Catacombs

by John Farris

  Two of the men, scientists of formidable brilliance, had never before been allowed to travel outside the Motherland. Grigor Altunyan was director of the Center for High-Energy Physics in Protvino, and Ardalion Udaltsov, known as the Russian Einstein, did his thinking at an institute named for him in the city of Obninsk, which was devoted exclusively to scientific facilities.

  They were chaperoned, so to speak, by Vasili Obadashev, a deputy director (First Chief Directorate) of the KGB and a protégé of the director; and by Aleksandr Kekilova, head of the powerful Administrative Organs Department of the Central Committee, also a protégé of the strongman–of the U.S.S.R., the general secretary of the Communist Party.

  A full support group of interpreters, secretaries, and KGB officers had accompanied them. A corollary purpose of the trip was to make contact with Michael Belov, who was known to have left Zanzibar on the morning of the nineteenth for Kilimanjaro. But where he was now, and what he was up to, remained a mystery that irritated Vasili Obadashev. Particularly because it was now clear that Cobra Dance's mission to the War-shield ranch had been a dismal failure. Undoubtedly Matthew Jade was at this moment well on his way to Tanzania, or already in the country.

  Obadashev was a small man with narrow shoulders and no meat on his bones, temples that stood out so prominently on a high forehead they looked like the bumps of horns about to sprout, accentuating a decidedly devilish appearance. He wore thick glasses that threw his eyes into unsettling relief, as if they lived independently of his face.

  He said to Jumbe, "The red diamond which we have seen is a remarkable artifact. The etchings found on it are, according to our scientists, part of a stringent mathematical model that has to do with the fluid-dynamic stability of plasmoids."

  "Interesting," Udaltsov said, with a nod. He was rough as a peasant, in stature almost a giant but with arms so short he had to bend over to unzip his fly.

  "Interesting," Kekilova continued. In a black suit and sweater and tieless white collar, he looked rather like an Irish priest. "But hardly enough to persuade us to reach into our hip pockets and hand over IRBMs in barter for those diamonds required to formulate the antimissile device known as FIREKILL."

  Jumbe, his eyes heavy lidded, let that one just hang there. It was hot in the room, with the louvers of the windows nearly closed to shut out the sun's glare. Jumbe had apologized; the air conditioner was not working. But perhaps he only wanted the un-acclimatized Russians to sweat.

  Robeson Kumenyere sipped iced tea and studied the faces in front of him, and kept an eye on his pocket watch as he had promised to do, because of Jumbe's delicate health.

  Jumbe said finally, "I'm not surprised to hear this. Only that it required so many of you, on short notice, to tell me."

  Obadashev smiled. "Obviously our reservations fall short of outright rejection of your terms. We would like, however, to propose a somewhat more equitable method of determining the . . . scientific value of the so-called FIREKILL stones. I assume we will not be allowed to speak to any of your own experts, among them Dr. Henry Landreth, I believe."

  "Presently unavailable," Kumenyere said. His pocket watch chimed delicately. Rather deliberately he lifted his sable eyes to Obadashev's face, who steepled his hands and stared back, reading Kumenyere like a well-loved book. He wondered if Jumbe realized the danger he was in from this smooth dandy. But that, for now, was of no concern to the KGB man. "We thought so," Kekilova said. "Therefore we propose to leave Comrade Altunyan and Comrade Udaltsov at Chanvai until the twenty-ninth of May, with the understanding that they will be allowed, under conditions agreeable to you, Comrade Kinyati, to examine a series–although not the complete series–of the relevant bloodstones, therefore arriving at some degree of certainty of their ultimate worth to us. They are, of course, among the great scientific minds in the world today. Their assurances will guarantee immediate shipment of the requested Scoundrel missiles, and the crews to launch them. These weapons are already being prepared for rapid delivery."

  Jumbe celebrated this news with a glum shrug of his shoulders.

  "It is a great honor to be afforded the opportunity of extending hospitality to such eminent men. As for allowing them access to certain of the bloodstones which make up the FIREKILL model, you know as well as I why that is impossible. It would be useless to withhold key stones from men of such dazzling ability. Even a hint or two could provide the theoretical links that would enable them to arrive at the correct formulations, and they are easily memorized. Which event, in less than ten days' time, would leave me holding several handfuls of beautiful rare red diamonds–and the bag. My eldest son, who spent some time in the United States a few years ago, could have best summarized my feelings with an expression I detest but which seems particularly apt now. Comrades, stop jerking me off."

  Obadashev frowned and, although he prided himself on his command of English, he was forced to glance at his interpreter, who shrugged, baffled. An oppressive silence followed.

  Kumenyere snapped shut the lid of his pocket watch and got to his feet.

  "That will do for today, I think," he said softly, smiling at the delegation from the U.S.S.R. Jumbe silently shuffled from the room.

  Only the Americans were left to be heard from. And time was getting away from them all.

  Luncheon at Camp David, on a screened porch amid gorgeous flowering dogwoods, consisted of a seafood sausage appetizer, sweetbreads in Madeira sauce, quail in pastry served with white grapes, wine to suit.

  Nobody was hungry.

  Boomer, his face more florid than usual, said to John Guy Gibson: "She's screwed us, hasn't she? But good."

  "It looks as if that was her intention all along," Gibby said, looking at the other men on the porch. Stephen Gage, the president's national security advisor, was there. So was Morgan Atterbury, the secretary of defense; General of the Army John Crew Landis, chairman of the joint chiefs; and Secretary of State Robert Dilks. Gibby referred again to the report he'd received an hour ago from his office in Langley, Virginia.

  "Miss Hardie has been careful about lying to us. In going over all the taped conversations she had with Matthew Jade, we found she never affirmed that the Catacombs were in the Makari Mountains. When pressed to designate a site from Landsat photos, she said, quote: 'This looks most like the area I remember." But mountain terrain is mountain terrain, anywhere in the world."

  "Some difference," Stephen Gage muttered. "So she didn't lie. She just let your superspy believe what he wanted to believe."

  "I understand she was never told of the importance of the Catacombs," Robert Dilks . said. He was a tall, inelegant man whose socks never seemed to reach high enough, whose tie was always unraveling, whose haircuts, self-administered, were a scandal. His virtues in international diplomacy were his tireless mind and a witty skepticism. He wished all people well, and expected the worst from them.

  "That's correct," Gibby said.

  "Her attitude might have improved if you'd been straight with her. Wasn't she entitled to know our little secret? It's her neck too."

  Gibby grimaced unhappily. "She was, after all, in prison for crimes against the Federal government."

  "How did you get onto her, Gibby?" General Landis asked.

  "Our chief of station in Tanzania checked out Raun's story. It seems she was hospitalized briefly in Dar for treatment of a severely sprained ankle, as she claimed. But records of the flying medic service indicate she was flown to Dar from the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, not the Makari Mountains. The pilot, who is now employed by Saga Oil in Benin, was tracked down. He remembered both Macdonald Hardie and his daughter."

  Boomer said, "So with all the trouble we've gone to, they're sitting on a mountain at the wrong end of the country. Have you been in touch with Matt?"

  "Goddard Space Flight Center can't lock him. There's a solar jam on. Our communications satellites may be deaf and blind for the next twelve hours."

  "In the meantime," Boomer said, "a delegation of Russians met w
ith Jumbe today at four thirty A.M. our time. They may have struck a deal."

  "I saw the South African ambassador at eight this morning," Dilks said. "He placed most of their cards on the table. They know about the bloodstones, but not what the symbols represent. I told him we were not prepared at this time to make any comment on Jumbe's diamonds. But I assured him that the United States had not offered, and would not offer in the future, tactical nuclear weapons to Jumbe. Ambassador Wolkers informed me that round-the-clock photo reconnaissance of Tanzania is being maintained. If the Russians attempt to deploy either men or arms in the country, the attempt will be repelled forcibly by squadrons of the South African Air Force."

  Boomer glanced at General Landis. "What kind of strength are they dealing from?"

  "They can hit any target inside Tanzania with a squadron of Buccaneers. Thousand-pound bombs, Bullpups. They have the transports available to put a force of one thousand commandos on the ground in the first wave of an all-out assault. It would be pretty damned effective."

  "What bothers me," Gage said, "is how the Russians would take it."

  "What could they do about it?" Morgan Atterbury said. "Declare war on South Africa? Why bother? That government has more problems now than it can hope to survive. The discontent of its own white population, indefensible borders, hostile neighbors, well-armed and sophisticated Umkhonto guerrillas operating throughout the Transvaal. The Russians would be more than willing to sacrifice a few IRBMs and personnel in exchange for the bloodstones. It's not inconceivable they would anticipate such a move on the part of the South Africans and send unusable or obsolete missiles, expecting that they'd be destroyed as soon as they were unloaded."

  "For that matter," General Landis said to Morgan, "would Jumbe know a functional nuclear warhead if he saw one? Libya has been trying to buy nuclear weapons for years. Qaddafi has been stung twice by con artists a lot less sophisticated than the Russians."

  "Any of the physicists Jumbe's detaining would be able to tell."

  "What we can't ascertain at this point," Dilks said, "is Jumbe's response to the delegation of our Soviet friends. Was there a deal?"

  "They beat it back home too soon," Boomer suggested.

  "Probably they wanted to see more stones," Morgan said. "In exchange for the usual vague promises. If so, they misjudged Jumbe."

  "How long will it take Matt to get to Kilimanjaro from where he is?" Boomer asked Gibby.

  "It's six hundred miles. He's virtually on foot. If they're picked up in that part of the country, which is a war zone, they'll either be shot or put in jail."

  "Can we support him? Helicopters from a carrier?"

  "No. The Makari Mountains are just about unreachable from the sea. And any carrier movements off the coast of East Africa would be big news."

  "Even if he gets to Kilimanjaro in time," Morgan said, "it's a big mountain. You ought to see it from the air.

  "Hell, Matt has a week! He can do miracles in a week."

  'What if Raun Hardie still won't cooperate?" Gage said, helping himself to a glass of Chateau Latour-Pauillac.

  Boomer said grimly, "It'll take Jade maybe the better part of an hour to reduce her to a big quivering pile of wet snot."

  "Just thought I'd ask," Gage said.

  Chapter 25

  IRINGA HIGHLANDS

  Makari Mountains, Tanzania

  May 21

  For Oliver Ijumaa, the coming of dawn meant only another night he had survived, another day he must somehow live through.

  He awoke, to the crowing of roosters, in a section of concrete drainpipe padded with folded cardboard cartons. He trembled from the cold at five thousand feet. His broken, festering fingers began to throb hideously. Blistered burns cracked and oozed at every movement of his body. He crawled to the mouth of the pipe and looked out at the corrugated iron roofs of Iringa, a town of twenty-five thousand people that sat on a high, gusty, rockbound bluff.

  In two days he had walked and jogged almost ninety miles through nearly trackless bush country, through heat and dust and swarms of insects attracted to his suppurating flesh, walked unprotected in clothing that was nothing but charred rags. All of his possessions (except for the stolen gold) had been lost in the holocaust of Von Kreutzen's Shooting Palace.

  But now he wore a black suit with pink pinstripes he had taken from a corpse in a Hehe village southwest of Iringa.

  Only desperation that bordered on insanity had prompted him to squeeze through a window in the small back room of the house while the villagers gathered in mourning beneath the trees in the front yard. It was dusk. He was looking for food, just a little of the abundance heaped on the family of the departed, nothing that could rob another living soul of sustenance. He was not by nature or habit, a thief, though sometimes he made no distinction between scrounging and thievery. When he saw, in the guttering candlelight, the long gaunt old man with his hands folded on his chest, despair had combined with fatigue and pain to defeat reason. The suit would very nearly fit him: He and the dead man were of the same length, and Oliver could not be any skinnier if he had lain in his own grave for the past three months. The suit was going nowhere but into the ground. And the magnificent shoes–

  The wing-tip, black-and-white perforated shoes, perhaps more than a quarter of a century old, were too narrow and tight to walk in for long distances, but they were necessary to complete the illusion of an appearance. Completely outfitted, with the ruins of his bush shirt well concealed, standing downwind of anyone who might smell his wounds, he looked like a man who had a life to go to.

  But it was another man's appearance, he now realized, as he crouched on all fours looking out at the still-sleeping town. A harsh wind was making a shoal of rubbish along the tree-lined main street. The pipe in which he had spent the night was for a culvert under construction, which would divert the waters of a river beneath the highway. He was safe here until the road crews reported for work. In town, by daylight, it would surely be another story. The disappearance of the suit and shoes, thus robbing the dignity of the dead man at his own wake, undoubtedly had caused a tribal uproar.

  Last night, hanging around the back steps to the kitchen of the Lions' Club in Iringa, where the annual dinner-dance was in progress, Oliver had eaten his first meal in days–a plate of machicha na nyama, beef and spinach, slipped to him by a sympathetic waitress he had chatted up and who liked his style.

  She would certainly recall him if she heard about the stolen suit of clothes. Following any kind of hue and cry, the trigger-happy local People's Militia, thirsting for blood to relieve their boredom, would shoot him on sight.

  Oliver had no wish to stay in Iringa a minute longer than necessary. But he had only a sketchy idea of where he was. He had left Bekele Big Springs knowing only that Kilimanjaro lay far to the north along Tanzania's Great North Road–and that road ran through Iringa. But it was much too far to walk. He had no money for bus fare, no identification. He was afraid to expose himself to hitch a ride.

  He didn't know how desperately slim his chances were, even if he reached Kilimanjaro, of finding the man who had stolen his gold, broken his fingers, cruelly left him to burn to death. Oliver didn't have the name but he would never forget the face: the mane of black hair, the sullen grin, the look of vacancy which came into Tiernan Clarke's crafty eyes just before his spells of walking about and mumbling to himself. The calculating sag of Clarke's eyelids at the mention of rare red diamonds. Not a good man for Erika to be with, Oliver was sure of that. The man would want the diamonds; something else Oliver was sure of. He would force Erika to take him to where the diamonds were hidden.

  Oliver had no concept of how enormous Kilimanjaro was. In his mind it was simply another mountain.

  He had climbed many mountains looking for gemstones; he would climb this one until he found Erika and the man he was going to kill.

  He had nothing going for him but this obsession, which had been powerful enough to see him through two and a half days of incredib
le hardship. But the early morning was cold, he was hungry again, and probably in danger. For all of his trekking he was still approximately nowhere. His spirits were not high, and falling like a barometer before a bad blow. There was no traffic on the highway that was being improved just a few yards from where he was holed up. The pressure of leaning on his hands was almost unbearable in the crooked mangled sticks of two broken fingers.

  Oliver backed slowly away from the opening of the drainpipe, until cardboard crumpled beneath his knees. He lay down again, sadly, eyes open. Before long they blinked slow tears. He gradually slipped into a stupefying depression, from which he was unable to rouse himself.

  Day Three, Makari.

  Raun Hardie awoke in her sleeping bag inside the small tent on Kungwe's south slope, hearing the barks and grunts of early-rising chimpanzees in the forest nearby. She'd observed a family of chimps near dusk the night before, in the glade where they were camped. The chimps were adroitly "fishing" in a termite mound with blades of bamboo for the toothsome grubs. After eating their fill, a couple of the chimps, one a big male who would weigh more than a hundred pounds, had reconnoitered the encampment, pausing to deny their curiosity by doing backflips. In this remote place they might never have seen another human being. They were good company, and Raun had always enjoyed having them around. But she didn't try to get too friendly. The chimpanzees could, for no apparent reason, become hostile, and one of them might remove part of her face with a single powerful swipe of a long forearm.

  She sat up, propping herself on one elbow. She smelled coffee. Already! The knowledge that she would soon have to face Matthew Jade again took her mind off the chimps' conversation.

  On arrival they had quickly been sealed off by clouds, and the jets (Jade had spotted more than one during his descent) were no longer a problem. But obviously their arrival in Tanzania had been noted and reported. He decided to move their projected campsite as far away as they could walk before dark, carrying on their backs just the necessities. The bikes would leave tracks too easy to follow, so they abandoned them.