“Now, one of them was a blond, you say?” she said.
“Yes,” Tom replied. “Teenager.”
“Johann Lang,” Botha confirmed. “Just turned nineteen.”
“All right,” Adrienne said. “Tom’s Ranger stunt went off like clockwork.”
Even then he felt a small glow of pride at the pride in her eyes.
“But I think this calls for real sneakiness, which is my specialty,” she went on.
“Where’s Johann?” Frikkie Lang said. “He should be back by now.”
“Probably still getting his dues from Oom Andries,” Dirk van Deventer said, poking at the fire.
He’d built the fire up a bit since they’d finished cooking; you needed a bed of low coals for that. They both kept their voices down; they were about Johann’s age, and along on sufferance. Johann’s father and Pik van Deventer were not ones to tolerate what they considered idle chatter or disrespect among the younger generation, particularly not on an important mission like this, vital to the future of the volk. Pik was sitting in a camp chair near one of the big tents, with a hurricane lantern hanging over him from its frontal awning, reading his Bible.
“Serves him right, and now we don’t have to do kaffir work cleaning up for a week,” Frikkie said. “Pretty soon we’ll all have kaffir to do the kaffir work.”
Dirk lowered his voice and smiled as he leaned close to his friend—both the older men with them were straitlaced.
“Not to mention kaffir meids to work on their backs. I hear they—”
They could have discussed that subject for hours, both being teenage males, but the sound of a horse’s hooves interrupted them. Both of them were farm-born and -raised; they could tell it was a single mount, ridden at a slow walk. The sound came from the east toward the pass.
“Johann!” the boy’s father shouted. “Get your lazy backside over here.”
The two young men rose, looking away from the fire and slitting their eyes to get their night vision back with the automatic gesture of those who’d hunted since they were twelve. That let them see what was coming: an Indian with bowed head and hands tied behind his back, walking in front of a lone horseman who held his rifle with the butt resting on his right thigh. It had to be Johann; they recognized his horse, and the bright hair that caught the edge of the firelight.
“Prisoner!” the horseman shouted, his voice high and shrill with excitement. “Prisoner!”
“You sklem!” Frikkie shouted joyfully, running out. “It wasn’t a bear after all!” The others were all on their feet as well; Dirk ran after him, and the two older men stood to watch. Frikkie had just enough time to realize that the horseman was a woman when the Indian’s arms came out from behind his back. The right hand flashed, and as the young man began to bring up his rifle something struck him a massive blow beneath the chin. He never saw the tomahawk that split his throat, only felt a huge wetness when he tried to draw breath, saw darkness, heard a distant fusillade of shots and the stuttering rattle of a machine gun.
Then nothing, ever again.
“Well, that was easy enough,” Adrienne said.
“It usually is, when you’ve got surprise on your side,” Tom replied.
The party’s own horses and mules had come up; they were some distance from the camp of the dead. Botha had insisted on that; it turned out several of the younger rebels had been friends of his son.
“There are things a man should not see too young,” he said.
Adrienne and Tom both looked after the big man as he walked off to help with loading the plunder on the captured horses—all the things Indian raiders would have taken, the cloth and tools and weapons and liquor. Kolomusnim had found some of that, and was now resting with his belly over a horse’s saddle.
“I wouldn’t have thought Piet had it in him,” Adrienne said quietly. “Granted he was never quite as bad as Schalk, but…”
“It all depends on who you consider human,” Tom said. “I suspect Botha has a fairly narrow definition, but he’s quite human himself within those limits.”
Their hands intertwined. “And I was scared spitless when you went in like that,” he said, his voice husky for a moment.
“You didn’t say anything,” she pointed out.
“Wouldn’t have done any good,” he said. “Besides, you were right.”
That got him a sudden tight squeeze. “God, you’re a find!”
“You’re another,” he said, and released her.
Tully got an all-out hug and kiss of relief from Sandra Margolin.
“Hey, I’m alive,” he said, when she let him come back up for air.
“That’s why, you idiot!” she said, and kissed him again.
And now to work, Tom thought. We’re just getting started.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The elephant put its forehead against the trunk of an oak and pushed, retreated, pushed again. It was a gray-brown mountain of flesh, the thick skin deeply wrinkled and the great triangular ears ragged; even a hundred yards away they could hear the quick exhaled huff of breath as it backed off. Then it curled its trunk high, trumpeted in anger and shuffled forward, head down and big curved tusks almost touching the dry earth as it charged the thing that had irritated it. Even with better than two hundred yards between them and the great beast, the party’s horses shied at the sound, and several of the mules threw their heads up and brayed.
Tom whistled softly, standing in the stirrups and shading his eyes against the setting sun with a hand. “What a monster!”
“I’ve never seen a bigger,” Botha agreed.
“We imported the savanna type from South Africa and Angola,” Adrienne said. “Couple of hundred young adults, mostly females, and they bred like bunnies; this could be one of the first generation. Piet, what size would you say he was?”
“Old bull, eleven, twelve feet at the shoulder… nine tons, maybe,” the Afrikaner said. “Big enough to push that tree over, by thunder.”
The big valley oak gave a groaning creak, and the branches at the top shivered; birds swept up from it in a cloud like twisting smoke. The elephant bull rocked backward, then thrust again. Roots broke, first isolated crack… crack… sounds, then a fusillade like the sound of battle. Another long groan, and the tree pitched forward, hesitated for a moment, then toppled over on its side. A big ball of the dry soil came up with it, leaving a pit deeper than a man in the earth, and a cloud of dust drifted away and fell. The elephant moved forward and began ripping off branches and stuffing them in its mouth, making small grunting sounds of contentment as it crunched leaves and acorns and twigs.
Tom pushed back his jungle hat and wiped sweat off his face onto his sleeve. They were in the northern lobe of the San Fernando now, northwest of the Verdugo Hills and not far from where Mission San Fernando Rey de España had stood in the other history. The coastal plain had been warm; the valley was no-doubt-about-it hot, nearly a hundred today.