The huge bullet smashed into the wall of bamboo, and at Sean's side Matatu shouted gleefully, 'Pigat Hit!" as he heard the bullet tell distinctly on living flesh.
'Take the blood spoor!" Sean commanded and the little Ndorobo loped across the clearing. But it was not necessary: the Mau Mau lay where he had dropped. The bullet had ploughed through bamboo, leaf and stem, without being deflected an inch from its track.
Ray and Alistair came into the camp, weapons ready, and picked over the bodies. One of the other Mau Mau women was still breathing, though bloody bubbles seethed on her lips, and Ray shot her in the temple with the Sten.
'Make sure none of them got away,' Sean ordered Matatu in Swahili.
The little Ndorobo made a quick circuit of the encampment to check for out-going spoor, and then came back grinning. 'All here." He gloated. 'All dead." Sean tossed the Gibbs to him and drew the ivory-handled hunting-knife from the sheath on his belt.
'Damn it, laddie,' Ray Harris protested as Sean walked back to where the body of the first girl lay. 'You are the bloody end, man." He had seen Sean do this before and although Ray Harris was a hard, callous man who for thirty years had made his living out of blood and gunfire, still he gagged as Sean squatted over the corpse and stropped the blade on the palm of his hand.
'You are getting soft, old man." Sean grinned at him. 'You know they make beautiful tobacco pouches,' he said, and took the dead girl's breast in his hand, pulling the skin taut for the stroke of the knife blade.
Shasa found Garry in the boardroom. He was always there twenty minutes before any of the other directors arrived, arranging his piles of computer print-out sheets and ,other notes around him and going over his facts and figures for one last time before the meeting began.
Shasa and Centaine had argued before appointing Garry to the boarA of Courtney Mining.
'You can ruin a pony by pushing him too hard too soon." 'We aren't talking about a polo pony,' Centaine had replied tartly.
'And it's not a case of pushing. He's got the bit between his teeth, to continue your chosen metaphor, Shasa, and if we try and hold him back we will either discourage him or drive him out on his own.
Now is the time to give him a bit of slack rein." 'But you made me wait much longer." 'You were a late-blooming rose, and the war and all that business held you up. At Garry's age you were still flying Hurricanes and chasing around Abyssinia." So Garry had gone on the board, and like everything else in his life he had taken it very seriously indeed. Now he looked up as his father confronted him down the length of the boardroom.
'I heard you have been borrowing money on your own bat,' Shasa accused.
Garry removed his spectacles, polished them diligently, held them up to the light and then replaced them on his large Courtney nose, all to gain time in which to compose his reply.
'Only one person knows about that. The manager of the Adderly Street branch of Standard Bank. He could lose his job if he blabbed about my personal business." 'You forget that both Nana and I are on the board of the Standard Bank. All loans of over a million pounds come up before us for approval." 1Rand,' Garry corrected his father pedantically. 'Two million rand - the pound is history." /'Thanks,' Shasa said grimly. 'I'll try to move with the times. Now how about this two million rand you have borrowed?" 'A straightforward transaction, Dad. I put up my shares in the Shasaville township as collateral, and the bank lent me two million rand." 'What are you going to do with it? That's a small fortune." Shasa was one of the few men in the country who would qualify that amount with that particular adjective, and Garry looked mildly relieved.
'As a matter of fact, I have used half a million to buy up fiftyone per ent of the issued shareholding of Alpha Centauri Estates, and loaned the company another half million to get it out of trouble." 'Alpha Centauri?" Shasa looked mystified.
The company owns some of the prime property on the Witwatersrand and here in the Cape Peninsula. It was worth almost twenty-six million before the crash at Sharpeville." 'And now it's worth zero,' Shasa suggested, and before Garry could protest. 'What have you done with the other million?" 'Gold shares - Anglos and Vaal Reefs. At the fire sale prices I paid for them they are returning almost twenty-six percent. The dividends will pay the interest on the entire bank loan." Shasa sat down in his seat at the head of the boardroom table and studiec his son carefully. He should have been conditioned by now, but Garry still managed to surprise Shasa. It was an imaginative but neatly logical coup, and if it had not been his own son, Shasa would have been impressed. As it was, he felt duty bound to find flaws in it.
'What about your Shasaville shares - you are taking an awful chance." Garry looked puzzled. 'I don't have to explain it to you, Pater.
You taught me. Shasaville is tied up. We can't sell or develop aggressively until land values recover, so I've used my shares to take full advantage of the crash." 'What if land values never recover?" Shasa demanded relentlessly.
'If they don't, it will mean the country is finished anyway. I will lose my share of nothing which is nothing. If they do recover, I will be in profit twenty or thirty million." Shasa picked at that for a while and then changed his angle of attack. 'Why didn't you come to me to borrow the money, instead of going behind my back?" Garry grinned at him and tried to smooth down the crest of wiry black hair that stuck up on his crown. 'Because you would have given me a list of five hundred reasons why not, just as you are doing now. Besides, I wanted to do this one on my own. I wanted to prove to you that I'm not a kid any more." Shasa twiddled the gold pen on the pad in front of him and when he could think of no other criticism, he grumbled, 'You don't want to get too damned clever for your own good. There is a line between good business sense and outright gambling." 'How do you tell the difference?" Garry asked. For a moment Shasa thought he was being facetious and then he realized that as usual Garry was deadly serious. He was leaning forward eagerly waiting for his father to explain, and he really wanted to know.
Shasa was saved by the entry of the other senior directors: Centaine on the arm of Dr Twenty-man-Jones and David Abrahams arguing amiably but respectfully with his father, and thankfully he let the subject drop. Once or twice during the meeting he glanced down the table at Garry, who was following all the discussion with a rapt expression, the light from the picture window reflecting a miniature image of the crest of Table Mountain in the lenses of his spectacles.
When all the business on the agenda had been completed and Centaine had started to rise to lead them through to the executive diningroom, Shasa arrested them.
'Madame Courtney and gentlemen, one additional piece of business. Mr Garry Courtney and I have been discussing the general state of the property market. We both feel that property and equities are very much undervalued at the moment and that the company should take advantage of this fact, but I'd like him to tell you in his own words and to put forward certain proposals. Would you oblige us please, Mr Courtney?" It was Shasa's own way of giving the lad a jolt and cutting him back a little. In the six months since his elevation, Garry had never been called upon to address the full board and now Shasa dropped it on him without warning and sat back with vindictive relish in his wing-backed leather chairman's throne and folded his arms.
At the bottom of the table Garry blushed furiously, and glanced longingly at the stinkwood door, his only escape, before giving the traditional salutation to his fellow directors.
'MaMa-dame Courtney and ge-ge-gentlemen." He stopped and threw his father a pitiful look of appeal, but when he received a stern uncompromising frown in return, he took a deep breath and launched into it. He stumbled once or twice, but when first Abe Abrahams and then Centaine shot cutting questions at him, he forgot about his stutter and talked for forty-five minutes.