Elephant Song

Daniel switched on his headlights, put his hand flat on the horn and drove hard at him, the hooter blaring.  The guard dived nimbly aside, and the Landrover slammed into the unlocked leaf of the gate and whipped it aside.  He roared through.

Behind him he heard the rattling clamour of automatic riflefire.  He felt half a dozen bullets slam into the aluminium bodywork of the Landrover, but he crouched low over the wheel and kept his foot hard down on the accelerator.

The first bend in the roadway rushed towards him in the headlights.

Another burst of automatic fire splattered against the rear of the vehicle.  The rear window exploded in a storm of glass splinters and something struck him high in the back within an inch of his spine.  He had been hit by a bullet before, in that long-ago war, and he recognized the sensation.  From the position of the wound, high and close to the spine, it had to be a lung shot, a mortal wound.  He expected to feel the choking flood of arterial blood into his lungs.

Keep going as long as you can, he thought, and swung the Landrover into the bend at full throttle.  She went up on two wheels but didn't roll.

When he glanced in the rear-view mirror the camp lights were obscured by forest trails, a dwindling glow in the darkness behind.

He could feel hot blood, ru

He knew exactly where the first road-block was situated.

Approximately five miles ahead, he reminded himself.  On the first river crossing.  He tried to remember how the road ran to reach it.  He had driven over it half a dozen times during the last three days filming.

He could remember almost every twist, every track that led off it.

He made his decision.  He leaned back against the seat.  The wound stabbed him like a knife in the back, but he wasn't losing much blood.

Internal bleeding, he thought.  You aren't going to walk away from this one, Da

There were five logging roads branching off from the main highway before it reached the first road-block.  Some of them were disused and overgrown, but at least two were still being subjected to heavy daily traffic.  He chose the first of these, two miles from Sengi-Sengi and turned on to it, heading westwards.

The Zaire border was ninety miles in that direction, but the logging track only ran five miles through the forest before it intersected the MOMU excavation.

He would have to dump the Landrover and try to make the remaining eighty miles on foot through uncharted forest.  The last part of the journey would be over high mountains, glaciers and alpine snowfields.

Then he thought about the bullet wound in his back and knew he was dreaming.  He wasn't going to get that far.

The logging track he was on had been deeply rutted and chopped up by the gigantic treaded tyres of the trucks and heavy trailers.  It was a morass of mud the consistency and colour of faeces, and the Landrover churned through it in fourwheel drive, pounding through the knee-deep ruts.

Flying mud stuck to the glass of the headlights and dimmed the beams to a murky glow that barely lit the roadway twenty paces ahead.

The wound in his back was begi

Suddenly he-was aware of lights far ahead of him on the track.  One of the logging trucks was coming towards him, and instantly he realised the possibility it offered.  He slowed the Landrover and searched the verge of unbroken jungle that pressed in upon the track.  He sensed rather than saw a break in the foliage and swung the Landrover boldly into-it.

For fifty paces or so he forced his way through almost impenetrable undergrowth.  It scraped along both sides of the bodywork, and small trees and branches thumped along beneath the chassis.  The soft forest floor sucked at the wheels and the Landrover's speed bled off until at last she was high-centred and stranded.

Daniel cut the engine and switched off the headlights.  He sat in the darkness and listened to the logging truck rumble past, headed eastwards towards Sengi-Sengi along the road he had come.  When the sound of the huge diesel engine had dwindled into silence, he leaned forward in the seat and steeled himself to examine the bullet wound in his back.

Reluctantly he twisted one arm up behind him and groped towards the centre of pain.

Suddenly he exclaimed and jerked his hand away.  He switched on the interior lights and examined the razor scratch on his forefinger.  Then quickly he reached behind himself again, and cautiously fingered the wound.  He laughed aloud with relief.  A shard of flying glass from the rear window had sliced open his back, and lodged against his ribs.  It was a long superficial wound with the sharp glass still buried in it.

He worked it loose and examined it in the overhead light.  It was bloody and jagged, and the bleeding had started again.  But you aren't going to die from it, he reassured himself, and tossed the splinter out of the side window and reached for the first-aid kit which was under the VTR equipment in the back of the vehicle.

It was difficult to treat the wound in his own back, but he managed to smear it liberally with Betadine ointment and strap an untidy dressing over it and knot the ends of the bandage in front of his chest.  All the time he was listening for other vehicles on the logging road, but he heard only the small jungle sounds of bird and insect and beast.

He found the Maglite in his kit and went back on foot to the road.

From the verge he examined the muddy rutted tracks.  As he had hoped, the logging truck had completely obliterated the Landrover's tracks with its own massive multiple wheels.  Only the spot where he had driven over the verge still carried the Landrover's prints.  He picked up a dead branch and swept them away carefully.  Then he turned his attention to the foliage that the Landrover had damaged as it crashed into the forest.

He rearranged it as naturally as possible and smeared mud on the raw broken ends of branches and twigs so they would not catch the eye.

After half an hour's work he was certain that nobody would suspect that a vehicle had left the road here and was hidden only fifty feet away in the dense undergrowth.

Almost immediately his work was put to the test.  He saw headlights approaching from the direction of Sengi-Sengi.  He drew back a little way into the forest and dropped flat.  He smeared his face with a handful of mud and then covered the backs of his hands.  His wind-cheater was dark forest green in colour; it would not show up in the lights.

He watched the vehicle approaching along the logging track.

It was moving slowly an as it drew level with his hiding-place he saw that it was an army transport painted in brown and green camouflage.

The rear was crowded with Hita.  soldiers and he thought he glimpsed Chetti Singh's white turban in the driver's cab, but he couldn't be certain.  One of the soldiers in the rear was flashing a spotlight along the verges of the road.

They were obviously searching for him.

Daniel dropped his face into the crook of his arm as the beam of the spotlight played over where he lay.  The truck passed on without slowing and was soon out of sight.

Daniel stood up and hurried back to the stranded Landrover.