Dark Heart Read online

  Table of Contents

  Recent Titles in the Mariners Series from Peter Tonkin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One: Ghost

  Two: Turbulence

  Three: Oyster

  Four: Tie

  Five: Ngoboi

  Six: Craft

  Seven: Shell

  Eight: War-game

  Nine: Truck

  Ten: Zoo

  Eleven: Cite

  Twelve: Kingfisher

  Thirteen: Nellie

  Fourteen: Burning

  Fifteen: Punch

  Sixteen: Manpads

  Seventeen: Kebila

  Eighteen: Compound

  Nineteen: Zubr

  Twenty: Scavengers

  Twenty-One: Dark

  Twenty-Two: Heart

  Twenty-Three: Technical

  Twenty-Four: Pearl

  Acknowledgements

  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 *

  * available from Severn House

  DARK HEART

  A 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 world edition published 2012

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

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

  Copyright © 2012 by Peter Tonkin.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Tonkin, Peter.

  Dark heart.

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

  2. Mariner, Robin (Fictitious character) – Fiction.

  3. Terrorism – Fiction. 4. Africa, West – Fiction.

  5. Suspense fiction.

  I. Title

  823.9'2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-273-3 (Epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8165-6 (cased)

  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 for the staff and students of Combe Bank,

  where I was working while I completed this story.

  ONE

  Ghost

  The orchid was a Ghost: the rarest in the world. Perhaps even among the most priceless. It should have been nestling high in the Florida Everglades, not resting trapped in the fork of an anonymous African freshwater mangrove overlooking the sullen heave of the Great River on the lower edge of the inner delta in the newly recognized West African state of Benin la Bas.

  Like thirty generations of its ancestors, the orchid had been seeded in the distant, derelict wreck of a greenhouse away in the montane high forest of the impenetrable jungle that clothed the slopes of a ridge of volcanoes a thousand miles inland. What little was left of the greenhouse stood beside the mouldering, overgrown framework of a long-abandoned facility on the shores of a lake that occupied one of the smaller bowl-shaped calderas on the side of Mount Karisoke, greatest of the volcanoes.

  In the long-ago boom years of the seventies, when there had been high hopes that the heart of Africa would make much of the continent and more of the world rich, a Japanese company created the facility. They built dams and sluices to control the flow of the young river running through the lake, seeded the warm, shallow, volcanic waters with oysters and drew up plans to harvest freshwater pearls. Not just any workaday Mikimoto freshwater pearls, so popular at the time. For the lake was silted with rich jet and ebony volcanic mud, and the oysters that crowded the fecund beds would in time, it was hoped, produce lustrous, priceless, pure black pearls.

  The man in charge of the project, Dr Koizumi, was an avid collector of orchids. He persuaded the engineers working on the dam system and the facility to build him a greenhouse and orchidarium where he could propagate his priceless collection of fragrant Japanese Fu Rans and Indonesian Dendrobium thyrsiflorums as well as his other, rarer specimens like the Ghost.

  But before the first pearl could even be harvested, the facility fell victim to the first of the civil wars that raged through central Africa in the eighties and nineties. Dr Koizumi’s skeleton now lay scattered somewhere beneath the ruins of the greenhouse as those of his colleagues were buried under the mouldering facility, or strewn down the slopes towards the black lake shore. The company cut its losses as swiftly as the rebel soldiers cut their throats.

  The local villages also vanished during the succeeding decades, their inhabitants scattered, slaughtered or kidnapped by restlessly marauding armies, carried away to become soldiers, sex-slaves or sacrifices. The jungle returned, empty of all but animal life – and that, too, began to die away as the rapacious, well-armed legions turned to bush meat, and then to cannibalism. The black lake passed back into half-forgotten legend and so did the black pearls it was supposed to have contained.

  By the turn of the millennium, there seemed to be nothing in the whole area except the tall trees, the ruined habitations and the timeless forest spirits which had been worshipped here between the mountains and the distant coast for most of the two millennia preceding 1999. The spirits of Obi, led by the snake god Obi himself, which governed the tribes while they still lived here – and also went west with the slave ships as Obeah: voodoo. Went west, but remained here also, as is the nature of gods and spirits, alone and unworshipped. Growing hungry, perhaps, like the swarming armies that came and went through the ruined countries, looking for human sacrifice.

  And Dr Koizumi’s body, facility and orchidarium remained here also, undisturbed and apparently forgotten, for more than thirty years in the lost heart of that vast, vacant darkness. And, even without the tender care that the good doctor had hoped to lavish upon them, the orchids flourished through generation after generation.

  Until the rains came.

  That year, in a vicious meteorological irony, all the areas of the East, from Somalia to Uganda, Tanzania and Sudan, where huge populations tried to scratch a living, were all but destroyed by drought. But on the empty and forsaken forests of the interior, five years’ rainfall tore down in less than a month. The upper slopes of the dormant volcano became deadly mudslides as even the tallest jungle trees began to lose their grip. The young river grew to a raging torrent almost overnight. The carefully constructed lake burst through the ancient, unmaintained dam system and added to the burgeoning river-spate. A wall of black water carried with it boulders of shat
tered cement, gallons of black slime, much of Dr Koizumi’s greenhouse and a range of his orchids which rode the strange grey crest. Topmost amongst them, the Ghost.

  Further downstream, where the river at last left Karisoke’s mountain slopes, it plunged over a low, wide waterfall. At the foot of the fall there was a massive, almost circular lake, its surface a solid mat of water hyacinth, sufficiently abundant to have leeched almost all the oxygen from the water beneath it and to have killed off those few marine life forms that hadn’t been caught and eaten by the passing armies.

  The debris from the lake shore smashed the lethal mat of plants apart and the power of the raging torrent sent the whole lot spinning out of the lake, on downstream. The river, which carried half as much water as the Nile, had simply been called the Great River by the long-vanished villagers who had once peopled its shores. And then the River Gir by variously coloured explorers, taking the name from records made by the earliest Roman mapmakers. Here, in strange matted islands, the water hyacinth was swept on downstream towards the distant coast, the better part of seven hundred miles away. A shore which lay beyond an outer and an inner delta which had been the death of almost every explorer seeking to come east and north upstream; from the earliest Arabic and Portuguese traders to the Elizabethan slave-traders and hardy Scottish and American missionaries. The Romans, the Bedou and the wise Mandingo traders came south and west through the Sahara – and most of them survived to tell the tale.

  The Ghost, also coming south and west, survived like the itinerant Mandingo traders – for the moment at least. Caught in the thickly tangled structure, the battered orchid sat high on the greenery, surrounded by other, less fortunate blooms, which were drooping, torn and broken. Most of the concrete boulders had sunk on to the lake bed at the floor of the waterfall, tearing the mat of hyacinth loose as they did so. But the hyacinth was robust enough to be buoyant still, even in smaller clumps; sufficiently strong to be carrying odds and ends from the increasingly distant facility. Wooden planks and metal struts from the greenhouse. Bunches of black vegetation from the bed of the ruptured lake. Bizarrely, Dr Koizumi’s skull, apparently keeping close watch on his beloved orchids with the wide-gaping sockets of its eyes, grinning eerily at the sight of their survival.

  The normally stately flow of the Great River Gir was enhanced not only by the flood from the slopes of the great volcano, but by the fact that the rains continued to pour on to the empty forests through which it was now flowing. The river spread itself into a series of meanders and lakes big enough to pass for inland seas, but still its flow remained fearsome under the unrelenting deluge that thundered down, day after day after day.

  The Ghost, with its watchful keeper, swept swiftly onwards, therefore, through what had once been prosperous farms and plantations. Past the ruins of fishing villages and mining towns, which, like Dr Koizumi’s facility, had flourished in the seventies only to die during the relentless onslaughts of the eighties and nineties. Every now and then there would be something newer – projects that had died at birth under the dead hand of the bribe-crippled kleptocracies that had run the place through into the noughties and early twenty-tens, before the IMF, World Bank, and interested economies from Chile to China, discovered the hard way that money invested in Central Africa was even more at risk than money invested in Iceland, Ireland, Greece and Portugal.

  Until, at last, the Great River entered the inner delta. A stream that had been as broad as the Amazon at Manaos, wide enough to make a fisherman suddenly believe he was lost at sea with the two banks fallen far below his horizon, suddenly fractured, shattered, ran away into the swampy jungle in a maze of lesser streams. From outer space, on Google Earth, the River Gir seemed to be constructed like one of the great trees that stood along its lost and silent upper reaches. Twigs of streams ran down from mountainsides and in from the edges of deserts, gathering into branches that flowed inevitably into one huge trunk – a trunk more than five hundred miles long; a trunk that became twisted, wandering, widespread, but coherent. Until it met the green wall of the delta. And here, like the trunk of a tree entering the ground, it spread its roots as widely and wildly as it had spread its branches far inland. There remained a tap-root, true; one stream stronger than the rest, still calling itself the River. Still the Gir. But no longer the Great River. Its greatness was lost in the delta.

  The Ghost, too, would have been lost, but for the force of the flood which held its floating island in midstream so that it followed that tap-root of the River Gir straight into the heart of the inner delta. Here the flood had all but swamped even the hardiest mangroves. But they still reached out, like deadly reefs and sandbars, swaying and shifting, until one at last snagged the matted roots of water hyacinth. The mares’ nest of vegetation swung inwards towards the shore and became more firmly anchored. It had reached its final resting place, seemingly almost as high as the simple wooden cross on top of the missionary church which was the first sign of current human habitation half a kilometre inland on a knoll miraculously above the floodwater.

  Then the flood beneath both chapel and orchid crested and began to recede. The force of the falling water sucked at the hyacinth raft with sufficient force to start it breaking up. The mangroves tore at it as the current began to release them. Ripping at it as they sprang back like the claws of the great leopards that had once hunted here, with branches as powerful as the arms of the huge silverback gorillas that had once ruled the impenetrable jungle on far Mount Karisoke. The hyacinth raft began to come apart. Dr Koizumi’s skull rolled away into the receding waters. Much of the rest of the matted vegetation fell into the mud of the river’s shore. But the Ghost, sitting on a high, tough fork of mangrove branch, remained miraculously unscathed. As the rains eased during the next few days and the water continued to fall until the Gir at last resumed its accustomed river course, running gently enough to allow the first couple of orphans from the church school near the chapel to come down to the bank and begin to explore the aftermath of the flood, like creatures recently released from the Ark, unaware of the beautiful flower sitting like a white dove just above their heads.

  Until the soldier crushed it out of existence by resting the barrel of his Kalashnikov on the tree-fork so that he could get a steady platform for observation and assessment of a good field of fire for the moment when the rest of the Army of Christ the Infant caught up with him. The fork offered the soldier a sufficiently steady lookout point for his purposes, for he was lying on what remained of the bed of water hyacinths and it made a perfect hiding place and observation platform. At this stage the soldier only wanted to spy on the unsuspecting children still wandering between the riverbank and the school, which was the army’s next objective because of the number of potential recruits its students represented – and because of the two women who were in charge of the place.

  A bell in the chapel began to ring. It had struck perhaps half a dozen times before its dominance over the breathless silence of the jungle was overwhelmed by a distant roaring from high in the sky. Thunder, perhaps – and the sultry air certainly threatened it. Or an airliner’s engines going into noisy reverse thrust somewhere high above the green jungle canopy as it settled towards its landing at the distant Granville Harbour International Airport. The soldier paid scant attention to the distant thunder – diminishing already – as he watched the children hurrying towards the chapel, blissfully unaware of his presence – and the impending arrival of his comrades. They were a mixture of boys and girls. It was hard to tell their ages, but they looked young to him. Young and soft and tender. His stomach grumbled in an internal echo of the distant thunder – and his mouth flooded with saliva.

  The soldier’s name was Esan, which meant ‘Nine’ in Yoruba. The soldier had been nine when Moses Nlong had recruited him into the Army of Christ the Infant by making him kill his cousin with his sharp-bladed matchet and eat part of her heart. Not General Nlong alone, of course, but the power of Obi that he controlled through Ngoboi, his own terrify
ing devil, with its magic mask and his matted raffia costume, who embodied the most terrifying of the Obi spirits of the Great Dark Forest and gave the general much of his power. A devil which would soon be here, with the army and with General Nlong, hungry for recruits in more ways than one.

  In the years since he joined the Army of Christ the Infant, Esan had risen to the rank of corporal and had been given the trusted role of pathfinder and scout, for, unlike many of the others, he was contained and icily quiet. He did not suffer from nightmares and he did not need to be motivated with cocaine. He had grown tall and strong in body as well as in spirit. He believed in the power of the spirits the devil embodied but he wore only one small fetish – and did not rely on bizarre magical wigs, costumes or make-up to make him invincible; the green-brown camouflage of his corporal’s uniform was what he preferred to wear. Consequently he blended into the forest and could be relied upon to give accurate reports. So the general came to know him. To trust him. And he had killed many more people and eaten many more hearts.

  He was thirteen years old.

  TWO

  Turbulence

  KLM Flight 1330 from Paris swung low over the delta, fighting to complete its landing at Benin la Bas’s Granville Harbour International before the threatening weather closed in again. The Boeing 737’s engines thundered as it settled into the lower air, rolling to the left as it swung on to a westerly heading, the better part of three hundred miles east of the runway, a little more than twenty minutes out. The captain’s voice crackled through the PA system, ‘Please ensure that your seat belts are tightened. We may experience a little turbulence.’

  Richard Mariner sat, looking down out of the window below his left shoulder, his big fists motionless in his lap. His belt was already as tight as it could go – and would have been so even if he hadn’t managed to get a seat with extra legroom. A necessity given his massive size, but nevertheless a slightly unnerving prospect whereby any kind of emergency landing would throw him bodily through the side wall of the lavatory if his belt proved less than perfect. In any case, he was expecting all kinds of turbulence in all sorts of ways. During the next few minutes, the next few hours, perhaps even during the next few days. His bright blue eyes were narrow and his throat felt dry – and almost as tight as his seat belt.