96

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.

But Lobengula had been a fighter all his life. This was not the first time he had been wounded. Countless claws had drawn blood from his flesh before now, but none of them had finished him. And he was not finished yet. Slowly, wincing with pain, he pulled himself to his feet and went on his way again.