by Peter Tonkin
Robert swore once, foully, and began to push her back beneath the train. She took the lead now, rolling across the hot, stinking cinder road bed and out onto the narrow ledge between the pulpit and pie-crust overhang. This time, her face came close to the sheer drop and her hair actually swung out into space. She made to jerk her head back as though her hair would suck her down after it. But then she stopped. The drop was not sheer. The vertiginous smoothness of the cliff was an illusion. The same forces which had pushed out the thin overhang of rock had also fashioned a second ledge beneath it. Invisible to all but someone lying here with their head hanging over the edge, the rock folded inwards sharply to a depth of a couple of metres.
Made desperate by the lack of any alternative other than surrender and death, she swung outwards and dropped over the edge. She landed with a thump which covered Robert’s gasp of horror, and shuffled backwards as quickly as she could, pushing detritus off the rock shelf with the soles of her desert boots as she moved. A moment later, his head thrust out over the edge and an instant after that he was swinging down to join her.
Like gulls nesting in the cliff, they wedged themselves into the narrow mouth of black rock. From this position it was obvious that the cliff was nowhere near as smooth and glassy as it seemed. The black rock was riven with cracks and crevices from side to side and up and down to depths which varied widely. All that lay below and in front of them, however, was the thick hot air. It stretched out to the quivering tawny and blue distances ahead; it reached temptingly, seductively, down and down and down to the hard red river bed.
And the air here was as crowded with ravening hordes of flies as that around the train had been. They settled on Ann’s body as soon as it was still; landed and crawled and bit with agonising power, each pair of jaws apparently armed with a red-hot needle to be thrust deep into her tender flesh.
As much to keep her eyes from tempting the rest of her over the edge and down that long fall to safe oblivion, Ann wriggled round so that she could see past Robert’s hulking shape and understand something of the rock surfaces surrounding her. At once it became obvious that, although there was no direct line of sight up to the ledge above their heads, it would have been possible to see this place if they had ventured out to the end of the pulpit and looked carefully, for the end of the short rock platform was clearly in their view.
Any further speculation was brought abruptly to an end by a spray of cinder and black gravel which spat over the edge of the cliff as impatient military boots strode along the outer edge of the carriages above their heads. Raucous voices shouted orders in Kyoga-accented French and N’Kuru. A resigned grumble of protest answered and it became clear that a number of people were being ordered out of the carriage.
Orders, questions - incomprehensible to Ann who could guess their meaning only from their tone - were bellowed. Grudging answers were given in a range of voices which fell silent one by one until only a liquid, French-accented contralto persisted. The Kyoga voices yelled and snarled more and more forcefully, but the soft N’Kuru voice maintained a steady flow in a tone of innocent ignorance. And indeed, thought Ann grimly, if the police were asking about Robert and herself then the fat woman who had sat opposite them, the owner of the beautiful voice, was indeed ignorant. No one on the train could possibly have any idea where she and Robert had vanished to.
But the woman’s protestations were clearly not enough to satisfy her inquisitors. There was the sound of slaps and blows, and the rich contralto rose in a shriek of outrage and pain.
The gravel spat over the edge of the precipice once again as a large body was obviously moved under close restraint. The contralto tones faded into the middle distance still protesting innocence, ignorance and outrage.
New voices entered the conversation, cold, commanding voices. At once the woman’s tone moderated. The outrage left it to be replaced by naked terror. The N’Kuru word for chief, one of the few that Ann understood, began to feature prominently. And, once or twice, incongruously, ‘milor’ in French. Now who in heaven’s name, Ann wondered, could the powerful N’Kuru matron be calling ‘my lord’?
The cold tones soon ran out of what little patience they had ever possessed. The voices became abrupt, dismissive. The woman’s voice rose to a wail of protest. The cold tones rapped out orders like a rifle on automatic.
And incredibly, shockingly, the bustle of motion became not only audible, but visible. A group of bodies worked their way out along the pulpit. Two solid Kyoga men in immaculately pressed blue uniforms dragged the writhing bulk of the unfortunate passenger out to the end of the rock pulpit. They released her and retreated at once. She whirled and would have run back towards safety, but the two soldiers were replaced by three other men. Both Ann and Robert hissed at the sight of these three, but they did so for varying reasons.
Ann’s first hiss of surprise came from the sickened recognition of her would-be assailant in the carriage. The same Western haircut, gold chains, bright shirt and pale blue slacks. The young man was shouting and gesturing to the woman and to the other two men. The other two men were obviously the possessors of the cold, commanding voices. Both wore the immaculate, razor-creased uniforms of senior officers, though one uniform was blue and the other green. The officer in blue was a squat, square man whose black skin and full face showed him to be of Kyoga descent. The man in green was white. Everything about him was albino white, cadaverous, consumptive; distastefully sick-looking.
Ann’s hiss of surprise became a gasp as though she had been kicked in the belly hard. All at once she was scrabbling for her camera and pressing it to her eye. Even without the telescopic lens, she could see the white man clearly enough in the trembling viewfinder to recognise him as the man who had killed the soldier for firing too soon at Harry Parkinson last night. But there was more. In the brightness of daylight, that thin, hawk-like profile was familiar from another context. She had seen him before. She knew who this man was, if only she could remember.
The N’Kuru woman stood transfixed on the end of the pulpit with these three standing quietly opposite her. The young man asked another question. The woman’s answer was negative. Desperately, she looked around, her mahogany skin gleaming with the sweat of terror. The two senior officers, white and black, pulled pistols from their belts. The young man asked his last question and this time the woman stood in silence. She had said all there was to say.
The certainty of what was about to happen hit Ann like a blow in the face. She jerked in her breath to call out, to tell the terrifying men with their pistols that she was down here. That she would give herself up at once, betray Robert even, to save this woman’s life.
But she was too late. The pistols spat once, together. The woman, struck in the upper chest, staggered back with the impact, and those few faltering steps were enough to take her over the edge. The three men almost ran forward, avidly following the fall of the silent body with bright, excited eyes. Ann pushed the button, catching them in clear profile, then she pulled the camera down to show what they were looking at so fixedly. By the time she found it so far below, the body had already landed and the dull thud of its arrival was echoing upwards loudly enough to drown the repeated sound of her shutter clicking. She took enough pictures to show the slow spread of darkness around the shattered, ruptured frame.
By the time she pulled the viewfinder up again, the three men were walking back along the pulpit, the young gigolo still protesting in animated monologue that the woman must have known more than she would tell. Abruptly, the white man seemed to run out of patience with the native. He turned his death’s head profile towards the man and yelled at him with a broken, wheezing snarl. The young man stopped, his face a dark echo of the expression he had worn before pulling the flick knife. He opened his mouth to protest, but the white man’s fist moved with terrifying speed and the lethal accuracy of a snake striking. He punched the gigolo in the chest. That was all. One blow immediately in the middle of the sternum.
The gigo
lo stepped back, more surprised than hurt, only to find that there was no rock to step on behind him. Waving his arms as though he might fly, he turned balletically on one toe and toppled off the side of the pulpit.
Where the woman had fallen backwards and silently, the gigolo dived off head first with that wild, seagull scream. He plummeted through one lazy somersault before hitting the ground. It was all so sudden and so unexpected that Ann never even considered trying to take pictures.
Where the woman had been tightly wrapped in swathe after swathe of tribal costume, the gigolo was wearing only his open-necked shirt. Where she had landed flat on her back, he landed head first and face down. His head exploded on impact and his chest burst open immediately behind it. Great gouts of blood and soft matter splattered out in a vivid circle all round him, showering not only the deceptively restful corpse of the woman but also the widely strewn collection of bones nearby. And Ann realised that what she had fondly believed to be the remains of animals, strewn by long departed scavengers, were the bones of N’Kuru who had been made to fly away home by the Kyoga soldiers of Nimrod Chala’s paramilitary police force.
The sound of the train departing covered the noises she made as she sent her lunch to join the remains of the unfortunates below. Only Robert’s iron grip stopped her from going over herself.
‘Well,’ he gasped, as soon as he saw some kind of intelligence glint back into her desperate eyes, ‘what do you think of your first introduction to our revered conservator of the law of the land?’
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you recognise him? The officer in the blue uniform? You must have seen his picture on posters. That was him. General of Police Nimrod Chala himself.’
Ann was shaking her head, desperate to impart her own news. Truth to tell, she had hardly bothered to look at the black officer, so fascinated had she been by the white man in green. ‘The other one,’ she gasped. ‘I recognised the other one. The white. He was in charge of the ambush that killed Harry Parkinson!’
‘What? Son of a—’
‘But that’s not all. I know him, Robert. I know who he is!’
‘What? How . . .’
‘Years ago. When I was working for Greenpeace full time. They got tapes of the Chernobyl trials. Everyone involved in the Chernobyl fiasco was either tried or gave evidence afterwards. He was there. He gave evidence. He was in charge of the circle of tanks they had in place around the complex on the night of the fifth and sixth of May! That was General Valerii Gogol of the Soviet Army General Staff, one of the greatest tank commanders of his generation. The Patton of the Soviet empire. The Rommel of the Ukraine. The Russian Horrocks.’ She paused in her wild rush of information and her eyes, fully alive now, filled with almost limitless speculation as she asked the question which was burning at the forefront of both their minds.
‘What in hell’s name is General Valerii Gogol doing here?’
~ * ~
HEAT
HORSE LATITUDES AND DOLDRUMS
‘An uneasy throne is ice on summer seas’
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Idylls of the King
~ * ~
Chapter Eighteen
The air above the globe circulates not only in great whirls round the points of the compass, wandering across the northern and southern hemispheres, but also in massive waves upwards and downwards between the ground and the troposphere which step north and south in unvarying series. Over the equator, hot air rises fiercely and continually, until it reaches the solid impenetrability of the upper reaches where its upward pressure is channelled northwards and southwards and, as it moves, is cooled and gains enough weight to fall again until it reaches surface level between 20 and 30 degrees north and south. Here, independently of the actual conditions on the ground, the air pressure is always high, for the cooled equatorial air is pressing downwards in untold, invisible masses. This is a system which not even the turning of the earth and the consequent power of the Coriolis force can seriously disturb, though circumstance and local conditions can undermine or intensify it from time to time.
Where the air presses down upon land masses between these latitudes, the result tends to be aridity, for the circulation of atmosphere required for regular rainfall is hampered by the weight of the pressure, and the frontal systems of the middle latitudes cannot break through the walls of air and the steady breezes which tend to blow at surface level north and south from their lower edges. In their hearts, under the massive weight of the air, there is a great stillness. Where this falls over the land, it is the cause of what the geographers have called the great hot deserts; where it falls over water it is the cause of what sailors have called the Doldrums.
During the autumn of this year, the sun, declining rapidly towards the Tropic of Capricorn, nevertheless shone with unremitting heat upon the equatorial jungles south of troubled Mau. Great masses of air rose into the sky and raced invisibly northward until their energy was dissipated and all that was left to them was exhausted weight. Downwards they plunged onto the Sahara which stood naked, dry and cold. Already the night-time temperatures in the white sand and red rock of the desert were plunging well below zero. It so happened that a combination of fallout from Chernobyl, Tomsk Seven and several severe volcanic eruptions was still trapped high in the jet stream, forming a layer of dust thick enough to give spectacular sunsets to the northern hemisphere, and solid enough to turn the daytime rays of the lowering sun off the desert, reflecting away both light and heat with millions of minute mirror surfaces. Even at midday, the Bedou shivered as they walked beside their camels across the great sand sea; and in the battered lorries rumbling southwards out of Ghardaia down the trans-Sahara highway across the Erg, the slight, dark-faced Tuareg drivers narrowed their eyes and checked the settings of the air conditioning in the cabs.
The weather man at the airport at Tamanrasset high on the Hoggar tapped his barometer and frowned, for the ambient pressure of the unusually cool air was worryingly high. He reached for his phone and, still frowning, began to ring round his colleagues at the airports of Oran, Tangier, Casablanca, Santa Maria, Funchal and Las Palmas.
But it was an old female camel, taking her ancient ease on the dry slopes below Tindouf, who first noted what was beginning to happen. At noon, when the heat should have been fiercest and her rest at its most uncomfortable, some atavistic memory jerked her long head round until her dull eyes and wise nostrils were pointed south. Slowly, she turned her head from side to side, disregarding the stench and noise of traffic from the ridge above which bore the roadway north to Bechar, and read the southern quadrant with the fine hairs and acute surfaces of her nostrils. Moving in on the air from the south-east, she found just the hope of distant water from some oasis, no more than a promise, far away. From the south-west, the planes within her nostrils detected the oven odour of hot rock surfaces and, beyond it, the familiar sand grains of the Yetti and the Erg Iguidi. But from die south, due south, she recognised the grains of sand from distant deserts, from the Erg Chech, from El Khenachich, borne upon a wind which had blown for more than a thousand kilometres to bring them here. The camel turned her head and sneezed, then she pulled herself erect and limped away. No beast wise enough to read the wind would remain on a south-facing slope while the harmattan was blowing north.
~ * ~
Psyche’s helipad was a bustle of activity, and Captain Peter Walcott looked down upon it with a mixture of wonder and relief. He was standing on the starboard bridge wing, away from the ice cliff, watching as Richard Mariner managed to make order out of the apparent anarchy attendant upon the refuelling of the incredibly thirsty long-range helicopter from the naval air base at Culdrose in Cornwall two thousand kilometres north-east of them and the loading into its extremely limited capacity of the four plastic body bags which were the reason for its long flight south. The helicopter itself was standing well over to the starboard side, where the constant drizzle from the overhang of ice cliff was its weakest, but in fact, they were all getting
used to it now and either disregarded it or varied their activity in order to avoid it.
During the ten days it had taken to reach this point, all the routines had shaken into place, and none of the Guyanese captain’s dark fears had come to obvious fruition. A close watch had been kept on his superstitious crew, but no more juju dolls had turned up. Tom Snell had replaced the one he had found - on Richard’s orders. Although the major had been offended by what he saw as superstitious disrespect for the dead, Richard had astutely calculated that Tom would be spending most of his time on Kraken or on the ice; the men who had placed the doll, for whatever reason, would be spending most of their time on Psyche with the corpses. And if the doll gave them a measure of relief from their worries, then it was performing a useful function.
It had been a wise decision. And Peter found that he was becoming more and more impressed by the simple wisdom of the leader of their enterprise. The big Guyanese had been prepared to dislike Richard Mariner in spite of - or perhaps because of - his reputation, but the Englishman had proved impossible to hate for any length of time.
