But it never came, for there was suddenly half a metre of cold steel sticking out of the raffia costume covering Ngoboi’s shoulder blades. He staggered back, and Mako stepped forward, the bonds falling away. His left hand joined his right hand on the grip of the matchet Richard had given him — and which was now rammed up under Ngoboi’s sternum, through his heart and out of his back. The dead god sagged, held erect only by Mako’s grip. His head lolled. The mask fell off. The face of a mere mortal was revealed, eyes bugged and mouth wide, frozen forever in the rictus of utter astonishment.
The acolytes sprang forward, screaming with outrage, matchets raised. The whip-crack of two rifle shots rang almost simultaneously out of the shadows and their heads jerked back in unison, spraying brain-matter. Odem howled something, snatching off his sunglasses to look around, his expression stunned. He looked at the guards up in the watch towers and started gesturing wildly. Even as he did so, two streaks of light soared out of the shadows behind him and the tops of the two skeletal towers exploded into flame. He ran round the end of the compound, waving his hands at the two attack helicopters whose cannons and rockets faced the prison compound in such naked threat. There was enough light to see movement in the cockpits as the pilots began to react.
But then, with an overwhelming rumble somewhere between a thunder crack and an avalanche, the dam blew up.
Dam
Richard had chosen to use the code word ‘Gibson’ after the leader of RAF Bomber Command’s 617 Squadron. On the 16 May 1943, three months before his twenty-fifth birthday, Squadron Leader Guy Penrose Gibson, VC, DSO, DFC, led his nineteen Lancaster bombers on the raid code-named Chastise that earned them the name The Dambusters. Half an hour before the explosion, Richard had allowed himself to be shoved down from the prison compound towards the dam by a couple of irate guards and an engineer wearing a Han Wuhan overall. No one on the bridge had given them a second look as they walked into the hut from where the demolition system was controlled. There was one other Han Wuhan operative there, completing the final installation of the controls designed to take the last wall down in careful sequence. At first, when he was addressed in a gentle rumble of Mandarin, the young engineer thought it must be the other Han Wuhan operative who was talking. But then, in a double surprise of almost disorientating power, he realized that it was the huge Russian. And he registered what he was saying. ‘My friends and I are taking control of this place. If you do what you are told then you might survive …’
The young man turned to the other Han Wuhan man and realized with a sickening lurch that the overall he was looking at belonged to the man he had last seen falling to his death over the edge of the dam. That, more than the giant’s threats, utterly unnerved him. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.
‘Lock the door. Explain to anyone trying to gain entry that you cannot be disturbed. Then show me exactly how this system works.’
The explosive deaths of the watch towers was the signal for Oshodi to turn off the jammer. He had sent the coded message to Sergeant Tchaba over the one open channel while Richard was still getting his disguise battered into his face. The death of the jammer opened the channel for the battlefield headsets. ‘GIBSON!’ bellowed Richard’s voice. And the dam went up. The Chinese engineers had placed their explosives in a carefully calculated series which they hoped would bring the structure down in sequence, level by level by level, past the foot of the dam wall itself and into the natural rock barrier that had contained the lake in the first place. Emptying out all of the water, but under some kind of control. They had never considered using the destruction of the dam as a weapon, which Richard, of course, had. On the warning shout of ‘GIBSON!’ therefore, the last of Dr Koizumi’s containment barriers burst. And so did the basalt sill on which it had been built. What had been a wall became a waterfall with incredible rapidity, tearing a hole in the mountainside that was deeper than the bed of Lac Dudo, which proceeded to flow out as fast as the laws of physics allowed.
As planned, the two attack helicopters felt the results of Richard’s explosive action first. The water beneath their floats began to thunder down into the black river’s channel with incredible force, overtaking the tumbling blocks of rock and masonry in their eagerness to be free. Millions of gallons were suddenly fighting to get through the huge breach. From a standing start, currents leaped into being that raced towards the gaping fissure at incredible speed. The pilot of the WZ10 nearest the dam stopped worrying about the cannon and the rockets. He started the motor instead, hoping to lift off before his machine went over the rapidly-approaching edge. But the second chopper was sucked towards him too quickly. As the rotors began to spin, they became entangled and the pair of them went over the edge like a shooting star, wrapped together as their fuel exploded, setting off their armaments.
Ivan saw the WZ10s vanish into a cloud of fire that seemed to fall off the edge of the world. ‘Faster,’ he bellowed down the length of the Zodiac. They were so nearly there. The shoreline looked almost close enough to touch, illuminated as it was by the brightly burning watch towers that had been the beacons to guide him across the lake. But the seeming closeness was an illusion. The promise of safety was little more than a bitterly ironic joke. Already he could feel the tug of the falling water, sense that the whole lake surface was sloping increasingly steeply down to his left. The twin beacons of the blazing towers were sliding to his right with mounting rapidity. And when he looked uphill to his right he could see a wall of water hyacinth coming down on him out of the shadows. His whole body went cold. ‘Richard!’ he yelled into his headset. ‘We’re in deep trouble here! Can anyone help?’
‘I see you!’ called Richard, who was running back up from the dam towards the camp. ‘Esan! Plan B!’
What in heaven’s name was Plan B? wondered Ivan, looking around desperately. The last he had seen of Esan was when he and Ado had taken the VDV men back on to hyacinth duty. But then a great beam of light struck down from the sky, and the roaring suck of the water beneath him was compounded by a battering downdraught from above. And he understood. Richard had sent the VDV men on to hyacinth duty because he had some kind of a plan to get them up into the Mils. It had to be VDV men because they were all trained to fly. And the choppers were Russian Mils, the first of which was hovering above him now, lowering the hook that it had used to clear the lake. ‘Get the hook,’ came Esan’s voice over his headset. ‘We’ll pull you ashore.’
‘How the hell did you get aboard?’ he asked as he caught it.
‘Up the ropes,’ answered Esan, as though it was obvious. ‘They weren’t expecting it. They weren’t paying much attention. And they weren’t armed.’
The Mil eased backwards as the hook slid under the rope round the inflatable’s side, jerking it out of the grip of the terrible current and over towards the red-lit shore. Ivan staggered, taking firmer hold. He risked a glance around. The men in the RIB behind him were all hanging on for dear life, Max and Bala Ngama seemingly hugging each other with terror. Then he looked left, and understood their fear, for the Zodiac seemed to be sitting on the edge of the world. The sides of the shattered dam stood high above his head. He looked to his right and shouted with fear himself. The hyacinth was rearing into the bright beam of the Mil’s searchlight. It was going to hit them before they could come ashore. ‘HANG ON!’ he bellowed, tearing his throat. Then the water hyacinth hit them. The Mil jerked upwards and for a wild moment the Zodiac seemed to take flight. Then it thumped on to the surface of the hyacinth, still skidding shorewards as the chopper pulled it relentlessly towards the burning watch towers. The propellers caught and the motor stalled. The solid keel of the Zodiac bumped across the heaving, sliding mat of vegetation. But the stalled propellers became tangled in the corded stems of the plant almost immediately. So that, just as the RIB reached the shore, the whole thing flipped over, spewing the passengers out into the mud.