by Wilbur Smith
‘Get off of me, you pretty little whore.’ He kicked her away and she flopped over onto her back without waking, still lost in a haze of drugs and alcohol.
He sat up slowly and rubbed his temples where the pain throbbed dully, and he looked around the room. His attention concentrated on the only unoccupied bed. For a while he was puzzled by the fact that the bed sheets on it were soaked with blood and other bodily fluids. Then slowly the events of the previous evening’s entertainment came back to him. He shook his head and frowned, as he began vaguely to recall how at one juncture in the revelry Johnny Congo had suddenly insisted on anally raping the youngest and tiniest of the females. Although her documents proved that she was eighteen years of age, her body was elfin and childlike; which is what had excited Johnny. Up until then she had stoutly resisted all his efforts to inveigle her into the act, even to the extent of offering her an absurd amount of money. However, this was the last evening and Johnny had reached the limit of his patience. Carl chuckled as his memories flooded back in full force. It had taken all the efforts of Carl and two of the strongest ladyboys to hold the girl still for Johnny to achieve his purpose. Her struggles, screams and finally her broken sobbing had been covered by Johnny Congo’s roars of abandoned feral ecstasy, and by the shouts and the laughter of the men who held her and the spectators who had gathered around the bed to watch and cheer Johnny on to greater endeavours.
It was only later that Carl realized, despite his drug-befuddled wits, what grievous internal injuries Johnny had inflicted on the girl.
‘Shit, Blackbird, you have torn her up something awful. The little whore is bleeding to death. It’s soaked clean through the mattress.’
‘Well then, you know what we got to do with her, don’t you, white boy?’ Johnny growled. Without waiting for an answer Johnny picked the girl up from the bed and carried her out onto the ramparts. Carl trailed after them. None of the others were in a fit state of mind to notice them leave the room.
There was a full moon high in the night sky, paling out the stars and bathing the terrace in a pearly luminosity. Carl found himself gripped by a sense of almost religious awe as he followed Johnny down the staircase to the gardens. His gigantic naked form was touched by silver moonlight, like a high priest of some arcane sect, carrying the sacrifice to place it on the altar of an ancient African god.
When Johnny reached the stone retaining wall of the crocodile pen he lifted the girl high over his head. It made such a striking vignette that Carl was moved to tears and the words from a role he had once performed at his prep school in Houston reoccurred spontaneously to him. He fell to his knees and intoned sonorously,
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
to the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Still holding the girl above his head, Johnny turned back and stared at Carl in amazement. When he spoke his tone was awed. ‘Hell, Carl baby! That was real cool. I never thought you could talk that kind of spooky mumbo-jumbo shit, man. What’s it mean?’
‘It means just drop her over the side, Johnny.’
They both listened to the splash as the girl hit the water far below, and then to the thrashing of the great scaly bodies as the crocodiles fed.
Carl stayed on his knees until there was silence and then he rose slowly to his feet.
‘That was beautiful, Johnny,’ he said softly. ‘That’s one of the most beautiful and moving things I have ever watched.’
The memory of it lingered with him now, even though he tried to thrust it aside.
Then he thought of Johnny again and he looked around the dishevelled room. There was no sign of him. Carl swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. He started across the floor towards the doors onto the terrace. He stepped warily around the discarded hypodermic syringes and the puddles of vomit, the broken wine and vodka bottles and the abandoned footwear and clothing. He was halfway to the door when he heard Johnny bellow from the ramparts beyond.
‘Here she comes. Wake up, everybody. Here comes the Condor.’
Most of the sleeping figures roused themselves, and they followed Carl, trooping out onto the ramparts where Johnny stood, shading his eyes with both hands against the rays of the rising sun as he peered up into the sky. They crowded around him, a plethora of skin colours ranging from Carl’s milky white, through the pale yellow and gold of their guests to Johnny’s glistening anthracite.
‘I was beginning to doubt that oaf Volkov would ever find his way back here without radio contact. But here he comes!’ Carl said. ‘Let’s go down and see what replacements he has brought us for this load of tired yellow whores.’ He tweaked the brown nipples of the Thai prostitute at his side, and she shrieked obligingly. Even after such a short acquaintance they had all learned in what direction Carl’s fancies lay; and just how much he enjoyed hearing a squeal of pain.
‘I am going to give Yuri a real tongue-lashing. I have been thinking up a few more choice insults for him. Come on, everybody, let’s go down and meet our new friends, and indulge in a little Yuri baiting.’
Carl led them back into the bedroom where they hastily retrieved last night’s clothing that was scattered all about the floor and furniture in wild abandon. They pulled it on as they trooped noisily down the staircase and headed for the courtyard.
The homecoming of the Condor was always a cause for celebration, laden as she was with gifts and luxuries and exciting new faces and bodies. For the guests who had stayed out their time in this strange and frightening place it was the promise of a return to home and safety.
Emma in faraway Houston picked up this concerted movement on her hidden cameras in the main rooms and even the one set atop the tallest minaret rising above the castle walls. She reported it to Jo Stanley in the approaching Condor.
‘There are three vehicles leaving through the main gate and heading down the hill in convoy towards the landing field…’
*
Johnny Congo led the convoy. He was driving the white Rover at his usual breakneck speed. Sam Ngewenyama was in the front passenger seat beside him. He was almost as eager as Johnny to get a first glimpse of the latest imports from Bangkok. He knew that they would be passed down to him in due course.
Into the back seat were crammed five of his armed goons. They were clad in ex-US Army issue camouflage and bedecked with bandoliers of ammunition. The barrels of their automatic rifles stuck out of the open windows. Every time Johnny hit a bump in the road they were thrown against each other. Their helmets and weapons clashed together or banged against the roof of the bouncing Rover.
Carl Bannock drove close behind Johnny in one of the Russian amphibious landing craft. He was dressed in a silk dressing gown with a vivid red paisley pattern. His hair was uncombed and it fluttered in the slipstream of the ungainly vehicle as he sat at the driving wheel. Around him Thai girls and transvestites clung onto whatever handholds they could find as the vehicle bounced and bucked over the rough track.
All of them were in the high festive mood induced by cannabis cheroots and other lively substances which Carl had made freely available during the night. Most of them were in a state of rude déshabillé. One of the trannies wore nothing more than a pair of Johnny’s voluminous underpants that kept sagging over his hips to expose the crease of his buttocks behind, and much more in front. As soon as he hoisted them up, the shorts immediately began their next downwards slide. One of the real girls stood behind Carl dressed only in his discarded shirt that was unbuttoned down the front and blew out behind her like a cloak. She clapped her hands over his eyes every time Carl raced down towards the next sharp bend in the track. They all squealed and shrieked with laughter as the landing craft careened around the bend with its outer wheels teetering over the drop.
The
last vehicle in the convoy was the second amphibian landing craft driven by one of the militia sergeants. It had been left far behind the other two. It was carrying a platoon of the castle guard that had been so hastily assembled that most of them were still trying to don their uniforms, and some of them had even forgotten their weapons.
Johnny in the Rover was the first one down the hill and he raced towards the gates in the high mesh fencing that now surrounded the airstrip. He was sounding his horn to warn the airport guards of his approach. Two of them emerged from the guard hut and ran to open the gates. Johnny led the convoy through and turned towards the terminal end of the runway furthest from the lake shore.
They parked beside the sandbagged redoubt which housed the heavy machine guns that protected the landing strip, which was sited in front of other airport buildings. One of these was the barracks that housed Sam Ngewenyama’s thugs and their families. The other massive building was the warehouse in which were stored the cargoes brought in by the Condor, as well as the goods awaiting export: the precious coltan and other conflict minerals from the Congolese mines.
To enable the Condor to reach the main doors on the southern side of the warehouse when she was taking on or discharging cargo was a taxi path leading from the runway to the tall sliding warehouse doors.
By this time the rising sun was clear of the horizon. Every head was uplifted and turned to watch the Condor approaching at low level over the lake. As the huge aircraft crossed the narrow brown beach at the edge of the lake and lined up with the runway of the airstrip, Bernie Vosloo at the controls waggled the wings in greeting. The crowd around the waiting trucks at the westerly end of the airfield had the sun full in their eyes, as Hector had intended when he ordered the approach. He didn’t want to give them a clear look at the Condor until it was on the ground, and up close at point-blank range.
Nevertheless the welcoming crowds were undeterred. They screamed and danced with excitement. As the Condor howled over their heads some of them ducked instinctively, but most of them caught a glimpse of the lovely women with long dark hair who looked down from the Condor’s portholes and waved at them. Even Sam Ngewenyama’s machine gunners abandoned their weapons and scrambled up to stand on top of the sandbags to join in the tumultuous welcome.
It had taken all Paddy O’Brien’s persuasive powers, short of the threat of the firing squad, to induce fifteen of his youngest troopers to don wigs and brightly coloured blouses and to permit Jo and Nastiya to plaster their faces with pancake make-up and lipstick.
Hector was crouched down between the two pilots’ seats, where he was out of sight from the ground but able to issue quick commands to Bernie and Nella at the controls. To disguise her femininity from watchers on the ground, Nella was wearing a baseball cap and a pair of dark glasses that she had borrowed from Yuri Volkov. She hoped that the watchers on the ground would recognize these items of apparel.
Both Bernie and Nella were enjoying themselves immensely. They were throwing the massive Condor around the sky with the gleeful abandon of teenagers on a Saturday-night spree. They would never have treated their own cherished Hercules with the same reckless disrespect.
‘Okay, bring her up and go around for your final approach,’ Hector told them as he clung to the arms of the command seat with both hands. Between them the two Vosloos hauled the nose up into a gut-swooping climb and turned out wide over the forest-clad mountains on the borders of Congolese territory. Then they came around in a wide circle, turning cross-wind and then onto the final approach over the airport buildings. Ahead of them the runway stretched three thousand metres down towards the lake shore. At the eastern end of it stood the second sandbagged redoubt housing the other battery of fifty-calibre heavy machine guns.
Bernie dropped his wing flaps to reduce the Condor’s airspeed and Nella helped him ease back on the throttle handles between the seats. Between them they lowered the aircraft gently onto the red dirt surface of the landing strip, and as soon as she settled they threw the engines into reverse thrust and applied the wheel brakes to bleed the speed off her.
The thrust of the mighty engines ripped a dense and swirling cloud of red dust from the surface of the runway behind the Condor.
‘Now hear me, Dave!’ Hector spoke over the internal PA system. ‘We are eight hundred metres from your drop-off.’ He read the distances from the boards that stood along the left-hand side of the runway as they flashed by. ‘Five hundred metres, three hundred metres…’ Dave Imbiss and his Red Team had already left their seats and gone back into the cargo hold. Now they were poised tensely at the head of the rear ramp.
‘As soon as the ramp goes down don’t wait for my order, Dave, just go for broke!’ Hector’s voice was raised sharply. They roared over the last two hundred metres towards the armed redoubt from which the twin barrels of the machine guns were trained upon them like the eyes of an executioner. Bernie was gauging the distance to travel with an expert eye.
For a moment Hector thought he had misjudged it, and that they were going to crash into the wall of sandbags at sixty miles an hour. He braced himself and locked his fingers onto the arms of the seats.
At the last moment Bernie pushed the starboard engines of the Condor to full power; at the same time Nella flung the port engines into full reverse thrust. Simultaneously they both stood on the left-hand brake pedals. The condor spun into a violent 180-degree turn and came to a juddering halt with the exhaust nozzles of her four jet engines pointed at the machine-gun emplacement from a distance of only one hundred metres.
For a count of ten seconds Bernie and Nella kept the engines howling at full power, but at the same time they prevented the Condor from moving forward by locking on full wheel brakes. The entire fuselage of the Condor lurched and bucked like a wild animal in a trap, protesting this intolerably harsh treatment. The speed of the gases emitted by her engine nozzles far exceeded that of any tornado; it rocketed up towards the speed of sound. It blew the first row of sandbags off the top of the redoubt wall. The exhaust gases picked up the sand and loose gravel from the surface of the runway and fired it back like tiny bullets into the faces of the gunners peering through the embrasures in the wall of sandbags. It blinded them instantly, scoring their eyeballs, sand-blasting their eyelids and the skin of their faces. Then it hurled their heavy weapons back into their faces, killing or maiming most of them. Their slack bodies were hurled backwards across the interior of the redoubt to smash into the rear wall.
‘Shut down power!’ Hector shouted at Bernie above the thunder of the jet engines, and he slapped the shoulders of the pilots to reinforce the order. The engines’ roar dropped to a gentle whisper and the Condor ceased her wild gyrations.
‘Open the rear ramp!’ Hector’s voice was loud in the comparative silence. ‘Red Team! Go! Go! Go!’ The orders were superfluous, but in the heat of the moment he shouted them anyway.
The belly of the Condor cleared the ground by a mere four feet, so the exit ramp did not have far to drop before it hit the ground, and Dave Imbiss led his twelve-man team sprinting down the ramp and across the open ground to the redoubt. They swarmed over the top of the wall and were into the redoubt with the speed and agility of a troop of hungry monkeys climbing a banana tree. Their orders from Hector were to take no prisoners and to leave no live enemy in their rear, but to do it quietly. They found little resistance inside the redoubt.
The gunners and their loaders were blinded and out of the fight. Most of them were already completely quiescent, scattered around the interior of the redoubt like the rag dolls of naughty child. A few were rolling about on the sandy floor, wailing in agony and cupping their ruined faces in their hands. A karate chop with the blade of the hand was sufficient to silence them permanently. However, one of the enemy broke from cover behind the stack of ammunition crates where he had escaped the main rush of exhaust gases through the embrasures.
He reached the narrow doorway in the rear of the redoubt. Dave Imbiss raised the heavy trench knife
he was carrying in his right hand. He swung it back over his shoulder, then he whipped his whole upper body into the throw. The ten-inch blade made one and a half revolutions in flight before it struck the running man between the shoulder blades. He lost direction and ran into the wall of sandbags. He slid slowly down the wall, trying to reach over his shoulders with both hands to grip the knife hilt. He coughed once and a spurt of blood hosed from his mouth onto the sandbag in front of his face. His hands dropped to his sides and he doubled up on his knees with his forehead pressed to the floor as if in prayer.
Dave Imbiss stepped up behind him and placed one booted foot on the back of his neck to steady him while he pulled the blood-smeared blade out of his flesh and wiped it clean on the dead man’s shirt sleeve. At the same time he spoke quietly into the voice-activated mike of the Birkin.
‘This is Red Leader. Target secured.’
It was all over in little more than two minutes from the time they exited the Condor. The runway was three kilometres long. At that distance neither Johnny Congo nor Carl Bannock at the further end had been able to see anything through the dust cloud kicked up by the exhausts, or to hear anything other than the brief thunder of the Condor’s engines at full power.
‘Okay! Initiating Phase Two,’ Hector acknowledged. ‘Dave, spike the guns you have captured and then get your arses down the runway to back us up.’
The MGs mounted in the embrasures were all ex-US Army Browning fifty-calibre weapons that Dave knew intimately. He went down the line swiftly and stripped out the sliding breechblock from each of them. He handed the blocks one at a time to the men with him. They ran with them through the rear entrance of the redoubt and threw them far out into the lake. Once the guns were out of action, Dave formed his men up in open order, and led them at a jog trot down the runway towards the airport building three kilometres away. They had covered less than a quarter of that distance when there was the sudden rattle of small-arms fire ahead of them.