Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (141 page)

Now he knew with the utmost certainty that the thing beneath the sheet was a snake. He knew that Chetti Singh or one of his men had placed it there. It must be one of the more deadly species, one of the mambas, slim and glittering with their thin grinning lips, or a forest cobra, black as death, or one of the thick repulsive gaboon adders.

Daniel sprang from the bed and spun around to face it. His heart hammered wildly as he looked around for a weapon. He snatched up the flimsy chair, and with the strength of his fear tore off one of the legs. With this weapon in his hand he regained control of himself. He was still breathing rapidly and he experienced a quick rush of shame. As a game ranger he had stood down the determined charges of buffalo and elephant and the great killer cats. As a soldier he had parachuted into enemy territory and fought it out in hand-to-hand combat, but now he was panting and shaking at a phantom of his imagination.

He steeled himself to go back to the bed. With his left hand he took the corner of the sheet, raised the chair leg with the other hand and flung back the bedclothes. A striped forest mouse was in the centre of the white sheet. It had long white whiskers and its bright inquisitive button eyes blinked rapidly in the sudden light.

Daniel was barely able to arrest the blow that he had already launched at it, and he and the tiny creature stared at each other in astonishment. Then his shoulders sagged and shook with nervous laughter. The mouse squeaked and leapt off the bed. It darted across the floor and vanished into a hole in the wainscoting and Daniel collapsed on to the bed and doubled up with laughter. “My God, Chetti Singh,” he gasped. “You won’t stop at anything, will you? What other nefarious tricks have you got up your sleeve?”

The helicopter came in from the east. They heard the whoppity-wop of its rotors long before it appeared in the hole in the forest canopy high above. It descended into the clearing with all the grace of a fat lady lowering herself on to a lavatory seat. The helicopter was a French-built Puma and it was obvious that it had seen many years of hard service, probably with a few other airforces, before it had reached Ubomo.

The pilot cut the motors and the rotors slowed and stopped. President Taffari vaulted down from the main hatch. He was lithe and vitally handsome in combat fatigues and parachutist’s boots. Bonny moved in with the camera and he flashed a smile as bright and almost as wide as the medal ribbons on his chest, and stepped forward to greet the reception committee headed by Chetti Singh.

Behind him Ning Cheng Gong used the boarding ladder to descend from the Puma. He was dressed in a cream-coloured tropical suit. His skin was almost a matching creamy yellow that contrasted strongly with his eyes, dark and bright as polished onyx. He looked around quickly, searching for somebody or something; and he saw Daniel standing back, out of camera shot.

Ning Cheng Gong’s eyes licked Daniel’s face for only an instant, like the black tongue of an adder, and then were past. His expression did not change. There was not the least sign of recognition, but Daniel knew with certainty that Chetti Singh had managed to get a message to his master, to warn him of Daniel’s presence in Ubomo. Daniel was startled by his own reaction. He had known that Cheng would be on the helicopter.

He had steeled himself for the first sight of him, but still it was as much of a physical shock as a punch under the ribs. It required an effort to respond normally to President Taffari’s handshake and greeting. “Ah, Doctor; as you see, Mohammed has come to the mountain. I have set aside the afternoon to cooperate with your filming. What do you want me to do? I am yours to command.”

“I am very grateful, Mr. President. I have drawn up a shooting schedule. In all, I will need about five hours of your time, that includes make-up and rehearsal.

Daniel resisted the temptation to glance in Cheng’s direction, until Chetti Singh intervened. “Doctor Armstrong, I’d like you to meet the managing director, head of UDC, Mr. Ning.”

Daniel was almost overcome by a strange sense of unreality as he shook Ning’s hand and smiled and said. “We know each other. We met briefly in Zimbabwe, when you were ambassador there. I don’t suppose you recall?”

“Forgive me.” Cheng shook his head. “I met so many people in the course of my official duties.” He pretended not to remember and Daniel forced himself to keep smiling.

It seemed incredible that the last time he had seen this man was on the escarpment of the Zambezi valley, only hours before he discovered the mutilated and abused corpses of Johnny and his family. It was as though all the sorrow and anger in him had grown stronger and more bitter for being bottled up all this time. He wanted to shout out his rage, “You filthy, greedy butcher!” He wanted to clench his fists and attack that smooth bland face, to batter it into pulp and feel the bones break under his knuckles. He wanted to gouge out those implacable shark’s eyes and pop them between his fingers. He wanted to wash his hands in Ning Cheng Gong’s blood.

He turned away as soon as he could. He could trust himself no longer. For the first time, he faced what he had to do. He had to kill Ning Cheng Gong, or be killed in the attempt. He expected no personal gratification from it. It was the fulfilment of the oath he had sworn over the body of his friend. It was a simple duty and a debt to the memory of Johnny Nzou.

“You may think that I am standing on the bridge of a battleship…” Ephrem Taffari smiled into the lens of Bonny’s camera, “but I assure you that I am not. This is in fact the command platform of Mobile Mining Unit Number One, known here by the affectionate acronym MOMU.”

Although Taffari was the only person in camera-shot, the rest of the platform was crowded with company personnel. The chief engineer and the geologist had briefed the president on his spiel, making certain that he had a grasp of all the technical details. The crew of the unit were still at the command console of MOMU. The operation of the complex machine could not be interrupted even for such an important visitor as the state president.

Daniel was directing the sequence, and both Chetti Singh and Cheng were spectators, although they kept in the background.

Bonny had seen to Taffari’s make-up herself. She was as good as any specialist make-up artist that Daniel had worked with.

“I am standing seventy feet above the ground,” Taffari went on. “And I am racing forward at the breathless speed of a hundred yards an hour.” He smiled at his own burnout.

Daniel had to admit that he was a natural actor, completely at ease in front of the camera. With those looks and with that voice he could grab the complete attention of any female audience anywhere in the world.

“The vehicle on which I am riding weighs one thousand tons…”

Daniel was making editing notes on his schedule as Taffari spoke. At this point he would cut away to a full shot of the gigantic MOMU vehicle riding on its banks of tracks. There were twelve separate sets of steel tracks each of them ten feet wide to give it stability over the most uneven terrain.

Steel hydraulic rams automatically adjusted the trim of the main platform keeping it on an even keel, tilting and dipping to counterbalance the ponderous wallowing, pitching movements of the tracks as they climbed and fell over the contours of the forest floor.

The size of the machine was not much less than the battleship that Taffari had suggested in his opening remarks. It was over one hundred and fifty yards long and forty wide.

Taffari turned and pointed forward over the railing. “Down there, he said, are the jaws and fangs of the monster. Let’s go down and take a look.”

It was easily said on camera, but it meant moving down to a new vantage point and setting up the angles, then rehearsing the new shot. However, Taffari was a joy to work with, Daniel admitted. He needed only one walk-through and he knew his lines. He delivered them with natural timing and without fluffing once, even though he was forced to raise his voice to a shout to compete with the noise of the machinery.

This shot was good cinema. The excavators were on long gantries. Like the necks of a herd of steel giraffe drinking at a water-hole, they moved independently, rising and falling. The excavator blades rotated ferociously, slicing out the earth and throwing it back on to the conveyor belts.

“These excavators can reach down thirty yards below the surface. They are cutting a trench sixty yards wide and digging out over ten thousand tons of ore an hour. They never stop. Day and night they keep on burrowing away.”

Daniel looked down into the cavernous trench that the MOMU was opening into the red earth. It would be a good place to dispose of a corpse, his corpse. He glanced up without warning; both Ning Cheng Gong and Chetti Singh were watching him intently. They were still standing on the command platform seventy feet above him. Their heads were close together, almost touching, and they were talking, their voices wiped out by the roar of the great spinning excavator heads and the thunder of the conveyor belts. From their expressions Daniel was left with no doubt about the subject of their discussion. For an instant he caught their eyes and then they both looked away and moved back from the rail. After that it was difficult for Daniel to concentrate on the work in hand, yet he had to take advantage of every minute that Ephrem Taffari was available to him.

Once again the camera crew climbed the steel ladder up to the central platform of the MOMU. Chetti Singh and Ning Cheng Gong had disappeared, and that made Daniel even more uneasy. From the height of the platform they could look down on to the tube mills. These were four massive steel drums, lying horizontally on the deck of the MOMU, and revolving like the spin-dryer in a domestic washing-machine. However, these drums were forty yards long, and each one was loaded with one hundred tons of cast-iron cannonballs. The red earth coming up from the excavated trench on the conveyor belts was continually being dumped into the open mouths of the drums.

As the earth passed down the length of the drum, the clods and rocks were pounded to fine talcum by the tumbling iron balls. The red powder that poured from the far end of the tube mills went directly into the separator tanks. The film team moved down the steel catwalks until they were above the separators, and here Taffari continued his explanation for the benefit of Bonny’s camera.

“The two valuable minerals that we are after are either very heavy or magnetic. The rare earth monazite is collected by powerful electromagnets.” His voice was almost drowned by the roar of the machinery. That didn’t worry Daniel. Later he would have Taffari make another clear recording of his speech and in the studio be would dub the tape to give it good sound. “Once we have taken out the monazite, the remainder goes into the separator tanks in which we float out the light material and capture the heavy ore of platinum.”

Taffari went on, “This is a very sensitive part of the operation. If we were to use chemical catalysts and reagents in the separator tanks we would be able to recover over ninety percent of the platinum. However, the chemical effluent from the tanks would be poisonous. It would be absorbed into the earth and washed by rain into the rivers to kill everything that came in contact with it animals, birds, insects, fish and plant life. As president of the Democratic People’s Republic of Ubomo, I have given an inviolable instruction that no chemical reagents of any kind are to be used during platinum mining operations in this country.” Taffari paused and stared into the camera levelly. “You have my absolute assurance on that point. Without using reagents, our recovery of ore drops to sixty-five percent. That means tens of millions of dollars are lost from the process. However, my government and I are determined to accept that loss, rather than to run any risk of chemical pollution of our environment. We are determined to do all in our power to make this a safe and happy world for our children, and your children, to enjoy.”

He was utterly convincing. When you listened to that deep reassuring voice and looked at that noble face, you could not possibly doubt his sincerity. Even Daniel was moved, and his critical faculties were suspended for the moment. This bastard could sell pork pies in a synagogue. He tried to get his cynical professional judgement functioning again.

“Cut,” he snapped. “That’s a wrap. That was marvelous, Mr. President. Thank you very much. If you’d like to go back to the mess for lunch, we’ll finish up here. Then this afternoon we’ll film the final sequences with the maps and models.”

Chetti Singh reappeared, like a turbaned genie from a lamp, to usher Taffari down from the MOMU and to drive him back to the base camp where Daniel knew a sumptuous buffet lunch was awaiting him. The food and liquor had been flown up from Kahali in the Puma helicopter.

Once the others had left, Daniel and Bonny captured the last sequences on the MOMU which didn’t require Taffari to be present. They filmed the heavy platinum concentrates pouring into the ore bins in a fine dark stream. Each bin had a capacity of a hundred tons and when it was full it dropped automatically on to the bed of a waiting trailer and was towed away.

It was three o’clock before they had wrapped up all the shots that Daniel wanted on the MOMU and by the time they got back to the base camp at Sengi-Sengi, the presidential lunch was just ending.

In the centre of the conference room of the headquarters hut was an elaborate scale model of a typical mining scenario, employing the MOMU unit. It was designed to illustrate the entire procedure. The model had been built by BOSS technicians in London. It was an impressive piece of work, complete in detail, authentic in scale. Daniel planned to alternate between shots of the model and helicopter shots from the Puma of the actual forest terrain with the real MOMU in action. He believed that on the screen it would be difficult to tell the difference between them.

The scale model showed the mining track, sixty yards wide, cut and cleared through the forest by the team of loggers and bulldozers working ahead of the MOMU. Daniel planned to devote a few days filming to the logging operation itself. The felling of the tall trees would yield riveting footage. The ponderous arabesques of the yellow bulldozers dragging the logs out of the jungle, the gangs loading them on to the logging trucks, would all be good cinema.