Vixen 03 Part 20

Francis led the unresisting Fawkes to the Bushmaster and tenderly deposited him in the pa.s.senger's seat.

As the vehicle pa.s.sed through the gate, Fawkes stared straight ahead, did not look back. He knew he would never see or set foot on his farm again.

Although it seemed as though his head had barely hit the pillow, Hiram Lusana had been asleep for seven hours when he was roused by the knock at his door. The wrist.w.a.tch on the bed table read six o'clock. He cursed, rubbed the sleep from his coffee-brown eyes, and sat up.

"Come in."

The knock came again.

"I said, Come in," he grunted loudly.

Captain John Mukuta entered the room and stood stiffly at attention. "Sorry to wake you, sir, but section fourteen has just returned from its reconnaissance of Umkono."

"So what's the emergency? I can study their report later."

Mukuta's eyes remained fixed on a spot on the wall. "The patrol experienced trouble. The section leader was shot and lies critically wounded in the hospital. He insists on reporting to you and no one else."

"Who is he?"

"His name is Marcus Somala."

"Somala?" Lusana's brow knitted. He got out of bed. "Tell him I'm coming."

The captain saluted and left, softly closing the door behind him, pretending not to have noticed the second shape curled beneath the satin sheets.

Lusana reached over and pulled away the top sheet. Felicia Collins slept like a statue. Her short Afro hair gleamed in the half light and her lips were puffy and parted. Her skin was the color of cocoa and her conical b.r.e.a.s.t.s, with their dark, full nipples, heaved with each deep breath.

He smiled and left the sheet off. Still half asleep, he weaved into the bathroom and splashed handfuls of cold water on his face. The eyes that stared back from the mirror were streaked with red. The face around them was lined and haggard from a night heavily laced with liquor and s.e.x. He tenderly patted the battle-worn features with a towel, returned to the bedroom, and dressed.

Lusana was a small, wiry man, medium boned and lighter skinned than any man in the army of Africans he commanded. "American tan" is what they called it behind his back. And yet any remarks about his color or his offhand stateside manner were not uttered out of disrespect. His men looked up to him with a primitive sort of awe of the supernatural. He had the air of a.s.surance that most lightweight fighters have in their early careers; some might call it an air of arrogance. He took a last fond look at Felicia, sighed, and walked across the camp to the hospital.

The Chinese doctor was pessimistic.

"The bullet entered from the rear, tore away half his lung, shattered a rib, and exited below the left breast. It is a miracle the man is still alive."

"Can he talk?" Lusana asked.

"Yes, but each word drains his strength."

"How long-"

"-has he to live?" .

Lusana nodded.

"Marcus Somala has an incredibly strong const.i.tution," the doctor said. "But I doubt if he can last out the day."

"Can you give him something to stimulate his senses, if even for only a few minutes?"

The doctor looked thoughtful. "I suppose speeding up the inevitable

SIP*"

will not matter." He turned and murmured instructions to a nurse, who left the room.

Lusana looked down at Somala. The section leader's face was drawn and his chest rose shallowly with spasmodic breaths. A maze of plastic tubing hung from a rack above the bed and ran into his nose and arms. A large surgical dressing was taped across his chest.

The nurse returned and carefully handed the doctor a hypodermic. He inserted the needle and pushed evenly on the plunger. In a few moments Somala's eyes fluttered half open, and he moaned.

Lusana silently motioned to the doctor and his nurse and they withdrew to the hall and closed the door.

He leaned over the bed. "Somala, this is Hiram Lusana. Do you understand me?"

Somala's whispered voice came out hoa.r.s.e but with a trace of emotion. "I do not see well, my General. Is it really you?"

Lusana took Somala's hand and gripped it tightly. "Yes, my brave warrior. I have come to hear your report."

The man on the bed smiled thinly, and then a haunting, questioning look came into his eyes. "Why ... why did you not trust me, my General?"

"Trust you?"

"Why did you not tell me you were sending men to raid the Fawkes farm?"

Lusana was shaken. "Describe what you saw. Describe everything. Leave out nothing."

Twenty minutes later, exhausted by the effort, Marcus Somala lapsed back into unconsciousness. By noon he was dead.

Patrick Fawkes stood alone and shoveled the mola.s.seslike clay soil over the coffins of his family. His clothes were soaked through by a light rain and his own sweat. It had been his wish to dig the common grave and fill it himself. The burial services were long over and his friends and neighbors had departed, leaving him to his grievous task.

At last he patted smooth the last shovelful, stood back, and looked down. The headstone had not arrived yet, and the mound seemed stark

and forlorn among the older grave sites that had been blanketed by gra.s.s and edged with rows of neatly kept flowers. He fell to his knees and reached into a pocket of his discarded coat. His hand came out with a fistful of bougainvillea petals. These he sprinkled over the damp earth.

Fawkes let the grief flow. He wept until after the sun dipped below the horizon. He wept until his eyes could no longer produce tears.

His mind traveled back twelve years and ran off images like a movie projector. He saw Myrna and the kids in the little cottage near Aberdeen on the North Sea. He saw the looks of surprise and happiness in their faces when he told them they were all packing up and heading to Natal to start a farm. He saw how sickly white skinned Jenny and Pat Junior were beside the other schoolchildren of Umkono, and how quickly they became tanned and robust. He saw Myrna begrudgingly leaving Scotland to alter her life-style totally, and then coming to love Africa even more than he.

"You'll never make a good farmer until you flush the salt water out of your veins," she used to tell him.

Her voice seemed so clear to him that he could not accept the fact that she lay beneath the ground he knelt on, never to see the daylight again. He was alone now and the thought left him lost. When a woman loses a man, he recalled hearing somewhere, she picks up her life as before and perseveres. But when a man loses a woman, he dies by half.

He forced the once-happy scenes from his mind and tried to conjure the shadowy figure of a man. The face had no distinct features, because it was the face of a man Fawkes had never seen: the face of Hiram Lusana.

Fawkes's grief was suddenly engulfed by a tidal surge of cold hatred. He balled his fists and beat them against the wet ground until his emotions finally drained away. Then he gave a great sigh and neatly arranged the bougainvillea petals so that they spelled out Myrna's and the children's names.

Then he rose unsteadily to his feet, and he knew what he had to do.