by Peter Tonkin
‘Going for a picture.’
‘You’re mad! Look what they’ve just done to those others! Do you want flying lessons?’
‘Sod you, Gardiner. That’s a five-star Russian general up there. This is big news!’
‘But he’ll kill us, Ann. God knows what he’ll do! I mean, what if he’s mixed up with the slaughter we’ve just witnessed upcountry? What if—’
‘What if nothing! Of course he’s mixed up in it. Who else is in charge of those tanks? And how could that village have been destroyed without the involvement of the tank? And who else but the people who destroyed the village would also destroy the landing field? I mean I saw that bastard there when poor old Harry Parkinson was killed. The only question is whether General Gogol has gone out of control or whether this is official Kremlin policy! Can you imagine the trouble Yeltsin will be in if he’s sanctioned this?’
Ann’s manic wriggle to get into a good position for a photograph and the hissing conversation were brought to a halt as a spray of pebbles fell past their hiding place and they realised that someone was just above their heads, looking down.
They froze and for the next few moments it was as though the added weight of the man on the rock above them was enough to close the whole thing down on their heads with crushing power. As they lay, hardly daring to breathe, even had the weight of the rock allowed them to, Ann kept her eyes firmly on the general. And it became obvious to her that he was not the same man she had seen interviewed at the Chernobyl enquiry. The same person, yes, there was no doubting that, but the man himself, the physical man, had changed. Gogol seven years ago had been thin but strikingly fit-looking. Almost threateningly athletic, he had moved with a sinister grace and the slightest of bounces, exactly the type of movement she associated with a hunting cheetah. Then he had worn the battle dress of a full general as though it was a suit from the most exclusive of English tailors. Now he wore the ubiquitous battle fatigues which everyone with military pretensions - or dreams - could find anywhere in the world. But he did not fill them; they hung off him as though they had been bought for someone much larger, much fitter. Only the red scarf knotted round the turkey-skinned throat and the jauntily angled green beret gave a hint of the old style. Now there was something emaciated about him; a withered gauntness which was eerily apparent even from this distance, an aura of sickness almost as powerful as the febrile intensity of his gaze. The effect of such intelligence attached to such corporeal corruption was deeply disturbing. Nimrod Chala might be a sadistic power-crazed psychopath, but Gogol was a dead body looking for somewhere to lie down, a man with no life left and nothing left to lose. And he was one of the foremost tactical intelligences of his day. It seemed all too probable that the pair of them wanted to speak to her. Urgently. It was more than enough to restart her unconscious wriggling towards self-preservation.
The ledge was narrow and the cleft reaching back into the black rock tapered so sharply that it pinched their legs and especially their feet painfully as they tried to crush themselves more deeply into it. And their movement finally disturbed the creatures whose home the humans had temporarily usurped. The first sign of life that Ann felt was a rushing scuttle up her right thigh. It required all of her most gritty fortitude to remain silent and immobile as that first scratchy movement over her sensitised flesh abruptly warned her that there were insects running all over her legs. Quite big insects, by the feel of things. Robert lurched beside her and she looked into his face from a disturbingly intimate closeness, as though they were sharing a bed. His face seemed to be swelling as if his head was a balloon being inflated. Sweat beaded his glistening skin. He began to twitch as though gripped by the onset of an epileptic seizure.
Ann came near to panic then, not just because the invasive scuttle was forbidden complete intimacy with her body only by the tightness of her underwear, but also because she knew in her bones that Robert was about to scream. Wildly, guided by nothing even faintly like logic, she reached across, took his head between her hands and crushed her lips to his with all the power at her command. It was not really a kiss; it was a kind of oral gagging. It worked. She felt the trembling in him ease, and was in fact so shocked by her own action that she too began to put the visceral reaction to those intimately scurrying legs into some kind of perspective.
Whatever was running all over her with such frenetic activity was at least not biting or stinging. Visions of scorpions and soldier ants began to recede. Robert’s lips began to move against her own and she correctly assumed that she had rechannelled some of his thoughts too. She broke away and turned back to her observation of the rocky pulpit. The grim, gaunt spectre of General Gogol was gone. Indeed, as her heartbeat slowed and her terror diminished, so the pattern of sounds going on above began to make some kind of sense to her. She lay down on her back, exhausted, and concentrated on what she could hear.
Footsteps were receding, grating over a cinder road bed. Then came the coughing of an engine being fired up and the thud, thud, thud of helicopter rotors. As they lay side by side staring upwards past the sheer edge towards the hard blue sky, concentrating fiercely and trying to envision what they could hear, the rotors achieved power and die helicopter lifted invisibly, clattering away down the distant, rock-hidden sky.
Silence surged slowly back into the afternoon, and the movement of whatever was crawling over them suddenly resumed its importance as the danger presented by General Gogol and General of Police Nimrod Chala receded. Robert began to move, preparing to climb back up over the cliff edge and out of this nest of busy creatures at once. Ann beat against his back until he paused. ‘Be careful!’ she hissed. ‘They may have left a guard!’
He nodded, and began to move again, but this time with careful slowness, like a cat, pulling himself clear of the crack a centimetre at a time, and rising with absolute concentration to peer up over the edge of the rock. As his leg came level with Ann’s face, she was given a very unwelcome close-up of the cloth of his khaki bush trousers stretched tight across his thigh. Hanging on the cotton fabric was a fat black spider the size of her spread hand. Her whole body bucked as a picture of what owned the scurrying feet filled her mind and she had to crush the back of her hand against her already bruised lips to stop herself calling out.
‘There’s a guard post!’ hissed Robert. ‘Three guards and a hut beside the track.’
Ann could taste blood and she suddenly realised this was because her teeth were fastened in the skin on the back of her hand. The spider fell off Robert’s leg and was heavy enough to make a sound as it hit the rock surface by her ear. It scrambled onto its feet and scuttled away. ‘They’re keeping a careful watch, I think they’ve been ordered to search for us!’
He paused, probably waiting for an answer, but she didn’t dare take her hand away from her mouth. She hated spiders even when they were small. The one on her belly, crawling from hip to hip at the moment, seemed even larger than the one that had fallen off Robert. It was moving across the upper swell of her stomach above the line of her panties, pausing for a moment to push one leg exploratorily into her navel. She could feel each of its eight feet and every single hair on its heavy black coconut of an abdomen. This was a section from one of her worst nightmares. If only she had been wearing long trousers like Robert. The shorts, cut loose for coolness, gave her no protection at all. The only thing stopping it crawling upward to explore her chest was the precious camera bag resting on her ribs.
‘No, wait!’
A distant call echoed out over the railway track.
‘They’re going into the hut. All of them.’ He paused. There was nothing to hear but the moaning of the wind, the calls of distant birds, the scratching of spider claws on the rock nearby and the rhythmic hiss of Ann’s breath through constricted nostrils. ‘Right! Coast clear!’ He was in motion, scrabbling upwards, kicking spiders loose as he went. She lay rigid until his face was thrust out over the cliff face above her. ‘Quickly!’ he hissed. The word coincided with the final mo
vement of the spider, scuttling across to tumble off her hip into the loose leg of her shorts. She was in motion at once, tearing her hand away from her mouth and rolling over onto her stomach. Then she was crawling along the ledge with the bag tucked clumsily under her left armpit and reaching up to grab his offered clasp.
On the cliff edge side of the ledge there was no cover at all so they were forced to scuttle across the tracks into the thin jungly scrub at the foot of the vertical cliff which reached up towards the high country above their heads. Here they both fell to their knees, irrespective of the danger, and tore at their clothing until they were certain that there were no spiders left anywhere near their supersensitive skin.
After a few minutes of frenetic activity, they stopped, crouched with their backs against the trunk of the one tree nearby broad enough to support them both, and began to think their position through. Every now and again, one or the other of them would shudder and scratch, as though the spiders were still in place.
‘We’ll have to go back the way we came on die train,’ hissed Robert. ‘We’ll never get past that guard hut.’
‘Do you think they’ll be looking for us?’ She asked the question like someone probing at a cavity in a suspect tooth.
‘They were looking for us on the train,’ he said.
She thought back to her earlier musings while she had been looking at Gogol and had to agree. It could not possibly be a coincidence that the two people they had seen killed were the two people who had talked to them on the train. No doubt Chala and Gogol had stopped the train for their own reasons, but whatever their original motive they had also been searching for the two of them.
Whoever set fire to the landing strip would almost certainly have checked in the little Cessna, so they would know that Robert Gardiner from the UN was involved in the situation and witness to the massacre in the N’Kuru village. Nimrod Chala or one of his underlings could all too easily have checked the flight plan and found that the best-selling writer and investigative journalist Ann Cable was registered as a passenger and in all probability trying to get the story of village massacres and Russian battle tanks out to the news-hungry world. Gogol himself had seen that they were involved with Harry Parkinson and it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to link them to the dead man’s Land Rover. Someone must have found Harry’s Land Rover outside the station in the township and the Kyoga officials behind the ticket counter and the barrier would both have remembered them quite clearly. That Land Rover would have been the key of course: whoever had been driving the T-80 main battle tank in the dry bed of the Blood River must have been able to see it clearly in the bright moonlight, and so would the gunner through his gunsights, number plate and all.
‘We’ve no chance at all if we stay up here,’ Ann said, urgently. ‘We’ve got to get down somehow.’
‘Depends on where we’re going ...’ temporised Robert.
‘We’re going to Mawanga city! Where else?’ She was up and in motion at once, pushing on back along the path they had followed in the train. He followed, listening as she continued to whisper with vivid passion. ‘It’s the only place we’ve got a chance, though even there it’s a slim one. We’ve got to get down onto the plain first, then find some way of getting back.’
‘Try for a bush taxi?’
‘Possibly. Hire a boat if we have to and go down the river itself. But we can’t wait around up here. And I don’t think it would be wise to wait for the next train!’
He nodded. “The only reason for the train to slow down here is for a police inspection. If it doesn’t slow, we can’t get on. If it does slow, we’d be lucky not to get caught as the soldiers go through it again. And this is just the first of the inspection posts. There must be another half a dozen of them between here and the coast.’
‘What about the roads?’
‘Same number.’
‘What about the river?’
‘There was a patrol boat but I don’t think they use it any more. The river is dry to all intents and purposes. It’s a mere shadow of its former self all the way down towards the coast, and it doesn’t even make it to the sea any longer. It empties into a lake about ten kilometres upstream from the city limits and that’s it.’
‘It’s still the best way back, though, isn’t it?’
‘In terms of avoiding police patrols and checkpoints, yes, it is.’
‘Well, that’s what we want to do.’ She stopped and looked at him, her face drawn with desperation. Real, disabling panic welled up in her and threatened to incapacitate her. ‘We can’t let them catch us! There’s no telling what they’d do to us!’
This time he had no dry riposte to offer. He gave a numb, defeated nod. She was right. They had very little chance of escaping the situation alive. If they were caught, death would be certain -and unimaginably protracted and horrible. He met the hopeless desperation in her gaze and frowned with fear in reply.
‘How do people keep going in situations like this?’ she whispered.
‘One step at a time, I suppose,’ he answered. His voice was rusty, as though he had been screaming until it broke.
‘Right. Our first step is to get down to the plain. Any ideas?’
Under the influence of her impassioned fear, he refrained from making any grim suggestions about flying and seriously began to think about the question. Soon after they had left the N’Kuru township, they had crossed the bridge over the Leopold Falls. The river was running low and the falls themselves had been revealed as a series of rocky steps down to the plain. How far back were the falls? Pretty far.
‘Wasn’t there some kind of cable car affair a little way back?’ asked Ann suddenly. ‘I remember coming under some machinery. I think it was broken down.’
‘Yes! I remember it. It was a bauxite lift or some such thing, designed to get minerals from the plateau down to the river for transportation to the city - in the days when the river was a reliable way of transporting anything. It’s ruined and deserted now. There may be a way down there, though. Good thinking!’
~ * ~
The lift had been constructed on a widening of the ledge where it was possible for goods trains to stop and be loaded if there were no barges available. The whole thing consisted of three compounds, one at the head of the cliff high on the jungly escarpment, one here on the main ledge behind the railway track on a semi-circular spur line, and one at the foot of the cliff on the river bank far below. The middle compound, behind the track, was the smallest by the look of things, a couple of hundred metres square surrounded by rotting, jungle-covered fencing. Inside the compound was a big storage shed, a loading facility beside the rusty spur line and the winding machinery which controlled the big box lifts that raised and lowered the consignments of ore from the cliff top. Outside the compound, in a little area of its own on the far side of the main tracks, stood another winding house which controlled the lines down to the riverside. It was all deserted and, in the gathering evening when Ann and Robert arrived, chillingly eerie.
They had been following a rough path through the jungle, trying with marked success to stay out of the general view. They had cowered behind mercifully massive bushes on the two occasions when trains had thundered past and had been fortunate to be under such a solidly impenetrable canopy, for time and again helicopters had swooped unnervingly over the cliff edge just above them and blattered away across the river and out over the grasslands. The vegetation in the groin between the horizontal ledge and the vertical cliff face was surprisingly lush, fed no doubt by the constant rain of detritus from the abundant vegetation overhanging the edge three hundred metres above their heads. It was very light in animal occupation, however, and although there were vivid, occasionally shocking hoots and monkey calls from the jungle far above, here there were only the calls of birds and the chitterings, rustlings and flutterings of the insect world. The earth upon which they trod so silently was a strange, soft stinking mixture of rotting vegetation and bird droppings liberally intermingled with the s
hattered corpses of monkeys who had fallen over the cliff above and failed their flying lessons as spectacularly as the people from the train. There was nothing of real soil about the place at all, no earth, no sand, stones or rock fragments, simply this thick, incredibly fertile layer of rotting ex-life on the flat black basalt. Only the roots of the abundant vegetation held the whole microcosm together, and these were beginning to give way as the bushes and trees slowly surrendered to drought.
Dead or not, dying or not, the jungle had invaded the ancient compound and held it in its thrall. The rusted, rotten diamonds of the compound wire surrendered to the first tentative push as though there was no trace of true metal left within them at all. The concrete which had once graced the main compound area was crumbling and floury. The rails of the little spur were the colour of dry blood in the setting sun as the two lost humans followed them ever more slowly across to the storage facility. The necessity of keeping out of sight forced first Robert then Ann into the bush-bulging web-clouded tombs of the buildings. Broken windows and doors gave easy access to desolate offices, which still contained, apparently undisturbed in nearly thirty years, a few pathetic sticks of furniture, books and calendars. Like children in a haunted house, they wandered through the gathering shadows, glancing here and there at the rubbish left behind by men who had apparently been spirited away like the crew of the Marie Celeste. The whole place had a disturbing air, as though sometime during its long, lonely wait, the buildings had gone native in the worst possible way.
