The river had narrowed again, but it was still the better part of a kilometre wide. Because it had narrowed, it was flowing more swiftly, but still smoothly, between walls of green vegetation trailing down over banks that only revealed themselves every now and then. On their right, the occasional glimpses of red earth seemed to be smooth and slick, sloping back gently, like the bank beneath the chapel back at the compound. On their left there were steeper red mud walls that once or twice attained enough height to count as cliffs. And above increasingly lengthy sections of these, the jungle appeared to have been cut back, so that Anastasia began wracking her brains trying to remember if there was some kind of a roadway up there. And, if there was, where it might lead to.
‘Citematadi,’ said Celine when Anastasia broke down and finally asked her. ‘The city may still be a long way off, and there isn’t anything much there in any case.’
‘Nothing at all,’ added the young soldier. ‘We were there not long ago. There’s nothing in Citematadi.’
There was silence for a moment, then Ado said, ‘My name’s Ado. That is Celine and the woman with the gun is Anastasia. What’s your name?’
‘Esan.’
‘Esan? That’s not a name, it’s a number.’
‘It’s the name the general and Ngoboi gave me when I became a Soldier of Christ the Infant. When I became a man.’
‘Let’s not ask how he became a man,’ said Anastasia wearily. ‘It’ll have involved killing, eating and raping if last night was anything to go by…’
That bitter observation crushed the boy to silence, but it also had an unexpected consequence. ‘Anastasia! The others!’ Celine was suddenly sitting upright, her movements enough to make the boat rock dangerously, her eyes wide with shock and bright with fever. ‘We have to go back! We have to help them!’
‘We have to help ourselves first,’ answered Anastasia sharply. ‘And there’s no going back. Not for the moment at least. Mind you,’ she added, ‘when I do go back I want to go in there, as the Americans say, like gangbusters!’
‘We can help them,’ insisted Ado. ‘We can pray for them!’
That idea seemed to calm Celine a little, and she and Ado began to pray quietly together. In the meantime, the less spiritual Anastasia set about checking over the outboard, all too well aware that they were going to need more than the power of prayer. And pretty soon, too. For it seemed to her that the river was gathering pace, with a strong current running over to the left, at the foot of those red mud cliffs. And that current was sucking the rowing boat faster and faster over towards the high-walled southern bank. But the engine was no AK and she had had no experience at all in making them work. ‘Look,’ she said at last. ‘Does either of you know anything about outboards? Or anything about motors at all?’
‘I do,’ answered Esan unexpectedly. ‘I have worked with Captain Ojogo. He is in charge of transport for the army. He has trained me in all sorts of matters to do with engines.’
Anastasia looked at the other two. Celine frowned, hesitating, but Anastasia had no idea whether that was because she didn’t trust the soldier or because her brain was slowed by shock and fever. Ado nodded decisively. And that was what made the difference.
It took longer to untie Esan from the oars, loosen his hands — though not his feet — and help him along the length of the boat — all the while keeping the AK trained on him — than it did for him to get the motor started. Then, as he sat back down in the bottom of the little craft, balancing Celine, with his shoulders at the bow, Anastasia tried to take them in a smooth arc away from the relentlessly approaching shore.
But what seemed like a big step forward proved very nearly disastrous. Anastasia had never handled an outboard before and she couldn’t get used to the counter-intuitive way it seemed to work. To go right, she had to push the handle left, and vice-versa. All too swiftly she found that her attempts to break out of the current were simply pushing them more firmly into its rapidly tightening grip. The red cliffs of the shore seemed to exercise some kind of magical attraction for the little vessel. The persistent beating of the late-morning sun on her unprotected head simply added to the gathering feeling that things were slipping out of control.
She had not panicked last night because she had felt confident with the AK-47; because she was focussed on rescuing Celine. She came close to panic now because she did not understand the boat or feel that she was really in control of it. But this time she was completely responsible for Celine and her continued welfare. Not to mention Ado and this strange boy-soldier. And it occurred to her now at the worst possible moment that if the boat went over, the tied-up boy would drown at once and Celine would not even be able to swim for safety with her shoulder in the state it was.
So when a tongue of the shore suddenly appeared, stuck out in a low, curving hook that seemed little more than a sandbar just above the racing surface immediately ahead of them, she pulled the outboard’s rudder-arm firmly in to her side without a moment’s hesitation and ran the boat hard up on to it.
EIGHT
War-game
Richard ran up the gangplank on to Captain Caleb Maina’s command with almost boyish excitement. Unable to stop himself, he trailed his fingers along the sleek vessel’s side as he moved, making a deep and personal contact. The neat, spare ship reminded him vividly of Heritage Mariner’s Poseidon, for she was also basically a corvette. The immediate difference was that, as he reached the top of the companionway and turned to step aboard, he could see that on Otobo’s foredeck there was a 125mm naval gun in its grey-white pillbox housing instead of the bright yellow deep-sea exploration vessel Neptune.
A glance upward past this showed Richard enclosed bridge wings and the blank one-step design of the bridge-house front was pretty similar to Poseidon’s too. He had time to look around, for as he stepped down on to the weather deck at the head of the companionway, he was met by a small armed guard led by the man who was clearly the ship’s security officer — who handed him a plastic-coated ID badge complete with photo to pin on his lapel before allowing him to proceed. While he did all this, the captain waited courteously a few steps ahead. Then they were off.
Aware of Robin, almost equally excitedly striding along at his shoulder, also securing her ID, Richard followed Captain Caleb along the familiar weather deck and in through the bulkhead door into the dark coolness of the air-conditioned bridge house. The captain swung round at the foot of the companionway, his long eyes crinkling into a smile. ‘I believe I may rely on you to know your way around,’ he said. ‘Now that you have your IDs, please feel free to proceed up to the command bridge while I return to the companionway and see to the greeting and disposition of the other, less shipshape, guests. This is A Deck, of course. The command bridge is on D. My watch officer, First Lieutenant Sanda, is waiting to show you around. Mr Asov will join you immediately, I’m sure, and I will be up in a moment.’
Richard needed no further bidding and went leaping up the stairway with Robin close behind. As Caleb Maina guessed, their experiences aboard a range of vessels made the layout of this one almost second nature to them. They pounded up three decks, therefore, then on up the final short flight to the command bridge itself.
The bridge was busy, if not actually crowded yet, thought Richard. There were perhaps a dozen stations in an angular horseshoe, most of them facing forward so that their occupants could look over the flat computer screens and through the angled clearview along the foredeck. A quick scan showed him all that he had expected to see, as they grouped astride the central ship’s handling system — the one that replaced the binnacle, helm and engine room telegraph handles on older vessels. He leaned over and half whispered to Robin, ‘Computer-enhanced navigation systems, pilot and electronic chart systems, collision alarms, weather monitors, ship’s system monitors, engine room slave monitors, sonar, several weapons control systems, echo sounder, GPS… Most of them 3D by the looks of things, like the Doppler radar.’