by Peter Tonkin
The first familiar faces Richard saw belonged to Caleb Maina and First Lieutenant Sanda. Who, he suspected, would be equally deep in trouble with Minister Ngama. The two men were seated at a big table surrounded by a larger group that Richard did not know. He recognized their uniforms, and realized at once who they were. But he did not recognize the faces. Max did, however, and he bellowed, ‘Hi guys!’ and started pushing towards them. Irina also recognized them and followed immediately in his wake. Richard grabbed Robin’s arm and – more gently – Dr Holliday’s, and followed Irina’s shapely back. As soon as the men with Captain Maina saw Max, they started cheering and pounding on the table. When they saw Irina, the noise redoubled.
A big bear of a man with a grey crew cut and a steel-coloured Zapata moustache stood up. He had piercing blue eyes beneath black, shaggy eyebrows and he had captain’s rank badges sewn on his collar. ‘Good evening, Captain Zhukov,’ shouted Max. ‘I trust the celebration is going well?’
‘As you see, Mr Asov,’ rumbled the Zubr’s captain. ‘At the moment we are trying to solve the age-old problem of whether the fact that Stolichnaya, which is bottled in Latvia, is any less genuine than Russian Standard.’
Richard counted a dozen bottles of each on the table. Clearly the men were taking the comparison very seriously indeed.
‘It’s probably all shipped down in tanks and bottled in Granville Harbour in any case,’ said Max as the Zubr’s crew made room for the new arrivals. Somehow Irina ended up between Captain Zhukov and Max. And Bonnie Holliday was squeezed between Caleb Maina and Lieutenant Sanda. It was obviously Caleb’s lucky night – he got Robin on the other side. But his interest was spoken for the moment Bonnie sat down.
‘So,’ said Richard, looking narrowly across at Max and Zhukov, ‘you had an ace in the hole?’
Max shrugged. ‘Let’s say that I was impressed by Captain Caleb and Lieutenant Sanda. More so than Minister Ngama. At the very least Captain Zhukov and I feel obliged to ensure that when President Chaka finally capitulates and buys our Zubrs, the good captain will already be trained in how to handle them. Even if he has to waste his talents on Shaldag patrol craft in the meantime.’
It was Caleb Maina’s lucky night in more ways than one. His quarters were only a short walk from OTI. And it was a walk a man could safely take, drunk or sober, in company or alone, because most of it was through the secure area of the naval base. The guard at the security gate nodded him through without comment – but raised his eyebrows in surprise when the captain’s back was turned. Caleb was famous throughout the base – throughout the service, in fact – for being utterly faithful to one mistress alone. The lovely corvette Otobo. But tonight, for the first time, he did not return to his quarters alone.
As a senior captain, Caleb rated a small detached cottage with sufficient facilities to house a wife and family – which in his case did not exist. So Caleb lived alone.
‘This is lovely,’ purred Dr Holliday as he followed her into the neat little living room, which was suffused with golden brightness from the security lighting.
‘As are you,’ he said gallantly if unoriginally, closing the door behind him and crossing to stand beside her.
She was waiting at the window looking down the slope into the harbour where his ex-command sat with her riding lights ablaze, waiting to be pulled into dry dock for repairs sometime in a future that was far too distant to worry about.
He towered behind her and slid his arm around her waist, allowing his hand to rest gently on the swell of her stomach immediately below the belt line. She moaned a little, pushing sensuously back against him, and rubbed the shadow-dark fall of her hair against his cheek, filling his nostrils with the scent of her shampoo and perfume. Coconut and Chanel. She felt burningly hot to him. He tightened his grip, lowering his hands.
She turned, pushing her breasts against his chest and allowing him to cup the full cheeks of her bottom. ‘I wanted you the moment I saw you,’ she whispered, sliding her cinnamon arms around his neck like snakes.
‘And you’re going to get me. Over and over and over . . .’
‘Aren’t I the lucky girl?’ she growled as their mouths closed together.
ELEVEN
Cite
Conversation died stillborn as the trucks ground through the night and Anastasia soon found herself fearfully calculating their chances of escaping rape and murder at the hands of the taciturn soldiers. As a distraction from thoughts that were likely to incapacitate her with simple terror if she wasn’t careful, she started trying to work out what she could about the men she was suddenly surrounded by and the vehicles they were driving.
The truck ahead seemed to be a five ton six-wheeler and she assumed this one was the same, though she hadn’t got too good a look at either of them. The back section of the lead truck was canvas over some kind of high frame. It was tightly secured at the sides. It looked to have been laced up tight at the back, but it had been opened sometime recently and it flapped open a little now. The canvas had been pulled almost closed, even if the laces were hanging untidily free, so there was no way of working out what the load was, short of simple guesswork. And she really didn’t have enough data even to bother with that.
This truck contained more clues, though Anastasia was careful to hide the fact that she was taking such a detailed look around. The huge soldier beside her was a smoker – as was his driver. The atmosphere in the cab told her that much at once. Though neither man seemed to be smoking at the moment. And, now she thought of it, there was a smell beneath the tobacco reek that she had recognized. A whiff of cordite? Probably coming from her own AK, she decided at last – she had fired it to light the fire Esan had set and again to attract their attention. The soldier was also either still nervous or was unwilling to reveal his identity, because he kept his body armour on in spite of the fact that the truck seemed to have no air con and it was soon swelteringly hot. But his combat uniform and the UN trappings – badges, helmet and armour – all looked authentic. As did the big M16 he kept cradled between his knees beside the relatively puny AK.
The grim soldier’s profile was chiselled and lean, especially in the reflected brightness of the headlights and the uplighting from the illuminated dash. He had high cheekbones and a hook of a nose. His chin was square and dark-stubbled. His mouth looked cruel to her – certainly it was thin-lipped and turned down. His eyes were narrow and it was impossible to tell their colour. His body seemed muscular beneath the armour. His shoulder was as solid as teak and his forearm was forested with hair like the gorilla’s tattooed on her back. A gorilla which also nursed a gun. He smelt of sweat and metal. Gunmetal, she thought. When he moved his arm, there was a long dark stain reaching down from his armpit. But she was slick with sweat too – even though she was only wearing a bra. And, she reckoned, she probably smelt worse herself – especially as she still had a pocket full of oysters.
Anastasia looked across at Ado, who was crushed against the driver on the far side of the unconscious Celine, and the instant she looked away from the soldier she seemed to feel his eyes on her. Their eyes met, and Ado’s were suddenly those of a woman rather than those of a child. She had grown up a lot in the last day or so, what with one thing and another. Anastasia hoped she would get the chance to grow up some more.
The driver’s face was that of a prizefighter who has lost too many bouts. It was almost formless. The blue beret pulled down to the brow could not disguise the lack of forehead. The brows themselves seemed to be deepened with scar tissue and overhung cavernous eye sockets, with tiny eyes lost in pools of shadow. Shadows deepened by the uplighting from the dashboard. Fat cheeks and bulbous cheekbones. Flat nose, squashed slightly out of line. Swollen mouth overhanging a receding chin. Barrel chest falling to fat, solid-looking paunch. It strained the material of his uniform, making the openings between the buttons gape. What looked like a frayed-edged hole on the far side of the massive chest. The whole thing stained, like the soldier’s beside her, with great
dark gouts of perspiration. Arms even hairier than the other man’s, muscles and sinews moving smoothly beneath the forested skin as he shifted what looked like a ten-gear gearbox. Sleeves so tight that they were beginning to come apart at the seams. It suddenly struck her that here indeed was what Simian Artillery had all been about. This really was an ape with a gun.
The trucks ground on, never seeming to exceed forty kph. Up a gathering slope, which was almost exciting, in that it broke the threatening monotony of the ride. Over a crest which suddenly really was exciting, for the jungle fell back from the roadway to reveal that the down-slope led into the great natural bowl that contained the huge ruin of Citematadi. Anastasia had never seen it from this angle and she blinked, hardly able to believe what her eyes were showing her. It could not be real, she thought. It looked more like the set from some post-apocalyptic sci-fi film.
Under a bright, fat moon, the whole lifeless metropolis lay stark and mouldering beneath her, like a rotting corpse sculpted in silver and ebony. The skeletal outline of it reaching in great square city blocks back towards the rim of the circular ridge. Like a war-zone in the middle of an air raid caught mid-blitz. On her left, the strange-shaped ruins of buildings that had once soared five or six storeys high now sagged, bursting with huge black explosions of bougainvillea and rhododendron frozen like bomb blasts fixed for ever in a monochrome snapshot. On her right, the great municipal buildings stood gutted, as though their violent destruction had also entered a state of suspended animation, with trees erupting stilly from within them, with creepers, lianas and ivies stopped dead in the act of tearing their crumbling walls asunder. And, further to the right again, beyond the bright line of an embankment topped by the highway they were following, the broad quicksilver stream of the river itself was shattered into writhing motion by the cataract that hurled itself over and between the great stone and concrete boulders which were all that remained of the bridge.
The soldier with the M16 spoke at last. ‘Home sweet home,’ he said.
She knew then; knew with a certainty that reached deep inside her – as deep as her clenching womb which twisted in a contraction almost reminiscent of childbirth. What UN soldier would claim such a place as his home? Suddenly her mind was ice cold, running through the information she and Celine had gathered from their radio, satellite TV and Internet access about the current UN contingents in and near the borders of Benin la Bas; adding it to what she had observed here in the cab. There were currently French, Greek, Dutch and African Union troops, including Nigerians and a few from Burundi and Uganda, all in the West Africa area, doing everything from peacekeeping in Congo-Brazzaville and the CDR to chasing the Army of Christ the Infant, The Lord’s Resistance Army and Boko Haram out of Uganda and Nigeria and through the jungles further north and west.
The South Africans were all over in Somalia and Sudan, trying to hold things together there. Almost against her better judgement, she looked back at the soldier sitting next to her. The metallic smell was, if anything, stronger. The humid heat in the cab had certainly intensified, and all the odours had strengthened with it. It must be touching forty-five degrees Celsius in here, she thought. But the dark patch she had assumed to be sweat beneath his armpit had not grown any larger. And she realized it wasn’t sweat. She glanced across at the driver, at the frayed material round what suddenly looked like a bullet hole; at the great dark gouts that weren’t sweat after all. It was blood, she was certain. And not the soldier’s blood. Someone else’s blood. Blood that belonged to the original owner of the uniform.
The lead truck suddenly turned off the road and the second one followed it. They were rolling off the causeway and on to the beginning of the bridge whose central spans lay at the bottom of the river. For a wild moment Anastasia wondered whether they were just going to drive off the edge and plunge into the roiling river below. But no. The truck turned left almost immediately and followed a track down the face of a steep embankment towards a wide flat bank side area below. They would clearly be arriving at their destination any moment now. Anastasia almost screamed, ‘Stop! I still haven’t worked out what the hell I’m going to do!’ But she suddenly found the atmosphere was too thick to breathe properly. And if she couldn’t breathe, she certainly couldn’t speak. She would have given anything for a comfort break, overwhelmed by the need to pee. She knew it was only panic. She had panicked plenty of times before. She planned to panic plenty more times in the future, too, come to that. On the assumption that she had a future. Once again she found herself wishing she’d had the good sense to blow her brains out beneath Father Antoine’s chapel the night before last. Dear God in heaven, was it only the night before last?
The lead truck lurched to a stop. This one pulled up beside it. The four headlight beams shone on the back of a sizeable riverside building and on the wildly writhing water downstream of the shattered bridge behind it. The whole place looked as deserted as the city they had just come past. But, unlike the buildings in the city above, this one looked well cared for. Like the roadway. Used. In the middle of the building’s back wall there was a sizeable entrance closed by a roll-down door. Beside this there was a normal door. Like the roll-down, it was closed. The motors died. Silence, disturbed only by the roaring of the cataract.
‘Keep an eye on the bitches,’ said the man wearing the dead soldier’s body armour after a moment. He handed the huge driver the AK and climbed down, holding the M16 casually under one arm. Immediately, the driver flicked the select lever down to automatic, wound down the window and held the AK ready to fire like a handgun. He reached under the dash with his left hand and pulled out a square-looking automatic. Anastasia reckoned it was a Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm. The man in the flak-jacket glanced back up. ‘If they make a move or a sound, kill them,’ he said.
The driver nodded. ‘I’m on it.’
The man with the M16 slammed the truck’s door, then turned and walked forward slowly. The door ahead of him opened cautiously inwards. He vanished into the big building.
Anastasia looked across at Ado. The young woman’s eyes were huge, but her mouth was set and her jaw was square, determined. Pretty good for someone with a gun jabbed into the soft bit under her rib. I hope I look like that, thought Anastasia, but she doubted it. The driver’s piggy little eyes kept flicking from the women to the building.
The noise made by the roll-down door opening up was so loud and unexpected that they all jumped and Ado was lucky not to get shot.
‘Here we go,’ growled the driver and pulled the AK back in through the window and slipped it into the footwell between his knee and the door. One-handed, with the S&W still firmly in Ado’s side, he switched on the motor. He reached across and put the forward gear shift into first, then reached down and released the brake. He put his hand back on the wheel and engaged the clutch. While he was doing all this, the truck that had taken the lead so far did so once again, rolling forward through the wide portal in the building’s wall. The truck with the women in it moved slowly forward into the building behind it and stopped. The roll-down door behind them rattled loudly once again and slammed shut with a noise like a pistol shot.
Anastasia numbly looked around. They were in an open-fronted building overlooking the river. It was part warehouse, part dock. There was plenty of room for the two trucks to sit side by side on a floor made of concrete slabs – but there was also room for a sizeable if battered-looking vessel at an internal dock topped with wooden planks. The whole place was dimly lit, but the boat itself was dark. With a lurch that actually felt like a kick in the belly, Anastasia recognized the boat. It was the Nellie. She was looking wildly around for the superannuated Captain Christophe and his crew, when the driver ordered, ‘Out!’ and pushed Ado sideways with the gun. Carrying Celine between them, Anastasia and Ado climbed out on to the concrete. The driver followed them, carefully sliding across the bench seat so that he could keep them covered with his Smith & Wesson. The two men from their truck had been joined by three others from the
lead truck. The soldier who had taken them aboard was clearly the leader. He was pulling off the body armour as they arrived, revealing a range of black-rimmed holes across the breast of his uniform. He crossed towards the three women. ‘Time to wake up,’ he said to Celine and slapped her round the face.
‘Stop!’ said Anastasia, outraged. ‘You can’t do that! She’s hurt!’
‘You don’t get it yet, do you?’ he asked. ‘We can do whatever we want. And we will. And whether or not you all get hurt depends on how you cooperate.’
As he spoke, he continued to slap Celine. The blows weren’t hard, but he kept repeating them until Celine’s eyes flickered and opened.
Anastasia looked around the big building desperately, hoping against hope to see Nellie’s captain or a member of his crew. But whoever had been on the boat – whoever had let the soldier in and raised the roll-down door – was now inspecting the contents of the trucks. The noise they were making and the movements of the dusty canvas sides made that clear enough. Anastasia’s whole mind seemed suddenly to be focussed on the immediacy of each vivid instant as it ticked past. She did not want to think about the future. Except for the faint, faint hope that the men currently inspecting the trucks’ contents would indeed turn out to be the kindly old captain and his elderly, gentle crew.
But when at last they came back into the light and confronted the five soldiers, they proved to be half a dozen unfamiliar young men. Well armed and arrogant-looking.
‘We have a deal, Van,’ one of them said. He spoke in accented English to the lead soldier, but his eyes were raking over the three women.
‘Money first, Captain’ said Van. ‘Party later.’
‘OK. The money’s aboard this floating shit-pile. You set up the party over in the office while I get it.’
The five soldiers and Nellie’s new crew dragged the women across to a sizeable lean-to built in a corner of the warehouse. There was a generator room just beside this, Anastasia noted inconsequentially, the pounding motor there providing the light. In the warehouse the light was dim and flickering. In the lean-to it was brighter. The place was more than an office, she noted numbly. It apparently doubled as a nightwatchman’s shelter. There was a table, chairs, a Primus stove – as well as a desk, filing cabinets, bookcases full of mouldering ledgers.