by Peter Tonkin
~ * ~
Chapter Twelve
Ann Cable rode down in the lift and bustled across the busy foyer of the Mawanga Hilton. She felt tired but full of a febrile energy, full of words and writing. She hesitated on the great doormat, just out of range of the infra-red beam which tripped the automatic doors. She took a last, lingering deep breath of the air-conditioned atmosphere and then, holding it in her lungs, she moved forward. The doors hissed open and she flinched. Even in the shade of the building’s wide porch, the atmosphere rolled over her like a wave of hot oil. The temperature was in the mid-thirties already and the humidity was in the nineties. She had taken less than three steps, hadn’t even reached the boiling brightness of direct sunshine, before her body was drenched in perspiration and she breathed cool air out and hot, humid air in. She felt the energy begin to leak away at once, ruthlessly sucked out of her like the sweat. She summoned reserves she didn’t know she possessed and ran down the steps towards Robert Gardiner’s jeep.
Even through the lenses of her dark glasses, the sun nearly blinded her. She wore a battered hat and headscarf and she could feel the weight of it on the crown of her head. She burned her hand on the door handle as she climbed into the vehicle. It was only nine o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake!
‘Has this thing got air conditioning?’ she asked.
Robert laughed, his deep booming chuckle drowning out the whine of the starter. ‘You can open the windows,’ he told her as the engine caught. ‘But be careful of the dust.’
As he drove out to the airport, she swung round in her seat and watched him. His skin was incredibly dark, gleaming like polished ebony. His face was broad - broad forehead, lined from temple to temple, broad cheeks with long, narrow eyes above and broad flat nose below. Broad mouth, perfectly sculpted, with lips the colour of aubergine. Broad, square, absolute chin. Almost no neck, the great cannonball head sitting straight on the broad shoulders and great square chest above a powerful, elephantine barrel of a belly. The limbs complemented that massive torso, giving Robert the physical impact of an Olympic-standard weightlifter. In this heat, a man of his size ought to have been sweating profusely but, apart from the oiled gleam of his skin, there was no evidence that he felt hot at all. In fact, as her first breath inside the jeep informed her, he smelt faintly of cologne and nothing more.
Unlike herself. Since her semi-hysterical shower more than a week ago she had used water for drinking only, wherever possible. She bathed with a flannel which was little more than damp and flushed the toilet only when it became difficult to breathe in the bathroom. Her hair was a dusty mess of oil and she daily thanked God that she had had it cut so much shorter than usual before she came out here. Even so, she felt filthy, itchy and smelly. And exhausted. She rested her head on the back of the seat and closed her eyes as they sped through the all too familiar shantytown outskirts of the city.
In the seventies, when it had looked as though there would be a booming travel industry here, the road from the city to the airport had been a well-constructed highway with six lanes in each direction. The massive, impressive thoroughfare seemed out of place now, and it stood in increasing need of maintenance, as though the government tacitly admitted that the tourists would never come after all.
The airport, too, was over-grandiose; the result of plans and dreams which had died. They drove past the terminal building which stood semi-derelict, the home of a number of refugees who had come here from the dust bowls upcountry and remained, as though too weak to go on into the city itself.
‘There are an increasing number of them, in spite of the aid camps and the roadblocks outside the city,’ observed Robert. ‘I don’t know how they’re getting through, but I’m afraid there will be more. It’s a bad sign, the beginning of the end.’
‘It can get worse. You know that.’
‘I know; that wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was that once this sort of thing gets rolling, it follows an inevitable course. There’s no way back. It’s like a law of nature. You know about Fahrenheit 451?
‘The science fiction novel? I guess so, why?’
‘Not so much the novel as the title. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the burning point of paper. That’s why Bradbury chose it for a novel about burning books. But it’s the physics I’m interested in. The inevitability. At 450 degrees paper doesn’t burn. At 451 degrees it does and there’s nothing you can do about it.’
‘And you say we’re reaching ignition point here?’
‘I’m going to show you. Upcountry, in the heartland. And it won’t be pleasant if the reports are true.’
He braked suddenly and the long green vehicle screeched to a halt outside a corrugated iron and clapboard hangar. There was a perky-looking little single-engined Cessna parked outside with a mechanic sitting beside it in the shade of a wing. He got up as Robert and Ann climbed out of the vehicle. ‘Ready to go?’ asked Robert in fluent Kyogi. The mechanic nodded, smiled and saluted. He saluted with his right hand which was holding an automatic weapon. Robert saw the direction of Ann’s gaze. ‘Not standard UN issue,’ he admitted, ‘but if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t have this plane for long either. There’s no safe UN compound here. Yet. Though as soon as the police realise what’s going on they’ll move in and clear the refugees out. Set up more roadblocks, just as they have been doing all week.’
They climbed in and, as he went through the pre-flight, she thought about this extraordinary man and what he had just said to her. Robert Gardiner had started out as a schoolteacher in his native Guyana but he had spent the long vacations working for Save the Children and had proved himself such an able organiser and administrator that he had been employed full-time by the organisation. During the succeeding years he had moved from organisation to organisation, retaining links with each one he passed through. He still had contacts with Save the Children, and with UNICEF, with the World Health Organisation and with the World Food Programme. But he was now a field man for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, specialising in identifying the next likely trouble spots where refugees would result. Specialising in finding the potential flashpoints and trying to put them out.
Which was what he had been talking about earlier. Here they were in a situation already too familiar to him, to her, to anyone who cared to look around the world. A country which had hidden its tribal divisions beneath a veneer of good government, where increasing wealth and national hope was suddenly confronted with anarchy, poverty and despair. A country once strong enough to stand alone, now in danger of falling victim to rapacious neighbours; where millions, desperate and hopeless, were on the verge of becoming the playthings of civil and cross-border warfare. And it was here. Now. The whole situation was simmering on the edge of explosion. How it would come and where was impossible to tell. When would it come? Soon. A day. A week. A month at most. The UN could see it coming, warned by Robert Gardiner and their other representatives on the ground, and there was apparently much bustling in New York as they tried to find some way of slowing down the inevitable slide to costly conflict. But no one quite knew what they were up to and when relief would arrive.
The UN were not the only people involved. There were all too many people who could see immense gains to be had out of anarchy in Mau. And they were out there too. For every Robert Gardiner there were others with much more sinister motives plotting to undo his work.
It was 450 degrees Fahrenheit now, today. And someone was trying to turn the temperature up.
She had come across some rumours last week but hadn’t really understood their full significance. She knew the rough history of the country, knew more detail than most Westerners because she researched her assignments so thoroughly, but it was only a couple of evenings ago when she had been talking to Robert about her interviews that the full significance had emerged.
The plane rumbled down the runway and swooped up into the air. She looked across at Robert but he was still deep in conversation with th
e control tower. She closed her eyes. In her mind’s eye she could see the first woman she had interviewed as clearly as if she had been sitting on the engine cowling just beyond the Cessna’s windshield. She had looked so old. Far too old to be cradling such a little baby, sitting wrapped in rags by a dead acacia by the side of a country road.
Ann had come out in the long-based jeep Cherokee with a guide duly licensed and recommended by the hotel. They had taken a hotel waiter with a supply of food and drink. It had been almost a picnic; an orientation trip, nothing more. At first.
Commissioned by an uneasy alliance of the publishing house who published her best-selling books and an independent TV producer who wanted a combination of grit and glamour, she had agreed to do a special documentary on Mau. Offered a research assistant, she had defiantly decided to do the groundwork herself and had flown out alone, only to realise when it was a little too late just how alone she really was. It was ten days until her film crew were due. She had that time to find her feet and get the outline of the programme clear in her head. She had phoned some of the names on the list of contacts the TV people had given her and had been invited to several garden parties and a literary evening. That was not what she wanted at all so she had approached the hotel manager and he had been more helpful. He had found her the jeep and the driver, at least.
They had driven out of town heading due east along the main highway. She realised now that they must have passed the airport buildings and she had never even noticed the refugees squatting within them. She knew now that she had chosen the last day before the police roadblocks went up - and suspected that her activities might have contributed to their existence. Had she tried to leave the city alone now, today, she would have been quietly but firmly turned back.
When she saw the figures, the long lines of figures walking wearily down the road, she had assumed they were women from the farms nearby come to trade in the city’s markets. She had taken a photograph or two. Like a tourist. This was not her area of expertise; she had made her reputation writing books about the environment further north and the dangers facing those who worked around the shores of the Atlantic - and those who worked in frail ships upon it. This was her first exposure to Africa and she was only just beginning to realise how much she still had to learn.
Then she had come to the first person who did not fit the simple, safe picture presented by the tall figures walking slowly westward with huge bundles on their heads: a withered old crone sitting with a tiny child. It was a scene familiar from countless reports in the press and on television. The woman and child were clearly at the end of their strength. The shock of recognition literally knocked the wind out of Ann’s body.
She had asked her guide, a Kyoga called Saul, to stop and she had climbed down with her tape recorder. Then, on closer inspection, she put the little machine in her pocket and went back for her water bottle. First the skeletal child and then the gaunt woman wet their lips. Their eyes, the only liquid things about them, came back to life a little. She reached for her tape recorder again. ‘I want to speak to her, Saul, can you translate for me?’
‘I am a Kyoga, lady. This is N’Kuru woman.’
‘Can you understand what she says?’
‘I can speak little N’Kuru.’
The servant from the hotel had climbed out by this point. He was hardly more than a boy but he said diffidently, ‘I am N’Kuru, madam. I can understand her.’
Saul climbed back into the jeep, leaving her with the boy and the woman. ‘How did she get here?’
‘She say she walk.’
‘Alone? Where is her family?’
‘The lions took her husband and her brothers. The dust took all the rest.’
Ann rocked back on her heels at that, thinking of some kind of massacre by wild animals. It had not occurred to her that lions might have a capital L. Robert had pointed it out when she played the tape to him later.
‘What about her daughter? The baby’s mother?’
‘It is her child.’
Ann looked deeply into that gaunt, lined face. A kind of horror swept over her.
‘How old is she?’
This took a little computation, a comparison of events and dates, but at last the boy looked up at her. ‘The woman say she is seventeen.’
They had put the N’Kuru woman in the back of the jeep and, much against Saul’s inclination, driven her straight back into Mawanga to the City Hospital. There, rather dazed staff relieved the angry white-skinned woman of the dying bush native and put her and her child in a room well away from the city folk who understood such things as health insurance and the proper ways of becoming ill.
Ann had been standing, lost and deflated in the reception, with the woman gone and Saul nowhere to be seen, suddenly vividly aware that she didn’t even have enough money on her for a cab back to the hotel, when a square stranger with incredibly black skin had walked up to her and grinned.
‘I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,’ he said. ‘I thought matron was going to have apoplexy. Don’t you know that this is the most exclusive private hospital in downtown Mawanga?’
‘I’m just beginning to find out how little I do know,’ she answered ruefully. ‘My name is Ann Cable and I don’t even know how I’m going to get back to my hotel.’
The grin darkened. ‘A dangerous admission to make here or anywhere,’ he warned. ‘A dangerous predicament, even for a good Samaritan. But this time you’re lucky. My name is Robert Gardiner. I work for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. I’ve read your books. I’ll take you back to your hotel.’
‘I don’t want to go back to my hotel. I want to go and find out what’s really going on out there.’
‘If you’re really serious about it, I can show you that, too.’
‘Let’s go then.’
~ * ~
‘It’s been quite a week for you,’ Robert said as the Cessna settled into level flight, the great cliff fell back into a thunderous purple shadow on the left and the bush began to unroll before them.
‘Tell me about it. I feel like I’ve been re-educated the hard way.’
‘I fear your education is just beginning, my dear. You’ve been at the edge of things so far. We’re going into the heart of it now. On the roads, at the aid stations and the camps I’ve taken you to visit, there have been only the survivors. Victims, yes; but the lucky ones, relatively speaking. I am concerned that we may soon be seeing people who have been much less lucky.’
‘You’re telling me it’s going to be dangerous? Or just disgusting?’
‘Both. But very dangerous.’
‘Then why are you bringing me?’
‘Because I want you to see. I desperately need someone influential to see what is going on. Someone with some influence.’
‘But surely you have influence, Robert.’
‘With the wrong people. I write my reports and they get considered and precious little gets done. Oh, I know they’ve set up the Mau Club now and they say they’re trying to move this iceberg but I ask you! What sort of a response is that to a situation like this? It’s a joke! Laughable! No. I need someone with influence where it counts: in the media.’
‘But I won’t even have a film crew here for another three days!’
‘That may be time enough. We’ll meet my contact, have a sniff around, see if there’s any truth in what he’s saying and get back to Mawanga tomorrow. One day to get a bit of a safari set up and your film crew and you could have decent footage by the weekend. Just in time for the Sunday papers. It’s worth the risk. If there is something going on out here, something even worse than the drought, something which is driving the N’Kuru off their land, maybe we’ll find out about it. You could really blow the lid off this. Like John Pilger did in Cambodia. Like Kate Adie in the Gulf. Get things moving with a vengeance.’
‘Is that true, what you said? That the United Nations is trying to send an iceberg here?’
‘Nothin
g official yet. It’s so laughable they probably daren’t admit it. But yes. That’s what I’ve been told. They’ve hired some ships -tugs, I suppose - and they’re trying to bring an iceberg here as an answer to the drought.’
It wasn’t only empty desert down below. The outlines of the communal farms and the sharp grids of the irrigation system showed where cultivation had been tried, and would be again, but there were no men there over great swathes of dry red land, and here the animals had returned. At first there were thinly dotted groups of zebra and wildebeest, grazing on the ruins of whatever crops had been left unattended and whatever greenery had sprung up in damp hollows of the untended ground, but as they roared further and further into the bush, the neat cultivation began to falter and the sad regimentation of the failed farms began to break down as the indigenous vegetation reasserted itself. Then came a circle of huts with a thorn wall and a stockade. ‘N’Kuru village,’ said Robert. His first words in some time. They went low and circled. It was deserted.
After another half an hour, there was a kind of patchy green covering to the ground. Not grass, but some kind of plant. The regular pattern of the irrigation ditches, far behind, was replaced here by the organic, root-like patterns of dry water courses. But where the rule-straight, man-made channels had simply been marks across the desert, here the wandering branches carried vegetation which gave some faint promise of water underground. Tall palms appeared, singly and in clumps, thorn scrub, umbrella acacias and baobabs. And, as the vegetation increased, so did the animal life. The zebra were in herds here, as were the wildebeest. In the shade of some of the bigger clumps stood kudu and impala in small family groups. Enough wildlife to support some lean lions. Robert obediently circled the first somnolent pride they found while Ann took photographs.