"There is no sign of game," Riccardo remarked, peering ahead through his binoculars. "We haven't seen so much as a rabbit since we crossed into Mozambique."
it was the first time he had spoken in hours, and Sean was encouraged. He had begun seriously worrying about his client.
Now he responded quickly.
"This was once a paradise of big game. I hunted here before the Portuguese pulled out and the buffalo were running in herds ten thousand strong."
"What happened to them?"
"Frelimo fed the army with them. They even offered me the contract for the slaughter. They couldn't understand why I refused. In the end they did it themselves."
"How did they do it?"
"From helicopters. They flew low over the herds and machine gunned them. They killed almost fifty thousand buffalo in three months. For all that time the sky was black with vultures and you could smell the killing fields from twenty miles off. When the buffalo were finished they started on the other game, the wildebeest and the zebra."
"What a cruel and savage land this is," Claudia said quietly.
"Surely you don't disapprove?" Sean asked. "It was done by black men, not whites. It couldn't possibly be wrong." He glanced at his Rolex wristwatch. "Time to move on."
He put out his hand to help Riccardo to his feet, but the older man shrugged the hand away. Nevertheless, Sean fell in beside him as the march resumed and let Claudia move up directly behind Matatu, while he chatted quietly to her father, jollying him along, trying to distract him from his weariness.
He recounted anecdotes from the bush war. He pointed out the site of the guerrilla training camp as they passed a few miles north of it and described the raid by the Ballantyne Scouts.
Riccardo was interested enough to ask questions. "This Comrade China sounds like a good field commander," he commented.
"Did you ever find out what happened to him after he escapedT"
"He was active right up to the end of the war. A tough cookie, all right. His men had to backpack all their munitions into Rhodesia, and a Russian T-5 antitank land mine weighs almost seventy pounds. The story goes that Comrade China brought in one of them at enormous cost in sweat and blood and laid it on the main Mount Darwin road for one of our regular armored patrols.
However, the local blacks had hired a bus that same weekend to go into town to watch the football match, and they touched off the land mine. There were sixty-five of them on the bus and twenty-three of them survived the explosion. Comrade China was so incensed by the waste of his precious T-5 that he sent for all the next of kin of the victims and the survivors who were still able to walk and fined them each ten dollars to cover the cost of another land mine."
Riccardo stopped and doubled over with laughter. Claudia turned on them furiously. "How can you laugh? That's the most outrageous story I've ever heard."
"Oh, I don't know," Sean replied evenly. "I don't think ten dollars was so outrageous. I think old China was being fairly lenient."
She tossed her head and lengthened her stride to catch up with Matatu, and Riccardo still chuckling, asked, "After the war, what happened to this character?"
Sean shrugged. "He was in the new government in Harare for a while, but then he disappeared in one of the political purges. He might have been liquidated.. the old revolutionaries are always looked on with distrust when the regime they fought for comes to power. Nobody likes sharing a bed with a trained killer and toppler of other rulers."
Sean called a halt an hour before dark for a brew of tea and their frugal evening meal. While Job cooked it over his small smokeless fire, Sean took Matatu aside and talked to him quietly. The tracker watched Sean's face as he spoke, nodding eagerly, and as soon as he finished Matatu slipped away, heading back the way they had come.
Riccardo looked a question as Sean came back to join them and he explained.
"I sent Matatu to backtrack us. Make sure we aren't being followed. I'm worried about that shot. It could have called up those uglies we found near the border."
Riccardo nodded. Then he asked, "Have you got a couple of aspirin, Sean?"
Sean opened the side flap of his pack and shook three tablets from their bottle.
"Headache?" he asked as he passed them to Riccardo, who nodded as he popped them into his mouth and washed them down with a swallow of hot tea.
"The dust and sun glare," he explained. But both Sean and Claudia were studying him and he bridled. "Damn it, don't look at me like that. I'm fine."
"Sure," Sean agreed smoothly. "Let's eat and move on to find a place to sleep." He went across to the cooking fire and squatted beside Job.
They talked softly.
"Papa," Claudia moved a little closer to her father and touched his arm. "How are you feeling, honestly?"
Don't worry about me, tesoro.
"it has started, hasn't it?"
"No," he replied, too swiftly.
Doc Andrews said there might be headaches."
"It's the sun."
"I love you, Papa," she said.