by Peter Tonkin
Although he had little education himself, Charles’s father had realised its importance and had invested much of his new fortune in educating his only offspring. After education at Winchester, Johns Hopkins and the London School of Economics, Charles had returned to spend the eighties extending the family business. But, like many men of his generation in Hong Kong, he had fallen foul of the Chinese government. His name had been mentioned by several student leaders caught in Tiananmen Square and the new mandarins in Beijing suddenly realised what an effort he and some others had been making to win over the next generation of Chinese officialdom, the generation that would be ruling Hong Kong when the colony returned to Chinese control in 1997. It had not occurred to the Chinese government until then that anyone could be so arrogant as to foment unrest, infect young minds, finance nascent political parties, all in an attempt to control the government itself and the power of a money market that they had hoped to control themselves. It came as a shock. It was seen as an outrage. It had so nearly worked, too. Consequently, it had been borne forcefully upon him that as soon as Hong Kong became Chinese again, Charles Lee and his company would cease to exist. So he had come west to work, to wait and to watch.
He was even more careful than Sir William, the man whose executive power he had assumed. It was paper power in Charles’s case but none the less real for that, and the Hong Kong Chinese executive knew this very well. All the stock of the company was held in this room. Originally it had been held by Sir William’s family, by himself, his wife and his two daughters. Lady Heritage’s portion had gone in equal shares to Rowena and Robin on her death, but some of Rowena’s had gone to Richard on their marriage and he had held on to it during their stormy relationship and during the years of estrangement which followed her death. Now he held some of Robin’s too, for he had married the little sister ten years ago and his second marriage had been everything the first had not.
Only Sir William held more stock in the business; only he wielded more power when push came to shove. But the family had agreed that the company could only survive if the power of ownership deferred to the power of senior company executives such as Helen and Charles. Richard had never seen this as any constraint. Until now.
‘Look,’ he began again, ‘it’s a once in a lifetime chance. We have the interest, the political and financial backing ready to go. It looks as though it can be done and there are suddenly a lot of people all over the world who want to see it done. If it is done, then a whole new door opens. If anyone proves that pulling an iceberg to a desert and delivering fresh water to drought-stricken areas is actually feasible then we suddenly have a whole new industry, a new shipping industry. It’ll be like oil transport in the seventies, the sky will be the limit, and if we get in now we’ll be holding all the chips. You must see that.’
Charles Lee shook his head. ‘I see us committing more than half of our entire fleet to one venture which has incalculable risks and uncertain rewards. I see winter closing in while you try to move this thing through the North Atlantic. I see you arriving off the Gulf of Mexico at the height of the hurricane season. I see you pulling a lump of ice across the equator into high summer where it will be very hot indeed and watching it all just melt away. I see problems of contract, payment and command structures. I see problems rearranging tanker schedules at this end and I see no final destination at the other end. I see no one in their right mind at the United Nations actually wanting to get involved with this when they have properly assessed the financial and political risks and dangers. But most of all I see no one in their right mind offering us any insurance cover whatsoever and without that, this is a dead issue.’
‘We can’t just stand still and catch our breath,’ Richard shot back. ‘We compete or we die, and we’ve got to keep looking for new markets. The oil market’s collapsed. The leisure market will take off when the recovery does. If the recovery does. The waste disposal market’s dead slow to stop. Atropos is fully employed but it’s a blessing Clotho’s in dry dock, because we couldn’t make much use of her until the British government make up their minds about Thorp and Sellafield and the whole question of reprocessing. The whole question of fast breeder nuclear reactors. The whole nuclear question itself, come to that. The only possible area of expansion is Russia. How’s that coming, Helen?’
‘Slowly. The government in Moscow’s still in trouble. The republics are dragging their feet. They don’t want fast breeder reactors either, not after Chernobyl and Tomsk Seven. And of course the whole point of reprocessing like British Nuclear Fuel propose at Thorp is that you extract the elements needed in fast breeders. And to make matters worse, the Russians don’t really want to part with the nuclear weapons Yeltsin and Bush agreed must be decommissioned. Some republics even see their nuclear arsenals and expertise as their only short-term chance of earning foreign currency. And the really dangerous stuff, the stuff they don’t want and only an outfit like ours could handle properly, still doesn’t come our way because they just shove it onto container ships and dump it on Novaya Zemlya - though of course they swear they don’t do that any more and the Americans would probably cut off all their aid if there was any real proof. All in all, it’s slow, hard work. And you know the Russians. One minute you’ve got a contract, the next. . .’ She gave one of her expressive Gallic shrugs.
Richard sprang into the attack. ‘So, retrenchment isn’t as risk-free as you seem to think, Charles. That iceberg may well represent a real chance. A genuine business deal. With a responsible, reasonable, reliable, rich client. Look at it. Look at what happens in Africa when the drought sets in. Look at Somalia! Don’t you think the UN and the US and all the other countries and organisations trying to police the world realise how much cheaper it would be to avert a war instead of trying to contain one? And this is a real chance to do just that. Sure there are risks. Yes, there will be problems, dangers even. One man is dead already, God help us. More might die. Yes. But think of the benefits if it all works. For the world as a whole! For us!’
Charles shifted in his chair. His brown-black eyes swept round the table, reading the expressions there. ‘Two for and two against,’ he said and four heads nodded. ‘I have the casting vote then, and I vote to put it to a full board. If you can persuade the duly appointed representatives of our bankers and most of all our insurers—’
The phone rang and the secretary quickly crossed to answer it. Silence settled on the long room, a silence emphasised by the quiet of the footsteps and the conversations in the street outside. Like the centre of Belfast, the centre of London was ringed with steel against the IRA now and there was little traffic allowed.
The secretary turned, her hand automatically covering the mouthpiece of die phone so that their deliberations remained private. ‘It’s the secretariat upstairs,’ she said quietly. ‘A fax has just arrived for Captain Richard Mariner. They’ll bring it down when it’s finished printing out.’
‘What is it? Any idea?’ asked Richard.
‘Yes, sir. According to the title page, it’s the draft contract for the hire of six supertankers and it’s apparently being sent directly from the office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations in New York.’
~ * ~
Chapter Eight
Ann Cable ran across her suite in the Mawanga Hilton, tearing off her clothes as she went. The buttons of her bush jacket ripped free of the buttonholes and those of her shirt burst loose to rattle against the wall. She paused only to get rid of her desert boots and rip her shorts down, then she was in motion again, heading towards the bathroom and the blessed promise of the shower.
The air conditioning in the whole hotel was down again, so even with the big fan turning up above her head, the air was as thick and hot as boiling oil. Although the shutters were closed against the afternoon sun, it glowed round their edges as though each one was a grill full on. There was no relief from the blistering heat, inside or out. She threw a sock across the room and it landed in an explosion of coarse red dust.
>
As she strode past the long mirror, she glanced automatically across at it, catching a glimpse of herself in a bar of sunlight, every curve and hollow of her covered in that same red dust as though she had first-degree burns. The whole of her long body felt as though it was infested with crawling things - things which scuttled restlessly over her olive skin and nested in her groin and under her arms, biting her mercilessly there. She tore her flimsy brassiere away and supported herself against the frame of the open door as she hopped on one leg to rid herself of her dust-caked white cotton pants. The tile of the bathroom floor was cool beneath her hot feet but this only served to emphasise the agonised discomfort of the rest of her.
She was actually groaning with expectation as she entered the tall cubicle, her need too great to allow her to bother with minor details like closing the shower door. Her concentration as she used both hands to turn on the cold tap was that of an addict injecting a drug and her gasp of relief as the first cold spray hit her upper chest was hoarse and guttural. She swept her hands up over her ribs and cradled her breasts in cool pools cupped in her palms until her nipples tensed with the cold. For an instant more she stood beneath the numbing blast, then she turned, mouth open and eyes closed, to let it pound against the back of her neck and slide like grains of ice across the breadth of her shoulders and down the length of her spine. She arched her long back ecstatically until the needles of cold beat through her thick, dark hair. But even this was not enough. She turned again, reaching up to pull the shower’s handset off the wall, then she ran the freezing power of the water quickly down her body until she could aim it directly up between her legs until coolness at last began to come. And with it came her self-control. Her left hand flew out and smashed against the tap, bloodying her knuckles as she turned the water off.
Then she was on her knees in the disappearing pools of water, swearing out loud, sobbing with anger and frustration, almost all of it aimed at herself and her Western, white-skinned weakness.
She had become so wildly over-heated out in the bush, interviewing local tribesmen and women who were dying in their thousands because of the drought. During the last few, unforgivably self-indulgent moments she had used enough water to keep a village baby alive for a month.
She sat back on the cool porcelain and slid across the shower stall until she could curl up in the corner with her back against the tiled wall, and while she waited for the prickly heat to return, she sucked her bleeding knuckles and she thought. She thought about this place where she was trapped, watching a tragedy and waiting for a war.
~ * ~
The state of Mau lay between Guinea and Gabon, north of Zaire on the west coat of Africa. At the back ends of the Bights of Biafra and Benin in the Gulf of Guinea as they had featured in her old school atlas in the days when Africa had seemed a romantic place to her. Now it looked very different. Now a country like Mau, a city like Mawanga just looked like the crippled, dangerous offspring of uncaring, abusive parents. Just like so many other states on the west coast; like so many in Africa as a whole.
Mau had been formed - malformed from the very beginning -by volcanic activity soon after the birth of the continent which would one day become Africa. At some time far back in pre-history, the rocky plains which would, become this dark continent split. One block of land was thrust up while the one beside it fell. For hundreds of kilometres in from what would one day become the west coast, a tectonic cliff thrust up. As the years passed into centuries and millennia and the continents drifted apart, so the water of the young Atlantic came to the foot of the cliff and then withdrew to run north/south at right angles to it.
At the top of the cliff grew a thick, lush jungle which swept northwards down the back of an incline into the forests of what would later become Guinea and the mountains of Cameroon. This jungle was supported by the weight of the rain which was carried in die moist winds that moved along the northern edge of the equator and was made to fall by the sudden upthrust of the cliff. But the jungle itself could not contain the rain and so a river was born which ran, in common with its brothers the Shangha, Ubangi and Zaire, south and west. Over the cliff edge came the great River Mau to thunder down two hundred metres sheer. At die foot of the cliff, the lie of the land turned the flow of water due west at once to run along the foot of the escarpment until it was gulped in by the greedy ocean more than five hundred kilometres distant. But the great flow of the Mau brought all sorts of silt and detritus and this formed a delta over the years, thrusting the coast away from the cliff foot into a flat alluvial plain. No matter how wide the plain became, it seemed the flow of the river was always enough to keep the centre of it clear so that a pair of sandy horns thrust out, like the tusks of the lowland elephants which wandered the green thorn country at the foot of the cliffs. But in fact there was more to it than that. The power of that first tectonic heave had been such that it had split the continental shelf. Although the plain and the sheltering harbour horns reached out, the bottom of Mawanga Bay reached down nearly a thousand metres and not even the mighty River Mau could fill it.
The N’Kuru tribe lived on the plain by the river at the escarpment foot from the dawn of the age of man. They were a tall people, who soon learned to organise themselves into loose confederations of villages and to keep, and trade, the cattle of the grasslands. They hunted little, mostly to protect their villages and half-wild cattle from the marauding herds of elephant and antelope, and the lions and cheetahs which roamed and hunted on the green pastures with their outcrops of baobab trees and thorn scrub. The N’Kuru took great delight in the bones and antlers, the skins, teeth and ivory their expeditions brought back home. Their hunting weapon was the long spear. When they made war they used intricately carved clubs fanged with lions’ claws, and the ox-hide shield. It was rare that they warred among themselves, for they had other enemies close by.
In the jungle at the top of the great escarpment lived the secretive, mysterious Kyogas. They were slighter, darker. They were not farmers at all, only hunters and explorers, ranging widely through the forests to the north. Their weapons were those of men who need to kill at a distance or at a great height: the bow and arrow. They tipped their arrows with poison prepared by wise women who passed the secret down from generation to generation. Inevitably they began to climb down the great cliffs in the darkness to enjoy the easy, rewarding hunting of the N’Kuru cattle on the plain. They found the N’Kuru women pleasing and would sometimes steal them, too; but no N’Kuru woman was ever told the secret of the poison. If forced to trade, a pastime they tended to look down upon, the Kyogas would part grudgingly with ornaments made of bright copper. But they would never say where the yellow metal came from. For centuries, a lazy rivalry festered, erupting occasionally into warfare as the farmers and traders of the plain were roused by some mighty warlord to defend themselves against the savage, witch-driven hunters of the high jungle.
Such a warlord was the great Mwanga who ruled from the coastal village which was later to bear his name in the year when the first Arab trading dhow came nosing down the coast. The Arab traders had spent the better part of a century exploring the length of this coast, watch by watch, from Tunis. On the far side of the continent, in a world undreamed of by the N’Kuru or even by the most intrepid Kyoga explorer, the sons of Sinbad had struck out into the magic vastness of the Indian Ocean, borne upon the wings of the monsoon. Here there were only winds like the harmattan blowing up and down the coast, and the sea to the west was forbidding and tall. No one who had ventured out upon it had ever returned, so now the captains crept along, never out of sight of the land, camping ashore each night. The Arab traders came seeking rare wood, spices, ivory and slaves. The N’Kuru were glad to trade; it was a profession they had followed since the dawn of time and they were proud of their commercial abilities. They had traded long in all the goods of interest to the strange, light-skinned men. In all except one. The Arabs added to their education in a single, important regard. Even Mwanga himself had only
considered killing his enemies; he had never thought to sell them.
But the Arab craft were small, suited only to the shallow coastal waters, and the way from Tangier was long. The Arabs never took many slaves, though the dark seed was sown. The villages, especially those along the coast, began to stockpile goods they knew the traders would want. Mwanga, a practical man, quickly understood that the strongest of his farmer subjects should be made into a warrior class whose task would be to fetch ivory, antlers, pelts and hides, and the fairest, most saleable of the sons and daughters made by the marauding Kyoga on the kidnapped N’Kuru girls.
The English captain John Smith came to the thriving village of Mawanga in the year Europeans called 1560 when the son of Mwanga’s son’s son was a very elderly king. The strange white creature in his boat as big as the great hut of the warriors wanted everything that the Arab traders did but in unimaginably greater quantities. Fortunately he was not too interested in the quality of the goods, and the N’Kuru soon understood - though they could hardly credit the fact - that the white skins were quite content to take even ugly little full-blooded Kyoga men and women.
During the next three centuries, Mawanga grew from a village to a trading port and to a town - almost a city. The English drove the Arabs out and built a stone fort to the seaward side of the village which was designed to protect the anchorage. The fort was a good idea but it was rarely adequately manned and the Arabs took it back with ease whenever they found the energy. As did the English, come to that. The relationship between the northern traders and the natives varied from co-operative peace to outright war. The fort was sacked and the garrison slaughtered on more than one occasion, but the stone walls remained and the traders came back again and again. Mwanga’s dynasty became dissolute and greedy. The white skins and the Arabs connived at its overthrow and replaced it with a series of their own chosen men. Peace came, and a kind of prosperity. Mwanga the great leader passed into shadowy legend. At last only the name remained as the name of the town itself.