It had taken the Kamov eight hours’ solid flying time to get here from Granville Harbour at the distant mouth of the River Gir, powering through the low, humid sky above the great waterway at its maximum speed. Eight hours that did not count the layover every two hours in increasingly remote wilderness areas where Max had set up fuel dumps. The whole project had taken six months to get even this far — the first sortie up to the fabulous lake itself. A trip that biznizmen Max and Felix insisted on leading themselves — and which the Mariners would not have missed for the world. Here, as in their dealings all over the globe, from the oilfields of the Arctic to those off the shores of Benin La Bas, whatever Bashnev/Sevmash discovered, drilled or mined, Heritage Miner shipped for them — and usually by water.
The last executive seat was occupied by Richard’s wife and business partner, Robin. ‘Even so,’ she said now, shaking her golden curls and frowning as she picked up on Richard’s point, ‘you’re looking at two thousand kilometres in from the coast. Two thousand kilometres from civilization to this Lac Dudo. And that’s as the crow flies. It must be another five hundred or so if you follow the river. Always assuming you can follow the river. What with the waterfalls, cataracts and white-water rapids we’ve flown over during the flight so far. And then there’s still this at the end of it.’ She gave a shudder, looking down.
‘But there is civil infrastructure down there already,’ insisted Max, straining round and unsuccessfully trying to catch the eye of whichever local government historian present on the Kamov had described the transport system in its seventies heyday to him. ‘There are roads, a railway, the whole communications network built in the late sixties and early seventies when this place was booming. There’s a twelve-lane highway joining Cite La Bas with CiteMatadi, then going straight on down to Granville Harbour and the coast.’
‘I’ve seen it — been on some of it,’ countered Robin. ‘It’s useless. Cite La Bas is dead and CiteMatadi is not much better. Cite La Bas was never all it was cracked up to be in the first place. They talked it up as the New York of West Africa — a buzzing twentieth-century hub. But it was little more than a frontier town with big ambitions.’
‘More like Tombstone in the Wild West rather than Tokyo, perhaps,’ offered Richard grimly. ‘Aptly enough, all things considered …’
‘Very witty, darling. Moreover, Max, the infrastructure between them hasn’t been touched for forty years. It’s all just jungle now. As far as I know the only way along your twelve-lane highway is by motorbike and on foot. God knows what’s happened to the railroad. Don’t fool yourselves, either of you. You’d need to start from scratch.’
‘It’s as though we haven’t just come up the river,’ added Richard thoughtfully, ‘it’s as though we’ve gone back in time! It’s like Jurassic Park down there.’
‘Robin!’ laughed Max. ‘Get a grip! And you, Richard — Tombstone … Jurassic Park! I ask you!’ But for once the booming Russian’s confident tone sounded a little hollow. For the last two hours there had been nothing to see other than the jungle, and that had been depressing enough. But now they were coming over the deserted suburbs of Cite La Bas.
After an hour’s flight at maximum cruising speed they were nearly three hundred kilometres from the River Gir now, approaching Cite La Bas from the south-west, so they were confronted at first by the stunted overgrowth of secondary jungle that had developed exponentially in the years since the gas cloud had killed those who had survived the eruption and the lava flow. City block after city block was literally running to seed. Plants burgeoned everywhere, given gigantic expansion by the rainforest climate. It was hard to see most of the houses, draped as they were with ivies, creepers and lianas. Huge trees rose, not only in gardens but through entire dwellings. It was hard not to see the secondary jungle as a living thing ruthlessly reinvading the land that humanity could no longer defend.
Awe-inspiring though this huge destruction was, it shrank to insignificance beside the utter devastation of the north-eastern suburbs. Here everything was black instead of green. Starkly, gauntly dead instead of threateningly fecund. Even after all these years — and after all that nature had dealt it, cars stuck up out of the cinder-black ground, half buried, frozen in place. All of them battered and rusting, many of them burst open like obscene flowers where their petrol tanks had exploded. Buses, trucks, lorries, pantechnicons stuck up like toys thrown on to an ash heap. Richard’s eyes swept over the devastation almost unbelievingly. A black-throated pit appeared, seemingly leading halfway to the centre of the earth; big enough to make him wonder if this was an offspring of the volcano itself.
‘That must be where the avgas tanks went up,’ said Max, who had read the report prepared for the government in the months after the disaster, when the international community had been throwing money, aid and volunteers at the place. Before it became obvious that almost nothing was getting past ex-president Liye Banda’s venal clique, who were growing fat while the dwindling survivors up-country were simply wasting away. And there was precious little that could be done in any case, especially in the face of the marauding Interahamwe, the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Army of Christ the Infant. Before they all pulled out again and left Benin La Bas well alone. ‘The explosion took out all the airport buildings and everything on the apron, so it says in the report.’
Richard just shook his head, beyond speech. He glanced at Robin. Her grey eyes were wide and full of tears. The state of the once-great city emphasized the point she had been making about the country’s infrastructure more powerfully than any words ever could have done.
‘Damn,’ said Max. ‘I’d hoped we could land on the runway at the airport or — at the worst — on the lava itself. The government report said the shield was flat, like the flows in Hawaii.’ He swung round, glaring at the experts cowering down the length of the cabin behind him. The two nearest glanced up guiltily. But in fact they were looking at the Japanese map and the GPS handset and were unlikely to have been the ones advising Max on the state of the lava flow.
‘You’ll never find a place to land there,’ said Robin. ‘What was Plan B?’
‘The lake,’ answered Richard. ‘Didn’t you see the floats on the undercarriage? The plan is to land on Lac Dudo.’
But Lac Dudo never appeared. The Kamov followed the pitted path of the lava flow until one of Max’s experts — the one with the map — called out and the helicopter swung westward. They all craned to see the surface of the volcanic lake. But there was nothing to see. The broccoli heads of the virgin rainforest opened out into a huge prairie of lighter green, but there was no water.
‘This is the place, Mr Asov,’ called the expert with the GPS, already nervous at having got the blame for the lava flow’s unexpected condition. ‘We are immediately above the position that the Japanese map makers recorded.’
‘But there is no lake here!’ snarled Max.
‘It looks like a big meadow,’ said Felix. ‘Put us down here and we can explore,’ he called through to the pilot. The chopper began to settle.