Shooting Butterflies Read Online Free Page B

his skin and his jungle hat. But it was Buffel’s hands that attracted Shilo’s attention the most. The last two fingers were missing on his left hand and thick scar tissue covered the place where they should have been.
    Shilo wondered what had happened to make this man into one who could live with himself and operate within the PSYOPS unit. The rumours of these men always involved mutilated bodies and unnecessary killings.
    Sergeant Riley tapped Shilo on the shoulder to get his attention and made a thumbs-up sign. Shilo returned the gesture, and Sergeant Riley moved up to the next trooper, Kwazi, and repeated the same procedure. The men moved quietly through the thick bush, each trained by the top SAS officers that the army had, and each man, both black and white, fighting for a cause he believed in.
    Silently, like leopards stalking at night, they carefully made their way through the darkness towards the target. Shilo held his AK-47 loosely to his right. The Russian-supplied weapons were not standard Rhodesian issue – they had been reconditioned in the armoury after they were captured from gooks. The standard-issue FN was more accurate and had better hitting power, and he wished he had one in his hands instead.
    He stepped onto a large fallen tree branch and took a wide stride off the other side to avoid a bite by a puff adder should it be lying in wait. His eyes skimmed the bush around them. Although it was dark, he could make out the areas of trees and shadows.
    The target, a whitewashed school building, quickly came into view. Behind a broken fence the camp looked deserted. Except that there were sentries posted on the corners of the wire fence, and the camp itself made noise that didn’t belong in the night. A man coughed, and someone smoked a cigarette next to the building, the red tip glowing.
    Schools were supposed to be deserted at night.
    Shilo could see the equipment they had in the yard. A tall swing claimed prize place in the centre of the playground. Rope hung from the crossbeam at the top, knotted in strategic places so that children could climb, testing their strength or plummeting downwards if they didn’t measure up, but not too far.
    There was something about this camp that looked different from the other ones they had seen before, those run by Chinese and Cuban trainers. Always, in those camps, they had found the soldiers inside were barely men. Boys taken from their homes and forced into combat. The camps always reflected that they trained killers though. Human-shaped targets, and modified playgroundequipment. This school looked like any other school in a rural society. Its soccer field with goalposts. Tyres hung like curled-up black shongololos on ropes under the trees, which had obviously been planted to provide shade around the playground. These were children’s toys, not military training equipment.
    Questions flew around Shilo’s brain.
    Why was a school protected by a guard?
    If this was in fact still a school, then why were they attacking it?
    An uneasy feeling washed over him. He crossed his chest in the sign of the Holy Cross as he’d been taught by his mother, who had learnt it from the nuns at the mission station so many years before. Shilo Mission, after which his mother had named him.
    Before those same missionaries, who had helped deliver him, had become victims of war.
    Before the mission and church had been burnt to the ground by the terrorists.
    Before he volunteered to become a soldier in the Rhodesian War of Independence, to fight the communists who were trying to take over his country.
    He was a solider, it was not his place to question his superiors.
    Carefully he made his way after Kwazi who walked just in front of him.
    The signal to leopard crawl was passed from Sergeant Riley through the men. Shilo signalled to the next trooper and immediately dropped to his belly. He dug his elbows into the ground and kept his AK-47 ready while maintaining the