‘That about sums it up,’ said Aziz.
Dr Dyal nodded in agreement. There was the slightest of smiles lifting the corners of her lips; she was impressed with the accuracy of Richard’s breakdown of the contract, especially as it had been delivered from memory.
‘You are aware that it is more than a hundred kilometres long.’
‘We have Dr Ross’s detailed report,’ answered Aziz.
‘Fifteen kilometres wide.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that it is currently about nine hundred metres deep.’
‘As I say, we have the report…’
‘Well, I cannot accept the contract without saying that I personally feel there is nowhere on the African coast where you will be able to get it ashore. Or even near the shore. Not near enough to do any good, anyway.’
This time it was Dr Dyal who spoke, and her voice had lost that laugh. ‘No, Captain Mariner,’ she said seriously, ‘there I must disagree with you. We have a feasibility study which suggests that there is just one place where we could get something that large into a position where it could do some good. And it so happens that this place needs it the most at the moment.’ She rose, and Richard automatically rose with her.
‘Now that we have finished our coffee and our preliminary chat, I’m sure you’d like to freshen up,’ she said. ‘And then I’d like you to meet the Mau Club.’
Richard shook the water off his hands then thought again, cupped them, filled them with water and dashed the glorious coolness up into his face, running his hands up over his forehead and back into his hair. He straightened and looked at himself in the mirror. Five minutes and he would be back on mainline. He stooped and filled his hands again.
He knew about the Congo Club in the sixties, that group of men in the United Nations who had overseen their involvement, in the terrible trouble there. He hadn’t realised they still had clubs thirty years later. Perhaps the name had been dusted off for the occasion.
But Mau! Why hadn’t he thought of Mau? Because the harbour at Mawanga had been more or less closed since that terrible business of the assassination of Julius Karanga nearly ten years ago. God in heaven, he thought, feeling old, nearly ten years ago. It seemed like yesterday.
Lost in thought, he scrubbed his cheeks dry and reached into his jacket pocket for a comb. He dismissed the memory of Dr Karanga’s death and turned his mind to the practicalities. The harbour at Mawanga had no bottom. It was an abyssal valley between seven and ten miles wide from memory — an old one if he was thinking in miles — contained between two horns of sandy silt. It would need some engineering work — maybe some serious engineering work — but if anywhere was feasible, Mawanga was. And, he suddenly realised, pausing in his combing to grin as he did so, if he was going to Mawanga, then he wouldn’t have to cross the equator. That thought somehow added considerably to his confidence about this enterprise. Yes, Mau was the most practical place to take the iceberg Manhattan to.
But why did they want it there so badly?
The Mau Club sat round the big oval table in the Secretary-General’s conference room further along the 38th floor. Dr Dyal and Mr Aziz occupied the head of the table, clearly Chair and Deputy. Richard sat opposite them at the foot, the guest of honour perhaps. The rest of the Club sat down the sides between them, four figures, two a side. Dr Gunther Sepulchre, the Belgian ‘expert’ on the area, was just finishing his analysis of the historical background.
‘So, since the assassination, the country has effectively been in turmoil. All Dr Karanga’s outstanding political, social and economic work has come undone and anarchy looms. Without water, the country will have slipped into civil war by next summer, I am certain. And if that happens, unless we become directly involved, there will be an invasion. Mawanga is too rich a prize for several other nearby states to resist.’
Dr Dyal nodded once, decisively. ‘Thank you, Dr Sepulchre. Most succinct. General Cord?’
General Warren Cord, US Army (Rtd), familiar from television and documentary footage of his part in Desert Storm and a dozen lesser peacekeeping campaigns, ran his broad hand over the white stubble of his regulation crew cut. ‘Well, Dr Dyal,’ he drawled, ‘I’d have to agree with Dr Sepulchre’s breakdown of the current status. There are a lot of folks out there who want to get at Mawanga. It’s the best harbour on the west coast. Not only that. It’s got the remains of all the infrastructure you would expect from what used to be a major business centre. Wouldn’t take all that much to get it up and running. Back to being — what did they used to call it? — the Cape Town of the north. And I suspect Professor Kroll here will bear me out when I say that outside South Africa, Mau has the potential to be about the richest country in Africa. I’m speaking about the mineral deposits, of course, but I would also reckon the grassland to be worth a great deal if it can be farmed again. Yeah. Unless we take tight hold on this one really quickly it’ll make Somalia and Rwanda look like a picnic.’
‘Can you be more specific, General?’
‘You want comparisons? Material estimates? Comparisons — worse than ten Somalias, worse than ten Bosnias. Cost you almost as much as World War Two, especially if the Angolans or the Congolese come in. Not a lot we could do to stop them either, unless we started sending major air cover — that open country’s just heaven sent for battle tanks and they got plenty there. Especially just across the border in Congo Libre. More than ever since the Russian republics started selling off their equipment to the highest bidder. Men and materiel — now, let me see. Not counting aircraft carriers, you’d need—’
‘No, thank you, General, I think you’ve made the picture clear enough for the time being. Professor Kroll.’
Professor Inga Kroll looked more like a dumpy hausfrau than an economics genius. Which was one of the reasons she was working here instead of at the Bundesbank in Bonn. But she sounded every bit as authoritative as General Cord.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The general is correct. In Mawanga the banking systems and the Bourse are still in place. It would be very easy to bring the country back on line financially. And when one considers that it was largely the work of the terrorist groups like the Lions which stopped the production of the mineral and agricultural wealth needed to support such powerful financial dealing, then you will see that whoever can either enlist or negate these people has the opportunity to reawaken the country financially very quickly indeed. You are familiar with the story of Sleeping Beauty? Yes? Mau just needs a handsome prince to kiss her and she will awake. And we are not the only people to be aware of this, I think. It is as the general says. There are people who understand economics all over Africa these days.’
‘And people who understand strategy,’ broke in the final speaker as though she could no longer contain herself. Alone among the Club members she was not content to sit and talk. No sooner was she speaking than she had torn herself up out of her seat and was pacing round the table, every lithe movement speaking of impatience and frustration. ‘You’ve got to move people. It’s all to win or all to lose and you have no time to sit around speechifying. Warren’s right: those borders in the bush were drawn by old guys in Brussels with pencils on paper. There’s nothing there but the grasslands and maybe a couple of baobab trees and maybe an acacia or a thorn or two and that’s not going to stop a squadron of battle tanks. And if you get tanks onto the farmland then the irrigation system will be shot to hell and even if the rains come back it’ll take the better part of a decade to get the farms and communes up and running again. I mean, it’s all still there, every ditch and channel. You’ve seen the reports from Bob Gardiner of UNHCR and the others who’ve actually been out in the bush to look for themselves. Even after all these years, the whole system is there even if the river isn’t any more. But it’s old and it needs work or it will all turn into dust like the rest of Mau is doing. And it needs more than the World Health people or Oxfam, for Christ’s sake. It needs something major and it needs it now. It’s my field of specialisation and you know I know what I’m talking about or I wouldn’t be in your Club. But you’ve only got a few months, or maybe only a few weeks. Then it’ll all be gone and you’ll have a political and environmental disaster on your hands. And you’ll be stuck in there just like the general says. The peacekeeping force you’ll have to send to get things back under control will cost you an arm and a leg — and I’ve got Kyoga blood, remember, so I know what I’m talking about — and then you’ll need a permanent police force there to keep everyone from each other’s throats like you’ve got for the rest of recorded time in Bosnia and Somalia and God knows where else, and in the meantime, quite apart from your men and materiel — with or without aircraft carriers — you’re going to have to feed five million N’Kuru in the bush and another two and a half million Kyoga in the cities and up on the escarpment, in the mines, the police and the army. If you can get their guns away from them, of course, and stop them slaughtering your aid workers and stealing all the supplies for their own people!’