Daniel forced himself to enter the room. He found where Mavis kept her extra bed-linen in one of the built-in cupboards and covered each of the corpses with a sheet. He could not bring himself to touch any of the girls, not even to close their wide staring eyes in which the horror and the terror was still deeply imprinted.
Sweet Mother of God, Jock whispered from the doorway. Whoever did this isn't human. They must be ravaging bloody beasts. Daniel backed out of the bedroom and closed the door. He covered Daniel Nzou's tiny body.
Have you found Johnny? he asked Jock. His voice was hoarse and his throat felt rough and abraded with horror and grief. No. Jock shook his head, then turned and fled down the passage. He blundered out across the verandah and into the rain.
Daniel heard him retching and vomiting in the flowerbed below the step.
The sound of the other man's distress served to steady Daniel. He fought back his own repugnance and anger and sorrow and brought his emotions back under control. Johnny, he told himself. Got to find Johnny-He went swiftly through the other two bedrooms and the rest of the house. There was no sign of his friend, and he allowed himself the first faint hope.
He might have got away, he told himself. He might have made it into the bush. It was a relief to get out of that charnel house. Daniel stood in the darkness and lifted his face to the rain. He opened his mouth and let it wash the bitter bile taste from his tongue and the back of his throat.
Then he turned the torch-beam on to his feet and saw the clotted blood dissolve from his shoes in a pink stain. He scrubbed the soles in the gravel of the driveway to clean them and then shouted to Jock Come on, we have to find Johnny!
In the Toyota he drove down the back of the hill to the domestic compound that housed the camp servants. The compound was still enclosed with an earthen embankment and barbed-wire fence from the war days.
However the fence was in a ruinous state and the gate was missing.
They drove through the gateway and the smell of smoke was strong. As the headlights caught them Daniel saw that the row of servants-cottages was burnt out. The roofs had collapsed and the windows were empty.
The rain had quenched the flames, although a few tendrils of smoke still drifted like pale wraiths in the lights.
The ground around the huts was sown with dozens of tiny objects which caught the headlights and sparkled like diamond chips. Daniel knew what they were, but he stepped down from the truck and picked one of them out of the mud. It was a shiny brass cartridge case. He held it to the light and inspected the familiar Cyrillic head stamp in the brass. 7. 62
mm, of East European manufacture, it was the calibre of the ubiquitous AK 47 assault rifle, staple of violence and revolution throughout Africa and the entire world.
The gang had shot up the compound, but had left no corpses. Daniel guessed that they had thrown the dead into the cottages before torching-them. The breeze shifted towards him so that he caught the full stench of the burned huts and had his suspicions confirmed.
Underlying the smell of smoke was the odour of scorched flesh and hair and bone.
He spat out the taste of ir and walked down between the huts.
Johnny! he shouted into the night. Johnny, are you there? But the only sound was the creak and pop of the doused flames and the sough of the breeze in the mango trees that brought the raindrops pattering down from the branches.
He flicked the torch left and right as he passed between the huts, until he saw the body of a man lying in the open. Johnny" he shouted, and ran to him and fell on his knees beside him.
The body was horribly burned, the khaki Parks uniform burned half away, and the skin and flesh sloughing off the exposed torso and the side of the face. The man had obviously dragged himself out of the burning hut into which they had thrown him, but he was not Johnny Nzou.
He was one of the junior rangers.
Daniel jumped up and hurried back to the track.
Did you find him? Jock asked, and Daniel shook his head. Christ, they've murdered everybody in the camp. Why would they do that?
Witnesses" Daniel started the truck. They wiped out all the witnesses.
Why? What do they want? It doesn't make sense. The ivory. That's what they were after. But they burned down the warehouse! After they cleaned it out. He swung the Toyota back on to the track and raced up the hill.
Who were they, Danny? Who did this? How the hell do I know?
Shifta? Bandits? Poachers? Don't ask stupid questions. Daniel's anger was only just beginning. Up until now he had been numbed by the shock and the horror. He drove back past the dark bungalow on the hill and then down again to the main camp.
The warden's office was still standing intact; although when Daniel played the beam of the torch over the thatched roof he saw the blackened area on which someone had thrown a burning torch. Well-laid thatch does not burn readily, however, and the flames had not caught fairly or perhaps had been extinguished by the rain before they could take hold.
The rain stopped with the suddenness which is characteristic of the African elements. One minute it was falling in a furious cascade that limited the range of the headlights to fifty yards, and the next it was over. Only the trees still dripped, but overhead the first stars pricked through the dispersing thunder clouds that were being carried away on the rising breeze.
Daniel barely noticed the change. He left the truck and ran up on to the wide verandah.
The exterior wall was decorated with the skulls of the animals of the Park. Their empty eye-sockets and twisted horns in the torch-beam gave a macabre touch to the scene and heightened Daniel's sense of doom as he strode down the long covered verandah. He now realised that he should have searched here first, instead of rushing up to the bungalow.
The door of Johnny's office stood open and Daniel paused on the threshold and steered himself before he stepped through.
A snowstorm of papers covered the floor and desk. They had ransacked the room, sweeping the stacks of forms off the cupboard shelves and hauling the drawers out of Johnny's desk, then spilling out the contents. They had found Johnny's keys and opened the old green-painted door to the Milner safe that was built into the wall.
The keys were still in the lock but the safe was empty.
Daniel's torch-beam darted about the room and then settled on the crumpled form that lay in front of the desk. Johnny, he whispered.
Oh, Christ, no! I thought that while I was waiting for the refrigerator truck to be repaired, I might as well go down to the water-hole at Fig Tree Pan. Ambassador Ning's voice interrupted Johnny Nzou's concentration, but he felt no resentment as he looked up from his desk.
In Johnny's view one of his major duties was to make the wilderness accessible to anybody who had an interest in nature. Ning Cheng Gong was certainly one of those. Johnny smiled at his accoutrements, the field guide and the binoculars.
He rose from his desk, glad of the excuse to escape from the drudgery of paperwork and went with the Ambassador out on to the verandah and down to his parked Mercedes, where he stood and chatted to him for a few minutes, making suggestions as to where he might get a glimpse of the elusive and aptly named gorgeous bush shrike that Cheng wanted to observe.
When Cheng drove away, Johnny walked down to the vehicle workshops where ranger Gomo was stripping and reassembling the alternator of the unserviceable truck. He was dubious about Gama's ability to effect the repair. In the morning he would probably have to ring the warden at Mana Pools and ask him to send a mechanic to do the job.
One consolation was that the elephant meat would keep indefinitely in the cold storage of the hull. The truck's refrigerating equipment was plugged in now to the camp generator and the thermometer registered twenty degrees below freezing when Johnny checked it. The meat would be processed and turned into animal feed by a private contractor in Harare.