‘My girls are tough,’ said Anastasia.
‘I take your point,’ said Abiye. ‘We accept them not as a group of women or children but as a battle-hardened unit. And a battle-hardened unit may well be what we need if we are up against Congo Libre’s regular army coming across the border under cover of the Army of Christ the Infant!’
‘But,’ added Richard softly, ‘Congo Libre has destroyed almost all its native jungle, I understand. And that means that their army won’t know how to handle this.’ He gave a gesture that included the last of the forest and the first of the virgin jungle. ‘Any more than Max’s men seem to do.’
‘That might give us an edge,’ agreed Abiye. ‘But whether it’s enough will depend on how many of them there are.’
‘And,’ added Anastasia, ‘the Army of Christ know all about the jungle.’
‘Right,’ said Richard. ‘So they’re the ones we go after first. Which was pretty much the plan in the first place, right, Anastasia?’
‘Fucking A,’ she said. And as she did so, two things happened at once. The moon came out, flooding the riverbank with cool silver light. And somewhere, deep in the nearby jungle, a leopard gave its full-throated hunting roar. Answered by another and another, almost as if they were echoes.
The next twelve hours passed for Richard like the night watches aboard a ship. He was used to keeping going with little or no sleep, but he entered a dreamlike state where his concentration on the immediate was so intense that the passage of hours went past in a flash. So that seemingly all too soon after the moon rose and the leopards gave their coughing roars, a cold grey light filtered out of the high blue sky through a veil of smoke from Karisoke’s crest, and they found themselves suddenly high on the mountainside, with the river in a deep gorge on their left-hand side. And it was dawn. Though, with the sun low on the far side of the mountain, there would be no direct sunlight until noon.
The little group were gathered together at the crest of another cliff, in a strange, grey-misted space between two huge trees. One standing tall, the other lying broken. This step of the mountainside seemed more substantial than any they had encountered so far. And, as if to emphasize this, the tallest tree they had come across gripped the rocky soil with a wide reach of gnarled roots and then soared what looked like a hundred metres straight up. Beyond it, the jungle seemed to fall away, as though some natural disaster had warped and stunted it. Beyond the giant tree’s massive canopy, the grey, smoke-smeared sky hung sullenly low above the south-western slopes in a way that tricked off something in Richard’s memory. He crossed to the enormous trunk and touched it, stroking it almost mindlessly, lost in deepest thought.
Anastasia joined him. ‘What a lookout post this would make,’ she said, echoing a thought he hadn’t even realized he was thinking.
Neither team had actually reckoned on the Russians leaving ropes and bridges for them to follow. Both leaders knew very well that they would need to climb cliffs. Therefore both teams were equipped with such basic climbing equipment as they thought they might require. Whereas employing these in the rock faces they had come up so far might have been a slower, more difficult job, the rough bark of the huge tree presented very little difficulty. It was at once deeply ridged and yet sturdily attached to the trunk itself. And Corporal Oshodi proved to be a very able climber. Armed with a pair of binoculars that communicated wirelessly with a hand-held tablet, the twin of the one with which Mako had explored the overhanging mangroves during Ngoboi’s first visit, he went up the tree in a way that reminded Richard irresistibly of a squirrel.
Oshodi had to climb little more than two-thirds of the way up the tree before a broad branch gave him a perfect lookout point. And Abiye’s hand-held tablet showed a scene of devastation that spread away into the grey distance. And, although the angle was a very different one, the picture jogged Richard’s memory and the whole thing fell into place. Oshodi’s binoculars were scanning above the tops of the trees that had been damaged all those years ago by the combination of the volcanic eruption and the gas cloud. For there, in the distance, rearing higher than the twisted and stunted vegetation, but even more depressing in its ruined majesty, stood Cite La Bas. ‘My God!’ breathed Richard. ‘I hadn’t realized we had come so far! We must be nearly there!’ Oshodi traversed right, showing the slope falling away westwards to the next valley slope, the barrier that had trapped the invisible gas, turning it into a poisonous lake for long enough to snuff out all the life in the city that had survived the terrible lava flow, whose long black scar could still be seen in the distance.
Then Oshodi traversed left, sweeping the binoculars’ enhanced vision back across the dead city to the upwards slopes below Karisoke’s smoking caldera and Lac Dudo. Here, it was clear that many of their worst fears were likely to be realized. For the air above the lake was busy. There were helicopters hovering there, coming and going through plumes of smoke.
Oshodi shinned another fifty or so metres upward. The new angle gave more of an idea what was going on at the lakeside. Makeshift buildings sat, their roofs just visible above the jungle down-slope of the lake. It seemed to Richard that here was where the main concentration of workers appeared to be. And maybe more than mere workers, he thought, eyes narrowing. Certainly, here was where skeletal guard towers stood. There looked to be activity all around the lake’s shore, but whoever was in charge had found the thick jungle on the upslope far more difficult to clear. The last picture showed the damaged dams and sluices which had allowed the pearls that had set all this in motion to escape. There was a considerable number of workers there. Trying to effect repairs, perhaps. Certainly, what they were doing seemed important — and would therefore bear closer scrutiny — for they seemed to be surrounded by guards.
Richard looked up as the picture went blank to find both Anastasia and Abiye looking expectantly at him. ‘It seems clear that we’ll have to cross the river,’ he said quietly. ‘It may be more difficult to get up the far bank, but the extra effort should be worth it. The jungle upslope will give us better cover when we get up to the lake itself — we’ll be able to get closer to whatever’s going on. And the extra height above the lake will be an advantage too.’
‘And,’ said Anastasia, ‘if we’re going to cross the river, then this looks like just the place to do it.’
The second tree was almost identical to the first, except that it had surrendered its grip on the thin soil of the far bank and crashed sideways across the seventy-metre gap that separated the banks at the lip of the cliff. It had clearly fallen a little way upslope and then rolled down into its present position. Most of the upper branches, that would have formed a considerable barrier, had snapped off as it settled and lay scattered around now. The lower branches, less dense if more massive, reached outwards in shattered stumps or hung down between the sheer rocky banks almost as far as the writhing surface of the water at the edge of the fall. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s get busy.’
They used the same technique as Oshodi had to secure lines on to the bank and the rough bark of the tree. This time it was Esan and Ado who worked their way nimbly and swiftly across, getting to the far bank with the safety lines anchored firmly behind them in little more than the time it took for Oshodi to shin back down to the jungle floor. Then, one by one, they began to pick their way across the makeshift bridge. Abiye sent two of his most reliable men to join Ado and Esan at the far side and the four of them immediately set up a secure guard point. Abiye and Anastasia did the same here, and Richard stayed with them, keeping a careful lookout. The men picked their way across and the Amazons followed them until there was only Abiye, Anastasia and Richard left.