Vixen 03 by Clive Cussler Page A

exactly what he was before becoming a Natal farmer.
    “Two days!” he exclaimed in a booming Scots accent. “I canna afford to take two days away from the farm. It’s inhuman; aye, that’s what it is, inhuman.” Miraculously, the tea in the cup he waved refused to slop over the brim.
    “If the Minister of Defence personally asked to meet with you, the least you can do is oblige.”
    “But damn, woman, he does not know what he’s asking.” Fawkes shook his head. “We’re in the midst of clearing new acreage. That prize bull I purchased in Durban last month is due to arrive tomorrow. The
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    tractors need maintenance. No, I canna go.”
    “You’d best be getting the four-wheel-drive warmed up.” Myrna Fawkes laid down her needlework and gazed up at her husband. “I’ve already packed your things and made a lunch to keep you in a good humor until you meet the Minister’s train at Pembroke.”
    Fawkes towered over his wife and scowled. It was a wasted gesture. In twenty-five years she had yet to buckle before him. Out of stubbornness he tried a new tack.
    “It would be negligent of me to leave you and the kids alone, what with all them damned heathen terrorists sneaking through the brush and murdering God-fearing Christians right and left.”
    “Aren’t you confusing an insurgency with a holy war?”
    “Why, just the other day,” Fawkes pushed on, “a farmer and his missus was ambushed over at Umoro.”
    “Umoro is eighty miles away,” his wife said matter-of-factly.
    “It could happen here just as well.”
    “You will go to Pembroke and you will visit with the Defence Minister.” The words that came from the woman seemed chiseled in stone. “I have better things to do than sit around on the veranda all morning and palaver with you, Patrick Fawkes. Now get on your way, and stay out of them Pembroke saloons.”
    Myrna Fawkes was not a woman to ignore. Though she was lean and tiny, she possessed the toughness of two good men. Fawkes seldom knew her when she wasn’t dressed in one of his outsized khaki shirts and blue jeans tucked into midcalf boots. She could do almost anything he could do: deliver a calf, ramrod their army of native workers, repair a hundred and one different pieces of mechanical hardware, nurse the sick and injured women and children in the compound, cook like a French chef. Strangely, she had never learned to drive a car or ride a horse and made no bones about not caring to bother. She kept her sinewy body in shape by miles of everyday walking.
    “Don’t fret for us,” she continued. “We have five armed guards. Jenny and Patrick Junior can both shoot the head off a mamba at fifty meters. I can call up the constable by radio in case of trouble. And don’t forget the electrified fence. Even if guerrillas get through that, there’s still old Lucifer to contend with.” She motioned toward a Holland & Holland twelve-gauge shotgun that rested against the door frame.
    Before Fawkes could grunt a last-ditch reply, his son and daughter drove up in a British Bushmaster and parked by the steps of the veranda.
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    “She’s filled with petrol and ready to go, Captain,” Patrick Junior shouted. He was two months past twenty and wore the face and slimness of his mother, but in height he loomed three inches over his father. His sister, a year younger, big boned and large breasted, smiled gaily from a face sprinkled with freckles.
    “I’m all out of bath oil, Papa,” Jenny said. “Will you please remember to pick me up some when you’re in Pembroke?”
    “Bath oil,” Fawkes groaned. “It’s a damned conspiracy. My whole life is one great conspiracy engineered by my own flesh and blood. You think you can get along without me? Then so be it. But in my log you’re all a bloody lot of mutineers.”
    Kissed by a laughing Myrna and herded by his son and daughter, Fawkes reluctantly boarded the four-wheel-drive. As he waited for the guard to open