Kebila suddenly leaned forward to his radio operator. ‘Put me through to the central police station in Granville Harbour,’ he ordered. ‘I want to get a full and detailed update from the senior officer on duty …’
Richard stood up, crossed to Robin and steered her towards the tent flap with one arm around her waist. This conversation was unlikely to be one Kebila wanted to share. And it was likely to be lengthy. Therefore he decided to risk his Benincom cell phone after all.
‘Dobryy vecher Reekard,’ said Ivan before switching to English. ‘How are you?’ Because Richard had come through on the phone rather than the radio, the conversation started off with gossip rather than business. But that was OK with him as he stood in the dark room looking through the tight-closed window down the slope towards the broad reach of the dark river, trying to work out what were gathering shadows and what were thickening clouds of insects.
‘I’m fine, thanks, Ivan,’ he answered. ‘I understand you’re beached and jungling up some supper.’
Halfway through his sentence, Richard saw the door, reflected in the window behind the reflection of his shoulder, silently swing open. Anastasia came tiptoeing soundlessly into the room. Their eyes met as though in a mirror — his narrow and thoughtful, hers wide and almost luminous in the shadows. Richard raised his eyebrows, thinking they really ought to do something about the walls in this place. Anastasia shook her head, put her finger to her lips and crossed to stand beside him as Ivan talked about supper. Richard tilted the phone so she could hear him. ‘That’s about it. We’ve done a good day’s travelling and now we’re bedding down in the last comfortable place we can find before we head on inland tomorrow. Except …’ There was a sound like a pistol shot. ‘Except for these damned mosquitoes. I’ll be sleeping aboard.’
‘We’ve had some here too,’ said Richard sympathetically. ‘You think they’re spreading downriver?’
‘Looks like it,’ said Ivan. ‘Though God knows where they’re coming from.’
‘The jungle,’ said Richard, distracted by the eavesdropper and the soft warmth of her breath on the back of his hand.
‘Anyway,’ persisted Ivan, blissfully unconscious that his words were being spied upon. ‘It’s lucky we brought our food with us. There was some talk of living off the land but it’s all come to nothing, as Colonel Mako said it would. Some of the men were certain the river would contain catfish. But no luck yet. I think Zubarov has given up with his rod but he wants to go for a quick swim before we bed down. He says the river mud will help make him mosquito-proof.’
Richard chuckled a little theatrically so that Ivan would hear him over the phone. He glanced at Anastasia, raising his eyebrows again. Want to join in? She shook her head. No.
‘You call about anything in particular?’ asked Ivan guardedly, coming nearer to the heart of his concerns. And hers, thought Richard.
‘Just as agreed,’ he said vaguely, still looking at Anastasia’s almost luminous gaze. ‘To update you on today — whatever hasn’t come to you already from Kebila via Caleb or Zhukov.’
‘Poor old Livitov, you mean. And Brodski, whatever’s happened to him. I must be slipping to lose two men like that.’
Richard made no immediate comment but after a moment, he said, ‘Odem’s been running rings round us all. With the help of his friend Ngoboi. What happened to Livitov is bad but not your fault.’
‘But still,’ said Ivan distantly. ‘When I think of what they did to him. What they probably did to him before that. What might have happened if their plan had worked. To you. And Anastasia … How’d Anastasia take it all?’
Ivan’s innocent question brought a new, intense electricity into Richard’s room. ‘As you’d expect,’ he said blandly once more, wishing the vibrant girl beside him would either get involved or get the hell out. ‘One more reason to catch them and kill them as soon as she can.’ She gave a lopsided grin at that and nodded.
‘Has she said anything about me?’ Ivan asked.
Richard stopped, apparently to think; actually to look into her intense gaze once again. This time she shook her head more vigorously than ever. Then, ‘No,’ he answered truthfully, if tactlessly. ‘She hasn’t mentioned you at all.’
‘Well, tell her … Tell her from me …’
Richard and Anastasia never discovered what Ivan wanted him to tell her, for as the unhappy Russian paused for the second time, all hell was let loose. The connection was suddenly full of shouting and swearing that grew so loud Richard pulled the cell phone even further away from his ear. He met Anastasia’s eyes; her look was simply agonized. She, like he, was clearly wondering whether Ivan was at the centre of a sudden attack. She opened her mouth to call to him, but his voice came over the connection and prevented her. ‘It’s Zubarov, Richard. I’ve got to go. He went swimming like he said he would — and they say that a crocodile got him. A crocodile! A huge one. A monster. Five metres or more. My god! Looks like there’s more than mosquitoes coming downriver!’
Pushkin
Zubarov’s death seemed to Ivan to signal the beginning of an increasingly dark and dangerous time. None of the men were certain they had seen the crocodile that took him; only the kind of disturbance on the dark surface of the benighted river that would be expected if a crocodile had taken him. But as Ivan’s swift — yet thorough — enquiry established, none of the witnesses had ever actually seen a crocodile in real life. And those that had — like Mako — hadn’t witnessed Zubarov’s disappearance. There was no body. But a search of the water and the riverbank revealed nothing, so at last they all went to their quarters aboard and slept as best they could.
Ivan slept little, his head whirling with worries about his missing men, his increasingly drunken and difficult boss, and the mess he seemed to have made of his relationship with his boss’s tempestuous daughter, for whom he was rediscovering feelings he had thought long dead.
Next morning began for Ivan and his companions with a quick service for the missing man which Max chivvied along impatiently enough to alienate the popular sergeant’s friends, followed by an even quicker breakfast. Then they broke camp, went back aboard and sailed on. Ivan was aboard Stalingrad with Max and Captain Zhukov. He started the voyage on the bridge with them, watching as the vista through the clear-view windows darkened — quite literally — in spite of the brightening day. It seemed to Ivan that the trees they were approaching would never stop growing. It was an optical illusion, he knew, but the nearer the drop-off approached, the more massive the palisade of tree trunks seemed to rise — as if they were being thrust up from the ground beneath, closing off the sky ahead as they did so. Sky which, in any case, was darkened by increasingly thick clouds of smoke blown north on the southerly wind, thick enough to dull even the noonday sun. What looked like a wooden wall with foundations of freshwater mangroves from a couple of kilometres out actually looked more like a sheer brown cliff close-up. A cliff with a massive overhang jutting out, seemingly just below the thickening smoke. What really disturbed him was the fact that the fifty-metre-high monsters near the south bank they were sailing along were all too obviously the small relations of the hundred-metre giants further inland — their simple scale seemingly enhanced by the fact that they stood on rising ground.
It came as a relief when Max reminded him that Mako was waiting to give his final briefing on survival and warfare in this particular jungle — and he needed to attend with his men. Max himself attended some of Mako’s talks, but by no means all of them. On the one hand, he considered himself the leader of the band bound up the tributary to the lake. On the other he saw no reason why he should burden himself with too many details when he was paying a great deal of money to men whose primary mission might be to get to the lake and secure it for Bashnev/Sevmash, but whose secondary mission, less than a short vershok behind of it, was to get Max safely up to the lake and back.