Black Pearl

by Peter Tonkin

  As the sun set and the sudden twilight swept across the mountain slopes, only the big Mil helicopters, still up in the sunshine, continued working. The last of the Russian prisoners were herded lethargically towards their gulag. And as they staggered wearily across the central compound past the listless figure of the crucified Mako, so the Army of Christ moved out of the jungle and gathered, watching through the razor wire. The evening breeze came whispering through the canopy overhead, spreading its restless sibilance down into the bushes, setting the ferns dancing as though some terrible life was in them. Ngoboi came whirling out of the shadows and into the compound behind the exhausted men. Two acolytes danced with him, keeping the raffia of his costume in place so that nothing of the man beneath the costume, of the face behind the mask, could be revealed. Led by Odem himself, the Army of Christ began to whistle and stamp in rhythm as Ngoboi leaped and capered, drawing out the performance, with his matchet whirling in the thickening shadows around him. The dark god whirled round Mako, the essence of primitive evil, embodying everything inhuman and unforgiving in the dark heart of the jungle.

  At last, Ngoboi arrived at the climax of his dance. He froze, mid-caper, immediately in front of Mako, just at the point where the last of the light made it possible still for everyone to see what he was about to do. Odem held up his hands, the twilight’s last gleaming reflected in his wraparound sunglasses. The silence rolled like thunder over the place. Ngoboi placed the flat of his matchet under Mako’s chin and raised the colonel’s face until their eyes could meet. Then the tall god turned his hideously masked face towards Mako’s remaining left-hand finger and thumb. He raised his matchet and tensed for the blow.

  But it never came, for there was suddenly half a metre of cold steel sticking out of the raffia costume covering Ngoboi’s shoulder blades. He staggered back, and Mako stepped forward, the bonds falling away. His left hand joined his right hand on the grip of the matchet Richard had given him – and which was now rammed up under Ngoboi’s sternum, through his heart and out of his back. The dead god sagged, held erect only by Mako’s grip. His head lolled. The mask fell off. The face of a mere mortal was revealed, eyes bugged and mouth wide, frozen forever in the rictus of utter astonishment.

  The acolytes sprang forward, screaming with outrage, matchets raised. The whip-crack of two rifle shots rang almost simultaneously out of the shadows and their heads jerked back in unison, spraying brain-matter. Odem howled something, snatching off his sunglasses to look around, his expression stunned. He looked at the guards up in the watch towers and started gesturing wildly. Even as he did so, two streaks of light soared out of the shadows behind him and the tops of the two skeletal towers exploded into flame. He ran round the end of the compound, waving his hands at the two attack helicopters whose cannons and rockets faced the prison compound in such naked threat. There was enough light to see movement in the cockpits as the pilots began to react.

  But then, with an overwhelming rumble somewhere between a thunder crack and an avalanche, the dam blew up.

  Dam

  Richard had chosen to use the code word ‘Gibson’ after the leader of RAF Bomber Command’s 617 Squadron. On the 16 May 1943, three months before his twenty-fifth birthday, Squadron Leader Guy Penrose Gibson, VC, DSO, DFC, led his nineteen Lancaster bombers on the raid code-named Chastise that earned them the name The Dambusters. Half an hour before the explosion, Richard had allowed himself to be shoved down from the prison compound towards the dam by a couple of irate guards and an engineer wearing a Han Wuhan overall. No one on the bridge had given them a second look as they walked into the hut from where the demolition system was controlled. There was one other Han Wuhan operative there, completing the final installation of the controls designed to take the last wall down in careful sequence. At first, when he was addressed in a gentle rumble of Mandarin, the young engineer thought it must be the other Han Wuhan operative who was talking. But then, in a double surprise of almost disorientating power, he realized that it was the huge Russian. And he registered what he was saying. ‘My friends and I are taking control of this place. If you do what you are told then you might survive …’

  The young man turned to the other Han Wuhan man and realized with a sickening lurch that the overall he was looking at belonged to the man he had last seen falling to his death over the edge of the dam. That, more than the giant’s threats, utterly unnerved him. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Lock the door. Explain to anyone trying to gain entry that you cannot be disturbed. Then show me exactly how this system works.’

  The explosive deaths of the watch towers was the signal for Oshodi to turn off the jammer. He had sent the coded message to Sergeant Tchaba over the one open channel while Richard was still getting his disguise battered into his face. The death of the jammer opened the channel for the battlefield headsets. ‘GIBSON!’ bellowed Richard’s voice. And the dam went up. The Chinese engineers had placed their explosives in a carefully calculated series which they hoped would bring the structure down in sequence, level by level by level, past the foot of the dam wall itself and into the natural rock barrier that had contained the lake in the first place. Emptying out all of the water, but under some kind of control. They had never considered using the destruction of the dam as a weapon, which Richard, of course, had. On the warning shout of ‘GIBSON!’ therefore, the last of Dr Koizumi’s containment barriers burst. And so did the basalt sill on which it had been built. What had been a wall became a waterfall with incredible rapidity, tearing a hole in the mountainside that was deeper than the bed of Lac Dudo, which proceeded to flow out as fast as the laws of physics allowed.

  As planned, the two attack helicopters felt the results of Richard’s explosive action first. The water beneath their floats began to thunder down into the black river’s channel with incredible force, overtaking the tumbling blocks of rock and masonry in their eagerness to be free. Millions of gallons were suddenly fighting to get through the huge breach. From a standing start, currents leaped into being that raced towards the gaping fissure at incredible speed. The pilot of the WZ10 nearest the dam stopped worrying about the cannon and the rockets. He started the motor instead, hoping to lift off before his machine went over the rapidly-approaching edge. But the second chopper was sucked towards him too quickly. As the rotors began to spin, they became entangled and the pair of them went over the edge like a shooting star, wrapped together as their fuel exploded, setting off their armaments.

  Ivan saw the WZ10s vanish into a cloud of fire that seemed to fall off the edge of the world. ‘Faster,’ he bellowed down the length of the Zodiac. They were so nearly there. The shoreline looked almost close enough to touch, illuminated as it was by the brightly burning watch towers that had been the beacons to guide him across the lake. But the seeming closeness was an illusion. The promise of safety was little more than a bitterly ironic joke. Already he could feel the tug of the falling water, sense that the whole lake surface was sloping increasingly steeply down to his left. The twin beacons of the blazing towers were sliding to his right with mounting rapidity. And when he looked uphill to his right he could see a wall of water hyacinth coming down on him out of the shadows. His whole body went cold. ‘Richard!’ he yelled into his headset. ‘We’re in deep trouble here! Can anyone help?’

  ‘I see you!’ called Richard, who was running back up from the dam towards the camp. ‘Esan! Plan B!’

  What in heaven’s name was Plan B? wondered Ivan, looking around desperately. The last he had seen of Esan was when he and Ado had taken the VDV men back on to hyacinth duty. But then a great beam of light struck down from the sky, and the roaring suck of the water beneath him was compounded by a battering downdraught from above. And he understood. Richard had sent the VDV men on to hyacinth duty because he had some kind of a plan to get them up into the Mils. It had to be VDV men because they were all trained to fly. And the choppers were Russian Mils, the first of which was hovering above him now, lowering the ho
ok that it had used to clear the lake. ‘Get the hook,’ came Esan’s voice over his headset. ‘We’ll pull you ashore.’

  ‘How the hell did you get aboard?’ he asked as he caught it.

  ‘Up the ropes,’ answered Esan, as though it was obvious. ‘They weren’t expecting it. They weren’t paying much attention. And they weren’t armed.’

  The Mil eased backwards as the hook slid under the rope round the inflatable’s side, jerking it out of the grip of the terrible current and over towards the red-lit shore. Ivan staggered, taking firmer hold. He risked a glance around. The men in the RIB behind him were all hanging on for dear life, Max and Bala Ngama seemingly hugging each other with terror. Then he looked left, and understood their fear, for the Zodiac seemed to be sitting on the edge of the world. The sides of the shattered dam stood high above his head. He looked to his right and shouted with fear himself. The hyacinth was rearing into the bright beam of the Mil’s searchlight. It was going to hit them before they could come ashore. ‘HANG ON!’ he bellowed, tearing his throat. Then the water hyacinth hit them. The Mil jerked upwards and for a wild moment the Zodiac seemed to take flight. Then it thumped on to the surface of the hyacinth, still skidding shorewards as the chopper pulled it relentlessly towards the burning watch towers. The propellers caught and the motor stalled. The solid keel of the Zodiac bumped across the heaving, sliding mat of vegetation. But the stalled propellers became tangled in the corded stems of the plant almost immediately. So that, just as the RIB reached the shore, the whole thing flipped over, spewing the passengers out into the mud.

  Ivan scrambled through the lumpy slime, fighting to catch his breath in the face of the overwhelming stench of fish. It took him an instant to realize that he was plunging through Dr Koizumi’s oyster beds. But then he was free and staggering up the black-mud slope to the prison compound. The Mil hovered overhead, its searchlight illuminating the crowd of Russians there grouped around the towering figure of Colonel Mako. He saw that Mako’s command were drawn up into a defensive square, their guns facing out through the razor wire into the jungle. It was only when he managed to stagger up to the outer line that he realized there was no sign of Richard, Anastasia or her Amazons.

  Richard and Anastasia were running side by side, with the Amazons grouped around them like a pack of hunting wolves. They had come out of the jungle now and were working their way along the lake shore, with the searchlights from the second Mil sweeping ahead of them and the guttering glow of the watch towers behind. They were in the cane forest and the tall spears of bamboo all around them were festooned with dripping clumps of water hyacinth that had been dropped here while the Mils were clearing the lake. Ngoboi might be dead. The Army of Christ the Infant might have melted into the jungle. But nothing was settled as far as Anastasia was concerned. Odem was still out there. He was, in fact, somewhere just in front of them, running for his life.

  The moment the dam went up he was on the shore waving at the pilots of the two attack helicopters, trying to arrange a deluge of thirty-millimetre cannon fire to sweep through the Russian camp. In spite of the fact that he had been focused on destroying Ngoboi, Mako had seen him there. Had seen him freeze as Richard’s explosion tore the dam and the rock sill beneath it apart. Mako had watched as the self-promoted colonel ran back towards his stunned soldiers, clearly yelling orders to open fire. But the snipers who had killed Ngoboi’s acolytes and the soldiers who had launched the MANPAD missiles were already busy. A fusillade of rifle fire came in out of the jungle that the Army of Christ normally assumed was its own territory. Caught in a perfect killing field around the exposed razor wire, Odem’s soldiers were in no position to listen to him – even had they felt any inclination to do so after the spectacular demise of his own private god.

  Mako saw the self-styled colonel stop, look wildly about, and run into the fringe of the jungle. He was on the point of sending some of his own men after the renegade when Richard and Anastasia arrived.

  ‘He has to be heading for the highway,’ gasped Richard as he and Anastasia ran, the Amazons coalescing around them. ‘If he can get through the belt of jungle here, then he’ll be on the lava flow from Karisoke that the Congo Librans are using as a road. It’s his fastest way out. Or it would be, except that I warned Tchaba to tell Kebila about it. I’m surprised the Benin La Bas air force hasn’t been up here yet.’

  But, ‘There!’ she called, and Richard saw a movement in the cane forest ahead. The Amazons went after him, swinging out around him, racing to cut him off from the last strip of jungle that might allow him access to the makeshift highway. The frightened man saw their movement, for his course veered towards the shore of the lake itself. The pack of women swung west as well, driving him into the open even as Richard and Anastasia burst on to the lake shore. But the shoreline stretched out into the blackness, and where there had been water there was now only lake bed – a wilderness of black slime stretching away to the far shore where the army of Congo Libre stood hesitant, rudderless and leaderless; out of their depth and far away from home. And the engineers and executives from Han Wuhan stood beside them, equally at a loss and far further away from home.

  And that was the moment the lake bed chose to adjust to the sudden absence of thousands of tons of water that had been pressing down on it until just now. The basalt bowl which had been forced down for aeons on the great bubble of carbon dioxide trapped beneath it moved fractionally now that the weight of the water was gone. The pressure, building sufficiently to be forcing the gas out in bursts and clouds strong enough to kill the Chinese engineer and gas Ivan’s men aboard the RIB, exploded into freedom now. And, just as had happened twenty years or so ago, a great bubble of deadly vapour exploded up out of the mud and went rolling downhill into the long-deserted graveyard of Cite La Bas. Everyone on the down-slope bank was swept away with it. The fittest lived for four minutes, choking as their lungs filled with pollution. Everyone else was dead long before that. Some of the deadly carbon dioxide rolled back into the bowl of the empty lake bed, filling it invisibly for a while before it followed the water out through the shattered dam and down the black river valley.

  But none of this was obvious from the upslope shore where Odem came running full-tilt out of the cane forest, finally threw away his precious AK-74 and went slithering down the bank into the black mud of the empty lake bed. Had there been water there he might have turned to fight like a cornered rat, even though his matchet was long gone – discarded in the jungle somewhere together with his beret and his wraparound sunglasses. But the lake bed stretched away before him, seemingly offering yet another chance of escape. And so he blundered on. Calling instructions to the Mil, Richard ran down the slippery black silt slope just behind Anastasia. The Amazons were in an arc on either side of them now, all of them focused on the floundering apparition at the heart of the searchlight beam. Richard slowed, his nose twitching, watching the black spectre heaving and falling, apparently trapped by magical toils of the glittering mud he was wading through. He caught at the stem of his headset. ‘STOP!’ he bellowed. ‘Nastia! HALT!’ On his word, the girls froze. ‘Fall back,’ he called. ‘There’s deadly gas here.’

  Odem already knew that. His whole face was on fire. His eyes and nose were streaming. His adenoids and throat were alight. He could feel the strength being sapped out of his body as the black mud wrapped itself around him as though it was made of nets. He grasped at the mud as it twined itself around him and pulled against great ropes of blackness while his consciousness reeled. He felt himself sinking into the suffocating, icy ooze. It was every one of his nightmares rolled into one overwhelming dreadfulness. He would have screamed at the horror of it but he could not catch his breath to do so. Richard watched as Odem fought, shaking his head in amazement at the way the mud seemed to gather itself into a great tangle of vines festooned with huge black grapes. And then he realized. It looked like nets because it was nets. Dr Koizumi had used nets to hold the oysters in place. The whole bed of the oyster
farm was made of webs of indestructible nets to which the oysters were attached. Odem was getting himself tangled in them and the more he struggled, the deeper he sank, so that it was a race between the black mud and the caustic gas as to which one would choke the life out of him first. ‘Nastia!’ he called. ‘Here’s what I want you to do …’

  Odem was dying. The acrid gas was burning the insides of his lungs now and the more he choked in the more he felt as though he was drowning. How could the whole of his chest be on fire inside while his entire body was freezing in icy slime on the outside? Had he been capable of rational thought he might have dwelt on the irony, but his brain was spinning into primal, howling panic. Then, suddenly – utterly unexpectedly – someone threw themselves across the mud towards him. A huge man with a battered and bloodied face reached out towards him. He grasped the massive hands and his grip was returned. ‘NOW!’ bellowed the giant and the pair of them were slowly dragged free of the clinging mud and back towards the cool, sweet, life-giving air of the shore.