Charles shifted in his chair. His brown-black eyes swept round the table, reading the expressions there. ‘Two for and two against,’ he said and four heads nodded. ‘I have the casting vote then, and I vote to put it to a full board. If you can persuade the duly appointed representatives of our bankers and most of all our insurers—’
The phone rang and the secretary quickly crossed to answer it. Silence settled on the long room, a silence emphasised by the quiet of the footsteps and the conversations in the street outside. Like the centre of Belfast, the centre of London was ringed with steel against the IRA now and there was little traffic allowed.
The secretary turned, her hand automatically covering the mouthpiece of die phone so that their deliberations remained private. ‘It’s the secretariat upstairs,’ she said quietly. ‘A fax has just arrived for Captain Richard Mariner. They’ll bring it down when it’s finished printing out.’
‘What is it? Any idea?’ asked Richard.
‘Yes, sir. According to the title page, it’s the draft contract for the hire of six supertankers and it’s apparently being sent directly from the office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations in New York.’
Chapter Eight
Ann Cable ran across her suite in the Mawanga Hilton, tearing off her clothes as she went. The buttons of her bush jacket ripped free of the buttonholes and those of her shirt burst loose to rattle against the wall. She paused only to get rid of her desert boots and rip her shorts down, then she was in motion again, heading towards the bathroom and the blessed promise of the shower.
The air conditioning in the whole hotel was down again, so even with the big fan turning up above her head, the air was as thick and hot as boiling oil. Although the shutters were closed against the afternoon sun, it glowed round their edges as though each one was a grill full on. There was no relief from the blistering heat, inside or out. She threw a sock across the room and it landed in an explosion of coarse red dust.
As she strode past the long mirror, she glanced automatically across at it, catching a glimpse of herself in a bar of sunlight, every curve and hollow of her covered in that same red dust as though she had first-degree burns. The whole of her long body felt as though it was infested with crawling things — things which scuttled restlessly over her olive skin and nested in her groin and under her arms, biting her mercilessly there. She tore her flimsy brassiere away and supported herself against the frame of the open door as she hopped on one leg to rid herself of her dust-caked white cotton pants. The tile of the bathroom floor was cool beneath her hot feet but this only served to emphasise the agonised discomfort of the rest of her.
She was actually groaning with expectation as she entered the tall cubicle, her need too great to allow her to bother with minor details like closing the shower door. Her concentration as she used both hands to turn on the cold tap was that of an addict injecting a drug and her gasp of relief as the first cold spray hit her upper chest was hoarse and guttural. She swept her hands up over her ribs and cradled her breasts in cool pools cupped in her palms until her nipples tensed with the cold. For an instant more she stood beneath the numbing blast, then she turned, mouth open and eyes closed, to let it pound against the back of her neck and slide like grains of ice across the breadth of her shoulders and down the length of her spine. She arched her long back ecstatically until the needles of cold beat through her thick, dark hair. But even this was not enough. She turned again, reaching up to pull the shower’s handset off the wall, then she ran the freezing power of the water quickly down her body until she could aim it directly up between her legs until coolness at last began to come. And with it came her self-control. Her left hand flew out and smashed against the tap, bloodying her knuckles as she turned the water off.
Then she was on her knees in the disappearing pools of water, swearing out loud, sobbing with anger and frustration, almost all of it aimed at herself and her Western, white-skinned weakness.
She had become so wildly over-heated out in the bush, interviewing local tribesmen and women who were dying in their thousands because of the drought. During the last few, unforgivably self-indulgent moments she had used enough water to keep a village baby alive for a month.
She sat back on the cool porcelain and slid across the shower stall until she could curl up in the corner with her back against the tiled wall, and while she waited for the prickly heat to return, she sucked her bleeding knuckles and she thought. She thought about this place where she was trapped, watching a tragedy and waiting for a war.
The state of Mau lay between Guinea and Gabon, north of Zaire on the west coat of Africa. At the back ends of the Bights of Biafra and Benin in the Gulf of Guinea as they had featured in her old school atlas in the days when Africa had seemed a romantic place to her. Now it looked very different. Now a country like Mau, a city like Mawanga just looked like the crippled, dangerous offspring of uncaring, abusive parents. Just like so many other states on the west coast; like so many in Africa as a whole.
Mau had been formed — malformed from the very beginning — by volcanic activity soon after the birth of the continent which would one day become Africa. At some time far back in pre-history, the rocky plains which would, become this dark continent split. One block of land was thrust up while the one beside it fell. For hundreds of kilometres in from what would one day become the west coast, a tectonic cliff thrust up. As the years passed into centuries and millennia and the continents drifted apart, so the water of the young Atlantic came to the foot of the cliff and then withdrew to run north/south at right angles to it.
At the top of the cliff grew a thick, lush jungle which swept northwards down the back of an incline into the forests of what would later become Guinea and the mountains of Cameroon. This jungle was supported by the weight of the rain which was carried in die moist winds that moved along the northern edge of the equator and was made to fall by the sudden upthrust of the cliff. But the jungle itself could not contain the rain and so a river was born which ran, in common with its brothers the Shangha, Ubangi and Zaire, south and west. Over the cliff edge came the great River Mau to thunder down two hundred metres sheer. At die foot of the cliff, the lie of the land turned the flow of water due west at once to run along the foot of the escarpment until it was gulped in by the greedy ocean more than five hundred kilometres distant. But the great flow of the Mau brought all sorts of silt and detritus and this formed a delta over the years, thrusting the coast away from the cliff foot into a flat alluvial plain. No matter how wide the plain became, it seemed the flow of the river was always enough to keep the centre of it clear so that a pair of sandy horns thrust out, like the tusks of the lowland elephants which wandered the green thorn country at the foot of the cliffs. But in fact there was more to it than that. The power of that first tectonic heave had been such that it had split the continental shelf. Although the plain and the sheltering harbour horns reached out, the bottom of Mawanga Bay reached down nearly a thousand metres and not even the mighty River Mau could fill it.
The N’Kuru tribe lived on the plain by the river at the escarpment foot from the dawn of the age of man. They were a tall people, who soon learned to organise themselves into loose confederations of villages and to keep, and trade, the cattle of the grasslands. They hunted little, mostly to protect their villages and half-wild cattle from the marauding herds of elephant and antelope, and the lions and cheetahs which roamed and hunted on the green pastures with their outcrops of baobab trees and thorn scrub. The N’Kuru took great delight in the bones and antlers, the skins, teeth and ivory their expeditions brought back home. Their hunting weapon was the long spear. When they made war they used intricately carved clubs fanged with lions’ claws, and the ox-hide shield. It was rare that they warred among themselves, for they had other enemies close by.