Black Pearl

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘And in the meantime,’ said Ivan quietly, ‘while you’re looking after our main worry here, we can take the second Zubr and head straight upstream in the morning. You could have your mission finished within days. And, if Odem and his army are down here fighting with you, then there’s nothing between us and Lac Dudo – so we could get our mission completed in record time as well!’

  Decline

  But it wasn’t quite as easy as that. In spite of the care with which the plans had been drawn back in Granville Harbour, there was no way Kebila was able to move his entire command ashore swiftly enough to get his camp set up overnight. No more than Ivan and Mako could move the Russians out of their cramped quarters to fill the spaces left by Kebila’s troops. On the other hand, Richard and Robin had come packed and dressed for bush work, even if some of Robin’s underwear was more suited to bedroom work, and even though at least two items had already come ashore with Anastasia. Richard’s main interest in the long term might be the lake, but Robin’s more immediate concern – and therefore his own – was for the safety of Anastasia, her colleagues and the orphans they were guarding against the Army of Christ.

  The Mariners’ kit followed Robin’s shirt and jeans off the hovercraft pretty quickly, therefore, and they were moved into the orphanage’s cramped but comfortable guest room, to which the clothing was returned almost immediately as Anastasia dressed in her own attire. No sooner had Robin settled in than she was off, making the acquaintance of the orphanage staff and as many of the children as she could find on whom to practise her increasingly fluent Matadi. Richard only caught one distant view of her, already at the refectory’s high table, talking animatedly between mouthfuls of modest supper.

  The truth of the matter, thought Richard as he strode through the ordered chaos in the orphanage’s great square playground, was that it was going to take another full day at least to get the rest of Kebila’s men as well sorted out as Robin and he were. It was fortunate that the expanse of the orphanage’s central area opened on to fallow fields which allowed Kebila’s men to set up camp in the very area that might be most exposed to sneak attack. But erecting the tents and getting the men fed and organized was slow work, even if the Russians were catered for by the teams aboard the hovercraft.

  And the situation was exacerbated by the fact that Kebila was as good as his word, thought Richard, as he went past the inner perimeter, chewing on the last of a Kyinkyinga – a meat and vegetable kebab dusted with peanut powder then wrapped in flat bread – which he had grabbed in passing when it became clear that he and Robin were not going to share their usual dinner a deux. The first squad of men who had come into the open area at the heart of the orphanage in the early darkness did not stop to help set up camp. They were fed first – and then focused on unpacking arms and equipment and preparing to go out into the jungle immediately. Anastasia, Ado and Esan agreed to guide them to the point where they had felt themselves being secretly observed. And, for no reason other than that he was on hand and at a loose end, Richard decided that he would go with them as well.

  The patrol was led by one of Kebila’s most trusted men, Sergeant Tchaba. Tchaba knew and respected Anastasia, Ado and Esan. He knew Richard also – and so was willing to take him along. But the sergeant blamed Richard for the fact that he had a false foot – though, to be fair, Richard had done no more than borrow the sergeant’s lucky boots at an unlucky time – and their relationship was one of professional respect rather than mutual admiration, therefore.

  ‘You can come, Captain Mariner,’ growled Tchaba. ‘But you stay low, remain quiet and do what I tell you. And you don’t get a gun.’

  ‘That’s fine, Sergeant,’ said Richard equably. ‘If anything violent happens I’ll get my head down and keep out of your way.’

  ‘It’s all right, Richard,’ whispered Anastasia. ‘Ado, Esan and I will look after you.’ The three of them held up the guns they had come into the compound carrying. Richard recognized them. He had given them to Anastasia some time ago in the face of the earlier attack by the murderous Army of Christ the Infant, under the now deceased General Moses Nlong. It was Anastasia’s shot, indeed, which had dispatched the general in the end.

  ‘Ado and Esan, you know where we’re going and you know the jungle better than the rest of us. You take point,’ rasped Tchaba. He handed each member of the patrol night-vision goggles and checked everyone’s weapon. ‘These goggles are dual function,’ he explained quietly as he did so. ‘Setting one – here – is enhanced light. It works by picking up what light there is in the environment – and there is almost always some – and amplifying it. Setting two is simple infrared. It picks up and enhances heat. Setting one gives you wide vision in green. Setting two gives you specific ranges of vision in red. We use setting one for general work. Setting two if we suspect heat sources nearby. It’s particularly useful for tracking enemies in the jungle. Or any animals large enough to pose a threat. OK?’ They all nodded, though the sergeant had obviously only been briefing the newcomers rather than his experienced squad. They put on the goggles. They tried both settings. They gave a general thumbs-up for Ready. ‘Lead on, Ado,’ said Tchaba at last.

  Anastasia fell in beside Richard and they all headed off into the darkness. The goggles took a bit of getting used to, as did the requirement for absolute silence. But the hand signals were pretty standard and the vocabulary limited. Stop. Go. Right. Left. Down. Up. That just about covered it, thought Richard. Other than that, there was just the discomfort of the goggles on his face and the way they seemed to channel the perspiration down his cheeks like tears. Anastasia’s proximity had a strange effect upon him. As they crept into the weird, night-vision world, in the heart of the tight phalanx of glowing figures, he began to replay that odd conversation he had overheard as he approached Max’s room in search of restorative vodka for the warlike woman at his side.

  ‘You know very well what the problem is!’ Ivan’s words echoed. ‘Simian Artillery. Or, more particularly, the lead singer, Boris whatshisname!’

  ‘He left his brains on the ceiling,’ Max had answered almost incoherently. ‘That’s all there is to him! He was lucky we didn’t just stake him out and pile his guts on his chest so he could watch himself die in the old way …’

  It was the phrase, ‘He left his brains on the ceiling …’ It seemed to Richard that there was a problem with the grammar there. A conundrum that took him back to the half-forgotten Latin lessons of his schooldays. For Russian, like Latin, had a range of cases from which words acquired subtleties of meaning as well as of ending and pronunciation. The main grammatical cases through which nouns declined were Nominative, Accusative, Genitive and Dative. In Latin as well as in Russian, they all had the same basic functions. Nominative for the subject of a sentence. Accusative for the object.

  ‘The nominative cat sat on the accusative mat,’ he had learned to chant while he still wore short trousers. Genitive to show possession: ‘The genitive cat’s bottom was on the mat,’ his Latin teacher used to joke.

  But this Russian grammar lesson was anything but funny. He – the Russian ‘oh’, was in the Nominative. It was the subject of the sentence. He left his brains. That was the start of the problem. ‘His brains …’ ‘Yuvan mosk …’Somehow the second his ‘yuvan’ had become moved into the Genitive. And Richard’s understanding of the Genitive case in Russian was that it described the possession of someone other than the subject of the sentence. So the he and the his could not refer to the same person, as they could in English. There had to be two people in that sentence. And, now he came to think of it, Russian was a reflexive language. Shouldn’t it be his own brains?

  So, parsing the sentence like his Latin master had taught him to do, the meaning seemed to be something that the bellicose Julius Caesar or the equally gory Homer would have approved of: Man One had left Man Two’s brains on the ceiling. Man Two, the possessor of the brains, seemed to be Boris.

  Was it, therefore, possible that the ‘he’ who
was the subject of the strange first sentence wasn’t Boris at all – the possessor of the brains on the ceiling – but someone else? A murderer, in fact, that both Max and Ivan knew had caused Boris’s brains to be placed on the ceiling. An assassin who had shot the unfortunate singer through the head.

  But was all this semantic supposition an irrelevancy? An indulgence? A simple waste of time and mental effort? Perhaps it was – except for the damage the whole incident had done to Anastasia, who in the end had blamed herself for the deaths of her brother and her lover. Who had, indeed, discovered both corpses. No wonder she had gone off the rails. But, in Boris’s case at least, had she been pushed off the rails? By Ivan and her father?

  For the next section of the patrol, therefore, Richard followed the greeny-black shapes around him silently but automatically, his mind wandering in and out of immediacy into increasingly lurid speculation. Like Anastasia, he had always assumed that Simian Artillery’s lead singer had chosen to end his own life. But now he wasn’t quite so certain. There were one or two questions he would like to ask. To ask Ivan, certainly. To ask Max, if he could get him in the right frame of mind. Perhaps even to ask Anastasia herself …

  Richard’s thoughts were interrupted when Ado held up her hand forcefully and the whole patrol came to a silent stop. She motioned forward with one finger and Esan joined her. Then she motioned again with a second finger and Sergeant Tchaba limped soundlessly up beside them. For a moment or two they all remained even more motionless than the wind-stirred trees whose restless rustling had more than covered the sounds of their careful movements so far. Then there was a more general direction to move forward.

  Tchaba signalled them all to raise their night-vision goggles, then he produced a torch which he shone around with a carefully shaded beam. Richard saw at once that Ado had discovered a carefully prepared bivouac – one that had been used on more than one occasion by the look of things, by more than one secret observer. Not so much a point man as a forward outpost. And if whoever had made and used the bivouac was with the Army of Christ the Infant, then that made it an extremely sinister discovery.

  The torch went out at once. The night goggles came down over their eyes once more. Everyone stayed still until their vision readjusted and the green world reassumed its ghostly forms around them. Then Tchaba gave a series of silent signals and his patrol fanned out – except for Anastasia and Richard. Richard saw the sergeant’s point. Gifted amateur he might be – competent soldier he was not. And where he went, Anastasia went; where he stayed, she stayed. They both hunkered down silently, side by side, until Richard’s knees started complaining, then he knelt on the soft, cool ground. But Richard was never one to waste his time. He looked around the bivouac with his night goggles in position one, straining to discern anything unusual in the green maze beneath his knees. Then he switched over to the infrared.

  At once the picture changed – and more than simply in its colour. Anastasia burned at his side like a molten figurine beginning to sink into the cold, dark ground. Cool trees soared, slightly warmer than the ground, the heat of the afternoon still being transmitted through their trunks by faintly glowing sap. Sun-warmed leaves became things of gold and red in the kind of autumn even New England could only dream of. Almost dazzled, Richard looked down at the cool darkness of the ground again. The warmth of the patrol’s footprints was fading in parallel pairs out into the gently glowing bush. One set showed only one print and Richard had a ridiculous image of someone hopping away towards the river – until he remembered Sergeant Tchaba’s prosthetic foot.

  But then, nearer at hand there was something else; proof that they were near the place from where Anastasia had thought her girls were being spied on. The floor of the jungle had been disturbed. It was a different colour to the surrounding area. Someone had been digging here. Richard also began to burrow with his fingers and it was only when they touched something hairy and prickly that he jerked back, suddenly fearful of spiders and scorpions. After a moment, when nothing moved, he reached back into the hole and pulled out the thing he had discovered. It was a fetish. A ju-ju. A magic manikin, like a voodoo doll from Haiti. It was crudely made but he recognized it – it was Ngoboi, deity of the dark places. The Poro god he associated most closely with the Army of Christ the Infant.

  Therapy

  Colonel Kebila frowned silently at the manikin of Ngoboi standing on the briefing table of his newly erected tent. Richard and Anastasia stood with Sergeant Tchaba, waiting to hear his thoughts. The night wind that had stirred the jungle at the river’s edge flapped the canvas walls. The bustle outside was quietening down sufficiently for Richard to hear the steady tread of the inner and outer security guards. Always out of synch – one nearby and the other further away.

  ‘This certainly makes our suppositions look stronger,’ said Kebila at last. ‘What are your thoughts, Captain?’

  ‘It was a spy point, all right,’ said Richard decisively. ‘Someone has been keeping a close eye on the orphanage. No matter who they were, that has to be of concern. But as things stand, I would suggest that manikin proved it was the Army of Christ. They were either waiting for Odem to come up with his forces, or they were advising him to wait. But he won’t wait long. Odem has scores to settle here. It was where he was defeated and nearly killed. Where his own personal Ngoboi was faced down and shown to be a fake. If he wishes to use magic to re-establish his power then the orphanage is the place his ju-ju proved to be the weakest – and it is here he must come to restore his reputation.’

  Richard looked around the earnest faces in the tent, then carried on. ‘But of course when he left here, wounded and defeated, the orphanage was a lonely and unprotected place at the edge of the jungle. Now his spies are telling him it’s at the edge of a township. Facilities have improved. Communications upgraded. He will likely have more of a fight on his hands if he comes in half-cocked. But on the other hand, there’s much more that’s worth taking, apart from the restoration of his reputation and power. And his revenge on Anastasia and the rest. So he hesitates – maybe tools up, looks for reinforcements.

  ‘But before he can move, we arrive. That really puts the cat among the pigeons. The spy point is deserted; his men must have pulled back. They’ll only have done that on his orders. Because now he really needs to think. It was one Zubr that did for him last time. Stalingrad, in fact. Now there are two. That’s got to make him stop and consider his options. At the very least he has to find out why the Zubrs are here and who – what – they brought with them.’

  ‘But, as you say, he’s in a bind …’ purred Kebila.

  ‘Between a rock and a hard place,’ agreed Richard. ‘What sort of a general claims Ngoboi is his personal god – and then daren’t test him out? I’d double the guards, Colonel. And consider putting out one or two forward posts in the farmland; perhaps even in the jungle to keep an eye on the river. Even with us in place he has to hit the orphanage somehow. Sometime. Soon. If he’s even got half a chance then he’ll have to come to us before we go after him.’

  ‘And we don’t know how he’s armed this time,’ added Anastasia. ‘Last time it was technicals with heavy duty Russian machine guns. If he’s come across the river now then he must have boats as well this time around. If he’s got mortars or missiles into the bargain, a couple of Zubrs might just look like fish in a barrel to him – just sitting there waiting for his guys to use as target practice.’

  ‘Right,’ said Kebila. ‘Sergeant Tchaba, double the guards and set up a river watch, then come back here for a further briefing. And Captain, tell Senior Lieutenant Yagula and Colonel Mako I want to see them. And Mr Asov as well.’

  Anastasia followed him. Her presence seemed to slow him down. Something in his subconscious probably prompted him to ease back on the quick march. Which, given the way their conversation went, was apt enough. Probably even Freudian. As they both seemed to be heading in the general direction of Ivan and Max – even if she was going to stop at the orphanage before
he got to the Zubrs – his earlier thoughts abruptly came flooding back to him. ‘Anastasia,’ he asked, his voice only just rising above the eerie moaning of the night wind in the tent-rigging all around them. ‘Can you tell me anything about how Boris died?’

  ‘My Boris? Boris Chirkoff? Boris from Simian Artillery?’ she asked, surprisingly equably. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘It was something I heard your father and Ivan discussing,’ he said. ‘I wondered what actually went on that night. Don’t tell me if it’s too upsetting.’

  ‘No, I can handle it. You and Robin paid the psychiatrist’s bills that got me over it, after all. And your very expensive shrink said it would do me good to talk it all through – especially with people I respect. What do you want to know?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘Just talk it through.’

  ‘OK. It’ll be just like another visit to the shrink. Perhaps it’ll do me some good. Especially as I’ve been having nightmares lately – about Ngoboi and Boris. I guess it’s because my father’s in the country. And now Ivan … Well, we were all in the hotel. Simian Artillery and I don’t know how many girls. All of the guys had a steady girl, except Fydor Novotkin on the lead guitar. I think he had the hots for me. But I was with Boris, you know? So, we were all in this hotel. The Petrovka just near Red Square. Simian Artillery had given a concert there on the stage in front of the Kremlin. It was a disaster. They got booed off and then they all got bottled. Fydor was terrible that night. But oddly enough, he was the only one the bottles didn’t hit, though he was usually a brilliant guitar and a good leader. He held the band together for six months or so afterwards. After Boris … But then he vanished and it all just fell apart. I heard he’d come into some money but I was too far gone to care by then.