“We adapt to the times,” said Limbani. “My father got his first doctor of medicine degree at Cambridge University. He was a member of Jasper Maskelyne’s magic circus during World War Two.”
“The man who made the city of Alexandria in Egypt and the Suez Canal disappear,” said Holliday. “He planted two thousand plywood tanks and painted entire fake armies on Salisbury Plain to throw off German reconnaisance flights just before D-day.”
“That’s right,” said Limbani. “They knew that aerial photography was an important part of protective coloration, and it’s even more important now with three dozen satellites peering down on us at various times of the day and night.”
“But why the camouflage?” Holliday asked. “What are you trying to cover up?”
“In the first place, the fact that the Umufo omhloshana exist at all. They are neither Baya, Banda nor even Kolingba’s scourge, the Yakima. If he discovered them here it would be genocide. Like most African dictators, Solomon Kolingba is a racist, in his case a racist of insane proportions. In the second place . . . well, you’ll see soon enough.”
They reached the bottom of the cliff a quarter of an hour later, a steep path through scrub brush leading down to a wall of dense jungle foliage. Following the path, Holliday realized that what had appeared to be dense jungle in front of them was in fact a curtain of netting hung with strips of multicolored cloth and inter woven with twigs and branches. They pushed through a small gap in the netting and stepped into the forest beyond.
“Amazing,” said Holliday, staring. “Absolutely amazing.”
Oliver Gash sat alone at a table in the bar at the Hotel Trianon and slowly sipped his after-dinner café brûlot, enjoying the aroma of the cinnamon stick and the bitter orange tang of the Grand Marnier. Except for Marcel Boganda, the bartender, the room was almost empty. There were two Chinese trade officials in the corner getting drunk but that was all. Oliver Gash’s appearance tended to clear most rooms he entered, but he was used to his effect on the local populace.
By now Kolingba was concentrating his attentions on the two prostitutes Gash had imported from Bangui who were willing to take their chances in bed with the three-hundred-pound dictator and his sometimes violent habits. Gash could relax for the evening, but somehow he didn’t think relaxation was in the cards for him tonight. He’d fled from Rwanda the better part of twenty years ago and he hadn’t survived that terrible place and the different jungle of Cherry Hill and the rest of south Baltimore by ignoring his intuitions and his hunches. Over the last ten days or two weeks those hunches and intuitions had set all his senses tingling and his alarm bells ringing, all banging out the same tune: Get the hell out while you can.
He slowly drank his coffee, trying to put things together in a logical progression, hoping to see something concrete take shape out of the kaleidescope of small impressions, rumors, facts and whispers that a man in his position came in contact with all the time.
It had started even before the arrival of the Canadian with the German accent; sightings of Limbani had increased and there was an air of expectation among the people, a desperate, uneven thing, the feeling you got when you saw someone die under the wheels of a bus. It didn’t take jungle drums to tell you that the natives were restless and, more important, expectant. These people were perhaps two generations from being naked savages running after their prey. He had no doubt they’d be gnawing on the bones of any ruler who showed a single sign of weakness.
He hadn’t heard from Saint-Sylvestre for more than a week now, which was worrying in itself, but he had done some investigation on his own. Archibald Ives had indeed been a mining engineer and it hadn’t taken much to backtrack from the murder site on the Sudan highway to his boarding the Pevensey, which plied the course of the Kotto River from Umm Rawq to the first cataract, effectively the border between southern Sudan and Kukuanaland. From there he’d gone deeper into the bush by dugout. If Saint-Sylvestre was right, he’d found something with enough importance to get him killed. According to the police report he’d eventually bribed the Khartoum police, for the killing was no random highway banditry; Sudanese bandits used old Mannlicher-Carcano Italian infantry rifles from the Second World War. According to the police file, the weapon used to kill Ives was a South African .50-caliber sniper rifle. The men who shot those were neither cheap nor easy to find, let alone hire, so who had done so?
The .50-caliber weapon led somehow to the appearance of Lanz, who by any indication was no arms dealer. During his time in Kukuanaland he’d made only the barest attempts to do business, preferring instead to go for long walks around the town. In Saint-Sylvestre’s opinion, Lanz was almost certainly plotting a takeover, and his own further investigations had seemed to bear that out.
On several trips to England made to open up lines of communication with large-scale drug operations there, he’d made a few private contacts who fed him regular tidbits of information about the men he was doing business with or might do business with in the future. Those contacts had only three days ago told him something of perhaps even greater importance: the appearance in London of none other than Francois Nagoupandé, dressed in a British Royal Army general’s uniform. Nagoupandé had been the vice governor of Vakaga province and the man who betrayed Limbani. He was also a bee in Kolingba’s bonnet. The fat dictator had a paranoid terror of Nagoupandé showing up with some phantom forces of arms raised God only knew where, even though Gash had men on a watching brief on the ex–vice governor, who rarely strayed out of his compound on a huge estate in Mali. Nagoupandé in a general’s uniform; was it just wishful tailoring or was something in the works? The most forceful clue to come downriver was the sinking of the Pevensey, the riverboat freight carrier destroyed by something big, like a Cessna Caravan. A question arose: Who wanted to stop the freight carrier from brokering eggs to the villages on the river in return for animal skins, native meat, fish and vegetables and occasionally a bit of panned gold or a diamond in the rough? Unless Pevensey’s Cuban expatriate captain was up to no good and bringing more than goat meat upriver.
Unless that was the direction the coup was coming from. Gash thought for a moment about the fact that Kolingba didn’t trust banks; the walls behind his third-floor private quarters were filled with billions in currency and bullion. Gash had checked the calendar today. In three days it would be the last phase of the moon. He had the feeling all the questions would be answered then. He finished his cup of café brûlot in a single swallow. No matter what he did or whose allegiance he honored he knew that Kukuanaland would be a very different place by the next time the full moon came around again. He got up from the table, only slightly pissed. He had a great deal to do and very little time to do it in.
He stood up and went to the bar to pay his account with Marcel the bartender. He paid the older, blankfaced black man thirty dollars in American bills, the generally accepted currency in Kukuanaland both because of its easy readibility and because it was the only currency in Africa that couldn’t be forged with a box of crayons. Marcel gave him his change and a receipt and Gash handed him back the change as a tip. It wasn’t until he got back to the compound and his quarters there that he unfolded the receipt.
Its message was simple and shocking: Limbani seen alive and well in the company of a number of white men near the Kotto River at Kazaba Falls.
He took out his old Baltimore Orioles Zippo and burned the piece of paper in the brass ashtray on his desk. He couldn’t hear the banging, thumping and screeching from above him in Kolingba’s quarters and decided that it would be more prudent to hold off on telling the general about it until tomorrow. Kolingba had an unpleasant habit of shooting the messenger, especially at times like this.
26
After standing at the foot of the cliff and then going through the foliage-threaded netting, Holliday could immediately see the genius of how the Pale Strangers had laid out their settlement. More than a settlement, actually—from what Holliday could see it looked very much like a
small city.
At least half of the valley floor—well camouflaged by the high canopy of the trees and assemblages of woven mats of twigs and plants hung at varying levels in the trees—was made up of at minimum fifty kraals, circular enclosures made from bamboo rammed into high mud-and-earthen walls, topped by heavy bamboo palisades a dozen feet tall.
At the entrances to the enclosures there was a heavy ladder that could be drawn up the berm, making it impossible to get in. There appeared to be small holes higher up in the palisades, and Holliday had no doubt that there were battlements up there, ready for Limbani’s warriors and their blowpipes.
Each of the enclosures had a central pole from which large triangles of fabric could unfold, covering the enclosure completely when it started to rain. Holliday recognized the design from the covering of the forum in Rome, and that stood to reason as well, since the lost legion was sure to have had engineers within the ranks.
“As I am sure you have already ascertained, the fabric roofs over each enclosure are of Roman origin,” Limbani said in the lead.
“But not the compounds themselves,” said Holliday.
“No, those are native, although the stone ones from Great Zimbabwe are roughly the same pattern.”
“It’s ingenious. Each compound is alone but at some point touches its neighbor. Any enemies have to fight down here on the low ground and what is, in fact, a garden maze. Easy to get lost, easy to bunch up if you were trying to take the place.”
“Better yet, if one compound is breached the occupants simply flee into the next,” Limbani said.
“The castle-within-a-castle design of a Templar fortress,” murmured Holliday.
As they made their way through the extraordinary maze they even saw tall canopy trees growing up out of several of the circular compounds, and in other places on the pathway more trees had been left in place. With that kind of attention to detail and the hundreds of hanging latticework shields, the whole place would be invisible from only a few hundred feet. From a surveillance satellite, the compound wouldn’t be seen at all.
“How many people live in each compound?” Holliday asked, following Limbani.
“It is difficult to say,” explained the doctor, half turning as they made their way through the serpentine maze, “since many different things are done within them, weaving, tanning, making fishing line and nets for the birds. One is given over to keeping bees. There is a whole compound merely for the making of blowguns and their darts, and yet another for the various poisons that are used, both plant toxins and animal. The plant toxin we use most often is concentrated ricin from the coating of simple castor beans. The animal toxins are usually concentrated venom from the gaboon viper or the boomslang. Sometimes we use the fat-tailed scorpion, Androctonus australis.”
“Fatal?”
“Invariably.” Limbani nodded. “My abilities in medicine have gone a long way toward improving the toxicity of their weaponry.”
“But why so aggressive?” Holliday asked. “There can’t be much in the way of real predators here.”
“You’re quite right,” Dr. Limbani answered. “For thousands of years they have been left alone in the jungle, to live their lives as they please, to fulfill their destinies as their gods see fit. But that is changing now. Those days are swiftly coming to an end. Kolingba is the first of his kind; he will not be the last unless we do something about it. We must do it, Colonel, and that time is coming sooner than you think. It is only a matter of days now.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“You think Mutwakil Osman is my only spy? There are a few others of my tribe who are friends to the Umufo omhloshana.”
“What can you do about someone like Kolingba? If he decided to go after this place it would be all over within a day. He has helicopters, rocket launchers, machine guns. You wouldn’t stand a chance. It would be suicide to fight those men.”
“And it would be genocide not to,” said Limbani calmly.
“You’ve got no defense against their kind of weapons,” argued Holliday.
“Think of your history, Colonel.”
“What kind of history?”
“Your specialty, as I understand it from Professor Wanounou. Military history.”
“All right. It’s simple: you’re outnumbered, you’re outgunned, and if laid siege to, you’d starve. It’s no contest.”
“Did you fight in Vietnam, Colonel?”
“Two tours when I was eighteen and nineteen. Exactly three hundred and sixty-five wet-behind-the-ears days, boots on the ground, and all three hundred and sixty-five have haunted me ever since. Not my favorite war, Doctor. Teenagers shouldn’t be killing people. It does bad things to their brains; believe me.”
“Then you know something about fighting in jungles.”
“Some.” Holliday nodded, a bitter, distant look in his eye.
“Helicopters are limited to some surveillance—the forest canopy sees to that,” answered Limbani. “Rocket launchers and any other forms of artillery are useless in the jungle. Tanks and other armored vehicles are equally useless; wouldn’t you agree?”
“For the most part.”
“Even laser-guided and infrared sighting devices are useless, day or night. During the day there’s too much interference and at night there’s so much return of heat from the ground to the air a person wearing night-vision goggles would be blinded. The West has invariably used weapons ill suited for unfamiliar terrains—the Abrams tank was meant for traveling three abreast on a European autobahn, and so was the Soviet T-90. Air transport to places like Afghanistan or Bosnia is a waste of time, and sand gets in the bearings when they fight in the deserts of Iraq. ”
“In Afghanistan, Americans forgot everything they learned about guerrilla fighting in Vietnam, and the Russians forgot the lessons they learned in their revolutions. Have you noticed that no foreign power has ever prosecuted a successful war on African soil against Africans—only against each other? Here warfare is reduced to its simplest and most terrible—two warriors, one against the other, where often it is the simplest weapon, least affected by terrain and the elements, that wins the day. With that kind of scenario, Colonel Holliday, we will not lose.”
“A proud speech, Dr. Limbani,” said Holliday. “But are you willing to bet your people’s lives on rhetoric?”
“Life is a bet, Colonel Holliday, but sometimes the odds can be evened. Follow me.”
He began to climb up one of the ladders laid down on the sloped berm around one of the palisades surrounding what appeared to be a larger-than-average compound close to the center of the maze. He reached the top of the mound of earth, bending over a little to catch his breath. Looking directly ahead, Holliday could see an indentation in the palisade: a doorway, perhaps.
“Skalle-odelle!” Limbani called out loudly.
“What language is that?” Holliday asked.
“They have sacred words; those are two of them. Their day-to-day language is an ancient Malinke dialect from Sogolon’s time.”
“It sounds Danish or Norwegian,” said Peggy.
“Ragnar Skull Splitter,” said Rafi softly. “Skalle-odelle , perhaps?” The archaeologist looked at Holliday. “It would make sense if this is where Julian de la Roche-Guillaume wound up—and we’ve proved by now that it is. It would also explain the clothing worn by the Pale Strangers: a good imitation of what the average Egyptian workingman wore eight hundred years ago—a simple linen kilt. If Ragnar and his men actually came down the Nile it would have been reasonable for them to adopt a similar form of dress.”
Limbani laughed. “You impress me, Wanounou; most archaeologists don’t make interpretive leaps of thought like that.”
“Rafi’s not your ordinary archaeologist,” said Peggy, smiling. “He’s more the ‘seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before’ type.”
A few feet in front of them a seven-foot-wide section of the palisade lifted like an old-fashioned portcullis
on a castle. Beyond the opening was an enclosed passage at least twelve feet high and made of solid planks on both sides and above. At regular intervals in the tunnel-like enclosure were small circular openings, each one a little larger than the diameter of the blowguns used by the Pale Strangers. The artificial tunnel was twenty feet long and ended in a second gate as solid as the walls and the roof.
“Ingenious!” Holliday said. “A barbican gatehouse, complete with meurtrières.”
“Murder holes?” Limbani said as they made their way along the enclosed corridor. “They had names for such things?”
“They’ve always had names for such things,” said Holliday dryly. “That particular one is a French invention, if memory serves.”
As the entrance behind them clattered shut, the gates in front of them swung open and they stepped out into the open compound within three palisades. A half dozen plank-cut Indian longhouse buildings were arranged in a semicircle at the outer edge of the compound, each one with a totemlike “figurehead” jutting out from the center beam of the sloping roof. One of them was identical to the rooster-shaped mask Holliday had seen Jerimiah Salamango, the “Christ’s destroyer,” wearing.
“Those are Viking longhouses!” Rafi whispered, his voice full of excitement. “This really is some kind of lost world.”
Women and children were moving from longhouse to longhouse while very young children, naked except for loincloths, played in the dirt, chasing one another around amid the buildings. A dozen or so adolescents, male and female, were seated cross-legged in a line a hundred feet or so away from a series of narrow plank targets painted with rough bull’s-eyes, the center marker white, the outer marker bright yellow.
Each of the young people had a blowgun in his or her lap and a woven, tubular quiver for darts slung bandolier-style across his or her chest. The boys were naked from the waist up while the girls wore simple cloth bands wound tightly over their breasts.
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