Black Pearl Read online

  Table of Contents

  Recent Titles in the Mariners Series from Peter Tonkin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Black Lake

  Richard

  Chopper

  Edge

  Talk

  The Kivu Gambit

  Patience

  History

  Ivan

  Plan

  Du Lac

  Nightmare

  Spetsnaz

  Tension

  Confrontation

  Mako

  Amazon

  Mission

  Decline

  Therapy

  Akunin

  Commando

  Immanuel

  Confrontations

  Cats

  Terrorist

  Mosquito

  Pushkin

  Charge

  Forest

  Fall

  Lookout

  Macho

  Lake

  Black

  Dam

  Ironyen

  Black Pearls

  Recent Titles in the Mariners Series from Peter Tonkin

  THE FIRE SHIP

  THE COFFIN SHIP

  POWERDOWN

  THUNDER BAY *

  TITAN 10 *

  WOLF ROCK *

  RESOLUTION BURNING *

  CAPE FAREWELL *

  THE SHIP BREAKERS *

  HIGH WIND IN JAVA *

  BENIN LIGHT *

  RIVER OF GHOSTS *

  VOLCANO ROADS *

  THE PRISON SHIP *

  RED RIVER *

  ICE STATION *

  DARK HEART *

  DEAD SEA *

  BLACK PEARL *

  * available from Severn House

  BLACK PEARL

  A Richard Mariner novel

  Peter Tonkin

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2013 by Peter Tonkin

  The right of Peter Tonkin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Tonkin, Peter

  Black pearl. – (A Richard Mariner adventure ; 27)

  1. Mariner, Richard (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Africa–Fiction. 3. Adventure stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9’2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8284-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-438-6 (epub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For

  Cham, Guy and Mark

  As always

  And, with thanks, for

  Graham Stanley,

  Olga Tarasenko

  and

  Michaela van Halewyn

  Black Lake

  1973

  Mizuki Yukawa stumbled through the rainforest in the heart of the West African country of Benin La Bas, which stretched from the west coast towards the interior of Central Africa, whimpering with terror. Her ribs seemed too frail to contain the beating of her heart. Her skull seemed too small to contain the pictures of the brutal attack that had destroyed her jungle home and led to the slaughter of everyone she worked with. She was certain that only flight could save her from the horrific fate her friends had suffered. She was running for her life. She had twenty minutes left to live.

  As Mizuki battled through the dank grey-green ferns that stood as high as she did and filled the ground between the enormous tree trunks that dwarfed and terrified her further, she relived the horror she had just experienced in a series of disorientating flashbacks. Pictures of a dozen Japanese biologists all formed up dutifully beside her in a cheerfully expectant line along the reed-fringed edge of Lac Dudo – Black Lake in the local Matadi language of the place. Dressed in tracksuits and trainers like Mizuki herself, ready for their morning tai-chi, the fitness programme undertaken by all employees of the Yakimoto Freshwater Pearl Company back home in Takashima City.

  Pictures of the square, solid, grey-haired Dr Koizumi standing framed against the timberline, beside the greenhouse that contained his collection of orchids, ready to lead them in farming the black pearls in the lake. The dreary vegetation rising in a wild wall close behind him, the upper canopy brushing the sky and hiding the enormous volcanic crater of Mount Karisoke, on whose vast flank they stood.

  She pictured the way the nearest bank of ferns had parted silently to reveal an astonishing number of soldiers, who seemed at first surprised to find the facility here. Strange young men armed with rifles and fearsome, iron-bladed matchets almost long enough to be swords. Their faces as black, hard and cold as Dr Koizumi’s priceless black pearls. The soldiers had raised their guns and almost casually taken their aim.

  Mizuki carried on running as she visualized the lakeside reeds that had formed a flimsy wall between her and the slaughter in the facility, behind which she had thrown herself at the first sight of the fearsomely armed men, and through which she had glimpsed even more shattered, kaleidoscopic flashes of horror.

  Dr Koizumi standing with his back against the front of the orchidarium, hands raised placatingly. The others, so conveniently lined up for the tai-chi, going down as though before a firing squad, beneath a withering hail of bullets from the automatic weapons. The sound of their shots like slaps against her delicate ears.

  Then Dr Koizumi collapsing like a burst balloon in front of the shattered greenhouse, his clothes a shocking red. Bullet holes in his T-shirt, black-rimmed and smoking. The bodies hacked disgustingly to pieces under the rain of matchet blows.

  Dr Koizumi’s head rolling free of his bright red torso and bouncing down the slope towards her, still spraying blood, his eyes wide with shock and horror. The soldier who had chopped it off looking up, his face a mask of tribal scars, his wide eyes seeming to see right through the reed wall. His powerful arm raising his dripping matchet and his blood-flecked boots stepping down the bank towards her as she turned to run.

  Now the tiny passage leading from the lakeside reed bed to an outcrop of the jungle proper seemed to jump and rock crazily in front of her as she fled along it, certain that the scarred man was close behind her. It was a passage she had never followed alone before for fear of what might lurk there.

  The ferns were rising in sombre waves in front of her, spitting icy drizzle into her face, whipping and tripping her as she plunged among them. Echoes of the gunshots were taken up by the jungle creatures all around her, stirring noisily with the dawn. Birds and monkeys were calling in the upper canopy, while sloths and lemurs were further down, adding their hoots and howls. Fruit bats and flying squirrels flitted from creeper to liana above her, shrieking and s
hrilling. All invisible – there only as part of an unnerving cacophony or a flicker in the outermost edge of Mizuki’s vision, until she burst out of the trackless jungle on to a narrow path which she did not recognize as an elephant trail. She paused, gasping hoarsely, looking right and left, trying to calm herself sufficiently to think, to reason. On her left the path seemed to rise – leading up towards Karisoke’s distant fiery peak. On her right it fell – leading, she prayed, down round the end of Lac Dudo and on towards Cite La Bas, the local government centre where there were authorities. Regular army. Police. Safety.

  Mizuki turned, therefore, and ran downhill towards her hope of safety. She had covered perhaps a hundred yards before the gorilla charged her. It came out of the jungle wall to her right without giving any warning at all. Like her, it had seen much of its troop slaughtered by the soldiers and was in no mood to give ritual warnings. It towered two full metres high and weighed two hundred and fifty kilos. Its arms extended two and a half metres fingertip to fingertip, ending in hands nearly thirty centimetres wide – and they reached for the screaming woman as it charged. The Japanese doctor stood a little over one point five metres. She weighed forty-four kilos. The only thing that saved her was that the gorilla had been wounded in the leg and so he collapsed on to all fours before he could reach her. She ran full tilt down the path, spurred on by his roar of frustration and the thunder of his huge palms beating against the massive drum of his chest.

  The elephant track ended abruptly at the wall of a fallen tree, whose trunk rose nearly six metres in front of her. She turned left because the gorilla had attacked from the right and followed the great brown wall of the tree trunk along a narrow sunlit path cleared out of the canopy three hundred feet above by the destructive force of its fall. She followed it for a hundred metres before being beaten back into the undergrowth by the shattered limbs of its branches. And here, at last, her luck ran out.

  Just as she had blundered unawares into a gorilla troop, Mizuki ran into a chimpanzee community that was still disorientated, angered and coming to terms with the random slaughter visited on them by the soldiers. Dr Koizumi had never included chimpanzees in his warning lectures and Mizuki at first found the pink, clown faces, wide mouths, ridiculous ears and round brown eyes reassuring. But then the largest of the males ran forward aggressively and reared up, screaming, less than thirty centimetres ahead of her. He stood one point seven metres tall, seeming to tower over her. He weighed over seventy kilos, almost twice as much as she did. No sooner had he arrived in front of her than half a dozen others, almost as big, joined in. And when he screamed again, shaking his head from side to side, filling her nostrils with the stench of his breath and her face with a rain of hot drool, she saw just how long and sharp his black-edged teeth were. Felt how unbelievably strong his grip was as he grabbed her by the throat and the upper arm. Her choking screams of terror and agony were lost in their blood-curdling snarls of threat and attack.

  Had Mizuki been one of the other smaller primates the chimpanzees normally hunted – a colobus monkey, a lemur, a bush baby, a youngster from another group – they would have torn her corpse apart and eaten it. As it was, they left her there with her throat ripped out and half her face chewed off, missing fingers, toes, and one or two other soft body parts.

  As the cool of the morning began to fade, a black panther, returning from a night’s hunting, stopped to sniff at her. He was a massive beast, more than two metres in length to his tail tip and weighing one hundred kilos. When he snarled, he revealed teeth that were the better part of twenty centimetres long. But all he did was lick her drying blood and pass on.

  As noon approached, a cloud of iridescent blue-winged butterflies descended on her and made the horror she had become seem unutterably beautiful. For a long, lingering moment, she was transformed into the most delicate work of art, covered in trembling shards of bright blue lapis lazuli as they, too, feasted on her, as thoughtlessly and randomly as the soldiers had massacred her friends.

  Within a day there was nothing left of her but bones.

  2003

  Mizuki’s skeleton was never recovered. Nor was Dr Koizumi’s head. Both lay undisturbed through the succeeding decades as the Yakimoto Freshwater Pearl Company pulled out of Africa and went into liquidation. What little could be found of the other bodies was respectfully returned to Japan but the facility was left to moulder. Unknown to anyone, the orchids in the ruined orchidarium and the pearl-rich oysters on the bed of the black lake flourished. The creatures Mizuki had blundered into did not. Through more than thirty years of sporadic war, with well-armed armies marauding hungrily to and fro, they all became bush meat – or vanished eastward over the mountains as the creatures they relied on in their food chain became bush meat in turn.

  The gorillas went first. The huge hands of their leader were sold in the great Ahia market of Cite La Bas as ashtrays. His hide became a rug, his head a massive paperweight. His flesh was smoked and eaten along with that of the rest of his troop. The murderous chimpanzees were worth nothing as ornaments in The Ahia so they too were smoked and sold for food. The black panther’s snarling head ended up on the wall of the minister of the interior in his offices in faraway Cite Matadi before even that great folly fell to ruin. His midnight-coloured pelt graced the floor of a Lebanese diamond trader in Granville Harbour. His bones were sold as tiger bones and followed Mizuki’s colleagues back to Japan.

  As the turn of the millennium came, the last of the creatures in the high canopy were blasted out of existence, either by random gunfire from below or by strafing runs from above as warplanes and attack helicopters sought to terminate the uncontrolled comings and goings of the armies, to bring an end to the anarchy that followed so destructively in their wake as their names went into nightmare folklore: Simbas, Interahamwe, Boko Haram, M23, Lord’s Resistance Army, Army of Christ the Infant.

  The rainforest became empty and silent, as did the whole country, from the volcanic chain at its heart right the way down to the delta. Even the mosquitoes and butterflies died out, for there was no blood for them to feed on. Moreover, the natural breeding ground of the mosquitoes in the warm, still waters of Lac Dudo were forbidden them by another form of invasive plants. Water hyacinth spread relentlessly upstream from the delta and managed to cover the obsidian surface of the lake in great mats thick enough to keep even mosquitoes at bay.

  Eventually there was nothing living on the western slope of Karisoke above Cite La Bas and the black lake except the water hyacinth, the gigantic plant life of the virgin rainforest and such creatures as could find food in the plants but could not furnish sustenance for the endless succession of starving armies. Who then began, in the time-honoured tradition of the place, to eat each other.

  The scarred man who cut off Dr Koizumi’s head was called Ajani, which is Matadi for ‘he fights for what is his’. In some ways the three decades after the massacre by Lac Dudo had been kind to Ajani – he was alive and relatively wealthy; he had a job and a shanty to live in. In other ways they had not – he was crippled and in constant pain, doomed to eke out the last of his days working as a cleaner in the main hospital in Cite La Bas. Unable to apply for what little social help there was – not with a past like his – nor able to afford the drugs he saw dispensed around him, he eked out his meagre wages by a little pilfering. Which saved doctor’s fees as he healed himself, and allowed a little extra income from street trading what was left over in The Ahia, where anything could be bought and sold. That was where he had bartered his battered AK-47 and rusty machet when he had finally escaped from the Army of Christ the Infant after twenty-five years of brutal service.

  Although he was only in his early sixties, Ajani moved like an eighty-year-old, pushing his broom along the corridors with a stooped back and an unsteady gait. Increasingly regularly now he reeled and staggered as though the floor was heaving. Sometimes this was because of his pain but more often it was because of an overdose of self-administered painkillers.


  Ajani was staggering badly as he began the last hour of his life. His legs were hurting unbearably. He had swallowed several handfuls of high-dose Keral tablets stolen from the already ill-supplied pharmacy. He was light-headed and thought his sense of balance must be failing him. But, in fact, the ground was quaking, an effect emphasized by the fact that Ajani was working on the topmost floor of the hospital, twelve stories above street level. The corridor he was sweeping so unsteadily ended with a panoramic window looking north across the city towards the volcanic caldera of Mount Karisoke. Ajani noted dreamily that the unsteadiness beneath his feet seemed to be matched by a disturbing amount of activity up there. He saw much more smoke than usual issuing from the massive crater, but there was no eruption. Karisoke often fumed and smoked – she had done so right throughout Ajani’s entire life. However, she had never yet erupted. He was not unduly disturbed.

  But Karisoke was playing a trick on Ajani and his fellow citizens in Cite La Bas. She was not erupting – she had not done so this century. Instead she had been quietly filling the huge caldera on her crater with a lake of molten lava, some seven hundred and fifty million cubic metres in volume, fed by a magma chamber nearly twice as large below. The lava was largely composed of melilite nephelinite – light rare earth elements which made the molten rock almost as liquid as water.

  The tremors that Ajani felt as he staggered towards the panoramic window and looked north up the vertiginous ten-mile slope towards the volcano’s rim were the effects on the lower slopes of a massive collapse in the southern wall of the caldera. The effect of the collapse was that of a dam bursting. Molten lava sprang out in a red-hot river more than two kilometres wide. The boiling rock was at a temperature in excess of one thousand degrees Celsius. Because it was so liquid, it ran like a tidal wave, guided by the heaves and folds of the mountain side round the eastern end of the lake and down through the blazing jungle towards the city below. It came down the mountainside at one hundred kilometres per hour. And that was the speed it was still going when it came flooding into the eastern suburbs of Cite La Bas.