Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (149 page)

It had to be a thing of the spirit, Daniel decided as he followed Sepoo through the forest. They were children of Africa, its pulse beat in both of them, its soul was their soul. They understood and loved this land’s beauty and savagery and treasured its bounty. They understood and loved its creatures and counted themselves merely one amongst this multitude of species.

When they camped that night they sat close to each other beside the fire and talked quietly. Sepoo spoke to him of the secrets and the mystery of the forest and the deeply felt beliefs of his people, and Daniel understood. In some measure they were his beliefs too and he accepted the reasons for the customs of these people as Sepoo explained them, and admired the wisdom and virtue of their lore. Sepoo called him Kuokoa, which meant
The one I rescued.
Daniel accepted the name, even though he knew it was meant as a monument to Sepoo’s deed and a reminder of his debt to the old man.

They came to the MOMU track through the forest near Sengi-Sengi in the late afternoon and lay up at the forest edge until it was dark. Then they crossed the open ground in the night.

Sepoo led Daniel to the logging road where he had abandoned the Landrover almost ten days previously but even Sepoo could not lead him directly to the stranded vehicle. It was only the following day that they at last found the Landrover exactly as Daniel had left it behind its screen of dense undergrowth, sunk to its axles in the soft forest floor.

There were no fresh human tracks around it and the video equipment was still in its aluminum carrying cases. Daniel laid it out on the tailboard of the vehicle and checked it quickly. The camera was not working. Either the batteries were flat after standing so long, or else the moisture had penetrated the mechanism.

Daniel noticed droplets behind the glass of the lens and condensation beaded the casing. It was a bitter disappointment, but Danny could only hope that the batteries could still be recharged or that a rudimentary cleaning and drying, once he reached Gondola, would get the camera serviceable again.

He gave Sepoo the case of cassettes to carry while he took for himself the camera, the lens and the spare battery packs, a burden of almost seventy pounds to lug through the steaming forest. Heavily laden as he was, the return took almost twice as long as the outward march and it rained most of the time.

As soon as he reached Gondola, Daniel recruited Victor Omeru’s assistance. He knew that Victor was a qualified electrical engineer. Victor had built and installed a turbine generator beneath the waterfall at the head of the Gondola glade. It generated 220 volts and almost ten kilowatts of power, sufficient to supply the community with lighting and to operate Kelly’s laboratory equipment.

So Victor was able to place the battery packs for the video on charge and found only one of them was defective. The camera and the lens were a different problem altogether. Daniel would not have known where to begin to look for the fault, but Victor stripped the camera and cleaned the condensed moisture. He checked the circuits and found one of the transistors was blown. He replaced it with one that he cannibalised from Kelly’s gas spectroscope.

Within twenty-four hours he had the VTR functioning again, then he took down the lenses and cleaned and dried them out and reassembled them.

Daniel realised just what a difficult task the old man had undertaken in such primitive conditions. “If you never get your country back, I’ve always got a job for you, sir,” he told Victor.

“That’s not such a good idea,” Kelly warned him. “You’d probably end up working for him.”

“All right,” Daniel said. “I’ve got a camera. Now what do you want me to film?”

“We leave tomorrow morning at first light,” Kelly told him.

“I’m coming along, Kelly,” Victor Omeru told her.

“I don’t think that is very wise, Victor.” She looked dubious. “You’re much too valuable.”

“After all my hard work, I deserve a little reward, don’t you think?” He turned to Daniel. “Besides which, you might have another breakdown in the equipment. Come on, Doctor Armstrong, put in a good word for me.”

“Chauvinists, both of you,” Kelly protested. “You’re ganging up on me just because I am a female. I’ll have to call Pamba to my aid.”

“Hell no!” Daniel shook his head. “That is using too much gun!” But he shared Kelly’s misgivings. Victor Omeru was over seventy years of age and the going would be tough. It was almost fifty miles to Wengu.

He was about to say so when Victor intervened quietly. “Seriously, Ubomo is my country. I cannot rely on second-hand reports. I have to see for myself what Taffari is doing to my people and my land.”

Neither of them could argue with that, and when the safari started out from Gondola the following morning, Victor Omeru was with them.

Sepoo had recruited eight men from his clan to act as porters and Pamba appointed herself as caravan manager to make certain that they applied themselves and did not lose interest in the typical Bambuti fashion, dropping their bundles to wander off fishing or honey hunting.

Every man in the clan stood in awe of Pamba’s tongue.

On the third day they reached the first of the bleeding rivers and the Bambuti men lowered their loads to the ground and huddled on the bank. There was no laughter nor banter. Even Pamba was silent and subdued.

Daniel climbed down into the stinking morass of red mud, dead animals and poisoned vegetation, and scooped a handful of it. He sniffed it and then threw it from him and tried to wipe the filth from his hands. “What is it, Kelly?” He looked up at her on the bank above him. “What caused this?”

“It’s the reagent that Taffari swore to you that he would never use.” She was dressed only in a cotton T-shirt and shorts with a coloured headband around her brow, and her small neat body seemed to quiver with outrage. “Victor and I have been monitoring the effluent from the mining operation. At first it was pure mud. That was bad enough. Then recently, in the last few weeks, there’s been a change. They have begun using a reagent. You see, the platinum molecules are coated with sulphides. The sulphides reduce the efficiency of the recovery process by forty percent. They are using a reagent to dissolve the sulphide coating and to free the platinum.”

“What does the reagent consist of?” Daniel demanded.

“Arsenic.” She spat the word like an angry cat. “They are using a two percent solution of white arsenic to break down the sulphide coating.”

He stared at her in disbelief. “But that’s crazy.”

“You said it,” Kelly agreed. “These aren’t sane or responsible people. They are poisoning the forest in a murderous orgy of greed.”

He climbed up out of the dead river and stood beside her. Slowly he felt her outrage seep into his own conscience. “The bastards,” he whispered.

It was as though she realised the moment of his total commitment to her cause, for she reached out and took his hand. It was not a gentle or an affectionate gesture. Her grip was fierce and compelling. “You haven’t seen it all yet. This is just the beginning. The real horror lies ahead at Wengu.” She shook his arm demandingly. “Come!” she ordered. “Come and look at it. I challenge you to remain on the sidelines after you have seen it.”

The little column moved on, but after another five hours’ march the Bambuti porters abruptly halted and dropped their packs and whispered together.

“Now what is the trouble?” Victor wanted to know, and Kelly explained.

“We have reached the boundary of the clan hunting area.” She pointed ahead. “From here onwards we will be entering the sacred heartland of the Bambuti. They are deeply troubled and perplexed. So far only Sepoo has seen what is happening at Wengu. The others are reluctant to go on. They are afraid of the wrath of the forest god, the Mother and Father of the forest. They understand that a terrible sacrilege has been committed and they are terrified.”

“What can we do to persuade them?” Daniel asked, but Kelly shook her head. “We must keep out of it. It is clan business. We must leave it to Pamba to convince them.”

The old lady was at her best now. She spoke to them, sometimes haranguing them shrilly, at others dropping her voice to a dovelike cooing and taking one of their faces in her cupped hands to whisper into an ear. She sang a little hymn to the forest and smeared ointment on each of their bare chests to absolve them. Then she performed a solitary dance, shuffling and leaping as she circled. Her withered breasts bounced against her belly and her skirt of bark cloth flipped up at the back to expose her surprisingly neat and glossy little buttocks as she cavorted.

After an hour one of the porters suddenly picked up his load and started along the path. The others, grinning sheepishly, followed his example and the safari went forward into the sacred heartland.

They heard the machines at dawn the next morning and as they went on the sound became louder. The rivers they crossed were waist-deep and thick as honey with the fearful red poisoned mud.

Apart from the distant growl and roar of the machines, the forest was silent. They saw no birds or monkeys or antelope, and the Bambuti were silent also. They kept close together and they were afraid, darting anxious glances into the forest around them as they scurried forward.

At noon Sepoo halted the column and conferred with Kelly in a whisper. He pointed towards the east and Kelly nodded and beckoned Daniel and Victor to her.

“Sepoo says we are very close now. Sounds in the forest are very deceptive. The machines are working not more than a few miles ahead. We dare not approach closer for there are company guards at the forest edge.”

“What are you going to do?” Victor asked.

“Sepoo says there’s a line of hills to the east. From there we’ll be able to overlook the mining and logging area. Pamba will stay here with the porters. just the four of us, Sepoo and I, you, Daniel and Victor, will go up on to the hills.”

Daniel unpacked the VTR and he and Victor checked it. “Come on,” Kelly ordered, before the light goes or it begins to rain again.

They climbed the hills in Indian file with Sepoo leading. However, even when they came out on the top they were still hemmed in by the forest. The great trees soared high overhead and the undergrowth pressed in closely about them, limiting visibility to twenty or thirty feet. They could hear the bellow of diesels below them, closer and clearer than before.

“What now?” Daniel wanted to know. “Can’t see a damned thing from here.”

“Sepoo will give us a grandstand view,” Kelly promised, and almost as she said it, they reached the base of a tree that was a giant amongst a forest of great trees. “Twenty pygmies holding hands can’t encircle this tree,” Kelly murmured. “We’ve tried it. It’s the sacred honey tree of the tribe.”

She pointed at the primitive ladder that scaled the massive trunk. The pygmies had driven wooden pegs into the smooth bark to reach the lowest branches and from there they had strung liana ropes and lashed wooden steps that ascended until they passed out of sight into the forest galleries a hundred feet above where they stood.

“This is a Bambuti temple,” Kelly explained. “Up there in the high branches they pray and leave offerings to the forest god.”

Sepoo went first for he was the lightest and some of the pegs and steps were rotten. He cut new ones and hammered them into place with the blade of his machete, and then signaled the others to follow him. Kelly went next and reached down to give Victor a hand when he faltered. Daniel came last, carrying the VTR slung over his shoulder and reaching up to place Victor’s feet on the ladder rungs when he could not find them for himself.

It was slow progress, but they helped the old man up and reached the upper gallery of the forest safely.

This was like the land at the top of Jack’s beanstalk, an aerial platform formed by interlinked branches and fallen debris. New plants had taken root in the suspended leaf mould and trash and formed a marvelous hanging garden where strange and beautiful flowers bloomed and a whole new spectrum of life flourished closer to the sun. Daniel saw butterflies with wings spread as wide as his hands, and flying insects that sparkled like emeralds and princely rubies. There were even lilies and wild gardenias growing in this fairyland. Daniel caught the flash of a bird so jewelled and splendid that he doubted his own eyes as it vanished like a puff of brilliant smoke amongst the foliage.

Sepoo barely allowed them to rest before he began to climb again. The trunk of the tree was half as thick at this level, but still as huge as its neighbours had been at their bases. As they went higher so the light changed. It was like coming up from the depths of the ocean. The green submarine glow brightened until abruptly they burst out into the sunlight and exclaimed with wonder. They were on the top branches of the sacred honey tree.

They looked down upon the carpet of the forest roof. It spread away, undulating like the billows of the ocean, green and unbroken on every side, except in the north. All their eyes turned in that direction and their cries of wonder faded and they stared in horror and disbelief.

In the north the forest was gone. From the base of the green hill below them, as far as they could see to the north, to the very foothills of the snowclad mountains the forest had been erased. A red plain of desolation lay where once the tall trees had stood.

None of them could speak or move. They clung to their lofty perch and stared speechlessly, turning their heads slowly from side to side to encompass the enormity of the bare devastated expanse.

The earth seemed to have been raked by the claws of some rapacious beast, for it had been scoured by the torrential rain waters. The topsoils had been torn away, leaving stark canyons of erosion; the fine red mud had been washed down to clog and choke the rivers through the forest. It was a desolate lunar landscape.

“Merciful God!” Victor Omeru was the first to speak. “It is an abomination. How much land has he defiled? What is the full extent of this destruction?”

“It’s impossible to calculate,” Kelly whispered. Even though she had seen it before, she was still stunned by the horror of it. “Half a million, a million acres, I don’t know. But remember, they’ve been at work here for less than a year. Think of the destruction in another year from now. If those monsters–” she pointed at the line of MOMU vehicles that were strung along the edge of the forest at the foot of the hill, “if those monsters are allowed to continue.”