‘On its way. Should be here by sunset.’
‘Then put her somewhere safe where the firefighters can get at her when they arrive, but where she’ll do a minimum of damage if she goes up after all,’ advised Robin briskly. ‘Your chief engineer left everything as safe as possible before he went down into the lead tug. There’s nothing more anyone can do until the firemen arrive. Why not beach her on one of those sandbars down by the south bank that started her problems yesterday in the first place?’
When the Shaldag FPB004 came back to its dock an hour later still, Otobo was a distant column of smoke heading for the minister’s proposed wildlife park — or the silk-smooth mudbank nearest to it. The huge Zubr Stalingrad was back out in the bay. And, thought Robin, looking warily around, that was probably just as well. The damage the hovercraft’s huge fans had caused looked even worse than she had feared. The whole of the government area appeared to have been hit by a tornado. Trees were uprooted and flower-beds simply decimated. Plasterboard, bricks and wooden beams lay piled on ruined lawns. Roof tiles lay scattered like autumn leaves. The entire top of the minister’s panoramic office was sitting askew and the wide face of the building gaped as though horrified by it all. There was shattered glass everywhere.
Richard was waiting at the dockside. ‘I don’t know who thought of using the Zubr to push the corvette round,’ he observed as Robin stepped unsteadily ashore and took his arm. ‘But it was a stroke of genius. Blew us all away, you might say…’
Richard was not alone. Colonel Kabila was standing just behind him. ‘You are all to come with me,’ he said shortly. ‘You too, Captain Maina.’
President Chaka received Captain Caleb’s report in thoughtful silence. ‘You appear to have resolved a potentially fatal situation through some inspired quick thinking,’ he said at last. ‘The damage to the government facilities is considerable but, I understand, repairable. And nothing compared to what would have happened if you had not taken action. There will be a Board of Inquiry of course, but I foresee a favourable outcome. For you, at least.’
‘Much of the credit must go to Captain Mariner,’ said Caleb. ‘It was her quick thinking…’
‘Indeed,’ said the President thoughtfully. He looked at the faces ranged in front of him. ‘It is upon Captain Mariner’s quick thinking that I wish to call. And I am pleased to see that you and she work so well together, Captain Maina.’
‘Me?’ said Robin frowning. ‘You want to call on me?’
‘Yes I do. You will have realized, I am sure, that I did not invite you to my country simply so that you could accompany your husband on his business mission here. No. I have a request to make of you. A personal request that I believe I could not make to anyone else. Certainly no one else I can readily think of.’
Robin looked at Richard, then at Captain Caleb. Her frown deepened as her mind raced. Richard shrugged, apparently at a loss. Caleb echoed the gesture. Laurent Kabila cleared his throat and shuffled, but it seemed that even he had been excluded from President Chaka’s plans for Robin. And for once in her life Robin herself simply could not guess what was going to be asked of her. ‘What do you want, Mr President?’ she asked.
‘Celine,’ he said at last. ‘Celine, my daughter. You are one of the few people alive who might take her a message from me and make her listen to reason. I want Celine to come back; we have been at each other’s throats too long. I want you to go upriver into the delta to the GPS coordinates of the school and orphanage she runs up there — coincidentally with Mr Asov’s daughter Anastasia. I want you to go there with Captain Maina aboard his fast patrol boat and I want you to bring my daughter back to me.’
THIRTEEN
Nellie
Even with Celine draped across her shoulder, Anastasia managed to stoop and grab her jeans off the floor. Her panties were nowhere to be seen, however, so she forgot about them. It looked as though she was going topless for the moment — she might as well go commando too. With the black cloth wadded in one hand and the other around Celine’s slim waist, she staggered forward. As soon as she stepped out on to the rough concrete of the warehouse floor she stubbed her toe and instantly regretted her trainers. Tears of pain flooded her eyes only to be blinked fiercely away. The trainers were long gone with her underwear. The price of being a drama queen, she thought wryly.
But then Ado swung in beside her, taking some of Celine’s weight, and they rushed her forward towards the wooden dock and the vessel the dead captain had called a floating shit-pile. She looked pretty good to Anastasia at that moment, though. The most beautiful White Sea cruise liner could have hardly looked better, to be fair. Only a battleship might have pipped her at the post. A battleship full of marines with some chopper back-up and heavy armour support. But even that dream might not have come out on top.
Because Anastasia knew how to drive Nellie.
‘You don’t drive a boat,’ Captain Christophe used to tell her, frowning with seriousness bordering on outrage. ‘You steer her. If you are in charge of the power too then you con her. Con. Manoeuvre. Navigate.’
‘If I’m holding a wheel and turning up the juice, then I’m driving,’ she used to tease him, never quite sure how many of these games were really getting through her Matadi dialect’s terrible Russian/American accent. But on their trips up and down the river, Christophe had taught her how to con his Nellie almost as well as he could himself. Had shown her how the whole battered vessel functioned, from the searchlight on top of the wheelhouse to the churning propeller below the square stern. And he had taught her something about the great River Gir, too. But the wise old teacher was probably dead now, she thought bitterly, floating face down in the water somewhere downstream of Malebo. Her eyes stung at the thought.
The dead captain’s ex-command was sitting tightly beside the dock, one small step down from the level of the jetty itself. Anastasia heaved Celine aboard, letting her full weight fall on Ado. The two women went sprawling and the boat heaved jerkily, straining against her moorings. She slung her jeans down on to the deck and ran for the bollard where the forward line was tied. Her mind, still skittering everywhere like spit on a hotplate, knocked loose by shock and relief, suddenly gave her an image of what she must look like — stark naked and liberally spattered with blood. She stooped to pull the line free wondering who was getting an eyeful this time.
The all too familiar hammering filled the warehouse once again, seeming to detonate like a line of firecrackers inside Anastasia’s head. Her white buttocks clenched as though they were the target. But it was the windows of Nellie’s bridge house that exploded, showering her like crystalline hail. The hammering was answered more loudly. Esan, firing back. She leaped down on to the foredeck, trying to avoid the still-dancing carpet of shattered glass, but needing to be quick, for the current coming down from the cataract of the ruined bridge had taken the riverboat’s head at once and was swinging it away from the dockside pretty quickly. ‘Esan,’ she shouted. ‘Get aboard.’ Then she crouched in the shelter of the wheelhouse, hoping it would protect her from any more shooting. Got to cover your ass, girl, she thought. Literally.
Nellie dipped as someone — Esan, prayed Anastasia — jumped aboard, then the sturdy little vessel was loose of the jetty, drifting rapidly out on to the river, in the firm grip of the relentless current. Anastasia risked a glance back round the wheelhouse’s wooden wall and caught a glimpse of Esan frozen in the act of throwing the rowboat’s petrol can back on to the dock, wrapped in blazing rags like a massive Molotov cocktail. ‘I hope he hasn’t used my jeans,’ she thought. But then she started calculating what he must have done to help them: heaved himself into the back of the second truck, ridden down here with them unsuspected, stolen the AK left in the footwell by the prizefighter and come to rescue them after all. Her eyes filled with tears of gratitude.