Hyena Dawn Read Online Free PDF Page A

where the rest of your men are, honey.’ ‘They want to know? I suppose they have a bloody right to know, but not right now.’
    The tight, closed expression on his face made her do something she normally never did - she began to cry. He tried to lift his arm to comfort her but the straps held it down.
    ‘ How did you hurt your neck, Sam?’
    She told him, told him how he’d tried to kill her. Then it was his turn to go silent.
    ‘ I’ve seen it before,’ she said at last. ‘It comes with the combination of the drugs, the shock and the strain.’ She paused. ‘Rayne, I still don’t completely understand what happened to you out there.’
    He was quiet. What more could he tell her? Sam lit him a cigarette, placed it in his mouth and watched him take a long, deep drag. Beneath his pyjamas, the muscled outline of his body was evident. Even though he was strapped down and still sedated, he sat erect in the wheelchair, and his sapphire-blue eyes were very bright below the blond fringe that needed cutting. He could have been a movie star.
    ‘ War is savage,’ he said. ‘There are no rules.’
    ‘ You’re an undercover killer.’ Sam never minced words. It wasn’t her way to avoid an issue.
    ‘ By becoming the enemy you destroy their soul, sap their morale. The hunter and the hunted become blurred.’
    ‘ And if you fluff your lines you get your brains blown out.’
    Rayne stared out of the door and through into another room. A soldier lay on a bed, bandages over both his eyes. He’d lost them in an ambush. His girlfriend was with him. Rayne wondered how long it would be before the real resentment would set in.
    Then he told Samantha how he’d killed his own men. This time she understood the closed expression.
    Rayne stared up at the old-fashioned fan on the ceiling as it rotated above his head in hypnotic circles. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I became the enemy.’
     
    Outside the Livingstone Hospital the air was warm and sweet with the smell of summer flowers. Everywhere in Salisbury, trees and shrubs were in full bloom; scarlet trees lined the streets, their vivid red leaves sprouting from long black trunks into the blue sky; in every garden, hazy mauve jacarandas and the beautiful bauhinias in pink and white, white and purple, created a stunning display of natural colour. The air was full of birdsong and the hum of bees. Not for nothing was Salisbury known as the city of flowering trees.
    The atmosphere was calm and relaxing in the way it can be only in Africa. Peace and war, she took them both in her stride. And war, now, was gathering apace all round Rhodesia. With ZANLA to the east and ZIPRA to the west she was virtually at war on every front. In the east particularly, with the withdrawal of all Portuguese forces from Mozambique in 1974, hostilities had taken on a new ferocity. And though Ian Smith had had to agree to the formation of a transitional government that would gradually transfer power to the black majority, both Joshua Nkomo, leader of ZIPRA, and Robert Mugabe, leader of ZANU, had vowed to destroy such a government.
    The gruesome terror tactics of the black freedom fighters were accelerating. In June 1978 a massacre at the Elim Mission horrified the Rhodesian public in its barbaric intensity. The butchery of eight white missionaries and their children, and the rape of the women, achieved its goal of shocking a war-weary nation.
    In September 1978, ZIPRA shot down an Air Rhodesia passenger plane, the Viscount Hunyani, just after it had taken off on a scheduled flight from Kariba to Salisbury. The plane was hit by a Soviet Sam-7 ground-to-air missile fired from the Matusadona mountain range on the Zambesi Escarpment. Thirty of the fifty-eight passengers died as the plane crashed to the ground. Another ten, women, men and children, were rounded up by ZIPRA ground forces and bayonetted to death. The rest of the world officially condemned the raid, but most people seemed to feel that the Rhodesians had