Richard and Anastasia accompanied Chief Oganga and his team down the slanting companionways to the sloping decks and back again as Richard explained what he had caused to be done. ‘It’s lucky,’ the engineering lieutenant told Anastasia’s expensively enhanced bust, ‘that the angle is no greater than it is or the lifts would not function. But we have performed miracles and everything is working well enough.’ He dragged his eyes reluctantly towards Richard. ‘However, we have not been able to power both the ammunition lifts and the cargo winches…’
‘That’s OK,’ answered Richard easily. ‘There’s a plan B.’ He reached for his telltale Benincom cellphone.
Anastasia watched closely as Richard ran her through all this — literally and figuratively. Frowning fiercely to conceal her wide-eyed astonishment, as the cases and crates of ammunition, explosive warheads, missiles and rockets were piled on to the after deck. Not piled randomly, she observed as she prowled restlessly and impatiently around them as he spoke forcefully into his Benincom cellphone — arranged carefully on flat wooden pallets. Even with his handset wedged between his shoulder and his ear, Richard was seemingly able to climb everywhere, assessing the piles of armaments, discussing with Chief Oganga — and whoever was on the other end of his phone call — obscure matters of weight and stability that seemed utterly arcane to her. Neither of them at the moment paying any attention to her at all. And it seemed to Anastasia that their overcareful preparations were something of an irrelevant waste of time — as though they were rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. Until she heard the first distant throbbing and understood everything.
‘The lift weight on these things is nine thousand kilos,’ Richard explained to her, appearing at her shoulder as the Super Pumas appeared low in the sky behind them and pocketing his mobile as he spoke. ‘The chief and I have had to be careful but the ammunition hoists have built in weight assessors and we’ve calculated how each load was added to each pallet. So we should be all right according to the experts at the helicopters’ HQ. Two choppers, three lifts each. What do you reckon?’
‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘For some ancient geezer old enough to be my father…’
‘Ah, but there’s more…’ Richard pulled one specific box from the final pile the chief had sent up from the arms locker. He flipped the top and swung it back. ‘Don’t you ever tell your father,’ he admonished her, but she hardly heard him. Nestled in the box’s black foam interior three semi-automatic carbines sat side by side. ‘They’re special forces kit,’ he said. ‘SIG SG 453s. Folding skeleton stock. Curved clip like your AK. Special order — fifty rounds per clip instead of the usual thirty. Three settings: single shot, three tap or fully automatic. Fire rate: eight hundred rounds a minute on automatic. Happy now?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Oh yes.’ She glanced almost coyly up at him as she stroked the nearest gun. ‘My shrink used to say it was penis envy, my fascination with guns. But she was an old-school Freudian.’
‘You had a shrink?’
‘How do you think I got over Simian Artillery and their aftermath? And anyhow you should know. You paid for her. Or Robin did. My bastard father most certainly did not!’
She crouched forward possessively and, as he digested all this, Richard registered for the first time there was writing on the back of her T-shirt. The front said ‘LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR’. The back said ‘AND F*** YOUR FAMILY’.
The Pumas hovered over Otobo’s poop, and lowered ropes that split into four strands, each with a carabiner designed to clip to the corner of a loaded pallet, then they lifted them off the corvette and lowered them on to the mudbank in front of the Zubr, where they were unloaded by the crew and their passengers working smoothly together. It took less than half an hour for everything from the ship that might be useful to be moved over to the hovercraft, as Richard planned.
Richard and Anastasia rode the last pallet down, standing side by side on the clearest corner, holding on to the guy rope — with Richard’s arm ready to reach round her waist if she slipped or panicked. Neither circumstance seemed likely to him. He knew that Max would find it hard to forgive him for giving his little girl a gun. But he would never ever forgive him for letting her get hurt. His Russian friend loved his petite printyessa — even if he still refused to talk to her. Or pay to fix her mental wounds, come to that. Too busy with his own penis — to the envy of most of his friends.
Stalingrad was a quiet bustle of activity as she lifted herself back on to her skirts and slid off the mudbank and back on to the surface of the water. The missiles, rockets, warheads, shells and ammunition were all taken to the places they would be needed most, and, where appropriate, loaded into the weapon systems that would use them. A burly sergeant took Anastasia’s gun box to her quiet corner of the bustling area and she called Ado and Esan over to look at her new toys. It was coming up to midday and the Zubr’s galley was preparing food designed to enhance the battlefield rations Colonel Mako’s three hundred soldiers had brought aboard with them. Up on the bridge, Richard looked at his steel-cased Rolex Oyster Perpetual, calculating. He had promised to get up the river within six hours. And that was his plan. He wanted to arrive six hours from now, in fact, for the timing itself was a crucial element of his exhaustive calculations.
‘Full ahead, Captain Zhukov,’ he said quietly and the silver bear of a commander nodded. ‘Pulniv piot,’ he said quietly — or something approximating to that; Richard’s Russian was a little rusty and the captain’s accent was thick and unfamiliar. The helmsman’s hands pushed the throttles forward, however, so the message had got through well enough. The message was also immediately transferred to the engine room. The power to the three huge turbines behind the bridge house cranked up to maximum. With the whole of her massive hull vibrating gently, Stalingrad lifted up her skirts and flew.
The mouth of the main channel closed before her with shocking rapidity, in Richard’s eyes. But Zhukov stood on spread feet, hands clasped behind him, relaxed. He spoke a word or two in his gruff Russian to the officers, ship-handlers and navigators around him. They answered equally tersely. What Richard’s rusty Russian was too unpractised to follow, the situation made clear enough. There was no sonar because the vessel did not break the water’s surface. But there was radar — wide band and collision alarm. All the captain seemed worried about was the width of the channels ahead. The radar would show him anything rising more than two metres above the water’s surface — and, if it was solid enough to present a threat, the collision alarm would sound.
But the monosyllabic conversation established that although the bank was gathering in on their right, and although there were islands looming midstream on their left, these two stood more than fifty metres apart, and all that lay between them, except water, was a solid mat of water hyacinth. Richard could well understand how this would slow even the speedy Shaldags, but the Zubr soared across it at more than a mile a minute, leaving a wake of shattered vegetation behind it.