Dark Heart (29 page)

The bullet from Anastasia's AK, beginning to tumble at the end of its flight, had hit the general directly on his left knee. It shattered the kneecap, spreading into a misshapen mushroom as it did so, and smashed the joint behind the patella – splintering both the big bones – the tibia shin bone and the femur thigh bone, before tearing the fibula free – thus destroying the ankle below as well. ‘It was lucky for the general that Sister Hope was a competent first-aider,' said Celine to young doctor Chukwu. ‘She managed to stem the blood loss from the popliteal artery and vein before he bled to death. But, in spite of her ministrations, Nlong will never walk properly again.'

‘Indeed,' Dr Chukwu agreed, frowning. ‘If I were a more confident surgeon I would have taken the leg off below the knee and tried to reconstruct the shattered end of the thigh. But surgery is not an option under these circumstances. Gangrene, however, is.'

A footfall behind Celine made her turn. It was Odem. He stood for a moment eyeing her as though he could see through all of her clothing, instead of just through the gossamer of the bloodstained blouse she had put on instead of the hospital robe from the clinic. Her flesh rose in goosebumps of revulsion at the thought of him doing to her what he apparently did to the harem of girls he kept with him each night. He crossed to the general's bed and looked down at him. ‘I don't think he has long to live,' the soldier growled. ‘He was growing weak in any case; wanting to settle down. To negotiate with your father. Become a
farmer
once again.' The full lips twisted in contempt.

‘I'm sure that would be a wise move, Captain,' said Celine carefully.

‘So are some of the others,' he sneered. ‘They have given him until dawn. He either starts getting better soon or I assume command.' He shouldered the doctor aside and crossed to the second bed where the dying Ngoboi lay tossing restlessly, coughing and choking. ‘His right-hand man, Captain Ojogo,' said Odem thoughtfully as he slid his matchet out. ‘My greatest rival.' The blade rose and fell once. Twice. The sound was indescribable. Odem turned his back on the fountain of blood which burst from Ngoboi. ‘You have 'til dawn,' he said, his red-rimmed eyes moving from Celine to the doctor and the nurses cowering with the two nuns on the raised platform that had once been an altar. ‘All of you.'

He went to move away and then turned back.

‘If you last past midnight,' he concluded.

S
talingrad
whispered into position half an hour after sunset, just at the moment that the tropical darkness closed down most fiercely. Thunderheads massed in the west once more, blotting out the last vestiges of daylight and threatening the upper sky. During the final section of their approach, Richard had asked Captain Caleb to get Robin back aboard the Shaldag, to drift downstream to the western end of the mangroves and rendezvous with the larger vessel there. He calculated that this put a good solid kilometre of cover between the compound and the two craft set to attack it. While there seemed to be every chance that the Shaldag had gone unnoticed, it seemed very unlikely that the massive Zubr would. And the plan that Richard was discussing with Colonel Mako, Captain Zhukov and Captain Caleb relied on surprise. Intelligence and surprise.

Robin, who had climbed back down to give her initial report, had then returned when the heat was going out of the afternoon, just after four, to spend some time completing as detailed a survey as possible of the stockade, relaying what information she could. Inevitably, it went to
Stalingrad
via Caleb aboard FPB004. Richard and the men he was working with, therefore, had a clear idea of the section of the compound facing the river. The stockade wall stood about four metres tall. It was built of thick-looking tree trunks chopped bodily out the nearby forest, which had been well secured together and seemed to be invulnerable to anything smaller than artillery. The primary watch position was the bell-tower of the chapel immediately behind it which seemed to have a platform beside the bell itself, and Robin had seen men come up and down what seemed to her to be a ladder reaching up from the chapel – judging from the way they moved. Something that looked like a shoulder-launched missile stood there, ready.

Robin described a couple of other rudimentary watch positions at either end of the wall – or that section of it she could see clearly. There was one where it vanished into the jungle on her left and another where it turned to run parallel to the river on her right. That second watchtower was the next most frequently occupied for it overlooked the little jetty. There was what looked like a heavy machine gun there. It had been empty in the morning. Now it was manned. The watch routine had seemed to be desultory before she made her first report. Things had tightened up noticeably by the time she returned for her second tour of duty. It seemed to her that whoever had come back with the vehicles and with Celine had had a marked impact on the discipline and routines of the encampment.

‘We need more intel,' said Mako thoughtfully, after an extended briefing, as 20:00 hours passed into 21:00.

‘I agree,' nodded Richard. ‘I mean, we can sail
Stalingrad
up to the jetty, all guns blazing, and send our troops ashore with a very high expectation of success. But during the time it takes us to get past that stockade and into the compound in any serious numbers, God alone knows what may have happened to the people we came up here to save.' He turned towards the microphone connecting him to the Shaldag's bridge. ‘Caleb, any feedback from Sanda and the patrol you sent ashore?'

‘Nothing of any use yet,' the captain's voice answered. ‘But they're making good progress along a track cleared by the vehicles they've been following.'

‘They'll be coming through the jungle on the other side,' mused Richard. ‘They'll be able to give us a new perspective when they get into position. But what we really need before we attack is some kind of solid intel from inside the compound itself. Ideally, we need someone actually in there who can tell us when the optimum moment for attack arrives – and can then get to Celine and the others and try to protect them during the time it takes us to break in and rescue them.'

Nobody said ‘dream on' or ‘what planet are you from?',
which surprised Richard, especially as Robin was listening. But the fact was that what he said was true. Unless they could actually smuggle some sort of fifth column into the compound, the chances of Celine and the others surviving were slim to negligible. So he went one step forward – the step that he had always known would take him on to the thinnest ice. ‘So I have an idea,' he said. ‘Something to be working on while we wait for the intel to firm up. I brought a disguise,' he explained. ‘I got Andre Wanago to bring up some costumes from the Granville Royal Lodge.'

‘What costumes?' asked Robin's voice over the radio-link from the Shaldag's bridge. She sounded genuinely intrigued.

‘Ngoboi's costume,' answered Richard. ‘From the white-tie dinner. Ngoboi's costume and his helpers'.'

‘Ngoboi's costume,' said Robin. ‘Clever. But we'd need to be desperate, surely, to take the risk . . .'

‘Fair enough,' temporized Richard. ‘But you never know. I noticed that Ngoboi's costume covered the dancer completely. There's no way to see through it. It's the perfect disguise. So I thought I could put it on and—'

‘It might work if you know the dance,' said Robin. ‘Do you know the dance?'

‘Wait!' commanded Caleb, interrupting the conversation at that moment. ‘Lieutenant Sanda and his men have just reported on the other radio. They have finally arrived at the inland perimeter of the camp. I'll patch Sanda through so he can make a more detailed report. Wait . . .'

‘. . . technicals,' came Sanda's voice suddenly, clearly partway through a sentence. ‘Flatbed trucks – Toyotas – with heavy machine guns mounted on them. They are in a section of the compound that's quite well lit so I can see them pretty clearly. I count half a dozen. A couple look as though they have the relatively new Chinese 14.5 millimetre QJG 02 heavy machine guns on the back. The rest have the older W85s. That's quite a lot of firepower, if they get it deployed. And there are a couple of four-by-fours – the ones we've been tracking, I'd guess. They seem to have Russian Strela missiles aboard them. They're plane killers that will take out a tank too, of course. The whole lot is pretty well guarded by a serious-looking patrol. But I think that's just standard procedure. I don't think they suspect we're here.' There was a brief silence, then Sanda added the thought that had been on everybody else's mind during his terse report. ‘I wonder what other nasty surprises they have hidden away in there . . .'

After a moment more of silence, Richard continued, ‘Well, it seems that my idea is more important than ever.'

‘Accepted,' answered Robin roundly. ‘But by the same token, if we're sending someone in for a look around, it has to be someone who fits the bill. Who knows what they're looking for – and who knows how Ngoboi would behave?'

‘Well, I'm pretty well up on modern weaponry,' persisted Richard. ‘And I thought I could improvise the soft-shoe shuffle, you know? Make it up . . .'

‘
Do you know the bloody dance, Richard?
'

Richard opened his mouth to admit, ‘No . . .'

But Bonnie Holliday interrupted. ‘I do. I know the weaponry. And I know the dance.'

An hour later still, as 22:00 reached round to 23:00, Richard was rowing the tiny cockleshell in which Anastasia, Ado, Esan and Celine had escaped back under the jetty and along the eastern bank behind it. The little rowboat carried Ado, Esan and Bonnie, in Ngoboi's costume. A couple of things had changed since Bonnie's declaration and the heated discussion that had followed it – not least with some of Mako's Poro officers who saw even the idea as a weird kind of sacrilege. Changed and progressed. Sanda and his men were in position to contact and support the undercover dancers. Sanda reported that there was no defensive wall on the jungle side – indeed, that, apart from the vehicles, the compound seemed open and undefended from the perimeter section where the jungle met the river upstream east of the jetty.

The jungle section was the most sporadically patrolled, so it seemed the most obvious point of entry into the compound, even though there were the powerfully armed technicals nearby and patrols were keeping a regular eye on them. Behind the little cockleshell of a boat, three larger inflatables whispered through the water, also being rowed, filled with a carefully selected mixture of men from both the Shaldag and from
Stalingrad
herself. Men and one insistent young woman who refused to take ‘No' for an answer. If Bonnie was going into the camp, she was not going in without support, and if Esan and Ado were going with her as Ngoboi's companions to try and pull Celine and the others out of the firefight, then Anastasia was going to be there beside her friends no matter what. Unlike the others, she had not needed to change in order to put on non-reflective black clothing. And she had positively revelled in covering her face, arms and hands in thick black camouflage paint. The only things about the warlike Russian woman likely to catch the light, thought Richard, were the whites of her eyes, the barrel of her SIG SG 453, or the teeth she kept baring in a truly unnerving tiger-smile. Perhaps there had been something in her psychoanalyst's Freudian diagnosis after all.

The three vessels eased under the ramshackle little jetty. The bow of Richard's cockleshell hissed on to the mud of the bank and his passengers eased themselves ashore. A lone dark figure detached itself from the blackness of the nearby bush and beckoned. Sanda's voice whispered in the earpieces of the headsets they were all now wearing. And even as it did so, the black inflatable bows of the other two vessels bumped ashore and black-dressed figures, armed to the teeth, started pouring silently on to the bank. As they whispered towards the treeline, the first glimpse of the rising moon shone downriver, reflecting weirdly off the bottoms of the roiling thunderclouds low overhead. It gave just enough light to define the vanishing commando. And to give Richard, as he eased the boat back into the stream, one last glimpse of Anastasia's unsettling tiger-smile as she went to rescue the friend she loved and the children she had nurtured and guarded for so long.

But the instant that Anastasia vanished, a strange and truly terrifying roaring sound began to echo out of the heart of the darkness ashore. He thought of the vuvuzelas at the 2010 Football World Cup. The sounds were a timeless and chillingly sinister reincarnation of the African bullhorns. By the time the river took him, sweeping him back downstream towards the Shaldag and
Stalingrad
, his mouth was dry and his heart was pounding; his palms were sweating and the hair on the back of his neck all astir.

At the sound of the bullhorns, Celine looked up, her face drawn with horror. She, Dr Chukwu, the nurses and Sisters Hope and Charity were all wide awake – and had in fact been praying; as close to midnight mass as they could come without Father Antoine. Until the distant, terrible roaring began, the little hospital chapel had become an almost sacred place. Even with a pagan mass-murdering butcher as the principal patient and a blood-soiled sheet concealing the chopped remains of his dead captain beside him. Even with a watchkeeper up in the little bell-tower above them, armed with semi-automatic rifle and MANPADS missiles.

But Celine knew all too well that the roaring of the bullhorns meant that Ngoboi had been reincarnated out in some terrible corner of the jungle. In his last incarnation the appalling Poro god had taken hearts for the general to eat. Celine knew in her own heart that this incarnation would be worse still. She came up off her knees as though some invisible hand had lifted her, and staggered to the door. The compound was unsettlingly empty under the dull yellow glare of the lighting. The buildings and shelters along its edges apparently shut tightly against the awful supernatural invasion. Above the misty outlines of the jungle treetops, the eastern sky was eerily pale with the promise of the rising moon, but its light refracted strangely and restlessly off the cloud cover rolling away towards the distant heights of Mount Karisoke. The doctor arrived at her shoulder. His hand fell on her upper arm, gripping her with almost painful intensity. ‘Get back,' he hissed. ‘It is death for a woman to look on Ngoboi!'