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  In her husband’s almost wilful absence, Robin opened her mouth to give some advice, but Bonnie beat her to it. ‘This is my field of expertise,’ she said quietly. ‘My doctorate is not just on West African belief systems but also on social organization – including the phenomenon of armies such as the Army of Christ the Infant. Basically they are scavengers. They have such a high attrition rate that they need to keep topping themselves up constantly with new recruits, with supplies to feed them, with artefacts that let them keep their bank accounts full – even if they carry their currency around in trucks with them. They need to have enough wealth in barter goods, gold, blood diamonds or conflict minerals, as well as good hard cash to allow the purchase of transport, fuel, arms and ammunition, and drugs. They have to have drugs because that’s how they keep the kids in line. Drugs and magic – Obi. Crack and Ngoboi.

  ‘They isolate the kids they pick up from any hope of returning to their original adult communities by making them perform specifically targeted acts that look like random barbarism to us, but which are carefully designed to break the most basic . . . call them taboos. Once a kid has killed a relative, raped a cousin, eaten part of a body, they can never go back, even if there’s anything or anyone left alive to go back to. From that point on there is only the army, except for a very lucky few. Very lucky. Very few. But of course there are problems of guilt and fear; the kids have committed the most terrible sins and they know it. Added terror in the build-up to battles and so forth. That’s where the drugs come in. They dull a guilty conscience, stop the nightmares, give loads of Dutch courage as well as building dependency. Free sex with any of the girls they have along with them helps too of course; the soldiers are mostly teenage boys after all.

  ‘And Obi, like I say. Magic far beyond the simple Poro jungle societies that a good few of the older kids have been inducted into, in any case. You’ll all have read accounts of soldiers wearing wigs, make-up, outlandish costumes. They believe these make them bulletproof – because as often as not Ngoboi has told them so. But of course it’s all lies. The kids aren’t protected. They get killed and wounded. They get depressed and try to kill themselves. They get AIDS from the random sex. They get hurt in accidents. Whatever. But the drugs the army has are recreational, not medical. They don’t have doctors of their own – that’s why they’ve taken Malebo’s, I guess. They don’t look after their invalids like a regular army. Anyone who slows them down gets slaughtered and left behind – unless they get added to the food locker.’ She paused for breath.

  ‘So,’ concluded Caleb. ‘The army is like a shark. It keeps moving or it dies.’

  ‘Unless there are circumstances that conspire to stop it. But that would have to be something quite unusual, because it would put the continued existence of the army itself at risk. And I have to say that where the Army of Christ has been, there’s never anything left behind. Certainly no one needing any kind of help, apart from a decent burial.’

  ‘So, we check on Malebo. Sounds like we’d be wasting our time heading upriver . . .’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ interjected Robin. ‘Think it through. Who, apart from General Nlong or his men, would want to isolate Malebo and then take a clinic full of doctors, medical supplies and nurses? And why would they do that unless someone needed medical attention? Someone so powerful that they could command this to be done – someone so vital that they wouldn’t just be left to die because they’re slowing the others down, like Bonnie says.’

  ‘So we do need to check upstream as well as down . . .’

  ‘Look,’ said Robin. ‘How about this? You get back to Malebo as fast as you can and drop off a commando of half a dozen or so. Get them to check the clinic and see if they can follow whatever trail they’ve left and report back to you at regular intervals. If I’m right and the army has taken the missing people, then you’ll have a direct line to wherever they are. And you’re getting closer to wherever Celine is into the bargain. Meanwhile, on the off chance that something catastrophic has happened to them, something bad enough to cripple them, you run up to the compound and see what there is to see up there.’

  ‘Now that,’ said Bonnie with unexpected forcefulness, ‘sounds like a plan.’

  The run down to Malebo took an hour at full speed. With the river’s current behind them adding another couple of knots, the banks flashed by at a mile a minute. Caleb didn’t waste the time. He detailed Sanda to choose five more men and to prepare to go ashore and follow whatever trail was left behind by the clinic staff and the men who had kidnapped them. By the time they reached the jetty at Malebo, Sanda’s little commando was ready to go ashore and start their mission. The radio man carried a SINCGARS kit using 25 kHz channels in the VHF FM band, from 30 to 87.975 MHz, and was set to FPB004’s secure channel. The fighting men had an assortment of personal sidearms – Beretta M9, Glock, Sig. Sanda himself, Robin noticed, favoured a Heckler & Koch .45. But they all looked well supplied. As they did with clips for the Uzi each of the three had slung over his shoulder. All in all it was a wonder that there was room on their belts for the range of grenades that they also carried. Or for the lethal-looking unscabbarded matchet each man wore with its naked blade down his left thigh to the knee and beyond.

  Sanda led them on to the jetty in the humid predawn greyness and they automatically went into full battle mode. Watching them jog into the early morning bustle of the town was unsettling to say the least. Inquisitive early-rising townsfolk fell back as if the soldiers were a group of plague carriers. The jetty itself emptied before them, and it was only when they vanished into the jungle like something out of Apocalypse Now that the citizens of Malebo seemed to regain their confidence, and tried to communicate with the patrol boat once again.

  The surge of people coming towards the Shaldag was something neither Robin nor Caleb had counted on, but the quick-thinking young officer jumped up on to the end of the jetty and called, ‘I am Captain Caleb Maina. My command and I have been sent to assess your situation but we cannot evacuate anyone as we are headed upriver into the delta, not downriver to Granville Harbour. We know from your mayor that your communications have been sabotaged and that everyone from your clinic has vanished. The soldiers you have just seen are going to search for your missing people. Meanwhile, I have another emergency upstream to check on so, unless anyone here has more information to give me, I must ask you to go back to your usual routines until the authorities send more substantial help to you.’

  The speech did the trick. It was less than twenty-four hours since the Nellie had passed through after all. At first it seemed that no one had any new information, and the fact that their mayor had alerted the authorities who were taking such swift action seemed to settle everyone down.

  Caleb took the opportunity to top up the tanks with the spare fuel from the jerry cans they had brought along then – and invested an extra half hour in refilling those at the petrol station. Then he swung Shaldag FPB004 in a wide U-turn and headed back upriver into the dazzle of the rising sun, while yet another crew member tried his hand in the galley and the depleted contingent occupied the empty time by filling their stomachs first, then checking their arms and equipment.

  The run upstream took two hours, not just because of the distance or because they were now sailing against the current, but because Caleb became increasingly cautious the further east they got. Sanda’s reports had something to do with this increasing caution. Every half hour – or sooner if he found something specific – he updated his commander on the little commando’s progress. His reports described a trail wide and clear enough to show that whoever made it was not worried about pursuit. Certainly, they – and whoever was up ahead of them – had no trouble in following it.

  And, as if the casual nature of the signs they left behind was not enough, there were the bodies left scattered in their wake. There had been half a dozen patients in various states of disrepair when the clinic was emptied. Five of them appeared one after another at the side of the trail, the
ir throats cut as their particular ailments slowed their kidnappers down. There was no identification on any of them, but Sanda – like everyone else in Benin la Bas – knew what the Angel of Granville Harbour looked like from the days when she had so famously stood against President Liye Banda and the torturers of his secret police. So he was able to confirm that, whoever the corpses might be, none of them was Celine Chaka.

  But then Sanda’s men came to the side of a forest track wide enough to serve as a road. No more corpses – tyre tracks. Kidnappers, victims and equipment had all been loaded into two four-by-fours and a couple of heavier technicals according to the tracker. And they had taken off pretty quickly, heading east.

  At last Caleb brought the Shaldag to an almost dead stop. The whispering engines just gave enough power for steerage way, holding them motionless against the bank, precisely balancing the counter-thrust of the river’s current. The vegetation dead ahead seemed to be an outgrowth of freshwater mangroves, variously festooned with detritus from the recent floods, hanging like crows’ nests in the upper branches. The mangroves hid the vessel from any casual upriver observer, but they also hid the hillock with its chapel, school and compound from Caleb, Robin and the rest. It was, Robin thought, accurately if unoriginally, the moment of truth. They were within a few hundred metres of the GPS coordinates that were their target.

  Caleb couldn’t just sit and wait. He either had to take the Shaldag forward or try to get yet another little commando ashore to spy out the land. The first course of action would alert anyone at the compound that the authorities were nearby – a good thing if there were survivors awaiting rescue; a bad thing if General Nlong had left any of his army behind to keep an eye out for just such an eventuality. A particularly bad thing if the men who had kidnapped Celine belonged to his command; and who else could they be? The second course of action would allow them to make their final decision based on a clearer understanding of what was going on. But of course the downside of that was the fact that sending a spy ashore was in itself problematic – the mangroves were pretty widespread – they must stretch back for a kilometre or more – and although pretty matted, they did not look all that strong. A fact made relevant because Caleb had selected a range of the biggest, butchest – and, therefore, heaviest – men available to him. And during the last ninety minutes or so they had all been loading themselves with a range of kit and weaponry that must almost have doubled their weight. ‘Tell you what,’ Robin said to the cautiously calculating Caleb, ‘why don’t I climb up into those mangroves there and see what I can see? It’s been a while since my tomboy days but I reckon I should be able to find some kind of a secure vantage point up there and take a good squint at the compound.’

  That gave Caleb something else to hesitate over, so Robin gave him the benefit of her assessment of the alternatives, and that helped him to make up his mind. Five minutes later, already beginning to regret her offer as sheer bloody madness, Robin was easing herself through a springy tangle of branches which took her straight back to childhood days creating secret dens in the huge rhododendron bushes in the garden of Cold Fell, her family home in the Scottish Borders. Eventually she found a kind of bed made out of a mat of water hyacinth that allowed her to look down past a fork in the branches where some kind of a flower lay crushed and dead. Her outlook was surprisingly good and she found herself speculating what a lethal field of fire she could lay down from here if she had any kind of automatic or semi-automatic weapon. But such thoughts were short-lived; crushed out of existence, like the flower at the branch junction, by simple, overwhelming surprise.

  Robin had come here with an idea of what she was expecting to see. A burned chapel. Ruined buildings. Dead bodies in various states of disrepair and decomposition. She had steeled herself to observe all this. Observe and report, as was her mission. What she actually saw was not a ravaged compound, wrecked and burst open like a corpse picked over by vultures, but a stockade, almost a rudimentary fortress. Not by any means the leavings of an army eternally on the move, as Bonnie had described. But the defensive stronghold of a command with every intention of staying exactly where it was.

  This was so precisely the opposite of what she had been expecting to see that she spent some extra time examining it, committing to mind the disposition of the rough palisade of wall – clearly chopped from the local jungle and carefully erected here. Of the stubby watchtowers – effective gun placements – providentially unoccupied at the moment. Of the long slope of naked mud that would allow whoever was defending the place a very effective killing field if anyone was mad enough to attack on foot from the river. Of the columns of smoke and hum of industry from within, which spoke of no fly-by-night group but of settled, steady, disciplined hard work.

  And, as she looked and listened with all the fearsome concentration at her command, so she heard the revving of motors that grew louder and then stopped, as though several vehicles were pulling in from somewhere in the jungle and parking in the middle of the fort. And amid the shouts of welcome and enquiry that followed the arrival, she was certain that she heard the name of Celine Chaka.

  NINETEEN

  Zubr

  ‘I am certain the president will see you at the earliest convenient moment,’ Colonel Kebila told Richard firmly. ‘But at present he is extremely busy.’ The two men stood face to face in the anteroom to the president’s office. They had met there, apparently by accident, but Richard was getting frankly suspicious about all these coincidental meetings. He had come from his meeting with Max Asov, full of ideas to help the situation upriver. He had paused only to change into an almost indestructible cotton shirt and a sturdy tropical suit and a pair of boots almost guaranteed to break the teeth of any crocodile. As he sped up to the president’s compound in the hotel limousine, he knew that Max was contacting Captain Zhukov on the strength of Richard’s assurance that he could get in to see The Man. Irina, meanwhile, was trying to clothe a mutinous Anastasia on the deeply mistaken assumption that she was still a child needing help or advice from anyone – least of all from yet another of her oversexed father’s mistresses.

  But Richard’s progress – smooth as silk from the Nelson Mandela Suite to the president’s anteroom – had been brought to an abrupt halt by the man who kept on turning up with such suspicious regularity that Richard was beginning to wonder if he had been slipped some kind of bug or tracking device.

  ‘I bet he is busy, Colonel,’ answered Richard with some asperity. ‘One part of his country seems to be a conduit for unregulated arms smuggling while the other part of it is open to unopposed invasion by foreign armies. But I have a proposal to put to him which may help. In the short term at least.’

  ‘I’m sure you do. To the benefit of Heritage Mariner or Bashnev-Sevmash also, no doubt. And I am sure he will wish to talk to you the moment he is free.’

  But that moment came sooner than Colonel Kebila calculated, for the door of the president’s office opened suddenly. Julius Chaka stood there himself, dressed in the military fatigues familiar from his soldiering days, his face thunderous. ‘Laurent, there you are! Have you heard this report yet?’ he demanded, waving a print-out covered with writing. ‘It’s just in from Naval HQ. Oh, good morning, Captain Mariner. Come through with the colonel please, this report will be of interest to you as well, I should imagine. Because it was your wife who sent it. She’s apparently hanging in a mangrove tree up the delta even as we speak. She’s overlooking the GPS coordinates we gave to Captain Maina, and this is what she can see . . .’

  The president led the two men in, describing the detail of Robin’s report as he did so. Richard looked around, distracted, but still paying close attention. Preferring to study the room rather than to start speculating what in God’s name Robin was getting herself into now. Or, indeed, what the Doctor of African Studies Bonnie Holliday was getting up to at her side. At the thought of Bonnie, he frowned thoughtfully. But then the room he was entering distracted him again. The president’s office, inherite
d unchanged like the rest of the compound from the more grandiose days of Liye Banda, was based on the White House Oval Office of the Bush administration, rather than the more conservative Obama makeover. The Great Seal of Benin la Bas lay at the centre of a carpet patterned with radiating lines in beige and brown. The desk was a double of the Resolute desk given to President Hayes by Queen Victoria in November 1880 and which had stood in the Oval Office through many administrations since.

  Seated on the sofas flanking the long teak coffee table at right angles to the president’s desk were senior officers from all of Benin la Bas’s armed services. Richard recognized the uniforms, if not the men wearing them. With Kebila representing state security, it was the equivalent of a meeting of the British prime minister’s emergency Cobra committee. There was nowhere to sit and nobody made any room, preferring to glare at both Kebila and himself with ill-concealed hostility. So, like the colonel, he stood, while the president paced restlessly, his movements reminiscent of the big black panther caged in the zoo.

  ‘Well, I’ll throw the question open,’ said Julius Chaka, prowling around the seated officers and ministers as though sizing them up for dinner. ‘What sort of force do we need up there to overwhelm an entrenched army in a simple but effective defensive position with the maximum speed and the minimum loss of life? Remember, independent of the fact that they have almost certainly got my daughter – a national heroine with a worldwide reputation – they also have a range of innocent bystanders, including doctors, nurses, priests and imams from a range of religions. And nuns. God knows how many nuns. Not to mention several hundred orphaned school children who were looking to us for help and protection.’