He knew that speed was vital now. Within the next ten hours the gang would be back across the river. However, he could not leave Johnny like that, lying in his own blood. It meant wasting a few more minutes, but he had to show him some last respect and at the very least cover him decently.
Daniel paused in the doorway to Johnny's office. The overhead lights were brutally explicit; they left nothing of the horror concealed. He set aside the AK 47 and looked around for a covering for his friend's corpse. The curtains over the front windows were green government issue, faded by sunlight, but they would do as a makeshift shroud. He took one of them down, and went with it to where Johnny lay.
Johnny's attitude was tortured. One arm was twisted up under his chest and his face lay in a pool of thick congealing blood. Gently Daniel rolled him over. The body had not yet stiffened in rigor mortis. He winced as he looked at Johnny's face, for the bullet had come out through his right eyebrow. He used a corner of the curtain to wipe his face clean, then arranged him in a comfortable attitude on his back.
Johnny's left hand was thrust into the front of his tunic and his fist was tightly clenched. Daniel's interest quickened as he saw the balled up sheet of paper in his hand. He prised Johnny's fingers open and freed the wad.
He stood up, crossed to the desk and spread the paper on it.
He saw at once that Johnny had scrawled on it, using his own blood, and Daniel shivered at the macabre characters.
NJNC. The letters were childlike and crude, smeared and barely legible.
They made no sense, although perhaps the J was an I. Daniel studied it.
NINC. Still there was nothing obvious in the message. Either it was gibberish or had some obscure meaning that only made sense to a dying man.
Suddenly Daniel felt a stirring in his subconscious, something was trying to surface. He closed his eyes for a minute to give it a chance. Often it helped to let his mind go blank when searching for an elusive idea or memory, rather than to harry the point and drive it further under. It was there, very close now, a shadow just below his conscious mind like the shape of a man-eating shark under the surface of a turgid sea.
NINC.
He opened his eyes again and found himself looking at the floor.
There were bloody footprints left by his own boot soles and by those of the killer. He was not thinking about them; he was still grappling with that single cryptic word that Johnny had left for him.
Then he found his eyes had focused on one of the footprints, and his nerves jumped tight and shrieked like the strings of a violin slashed with the bow. The footprint was chequered with a fish-scale pattern.
NINC. It resounded through his mind and then that distinctive footprint turned the sense of it and the echo came back, altered and compelling.
NING. Johnny had tried to write NING! Daniel found that he was cold and trembling with the shock of the discovery. Ambassador Ning, Ning Cheng Gong. How was it possible? And yet there were the bloody footprints to confirm the impossible. Ning had been here after Johnny was shot. Ning had been lying when he said that he had left, Daniel broke that train of thought as another memory struck him like a bolt from a cross-bow.
The blood on the cuff of the blue cotton slacks, the tracks of Ning's training shoes and the blood, Johnny's blood. At last his rage had a target on which to focus, but now it was a cold constructive rage. He pressed the bloody note back into Johnny's hand and folded his fingers around it for the police to find. Then he spread the green curtain over Johnny's body, covering the shattered head. He stood over him for a few seconds.
I'll get the bastard for you, old friend. For you and Mavis and the babies. I promise you, Johnny, on the memory of our friendship. I swear it. Then he snatched up the rifle and ran from the office, down the steps to where Jock waited beside the parked Landcruiser.
In the few seconds that it took him to reach the truck, the last details fell into place in his mind. He remembered Cheng's perturbation when he thought Daniel might be staying longer at Chiwewe, and his obvious relief when he learned that Daniel was leaving.
He glanced back towards the ruins of the ivory godown and the tyre treads were still just visible in the mud. It was simple and ingenious. Let the gang of poachers draw the pursuit, while they ferried the ivory out in the Parks Board's own trucks.
Daniel remembered the surly unnatural behaviour of Gomo and the other driver when he had met them on the road. Now it made good sense. They had been sitting on a load of stolen ivory. No wonder they were acting strangely.
As he slipped behind the wheel of the Landcruiser and ordered Jock to climb aboard, he glanced at his wristwatch. it was almost ten o'clock, nearly four hours since he had passed Cheng and the trucks on the escarpment road. Could he catch them before they reached the main highway and disappeared?
He realised that it had been so carefully planned that they must have worked out an escape route and some means of disposing of the ivory.
He started the Landcruiser and hit the gear-lever. You aren't going to get away with it, you dirty bastard! In many places the recent storm waters had scoured the escarpment road, gouging knee-deep gulleys across the tracks and exposing boulders the size of cannonballs.
Daniel pushed the Landcruiser over them so violently that Jock seized the grab handle on the dashboard for support. Slow down, Danny, damn it.
You'll kill us both. Where the hell are we going? What's the rush?
In as few words as possible Daniel told him the bare outlines. You can't touch an ambassador, Jock grunted as the bouncing truck slammed the words out of him. If you're wrong, they'll crucify you, man. I'm not wrong, Daniel assured him. On top of Johnny's note, I feel it in my guts. The rain waters had rushed down the slope of the escarpment, but when they reached the floor of the valley they slowed and piled up upon themselves.
Only hours before, Daniel had crossed and re-crossed a dry river-bed at the foot of the escarpment. Now he pulled up on the approach to the ford and stared down the beam of the headlights.
You'll never get through there, Jock muttered with alarm.
Daniel left the motor running and jumped down into ankledeep mud. He ran to the edge of the crazy water. It was the colour of creamed coffee, racing past in a muddy blur, carrying small tree-trunks and u rooted bushes with it. It was almost fifty yards across.
One of the trees growing beside the ford draped its branches out over the torrent, in places just touching the swirling waters with its lowest twigs. Daniel grabbed the main branch for support and let himself down into the river. He edged out across the flood and it took all the strength of his arms to prevent himself from being swept away.
The drag of the water was overpowering and his feet were continually lifted clear of the bottom. However, he worked himself out to the deepest section of the river.
It was as deep as his lowest rib. The branch to which he was clinging was creaking and bowing like a fishing-rod to the strain as he began to work his way back to the bank. He emerged from the torrent with water streaming down his lower body, his sodden clothing clinging to his legs and his boots squelching.
It'll go, he told Jock, as he clambered back into the cab. You're crazy mad, Jock exploded. I'm not going in there. Okay! Fine!
You've got just two seconds to get out, Daniel told him grimly, and changed the gearing of the Toyota into four-wheel drive and low ratio.
You can't leave me here, Jock howled.