"I can get guns. Some of our people have escaped. They are here in Botswana. They had guns hidden in the bush from the war."
"What kind? "Craig demanded.
"Banana guns and hand grenades."
"AKs," Craig rejoiced. "Sarah, you are a star."
"Just the two of us?" Sally-Anne paled as she realized th at he truly meant it. "Two of us, against the entire Third Brigade is that what you are thinking about?" A "No, I'm coming with you." Sarah put aside the tissue.
"There will be three of us."
"Three of us, gread" said Sally-Anne.
"Three of us bloody marvelous!" ack and stood in front of them.
Craig came b "Number one: we are going to draw up a map of Tuti camp. We are going to put down every detail we can remember." He started pacing again, unable to stand still.
"Number two: we meet with Sarahs friends and see how much help they can give us. Number dime: Sally-Anne takes the commercial flight down to Johannesburg and brings back the Cessna how long will that takeP 11 can be back in three days." Colour was coming back into Sally-Anne's cheeks. "That's if I decide to gaP okay! Fine!" Craig rubbed his hands together. "Now we M can start on the map." Craig ordered sandwiches and a bottle of w me to be sen t to the room and they worked through until 2 am.
when Sarah left them with a promise to return at breakfast time. Craig folded the map carefully and then he and Sally-Anne climbed into one of the narrow beds together, but they were so keyed up that neither of them could sleep.
"Sam was trying to protect me," Craig marvelled. "He was doing it for me, all along."
"Tell me about him," Sally-Anne whispered and she lay against his chest and listened to him talk of their friendship. When at last he fell silent, she asked softly, "So you are serious about this thing?"
"Deadly serious, but will you do it with me?"
"It's crazy," she said. "It's plain dumb but let's do it then." he sooty black smoke from the beacon fires of oil rags that Craig had set climbed straight up in two columns into the clear desert sky. Craig and Sarah stood together on the bonnet of the Land' Rover staring into the south. This was the dry wild land of northeastern Botswana. The Zimbabwe border was thirty kilometres east of them, the flat and plain between pimpled with camel.
thorn trees and blotched with the leprous white salt pans
The mirage shimmered and tricked the eye so that the stunted trees on the far side of the pan seemed to swim and change shape like dark amoeba under a microscope. A spinning dust devil jumped up from the white pan surface, and swirled and swayed sinuously as a belly dancer, rising two hundred feet into the hot air until it collapsed again as suddenly as it had risen.
The sound of the Cessna engine rose and fell and rose again on the heat-flawed air. "There!" Sarah pointed out the mosquito speck, low on the horizon.
Craig made a last anxious appraisal of his makeshift landing, strip He had lit the beacon fires at each end of it as soon as they had pick el tip the first throb of the Cessna's motor. He had driven the Land-Rover back and forth between the beacons to mark the hard crust at the edge of the pan. Fifty metres out, the surface was treacherously soft.
Now he looked back at the approaching aircraft. Sally Anne was banking low over the baobab trees, lining up with the strip he had set out for her. She made a prudent precautionary pass along it, her head twisted in the cockpit window as she examined it, then she came around again and touched down lightly, and taxied towards the Land Rover.
"You were gone for ever." Craig seized her as she jumped down from the cockpit.
"Three days," she protested with her feet off the ground.
"That's for ever, "he said and kissed her.
He set her down but kept one arm around her as he led her to the Land-Rover. After she had greeted Sarah, Craig introduced her to the two Matabele who were squatting in the shade of the Land-Rover.
They rose courteously to meet her.
"This is Jonas, and this is Aaron. They led us to the arms cache and they are giving us all the help they can." They were reserved and unsmiling young men with old eyes that had seen unspeakable things, but they were willing and quick.
They pumped the Avgas from the forty-four-gallon drums on the back of the Land-Rover directly into the Cessna's wing tanks, while Craig stripped out the seats from the rear of the cockpit to reduce weight and give them cargo space.
Then they began loading. Sally-Anne weighed each item of cargo on the spring balance that she had bought for the purpose, and entered it on her loading table. The ammunition was the heaviest part of the load. They had eight thousand rounds of 7.62 men ball Ps. Craig had broken bulk and repacked it in black plastic garbage -bags to save weight and space. It had been buried for years and many of the rounds were so corroded as to be useless.
However, Craig had "hand-sorted it, and test-fired a few rounds from each case without a single misfire.
Most of the rifles had also been corroded and Craig had worked through the nights by gas lantern, stripping and cannibalizing until he had twenty-five good weapons.
There were also five Tokarev pistols and two cases of fragmentation grenades which seemed in better condition than the rifles. Craig had set off one grenade from each case, popping them down an ant-bear hole to a satisfactory Crump and cloud of dust. That had left forty-eight from the original rift),. Craig packed them in five cheap canvas haversacks that he had bought from a general dealer in Francistown.
The rest of the equipment he had also purchased in Francistown, Wire-cutters and bolt-cutters, nylon rope, pan gas that Jonas and Aaron sharpened to razor edges, flashlights and extra batteries, canteens and water bottles and a dozen or so other items which might prove useful.