"We Ballantynes are winners," Bawu had said. "We have got the instinct for the jugular." Roland seemed, impossibly, to grow even taller, and then he served. Craig began to move left, saw it was the wrong side and tried to change. His long legs tangled and he sprawled on the yellow clay. He stood up, retrieved his racquet, and went across to the other court. There was a bloody smear on his knee.

Roland's next service crashed in, and he did not get a touch of his racquet to it.

When his turn came, he hit one into the net, and the next one off the wood. Roland broke his service three times in a row, and it went on like that.

"Match point," Roland said. He was smiling again, gay and handsome and genial as he bounced the ball at his feet, and lined up for his final service. Craig felt that old heavy feeling in his limbs, the despair of the born loser.

He glanced off court. Janine Carpenter was looking directly at him, and in the instant before she smiled encouragingly, Craig saw the pity in those dark indigo eyes, and abruptly he was angry.

He sockM Roland's service, double-handed, into the corner, and had it come back as hard. He crossed with his forehand, and Roland was grinning as he drove it back. Again Craig caught it perfectly, and even Roland was forced to lob. It came down from on high, floating helplessly, and Craig was under it, poised and coldly angry, and he hit it with all his weight and strength and despair. It was his best shot.

After that he had nothing to follow. Roland trapped it on the bounce, before it could rise, and he punched it tantalizingly past Craig's right hip while he was twisted hopelessly off balance by the power of his own stroke.

Roland laughed, and vaulted easily over the net.

"Not bad, Sonny." He put his arm patronizingly around Craig's shoulders. "I'll know not to give you a start in future he said and led Craig off the court.

Those who had been gloatingly anticipating Roland's humiliation a few minutes before now crowded slavishly around him.

"Well played, Roly." "Great stuff." And Craig slipped away from them. He picked a clean white towel off the pile and wiped his neck and face. Trying not to look as miserable as he felt, he went to the deserted bar, and fished a beer out of the bath of crushed ice. He swallowed a mouthful, and it was so tart that it made his eyes swim.

Through the tears he realized suddenly that Janine Carpenter was standing beside him.

"You could have done it," she said softly. "But you just gave up." "Story of my life." He tried to sound gay and witty, like Roland, but it came out flat, and self-pityingly.

She seemed about to speak again, then shook her head and walked away.

Graig used Roland's shower and when he came out with the towel around his waist, Roland was in front the full-length mirror adjusting the angle of his beret. his beret was dark maroon with a brass cap-badge above the left ear. The badge was a brutish human head, with the forehead of a gorilla and the same broad flattened nose. The eyes were crossed grotesquely and the tongue, protruded from between negroid lips, like a Maori carving of a war idol.

"When old Great-grandpa Ralph recruited the Scouts during the rebellion," Roland had once explained to Craig, "one of his better-known exploits was to catch the leader of the rebels, and to hang him from the top of an acacia tree. We have taken that as our regimental emblem. - Bazo's hanged head. How do you like it?"

"Charming," Craig had given his opinion. "You always did have such exquisite taste, Roly." Roland had conceived the Scouts three years previously when the sporadic warfare of the earlier days had begun to intensify into the merciless internecine conflict of the present time.

His original idea had been to gather a force of young white Rhodesians who could speak fluent Sindebele and reinforce them with young Matabele who had been with their white employers since childhood, men whose loyalty was unquestionable. He would train black and white elements into an elite strike-force that could move easily through the tribal trust areas amongst the peasant farmers, speaking their language and understanding their ways, able to impersonate innocent tribesmen or.

ZIPRA terrorists at will, able to meet the enemy at the border or drop onto him from the sky and take him on at the most favourable terms.

He had gone to General Peter Walls at Combined Services Headquarters. Of course, Bawu had made the usual phone calls to clear the way, and Uncle Douglas had put a word in Smithy's ear during a cabinet meeting. They had given Roland -the go-ahead, and so Ballantyne's Scouts had been reborn, seventy years after the original troop was disbanded.

In the three years since then, Ballantyne's Scouts had cut their way into legend. Six hundred men who had been officially credited with two thousand kills, who had been five hundred miles over the border into Zambia to hit a ZIPRA training base, men who had sat at the village fires in the tribal trust lands listening to the chatter of the women who had just returned from carrying baskets of grain to the ZIPRA cadres in the hills, men who laid their ambushes and maintained them for five straight days, burying their own excrement beside them, waiting patiently and as unmoving as a leopard beside the water-hole, waiting for yet another good kill.

Roland turned from the mirror as Craig came into the bedroom. The pips of a full colonel sparkled on his shoulders, and over his heart the cluster of the silver cross was pinned below his dog-tab on the crisply ironed khaki bush-shirt.

"Help yourself to what you need, Sonny he invited, and Craig went to the built-in cupboard and selected a pair of flannels and a white cricket sweater with the colours of Oriel College around the neck. It seemed like coming home to be wearing Roland's cast-offs again, he had always been a year behind him. "Mom tells me you've been fired again."

"That's right." Craig's voice was muffled by the sweater over his head.

"There's a billet for you with the Scouts." "Roly, I don't fancy the idea of putting piano wire around somebody's neck and plucking his head off." "We don't do that every day," Roland grinned. "Personally, I much prefer a knife, you can also use it to slice biltong when you aren't slitting throats. But seriously, Sonny, we could use you.

You talk the lingo like one of them, and you are a real buff at blowing things up. We are short of blast bunnies." "When I left King's Lynn I swore an oath that I would never work for anyone in the family again."

"The Scouts aren't family." "You are the Scouts, Roly." "I could have you seconded, you know that?" "That wouldn't work." "No," Roland agreed. "You always were a stubborn blighter. Well, if you change your mind, let me know." He knocked a cigarette half out of its soft pack and then pulled it the rest of the way with his lips. "What do you think of Bugsy?" The cigarette waggled as he asked the question, and he flicked his gold Ronson to it.

"She's all right," Craig said cautiously.

"Only all right?" Roland protested. "Try magnificent, try sensational, wonderful, super-great wax lyrical, for you're talking about the woman I love." "Number one thousand and ten on the list of the women you have loved, Craig corrected.

"Steady, old son, this one I am going to marry." Craig felt a coldness come over his soul, and he turned away to comb his damp hair in the mirror.

"Did you hear what I said? I'm going to marry-her." "Does she know?" "I'm letting her ripen a little before I tell her." "Ask her, don't you mean ask her?" "Old Roly tells "em, he doesn't ask "em. You are supposed to say, "Congratulations, I hope you will be very happy."" "Congratulations, I hope you will be very happy." "That's my boy. Come on, I'll buy you a drink." They went down the long central corridor that bisected the house but before they reached the veranda, a telephone rang in the lobby and they heard Aunty Val's voice. "I'll fetch him. Hold the line please," and then louder, "Roland, darling, it's Cheetah for you." Cheetah was the call-sign of Scout base. "I'm coming, Mom." Roland strode into the lobby and Craig heard him say, "Ballantyne," and then after a short silence, "are you sure it's him?

By Christ, this is the chance we have been waiting for. How soon can you get a chopper here? On its way? Good! Throw a net around the place, but don't go in until I get there. I want this baby myself."

When he came back into the corridor, he was transformed. It was the same look as he had given Craig across the net, cold and dangerous and without mercy.

"Can you get Bugsy back to town for me, Sonny? We are going into a contact." "I'll look after her." Roland strode out onto the veranda.

The last of the tennis guests were dispersing towards their vehicles, gathering up nannies and children as they went, shouting farewells and last-minute invitations for the coming week. There was a time when a gathering like this would not have broken up until after midnight, but now nobody drove the country roads after 4 p.m the new witching hour.

Janine Carpenter was shaking hands and laughing with a couple from the neighbouring ranch.

"I'd love to come over," she said, and then she looked up and saw Roland's expression. She hurried to him.

"What is it?" "We are going in. Sonny will look after you. I'll call you." He was searching the sky, already remote and detached, and then there was the whack, whack, whacking of helicopter rotors in the air and the machine came bustling in low over the kopje. She was painted in dull battle-brown, and there were two Scouts standing in the open belly port, one white and one black, both in bush camouflage and full webbing.

Roland ran down the lawns to meet her as she sank, and before she touched he jumped to link arms with his Matabele sergeant, and swung up into the cabin of the helicopter. As the machine rose and beat away, nose low over the kopje, Craig caught a last glimpse of Roland. He had already replaced the beret with a soft bush hat, and his sergeant was helping him into his camouflage battle-smock.

"Roly said I was to see you home. I take it you live in Bulawayo?" Craig asked, as the helicopter disappeared and the sound of its rotors dwindled. It seemed to take an effort for her to bring her attention back to him.

"Yes, Bulawayo. Thanks." "We won't make it this evening, not before ambush hour. I was going to stay over at my grandpa's place."

"Bawu?" "You know him?" "No, but I'd love to. Roly has kept me in fits with stories about him. Do you think there'd be a bed for me also?"

"There are twenty-two beds at King's Lynn." She perched on the seat of the old Land-Rover beside him, and the wind made her hair shimmer and flutter.

"Why does he call you Bugsy?" Craig had to raise his voice above the engine noise.

"I'm an entomologist," she shouted back. "You know, bugs and things." "Where do you work?" The cool evening air flattened her blouse against her chest, and she was very obviously not wearing a bra.

She had small finely shaped breasts and the cold made her nipples stand out in little dark lumps under the thin cloth. It was difficult not to gawk.

"At the museum. Did you know that we have the finest collection of tropical and sub-tropical insects in existence, better than the Smithsonian or the Kensington Natural History Museum?" "Bully for you."

"Sorry, I can be a bore." "Never." She smiled her thanks, but changed the subject. "How long have you known Roland?" "Twenty-nine years."

"How old are you?" "Twenty-nine." "Tell me about him." "What's to tell about somebody who is perfect?" "Try to think of something," she encouraged him.

"Head boy at Michaelhouse. Captain of rugger and cricket. Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, Oriel scholar. Blues for rowing and cricket, half-blue for tennis, colonel in the Scouts, silver cross for valour, heir to twenty-million-plus dollars. You know, all the usual things."