Dark Heart (19 page)

‘It's not the weaponry,' said Richard at last. ‘The last time you were up in the delta you and Anastasia had been kidnapped. Celine and I were coming after you, fair enough, but it was the fact that all we heard from you – all we heard about you – was the kidnappers' messages, threats and demands. It was you I needed to talk to – and you were out of contact . . .'

Robin's expression softened. She remembered how stressful the incident had been – oddly, it had been worse for him than it had been for her. She could understand why he wanted to avoid any chance at all that the nightmare might be repeated. But she was going to go for all that; the president's mission was simply too good to miss. ‘FPB004 has broadband, satellite, GPS, radar, sonar. She has better navigation equipment than your precious top-of-the-range
Katapults
. She can sail at fifty knots for seven hundred nautical miles – more than enough for the round trip, especially as we will be carrying an extra six tons of spare fuel, which should get us another five hundred nautical miles or so. If we halve our speed – when coming back downriver, say – we double our range. And we are talking nautical miles here. That's twelve hundred and sixty klicks at full speed and twenty-five hundred if we're careful. God! I bet we could sail right up to those famous volcanoes – Mount Karisoke and the rest – if we wanted.'

She could see him wavering. So she pushed home her advantage ruthlessly. ‘Jesus, Richard, it's like I was taking a walk from Nelson's Column to Buckingham Palace, wrapped in cotton wool with an armed guard from the household cavalry! It'll be a walk in the park . . .'

‘Yes,' he acknowledged. ‘St James's Park, in fact.' But there was still that lingering scepticism in his voice as he sought to puncture her grandiose comparison.

‘Oh, Richard,' she challenged him directly at last. ‘
What on earth could go wrong
?'

Richard threw up his hands in defeat. ‘I just wish I was coming with you,' he said. And that, she knew. was the crux of the matter.

‘In case I need someone to hold my hand, wipe my nose or change my nappy?' she teased, lightening the atmosphere. ‘Come on, darling! You've got enough to keep you occupied here. And the upside from the Heritage Mariner point of view is that while I'm doing my Mary Poppins act upriver, Chaka himself promises to head up the negotiations. That'll short-cut Minister Ngama and his cohorts. Maybe even outmanoeuvre BP, Shell, Exxon, Conoco and the rest!'

‘OK,' he acquiesced. ‘I give in. So what's the plan now?'

‘I get my Jungle Jane kit on, throw one or two necessaries in a grip, and go down to what little Captain Zhukov's fans left of the new docks.' She was on her feet already, unable to contain herself any longer, heading from the reception room into the bedroom. ‘You, my darling, get the team together and get ready to go and kick some presidential bottom.'

The conversation took place over the remains of a late lunch in the Nelson Mandela Suite. It had been a busy day so far and it looked like getting busier, if anything. While the Mariners had been lunching, the venue of the morning's meeting was being moved to the president's own offices for the afternoon session and everyone was due to reassemble there in the cool of the afternoon at four. Caleb's Shaldag was being refuelled and prepared to undertake the president's mission with a night-run upriver which should get them to Celine's school sometime the next morning.

For Richard the prospect was of another boring meeting, a quick change, another formal dinner, a lonely night and yet another lengthy meeting tomorrow. The only positive element to his day so far had been the adventure of the burning corvette and the awesome experience of Captain Zhukov's private hurricane. It was all clearly going to be downhill from there. He could not begin to express his boredom and depression.

Robin on the other hand could scarcely contain her excitement, he thought, with pure, simple jealousy. In about a tenth of the time it usually took her to change – only just giving him time to contact his negotiating team – she had slipped into a pair of jeans and solid-looking boots. She was tucking a seemingly indestructible plum-coloured brushed silk blouse into a solid leather belt and catching up a safari jacket he didn't even know she possessed. Then she was off, with Richard almost sullenly in tow.

‘Get my bag for me, would you?' she asked winningly as she reached for the door handle. And so he followed her down to reception with a surprisingly heavy Louis Vuitton Canvas Keepall in one hand and his black leather briefcase in the other. When Andre Wanago gallantly relieved him of the Keepall in the lobby as they swept out towards the car, the pained look in the elegant manager's eyes showed that he realized he had made the wrong choice.

They settled into the back of the hotel limousine. ‘Docks first?' said Richard. ‘So I can kiss you farewell and wish you Godspeed like a good sailor's spouse?' The gentle irony at least showed he was beginning to come to terms with her plans, thought Robin.

‘In a pig's eye, matey,' she answered shortly, but with a dazzling smile. ‘President's offices first. And I'll go on downhill from there. You've had your kiss for the day. You'll have to save up for the rest. I want you glad to see me when I get back, sailor.
Very
glad!'

Half an hour later, just after 16:30 local time, Lieutenant Sanda found himself unknowingly sharing Andre Wanago's feelings as he shouldered the Louis Vuitton Keepall and directed Captain Robin Mariner towards the Shaldag's accommodation ladder. Bonnie Holliday was already aboard and the two women greeted each other like excited schoolgirls in the crew's mess and accommodation area. Bonnie had been aboard a while and, bubbling with enthusiasm, she gave Robin a quick orientation tour. Right in the bow at the forward end of the mess, there was a secure storage area. Its door was locked, but it was where their bags would go when their necessaries were unpacked. The mess and accommodation area, where they were now, was immediately below the main command area and bridge – above which was the open flying bridge they had shared with Caleb that morning. Aft of the mess there were the heads and then the ship's small galley before the engine sections. The placing of the galley raised Robin's eyebrow until she saw the logic of its access to fresh water from the ablutions and heat from the engines. The whole area below deck was more than six feet high – so both women could stand upright. It was also the better part of fifteen feet across at its widest, though the walls sloped inwards as dictated by the curve of the hull, and, reckoned Robin, nearly forty feet long, so there was plenty of room for the table – which was suspended from the ceiling and would be raised when the comfortable seats around it folded out into bunks. It was all so neat and practical. And, thought Robin,
air-conditioned
. Bliss!

Of course, the two women were not alone as they enjoyed their little tour. There was an engineering officer with a team of three looking after propulsion in the twenty-five feet of engine room. Caleb and Sanda had their junior navigators – two of them working up in the forty odd feet of command bridge, which was also nearly twenty feet wide and six feet high. There was a communications officer. And, just in case – in spite of Robin's overstated confidence that this would be a walk in the park – there was a gunnery officer.

Immediately before leaving, Caleb crowded everyone around the mess table for a quick briefing. He laid out a map of the delta on which a series of notes and GPS coordinates had been pencilled. ‘We're due to depart at seventeen hundred hours,' he said. ‘That'll give us an hour of daylight to get well upstream. We're going to follow standard river procedure and keep to the south bank on the way in. That will take us past the sandbank where
Otobo
is beached and let me assess the progress of the firefighting. Then we'll head upstream keeping to this channel here, south of the chain of small islands that split the main stream into two from here to here. We'll have to keep a good watch out for mats of floating water hyacinth – they're the main hazard for shipping there. We should keep a lookout for small vessels too – but that's the proposed site of the minister's wildlife sanctuary so there aren't any villages there. No people at all as far as we know. We'll pass the township of Malebo on the far side of the river, and keep to the south side as we shoot the rapids left by the fallen bridge beside Citematadi.'

‘I'd like to see Citematadi, if possible,' said Robin. ‘Richard's told me it's a spectacular sight – if rather creepy and depressing. I missed it on my last visit.'

‘If there's time and opportunity,' said Caleb. ‘But we won't be hanging around there.' He turned back to the others. ‘Then it'll be the long haul upriver and across the stream to these coordinates here, which are the GPS location of the settlement where the president's daughter is currently located. Are we all clear about this? It's further upriver than I've ever been and further than anyone else aboard has been—'

‘I've been up that far – past Citematadi at least,' Robin interrupted him again. ‘I was a guest of General Chaka's revolutionary army just before he took the power and the presidency from ex-President Banda. It won't,' she added looking round them all and thinking, suddenly, that Richard might have had a point after all . . . ‘It won't be a walk in the park.'

‘No, indeed,' countered Captain Caleb with a smile. ‘It'll be a cruise in the delta. So, ladies and gentlemen, let's get to it.'

Shaldag FPB004 eased away from the jetty at 17:00 local time on the dot. Once again, Caleb took control in the flying bridge while Robin and Bonnie stood at his shoulders. The evening was vast and sultry at first, the darkening sky high, the horizons far, the wind laden with a humidity that seemed to intensify the odd mixture of sea smells and river odours. The sun was setting away out to sea on their right as the Shaldag sat up and swept southward in that long arc designed to take her to the sandbar where
Otobo
was beached. Beached and still burning. Even from a couple of kilometres away it was possible to see the tall arches of white water that the two firefighting ships in attendance were pouring on to her. As the speeding patrol boat drew near, so the droplets began to catch the light from the westering sun, and the white water shattered into solid rainbows tinged with gold.

‘Looks like your armaments are safe,' shouted Robin.

‘Will they still be serviceable?' wondered Bonnie.

‘It looks as though you'll still have a hull when this is all over,' persisted Robin thoughtfully. ‘Everything else can be fixed when she gets into dry dock.'

‘I guess so,' said Caleb less than happily, and he swung the wheel to bring the crippled vessel round on their right and the sunset directly behind them as he sped FPB004 due eastwards up the river, into the delta and the gathering darkness.

The sun set at 18:00 with military precision. It turned the delta on either side of the speeding boat into a slaughterhouse of red leaves, dripping like huge gouts of blood into the hyacinth-clotted artery ahead of them. The first of the midstream islands hulked on their left, making what had seemed a wide, inviting channel suddenly threatening and overgrown. The tall superstructure cast a huge shadow forward which camouflaged the floating islands of vegetation, making it hard for even the most experienced eye to distinguish clearly. Caleb kept up a muttered conversation with the man on the radar as he eased the vessel forward, its motors scarcely rising above a grumble. Even so, the beds of water hyacinth scraped eerily along the sides, like something out of a horror movie. Robin found herself shivering in spite of the humid heat. Richard's worries were suddenly looking more and more real. The narrow, arterial channel with its thrombosis of matted plants even smelt foetid, as though the whole blood-soaked place was rotting around them. She noticed Bonnie sliding ever closer to Caleb as the atmosphere got to her as well. And then, with a suddenness only the tropics can supply, it was dark.

‘Searchlight!' ordered Caleb, and a great beam of brightness probed the channel ahead of them. But all it seemed to do, as far as Robin was concerned, was to emphasize how close the overhanging bank had become on their starboard quarter. How close the mid-river island was on their port. She looked across at the low, shrub-covered mudbank, wondering whether there were after all any of the huge crocodiles she had seen in the zoo yesterday evening still lurking hidden there. The thought was disturbing enough to shorten her breath and add to the sweat beading her upper lip.

But then something distracted her. A trick of the light, she thought. The shaggy overgrowth crowning the nearest island seemed suddenly to be illuminated from inside, as though not crocodiles but the strange local dancing deity Ngoboi and his ghostly lieutenants were about some supernatural business in there.

Robin drew in a breath to tell Bonnie and Caleb about her strange vision, when the most unexpected thing happened. Someone started shooting at them. A long rattle of automatic fire rang out across the silence of the river. Silence she hadn't even registered until the gunshots shattered it. She ducked, flinching.

‘Get below,' ordered Caleb. ‘Hurry! Kill the light!' And he shepherded them to the ladder down to the deck. ‘Into the cabin,' he said as they reached the deck – then he strode through into the bridge.

‘What on earth was that?' asked Bonnie, shaken, as they stepped down into the cool of the mess.

‘Someone took a potshot at us,' said Robin briefly.

As Bonnie sat, shaken, on one of the padded benches that would later fold out into bunks, Robin stationed herself at the foot of the companionway leading up into the command bridge. She could hear the creak of Caleb and his bridge watch sitting in the big pilot's seats she had seen as she went past. She could hear the pinging of the sonar and the occasional contact from the collision alarm radar as a particularly solid raft of water hyacinth washed downstream towards them. The motors were grumbling away behind her at the stern, and those floating mats of water hyacinth were still whispering past the outside of the hull. But none of the noises around her were loud enough to drown out the quiet conversation the captain was having with his navigators and communications officer. Some of the technical language tested her understanding of Matadi to the utmost, but she filled in the gaps easily enough by assessing what she would be asking and answering under the circumstances.