by Peter Tonkin
‘All ready, Captain,’ answered the young man punctiliously. ‘Forward and aft doors closed. Everything aboard secure. All personnel in their assigned places. All crew ready and waiting.’ As if to support him in his report, the whole great frame of the hovercraft began to throb as the main motors came on line.
Zhukov turned to Robin. ‘We do not cast off, you see. We lift off! Inflate the skirts.’
Robin felt for a disorientating moment as though she was in an elevator car rising towards the first floor. As the deck beneath her levelled and settled, vibrating with suppressed power, Max came bustling on to the bridge. The instant he arrived he seemed to take charge.
‘Full ahead, Captain Zhukov,’ he ordered officiously, and the silver bear of a commander nodded.
‘Pulniv piot,’ he said quietly – or something approximating to that; Robin’s Russian was a little rusty and the captain’s accent was unfamiliar. The helmsman’s hands pushed the throttles forward, however, so the message had got through well enough. The message was also immediately transferred to the engine room, the power to the three huge turbines behind the bridge house cranked up to maximum. With the whole of her massive hull vibrating gently, Stalingrad lifted up her skirts and flew.
Anastasia was not consciously thinking about Ivan, but he was never far from her mind at this time of day. In the first cool of the evening she, Ado and Esan were leading the girls in a route march much like the ones Ivan described in the days when they had been in regular contact. Except that there was no route – they went where Anastasia chose on the spur of the moment. And they did not march – they jogged. Further, in an addition to a routine already deeply foreign to the tribal societies of the west coast, they carried makeshift backpacks. Most of the weight of the backpacks consisted of drinking water, so each time they stopped to rehydrate their burden became lighter. It was a system Anastasia had designed and she found it worked well. The girls were fit, lean and strong. Metamorphosing from a group of frightened schoolchildren into a fighting force. Her Dahomey Amazons reborn.
Running was a familiar tribal custom further south and east, she knew. No one would have looked twice at a Masai or a Zulu running across the veldt. But here the girls were followed by cheers, whistles and hoots from Matadi, Yoruba and Kikuyu farmers whose traditions were rooted in fields and forests. Only the boys from the orphanage, out working in the fields with the farmers, looked on silently. And, if the truth be told, a little jealously.
Anastasia and her girls were dressed in clothing suited to their efforts – and again this broke with tribal traditions. Instead of the modest traditional costume of buba and iro, such as Celine, in fact, was wearing in the parliament building away downriver, they were dressed in loose trousers and vests. The trousers were light, baggy and modest. The vests were high-necked and sleeved to the elbow. When the girls set out, they could have been going to church. The trouble was, of course, that a lot of the water they used to rehydrate their bodies came out again, almost instantly, as perspiration. And, try as she might, Anastasia could not overcome the fact that after a couple of miles the trousers moulded themselves to straining buttocks and pumping thighs, while the vests effectively became as revealing as layers of body paint.
This evening, in an attempt to spare the girls’ blushes, Anastasia led them through the cultivated fields first, with the sun setting warmly on their backs, then she swung right off the beaten track and down southwards towards the river. Here, although the soil was fertile, the jungle was thickest. As the sun sank into the tops of the trees far down the delta itself, and the moon began to rise behind her left shoulder across the wide expanse of the river, she led the girls back towards the orphanage, past the township clustered around it and the enhanced landing and docking facilities that had so recently been built there. But it was more than the gathering cool of the evening that made her skin rise into goosebumps, her nipples clench to firm points beneath the soaking cling of her green vest. Suddenly Ado and Esan were at either shoulder.
‘Someone’s watching us,’ whispered Esan.
‘I feel it,’ gasped Anastasia.
‘I don’t like it,’ hissed Ado.
Anastasia could see her point. Everyone who watched them usually was open – and noisy – about it. This was something else. This was someone watching them in secret from somewhere in the nearby jungle. Her mind suddenly flooded with fears about the news that had arrived from several quarters – not least from Robin on Skype – that the Army of Christ was back.
Automatically, Anastasia picked up the pace, looking around carefully – hopefully without giving her suspicions away to whoever was spying on her and her girls. Let it not be Odem, she prayed. We are not ready for the Army of Christ! A worm of self-doubt gnawed at her, whispering, We will never be ready for the Army of Christ. But all she could see was the jungle through whose edge they were running. The slope down to the river on her left. The river, occasionally visible through the trees and the undergrowth. The darkness of the gathering shadows in between.
Without conscious thought, she began to push right, up a slight incline, towards the brightness of the first fields – empty now as everyone had trooped back to town for their evening meals. But even deserted fields would be better than the shadows, she thought. A little breeze sprang up, running down towards the coast. It was a furnace-hot wind, locally called Karisoke’s Breath, which often blew just after sunset. Today it made the branches overhead heave and sway, filling the jungle with sinister hissing whispers. And, abruptly, there in her imagination, stepping straight out of her nightmares came Ngoboi.
Ngoboi danced in the gathering darkness at the edge of her vision – never clear when she looked directly at him. But as she ran uphill, fighting to get her little command out of the sinister, watching jungle, he swirled and capered before her. She could see the flash of his raffia skirts as they twirled out of sight behind bushes and trees. She could hear the beat of his dancing feet in the pounding of her heart. The deadly magic of his devilish song in the blood rushing through her ears and in the wind rustling through the trees.
Anastasia and her girls were running full-tilt and very near at the edge of panic, when she burst out of the jungle by the river’s edge and plunged on to the new slipway. The ghostly, taunting presence of Ngoboi was replaced by the unexpected bustle of two huge hovercraft unloading what looked like hundreds of soldiers, their transport and their kit. Anastasia did not hesitate. As though the reality of what lay before her was just the product of another feverish dream, she pounded relentlessly into the middle of it. Until suddenly somebody tall and unbelievably familiar straightened and turned to confront her. It might as well have been Ngoboi for all the credence her reeling brain was willing to give what her staring eyes could see.
‘Privyet, Nastia,’ Ivan said in that familiar voice, in those familiar terms that took her back to her childhood before the nightmares began. ‘Hi, Nastia.’
‘Vernis!’ she spat. ‘Get back!’ And she began to add, ‘Ya nenaviju tebya!’ I hate you!’ But somehow it came out as ‘Ya lublu tebya!’ – the exact opposite – instead. Then, like the heroine of the romantic fiction that she so despised, she fainted dead away.
If it had been a romance, Ivan would have caught her and carried her tenderly to safety in his strong but gentle arms. It was not. So she went down like a pile of bricks at his feet. Had the slipway been made of concrete, she would have done herself serious damage. But it was just a rough-hewn slope of red riverbank.
So it was, as Robin observed to Richard later, the mud and not the man that saved her.
Mission
‘Ivan! My God, what have you done to her?’ cried Robin, simply horrified.
At first glance it looked as though Anastasia had been shot in the head. The side of her face and the T-shirt that clung to her like a coat of paint were liberally splattered with a thick red mess. Her short hair hung in mud-thick, red rats’ tails. Her mouth gaped and her eyelids flickered, showing nothing but w
hite between the trembling lashes.
‘Nothing!’ snarled the Russian angrily. ‘The silly little zaychek keeled over the moment she saw me. This is red mud, not blood. But I couldn’t think of anywhere else to bring her, except to you.’ He held her out a little helplessly, like a child with a broken toy. There was more than anger in his eyes. There was pain and confusion. And Robin suddenly started feeling sorry for him.
She looked across her cabin at the bed which was only just large enough to accommodate Richard and herself. It was made up with a pristine, perfectly starched white cotton sheet. She closed her eyes, closed the case she had just put on it and swung it on to the floor. ‘Put her down here, Ivan,’ she said wearily. ‘Then go and get a medic. And Richard. In the meantime, leave her to me.’
No sooner had Ivan closed the door behind himself when the Russian girl’s eyes opened. ‘Was that Ivan Lavrentovitch?’ she asked Robin, her voice soft and croaky. ‘Or was I dreaming?’
‘Ivan as ever was,’ said Robin bracingly. ‘Though you look a bit of a nightmare, young lady. Did he hit you or something?’
‘I fainted.’ Her rasping voice was somewhere between wonderment and outrage. ‘I took one look at the big ox and keeled over. It was like I was in a romantic novel. Anna Karenina! Emma Bovary! Pathetic!’
‘Are you sure he didn’t hit you? You look dreadful.’
‘The only thing that hit me was the ground. And I was lucky it was mud instead of concrete. I went down so fast, anything really solid would probably have impacted like Anna Karenina’s bloody train!’
Richard announced his presence at that moment, pushing his head round the door. His arrival was a relief to Robin, who was beginning to find the literary references a little testing. But at least she knew that Anna Karenina threw herself under a train near the end of Tolstoy’s novel.
‘Ivan’s gone looking for the medic,’ said Richard. Then he registered the two pairs of eyes looking less than charitably towards him. ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked Anastasia solicitously.
‘I’m in shock and in pain and in need of a huge vodka and a long shower. In that order,’ Anastasia announced, sounding for once very much like her father.
‘But this is a dry ship!’ Richard said, almost outraged.
‘Is my otets aboard?’ demanded Anastasia.
‘Well, yes … Max has a cabin just up the corridor. As it happens …’
‘Then it’s not dry. Go get me some paternal vodka.’ She changed from a wounded harridan to an injured kitten in a twinkling. ‘Please, Richard …’
‘All right. But I know when I’m being ruthlessly manipulated …’
Richard arrived at Max’s cabin to find that Ivan had beaten him to it. The Russians were in the middle of a heated debate which under most social circumstances would have been private. But Ivan hadn’t closed the door and Max hadn’t told him to. Richard hesitated uncharacteristically for a moment, testing his Russian to the utmost both in terms of vocabulary and understanding. For although the last couple of Ivan’s words came loud and clear, Max’s reply was anything but.
‘You know very well what the problem is!’ Ivan was saying. ‘Simian Artillery. Or, more particularly, the lead singer, Boris whatshisname!’
‘He left his brains on the ceiling. That’s all there is to him!’ slurred Max angrily. ‘He was lucky we didn’t just stake him out and pile his guts on his chest so he could watch himself die in the old way …’
Richard thought that this was probably more information than he strictly required – especially as his Russian was not really up to the task of translating Max’s slurred voice with absolute accuracy. His understanding of what his business partner had just said would probably not stand up in court, for instance. ‘Excuse me,’ he asked, feeling as English as Bertie Wooster – and suspecting that Bertie was asking a thoroughly redundant question. ‘Have you any vodka handy, Max?’
‘Richard! Is that you? Yes, I have vodka. Naturally I have vodka. Russian vodka. But who do you want it for, my poor, teetotal friend?’
He knew how the truth would play out. It’s for your daughter would be answered by I have no daughter! Like dialogue from a Victorian melodrama. So he lied. ‘It’s for Robin. You know she likes a good solid belt of alcohol every now and then, Max. Well, tonight’s the night …’
Max gave a grunt of ribald amusement. ‘Tonight’s the night, eh?’ he said. ‘Then only the best will do.’ He reached down into a case on the far side of his bed and pulled out a bottle of Stolichnaya Elit. ‘Tell her it’s with my love,’ he said, handing it over. ‘No. With your love, eh?’
‘You can rely on it,’ said Richard, taking the bottle and finding himself awestruck by the fact that it was so cold his hand nearly stuck to it.
When he got back to the cabin, he found the women in a conversation about Anastasia’s childhood and her relationship with both the Ivans who had filled her young life. The conversation stopped when he entered, however. He crossed to the tiny en-suite shower room, reached over to the basin and lifted out a tooth glass. ‘Your father says it’s the best,’ he said, pouring a single measure and passing it over to her. And failing to mention that Max meant it for Robin, not the disinherited Anastasia.
‘Did he?’ she said. ‘Then I’ll need to have enough so I can taste it.’ She held out her hand for the bottle, and when Richard passed it over she filled the glass to the brim, then tossed it back in three great swallows. She rested both the glass and the bottle on the red wreck of the bed, one on either side of her hips, eyes closed. Her whole body rigid. Then she took one great, shuddering breath. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Bring me up to date before I drag myself off to the orphanage showers.’
‘I thought you knew that Colonel Kebila was going to use this area for his first base,’ said Richard with a glance across to Robin, who had been the Skypemistress of the trip so far and therefore the head of communications. ‘He plans to set up camp here – using any of the orphanage facilities you can share, and then send out patrols to secure the farmland and protect the farmers in the cooperatives as necessary – while tracking and catching Odem and his Army of Christ.’
‘He thinks they’re on this side of the river?’ she asked, frowning.
‘They could be, he thinks.’
‘He could be right. I had the feeling I was being watched just before I bumped into Ivan. Esan, Ado and I were pretty certain someone was spying on us from the jungle on the bank just a little way from here.’
‘Then Kebila may have arrived just in time,’ said Richard. ‘If whoever was watching you was a point man for the Army of Christ, this lot will scare him away. Even if it was Odem himself, he’ll think twice about taking on Colonel Kebila and his command. But I’d better pass on your intelligence to him just in case. Unless you want to report to him yourself.’
‘Looking like this? I think not, Richard.’ The vodka was mellowing her. He could almost see the strain draining out of her long, slim body.
‘I’ll talk to him then. Better safe than sorry,’ decided Richard, thinking of the way Mako had struck at Ivan just in that second before the big Russian was ready. That might be a stratagem that could appeal to Odem if his army was close at hand, given that it was probably as well equipped as Ivan’s men were. ‘But he’s bound to want to check with you, Ado and Esan.’
‘I’d better get moving then,’ said Anastasia. She swung her legs off the bed. ‘Unless,’ she said, ‘I can shower here and borrow a towel and a change of clothes from you, Robin.’
‘Well, of course,’ said Robin without thinking. Then she saw the implications of her generosity. She shot a slightly hunted look at her suitcase and the wisps of silk and lace that were bulging out of its ill-closed side.
‘Fear not,’ said Anastasia. ‘I won’t steal any frillies. Just lend me a shirt and some jeans and I’ll go commando.’
Richard was deep in conversation with Kebila in his makeshift office – the captain’s day room – when Anastasia arrived. She had br
ought Ivan with her, and Kebila nodded at the huge man companionably enough as he joined the conference as of right. Richard found himself marvelling at how fast the couple seemed to have mended fences – to the extent that they had achieved a sort of armed truce, at any rate – and speculated as to whether vodka had played any part in their reconciliation.
‘Thank you for coming so swiftly,’ said Kebila, rising and gesturing Anastasia to a seat. ‘What Captain Mariner tells me you experienced may be of the greatest importance. I have sent a man to the orphanage to ask Esan and Ado to join us. I expect your stories to match what Captain Mariner has told me and when they do, I will use this information as the basis of my strategy.’
When Esan and Ado arrived mere moments later, they confirmed that someone had been secretly watching them from the jungle close to where they were completing their route march. On this side of the river, therefore. And no – they had never experienced this feeling before, they explained to Richard, who got the question in a moment or so before Ivan. And, no – no one local had ever spied on them. It was not in the nature of the local farmers or the townspeople, all of whom called and whistled when the Amazons ran by, they explained to Ivan, who nodded and said that Russians were the same. Open. Honest.
Sexist, thought Richard. Antediluvian.
So, by the time the six of them had finished their conference, Kebila’s mind was made up. It was his mission to set up camp here and then to seek and destroy the Army of Christ. But the army, it seemed, had come to him. Chance had given him the opportunity of completing his mission more quickly than he could ever have dreamed. All he had to do was get enough of his men ashore and he could send out the first patrols tonight.
‘I can call for air support from dawn,’ he said. ‘I can have planes within half an hour, attack helicopters within one hour and troop transports within two, if I need more boots on the ground.’ He looked at Richard and Ivan. ‘We have the Chegdu Jian sevens which can get up there at twice the speed of sound. They are armed with a range of weaponry effective against troops and light armour on the ground. We have the Hip and Hind attack helicopters with gattlings and hellfires. And the Eurocopter Super Puma transports. All armed, fuelled and ready to go!’ He rubbed his hands in anticipation. ‘With any luck, we could have settled things with Odem within a day or two.’