“Your father knew of this place?” Holliday said.
“And his father before him.” Limbani nodded. “For more than a hundred years our family has been to the Umufo omhloshana what Mutwakil Osman, my spy, has been to me-their only connection with the present day and the outside world. It was because of that my father became governor of Vakaga province; this part of the country was prime to be developed: roads through the jungle, talk of damming the river and even using the Kazaba Falls for hydroelectric power. ”
“The Umufo omhloshana would have been discovered and all their secrets and their legacy destroyed forever. A proud people turned to government handouts and squalor. When my father was murdered by the government I took his place. It is my sacred duty. To the people of this valley I am the Umlondolozi, the Protector.”
“Conan Doyle’s Lost World,” said Rafi.
“More like Turok, Son of Stone,” said Holliday.
“What on earth is that?” Peggy said.
“A comic book I used to read when I was a kid,” answered Holliday. “Uncle Henry used to buy them for me when I visited during the summer. You’re way too young.”
“Come,” said Limbani. “We must hurry now; the sun will set soon and the pathway down the cliffs is narrow and quite treacherous in the darkness.”
They made their descent slowly, the path no more than eight or nine feet wide at best, some pounded earth but most of the way was wide stone steps worn smooth by uncounted centuries of travelers’ feet.
“The steps were carved by the slaves of Dinga Cisse, first warrior king of Wagadou in the seventh century,” said Limbani, reading Holliday’s mind as he led the way downward. “Although the warrior kings, or ‘ghanas,’ had mined the hills in the valley for a thousand years before that.”
“What about King Solomon?” asked Peggy, walking behind Holliday in the long file down the cliff.
“The ghanas of what became Mali were eventually overthrown by the ‘mansas,’ or kings of that empire, one of whom was Sogolon Djata, or in English, King Solomon, and no relation at all to Solomon, king of the house of David. I am afraid that Christians, Jews and Muslims think history began with the Old Testament, but I can assure you, Africa’s history is a great deal older than that.”
They continued down the precarious cliff trail, which fortunately began to widen slightly. Staring down at the jungle far below them Holliday was suddenly aware that there were strange shapes in the landscape that didn’t quite seem to make sense. He also realized that it was only the setting sun that was giving the secret away, throwing hard shadows where there shouldn’t have been any. Going lower still, perhaps fifty feet from the jungle floor, he saw that it was. “That’s incredible,” he said admiringly. “You’ve got half the valley camouflaged! What are you hiding down here?”
“We adapt to the times,” said Limbani. “My father got his first doctor of medicine degree at Cambridge University. He was a member of Jasper Maskelyne’s magic circus during World War Two.”
“The man who made the city of Alexandria in Egypt and the Suez Canal disappear,” said Holliday. “He planted two thousand plywood tanks and painted entire fake armies on Salisbury Plain to throw off German reconnaisance flights just before D-day.”
“That’s right,” said Limbani. “They knew that aerial photography was an important part of protective coloration, and it’s even more important now with three dozen satellites peering down on us at various times of the day and night.”
“But why the camouflage?” Holliday asked. “What are you trying to cover up?”
“In the first place, the fact that the Umufo omhloshana exist at all. They are neither Baya, Banda nor even Kolingba’s scourge, the Yakima. If he discovered them here it would be genocide. Like most African dictators, Solomon Kolingba is a racist, in his case a racist of insane proportions. In the second place. . well, you’ll see soon enough.”
They reached the bottom of the cliff a quarter of an hour later, a steep path through scrub brush leading down to a wall of dense jungle foliage. Following the path, Holliday realized that what had appeared to be dense jungle in front of them was in fact a curtain of netting hung with strips of multicolored cloth and inter woven with twigs and branches. They pushed through a small gap in the netting and stepped into the forest beyond.
“Amazing,” said Holliday, staring. “Absolutely amazing.”
Oliver Gash sat alone at a table in the bar at the Hotel Trianon and slowly sipped his after-dinner cafe brulot, enjoying the aroma of the cinnamon stick and the bitter orange tang of the Grand Marnier. Except for Marcel Boganda, the bartender, the room was almost empty. There were two Chinese trade officials in the corner getting drunk but that was all. Oliver Gash’s appearance tended to clear most rooms he entered, but he was used to his effect on the local populace.
By now Kolingba was concentrating his attentions on the two prostitutes Gash had imported from Bangui who were willing to take their chances in bed with the three-hundred-pound dictator and his sometimes violent habits. Gash could relax for the evening, but somehow he didn’t think relaxation was in the cards for him tonight. He’d fled from Rwanda the better part of twenty years ago and he hadn’t survived that terrible place and the different jungle of Cherry Hill and the rest of south Baltimore by ignoring his intuitions and his hunches. Over the last ten days or two weeks those hunches and intuitions had set all his senses tingling and his alarm bells ringing, all banging out the same tune: Get the hell out while you can.
He slowly drank his coffee, trying to put things together in a logical progression, hoping to see something concrete take shape out of the kaleidescope of small impressions, rumors, facts and whispers that a man in his position came in contact with all the time.
It had started even before the arrival of the Canadian with the German accent; sightings of Limbani had increased and there was an air of expectation among the people, a desperate, uneven thing, the feeling you got when you saw someone die under the wheels of a bus. It didn’t take jungle drums to tell you that the natives were restless and, more important, expectant. These people were perhaps two generations from being naked savages running after their prey. He had no doubt they’d be gnawing on the bones of any ruler who showed a single sign of weakness.
He hadn’t heard from Saint-Sylvestre for more than a week now, which was worrying in itself, but he had done some investigation on his own. Archibald Ives had indeed been a mining engineer and it hadn’t taken much to backtrack from the murder site on the Sudan highway to his boarding the Pevensey, which plied the course of the Kotto River from Umm Rawq to the first cataract, effectively the border between southern Sudan and Kukuanaland. From there he’d gone deeper into the bush by dugout. If Saint-Sylvestre was right, he’d found something with enough importance to get him killed. According to the police report he’d eventually bribed the Khartoum police, for the killing was no random highway banditry; Sudanese bandits used old Mannlicher-Carcano Italian infantry rifles from the Second World War. According to the police file, the weapon used to kill Ives was a South African.50-caliber sniper rifle. The men who shot those were neither cheap nor easy to find, let alone hire, so who had done so?
The.50-caliber weapon led somehow to the appearance of Lanz, who by any indication was no arms dealer. During his time in Kukuanaland he’d made only the barest attempts to do business, preferring instead to go for long walks around the town. In Saint-Sylvestre’s opinion, Lanz was almost certainly plotting a takeover, and his own further investigations had seemed to bear that out.
On several trips to England made to open up lines of communication with large-scale drug operations there, he’d made a few private contacts who fed him regular tidbits of information about the men he was doing business with or might do business with in the future. Those contacts had only three days ago told him something of perhaps even greater importance: the appearance in London of none other than Francois Nagoupande, dressed in a British Royal Army general’s uniform. Nagoupande had been the vice governor of Vakaga province and the man who betrayed Limbani. He was also a bee in Kolingba’s bonnet. The fat dictator had a paranoid terror of Nagoupande showing up with some phantom forces of arms raised God only knew where, even though Gash had men on a watching brief on the ex-vice governor, who rarely strayed out of his compound on a huge estate in Mali. Nagoupande in a general’s uniform; was it just wishful tailoring or was something in the works? The most forceful clue to come downriver was the sinking of the Pevensey, the riverboat freight carrier destroyed by something big, like a Cessna Caravan. A question arose: Who wanted to stop the freight carrier from brokering eggs to the villages on the river in return for animal skins, native meat, fish and vegetables and occasionally a bit of panned gold or a diamond in the rough? Unless Pevensey’s Cuban expatriate captain was up to no good and bringing more than goat meat upriver.