Harry wrestled the bucking vehicle round in as tight an arc as it would manage and they thundered off up the dry river bed, bounding from parched rut to smooth river boulder in a storm of protesting tyres and complaining suspension. Something solid battered its way along the vehicle’s underside and Robert yelled, ‘Watch your axles!’
The second shell erupted in the dry mud exactly behind them. Harry swung the screaming vehicle into the first river bend and out of the tank’s direct line of sight. ‘They’ll come after us,’ yelled Ann. ‘They have to!’ She scrabbled in the rubbish on the back seat for her camera. She was a reporter. She would die reporting this.
‘Either that or they have friends they can send!’ yelled Robert. ‘Harry, can you get this thing up out of here?’
‘Half a mile,’ yelled Harry. ‘There’s another old elephant track. Tight squeeze. Too narrow for tanks.’
The river bed immediately on their left exploded into a column of earth. The force made the Land Rover leap sideways. A burning wind ripped the canvas with the ease of a leopard’s claws and threw Ann across the back seat. Robert’s window cracked and struggled to come in — only the fact that it was half open saved him. The force whirled by him and the windscreen trembled.
‘Lobbed it over on spec., canny buggers,’ yelled Harry impenetrably. ‘Look back behind us, would you, love? They hit my rearview with that if nothing else.
Ann pulled herself breathlessly round in her seat, held on tight with one hand only, tried to put the smell of burned hair out of her mind, squinted through the viewfinder of the camera and concentrated on the deceptively peaceful scene behind.
The wide bed of the river lay clear and quiet under the full, low moon with the forest standing in Stygian clouds on either side, like smoke that had rolled into place on either bank and then, magically, stopped. There was a distant promise of flat veldt with steep-sided hillocks in the V behind the overlap of forested banks in die distance, and above the shimmering hillocks shone extravagant pearl-bright stars.
The tank swung into view, sitting like a steel toad in the middle of the river bed, grinding forwards along their tracks. She pressed the button, praying that there was light enough. It clicked and whirred twice before she spoke.
‘Here it comes!’ she yelled. Harry swung the wheel hard left.
‘What I would like to do …’ he bellowed at the top of his voice. The wheels hit a log about the same size as an adult crocodile and the Land Rover’s bonnet slammed up into the air and down again. Harry wrestled with the steering until the shoulder seam of his bush jacket split open with the strain. ‘What I would like to do is lead this bugger up to the bank that’s holding the lake in place. Trick him into putting a shell through that!’
The log the size of a crocodile, still dancing from their passage, vanished in another column of black power. This one had a bright yellow and white heart, though. And, for the first time, a voice. A flat bellow which drowned out the click and whir of the camera photographing it.
‘The lake’d come down here like a tidal wave and drown the buggers if I could do that!’
Harry had the wheel on hard right lock now and the Land Rover was screaming at full speed for the precipitous black bank.
‘Could you do that?’ yelled Ann hopefully.
‘Not in a thousand years. Pure bloody fantasy, I’m afraid.’
The barrel of the tank’s gun was pointing directly at them; then, as it was obvious they would have to sheer away from the high bank side, it swung one degree to the left. Ann framed it and pushed the button, holding it down as the shutter clicked and the motor whirred. A puff of smoke belched out of it, glowing with a greenish luminescence which was actually very pretty indeed. ‘Incoming!’ yelled Ann, and wondered inconsequentially where she had heard the word used like that. She pulled her eye away from the camera and looked back over her shoulder between the men in the front.
The black bank parted in front of them and the Land Rover’s square bonnet lifted again — lifted and kept on lifting. Ann hadn’t thought the engine could make any more noise but suddenly Harry was kicking at the pedals and shifting the gears. The huge motor screamed and howled. Ann was thrown backwards by the vehicle’s wild movement up the sheer slope and then forwards by the explosion of the bank almost beneath their left rear wheel. She bashed herself in the face with the camera. Dust and chunks of earth roared past, collected the canvas roofing and tore it away like tissue. She found herself suddenly looking up at open sky where there had been dusty cloth an instant earlier. There was a strange tearing sensation at her breast. She registered it without any understanding of what it might mean. Then she was jolted back down onto the seat to discover that the metal backrest was twisted and hot. The air smelt of burning leather and the seat was covered in clods of dried mud which burned her through her jeans. She rocked forwards and the tearing sensation returned. Her whole chest moved strangely and for a terrifying instant she thought she must have been wounded after all. But then the Rover jolted again and her breasts bounced and she realised she had only burst the catches on her sport bra and broken her straps.
It was just dawning on her how lucky she had been when the tank’s turret slammed into view again, gun pointing directly up the short, narrow track towards them. She framed it and hit the button, screaming a warning as she did so.
‘HARRY!’ It was all she could think of to say, but it was enough. He swung the wheel to the right and crashed into the thorn scrub. With tough-branched bushes and saplings screaming and clawing along the sides and bottom of the vehicle like an army of wildcats being crushed beneath its wheels, the battered old Rover forged its own track through the forest while the tank’s last shell set fire to the dry trees behind them.
‘That’s sorted him,’ Harry yelled as they burst out onto the old elephant track they had followed earlier. With the engine still racing wildly, Harry turned the Rover towards the ruined village with its slaughtered inhabitants. ‘He’ll never get back round now. We’re OK for the moment.’
He rearranged the gears and the Land Rover settled into her accustomed steady rumble, chewing up the trackway at the fastest possible speed. Harry hit the lights. Tree trunks appeared dazzlingly, like the legs of tall elephants standing still among the scrub.
‘Is that a good idea?’ asked Robert. ‘That T-80 may have friends.’
‘Will certainly have friends. There were no tank tracks around the village. There’s some kind of guerrilla squad out here somewhere and I reckon the tank is backing them up.’
‘Where did it come from?’ asked Ann, who was just beginning to shake with shock again.
‘Congo Libre,’ said both the men at once. Then Harry continued, ‘Has to be. No tank tracks this side of the river that I’ve seen.’
‘But why?’ Ann asked, and for the first time her question included the village as well as everything else. ‘Why is all this horror going on?’
‘It’s a message,’ said Harry. ‘They want to drive the people off the land.’
‘But why?’
Robert turned round. ‘You know why,’ he said. ‘You’re just not thinking clearly. They want the population on the move. The N’Kuru people starving and drought-stricken, moving down to the coast looking for help. But all they’ll find there is Kyoga roadblocks run by Nimrod Chala’s state police and Moses M’Diid’s tank regiments. The N’Kuru will explode. It’ll be civil war.’
‘But what will they fight with?’ cried Ann. ‘They haven’t any weapons!’
‘With sticks and stones,’ said Robert wearily, ‘until the Lions arrive. Where do you think all the men from the villages were? They’re in Congo Libre being trained to fight the Kyoga, being armed with Kalashnikovs and die odd T-64 tank, I’d guess. They’ll come in and the real slaughter will begin. It’ll be just another local African war unless the UN gets fully involved — and why should they? If they try now and it doesn’t work, why shouldn’t they just wash their hands and walk away? Then Mau will be just another bloody Senegal, another Angola, another Sudan, Rwanda or Somalia, except the war won’t last nearly as long. After a while the Congo Libre troops will come in and clean up with their brand new T-80 main battle tanks and their battle-hardened troops who specialise in putting six bullets into women and children before they hit the ground.’