leave them lying here for the vultures."

  "Your neighbor Brian Vogel is coming with his workers to bury them. They should be here any time. Until then, my men will keep the scaven-gers away."

  Fawkes was like a man wandering lost in a dream as he walked up the steps to the veranda. He could not yet grasp the immensity of the tragedy. He still half expected to see his three loved ones standing framed by the bougainvillea. And his mind very nearly formed a picture of them as they were, waving happily to him when he left for Pembroke.

  The veranda was painted in gore. Puddled streaks traveled from the smoking embers down the steps to the yard, where they abruptly ended. It looked to Fawkes as if three or maybe four bodies had been dragged from the house before it was torched. The blood had coagulated and turned crusty under the afternoon sun. Fat iridescent flies hummed and waded about the trails in swarms.

  Fawkes leaned against the lattice and felt the first uncontrollable tremor of shock. The house he had built for his family was nothing but blackened, grotesque ruins incongruously heaped in the middle of the trimmed lawn and the beds of gladiola and fire lilies that stood virtually unmarked. Even the memory of how it had looked was beginning to twist and distort. He sank down on the steps and covered his face with his hands.

  He was still sitting there half an hour later when Constable Francis came over and gently nudged him.

  "Come, Patrick, let me take you to my place. There is nothing to be gained by staying here."

  Francis led the unresisting Fawkes to the Bushmaster and tenderly deposited him in the passenger's seat.

  As the vehicle passed through the gate, Fawkes stared straight ahead, did not look back. He knew he would never see or set foot on his farm again.

  17

  26

  Although it seemed as though his head had barely hit the pillow, Hiram Lusana had been asleep for seven hours when he was roused by the knock at his door. The wristwatch on the bed table read six o'clock. He cursed, rubbed the sleep from his coffee-brown eyes, and sat up.

  "Come in."

  The knock came again.

  "I said, Come in," he grunted loudly.

  Captain John Mukuta entered the room and stood stiffly at attention. "Sorry to wake you, sir, but section fourteen has just returned from its reconnaissance of Umkono."

  "So what's the emergency? I can study their report later."

  Mukuta's eyes remained fixed on a spot on the wall. "The patrol experienced trouble. The section leader was shot and lies critically wounded in the hospital. He insists on reporting to you and no one else."

  "Who is he?"

  "His name is Marcus Somala."

  "Somala?" Lusana's brow knitted. He got out of bed. "Tell him I'm coming."

  The captain saluted and left, softly closing the door behind him, pretending not to have noticed the second shape curled beneath the satin sheets.

  Lusana reached over and pulled away the top sheet. Felicia Collins slept like a statue. Her short Afro hair gleamed in the half light and her lips were puffy and parted. Her skin was the color of cocoa and her conical breasts, with their dark, full nipples, heaved with each deep breath.

  He smiled and left the sheet off. Still half asleep, he weaved into the bathroom and splashed handfuls of cold water on his face.

  The eyes that stared back from the mirror were streaked with red. The face around them was lined and haggard from a night heavily laced with liquor and sex. He tenderly patted the battle-worn features with a towel, returned to the bedroom, and dressed.

  Lusana was a small, wiry man, medium boned and lighter skinned than any man in the army of Africans he commanded.

  "American tan" is what they called it behind his back. And yet any remarks about his color or his offhand stateside manner were not uttered out of disrespect. His men looked up to him with a primitive sort of awe of the supernatural. He had the air of assurance that most lightweight fighters have in their early careers; some might call it an air of arrogance. He took a last fond look at Felicia, sighed, and walked across the camp to the hospital.

  The Chinese doctor was pessimistic.

  "The bullet entered from the rear, tore away half his lung, shattered a rib, and exited below the left breast. It is a miracle the man is still alive."

  "Can he talk?" Lusana asked.

  "Yes, but each word drains his strength."

  "How long-"

  "-has he to live?" .

  Lusana nodded.

  "Marcus Somala has an incredibly strong constitution," the doctor said. "But I doubt if he can last out the day."

  "Can you give him something to stimulate his senses, if even for only a few minutes?"

  The doctor looked thoughtful. "I suppose speeding up the inevitable will not matter." He turned and murmured instructions to a nurse, who left the room.

  Lusana looked down at Somala. The section leader's face was drawn and his chest rose shallowly with spasmodic breaths. A maze of plastic tubing hung from a rack above the bed and ran into his nose and arms. A large surgical dressing was taped across his chest.

  The nurse returned and carefully handed the doctor a hypodermic. He inserted the needle and pushed evenly on the plunger. In a few moments Somala's eyes fluttered half o
pen, and he moaned.

  Lusana silently motioned to the doctor and his nurse and they withdrew to the hall and closed the door.

  He leaned over the bed. "Somala, this is Hiram Lusana. Do you understand me?"

  Somala's whispered voice came out hoarse but with a trace of emotion. "I do not see well, my General. Is it really you?"

  Lusana took Somala's hand and gripped it tightly. "Yes, my brave warrior. I have come to hear your report."

  The man on the bed smiled thinly, and then a haunting, questioning look came into his eyes. "Why . . . why did you not trust me, my General?"

  "Trust you?"

  "Why did you not tell me you were sending men to raid the Fawkes farm?"

  Lusana was shaken. "Describe what you saw. Describe everything. Leave out nothing."

  Twenty minutes later, exhausted by the effort, Marcus Somala lapsed back into unconsciousness. By noon he was dead.

  18

  Patrick Fawkes stood alone and shoveled the molasseslike clay soil over the coffins of his family. His clothes were soaked through by a light rain and his own sweat. It had been his wish to dig the common grave and fill it himself. The burial services were long over and his friends and neighbors had departed, leaving him to his grievous task.

  At last he patted smooth the last shovelful, stood back, and looked down. The headstone had not arrived yet, and the mound seemed stark and forlorn among the older grave sites that had been blanketed by grass and edged with rows of neatly kept flowers.

  He fell to his knees and reached into a pocket of his discarded coat. His hand came out with a fistful of bougainvillea petals. These he sprinkled over the damp earth.

  Fawkes let the grief flow. He wept until after the sun dipped below the horizon. He wept until his eyes could no longer produce tears.

  His mind traveled back twelve years and ran off images like a movie projector. He saw Myrna and the kids in the little cottage near Aberdeen on the North Sea. He saw the looks of surprise and happiness in their faces when he told them they were all packing 27

  up and heading to Natal to start a farm. He saw how sickly white skinned Jenny and Pat Junior were beside the other schoolchildren of Umkono, and how quickly they became tanned and robust. He saw Myrna begrudgingly leaving Scotland to alter her life-style totally, and then coming to love Africa even more than he.

  "You'll never make a good farmer until you flush the salt water out of your veins," she used to tell him.

  Her voice seemed so clear to him that he could not accept the fact that she lay beneath the ground he knelt on, never to see the daylight again. He was alone now and the thought left him lost. When a woman loses a man, he recalled hearing somewhere, she picks up her life as before and perseveres. But when a man loses a woman, he dies by half.

  He forced the once-happy scenes from his mind and tried to conjure the shadowy figure of a man. The face had no distinct features, because it was the face of a man Fawkes had never seen: the face of Hiram Lusana.

  Fawkes's grief was suddenly engulfed by a tidal surge of cold hatred. He balled his fists and beat them against the wet ground until his emotions finally drained away. Then he gave a great sigh and neatly arranged the bougainvillea petals so that they spelled out Myrna's and the children's names.

  Then he rose unsteadily to his feet, and he knew what he had to do.

  19

  Lusana sat at the head of an oval conference table, his eyes pensive, his hands toying with a ball-point pen. He looked at the ever-smiling Colonel Due Phon Lo, chief military adviser to the AAR, then at the officers sitting in tense formation in the chairs beside him.

  "Some bloodthirsty idiot takes it into his head to knock over the farm of the most respected citizen of Natal, and you all sit here looking as innocent as Zulu virgins." He paused a moment, searching their faces. "Come, come, gentlemen. Let's stop playing games. Who was behind it?"

  Lo bowed his head and spread his hands on the table. His almond eyes and closely cropped straight hair made him seem out of place among the others. He spoke slowly and enunciated each word precisely.

  "You have my word, General, no one under your command was responsible. I have studied the exact placement of every section during the time of the attack. None of them, except for the one Somala led, was within two hundred kilometers of Umkono."

  "Then how do you explain it?"

  "I cannot."

  Lusana's gaze lingered on Lo, appraising the Asian's expression. Satisfied that he saw nothing devious in the permanently etched smile, he turned and surveyed the other men at the table.

  To his right sat Major Thomas Machita, his chief intelligence analyst. Next to him was Colonel Randolph Jumana, his second-in-command. Opposite them were Lo and Colonel Oliver Makeir, coordinator of A AR propaganda programs.

  "Any theories on the subject?" Lusana asked.

  Jumana straightened a sheaf of papers for the tenth time and avoided Lusana's gaze. "What if Somala imagined the Fawkes raid?

  Perhaps he saw it during a fit of delirium; or, then again, perhaps he made it up."

  Frowning, Lusana shook his head in irritation. "You forget, Colonel, I was the one who took Somala's report. He was a damn good man. The best section leader we had. He was not delirious and he had no reason to create a fairy tale, knowing he was about to die."

  "There is no doubt that the raid took place," said Makeir. "The South African papers and television newscasts have given it heavy play. Their stories all check with what Somala told the general here, except the government Defence Forces have yet to come up with any reliable witnesses who can provide a description of the attacking troops. We were fortunate that Somala was able to return from his mission and describe in detail what he saw before he died."

  "Did he see who shot him?" asked Jumana.

  "He was hit in the back at great distance," answered Lusana, "probably by a sniper. The poor devil managed to crawl three miles to the area he assigned the rest of his scouting party. They performed what first aid they could and then beat a track back to our camp."

  Thomas Machita shook his head in utter incomprehension. "None of it tallies. I doubt that other liberation movements would dress up and masquerade as AAR soldiers."

  "On the other hand," said Makeir, "maybe they staged the raid to cast blame on us and take the heat off themselves."

  "I am in close contact with my countrymen who are advising your brother revolutionaries," said Colonel Lo. "They are all as angry as disturbed hornets. No one gained by the assault on the Fawkes farm. If anything, it has stiffened the resolve of the whites, the Indians, the coloreds, and many blacks, as well, to stand firm against outside inter-vention."

  Lusana rested his chin on clasped hands. "Okay, if they didn't do it, and we know we didn't do it, who does that leave as a prime suspect?"

  "South African whites," Lo answered simply.

  Every eye focused on the Vietnamese adviser. Lusana stared into the inscrutable eyes. "Perhaps you'd care to repeat the statement."

  "I am merely suggesting that someone in the South African government may have ordered the murder of the Fawkes family and their field workers."

  They all stared at him wordlessly for several moments. Finally Machita broke the silence.

  "I fail to see a purpose."

  "Nor I," Lo said, and shrugged. "But consider this. Who else would have the resources to equip a group of commandos in arms and uniforms that are identical to our own? Also, and most important, does it not strike you, gentlemen, as odd that even though the attacking group retreated within the sound of Defence Force helicopters, none of them was tracked down. It is a fact of guerrilla life that we require a minimum of one hour to insure even a moderate chance of a successful escape. Less than ten minutes' head start on a force using helicopters and dogs is suicide."

  "You make an intriguing case," Lusana said, his fingers drumming the table. "I don't for one minute accept it as valid. However, it won't hurt to run a check." He turned to Machita. "Do you have a
trusted informer in the Defence Ministry?"

  28

  "Someone highly placed," answered Machita. "Costs us a pretty penny, but his information is thoroughly reliable. Odd sort, though; he never appears in the same place twice under the same guise."

  "You make him sound like some kind of mystic," said Jumana.

  "Perhaps he is," conceded Machita. "Emma materializes when we least expect him."

  "Emma?"

  "His code name."

  "Either the man has a warped sense of humor or he's a transvestite," said Lusana.

  "I cannot say, General."

  "How do you contact him?"

  "We don't. He reaches us only when he has useful information to sell."

  Jumana's face clouded. "What guarantee have we that he isn't feeding us falsified documents?"

  "To date, everything he passed us from the Ministry has checked out one hundred percent."

  Lusana looked at Machita. "You'll see to it, then?"

  Machita nodded. "I'll fly to Pretoria myself and await Emma's next appearance. If anyone can clear up the mystery, it will be him."

  20

  The African Army of Revolution's camp was not really a camp at all; rather, it was a headquarters in what was once a small university for the Portuguese when they ruled Mozambique. A new university for the nation's black citizens had since risen from the heart of a new city torn from the northern interior, on Lake Malawi.

  The converted campus made an ideal base for Lusana's army: dormitories for the troops, cafeterias turned mess halls, sporting facilities now utilized for combat instruction, comfortable quarters for the officers, a newly decorated ballroom for social events.

  Democratic congressman Frederick Daggat, one of New Jersey's three black congressmen, was impressed. He'd half expected a typical revolutionary movement run by tribesmen armed with Soviet rockets, dressed in drab Chinese uniforms, and spouting inane, overused Marxist cliches. Instead he was pleased to discover an organization run on the lines of an American oil corporation.