Sunbird (20 page)

The terrified engineer moaned into his gag, the knife pressed to the softly throbbing skin of his throat. They pushed him towards me, closer so that I could see his face clearly.

'Air Force Striker Two this is ZA-CEE standing by.' I croaked into the mike, staring fascinated into the engineer's terrified face.

'Report your complement and destination.'

'This is Dr Kazin of Sturvesant, Africa on a routine flight from--' As I spoke I saw them relax, the tension eased and Timothy's hand moved from the transmit switch of the set. The engineer's eyes held mine and I wanted to tell him that I was sorry, that I wished I could save him. I wanted to explain that I was trading his life for those of fourteen of my country's most dangerous enemies, that the sacrifice was worthwhile, and that I would willingly add my own life to the price. Instead I shouted into the handset:

'Hi-jacked by terrorists! Fire into us! Disregard our safety.' Timothy's hand darted to the transmit switch, and at the same moment he turned towards the hostage. I think he was going to intervene, to try and stop it. He was too late.

The knife slashed across the tensed throat, slitting it deeply beneath the line of the jaw. The blood burst forth like a ruptured garden hose, it sprayed out in a red fountain that drenched both Timothy and me. It pumped in great liquid jets that splashed against the foot of the cabin, then dribbled in thick cords and strings to the floor. The engineer was keening a high wailing sound like steam from a kettle, and the air from his lungs burst from the severed windpipe in a pink froth, that spattered the radio set.

The Tannoy was squawking, 'Reverse your course! Conform to me! Conform to me immediately, or I will fire into you.'

Timothy was cursing as he wrestled the microphone out of my hands: I was screaming and fighting against the ropes.

'You animals! You filthy murdering bloody animals.'

One of the gang lifted his machine-pistol to hit me in the face, but Timothy knocked his arm away.

'Get him out of here!' He jerked his head towards the still twitching, kicking corpse of the engineer - and they dragged him out into the cargo hold.

'Mirage is attacking!' shouted Roger, from the cockpit, and we saw it coming from ahead of us, a silvery flash as it bore in on a head-on interception course.

Timothy snatched the microphone to his mouth. I saw that his face was speckled with the engineer's blood.

'Hold your fire!' he shouted. 'We have hostages aboard.'

'Attack!' I screamed, tearing and jerking at my bonds. 'They'll murder us anyway! Open fire!'

The Mirage jet pulled up steeply ahead of us, without opening fire, and howled a few feet over our heads. The Dakota rocked violently in the slipstream. I was still screaming and struggling to tear myself loose. I wanted to get at them. The steel chair was rocking from side to side. I got my feet against the side of the fuselage and heaved with all my strength. The seat buckled a little, and again the guard lifted his machine-pistol.

'No,' shouted Timothy. 'We need him alive. Tell Mary to bring the morphine.'

The Mirage sheered off, then circled to take up station a hundred feet off our starboard wingtip, I could see the pilot staring helplessly across the gap at us.

'You have spoken to Dr Kazin,' Timothy warned the pilot of the jet. 'And we have four other hostages. We have already executed one white hostage and we will not hesitate to execute another if you take any further hostile action.'

'They're going to kill us anyway,' I shouted, but Timothy broke the contact.

It took five of them to hold me still for the hypodermic, but at last they got it into my arm, and though I tried to resist the drug, I felt myself going muzzy and misty. I tried to maintain my struggle, but my movements became lethargic and uncoordinated and slowly I drifted off into unconsciousness. My last waking memory was hearing Timothy giving Roger a new course to fly.

Pain and thirst woke me. My mouth was thick and scummy and my head was a mass of solid blinding agony. I tried to sit up and cried out aloud.

'Are you all right, Doctor? Take it easy.' Roger van Deventer's voice, and I focused my eyes on him.

'Water?' I asked.

'Sorry, Doc.' He shook his head, and I looked around the bare whitewashed room. Four wooden bunks and a lavatory bucket were all the furnishings, and the door was barred and grilled. The three Bantu ground crew sat on one of the bunks across the room, looking lost and unhappy.

'Where are we?' I whispered.

'Zambia. Some sort of military camp. We landed an hour ago-'

'What happened to the Air Force jet?'

'It turned back when we crossed the Zambezi. Nothing they could do.'

And there was nothing we could do, either. For five days we sat in the airless, oven-like room with its stinking bucket, until on the fifth day our guards came to fetch me. With much shouting and many unnecessary shoves and blows I was marched down a corridor and into a sparsely furnished office whose main furnishing was a portrait of Chairman Mao. Timothy Mageba rose from behind the desk and motioned my guards to leave.

'Sit down, Doctor, please.' He wore paratrooper camouflage, and the bars and stars of a Colonel in the Chinese People's Army.

I sat on the wooden bench, and my eyes fastened on the half-dozen bottles of Tusker beer that stood on a tray. The bottles were bedewed with cold, and I felt my throat contracting.

'I know how fond you are of a bottle of cold beer, Doctor.' Timothy opened one of the bottles, and offered it to me, I shook my head.

'No, thank you. I don't drink with murderers.'

'I see.' He nodded, and I saw the little shadows of regret in those dark brooding eyes. He lifted the bottle to his own lips and drank a mouthful. I watched him thirstily.

'The engineer,' he said, 'the execution, it was not intended. I did not mean it to happen. Please understand that, Doctor.'

'Yes. I understand. And when the smoke of our burning land blackens the skies, and the stink of our dead sickens even your dark spirits, will you cry out, I did not mean it to happen?'

Timothy turned away and went to stand at the window, looking out over a parade ground where squads of uniformed Bantu drilled under a dazzling sun.

'I have been able to arrange for your release, Doctor. You will be allowed to return in the Dakota.' He came back to stand before me, and then he changed from English into Venda. 'My heart cries out to see you go, Machane, for you are a man of gentleness, and strength, and great courage. Once I hoped that you might join us.'

In Venda I answered, 'My heart weeps also, for a man who was a friend, one I trusted, one who I believed was a man of goodwill, but he is gone now into the half-world of the criminals and the destroyers He is dead to me, and my heart weeps.'

It was true, I realized. It was not just an attempt to shame him. Beneath my hatred and anger, there was a sense of sorrow, of loss. I had believed in him. I had seen in a man such as he was, a hope for the future of this poor tormented continent of ours. We looked at each other wistfully, regretfully across a space of four feet that was as wide as the span of the heavens and as deep as the chasms of Hell.

'Goodbye, Doctor,' he said softly. 'Go in peace, Machane.'

They took us in the covered back of a three-ton truck to the airstrip, bare-footed and stripped to our underclothes.

They formed a double line from the truck to the Dakota, There were perhaps 200 of them in paratrooper uniform, and we were forced to walk down the narrow aisle with jeering black faces on each side of us. There were Chinese instructors with them, their lank black hair flopping out from under the cloth uniform caps, grinning hugely as we passed. I was bitterly aware of the mocking eyes and jibes aimed at my crooked exposed back, and I hurried towards the refuge of the Dakota, Suddenly one of them stepped out of the ranks in front of me. Deliberately he spat at me, and a storm of laughter went up from them. With a thick gob of yellow phlegm plastered in my hair, I scrambled up into the cabin of the aircraft.

The Air Force Mirages picked us up an hour after we crossed the Zambezi river and they escorted us to the military airfield at Voortrekker Hoogte. However, my almost hysterical relief at our safe home-coming was shortlived. Once a doctor had cleaned and dressed the clotted and suppurating gashes in my head, I was hustled away in a closed car to a meeting with four unsmiling, grimly polite, officers of the police and military intelligence.

'Dr Kazin, is this your signature?'

It was my recommendation for the issue of Timothy Mageba's passport.

'Dr Kazin, do you remember this man?'

A Chinaman I had met when I visited Timothy at London University.

'Are you aware that he is an agent of the Communist Chinese government. Doctor?'

There was a photograph of the three of us drinking beer on the tow-path beside the Thames.

'Can you tell us what you spoke about, please, Doctor?'

Timothy had told me that the Chinaman was an anthropology major, and we had discussed Leakey's discoveries at Olduvai Gorge.

'Did you recommend Mageba for the Sturvesant travel scholarship, Doctor?'

'Did you know that he went to China and received training as a guerrilla leader?'

'Did you sign these order forms for twenty-seven drums of fuller's earth from Hong Kong, Doctor - and these customs declarations?'

They were standard Institute forms, I could recognize my signature on the customs form across the desk. I did not remember the shipment.

'Were you aware that this shipment contained 150 lb of plastic explosives, Doctor?'

'Do you recognize these, Doctor?'

Pamphlets in a dozen African languages. I read the first line of one of them. Terrorist propaganda. Exhortations to kill, burn and destroy.

'Were you aware that these were printed on your press at the Institute, Doctor?'

The questions went on endlessly, I was tired, confused, and began contradicting myself. I pointed out the wounds on my head, the rope burns at my wrists and ankles, and the questions went on. My head throbbed, my brain felt like a battered jelly.

'Do you recognize these, Doctor?'

Machine-pistols, ammunition.

'Yes!' I shouted at them. I had pistols like that against my head, in my belly!'

'Did you know that these were imported in cases of books addressed to your Institute?'

'When you obtained police clearance for the Dakota flight, Doctor, you stated--
^'

^{'They jumped me after the phone call, I've explained that a dozen times, damn you!'}

^{'You've known Mageba for twelve years. He was a protege of yours, Doctor.'}

^{'Do you mean to tell us that you were never approached by Mageba? Never discussed politics with him?'}

^{'I'm not one of them! I swear it--' I remembered the blood spraying against the cabin roof, the crunch of steel biting into the bone of my skull, the spittle clinging in my hair. 'You've got to believe me, please! Oh God, please!' And I think I must have fainted, it went all dark and warm in my head and I slumped sideways off the chair onto the floor.}

^{I woke in a hospital room, between clean crisp sheets - and Louren Sturvesant sat beside the bed.}

^{'Lo, oh thank God.' I felt all choked up with relief. Louren was here, and it would be all right now.}

^{He leaned forward, unsmiling, that marvellous face cold and hard as though it had been cast in bronze. 'They think you were one of the gang. That you set it up, that you were using the Institute as the headquarters for a terrorist organization.'}