After take-off, she turned out of the circuit on a northwesterly heading and engaged the automatic pilot, opened a large-scale map on her lap and concentrated on the route. Good flying technique, Craig admitted, but not much for social intercourse.
"A beautiful machine," Craig tried. "Is it your own?"
"Permanent loan from the World Wildlife Trust," she answered, still intent on the sky directly ahead.
"What does she cruise at?"
"There is an air-speed indicator directly in front of you, Mr. Mellow," she crushed him effortlessly.
It was Peter Fungabera who leaned over the back of Craig's seat and ended the silence.
"That's the Great Dyke," he pointed out the abrupt geological formation below them. "A highly mineralized intrusion chrome, platinum, gold-" Beyond the dyke, the farming lands petered out swiftly and they were over a vast area of rugged hills and sickly green forests that stretched endlessly to a milky horizon.
"We will be landing at a secondary airstrip, just this side of the Pongola Hills. There is a mission-station there and a small settlement, but the area is very remote. Transport will meet us there but it's another two hours" drive to the camp," the general explained.
"Do you mind if we go down lower, General?" Sally Anne asked, and Peter Fungabera chuckled.
"No need to ask the "reason. Sally-Ainne is educating me in the importance of wild animals, and their conservation." Sally' Anne eased back the throttle and went down.
The heat was building up and the light aircraft began to bounce and wobble as it met the thermals coming up from the rocky hills. The area4 below them was devoid of human habitation and cultivation.
"Godforsaken hills," the general growled. "No permanent water, sour grazing and fly." However, Sally-Anne picked out a herd of big beige hump-backed eland in one of the open vleis beside a dry river-bed, and then, twenty miles further on, a solitary bull elephant.
She dropped to tree-top level, pulled on the flaps and did a series of steep slow turns around the elephant, cutting him off from the forest and holding him in the open, so he was forced to face the circling machine with ears and trunk extended.
"He's magnific end she cried, the wind from the open window buffeting them and whipping her words away. "A hundred pounds of ivory each side," and she was shooting single-handed through the open window, the motor drive on her Nikon whirring as it pumped film through the camera.
They were so low that it seemed the bull might grab a wingtip with his reaching trunk, and Craig could clearly make out the wet exudation from the glands behind his eyes. He found himself gripping the sides of his seat.
At last Sally-Anne left him, levelled her wings and climbed away. Craig slumped with relief.
"Cold feet, Mr. Mellow? Or should that be singular, foot?" "Bitch," Craig thought. "That was a low hit." But she was talking to Peter Fungabera over her shoulder.
"Dead, that animal is worth ten thousand dollars, tops.
Alive, he's worth ten times that, and he'll sire a hundred bulls to replace him."
"Sally-Anne is convinced that there is a large-scale poaching ring at work in this country. She has shown me some remarkable photographs and I must say, I am beginning to share her concern."
"We have to find them and smash them, General," she insisted.
"Find them for me, Sally-Anne, and I will smash them.
You already have my word." Listening to them talking, Craig felt again an oldfashioned emotion that he had been aware of the very first time he had seen these two together. There was no missing the accord between them, and Fungabera was a dashingly handsome fellow. Now he darted a glance over his shoulder, and found the general watching him closely and speculatively, a look he covered instantly with a smile.
"How do you feel about the issue, Mr. Mellow?" he said, and suddenly Craig was telling him about his plans for Zambezi Waters on the Chizarira. He told them about the black rhinoceros and the protected wilderness areas surrounding it, and he told them how accessible it was to Victoria Falls, and now Sally-Anne was listening as intently as the general. When he finished, they were both silent for a while, and then the general said, "Now, Mr. Mellow, you are making good sense. That is the kind of planning that this country desperately needs, and its profit potential will be understood by even the most backward and unsophisticated of my people."
"Wouldn't Craig be easier, General?"
"Thank you, Craig my friends call me Peter." Half an hour later Craig saw a galvanized iron roof flash in the sunlight dead ahead, and Sally-Anne said, "Tuti Mission Station," and began letting down for a landing.
She banked steeply over the church and Craig saw tiny figures around the cluster of huts waving up at them.
The strip was short and narrow and rough, and the wind was across, but Sally-Anne crabbed in and kicked her straight at the moment before touch-down, then held the port wing down with a twist of the wheel. She was really very good indeed, CraigWiealized.
There was a saq-coloured army Land-Rover waiting under a huge manila tree off to one side of the strip, and three troopers saluted Peter Fungabera with a stamping of boots that raised dust and a slapping of rifle-butts. Then while Craig helped Sally-Anne tie down the aircraft, they loaded the meagre baggage into the Land' Rover
As the Land-Rover drew level with the mission schoolhouse beside the church, Sally-Anne asked, "Do you think they have a girls" room here?" and Peter tapped the driver on the shoulder with his swagger-stick and the vehicle stopped.