by Peter Tonkin
‘I’ve seen it – been on some of it,’ countered Robin. ‘It’s useless. Cite La Bas is dead and CiteMatadi is not much better. Cite La Bas was never all it was cracked up to be in the first place. They talked it up as the New York of West Africa – a buzzing twentieth-century hub. But it was little more than a frontier town with big ambitions.’
‘More like Tombstone in the Wild West rather than Tokyo, perhaps,’ offered Richard grimly. ‘Aptly enough, all things considered …’
‘Very witty, darling. Moreover, Max, the infrastructure between them hasn’t been touched for forty years. It’s all just jungle now. As far as I know the only way along your twelve-lane highway is by motorbike and on foot. God knows what’s happened to the railroad. Don’t fool yourselves, either of you. You’d need to start from scratch.’
‘It’s as though we haven’t just come up the river,’ added Richard thoughtfully, ‘it’s as though we’ve gone back in time! It’s like Jurassic Park down there.’
‘Robin!’ laughed Max. ‘Get a grip! And you, Richard – Tombstone … Jurassic Park! I ask you!’ But for once the booming Russian’s confident tone sounded a little hollow. For the last two hours there had been nothing to see other than the jungle, and that had been depressing enough. But now they were coming over the deserted suburbs of Cite La Bas.
After an hour’s flight at maximum cruising speed they were nearly three hundred kilometres from the River Gir now, approaching Cite La Bas from the south-west, so they were confronted at first by the stunted overgrowth of secondary jungle that had developed exponentially in the years since the gas cloud had killed those who had survived the eruption and the lava flow. City block after city block was literally running to seed. Plants burgeoned everywhere, given gigantic expansion by the rainforest climate. It was hard to see most of the houses, draped as they were with ivies, creepers and lianas. Huge trees rose, not only in gardens but through entire dwellings. It was hard not to see the secondary jungle as a living thing ruthlessly reinvading the land that humanity could no longer defend.
Awe-inspiring though this huge destruction was, it shrank to insignificance beside the utter devastation of the north-eastern suburbs. Here everything was black instead of green. Starkly, gauntly dead instead of threateningly fecund. Even after all these years – and after all that nature had dealt it, cars stuck up out of the cinder-black ground, half buried, frozen in place. All of them battered and rusting, many of them burst open like obscene flowers where their petrol tanks had exploded. Buses, trucks, lorries, pantechnicons stuck up like toys thrown on to an ash heap. Richard’s eyes swept over the devastation almost unbelievingly. A black-throated pit appeared, seemingly leading halfway to the centre of the earth; big enough to make him wonder if this was an offspring of the volcano itself.
‘That must be where the avgas tanks went up,’ said Max, who had read the report prepared for the government in the months after the disaster, when the international community had been throwing money, aid and volunteers at the place. Before it became obvious that almost nothing was getting past ex-president Liye Banda’s venal clique, who were growing fat while the dwindling survivors up-country were simply wasting away. And there was precious little that could be done in any case, especially in the face of the marauding Interahamwe, the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Army of Christ the Infant. Before they all pulled out again and left Benin La Bas well alone. ‘The explosion took out all the airport buildings and everything on the apron, so it says in the report.’
Richard just shook his head, beyond speech. He glanced at Robin. Her grey eyes were wide and full of tears. The state of the once-great city emphasized the point she had been making about the country’s infrastructure more powerfully than any words ever could have done.
‘Damn,’ said Max. ‘I’d hoped we could land on the runway at the airport or – at the worst – on the lava itself. The government report said the shield was flat, like the flows in Hawaii.’ He swung round, glaring at the experts cowering down the length of the cabin behind him. The two nearest glanced up guiltily. But in fact they were looking at the Japanese map and the GPS handset and were unlikely to have been the ones advising Max on the state of the lava flow.
‘You’ll never find a place to land there,’ said Robin. ‘What was Plan B?’
‘The lake,’ answered Richard. ‘Didn’t you see the floats on the undercarriage? The plan is to land on Lac Dudo.’
But Lac Dudo never appeared. The Kamov followed the pitted path of the lava flow until one of Max’s experts – the one with the map – called out and the helicopter swung westward. They all craned to see the surface of the volcanic lake. But there was nothing to see. The broccoli heads of the virgin rainforest opened out into a huge prairie of lighter green, but there was no water.
‘This is the place, Mr Asov,’ called the expert with the GPS, already nervous at having got the blame for the lava flow’s unexpected condition. ‘We are immediately above the position that the Japanese map makers recorded.’
‘But there is no lake here!’ snarled Max.
‘It looks like a big meadow,’ said Felix. ‘Put us down here and we can explore,’ he called through to the pilot. The chopper began to settle.
Richard looked out, his mind racing. ‘This is weird, even for Benin La Bas,’ he observed to Robin. ‘One minute there’s a black lake, the next there’s a big meadow. What on earth is going on?’
Robin knew the river best, so she understood what they were looking at first. ‘Stop!’ she called to the pilot. ‘Take us up again! Max, for God’s sake tell him before it’s too late! That isn’t grass – it’s water hyacinth!’
The pilot responded to her call, and under the extra pressure of the rotor’s downdraught, the apparently solid prairie rippled and began to heave.
‘Thank you, Robin,’ said Max soberly. ‘I believe you have saved us all from an unexpected swim and a very long walk indeed!’
Richard and Robin exchanged meaningful glances. They both knew that if the Kamov had tried to land on the deceptive-looking meadow it would almost certainly have broken through the mat of vegetation and sunk. And anyone trying to find the surface once they were below the water hyacinth would have been doomed to drown as though trapped beneath a solid layer of ice.
Chopper
‘Right!’ said Max. ‘Now that we have found the lake, let us explore a little further. I am not about to let some floating weeds stand between me and two trillion dollars’ worth of coltan!’
‘Good idea!’ added Felix. ‘But where shall we start? I doubt we have enough fuel left in the chopper to simply circle round and round …’
‘Excuse me, Mr Asov,’ hazarded the expert with the map a little nervously. ‘The area in which the Yakimoto Freshwater Pearl Company constructed Doctor Koizumi’s oyster-harvesting facility is marked most precisely on this map. Apparently there was a relatively large section cleared of jungle there.’
‘Excellent!’ boomed Max. ‘Go and give the pilot the coordinates. Once I get a toehold,’ Max continued, ‘then I’m in. I’ll bomb, burn or poison that floating garbage and get at the lake bed no matter what.’
‘It might be worth taking it carefully to begin with,’ warned Robin. ‘If you leave the oysters alive, then you could have a second income stream in pearls.’
‘Huh,’ grunted Max. ‘We’ll have to see whether they’re worth more mounted or strung – or crushed to get at the coltan dust within them!’
Felix reached down for the briefcase that was standing beside his right ankle. It went on to the table and opened to reveal, among other things, a slim bottle of Stolichnaya Elit vodka and four shot glasses, one inside the other. ‘Let us leave such thoughts to the future and drink to our continued success,’ he suggested, handing shot glasses over to Max and Robin.
Robin put her glass upside down on the table with a disapproving snap and glanced at her teetotal husband. But his mind was elsewhere. Richard was not used to following along in someone else’s p
lans. He was a natural leader. She wondered what he was thinking up now. Max held his glass out as Felix unscrewed the top of the bottle. ‘Success!’ he said. ‘A good toast!’
‘Success!’ toasted Felix cheerfully. Both Russians tossed the spirit back, then repeated the procedure and seemed to become a little more expansive and relaxed at once. They leaned back. Loosened their seat belts. ‘It will be good to see what is left of Doctor Koizumi’s facility in any case,’ rumbled Max. ‘It would make a satisfactory base for our own people.’
‘There won’t be much there, surely,’ said Robin. ‘Not after what happened. I mean, I’m a bit sketchy on the history of the place but I know they were all slaughtered. Bodies were brought back but no one ever really sorted out who was who. They were chopped to pieces by those terrible matchet things the men all seem to carry here. In any case, the buildings were all destroyed. Apparently there was some woman there who was never found.’
‘Doctor Mizuki Yukawa,’ confirmed Max, who had clearly read more than just the report of Cite La Bas’s destruction. Not for the first time, Robin made a mental note never to underestimate Max’s professionalism and willingness to do the basic groundwork. He might be a bullying sexist bastard who’d disowned his daughter Anastasia while bed-hopping through a series of mistresses young enough to be her sister. He might show a weakness for vodka and occasionally become dangerously unpredictable as a result. But he had built a massive company. And he hadn’t just done that by luck, bribery, strong-arm tactics and buying up massively undervalued ex-nationalized facilities in the months after the collapse of the communist system. He was nobody’s fool. He did the groundwork. And the fact that he knew about the deaths of the Japanese was a case in point.
‘She’s out there somewhere, whatever’s left of her,’ Max continued, his tone darkening. He gestured with his left hand, striking the knuckles against the window as he tried to encompass the entire rainforest on Karisoke’s southern slope. ‘Unless the people who killed the others took her with them.’
‘If they did, then she’s probably somewhere nearby,’ said Robin sadly. ‘They won’t have taken her anywhere very far, I’d have thought.’
‘And, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, they won’t have kept her long,’ added Richard grimly. ‘Whoever they actually were.’
‘Apparently the best guess was that it was an early manifestation of the Army of Christ the Infant,’ continued Max. ‘Pre-Moses Nlong days. Before they hit the headlines like Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army. They say the Army of Christ has been coming and going through here for decades in one guise or another, slaughtering villagers and animals, taking boys into their fighting units and making women and girls their sex slaves.’
‘If they caught her they’d have raped her, killed her and eaten her,’ said Robin matter-of-factly. ‘As Richard says, they won’t have taken her far. And they won’t have wasted time and food keeping her alive unless they thought she was worth a good solid ransom. But if they were going to ransom anyone, logic dictates that it would probably have been whoever was in charge.’
‘Doctor Koizumi,’ nodded Max. ‘They never found much of him either – certainly not his head.’
‘Nice!’ muttered Felix ironically. He threw back another shot of vodka. ‘More chopper work – with those matchets. Very nice.’
There was another short silence. Both Richard and Robin felt the weight of the knowledge they all shared but nobody was willing to discuss at the moment. Max’s estranged daughter Anastasia had been one of those attacked by Moses Nlong and his Army of Christ the Infant – and had been miraculously lucky to have survived the capture and slaughter visited on her friends. It had been a narrow escape, with a hair-raising ride down the great river in a tiny motor boat. Not to mention the equally spine-tingling return with Richard, Robin and an army bent on the rescue of the living and revenge for the dead. Anastasia was at the front of it all, armed to the teeth – ready, willing and able to execute her personal vengeance on Moses Nlong, the brutal army’s cannibalistic leader, only to see Odem, his right hand man, vanish into the jungle. But Max never talked about Anastasia, whom he had disowned and disinherited in the most brutally public manner possible the better part of ten years ago. So the silence lay there between them, like a dead thing on the table. Max threw back another shot of vodka.
‘You’ll want to be up on that,’ observed Richard grimly, breaking the tension at last. His narrowed eyes swept over both Max and Felix. ‘You’ll need to know pretty precisely what madmen are marauding around here nowadays. Moses Nlong may be dead but the Army of Christ is still out there somewhere. Like the situation with Kony and the LRA. Whether he’s dead or not, they still seem to be going, and not too far south of here either, come to that.’
Robin nodded to herself. So that was what Richard was thinking about as his bright blue gaze had been quartering the jungle all around them. And wisely so. Until the area could be secured against the anarchic militias that had infested the place for the last forty years or so, there was absolutely no point in investing anything up here – no matter how great the promised prize. And there were only two ways in which absolute security could be guaranteed: either the country itself needed a settled government that was able to guarantee security throughout its dominions, or Max was going to have to come up with an army of his own capable of outgunning the Army of Christ and whoever else came cruising by, drawn to Max’s promised trillions like sharks drawn to blood.
‘And this is the kind of place they come to, to regroup if for no other reason,’ emphasized Robin, running with Richard’s idea as though she had been able to read his mind. ‘Not that there’s much for anyone up here, heaven knows! Unless they can get across the border into Congo Libre or one of the other neighbouring states who don’t mind supplying arms and expertise in the hope of fomenting a little trouble along the border. They can regroup and rearm there, then come back and start all over again here. But even so, unless they have a very powerful agenda indeed, it’s hard to see that there’s anything worthwhile for anyone in this godforsaken place.’
‘Except for us,’ exulted Max, brightening up suddenly, unexpectedly. And, given Richard and Robin’s concerns, not a little disturbingly. ‘Except for us! For us there is two trillion, five hundred billion US dollars!’
‘We’re there, Mr Asov,’ called the map man from the cockpit. ‘Right over Doctor Koizumi’s facility. At least, where it’s marked on the map. But I’m afraid I can’t see any buildings or anything …’
‘Right,’ said Max. ‘Tell the pilot to take us down. But do it carefully!’
Felix screwed the top back on the vodka bottle and replaced it in his briefcase, much to Robin’s relief. Richard strained to see out of the window, hoping for a clear view of whatever lay immediately beneath them, wondering what the odds against finding a hostile army hiding in the undergrowth were.
Robin looked further away as the helicopter settled below the level of the upper canopy. The great branches reached out, laden with broad green leaves, festooned with pendant mosses, even at this upper level, bound with massive ropes of creeper and liana. Below them were cavernous, shadowy spaces. Then the lower, secondary canopy – thinner, robbed of light by the huge upper leaves, seemingly strangled from below by the creepers, the parasitic orchids and all the other plant life fighting desperately for a share of the sun and the rain, feeding off each other like vegetable vampires.
As the Kamov obediently settled further, Richard’s gaze fastened on the huge grey ferns of the jungle floor which came piling out into the sunlight like breaking waves. Immediately in front of them, a wall of reeds and rushes as wide as a highway and as tall as a bungalow defined the edge of the lake. The reeds reached towards the belly of the helicopter, and Richard frowned with concentration, seeking clearer ground beside them. But there was nothing.
Where Max had no doubt imagined an open area of grass the size of a football pitch conveniently placed for the Kamov to land safely, th
ere was instead a stand of bamboo the size of Wembley Stadium. Many of the bamboo tops were covered with feathery leaves, but by far the majority of them were tipped with fearsome points, like spears. And the bamboo stood as tall as the lakeside reeds – at least three metres. There was no sign at all that any human had ever had the temerity to come here. Dr Koizumi and his facility might be as much of a fairy tale as the monsters Richard had brought to mind when he likened the place to Jurassic Park.
‘You’ll never get down here,’ said Richard grimly. ‘This place is locked tight shut against any kind of aircraft. The only way in is on foot, Max.’
‘You’re right,’ admitted Max. ‘I just hate admitting defeat.’ His fist crashed on to the tabletop. ‘Take us up again,’ he called to the pilot.
‘At least, now that we’re here, we can try to follow the tributary stream to the main river,’ said Richard. ‘Anyone coming in on foot may well want to follow it upstream – as a guide, at least. It’ll be as well to get a good idea what the terrain actually looks like.’
As the helicopter rose back into the sky above the treetops and turned away towards the distant River Gir, the largest of the ferns parted and a man dressed in army camouflage cargo pants and a green vest stepped out. He wore a green beret and wraparound sunglasses with mirrored lenses. He carried a Desert Eagle in a green webbing holster on his right hip. On his left he carried a matchet with a stainless steel blade more than a metre long. In his high-laced right boot he carried a black-bladed Russian military Stalker knife. Around his chest he wore a webbing bandolier carrying half-a-dozen double clips of five point forty-five ammunition for the brand-new AK-74M with GP-30 forty millimetre grenade launcher that he cradled like a baby in his muscular arms.