by Wilbur Smith
At the end the reader was forced to share with the writer her obvious affection for and understanding of her subject, but even more, her deep concern for the forest in which they lived.
Daniel closed the book and sat for a while in the pleasant glow of wellbeing that it had inspired. Not for the first time he felt a desire to meet and talk to the woman who had created this small magic, but now at last he knew how and when to do so.
The annual general meeting of the shareholders of BOSS was set for a week before his departure for Ubomo, and Pickering in public relations arranged an invitation for Daniel and Bonny to attend. The AGM was always held in the ballroom of BOSS’s own magnificent headquarters in Blackfriars. The AGM was always held on the last Friday of July and began at seven-thirty in the evening. It ran for an hour and twenty-five minutes: ten minutes to read the previous minutes, an hour of sonorous prose from Sir Peter as he made his chairman’s report and, finally, fifteen minutes of appreciation by the members of his board, capped by a vote of thanks and approbation, proposed by an individual planted in the body of the shareholders. The vote was always passed unanimously by a show of hands.
That’s the way it always went. It was company tradition.
Security at the door was very strict. The name of every person entering was checked against the current register of shareholders and special invitations were scrutinised by uniformed members of BOSS’s security staff.
Sir Peter didn’t want wild Irishmen or anti-Rushdie fundamentalists letting off bombs in the middle of his carefully rehearsed speech, nor did he want freelance journalists or trade unionists, or other free-loading riffraff making pigs of themselves at the heavily laden buffet table and complimentary bar.
Daniel had mistimed their departure from the flat in Chelsea. They would have been at Blackfriars thirty minutes earlier but Bonny had, at the last minute, begun feeling very healthy. She had made a suggestion which Daniel, always the perfect gentleman, had been unable to refuse. Afterwards it had been necessary to take a shower together during which Bonny had started a water fight which had reduced the bathroom to a sodden shambles with water running out under the door into the passageway.
All this took time, and then they had battled to find a taxi. When they finally flagged one down in the King’s Road they ran into traffic along the Embankment and only arrived at the BOSS building after Sir Peter was in full stride, mesmerising his audience with an account of BOSS’ performance over the previous twelve months.
All seats were taken and the overflow crowded the back of the hall.
They sneaked in, and Daniel shepherded Bonny into a corner near the bar, and pressed a large whisky and soda into her hand. “That should hold you for half an hour,” he whispered. “Just please don’t start feeling healthy again until we get home.”
“Chicken.” She grinned at him. You can’t take it, Armstrong.
The shareholders around them frowned and shushed disapproval and they settled down contritely to an appreciation of Sir Peter Tug Harrison’s wit and erudition.
On the dais Sir Peter faced them from the centre of the long table with a microphone in front of him and the members of his board spread out on each side of him. Amongst them there was an Indian maharajah, an earl, an East European pretender and a number of run-of-the-mill baronets. All were names and titles that looked good on the company letter-head, but not a person in the room that evening had any illusion as to where the true power and might of BOSS lay.
Sir Peter stood with his left hand thrust into his jacket pocket, occasionally extending the forefinger of his right hand and pointing at his audience. As he made each point, he stabbed his forefinger like a pistol barrel at them, and even Daniel found himself flinching and blinking as though a shot had been fired at his head.
Everything Sir Peter had to tell them was good news, from the results of offshore oil drilling in the Pemba channel, to the cotton harvests and ground-nut crop of Zambia, and the increase in both pretax profits and declared dividends. The audience hummed with delight at each fresh revelation.
Sir Peter glanced at his watch. He had been running for fifty minutes, ten to go. It was time to move on to future plans and projections. He took a sip of water, and when he resumed, his voice was velvety and seductive. “My lords, ladies and gentlemen, I have given you the bad news…” He paused for laughter and a volley of applause. “Now let me move on to the good news. The good news is Ubomo, the People’s Democratic Republic of Ubomo and your company’s participation in a new era for that beautiful little country, the opportunity that we have, not only to provide employment but also prosperity for a sadly disadvantaged population of four million souls.”
For nine minutes more he enthraled them with the promise of bright new profits and skyrocketing dividends and then he ended, “And so, ladies and gentlemen, what we see before us is Ubomo, the high road to the future of the African continent.”
“Hell!” Daniel whispered, his voice blanketed by the applause. “That’s a blatant case of plagiarism. The old bastard lifted it straight from me.”
When Sir Peter sat down the company secretary gave them two minutes to express their approval fully before he leaned over his microphone. “My lords, ladies and gentlemen, I am now opening the meeting to the floor. Are there any shareholders questions, please? Your chairman and board will endeavour to answer them to the best of their ability.”
His magnified voice was still reverberating through the ball when another voice cut in. “I have a question for the chairman.” It was a feminine voice, clear, self-assured, and surprisingly loud, so loud that on the dais Sir Peter winced.
Up until then Daniel had been trying to identify Doctor Kinnear in the body of the crowded hall, but without success. She was either not present or she was obscured by the crush of other shareholders. He had given up the search.
Now there was no mistaking her. She was very much present, standing on her chair, three rows from the front. Daniel grinned with delight. The echoing volume of Kelly Kinnear’s voice was explained. She had armed herself with an electronic bull-horn. How she had smuggled the device past the hawk-eyed security guards was a mystery, but now she was wielding it with telling effect.
So often at other meetings that Daniel had attended, the questions from the floor, no matter how pertinent or penetrating, had lost all their force simply because they were not audible to the bulk of the audience. “What did he say?” and “Speak up!” were the cries that greeted them, and the game was lost with the first delivery. This was not happening to Kelly Kinnear.
Perched high on her chair, in full view of the entire audience, she was lashing Sir Peter Harrison at a range of thirty paces in a ringing young voice. She was smaller than Daniel had expected, but her neat little body was poised and graceful, almost birdlike, and there was a force and presence about her that transcended her physical size. “Mr. Chairman, BOSS has very recently included the image of a green tree in the company emblem. What I want to know is whether this is to enable you to cut it down?”
There was a stunned silence. Her sudden appearance had been greeted with amused and admiring smiles from most of the audience, the natural masculine reaction to a pretty girl, but now the smiles were replaced by puzzled expressions. “For thirty years, Sir Peter,” Kelly Kinnear went on, “ever since you have been chairman of BOSS, the slogan of the company has been ‘Dig it up!’ ‘Chop it down!’ or ‘Shoot it!’ The puzzled expressions turned to frowns, shareholders exchanged worried glances. “For many years BOSS employed professional hunters to massacre wild animals. The meat was used to feed the company’s thousands of employees. The policy of cheap food was only discontinued relatively recently. That was the1shoot it1 philosophy.”
The back of Kelly Kinnear’s slim sun-tanned neck was flushing with her mounting anger. The thick dark braid of hair hanging down between her shoulder-blades twitched like the tail of a lioness. “For thirty years, BOSS has been ripping the mineral riches from Africa’s soil and leaving
gaping craters and devastation in its wake. That’s the ‘dig it up’ mentality.
“For thirty years, BOSS has been slashing down the natural forests and putting the land to cotton and ground-nuts and other cash crops that drain the soil, that poison it with nitrate fertilisers, that contaminate the streams and rivers. That’s the ‘chop it down’ philosophy.” Her whole body quivered with indignation, a phenomenon that intrigued Daniel. “Those cash crops produce no food for the people who once lived upon the land. They are forced to trek away from the devastation that BOSS has created to live in the odious slums of Africa’s sprawling new towns. These people are turned into outcasts by BOSS’s greed.”
Sir Peter turned his head and raised an eyebrow at the company secretary. Obediently the secretary leapt to his feet. “Will you please state your name, and put your question briefly and clearly?”
“My name is Doctor Kelly Kinnear, and I am putting my question. Will you just give me a chance?”
“That is not a question. You are haranguing…”
“Listen to me,” she ordered, and hopped around on the chair to face the ballroom filled with shareholders. “For most of us, our personal welfare ranks far ahead of tropical forests and lakes in a faraway land. The princely dividends paid by BOSS are more important to us than exotic birds and unfamiliar animals and tribes of indigenous people. It’s so easy to pay lip service to the environment as long as it doesn’t affect our own pockets–”
“Order! Order, please!” bawled the company secretary. “You are out of order, Doctor Kinnear. You are not asking a question.”
“All right,” Kelly rounded on him. “I’ll ask a question. Is the chairman of BOSS aware that while we sit here, the tropical rain forests of Ubomo are being destroyed?” She glared at him. “Does the chairman realize that over fifty species of wildlife have become extinct in Ubomo as a direct result of the activities of Boss?”
“Shame!”
“Sit down!”
“The death of a species affects us directly. It will lead in the end to our own extinction, the death of man on earth.” There was a hum of indignation and outrage from the shareholders.
Sir Peter Harrison smiled and shook his head pityingly, making no attempt to respond to her attack. He knew where the loyalty of his shareholders lay.
“Sit down!” somebody shouted again. “You silly bitch!”
“Doctor Kinnear,” the company secretary called, “I must ask you to resume your seat at once. This is a deliberate attempt to disrupt our proceedings.”
I accuse you, Mr. Chairman, Kelly pointed a quivering finger at Sir Peter, I accuse you of rape. There were shouts of protest, some of the other shareholders were on their feet. Shame!
The woman’s a lunatic One of them attempted to pull Kelly down off her chair, but it was obvious that she had surrounded herself with a small group of supporters of her own, half a dozen young men and women in casual dress, but with determined expressions. They closed up around her. One of the young men pushed her attackers away. Let her speaK!
“I accuse you of the rape of Ubomo. Already your bulldozers are ripping into the forest–”
“Get her out of here!”
“Doctor Kinnear, if you don’t heed the chair I will have no alternative but to have you forcibly removed.”
“I’m a shareholder. I have every right–”
“Throw her out!”
There, was confusion and uproar in the front of the hall, while on the dais Sir Peter Harrison looked bored and detached.
“Answer me!” Kelly yelled at him, surrounded by her struggling cohorts. “Fifty species doomed to extinction so that you can drive around in your Rolls–”
“Ushers! Ushers!” yelped the company secretary, and from every corner of the room the uniformed security men leapt, into the fray.
As one of them elbowed Daniel aside and charged forward, Daniel could not help himself. He thrust out his right foot, a cunning little ankle-tap that knocked one of the usher’s large black boots across his own ankle. The man tripped himself and was hurled forward by his own momentum. He flew headlong into a row of chairs and, amidst loud cries of protest and outrage, knocked the occupants into a heap. Chairs crashed, and women screamed.
The press photographers loved it, and their flashes bloomed and lit the hall with a flickering like summer lightning.
“While you mouth your sanctimonious platitudes and put a little green tree on the BOSS emblem, your bulldozers are tearing the guts out of one of the most vulnerable and precious forests in the world.” Kelly Kinnear’s amplified voice rose above the uproar. She was still on her chair, but swaying precariously in the storm that raged around her, a small heroic figure in the confusion. “Those forests do not belong to you. They do not belong to the cruel military tyrant who has seized power in Ubomo and who is your accomplice in this atrocity. Those forests belong to the Barnbuti pygmies, a tribe of gentle inoffensive people who have lived there since time immemorial. We, the friends of the earth, and all decent people everywhere say ‘keep your greedy hands off the–”
Three of the BOSS ushers formed a scrimmage line; in their black uniforms they resembled a New Zealand front rank. They broke through her ring of defenders and reached up to drag Kelly Kinnear down from her perch. “Leave me alone,” she yelled at them, and turned her bullhorn into an offensive weapon, raining blows upon them until the trumpet cracked and shattered and she was defenceless. Between them they dragged her down off her perch and bore her, kicking and clawing and biting, from the hall.
A kind of awed calm returned. Like the survivors of a bomb blast, the shareholders picked up the chairs and straightened their clothing and examined themselves for injuries.
On the dais Sir Peter rose unhurriedly to his feet and resumed his place at the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, the floor show was unscheduled, I assure you. On behalf of BOSS and my board, I sincerely apologize for this outburst. If it served any useful purpose at all, it was as a graphic illustration of the difficulties we face when we try to improve the lot of our fellow men.”
Those who had been distracted gathered themselves and turned to listen to his rich dark seductive tones. After the shrill denunciations and accusations, it was a soothing balm.
“Doctor Kelly Kinnear is notorious for her intemperate views. She has declared a one-woman war on the government of President Taffari of Ubomo. She has, in fact, made as much of a nuisance of herself in that country as she did here tonight. You have seen her in action, ladies and gentlemen, so you will not be particularly surprised to hear that she was deported from Ubomo, and formally declared an undesirable. The vendetta that she is waging is personal and spiteful. She sees herself as an injured party, and she is taking her revenge.”
He paused again, and shook his head. “However, we must not make the mistake of believing that what we have witnessed tonight was the isolated act of some poor misguided soul. Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, in this crazy new world of ours we are surrounded by the loonies of the left. This lady, who has just left us–” They laughed uncertainly, beginning to recover from the effects of Kelly Kinnear’s attempt at persuasion, “this lady is one of those who prefers that tens of thousands of her fellow human beings suffer starvation and misery, rather than that a single tree be cut down, rather than that a single plough should run a furrow, rather than that a single animal should die.” He paused and scowled at them sternly, exerting the full force of his personality, reasserting his control that for a minute had been shaken by the small determined woman with the loud-hailer. “This is nonsense. Man has as much right to life as any other species on this planet. However, BOSS recognizes its responsibility to the environment. We are a green company committed to the wellbeing of all creatures on this earth, men and animals and plants. Last year we spent over a hundred thousand pounds on environmental studies prior to proceeding with some of our enterprises. One hundred thousand pounds, ladies and gentlemen, is a great deal of money.” He paused for the applaus
e from his audience.
Daniel noted that he was careful not to compare this great deal of money to BOSS’s taxable profits for the same period, profits of almost one billion pounds.
As the applause died away he continued. “We spent that money, not to impress anybody, not as some grand public relations gesture, but in a genuine and sincere attempt to do the right thing by all the world. We know in our hearts that what we are doing is right and proper. So do you, who are the most important members of BOSS, the shareholders. Our conscience is clear, ladies and gentlemen! We can go forward with confidence and enthusiasm to keep our company what it has always been, one of the great forces for good in an otherwise sad and naughty world.”
The meeting overran its usual duration by almost twenty minutes, a great deal of extra time being devoted to a standing ovation for the chairman’s impromptu speech.
For once the traditional vote of thanks was passed not by a show of hands, but by thunderous acclaim. Tug hammers loony Greens was the headline in the tabloid press the following morning and the general consensus in the media was that it had been not so much a confrontation, as a massacre of the innocents.
Chapter 21
There was no direct flight from Heathrow to Kahali in Ubomo.
Although the airport had been renamed the Ephrem Taffari airport, and twenty-five million dollars had been loaned by the World Bank to extend the main runway to accommodate intercontinental jet aircraft and to refurbish the airport buildings, there had been a series of delays in the construction work due to the fact that much of the original loan capital seemed to have evaporated. Rumour in the streets of Kahali suggested that the missing funds had found a happy home in a numbered Swiss bank account. Another twenty-five million was needed to complete the project and the World Bank was demanding unreasonable assurances and guarantees before supplying it. In the meantime travellers were forced to travel to Ubomo via Nairobi.