With a slight shrug, Richard turned back to the breathtaking view. Straight ahead, on the far bank, the forest and jungle of the delta itself swept out across the bay. But where in the old days that had been an environmental disaster of oil-polluted mangroves peopled with restlessly dissatisfied freedom fighters, now it reflected order and care. Pipework looked new. There seemed to be no leaks. Some distant figures were working there, wearing a range of coloured overalls, clearly about legitimate business.
To the right, the bay itself stretched away to southern and western horizons, ringed with rigs of various sizes at various distances — the farthest only visible as columns of smoke and flame. A range of vessels moved busily among them, and Richard found himself wishing for binoculars as he strained to see the telltale house colours of Heritage Mariner. Hard right, looking almost north-west along the city’s coastline, there stood the new dock facilities. The last time Richard had seen the place it had been a blazing ruin after the late president’s helicopter had caused a supertanker to explode with near nuclear force. Now it was all rebuilt — quite a feat in less than five years, he allowed. The port frontage extended right down to the office complex itself; the minister’s waterside office seeming to stand as the dividing point between seagoing and river-going vessels, between commercial craft and pleasure boats. Right at the hub of Granville Harbour. At the heart of Benin la Bas.
No sooner had Richard completed these thoughts than there was a sharp rap on the door and Captain Caleb Maina entered. ‘Everything is ready, Minister,’ he announced.
‘Good. Then we can begin. Mr Asov, you will take the lead in due course but for the moment, please allow the captain and myself to be your guides. It is only a short walk, I assure you…’ He gestured expansively once again. And Richard realized he was pointing towards the nearest of the vessels tied up on the seaward side of the docks to their right. A neat-looking corvette. The Otobo. Captain Maina’s blue-water command, no doubt. He looked out across the bay, suddenly, working out what was going on here.
About half a mile offshore was a freighter he had overlooked in his keenness to search out Heritage Mariner house colours. The freighter was in Sevmash colours and it had its cranes up, busily lowering something over the side. He blinked. Gasped. It was all very well to be talking about Max’s plans to sell equipment to the local navy, but it looked as though they were just about to get a closer look at the deal than he had calculated.
‘A little surprise,’ breathed Max, as he passed close by Richard’s shoulder, simply bubbling with excitement.
‘You can say that again!’ said Richard, straining for a closer look at what the freighter was lowering into the bay — even as the pressure of all the bodies around him forced him to move towards the door.
‘What is it?’ demanded Robin.
‘It’s Max’s hovercraft,’ said Richard. ‘The Zubr. Look at the size of the thing. It’s almost as long as Captain Caleb’s corvette, twice as wide and a great deal better armed. Or, as I said, it would be—’
‘Except for the fact that I was forbidden to bring her full range of weaponry with me,’ Max threw back over his shoulder. Then he was gone.
‘So what’s the actual plan, then?’ she demanded as they walked out of the building and on to the dock where the corvette’s gangplank awaited them.
‘I think,’ he answered quietly, ‘that we’re just about to join in a little war-game…’
SEVEN
Shell
‘Bail!’ shouted Anastasia. ‘Bail or we’ll all drown!’
The tiny cockleshell of a rowing boat whirled out into the middle of the Great River. There was water everywhere — slopping over the sides, thundering down from the sky. The whole universe seemed to be made of liquid — and it was all swamping the boat at a terrifying rate. Another fork of lightning made everything bright for a second — just enough time for Anastasia to see how wide the river had suddenly become. How far from the shores they were already. How near their gunwales were to the heaving, boiling surface. For an instant she regretted her failure to blow her own brains out with the AK. Things seemed to be getting worse by the moment. A quick, clean quiet death might have had its attractions after all.
Her scrabbling fingers kept skinning themselves against the AK in the bottom of the boat beside her. She tore a nail loose on an oar submerged beside it, then her hand became briefly entangled in the plastic bag. There was another oar and a grappling hook down there as well, she knew. And a big can of petrol — against which she bruised her knuckles. That was for the ancient two-stroke motor she had neither the time nor the knowledge to power up. But at last she found something that felt like a cup. She started pouring water over the side with feverish haste. ‘Bail!’ she screamed again.
She felt Celine moving beside her, her motion jerky and spasmodic, but she assumed that this was just some part of the young woman’s long-past injuries, like her limp, like her stiff and painful shoulder joints. ‘Ado!’ she shouted. ‘Are you bailing?’
‘I can’t find anything to bail with!’ came the distant, desperate answer.
‘Shine the torch around…’ she ordered, thinking: We have to be well out of sight of them now.
The Maglite’s beam struck out across the vast darkness, showing only sheets of pouring rain and the wildly dimpled foaming surface their massive drops were falling on to. There was no longer any sign of the bank. Then Ado swung the beam inboard and gasped. ‘The soldier. His face is under water! It is deep. He may drown.’
‘See what you can do. But be quick or we’re all going to drown! Can you see anything?’
‘I have an old bait tin here. I must just turn him…’ The light wavered wildly. The boat rocked even more unsettlingly. Then the darkness returned and the three of them continued bailing.
After half an hour — which none of them counted or calculated — the rain eased. After a further hour, which whipped by equally unnoticed, the cloud cover broke up and a low, full moon came out. Had they been in the forest, it would have made no difference to them at all, for it would have been blotted out by the canopy and they would still have been lost in shadow. But they were in the middle of a wide river — slowing now because it had grown so broad. So there were no leafy branches above them — simply the big sky, the stars and the moon.
The pace of their bailing slowed to a stop. The bottom of the boat was by no means dry, but they were too exhausted to continue. They sat, slumped, arms hanging and eyes vacant. The little boat sailed on, pulled unerringly by the current towards the heart of the delta and on towards the sea, hundreds of miles downriver. Only the whispering chuckle of the water sounded sibilantly near at hand. There was no life in the river to breach and breathe, to jump and splash. There was no life in the jungle on the far banks to hoot, howl, roar or call. There was no wind to whisper in the distant leaves. There was only the patter of the fallen raindrops dripping down from leaf to leaf, from grass to ground. And, like their mighty cousin the river, whispering and chuckling as they did so, like the thread-thin ghostly voices of the great spirits and long dead ancestors crowding the deepest shades.
The soldier groaned.
‘At least he’s still alive,’ Anastasia voiced her thought without realizing it. And, because of this, she spoke in English. She had been thinking in English for some time now. ‘But that’s a fact which could cut both ways. Is he tied up tightly?’
‘Yes,’ answered Ado, the little school’s star pupil, fluent in English and Russian as well as her native Matadi. ‘But he’s in pain. I think he’s cramping badly. And you tied him really tightly…’