Wilbur Smith - Assegai

‘Pull up the ladder!’ Graf Otto shouted, and reinforced the command with a hand signal. Leon leaned over the side, lifted it and hooked it into the retaining brackets on the fuselage.

‘Good. Sit here!’ Graf Otto indicated the seat beside him. Leon sat in it and fastened the safety strap across his lap. Graf Otto cupped his hands into a trumpet and bellowed into his ear, ‘You will navigate for me, ja ?’

‘Where are we going?’ Leon shouted back.

‘To the closest of your hunting camps.’

‘That’s more than a hundred miles away,’ Leon protested.

‘A short hop. Ja! We will go there.’ He opened the throttles and taxied back to the far side of the field, paused to check the dials on his dashboard, then slowly pushed the four throttle levers forward to their full extent. The thunder of the Meerbach engines was deafening. The Butterfly bounded forward, bumping and thumping over every irregularity in the ground, her wings rocking and swaying as she gained speed swiftly. Leon clung to the rim of the cockpit, peering ahead. Tears started from his eyes as the wind ripped at them, but his heart was singing almost as loudly as the engines. Then, suddenly, all the rocking and bumping stopped with dramatic suddenness. Leon looked over the side and saw the earth dropping away below him. ‘We’re flying!’ he shouted into the wind. ‘We’re really flying!’ He saw the town below him but it took him moments to recognize it. Everything looked so different from that angle. He had to take his bearings from the snake of the railway line before he could pick out other landmarks: the pink walls of the Muthaiga Country Club; the shining corrugated-iron roof of Delamere’s new hotel; the whitewashed bulk of Government House and the governor’s residence.

‘Which way?’ Graf Otto had to shake his arm to get his attention.

‘Follow the railway line.’ Leon pointed westwards. With both hands he was trying to shield his eyes from the hundred-mile-an-hour wind that tore at his face. Graf Otto prodded his ribs with a bony finger and pointed at a small cubby-hole in the side of the cockpit. Leon opened it and found another leather flying helmet at the back. He pulled it over his head and buckled the strap under his chin, then adjusted the goggles over his eyes. Now he could see, and the side flaps of the helmet protected his eardrums from the roar of the rushing wind.

While he had been engrossed with fitting his helmet Eva had risen from her seat and moved to the front of the cockpit where she was standing, holding the handrail that ran around the rim. She resembled a figurehead on the bows of a man-o’-war, as she balanced gracefully against the motion of the Butterfly .

At that moment the aircraft plummeted sickeningly and unexpectedly. Leon grabbed at the nearest handhold in panic. He knew, without a shadow of doubt, that they were about to fall out of the sky and die a swift but violent death in a pile of wreckage on the earth far below. But the Butterfly was unperturbed: she waggled her wings in a dignified gesture of contempt at the forces of gravity and flew on serenely into the west.

Eva was still standing in the nose, and only then did Leon notice the safety-belt buckled around her waist and the karabiner snap-link at the other end of the lanyard hooked into a steel eye bolt in the floorboards between her feet. It had prevented her being hurled over the side when the Butterfly had dropped.

Graf Otto was still handling the controls with gentle touches of his big, freckled hands. He grinned at Leon around the unlit Cohiba cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth. ‘Thermal!’ he shouted above the wind. ‘It is nothing.’

Leon was mortified by his own panicky display. He had read enough about the theory of flight to know that air acted in the same way as water, with all its unpredictable currents and eddies.

‘Go forward.’ Graf Otto gestured. ‘Go forward to where you can see ahead to guide me.’ Leon edged gingerly to the front of the cockpit. Without a glance in his direction Eva moved aside to make room for him and he took up his position beside her and fastened his safety belt to the ring bolt. They braced themselves with both hands on the rail. They were so very close that he fancied, despite the wind, that he could smell a trace of her special perfume. Facing forward, he glanced at her from the corner of his eye. The slipstream flattened the blouse and long skirt against her body and limbs so that every curve and contour was accentuated. For the first time he was able to make out the shape of her legs, long and slender, and then he looked to the twin mounds of her bosom under the velveteen jacket. He saw at once that her breasts were larger than they had seemed, rounder and fuller than Verity O’Hearne’s had been. He forced himself to tear his eyes away and look ahead.

Already they were approaching the rim of the Great Rift Valley. He picked out the glint of the steel tracks where the railway began its descent of the escarpment to the volcanic steppe of the valley floor. He looked back at Graf Otto and gave him a hand signal to turn ninety degrees southwards. The German nodded and the Butterfly dropped one wing and went into a lazy left-hand turn. Centrifugal force pushed Eva lightly against him, and for a long, exquisite moment Leon felt the outside of her warm thigh press against his. She seemed oblivious to this for she made no move to pull away. Then Graf Otto lifted the port wing and the Butterfly came back on to even keel again. The contact was broken.

The Great Rift Valley opened before them. From this altitude it was a vista that belonged not to petty mankind but to God and his angels. Now Leon could truly appreciate the immensity of the land: the seared and rocky hills, the lion-coloured plains blotched with dark expanses of forest, and the blue palisades of hills and mountains stretching away into infinite distances.

Suddenly the deck canted under their feet as Graf Otto lowered the Butterfly ’s nose and she dropped into the airy void. The cliffs of the escarpment rushed under them, so close that it seemed her wheels must bounce off the rocks. The valley floor loomed up to meet them. Leon saw Eva’s fists tighten into balls on the handrail. He could see that the tension in her body was arching her back. To pay her back for her earlier sauciness he released his own grip on the rail, and placed his hands on his hips, leaning easily into the dive as the aircraft dropped. This time she could not ignore him, and shot him a quick glance as he balanced against the disparate forces that dragged at his body. Then she looked ahead, but lifted one hand from the rail and turned it palm upwards in a gesture of resignation.

Graf Otto pulled the Butterfly ’s nose up out of her dive down the valley wall. Leon’s knees buckled under the force of gravity and Eva was pushed against him once more. She swayed away as the Butterfly came back again on to even keel. They barrelled along the escarpment with the wall flashing past on the port side, so close that it seemed the wing-tip might touch it at any moment.

Suddenly Leon saw what appeared to be a swarm of large black scarab beetles crawling along a mile or so ahead. It was only when the Butterfly raced down on them that he saw it was a large herd of buffalo charging away in panic from their approach. He made another hand signal to Graf Otto, and the Butterfly banked steeply towards the fleeing herd. Once again Eva was pressed against him, but this time she gave him a deliberate bump with her hip. With a surge like electricity through his loins, he understood she was letting him know that she was just as aware of these physical contacts as he was.

They flashed over the heaving backs of the buffalo, so close that Leon could see each pellet of dried mud sticking to their hair, and clearly discern the parallel pattern of scars across the shoulders of the leading bull, left by the raking claws of a marauding lion.