Tom Cain: Dictator

Carver turned off the engine, and as a cloud of smoke and dust drifted away on the breeze, silence returned to the hillside. The tree had punched a great trough in the roof of the Land Rover. All the windows down the driver’s side of the car were smashed and the interior of the car was scattered with safety glass. The three people inside were hanging sideways in their chairs, suspended from their seat-belts.

The right side of Carver’s head had smashed against the side of the car as it fell. It ached, and there was blood dripping from his forehead into one eye. Aside from that he felt bruised and shaken but otherwise in one piece. There were no broken bones, so far as he could tell.

‘You guys all right?’ he asked.

There were grunts of assent from Justus, who was hanging immediately above him, and Zalika in the rear.

And then she said, ‘Now what?’

As the Land Rover reversed away from him, Lobengula’s first instinct had been to get back to sleep. He was just about to slump back down on the ground when a scent came to him, one that had previously been masked by the stench of the exhaust: the smell of human being.

Lobengula had never been a man-eater. For the great majority of his life he had never needed to be. There had been plenty of game on the reserve and plenty of willing females to hunt it on his behalf. Now, though, times had changed. Humans might be unfamiliar prey, but they smelled edible, just the same. And Lobengula was very, very hungry.

Filled with the curiosity natural to his kind, he padded along the trail and down the hillside towards the ruined car.

Carver was busy working out the best way of getting out of the Land Rover. It was a right-hand-drive vehicle, so the door on his side was now pressed against the ground. There was a fist-sized hole in the windscreen directly in front of him and the rest of the glass was so cracked that one good kick would get rid of it. First, though, he had to find a way of delivering that kick, which would mean unstrapping himself and freeing his legs from the well in front of the driver’s seat. Justus would have the easier way out if he could somehow open the passenger-side window or door and scramble up through that. Zalika would be able to do the same at the back.

Somehow, though, Carver felt that he should be the first one out of the vehicle. He was painfully aware that anyone for miles around would have heard the sound of the crash – a crash that was entirely his fault. He had got them into this mess. Time he started getting them out of it.

Justus, however, had other ideas. He was wriggling in his seat, trying to reach the handle that would wind down his window. He finally got hold of it and started turning it as fast as he could.

Then a low, purring growl reverberated round the inside of the Land Rover. Suddenly Justus began working the handle the other way. The lion was just outside. They could hear it snuffling at the upturned car, pawing the ground.

‘Oh God, oh God… come on…’ he muttered as Zalika shrieked, ‘For God’s sake, close that fucking window!’

Just then there was a thud up above him. The lion had jumped up and was now pacing along the overturned bodywork and peering in through the windows.

Zalika screamed. She unclipped her harness and fell down to the bottom of the car, away from the marauding animal. Justus lowered himself more carefully and crouched down next to Carver.

By now, Carver had drawn the pistol that Parkes had given him and pointed it up at the side of the car. ‘Watch out,’ he said. ‘Fire in the hole.’

He punched half-a-dozen holes in the side of the car as he fired at where the great cat was standing. From outside came a squeal of pain. The lion half-jumped, half-fell down to the ground, gave another agonized grunt, then disappeared into the night.

For an entire minute, no one moved. But there were no more sounds from outside. No sign of the animal’s return.

‘Right,’ said Carver. ‘Time to go.’

‘But the lion is still out there,’ Justus protested. ‘And as long as it is alive it is dangerous.’

‘Yeah, the lion and Moses Mabeki. He’s out there somewhere, too, and I’m not waiting for him to find us.’

‘He might not find us,’ said Zalika. ‘Why don’t we wait a bit longer, just to make sure the lion has really gone away?’

Carver was about to reply when he stopped, tilted his head to one side and whispered, ‘Listen.’

The only sound to be heard in the Land Rover was very faint, but unmistakable: a helicopter, still a fair way off but getting closer all the time.

‘Right, that does it,’ said Carver. ‘I don’t care how many lions are prowling around outside, we’re getting out of here.’

Moses Mabeki was up at the front of the helicopter in the co-pilot’s seat, his eyes focused on the ever-moving pool of light created by the searchlight as it swept across the ground just a couple of hundred feet below. They were passing over hillier country now, where the shadows cast by the broken landscape made it harder than ever to see anything down below. His frustration was mounting. The border with South Africa was barely a mile away now. There was a very real possibility that Carver had eluded him and, just as bad, taken the Stratten girl beyond his reach. He was almost at the point where he would have to admit defeat.

And then something caught his eye. At first, he could not say exactly what it was, just an anomaly in the landscape. He tapped the pilot on his shoulder. ‘Go back,’ he said, pointing down at the ground behind them. ‘I saw something.’

The pilot brought the chopper round through a one-eighty turn and retraced their course, more slowly now.

‘There!’ said Mabeki triumphantly, pointing down at the ground where the abandoned Land Rover lay. ‘I knew it! Get us down. As close to that car as possible.’

Barely a minute later, Mabeki was standing at the crash site, running his hands over the punctured flank of the Land Rover, contemplating the significance of shots fired from inside the car and wondering where the blood coagulating in drips and smears across the metal had come from.

‘Lion,’ said one of his men. ‘Big lion. See here.’

He flashed a torch at paw-prints the size of a large dinner-plate pressed into the earth around the car.

For a moment, Mabeki was nervous. ‘Lion? Where did it go?’

The man looked down at the prints and the drops of blood scattered among them. Then he pointed away down the hillside, to the northwest. ‘That way,’ he said.

‘And the people in the car?’

The man spent a few seconds examining the side of the hill before returning to Mabeki. ‘That way.’

He was pointing back up the hill, towards the trail that ran about twenty feet above their heads. Towards the South African border.

‘Excellent,’ said Mabeki. ‘Then let us follow them at once.’

Lobengula had indeed walked away to the northwest, but had not gone very far before lying down to ease the pain of his wounds, his huge frame melting invisibly into the undergrowth. In full sunlight, even an experienced tracker would have had a hard time spotting him. At night it was impossible.

The rounds fired by the M11 pistol would not have been recommended for the job by any reputable lion-hunter, and their trajectory had been impeded by the metal barrier through which they had flown, distorting their shape en route, before three of them hit Lobengula. So none of his wounds was fatal; not immediately so, at any rate. He had one round caught between two ribs, both of which were cracked as a result. Another had punctured his lower intestine. The third had worked its way into the muscle of his upper left hind leg, which he was now attempting to lick better. He was in severe pain, which increased with every breath or stride that he took.