‘Whatever happened to you,’ she told the dead man with his trousers down, ‘I think you probably deserved it.’
Then she turned her attention to the other corpses there.
Caleb re-entered from the back lot to find her on her knees beside a dead man whose whole face seemed to be sitting at such a very strange angle. She was wrestling something out of the dead man’s hand.
‘What on earth…’ he began in English, feverishly reassessing his basic beliefs about the entire female sex.
‘I don’t know what else they were up to — what else you found outside,’ she grated, ‘but at the moment retribution caught up with them, these bastards were in the middle of a rape party. Coitus interruptus of the very best kind in my book.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’ Caleb looked around, his horror intensifying.
Robin explained her reasoning tersely, as she continued to wrestle with the dead fist she was trying to open. ‘But that’s just from a quick scout round,’ she concluded. ‘I’d probably be able to give you more details if I had more time.’
Caleb took a deep breath. ‘You’ll have at least half an hour. I have to report this in. And I have to put some heavy stuff aboard my vessel. That truck outside has half a dozen Chinese QW1M shoulder-launched missiles in it; they call them MANPADS — short for Man-portable air-defence system. Each one can blow the guts out of anything on the ground or in the air. From a tank to a cruise missile. From a train to a jumbo jet, come to that. Half the terrorist groups on earth have been trying to get their hands on stuff like this for years and here it turns up in the middle of a deserted jungle in a UN truck surrounded by dead men. If we were on anything other than a mission for the president, I’d probably turn round and head back to base at once.’
Had Caleb been Richard, Robin would have made a Blues Brothers joke, but she didn’t think Caleb would understand or appreciate references to being on a mission for God. Suddenly she missed Richard. The bloody man had been right all along. This was no walk in the park. This was getting really flaming dangerous.
As the thought occurred to Robin, the dead man’s fist came open. An oyster shell fell out of it. And a black pearl the size of a marble rolled across the floor. ‘Now that,’ said Robin, her voice awed, ‘is something you don’t see every day.’
‘What?’ said Caleb in simple wonder. ‘What in God’s name has gone on here?’
‘OK,’ said Robin half an hour later. ‘Hang on a minute longer and I’ll walk you through this. I think I can give you some idea about everything except the pearl.’
‘I’m listening,’ said Caleb grudgingly.
‘Good. Because what I’m going to tell you might well influence what you want to add to your final report to base — and what they want you to do as a result. Let’s start at the beginning. Way back through the jungle, way, way back, beyond Mount Karisoke and the volcano chain beside it, back in the UN mission in Somalia, Sudan, Uganda or wherever, there are a couple of trucks gone missing. Almost certainly a good few UN soldiers dead in a ditch, stripped of all they possessed. There’s a smuggling route through the horn of Africa that starts with the Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean — which in turn connects with China where the MANPADS originally came from. It’s supposed to be a two-way trade. Weaponry in — conflict minerals out, especially coltan for all those mobile telephones and whatnot. You follow so far?’
Caleb nodded dumbly, his eyes and his mouth a little wider than usual.
‘The guys who killed the UN soldiers and stole the trucks dressed in the dead men’s uniforms and drove through the jungles to here. Good disguise, eh? Not the first time it’s been done either — not by a long chalk. Certainly our smugglers seem to have been wearing the dead men’s uniforms when they in turn died — that fat bloke on the bed for instance, his uniform has a bullet hole surrounded by dry blood over his heart. But he’s not been shot in the heart, he’s been shot through the head. They were using the trucks as a disguise. I guess they were doing the same with the uniforms. Somewhere along the line, not far back, they picked up some prisoners — at least one woman, maybe more. And another passenger perhaps they didn’t know about, in the back of this truck here. The lashings have been cut, and I found a Victorinox knife there — no one in their right mind is going to leave one of those unless the going’s got tough. At least one of the women seems to have been wounded — there’s blood on the seat there where neither a driver nor a single passenger would sit. Certainly not big men like these.
‘They drive the trucks down off the road back there leaving two sets of tracks coming — and one set going. One pretty uncontrolled set going, come to that, as though the driver was drunk. Or terrified. Or wounded. Or all three. There’s blood on the ground beside where the other truck was parked, and a bottle of vodka on the ground, still part full. So I guess there weren’t many survivors fit to drive, which is why you have this truck left behind.
‘Anyhow, going back in time a little, they arrive, with their MANPADS, their disguises, their women bleeding in the front and their unsuspected guest hiding in the back. They are met by the next link in the smuggling chain. Men with a boat, therefore, as the road ends here. Men, now I think of it, who might have taken those potshots at us earlier as they also escaped, terrified, drunk and bleeding. Because, like the guys on the truck, their numbers have been brutally diminished. You notice that only half of your corpses are in uniform — the rest are in jeans and T-shirts: city boys, I’d say. Or maybe it was not the boat’s crew who shot at us; they may all be here or in the second truck, wherever that is — maybe it was the women and their rescuer escaping, hyped-up and terrified. Maybe they fired those shots. Anyway, the two groups got together — Uniform guys and T-shirt guys — and decided to seal their deal by having a rape party. There’s booze. There’s guys with their trousers down and their peckers out — and only deflated, one assumes, by the massive loss of blood. And there’s underwear belonging to at least one woman.
‘But, as I said earlier, the party was brutally interrupted, one assumes by the unsuspected guest who lost his Victorinox in the back of the truck out there. Lost his knife but found at least one gun. Party pooped. Woman or women run out, leaving trainers and underwear behind. Boat goes. Boathouse burns. Now I think of it, the intended rape victims are most likely to be the ones on the boat and therefore the ones who fired those shots. Burned the boathouse to cover their escape. Good planning by someone.
‘But I am simply buggered if I can tell you anything at all about the black pearl. Except that there were three more oysters scattered across the floor which I have in my possession — just in case they too contain black pearls.’
‘Is that it?’ asked Caleb, not a little dazed.
‘Not quite,’ answered Robin, who, like Richard, loved to save the best for last. ‘The girl on the table — the one who left her outline in her would-be rapist’s blood. She left her shoes and knickers, at least I guess it was her. Now, I can’t tell anything about her from the trainers. Nike. Could be anybody’s. Anybody’s with the right shoe size. She could have bought them anywhere. The underwear, however, is another kettle of fish. Look.’ Robin held the less than pristine garment up so that Caleb could see the label sewn into the waistband.
It said ‘????????????’.
‘What is that?’ asked Caleb, still stunned.