Clive Cussler - Vixen 03

"Aren't you confusing an insurgency with a holy war?"

"Why, just the other day," Fawkes pushed on, "a farmer and his missus was ambushed over at Umoro."

"Umoro is eighty miles away," his wife said matter-of-factly.

"It could happen here just as well."

"You will go to Pembroke and you will visit with the Defence Minister." The words that came from the woman seemed chiseled in stone. "I have better things to do than sit around on the veranda all morning and palaver with you, Patrick Fawkes. Now get on your way, and stay out of them Pembroke saloons."

Myrna Fawkes was not a woman to ignore. Though she was lean and tiny, she possessed the toughness of two good men. Fawkes seldom knew her when she wasn't dressed in one of his outsized khaki shirts and blue jeans tucked into midcalf boots. She could do almost anything he could do: deliver a calf, ramrod their army of native workers, repair a hundred and one different pieces of mechanical hardware, nurse the sick and injured women and children in the compound, cook like a French chef. Strangely, she had never learned to drive a car or ride a horse and made no bones about not caring to bother. She kept her sinewy body in shape by miles of everyday walking.

"Don't fret for us," she continued. "We have five armed guards. jenny and Patrick junior can both shoot the head off a mamba at fifty meters. I can call up the constable by radio in case of trouble. And don't forget the electrified fence. Even if guerrillas get through that, there's still old Lucifer to contend with." She motioned toward a Holland & Holland twelve-gauge shotgun that rested against the door frame.

Before Fawkes could grunt a last-ditch reply, his son and daughter drove up in a British Bushmaster and parked by the steps of the veranda.

"She's filled with petrol and ready to go, Captain," Patrick junior shouted. He was two months past twenty and wore the face and slimness of his mother, but in height he loomed three inches over his father. His sister, a year younger, big boned and large breasted, smiled gaily from a face sprinkled with freckles.

"I'm all out of bath oil, Papa," jenny said. "Will you please remember to pick me up some when you're in Pembroke?"

"Bath oil," Fawkes groaned. "It's a damned conspiracy. My whole life is one great conspiracy engineered by my own flesh and blood. You think you can get along without me? Then so be it. But in my log you're all a bloody lot of mutineers."

Kissed by a laughing Myrna and herded by his son and daughter, Fawkes reluctantly boarded the four-wheel-drive. As he waited for the guard to open the gate, he turned and looked back at the house. They were still standing on the steps of the veranda, framed by a lattice bursting with bougainvillea blossoms. The three of them waved and he waved back. And then he was shifting the Bushmaster through the gears as he swung onto the dirt road, pulling a small dust cloud behind.

Somala watched the captain's departure, closely noting the procedure of the guard as he turned the electricity off and on when opening and closing the gate. The motions were accomplished mechanically. That was good, Somala thought. The man was bored. So much the better if the time came for an assault.

He angled the binoculars toward the dense elephant grass smudged with thick clumps of shrub that made up the snaking boundaries of the farm. He almost missed it. He would have missed it if his eye hadn't caught a lightning-quick glint from the sun 's reflection. His instinctive reaction was to blink and rub his eyes. Then he looked again.

Another black man was lying on a platform above the ground, partially obscured by the fernlike leaves of an acacia tree. Except for slightly younger features and a shade lighter skin, he could have passed for Somala The intruder was dressed in identical camouflage combat fatigues and carried a Chinese CK-88 automatic rifle with cartridge bandolier — the standard issue of a soldier in the African Army of Revolution. To Somala it was like gazing into a distant mirror.

His thoughts were confused The men of his section were all accounted for. He did not recognize this man. Had his Vietnamese advisory committee sent a spy to observe his scouting efficiency? Surely his loyalty to the AAR was not in question. Then Somala experienced a creeping chill up the nape of his neck.

The other soldier was not watching Somala. He was staring through binoculars at the Fawkes house.

The dampness hung like a soggy blanket and kept the water from evaporating out of the potholes. Fawkes glanced at the clock in the ashboard; it read three thirty-five. In another hour he would reach Pembroke. He began to feel a growing urge for a healthy tot of whisky.

He passed a pair of black youngsters squatting in the ditch beside the road. He paid them no heed and did not see them as they leaped to their feet and began running in the Bushmaster's dusty wake. A hundred yards farther on the road narrowed. A swamp on the right side held a rotting bed of reeds. On the left a ravine fell more than a hundred feet to a muddy streambed. Directly ahead a boy of about sixteen stood in the middle of the road, one hand gripping a broad-bladed Zulu spear, the other hand supporting a raised rock.

Fawkes stopped abruptly. The boy held his ground and stared with an expression of grim determination at the bearded face behind the windshield. He wore ragged shorts and a soiled, torn T-shirt that had never seen soap. Fawkes rolled down his window and leaned out. He smiled and spoke in a low, friendly voice.

"If you have a mind to play Saint George and the dragon with me, boy, I suggest you reconsider."

Fawkes was answered by silence. Then he became aware of three images simultaneously, and his muscles tensed. There was the sight of gleaming safety-glass fragments that had been carelessly kicked into a raineroded rut. There were parallel tire marks that curved at the lip of the ravine. And the other, most tangible evidence of something dangerously wrong was the reflection in the side mirror of the two boys charging toward his rear. One, a fat, lumbering youth, was pointing an old bolt-action rifle. The other swung a rusty machete above his head.

My God, Fawkes's mind flashed. I'm being ambushed by schoolchildren.

His only weapon was the hunting knife in the glove compartment. His family had hustled him on his way so quickly that he had forgotten to pack his favorite.44 Magnum revolver.

Wasting no time by cursing his laxity, he crammed the Bushmaster in reverse and mashed down on the gas. The tires bit and jerked the four-wheel-drive backward, missing the boy carrying the machete but clipping the one with the gun, sending him spinning into the swamp. Fawkes then' braked and shoved the gearshift into first and spun wheels toward the boy who stood poised to throw both spear and rock.

There was no hint of fear in the black teenager's eyes as he rooted his bare feet and pitched both arms in unison. At first Fawkes thought the boy's aim was high; he heard the spear clatter and ricochet off the roof. Then the windshield dissolved in a hail of glittering slivers and the rock was in the front seat, beside him. Fawkes felt the glass particles slice his face, but the only thing he remembered afterward was the cold look of hatred in his assailant's eyes.

The impact lifted the boy off his feet like an elastic doll and flung him under the front wheels. Fawkes stomped on the brake pedal but succeeded only in making the injuries worse. The locked tires bounced and skidded over pliant flesh, tearing skin from sinew.

Fawkes eased from behind the wheel and cautiously walked back. The boy was dead, his skull crushed nearly flat, his skinny legs mangled chunks of crimson. The fat boy with the gun lay half in the algae-coated swamp water, half on the sloping bank. His head had been wrenched backward until it touched his spine. There was no sight of his companion; he had vanished into the swamp.