‘No wonder the bastard wanted us out, then,’ went Phil. ‘He’s after the stone himself.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t afford to have us know anything about it. That’s why he had those two guys shot by the kangaroo court. Must be. He reckoned they’d got the big one, or knew something about it. You know how he kept shouting the same question at the second guy? I bet he was asking, “Where is it? Where is it?” He’ll be doing his nut by now.’
‘Fuck him,’ said Phil, savagely. ‘It’s too much to hope that noise just then was him running into the rebels.’
‘Not him,’ I said. ‘Not Joss. He’ll be down there digging holes all over the compound, trying to find his magic rock.’
When we drove on again, I kept thinking about the diamond. If Boisset had been working in the heart of the mine, why hadn’t he seen it when it came up out of the river? Maybe he’d been locked away in his cell at the time. And then, how had Joss found out about it? From one of the technicians we’d released, I supposed. They were the guys who would have seen it. And what had happened to them? If they’d refused to say where it had been hidden, they’d probably been fed to the crocs by now. The one fact of which I felt certain was that Joss himself wouldn’t leave the mine until he’d found the big one.
Our plan was to keep moving until first light, and then take stock of our position. But things didn’t quite work out that way. By 0430 we’d reached a dead flat area. The ground was smooth and level, and sandy to the touch, with patches of tall, dense grass scattered about. I realised we might be near the edge of what the map called the Zebra Pans, and that therefore the ground might be soft, so for a while we had a couple of guys walking ahead to test the going. Then, because it seemed firm enough, they climbed back aboard.
Trouble came without warning. Pavarotti, at the wheel of the lead pinkie, suddenly began cursing.
‘Fucking hell!’ he went. ‘Puncture… no it isn’t. We’re going down!’
He slammed the gear lever down into second and gunned the engine, but the vehicle wallowed as if it was afloat and settled on to its belly. Pav revved some more, went into reverse, gunned again, and gave up with a yell of ‘Shit!’
Twisting round, I saw the blunt bonnet of the mother wagon just behind us, also stationary. The roar of its engine instantly told me that it, too, was stuck.
‘Switch off a minute,’ I shouted. I jumped out, expecting my boots to sink in. To my surprise, the ground felt firm. But when I shone a torch at the pinkie’s wheels, I immediately saw what had happened. We’d driven on to a crust of dried-out earth, and the weight of the vehicles had taken them through it. Round the tyres liquid mud was oozing up, glistening in the torch beam.
‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘This is all we need.’
Genesis was still gunning the engine of the mother truck, which heaved and shuddered like a stranded elephant as all four wheels churned in the morass. Already our predicament was bad enough, and the mechanical scream made it intolerable. I waved my torch violently at him, shouting, ‘Switch off, for fuck’s sake!’ Thank God, Stringer, driving the second pinkie, had been far enough behind to stop and back off before he too sank into the quagmire.
Behind us the sky was already starting to lighten. Looking all round, I couldn’t make out a tree anywhere, only grass, grass, grass. Nothing to winch on to. Nothing to hide under. In every possible sense of the phrase, we’d landed in the shit. The only factor in our favour was that the ground round the vehicles was solid enough to bear human beings: we could walk about without our boots going through the crust. But the bedded vehicles were over their axles, down on their bellies.
‘Pav,’ I called. ‘I vote we wait for daylight before we start any winching. What do you reckon?’
‘Good decision,’ he answered. ‘Otherwise we could end up worse than we are.’
‘Let’s get some breakfast, then.’
Before I looked out some food, I went to check on Whinger. I found Mart with him in the back of the mother wagon, propping him half upright to make him drink some water. The right side of his head was still covered with gauze, but the other half of his face looked puffed-out and swollen. When I went, ‘How’re you doing, Whinge?’ he didn’t answer, and Mart had to fill in for him.
‘He’s going down,’ he said. ‘Unless we get him into a better environment, he’s not going to last the day.’
For a few moments I couldn’t speak. Then I took refuge in practicalities, and said loudly, ‘We’ve got to get out of this mess, first. Then we’ll see what we can do.’
I drew Pav aside, and said, ‘I know we’re wanting north. But I reckon the priority now is definitely to get old Whinge into dock.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Best if we can all go on to Msisi together then. But if we can’t, it may come down to a couple of us taking the good pinkie and leaving the rest of you here. I don’t like the idea of those turds following our trail and finding you stuck — but there it is.’
‘No sweat,’ said Pav. ‘I don’t think they’ll come anyway. But somebody can nip back a couple of kilometress and mine the track. At least that’d give us early warning. Christ, look at that.’
Straight behind us, in precisely the direction from which we’d come, the rim of the sun was coming over the horizon, a blood-red crescent sitting on the rim of a black world. As we stared, it grew rapidly into a crimson hemisphere, then into a complete ball, and our surroundings took on a ruddy glow.
A GPS check gave coordinates that tallied closely with the location shown on our good map as the eastern end of the first Zebra Pan. We reckoned the river couldn’t be more than a couple of kilometres due south, and the convent no more than fifteen downstream to the south-west.
With daylight strengthening, we recced outwards on foot and confirmed that we’d driven into the edge of the easternmost pan. The land round the stranded vehicles had obviously been flooded during the rains: although the surface was dry now, we could see it had been levelled and puddled by sheets of water. Genesis, returning from a quick sortie, reported that reeds eight or ten feet tall were growing in water a few hundred metres ahead. Behind us, in contrast, the terrain was quite different. Only fifty metres from the big wagon we found a definite demarcation line, where the bare mud ended and thick grass was established. Easy enough to see it now, but if we’d stopped half an hour earlier, and waited for dawn to break, we’d have been okay. As it was, exhaustion had blunted my judgement and let me blunder on.
All three vehicles were equipped with front-end winches. In theory the way to recover the stranded pair was to winch out the pinkie first, and then use both jeeps to pull the mother wagon out backwards. The trouble was, truck and jeep were one behind the other, in line ahead, both facing away from the pinkie on dry land. There was no way we could drive round in front, to give a pull from that direction, because the treacherous ground extended for hundreds of metres, becoming softer and softer as it approached the reeds. The only solution seemed to be to attach both pinkies’ winch cables to each other and try, by pulling at an angle, to drag the bogged one round in its own length.
So began a dire struggle. While Pav went back along our tracks to cover our backsides, the rest of us dug, heaved and sweated until we were on our knees with filth and exhaustion. The mud beneath the crust was grey-brown and glutinous. The moment we began to dig, we were covered in it from top to toe, and as the temperature mounted, we got into a hell of a state, so plastered in slime that we looked like aboriginals going through some initiation ceremony.
Progress was alarmingly slow. Once the mud was disturbed, it exercised terrific suction: when our boots went down into it, we had the devil’s own job to pull them out, and the vehicles were held as if by glue. When we linked the two winch cables together with shackles and pulled in opposite directions, trying to heave the front of the stranded pinkie round, all that happened was that the free vehicle got dragged bodily forward, with the clutches of both winches squealing and overheating. Next we tried digging so that we could get our perforated steel strips of sand-track under the wheels, but as soon as we opened a trench, water seeped into it and dissolved the mud into thick soup, leaving the tyres nothing to grip on, with the belly of the vehicle held as fast as ever.