They reached Citematadi just after three. Richard knew all too well what lay behind the wide sweep of the bend at the apex of the embankments rising up like square escarpments on their right, so he called to the captain, ‘Slow!’
‘Meadimna,’ said the gruff captain, and slowed his command for the first time since midday.
Stalingrad came round the wide bend below Citematadi with just a little more caution than she had showed coming upstream so far. The ruin of the bridge stretched across the river ahead of her, and even as the eyes aboard the command bridge registered it, so the collision alarms started sounding. The huge hovercraft sailed circumspectly forward, the 3D display of her Doppler radar calculating and displaying measurements — the heights of the piers still standing; the distances from one to the other. The massive blocks of masonry lay half submerged like boulders between the bridge’s solid piers, their surfaces rearing three and four metres above the roiling wilderness of foam around them. There was simply no channel anywhere near thirty metres wide. ‘It is a solid wall,’ growled Zhukov at last in English. ‘There is nowhere I can take her through.’
‘I know there’s no way through,’ Richard answered confidently. ‘But I’d thought of that. I believe there’s a way round.’
‘What do you mean?’ The captain looked away from his displays and his fierce blue gaze rested like a weight on Richard.
‘The south bank,’ Richard explained. ‘Look. Just beside that burned-out boathouse, the bank rises quite gently on the inward side of the curve. And, if you can get up on to the shore beneath the embankment there, the first span of the bridge is still intact, you see? The roadway actually projects out over the river like a huge ramp before the real destruction starts. But the bridge and the highway behind it are still intact. There’s a roadway coming down off the embankment to the boathouse, so it’s not too easy to see, but I think if you take it carefully, you’ll just be able to squeeze her under that first span and slide back down the bank on the upriver side.’
‘I see,’ said Zhukov, grudgingly. ‘That is very clever. We will give it a go. But take it one step at a time. Helmsman, come right. Navigator, you see the slope of bank below that burned-out boathouse with the truck parked behind it…?’
Richard stiffened as the penny dropped. He had been so focussed on his own plans he had forgotten what he had seen of Caleb and Robin’s reports from the Shaldag. What Anastasia had told him of her adventures. ‘Captain!’ he said. ‘Can you call Anastasia Asov to the bridge, please?’
‘For what reason?’ Zhukov was still understandably nervous at having his owner’s daughter aboard without Asov’s specific directions.
‘You see the boathouse?’
‘Of course. We are swinging round towards it…’
‘It was Anastasia and her friends who burned it. She was on this bank a matter of hours ago. If anyone can give you updates on current conditions then she can. And, come to think of it, you might get in touch with Shaldag FPB004. Captain Caleb might have some relevant intel for you.’
Anastasia was on the bridge four minutes later, as the Zubr eased itself delicately ashore on to the long slope of bank behind the burned boathouse. Ado and Esan came with her. She brought her gun but they did not. Richard looked at her as she surveyed the place. She was pale and seemed a little shaky. The three of them crowded together for mutual support and the Russian woman in her black jeans and childish T-shirt suddenly seemed hardly older than the teenagers beside her. She held on to her SIG SG carbine with an almost disturbing intensity. ‘The parking area where that truck is standing is just concrete slabs laid over the mud of the bank,’ she said quietly, her voice a lot steadier than her hands. ‘It was dark when they brought us down here, so I can’t be certain of the details, but I got the impression that the road out on to the bridge was as solid as the road down here.’
‘I got the impression there was lots of room behind me when I climbed out of the back of the truck,’ Esan added. ‘I was looking around for enemies and it was dark — but the moon was up and I certainly thought there was a wide, deep space back there.’
‘What was actually in the back of the truck you hid in?’ asked Richard, sidetracked. ‘Did you notice that?’
‘Crates and stuff. I really have no idea what was in them.’
‘There were MANPADS in the other one,’ said Richard. ‘Shoulder-fired guided missiles. Nothing like that?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Esan. ‘But I’m certain that there was something like a huge wide tunnel stretching away behind me when I got out…’
‘OK, boy,’ said Zhukov. ‘We proceed. Into your tunnel, if it’s really there.’
Stalingrad eased herself right up on to the bank and swung her face eastwards. The slope of the bank canted gently downwards from right to left, from bank to waterline, but nowhere near steeply enough to cause the hovercraft any trouble. The first span of the bridge reached out above them, soaring upwards a good twenty metres to the underside of the roadway. The first pier of the bridge, with its solid column of masonry towering to the shattered end of the road it had carried more than forty years ago, stood out on the water, leaving a gap on the shore side at least fifty metres wide. But the collision alarm continued to sound stridently. Because the second truck was parked in the middle of their path, in the shadow beneath the bridge.
‘I blow it out of the way,’ rumbled Zhukov. ‘Now I have real munitions.’
But Richard shouted, ‘No! Wait! Look. There’s someone moving in the cab. And besides,’ he emphasized, sensing that even Zhukov wasn’t going to be slowed by one man any more than by one truck, ‘anything big enough to blow the truck out of the way might bring the bridge down too. Especially if it has more missiles in it. Here’s a chance for some of us to live up to your T-shirt,’ he said to Anastasia. ‘To the front of it at least.’ And that seemed to settle things.
But he drew the line at letting her come with him. Instead, when the front of the hovercraft banged down on to the brick-hard mud of the bank, he was standing with Colonel Mako at the centre of a small contingent of his well-drilled, fearsomely armed and very impressive-looking soldiers. A point team fanned out ahead of them, running up on to any elevated sections, in case this was a trap. The colonel was clearly a strategist, thought Richard. The point team signalled the all clear and the command group strode forward. As they approached the truck, three men climbed out of the cab with their heads hanging and their hands high. Two were dressed in shorts and T-shirts, obviously from Nellie’s crew. The other wore a UN uniform and body armour. They were all staring past him at something which had clearly scared them. When Richard glanced over his shoulder, it became obvious why they had not even considered resistance — the presence of the Zubr was simply overpowering. It sat in the opening beneath the bridge like some massive crocodile, its mouth agape, lined with soldiers instead of teeth, a T80U main battle tank lurking in the dark throat of the thing instead of a tongue. It almost made Richard’s hair stand on end — and the monster was on his side!
As Mako’s soldiers disarmed and searched the frightened men, Richard went in hard with the first questions. In a moment or two he had established that there were no more of the smugglers left alive. That these three had not been part of the rape party; that the wound in one man’s shoulder had come from a ricochet. That they had panicked and driven the truck into Citematadi when the shooting had started. But that the deserted city had offered very little in the way of shelter and nothing in the way of sustenance. And no hope at all for rescue. So they had come back here where there was at least water and shelter from both sun and rain beneath the bridge. They had simply hoped that someone would come past before they starved to death. In the absence of civil authorities, Mako placed them in military detention and his men led them aboard Stalingrad, while the colonel himself prepared to climb into the cab and move the truck.