by Peter Tonkin
‘Oh Emily! I’m sorry!’
‘Never mind. I got what you wanted and I hope it’s useful. Hey! I’ve got a message from an old friend for you!’
‘Oh? Who?’
‘Ann Cable. She’s been in the biggest private hospital we have here for a week now and she only came round this afternoon. I was the one who brought her in, so they called me at once and I went straight over.’
‘How is she? What happened to her?’
‘She’s surprisingly well. She seemed in a pretty bad way when I found her in an irrigation ditch upcountry. But they say she’s pretty good. Pulling through nicely now. When I told her I knew you, she brightened up a lot. All the nice girls love a sailor, I guess.’
‘She does, but not this sailor. I’ll give the right man a call later. What on earth was she doing in an irrigation ditch?’
Emily explained what little she knew.
‘Sounds grim,’ he said when she had finished.
‘It is. I haven’t been right into the interior, but there are all sorts of stories coming out of there. You don’t want to know!’
‘Horrific.’
‘Do tell! Well, you just get that ice cube of yours over here before we run out of Martini.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Hey! That’s not too impressive, Richard! I’ll do my best! Where’s that old Mariner spirit? Are you all right? You sound pretty beat to me. As a matter of fact, Ann sounded a good deal brighter. What’s the matter?’
‘Well, now that you ask. . .’
And, against his nature, breaking the rule of a lifetime, too exhausted to maintain his usual facade of granite, he told her exactly what the matter was.
Which, as it turned out, was the best thing he could possibly have done.
‘Only on the hands and face?’
‘That’s right.’
‘OK, let’s be clear about this. None of you is missing skin from under their clothing? It’s just, like, faces, hands and legs?’
‘That’s right. Why so exact, Emily? You sound as though you know what’s happening.’
‘Maybe I do. Let me take it from here for a while, though. You just stop me if I’m wrong, OK?’
‘OK. Fire away.’
‘You’ve been sailing through a sandstorm, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Strong southerly wind, full of sand. Head on, unrelenting. No gusting.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘And the men who have been affected are all people who’ve been out in it for a while.’
‘Yes. They’ve all been doing deck work. Line watches, deck officers ... Yes!’
‘And the people who are worst affected have been out in the most exposed sections.’
‘Yes. Yes! My God, you’re right! How did you know?’
‘Anyone down here would know. Anyone from Mau, Cameroon, any of the countries with a Saharan border. It’s the harmattan.’
‘That’s right. We’ve had a harmattan blowing! It blew for days!’
‘Then anyone who was out in it for any length of time must expect to lose a little skin. That’s what the harmattan does. It skins you. It’s a vicious wind.’
‘And that’s all? I mean, there are no other side effects?’
‘Never heard of any. I’ll check in the hospital if you like, there’ll be someone there who will know for sure.’
‘No, that’s all right, Emily. I’ll do it from here. You’ve done enough. Thank you. Thank you very much!’
He switched off his walkie-talkie and looked at his hand. Already the blisters looked less repulsive. He knew what had caused them. He knew that they were nothing to worry about. He raised the walkie-talkie again, but now there was a song in his heart and the unbounded cheeriness he had felt a couple of days ago which had only taken a bit of a knock from this affair returned tenfold.
Even as he asked for Directory Enquiries in Mawanga, he pulled himself to his feet, too excited to sit down any longer, too full of energy to try.
This was the last setback, it had to be. And it. had turned out to be nothing important at all.
They were only a few days out of Mawanga harbour and he suddenly felt certain that everything was going to go smoothly to plan. They would get Manhattan there and save most of her melt-water on the way. In spite of Colin Ross’s figures, the berg would remain stable. The area of radioactive contamination seemed to be relatively limited after all, if the readings collected on the day they found LeFever’s corpse were correct. Once the ice island was safe in harbour it could be inspected in more detail and the contaminated sections cut off and disposed of. His company, in actual fact, were expert in the transport of such waste and it suddenly seemed entirely possible that even the existence of radioactive debris in the ice could work out, like everything else so far, to the advantage of Heritage Mariner. He closed his eyes and thought as hard as he could, but in his euphoric state he simply could not imagine anything going awry which they had not allowed for, which they could not handle easily.
~ * ~
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Valerii Gogol had brought eight Hind-D attack helicopters with him to support the division of tanks he was engaged in selling to the power-hungry government of Congo Libre. The Congo Librens were on the point of agreeing the purchase of the whole package, but a certain amount of jealousy and infighting had slowed things down. Which had allowed him to join the men across the border fomenting trouble in Mau, preparing to place Nimrod Chala in undisputed control of the country - which would then become a docile satellite of Congo Libre and a guaranteed soul-mate of Russia. He had also found the atrocities of the vicious little bush war very much to his taste and, for the first time in many years, he had found he was actually enjoying himself.
Which is what he had been doing when the game warden, the UN man and the American reporter had stumbled across him and his putative N’Kuru Lion commando. He had been fortunate that the delay had continued long enough to allow him to hunt them down to death. He had been over the grasslands upcountry with a fine-tooth comb and had seen detailed reports from Nimrod Chala’s ubiquitous paramilitary police patrols. He had no doubt that they were all dead. It was a pity, though, that he had seen only one of them die.
The delay also allowed him time to take five of his Hind-Ds, arm the big helicopters with all the air-to-surface rocketry he could lay his hands on, and go, as General Bovary had ordered, to destroy this iceberg called Manhattan.
The five Hinds came over the Blood River and past the lake on the late Harry Parkinson’s game reserve at zero feet, tearing the tops off the last green trees between here and the coast as they went. Then there was just the endless red dust bowl which had once been the great rolling grasslands of Mau. Gogol looked down on the dead land, smiling slightly. He knew it well; he had been flying over it regularly for more than a month now, usually in one of Nimrod Chala’s police helicopters. The Russian’s cold eyes swept from side to side as he considered Chala’s helicopters. They were going to be a problem sooner or later and the question was, should he destroy them on the way in or on the way back out?
He had omitted to inform Chala of his current plans - the General of Police had made no secret of the fact that he very much wanted the iceberg to arrive. Chala didn’t mind fomenting a small civil war and assisting several million people to starve to death, but he had no intention of becoming the political leader of a permanent economic ruin. And now that the United Nations had declared its intention of delivering a great deal of aid to support the good work begun by the water which the iceberg represented, the possibilities of infinite power had been gilded by the possibilities of infinite pilferage. Oh yes, Nimrod Chala desperately wanted to see Manhattan come safely to Mau. Once he knew what Gogol and his helicopters were up to, he would use any power at his command to stop them - or destroy them in revenge.
‘What kind of resistance can we expect when we register on their radar?’ asked Captain Illych Kizel anxiously.
He sang no more and spoke as little as possible. He reached into the breast pocket of his blouson and pulled out another painkiller. He had learned to function with massive dosages of morphine in his system. It was the only way he could function at all, nowadays.
But he wanted Captain Kizel calm, at least until Manhattan came into view, so he enlarged. “They have no air force, Illych. Their army has no airborne wing worth the name. The paramilitary police have five secondhand Sikorsky Black Hawks. They’re all fifteen years old, basically equipped and badly maintained. They’re there to make a jumped-up little policeman called Nimrod Chala look good. They’re no match for us. But they will, of course, be bringing us a nice present, one way or another.’
Captain Kizel looked across at the general with a great deal of surprise. That was the longest speech he had ever heard the senior officer give. And it had taken its toll. What he could see of Gogol’s face was white with strain. He looked back at his display and, beyond, down to the ground. They were sweeping northwards as well as westwards because they proposed to use the River Mau as their primary navigational aid. And the tectonic basalt cliff above it would work as extremely effective protection against radar. They were going out fast and low in the early morning with the rising sun at their backs and, all things being equal, would be coming back the same way in the late afternoon with the setting sun exactly behind them. This was important, of course; they were most at risk in Maui airspace, and on Maui sovereign territory, in spite of what the general said.
‘There it is,’ said Kizel as the cliff came up over the northern horizon. He looked down briefly. They were moving at more than 250 kph through the low, still, heavy morning air. They would be there in a few moments. He glanced at his watch and checked his time-plan. Bang on time. He looked at the green read-out which gave him the position of the four aircraft flying in close formation behind him. He glanced up at the mirror above his head which allowed him to check on the disposition of the six heavily armed men occupying the seats in the body of the fuselage behind him. His eyes flicked back. The cliff was coming up fast. He pressed the button on his throat mike. ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Execute manoeuvre number one on my mark . . . Now.’
Kizel swung the head of his chopper hard west and the others behind him fell into line astern. They were so low, their down-draught disturbed the cinder bed under the track of the Mawanga railway, so that as they sped past they were followed by a rain of pebbles and grit which spilled over the edge into the withered water below. Within a very few minutes they were hurtling over a labouring train and the smoke from its stack exploded around them and leaped into delicate whirls in their wake. A disused lift and some ruined buildings flashed past, ancient corrugated tin reverberating to the sound of their engines.
Such was the power of their passing that the first police guard hut was torn apart as though by a hurricane - but the dazed policeman managed to get through to Mawanga city with a report of what had happened.
Gogol looked down idly, recognising landmarks. There was the pulpit where he and Chala had questioned die man and woman from the train. Their bones lay scattered on that tongue of red mud below. He glanced back without thinking, and the uncontrolled movement tore his cancerous neck with such acute pain that nausea welled in his throat. But he had eaten nothing for two days; there was nothing to come up. He was never hungry nowadays. He thought that the huge tumour which they told him was growing in his stomach probably filled it well enough, and he only ate when he needed to stoke up his strength, and when he was tempted. The foul concoction called achu which the Congo Librens subsisted on did not tempt him at all. He saw his body as a machine now, it was the only way he could hang on to his sanity. A machine which was beginning to malfunction because of what had happened to it at Chernobyl.
Captain Kizel jumped and turned towards Gogol, then reached across to switch on the radio’s cockpit speaker. A woman’s anxious voice filled the cockpit at once, speaking in English. ‘. . . I say again, please identify yourselves. This is air traffic control at Mawanga airport calling the five aircraft closing with Mawanga city from the east at zero feet. You have no registered authorisation to cross Maui airspace, please identify yourselves at once ...’
The captain looked at Gogol. The general shook his head once, carefully. Kizel pressed his throat mike. ‘Maintain radio silence,’ he ordered and switched his own radio off.
Below, a great area of grey ash overlapped the first straight pattern of irrigation ditches spreading out in geometric designs from the edge of a dry lake. Idly, Gogol wondered if the naked Kyoga woman was still down there, dead in the ditch where he had left her. No. That had been a week ago, before General Bovary’s orders had come in. The scavengers would have had her long ago. He found himself shaking his head almost with sorrow.
He was the man who had invented the shooting competition which used native girls as targets and sorted out the men from the boys. How could he be concerned over one savage woman? No. He was not concerned; he simply speculated. She remained in his memory only because she had not been the American woman who had been their quarry but some tick-ridden, fuzzy-haired, fat-faced native. Thoughtlessly, he sucked his teeth and his mouth at once filled with blood. He choked, body rigid, refusing to cough or vomit, willing himself to maintain the massive dignity which had to be associated with his rank. They had warned him about this at the institute when they had advised him to have all his teeth out. It would be better for him in the long run, they had said. They would only perish like the rest of his bones, and his gums were shot to hell in any case. And, like his hair, they would fall out in no time at all. He had been bald as an egg for six years and was mildly surprised that his teeth had lasted so long. They were another reason he ate so little nowadays; when he chewed anything even faintly solid, he could hear the roots of his molars stirring in his head.
Vodka was out of the question too, given the state of his liver.
Really and truly, now he came to look at it, there was only one thing left worth living for: killing.
The Sikorsky Black Hawk came down over the top of the cliff above them and skipped along just in front of their nose, moving at full speed - the better part of 300 kph.
‘He’s trying to make contact,’ said Captain Kizel urgently. ‘Shall I answer?’
‘Yes. With that.’ The general pointed to the weapons system control. The helicopter was equipped not only with the AS-7 Kerry air-to-surface missiles they proposed to use against the iceberg -and the ships controlling it if necessary - but also several AA-2 A-toll air-to-air missiles as well. The Sikorsky, Gogol knew, was armed with a 30 millimetre cannon. But it probably wasn’t loaded and even if it was, it would jam. And none of Chala’s police pilots would ever open fire without direct orders from their beloved leader, signed, in triplicate. The General of Police did not approve of independence of thought, least of all among such dashing characters as his helicopter pilots.
Gogol’s pilot, however, did not hesitate. Kizel launched the missile on his commander’s word. The A-22 A-toll was old, but still effective. It was one of a range of Russian designs based on the American Sidewinder. This one was armed with a high-explosive warhead and controlled by a heat-seeking guidance system. The Sikorsky had no sooner settled like a black dragon fly to race along beside the Hinds than it exploded into a dazzling blossom of red an
d yellow flame. Pieces of wreckage sped out and down, trailing smoke like failed fireworks. The last two helicopters in the line astern dipped and jumped over the shock wave of the explosion and that was all.
I hope Chala was in that one, thought Gogol. But he doubted it.
They raced on, unmolested for ten minutes until, far below, beyond the dry river bed at the foot of the basalt cliff, the first reception camps appeared. These had been set up by Chala’s police to look after the starving millions from the interior as they tried to get into Mawanga city itself - and, more importantly, to relieve them of anything of worth that they still possessed.