Peter Tonkin
Black Pearl
For
Cham, Guy and Mark
As always
And, with thanks, for
Graham Stanley,
Olga Tarasenko
and
Michaela van Halewyn
Black Lake
Mizuki Yukawa stumbled through the rainforest in the heart of the West African country of Benin La Bas, which stretched from the west coast towards the interior of Central Africa, whimpering with terror. Her ribs seemed too frail to contain the beating of her heart. Her skull seemed too small to contain the pictures of the brutal attack that had destroyed her jungle home and led to the slaughter of everyone she worked with. She was certain that only flight could save her from the horrific fate her friends had suffered. She was running for her life. She had twenty minutes left to live.
As Mizuki battled through the dank grey-green ferns that stood as high as she did and filled the ground between the enormous tree trunks that dwarfed and terrified her further, she relived the horror she had just experienced in a series of disorientating flashbacks. Pictures of a dozen Japanese biologists all formed up dutifully beside her in a cheerfully expectant line along the reed-fringed edge of Lac Dudo — Black Lake in the local Matadi language of the place. Dressed in tracksuits and trainers like Mizuki herself, ready for their morning tai-chi, the fitness programme undertaken by all employees of the Yakimoto Freshwater Pearl Company back home in Takashima City.
Pictures of the square, solid, grey-haired Dr Koizumi standing framed against the timberline, beside the greenhouse that contained his collection of orchids, ready to lead them in farming the black pearls in the lake. The dreary vegetation rising in a wild wall close behind him, the upper canopy brushing the sky and hiding the enormous volcanic crater of Mount Karisoke, on whose vast flank they stood.
She pictured the way the nearest bank of ferns had parted silently to reveal an astonishing number of soldiers, who seemed at first surprised to find the facility here. Strange young men armed with rifles and fearsome, iron-bladed matchets almost long enough to be swords. Their faces as black, hard and cold as Dr Koizumi’s priceless black pearls. The soldiers had raised their guns and almost casually taken their aim.
Mizuki carried on running as she visualized the lakeside reeds that had formed a flimsy wall between her and the slaughter in the facility, behind which she had thrown herself at the first sight of the fearsomely armed men, and through which she had glimpsed even more shattered, kaleidoscopic flashes of horror.
Dr Koizumi standing with his back against the front of the orchidarium, hands raised placatingly. The others, so conveniently lined up for the tai-chi, going down as though before a firing squad, beneath a withering hail of bullets from the automatic weapons. The sound of their shots like slaps against her delicate ears.
Then Dr Koizumi collapsing like a burst balloon in front of the shattered greenhouse, his clothes a shocking red. Bullet holes in his T-shirt, black-rimmed and smoking. The bodies hacked disgustingly to pieces under the rain of matchet blows.
Dr Koizumi’s head rolling free of his bright red torso and bouncing down the slope towards her, still spraying blood, his eyes wide with shock and horror. The soldier who had chopped it off looking up, his face a mask of tribal scars, his wide eyes seeming to see right through the reed wall. His powerful arm raising his dripping matchet and his blood-flecked boots stepping down the bank towards her as she turned to run.
Now the tiny passage leading from the lakeside reed bed to an outcrop of the jungle proper seemed to jump and rock crazily in front of her as she fled along it, certain that the scarred man was close behind her. It was a passage she had never followed alone before for fear of what might lurk there.
The ferns were rising in sombre waves in front of her, spitting icy drizzle into her face, whipping and tripping her as she plunged among them. Echoes of the gunshots were taken up by the jungle creatures all around her, stirring noisily with the dawn. Birds and monkeys were calling in the upper canopy, while sloths and lemurs were further down, adding their hoots and howls. Fruit bats and flying squirrels flitted from creeper to liana above her, shrieking and shrilling. All invisible — there only as part of an unnerving cacophony or a flicker in the outermost edge of Mizuki’s vision, until she burst out of the trackless jungle on to a narrow path which she did not recognize as an elephant trail. She paused, gasping hoarsely, looking right and left, trying to calm herself sufficiently to think, to reason. On her left the path seemed to rise — leading up towards Karisoke’s distant fiery peak. On her right it fell — leading, she prayed, down round the end of Lac Dudo and on towards Cite La Bas, the local government centre where there were authorities. Regular army. Police. Safety.
Mizuki turned, therefore, and ran downhill towards her hope of safety. She had covered perhaps a hundred yards before the gorilla charged her. It came out of the jungle wall to her right without giving any warning at all. Like her, it had seen much of its troop slaughtered by the soldiers and was in no mood to give ritual warnings. It towered two full metres high and weighed two hundred and fifty kilos. Its arms extended two and a half metres fingertip to fingertip, ending in hands nearly thirty centimetres wide — and they reached for the screaming woman as it charged. The Japanese doctor stood a little over one point five metres. She weighed forty-four kilos. The only thing that saved her was that the gorilla had been wounded in the leg and so he collapsed on to all fours before he could reach her. She ran full tilt down the path, spurred on by his roar of frustration and the thunder of his huge palms beating against the massive drum of his chest.
The elephant track ended abruptly at the wall of a fallen tree, whose trunk rose nearly six metres in front of her. She turned left because the gorilla had attacked from the right and followed the great brown wall of the tree trunk along a narrow sunlit path cleared out of the canopy three hundred feet above by the destructive force of its fall. She followed it for a hundred metres before being beaten back into the undergrowth by the shattered limbs of its branches. And here, at last, her luck ran out.
Just as she had blundered unawares into a gorilla troop, Mizuki ran into a chimpanzee community that was still disorientated, angered and coming to terms with the random slaughter visited on them by the soldiers. Dr Koizumi had never included chimpanzees in his warning lectures and Mizuki at first found the pink, clown faces, wide mouths, ridiculous ears and round brown eyes reassuring. But then the largest of the males ran forward aggressively and reared up, screaming, less than thirty centimetres ahead of her. He stood one point seven metres tall, seeming to tower over her. He weighed over seventy kilos, almost twice as much as she did. No sooner had he arrived in front of her than half a dozen others, almost as big, joined in. And when he screamed again, shaking his head from side to side, filling her nostrils with the stench of his breath and her face with a rain of hot drool, she saw just how long and sharp his black-edged teeth were. Felt how unbelievably strong his grip was as he grabbed her by the throat and the upper arm. Her choking screams of terror and agony were lost in their blood-curdling snarls of threat and attack.
Had Mizuki been one of the other smaller primates the chimpanzees normally hunted — a colobus monkey, a lemur, a bush baby, a youngster from another group — they would have torn her corpse apart and eaten it. As it was, they left her there with her throat ripped out and half her face chewed off, missing fingers, toes, and one or two other soft body parts.
As the cool of the morning began to fade, a black panther, returning from a night’s hunting, stopped to sniff at her. He was a massive beast, more than two metres in length to his tail tip and weighing one hundred kilos. When he snarled, he revealed teeth that were the better part of twenty centimetres long. But all he did was lick her drying blood and pass on.