Black Pearl

by Peter Tonkin

  Commando

  At the first echoing report, Richard leaped off the bed. Even in the pitch black of an unfamiliar room he reached unerringly for his clothes and stepped into his trousers at once, zipping up and cinching his belt as he felt around on the floorboards with his toes, searching for his boots. For a moment, he regretted returning the night-vision goggles to Tchaba. He could really have used them now. But then there was the flare of a match behind him as Robin prepared to light the lamp. The shadows danced weirdly across the floor but he was able to see his boots with his underwear beside them before darkness returned, accompanied by some rather unladylike language. And, more distantly, a second fusillade of shots. He reached down, grabbed the boots and sat on the edge of the bed to pull them on. Then he crossed to the door, pulling on his shirt as he went. There was no time for anything else. If ever there was a moment to go commando, he thought wryly, this was it.

  As Richard ran down the dimly lit corridor, a nun in dishabille jerked back into her bedroom two doors down, and he remembered he was still half naked. He glanced through Anastasia’s open door as he sprinted past. Her room seemed empty. Her bed was undisturbed. An almost full bottle of Stoli Elit stood on a bedside table. Then he was at the door into the compound. Like the bedroom door, this was open. It seemed Anastasia was moving even faster than he was. But when he stepped out into the vast, noisy midnight, she was nowhere to be seen. He paused, his mind racing. He needed to orientate himself.

  Another burst of firing echoed across the orphanage. In the nearby town, there were lights coming on in the windows. Under the rattle of fire, he could now hear the revving of engines. And out here he could discriminate between the thudding of heavier machine guns and the rattle of assault rifles. The fields must be full of technicals – flatbed Toyota Hilux four by fours with machine guns mounted on the back. Everything from Shipunov gattlings to Bofors forty-millimetre light anti-aircraft guns. African armoured divisions.

  Kebila would be sending the T80 main battle tanks against them and hoping they didn’t have too many tank-killing rockets. In the last engagement Richard had been involved with the Army of Christ had used Milan anti-tank missiles. If they had many more of those, the T80s would be in trouble. Then the penny dropped. The screaming he had heard could well have been the sound made by the treads of the tanks moving forward. He looked down at the hard earth of the compound and there indeed were the telltale caterpillar tracks.

  These thoughts and impressions were all-but instantaneous. Richard was convinced the attack across the fields at Kebila’s most heavily guarded positions would be a feint in any case. In a heartbeat he was in motion again, sprinting down towards the Zubrs. Since he had split away from Ivan and Mako, there had been a change in their disposition – a welcome one. The hovercraft were no longer facing upslope and inland. Sometime during his conversation with Robin, the skirts had been inflated and the Zubrs had been turned right round. Now they crouched with their great trios of turbofans facing inwards, their rear access ramps down, and their bows – not to mention all the weaponry mounted upon them – facing out into the river. Even so, they were sitting ducks. Richard sprinted towards the nearest one, just in time to meet half of the Spetsnaz men coming out at the run. Ivan was leading them. He had a field radio on the side of his head and was clearly updating Captain Zhukov on what was happening on the ground. Like Tchaba’s patrol, they were all wearing night-vision goggles.

  ‘Tell Zhukov he’s got to get moving,’ said Richard, joining Ivan. ‘If they have boats they’ll be coming downriver with all the missiles in their armoury!’

  ‘I agree,’ snapped Ivan. ‘You hear, Captain? We’re clear. Close up and inflate. Get moving as fast as you can.’

  ‘In the meantime,’ Richard panted, ‘we need to protect his flank if we can. What do your men have on them?’

  ‘Assault rifles. Grenade launchers. The stuff you saw.’

  ‘What’s the heaviest you have?’

  Both men were shouting now, as Stalingrad’s rear ramp screamed up into position and the huge black skirts began to inflate as it did so. ‘We have a couple of RPG twenty-eight MANPADS – the RMG variants,’ Ivan bellowed.

  Richard paused for an instant, calculating. Man-portable air defence systems were all very well but unless they could be guided they were of limited use against waterborne targets. The RMG variant, however, was designed to go anti-personnel and anti-tank as well as anti-aircraft. It would do very well indeed. ‘Just what the doctor ordered,’ he decided, in action once more. ‘Hopefully not the witch doctor – as you could find yourselves shooting at Ngoboi himself. Now, we need to locate our positions down by the shore, right at the edge of the jungle there, where we can set up a decent field of fire upriver. I’d suggest you get Mako’s men to back us up as quickly as possible. And if they have any MANPADS, they should bring them along with them. Until Stalingrad and Volgograd are up and out, with their weapons zeroed and readied with their countermeasures on line, we’re all the protection they have.’

  While the two men were talking and Ivan was relaying relevant sections to Captains Zhukov and Maina – and to Colonel Mako – Richard hurried them down to the edge of the river. On their left the jungle gathered itself into a thickening, almost triangular heave of blackness. But at the edge of the bank itself there was a low cliff, for they were at the back of a meander. And, as though extending the tall jungle on the crest of the bank, a jumble of freshwater mangroves reached out for twelve metres or more. Against the breadth of the slow, black water, the outreach of the mangroves looked minuscule. But on a more human scale, they were as wide as one half of a dual carriageway road.

  There was still no moon, but the stars were hanging low and fat in the indigo velvet sky, giving a surprising amount of pearlescent light. Enough to show that the broad reach of the river was clear of everything except for some floating islands of water hyacinth. Richard shook his head, hardly able to believe it was little more than four hours since he was following Sergeant Tchaba wearing the night-vision goggles.

  Having taken Richard’s points on board, Ivan now assumed command and plunged into the cover of the trees, staying as close to the bank itself as possible, looking for secure positions where he could place small groups of men armed with MANPADS to cover the river and protect the Zubrs from waterborne attacks. Almost immediately Richard began to fall behind, increasingly blinded by the shadows. He moved more and more slowly and carefully, deeply regretting the loss of his night-vision goggles. And, because he was not a member of Ivan’s team, he didn’t have the communications earpiece either.

  But then again, perhaps it was because he was blind and not distracted that he heard the whispering grumble of outboards running on almost silent first. He crouched, forgetting that he was going commando, and almost made a eunuch of himself after all. He looked around through streaming eyes, but the tail-end of Ivan’s men were vanishing into the black forest shadows. He looked downstream towards the distant brightness of the slipway where the Zubrs were beginning to stir like sleepy dinosaurs. This was the moment of greatest danger. If Ivan was still looking for secure emplacements and calculating fields of fire, then whatever Richard could hear might well slip past him.

  Richard crouched there, turning his head from side to side as though his ears could work like sonar dishes and locate the precise source of the sound. Was it coming from nearby or further away? Richard knew how a Zodiac – a sixteen-seater rigid-hulled inflatable boat or RIB – could slip along a tunnel of clear water under the overhang of mangroves. Odem would know about such things. Ivan wouldn’t. On the other hand, the floating islands of water hyacinth would also furnish excellent cover. Richard wiped his eyes, trying to calculate whether the hyacinth was tall enough to offer realistic cover. Ivan would probably work out that the floating plants were a potential danger. But Richard was still worried about the tunnel beneath the mangroves. That was the sort of thing Mako would be briefing them about in the future – which was no use if
they needed to know about it now.

  Richard moved down to the very edge of the river bank and lay on his belly, easing himself out as far as he could, using the mangroves to support him. But he stood no real chance of penetrating the roof of the tunnel that lay so tantalizingly close. Still, the position he managed to achieve allowed him to listen to the sounds whispering along the channel immediately below the tangle of stems. And it was here that the quiet grumbling of the outboards seemed to be coming from. Burning with frustration, he pulled himself up and scrabbled back until he was kneeling on solid ground.

  Abruptly, he was surrounded by legs dressed in cargo pants. Monstrous three-eyed faces stared down at him like something out of a science fiction movie. Then a huge black hand reached down, lifting the three-pointed headset free. ‘Hi, Captain Mariner,’ rumbled Mako. ‘What’s happening?’ As briefly as he could, Richard explained. But even as he did so, the nearest of the water hyacinth rafts erupted into flame as one of Ivan’s men sent a missile out at it.

  ‘Under the mangroves, hunh?’ growled Mako, paying no attention to the spectacular distraction and hunkering down beside Richard. He produced a long, articulated stick with a mini camera on the end of it. ‘Look in this.’ He handed Richard what looked like an iPad. He flicked a switch. Richard saw a light-enhanced version of what the camera on the end of the stick could see. With no further comment, Mako pushed the stick down through the mangroves, turning the camera round until Richard could see a tunnel of woven branches. And there – disturbingly close within it – a narrow boat packed with men in a range of bush uniforms. In the bow, crouching low, but unmistakable in his raffia costume and mask, was the god of the dark places, Ngoboi.

  ‘They’re there!’ spat Richard. ‘Ngoboi …’

  But as he did so, the second raft of water hyacinth seemed to simply vanish and a sizeable Zodiac inflatable appeared. This too was full of men. And, set up on the bow in place of the evil deity, was a tripod. ‘Night glasses!’ rapped Richard, and one of Mako’s men handed him a pair. He slammed them to his eyes and fixed his gaze on the bow of the Zodiac. He focused until he could see a sleek-looking missile sitting on the tripod, with a guidance system rigged beside it. ‘If they launch that it’ll do quite a bit of damage. Are you in contact with Ivan?’

  ‘Separate systems. Vladimir! Bring up the RPG! The rest of you fall back. He needs twenty metres clearance to be safe!’

  ‘Warn Zhukov then,’ hissed Richard. ‘He can try to get his countermeasures on line while Vladimir sets up.’ Mako saw the wisdom in that. Just as everyone else saw the wisdom in his orders and cleared twenty metres behind the kneeling soldier.

  It was the fact that the men in the Zodiac were equally careful that saved them, thought Richard a few moments later. The inflatable was suddenly rocking wildly as the Army of Christ men cleared out from the missile’s exhaust path. The laser guidance system was thrown off. The operator hesitated.

  Ivan must have seen something then, because one of his MANPADS came streaking out of the jungle half a kilometre further upstream, just at the very moment that Vladimir loosed off his RPG. The men on the Zodiac saw the rocket-propelled grenades heading their way and threw themselves into the water. But the man with the launcher fired it anyway then all three weapons came together in one unholy meeting. Thirty kilograms of TNT equivalent all went up together with a flash that blew the Zodiac and its crew to atoms.

  But no sooner was that threat neutralized than Richard was on his stomach again, probing through the mangroves with Mako’s camera stick, his eyes focused on the square of the hand-held screen in front of him. The sinister, mangrove-walled tunnel was empty. The men he had seen had vanished.

  Ngoboi was gone.

  Immanuel

  Richard sat back on his haunches, his mind racing. Where could they have gone?

  He turned to Mako. ‘Colonel, can you see anything moving out on the water, just beyond the edge of the vegetation?’ Mako eased into a better position, swivelled his alien, almost insect-like head, and focused the night-vision goggles on the outer edge of the mangroves.

  ‘Nothing,’ he rumbled.

  Richard hissed with frustration, looking back into the vast blackness of the jungle behind him. You could hide an army in there, if you could avoid the night-vision goggles, he thought bitterly. Ngoboi had come ashore. And there was only one likely target important enough to tempt the angry god. ‘Colonel,’ he grated, handing back the camera stick and the handset, ‘we’ve got to get back to the orphanage as quickly as we can.’ He paused, his mind whirling. ‘Except for one patrol. Leave a patrol here to search along the bankside. There’s a way down to the river through the mangroves and the undergrowth. It’ll be hidden – camouflaged. But it’ll be there. And there’ll almost certainly be a boat tied up and someone guarding it.’ Then he turned and began to work his way back.

  Mako stayed crouched in position for a few more moments, giving orders and passing others along, then he rose, motioned to his men and followed Richard. He caught up after a while, his movements speeded by the night-vision goggles, and he fell in at Richard’s shoulder. ‘What’s your thinking on this?’ he rumbled, almost silently.

  ‘Odem has to hit you before you get settled and ready. Before Kebila can call up air support and anything else he has planned for the morning. But he really has only one target at this moment: Anastasia. If Ngoboi doesn’t feed her heart to Odem, then he’s not half the god he’s supposed to be. And as an instrument of terror and control, he’s a busted flush. So he’s sent his technicals in across the fields and his Zodiacs down along the river – but they’re something of a distraction. He’s sneaking a little commando unit undercover to grab Anastasia and anyone else he can get hold of. The more hearts the better.’

  ‘This Ngoboi sounds like a hungry son of a bitch to me,’ rumbled Mako.

  ‘And then some. Given his head, he’s insatiable. And that’s the point. With Ngoboi behind him Odem’s in total control. No one knows who’s next on Ngoboi’s list – except for Odem himself, of course. It’s a guarantee of sheer, naked power, for as long as the army believe in the magic.’

  ‘Getting his little team in is one thing,’ rumbled Mako, returning to the logistics of the situation. ‘Getting them out again is another – especially if he wants to take prisoners with him.’

  ‘He’ll have thought of that. We keep underestimating him. Odem’s no fool. Quite the opposite, in fact.’

  Richard’s conclusion seemed more than fully borne out as the pair of them led Mako’s Russian contingent out into the orphanage’s central compound. What had been a bustling encampment was now a deserted ghost town of flapping tents and moaning guy-ropes. The slipways were empty, Stalingrad and Volgograd out on the wide black water, their searchlights probing the shadows on the stream and along the banks. The tanks, troops and transports were all out in the fields chasing Odem’s technicals. Or, at Richard’s request, in the jungle along the riverside, watching out for waterborne attacks.

  Apart from the restlessness of the wind in the tents, the whole place was eerily silent. The buildings of the orphanage were all in darkness and apparently deserted. That made Richard’s blood run cold – in spite of the fact that the wind must be thirty Celsius or warmer. Apart from Anastasia and Robin there should be several nuns, a priest, an imam and a couple of helpers. And the better part of a hundred kids – not counting the twenty or so that made up the army of Amazons that Anastasia, Esan and Ado were apparently training up. That was a lot of people to be sitting silently in the darkness in the middle of a fire fight. He motioned to Mako, and the whole contingent stopped and hunkered down in the shadow of the largest of the tents – the unit refectory tent. ‘Pass the word for any Vympel, Alpha and OMON men,’ he whispered, peeping round the square canvas side at the dark, silent buildings.

  Half-a-dozen burly Russians answered by moving silently forward.

  ‘Any of you know about Beslan?’ he asked in his lumpy Russian. They all nodde
d. That figured, he thought. They were all probably too young to have been involved in the notorious school siege of September 2004 themselves, but stories like that get passed down units like family lore. They were the ones likely to have any experience of what this could turn into, he thought grimly. At the very least they’d know what not to do.

  ‘Zubarov,’ one of them introduced himself, taking the lead. ‘We know. We lost seven of the Alpha team and nine Vympel at Beslan. And nearly four hundred hostages, shot, blown up, burned and buried. We’re not looking at another Beslan here, are we?’ He shuddered.

  ‘We almost certainly have between ten and a dozen hostiles in charge of the orphanage,’ whispered Richard. ‘Possibly a hundred and thirty hostages. They haven’t had time to rig explosives and there’s no central holding area unless they get them all into the orphanage’s refectory building. The enemy’s main objective is to get several of them out and away. It’ll only become a hostage situation if there’s a stand-off.’

  ‘So our best bet is to stand back,’ said Zubarov. ‘Move away, keep a watch and hope they haven’t seen us. This tent makes good cover, thank God.’

  ‘Let them think they’re getting away with it,’ said Richard. ‘Then hit them when they come out with whoever they kidnap. That’ll do as a game plan for now. But …’

  ‘But?’ whispered Mako and Zubarov together.

  ‘They’re being led by a god and a commander, both of whom have to make a statement here. They want to eat the hearts of whoever they take. And probably the rest of them into the bargain. They may not want to leave anyone else alive in the meantime.’

  ‘That could complicate things,’ said Mako. ‘Immanuel. God with us …’

  The theological discussion was interrupted by an inhuman howl. A long, tortured scream that seemed to echo from the dark depths of the orphanage.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Richard. ‘Let’s go …’