Elephant Song - Smith Wilbur. Страница 49

Almost immediately Chawe sensed the change in the engine beat and thrust the shotgun into the nape of his neck.  Kawaleza!  Go faster!

That horse wouldn't run.  Daniel grimaced and obeyed.  On the other hand Chawe wasn't likely to shoot him at this speed and risk the sudden loss of control and the inevitable pile-up.

He expected an order to stop or pull off the road when they reached their destination, wherever that might be.  That would be the time to make his play.  Daniel settled down to wait until then.

Suddenly the road was steeper, and the bends sharper.  The dawn was grey.

As they came through each turn in the road, Daniel had glimpses of the valley below.  It was filled with silver mist banks, through which he made out the white cascades of a mountain river, running deep in its gloomy gorge.

Another bend loomed ahead and as he braced himself to negotiate it, Chawe spoke sharply, Stop!  Pull in to the edge.

Over there.

Daniel braked and pulled over, on to the verge.

They were at the top of a cliff.  The edge of the road was guarded by a line of white-painted rocks.  Beyond that the chasm gaped.  It was a drop of two or three hundred feet to the rocky riverbed below.

Daniel pulled on the handbrake and felt his heart bounding against his rib cage.  Would the shot come now?  he wondered.

It would be a stupid thing to do if they wanted to make it look like an accident, but then the big Angoni did not seem to be labouring under a heavy burden of brains.  Switch off the engine, he ordered.

Daniel did as he was told.  Put your hands on your head, Chawe ordered, and Daniel felt a small lift of relief.  He had a few seconds longer. He obeyed and waited.

He heard the click of the door latch, but the pressure of the steel muzzle against his spine never slackened.  He felt the cool draught of air as Chawe swung the back door open.  Do not move, he warned Daniel, and slid sideways from his seat still aiming the shotgun in through the open door.  Now he was standing alongside the car.  Open your door slowly.  The shotgun was aimed through the side window into Daniel's face.  He opened the door.  Now come out.  Daniel stepped down.

Still covering him with the shotgun, holding it in one hand like a horse pistol, Chawe reached out with his left hand through the open door.

Daniel saw that he had the steel jackhandle lying on the rear seat.

During the journey he must have taken it from under the front seat.

In that instant Daniel understood how Chawe planned to get rid of him.

Chawe would prod him to the edge of the precipice with the shotgun, and then a single blow to the back of the skull with the jack-handle would tumble him two hundred feet into the rocky gorge.  After that the Landcruiser, with the driver's door open and probably with a burning rag stuffed into the filter of the fuel tank, would.  be pushed over the cliff on top of him.

It would look like another tourist killed by negligent driving on a notorious stretch of mountain road.  Nothing to excite police suspicion, or to tie the incident to Chetti Singh and a cargo of contraband ivory in Lilongwe a hundred miles from the scene.

At that moment Daniel saw his opportunity.

Chawe was reaching in through the open door, and he was just marginally off balance.  Although the shotgun was still pointed at Daniel's guts, he would be slow to adjust his aim if Daniel moved quickly.

Daniel hurled himself forward, not at the man or the gun but at the door.

He crashed into it with his full weight, and it slammed shut with Chawe's arm trapped between steel edge and jamb.

Chawe screamed in agony.  The sound of it did not cover the crack of breaking bone, sharp as a stick of dry kindling snapped across the knee.

His forefinger, thick as a blood sausage, slipped across the trigger, firing one of the barrels.  The blast of shot missed Daniel's head by a foot, though the detonation fluttered his hair and made him wince.  The recoil threw the barrel high.

Using his momentum Daniel charged him head on, seizing the shotgun with both hands, at buttstock and hot barrel.

Chawe's grip on the weapon was single-handed and weakened by the agony of broken bone trapped in the door.  He fired the second barrel, but the shot flew harmlessly into the sky.

Daniel slammed the side of the breech into his face, catching him across the upper lip, crushing his nose and shearing off all his upper teeth at the gum.  Chawe bellowed through a mouthful of blood and broken teeth, as he tried to pull his arm from the steel trap of the door.

Daniel had the advantage of a double-handed grip on the shotgun and used it to tear the weapon from Chawe's right hand.  He lifted the shotgun high, reversed it and drove the steel butt-plate into Chawe's face, catching him in the side of the jaw with the full force of the blow.

Chawe's jawbone shattered at the hinge and his face changed shape, sagging at one side as the bone collapsed.  Stunned and uncoordinated he fell backwards, held only by his trapped arm.

Daniel yanked the door handle and it flew open, releasing Chawe's arm when he was not expecting it.

Chawe reeled backwards, not in control of his legs, windmilling his arms to try and retain his balance, the shattered arm flapping uselessly below the joint of the elbow.  One of the white-washed boulders at the edge of the cliff caught his heels and he jerked backwards, as though plucked on a wire, and disappeared over the precipice.

Daniel heard him scream.  The sound receded swiftly as he fell and was cut off abruptly on the rocks at the bottom.  The silence afterwards was profound.

Daniel found himself leaning against the Landcruiser with the shotgun still clutched to his chest, panting from those few seconds of wild exertion.  It took a moment to gather himself and then he went to the edge of the cliff and looked over.

Chawe lay on his face on the rocks at the edge of the waterfall directly below, his limbs spread like a crucifix.  There was no scuff mark at the brink of the precipice to mark his fall.

Daniel thought swiftly.  Report the attack?  Tell the police about the ivory?  Hell, no!  A white man had better not kill a black man in Africa, even in self-defence, even in a civilised state like Malawi.

They would crucify him.

His mind was made up by the sound of a heavy vehicle descending the mountain road in low gear.  Swiftly he slipped the shotgun on to the floorboards of the Landcruiser and pulled a light tarpaulin over it.

Then he crossed to the edge of the cliff, unzipped the fly of his trousers and forced himself to urinate over the drop.

The descending truck appeared around the bend of the road above him.

It was a timber lorry piled with cut logs that were chained to the cargo bed.  There were two black men in the cab, the driver and his assistant.

Daniel made a show of shaking off the drops and zipping his fly closed.

The black driver grinned and waved at him as the lorry rumbled past and Daniel waved back.

As soon as it was out of sight he ran to the Landcruiser and drove on up the mountain.  Within two hundred yards he found a disused logging track that branched off the main road.  . He drove through the dense secondary growth that clogged the track until he was out of sight of the road.  He left the Landcruiser there and went back on foot, ready to duck into cover at the sound of another vehicle.

At the top of the cliff he checked that Chawe's body still lay on the rocks below.  His instinct was to leave him there and get far away from the scene as quickly as possible.  He suspected that a Malawian prison was no great improvement on any other in Africa.  His arm was very painful now.  He could feel the first fires of infection kindling, but he didn't want even to look at it until he had cleaned up the evidence against himself.