Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur. Страница 4

At the officer's hand signal the helicopter rose and darted likea dragonfly to the next animal that showed good ivory from the lip. This one was still alive, and heaved itself into a sitting position, reaching up with bloody dust-smeared trunk to try and pluck the hovering helicopter from the air.

Braced in the hatch, the officer sighted down the AK 47 and fired a single shot into the back of the neck where it joined the skull, and the cow collapsed and lay as still as the body of her calf bekde her. The officer nodded at the leader of the next gang of butchers.

Balanced on the gigantic grey heads, careful not to let a foot touch the earth, the axe men chipped the tusks loose from their castles of white bone. It was delicate work, for a careless stroke could drastically diminish the value of the ivory. They had seen the officer in the dyed jeans, with a short, well-timed swing of the rifle-butt, break the jaw of a man who merely queried an order. What would he do with one who ruined a tusk? They worked with care. As the tusks were freed, the helicopter winched them up and then carried the gang to the next carcass.

By nightfall most of the elephant had died of their massive wounds or had been shot to death, but the screams of those who had not yet received the coup de grdce mingled with the hubbub of the gathering jackal and hyena packs to make the night hideous. The axe men worked on by the light of grass torches, and by the first light of dawn all the ivory had been gathered in.

Now the axe men could turn their attention to butchering and dismembering the carcasses. The rising heat worked more swiftly than they could. The stench of putrefying flesh mingled with the gases from ruptured entrails and drove the skulking scavengers to fresh paroxysms of gluttonous anticipation. The helicopter carried each haunch or shoulder as it was hacked free to the safe und beyond the minefield. The women cut the meat gro into strips and festooned it on the smoking racks above the smouldering fires of green wood.

While he supervised the work, the officer was calculating the spoils. It was a pity they could not save the hides, for each was worth a thousand dollars, but they were too bulky and could not be sufficiently preserved, putrefaction would render them worthless. On the other hand, mild putrefaction would give the meat more zest on the African palate in the same way that an Englishman enjoys his game high.

Five hundred tons of wet meat would lose half its weight in the drying process, but the copper mines of neighbouring Zambia with tens of thousands of labourers to feed, were eager markets for proteins. Two dollars a pound for the crudely smoked meat was the price that had already been agreed. That was a million U.S. dollars and then of course there was the ivory.

The ivory had been ferried by the helicopter half a mile beyond the sprawling camp to a secluded place in the hills.

There it had been laid out in rows, and a selected gang set to work removing the fat white cone shaped nerve mass from the hollow end of each tusk and cleansing the ivory of any blood and muck that might betray it to the sensitive nose of an oriental customs officer.

There were four hundred tusks. Some of those taken from immature animals weighed only a few pounds, but the old bull's tusks would go well over eighty pounds apiece. A good average was twenty pounds over the lot.

The going price in Hong Kong was a hundred dollars a pound, or a total of eight hundred thousand dollars. The profit on the day's work would be over one million dollars, in a land where the average annual income of each adult male was less than six hundred dollars.

Of course, there had been the other small costs of the operation. One of the axe men had over-balanced and tumbled from his perch on an elephant carcass. He had landed flat on his buttocks, directly on top of an antipersonnel mine.

"Son of a demented baboon." The officer was still irritated by the man's stupidity. It had held work up for almost an hour while the body was retrieved and prepared for burial.

Another man had lost a foot from an overzealous axe stroke and a dozen others had lesser cuts from swinging pan gas One other man had died during the night with an AK 47 bullet through the belly when he objected to what the officer was doing to his junior wife in the bushes beyond the smoking racks but when the profit was considered, the costs were small indeed. The comrade commissar would be plea so and with good reason.

It was the niornin4 of the third day before the team working on the ivory' had completed their task to the officer's satisfaction. Then they were sent down the valley to assist at the smoking racks, leaving the ivory camp deserted. There must be no eyes to discover the identity of the important visitor who would come now to inspect the spoils.

He arrived in the helicopter. The officer was standing LO attention in the clearing beside the long rows of gleaming ivory. The down-draught of the rotors tore at his jacket, and fluttered the legs of his jeans, but he maintained his rigid stance.

The machine settled to earth and a commanding figure stepped down, a handsome man, straight and strong, with very white square teeth against the dark mahogany of his face, crisp kinky African hair cropped closely to the finely shaped skull. He wore an expensive pearl-grey suit of Italian cut over a white shirt and dark blue tie. His black shoes were hand-made of soft calf.

He held out his hand towards the officer. Immediately the younger man abandoned his respect fill pose and ran to him, likea child to its father.

"Comrade Commissar!"

"No! No!" he chided the officer gently, still smiling. "Not Comrade Commissar any longer, but Comrade Minister now. No longer leader of a bunch of unwashed bush fighters, but Minister of State of a sovereign government." The minister permitted himself a smile as he surveyed the rows of fresh tusks. "And the most successful ivory, poacher of all time is that not true?" raig Mellow winced as the cab hit another pothole in the surface of Fifth Avenue just outside the entrance of Bergdorf Goodman. Like most New York cabs, its suspension would have better suited a Sherman tank.

"I've had a softer ride through the Mbabwe depression in a Land-Rover," Craig thought, and had a sudden nostalgic twinge as he remembered that rutted, tortuous track through the bad lands below the Chobe river, that wide green tributary of the great Zambezi.