Mahoney turned and ran back to the kraal, while his men kept him covered. ‘Where is the headman?’ he shouted.
The African woman looked up, astonished. An infant with flies round his nostrils stared, then burst into tears. People came creeping out of the huts, wide-eyed, young and old, in white man’s tatters. ‘Are you the headman, old gentleman?’ Mahoney demanded.
The man was grey-haired. ‘Yes, Nkosi.’
‘Some terrorists have been to your kraal today. How many?’
The old man was trembling. ‘I have seen nobody, Nkosi.’ Everybody was staring, frightened.
Mahoney took him by the elbow and led him aside.
‘Their spoor leads into your kraal. Where were they going?’
The old man was shaking. ‘They did not say, Nkosi.’
‘What did they want from you?’
The old man trembled. ‘They ordered my wives to cook food.’
‘How many men?’
‘I think there were ten.’
Mahoney took a big, sweating breath. ‘If anymore come, you have not seen me. When I leave now, you will obliterate my spoor in your kraal. Understand?’
Mahoney turned and left. The soldiers started following the spoor again, hard.
When darkness fell they were less than two hours behind the terrorists. With the first light they started again.
After an hour the spoor split into two groups.
‘They’re looking for more kraals. For more food.’
Mahoney divided his men. After an hour the spoor he was following turned. It headed back towards the old man’s kraal.
When the terrorists got back to the kraal they ordered the women to cook more food and they sat down to wait.
‘Have you seen any soldiers?’
‘No,’ the old man mumbled.
Everybody had their eyes averted. Then a child spoke up boastfully: ‘Yesterday a white soldier came.’
First they beat up everybody, with fists and boots and rifle butts, and the air was filled with the screaming and the wailing. Then they threw the old man on his back. They lashed his hands and feet to stakes. They staked his senior wife beside him. Then the commander thrust an axe at the eldest son: ‘This is how we treat traitors to the Party! Chop your father’s legs off!’
And the women began to wail and the youth cowered and wept and so they threw him to the ground and kicked him, and then the commander picked up a big stone and he held it over his mother’s face: ‘This is how we treat people who do not obey!’
He dropped the stone on to the old woman’s face. And her nose broke and she cried out, spluttering blood, half-fainted; he picked up the stone and held it over her again, and dropped it again. Her forehead gashed open and she fainted, gurgling blood. The commander shouted: ‘Now chop your father’s legs off!’
And the boy wept and cowered, so they beat him again. And the commander held up the stone again: the old woman had revived, her face a mass of blood and contusion, breathing in gurgling gasps, and when she saw the stone poised again she cried out, cringing; and the man dropped the stone again. There was a big splat of blood and she fainted. The commander shouted: ‘Tie wire around his testicles!’
They pulled the boy’s trousers off and tied a long wire tight around his scrotum so he screamed, then they yanked him to his feet in front of his father and thrust the axe in his hand.
‘Chop well! For each chop we will pull your balls and drop the stone on your mother’s face! Now chop!’ And the wire was wrenched.
The boy screamed, and the wire was wrenched again, and he lurched the axe above his head, his tears streaming, and the old man wrenched at his bonds, and the commander slammed his boot down on his throat. ‘Chop!’ he roared and the wire was wrenched and the boy screamed again, and they wrenched the wire again and his face screwed up in agony, and he swung the axe down with all his horrified might. There was a crack of shin-bone and the leg burst open, sinews splayed, and the old man screamed and bucked and the commander bellowed.
‘One!’
And he dropped the stone on the woman’s face and the wire was wrenched so the boy screamed through his hysterical sobbing, and he swung the axe on high again and swiped it down on the other shin, and there was another crack of bone, and another gaping wound in the glaring sunshine, white shattered bone and sinews and blood, and the commander shouted.
‘Two!’
And he dropped the stone again and the wire wrenched and the boy screamed, reeling, and he swung the axe again at his father’s legs.
‘Three!’
And another crash of the stone, and another wrench of the wire. ‘Four!’ And again. ‘Five!’ And now the boy was hysterically swinging the axe, out of his mind with the horror and the agony, and there was nothing in the world but the screaming and the blood and stink of sweat under the African sun. Altogether it took the boy nine swipes to chop his father’s legs right off, but his mother was dead before then, suffocated in her own blood.
The troopers heard the screams a quarter of a mile away. They came running, spread out. Mahoney saw the old man writhing, the youth reeling over him with an axe, the terrorists, and he thought the youth was one of them – and he fired; then his men opened up, and there was pandemonium. The cracking of guns and the stench of cordite and the screaming and the scrambling and the running.
A minute later it was almost over. The women had fled into a hut. Three terrorists lay dead, three others had dived into a hut, but they had been flushed out by the threat of a hand-grenade. Mahoney knelt beside the groaning old man in the bloody mud, aghast, holding two tourniquets while the sergeant gave the man a morphine injection. He could not bear to look at the two stumps, the splintered bones sticking out, the severed feet. After a minute the man fell mercifully silent. Beside him lay his wife, her head twice its normal size, her lacerated eyes and nostrils swollen tight shut, her split lips swollen shut in death.
Then Mahoney got the story from the weeping women. He stared at the youth he had shot, and he felt ringing in his ears and the vomit rise in his gut. He walked to the back of the hut, and he retched, and retched.
When he came back the sergeant had lined up the terrorists. They were trembling, glistening with sweat. Mahoney could feel his men’s seething fury for revenge.
‘Shoot them, sir?’
Mahoney stopped in front of the three.
‘Or let the women shoot them, sir?’
‘Chop their legs off too, sir?’ a trooper shouted theatrically.
Mahoney looked at the three. One had his eyes closed in trembling prayer.
‘You
