Dark Heart Read online

  Robin slipped down the companionway and found her bag on the bunk that had been prepared for her. She unzipped the exclusive Louis Vuitton Keepall, reached in and pulled out a torch. Less than a minute later she was back on deck.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Bonnie from the bridge door.

  ‘You know very well where I’m going,’ she answered. ‘But from the sound of things you do not want to come along.’

  She leaped out on to the concrete and ran forward, crouching a little, even though she was almost certain there was nothing to fear. Unlike the soldiers who preceded her, however, she added the beam of her own torch to the brightness sweeping across the floor. So, just outside the stage-set wall of the internal office, a little way from the door itself, she found a trainer that they had overlooked. She scooped it up on the run, one glance was enough to tell her it belonged to a woman or a girl.

  However, one glance around the charnel house of the office was more than enough. The stench of blood and cordite turned her stomach but she refused to let the swelling nausea distract her. She straightened, flashing her torch beam around, letting its bright light add to the square of illumination coming in through the window behind her. The table caught her attention first, for it was most brightly lit. It was oddly placed, too close to the door. The man lying beside it, with his chest blown open, had his trousers and pants round his ankles. Taken in conjunction with a woman’s shoe, that was immediately sinister. But not as sinister as the fact that the spray of blood across the table – which had clearly issued from the dead man’s chest – formed a rough outline round a clean space in the middle. A clean space that might, at a stretch, have conformed to the shape of a woman’s torso. Robin’s torch beam went down on to the floor once again. She found the second trainer almost at once. And then, most tellingly, a bundle of cotton that turned out to be a pair of panties.

  ‘Whatever happened to you,’ she told the dead man with his trousers down, ‘I think you probably deserved it.’

  Then she turned her attention to the other corpses there.

  Caleb re-entered from the back lot to find her on her knees beside a dead man whose whole face seemed to be sitting at such a very strange angle. She was wrestling something out of the dead man’s hand.

  ‘What on earth . . .’ he began in English, feverishly reassessing his basic beliefs about the entire female sex.

  ‘I don’t know what else they were up to – what else you found outside,’ she grated, ‘but at the moment retribution caught up with them, these bastards were in the middle of a rape party. Coitus interruptus of the very best kind in my book.’

  ‘How on earth do you know that?’ Caleb looked around, his horror intensifying.

  Robin explained her reasoning tersely, as she continued to wrestle with the dead fist she was trying to open. ‘But that’s just from a quick scout round,’ she concluded. ‘I’d probably be able to give you more details if I had more time.’

  Caleb took a deep breath. ‘You’ll have at least half an hour. I have to report this in. And I have to put some heavy stuff aboard my vessel. That truck outside has half a dozen Chinese QW1M shoulder-launched missiles in it; they call them MANPADS – short for Man-portable air-defence system. Each one can blow the guts out of anything on the ground or in the air. From a tank to a cruise missile. From a train to a jumbo jet, come to that. Half the terrorist groups on earth have been trying to get their hands on stuff like this for years and here it turns up in the middle of a deserted jungle in a UN truck surrounded by dead men. If we were on anything other than a mission for the president, I’d probably turn round and head back to base at once.’

  Had Caleb been Richard, Robin would have made a Blues Brothers joke, but she didn’t think Caleb would understand or appreciate references to being on a mission for God. Suddenly she missed Richard. The bloody man had been right all along. This was no walk in the park. This was getting really flaming dangerous.

  As the thought occurred to Robin, the dead man’s fist came open. An oyster shell fell out of it. And a black pearl the size of a marble rolled across the floor. ‘Now that,’ said Robin, her voice awed, ‘is something you don’t see every day.’

  ‘What?’ said Caleb in simple wonder. ‘What in God’s name has gone on here?’

  ‘OK,’ said Robin half an hour later. ‘Hang on a minute longer and I’ll walk you through this. I think I can give you some idea about everything except the pearl.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ said Caleb grudgingly.

  ‘Good. Because what I’m going to tell you might well influence what you want to add to your final report to base – and what they want you to do as a result. Let’s start at the beginning. Way back through the jungle, way, way back, beyond Mount Karisoke and the volcano chain beside it, back in the UN mission in Somalia, Sudan, Uganda or wherever, there are a couple of trucks gone missing. Almost certainly a good few UN soldiers dead in a ditch, stripped of all they possessed. There’s a smuggling route through the horn of Africa that starts with the Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean – which in turn connects with China where the MANPADS originally came from. It’s supposed to be a two-way trade. Weaponry in – conflict minerals out, especially coltan for all those mobile telephones and whatnot. You follow so far?’

  Caleb nodded dumbly, his eyes and his mouth a little wider than usual.

  ‘The guys who killed the UN soldiers and stole the trucks dressed in the dead men’s uniforms and drove through the jungles to here. Good disguise, eh? Not the first time it’s been done either – not by a long chalk. Certainly our smugglers seem to have been wearing the dead men’s uniforms when they in turn died – that fat bloke on the bed for instance, his uniform has a bullet hole surrounded by dry blood over his heart. But he’s not been shot in the heart, he’s been shot through the head. They were using the trucks as a disguise. I guess they were doing the same with the uniforms. Somewhere along the line, not far back, they picked up some prisoners – at least one woman, maybe more. And another passenger perhaps they didn’t know about, in the back of this truck here. The lashings have been cut, and I found a Victorinox knife there – no one in their right mind is going to leave one of those unless the going’s got tough. At least one of the women seems to have been wounded – there’s blood on the seat there where neither a driver nor a single passenger would sit. Certainly not big men like these.

  ‘They drive the trucks down off the road back there leaving two sets of tracks coming – and one set going. One pretty uncontrolled set going, come to that, as though the driver was drunk. Or terrified. Or wounded. Or all three. There’s blood on the ground beside where the other truck was parked, and a bottle of vodka on the ground, still part full. So I guess there weren’t many survivors fit to drive, which is why you have this truck left behind.

  ‘Anyhow, going back in time a little, they arrive, with their MANPADS, their disguises, their women bleeding in the front and their unsuspected guest hiding in the back. They are met by the next link in the smuggling chain. Men with a boat, therefore, as the road ends here. Men, now I think of it, who might have taken those potshots at us earlier as they also escaped, terrified, drunk and bleeding. Because, like the guys on the truck, their numbers have been brutally diminished. You notice that only half of your corpses are in uniform – the rest are in jeans and T-shirts: city boys, I’d say. Or maybe it was not the boat’s crew who shot at us; they may all be here or in the second truck, wherever that is – maybe it was the women and their rescuer escaping, hyped-up and terrified. Maybe they fired those shots. Anyway, the two groups got together – Uniform guys and T-shirt guys – and decided to seal their deal by having a rape party. There’s booze. There’s guys with their trousers down and their peckers out – and only deflated, one assumes, by the massive loss of blood. And there’s underwear belonging to at least one woman.

  ‘But, as I said earlier, the party was brutally interrupted, one assumes by the unsuspected guest who lost his Victorinox in the back of the tr
uck out there. Lost his knife but found at least one gun. Party pooped. Woman or women run out, leaving trainers and underwear behind. Boat goes. Boathouse burns. Now I think of it, the intended rape victims are most likely to be the ones on the boat and therefore the ones who fired those shots. Burned the boathouse to cover their escape. Good planning by someone.

  ‘But I am simply buggered if I can tell you anything at all about the black pearl. Except that there were three more oysters scattered across the floor which I have in my possession – just in case they too contain black pearls.’

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Caleb, not a little dazed.

  ‘Not quite,’ answered Robin, who, like Richard, loved to save the best for last. ‘The girl on the table – the one who left her outline in her would-be rapist’s blood. She left her shoes and knickers, at least I guess it was her. Now, I can’t tell anything about her from the trainers. Nike. Could be anybody’s. Anybody’s with the right shoe size. She could have bought them anywhere. The underwear, however, is another kettle of fish. Look.’ Robin held the less than pristine garment up so that Caleb could see the label sewn into the waistband.

  It said ‘????? ???????’.

  ‘What is that?’ asked Caleb, still stunned.

  ‘It’s Russian. It says, if memory serves, “Wild Orchid”. It’s the name of one of the more upmarket lingerie boutiques in Moscow.’

  ‘Moscow? What has that—’

  ‘Got to do with anything?’ interrupted Robin triumphantly. ‘Well, Captain, I think you will find that the only person in this particular jungle likely to be caught wearing Russian underwear is Anastasia Asov. And it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to see that if Anastasia Asov is in the middle of a rape party then some of her closest friends might also be at risk. And who is Anastasia Asov’s closest friend?’

  ‘Celine Chaka,’ said Caleb, shaken to the core. ‘Oh my God, Celine Chaka.’

  It was the underwear that made the difference in the end. Had it not been for the Wild Orchid Russian lingerie, Caleb and his men would have been scouting the road into Citematadi looking for the second truck and – presumably – another load of MANPADS. Or at least trying to tidy up the charnel house in the office. But Naval HQ was very actively of Caleb’s opinion that if Anastasia Asov was in trouble, Celine wasn’t far behind, so he was ordered to proceed with his mission. At once.

  The Shaldag ran the rapids created by the wreckage of what had once been a great bridge stretching across the river, half as high as the Golden Gate, and carrying an eight-lane highway on the top level, and a railway line on the lower. The massive piers, starlings and footings that had strode across the river carrying the massive weight of concrete still stood. But their carefully designed aqua-dynamic profile was utterly undone by the massive blocks of masonry that now lay on the river-bed between them. Getting past the Citematadi bridge was a little like shooting the first cataract on the Nile. The only real difference was that if you were very careful indeed, you didn’t have to carry your boat around it.

  Frustrated in her desire to look round Citematadi, Robin remained on the bridge with Caleb to see how he got the Shaldag through the maze of rapids, falls and whirlpools that lay across the river like a dirty white wall. Bonnie preferred to stay below. The simple sound of the monster was enough for her. But, after Caleb and Sanda conned their vessel safely through, Robin joined her friend – for a moment or two at least. Armed with the Victorinox, the women set about opening the stinking little pile of oysters, and the three they prized inexpertly apart yielded two more pearls as black and lustrous as great drops of oil. Robin looked at them thoughtfully, then climbed on to the bridge again.

  The Shaldag was running rapidly eastwards, hugging the south bank. Above her starboard quarter, the causeway leading down to Citematadi still loomed up against the moon-bright sky like a black cliff. Robin stared at it, frowning, and was struck suddenly by a simple truth that she had not examined so far. If Anastasia Asov had got herself aboard a truck up there, how had she managed to get across the river? Robin knew as well as anyone that the church and school they were heading for was on the north bank. And the man-made rapids they had just come through established absolutely that there were no bridges still standing across the mighty flood. With her frown deepening, she asked Caleb, ‘Captain, would it be possible for you stay as close to the south bank as you can – and to shine your searchlight on it as we pass?’

  Still in the grip of something akin to awe in the face of Robin’s reasoning abilities – not to mention her gritty intrepidity – Caleb was in no mood to refuse her anything. For the next half hour, the Shaldag hugged the south bank of the river and the starboard searchlight cast its great white beam ashore, while Robin stood out on the deck beside the bridge, straining her eyes as the jungly overhang flashed by. The land behind heaved up into a ridge and fell back again, the distant heave of it etched in shaggy outline against distant galaxies that shone more brightly than Robin had ever seen. But the near bank remained simply a boring, repetitive wall of unvarying foliage, flashing green under the searchlight and fading to black in the shadows behind it.

  Until, all of a sudden, the bank itself fell back into a little bay whose outer edge was a tumbled mess of red mud and green foliage where a cliff had obviously collapsed. And there – seen and gone in a flash – a little rowing boat was moored to a fallen tree trunk.

  ‘Stop!’ shouted Robin, tearing her throat. ‘Stop! Go back!’

  The Shaldag slowed. Reversed, her movements aided by the downward rush of the river beneath her. The little bay returned. The tethered boat.

  Caleb ordered the Shaldag to get as close in as possible and to wait. A ladder went over the side and the captain himself climbed down to a solid-looking mudbank and walked the mooring rope ashore to secure his command as close to the rowing boat as possible. Then Robin clambered down and followed him, carrying her torch once again.

  ‘You knew it was here,’ he said as the pair of them stood looking down into the little vessel.

  ‘Had to be,’ said Robin shortly. She looked up. ‘I’ll bet there’s something up there too. Other than the road,’ she said, and handed him her torch.

  Caleb scrambled up, pulling out the sidearm he was still carrying as soon as he reached the roadway she had known he would find up there.

  Robin crouched down, looking intently into the boat. It was the blood she saw first, the black smears of it on the bench seat beside the little outboard. Then the water in the bottom, with the oars and the boathook. Like most boats, it stank and she supposed the smell was coming from the bilge. But then she saw the handle of a plastic bag sticking out from beneath the bloodstained seat.

  When Caleb came scrambling back down the collapsed bank, carrying a T-shirt and a camouflage jacket, he found her gazing in wonder into the bag. She looked up at him, wide-eyed. ‘There must be thirty more oysters in here,’ she said. ‘Maybe more. Looks as though whatever else happens, someone’s going to get a necklace out of this. A black pearl necklace.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Kebila

  Colonel Laurent Kebila looked at Anastasia Asov in thoughtful silence. ‘You have always had a reputation for resourcefulness,’ he said at last in his beautifully modulated Sandhurst English. ‘But you are beginning to stretch my credulity now.’

  ‘But it’s true. Every word! It’s what has happened to me since the Army of Christ the Infant attacked.’

  ‘The whole truth?’ he probed gently.

  ‘Yes!’ Anastasia’s eyes slid away from the colonel’s steady gaze, however. A simple gesture that undermined his faith in her truthfulness almost fatally. And she knew it. But what could she do? She had never felt anything but trust and respect for the soldier sitting opposite her, leaning forward across his desk, his swagger stick resting beside the cooling coffee cups and empty plate of chocolate digestive biscuits, the CCTV monitor patched into his laptop still showing the picture of the cell they had held her in until he came down to fetch her. To r
escue her.

  But even Kebila could not be relied on to see that Esan was no longer a murderous child-soldier to be detained at once, or to be shot like a rabid dog if he resisted for a second. That, instead, he needed congratulating, helping and rewarding. So she had been very circumspect indeed in her version of how the young man had fallen in with them before he began to prove the valuable friend and helper he now was. And that one omission, that one flaw in her story, was in danger of undermining the whole thing.

  ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘we can start by checking some details that are closer to hand. Begin at the end of your story, so to speak, and then work our way back to the start of it, fact by fact. Captain Christophe is in our holding facility. We can talk to him immediately . . .’

  But that eminently sensible course of action was another problem for her. Not because of what Captain Christophe might say or do – but because of what he had said and done already. Specifically, what he had said about the men who might be coming after them. Who might be aboard Nellie now, asking about their absent friends and missing cargo. And chopping off hands while they did so.

  ‘Please, Colonel,’ she said. ‘Check on the captain later. Check on Nellie first.’

  Kebila looked at her thoughtfully for a moment longer, then he said, ‘Very well. I will order a squad to accompany us,’ sounding to the squirming Anastasia like a parent who knows his child is lying but is willing to give them enough rope to hang themselves. Been there, done that, she thought.

  But once again Anastasia found herself with a problem. If Esan saw a squad of soldiers coming down the jetty he would either turn tail or open fire. ‘Why do we need a squad?’ she said, feeling her eyes sliding guiltily away from his once again and fighting to hold his gaze like an honest person would. ‘Surely we can check on the existence of an ancient riverboat and a couple of youngsters without back-up.’