Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  In the night she came awake to find herself weeping aloud and Sepoo’s hand stroking her arm to comfort her.

  The return journey down the dying river was slower, as though she were burdened by her sadness and Sepoo shortened his stride to match her. Five days later, Kelly and Sepoo reached Gondola.

  Chapter 24

  Gondola was a site unique in this part of the forest. It was a glade of yellow elephant grass less than a hundred acres in extent. At the south end it rose to meet a line of forest-clad hills. For part of the day the tall trees threw a shadow across the clearing, keeping it cooler than if it had been exposed to the full glare of the tropical sun. Two small streams bounded this wedge of open ground, while the slope and elevation disclosed a sweeping vista over the treetops towards the northwest. It was one of the few vantage points in the Ubomo basin from which the view was not obscured by the great forest trees. The cool air in the open glade was less humid than that of the deep forest.

  Kelly paused at the edge of the forest, as she always did, and looked out at the mountain peaks a hundred miles away. Usually the Mountains of the Moon were bidden in their own perpetual clouds. This morning, as if to welcome her home, they had drawn aside the veil and stood clear in all their glistening splendour. The glaciated massif of Mount Stanley was forced upwards between the faults of the Great Rift Valley to a height of almost seventeen thousand feet. It was pure icewhite and achingly beautiful.

  She turned away from it reluctantly and looked across the clearing. There was her homestead and laboratory, an ambitious building of log, clay plaster and thatch which had taken her almost three years to build, with a little help from her friends.

  The gardens on the lower slopes were irrigated from the streams and fenced in to protect them from the forest creatures. There were no flowerbeds. The garden was not ornamental but provided the small community of Gondola with a large part of its sustenance.

  As they left the forest, some of the women working in the garden spotted them and ran to greet Kelly, shrieking and laughing with delight. Some were Bambuti, but most were Uhah women in their traditional colourful long skirts. They surrounded her and escorted her up to the homestead.

  The commotion brought a solitary figure out of the laboratory on to the wide verandah. He was an old man with hair as silver as the snows on Mount Stanley that faced him from a hundred miles away. He was dressed in a crisp blue safari suit and sandals. He shaded his eyes and recognized her and smiled. His teeth were still white and perfect in his dark intelligent face.

  “Kelly.” He held out both hands to her as she came up on to the verandah, and she ran to meet him. “Kelly,” he repeated, as he took her hands. “I was beginning to worry about you. I expected you days ago. It’s good to see you.”

  “It’s good to see you also, Mr. President.”

  “Come now, my child. I am no longer that, at least not in Ephrem Taffari’s view, and when did we last stand on ceremony, you and I?”

  “Victor,” she corrected herself. “I have missed you so, and I have so much to tell you. I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Later.” He shook his handsome grizzled head and embraced her. She knew that he was over seventy years old but she could feel that his body had the strength and vigour of a man half that age. “First let me show you how well I have taken care of your work during your absence. I should have remained a scientist rather than becoming a politician,” he said. He took her hand and drew her into the laboratory, and immediately they were engrossed in technical discussion.

  President Victor Omeru had studied in London as a young man. He had returned to Ubomo with a Master’s degree in electrical engineering and for a short time had been employed in the colonial administration until he had resigned to lead the movement towards independence. Yet he had always retained his interest in the sciences and his learning and skills had always impressed Kelly.

  When he had been overthrown in Ephrem Taffari’s bloody coup, he had fled into the forest with a handful of loyal followers and sought sanctuary, with Kelly Kinnear at Gondola.

  In the ten or so months since then, the settlement in the glade had become the headquarters of the Ubomo resistance movement against Taffari’s tyranny, and Kelly had become one of his most trusted agents. When he was not receiving visitors from outside the forest and planning the counter-revolution, he made himself Kelly’s assistant and in a very short time had become invaluable to her.

  For an hour the two of them were happily engrossed with slides and retorts and cages of laboratory rats. It was almost as though they were deliberately putting off the moment when they must discuss urgent and ugly reality.

  Kelly’s research was handicapped by inadequate equipment and shortage of expendable supplies. All of this had to be portered into Gondola, and since Kelly’s field grant had been rescinded and Victor Omeru deposed, she had been even more restricted. Nevertheless, they had made some exciting discoveries. In particular they had been able to isolate an anti-malarial substance in the sap of the selepe tree. The selepe was a common plant of the forest that the pygmies used for the dual purposes of building their huts and treating fever.

  Malaria was a resurgent menace in Africa where more and more frequently there appeared strains resistant to the synthetic prophylactics. Soon malaria might rank, once again, as the greatest killer on the continent, apart from AIDS. It seemed ironic that both these scourges should have their origin in the cradle of man himself, in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, where man had stood upright and taken his first uncertain footsteps into glory and infamy. Was it not possible that the ultimate cure for both these diseases might yet come from this same area of the globe? They both reasserted that hope, as they had done a thousand times before.

  In addition to the malarial cure, there were the other possibilities that Kelly and Victor Omeru were considering. The one disease to which the Bambuti were susceptible was cancer of the pancreas. This was caused by some factor of their diet or environment in the forest. The women of the tribe used an infusion of the root of a vine that contained a bitter milky sap to treat the disease, and Kelly had witnessed some seemingly miraculous cures. She and Victor Omeru had isolated an alkaloid from the sap which they hoped was the active agent in the cure, and they were testing it with encouraging results.

  They were using the same alkaloid to treat three of the Uhali men in camp who were suffering from AIDS. It was too soon to be certain, but once again the results were most encouraging and exciting. Now they discussed them avidly. This excitement and the pleasure of reunion lasted them through the frugal lunch of salads that they shared on the verandah of the thatched bungalow.

  Kelly revelled in the joy of conversing with such a cultured and erudite man. Victor Omeru’s presence had transformed her lonely isolated life at Gondola. She loved her Bambuti friends, but they came and went without warning, and though their simple happy ways were always a joy, they were no substitute for the stimulation of a superior educated mind.

  Victor Omeru was a man she could respect and admire and love without reservation. As far as Kelly was concerned, he was without vice, overflowing with humanity and compassion for his fellow men, and at the same time with a deep and abiding respect and concern for the world in which they lived and the other creatures that shared it with them.

  She saw in him the true patriot, completely devoted to his little nation. He was, in addition, the only African Kelly had ever met who was above tribalism. He had spent his entire political life trying to appease and ameliorate the terrible curse that was, in both their views, the single most tragic fact of the African reality. He should have been an example to the rest of the continent, and to his peers in the high councils of the Organisation of African Unity.

  When, almost single-handed, he had obtained independence from the colonial administration, the preponderance of his fellow Uhah tribesmen had swept him into the presidential office and overturned at a single stroke the centuries of brutal domination by the proud Hi
ta aristocracy.

  The greatest crisis of his presidency had come within the very first days of independence. The Uhali tribe had turned upon the Hita in a savage orgy of retribution. In five terrible days, over twenty thousand Hita had perished. The mob had torched their manyattas. Those Hita who survived the flames were hacked to death with hoes and machetes. The tools with which the enslaved Uhali had tilled the fields and hewn the firewood for their masters were turned upon them.

  The proud Hita women, tall and stately and beautiful, were stripped of their traditional ankle-length robes, and the elaborately plaited locks in which they gloried were hacked roughly from their heads. They were herded naked before the jeering Ubali mob, and pelted with excrement.

  Some of the women were lifted struggling and naked and impaled upon the poles of the manyattas outer stockade. The younger women and girls had been yoked between two of their own oxen, secured with rawhide thongs by each ankle. Then the mob had urged the oxen forward and the girls had been torn apart.

  Kelly had not been there to witness these atrocities. She had been a schoolgirl in England at the time, but the legend had become history of how Victor Omeru had gone out to plead with the mob and physically to interpose himself between them and their Hita victims. With the sheer force of his personality he had brought the slaughter to an end, and virtually saved the Hita tribe from genocide and extinction.

  Nevertheless, thousands of Hita perished and fifty thousand fled for sanctuary into the neighbouring countries of Uganda and Zaire.

  It had taken a major exercise of statesmanship over decades of wise government for Victor Omeru to cool the terrible tribal animosities of his people, to persuade the exiled Hita to return to Ubomo, to restore their herds and their grazing lands to them, and to bring their young men in from the traditional pastoral ways to education and advancement in the modern Ubomo nation he was trying to build.

  In recompense for those terrible first days of independence Victor had always thereafter erred on the side of leniency towards the Hita tribe. To demonstrate his trust and faith in them he allowed them gradually to take control of Ubomo’s little army and police force. Ephrem Taffari himself had travelled abroad to complete his education on a special scholarship provided by Victor Omeru out of his own meagre presidential salary.

  Victor Omeru was paying for that generosity now. Once again the Uhali tribe groaned beneath the Hita tyranny. As so often happens in Africa, the cycle of oppression and brutality had run its full course, but even now as they sat on the wide verandah of the bungalow, immersed in discussion, Kelly could still detect the suffering and concern for his nation and all his people in Victor Omeru’s dark eyes.

  It seemed cruel to add to his misery but she could no longer keep it from him. Victor, there is something awful happening up there, in the rivers of the forest, in the sacred Bambuti heartland. Something so terrible that I hardly know how to describe it to you. He listened without interruption, but when she had finished he said quietly, Taffari is killing our people and our land. The vultures smell death in the air and they are gathering, but we will stop them. Kelly had never seen him so angry before. His face was hard and his eyes were dark and terrible.

  They are powerful, rich and powerful. There is no power to match that of honest men and a just cause, he replied, and his strength and determination were contagious. Kelly felt her despair slough away, leaving her feeling renewed and confident.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “We will find a way to stop them. For the sake of this land we must find a way.”

  Chapter 25

  Beautiful. The name was appropriate, Tug Harrison conceded, as the Rolls Royce Silver Spirit left the littoral plain and climbed up into the green mountains. The road swept around a shoulder of one of the peaks and for a moment Tug gazed out across the broad Formosa Straits and fancied he saw the loom of mainland China lurking like a dragon a, hundred and more miles out there in the blue distance. Then the road turned again and they were back into the forests of cypress and cedar.

  They were four thousand feet above the humid tropical plain and the bustle of Taipei, one of the busiest and most affluent cities in Asia. The air up here was sweet and cool; there was no need of the Rolls’s superb air-conditioning system.

  Tug felt relaxed and clear-headed. It was one of the joys of having your own jet aircraft, he smiled. The Gulfstream flew when he was ready, wherever he wanted to go. There was none of the aggravation of large airports and throngs of the great unwashed multitude. No miles of corridors to traverse nor luggage carousels at which to play the guessing game of will it come or won’t it, no surly customs officials and porters and taxi-drivers.

  Tug had taken it in easy stages from London. Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Brunei, Hong Kong, he had spent a day or two in each of those centres in all of which he had major games in play.

  The stop-over in Hong Kong had been particularly worthwhile. The richest and more prudent of the Hong Kong businessmen were intent on moving out their assets and relocating ahead of the termination of the treaty and the reversion of the territory to mainland China. In the permanent suite which he kept at the Peninsula Hotel, Tug had signed two agreements which should net him ten million pounds over the next few years. When his chief pilot touched down at Taipei airport, ground control directed Tug’s Gulfstream to taxi to a discreet parking billet behind the Cathay Pacific hangars and the Rolls-Royce was waiting on the tarmac, with the youngest son of the Ning family to meet him.

  Customs and Immigration, in the shape of two uniformed officials, were ushered aboard, bobbing and smiling, by his host. They stamped Tug’s red diplomatic passport and placed the in bond seals on his private bar and departed, all within five minutes.

  In the meantime Tug’s matched set of Louis Vuitton luggage was being transferred to the boot of the Rolls by a team of white-jacketed and gloved servants. Within fifteen minutes of touchdown, the Rolls whisked him out of the airport gates.

  Tug felt so good that he was inclined to philosophise. He compared other journeys he had made when he was young and poor and struggling. On foot and bicycle and native bus he had crossed and recrossed the African continent. He remembered his first motor vehicle, a Ford V-8 truck with front mudguards like elephant ears, smooth tyres that never ran fifty miles without puncturing, and an engine held together with baling wire and hope. He had been immensely proud of it at the time.

  Even his first air flight on one of the old Sunderland flying boats that once plied the African continent, landing to refuel on the Zambezi, the great lakes, and finally the Nile itself, had taken ten days to reach London.

  Truly to appreciate luxury it is necessary to have withstood severe hardship, Tug believed. The early days had been tough. He had revelled in each one of them but, hell, the touch of silk against his skin and the Rolls upholstery under his backside felt wonderful and he was looking forward to the negotiations that lay ahead. They would be hard and without quarter, but that was the way he liked it.

  He loved the cut and thrust of the bargaining table. He enjoyed changing his style to match each adversary he faced. He could flash the cutlass or palm the stiletto as the occasion warranted. When called for he could shout and bang the table and curse with the same vigour as an Australian opal miner or a Texan rough-neck on an oil rig, or he could smile and whisper honeyed hemlock as skilfully as could the man he was now going to meet. Yes, he loved every moment of it. It was what kept him young.

  He smiled genially and turned to discuss oriental netsukes and ceramics with the young man who sat beside him on the pale green leather back seat of the Rolls. “Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek brought the cream of China’s art treasures with him from the mainland,” Ning Cheng Gong was saying, and Tug nodded.

  “All civilised men must be thankful for that,” he agreed. “If he had not done so, they would have been destroyed in Mao’s cultural revolution.”

  As they chatted, Tug was studying his host’s youngest son. Even though he had not yet shown himself to be
a force in the Ning financial dynasty, and up until now had been overshadowed by his elder half-brothers, Tug had a full dossier on Cheng.

  There was some indication that Cheng, even as the youngest son, was his father’s favourite, the child of his old age, by his third wife, a beautiful English girl. As often happens, the admixture of oriental and occidental blood seemed to have brought out the good traits of both parents. It seemed that Ning Cheng Gong had bred true, for he was clever, deviously ruthless, and lucky. Tug Harrison never discounted the element of luck. Some men had it and others, no matter how clever, did not.

  It seemed that old Ning Heng H’Sui was bringing him on carefully, like a fine thoroughbred colt, preparing him for his first major race with patience and diligence. He had given Cheng all the advantages, without allowing him to grow up soft.

  After his master’s degree at Chiang Kai-shek University, Ning Cheng Gong had gone straight into the Taiwanese army for national service. His father had made no effort to beat the draft on his behalf. Tug supposed that it was part of the toughening process.

  Tug Harrison had a copy of the young man’s military service record. He had done well, very well, and had ended his call-up with the rank of captain and a job on the general staff. Of course, the commander of the Taiwanese army was a personal friend of Ning Heng H’Sui, but his selection would not have been entirely based on preferment rather than ability. There had been only one small shadow on Cheng’s service record. A civilian complaint had been brought against Captain Ning, and investigated by the military police. It involved the death of a young girl in a Taipei brothel. The full report of the investigating officer had been carefully removed from Ning’s service record and only the recommendation that there was no substance in the accusation remained, together with an endorsement by the Attorney-General that no charges be pursued.