The Dark Chronicles (26 page)

I leapt through the grass, feeling plants and insects stinging my skin and prying my shoes away from the mud with each step. Two of the others – Gunner and Senegal, I thought – overtook me, clattering down the hill with their arms outstretched, and I followed them without thinking, blocking the rest of the world from my
head and concentrating on my feet and the ground directly in front of me. Soon, I couldn’t hear the Ferret – perhaps the lever had jammed and they were still trying to prise the gate open. I was running so fast that it took several strides before it hit home. I couldn’t hear the Ferret, but I couldn’t hear anything else either: no shots, no footsteps, not even my own breathing, which had been so strong just moments before.

I had gone deaf.

I began to slow down. The pain in my upper left thigh was sharpening with every step, and I was shivering with cold. It felt like I was losing my balance, and my face was sticky with sweat. My brain also needed to absorb what had just happened. Which was that all the noises that had been registering in my head moments before – the squelching of my feet in the rain-sodden earth, the buzzing of the mosquitoes around me, the machine-gun fire from the men in armoured cars trying to kill me – had, without notice, been replaced by complete silence.

I had never experienced
true
silence before. It had a rather frightening beauty to it: every detail of the world around me was intact – the rank swamp smell, the curtain of sky framed by darkened palm trees, the shapes of the other two men skidding down the slope away from me – but with one element removed, it seemed unreal.

What the hell had caused this? Surely not the sound of the gunfire – I’d heard plenty of that in my time. Hunger and fatigue, then? I suddenly remembered all those horror stories people liked telling in the basement bar after hours of agents collapsing of exhaustion or going mad in the field. That poor sod Carslake who’d started having headaches in the middle of an operation just outside Bangkok. He’d gone blind before finding a hospital, and the opposition had simply picked him off on the street. His corpse hadn’t been a pretty sight, by all accounts. Was that my fate, then? One
second all my faculties intact; the next running through a soundless world towards oblivion?

Run anyway – and then keep running. Think later. The car would break through the gate soon. Perhaps it already had. I forced my feet back into action, fixing on the path ahead and trying to block out the pain as I scrambled down the bank. I outstretched one arm to protect me from insects and branches, and kept the other hovering low in case I slipped. As I pushed aside some large fronds, glossy and greeny-black in the moonlight, I sensed something in my peripheral vision, and turned to see a blurred ball of dark matter propelling straight towards my head. As I leapt away from it, I realized it was a mammoth insect – perhaps a dragonfly? – but that was as far as I got because I landed on something sharp, which cut into my right calf and shredded my trouser-leg so a flap of it now hung loose, leaving the wound exposed to the cool night air: a feast for the mosquitoes.

I tried to right myself and felt something solid pushing down on my head. I looked up to see a pair of gleaming bloodshot eyes: Gunner! What the hell was he doing coming back for me? His mouth was moving urgently, shouting something behind the screen between us. I gestured at my ears and shook my head, and he pushed my shoulders down roughly. I followed his lead and flattened myself against some muddy roots.

We looked up the hill. Flickers of red and yellow light flashed over the rim, and I guessed that the Ferret was heading down the road.

They hadn’t seen us.

We lay there for a few minutes, or perhaps it was only seconds – time was getting harder to judge – and then I turned to see that he had gotten up and had started running back down the mountainside.

With a mighty effort I stood up and leapt after him, pounding my feet every step of the way. It was excruciating, but if I pounded
hard enough, I could ‘hear’ the pulse reverberating through my body – not as a sound but as a physical sensation. Somehow it seemed comforting, so I concentrated on making it happen, again and again, all the while watching Gunner’s silhouette ahead, weaving through the plants.

As the slope finally started to flatten out and we waded across a narrow rivulet of swamp water, I felt a closer shuddering. Had they changed their minds? Were they coming down the hill? I didn’t dare look back, and at some point I realized that these new vibrations were coming from inside my own head – my teeth were chattering.

It was shortly after I realized this that the sound came back. Just as suddenly as it had been shut off, someone lifted the needle and placed it back on the record. My panting breaths, the rush of the wind and the sound of my trousers pushing through the brush burst into my brain at what seemed like double the normal volume, but after a few shaky seconds where I nearly lost my balance, I was almost insanely happy. The deafness had lasted just a few minutes, and now it had gone! The swish of my legs now spurred me on – create more swish, more noise, let the sounds continue for as long as you can enjoy them – and I leapt over rocks and eddies and kept running, full pelt, towards Gunner, until I slowly started to bear down on him, my heart thumping in my ribcage.

*

‘I need to get to Udi. Do you have any idea which direction I should take?’

He shook his head. ‘You no fit to go anywhere. You be very sick. You shake and sweat, and you no answer when I speak.’

‘I lost my hearing for a couple of minutes,’ I said. ‘It’s back now.’

He looked at me. ‘This has happen to you before?’

I felt inside my shirt pocket and pulled out the soft pack of Players. So much for my little game – the remaining cigarettes were all sodden.

‘Who the hell is Samuel Johnson?’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Someone I know at school. It was the first name that came to my mind.’

I nodded. ‘Thanks for the help back there,’ I said. ‘I appreciate how hard it must have been.’

There was an awkward silence. When he’d seen that I was still visible from the road, he had realized it would lead the men down the hill – to me, but also to him. So he’d run back, made me duck for cover, and it had worked. But we’d lost Senegal and Boxer as a result – and who could blame them?

Now we were resting for a moment against a large palm tree he had picked out. He had found some of its flowers in the surrounding shrubbery and squeezed them open until a string of sap had dribbled from the stems, which he had offered me. Fermented, it would have become ‘palm wine’, but the sweet stickiness had been welcome enough and I had gained a little strength from it. My shivering had also subsided, although my thigh still pulsed with a dull pain.

‘I sorry about your girl,’ said Gunner.

I crumpled the cigarette pack in my hand. The tenses in his English were sometimes hard to decipher: the present was also used for the past. Did he mean that seeing Isabelle killed had helped persuade him to come with me – or was he sympathizing generally? Perhaps both. I had a sudden memory of her sitting and smoking in her black swimsuit on the breeze blocks at the Lagos Yacht Club, when I had mistaken her for Anna. And then later that night, her body glistening with sweat as she had called out to me in the dark.

‘She wasn’t my girl,’ I said. I considered whether or not I wanted to know the answer to my next question, and decided it might be important. ‘What’s the procedure for prisoners’ deaths?’

He nodded. ‘It depends on the importance of the prisoner. I think they will bury her and the compound reverend bless the ground. But I don’t think they tell anyone about it.’

‘No.’

It would probably be weeks until her office became worried
enough to notify the embassy in Lagos, and then her parents – were they in France? I couldn’t remember if she had said – would fly over and start trying to piece together what had happened.

‘This war must end!’ said Gunner suddenly, standing and spitting on the ground to emphasize the point. ‘I want no more part of it.’

I wondered which part he meant – the shooting of Isabelle, or the fate of the Biafrans? Isabelle had not deserved to die, but she had chosen to be here, chosen this cause. And she had chosen, finally, to confront an armed soldier while a prisoner of war. The Biafrans, on the other hand, had had no choice, or very little. Fight for one side, fight for the other, or fight for none. Another image swam into view: their skeletal frames immobile on those flea-infested mattresses. The flies buzzing into the huge eyes of the children as they had stood in the hut. I pushed it down, as Gunner had pushed me down into the wet earth a few minutes before. Humanity coming over the hill. Don’t let it spot you.

I must not make the same mistake Isabelle had, I told myself. This was not my war. Biafrans were being held prisoner across the country – so were Nigerians. Their fate wasn’t my cross to bear, and there was no especial reason why I should have been concerned about the fate of a squadron of deserters, even with women and children attached. War was hell, and this one was no exception. Listening to Gunner talk about what he had seen and what he believed, I was reminded for a moment that I, too, had once been young and felt I could shake the world’s foundations. Well, I hadn’t done it. I wasn’t sure it was even possible to do. Part of me wanted to argue against his young man’s idealism, to tell him that he wasn’t going to change anything by talking. But I forced myself to keep quiet: I still needed his help, and I’d soon have to persuade him all over again. I had to get to the nearest town and find transport. The scant cover that I was his prisoner was a lot more likely to get me there than going it alone.

And what would I find once I reached Udi? I wondered. From what I knew so far, it didn’t look comforting. Anna was apparently
not only still alive, but engaged on a mission to assassinate the British prime minister.

And yet, and yet… could it really be? I still had no solid proof of her guilt. There was no way I could even be completely certain about the photograph of her in Lagos: photographs could be forged. Perhaps they had found someone who looked rather like her, and Slavin’s defection had been an elaborate operation to hook me in. But no, that couldn’t be right. Why bother? Sasha was in touch with me whenever he needed. If they had wanted to cut me loose, they could have done so in London. But the assassination story didn’t fit either… There were still too many unanswered questions. Had Anna really survived, and, if so, what had been her role in Father’s death? How had Slavin found out about me? And how did the plot against Wilson fit into the situation?

I put these problems out of my mind – the answers lay in Udi, and I had thirty-seven hours and twenty minutes to get there. Perhaps the thing to do was to work our way back to the road we’d come from? Would they still have men posted on it? Possibly. It wasn’t worth the risk. We’d have to find another road, or intersect the same one further along…

I realized that Gunner had stopped talking. His face was frozen, grim, and I looked up to see what had made it so.

There were five of them. They all had black beards, fierce expressions and were pointing rifles at us. The patches on the sleeves of their uniforms bore an illustration of an orange sun dawning – or was it setting?

Biafrans. But these ones weren’t starving and there were no flies in their eyes.

‘Come with us,’ one of them said softly. ‘You come with us now.’

We were led through the palm trees to a mud track, where a battered old Land Rover was parked, camouflaged by fronds and netting. Senegal and Boxer sat in the rear, guarded by about a dozen men, all of whom looked to be armed and – always a bad sign with soldiers – bored. None of their uniforms matched, and they wore an assortment of headgear: helmets, berets, caps and what looked like beach hats. A black metal pole was attached to the front passenger window of the vehicle, holding aloft a radio transmitter, and one of the soldiers held a receiver on his lap, the announcer’s voice leaking out from it in an unbroken stream. We were pushed into the back, and then the jalopy stuttered into life and we started moving slowly down the track.

Pritchard’s dossier had mentioned that Biafra had a guerrilla force. I wondered what Isabelle would have made of them – how they would have fitted with her idea of the Biafrans as utterly powerless victims. Their uniforms and weaponry were tattered and piecemeal, and half of them, I now noticed, seemed to be stoned. But they had crept up on Gunner and me without either of us noticing, and had sprung their trap smoothly and efficiently. With several rifles pointed firmly in my direction, I had little choice but to stay put and watch for an opportunity to escape. I wasn’t all that hopeful it would arrive – I’d faced a similar situation just a few hours ago, when Alebayo’s men had driven me to Port Harcourt under a similar armed guard.

Gunner, Senegal and Boxer were seated near me, all of them staring expressionlessly ahead, lost in their own thoughts. No doubt they were repenting their decision to follow me – if it came down to it, they would probably accuse me of kidnapping them or some such story. I wasn’t sure what my own story should be. My thinking was impaired, by pain, fatigue, hunger, thirst – and the nagging thought that I might lose my hearing again. The smell of the marijuana was making me even woozier, and I hadn’t stopped sweating since leaving the Shell camp. Every so often, my guts gave a sudden lurch, and vomit would rise in my throat.

After a few minutes, I decided I might as well try to make an opening, and asked the soldiers seated on the bench opposite me where we were going. ‘I’m ill, and I need to see a doctor. Are we anywhere near Udi? There’s a hospital there.’

They stared right through me.

‘If you don’t shut your mouth, old man, you will soon be much more ill,’ said one.

That drew our cosy little chat to an end, and I concentrated on trying to keep my innards on an even keel instead. We bumped along the track for over an hour, past glittering lagoons and mangrove swamps, all the while rending the night air with the commentary from Radio Biafra. My ears pricked up as the announcer mentioned ‘perfidious Albion’ and, sure enough, he began to discuss the Prime Minister’s impending visit. I couldn’t follow it all due to the noise of the engine and a squabble that had started between two of the men near me, but the thrust seemed to be that the visit was a gimmick designed to deflect the world’s media from a sudden and brutal attack by the Nigerians.