Hyena Dawn Read Free

had thought about what happened when Pseudo Groups confronted each other - when the disguise was so good that you each thought the other was the enemy, and then you shot at each other to kill and you killed your own men. That was when the logic of the thing fell away.
    Rayne wished they’d thought of a password, or some other subtle means of communication. But as in all wars, at the moment of crisis it was every man for himself. You only thought about what you should have done after things had gone horribly wrong.
    At least they would never know who had really killed them.
    They were better off than he was. He had to live with the fact that he’d killed four of his friends, his own men.
    He had shot Ron in the mouth. Ron with the pretty, smiling wife and the two children. He had sawn through Mac’s guts with an avalanche of bullets. Mac was the one who always made them laugh when things were bad. Mike had just got engaged. He’d blown away Mike’s shoulder and then shot him in the throat. And he’d blown out Alan’s guts with a grenade. Alan, with two brothers already dead in the bush war and his father a bitter old man.
    How could he go back into Rhodesia? Tell Ron’s wife that he’d killed her husband, and his three-year-old son that his dad wasn’t coming home to the farm? They’d bloody understand. He knew they’d accept it and that would be the hardest part of all, living with their understanding. In the last forty-eight hours he’d leapt an abyss and landed a different man on the other side.
    For some bizarre reason he remembered a piece of poetry he’d learnt at boarding school in Natal. He recited it aloud, hoping to regain some sanity.
     
    He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
    Close to the sun in lonely lands,
    Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
    The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
    He watches from his mountain walls,
    And like a thunderbolt he falls.
     
    After that he fell silent, listening to the sounds that came from the darkness of Africa. Eventually he fell asleep, a solitary body on a piece of stone in the hell-hole that was Mozambique.
    He woke up sweating, the sun burning down on him. The rifle lay under his right hand, so hot it almost scorched his skin. He climbed down from the rock and back into the clearing below. His leg was murderously painful.
    Rayne moved swiftly, taking one of their packs and most of their ammunition. Then he disappeared into the bush, moving in a zig-zag pattern and covering his tracks constantly. He was close to collapse; the wound in his thigh was still oozing blood, and it made him sick to look at it. But the fear that, in this weakened state, he might run into a genuine ZANLA group, pushed him on. He had to get out of Mozambique, and fast.
     
    Five days later Rayne swam painfully across the Gairezi River, north of Ruda in the Honda Valley. He had covered some eighty- five kilometres, mostly at night, avoiding any contact with local people.
    He had been in constant danger. There were ZANLA forces scattered over the entire area and also frequent patrols by Mozambique’s own armed force FRELIMO. Either of these groups would shoot him on sight or worse, capture him and subject him to the horrors of interrogation. Several times, in fact, he had almost walked into a party of soldiers but years of experience had taught him how to melt into the bush at the first sight of the enemy.
    The days had passed in a blur. The evenings and nights he had spent staggering wearily onward, the mornings and afternoons had been spent ‘resting’ - lying wide awake, listening for the sounds of enemy patrols. These were the worst times, for over and over again his mind replayed the ambush.
    For Rayne, killing had always been something he’d done to the enemy. Its justification was that the enemy would otherwise kill him; he never thought about the men he killed. But now he had killed his friends, murdered them in cold blood. The guilt of it would never leave him. He felt sick