Wilbur Smith - Assegai

‘Otto, I can’t do this,’ Eva cried, but he did not argue with her. He seized her around the waist and carried her bodily, struggling, to the doorway. With powerful kicks he booted the two men ahead of him out of the way, and as soon as the doorway was open he threw Eva out. As she dropped away he shouted after her, ‘Count to seven, then pull the cord.’

He watched her fall towards the top gallery of the rainforest. Just when it seemed she must crash into the branches her parachute burst open and jerked her so violently that her body swung on the shrouds like a puppet’s. He did not wait to see her land but stepped out into space and plunged towards the trees.

Leon held the Butterfly in a tight turn above the cliffs and peered down at the human bodies spilling out of the hatchway in the airship’s control cabin. He saw at least three parachutes fail to open and the men drop, arms and legs flailing, until they hit the treetops. Others more fortunate were carried away on the monsoon wind like thistledown and scattered across the mountainside. Then Eva was falling free, smaller and slimmer than any of the men. He bit his lip hard as he waited for her parachute to open, then shouted with relief as the white silk blossomed above her. She was already so low that, within seconds, she had been sucked into the dense green mass of the jungle.

The Assegai floated on, nose high and yawing aimlessly across the wind. She was rising slowly but he knew at a glance that she would never clear the top of the cliff. Her tail touched the trees and she came around abruptly. Like a stranded jellyfish she rolled on to her side and her cavernous gas chambers snagged in the upper branches of the trees. They collapsed and the airship deflated like a punctured balloon. Leon braced himself for the explosion of hydrogen that he was sure must follow – it needed but a spark from the damaged generators – but nothing happened. As the gas gushed out and was dispersed by the wind, the Assegai settled in a shapeless mass of canvas and wreckage on the jungle tops, breaking down even the largest branches under her massive weight.

Leon put the Butterfly into a tight turn and flew back only a few feet over the wreck. He tried to see down into the forest, hoping desperately for a glimpse of Eva, but he could see nothing of her. He circled back and made one more fly-past. This time he saw a body hanging lifelessly on the shrouds of a parachute, the silk tangled in the branches of a tall tree. He was so low now that he could recognize Graf Otto.

‘He’s dead,’ Leon decided. ‘Broken his rotten bloody neck at last.’ Then the Butterfly was directly over him and her lower wing blocked Leon’s line of sight. He did not see Graf Otto lift his head and look up at the aircraft.

Leon turned back and put the Butterfly into a climb for the landing strip, keeping low along the cliff face so that he did not waste a moment. He wanted to get back and find Eva. As he flew past the cascading white waterfall and looked down into Sheba’s Pool at the foot, he checked his landmarks carefully. He was only a few minutes’ flight from the wreck of the Assegai , but he knew it would be heavy going to cover the same ground on foot. The moment he landed and cut the engines he reached under the seat to pull out his gun case. With three quick movements he reassembled the stock and barrels and loaded the chambers of his big Holland. Then he swung his legs over the side of the cockpit and jumped down, shouting orders to the crowd of waiting morani who ran forward to meet him.

‘Hurry! Get your spears. The memsahib is out there alone in the forest. She may be hurt. We have to find her fast.’ He raced down the slope, hurdling low bushes. The warriors following him were hard put to keep him in sight through the trees.

Swinging wildly on her parachute shrouds Eva stared down as the forest tops rushed up to meet her. She crashed through the uppermost branches, twigs breaking and crackling around her head. Each time she collided with another branch it slowed her a little more, until she hit the ground in a small clearing on the mountainside.

The slope was steep so she let herself roll head over heels until she came to rest in a patch of swamp. She remembered Graf Otto’s advice and tugged frantically at the buckles of her harness until she could shrug herself free. Then she got gingerly to her feet and checked herself for injuries. There were a few scratches on her arms and legs and her left buttock was bruised, but then she remembered the terror of being thrown out of the airship and saw how lucky she had been.

She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin.

‘Now, where will I find Badger? If only I had some idea of where he came from, but he popped up out of the blue.’ She thought about it for no more than a few seconds before she answered her own question. ‘Sheba’s Pool, of course! It’s the first place he will look for me.’

She knew the ground so well because she and Leon had wandered over it on their forays about the slopes during the enchanted months they had spent at Lusima’s manyatta . Now a sudden glimpse of the cliff face through the jungle helped her to orientate her present position. ‘The waterfall can’t be more than a few miles to the south,’ she told herself.

She started off, using the direction of the slope to guide her and keeping the line of the cliff on her right hand. But then she pulled up sharply. There was a commotion in the bushes ahead and a hideous spotted hyena bolted out of the thicket, a strip of tattered raw flesh dangling from its jaws. She had disturbed its meal of carrion.

She went forward cautiously and found the corpse of Thomas Bueler, the first officer, lying crumpled in the shrubbery. He was one of those whose parachute had failed to open. She recognized him by his uniform: most of his face was missing – the hyena had torn it away. She was about to hurry on down the path but then she saw that Bueler had a small rucksack fastened to the front of his harness – that was why the parachute had failed to open: it had snagged the shrouds of his chute. Perhaps it contained something that would help her to survive, alone and unarmed, on the mountain.

She knelt beside the corpse and forced herself not to look at its mutilated face as she opened the rucksack. She found a small first-aid kit, several packets of dried fruit and smoked meat, a tin of Vestas for fire-making and a 9mm Mauser pistol in its wooden holster with two spare clips of ammunition. All these things could be invaluable.

She disentangled the strap of the rucksack from the parachute harness and slung it over her shoulder, then jumped up and hurried along the game path. Half a mile further on she heard Otto’s voice, calling plaintively for help from a little higher up the slope: ‘Can anybody hear me? Ritter! Bueler! Come! I need your help.’ She turned off the game trail she was following and moved cautiously towards the sound. When he called again, she looked up and found him. He was hanging high in the canopy. His shrouds had wrapped around a large branch, and he was dangling seventy feet above the ground, swinging himself back and forth, trying to get a grip on the branch from which he was suspended, but he could not muster sufficient momentum to reach it.

Eva looked around her carefully. None of the Assegai crew was in sight. They were alone in the forest. She was about to sneak away and continue her escape when he spotted her. ‘Eva! Thank God you have come.’ She stopped. ‘Come, Eva, you must help me to get down. If I open my harness I will fall to my death. But I have a light rope in my pack.’ He reached under its flap and pulled out a hank of jute twine. ‘I am going to drop the end of it to you. You must pull me towards the branch so I can get a hold on it.’ She stood perfectly still, staring up at him. Now that he knew she had survived the crash she could not leave him. He would follow her. He would never let her escape.