p "Let there be no more talk of women and cowards, Kuphela. Let there be no more talking at all. Let us rather go to Tuti and do this thing that must be done. That is what I say." hey lit the smoke signal as soon as they heard the ished it immediately Sally Cessna, and extingu to acknowledge.
Anne flashed her landing lights Comrade Lookout's guerrillas had cut the grass in the clearing with pan gas and filled in the holes and rough spots, so Sally-Anne's landing was confident and neat.
Eli The guerrillas unloaded the rest of the ammunition and the weapons in disciplined silence, but they could not conceal their grins of delight as they handed down the bags of ammunition and the haversacks of grenades, for these were the tools of their trade. The loads disappeared swiftly into the forest. Within fifteen minutes Craig and the empty Sally-Anne were left alone under the wing of Cessna.
"Do you know what I prayed for?" Sally-Anne asked. "I able to find the gang, and if prayed that you wouldn't be you did, that they would refuse to go with you, and that you had been forced to abort and had to come back with me."
"You aren't very good at praying, are you?" "I don't know. I'm going to get in a lot of practice in the next few days."
"Five days," Craig corrected her. "You come in again on Tuesday morning."
"Yes," she nodded. "I will take off in the dark, and be over Tuti airfield at sunrise that's at 05.22 hours."
"But you are not to land until I signal that we have secured the strip. Now, for the love of God, don't run yourself short of fuel to get back to the pan. If we don't show up, don't stay on hoping."
"I will have three hours" safe endurance over Tuti. That means you will have until 08-30 hours to get there."
"If we don't make it by then, we aren't going to make it.
It's time for you to go now, my love." I know, Sally-Anne said, and made no move.
"I have to go," he said.
"I don't know how I'm going to live through the next few days, sitting out there in the desert, not knowing a thing, just living with my fears and imagination." He took her in his arms and found she was trembling.
"I'm so very afraid for you," she whispered against his throat.
4see you Tuesday morning, "he told her. "Without fail."
"Without faffl" she agreed, and then her voice quavered.
"Come back to me, Craig. I don't want to live without you.
Promise me you'll come back."
"I promise." He kissed her.
"There now, I feel much better." She gave him that cheeky grin of hers, but it was all soft around the edges.
She climbed up into the cockpit and started the engine.
"I love you." Her lipiformed the words that the engine drowned, and she svAng the Cessna round with a burst of throttle and did not look back.
m the front t was only sixty miles on the map and fro seat of an aircraft it had not looked like hard going.
On the ground it was different.
They were crossing the grain of the land; the watershed dropped away from their right to their left, towards the escarpment of the Zambezi valley. They were forced to ack of hills and the intervening valleys follow the switchb so they were never on level ground.
The guerrillas had hidden their own women in a sate place, and only reluctantly consented to Sarah accompanying the raiding pare, but she carried a full load and kept up with the hard pace that Comrade Lookout set for them.
The ironstone hills soaked up the heat of the sun and at them, as they toiled up the steep bounced it back hillsides and dropped again into the next valley. The descents were as taxing as the climbs, the heavy load-, the backs of their legs jarring their spines and straining and their Achilles tendons. The old elephant trails that pebbles they were following were littered with round rolled under foot like hall washed out by the rains that bearings and made each pace fraught with danger.
One of the guerrillas fell, and his ankle swelled up so that they could not get his boot back on his foot. The m and left him to find his distributed his load amongst the own way back to where they had left the women.
i bees plagued them dit ring the day, The tiny mo pan clouding around their mouths and nostrils and eyes in their persistent search for moisture and in the nights the mosquitoes from the stagnant pools in the valleys took over from them. At one stage of the trek they passed fly-belt, and the silent, light through the edge of the -ie torment, settling so softh footed tsetse-flies joined ri that the, victim was unaware until a red-hot needle stabbeJ
7 into the soft flesh at the back of the, ear, or under the armpit.
Always there was danger of attack. Every few miles either the scouts out ahead or the rear-guard dragging the trail behind them would signal an alert, and they would be forced to dive into cover and wait with finger on trigger until the all-clear signal was passed down the line.
it was slow and gruelling and nerve-racking two full days" marching from freezing dawn through burning noon into darkness again, to reach Sarah's father's village.