Dark Heart (12 page)

‘We drift,' suggested Esan. ‘Drift downstream and only use the motor to keep us safe or to bring us ashore or to try and avoid these rapids you talk of.'

‘It will take too long!' countered Anastasia, her voice tense with frustration. She did not add that Esan's plan relied on them trusting him absolutely. No one else would be able to guide the boat in the way that he suggested. ‘Drifting might take us four days to reach Malebo,' she said instead. ‘Your army will have moved; vanished. Our people will have vanished with them – those that haven't been butchered. We would never be able to find them, let alone get them back again.' She did not add that it was also her burning ambition to see the men who ran the army brought to justice. Or simply executed at the earliest possible moment.

‘There is another problem with time,' interjected Ado suddenly.

‘What?' asked Anastasia.

Ado simply pointed with her chin in the Matadi fashion. Celine was slumped over and shaking. Her blouse was transparent with perspiration. ‘Madame Celine may not have much of it,' she observed.

Anastasia felt Celine's forehead. She was running a very high temperature indeed, and it seemed to have sprung up since the pair of them had climbed up to the banana grove and back. Her heart sank. ‘We'd better not move her too far anyway,' she decided. Then she looked around. ‘But we can't stay down here either. If it rains or if the river rises at all, we'll all be washed away. We have to get her back up into that banana grove. Find some way to keep her warm. Light a fire, maybe.'

Then the afternoon turned for Anastasia into a living enactment of a puzzle she lad loved as a child. One of Kordemsky's famous Moscow Puzzles – where a farmer has to row a piglet, a goat and a wolf across the river in a boat only big enough to take two animals. The goat and the piglet are friends. The goat and the wolf fight if they are left alone. The wolf eats the piglet if they are left alone. This time the conundrum concerned a fit – if exhausted – woman with a knife and a gun, a sick woman who needed to be moved, a girl whose loyalties were beginning to shift and a boy soldier who just might be planning to slaughter the lot of them – especially if he could get his hands on the gun or the knife.

Eventually, Ado and Esan helped Celine back up the bank while Anastasia followed with the AK. Then Ado made her teacher as comfortable as possible on a bed of banana leaves while Anastasia watched Esan pull the boat further ashore and secure it to a solid-looking tree – with the AK cradled across her breast. Then, as darkness gathered, the increasingly active and decisive youngsters moved confidently through the grove and the jungle surrounding it. They made Celine's bed, though Anastasia sacrificed her T-shirt as a pillow while Esan offered his combat jacket as a rudimentary blanket. The torsos thus revealed could hardly have been more different on one level – more similar on another. His was smoothly muscled, deep-chested, marked with the scars that told of his initiation into Poro jungle society. Hers was scrawny but strong, modestly breasted – her bra verged on being an unnecessary vanity. And, like his, her skin was covered in the marks that proclaimed her membership of certain societies. A leopard was tattooed across her belly, seeming to leap out of her jeans, its ear-tips brushing the lower curves of the loose black bra, level with its fore-claws. Its snarl filled the hollow of her solar plexus. And, when she turned, a silverback gorilla stood guard on her back, clutching an AK-47. Each of them looked askance at the other, then came to terms with such primitive ritualism with a shrug.

Esan and Ado erected a low shelter over the sleeping woman by putting up a simple frame of branches and covering it with banana leaves. Then Esan built a fire like an accomplished member of the Russian Federation of Scouts and Navigators, and showed Anastasia how to light it – a process aided by a cupful of petrol from the fuel can in the boat and a shot from the AK, its muzzle buried in the petrol-soaked kindling. Then the children rose and began to walk towards the darkening jungle. ‘Wait!' said Anastasia, raising the AK. ‘Where are you going?'

Esan turned back, just at the edge of the darkness – hardly more than a series of golden planes and glitters in the reflection of the little fire's flames. ‘I am Poro,' he said simply. ‘I know the jungle. I will find her medicine.'

‘In the dark?'

‘It is only dark near the fire. I know what I'm looking for. I will be quick.'

‘Ado?' called Anastasia, feeling the initiative, the power, slipping away from her. Ado turned, a ghostly figure in her pale blouse and skirt.

‘I am Sande. I know as much as he does. I will go with him. We will bring medicines for Madame Celine.'

And, without a further word, or any sound at all, they were gone.

Anastasia sat cradling the AK and watching her friend as she slept her restless, feverish sleep. Long ago, in the days immediately after her adventures with Simian Artillery, there had been an Anastasia who was depressive, negative, always expecting the worst from a life she could not control, which was always headed from bad to worse and regularly kicking her in the teeth. That had been the life she had tried to hide from in numberless bottles – mostly of Stoli and Russian Standard – then cheap Polish potato vodka and worse – then, finally, behind lines of coke and crack.

But that was the old Anastasia. This one, the new Anastasia – post-Robin Mariner, post-detox, post-psychiatric help and support – knew that if life threw problems at her then she could overcome them. It was just that if the problems got bigger they required more energy, more self-reliance, more faith in herself. Certainly not more alcohol or more cocaine or more group sex or gang-bangs. Even so, when she looked down at Celine tossing from side to side in the firelight, she felt she would have given almost anything for a decent belt of original Red Label Stolichnaya.

Quite when the grumbling of the truck's engine first insinuated itself into Anastasia's reverie she didn't know. But when she suddenly sprang alert, it was already quite loud. She jumped to her feet and looked around. The noise could have been coming from anywhere – like the roar of a hunting leopard. But she felt it was coming from upriver, moving down, along the road they had been following on the water. She looked back up the highway into the darkness, therefore, and was rewarded with a distant glimpse of headlights. Wracked with indecision, she hesitated as her mind raced. The only land transport she had even dreamed about during the last twenty-four hours and more belonged to the Army of Christ the Infant. But they were on the far side of the river and there were no bridges standing and no ferries running. Moses Nlong and his men simply could not have got their trucks over to this side of the river. But who else was out there? Who was there who might be trusted?

Who?

Abruptly, Ado and Esan reappeared. Silently they doused the fire, bringing a velvety, impenetrable darkness beneath the canopy of banana leaves. Even so, they pulled the bivouac down to render the sleeping Celine doubly invisible. Then they led the blind Anastasia back into the thickest grove nearby, able to see much more than she could, for their eyes had not been blinded by the fire. ‘All this will be useless if they have their windows open,' whispered Esan as they crouched in the darkness at the farthest point away from the road, which nevertheless allowed them to see what was coming along it. ‘Because they will smell the fire.'

‘Then let's hope they are people we can ask for help,' said Anastasia.

She felt Esan stir uneasily beside her and realized that anyone wanting to help her would probably want to arrest him. But then Anastasia's attention switched. Headlight beams, seeming to shatter and scatter in the night, seeming to light up both sides of the roadway at once. Then she understood. There were two sets of headlights. Two trucks. And as the first came into view at last, the headlights of the one behind it illuminated it quite clearly. Its cab was white-painted with a wire grille over the windscreen. The back was canvas-covered. But just discernible on the front beneath its headlights were the bold black letters ‘U N', and on the canvas side under the lights of the second truck there was stencilled the familiar white on blue logo with the words ‘United Nations Peacekeepers'.

Anastasia was in motion at once, running forward, shouting wildly, before she realized that she was still holding the AK. She pulled the trigger. The gun bellowed and the trucks accelerated. ‘No!' she screamed, pounding forward wildly into the headlights of the second truck. She held up the rifle to show she was not going to fire again. The trucks stopped. She put down the AK on the warm tarmac of the road surface and backed away a little, her hands in the air. It must look so suspicious, she thought. A half-naked woman alone in the jungle with an AK. It could so easily be some kind of trap. Would they risk talking to her – let alone coming out and helping her?

After a few moments more, the door of the second truck opened and a man in combat fatigues and a blue helmet got down. He was wearing blue-coloured body armour with ‘UN Peacekeeper' stencilled on it in white. He was carrying a gun which was pointed at her. ‘Who are you?' he asked in Afrikaans accented English.

Anastasia's story came tumbling out. The truth, but not the whole truth. Not the part about Esan. As she spoke, she heard the door of the first truck open behind her. A burning between her shoulder blades told her that she was also being covered with at least one gun from there as well.

‘And there are two more women out there?' asked the UN soldier at last. ‘Just two women?'

‘A student and another teacher. She is wounded. We need your help . . .'

The UN soldier was sceptical, guarded. But at last he stepped forward far enough to pick up the AK. He stepped back and passed it up to someone in the second truck's cab. ‘Cover me,' he said, still speaking English. He turned to Anastasia. The headlight at last allowed her to recognize what he was carrying. It was an M16A4 that was becoming almost as ubiquitous as the AK. But it was a much more modern and powerful piece of kit. She didn't want to imagine what it would do to her if he pulled the trigger he kept caressing. ‘Show me,' he said.

She followed her nose into the darkness, but after a few steps he told her to stop. ‘Take this,' he ordered gruffly and handed her a narrow-beam torch that gave enough light to guide them without making whoever was holding it too much of a target. He kept back, keeping her covered as carefully as she had kept Esan covered that afternoon.

But the telltale torch beam at last helped her see the pale figure of Ado who was kneeling beside the body of Celine. ‘Just the three of you?' he confirmed again.

‘Just the three of us,' confirmed Anastasia desperately. ‘We need help. We need to tell someone what has happened.'

‘You'd better come with us,' said the soldier.

But as Anastasia and Ado carried Celine to the truck, he kept the three of them covered just in case. And, in spite of the fact that Anastasia insisted that Celine really ought to lie down in the back, he simply squashed the three of them on the bench seat between himself and the massive man driving the truck. Then the driver blinked his lights as a signal to the truck waiting up ahead. And they were off.

M
inister for the Outer Delta Bala Ngama was clearly not a happy man. Richard hated to imagine the conversation between the minister and his defeated corvette captain while the guests were being taken home in one helicopter after another. But, politician to his fingertips, he was equally clearly striving not to display the fact now, the better part of six hours later. Especially before guests from whom he was hoping to charm a considerable fortune. And with whom he was planning to complete a series of extremely lucrative deals.

‘Captain Mariner.' Minister Ngama's broad hand carefully encompassed both Richard and Robin, courteously but casually, because they happened to be at the front of the crowd of dignitaries. ‘Madame and Monsieur Lagrande, Mr Asov, Ma'm'selle Lavrov, Dr Holliday. Everybody . . . Welcome to the Zoo!' He hesitated, beaming around their expectant faces, with a smile that reached from ear to ear but somehow didn't quite climb to his eyes. Then he continued as he had begun, in English, ‘Except, of course, it is not a zoo in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Let us rather call it a game park-in-waiting. A nascent Masai Mara. Not even Zimbabwe's Lower Zambezi or Uganda's Impenetrable Forest game reserves and world heritage sites will rival the Benin la Bas Lower Delta wildlife sanctuary. It is – and will be – like much that you have seen on your visit so far, symbolic of my country and its vision for the future. What you will observe as we proceed is a collection culled regardless of expense from institutions all around the world, of animals, birds, insects, reptiles, amphibians and fishes that were once indigenous to the delta. Or the beginnings of an exhaustive collection at any rate: our pockets are not infinitely deep!'

Ngama turned, leading the group out of the considerable waiting area behind the big gates which said – in spite of his assurances – ‘ZOO'. ‘Here we have gathered together specimens of creatures which were driven to extinction in the hungry decades of the seventies, eighties and nineties but which we plan to reintroduce – in a controlled environment at first, but then more generally.' He continued, striding purposefully forward between the first few cages. ‘And in the meantime, of course, the sanctuary will form the centrepiece of one of the most important industries of the early twenty-first century. One in which Benin la Bas will become a world-leader, like Florida, like Indonesia, like Egypt and the Sinai. Tourism.
Eco-friendly
tourism.'

Typically of life in a hot tropical climate, Richard, Robin and the rest had taken something of a siesta after their return from the disastrous war-game. The ebullient Max had choppered them to the hotel's helipad, leaving the disgruntled, deflated – defeated – Captain Caleb Maina to oversee the towage of his crippled command to the naval dock for repairs, after a debriefing with the minister. Typically of his boundless energy, however, Richard had used the quiet lunchtime for a lengthy meeting with his team rather than for a rest, but that had been in the air-conditioned comfort of the Nelson Mandela Suite with a light buffet supplied by room service. Now, in the cool of the evening, more general business was resumed.