Dark Heart (24 page)

‘Just in, sir,' said the lieutenant, relaxing infinitesimally. ‘It's quite a long one. Here's the transcript . . .'

The lieutenant handed Kebila a long flimsy of white paper covered in dense writing. The colonel stood frowning over the report for some moments, then he said, ‘All right. Captain Maina has found your boathouse and your bodies. And –' his eyes raked her from head to toe with a suddenly disturbing intimacy – ‘Captain Mariner has found and recognized your underwear. Wild Orchid, from Moscow.'

Anastasia blushed from the pit of her throat to the roots of her hair. ‘My underwear . . .
Richard
. . .'

‘No. I understand your girlish embarrassment. It was
Robin
Mariner who found it. I sincerely trust that
Richard
would
never
have recognized your lingerie.'

It took the red-faced woman an instant to understand that she was being teased. But her mind was whirling away from her embarrassment. Richard and Robin Mariner were here.
Richard and Robin
. In Granville Harbour. In the delta. How could she not have known that?

‘But as I must now accept the absolute truth of everything you have been telling me,' Kebila continued, at his most po-faced and urbane, ‘I think it is time to send the Shaldag back to Malebo with orders to pick up Celine Chaka if she is in any fit state to be moved from the clinic there. I think I have the authority, even without referring to the president.'

He turned to the lieutenant and opened his mouth to issue the order. But before he could utter a word, his cellphone started ringing. ‘Excuse me,' he said, frowning. ‘That tone denotes a high priority call. I must take it at once.'

He put the cellphone to his ear and listened for a few minutes in silence. Then he broke contact and turned to Anastasia, his face folded into a frown. ‘The mayor of Malebo . . .' he began slowly, as though trying to get his mind round something that lay just beyond his mental grasp.

‘Mr Obada. He runs the hardware store. Yes . . .' she prompted him.

‘And the garage evidently. And he owns a Ford Ranger Wildtrak which he has just driven down from Malebo himself – that must have taken some doing, even for a vehicle so aptly named. He has arrived at my headquarters to report two very disturbing developments. First, that the mast which carries all his town's communications has been sabotaged, leaving them absolutely cut off from the outside world. And, secondly, that everyone in Malebo's medical clinic has disappeared. Including Celine Chaka.' He paused for an instant. ‘I think perhaps Captain Maina aboard Shaldag FPB004 should be alerted,' he said to the communications lieutenant. ‘And I think it is at last time to inform the president . . .' he added, looking round at Anastasia.

‘Sod the president,' said Anastasia roundly. ‘If I were you I'd wake up Richard Mariner. And quickly.'

Richard often woke around four a.m. Aboard the ships he captained, this was the moment the middle watch became the morning watch, and he liked to be up and about then if possible. He had passed a restless night in any case, full of half-remembered nightmares, most of them involving Robin. He switched on the bedside light, rolled out from under the tangled duvet, straightened his blue silk pyjama jacket and ambled through into the reception room, intent on making a cup of tea. Which is what he was doing when someone started banging on his door.

Never a man to give in to premonitions of doom, he strolled across the room, teacup in hand, his mind automatically seeking ways in which a visit at this time of day could be a good thing, and opened the door without even checking the spyhole. ‘Well I'll be damned,' he said. ‘Anastasia.'

The night porter, hovering behind her in the little three-door lobby, said apologetically, ‘Miss Asov was insistent, and as she was dropped off by Colonel Kebila himself . . .'

‘That's fine,' said Richard. ‘You did the right thing. Come in Anastasia and tell me what's on your mind. Did you know, by the way, that your father's in the suite next door?'

‘My father?' Anastasia almost scurried into Richard's room. ‘What's he doing here?' she demanded, closing the door with her shoulders and glaring at him as though her father was his fault.

‘Trying to sell the government some massive hovercraft. And a brand new T80U main battle tank.' Richard's words were airily dismissive but his mind, like Kebila's under similar circumstances, was racing. ‘You look dreadful,' he continued cheerily. ‘You'd better tell me what's going on. Coffee or tea?'

Unlike Kebila, Richard had no trouble in believing Anastasia. ‘It sounds as though Kebila will be able to get more intel on the smugglers,' he said. ‘Especially as he has a suspect he can question. But it's what's going on along the north bank of the river and right in the heart of the delta that's really worrying. And the fact that Robin's in the middle of it now as well as Celine. I don't know how President Chaka will react – he sent Robin up there to bring Celine back for a family reconciliation. He's going to want to take action – and quickly. But he's disbanded most of the late President Banda's army. He's kept some of his own men – like Kebila and Captain Caleb – and the T80 tanks that helped him win the presidency. He has the rump of an air force, some choppers – but nothing big. Nor any special forces he could get upriver in sufficient numbers to find and confront General Nlong and his army.'

He stopped speaking for a moment, his eyes narrow.

‘But I think I know a man who has,' he said. He rose to his full height, strode into his bedroom, grabbed his dressing gown and swung it on as he stepped into his slippers. ‘Come with me,' he ordered, and Anastasia didn't dream of arguing.

Five minutes of knocking on Max Asov's door finally elicited a response. A tousled, heavy-eyed, less than happy Max opened up. ‘Richard!' he spat. ‘What—' Then he saw his daughter who had been hiding behind his friend and stopped speaking, winded by surprise.

‘Sorry to disturb you, Max,' said Richard cheerfully. ‘But it's important.'

C
aleb Maina had no real intention of excluding the women from his plans, Robin thought. But now that the going was getting tough, he was focussing on the elements aboard he was certain he could rely on. He turned to Lieutenant Sanda, therefore, and Robin was vaguely surprised that he didn't order her and Bonnie off the bridge while they talked.

‘To sum up,' the captain said to his first lieutenant. ‘The latest intel suggests that what we have discovered on the south bank at Citematadi is almost irrelevant in the face of what has been happening on the north bank . . .' He listed in terse militarese that strained Robin's understanding of the Matadi dialect the details that had just come in from Naval headquarters, with the further information added by Colonel Kebila. ‘We have to decide our own priorities and report what action we propose,' he summed up. ‘Keep HQ informed. But what should those priorities be?'

Sanda was a slow, methodical man, who weighed the odds and did not rush to judgement. ‘As I see it, we have two conflicting calls on us,' he said. ‘HQ needs us to check on the situation downriver in Malebo – has everyone including the president's daughter really vanished from the clinic there? If so, where have they gone? But HQ also wants us to see if we can find out what's happening upriver. Has the Army of Christ the Infant really hit the church and orphanage compound up there? If so, what state are the survivors in – if there are any? And what can we do to help them?'

‘And where is the extremist army at the moment – and where is it headed next?' Caleb concluded. He sighed. So many priorities, so little time. And the president's daughter thrown in for good measure. Robin looked at the frowning man with lively sympathy. Then she thought that Richard dealt with conundrums like this on a regular basis and usually came out OK. Where was the bloody man when you really needed him?

In her husband's almost wilful absence, Robin opened her mouth to give some advice, but Bonnie beat her to it. ‘This is my field of expertise,' she said quietly. ‘My doctorate is not just on West African belief systems but also on social organization – including the phenomenon of armies such as the Army of Christ the Infant. Basically they are scavengers. They have such a high attrition rate that they need to keep topping themselves up constantly with new recruits, with supplies to feed them, with artefacts that let them keep their bank accounts full – even if they carry their currency around in trucks with them. They need to have enough wealth in barter goods, gold, blood diamonds or conflict minerals, as well as good hard cash to allow the purchase of transport, fuel, arms and ammunition, and drugs. They have to have drugs because that's how they keep the kids in line. Drugs and magic – Obi. Crack and Ngoboi.

‘They isolate the kids they pick up from any hope of returning to their original adult communities by making them perform specifically targeted acts that look like random barbarism to us, but which are carefully designed to break the most basic . . . call them
taboos
. Once a kid has killed a relative, raped a cousin, eaten part of a body, they can never go back, even if there's anything or anyone left alive to go back to. From that point on there is only the army, except for a very lucky few. Very lucky. Very few. But of course there are problems of guilt and fear; the kids have committed the most terrible sins and they know it. Added terror in the build-up to battles and so forth. That's where the drugs come in. They dull a guilty conscience, stop the nightmares, give loads of Dutch courage as well as building dependency. Free sex with any of the girls they have along with them helps too of course; the soldiers are mostly teenage boys after all.

‘And Obi, like I say. Magic far beyond the simple Poro jungle societies that a good few of the older kids have been inducted into, in any case. You'll all have read accounts of soldiers wearing wigs, make-up, outlandish costumes. They believe these make them bulletproof – because as often as not Ngoboi has told them so. But of course it's all lies. The kids aren't protected. They get killed and wounded. They get depressed and try to kill themselves. They get AIDS from the random sex. They get hurt in accidents. Whatever. But the drugs the army has are recreational, not medical. They don't have doctors of their own – that's why they've taken Malebo's, I guess. They don't look after their invalids like a regular army. Anyone who slows them down gets slaughtered and left behind – unless they get added to the food locker.' She paused for breath.

‘So,' concluded Caleb. ‘The army is like a shark. It keeps moving or it dies.'

‘Unless there are circumstances that conspire to stop it. But that would have to be something quite unusual, because it would put the continued existence of the army itself at risk. And I have to say that where the Army of Christ has been, there's never anything left behind. Certainly no one needing any kind of help, apart from a decent burial.'

‘So, we check on Malebo. Sounds like we'd be wasting our time heading upriver . . .'

‘Not necessarily,' interjected Robin. ‘Think it through. Who, apart from General Nlong or his men, would want to isolate Malebo and then take a clinic full of doctors, medical supplies and nurses? And why would they do that unless someone needed medical attention? Someone so powerful that they could command this to be done – someone so vital that they wouldn't just be left to die because they're slowing the others down, like Bonnie says.'

‘So we do need to check upstream as well as down . . .'

‘Look,' said Robin. ‘How about this? You get back to Malebo as fast as you can and drop off a commando of half a dozen or so. Get them to check the clinic and see if they can follow whatever trail they've left and report back to you at regular intervals. If I'm right and the army has taken the missing people, then you'll have a direct line to wherever they are. And you're getting closer to wherever Celine is into the bargain. Meanwhile, on the off chance that something catastrophic has happened to them, something bad enough to cripple them, you run up to the compound and see what there is to see up there.'

‘Now that,' said Bonnie with unexpected forcefulness, ‘sounds like a plan.'

The run down to Malebo took an hour at full speed. With the river's current behind them adding another couple of knots, the banks flashed by at a mile a minute. Caleb didn't waste the time. He detailed Sanda to choose five more men and to prepare to go ashore and follow whatever trail was left behind by the clinic staff and the men who had kidnapped them. By the time they reached the jetty at Malebo, Sanda's little commando was ready to go ashore and start their mission. The radio man carried a SINCGARS kit using 25 kHz channels in the VHF FM band, from 30 to 87.975 MHz, and was set to FPB004's secure channel. The fighting men had an assortment of personal sidearms – Beretta M9, Glock, Sig. Sanda himself, Robin noticed, favoured a Heckler & Koch .45. But they all looked well supplied. As they did with clips for the Uzi each of the three had slung over his shoulder. All in all it was a wonder that there was room on their belts for the range of grenades that they also carried. Or for the lethal-looking unscabbarded matchet each man wore with its naked blade down his left thigh to the knee and beyond.

Sanda led them on to the jetty in the humid predawn greyness and they automatically went into full battle mode. Watching them jog into the early morning bustle of the town was unsettling to say the least. Inquisitive early-rising townsfolk fell back as if the soldiers were a group of plague carriers. The jetty itself emptied before them, and it was only when they vanished into the jungle like something out of
Apocalypse Now
that the citizens of Malebo seemed to regain their confidence, and tried to communicate with the patrol boat once again.