Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (137 page)

She giggled and he realised she was drunk. “Have you any idea of the risk you’re taking, you silly bitch?” he asked bitterly. “This is Africa. What you’ll get is a four-letter word and it’s not the one you’re thinking of, sweetheart. It’s spelled A I D S.”

“Tut Tut! jealous, are we? How do you know what I’ve been doing, darling?”

“It’s no big secret. Everybody at the party knew. You’ve been doing what any good little whore does.” She took a wild round-arm swing at his head. He ducked under the blow, and the momentum carried her on to the bed. She pulled the mosquito net down on top of herself and fell in a tangle of long legs. The mini-skirt pulled up almost as high as her waist, her buttocks were bare and white as ostrich eggs.

“By the way,” he said, “you’ve left your knickers with Ephrem.”

She crawled up on to her knees and pulled down the green skirt. “They are in my handbag, ducky.” She got unsteadily to her feet. “Where the hell are my things?”

“In your room, your new room across the passage.”

She flashed at him. “So that’s the way you want it?”

“You didn’t really think I’d want to pick up Ephrem’s leftovers, did you?” Daniel tried to keep his tone reasonable. “Off you go, there’s a good little harlot.”

She picked up her handbag and shoes and marched to the door. There she turned back to him, swaying with a drunkard’s dignity. “It’s all true, what they say,” she told him with vindictive relish. “They are big. Bigger and better than you’ll ever be!” She slammed the door behind her.

Daniel was on his second cup of breakfast tea when Bonny came out on to the verandah and, without greeting him, took her place at the breakfast table opposite him. She wore her usual working uniform of faded blue jeans and denim top, but her eyes were puffy and her expression disgruntled with hangover.

The guest house chef was an anachronism from the colonial era and he served a traditional English breakfast. Neither of them spoke while Bonny demolished her plateful of eggs and bacon.

Then she looked up at him. “So what happens now?”

“You make a film,” he said. “Just the way it’s written in your contract.”

“You still want me around?”

“As a cameraman, yes. But from now on it’s a business relationship.”

“That suits me just fine, she agreed. It was getting to be a bit of a strain; I’m not good at faking it.”

Daniel stood up abruptly, and went to fetch his gear from the bedroom. He was still too angry to risk getting into an argument with her. Before he was ready, Captain Kajo arrived with three soldiers in the back of his Landrover. They helped carry out the heavy video equipment and load it into the back of the truck. Daniel let Bonny sit up in the cab beside Captain Kajo, while he rode in the back with the heavily armed Hita soldiers.

The town of Kahali was very much as he remembered it from his last visit. The streets were wide and dusty where the potholes had eaten, cancerlike, through the tarmac. The buildings looked like those from the movie set of an old-fashioned Western.

The main difference that Daniel noticed was the mood of the people. The Uhali women still wore their colourful ankle-length robes and turbans, the Moslem influence apparent in their demeanour, but the expressions on their faces were guarded and neutral. There were few smiles and no laughter in the open-air market where the women squatted in lines with their wares spread out on sheets of cloth in front of them. There were army patrols in the market-place and on the street corners. The populace averted their eyes as the Landrover passed.

There were very few tourists, and these were dusty, unshaven and rumpled, probably members of an overland safari making their way down the length of the African continent in a huge communal truck. They were haggling for tomatoes and eggs in the market.

Daniel grinned. They were paying for a glimpse of purgatory. The overland safari meant amoebic dysentery and punctures, five thousand miles of potholes and army roadblocks, probably the only package holiday on the globe with no repeat customers. Once was enough to last a lifetime.

The gunboat was waiting for them at the wharf. Seamen in navy blue uniforms and bare feet carried the video equipment up the gangplank and the captain shook hands with Daniel as he came aboard. “Peace be with you,” he greeted him in Swahili. “I have orders to take you where you want to go.”

They left the harbour and turned northwards, parallel to the lakeshore. Daniel stood out on the foredeck and his good spirits returned swiftly. The water was a dark and lovely blue, sparkling in the sunlight. There was a single cloud on the northern horizon, as white as a seagull and not much larger. It was the spray column where the lake spilled over its rocky rim into a deep gorge and became the infant Nile.

The ultimate source of the White Nile had been debated for two thousand years and had still not been entirely agreed upon. Was it those falls where the Victoria Nile out of Lake Victoria joined the Albert Nile in Lake Albert and spilled over at the beginning of the incredible journey down to Cairo and the Mediterranean Sea? Or was it higher still, as Herodotus had written long before the birth of Christ? Did it spring from a bottomless lake lying between the two mountains Crophi and Mophi and fed by their eternal snows?

With the lake-spray in his face, Daniel turned to look westward, trying to make out the loom of the romantic mountain peaks in the distance, but today, as on most days, it was a diffuse blue cloud mass, blending with the blue of the African sky. Many of the earlier explorers had passed close by the Mountains of the Moon without ever dreaming of their existence.

Even Henry Morton Stanley, that ruthless, driven, Americanised Welsh bastard, had lived for months in their shadow before the perpetual clouds had opened and astonished him with a vista of snowy peaks and shining glaciers. It gave Daniel a mystic feeling to sail upon these waters that were the lifeblood pumped from the heart mountains of this savage continent.

He turned and glanced up at the open bridge of the gunboat. Bonny Mahon was filming. She had the Sony camera balanced on her shoulder and pointed towards the shore. He grimaced with reluctant approval. Whatever their personal problems, she was a true professional. At the end she’d probably get a good shot of the devil on her way through hell, and the thought made him grin and took the edge off his antagonism towards her.

He went back to the chartroom below the bridge and spread the survey maps and architect’s drawings that BOSS had provided for him on the table. The site that had been chosen for the hotel and casino was seven miles up the coast from the port of Kahati. Daniel saw that it was a natural bay with an island garding the entrance. The Ubomo River, pouring down the escarpment of the Rift Valley from the great forests and snowy mountain ranges, debauched into the bay. On the map it looked an ideal site for the holiday complex that Tug Harrison hoped would make Ubomo one of the more desirable holiday destinations for tourists from southern Europe.

To Daniel there seemed to be only one drawback. There was already a large fishing village sited on the bay. He wondered what Tug Harrison and Ning Cheng Gong planned to do about that. European sunbathers would not want to share the beach with native fishermen and their nets, while the odour of sundried fish on the racks would not encourage the appetite or add much to the romantic attractions of Fish Eagle Bay Lodge, as the project had already been named.

The captain hailed Daniel from above. He left the chart-table and went out to the open deck, just as the gunboat rounded the headland and Fish Eagle Bay opened ahead of them. Daniel saw at once why the name had been chosen. The island at the mouth of the bay was heavily forested. Nourished by the lake’s sweet clear waters, the ficus and wild mahogany trees had grown into giants with branches spreading out high over the rocky shore and the surrounding lake waters. Hundreds of mating pairs of fish eagles had built their nests in the high branches. With russet and chestnut plumage and glistening white heads, these were the most spectacular of all the African raptors. The great birds sat on every prominent perch, while still others sailed overhead on wide pinions, throwing back their heads in flight to utter the wild yelping chant that is so much a part of the African pageant.

The gunboat anchored and launched an inflatable Zodiac to take Daniel and Bonny to the island. For an hour they filmed the eagle colony. Captain Kajo threw dead fish off the rocky cliff and Bonny captured exciting sequences of rival eagles contending for the offerings and engaging in ritual aerial combat by hooking each other’s talons and spinning and swirting in flight.

Daniel helped her lug the Sony camera up the smooth, massive trunk of a wild fig tree to film the eagle chicks in the nest. The parent birds attacked them both on the exposed branch, coming in on screaming power-dives with talons extended and curved yellow beaks agape, pulling away at the last possible moment so that the draught of the great wings buffeted them on their exposed perch.

By the time Bonny and Daniel reached the ground, their personal antagonism had been shelved and they were operating as a professional film crew again.

They returned to the Zodiac and ran out to the gunboat. As they came aboard, the captain weighed anchor and pushed on slowly into the bay. It was a spectacular site with volcanic rock cliffs climbing sheer out of the blue water and bright orange sand beaches in between the black rock.

Once again they climbed into the Zodiac and landed on one of the beaches near the mouth of the Ubomo River. Leaving Captain Kajo and the two seamen on the beach with the boat, Daniel and Bonny climbed to the highest point on the cliffs and were rewarded with a panoramic view over the bay and the lake.

They could look down on the large fishing village at the mouth of the Ubomo River. Twenty or so dhow-rigged boats were drawn up on the beach while as many more were dotted out upon the lake waters. On gull-winged sails the fleet was bearing in towards the bay, the night’s fishing over, coming in to land the catch. Along the head of the beach the fishing-nets were spread out in the sunlight to dry and the smell of fish carried up to them, even on the top of the cliff. Naked black children played upon the beach and splashed in the lake. Men worked on the dhows or sat cross-legged with needle and palm to repair the festooned nets.

In the village the women moved gracefully in their long skirts as they pounded grain in the tall wooden mortars, swinging rhythmically to the rise and fall of the pestles in their hands, or squatted over the cooking-fires on which stood the black three-legged pots. Daniel pointed out the various features which he wanted filmed and Bonny followed his instructions and turned the camera lens to record it all.

“What will happen to the villagers?” she asked, still peering into the viewfinder of the Sony.

“They’re scheduled to start digging the foundations of the casino in three weeks… I expect they’ll move them to another site,” Daniel told her. In the new Africa people are moved about by their rulers like chess pieces He broke off and shaded his eyes, peering out along the road that led back along the lakeshore towards the capital.

Red dust blew in a slow sullen cloud out across the blue lake waters, carried on the mountain breeze from up-country. “Let me have a look through your telephoto lens,” he asked Bonny, and she handed him the camera. Swiftly Daniel zoomed the lens to full power and picked up the approaching column of vehicles. “Army trucks, he told her. And transporters. I’d say those were bulldozers on the transporters.”

He handed her back the camera, and Bonny studied the approaching column. “Some kind of army exercise?” she guessed. “Are we allowed to film it?”

“Anywhere else in Africa I wouldn’t take the chance of pointing a camera at anything military, but here we’ve got President Taffari’s personal firman. Shoot away!”

Quickly Bonny set up the light tripod she used only for longrange telephoto shots and zoomed in on the approaching military convoy. Meanwhile, Daniel moved to the edge of the cliff and looked down on the beach. Captain Kajo and the sailors from the gunboat were stretched out on the sand. Kajo was probably sleeping off the previous evening’s debauch. Where he lay he was out of sight of the village.

Daniel strolled back to watch Bonny at work.

The convoy was already approaching the outskirts of the village. A mob of children and stray dogs ran out to greet it. The children skipped along beside the trucks, laughing and waving, while the dogs yapped hysterically. The vehicles drew up in the open ground in the centre of the village which was both soccer pitch and village square.

Soldiers in camouflage uniform, armed with AK 47 rifles, jumped down and formed up into their platoons on the soccer ground. A Hita officer climbed on to the cab of the leading truck and began to harangue the villagers through a bull-horn. The sound of his electronically distorted voice carried intermittently to the crest of the cliff on which Daniel was standing. He lost the sense of some of the Swahili as the breeze rose and fell, but the gist of it was clear.

The officer was accusing the villagers of harbouring political dissidents, obstructing the economic and agricultural reforms of the new government, and engaging in counter-revolutionary activities. While he was speaking, a squad of soldiers trotted down to the beach and rounded up the children and fishermen there. They herded them back to the village square.

The villagers were becoming agitated. The children hid amongst the skirts of the women and the men were protesting and gesticulating at the officer on the cab of the truck. Now soldiers began moving through the village, ordering people out of the thatched huts. One old man tried to resist being dragged from his home, and a soldier clubbed him with the butt of an AK 47. He fell in a huddle on the dusty earth and they left him there and moved on, kicking open the doors of the huts and shouting at the occupants. On the beach another group of soldiers was meeting the incoming fishing fleet and prodding the fishermen ashore at bayonet point.

Bonny never looked up from the viewfinder of her camera. “This is great stuff! God, this is the real thing. This is Emmy Award territory, I kid you not.”