Sally-Anne rotated and the Cessna lifted its nose, bounced lightly and became airborne. Peter Fungabera and his line of paratroopers disappeared from view under the nose and engine section as the Cessna climbed away, but the aircraft would have to pass directly over the top of their heads at little more than a few hundred feet.
"Oh mother!" Sally-Anne spoke in almost conversational tones. "This is id" And as she said-it, the instrument panel in front of Craig exploded, covering him with fine chips of glass like sugar crystals. Hydraulic fluid sprayed over the front of his shirt.
Machine-gun fire came in through the floor of the cabin and tore out through the thin metal roof so that the interior was filled with a gale of swirling wind as the slipstream found the holes.
In the back seat,. Sarah cried out, and the body of the machine was racked and jarred by the storm of AK 47 bullets. Craig felt the seat under him jump as bullets smacked into the metal frame. jagged punctures appeared miraculously in the wing roots just outside his window.
Sally-Anne shoved the control wheel forward and the Cessna dived back towards the airstrip again with a gut swooping rush, ducking under the maelstrom of machine-gun fire and giving them a moment's respite. The brown earth came up at them, and Sally-Anne caught the Cessna's suicidal dive and held it off, but the wheels hit the surface and they bounced wildly thirty feet back into the air. Craig saw two paratroopers dive to the side as the plane raced towards them.
The wild dive towards the earth had pushed their speed way up, so that Sally-Anne could instantly throw the Cessna into a maximum rate turn, the port wingtip brushing the earth. Her face was contorted and the muscle stood proud in her forearms with the effort of holding the Cessna's nose up in the turn and preventing her from going in. Ahead of them on the left-hand side of the airstrip, only a hundred yards or so from the verge, stood a single tree with dense, widespread branches.
It was a morula, ninety feet tall.
Sally-Anne levelled out for an instant and flew for the morula, her wingt* almost touched its outermost branches, and y immediately she threw the Cessna into an opposite turn, neatly placing the tree between them and the line of paratroopers on the airstrip behind them.
She kept at ground level, her undercarriage brushing the tops of the maize plants in the open fields, glancing up in the rear-view mirror above her head to keep the morula tree exactly behind the Cessna's tail, blanketing the paratroopers" field of fire.
"Where is the Dakota?" Craig asked, raising his voice above the rush of wind through the cabin.
"It's going in to land," Tungata called, and, twisting in his seat, Craig had a glimpse of the big grey machine going in low over the tree-tops behind them, lined up for the airstrip.
"I can't get the undercarriage up." Sally-Anne was thumbing the rocker switch but the three green eyes of the undercarriage warning light still glared at her from the console. "We have damage there, it's stuck." The forest beyond the open fields rushed towards them and as she eased back on the control wheel to lift the Cessna over the tree-tops, a hydraulic lead burst under the shot-ruptured engine housing and hydraulic fluid sprayed in viscous sheets over the windscreen.
"Can't seeP Sally-Anne cried, and pulled open her side window, flying by reference to the horizon under her wingtip.
"We've got no instruments," Craig checked the shattered panel. "Airspeed's gone, rate of climb, artificial horizon, altimeter, gyro compass-"
"The undercarriage-" Sally-Anne interrupted him.
"Too much drag, it will cut down our range we'll never make it back!" She was still climbing, but gradually starting to come around onto her course, using the compass in its glass oil bath above her head, when the engine stuttered, almost cut and then surged again in full power.
Quickly Sally-Anne adjusted pitch and power-settings.
"That sounded like fuel starvation," she whispered. "They must have hit a fuel line." She switched the fuel-tank selector cock from 'starboard" to "both" and then glanced up at Craig and grinned. "Hi there! I missed you something awful "Me too." He reached across and squeezed her thigh.
"Time check." Businesslikeagain.
"05-17 hours," Craig told her and looked over side The brown snake of the Tuti road was angling away towards the north, and they were crossing the first line of hills Vusamanzi's village would be out there a few miles beyond the road.
The engine missed again, and Sally-Anne's expression was taut with apprehension.
"Time?"she demanded again "05.27,"Craig told her.
"We will be out of sight of the airstrip by now. Out of earshot too."
"Fungabera won't know where we are, where we are heading." "They've got a helicopter gunship at Victoria Falls." Tungata leaned forward over the seats. "If they guess that we are heading for Botswana, they will send it down to intercept."
"We can outrun a helicopter," Craig guessed.
"Not with our undercarriage down," Sally-Anne contradicted him, and without another warning, the engine cut out completely.
It was suddenly eerily quiet, just the whistle of the wind through the bullet-holes in the fuselage, the propeller windmilling softly for a few seconds longer, and then with a jerk stopping dead and pointing skywards likea headsman s blade.
"Well," Sally-Anne said softly, "it's all immaterial now.
Engine out. We are going in." And then briskly she began her preparations for a 11n f0fed landing as the Cessna started to sink gently away, towards the broken hilly and forested land beneath them. She pulled on MI flap to slow their airspeed.