The War of Immensities

by Barry Klemm

  “We know that. We have a camera crew on the plane. You can continue all the way.”

  She smiled. The man looked pleased at his own efficiency.

  “Then fine. What’s holding us up?”

  *

  All along the southern edge of the mighty Congo River, a vast flotilla had gathered comprising vessels of every kind. There were the huge river ferries looking fearfully top-heavy, and a number of very decrepit wooden tourist boats. There were fishing boats, private boats, row boats and canoes. Anything that could float for miles around was gathered there, compliments of Brian Carrick who had toiled through the tedium of contacting every operator on the whole river system and offering them twice the normal rate. Even police boats and military boats had been turned to the task, amphibians and a gun boat that undoubtably survived from European rule. The presidential barge was there, and a paddle steamer that seemed to have sailed right out of Mark Twain.

  Several pontoon jetties had been organised and now onto these flocked Andromeda’s legions, making their way to whatever boat was most convenient, and when each was full it pulled away from the pontoons to allow the next vessel to be filled. At this point, the opposite bank of the river was only just visible in the distance, and it had been agreed that the boats wait to travel in convoy for they would tow the pontoons with them —loaded with people—since there was a similar lack of landing facilities on the other side. For the sake of organisation and to appease local officialdom, it had been decided to avoid using any major docks and towns as part of the operation, for they were overcrowded places, shanty towns mostly, and the huge influx people would create more chaos than their meagre docking facilities would solve. More pontoons were on the way and could be expected to be in place by the time the flotilla returned to for their next consignment of humanity, and then they too would be towed across, increasing the landing stage. Even with such maximised organisation, the transportation of the entire group was expected to take several days.

  On the far side was mostly a gigantic swamp and the location had been chosen because it was the only bit of dry ground in the region, and just a mile inland from the landing place there was an airstrip which Maynard had commandeered. Here the C130s and other cargo aircraft—mainly DC-3s and similar vintage types from local charter operators, and Caribous and Chinooks provided by the USAF, would be there to immediately begin ferrying the people to Lake Chad. While the large aircraft could make the distance directly, arrangements had been made to refuel the smaller en route.

  There was a small white launch that had been gladly provided by friends of the president and it was here that Andromeda positioned herself. Maynard was with her, liaising by radio with his men who directed the loading procedures. The only other occupants of the launch was a local helmsman, and twenty children chosen from the flock as a reward for their bravery on the long march.

  “Position me where everyone can see me,” Andromeda instructed the helmsman.

  Maynard smiled but said nothing. The captains of all the various vessels had their orders. He was on the launch to facilitate getting to any troublespot speedily. He checked the flare pistol he would fire when they gave him the clearance from the land. The helmsman sailed them fifty metres toward the middle of the river, directly away from the fleet. Andromeda stood in the rear of the boat and raised her arms. From the boats, a great roar went up in response.

  Maynard offered her a bleak look. “It’s hard enough to tell what’s going on, Andromeda, without you getting them all over-excited.”

  “I just wanted to make sure they all knew where I was,” Andromeda said determinedly.

  Maynard checked his mood. He was a very harried man, and he had left the arrangements at Lake Chad to Brian Carrick, in order to fly down here and supervise this, the most difficult part of the operation. On the Plain of Confrontation, as the Lake Chad base had come to be called—in fact it was officially but less conspicuously the northern extreme of the Plain of Bornu—the airstrips were operating and the pilgrims streaming in and it was all as planned and organised as it would get. But, for the moment, that would have to take care of itself. Getting these people over the river without disaster was the primary concern—the larger scale difficulties he could work on when he got back.

  His men were weary from their brief but successful firefight, and should have been rested. But they had the experience in handling these people and anyway, all wanted to be in on the completion of the job. US and UN troops had moved in at Lake Chad. And, best of all, this was a maritime operation when Maynard and his crew had been landlocked for far too long.

  The radio signal came through, and Maynard stood in the stern of the launch and fired the flare. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the river began to churn as the innumerable vessels got underway.

  As soon as they started to move, Andromeda turned to the helmsman, who had been watching for her signal with some anxiety, and nodded. The launch swerved left with such violence that Maynard was all but thrown into the river. As he recovered himself into a sitting position, Andromeda strode down to the stern and, as before, threw up her arms. From the flotilla, the roar of voices in response could be clearly heard.

  Maynard, his head swivelling this way and that, finally regained his footing, but she was so much taller than he that he still seemed to grovel about her feet.

  “Where the hell are you going?” he protested frantically.

  “Where I said I would go,” Andromeda replied blithely.

  “You mean Sierra Leone,” Maynard said. He was carrying a pistol on his belt and reached for it now. “Mantu. Turn the boat now,” he yelled.

  “If you pull that gun, Captain,” Andromeda said, stepping between the two men. “You’ll have to shoot me first. Here. In front of all these children.”

  Maynard closed his eyes as if not wanting to see that possibility, and then opened them again. “You can’t get to Sierra Leone from here. We talked about this.”

  “We can get there, Captain,” Andromeda replied assuredly. “Downriver, where we can find ships and sail to the Land of my Fathers.”

  Maynard shook his head in dismay. “There aren’t those sorts of ships available.”

  “Captain, after all the hardship we been through together and all the obstacles we’ve overcome, I’m mighty surprised to hear your negative view.”

  Maynard, in frustration, gazed away into the distance. He was seriously contemplating overpowering her—if indeed he could—and looked toward the fleet behind them to see what chaos this manoeuvre was causing. He cocked his head, making sure he was seeing what he saw.

  “Not just me, Andromeda. You’ll have to persuade them too.”

  She turned, regarding the vessels back there with a frown. None of them had turned. They were all carrying on straight across the river.

  Andromeda threw up her arms in what had become the signal to her flock. When they responded, it was, all of them, to point out the way they should go, for plainly, to all of them, she had missed the turn.

  “They aren’t following,” Andromeda said, in complete horror, to the world in general.

  “Apparently not. Maybe they misunderstood your signal.”

  “But they followed me so far,” Andromeda continued in sheer grief. “Why won’t they follow me now?”

  “Because you are no longer going the right way.”

  *

  When Lorna landed, Brian was there to greet her. Lorna came off the plane with a look of annoyance, spluttering dust and her hand lashing at insects. She would, eternally, hate these hot and fly-blown places.

  “Welcome to the end of the world,” he grinned at her.

  “Am I the last to arrive?”

  “Are you kidding? Word is there’s millions of people on your tail, coming this way, and more getting ready to leave. This is just the beginning.”

  “Goodness, Brian. What a organisational nightmare you must be having.”

  “Done it all before,” Brian grinned. “Piece of pi
ss.”

  He took her on a little guided tour of his operation, after which she realised just exactly how profound his abilities to understate the circumstances were.

  By that time, a huge city was beginning to grow on the Plain of Confrontation. Shuttled in from twenty international airports in all directions from the focal point, the biggest fleet of C-130s and similar aircraft in the world landed, disgorged their human cargo and flew away again immediately. The runway was now equipped with landing lights that were rarely extinguished, and they kept coming day and night.

  Once landed, the people and their belongings were herded by troops, registered by the Red Cross, and set walking through the rows of tents in various directions until they reached the perimeter where they set up their own camp. Buses and trucks were available only for those who could not walk the distance. So the city continually grew as the able-bodied were given instructions on how to dig latrines and lay water pipes and erect prefabricated structures. Notice boards carried maps of the city that changed daily, indicating food supply areas, hospital facilities, police stations.

  It was decided that all materials were brought in by road—all available aircraft were needed to ferry the people. The city grew of its own accord, until the distance to the outskirts could not be walked in a single day, and then not in two days. Able-bodied people removed themselves further out to make room for way-stations and further facilities to be made along each roadway.

  It was not the most pleasant place. The heat in the day and extreme cold at night afflicted many, insects plagued everyone all the time. The dust from hundreds of thousands of feet blew about the tent flaps, and if it rained, which was not impossible, the whole place would become a giant quagmire.

  Anyone could leave, any time they wanted. They had only to board one of the outgoing aircraft which carried only garbage but otherwise flew back empty. Apart from emergency illnesses, no one did leave.

  On the plain most people knew that whatever hardship they faced, it would be over within a week, and that thought seemed to make it bearable for everyone.

  They were fortunate that this was a region that the lake flooded annually but which at this time of year was baked hard mud. Once the airfield for the C-130s was completed, the workers immediately began a longer parallel runway, and they had only to smooth out the surface of the baked mud and it was firm enough and long enough to take the severe impact of 747s coming in as direct flights from around the world. The ground was hard enough to withstand them, on a short term basis at least.

  Thyssen flew in on one of the first, sleeping all the way. Debbie the nurse awoke him only as they circled the tent city, so that he might see the broad panorama of his work. He grunted and went back to sleep.

  For he could finally sleep, for the first time in about a decade. No longer did he need the assistance of alcohol—which was presently denied him by the medical profession anyway—or sedation to bring on sleep. The terror and the remorse had been evicted from his dreams. He no longer had to decide anything. It was out of his hands now and all he had to do was await the results. As such, he was more relaxed than he had ever known himself to be before.

  Debbie rolled him off the plane in a wheelchair, into the blazing sun.

  “It’s very hot,” she said.

  “It’ll get hotter,” Thyssen replied

  So they gathered, coming from everywhere now, facing possible death but determined to fulfil their belief.

  *

  Andromeda was the last to leave. Maynard had sent back a long-range helicopter which could fly her in directly and she stepped down onto the airstrip to be swamped by her followers. A great roar went up and they swarmed around her, chanting and cheering despite the heat and dust

  “They wouldn’t disperse until you got here to lead them,” Brian had to shout in her ear. He looked ridiculously calm and unharried when such prodigious chaos reigned all about him.

  “Well, I’m here now, Brian. Which way would you like me to go.”

  “We’ve reserved a set of prefab huts with a hospital for your lot over there. Most of them are under nourished and need medical attention.”

  “It was a tough journey, Brian. But here we are.”

  “The Promised Land?” Brian asked with raised eyebrows.

  Andromeda surveyed the scene grimly. “Hardly that! But I guess it’ll have to do.”

  *

  On the Plain of Confrontation the great tent city had grown at an astonishing rate. Two days after Maynard’s troops cleared the area, it had exceeded the population of Lagos in Nigeria and Addis Abba in Sudan, the largest cities in the region. Two more days and the 1.5 million population of Casablanca had been surpassed. By the end of the first week, the largest city in Central Africa—Kinshasa—was exceeded. Three days before the event, it had passed Cairo and had become the biggest city in Africa.

  The Red Cross and UN groups struggled to keep count of the numbers as the city began to double in size, and then doubled again. It was one of the ten most populous cities in the world on the day the sun dawned, perhaps for all of them for the final time. They came and kept on coming, carrying their tents and blankets and food parcels while all around, armies dug pits for hygiene and pumped in water from the lake.

  *

  In the end it was a small piece of foolish bureaucracy that tripped him up. It was always the way. You could soar to the heights, trade in billions of dollars, chat with presidents and captains of industry, and fool everybody all the time. But all such men fell in the end and it was some little man, faceless and insignificant, who just would not let go on some tiny fragment of the structure, bringing the whole dizzy construct crashing down.

  Joe Solomon had no idea who his mentor was, and in the end, did not care. Someone, somewhere, had noticed that they were about to take a man out of the country when he was sub judice and refused to sign the appropriate paper or stamp the appropriate stamp. Whatever. Of course Joe tried to explain it.

  “But I have to be there. Otherwise it will throw the whole focal point out of position and ruin everything.”

  No one seemed to know what he was talking about. He wasn’t sure he knew himself. I had no idea of what arrangements Thyssen might have made to ensure the focal point stayed right where he wanted it. Maybe every pilgrim in the world was there except him, or perhaps, knowing Thyssen, there were groups positioned precisely around the world to ensure it locked in. Maybe he was within the circle, maybe not. There was no one he was allowed to talk to who could understand the problem.

  Of course, as usual, they had arranged to move him when the linkage time came. His guardian agents assured him of this, every time he protested. The usual run in his motorised wheelchair escorted by two agents on bicycles or maybe a stretch limo heading aimlessly in the direction he chose, as had been the options in the past. That the agents understood and were prepared for. The rest was beyond them. They were sure that arrangements would be satisfactory.

  “I want to speak to the President!” Joe raged at them.

  “Yeah, sure Joe.”

  Joe sat in his room at the hotel as the linkage came on and his desperation grew, until suddenly he realised he didn’t care anymore. He had done enough. All that was needed. He had certainly done Thyssen enough favours. Far too many in fact. He thought it through and realised that he wasn’t really thinking anything at all. There was just the pain and the anxiety and who needed that?

  He had no thoughts at the end. They found him in his room, overdosed on the painkillers he took constantly. Beside him was a note. “I have never believed in Thyssen. Whether he is proven right or I am vindicated, I have no wish to be around to see it. Also pressures in Washington have left my run too late, and I am stuck here. This way, I will not distort the position of the pilgrims. No matter what the outcome, I am guilty of fraud on a massive scale. It was all my own idea and all my own guilt. My physical pain, also, has become too much to bear. I am too tired to fight any longer.”

  “Do we tell th
e President?” the secret service agents who found him asked each other. They did not until it was over.

  *

  In the control room in Washington, the visual display offered a countdown to sunset at Lake Chad, and before it John Cornelius mused on the ironies of life. Here, in the moment of greatest crisis, he found one of his few times of peace. In the next few minutes, fate would decide the future course of his life. One outcome would take him in the direction of the champion of Thyssen’s cause, and who was to say that didn’t lead all the way to the White House. The opposite outcome would see him as the man who stood up to Thyssen, who tried and failed to save all those unfortunate souls. Where that would lead was less clear, but he was ready for the months and years of inquiries and media attention—all of the documents prepared or shredded, all his speeches to senators or journalists already written.

  Cornelius had it covered, whatever the outcome, and now, in these last minutes when there was nothing else to do, he suddenly discovered he had reached the end of his mission. It had all worked out fine, and there was nothing else to be done. He sat in the control room, watching the screens with detached interest. In this one time in his life when there were no more deceptions, there was no more pressure, in that blissful moment between the time when what went before ended, but what followed had not yet begun.

  *

  Judy Carrick watched it all on television. To her it all looked rather like a country carnival, a barbecue in the bush, with thousands and thousands of people gathered, playing together, talking, drinking, eating, reading, doing all the things that gathered people do amid the random scatter of tents and vehicles and beach umbrellas and director’s chairs and rugs laid on the ground. She saw that the sun shone down upon them brilliantly, and if you turned the commentary off, you would have thought there was nothing wrong, that these people were happy to be together, enjoying their day. Only the commentary told her that this was their last day, that these people were facing up to doom.