Выбрать главу

‘General?’ snapped Chaka, turning to the next uncomfortable-looking officer whose beautifully pressed brown uniform — a tad less perfectly presented than Kebila’s — was also festooned with gold.

‘We have an emergency special forces command on standby. They can be ready to go within ninety minutes. But they are here in Granville Harbour. What would take the time is getting them up to the middle of the delta. You know the state of the roads and tracks in the jungle up there. You famously brought your tanks through it when you overthrew the tyrant Liye Banda five years ago, but you had to use the snorkel facility on the T80s and come downriver underwater for a good deal of the way, because there aren’t any roads wide enough for tanks or troop carriers left up there. We could chopper them in on the Pumas as the air marshal has suggested — but they will only be effective if we can deliver them to the battle zone safely. No question of parachuting or abseiling into the middle of a battle, I’m afraid. Always assuming the Army of Christ the Infant doesn’t have anything that would bring the choppers down.’ Like the six QW-1M shoulder-launched MANPADS being smuggled down the other bank, thought Richard. I wonder what was in the other truck — and where it is now…

‘And ideally I would like some kind of artillery or armour in support,’ the army man concluded. ‘Especially if they are going against a fortification of any kind. Even a wooden stockade.’

‘Admiral?’ Chaka’s voice betrayed frustration and anger mounting from volcanic to seismic, thought Richard sympatheti-cally. The admiral’s dress whites were at least less laden than those of his colleagues. But his words were only marginally more hopeful.

‘We have five more Shaldag fast patrol boats. They could get up there within eight hours if they can proceed at full speed. But Captain Maina’s reports of channels being all but blocked by water hyacinth make me wonder whether we could actually guarantee to get them there even within that time frame. Of course, anything larger, like the one corvette still functioning, couldn’t even begin to get up there. Independently of blocked channels, she has far too deep a draft even to consider it. No. Only the Shaldags could make it. Like the FPB004 which is on site already, they could each carry ten commandos or seals doubling as crew. But sixty men isn’t much of an army, even though they’ll have the back-up of a considerable artillery section of six 20 millimetre guns with twelve 0.5 inch machine guns, one pair per boat.’

President Chaka looked around the room, frowning, his anger and frustration erupting at last. ‘That’s the best we can do is it?’ the ex-General, ex-tank commander snarled. ‘Sixty men, half a dozen 20 millimetre cannon and a dozen or so light machine guns, sometime this afternoon or, perhaps, this evening if we’re lucky…’

Richard cleared his throat and stepped forward, almost literally into the fray. ‘Actually, Mr President, no. It’s not the best you can do at all. I believe that, with your permission and with the cooperation of these gentlemen, I can deliver three hundred and fifty troops armed to your specifications, one T80U main battle tank with a 125 millimetre cannon, two RIM 116 missile systems, four 30 millimetre Gatlings, and two 140 millimetre Ogon rocket systems, to a point precisely beside FPB004’s present position within six hours of the moment I get your go-ahead. And I can deliver them in a safe environment that will allow all the men and materiel to land on the slope of a bank which I believe lies downhill from the chapel — and which, therefore, will be within a couple of hundred yards of the stockade wall.’

‘What!’ spat Minister Ngama. ‘Do you have some kind of Obi magic?’

‘No, Minister,’ answered Richard gently. ‘I have a Zubr class air-cushioned landing craft called Stalingrad. And she is at your disposal, Mr President.’

‘But she is not armed!’ said President Chaka, his frown becoming less apoplectic and more calculating. ‘She has aboard nothing more than the toys with which Mr Asov humiliated Captain Maina — paint-filled warheads, blank rounds. Even the T80U, the upgraded tank he has brought for me to look at, is very limited in the matter of arms and armament. Benin la Bas is not the sort of country that allows unregulated arms imports!’

Unless, of course, you’re a smuggler disguised as a UN patrol, thought Richard. But for once in his life he kept his smart retort to himself. Instead, he said, ‘I believe I have a way round that, Mr President, a way to arm her quickly and efficiently even as she proceeds upriver to her target. I believe I have a plan that will guarantee the best hope for General Nlong’s prisoners. And for your daughter, of course. As long as I can count on your cooperation. And that of these gentlemen.’

The president looked round the oval office with eyes as hard as jet. ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to wait outside, Captain Mariner,’ he said, showing Richard to the door. ‘I’m sure we won’t keep you long!’

* * *

Half an hour later, Richard was sitting beside Colonel Kebila in a staff car heading for the docks. In the inside pocket of his jungle-proof jacket he carried a letter from the president which was almost the kind of commission familiar to him from the Hornblower novels he had loved in his younger days. ‘To whom it may concern,’ it said. ‘You are hereby requested and required to furnish Captain Richard Mariner with any and all assistance he may demand…’

It was not so much that the document gave him extra confidence — though there was no doubt that it added considerably to his clout — it was more that it rearranged his priorities by making him, albeit temporarily, an officer of the state. ‘Have you put a tracking device on me, Colonel?’ he asked, without giving the question much thought.

‘Of course, Captain. It is in your Benincom phone. When Mr Bourne arranged for one to be sent to Heritage Mariner I had a bug put in as a matter of simple expediency. You are not the sort of man I wish to have running around my country unobserved. That is why I was tracking your movements personally right from the moment you deplaned at the international airport. Look at what you and Mrs Mariner became involved in on your last visit. What uncalculated consequences arose from a simple attempt to negotiate some oil concessions with the previous administration. A near civil war and a new president being perhaps the least of them. It is the way you seem to do things. Cause things. Do you remember Sergeant Major Tchaba, my driver here? All you did to him was to steal his boots. Borrow his boots, perhaps; in a good cause of course — that goes without saying. But now he has a false foot. Uncalculated consequences. This part of Africa is full of them after all, is it not? The uncalculated consequences of your ancestors setting up the slave trade. The uncalculated consequences of a European and American rush for ivory, rubber, copper, gold and diamonds. And oil, I need hardly add. And the new, wider, imperatives. Cassiterite and coltan; tin and tantalum. The western lust for things as innocent as baked beans and mobile phones — let alone for motor car tyres, petrol engines, jewellery and so forth — simply leads to my countrymen being enslaved and slaughtered. And crippled.’

‘Perhaps it is you who should be running for president, Colonel,’ said Richard stiffly.

‘If I thought I could send the IMF, the World Bank, the CIA —’ he paused meaningfully — ‘the UN, the NGOs, the charities, Exxon, Shell, Mobil, De Beers, Bashnev-Sevmash and, yes, Heritage Mariner, and all they represent packing, then I might perhaps consider it. But alas, I, like you, live in the real world. In which it is necessary to employ a Russian hovercraft armed with American and European weaponry to transport one African army to confront another African army — in order to rescue several hundred African children, and, more importantly it appears, half a dozen non-African nuns and priests.’