Johnny and Mavis had named their only son after him, Daniel Robert Nzou.
After two daughters, Mavis had finally given birth to a son and both parents had been overjoyed.
Daniel Nzou had been four years old. He lay on his back. His eyes were open but sightlessly staring into the beam of the torch.
They had killed him in the old barbaric African way, in the same way that Chaka's and Mzilikazi's impis had dealt with the male children of a vanquished tribe. They had seized little Daniel by the ankles and swung him head-first against the wall, crushing his skull and beating his brains out against the brickwork.
His splattering blood had daubed that crude mural on the white surface.
Daniel stooped over the little boy. Despite the deformation of the crushed skull his resemblance to his father was still marked. Tears prickled the rims of Daniel's eyelids and he stood up slowly and turned to the bedroom door.
It stood half open but Daniel dreaded pushing it all the way.
He had to force himself to do it. The hinges of the door whined softly as it swung open.
For a moment Daniel stared down the beam of the Maglite as he let it play around the bedroom and then he reeled back into the passageway and leaned against the wall, gagging and gasping for breath.
He had witnessed scenes such as these during the days of the bush war, but the years had eroded his conditioning and softened the shell that he had built up to protect himself. He was no longer able to look dispassionately on the atrocity that man is able to perpetrate on his fellows.
Johnny's daughters were older than their brother. Miriam was-ten and Suzie almost eight. They lay naked and spreadeagled on the floor at the foot of the bed. They had both been raped repeatedly. Their immature genitalia were a torn and bloody mush.
Mavis was on the bed. They had not bothered to strip her entirely, but had merely pushed her skirts up around her waist.
Her arms were pulled up above her head and tied by the wrists to the wooden headboard. The two little girls must have died of shock and loss of blood during the prolonged assault upon them. Mavis had probably survived until they were finished with her, then they had put a bullet through her head.
Daniel forced himself to enter the room. He found where Mavis kept her extra bed-linen in one of the built-in cupboards and covered each of the corpses with a sheet. He could not bring himself to touch any of the girls, not even to close their wide staring eyes in which the horror and the terror was still deeply imprinted.
Sweet Mother of God, Jock whispered from the doorway. Whoever did this isn't human. They must be ravaging bloody beasts. Daniel backed out of the bedroom and closed the door. He covered Daniel Nzou's tiny body.
Have you found Johnny? he asked Jock. His voice was hoarse and his throat felt rough and abraded with horror and grief. No. Jock shook his head, then turned and fled down the passage. He blundered out across the verandah and into the rain.
Daniel heard him retching and vomiting in the flowerbed below the step.
The sound of the other man's distress served to steady Daniel. He fought back his own repugnance and anger and sorrow and brought his emotions back under control. Johnny, he told himself. Got to find Johnny-He went swiftly through the other two bedrooms and the rest of the house. There was no sign of his friend, and he allowed himself the first faint hope.
He might have got away, he told himself. He might have made it into the bush. It was a relief to get out of that charnel house. Daniel stood in the darkness and lifted his face to the rain. He opened his mouth and let it wash the bitter bile taste from his tongue and the back of his throat.
Then he turned the torch-beam on to his feet and saw the clotted blood dissolve from his shoes in a pink stain. He scrubbed the soles in the gravel of the driveway to clean them and then shouted to Jock Come on, we have to find Johnny!
In the Toyota he drove down the back of the hill to the domestic compound that housed the camp servants. The compound was still enclosed with an earthen embankment and barbed-wire fence from the war days.
However the fence was in a ruinous state and the gate was missing.
They drove through the gateway and the smell of smoke was strong. As the headlights caught them Daniel saw that the row of servants-cottages was burnt out. The roofs had collapsed and the windows were empty.
The rain had quenched the flames, although a few tendrils of smoke still drifted like pale wraiths in the lights.
The ground around the huts was sown with dozens of tiny objects which caught the headlights and sparkled like diamond chips. Daniel knew what they were, but he stepped down from the truck and picked one of them out of the mud. It was a shiny brass cartridge case. He held it to the light and inspected the familiar Cyrillic head stamp in the brass. 7. 62
mm, of East European manufacture, it was the calibre of the ubiquitous AK 47 assault rifle, staple of violence and revolution throughout Africa and the entire world.
The gang had shot up the compound, but had left no corpses. Daniel guessed that they had thrown the dead into the cottages before torching-them. The breeze shifted towards him so that he caught the full stench of the burned huts and had his suspicions confirmed.
Underlying the smell of smoke was the odour of scorched flesh and hair and bone.
He spat out the taste of ir and walked down between the huts.
Johnny! he shouted into the night. Johnny, are you there? But the only sound was the creak and pop of the doused flames and the sough of the breeze in the mango trees that brought the raindrops pattering down from the branches.
He flicked the torch left and right as he passed between the huts, until he saw the body of a man lying in the open. Johnny" he shouted, and ran to him and fell on his knees beside him.
The body was horribly burned, the khaki Parks uniform burned half away, and the skin and flesh sloughing off the exposed torso and the side of the face. The man had obviously dragged himself out of the burning hut into which they had thrown him, but he was not Johnny Nzou.
He was one of the junior rangers.
Daniel jumped up and hurried back to the track.
Did you find him? Jock asked, and Daniel shook his head. Christ, they've murdered everybody in the camp. Why would they do that?
Witnesses" Daniel started the truck. They wiped out all the witnesses.
Why? What do they want? It doesn't make sense. The ivory. That's what they were after. But they burned down the warehouse! After they cleaned it out. He swung the Toyota back on to the track and raced up the hill.
Who were they, Danny? Who did this? How the hell do I know?
Shifta? Bandits? Poachers? Don't ask stupid questions. Daniel's anger was only just beginning. Up until now he had been numbed by the shock and the horror. He drove back past the dark bungalow on the hill and then down again to the main camp.
The warden's office was still standing intact; although when Daniel played the beam of the torch over the thatched roof he saw the blackened area on which someone had thrown a burning torch. Well-laid thatch does not burn readily, however, and the flames had not caught fairly or perhaps had been extinguished by the rain before they could take hold.
The rain stopped with the suddenness which is characteristic of the African elements. One minute it was falling in a furious cascade that limited the range of the headlights to fifty yards, and the next it was over. Only the trees still dripped, but overhead the first stars pricked through the dispersing thunder clouds that were being carried away on the rising breeze.
Daniel barely noticed the change. He left the truck and ran up on to the wide verandah.
The exterior wall was decorated with the skulls of the animals of the Park. Their empty eye-sockets and twisted horns in the torch-beam gave a macabre touch to the scene and heightened Daniel's sense of doom as he strode down the long covered verandah. He now realised that he should have searched here first, instead of rushing up to the bungalow.
The door of Johnny's office stood open and Daniel paused on the threshold and steered himself before he stepped through.
A snowstorm of papers covered the floor and desk. They had ransacked the room, sweeping the stacks of forms off the cupboard shelves and hauling the drawers out of Johnny's desk, then spilling out the contents. They had found Johnny's keys and opened the old green-painted door to the Milner safe that was built into the wall.
The keys were still in the lock but the safe was empty.
Daniel's torch-beam darted about the room and then settled on the crumpled form that lay in front of the desk. Johnny, he whispered.
Oh, Christ, no! I thought that while I was waiting for the refrigerator truck to be repaired, I might as well go down to the water-hole at Fig Tree Pan. Ambassador Ning's voice interrupted Johnny Nzou's concentration, but he felt no resentment as he looked up from his desk.
In Johnny's view one of his major duties was to make the wilderness accessible to anybody who had an interest in nature. Ning Cheng Gong was certainly one of those. Johnny smiled at his accoutrements, the field guide and the binoculars.
He rose from his desk, glad of the excuse to escape from the drudgery of paperwork and went with the Ambassador out on to the verandah and down to his parked Mercedes, where he stood and chatted to him for a few minutes, making suggestions as to where he might get a glimpse of the elusive and aptly named gorgeous bush shrike that Cheng wanted to observe.
When Cheng drove away, Johnny walked down to the vehicle workshops where ranger Gomo was stripping and reassembling the alternator of the unserviceable truck. He was dubious about Gama's ability to effect the repair. In the morning he would probably have to ring the warden at Mana Pools and ask him to send a mechanic to do the job.
One consolation was that the elephant meat would keep indefinitely in the cold storage of the hull. The truck's refrigerating equipment was plugged in now to the camp generator and the thermometer registered twenty degrees below freezing when Johnny checked it. The meat would be processed and turned into animal feed by a private contractor in Harare.
Johnny left ranger Gomo to his labour over the dismembered alternator and went back to his own office under the Casia trees. No sooner had he left the workshop than Gomo looked up and exchanged a significant glance with David, the other black ranger. The alternator he was tinkering with was a worn out piece of equipment that he had retrieved from the scrap heap in Harare for just this purpose. The truck's original alternator, in perfect working order, was hidden under the driver's seat in the cab. It would take less than ten minutes to bolt it back in place and reconnect the wiring.
Back in his office Johnny settled to the monotony of his forms and ledgers. Once he glanced at his wristwatch and found that it was a few minutes before one o'clock, but wanted to finish the week's reports before knocking off for lunch. Of course, it was a temptation to go up to the house early. He liked to be with the children for a while before lunch, especially with his son, but he resisted the impulse and worked on conscientiously. Anyway he knew that Mavis would probably send the children down to fetch him soon. She liked to serve his lunch promptly.
He smiled in anticipation of their arrival as he heard a sound at the door and looked up.
The smile faded. A stranger stood in the doorway, a stocky man with bow legs, dressed in filthy rags. Both his hands were behind his back as though he was concealing something. Yes? Johnny asked shortly.
Who are you? What do you want? The man smiled. His skin was very dark with purple black highlights. When he smiled the scar that ran down one cheek pulled his mouth out of shape and the smile was malicious and humourless.
Johnny stood up from the desk and went towards him. What do you want?
he repeated, and the man in the doorway said, You! From behind his back he brought out an AK 47 rifle and lifted the barrel towards Johnny's belly.
Johnny was caught totally off guard in the centre of the room.
However, his recovery was almost instantaneous. His reflexes were those of a hunter and a soldier. The armoury door was ten paces to his left and he went for it.
The Parks weapons were kept in there. Through the door he could see the rack of firearms on the far wall. With despair turning his legs as heavy as concrete, Johnny realised that none of the weapons in the rack was loaded. That was his own strict safety rule. The ammunition was kept in the locked steel cupboard under the gun-rack.
All this passed through his mind as he leaped for the door.
From the corner of his eye he saw the scar-faced brigand swing the AK on to him and halfway across the room Johnny tumbled forward like an acrobat, ducking under the blast of automatic fire that swept across the room.
As he rolled smoothly to his feet he heard the- man curse and Johnny dived forward once more for the doorway. He realised that his assailant was food. He had seen that he was a killer in the practised way he handled the rifle. It was a miracle that he had been able to evade that first close-range volley.
The air was filled with a haze of plaster dust that the bullets had battered from the wall and Johnny dived through it, but he knew he was not going to make it. The man with the AK 47 was too good. He could not be fooled again. The shelter of the doorway was too far for Johnny to reach before the next burst came.
The clock in Johnny's head was running; he anticipated how long it would take for the man to recover his balance. The muzzle of the AK 47
always rode up uncontrollably in automatic fire; it would take him the major part of a second to bring it down, and line up for the second burst.
Johnny judged it finely and twisted his body violently aside, but he was a fraction late.
The gunman aimed low to compensate for the rise of the AK.
One bullet sliced through the flesh of Johnny's thigh, missing the bone, but the second cut through the lower curve of his buttock and smashed into the joint at the femur, shattering the head and the cup of bone of the pelvis.
The other three bullets of the burst flew wide as Johnny threw himself to one side. However, his left leg was gone and he fell against the door jamb and tried to hold himself from falling. His impetus sent him sliding sideways along the wall, and his fingernails screeched as they gouged the plaster. He ended up facing back into the room standing on one leg. His left leg hung from the shattered joint, and his arms were flung open like a crucifix as he tried to hold his balance.
Still smiling, the gunman clicked the rate-of-fire selector on to single-shot. He wanted to conserve ammunition. A single round cost him ten Zambian kwacha, and had to be carried hundreds of miles in his pack.
Each cartridge was precious, and the warden was maimed and completely at his mercy. One more bullet would be enough. Now, he said softly.
Now you die. And he shot Johnny Nzou in the stomach.
The bullet drove the breath from Johnny's lungs with an explosive exhalation. He was slammed hard against the wall and doubled over by the brutal force of the impact and then he toppled forward. Johnny had been hit before, during the war, but he had never received a full body strike and the shock of it was beyond his worst expectations. He was numbed from the waist down but his brain stayed clear, crystalline, as though the rush of adrenalin into his bloodstream had sharpened his perception to its limits.