by Peter Tonkin
And still she ran on, plunging madly through the wild whirl of blazing air, screaming nonstop as the withering caress of the flames moved lovingly over her curves, igniting every little hair on her thighs and flanks into a tiny prick of agony. She beat her hands before her face as though she could knock the deadly flames aside. But some part of her knew that her hands were useless against the heat and her only chance of survival lay in the water of the river. A chance of survival which receded almost unreachably when her thick brown hair caught fire.
Out onto the sloping bank she exploded, the wash of flame pursuing her as she flashed down the rough bank, miraculously keeping her footing, until the cool, healing balm of the River Mau welcomed her and she went under, and stayed there until her lungs threatened to suck in water, leeches and all, if she did not let them breathe.
She put her head above the water, but ducked back under again immediately, with only the beginning of a breath in her lungs, for the inferno she had just escaped was attaining its full fury now and the heat from the bank, worse even than the sun at midday had been, threatened to re-ignite her hair. But her body, coming out of its animal panic, imperiously demanded sustenance and although it had continued to function without food, it refused flatly to work a moment longer without air. Weary unto death, shaking with shock, she rolled onto her back and let her lips and nose break the surface so that they could gulp down great shuddering gulps of hot air. Half fainting, she allowed herself to drift like this as the sluggish current pulled her slowly along the curving shoreline towards the west. She did not think of Robert. She did not think of dangers - not even of crocodiles. She did not really think at all. She drifted slowly in the shallows, with the slick mud brushing along her back, the surface tickling her belly and thighs while the weight of the camera case sat on her chest like a drowning friend and the hot air filled her lungs, alive, and scarcely more.
When the current began to pull her southwards, she didn’t notice, nor did she register much when the bank gathered over her like a black wave breaking, fringed with fire. When she slid sleepily into the black mouth of the tunnel, something registered, and she opened her eyes. She sat up at once, shocked out of her torpor. This was not some natural runnel or bore created by an incoming stream. This was manmade - the precise curve of the opening told her that, and the wide steps cut into the wall which mutely invited her to climb them. She rolled onto her hands and knees and crawled across to the steps. Where she found the energy to come up onto her feet she would never know, but come erect she did. There were six square steps up to a walkway which led intriguingly down the tunnel into the cool darkness. What had she to lose? She followed it.
The walkway was at least a metre wide. Along the high curve of the wall on her right was a cool handrail and she used this to guide her, for all too soon her eyes could see nothing in the darkness. Just before this happened, when there was barely enough light for her to see what was ahead of her, she came across a low barrier beside a metal wire grille behind which was trapped a wild mess of detritus. There was a low gate here, with wire-edged holes in it about ten centimetres square.
It almost stopped her, for it was obvious that she would only be able to negotiate it if she climbed over it and she would only be able to do that if she took off her boots and her camera bag. But she could not - would not - stop here, so, wearily, she sat and began to unlace the boots. It took a long time to achieve this, for her hands were stiff and swollen, and her laces were wet and intransigent. But in the end she was able to pull off the sodden footware and place it carefully on the walkway by her side. She placed her camera bag beside it, then she climbed over the gate. It cost her some flesh from her upper chest and shoulders to squeeze past the top of the grille and she whimpered with a combination of discomfort and panic when, uncomfortably astride die top of the gate, she thought that she was stuck. But at last she forced herself through to the other side.
Then she realised that she had left everything precious to her back on the other side. She collapsed on the spot and sat for an unmeasured time, sobbing brokenly. But eventually the same determination which had brought her this far forced her on. She could not go back, therefore she would go forward. She pulled herself up and placed her feet carefully on the cold concrete ahead.
All along the floor of the tunnel she was following, water trickled and slopped, and had she hoped to be free of the agonising attentions of the massive river mosquitoes, she was unlucky. Only the thickness of the mud on her back gave her some measure of relief. At last, driven almost insane by the whining, burning biting on her face, she took the last piece of cloth she possessed - the wreckage of her underpants - and clutched the cotton over her nose and mouth. As she walked, her mind shrank away from the present. It fled into the past; into fantasy. For a while Robert walked by her side. Then Nico joined him and the two men had a fight. Her father came to have a chat with her and then she really began to be surprised because he had been dead for many years.
She was still talking to him when she walked over the end of the walkway and fell flat on her face into the bottom of an irrigation ditch two metres straight down.
And that was where she was when Nimrod Chala and Valerii Gogol found her. The two men who had been pursuing her for two days were there when she was discovered. She knew this because she heard them speaking. She did not open her eyes or speak herself, but she heard them.
A rough hand woke her by taking her by the left shoulder and rolling her onto her back against the slope of the ditch wall. A voice called something loud in impenetrably Kyoga dialect.
Feet arrived.
There was more conversation which she could not understand at all.
Had she been more alive, she would have been speechless with terror, for what was happening to her now was the most terrible thing she had ever imagined happening to her. As it was, she lay like a doll, loosely in their hands, and pretended to be dead.
‘Speak English! I cannot understand these Kyoga grunts and gibbers!’ She recognised the Russian accent and the sharp-edged tones all too well.
‘He says here is another one.’
‘I can see that, Comrade General. Pick her up. I want a closer look.’
She felt strong hands fasten on her limbs and she was hefted into the air. Without the warning of the words, she would have reacted to the casually intimate handling. As it was, she remained flaccid as a rag doll. She was so terrified she really felt that she was dying.
‘This is not the woman. This is some native. Can you not see? Look at her face! Her lips and eyes! Her hair. You stupid ape, can you not see that her skin is black? How can this be the right one?’
She was cast down again and fell with stunning force against the rock-solid wall.
‘Look at her! A naked, mud-covered savage, ugly as a baboon and probably full of disease. Leave her! She is as good as dead in any case. It isn’t even worth playing the game with her, we’d never get her to stand up for long enough! Leave her. We have better things to do!’
Footsteps retreated.
A hand groped speculatively between her legs. A distant voice rapped an order in angry Kyoga. The hand was taken away and the last set of footsteps retreated. A helicopter lifted off and thundered away.
Ann rolled over onto her side and was rackingly sick, then she rolled back onto her back and waited to die.
~ * ~
A long, long time later, the footsteps returned.
Thinking of the rough hand between her legs, she flinched. She knew it was death to do so, but she could not help herself. ‘She’s alive,’ called a voice. A new voice. A woman’s voice speaking in American English. The footsteps came up close and a shadow moved between Ann’s bloated, bitten face and the sun. There was a grinding of shoe leather on concrete as the shadow knelt by her side.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said the American voice, infinitely tenderly. ‘How do they come to this? How can we let them come to this?’
Ann tried to open her eyes, but they di
dn’t seem to be working. She tried to speak, but only succeeded in making her body twitch and jump. The soft voice said something soothing in dialect which Ann did not understand, and suddenly cleft by the terrifying realisation that this woman might simply take her to the nearest native village, she forced words into her swollen mouth. English words.
‘My name is Ann Cable. I am an American citizen.’
‘What? Say that again! Joe, come here! Get over here at once.’
‘My name is Ann Cable . . .’ It was all she had the strength to say.
It was enough. ‘It’s OK, honey, just you lie there. You’re in safe hands now and we’ve got just what you need. My name is Emily Karanga and I’m going to take care of you.’
~ * ~
BIGHT
GUINEA AND BENIN
Beware, beware the Bight of Benin
~ * ~
Chapter Twenty-Five
Richard Mariner pressed the walkie-talkie to his lips, thumbed SEND and talked to four helmsmen at once. Four helmsmen and three other captains, come to that. ‘One degree more,’ he said. ‘One degree further west.’
‘That’ll be one ninety-one magnetic, Captain,’ said his own helmsman helpfully.
‘I know. But not for all of us.’ He thumbed SEND. ‘John?’
‘Here, Richard.’
‘How is Niobe heading?’
‘One ninety-eight magnetic on your order.’
‘Peter?’ he asked Captain Walcott next.
‘Psyche is at one eighty-six, magnetic.’ Peter Walcott’s voice was weary and cold. Both he and Gendo Odate were being a little short with Richard at the moment. Asha had yet to diagnose exactly what it was that was causing the skin damage to their crews, though she was treating it with apparent success. It was still spreading, though the incidence of new cases reported was falling off. The first panic seemed to be fading now that everyone knew that the condition was not life-threatening and that it responded to treatment. But where it came from and why it struck remained a mystery which niggled the giant body of Richard’s organisation like an itch it could not scratch, and with each new case reported to Gendo or Peter, things took a small step further down a dangerous road. The atmosphere aboard the two ships shackled nearest to the high flanks of Manhattan simmered darkly - and Richard had made things worse by appropriating their helicopter.
He had taken it first to remove the frozen corpse of the murderous eco-terrorist Henri LeFever into Titan’s cold storage, but then he had found that he needed to keep it. A new chopper was on its way out to them, he knew, but there was no definite ETA for it yet and in the meantime he simply had to have the facility of going high above or far ahead as he laid his plans.
‘Bob?’
‘Achilles is at one eighty-two, magnetic,’ came Bob Stark’s cheerful New England tones. There had been no cases of the mystery disease reported on his ship. Yet.
Richard looked down at the diagram on the chart table in front of him, the different headings for all his ships carefully calculated and meticulously plotted, as they needed to be. While Manhattan pursued its own majestic way, the six ships tethered to her each sailed along a slightly different bearing, their corporate objective to influence in the minimum amount of time the course it was actually following.
They had reached the next really critical stage now, for they were preparing to turn the corner as they came past Freetown, Sierra Leone. The Canaries current had carried them safely southwards during the last few days, and its coastal offshoot would combine with the gathering eastward pressure of the equatorial counter current to swing them into the grip of the Guinea current within the next few hours when they would head east along the final leg of their journey. But the Guinea current swept along the shallow, coral-fanged seas off Guinea and Benin before it reached the deep-water anchorages of Mau’s tectonic coast. Titan and her team were swinging their massive burden out across the water’s drift, therefore, in an attempt to place the massive burden on the outer, deep-water edge of the current, far from lee shores and sharp reefs.
Captain Gendo Odate was the only one of them whose course matched the iceberg’s, for Kraken was too close to the ice to follow anything but a carefully parallel heading. Even Anna Borodin in Ajax was angling her course slightly, trying to support the efforts of Bob Stark in Achilles.
‘Gendo?’ Silence. ‘Captain Odate?’
‘Hai?’
‘Course and speed, please.’
‘We continue to proceed due south, Captain Mariner, at eleven knots precisely. You are a miracle-worker, sir.’
With the passage of time and the increasing stress, Captain Odate had become so much more formal that Richard sometimes wondered whether he was getting at the sake more than was good for him.
‘Thank you, Captain Odate. Inform me at once if we deviate from that course at all, please.’
‘Hai!’
Their course was right, then, and it looked as though they could maintain it - until the full force of the counter current came down on their starboard quarter, at any rate. Their position he could read for himself. He strolled across to the satnav equipment and looked down at the figures which placed his ship accurately to within mere metres on the earth’s surface. Yes, there they were, at eight degrees north latitude and ten degrees west longitude, with the berg behind them still scraping over the Sierra Leone rise while the ships out in front were heading hard for the Guinea basin.
Even now, he found he had to doublecheck when he was looking at courses, bearings, and especially location readings and reckonings. He was well enough used to placing vessels more than a quarter of a mile long, but Manhattan was something else. He had to keep reminding himself that his command was at the leading edge of an oblong on the earth’s surface one hundred kilometres long and fifteen or more wide. The measurements were increasingly rough, but they included the positions of the ships and the increasing puddle of cold, clear, pure water through which they were sailing. A puddle of water which had registered on the eastern coasts of the Azores, on the western ones of the Canaries and on the eastern side of the Cape Verdes as they had come past the three sets of islands during the last ten days. Now they were preparing to turn east onto the final leg and there was only a week to go - if nothing else went wrong.
But what else could possibly go wrong?
Certainly, during the week since his memory had returned, the situation on the six ships and the berg itself seemed to have been held almost immobile. The wind had abated and the weather had become clear and summery all around them, and it seemed that the worst was over. With the last of the bodies off the ice, even the sand-shrouded Manhattan seemed to be exercising a relatively beneficent air - except, perhaps, in the perceptions of those still closest to it.
By the time he had come to this point in his thoughts, Richard was once again standing by his chart. The pale colours showed all too vividly the shallow waters, the coral reefs, the narrowness of the entrance to the gigantic harbour of Mawanga, the nearness of the city to the final resting place of Manhattan, the all too obvious dangers of moving it into place and stopping that movement in time. There was someone in the United Nations building, he knew, whose sole job was to calculate the effects both locally and globally if one billion tonnes of ice was still moving at any kind of speed when it collided with the African coast. Bracingly, they had already informed him that it was unlikely that the whole continent would shift on its foundations . . .
He dragged his thoughts back to the matter in hand, never one to cross his bridges before he came to them, no matter how carefully or acutely he scouted them first.
‘Yves? Any update on the currents?’ He had asked about the ‘current situation’ last time, but the Frenchman on the forecastle head had failed to recognise the pun. Or, more likely, refused to recognise it as he had not made the joke himself.
‘Yes. You should go out onto your right bridge wing, Richard. The sea presents an interesting sight this afternoon.’
Richard
walked across and looked through the clearview. Thick glass still tinged with a fine dusting of sand placed a patina on everything. Yves was right: if he wanted to make out any fine detail he would have to go out onto the bridge wing.