Dark Heart Read online

  The office was in one of the smart new low-rise government buildings that had been erected on the land that had housed the shanty towns and slums the last time Richard was here. What had been a riverside mess of shacks and tents constructed of clapboard, bamboo, timber pilfered from the wreckage of the nearest suburbs and ubiquitous plastic sheeting, was now a carefully planned complex of manicured public gardens and municipal offices. The position of this particular office could hardly have been better from the minister’s point of view. The broad front of the building opened through a series of glass doors on to a convex curving veranda that seemed to command a view of everything for which he stood responsible. To the left, the mouth of the River Gir opened, as wide as the Thames at Greenwich. Where the jungle used to cluster right up to the edge of the city, now there stood river docks, bustling with river craft, some freighters, more dredgers, and a pair of the neat little Shaldag fast riverboats that Caleb Maina was supposed to captain on his brown-water days. And a neat marina, filled with pleasure craft of all sorts, from pirogues to gin palaces, that could have been transported here directly from San Francisco or St Tropez.

  With a slight shrug, Richard turned back to the breathtaking view. Straight ahead, on the far bank, the forest and jungle of the delta itself swept out across the bay. But where in the old days that had been an environmental disaster of oil-polluted mangroves peopled with restlessly dissatisfied freedom fighters, now it reflected order and care. Pipework looked new. There seemed to be no leaks. Some distant figures were working there, wearing a range of coloured overalls, clearly about legitimate business.

  To the right, the bay itself stretched away to southern and western horizons, ringed with rigs of various sizes at various distances – the farthest only visible as columns of smoke and flame. A range of vessels moved busily among them, and Richard found himself wishing for binoculars as he strained to see the telltale house colours of Heritage Mariner. Hard right, looking almost north-west along the city’s coastline, there stood the new dock facilities. The last time Richard had seen the place it had been a blazing ruin after the late president’s helicopter had caused a supertanker to explode with near nuclear force. Now it was all rebuilt – quite a feat in less than five years, he allowed. The port frontage extended right down to the office complex itself; the minister’s waterside office seeming to stand as the dividing point between seagoing and river-going vessels, between commercial craft and pleasure boats. Right at the hub of Granville Harbour. At the heart of Benin la Bas.

  No sooner had Richard completed these thoughts than there was a sharp rap on the door and Captain Caleb Maina entered. ‘Everything is ready, Minister,’ he announced.

  ‘Good. Then we can begin. Mr Asov, you will take the lead in due course but for the moment, please allow the captain and myself to be your guides. It is only a short walk, I assure you . . .’ He gestured expansively once again. And Richard realized he was pointing towards the nearest of the vessels tied up on the seaward side of the docks to their right. A neat-looking corvette. The Otobo. Captain Maina’s blue-water command, no doubt. He looked out across the bay, suddenly, working out what was going on here.

  About half a mile offshore was a freighter he had overlooked in his keenness to search out Heritage Mariner house colours. The freighter was in Sevmash colours and it had its cranes up, busily lowering something over the side. He blinked. Gasped. It was all very well to be talking about Max’s plans to sell equipment to the local navy, but it looked as though they were just about to get a closer look at the deal than he had calculated.

  ‘A little surprise,’ breathed Max, as he passed close by Richard’s shoulder, simply bubbling with excitement.

  ‘You can say that again!’ said Richard, straining for a closer look at what the freighter was lowering into the bay – even as the pressure of all the bodies around him forced him to move towards the door.

  ‘What is it?’ demanded Robin.

  ‘It’s Max’s hovercraft,’ said Richard. ‘The Zubr. Look at the size of the thing. It’s almost as long as Captain Caleb’s corvette, twice as wide and a great deal better armed. Or, as I said, it would be—’

  ‘Except for the fact that I was forbidden to bring her full range of weaponry with me,’ Max threw back over his shoulder. Then he was gone.

  ‘So what’s the actual plan, then?’ she demanded as they walked out of the building and on to the dock where the corvette’s gangplank awaited them.

  ‘I think,’ he answered quietly, ‘that we’re just about to join in a little war-game . . .’

  SEVEN

  Shell

  ‘Bail!’ shouted Anastasia. ‘Bail or we’ll all drown!’

  The tiny cockleshell of a rowing boat whirled out into the middle of the Great River. There was water everywhere – slopping over the sides, thundering down from the sky. The whole universe seemed to be made of liquid – and it was all swamping the boat at a terrifying rate. Another fork of lightning made everything bright for a second – just enough time for Anastasia to see how wide the river had suddenly become. How far from the shores they were already. How near their gunwales were to the heaving, boiling surface. For an instant she regretted her failure to blow her own brains out with the AK. Things seemed to be getting worse by the moment. A quick, clean quiet death might have had its attractions after all.

  Her scrabbling fingers kept skinning themselves against the AK in the bottom of the boat beside her. She tore a nail loose on an oar submerged beside it, then her hand became briefly entangled in the plastic bag. There was another oar and a grappling hook down there as well, she knew. And a big can of petrol – against which she bruised her knuckles. That was for the ancient two-stroke motor she had neither the time nor the knowledge to power up. But at last she found something that felt like a cup. She started pouring water over the side with feverish haste. ‘Bail!’ she screamed again.

  She felt Celine moving beside her, her motion jerky and spasmodic, but she assumed that this was just some part of the young woman’s long-past injuries, like her limp, like her stiff and painful shoulder joints. ‘Ado!’ she shouted. ‘Are you bailing?’

  ‘I can’t find anything to bail with!’ came the distant, desperate answer.

  ‘Shine the torch around . . .’ she ordered, thinking: We have to be well out of sight of them now.

  The Maglite’s beam struck out across the vast darkness, showing only sheets of pouring rain and the wildly dimpled foaming surface their massive drops were falling on to. There was no longer any sign of the bank. Then Ado swung the beam inboard and gasped. ‘The soldier. His face is under water! It is deep. He may drown.’

  ‘See what you can do. But be quick or we’re all going to drown! Can you see anything?’

  ‘I have an old bait tin here. I must just turn him . . .’ The light wavered wildly. The boat rocked even more unsettlingly. Then the darkness returned and the three of them continued bailing.

  After half an hour – which none of them counted or calculated – the rain eased. After a further hour, which whipped by equally unnoticed, the cloud cover broke up and a low, full moon came out. Had they been in the forest, it would have made no difference to them at all, for it would have been blotted out by the canopy and they would still have been lost in shadow. But they were in the middle of a wide river – slowing now because it had grown so broad. So there were no leafy branches above them – simply the big sky, the stars and the moon.

  The pace of their bailing slowed to a stop. The bottom of the boat was by no means dry, but they were too exhausted to continue. They sat, slumped, arms hanging and eyes vacant. The little boat sailed on, pulled unerringly by the current towards the heart of the delta and on towards the sea, hundreds of miles downriver. Only the whispering chuckle of the water sounded sibilantly near at hand. There was no life in the river to breach and breathe, to jump and splash. There was no life in the jungle on the far banks to hoot, howl, roar or call. There was no wind to whisper in the distant leaves. The
re was only the patter of the fallen raindrops dripping down from leaf to leaf, from grass to ground. And, like their mighty cousin the river, whispering and chuckling as they did so, like the thread-thin ghostly voices of the great spirits and long dead ancestors crowding the deepest shades.

  The soldier groaned.

  ‘At least he’s still alive,’ Anastasia voiced her thought without realizing it. And, because of this, she spoke in English. She had been thinking in English for some time now. ‘But that’s a fact which could cut both ways. Is he tied up tightly?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Ado, the little school’s star pupil, fluent in English and Russian as well as her native Matadi. ‘But he’s in pain. I think he’s cramping badly. And you tied him really tightly . . .’

  ‘Probably has a nasty headache as well,’ said Anastasia wearily. ‘But you’re right. I’ll see what I can do.’ She pulled herself slowly and carefully down the boat, aching in every muscle, moving like a very old lady.

  The braided nylon line came undone surprisingly easily now that no one was chasing them. Especially under the bright beam of the Maglite. And it looked as though it would make a far more efficient restraint than the AK’s webbing sling. The boy was still groggy enough for Anastasia to risk loosening his wrists from his ankles and straightening him out before she re-secured him. Just to make doubly sure, however, she called over her shoulder to Celine, ‘Hold the gun on him while I do this, would you?’

  Ten minutes later, he was lying on his back in the bottom of the boat – a useful piece of ballast if nothing else. His shoulders were wedged between the oars and the boathook was under his spine along the keel where he couldn’t get at it. His wrists were lashed together, as were his ankles. Anastasia had been generous with the rope and it looked as though they wouldn’t be tying up to any jetty in the immediate future. He also had a band around his chest and another round his knees securing him to the oars and the boathook – in case he took it into his head to start rolling around or kicking out.

  ‘All right, Celine,’ said Anastasia. ‘You can stop covering him now.’ She turned to her friend, looking at her properly for the first time since their escape.

  Celine was slumped with the AK across her knees pointing at the boy. But her finger was nowhere near the trigger. Her arms were hanging limply, her hands resting in her lap like a pair of lilies. Her head was bowed and only the curve of the boat’s side was holding her erect. One side of her blouse was dark with blood. And Anastasia realized with a pang of utter horror that the woman she loved had been shot.

  ‘Don’t die!’ snarled Anastasia. ‘Don’t you dare die on me!’

  Celine was lying on her back on top of the semi-conscious soldier. She was still unconscious. Her head was held by the ill-fitting combat boots that completed the soldier boy’s uniform and her own feet rested astride his battered face. Ado, at the left-hand side of the boat’s prow, was trying to balance Anastasia who was sitting on the right side of the stern, her backside on the only seat aboard, her torso leaning in over her friend’s right shoulder, her own shoulder hard against the outboard motor’s control lever as she worked. Celine’s blouse was open wide. The blood-soaked right cup of her bra gleamed under the still-bright beam of the Maglite. The strap that should have supported it was snapped right at the crest of her shoulder, above her collar bone where the bullet from Moses Nlong’s automatic had gone right through her trapezius muscle, about seven centimetres out from her neck. Anastasia tore the bra off, seeking a second, fatal bullet hole before it registered that there had been just one shot fired at them. She tore her eyes away from the liquid perfection of Celine’s right breast and concentrated on the damage that she could see.

  Anastasia looked in horror down at the wound, her mind racing, with no idea just how lucky the wounded woman had been. As wounds went, it was about as neat as could be expected. The bullet had simply gone straight in and straight out.

  Memory kicked in. The last time Anastasia had seen anything like this was when the lead singer of Simian Artillery had accidentally shot his lead guitarist during a variation on Russian Roulette that had formed the centrepiece of a marathon drinking session at the Ermitage Hotel after a sell-out concert in St Petersburg. Anastasia, the soberest of the group, had packed the entry and exit wounds with clean cloth, bound tight, and phoned the hotel’s doctor. Who, as it turned out, had complimented her work and said she had missed her vocation as a nurse. Just before the disgruntled night manager threw them all out of his exclusive hotel – and suggested they try the Baskov Hotel instead.

  She knew what to do, therefore – but she wasn’t so sure she had the wherewithal to do it. The cleanest piece of cloth on board was likely to be Ado’s blouse or the T-shirt she wore beneath it. They, unlike Anastasia’s or Celine’s own, had not been rolling around in God knew what underneath the chapel. The blouse was cotton and too flimsy. The T-shirt was more substantial however. And, although Ado was by no means fully grown, there was a good deal more of her than there was of Anastasia – and a good deal more T-shirt, therefore.

  ‘Ado,’ said the Russian after a moment, ‘pass me the Victorinox and your T-shirt.’

  By midnight the wound was bound. Celine was resting more comfortably and both Ado and the prisoner seemed to be sound asleep. Anastasia wearily relieved herself over the stern, trying not to take too seriously the mental picture of a crocodile rising to bite off her backside. Then she too slumped sideways on the seat, trying without much success to make herself comfortable as she leaned back on to the top of the outboard motor. But even so, she went to sleep. It was only in her dreams that she began to come to terms with what had happened – what was happening still – at the chapel and the compound. But by the time she woke, she knew with a bone-deep certainty that she was going to have to do something about it.

  Anastasia sprang awake six hours later as the sun rose behind her and sent its first rays like a golden hammer to batter the back of her skull. Without thinking, she sat up, stretched, and reached down into the river to scoop a handful of blessedly cool water. She poured this over her head. It ran down her face and she licked her lips. It tasted sweet. She looked over the side. The river’s surface was glassy and clear. Her gaze plunged down into the crystal depths. Only at the deepest reach did shadowy hints of river-bed come and go, like reflected clouds far, far below. She scooped more water from the upper reaches. Drank and began to look around.

  She looked down at Celine first and was relieved to see her apparently sleeping peacefully. The white pads she had fashioned from Ado’s T-shirt were still in place, and still white. Their pressure had stopped the bleeding at least. Anastasia reached down to pull the wounded woman’s blouse together in a vain attempt to cover up her breasts. Then she looked up and out a little further. And met Ado’s wise eyes. ‘Thanks for the T-shirt,’ she said in Matadi. ‘The bandage seems to be holding well.’

  Ado nodded, her face still serious and thoughtful. Her blouse was little more substantial than Celine’s but at least it was decorously buttoned.

  ‘You didn’t kill me!’ a wondering, masculine voice announced from the bottom of the boat. ‘I thought you had killed me.’ The prisoner spoke Yoruba, but Matadi was a sub-dialect of the West African lingua franca and they could all understand each other.

  ‘We probably should have,’ snapped Anastasia. ‘Your friends have killed our friends – killed them and eaten them. And taken our students as slaves and soldiers. We need fewer like you, not more!’

  ‘But we do not slay our enemies,’ said Ado simply. ‘We love them. And we do good to those that hate us. It is what Father Antoine said.’

  ‘Father Antoine,’ answered Anastasia brutally, ‘was the first to die.’

  ‘Anastasia!’ Celine’s gentle voice came from beside the Russian’s foot. The tone of the word was that of a parent chiding a child. But instead of berating her, Celine simply said, ‘I’m thirsty.’

  Celine was too weak to sit on the seat beside the outboard, but
some cautious wriggling soon had her resting at a slight angle with her back against the curve of the side and her wounded shoulder in the shade of the seat above her. Anastasia scooped handful after handful of sweet water from the river and fed it to her friend – and Ado did the same for the soldier at her feet. The Russian woman at last took the opportunity to look around and get a clearer measure of their wider situation.

  The river had narrowed again, but it was still the better part of a kilometre wide. Because it had narrowed, it was flowing more swiftly, but still smoothly, between walls of green vegetation trailing down over banks that only revealed themselves every now and then. On their right, the occasional glimpses of red earth seemed to be smooth and slick, sloping back gently, like the bank beneath the chapel back at the compound. On their left there were steeper red mud walls that once or twice attained enough height to count as cliffs. And above increasingly lengthy sections of these, the jungle appeared to have been cut back, so that Anastasia began wracking her brains trying to remember if there was some kind of a roadway up there. And, if there was, where it might lead to.

  ‘Citematadi,’ said Celine when Anastasia broke down and finally asked her. ‘The city may still be a long way off, and there isn’t anything much there in any case.’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ added the young soldier. ‘We were there not long ago. There’s nothing in Citematadi.’

  There was silence for a moment, then Ado said, ‘My name’s Ado. That is Celine and the woman with the gun is Anastasia. What’s your name?’

  ‘Esan.’

  ‘Esan? That’s not a name, it’s a number.’

  ‘It’s the name the general and Ngoboi gave me when I became a Soldier of Christ the Infant. When I became a man.’

  ‘Let’s not ask how he became a man,’ said Anastasia wearily. ‘It’ll have involved killing, eating and raping if last night was anything to go by . . .’

  That bitter observation crushed the boy to silence, but it also had an unexpected consequence. ‘Anastasia! The others!’ Celine was suddenly sitting upright, her movements enough to make the boat rock dangerously, her eyes wide with shock and bright with fever. ‘We have to go back! We have to help them!’