He thought she might actually attack him, and he stepped back. As he did so he looked beyond her and saw a tiny arrowhead of ripples slipping silently across the still green surface of the pool toward them. At the apex of the V-shaped ripple were two black lumps; gnarled and no bigger than a pair of large walnuts, they came at surprising speed.
Sean grabbed her arm, the same arm about whose injuries she was complaining, and jerked her back past him and away from the water's edge so viciously that she sprawled on her hands and knees in the mud.
He swung up the.577 Express rifle and aimed between the black eye lumps of the approaching crocodile. The eyes were at least nine inches apart, he calculated as he rode the pip of the foresight between them-a big old mugger.
The thunder of the rifle was stunning in the silence of the reeds and the bullet flicked an ostrich feather of spray from the surface, dead center between the eye protuberances. The crocodile rolled sluggishly onto its back, its tiny brain mangled by the shot.
Claudia scrambled to her feet and stared over his shoulder as the reptile flashed its butter-yellow saurian belly. Sixteen feet from chin to the tip of its long crested tail, its jaws clicked as its nerves spasmed from the brain shot. The fangs, as long and thick as a human forefinger, overlapped the grinning scaly lips. It sank slowly back into the pool, the creamy belly fading into the green depths.
Claudia's fury had evaporated. She was staring into the pool, shivering uncontrollably, shaking her wet hair.
"oh God, I didn't realize... how horrible." She swayed toward him, shattered and vulnerable. "I didn't know." Her body was cold from the pool, long and sleek and wet as she pressed against him.
"What is it?" Riccardo Monterro shouted from the edge of the reed bed.
"Sean, are you all right? What happened? Where's Claudia?"
At the sound of her father's voice, she jumped back from him guiltily and for the first time tried to cover her breasts and crotch.
"It's all right, Capo," Sean yelled back. "She's safe."
Claudia snatched up her panties and pulled them on hastily, hopping on one foot in the mud, turning her back to him as she picked up her shirt and thrust her arms into the sleeves. When she turned back to him, she had recovered her anger.
"I got a fright," she told him. "I didn't mean to grab you like that. Don't make any big deal out of it, buster." She zipped up the fly of her jeans and lifted her chin. "I would have grabbed the garbage man if he'd been handy."
"Okay, ducky, next time I'm going to let them bite you, lion or croc, what the hell."
"You shouldn't have any complaints," she said over her shoulder as she marched back up the path. "You got yourself a big eyeful and I noticed you made a meal of it, Colonel."
"You're right. You gave me a good peep. Not bad, a bit skinny perhaps-but not bad."
And his grin expanded as he saw the back of her neck turn angry red.
Riccardo ran down the path to meet them, frantic with worry, and he seized Claudia and hugged her with relief. "What happened, tesoro? Are you all right?"
"She tried to feed the crocs," Sean told him. "We are moving out in exactly thirty seconds from now. That shot will have alerted every ugly within ten miles."
"At least I got that filthy black muck off my face," Claudia told herself as they struck out away from the marshes. Her damp clothing felt cool and clean on her skin, and she was invigorated by her perilous bathe.
"No harm done," she thought. "Except I got ogled." Even that no longer troubled her. His eyes on her naked body had not been altogether offensive, and in retrospect there was a satisfaction in having tantalized him.
"Eat your heart out, lover boy." She watched his back as he strode out ahead of her. "That was the best you're ever likely to lay eyes on."
Within a mile her clothes had dried and she had no energy for
, any extraneous activity. The whole of her existence became the act of picking up one foot and swinging it forward after the other.
The heat was fierce and became fiercer still as they reached the rim of the escarpment of the Zambezi Valley and started down.
The air changed its character. It lay on the earth in silvery streams like water, it quivered and shimmered like curtains of crystal beads and changed the form and shape of things at a distance so that they squirmed and wriggled, doubled in size, assumed monstrous shapes in the mirage, or disappeared from view, swallowed up by the cascades of heated air.
Farther off the air was blue, so when she looked back, the escarpment down which they were climbing was washed with pale blue, misty and ethereal. The sky was a different blue, deep and vigorous, and the clouds stood on the firmament in towering ranges the colors of lead and silver, their bottoms cut cleanly horizontal to the earth, their heads shaped like full-rigged ships, mainsail and topsail, royal and skysail piled up into the heavens. Under the cloud ranges the air was trapped and lay upon the earth so it felt as heavy as hot syrup. They trudged along beneath its weight.
From the forest around them the minute black mo pane flies came swarming and gathered at the corners of their eyes and mouths, crawled up into their nostrils and into their ears to drink the moisture from their bodies. Their insistence was an exquisite torture.
As each long mile fell behind them, so vistas of the valley floor opened ahead. On the horizon they could at last make out the dark belt of riverine vegetation that marked the course of the great Zambezi. Always Matatu danced along ahead of them like a wraith, following a trail that no other eye than his could discern, tireless and unaffected by the heat, so that Sean had to call him back for the regular periods of rest with which he interrupted the march.