Dark Heart

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘I blow it out of the way,’ rumbled Zhukov. ‘Now I have real munitions.’

  But Richard shouted, ‘No! Wait! Look. There’s someone moving in the cab. And besides,’ he emphasized, sensing that even Zhukov wasn’t going to be slowed by one man any more than by one truck, ‘anything big enough to blow the truck out of the way might bring the bridge down too. Especially if it has more missiles in it. Here’s a chance for some of us to live up to your T-shirt,’ he said to Anastasia. ‘To the front of it at least.’ And that seemed to settle things.

  But he drew the line at letting her come with him. Instead, when the front of the hovercraft banged down on to the brick-hard mud of the bank, he was standing with Colonel Mako at the centre of a small contingent of his well-drilled, fearsomely armed and very impressive-looking soldiers. A point team fanned out ahead of them, running up on to any elevated sections, in case this was a trap. The colonel was clearly a strategist, thought Richard. The point team signalled the all clear and the command group strode forward. As they approached the truck, three men climbed out of the cab with their heads hanging and their hands high. Two were dressed in shorts and T-shirts, obviously from Nellie’s crew. The other wore a UN uniform and body armour. They were all staring past him at something which had clearly scared them. When Richard glanced over his shoulder, it became obvious why they had not even considered resistance – the presence of the Zubr was simply overpowering. It sat in the opening beneath the bridge like some massive crocodile, its mouth agape, lined with soldiers instead of teeth, a T80U main battle tank lurking in the dark throat of the thing instead of a tongue. It almost made Richard’s hair stand on end – and the monster was on his side!

  As Mako’s soldiers disarmed and searched the frightened men, Richard went in hard with the first questions. In a moment or two he had established that there were no more of the smugglers left alive. That these three had not been part of the rape party; that the wound in one man’s shoulder had come from a ricochet. That they had panicked and driven the truck into Citematadi when the shooting had started. But that the deserted city had offered very little in the way of shelter and nothing in the way of sustenance. And no hope at all for rescue. So they had come back here where there was at least water and shelter from both sun and rain beneath the bridge. They had simply hoped that someone would come past before they starved to death. In the absence of civil authorities, Mako placed them in military detention and his men led them aboard Stalingrad, while the colonel himself prepared to climb into the cab and move the truck.

  ‘Colonel, have your men all got body armour?’ asked Richard, watching the third prisoner walking up the ramp with his bright blue UN vest.

  ‘Yes. It’s standard issue.’

  ‘Not for us or the Zubr’s crew . . .’ Richard’s first thought was to scavenge body armour in case anyone on the Zubr had to get involved in the fighting, but soon enough he was thinking bigger than that. Mako drove the truck up beside its companion. Richard jumped down and glanced into the first truck. Caleb’s men had arranged the dead men from the boathouse neatly and covered them with a respectfulness Richard suspected they did not really merit. They had simply piled the body armour on the bench seat in the cab. ‘We should take that,’ said Richard. ‘And we should take a look in the back of this one too. Esan might not have recognized what was in the crates back here, but we might have a better idea.’

  As it happened, they didn’t. The marking on the crates meant nothing to them – even the sections of it that were written in English. But when Richard snapped the top of one open, it was immediately clear that they were looking at some kind of communications equipment rather than any actual weaponry. ‘I’m not sure it’s worth wasting much time over,’ said Mako, but Richard’s Scottish blood simply would not allow him to discard something so thoughtlessly. Ten minutes later Stalingrad’s communications officer was standing beside Mako’s army man. And both of them were wide-eyed. ‘It’s the latest update of the Parakeet,’ said the army man, his voice simply awed. ‘It is state of the art.’

  ‘Parakeet,’ said Richard, disappointed. ‘That doesn’t sound like much.’

  ‘It’s the complete battlefield communication system,’ breathed the soldier. ‘Like the British Bowman – but it works better.’

  ‘Battlefield communications?’ said Richard. ‘You mean from command vehicles to attack vehicles and so forth?’

  ‘No,’ said Mako, his light baritone voice decisive, authoritative. ‘The Parakeet system is for use by dismounted personnel. On foot. Using this I can stay in detailed personal real-time contact with as many squad leaders as I want. Secure, encrypted, two-way, no matter where I am on the battlefield, or they are.’

  ‘Well, I think we should take it aboard,’ said Richard, impressed.

  ‘So do I,’ agreed Colonel Mako. ‘I’ll drive the truck straight up the ramp.’

  ‘And I’ll drive the other one,’ said Richard. ‘Waste not, want not. And at the very least it’ll allow Anastasia and Ado to give us a complete list of the men who tried to rape them, living or dead.’

  ‘And Celine Chaka, of course,’ called Mako, slamming the truck door behind him. ‘She’s the reason we’re here after all.’

  Just at that very moment, four hours upriver, the stiff and aching Celine Chaka finally realized that Anastasia Asov had saved her life. Twice. The first time she had saved it was when she pulled Celine out of the compound, under the chapel, and got her down to the boat. She had saved her then, even though she had been wounded in the shoot-out with the pursuing Army of Christ the Infant. And she had saved it now. For the two shots Anastasia had fired from the AK47 had wounded the two men that the army could least afford to do without. Two men so severely wounded that even the young doctor kidnapped from the clinic at Malebo could not guarantee to save them. Only she, with her far wider and more painfully learned experience, could do that. Which was the reason that she was still alive, where all the other invalids from the clinic had been executed long since. Which was why she would stay alive – like the young doctor and his little medical team, like Sister Hope and Sister Charity, and Jacob, the useful handyman – for just as long as she could be of service to these brutal and terrible people.

  The two wounded men lay in the chapel itself, where her own sickbed was, though the interchangeable places of learning and worship had been stripped out ages ago. Now it was, as closely as it was possible to make it, a hospital. Albeit a hospital with only two patients remaining, now that Celine was finally up. Celine called the man with the chest wound Ngoboi, for that was the costume he was wearing when Anastasia shot him, though she understood his real name was Ojogo. His responsibilities within the Army of Christ the Infant were for the oversight and maintenance of transport. And since his shooting, the transport section had all but closed down. Especially as one of his most trusted lieutenants – a boy called Esan, apparently – had vanished in the melee of that night three days since.

  Moses Nlong himself had been coherent – although in great and increasing agony – for some time after his wounding. Just long enough to issue a whole string of orders, from the building of the stockade to the kidnapping of the nearest doctor from the clinic at Malebo. But he was delirious and helpless now. So much so that the men in charge at the moment, led by the man who had kidnapped her – the fearsome Captain Odem – had very pointedly allowed her to live as long as she tended him and kept him alive. But that was becoming increasingly hard to do.

  The bullet from Anastasia’s AK, beginning to tumble at the end of its flight, had hit the general directly on his left knee. It shattered the kneecap, spreading into a misshapen mushroom as it did so, and smashed the joint behind the patella – splintering both the big bones – the tibia shin bone and the femur thigh bone, before tearing the fibula free – thus destroying the ankle below as well. ‘It was lucky for the general that Sister Hope was a competent first-aider,’ said Celine to young doctor Chukwu. ‘She managed to stem the blood loss from th
e popliteal artery and vein before he bled to death. But, in spite of her ministrations, Nlong will never walk properly again.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Dr Chukwu agreed, frowning. ‘If I were a more confident surgeon I would have taken the leg off below the knee and tried to reconstruct the shattered end of the thigh. But surgery is not an option under these circumstances. Gangrene, however, is.’

  A footfall behind Celine made her turn. It was Odem. He stood for a moment eyeing her as though he could see through all of her clothing, instead of just through the gossamer of the bloodstained blouse she had put on instead of the hospital robe from the clinic. Her flesh rose in goosebumps of revulsion at the thought of him doing to her what he apparently did to the harem of girls he kept with him each night. He crossed to the general’s bed and looked down at him. ‘I don’t think he has long to live,’ the soldier growled. ‘He was growing weak in any case; wanting to settle down. To negotiate with your father. Become a farmer once again.’ The full lips twisted in contempt.

  ‘I’m sure that would be a wise move, Captain,’ said Celine carefully.

  ‘So are some of the others,’ he sneered. ‘They have given him until dawn. He either starts getting better soon or I assume command.’ He shouldered the doctor aside and crossed to the second bed where the dying Ngoboi lay tossing restlessly, coughing and choking. ‘His right-hand man, Captain Ojogo,’ said Odem thoughtfully as he slid his matchet out. ‘My greatest rival.’ The blade rose and fell once. Twice. The sound was indescribable. Odem turned his back on the fountain of blood which burst from Ngoboi. ‘You have ’til dawn,’ he said, his red-rimmed eyes moving from Celine to the doctor and the nurses cowering with the two nuns on the raised platform that had once been an altar. ‘All of you.’

  He went to move away and then turned back.

  ‘If you last past midnight,’ he concluded.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Dark

  Stalingrad whispered into position half an hour after sunset, just at the moment that the tropical darkness closed down most fiercely. Thunderheads massed in the west once more, blotting out the last vestiges of daylight and threatening the upper sky. During the final section of their approach, Richard had asked Captain Caleb to get Robin back aboard the Shaldag, to drift downstream to the western end of the mangroves and rendezvous with the larger vessel there. He calculated that this put a good solid kilometre of cover between the compound and the two craft set to attack it. While there seemed to be every chance that the Shaldag had gone unnoticed, it seemed very unlikely that the massive Zubr would. And the plan that Richard was discussing with Colonel Mako, Captain Zhukov and Captain Caleb relied on surprise. Intelligence and surprise.

  Robin, who had climbed back down to give her initial report, had then returned when the heat was going out of the afternoon, just after four, to spend some time completing as detailed a survey as possible of the stockade, relaying what information she could. Inevitably, it went to Stalingrad via Caleb aboard FPB004. Richard and the men he was working with, therefore, had a clear idea of the section of the compound facing the river. The stockade wall stood about four metres tall. It was built of thick-looking tree trunks chopped bodily out the nearby forest, which had been well secured together and seemed to be invulnerable to anything smaller than artillery. The primary watch position was the bell-tower of the chapel immediately behind it which seemed to have a platform beside the bell itself, and Robin had seen men come up and down what seemed to her to be a ladder reaching up from the chapel – judging from the way they moved. Something that looked like a shoulder-launched missile stood there, ready.

  Robin described a couple of other rudimentary watch positions at either end of the wall – or that section of it she could see clearly. There was one where it vanished into the jungle on her left and another where it turned to run parallel to the river on her right. That second watchtower was the next most frequently occupied for it overlooked the little jetty. There was what looked like a heavy machine gun there. It had been empty in the morning. Now it was manned. The watch routine had seemed to be desultory before she made her first report. Things had tightened up noticeably by the time she returned for her second tour of duty. It seemed to her that whoever had come back with the vehicles and with Celine had had a marked impact on the discipline and routines of the encampment.

  ‘We need more intel,’ said Mako thoughtfully, after an extended briefing, as 20:00 hours passed into 21:00.

  ‘I agree,’ nodded Richard. ‘I mean, we can sail Stalingrad up to the jetty, all guns blazing, and send our troops ashore with a very high expectation of success. But during the time it takes us to get past that stockade and into the compound in any serious numbers, God alone knows what may have happened to the people we came up here to save.’ He turned towards the microphone connecting him to the Shaldag’s bridge. ‘Caleb, any feedback from Sanda and the patrol you sent ashore?’

  ‘Nothing of any use yet,’ the captain’s voice answered. ‘But they’re making good progress along a track cleared by the vehicles they’ve been following.’

  ‘They’ll be coming through the jungle on the other side,’ mused Richard. ‘They’ll be able to give us a new perspective when they get into position. But what we really need before we attack is some kind of solid intel from inside the compound itself. Ideally, we need someone actually in there who can tell us when the optimum moment for attack arrives – and can then get to Celine and the others and try to protect them during the time it takes us to break in and rescue them.’

  Nobody said ‘dream on’ or ‘what planet are you from?’, which surprised Richard, especially as Robin was listening. But the fact was that what he said was true. Unless they could actually smuggle some sort of fifth column into the compound, the chances of Celine and the others surviving were slim to negligible. So he went one step forward – the step that he had always known would take him on to the thinnest ice. ‘So I have an idea,’ he said. ‘Something to be working on while we wait for the intel to firm up. I brought a disguise,’ he explained. ‘I got Andre Wanago to bring up some costumes from the Granville Royal Lodge.’

  ‘What costumes?’ asked Robin’s voice over the radio-link from the Shaldag’s bridge. She sounded genuinely intrigued.

  ‘Ngoboi’s costume,’ answered Richard. ‘From the white-tie dinner. Ngoboi’s costume and his helpers’.’

  ‘Ngoboi’s costume,’ said Robin. ‘Clever. But we’d need to be desperate, surely, to take the risk . . .’

  ‘Fair enough,’ temporized Richard. ‘But you never know. I noticed that Ngoboi’s costume covered the dancer completely. There’s no way to see through it. It’s the perfect disguise. So I thought I could put it on and—’

  ‘It might work if you know the dance,’ said Robin. ‘Do you know the dance?’

  ‘Wait!’ commanded Caleb, interrupting the conversation at that moment. ‘Lieutenant Sanda and his men have just reported on the other radio. They have finally arrived at the inland perimeter of the camp. I’ll patch Sanda through so he can make a more detailed report. Wait . . .’

  ‘. . . technicals,’ came Sanda’s voice suddenly, clearly partway through a sentence. ‘Flatbed trucks – Toyotas – with heavy machine guns mounted on them. They are in a section of the compound that’s quite well lit so I can see them pretty clearly. I count half a dozen. A couple look as though they have the relatively new Chinese 14.5 millimetre QJG 02 heavy machine guns on the back. The rest have the older W85s. That’s quite a lot of firepower, if they get it deployed. And there are a couple of four-by-fours – the ones we’ve been tracking, I’d guess. They seem to have Russian Strela missiles aboard them. They’re plane killers that will take out a tank too, of course. The whole lot is pretty well guarded by a serious-looking patrol. But I think that’s just standard procedure. I don’t think they suspect we’re here.’ There was a brief silence, then Sanda added the thought that had been on everybody else’s mind during his terse report. ‘I wonder what other nasty surprises th
ey have hidden away in there . . .’

  After a moment more of silence, Richard continued, ‘Well, it seems that my idea is more important than ever.’

  ‘Accepted,’ answered Robin roundly. ‘But by the same token, if we’re sending someone in for a look around, it has to be someone who fits the bill. Who knows what they’re looking for – and who knows how Ngoboi would behave?’

  ‘Well, I’m pretty well up on modern weaponry,’ persisted Richard. ‘And I thought I could improvise the soft-shoe shuffle, you know? Make it up . . .’

  ‘Do you know the bloody dance, Richard?’

  Richard opened his mouth to admit, ‘No . . .’

  But Bonnie Holliday interrupted. ‘I do. I know the weaponry. And I know the dance.’

  An hour later still, as 22:00 reached round to 23:00, Richard was rowing the tiny cockleshell in which Anastasia, Ado, Esan and Celine had escaped back under the jetty and along the eastern bank behind it. The little rowboat carried Ado, Esan and Bonnie, in Ngoboi’s costume. A couple of things had changed since Bonnie’s declaration and the heated discussion that had followed it – not least with some of Mako’s Poro officers who saw even the idea as a weird kind of sacrilege. Changed and progressed. Sanda and his men were in position to contact and support the undercover dancers. Sanda reported that there was no defensive wall on the jungle side – indeed, that, apart from the vehicles, the compound seemed open and undefended from the perimeter section where the jungle met the river upstream east of the jetty.

  The jungle section was the most sporadically patrolled, so it seemed the most obvious point of entry into the compound, even though there were the powerfully armed technicals nearby and patrols were keeping a regular eye on them. Behind the little cockleshell of a boat, three larger inflatables whispered through the water, also being rowed, filled with a carefully selected mixture of men from both the Shaldag and from Stalingrad herself. Men and one insistent young woman who refused to take ‘No’ for an answer. If Bonnie was going into the camp, she was not going in without support, and if Esan and Ado were going with her as Ngoboi’s companions to try and pull Celine and the others out of the firefight, then Anastasia was going to be there beside her friends no matter what. Unlike the others, she had not needed to change in order to put on non-reflective black clothing. And she had positively revelled in covering her face, arms and hands in thick black camouflage paint. The only things about the warlike Russian woman likely to catch the light, thought Richard, were the whites of her eyes, the barrel of her SIG SG 453, or the teeth she kept baring in a truly unnerving tiger-smile. Perhaps there had been something in her psychoanalyst’s Freudian diagnosis after all.