Assegai

Then, miraculously he was before her, so close that if she reached out her hand she could have touched his beautiful sun-browned face. He was gazing directly into her eyes. It was only for the most fleeting moment, but she saw that he had recognized her, and then he was gone, as suddenly as he had come.

Leon was still asleep, buried in his blankets. He heard distant voices through the last shreds of sleep, the calling of the chungaji in the stillness of the dawn. Something in their tone had alerted him. He forced himself awake as Loikot shook him with a hand on each of his shoulders. ‘M’bogo!’ His voice rang with excitement. ‘The silver fish is coming! The chungaji have seen it. It will be here before the sun is clear of the horizon.’

Leon leaped to his feet and was, in the instant, fully awake. ‘Start up!’ he shouted at Manyoro. ‘Number-one port side.’ He scrambled up on to the Butterfly’s lower wing, then swung himself over the cockpit coaming.

‘Suck in!’ he shouted, and primed the carburettor. The machine seemed as eager for the hunt as he was. The engines caught and fired on the first swing of the propeller. While he waited for them to run up to full operating temperature he peered up at the sky. From the clouds he saw that a stiff breeze was coming in from the ocean, blowing straight down the short, narrow runway. It was the perfect wind for take-off. It seemed as though the gods of the chase were already smiling on him.

Loikot and Ishmael climbed into the cockpit, and when Manyoro scrambled up behind them, it seemed as though there was not enough space for all of them. He eased open the throttles and the Butterfly rolled forward. The Masai porters on the wing-tips swung her around to line up on the runway and then, as he opened the throttles wide, they shoved with all their strength on the trailing edges of the wings. The Butterfly accelerated away swiftly, but not swiftly enough, for she was still under her flying speed as they came to the end of the runway and the cliff face dropped away. Leon’s instinct for survival warned him to stand hard on the wheel brakes and save them from the plunge, but he went against it and kept all the throttles pressed hard up against the stops. The engines were howling in full power, and at that moment he felt a stronger blast of air hit his face. It was a freak, a stray unlooked-for gust. He felt it get under the Butterfly’s wings and give her a gentle lift. For a moment he thought even that was not enough. He felt one wing drop as she staggered on the edge of stalling and forced her nose down mercilessly. He felt her bite into the wind and suddenly they were flying. He kept her nose down as his airspeed rocketed to a hundred knots, then eased back on the control wheel. She climbed away gamely, but he was panting with fear. For a moment they had been on the verge of death.

He put the fear behind him and looked ahead. They all saw it at the same time: the enormous silver fish gleaming in the early sunlight. He thought he had been prepared for his first sight of her, but he discovered he was not. The sheer size of the Assegai astonished Leon. It was several hundred feet below the Butterfly and had almost passed their position. A few minutes more and they would have lost her for ever. But the Butterfly was in a perfect position for him to close with her. He was above and behind her, sitting perfectly in her blind spot. He pushed the nose down and went for her. As he closed with her swiftly she seemed to balloon in size until she filled his entire field of vision. He saw that one of the forward motors was already out of commission, the propeller standing upright as rigidly as a sentry on guard duty. The two rear engines were mounted in their gondolas just below and abaft the passenger and cargo cabin. He was so intrigued that he almost forgot to give his crew the order to deploy the entangling net.

He knew that this was one of the most critical moments of the plan. It would have been so easy to entangle his own tail skid or landing gear as the net spread out behind him. But the easterly monsoon wind pushed its heavy folds gently to one side so that they streamed out perfectly four hundred feet behind the Butterfly. He let her slide down the side of the airship’s gas chamber, overtaking slowly until he was flying level with the observation cabin and command bridge.

It came as a shock to see live human beings behind the glass windows. Somehow the airship had seemed to have a monstrous life of its own, entirely divorced from anything human. Yet there was Graf Otto von Meerbach only fifty feet away, glaring at him with an expression of outrage, his mouth working silently as he shouted obscenities that were lost in the thunder of the engines. Then he spun around and ran to man the machine-gun mounted in the angle of the bridge.