Sean's tone was hard. "Send two of your men to fetch the stretcher."
"General China calls for you. He is leaving in the Russian hen shaw He wants to speak to you before he goes," Alphonso said.
"AB right, but I wantiat stretcher here when I get back," Sean warned him. He glowed at his wristwatch. "We will march for the border in one hour from now."
"Nkosi!" Alphonso agreed cheerfully. "We will be ready."
Sean turned back to Claudia. "I'm going to see China. I'm going to try to talk him into flying Job out in the helicopter, but I don't think my chances are particularly rosy. Please stay with Job and keep an eye on his pulse rate. I've found a disposable syringe of adrenaline in the medic pack. Use it only as a last resort."
"Please don't be long," she whispered. "I'm only brave when you're here."
"Matatu will stay with you."
Sean climbed the hill swiftly, passing the first string of Renamo porters. Obviously China was taking everything he could carry, including boxes of helicopter spares and hundreds of jerry cans of avgas. The lines of porters were heading back into the wilderness toward the river, and Sean paid them scant attention. He had played his role. He was eager to get out, reach the border, get Job to where he could receive professional medical attention and get Claudia to safety. However, over all his urgency lay the nagging uncertainty: Was China really going to stand by his word and let them go? Was he not being just a trifle optimistic?
"We'll. see," he told himself grimly, and shouted at one of the Renamo officers who was supervising the loading of the porters.
"Where is General China?"
He found him with his staff and the captured Russians in the laager's command bunker. China looked up from the map he was consulting and smiled affably as Sean entered. "Colonel Courtney, my felicitations. You were magnificent. A famous victory."
"And now you owe me a favor."
"You and your party wish to leave," China agreed. "AD debts between us have been paid in full. You are free to go."
"No," Sean shook his head. "By my calculation you still owe me one. Captain Job has been badly wounded. Ms condition is crit iI want him flown out to Zimbabwe in the captured Hind."
cal.
"You jest, of course." China laughed lightly. "I cannot risk sending such a valuable asset on a nonproductive mission. No, Colonel, all debts are paid. Please don't persist in extravagant demands. With my defective hearing, it only annoys me, and I may be tempted to review my generous offer to allow you and yours to depart unhindered." He smiled and held out his hand. "Come now, Colonel. Let us part as friends. You have the services of Sergeant Alphonso and his men. You are a man of infinite resourcefulness. I am sure you will contrive to get yourself and all your party to safety without any further assistance from me."
Sean ignored the outstretched hand. China glanced at it and then lowered it to his side. "So we part, Colonel. Me to my little war and, who knows, perhaps one day a country of my very own.
You to the tender embraces of your very rich, very beautiful young American." His smile had a sly, foxy slant to it. "I wish YOU JOY, and I am sure you do the same for me." He turned back to his map, leaving Sean for an instant nonplussed and taken off balance. It was incomplete, it couldn't end like this. Sean wondered if there was more to come, but General China began dictating orders to one of his officers in Portuguese, leaving Sean standing uncertainly at the door of the bunker.
Sean waited a few moments longer, then turned abruptly and ducked out through the entrance. Only after he was gone did China lift his head and smile after him, a gloating little smile which, if Sean had seen it, would have answered his question.
Alphonso's men had worked quickly. The fiberglass stretcher was one of those lightweight body-molded types used by mountain rescue teams. Nonetheless it would require four men to carry it over rough ground, and they had a long, hard path to the border.
"Less than a hundred kilometers and not that hard," Sean reassured himself. "Two days, if we push it."
Claudia greeted him with relief. "Job seems stronger. He was conscious, asking for you. He said something about a hill. Hill Thirty-one?"
Sean flickered a smile. "That's where we met. He's wandering a little. Help me to get him onto the stretcher."
Between them they lifted Job gently and settled him onto the stretcher. Sean rigged the drip set on a wire frame above his head and tucked looted gray woolen blankets around him.
"Matatu," he said as he stood up. "Take us home." And he gestured to the first team of stretcher bearers to take their positions.
It was less than two hours since sunrise, but they seemed to have lived an entire lifetime in that short period, Sean thought as he glanced back at the hilltop laager. Streamers of smoke drifted from its crest, and the last column of General China's porters was disappearing into the forest below it, all heavily laden with booty.
The distant sounds of battle had finally dwindled into silence.
The halfhearted Frefirno counterattack had long since fizzled out, and China was withdrawing his forces into the bad ground below the Pungwe River.
As Sean watched, the captured Hind helicopter rose slowly out ng above the hill on its glistening rotor;
0 1 em , then abrul i [y it dipped toward them, the sound of its engine crescendoc 1, and suddenly Sean was staring into the multiple mouths of the Gatling cannon in its nose.
As it raced toward him, he recognized China's face behind the armored glass canopy. He was perched in the flight engineer's seat, at the controls of the 12.7-men cannon. Sean saw the barrels of the cannon swing slightly, coming on to aim. The Hind was only fifty feet above them, so close he could see China's teeth flash in his dark face as he smiled.
Their little column had not reached the edge of the forest. There was no cover, no protection from the blast of that terrible weapon, and instinctively Sean reached out and drew Claudia to him, trying to shield her with his own body.
Above them General China lifted his right hand in an ironic salute, and the Hind banked steeply away into the northwest, dwindled swiftly to a speck, and was gone. They all stared after it silently, seized by a sense of anticlimax, until Sean broke the spell.
"Let's go, brethren!" And once again the stretcher bearers started forward at an easy jog trot, very softly singing one of the ancient marching songs.
Scouting ahead of them, Matatu came across a few scattered parties of Frehmo assault troops, but they were all in headlong retreat from the river wilderness. After the loss of their air support the Frefirno offensive seemed to have collapsed completely and the situation was fluid and confused. Although they were forced to detour further northward than Sean had planned, Matatu steered them out of contact with any Frelimo and the stretcher bearers were rotated regularly so they made swift progress.
At nightfall they stopped to cat and rest. Alphonso made the scheduled radio contact with Renamo headquarters and gave them a position report. He received only a laconic acknowledgement without change of orders. They feasted on canned goods looted from the Russian stores and smoked the perfumed Balkan tobacco in yellow cigarette paper with hollow cardboard filters.