Anastasia looked for Kebila but he was gone. She heard the flat report of his gun, the thud of another body falling and then silence. Except for the moaning. ‘Come down,’ he called. ‘Quickly.’
She arrived in the cabin to see Kebila standing beside the body of a second man, trying with limited success to untie something that looked like fishing line hanging tautly from a hook in the cabin ceiling. And she saw in a flash why it was important he should do so. The lower end of the line was secured round Esan’s scrotum and the boy was half-hanging, bent like a bow, face-up, with his trousers round his ankles, on the bunk below. His eyes were rolled back so only the whites were showing and it was he who was moaning. Which didn’t surprise her at all. She crossed the cabin in four swift steps and caught up the matchet that had been destined one second later to have severed Ado’s hands. She stepped past Kebila and cut the line. Esan collapsed back on to the bed. His moans became a howl of agony. He clutched himself and rolled on to his side. Anastasia slammed the matchet blade down again and Ado’s hands were free. Ado was on top of Esan immediately, covering him protectively with her body. Which, Anastasia noticed now, was battered, bruised, bleeding in one or two places, and also naked.
‘You know, I’m beginning to find your story a little easier to believe,’ Kebila admitted in a grimly conversational tone.
Sergeant Tchaba came stomping through the door like Long John Silver. ‘Three for the hospital and one for the morgue,’ said Kebila, ‘and I think we’d better prepare the interrogation cell at headquarters.’ And Anastasia registered for the first time that the man at the colonel’s feet was still alive.
‘So,’ said Kebila twenty minutes later as the ambulance wailed off into the distance, while Tchaba engaged the gears and eased the colonel’s staff car into motion. ‘You managed to get away from those gentlemen’s colleagues in the good ship Nellie, dropped Celine Chaka off at the clinic in Malebo and came straight back down here to alert the authorities about smugglers, rapists — mostly deceased — and secret armies overrunning sections of the jungle unsuspected.’
‘Yes,’ she said shortly. ‘I told you. The same as I told you about the men who might be coming after Nellie. And I was right about that, wasn’t I?’
‘Indeed. However, there are still elements in your narrative I find hard to believe,’ he said. ‘Even making allowances for the fact that it is you who are at the heart of it all. Logic dictates that, if everything you say is true, I should wake up the president and get some sort of expeditionary force up there. But it is —’ he consulted his watch — ‘still two hours until dawn. And the president will not thank me for disturbing him at this time of night without absolutely incontrovertible proof. Especially as we happen to have a Shaldag fast patrol boat in the area and we haven’t heard a whisper out of them about any of this so far. But we are conveniently situated to get an update on their latest contact. Naval headquarters, please, Sergeant.’
Kebila’s presence was like a magic pass. The car was waved through the security gate and into the golden aura of the security lighting. As it passed, the guard slammed to attention and saluted. Tchaba parked in a bay marked ‘Commanding Officer Only’ and then waited while Kebila led Anastasia into a three-storey white-painted box of a building with a display of antennas and dishes on its roof that would have flattered GRU headquarters on Khoroshevskiy Highway in Moscow. The security guard on the door also slammed to attention and waved them through like his colleague on the gate. The twenty-four-hour communications room was on the third floor and the pair of them ran lightly up the stairs side by side. The officer in charge leaped to his feet and was halfway to attention when Kebila said, ‘That will do, Lieutenant. I’m here to see the latest communication from Shaldag FPB004, not to hold some kind of an inspection.’
‘Just in, sir,’ said the lieutenant, relaxing infinitesimally. ‘It’s quite a long one. Here’s the transcript…’
The lieutenant handed Kebila a long flimsy of white paper covered in dense writing. The colonel stood frowning over the report for some moments, then he said, ‘All right. Captain Maina has found your boathouse and your bodies. And —’ his eyes raked her from head to toe with a suddenly disturbing intimacy — ‘Captain Mariner has found and recognized your underwear. Wild Orchid, from Moscow.’
Anastasia blushed from the pit of her throat to the roots of her hair. ‘My underwear… Richard…’
‘No. I understand your girlish embarrassment. It was Robin Mariner who found it. I sincerely trust that Richard would never have recognized your lingerie.’
It took the red-faced woman an instant to understand that she was being teased. But her mind was whirling away from her embarrassment. Richard and Robin Mariner were here. Richard and Robin. In Granville Harbour. In the delta. How could she not have known that?
‘But as I must now accept the absolute truth of everything you have been telling me,’ Kebila continued, at his most po-faced and urbane, ‘I think it is time to send the Shaldag back to Malebo with orders to pick up Celine Chaka if she is in any fit state to be moved from the clinic there. I think I have the authority, even without referring to the president.’
He turned to the lieutenant and opened his mouth to issue the order. But before he could utter a word, his cellphone started ringing. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, frowning. ‘That tone denotes a high priority call. I must take it at once.’
He put the cellphone to his ear and listened for a few minutes in silence. Then he broke contact and turned to Anastasia, his face folded into a frown. ‘The mayor of Malebo…’ he began slowly, as though trying to get his mind round something that lay just beyond his mental grasp.
‘Mr Obada. He runs the hardware store. Yes…’ she prompted him.
‘And the garage evidently. And he owns a Ford Ranger Wildtrak which he has just driven down from Malebo himself — that must have taken some doing, even for a vehicle so aptly named. He has arrived at my headquarters to report two very disturbing developments. First, that the mast which carries all his town’s communications has been sabotaged, leaving them absolutely cut off from the outside world. And, secondly, that everyone in Malebo’s medical clinic has disappeared. Including Celine Chaka.’ He paused for an instant. ‘I think perhaps Captain Maina aboard Shaldag FPB004 should be alerted,’ he said to the communications lieutenant. ‘And I think it is at last time to inform the president…’ he added, looking round at Anastasia.
‘Sod the president,’ said Anastasia roundly. ‘If I were you I’d wake up Richard Mariner. And quickly.’
Richard often woke around four a.m. Aboard the ships he captained, this was the moment the middle watch became the morning watch, and he liked to be up and about then if possible. He had passed a restless night in any case, full of half-remembered nightmares, most of them involving Robin. He switched on the bedside light, rolled out from under the tangled duvet, straightened his blue silk pyjama jacket and ambled through into the reception room, intent on making a cup of tea. Which is what he was doing when someone started banging on his door.
Never a man to give in to premonitions of doom, he strolled across the room, teacup in hand, his mind automatically seeking ways in which a visit at this time of day could be a good thing, and opened the door without even checking the spyhole. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘Anastasia.’