The Leopard Hunts in Darkness by Wilbur Smith Read Free Book Online

yours?’
    ‘I don’t come that cheap,’ Craig shook his head, ‘but I’d hate like hell to have a Soviet stooge running the land where my leg is buried. I’ll take the
job.’
    ‘Thought you might.’ Henry offered his hand. It was cool and startlingly powerful. ‘I’ll send a courier down to your yacht with a file and a survival kit. Read the file
while the courier waits and send it back. Keep the kit.’
    Henry Pickering’s survival kit contained an assortment of press cards, a membership of the TWA Ambassadors Club, an unlimited World Bank Visa credit card, and an ornate metal and enamel
star in a leather case embossed ‘Field Assessor – World Bank’.
    Craig weighed it in his palm. ‘You could beat a man-eating lion to death with it,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t know what else it will be good for.’
    The file was a great deal more rewarding. When he finished reading it, he realized that the alteration of name from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe was probably one of the least drastic changes that had
swept over the land of his birth since he had left it just a few short years before.
    C raig nursed the hired Volkswagen over the undulating golden grass-clad hills, using an educated foot on the throttle. The Matabele girl at the
Avis desk at the Bulawayo airport had cautioned him.
    ‘The tank is full, sir, but I don’t know when you will get another tankful. There is very little gasoline in Matabeleland.’
    In the town itself he had seen the vehicles parked in long queues at the filling-stations, and the proprietor of the motel had briefed Craig as he signed the register and picked up the keys to
one of the bungalows.
    ‘The Maputo rebels keep hitting the pipeline from the east coast. The hell of it is that just across the border the South Africans have got it all and they are happy to deal, but our
bright laddies don’t want politically tainted gas, so the whole country grinds to a halt. A plague on political dreams – to exist we have to deal with them and it’s about time
they accepted that.’
    So now Craig drove with care, and the gentle pace suited him. It gave him time to examine the familiar countryside, and to assess the changes that a few short years had wrought.
    He turned off the main macadamized road fifteen miles out of town, and took the yellow dirt road to the north. Within a mile he reached the boundary, and saw immediately that the gate hung at a
drunken angle and was wide open – the first time he had ever seen it that way. He parked and tried to close it behind him, but the frame was buckled and the hinges had rusted. He abandoned
the effort and left the road to examine the sign that lay in the grass.
    The sign had been pulled down, the retaining bolts ripped clear out. It lay face up, and though sun-faded, it was still legible:
    King’s Lynn Afrikander Stud
Home of ‘Ballantyne’s Illustrious IV’
Grand Champion of Champions.
Proprietor: Jonathan Ballantyne.
    Craig had a vivid mental image of the huge red beast with its humped back and swinging dewlap waddling under its own weight of beef around the show-ring with the blue rosette of the champion on
its cheek, and Jonathan ‘Bawu’ Ballantyne, Craig’s maternal grandfather, leading it proudly by the brass ring through its shiny wet nostrils.
    Craig walked back to the VW and drove on through grassland that had once been thick and gold and sweet, but through which the bare dusty earth now showed like the balding scalp of a middle-aged
man. He was distressed by the condition of the grazing. Never, not even in the four-year drought of the fifties, had King’s Lynn grass been allowed to deteriorate like this, and Craig could
find no reason for it until he stopped again beside a clump of camel-thorn trees that threw their shade over the road.
    When he switched off the engine, he heard the bleating amongst the camel-thorns and now he was truly shocked.
    ‘Goats!’ he spoke aloud. ‘They are running goats on King’s Lynn.’