‘Why is that?’ asked Dr Holliday, no doubt hoping to have something to talk to Captain Caleb about if she got him on the dance floor later.
‘It’s the biggest hovercraft ever built,’ said Richard easily. ‘It’s just under sixty metres long and twenty-five wide. It has a displacement of five hundred and fifty tons but when the cushion is up it has a draft of less than two metres, though it sits just over twenty metres high. It can carry more than one hundred tons — three T80 main battle tanks for instance, and it goes at nearly fifty knots — that’s the better part of sixty miles per hour. It’s bristling with rocket launchers, thirty millimetre cannons, air and missile defence systems. Or it would be if Max was allowed to import fully functioning armaments — which he’s not. It has an armoured command post and sealed combat stations for when the going gets tough. That’s almost as much firepower as his corvette on a platform that moves as fast as his Shaldag, with a draft only half a metre deeper than the patrol boat has. Max thinks he’ll find it irresistible. And Sevmash have plenty more where that came from. A million US dollars apiece, apparently. A snip at twice the price.’
‘That poor girl,’ said Robin lazily some time later, as they were wandering back through the Nelson Mandela Suite, all footsore and danced out. ‘I thought you were going to start trying to sell her a used car or some life insurance.’
‘She asked,’ said Richard, shrugging off his tails and pulling his bow tie apart. ‘And, from what I observed on the dance floor later, she was making good use of what I told her.’
‘You weren’t supposed to be looking at her on the dance floor!’ snapped Robin, outraged. ‘You were supposed to be looking at me!’
‘I was,’ he answered, wounded, looking at her reflection over his shoulder as he undid the stud at the front of his collar. ‘I was watching you eyeing Colonel Kebila sitting all alone and forlorn.’
‘That was different,’ she said, giving a little pirouette as she floated round the end of their massive bed. ‘I was feeling sorry for him.’
‘Perhaps you should have asked him to dance,’ suggested Richard as he unscrewed the pearl studs down the front of his shirt and waistcoat.
‘Wouldn’t have done any good,’ she announced a tad over dramatically, plumping herself down a trifle inaccurately on the edge of the bed. ‘He’s heartbroken. Everyone knows, apparently. That’s what Bonnie Holliday reported back at any rate. What his gorgeous cousin Captain Caleb said.’ She collapsed back, arms spread.
‘Once you started grilling her over that South African brandy,’ said Richard, dropping his waistcoat on a chair and shrugging off his braces. ‘How much did you have to drink yourself?’ He stepped out of his shoes and began unbuttoning his trousers.
‘A perfect amount. An inelegant suff… sufff —’ she gave up on ‘sufficiency’ and continued — ‘suffishanchips. And don’t change the subject.’ She rolled over, the movement threatening to make her burst out of her dress after all. She looked across at him, her eyes huge and fathomless.
‘OK. Why is poor Colonel Kebila heartbroken?’ He stepped out of his trousers and folded them neatly, placed them carefully over the back of the chair then watched them slither gracefully on to the floor.
‘Celine Chaka,’ she announced triumphantly. ‘He loves her with a love that burns unrequited in his breast. Especially since his boss, her father, has publicly disowned and abandoned her.’
‘Has he? Does he? Is that from a poem? Burns unrequited? Or a Barbara Cartland novel, perhaps?’ He slipped off his shirt and threw it at the chair, turning before he saw it land. There was a quiet rattle of studs and cufflinks hitting the floor.
‘No. I made it up. And now that you mention burning unrequited…’
‘Yes?’ he hopped from one foot to the other, pulling off his socks.
‘That’s exactly how I feel. Come here and get me out of this dress and requite me. I hope you had a lot of those koala bear nuts and oysters. Because, believe me, sailor, you are going to need them!’
By something akin to a miracle, they both woke bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, clear-headed and ravenous a little over six hours later. An hour later still, Richard and Robin were side by side in the most striking office either of them had ever visited. Richard was relieved to see that, as with the food, last night’s traditional costume had been dispensed with. Minister for the Outer Delta Bala Ngama met them in a lightweight business suit made of beige merino, apparently cut and crafted for him in Paris, London or New York. It was very much a match for Richard’s own tropical lightweight, from Gieves & Hawkes, his favourite London tailors. There were a couple of dozen others in the room; most of them men, most of them in business suits of some kind.
‘I have several offices,’ the minister explained as the Heritage Mariner team assembled together with the Sevmash Consortium people, led by Max Asov. ‘But this one seemed the most apposite, given the main focus of today’s first meeting.’ He raised a broad hand, gesturing proudly around. Richard, Robin, Max and the others looked appreciatively — even the members of Ngama’s own team — as the minister’s staff passed around them offering cool drinks, coffee and biscuits.
Richard’s mind raced, picking up on subliminal messages designed to underline what had been so forcefully not stated last night — the opposite of what he had experienced at the airport. That Benin la Bas had changed from a broken kleptocracy with a moribund economy and a starving population simmering on the edge of revolution to a modern, wealthy, self-sufficient state. That President Chaka and his governments — both national and local — had pulled the country round and stood on the verge of achieving the African dream, thereby becoming a place where investment might be welcomed — and for the lucky acceptable few, would be enormously profitable. The whole of their current environment said this in no uncertain terms. Especially to someone like Richard who had known the place in the bad old days.
The office was in one of the smart new low-rise government buildings that had been erected on the land that had housed the shanty towns and slums the last time Richard was here. What had been a riverside mess of shacks and tents constructed of clapboard, bamboo, timber pilfered from the wreckage of the nearest suburbs and ubiquitous plastic sheeting, was now a carefully planned complex of manicured public gardens and municipal offices. The position of this particular office could hardly have been better from the minister’s point of view. The broad front of the building opened through a series of glass doors on to a convex curving veranda that seemed to command a view of everything for which he stood responsible. To the left, the mouth of the River Gir opened, as wide as the Thames at Greenwich. Where the jungle used to cluster right up to the edge of the city, now there stood river docks, bustling with river craft, some freighters, more dredgers, and a pair of the neat little Shaldag fast riverboats that Caleb Maina was supposed to captain on his brown-water days. And a neat marina, filled with pleasure craft of all sorts, from pirogues to gin palaces, that could have been transported here directly from San Francisco or St Tropez.