"Silly little bugger," he said happily and began to run, going back to his rightful place beside the man he loved more than a father.
Sean woke with the first chill of evening in the air. Ahead the cliffs of the escarpment were fading into the smoky purple dusk. Sean stretched and looked around for Matatu. When he remembered he was gone, it gave him a physical jolt in the pit of his stomach. He tied his bootlaces and drank again. When he stoppered the water bottle, he held it to his ear and shook it. Still half full.
He opened the breech of the.577, slipped the cartridges out of the twin chambers, and exchanged them for two others from the loops on his bush jacket. He squeezed an inch of black camouflage cream from the crumpled tube and rubbed it over his face and the backs of his hands. That completed his preparation and he stood up and moved quietly up the slope.
He spent the last twenty minutes of daylight glassing the entrance to the valley and the top of the cliffs through his binoculars.
As far as he could see, nothing had changed. Then he studied and memorized the route up the cliff face.
As the night spread its cloak over the escarpment, he slipped quietly over the ridge and crept tip toward the base of the cliff. The bush grew dense and tangled there, and it took him much longer than he had anticipated to reach the rocky wall. It was almost completely dark by then, but he was able to identify the starting point of the climb by a small bush growing in a crack of the cliff that he had marked through the binoculars.
Sean had never used a carrying sling on his rifle. It could be mortally dangerous in thick bush when the sling caught on a branch just as a buffalo or wounded elephant began its charge. He lashed the short-barreled weapon under the flap of his backpack with his sleeping bag. The butt stuck out on one side of his shoulders and the muzzles on the other, making an awkward unbalanced load. He went to the cliff face and laid his hands on it, getting the feel of it. The stone was still hot from the sun and the texture was smooth, almost soapy, under his fingers.
Before the war, rock climbing had been one of his passions. He loved the risk, the terror of the open face and drop sucking at his heels. He had climbed in South America and Europe as well as on the Drakensberg and Mount Kenya. He had the requisite sense of balance and the strength in his fingers and arms. He could have been one of the top international climbers but for the intervention of the bush war. However, he had never attempted a climb like this before.
His boots were soft velskoen without reinforced toes. He had no ropes, no anchorman, no pitons or carabiner, and he would be opening this route in darkness, barely able to see the next hold above, following a pitch he had studied from a mile distant, going blind on red sandstone, the most treacherous of rock.
He stepped up onto the face and began to climb. He used his toes and his fingers, leaning back from the rock, keeping in fine balance, never stopping, never jerking or fighting the holds, flowing upward as smoothly as molten chocolate.
At first the holds were solid, the kind he called "jug handles"; then the face leaned out slowly and the holds were mere flakes and indentations. He used them lightly and briefly. A touch of his fingers, a nudge of his toes and he was past, putting the minimum of weight on each but even then feeling the frailer flakes of stone grate and creak threateningly under his fingers-but he was gone before the hold could fail.
In places he could not see above his head and he climbed by instinct, reaching up in the darkness, his fingertips as sensitive as those of a pianist as they brushed the rock and then locked into it.
Without check or pause, he covered the first pitch and reached the ledge a hundred feet up from the base.
The ledge was narr*er than it had appeared through the binoculars, no more than nine inches wide. With the pack strapped on his back and the Afle protruding on each side of his shoulders, it was impossible for him to turn his back to the rock and use the ledge as a bench to sit upon.
He was forced to stand facing the cliff, his heels hanging over the edge and the weight of pack and rifle pulling on his shoulders, trying to drag him backward. He was less comfortable on the ledge than he had been on the face. He began to shuffle along it, spreading his arms like a crucifix to steady himself, his fingers groping for irregularities in the rock face, the sandstone an inch from the tip of his nose.
He went left along the ledge, seeking the vertical crack he had spotted through the binoculars. It had been his first choice of the M I two possible routes. Sean had the rock climber's instinctive distrust of roots and branches and tufts of grass. They were always unreliable, too treacherous to risk life on.
He counted his shuffling crablike paces along the ledge, and by the time he reached a hundred the ledge under his toes had narrowed dangerously and the muscles in his thighs were burning and qwv ering from the unnatural strain of counterbalancing the rifle and pack.
Twenty paces more and the cliff face was beginning to bulge out toward him, forcing him further backward. He had to thrust his hips forward to keep himself from toppling out over the sheer drop. It was only a hundred feet to the bottom, but it would crush and kill just as surely as a fall from the top of Eiger north face.
The strain on his legs was intolerable now. He thought of going back and trying the roots of the ficus, but he doubted he still had that choice. He wanted to stop, just to rest his legs a moment and gather himself, but he knew that would be the end of it. To stop on a pitch like this was defeat and certain death.
He made himself take another pace and then another. Now he was forced backward so his back was arched and his legs were numb to the ankles; he could feel them juddering under him, knew they were going. Then suddenly the fingers of his left hand touched the crack, and it was as though a syringeful of adrenaline had been squirted into one of his arteries.
His legs steadied under him, and he managed another pace. His fingers danced over the crack, exploring it swiftly. It was not wide enough to get his shoulder into it, and it narrowed quickly.
Sean thrust his hand into it as deep as it would go, then bunched his fist, jamming it securely into the crack. Now he could hang back on his arm and rest his back and his aching legs. His breathing hissed and sawed in his chest and the sweat was streaming down his body, soaking his shirt. Sweat melted the camouflage cream from his face and burned his eyes, blurring his vision.
He blinked rapidly and lifted his head. He was surprised to see that the cliff face above him was visible against the night sky and that he could make out the crack running vertically up its side.
He turned his head and saw that while he had been climbing the moon had cleared the horizon in the east. Its beams had turned the forest below to a frosty silver.
He could not wait any longer. He had to keep moving. He reached up with his free hand, thrust it into the rock crack above the other, and made another jam-hold. Then he twisted his foot and pressed the toe into the crack three feet up from the ledge; b( straightened his foot and it wedged securely. He put his weight on it and, with the other foot, stepped up and repeated the action.
Hand over hand, foot over foot, he walked up the crack, hanging back from the rock face, once more in balance, the strain removed from his legs and back and his weight evenly distributed.