Now, with the early sun on our backs, the ground ahead was brilliantly illuminated. My instinct was to hustle on and overtake the party ahead of us. The trouble was, our forward visibility was limited by the curve of the hill bending away from us, and by the constant rock ledges, dropping down; if we hurried, we might lose the trail or, worse, come on the others unexpectedly. Our paramount need was to move so stealthily that we took them by surprise. If we managed that, we’d catch them with the diamond on them, whereas if they got any warning, they might have time to drop it, throw it into the bush or conceal it under a rock.
Jason was advancing in small spurts: he’d gaze at the ground, go forward a few metres, pause and gaze again. Then he stopped altogether. His body stiffened. Looking ahead intently, he unshipped his 203 and brought it to bear. I followed his gaze and caught a flicker of movement beside a shrub, fifty metres ahead. It hadn’t been grass waving — there wasn’t a breath of wind.
We stood still, watching. Another movement, uphill to the left. Something came up above a smooth rock. Pointed ears, then a whole head, looking back at us. Another hyena, or the same one circled back. It watched us for a few moments, then ducked and disappeared.
Jason lowered his weapon, but still he did not move. Clearly he was puzzled by the scavenger’s behaviour. When nothing else stirred, he at last went forward again. Fifty metres on, part of the mystery was explained. In a depression among the rocks lay a body: a black soldier, face down, wearing DPMs, with an AK47 on the ground beside him.
For fully a minute Jason kept still. From my position beside him I could see his eyes flickering back and forth as he studied our immediate surroundings, searching, calculating possibilities. Only when he felt secure did he go down to the casualty.
One glance was enough to tell us what had happened. The man had been shot between the shoulderblades, point-blank. The muzzle of the weapon that killed him had been pressed right against his back: around the bullet hole in his tunic scorch marks radiated. At our approach flies rose in a cloud from the wound, but the body was still warm. When we turned it over, we saw the blood from the exit wound had hardly started to congeal.
‘How long?’ I asked.
‘One hour,’ went Jason. ‘Maybe less.’
‘That was the shot I heard.’
He nodded. The man looked young — barely twenty — and fit, with a lean face and just the shadow of a moustache. Obviously a squaddie. But why had he been murdered out here?
My imagination, working overtime, rapidly constructed a scenario. Muende had brought this guy along as a bodyguard, maybe because he understood how to use a GPS. Perhaps this was the very guy who’d nicked my GPS off me at the convent, and he’d been forced into the expedition as a penance. Anyway, once they’d got the diamond, Muende decided to dispense with him, to stop him talking. Or maybe he became scared that his bodyguard might turn on him and the woman and murder both of them, to get the big rock for himself. Whatever the precise motivation, the fact that the others had left the AK47 lying by the body showed they themselves were well armed, and needed no more weapons.
All this I communicated to Jason in short takes. Several times he nodded agreement. As I talked, a peculiar look came into his eyes as his normal calm gaze turned into a glare of hatred or anger.
We left the body and rifle where they were and moved on. After four or five steps Jason bent down and retrieved something from the grass — an empty 9mm cartridge case ejected from a pistol or a sub-machine gun. Even I could tell that the smell of cordite coming out of it was absolutely fresh.
The line Jason was following began to take us down across the slope and towards the trees. Now we could look out from the side of the hill over the flatter terrain below, but the scattered forest covered quite a large proportion of the ground and provided any number of hiding places.
We moved on yet again. Then the changing perspective abruptly revealed something shiny, something man-made, showing through a gap in the canopy of a sausage tree. I touched Jason’s shoulder and pointed. At once he sank down on his haunches.
‘Car,’ he said, quietly.
The shiny object was the windscreen of a vehicle. The leaves on the tree were so still that we had to keep going forward, a few metres at a time, before we lined up on an opening that allowed us to see more of it. The fifth or sixth short advance revealed the outlines of a Gaz jeep.
‘That’s them,’ I whispered.
Looking back below us, I saw that if we withdrew out of sight and dropped down, we’d be able to close in on the vehicle unseen from behind a gravelly mound that lay below us. I started to whisper my plan to Jason, but I’d hardly started when he nodded vigorously, and I knew he’d had the same idea.
Ten minutes later we crept up the back of the mound, raised our heads with infinite caution, and peered round the loose stones on the top. The jeep was rear end-on to us. It had a canvas top, but the back was rolled up so that we could see straight through it, over the front seats and out through the windscreen. There was no human in it or near it.
For five minutes we lay and watched. As the seconds ticked by, I became possessed by the feeling that somebody was watching us from the clumps of trees and bush round about. I convinced myself the jeep had been left there as a decoy or booby-trap, that if we approached it the enemy would open fire on us from somewhere close, or it would blow up.
‘D’you think there’s anyone around?’ I whispered.
Jason shook his head. ‘People gone, sah.’
Maybe my own feeling was sheer imagination. By then I’d learned to respect Jason’s intuition. I knew he could notice things and pick up vibes that passed me by. So I didn’t ask, ‘How d’you know?’ Instead, I said quietly, ‘Okay, then. Cover me while I go forward.’
There was no point in moving slowly now. I hustled into the open quite fast, 203 at the ready, ran to the vehicle, dropped down beside it. Lying there, I could see under its belly. As I looked out through the opening framed by the front wheels, I realised something was out of place: a slender rod, coming down to the ground at an angle. The track-rod was broken. The jeep’s steering was knackered. It had been abandoned.
I jumped up. Sure enough, the key was in the dash. I beckoned Jason forward and showed him what I’d found. We opened the bonnet and laid hands on the engine. Its temperature was hardly higher than that of the air.
‘This happened on their way in,’ I said. ‘In the early hours of the morning. They walked from here, and now they’re walking out.’
We made a quick check of the vehicle, but there was nothing in it to give a clue as to the nature of its crew. The occupants had taken whatever kit they had with them.
‘Where can they be heading?’ I asked.
Jason spread his hands.
‘No town anywhere near? No villages?’
He shook his head. ‘Next place is Narombo — small town.’
‘How far’s that?’
‘Four day good walker. Sick woman six, seven day.’
‘They’ll never make that. Muende can’t walk that far. He’s fat as butter.’
For the first time in days Jason gave a little laugh. I grinned back, and pulled a water-bottle out of my belt-kit. We were going to have to watch it with our water; expecting a short, sharp contact, I hadn’t brought very much.
‘They won’t walk all day,’ I said. ‘They’ll stop soon and sit out the midday heat. We’ll catch up with them then.’
The diversion caused by the vehicle cost us dearly. By the time we’d climbed back up the hill, the trail had gone cool, almost cold. Bent stalks of grass had straightened, and the dew had long since burnt off. Even Jason had a job to detect traces, and he made frequent moves that turned out to be false: he’d go ahead on a speculative quest while I stood still to mark the end of the sure route, then come back and cast about again.