Robin had come here with an idea of what she was expecting to see. A burned chapel. Ruined buildings. Dead bodies in various states of disrepair and decomposition. She had steeled herself to observe all this. Observe and report, as was her mission. What she actually saw was not a ravaged compound, wrecked and burst open like a corpse picked over by vultures, but a stockade, almost a rudimentary fortress. Not by any means the leavings of an army eternally on the move, as Bonnie had described. But the defensive stronghold of a command with every intention of staying exactly where it was.
This was so precisely the opposite of what she had been expecting to see that she spent some extra time examining it, committing to mind the disposition of the rough palisade of wall — clearly chopped from the local jungle and carefully erected here. Of the stubby watchtowers — effective gun placements — providentially unoccupied at the moment. Of the long slope of naked mud that would allow whoever was defending the place a very effective killing field if anyone was mad enough to attack on foot from the river. Of the columns of smoke and hum of industry from within, which spoke of no fly-by-night group but of settled, steady, disciplined hard work.
And, as she looked and listened with all the fearsome concentration at her command, so she heard the revving of motors that grew louder and then stopped, as though several vehicles were pulling in from somewhere in the jungle and parking in the middle of the fort. And amid the shouts of welcome and enquiry that followed the arrival, she was certain that she heard the name of Celine Chaka.
NINETEEN
Zubr
‘I am certain the president will see you at the earliest convenient moment,’ Colonel Kebila told Richard firmly. ‘But at present he is extremely busy.’ The two men stood face to face in the anteroom to the president’s office. They had met there, apparently by accident, but Richard was getting frankly suspicious about all these coincidental meetings. He had come from his meeting with Max Asov, full of ideas to help the situation upriver. He had paused only to change into an almost indestructible cotton shirt and a sturdy tropical suit and a pair of boots almost guaranteed to break the teeth of any crocodile. As he sped up to the president’s compound in the hotel limousine, he knew that Max was contacting Captain Zhukov on the strength of Richard’s assurance that he could get in to see The Man. Irina, meanwhile, was trying to clothe a mutinous Anastasia on the deeply mistaken assumption that she was still a child needing help or advice from anyone — least of all from yet another of her oversexed father’s mistresses.
But Richard’s progress — smooth as silk from the Nelson Mandela Suite to the president’s anteroom — had been brought to an abrupt halt by the man who kept on turning up with such suspicious regularity that Richard was beginning to wonder if he had been slipped some kind of bug or tracking device.
‘I bet he is busy, Colonel,’ answered Richard with some asperity. ‘One part of his country seems to be a conduit for unregulated arms smuggling while the other part of it is open to unopposed invasion by foreign armies. But I have a proposal to put to him which may help. In the short term at least.’
‘I’m sure you do. To the benefit of Heritage Mariner or Bashnev-Sevmash also, no doubt. And I am sure he will wish to talk to you the moment he is free.’
But that moment came sooner than Colonel Kebila calculated, for the door of the president’s office opened suddenly. Julius Chaka stood there himself, dressed in the military fatigues familiar from his soldiering days, his face thunderous. ‘Laurent, there you are! Have you heard this report yet?’ he demanded, waving a print-out covered with writing. ‘It’s just in from Naval HQ. Oh, good morning, Captain Mariner. Come through with the colonel please, this report will be of interest to you as well, I should imagine. Because it was your wife who sent it. She’s apparently hanging in a mangrove tree up the delta even as we speak. She’s overlooking the GPS coordinates we gave to Captain Maina, and this is what she can see…’
The president led the two men in, describing the detail of Robin’s report as he did so. Richard looked around, distracted, but still paying close attention. Preferring to study the room rather than to start speculating what in God’s name Robin was getting herself into now. Or, indeed, what the Doctor of African Studies Bonnie Holliday was getting up to at her side. At the thought of Bonnie, he frowned thoughtfully. But then the room he was entering distracted him again. The president’s office, inherited unchanged like the rest of the compound from the more grandiose days of Liye Banda, was based on the White House Oval Office of the Bush administration, rather than the more conservative Obama makeover. The Great Seal of Benin la Bas lay at the centre of a carpet patterned with radiating lines in beige and brown. The desk was a double of the Resolute desk given to President Hayes by Queen Victoria in November 1880 and which had stood in the Oval Office through many administrations since.
Seated on the sofas flanking the long teak coffee table at right angles to the president’s desk were senior officers from all of Benin la Bas’s armed services. Richard recognized the uniforms, if not the men wearing them. With Kebila representing state security, it was the equivalent of a meeting of the British prime minister’s emergency Cobra committee. There was nowhere to sit and nobody made any room, preferring to glare at both Kebila and himself with ill-concealed hostility. So, like the colonel, he stood, while the president paced restlessly, his movements reminiscent of the big black panther caged in the zoo.
‘Well, I’ll throw the question open,’ said Julius Chaka, prowling around the seated officers and ministers as though sizing them up for dinner. ‘What sort of force do we need up there to overwhelm an entrenched army in a simple but effective defensive position with the maximum speed and the minimum loss of life? Remember, independent of the fact that they have almost certainly got my daughter — a national heroine with a worldwide reputation — they also have a range of innocent bystanders, including doctors, nurses, priests and imams from a range of religions. And nuns. God knows how many nuns. Not to mention several hundred orphaned school children who were looking to us for help and protection.’
In the face of an uneasy silence, he began to get more specific and personally challenging. ‘Air Marshal, how soon could you get planes or helicopters up there?’ he demanded impatiently, stopping to tower over the slight figure in light blue serge and heavy gold braid.
‘Planes within an hour, attack helicopters within two, troop transports within two hours of the troops being ready,’ answered the air marshal unhesitatingly. ‘We have the Chengdu Jian-7s which can get up there at twice the speed of sound. We have the Hip and Hind attack helicopters and the Eurocopter Super Puma transports. All armed, fuelled and ready to go. But I believe that air attack, while guaranteeing minimum time loss, will also guarantee maximum casualties; and unless you want troops parachuting or abseiling into the battle zone, again with high levels of casualties guaranteed, then we will need to define a watertight safe landing zone first.’