Dark Heart (28 page)

The mouth of the main channel closed before her with shocking rapidity, in Richard's eyes. But Zhukov stood on spread feet, hands clasped behind him, relaxed. He spoke a word or two in his gruff Russian to the officers, ship-handlers and navigators around him. They answered equally tersely. What Richard's rusty Russian was too unpractised to follow, the situation made clear enough. There was no sonar because the vessel did not break the water's surface. But there was radar – wide band and collision alarm. All the captain seemed worried about was the width of the channels ahead. The radar would show him anything rising more than two metres above the water's surface – and, if it was solid enough to present a threat, the collision alarm would sound.

But the monosyllabic conversation established that although the bank was gathering in on their right, and although there were islands looming midstream on their left, these two stood more than fifty metres apart, and all that lay between them, except water, was a solid mat of water hyacinth. Richard could well understand how this would slow even the speedy Shaldags, but the Zubr soared across it at more than a mile a minute, leaving a wake of shattered vegetation behind it.

They reached Citematadi just after three. Richard knew all too well what lay behind the wide sweep of the bend at the apex of the embankments rising up like square escarpments on their right, so he called to the captain, ‘Slow!'

‘
Meadimna
,' said the gruff captain, and slowed his command for the first time since midday.

Stalingrad
came round the wide bend below Citematadi with just a little more caution than she had showed coming upstream so far. The ruin of the bridge stretched across the river ahead of her, and even as the eyes aboard the command bridge registered it, so the collision alarms started sounding. The huge hovercraft sailed circumspectly forward, the 3D display of her Doppler radar calculating and displaying measurements – the heights of the piers still standing; the distances from one to the other. The massive blocks of masonry lay half submerged like boulders between the bridge's solid piers, their surfaces rearing three and four metres above the roiling wilderness of foam around them. There was simply no channel anywhere near thirty metres wide. ‘It is a solid wall,' growled Zhukov at last in English. ‘There is nowhere I can take her through.'

‘I know there's no way
through
,' Richard answered confidently. ‘But I'd thought of that. I believe there's a way
round
.'

‘What do you mean?' The captain looked away from his displays and his fierce blue gaze rested like a weight on Richard.

‘The south bank,' Richard explained. ‘Look. Just beside that burned-out boathouse, the bank rises quite gently on the inward side of the curve. And, if you can get up on to the shore beneath the embankment there, the first span of the bridge is still intact, you see? The roadway actually projects out over the river like a huge ramp before the real destruction starts. But the bridge and the highway behind it are still intact. There's a roadway coming down off the embankment to the boathouse, so it's not too easy to see, but I think if you take it carefully, you'll just be able to squeeze her under that first span and slide back down the bank on the upriver side.'

‘I see,' said Zhukov, grudgingly. ‘That is very clever. We will give it a go. But take it one step at a time. Helmsman, come right. Navigator, you see the slope of bank below that burned-out boathouse with the truck parked behind it . . . ?'

Richard stiffened as the penny dropped. He had been so focussed on his own plans he had forgotten what he had seen of Caleb and Robin's reports from the Shaldag. What Anastasia had told him of her adventures. ‘Captain!' he said. ‘Can you call Anastasia Asov to the bridge, please?'

‘For what reason?' Zhukov was still understandably nervous at having his owner's daughter aboard without Asov's specific directions.

‘You see the boathouse?'

‘Of course. We are swinging round towards it . . .'

‘It was Anastasia and her friends who burned it. She was on this bank a matter of hours ago. If anyone can give you updates on current conditions then she can. And, come to think of it, you might get in touch with Shaldag FPB004. Captain Caleb might have some relevant intel for you.'

Anastasia was on the bridge four minutes later, as the Zubr eased itself delicately ashore on to the long slope of bank behind the burned boathouse. Ado and Esan came with her. She brought her gun but they did not. Richard looked at her as she surveyed the place. She was pale and seemed a little shaky. The three of them crowded together for mutual support and the Russian woman in her black jeans and childish T-shirt suddenly seemed hardly older than the teenagers beside her. She held on to her SIG SG carbine with an almost disturbing intensity. ‘The parking area where that truck is standing is just concrete slabs laid over the mud of the bank,' she said quietly, her voice a lot steadier than her hands. ‘It was dark when they brought us down here, so I can't be certain of the details, but I got the impression that the road out on to the bridge was as solid as the road down here.'

‘I got the impression there was lots of room behind me when I climbed out of the back of the truck,' Esan added. ‘I was looking around for enemies and it was dark – but the moon was up and I certainly thought there was a wide, deep space back there.'

‘What was actually in the back of the truck you hid in?' asked Richard, sidetracked. ‘Did you notice that?'

‘Crates and stuff. I really have no idea what was in them.'

‘There were MANPADS in the other one,' said Richard. ‘Shoulder-fired guided missiles. Nothing like that?'

‘I've no idea,' said Esan. ‘But I'm certain that there was something like a huge wide tunnel stretching away behind me when I got out . . .'

‘OK, boy,' said Zhukov. ‘We proceed. Into your tunnel, if it's really there.'

Stalingrad
eased herself right up on to the bank and swung her face eastwards. The slope of the bank canted gently downwards from right to left, from bank to waterline, but nowhere near steeply enough to cause the hovercraft any trouble. The first span of the bridge reached out above them, soaring upwards a good twenty metres to the underside of the roadway. The first pier of the bridge, with its solid column of masonry towering to the shattered end of the road it had carried more than forty years ago, stood out on the water, leaving a gap on the shore side at least fifty metres wide. But the collision alarm continued to sound stridently. Because the second truck was parked in the middle of their path, in the shadow beneath the bridge.

‘I blow it out of the way,' rumbled Zhukov. ‘Now I have real munitions.'

But Richard shouted, ‘No! Wait! Look. There's someone moving in the cab. And besides,' he emphasized, sensing that even Zhukov wasn't going to be slowed by one man any more than by one truck, ‘anything big enough to blow the truck out of the way might bring the bridge down too. Especially if it has more missiles in it. Here's a chance for some of us to live up to your T-shirt,' he said to Anastasia. ‘To the front of it at least.' And that seemed to settle things.

But he drew the line at letting her come with him. Instead, when the front of the hovercraft banged down on to the brick-hard mud of the bank, he was standing with Colonel Mako at the centre of a small contingent of his well-drilled, fearsomely armed and very impressive-looking soldiers. A point team fanned out ahead of them, running up on to any elevated sections, in case this was a trap. The colonel was clearly a strategist, thought Richard. The point team signalled the all clear and the command group strode forward. As they approached the truck, three men climbed out of the cab with their heads hanging and their hands high. Two were dressed in shorts and T-shirts, obviously from
Nellie
's crew. The other wore a UN uniform and body armour. They were all staring past him at something which had clearly scared them. When Richard glanced over his shoulder, it became obvious why they had not even considered resistance – the presence of the Zubr was simply overpowering. It sat in the opening beneath the bridge like some massive crocodile, its mouth agape, lined with soldiers instead of teeth, a T80U main battle tank lurking in the dark throat of the thing instead of a tongue. It almost made Richard's hair stand on end – and the monster was on his side!

As Mako's soldiers disarmed and searched the frightened men, Richard went in hard with the first questions. In a moment or two he had established that there were no more of the smugglers left alive. That these three had not been part of the rape party; that the wound in one man's shoulder had come from a ricochet. That they had panicked and driven the truck into Citematadi when the shooting had started. But that the deserted city had offered very little in the way of shelter and nothing in the way of sustenance. And no hope at all for rescue. So they had come back here where there was at least water and shelter from both sun and rain beneath the bridge. They had simply hoped that someone would come past before they starved to death. In the absence of civil authorities, Mako placed them in military detention and his men led them aboard
Stalingrad
, while the colonel himself prepared to climb into the cab and move the truck.

‘Colonel, have your men all got body armour?' asked Richard, watching the third prisoner walking up the ramp with his bright blue UN vest.

‘Yes. It's standard issue.'

‘Not for us or the Zubr's crew . . .' Richard's first thought was to scavenge body armour in case anyone on the Zubr had to get involved in the fighting, but soon enough he was thinking bigger than that. Mako drove the truck up beside its companion. Richard jumped down and glanced into the first truck. Caleb's men had arranged the dead men from the boathouse neatly and covered them with a respectfulness Richard suspected they did not really merit. They had simply piled the body armour on the bench seat in the cab. ‘We should take that,' said Richard. ‘And we should take a look in the back of this one too. Esan might not have recognized what was in the crates back here, but we might have a better idea.'

As it happened, they didn't. The marking on the crates meant nothing to them – even the sections of it that were written in English. But when Richard snapped the top of one open, it was immediately clear that they were looking at some kind of communications equipment rather than any actual weaponry. ‘I'm not sure it's worth wasting much time over,' said Mako, but Richard's Scottish blood simply would not allow him to discard something so thoughtlessly. Ten minutes later
Stalingrad
's communications officer was standing beside Mako's army man. And both of them were wide-eyed. ‘It's the latest update of the Parakeet,' said the army man, his voice simply awed. ‘It is state of the art.'

‘Parakeet,' said Richard, disappointed. ‘That doesn't sound like much.'

‘It's the complete battlefield communication system,' breathed the soldier. ‘Like the British Bowman – but it works better.'

‘Battlefield communications?' said Richard. ‘You mean from command vehicles to attack vehicles and so forth?'

‘No,' said Mako, his light baritone voice decisive, authoritative. ‘The Parakeet system is for use by dismounted personnel. On foot. Using this I can stay in detailed personal real-time contact with as many squad leaders as I want. Secure, encrypted, two-way, no matter where I am on the battlefield, or they are.'

‘Well, I think we should take it aboard,' said Richard, impressed.

‘So do I,' agreed Colonel Mako. ‘I'll drive the truck straight up the ramp.'

‘And I'll drive the other one,' said Richard. ‘Waste not, want not. And at the very least it'll allow Anastasia and Ado to give us a complete list of the men who tried to rape them, living or dead.'

‘And Celine Chaka, of course,' called Mako, slamming the truck door behind him. ‘She's the reason we're here after all.'

Just at that very moment, four hours upriver, the stiff and aching Celine Chaka finally realized that Anastasia Asov had saved her life. Twice. The first time she had saved it was when she pulled Celine out of the compound, under the chapel, and got her down to the boat. She had saved her then, even though she had been wounded in the shoot-out with the pursuing Army of Christ the Infant. And she had saved it now. For the two shots Anastasia had fired from the AK47 had wounded the two men that the army could least afford to do without. Two men so severely wounded that even the young doctor kidnapped from the clinic at Malebo could not guarantee to save them. Only she, with her far wider and more painfully learned experience, could do that. Which was the reason that she was still alive, where all the other invalids from the clinic had been executed long since. Which was why she would stay alive – like the young doctor and his little medical team, like Sister Hope and Sister Charity, and Jacob, the useful handyman – for just as long as she could be of service to these brutal and terrible people.

The two wounded men lay in the chapel itself, where her own sickbed was, though the interchangeable places of learning and worship had been stripped out ages ago. Now it was, as closely as it was possible to make it, a hospital. Albeit a hospital with only two patients remaining, now that Celine was finally up. Celine called the man with the chest wound Ngoboi, for that was the costume he was wearing when Anastasia shot him, though she understood his real name was Ojogo. His responsibilities within the Army of Christ the Infant were for the oversight and maintenance of transport. And since his shooting, the transport section had all but closed down. Especially as one of his most trusted lieutenants – a boy called Esan, apparently – had vanished in the melee of that night three days since.

Moses Nlong himself had been coherent – although in great and increasing agony – for some time after his wounding. Just long enough to issue a whole string of orders, from the building of the stockade to the kidnapping of the nearest doctor from the clinic at Malebo. But he was delirious and helpless now. So much so that the men in charge at the moment, led by the man who had kidnapped her – the fearsome Captain Odem – had very pointedly allowed her to live as long as she tended him and kept him alive. But that was becoming increasingly hard to do.