A few drops at a time he passed the precious fluid from his own mouth into hers and she swallowed each sip more easily, He kept the last mouthful for himself and let it to his head like strong trickle down his throat. It went drink and he sat grinning stupidly through fat, scaly black le red, the abraen and sun-baked purp lips, his face swoll scab, and leis ions on his cheek covered with a crusty weeping his bloodshot eyes gummed up with dried mucus.
He rebuilt the still and lay down beside Sally-Anne. He covered his face from the sun with the tail torn from his shirt and whispered, "All right find help soon. Don't worry my love-" But he knew that this was their last day. He could not keep her alive for another.
Tomorrow they would die. It would be either the sun or the men of the Third Brigade but tomorrow they would die.
t sunset the still gave them another half cup of distilled water, and after they had drunk it, they fell into a heavy, deathlike sleep in each other's arms.
Something woke Craig, and for a moment he thought it was the night wind in the scrub. With difficulty he pushed himself into a sitting position, and cocked his head to listen, not sure whether he was still hallucinating or whether he was truly hearing that soft rise and fall of sound. It must be nearly dawn, he realized, the horizon was a crisp dark line beneath the velvet drape of the sky.
Then abruptly the sound firmed, and he recognized it.
The distinctive beat of a four, cylinder Land-Rover engine.
The Third Brigade had not abandoned the hunt. They were coming on relentlessly, like hyenas with the reek of blood in their nostrils.
He saw a pair of headlights, far out across the desert, their pale beams swi Any and tilting as the vehicle covered mg the rough ground. He groped for the AK 47. He could not find it. Ashe Levy must have stolen it, he thought bitterly, taken it off with him on the hyena. "I never did trust the son-of-a-bitch." Craig stared hopelessly at the approaching headlights.
In their beams danced a little pixie-like figure, a diminutive yellow mannikin. "Puck," he thought. "Fairies. I never believed in fairies. Don't say that when you do, one dies.
Don't want to kill fairies. I believe in them." His mind was going, fantasy mixed with flashes of lucidity.
Suddenly he recognized that the little half-naked yellow mannikin was a Bushman, one of the pygmy desert race. A Bushman tracker, the Third Brigade were using a Bushman tracker to hunt them down. Only a Bushman could have run on their spoor all night, tracking by the headlights of the Land-Rover.
The headlights flashed over them, likea stage spotlight, and Craig lifted his hand to shade his eyes. The light was so bright that it hurt. He had the bayonet in his other hand behind his back.
I'll get one of them, he told himself I'll take one of them The Land-Rover stopped only a few paces away. The little Bushman tracker was standing near them, clicking and clucking in his strange birdlike language. Craig heard the door of the Land-Rover open behind the blinding lights, and a man came towards them. Craig recognize d him instantly. General Peter Fungabera he seemed as tall as a giant in the back lighting of the headlights as he strode towards where Craig huddled on the desert floor.
Thank you, God, Craig prayed, thank you for sending him to me before I died, and he gripped the bayonet. In the throat, he told himself, as he stoops over me. He marshalled all his remaining strength, and General Peter Fungabera stooped towards him. Now! Craig made the effort. Drive the point into his throat! But nothing happened. His limbs would not respond. He was finished. There was nothing left.
"I have to inform you that you are under arrest for illegal entry into the Republic of Botswana, sir," said General Fungabera but he had changed his voice. He was using a deep, gentle, caring voice, in heavily accented English.
He won't al me, Craig thought, the tricky bastard, and lo he saw that Peter Fungabera was wearing the uniform of a sergeant of Botswana police.
"You are lucky." He went down on one knee. "We found where you were crossing the road." He was holding a felt covered water bottle to Craig's mouth. "We have been following you, since three o'clock yesterday." Coo , sweet water gushed into Craig's mouth and ran down his chin. He let the bayonet drop and grabbed for the bottle with both hands. He wanted to gulp it all down at Once, he wanted to drown in it. It was so marvelous that his eyes flooded with tears.
Through the tears he saw the Botswana police crest on the open door of the Land' Rover
"Who?" he stared at Peter Fungabera, but he had never seen this face before. It was a broad, flat nosed face, puckered now with worry and concern, like that of a friendly bulldog.
"Who?" he croaked.
"Please not to talk, we must get you and the lady to hospital at Francistown pretty bloody quickly. Plenty people die in desert you goddamned lucky."
"You aren't General Fungabera?" he whispered. "Who are you?"
"Botswana police, border patrol. Sergeant Simon Mare, keng at your honour's service, sir." s a boy, before the great patriotic war, Colonel Nikolai Bukharili-had accompanied his father on the wolf hurfts, hunting the packs that terrorized their remote village in the high Urals during the long harsh winter months.
Those expeditions into the vast gloomy Taiga forest had nurtured in him a deep passion for the hunt. He enjoyed the solitude of wild places and the primeval joy of pitting all his senses against a dangerous animal. Eyesight, hearing, smell, and the other extraordinary sense of the born hunter that enabled him to anticipate the twists and evasions of his quarry all these the colonel still possessed in full strength, despite his sixty-two years. Together with a memory for facts and faces that was almost computer like they had enabled him to excel at his work, had seen him elevated to the head of his department of the Seventh commissariat where he had hunted professionally the most dangerous game of all man.
When he hunted boar and bear on the great estates reserved for the recreations of high officers of the GRU and KGB, he had alarmed his comrades and the gamekeepers by scorning to fire from the prepared hides and by going on foot alone into the thickest cover. The thrill of great physical danger had satisfied some deep need in him.
When the assignment on which he was now engaged had been channelled through to his office on the second floor of the central headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square, he had recognized its importance immediately, and taken control of it personally. With careful cultivation, that first potential was gradually being realized, and when the time had come for Colonel Bukharin at last to meet his subject face to face on the ground over which they would manoeuvre, he had chosen the cover which best suited his tastes.
Russians, especially Russians of high rank, were objects of hostile suspicion in the new republic of Zimbabwe.
During the chimurenga, the war of independence, Russia had chosen the wrong horse and given her support to Joshua Nkomo's ZIPRA the Matabele revolutionary wing. As far as the government in Harare was concerned, the Russians were the new colonialist enemy, while it was China and North Korea who were the true friends of the revolution.