When he woke it was morning, and he could not rouse Sally-Anne. Her breathing snored and sawed through her nose and open mouth.
On his knees he dug. the hole for a solar still. Though the soil was soft and friable, it went slowly. Laboriously, still on his knees, he gathered an armful of the scattered desert vegetation. It seemed there was no moisture in the woody growth when he chopped it finely with the bayonet, and laid it in the bottom of his hole.
He cut the top off thWempty aluminium water bottle, and placed the cup this formed in the centre of the hole.
It required enormous concentration to perform even these simple tasks. He spread the plastic ground sheet over the hole, and anchored the edges with heaped earth. In the centre of the sheet he gently laid a single round of ammunition, so that it was directly above the aluminium cup.
Then he crawled back to Sally-Anne and sat over her so that his shadow kept the sun off her face.
"It's going to be all right," he told her. "We'll find the road soon. We must be close--2 orn his throat, He did not realize that no sound came fr and that she would not have been able to hear him even if it had.
"That little turd Ashe is a liar. I'll finish the book, you'll see. I'll pay off what I owe- We'll get a movie deal I'll buy King's Lynn. it will be all right. Don't worry, my darling." He waited out the baking heat of the morning, containing his impatience, and at noon by his wrist-watch he opened the still. The sun beating down on the plastic sheet had raised the temperature in the covered hole close to the boiling point. Evaporation from the chopped plants had sheet and run condensed on the under-side of the plastic down it towards the sag of the bullet. From there it had dripped into the aluminium cup.
He had collected half a pint. He took it up between both hands, shaking so violently that he almost spilled it.
He took a small sip and held it in his mouth. It was hot, but it tasted like honey and he had to use all his selfcontrol to prevent himself swallowing.
He leaned forward and placed his mouth over Sally Anne blackened and bleeding lips. Gently he injected id between them.
the lieu 11)rink, my sweet, drink it up." He found he was giggling stupidly as he watched her swallow painfully.
A few drops at a time he passed the precious fluid from his own mouth into hers and she swallowed each sip more easily, He kept the last mouthful for himself and let it to his head like strong trickle down his throat. It went drink and he sat grinning stupidly through fat, scaly black le red, the abraen and sun-baked purp lips, his face swoll scab, and leis ions on his cheek covered with a crusty weeping his bloodshot eyes gummed up with dried mucus.
He rebuilt the still and lay down beside Sally-Anne. He covered his face from the sun with the tail torn from his shirt and whispered, "All right find help soon. Don't worry my love-" But he knew that this was their last day. He could not keep her alive for another.
Tomorrow they would die. It would be either the sun or the men of the Third Brigade but tomorrow they would die.
t sunset the still gave them another half cup of distilled water, and after they had drunk it, they fell into a heavy, deathlike sleep in each other's arms.
Something woke Craig, and for a moment he thought it was the night wind in the scrub. With difficulty he pushed himself into a sitting position, and cocked his head to listen, not sure whether he was still hallucinating or whether he was truly hearing that soft rise and fall of sound. It must be nearly dawn, he realized, the horizon was a crisp dark line beneath the velvet drape of the sky.
Then abruptly the sound firmed, and he recognized it.
The distinctive beat of a four, cylinder Land-Rover engine.
The Third Brigade had not abandoned the hunt. They were coming on relentlessly, like hyenas with the reek of blood in their nostrils.
He saw a pair of headlights, far out across the desert, their pale beams swi Any and tilting as the vehicle covered mg the rough ground. He groped for the AK 47. He could not find it. Ashe Levy must have stolen it, he thought bitterly, taken it off with him on the hyena. "I never did trust the son-of-a-bitch." Craig stared hopelessly at the approaching headlights.
In their beams danced a little pixie-like figure, a diminutive yellow mannikin. "Puck," he thought. "Fairies. I never believed in fairies. Don't say that when you do, one dies.
Don't want to kill fairies. I believe in them." His mind was going, fantasy mixed with flashes of lucidity.
Suddenly he recognized that the little half-naked yellow mannikin was a Bushman, one of the pygmy desert race. A Bushman tracker, the Third Brigade were using a Bushman tracker to hunt them down. Only a Bushman could have run on their spoor all night, tracking by the headlights of the Land-Rover.
The headlights flashed over them, likea stage spotlight, and Craig lifted his hand to shade his eyes. The light was so bright that it hurt. He had the bayonet in his other hand behind his back.
I'll get one of them, he told himself I'll take one of them The Land-Rover stopped only a few paces away. The little Bushman tracker was standing near them, clicking and clucking in his strange birdlike language. Craig heard the door of the Land-Rover open behind the blinding lights, and a man came towards them. Craig recognize d him instantly. General Peter Fungabera he seemed as tall as a giant in the back lighting of the headlights as he strode towards where Craig huddled on the desert floor.
Thank you, God, Craig prayed, thank you for sending him to me before I died, and he gripped the bayonet. In the throat, he told himself, as he stoops over me. He marshalled all his remaining strength, and General Peter Fungabera stooped towards him. Now! Craig made the effort. Drive the point into his throat! But nothing happened. His limbs would not respond. He was finished. There was nothing left.