blue metal. "But look what they hold now!" Bruce stirred irritably.
He had not wanted to provoke another bout of Mike Haig's soul-searching.
Damn the old fool - why must he always start this, he knew as well as
anyone that in the mercenary army of Katanga there was a taboo upon the
past. It did not exist. "Ruffy," Bruce snapped, aren't you going to feed
your boys?"
"Right now, boss." Ruffy opened another beer and handed it to Bruce.
"Hold that - it will keep your mind off food while I rustle it up." He
lumbered off along the root of
the coach still singing.
"Three years ago, it seems like all eternity," Mike went on as though
Bruce had not interrupted. "Three years ago I was a surgeon and now
this.-The desolation had spread to his eyes, and Bruce felt his pity for
the man deep down where he kept it imprisoned with all his other
emotions.
"I was good. I was one of the best. Royal College.
Harley Street. Guy's." Mike laughed without humour, with bitterness.
"Can you imagine my being driven in my Rolls to address the College on
my advanced technique of cholecystectorny?"
"What happened?" The question was out before he could stop it, and Bruce
realized how near to the surface he had let his pity rise. "No, don't
tell me. It's your business. I don't want to know."
"But I'll tell you, Bruce, I want to. It helps somehow, talking about
it." At first, thought Bruce, I wanted to talk also, to try and wash the
pain away with words.
Mike was silent for a few seconds. Below them the singing rose
and fell, and the train ran on through the forest.
"It had taken me ten hard years to get there, but at last I had done it.
A fine practice; doing the work I loved with skill, earning
the rewards I deserved. A wife that any man would have been proud of, a
lovely home, many friends, too many friends perhaps; for success breeds
friends the way a dirty kitchen breeds cockroaches." Mike pulled out a
handkerchief and dried the back of his neck where the wind could not
reach.
"Those sort of friends mean parties," he went on. "Parties when you've
worked all day and you're tired; when you need the lift that you
can get so easily from a bottle. You don't know if you have the
weakness for the stuff until it's too late; until you have a bottle in
the drawer of your desk; until suddenly your practice isn't so good any
more." Mike twisted the handkerchief around his fingers as he ploughed
doggedly on. "Then you know it suddenly. You know it when your hands
dance in the morning and all you want for breakfast is that, when you
can't wait until lunchtime because you have to operate and that's the
only way you can keep your hands steady. But you know it finally and
utterly when the knife turns in your hand and the artery starts to spurt
and you watch it paralysed - you watch it hosing red over your gown and
forming pools on the theatre floor." Mike's voice dried up then and he
tapped a cigarette from his pack and lit it. His shoulders were hunched
forward and his eyes were full of shadows of his guilt.
Then he straightened up and his voice was stronger.
"You must have read about it. I was headlines for a few days, all the
papers But my name wasn" Haig in those days.
I got that name off a label on a bottle in a bar-room.
"Gladys stayed with me, of course, she was that type. We came out to
Africa. I had enough saved from the wreck for a down payment on a
tobacco farm in the Centenary block outside Salisbury. Two good seasons
and I was off the bottle.
Gladys was having our first baby, we had both wanted one so badly.
It was all coming right again." Mike stuffed the handkerchief back in
his pocket, and his voice lost its strength again, turned dry and husky.
"Then one day I took the truck into the village and on the way home I
stopped at the club. I had been there often before, but this time they
threw me out at closing time and when I got back to the farm
I had a case of Scotch on the seat beside me." Bruce wanted to stop
him; he knew what was coming and he didn't want to hear it.
"The first rains started that night and the rivers came down in
flood. The telephone lines were knocked out and we were cut off. In the
morning--" Mike stopped again and turned to Bruce.
"I suppose it was the shock of seeing me like that again, but in the
morning Gladys went into labour. It was her first, and she wasn't so
young any more. She was still in labour the
next day, but by then she was too weak to scream. I remember how
peaceful it was without her screaming and pleading with me to help.
You see she knew I had all the instruments I needed. She begged me to
help. I can remember that; her voice through the fog of whisky. I
think I hated her then. I think I remember hating her, it was all so
confused, so mixed up with the screaming and the liquor.
But at last she was quiet. I don't think I realized she was dead.
I was simply glad she was quiet and I could have peace." He dropped his
eyes from Bruce's face.
"I was too drunk to go to the funeral. Then I met a man in a bar-room, I
can't remember how long after it was, I can't even remember where. it
must have been on the Copperbelt. He was recruiting for
Tshombe's army and I signed up; there didn't seem anything else to do."
Neither of them spoke again until a gendarme brought food to them, hunks
of brown bread spread with tinned butter and filled with bully beet and
pickled onions. They ate in silence listening, to the singing, and Bruce
said at last: "You needn't have told me."
"I know."
"Mike-" Bruce paused.
"Yes?"
"I'm sorry, if that's any comfort."
"It is," Mike said.
"It helps to have - not to be completely alone. I like you, Bruce." He
blurted out the last sentence and Bruce recoiled as though Mike had spat
in his face.
You fool, he rebuked himself savagely, you were wide open then.
You nearly let one of them in again.
Remorselessly he crushed down his sympathy, shocked at the effort it
required, and when he picked up the radio the gentleness had gone from
his eyes.
"Hendry," he spoke into the set, "don't talk so much. I put you up front
to watch the tracks." From the leading truck Wally Hendry looked round
and forked two fingers at Bruce in a casual obscenity, but he turned
back and faced ahead.
"You'd better go and take over from Hendry," Bruce told Mike.
"Send him back here." Mike Haig stood up and looked down at Bruce.
"What are you afraid of?" his voice softly puzzled.
"I gave you an order, Haig."
"Yes, I'm on my way."
The aircraft found them in the late afternoon. It was a Vampire
jet of the Indian Air Force and it came from the north.
They heard the soft rumble of it across the sky and then saw it glint
like a speck of mica in the sunlight above the storm clouds ahead of
them.
"I bet you a thousand francs to a handful of dung that this Bucko don't
know about us," said Hendry with anticipation, watching the jet turn off
its course towards them.
"Well, he does now," said Bruce.
Swiftly he surveyed the rain clouds in front of them.
They were close; another ten minutes" run and they would be under them,
and once there they were safe from air attack for the belly of the
clouds pressed close against the earth and the rain was a thick
blue-grey mist that would reduce visibility to a few hundred feet. He
switched on the radio.
"Driver, give us all the speed you have - get us into that rain."
"Oui, monsieur, I came the acknowledgement and almost immediately the
puffing of the loco quickened and the clatter of the crossties changed
its rhythm.
"Look at him come," growled Hendry. The jet fell fast away against the
backdrop of cloud, still in sunlight, still a silver
point of light, but growing.
Bruce clicked over the band selector of the radio, searching the ether
for the pilot's voice. He tried four wavelengths and each time found
only the crackle and drone of static, but with the fifth came the gentle
sing-song of Hindustani. Bruce could not understand it, but he
could hear that the tone was puzzled. There was a short silence on the
radio while the pilot listened to an instruction from the Kamina base
which was beyond the power of their small set to receive, then a curt
affirmative, "He's coming in for a closer look," said Bruce, then raising
his voice, "Everybody under cover - and stay there." He was not prepared
to risk another demonstration of friendship.
The jet came cruising in towards them under half power, yet incredibly
fast, leaving the sound of its engine far behind it, sharklike above the
forest. Then Bruce could see the pilot's head through the canopy; now he
could make out his features. His face was very brown beneath the silver
crash helmet and he had a little mustache, the same as the jack of
spades. He was so close that Bruce saw the exact moment that he
recognized them as Katangese; his eyes
showed white and his mouth puckered as he swore. Beside Bruce the radio
relayed the oath with metallic harshness, and then the jet was banking
away steeply, its engine howling in full throttle, rising, showing its
swollen silver belly and the racks of rockets beneath its wings.
"That frightened seven years" growth out of him," laughed Hendry.
"You should have let me blast him. He was close enough for me to hit him
in the left eyeball."
"You'll get another chance in a moment," Bruce assured him grimly. The
radio was gabbling with consternation as the jet dwindled back into the
sky. Bruce switched quickly to their own channel.
"Driver, can't you get this thing moving?"
"Monsieur, never before has she moved as she does now." Once more he
switched back to the jet's frequency and listened to the pilot's excited
voice. The jet was turning in a wide circle, perhaps fifteen miles away.
Bruce glanced at the piled mass of cloud and rain ahead of them; it was
moving down to meet them, but with ponderous dignity.
"If he comes back," Bruce shouted down at his gendarmes, twe can be sure
that it's not just to look at us again. Open fire as soon as he's in
range. Give him everything you've got, we must try and spoil his aim."
Their faces were turned uptowards him, subdued by the awful inferiority
of the earthbound to the hunter in the sky.
Only Andre did not look at Bruce; he was staring at the aircraft with
his jaws clenching nervously and his eyes too large for his face.
Again there was silence on the radio, and every head turned back to
watch the jet.
"Come on, Bucko, come on!" grunted Hendry impatiently. He spat into the
palm of his right hand and then wiped it down the front of his jacket.
"Come on, we want you." With his thumb he flicked the safety catch of
his rifle on and off, on and off.
Suddenly the radio spoke again. Two words, obviously acknowledging an
order, and one of the words Bruce recognised. He had heard it before in
circumstances that has burned it into his memory.
The Hindustani word
"Attack!" "All right," he said and stood up. "He's coming!" The wind
fluttered his shirt against his chest. He settled his helmet firmly and
pumped a round into the chamber of his FN.
"Get down into the truck, Hendry," he ordered.
"I can see better from here." Hendry was standing beside him, legs
planted wide to brace himself against the violent motion of the train.
"As you like," said Bruce. "Ruffy, you get under cover."
"Too damn hot down there in that box," grinned the huge Negro.
"You're a mad Arab too," said Bruce.
"Sure, we're all mad Arabs." The jet wheeled sharply and stooped
towards the forest, levelling, still miles out on their flank.
"This Bucko is a real apprentice. He's going to take us from the side,
so we can all shoot at him. If he was half awake he'd give it to us up
the bum, hit the loco and make sure that we were all shooting over the
top of each other," gloated Hendry.
Silently, swiftly it closed with them, almost touching the tops of the
trees. Then suddenly the cannon fire sparkled lemon-pale on its nose and
all around them the air was filled with the sound of a thousand whips.
Immediately every gun on the train opened up in reply.
The tracers from the Brens chased each other out to meet the plane and
the rifles joined their voices in a clamour that drowned the cannon
fire.
Bruce aimed carefully, the jet unsteady in his sights from the lurching
of the coach; then he pressed the trigger and the rifle
juddered against his shoulder. From the corner of his eye he saw the
empty cartridge cases spray from the breech in a bright bronze stream,
and the stench of cordite stung his nostrils.
The aircraft slewed slightly, flinching from the torrent of fire.
"He's yellow!" howled Hendry. "The bastard's yellow!"
"Hit him!"
roared Ruffy. "Keep hitting him." The jet twisted, lifted its nose so
that the fire from its cannons passed harmlessly over their heads.
Then its nose dropped again and it fired its rockets, two from under
each wing. The gunfire from the train stopped abruptly as everybody
ducked for safety; only the three of them on the roof kept shooting.
Shrieking like four demons in harness, leaving parallel lines of white
smoke behind them, the rockets came from about four hundred yards out
and they covered the distance in the time it takes to draw a deep
breath, but the pilot had dropped his nose too sharply and fired too
late. The rockets exploded in the embankment of the tracks below them.
The blast threw Bruce over backwards. He fell and rolled, clutching
desperately at the smooth roof, but as he went over the edge his fingers
caught in the guttering and he hung there. He was dazed with the
concussion, the guttering cutting into his fingers, the shoulder strap
of his rifle round his neck strangling him, and the gravel of the
embankment rushing past beneath him.
Ruffy reached over, caught him by the front of his jacket and lifted him
back like a child.
"You going somewhere, boss?" The great round face was coated with dust
from the explosions, but he was grinning happily. Bruce had a confused
conviction that it would take at least a case of dynamite to make any
impression on that mountain of black flesh.
Kneeling on the roof Bruce tried to rally himself. He saw that the