Comrade China screamed and clutched at his ear with both hands. A thin trickle of blood from his ruptured eardrum ran out between his fingers. "On your feet!" Sean said and still holding his damaged ear, Comrade China spat at him again. Sean laid the revolver barrel against his other ear. "After your ears, we will take out your eyes, with a sharp stick." Comrade China stood up.
At the double, move out." Job took over. He placed his hand between China's shoulder blades and sent him tottering down the riverbank.
Sean took one more look around the battlefield. it had been done swiftly and thoroughly, what the Scouts called "a good kill."
"All right, Matatu," Sean said softly. "Let's go home." And the little Ndorobo ran ahead of him.
When Comrade China faltered and his knees went rubbery and he collapsed from the agony of his burst eardrum, Sean gave him a subcutaneous shot of morphine from a disposable syringe and a drink from his water bottle.
"For a soldier of the revolution who shoots babies and chops the feet off old women, this is a stroll in the park," Sean told him.
Brace up, China, or I'll blow your other ear out." And he took one of China's elbows and Job the other. Between them they hoisted him to his feet and half carried him until the morphine had a chance to work, but they kept up the pace of the running column of Scouts through the forest and over the rolling rocky hills.
"You may have killed some of our people today." After a mile or so the morphine was working and China became loquacious.
"Today you have won a single little battle, Colonel Courtney, but tomorrow we will have won the war." China's voice was harsh with bitter self-righteousness.
"How do you know my name?" Sean asked with amusement.
"You are famous, Colonel, or should I say infamous. Under you, this pack of killer dogs is even more dangerous than when the murderous Ballantyne himself was leading it."
"Thank you for the pretty compliment, my old China, but aren't you claiming victory a little prematurely?"
"The side which controls the countryside by night wins the war.
"Mao Tse-tung." Sean smiled. "A most appropriate quotation for one of your kind."
"We control the Countryside at last, we have you bottled up in your villages and towns. Your white farmers are losing heart, their women are sick of war. The black peasants are openly sympathetic to our cause. Britain and the world are against you. Even South Africa, your only ally, is growing disenchanted with the struggle.
Soon, very soon..
They argued as they ran, and despite himself Sean could not suppress a grudging admiration for his prisoner. He was quick witted his command of English impressive and his grasp of politics and military tactics even more so. He was physically strong and fit.
Sean could feel the wiry muscle in his arm as he supported him, and few other men with a burst eardrum could have sustained the pace of the march.
"He would make a superb Scout," Sean thought. "If we could turn him" Many of his most valuable men were former guerrillas, captured and skillfully turned by Rhodesian intelligence.
So as they ran on he studied Comrade China with renewed interest. He was probably a few years younger than Sean. He had refined Nilotic features, more Ethiopian than Shana, a narrow high-bridged nose and chiseled lips rather than the broadly negroid. Even the morphine could not dim the intelligence of his large dark eyes. He was a handsome man, and of course he would be tough and utterly ruthless. He would not have reached his rank were he not.
"I want him," Sean decided. "My God, he would be worth another full regiment to us." And he tightened his grip on the man's arm, a proprietorial gesture. "This little darling is going to get the full treatment."
The vanguard ran into a Frelimo patrol in the middle of the morning and brushed them aside, hardly slackening their pace to do so. The corpses in their blotched Frelimo camouflage lay beside the track as they trotted past.
They came up with the troop convoy a little after midday. The trucks were guarded by Eland armored cars, and they had cans of ice-cold Castle beer in the cool boxes. The Scouts had covered forty-two miles in just over seven hours, and the beer tasted like nectar.
Sean gave a can to Comrade China. "Sorry about your ear," he told him, and saluted him with the beer can.
"I would have done the same to you." China smiled, but his eyes were inscrutable. "To our next meeting?" he suggested the toast.
"Until we meet again," Sean agreed, and handed him over to a guard detail under a white sergeant. Then he climbed into the Command armored car to lead the final stage of withdrawal.
Sean extricated his column and had them back across the border ten and a half hours after the attack began. Ian Smith, the prime minister, came on the radio net in person to congratulate him and inform him of his decoration, a bar to his Silver Cross.
Sean didn't learn about Comrade China's escape until the column went into laager that evening. Apparently China had slit the canvas hood of the troop truck and slipped through it while his guard was dozing. Undeterred by his manacles, he had dropped off the speeding truck, screened by the dust boiling out from the back wheels, and rolled into the head-high elephant grass along the verge.
Two months later Sean had seen an intelligence report that placed China in command of the successful attack that had wiped out a supply convoy on the Mount Darwin road.
"Yes, Matatu, I remember it all very well," Sean answered his question. He made one more steep turn above the site of the old terrorist base before he returned the Beechcraft to straight and level flight on a southerly heading.
He did not, however, fly as far southward as the railway line that linked the port of Beira to the landlocked Zimbabwean border.
This was a focus for all the military and rebel activity in the area, and the countryside would be swarming with Frelimo and Zimbabwean troops, all armed with RPG rockets and eager to get a shot at an unmarked low-flying aircraft with no flight authorization.
"At least," Sean told Job, "it looks like a possibility."
Job agreed. "The border opposite our camp seems undefended and deserted."
"Worth a try for half a million?" Sean asked. Job just grinned at him.
"One more little chore before we go home," Sean told them.
It required precise navigation and an eye for the terrain, but Sean crossed back into the Zimbabwean side, and by flying low they were able to pick out the spot where the previous day they had first come across the poachers" tracks; from that point, with Matatu craning his head to see down and calling directions, they found the tableland and valley where they had come up with the band of poachers and taken them under fire. From the air the distances seemed much shorter than they had on foot.
Matatu directed Sean along the trail the old bull had made toward the border. It seemed his gift for direction and terrain was not impaired by being high above the ground, and Sean was following their course on The map he held in his lap.