The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘And you think something has happened there to call your men away so suddenly?’

  ‘It’s the only reason I can think of to account for what they seem to have done. They are highly trained and absolutely reliable, but they all have family in the villages. Something must have happened.’

  Silence fell.

  They were driving across the grassland where the zebra were grazing; the animals, obviously used to the sight of Harry’s Land Rover, paid little attention to it. Ann felt her mood begin to lighten as she leaned out through the window watching the big herds milling by. Soon there were more than mere zebra to look at. Great dark-skinned wildebeest collected in massive herds lazily grazing and, on the low hillocks overlooking them, a pride of lions.

  The camera clicked and clicked. The men in the front glanced at each other without a word.

  They reached the first village within half an hour. It was as deserted as the house had been. They stopped. They searched. The huts, made of wattle and daub with wooden doorframes exquisitely carved, all stood empty. Stripped. Not a rug on wall. Not a stool on hard earth floor. Not a copper pot by cold hearth. Not a cow or a goat in the stockade nearby.

  The three of them stood side by side at the entrance to the thorn stockade which surrounded the huts and Harry looked north across the plain. ‘That’s where they went,’ he said. ‘Every mother, child and mother’s son among them. I don’t know why, but that’s where they went.’

  ‘What about your men in the lorry?’ asked Ann.

  Harry’s eyes were chilly as they regarded her. ‘They went east, to the next village,’ he said. ‘They were here after the villagers had gone so they found the same as us. They didn’t stop, though. Their tracks just go straight over the tracks heading north.’

  ‘Then they must have been expecting something like this,’ Ann observed. Harry gave a minuscule nod of agreement.

  ‘Let’s get on,’ said Robert. ‘The day is wasting and we don’t want to be out here in the dark.’

  Half an hour later, at the second village, the same thing. This time Harry only stopped for long enough to ascertain that the truck’s tracks went on eastwards with no sign of having stopped.

  ‘They knew,’ Harry said. ‘Whatever message came, however it came, told them to go to the third village. But half of them had relatives in those first two. Why didn’t they even stop?’ He hit the steering wheel with his clenched fist as though it knew the answer but would not tell him.

  ‘What’s that up ahead?’ asked Robert suddenly. ‘Smoke?’

  ‘You’ve got good eyes. No. It’s birds. Vultures. Judging from the way they’re flying, they look pretty full to me. Miss Journalist, I hope you got some spare film for that camera after you shot all those zebra and wildebeest and lion. I think we may get you some pictures here to make the papers in London and New York sit up.’

  ‘What sort of pictures?’ asked Ann, though she knew the answer well enough.

  ‘The kind they like best,’ spat the game warden bitterly. ‘Dead niggers.’

  ‘Robert?’ said Ann uncertainly. She was unsure about this suddenly. Unsure about Harry Parkinson, about the situation he was hurling them into. The local representative of the UNHCR reached up and tugged the big rifle out of its retaining clips above the windshield.

  ‘Remington,’ he growled. ‘I’d rather have an automatic.’

  ‘I’d rather be driving a Chieftain tank. You use what you’ve got.’

  ‘Shells?’

  ‘In the glove compartment. Give me a box for the handguns.’

  ~ * ~

  The third village crouched against a backdrop of forest, as though seeking some kind of shelter from the tall, dark trees. Rising and falling, first invisibly against the foliage and then etched clearly against the evening sky, a column of darkness wavered. Like Robert, she would at first have assumed that it was smoke, but Harry’s words caused the scales to fall from her eyes and the seeming clouds resolved themselves into individual black shapes. She was obscurely offended. The place was near desert, at least to her eye; how could it carry the weight of so many scavengers? The size of the herds behind her was answer enough. Something here had been powerful enough to call all the vultures in the area under Parkinson’s Law to assemble in this tiny village they were approaching with increasing caution.

  ‘Can you see anything?’ asked Robert when his busy fingers had finished checking and loading the Remington.

  ‘Vermin. Scavengers. No people. It’s very busy up there though.’

  ‘You could hide an army in those trees.’ Robert’s voice was cool.

  ‘Yes, you could, but then the jackals and hyenas wouldn’t be running in and out so happily.’

  Craning to see over the square shoulders in front of her, Ann suddenly realised that the ground all around the village seemed to be seething. Through the open window at Robert’s side there suddenly came a sound like open warfare between a dog’s home and a cattery, and a stench which turned her stomach.

  ‘We’re going to have to go in hard,’ said Harry. ‘Hang on.’ He put his right foot on the floor and straightened his arms, wedging his shoulders against the back of his seat. Robert dropped the Remington onto his lap and grabbed the dashboard. Ann held on to the back of Robert’s seat with all the strength at her command.

  The Land Rover hurtled up the beaten earth track towards the main break in the thorn bush wall round the little village of huts. But suddenly Ann could see that there were many breaks in the stockade. Unlike the neat, picture-postcard defences round the two deserted villages, here the circle of high-piled thorns was ruptured in dozens of places and gaped widely. Through the breaks, animals were slinking and scuttling. Harry’s words had warned her that there would be hyenas and jackals. She had not expected to see foxes, what looked like wolves; was that a lion? Surely not a leopard... They hit a pothole and for a moment it was difficult to see anything clearly at all.

  Harry punched the horn and started yelling at the top of his lungs. The creatures leaped away from whatever they were doing, incredible numbers of them scattering back out like muddy blood escaping through gaping wounds. The light was just beginning to thicken now. The sun was behind them. Shadows hid much, but there were enough areas of ruddy light to show that not all the escaping animals were leaving empty-handed.

  They exploded through the main gate and immediately Harry was swearing and swerving. The effect was painful and deeply unnerving, for he did not lower his voice at all and his wordless yelling suddenly became obscene invective screamed madly at the top of his lungs. Ann all but broke her ribs on the back of Robert’s seat and was lucky not to knock herself out against the back of his head.

  The Land Rover jumped and bucked and for a moment she thought it was going to roll, but Harry held it upright apparently by main force until it came to a stop. Had she supposed the drama of their entrance would have scared off all the animals, she was wrong. The ground around them still seethed. Vultures, some with wingspans in excess of two metres, hopped and flapped, too gorged to fly. Hyenas skulked towards shadows and jackals snarled. Three lean lions stood their ground until Harry leaned out of his window and opened fire. He seemed to be aiming high; the animals flinched and turned away at the sound his gun was making, but none seemed to have been hit. Then Robert kicked open his door and the Remington joined in. The deep boom of its report was like an echo of his basso profundo shouting. A flapping, hopping vulture exploded into a mist of blood, flesh and feathers. A hyena’s head vanished and its body jumped high into the air, tumbling acrobatically. A jackal sprang open as though it had swallowed a live grenade.

  All the animals that could move vanished then and a kind of quiet came. The three Remington shots echoed distantly. The vultures flapped and squawked. The barking, spitting, hissing of the frustrated scavengers whispered from the edge of the forest like a faraway tempest. In the village there was relative stillness.

  Except for the scuttling, humming whisper of the insect wor
ld at work. The presence of the larger creatures had blinded Ann to the fact that everywhere there were flies. Big, black, bloated flies filled the rank air, as though giving body to the fetid stench. Ann pulled an end of her headscarf over her mouth and nose.

  ‘Watch it when you get out, Harry,’ Robert grated. ‘I’ve never seen so many nasty-looking ants. You have soldier ants here like we do in the Amazon?’

  Harry didn’t answer. As though in a daze he sat, filling magazines for his automatic pistols, looking away to his right, at the centre of the village. At the tall pile of black corpses there. Then he slammed a magazine in place and pushed his door open. He hesitated, then reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a pair of heavy-duty rubber gloves. ‘Stay here,’ he ordered. ‘Both of you.’

  He stepped down delicately and moved off. Robert stepped down too and pushed his door closed; then he took a couple of steps and leant across the bonnet of the Land Rover, covering Harry with the Remington.

  Ann seemed to jump awake then, though she was in fact deep in shock. She shuffled across to the side of the vehicle which overlooked the village and the slowly moving game warden and she raised her camera. Framing what she could see through the camera viewfinder brought the overpowering enormity into focus somehow. It chopped the general horror up into a series of sharply focused images. The central pile of bodies could have been a hillock of slowly congealing tar, and the scattered individuals just shadows of various shapes and sizes. But the camera made a sort of sense of it. A visual sense of what was unutterably, obscenely senseless in every other regard.

  She framed Harry on one knee in a nearby doorway, tenderly lifting in bright-gloved hands a child of two or three years, whose blood and brain was splattered brightly in the sunlight over the exquisite carving of the hard wood jamb. She pressed the button. The shutter clicked and the motor whined.

  She framed Harry booting a bloated vulture off the body of a woman exactly like the woman she had first interviewed beneath the dead acacia on the outskirts of Mawanga; the vulture had been feasting on her baby. One bullet had been enough for both of them by the look of things. Ann pressed the button and the shutter clicked.

  She framed Harry beside the central pile - or as much of it as she could fit into the trembling square. The wiry little Englishman stood five feet seven or eight. The pile of corpses was taller than he was even though the scavengers had pulled so many away. She found she could take the shattered limbs and the bright chests with their lungs like strange pink flowers; the lazy serpentine loops of intestine and the dark clots of internal organs so beloved of the flies. It was the faces which made her cry. And especially the wide eyes. She pressed the button.

  Then, terrified that her weakness had made the camera tremble and spoil the shot, she wedged her elbows against the metal frame and took it twice again.

  She framed him on his knees and throwing up, although she suspected there would be a lawsuit if she published. She framed Robert standing with the Remington, his elbows on the Land Rover hood in a puddle of his tears.

  When she swung the camera back, Harry came into close-up so abruptly that she jumped. ‘Robert. Come and witness this. I need an official witness. But put on gloves. There’s AIDS everywhere.’

  ‘Can’t we do something?’ Robert seemed dazed by it, made helpless and indecisive, too shocked even to register Harry’s warning about AIDS. But he too pulled on heavy-duty rubber gloves as though preparing to wash dishes.

  ‘We can look. Remember. Report. Report in detail.’

  ‘Bury them or something?’

  ‘There are too many and we haven’t enough time. It’ll be dark soon. There won’t be much left by morning. Listen to them out there.’

  As the shadows lengthened, the horrific chorus in the forest gathered new strength and volume.

  ‘Burn them?’

  ‘With what? The only fuel we have is in the Land Rover and we need it to get home. And we still haven’t found my askaris, remember. They went that way.’ The warden gestured over his shoulder past the pile of bodies towards the jungle.

  ‘We’re going in there?’ Robert was clearly stunned by the thought of going where the terrible, inhuman cacophony was coming from. He caught up the Remington again as though it were a security-blanket.

  ‘Certainly. Once we leave, they’ll all be back out here, won’t they? But do hurry up, old man. I want to at least try for a head count. Some kind of solid facts for the report.’

  ‘Jesus CHRIST!’ yelled Robert and he threw the gun down. Harry flinched as the weapon, loaded and primed, hit the vehicle. It did not go off and he straightened.

  Ann framed the pair of them searching. Lifting a doll-like child, one arm each. Rearranging the edges of the pile. Checking that the pile was composed of bodies to its oozing core. Sorting. Counting. And at last the distance was too much. Hiding behind the safe glass of the Land Rover’s windows was cowardice when the men were doing what they were doing. They were striving to compute and to remember. She had a function here: to feel and to record.

  She opened the door. Flies and stench. The ground crackled as she stepped down onto it and not only because it was covered in dry grass. She crossed to the nearest doorway. She lifted her camera as though it was a shield and framed the bright spray of blood. In the shadows of the interior there were other children who had had their brains dashed out. She had not realised that. A pile of ten or so. She framed the huddled little bodies and then the bright spray of their blood. It caught the sun so vividly because it was alive with green-winged flies. She had not realised that.

  She crossed to the woman and the baby. She was sitting up so straight because her back was supported by more corpses. Ann framed the mother with her almost headless baby but the camera was no kind of shield. Her hands were shaking so much that the camera case split her lip. She sucked at it automatically and her mouth filled up with blood. It was only when she tore the scarf off her mouth and started throwing up that the two men noticed her. Robert stumbled over to her, took her by the shoulders and pulled her erect. His broad face twisted with such rage that she thought he was going to strike her and she flinched. The movement made him realise what he was doing and he stood, gulping in fetid air and bloated flies until he calmed. His fingers bruised her shoulders. The pressure of his thumbs beneath her collarbone made it crack.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked at last, his deep voice raw and ragged.

  ‘My job! The same as you are doing yours. People need to know about this. You report to the UN. I’ll report to every programme and paper in the world. Everyone who will listen to me and print my pictures. You have to do it. I have to do it. Otherwise what’s the point?’

  ‘She’s right, Robert,’ called Harry. ‘She’s right and you know it.’

  He let her go. His gloved palms made a tearing sound as they peeled away from the cotton of her shirt and at once the flies began to settle on the bloody hand prints there. She tucked the end of the headscarf back across her mouth. Her hands shaking with reaction, anger and shock, she went rapidly, brutally, through the routine of emptying and reloading her camera. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ called Harry. ‘We’ve no more gloves.’

  Robert returned to his grim work and she followed. She brought the camera up and crushed it to her cheek. She framed a naked body face down where he had laid it beside half a dozen others. It bore a series of wounds which were striking in their regularity. Low on the back, almost between the buttocks; mid-back, shattering the spine; just below each shoulder blade; the back of the head. She framed and pushed the button.

  Harry was crouching by another pile. She framed him as he worked. He had pulled his neckerchief up and looked like a bandit. The cloth and his cheeks beside it were smeared red. He looked up and she caught the white channels running downwards where his tears had washed the blood away. He was arranging the corpse of a girl whose upper chest and face had been blown away as though her heart had exploded like an anti-personnel mine. She framed an
d pushed the button. The shutter clicked and the motor whined.

  ‘There are only women and children here,’ she said.

  “The old men and the boys are over there.’ He nodded towards the section of the stockade nearest to the forest. ‘Looks like they made a stand but they didn’t have a chance. Whoever did this just walked right over them and moved in. Then they took their time with the women and girls.’

  Whoever did this. The flat phrase echoed in Ann’s head. What had happened here seemed so colossal that she had viewed it as some kind of natural catastrophe. In some part of her shock-numbed mind she had been treating this as though it was the result of some earthquake. Now Harry’s words brought home to her with terrible force that this had been done deliberately. That there had been a pattern to it. A sequence. That the horror, terror and agony on these faces was not put there by the exercise of death but by someone who had done things to these people which had horrified and terrified and agonised them.