Ivan scrambled through the lumpy slime, fighting to catch his breath in the face of the overwhelming stench of fish. It took him an instant to realize that he was plunging through Dr Koizumi’s oyster beds. But then he was free and staggering up the black-mud slope to the prison compound. The Mil hovered overhead, its searchlight illuminating the crowd of Russians there grouped around the towering figure of Colonel Mako. He saw that Mako’s command were drawn up into a defensive square, their guns facing out through the razor wire into the jungle. It was only when he managed to stagger up to the outer line that he realized there was no sign of Richard, Anastasia or her Amazons.
Richard and Anastasia were running side by side, with the Amazons grouped around them like a pack of hunting wolves. They had come out of the jungle now and were working their way along the lake shore, with the searchlights from the second Mil sweeping ahead of them and the guttering glow of the watch towers behind. They were in the cane forest and the tall spears of bamboo all around them were festooned with dripping clumps of water hyacinth that had been dropped here while the Mils were clearing the lake. Ngoboi might be dead. The Army of Christ the Infant might have melted into the jungle. But nothing was settled as far as Anastasia was concerned. Odem was still out there. He was, in fact, somewhere just in front of them, running for his life.
The moment the dam went up he was on the shore waving at the pilots of the two attack helicopters, trying to arrange a deluge of thirty-millimetre cannon fire to sweep through the Russian camp. In spite of the fact that he had been focused on destroying Ngoboi, Mako had seen him there. Had seen him freeze as Richard’s explosion tore the dam and the rock sill beneath it apart. Mako had watched as the self-promoted colonel ran back towards his stunned soldiers, clearly yelling orders to open fire. But the snipers who had killed Ngoboi’s acolytes and the soldiers who had launched the MANPAD missiles were already busy. A fusillade of rifle fire came in out of the jungle that the Army of Christ normally assumed was its own territory. Caught in a perfect killing field around the exposed razor wire, Odem’s soldiers were in no position to listen to him — even had they felt any inclination to do so after the spectacular demise of his own private god.
Mako saw the self-styled colonel stop, look wildly about, and run into the fringe of the jungle. He was on the point of sending some of his own men after the renegade when Richard and Anastasia arrived.
‘He has to be heading for the highway,’ gasped Richard as he and Anastasia ran, the Amazons coalescing around them. ‘If he can get through the belt of jungle here, then he’ll be on the lava flow from Karisoke that the Congo Librans are using as a road. It’s his fastest way out. Or it would be, except that I warned Tchaba to tell Kebila about it. I’m surprised the Benin La Bas air force hasn’t been up here yet.’
But, ‘There!’ she called, and Richard saw a movement in the cane forest ahead. The Amazons went after him, swinging out around him, racing to cut him off from the last strip of jungle that might allow him access to the makeshift highway. The frightened man saw their movement, for his course veered towards the shore of the lake itself. The pack of women swung west as well, driving him into the open even as Richard and Anastasia burst on to the lake shore. But the shoreline stretched out into the blackness, and where there had been water there was now only lake bed — a wilderness of black slime stretching away to the far shore where the army of Congo Libre stood hesitant, rudderless and leaderless; out of their depth and far away from home. And the engineers and executives from Han Wuhan stood beside them, equally at a loss and far further away from home.
And that was the moment the lake bed chose to adjust to the sudden absence of thousands of tons of water that had been pressing down on it until just now. The basalt bowl which had been forced down for aeons on the great bubble of carbon dioxide trapped beneath it moved fractionally now that the weight of the water was gone. The pressure, building sufficiently to be forcing the gas out in bursts and clouds strong enough to kill the Chinese engineer and gas Ivan’s men aboard the RIB, exploded into freedom now. And, just as had happened twenty years or so ago, a great bubble of deadly vapour exploded up out of the mud and went rolling downhill into the long-deserted graveyard of Cite La Bas. Everyone on the down-slope bank was swept away with it. The fittest lived for four minutes, choking as their lungs filled with pollution. Everyone else was dead long before that. Some of the deadly carbon dioxide rolled back into the bowl of the empty lake bed, filling it invisibly for a while before it followed the water out through the shattered dam and down the black river valley.
But none of this was obvious from the upslope shore where Odem came running full-tilt out of the cane forest, finally threw away his precious AK-74 and went slithering down the bank into the black mud of the empty lake bed. Had there been water there he might have turned to fight like a cornered rat, even though his matchet was long gone — discarded in the jungle somewhere together with his beret and his wraparound sunglasses. But the lake bed stretched away before him, seemingly offering yet another chance of escape. And so he blundered on. Calling instructions to the Mil, Richard ran down the slippery black silt slope just behind Anastasia. The Amazons were in an arc on either side of them now, all of them focused on the floundering apparition at the heart of the searchlight beam. Richard slowed, his nose twitching, watching the black spectre heaving and falling, apparently trapped by magical toils of the glittering mud he was wading through. He caught at the stem of his headset. ‘STOP!’ he bellowed. ‘Nastia! HALT!’ On his word, the girls froze. ‘Fall back,’ he called. ‘There’s deadly gas here.’
Odem already knew that. His whole face was on fire. His eyes and nose were streaming. His adenoids and throat were alight. He could feel the strength being sapped out of his body as the black mud wrapped itself around him as though it was made of nets. He grasped at the mud as it twined itself around him and pulled against great ropes of blackness while his consciousness reeled. He felt himself sinking into the suffocating, icy ooze. It was every one of his nightmares rolled into one overwhelming dreadfulness. He would have screamed at the horror of it but he could not catch his breath to do so. Richard watched as Odem fought, shaking his head in amazement at the way the mud seemed to gather itself into a great tangle of vines festooned with huge black grapes. And then he realized. It looked like nets because it was nets. Dr Koizumi had used nets to hold the oysters in place. The whole bed of the oyster farm was made of webs of indestructible nets to which the oysters were attached. Odem was getting himself tangled in them and the more he struggled, the deeper he sank, so that it was a race between the black mud and the caustic gas as to which one would choke the life out of him first. ‘Nastia!’ he called. ‘Here’s what I want you to do …’