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‘Then they must have been expecting something like this,’ Ann observed. Harry gave a minuscule nod of agreement.

‘Let’s get on,’ said Robert. ‘The day is wasting and we don’t want to be out here in the dark.’

Half an hour later, at the second village, the same thing. This time Harry only stopped for long enough to ascertain that the truck’s tracks went on eastwards with no sign of having stopped.

‘They knew,’ Harry said. ‘Whatever message came, however it came, told them to go to the third village. But half of them had relatives in those first two. Why didn’t they even stop?’ He hit the steering wheel with his clenched fist as though it knew the answer but would not tell him.

‘What’s that up ahead?’ asked Robert suddenly. ‘Smoke?’

‘You’ve got good eyes. No. It’s birds. Vultures. Judging from the way they’re flying, they look pretty full to me. Miss Journalist, I hope you got some spare film for that camera after you shot all those zebra and wildebeest and lion. I think we may get you some pictures here to make the papers in London and New York sit up.’

‘What sort of pictures?’ asked Ann, though she knew the answer well enough.

‘The kind they like best,’ spat the game warden bitterly. ‘Dead niggers.’

‘Robert?’ said Ann uncertainly. She was unsure about this suddenly. Unsure about Harry Parkinson, about the situation he was hurling them into. The local representative of the UNHCR reached up and tugged the big rifle out of its retaining clips above the windshield.

‘Remington,’ he growled. ‘I’d rather have an automatic.’

‘I’d rather be driving a Chieftain tank. You use what you’ve got.’

‘Shells?’

‘In the glove compartment. Give me a box for the handguns.’

* * *

The third village crouched against a backdrop of forest, as though seeking some kind of shelter from the tall, dark trees. Rising and falling, first invisibly against the foliage and then etched clearly against the evening sky, a column of darkness wavered. Like Robert, she would at first have assumed that it was smoke, but Harry’s words caused the scales to fall from her eyes and the seeming clouds resolved themselves into individual black shapes. She was obscurely offended. The place was near desert, at least to her eye; how could it carry the weight of so many scavengers? The size of the herds behind her was answer enough. Something here had been powerful enough to call all the vultures in the area under Parkinson’s Law to assemble in this tiny village they were approaching with increasing caution.

‘Can you see anything?’ asked Robert when his busy fingers had finished checking and loading the Remington.

‘Vermin. Scavengers. No people. It’s very busy up there though.’

‘You could hide an army in those trees.’ Robert’s voice was cool.

‘Yes, you could, but then the jackals and hyenas wouldn’t be running in and out so happily.’

Craning to see over the square shoulders in front of her, Ann suddenly realised that the ground all around the village seemed to be seething. Through the open window at Robert’s side there suddenly came a sound like open warfare between a dog’s home and a cattery, and a stench which turned her stomach.

‘We’re going to have to go in hard,’ said Harry. ‘Hang on.’ He put his right foot on the floor and straightened his arms, wedging his shoulders against the back of his seat. Robert dropped the Remington onto his lap and grabbed the dashboard. Ann held on to the back of Robert’s seat with all the strength at her command.

The Land Rover hurtled up the beaten earth track towards the main break in the thorn bush wall round the little village of huts. But suddenly Ann could see that there were many breaks in the stockade. Unlike the neat, picture-postcard defences round the two deserted villages, here the circle of high-piled thorns was ruptured in dozens of places and gaped widely. Through the breaks, animals were slinking and scuttling. Harry’s words had warned her that there would be hyenas and jackals. She had not expected to see foxes, what looked like wolves; was that a lion? Surely not a leopard… They hit a pothole and for a moment it was difficult to see anything clearly at all.

Harry punched the horn and started yelling at the top of his lungs. The creatures leaped away from whatever they were doing, incredible numbers of them scattering back out like muddy blood escaping through gaping wounds. The light was just beginning to thicken now. The sun was behind them. Shadows hid much, but there were enough areas of ruddy light to show that not all the escaping animals were leaving empty-handed.

They exploded through the main gate and immediately Harry was swearing and swerving. The effect was painful and deeply unnerving, for he did not lower his voice at all and his wordless yelling suddenly became obscene invective screamed madly at the top of his lungs. Ann all but broke her ribs on the back of Robert’s seat and was lucky not to knock herself out against the back of his head.

The Land Rover jumped and bucked and for a moment she thought it was going to roll, but Harry held it upright apparently by main force until it came to a stop. Had she supposed the drama of their entrance would have scared off all the animals, she was wrong. The ground around them still seethed. Vultures, some with wingspans in excess of two metres, hopped and flapped, too gorged to fly. Hyenas skulked towards shadows and jackals snarled. Three lean lions stood their ground until Harry leaned out of his window and opened fire. He seemed to be aiming high; the animals flinched and turned away at the sound his gun was making, but none seemed to have been hit. Then Robert kicked open his door and the Remington joined in. The deep boom of its report was like an echo of his basso profundo shouting. A flapping, hopping vulture exploded into a mist of blood, flesh and feathers. A hyena’s head vanished and its body jumped high into the air, tumbling acrobatically. A jackal sprang open as though it had swallowed a live grenade.

All the animals that could move vanished then and a kind of quiet came. The three Remington shots echoed distantly. The vultures flapped and squawked. The barking, spitting, hissing of the frustrated scavengers whispered from the edge of the forest like a faraway tempest. In the village there was relative stillness.

Except for the scuttling, humming whisper of the insect world at work. The presence of the larger creatures had blinded Ann to the fact that everywhere there were flies. Big, black, bloated flies filled the rank air, as though giving body to the fetid stench. Ann pulled an end of her headscarf over her mouth and nose.

‘Watch it when you get out, Harry,’ Robert grated. ‘I’ve never seen so many nasty-looking ants. You have soldier ants here like we do in the Amazon?’

Harry didn’t answer. As though in a daze he sat, filling magazines for his automatic pistols, looking away to his right, at the centre of the village. At the tall pile of black corpses there. Then he slammed a magazine in place and pushed his door open. He hesitated, then reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a pair of heavy-duty rubber gloves. ‘Stay here,’ he ordered. ‘Both of you.’

He stepped down delicately and moved off. Robert stepped down too and pushed his door closed; then he took a couple of steps and leant across the bonnet of the Land Rover, covering Harry with the Remington.

Ann seemed to jump awake then, though she was in fact deep in shock. She shuffled across to the side of the vehicle which overlooked the village and the slowly moving game warden and she raised her camera. Framing what she could see through the camera viewfinder brought the overpowering enormity into focus somehow. It chopped the general horror up into a series of sharply focused images. The central pile of bodies could have been a hillock of slowly congealing tar, and the scattered individuals just shadows of various shapes and sizes. But the camera made a sort of sense of it. A visual sense of what was unutterably, obscenely senseless in every other regard.