Ann jumped awake. She was inside a long box being thrown around like a die in an energetic game. Her legs were twisted so that each movement of her body hurt her knees. There was absolute darkness nearby but a kind of a glow above her illuminated the head and shoulders of a man a metre or so away. She couldn’t remember what she had been dreaming about but the terror of the nightmare filled her with an almost uncontrollable dread. Somewhere, perhaps in her fleeing dream, a group of creatures were laughing the sort of laughter she had always imagined Jack the Ripper must have laughed when he was at work upon the bodies of his victims. Whatever she was lying on came up and smacked her in the back of her head.
The head outlined against the darkness turned to profile and faced another, smaller, head outlined beside it. ‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going, Harry? This isn’t the way back.’
‘We’ve still got to find my askaris, Robert.’
‘Are you out of your mind? Out here? In the dark?’
‘There’ll be no dangerous animals in the forest for miles around. We’ll be safe if we’re careful. And the moon’ll be up soon.’
‘The moon?’
‘Full moon tonight. It’ll be as bright as day.’
‘You’re out of your fucking…’
Abruptly the two figures in the front were wrestling together. The box Ann was trapped in really began to get thrown about. Her stomach rebelled and she felt her throat flood with burning liquid. She jerked upright, choking. ‘I’m going to be sick,’ she said urgently. ‘Harry, I’m going to be sick now?
The Land Rover juddered to a halt and she threw the door open just in time, hurling herself forward to hang over a pool of darkness into which she emptied what little was left in her stomach. When she was finished, she just hung there, feeling the stillness wash over her. Stillness and, apart from the rumble of the engine, silence.
A wind stirred and leaves whispered peacefully far above. ‘We’re in the forest,’ she observed dreamily and pulled herself up to look around.
‘Are you OK?’ asked Robert, turning to look at her, his face invisible in the shadow except for a flash of teeth and a gleam of eye. ‘You were out cold for more than an hour.’
‘Fine, I guess,’ she answered. ‘But bits of me won’t stop shaking, and other bits of me really want to know if there’s a john around here.’
‘Behind every bush,’ said Harry. ‘But take a torch and look out for scorpions, spiders and snakes. If you can hold it steady enough.’
‘I think I’ll cross my legs just for the time being, thanks.’
‘Suit yourself.’
Harry engaged the gear and the Land Rover rolled forward again. Ann was sitting up now and she could see that they were following a wide beaten track through a forest of tall trees. On either side, framed by the shadows beyond the headlight beams, the low scrub gleamed palely. Every now and then there came a scurry of movement and a flash of reflected light. Up in the shadowy canopy above, dark shapes fluttered, and occasionally the power of their song broke through the monotonous grumble of the engine.
‘This is quite a road,’ said Ann, after a while.
‘It’s an elephant track,’ explained Harry. ‘Shortest way from the grassland down to the Blood River.’
‘And you’re sure they came this way?’ Robert still wasn’t happy to be following the lorry full of Harry’s askaris.
‘They didn’t stop at die village for long,’ answered Harry tersely. ‘This is the way they were coming.’
‘But what’s down here?’
‘The river. Dry now. Congo Libre beyond. No border guards or checkpoints for a couple of hundred kilometres in either direction. That’s about it. The message must have told them that whoever did the killing would be down here too.’
‘You wouldn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to be sure that it’s the likeliest bet,’ growled Robert.
The elephants came running out of the darkness dead ahead straight into the headlight beams just as Robert said ‘bet’. The lead animal was a huge male, trunk high and ears spread. His tusks reached out in two yellow bows two metres long from jaw to rounded tip. To Ann’s startled eyes he looked to be four metres at least to the shoulder and another one and a half to the top of his head. He was on top of them at once and Robert, yelling, leaned across to help Harry wrench the wheel over in a kind of power steering. The game warden’s right foot went flat on the floor, perhaps in reaction to the shock, and the vehicle spun sideways out of the monster’s path to crash into the undergrowth at the side of the track. Ann half fell, half jumped out of the door, to see the long legs and high flanks of the rest of the little herd flash by. ‘Get back in here,’ Harry was yelling. ‘Get back in here, you stupid bitch!’
She stood, entranced, watching as they vanished through a sudden patch of moonlight into the impenetrable shadows behind them, silent as a dream.
A hand fell on her shoulder and she jumped. Turning, she saw Robert. There was moonlight further down the road but only darkness here. The Land Rover’s headlights were pointing directly into a thick bush and one of them was broken. It was impossible to see the expression on his face. ‘Get back into the Rover now, at once,’ he said. His voice was calm, but even more compelling than Harry’s fulminations. ‘Elephants are incredibly dangerous. We were lucky those ones didn’t trample us. If they smell you, it’s a fair bet they’ll come back and tear you to pieces.’
Numbly, she climbed into the back of the vehicle. Harry had got a grip on himself now, but it was clear that he had had more than enough today. The atmosphere was thunderous as Robert climbed in the front.
‘Are you both all right?’ he asked quietly.
‘Yes,’ snapped Harry as he reversed out of the bush.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ answered Ann. ‘Why?’
‘I think I cracked my ribs. My side hurts like a son of a bitch.’
Harry grunted. ‘If you start to cough blood, tell me about it.’
‘If I start to cough blood, I’ll tell the world about it.’
Harry drove more carefully now.
It must take something fairly big to panic a herd of elephants, Ann was thinking. And whatever panicked them might still be down here.
‘I’m just going to switch off the lights and roll forward in neutral,’ said Harry suddenly. ‘It’s all downhill to the river from here and we don’t know what’s waiting down there.’
As the Land Rover rolled down the incline, the forest canopy fell back and the bend of a wide, shallow, dry river valley was slowly revealed. The moon had risen during their drive through the forest and it was as bright as Harry had said it would be — easily bright enough to illuminate the scene in front of them. The river bed curved away like the leg of a giant, slightly bent. They were approaching the curve of the knee where a little promontory jutted, like a kneecap above the dry ground. Here Harry braked and they came silently to a stop.
The solid mud was as grey, cracked and wrinkled as elephant hide in the silent moonlight, and it stretched away on either hand north to the arid source of the dry river and south to the solid sandbar which stopped the lake in the game reserve from draining back down here. On the far bank of the mud channel lay more shadowy forest, belonging to the People’s Marxist Republic of Congo Libre. On this bank, at the foot of a cliff which must have been carved by a current in happier times, lay Harry’s lorry, twisted, burned out, on its side. The marks just up ahead told their own grim but simple story. In the middle of the track, dead ahead, was a crater, such as a land mine might make. This side of the crater was marked with tyre tracks. The far side showed gashed impressions such as a vehicle tumbling end over end might make and circular scorch marks such as might result from a petrol tank igniting. The bankside vegetation was blackened; it had obviously ignited as the blazing truck slid past and then mercifully burned itself out without starting a forest fire.