This one came apart under her fingers almost by magic. Less than five minutes after she picked it up it was back together again and she was deciding how best to use it. The magazine was a standard thirty round capacity and the weight of it felt about right for fully loaded. Short of taking the cartridges out and wiping them all off then counting them all back in, there was nothing more she could do other than to rely on the gun. But that was OK because, of course, it was just about the most reliable weapon ever manufactured. It was probably an AK that cut short the poor old priest’s last sermon. Better that than one of the local matchets — what the rest of the West called machetes.
‘Hold this,’ she breathed to Ado, passing the AK. Then she set about searching the unconscious soldier. He carried no matchet, but he did have another two curving clips. That was ninety shots in all. She could do some serious damage with ninety shots, she thought. As long as she stayed alive. But she sure as hell couldn’t outgun a whole fucking army. Mind racing now as the formless howling of the attack settled into a deeply disturbing rhythmic chanting, Anastasia took the AK back, unclipped the shoulder strap and set about tying the soldier’s wrists and ankles together with it.
‘I’m going back,’ she breathed, stooping to scoop a handful of dark silt from the pile of flotsam on the river’s edge. She smeared it on her face, thinking inconsequentially of fish. It was the black mud that came downstream with the orchid and the oysters from the lake. ‘You stay here. If it looks hopeless then I’ll come back for you and we’ll try and go for help. If the soldier stirs or makes a sound then you hit him in the head and keep hitting him until he stops. Really. You know what they’ll do to you if they catch you.’
‘I would rather fight,’ said Ado. ‘I would rather die.’
‘Fight him,’ said Anastasia. ‘And try to stay alive. I will too.’ She clicked the safety on the AK to select single shot. And she was gone.
The brightness of the compound’s electric lighting was enough to guide her up the bank. She slid across the mud flat on her belly, trying to remember what little she had learned about this kind of thing from watching endless macho war films with Simian Artillery and going paintballing with her father in happier days. It seemed sensible to keep low, move slowly and use her eyes to the limit of their ability. At the back of her mind the fact that the soldier hadn’t been able to distinguish her black clothing from the shadows gave her a little confidence — but not as much as the AK cradled across her forearms just under her chin. Or the spare clips she had shoved down the back of her belt to lie like sabres of ice across her buttocks. Or even the Victorinox she had in her left-hand pocket. She became distracted by the wry thought that for the first time in her life she was glad that she didn’t have much of a bust — her flat chest helped her stay lower still. She didn’t even register that she also had a pocket full of oysters and at least one big black pearl.
Anastasia came up behind the chapel. Like all of the compound buildings it stood on breeze blocks that raised it about three quarters of a metre off the ground. The area might have been mercifully clear of mosquitoes but the same could not be said for ants and termites. Further, it had been erected on a slight slope — the one that ran from the compound down to the river — and the breeze blocks had been used to level it so the gap on the river side was higher than the one on the camp side. A welcoming cavern, easy to enter.
Still with the AK cradled under her chin, Anastasia wriggled under this, moving slowly on elbows and knees, keeping her butt low and her chest tight to the ground, straining to see out of the shadows into the brightness of the central compound — all too well aware that she would be lucky to see much more than footwear, calves and knees from this angle, and trying not to think about ants, snakes, spiders, centipedes and scorpions.
But it was nothing from the insect world that came closest to making Anastasia give herself away. It was Father Antoine. She had calculated that the best place for her to place herself to start with was beneath the steps that led up from the compound to the chapel. The first step was made entirely of brick, but the next two were simple planks standing on piles of bricks, maybe forty-five centimetres high and a metre and a half apart. The lower step would form a protective wall she could hide behind. The upper steps would give her good vision and, perhaps, a secure field of fire.
But Father Antoine had been standing on the bottom step shouting at the Army of Christ the Infant when he was shot. He had fallen back on to the wooden planks and the nearest child soldiers had spent some moments ensuring his demise by chopping at him with their matchets. They had rolled him over to one side of the rudimentary stairs so that they could search the chapel itself. Anastasia was therefore confronted by the vision of his staring eyes, so wide they seemed to gleam in the shadows. His forehead had been burst by the gunshot and then chopped open in four more places by matchet blows. His crisp white hair — a blackish brown now — hung forward on his forehead and the matted strands seemed to be all that was holding his brains in place. His nose was gone and his mouth gaped unnaturally wide, tongue lolling grotesquely. Beneath the shapeless russet sack of his once snowy robe, a considerable lake of blood was slowly soaking into the red mud and dusty brickwork. His hands stuck through the planks, hanging down helplessly. All his fingers were gone.
Anastasia lay there for several minutes, considering things. She had no notion of being in rapidly deepening shock. She was wondering — albeit distantly — whether to be sick. She had been too focussed on action before to feel fear but it stabbed through her now. Not fear. Sheer stark terror. She had, perhaps, wet herself. Or it might have been Father Antoine’s bodily fluids flowing downhill under her. She wondered vaguely whether there was any way she could manoeuvre the AK so that she could kill herself now and escape all this in one agonizing instant. But then she heard Celine’s clear voice, and all other thoughts flew straight out of her mind.
Anastasia discovered that if she pulled herself up as close as possible to Father Antoine’s corpse, she got quite a good view of the compound. The unfamiliar children — the Army of Christ the Infant — were distinguishable from her own young charges only in that they were armed, and were wearing an assortment of dirty, ragged clothing — shorts and T-shirts for the most part. And that they all needed a good bath by the look of things. The child soldiers were standing in a restless ring around the taller, fitter, better dressed and cleaner orphans, who were cowed and terrified by the guns and the matchets. Also by the death of Father Antoine and by the situation of the other adults in the camp. Imam Mohammed, the Muezzin Samir and Ibrahim were in the same state as Father Antoine, lying in the centre of the circle, hacked to death. Brother Jacob was kneeling beside them but he seemed to be alive. Just about. Celine was standing, tall and apparently fearless, in front of the three nuns. And, behind the nuns, the boys and girls they were trying so vainly to protect. There was silence and stasis after whatever she had said. So much silence, in fact, that Anastasia dared not risk pushing the selector down one more notch to automatic fire. Even though a fire-rate of 600 rounds a minute suddenly seemed worth having at her disposal — for the second or so that her clips would last for.
Anastasia wormed round until she could see whoever it was that Celine was speaking to. A group of older boys — young men — were standing round half a dozen adults whose uniforms were cleaner, pressed, more military-looking. The special guards all held AK-47s. In the centre of this group, the tallest man stood, apparently thinking. What looked like a Browning automatic hung from one listless arm. A blood-spattered matchet the better part of a metre long hung from the other, its lanyard looped up round his wrist above the huge gold watch he wore. It was hard to tell what he was thinking because his face was a mask of ritual scars that seemed to be set like ebony. His mouth looked like just one more scar running from side to side instead of up and down. He wore a maroon beret pulled to the line of his eyebrows. Between the beret and the scarred cheeks there was a pair of sunglasses whose silver lenses simply reflected Celine’s wide-eyed stare. Anastasia had never seen any pictures of self-styled General Moses Nlong, but she reckoned that this must be him. And whatever Celine had said must have given the general pause. And the whole of his army had paused with their leader.