Richard looked out, his mind racing. ‘This is weird, even for Benin La Bas,’ he observed to Robin. ‘One minute there’s a black lake, the next there’s a big meadow. What on earth is going on?’
Robin knew the river best, so she understood what they were looking at first. ‘Stop!’ she called to the pilot. ‘Take us up again! Max, for God’s sake tell him before it’s too late! That isn’t grass — it’s water hyacinth!’
The pilot responded to her call, and under the extra pressure of the rotor’s downdraught, the apparently solid prairie rippled and began to heave.
‘Thank you, Robin,’ said Max soberly. ‘I believe you have saved us all from an unexpected swim and a very long walk indeed!’
Richard and Robin exchanged meaningful glances. They both knew that if the Kamov had tried to land on the deceptive-looking meadow it would almost certainly have broken through the mat of vegetation and sunk. And anyone trying to find the surface once they were below the water hyacinth would have been doomed to drown as though trapped beneath a solid layer of ice.
Chopper
‘Right!’ said Max. ‘Now that we have found the lake, let us explore a little further. I am not about to let some floating weeds stand between me and two trillion dollars’ worth of coltan!’
‘Good idea!’ added Felix. ‘But where shall we start? I doubt we have enough fuel left in the chopper to simply circle round and round …’
‘Excuse me, Mr Asov,’ hazarded the expert with the map a little nervously. ‘The area in which the Yakimoto Freshwater Pearl Company constructed Doctor Koizumi’s oyster-harvesting facility is marked most precisely on this map. Apparently there was a relatively large section cleared of jungle there.’
‘Excellent!’ boomed Max. ‘Go and give the pilot the coordinates. Once I get a toehold,’ Max continued, ‘then I’m in. I’ll bomb, burn or poison that floating garbage and get at the lake bed no matter what.’
‘It might be worth taking it carefully to begin with,’ warned Robin. ‘If you leave the oysters alive, then you could have a second income stream in pearls.’
‘Huh,’ grunted Max. ‘We’ll have to see whether they’re worth more mounted or strung — or crushed to get at the coltan dust within them!’
Felix reached down for the briefcase that was standing beside his right ankle. It went on to the table and opened to reveal, among other things, a slim bottle of Stolichnaya Elit vodka and four shot glasses, one inside the other. ‘Let us leave such thoughts to the future and drink to our continued success,’ he suggested, handing shot glasses over to Max and Robin.
Robin put her glass upside down on the table with a disapproving snap and glanced at her teetotal husband. But his mind was elsewhere. Richard was not used to following along in someone else’s plans. He was a natural leader. She wondered what he was thinking up now. Max held his glass out as Felix unscrewed the top of the bottle. ‘Success!’ he said. ‘A good toast!’
‘Success!’ toasted Felix cheerfully. Both Russians tossed the spirit back, then repeated the procedure and seemed to become a little more expansive and relaxed at once. They leaned back. Loosened their seat belts. ‘It will be good to see what is left of Doctor Koizumi’s facility in any case,’ rumbled Max. ‘It would make a satisfactory base for our own people.’
‘There won’t be much there, surely,’ said Robin. ‘Not after what happened. I mean, I’m a bit sketchy on the history of the place but I know they were all slaughtered. Bodies were brought back but no one ever really sorted out who was who. They were chopped to pieces by those terrible matchet things the men all seem to carry here. In any case, the buildings were all destroyed. Apparently there was some woman there who was never found.’
‘Doctor Mizuki Yukawa,’ confirmed Max, who had clearly read more than just the report of Cite La Bas’s destruction. Not for the first time, Robin made a mental note never to underestimate Max’s professionalism and willingness to do the basic groundwork. He might be a bullying sexist bastard who’d disowned his daughter Anastasia while bed-hopping through a series of mistresses young enough to be her sister. He might show a weakness for vodka and occasionally become dangerously unpredictable as a result. But he had built a massive company. And he hadn’t just done that by luck, bribery, strong-arm tactics and buying up massively undervalued ex-nationalized facilities in the months after the collapse of the communist system. He was nobody’s fool. He did the groundwork. And the fact that he knew about the deaths of the Japanese was a case in point.
‘She’s out there somewhere, whatever’s left of her,’ Max continued, his tone darkening. He gestured with his left hand, striking the knuckles against the window as he tried to encompass the entire rainforest on Karisoke’s southern slope. ‘Unless the people who killed the others took her with them.’
‘If they did, then she’s probably somewhere nearby,’ said Robin sadly. ‘They won’t have taken her anywhere very far, I’d have thought.’
‘And, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, they won’t have kept her long,’ added Richard grimly. ‘Whoever they actually were.’
‘Apparently the best guess was that it was an early manifestation of the Army of Christ the Infant,’ continued Max. ‘Pre-Moses Nlong days. Before they hit the headlines like Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army. They say the Army of Christ has been coming and going through here for decades in one guise or another, slaughtering villagers and animals, taking boys into their fighting units and making women and girls their sex slaves.’
‘If they caught her they’d have raped her, killed her and eaten her,’ said Robin matter-of-factly. ‘As Richard says, they won’t have taken her far. And they won’t have wasted time and food keeping her alive unless they thought she was worth a good solid ransom. But if they were going to ransom anyone, logic dictates that it would probably have been whoever was in charge.’
‘Doctor Koizumi,’ nodded Max. ‘They never found much of him either — certainly not his head.’
‘Nice!’ muttered Felix ironically. He threw back another shot of vodka. ‘More chopper work — with those matchets. Very nice.’
There was another short silence. Both Richard and Robin felt the weight of the knowledge they all shared but nobody was willing to discuss at the moment. Max’s estranged daughter Anastasia had been one of those attacked by Moses Nlong and his Army of Christ the Infant — and had been miraculously lucky to have survived the capture and slaughter visited on her friends. It had been a narrow escape, with a hair-raising ride down the great river in a tiny motor boat. Not to mention the equally spine-tingling return with Richard, Robin and an army bent on the rescue of the living and revenge for the dead. Anastasia was at the front of it all, armed to the teeth — ready, willing and able to execute her personal vengeance on Moses Nlong, the brutal army’s cannibalistic leader, only to see Odem, his right hand man, vanish into the jungle. But Max never talked about Anastasia, whom he had disowned and disinherited in the most brutally public manner possible the better part of ten years ago. So the silence lay there between them, like a dead thing on the table. Max threw back another shot of vodka.
‘You’ll want to be up on that,’ observed Richard grimly, breaking the tension at last. His narrowed eyes swept over both Max and Felix. ‘You’ll need to know pretty precisely what madmen are marauding around here nowadays. Moses Nlong may be dead but the Army of Christ is still out there somewhere. Like the situation with Kony and the LRA. Whether he’s dead or not, they still seem to be going, and not too far south of here either, come to that.’