Wilbur Smith - Assegai

‘That is what I hoped to hear you say, General. I have been given total authority by the Kaiser and by my government to promise you whatever you require in the way of supplies, arms and money.’

‘We will need all of those things,’ de la Rey agreed, ‘especially in the beginning, before we have been able to wrest control from Botha and before we have seized the army arsenals and the vaults of the Reserve Bank in Pretoria where the money is.’

‘Tell me what you will need, General. I will get it for you from Berlin.’

‘We will not need food or uniforms. We are the farmers who grow the crops so we will feed ourselves. We will fight, as we did before, in our workaday clothes. We will not need small arms. Every man of us still has his Mauser.’

‘What will you need, then?’ Graf Otto persisted.

‘For a start, I will need one hundred and fifty heavy machine-guns and twenty trench mortars, with the ammunition and bombs for them. Say, one million rounds of ammunition and five hundred mortar bombs. Then we will need medical supplies . . .’ Graf Otto made shorthand notes on his pad, as de la Rey enumerated his requirements.

‘Heavy cannon?’ von Lettow Vorbeck suggested.

‘No. Our first attacks will rely on speed and surprise. If they succeed we will capture the government arsenals and the heavy artillery will fall into our hands.’

‘What else do you need?’

‘Money,’ de la Rey replied simply.

‘How much?’

‘Two million pounds in gold sovereigns.’

For a minute they were all silenced by the enormity of the request. Then Graf Otto said, ‘That is a great deal of money.’

‘That is the price of the richest land in the southern hemisphere. It is the price of an army of sixty thousand trained and battle-hardened men. It is the price of victory over the British. Do you really believe it to be too high, Graf?’

‘No!’ Graf Otto shook his head emphatically. ‘When you put it like that, it’s a fair price. You shall have the full two million. I will see to it.’

‘All of this, all the money and arms, will be to no avail until it is delivered to our bases in South Africa.’

‘Tell me how we should get it to you.’

‘You could not smuggle it in through one of the main harbours, not through Cape Town or Durban. Customs surveillance is too strict. However, South Africa has a common border with your colony in the south-west. They are joined by a good railway line. The management and employees of South African Railways are almost exclusively Afrikaners. We can rely on them to sympathize with our cause. An alternative route might be from here in German East Africa across Lake Tanganyika by boat to the copperbelt in Rhodesia and from there south, once again by the railway line.’

Von Lettow Vorbeck looked grave. ‘It would take weeks or even months to get the supplies to you by those routes. At every turn there would be danger of the shipment’s discovery and interception by the enemy. It would be too risky.’ Both men looked to Graf Otto for an alternative plan.

‘How could you deliver the goods to us?’ de la Rey demanded. They all waited expectantly for his reply.

Eva went on sketching imperturbably. Obviously she had not followed a single word of the discussion, but Graf Otto glanced at her, then at Hennie, and frowned slightly. For a little longer he remained silent, drumming his fingers on the table, thinking deeply. Then he seemed to reach a decision. ‘It can be done. It will be done. I give you my word, General. I will deliver everything that you need to wherever you need it. But from now on our watchword must be secrecy. I shall inform only you and Colonel von Lettow much nearer the time of the method of delivery that we will employ. At this stage I must ask you to trust me.’

De la Rey stared at him with those smouldering fanatical eyes, and Graf Otto returned his gaze calmly. At last de la Rey picked up the sheet of paper with the eagle letterhead that still lay on the table in front of him. ‘This is the guarantee of your Kaiser and your government. It is not sufficient incentive to persuade me to lead my Volk into the holocaust once again.’

Graf Otto and von Lettow Vorbeck continued staring at him wordlessly. The whole design seemed on the point of collapse.

Then de la Rey went on, ‘You have given me another guarantee, Graf. You have given me your word. I know you are a man who has moved great mountains. Your accomplishments are the stuff of legend. I know you are a man who does not even admit the possibility of failure.’ He paused again, perhaps to gather his thoughts. ‘I am a humble man, but in one respect alone I am proud. I am proud of my ability to judge horses and men. You have given me your word, and now I give you mine. On the day that the scourge of war sweeps across Africa once again, I will be ready for you with an army of sixty thousand fighting men at my back. Give me your hand, Graf. From this day on I am your ally to the death.’

From dawn to dusk over the past four days Leon Courtney had flown the Bumble Bee at treetop height over the wide savannah. Manyoro and Loikot were perched in the front of the cockpit, vigilant as cruising vultures, watching and searching. They had found many lions, probably more than two hundred, females and cubs, young males and toothless old solitaries. But Kichwa Muzuru had told them, ‘He must be big and his mane must be as black as the hell hound.’ So far, they had found no animal that came close to that description.

On the fourth day Manyoro had wanted to give up the search in Masailand and fly up to the Northern Frontier District, to the wild land between Lake Turkana and Marsabit. ‘There we will find lions under every acacia tree. Lions big enough and fierce enough to make even Kichwa Muzuru happy.’

Loikot had strenuously opposed the move. He had told Leon of a pair of legendary lions that held a huge territory between Lake Natron and the west wall of the Rift Valley. ‘I know those lions well. Many times I have seen them over the years that I herded my father’s cattle. They are twins, brothers born from the same lioness on the same day. That was in the season of the locust plagues, eleven years ago, when I was just a child. Year after year I have watched them grow in size, strength and daring. By now they are in their prime. There is not another lion to compare with them in all the land. They have killed a hundred head of cattle, maybe more,’ Loikot had said. ‘They have killed eighteen of the morani who set out to hunt them down. No man has been able to stand against them for they are too fierce and cunning. Some of the morani believe they are ghost lions that can change themselves into gazelle or birds when they hear the hunters coming after them.’

Manyoro had scoffed, rolled his eyes and touched his temple with a forefinger to indicate the depth of Loikot’s dementia. But Leon had backed him, so for the last few days they had scoured the wide brown grassland. They had seen huge herds of buffalo, and countless thousands of smaller plains game, but the lions were either very young or very old and not worthy of the spear.

That evening, as they sat around the campfire, Loikot tried to keep up their flagging enthusiasm. ‘I tell you, M’bogo, these two are the paramount chieftains of all the lions in the valley. There are no others greater, fiercer or more cunning. These are the ones that Kichwa Muzuru has sent us to find.’

Manyoro hawked and spat in the fire, then watched the slug of his phlegm boil and bubble in the flames before he gave his opinion. ‘For many days I have listened to this story of yours, Loikot. There is one part of it that I have come to believe, that these lions you speak of can change their shape to birds. That is what they must have done. They have become little sparrows and flown away. I think we should leave these bird-lions, and go up to Marsabit to find a real one.’