Dark Heart

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘What’s happening?’ breathed Bonnie.

  Caleb was too preoccupied to answer so Robin explained. ‘The engines are on fire. The smoke is coming out of the sides because of the ship’s heat-reduction system – no more hot funnels, you see? But she’s out of control. She must be badly ablaze for the crew to be jumping overboard like that. And, given what Captain Caleb and Lieutenant Sanda were saying about the tide, she’s likely to drift back into the jetty pretty quickly.’

  ‘Which,’ said Caleb, ‘could set the whole of the new wooden frontage on fire. Everywhere from the deep-water port to the new marina, in fact. Including the minister’s new office and the whole of the complex it’s in. Including the zoo, if the wind increases. And that’s even before you start calculating what damage she could do if all of the armaments she has aboard start detonating because of the heat.’ He spoke into the microphone stalk again. ‘Put me on Otobo’s hailing frequency.’ A moment later the open channel hissed. ‘Otobo, can you hear me? Is there anyone there? It’s Captain Caleb.’

  ‘Captain. It’s the Chief. I think I’m the only one left aboard. That puppy Jonah Ngama screwed the motors then abandoned. He ordered everyone over the side. The tide’s got her and there’s nothing I can do on my own. We’re going to drift back on to the jetty. It’ll be bad.’

  ‘I’m in the Shaldag, Chief. I can be there in a few minutes. What’s the tug on your port side doing?’

  ‘Keeping us off as best he can. The starboard tug’s trying to retrieve its line. If they work together they might slow the drift. But I’m not hopeful.’

  ‘Are the armaments at risk? Have you activated the safety equipment?’

  ‘I’ve activated everything I can. But I wouldn’t rely on it. We need help.’

  ‘I’m on my way. Hang on. Radio Officer, I want the general frequency . . . All shipping in Granville Harbour, this is Captain Caleb Maina aboard Shaldag FPB004. Please be aware that the Corvette Otobo is drifting out of control, on fire and in a dangerous condition . . .’

  Out of the confused babble of concern, one voice came loud and clear. ‘Captain Maina, this is Captain Zhukov aboard Zubr Stalingrad. We see you and we see Otobo. We are five minutes distant. Please advise how we can assist . . .’

  ‘Could we?’ said Caleb. ‘Could a Shaldag and a Zubr tug her out of trouble?’

  He was thinking aloud, but Robin answered. ‘All you have to do immediately is turn her head into the incoming tide. Her hull’s so slim almost all the pressure would disappear at once. Then you could maybe pull her clear.’

  ‘It’s worth a try . . . Captain Zhukov. Thank you. See you there in five.’

  The Shaldag FPB004 sped across the bay like an arrow. After four minutes she was beside the starboard tug, which had retrieved the broken towline and was trying to re-secure it. ‘Think you could share that line?’ asked Robin, surveying the situation, narrow-eyed as the burning corvette’s forecastle head towered dangerously above them. ‘I’m not sure about the physics – you have almost no mass, but you have power. Those big motors of yours should certainly help . . .’

  ‘What about the Zubr? She’ll be here in a minute. Could she link up with us?’

  ‘Same problem. But compounded now I think of it. Those big fans of hers would do more damage than good – they’d effectively set up a hurricane wind blowing Otobo’s forecastle head back shorewards, just adding extra power to the push of the tide. No. The Zubr will have to go on the port side and push outwards. She’ll probably blow some windows out of the minister’s office and conference rooms, but – wow! – she should be able to exert one hell of a lot of force.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ whispered Bonnie as Caleb negotiated matters with Zhukov and the two tug skippers. Contacted the chief and got Sanda working.

  ‘I’m a full ship’s captain. I’ve commanded supertankers . . .’

  ‘Not just a pretty face then,’ said Bonnie with a nervous smile.

  ‘Let’s hope we both still have pretty faces when this lot’s over,’ said Robin and instantly regretted her words. Bonnie frowned, tried to look brave, but failed dismally. ‘Only joking,’ said Robin, but this time she couldn’t even fool herself.

  The captain of the starboard tug jury-rigged a double towline and, as the Zubr cruised majestically past, Shaldag FPB004 took it aboard. All Sanda had to secure it was the two stern bitts used to moor the Shaldag. There was no guarantee how much pressure these would take before they were ripped out. But they were big enough to secure the hawser so that was good enough to begin with. The Zubr vanished round the corvette’s forecastle, and after that Robin could only make out its position by looking for the whip-antenna that topped its radio mast. But everything was ready surprisingly quickly and, with Caleb coordinating, the four disparate vessels carefully powered up until they could feel Otobo’s head beginning to swing across the tide, turning away from the shore.

  Ten minutes became twenty as the tugs tugged, the Shaldag pulled and the Zubr pushed. Until, quite suddenly, the corvette’s long grey hull settled and stopped fighting. ‘We have her now, Captain,’ said the skipper of the starboard tug through the static of the open channel. ‘Where shall we put her?’

  ‘She still represents a considerable hazard,’ prompted Robin. ‘And she will do until the fire is under control and the armaments are made safe. Have you a firefighting ship that you can call on to get things under control?’

  ‘On its way. Should be here by sunset.’

  ‘Then put her somewhere safe where the firefighters can get at her when they arrive, but where she’ll do a minimum of damage if she goes up after all,’ advised Robin briskly. ‘Your chief engineer left everything as safe as possible before he went down into the lead tug. There’s nothing more anyone can do until the firemen arrive. Why not beach her on one of those sandbars down by the south bank that started her problems yesterday in the first place?’

  When the Shaldag FPB004 came back to its dock an hour later still, Otobo was a distant column of smoke heading for the minister’s proposed wildlife park – or the silk-smooth mudbank nearest to it. The huge Zubr Stalingrad was back out in the bay. And, thought Robin, looking warily around, that was probably just as well. The damage the hovercraft’s huge fans had caused looked even worse than she had feared. The whole of the government area appeared to have been hit by a tornado. Trees were uprooted and flower-beds simply decimated. Plasterboard, bricks and wooden beams lay piled on ruined lawns. Roof tiles lay scattered like autumn leaves. The entire top of the minister’s panoramic office was sitting askew and the wide face of the building gaped as though horrified by it all. There was shattered glass everywhere.

  Richard was waiting at the dockside. ‘I don’t know who thought of using the Zubr to push the corvette round,’ he observed as Robin stepped unsteadily ashore and took his arm. ‘But it was a stroke of genius. Blew us all away, you might say . . .’

  Richard was not alone. Colonel Kabila was standing just behind him. ‘You are all to come with me,’ he said shortly. ‘You too, Captain Maina.’

  President Chaka received Captain Caleb’s report in thoughtful silence. ‘You appear to have resolved a potentially fatal situation through some inspired quick thinking,’ he said at last. ‘The damage to the government facilities is considerable but, I understand, repairable. And nothing compared to what would have happened if you had not taken action. There will be a Board of Inquiry of course, but I foresee a favourable outcome. For you, at least.’

  ‘Much of the credit must go to Captain Mariner,’ said Caleb. ‘It was her quick thinking . . .’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the President thoughtfully. He looked at the faces ranged in front of him. ‘It is upon Captain Mariner’s quick thinking that I wish to call. And I am pleased to see that you and she work so well together, Captain Maina.’

  ‘Me?’ said Robin frowning. ‘You want to call on me?’

  ‘Yes I do. You will have realized, I am sure, that I did not invite you to my coun
try simply so that you could accompany your husband on his business mission here. No. I have a request to make of you. A personal request that I believe I could not make to anyone else. Certainly no one else I can readily think of.’

  Robin looked at Richard, then at Captain Caleb. Her frown deepened as her mind raced. Richard shrugged, apparently at a loss. Caleb echoed the gesture. Laurent Kabila cleared his throat and shuffled, but it seemed that even he had been excluded from President Chaka’s plans for Robin. And for once in her life Robin herself simply could not guess what was going to be asked of her. ‘What do you want, Mr President?’ she asked.

  ‘Celine,’ he said at last. ‘Celine, my daughter. You are one of the few people alive who might take her a message from me and make her listen to reason. I want Celine to come back; we have been at each other’s throats too long. I want you to go upriver into the delta to the GPS coordinates of the school and orphanage she runs up there – coincidentally with Mr Asov’s daughter Anastasia. I want you to go there with Captain Maina aboard his fast patrol boat and I want you to bring my daughter back to me.’

  THIRTEEN

  Nellie

  Even with Celine draped across her shoulder, Anastasia managed to stoop and grab her jeans off the floor. Her panties were nowhere to be seen, however, so she forgot about them. It looked as though she was going topless for the moment – she might as well go commando too. With the black cloth wadded in one hand and the other around Celine’s slim waist, she staggered forward. As soon as she stepped out on to the rough concrete of the warehouse floor she stubbed her toe and instantly regretted her trainers. Tears of pain flooded her eyes only to be blinked fiercely away. The trainers were long gone with her underwear. The price of being a drama queen, she thought wryly.

  But then Ado swung in beside her, taking some of Celine’s weight, and they rushed her forward towards the wooden dock and the vessel the dead captain had called a floating shit-pile. She looked pretty good to Anastasia at that moment, though. The most beautiful White Sea cruise liner could have hardly looked better, to be fair. Only a battleship might have pipped her at the post. A battleship full of marines with some chopper back-up and heavy armour support. But even that dream might not have come out on top.

  Because Anastasia knew how to drive Nellie.

  ‘You don’t drive a boat,’ Captain Christophe used to tell her, frowning with seriousness bordering on outrage. ‘You steer her. If you are in charge of the power too then you con her. Con. Manoeuvre. Navigate.’

  ‘If I’m holding a wheel and turning up the juice, then I’m driving,’ she used to tease him, never quite sure how many of these games were really getting through her Matadi dialect’s terrible Russian/American accent. But on their trips up and down the river, Christophe had taught her how to con his Nellie almost as well as he could himself. Had shown her how the whole battered vessel functioned, from the searchlight on top of the wheelhouse to the churning propeller below the square stern. And he had taught her something about the great River Gir, too. But the wise old teacher was probably dead now, she thought bitterly, floating face down in the water somewhere downstream of Malebo. Her eyes stung at the thought.

  The dead captain’s ex-command was sitting tightly beside the dock, one small step down from the level of the jetty itself. Anastasia heaved Celine aboard, letting her full weight fall on Ado. The two women went sprawling and the boat heaved jerkily, straining against her moorings. She slung her jeans down on to the deck and ran for the bollard where the forward line was tied. Her mind, still skittering everywhere like spit on a hotplate, knocked loose by shock and relief, suddenly gave her an image of what she must look like – stark naked and liberally spattered with blood. She stooped to pull the line free wondering who was getting an eyeful this time.

  The all too familiar hammering filled the warehouse once again, seeming to detonate like a line of firecrackers inside Anastasia’s head. Her white buttocks clenched as though they were the target. But it was the windows of Nellie’s bridge house that exploded, showering her like crystalline hail. The hammering was answered more loudly. Esan, firing back. She leaped down on to the foredeck, trying to avoid the still-dancing carpet of shattered glass, but needing to be quick, for the current coming down from the cataract of the ruined bridge had taken the riverboat’s head at once and was swinging it away from the dockside pretty quickly. ‘Esan,’ she shouted. ‘Get aboard.’ Then she crouched in the shelter of the wheelhouse, hoping it would protect her from any more shooting. Got to cover your ass, girl, she thought. Literally.

  Nellie dipped as someone – Esan, prayed Anastasia – jumped aboard, then the sturdy little vessel was loose of the jetty, drifting rapidly out on to the river, in the firm grip of the relentless current. Anastasia risked a glance back round the wheelhouse’s wooden wall and caught a glimpse of Esan frozen in the act of throwing the rowboat’s petrol can back on to the dock, wrapped in blazing rags like a massive Molotov cocktail. ‘I hope he hasn’t used my jeans,’ she thought. But then she started calculating what he must have done to help them: heaved himself into the back of the second truck, ridden down here with them unsuspected, stolen the AK left in the footwell by the prizefighter and come to rescue them after all. Her eyes filled with tears of gratitude.

  The can hit the wooden jetty and exploded into a wall of flame that spread right across the opening – on the wood, on the concrete, on the water in between. Anastasia risked a dash back and round into the raised wheelhouse, three steps up from the deck where Esan was helping Ado pull Celine to her feet. She glanced around the familiar little space in the flickering dazzle of the flames behind her. The windows were gone. So was most of the equipment. It looked as though the radio was defunct. Its guts lay scattered everywhere; and so did those of the venerable GPS. But the wheel was intact. So were the levers controlling the diesel. All she had to do was turn the key in the dashboard and pray. She did – and, not for the first time that night, her prayers were answered.

  Anastasia held Nellie’s head as far across the current as she could while she eased the grumbling motor up to speed, feeling the single shaft shaking in its tubular bedding beneath the deck with the soles of her bare feet, feeling the propeller grip with all the vividness of a fisherman sensing a bite on his line, and finally feeling the battered, flat-bottomed hull attain steerage way. Without the GPS for positioning and the radio for help, she would find it hard to get Nellie to the dock at Malebo. But that had to be her immediate destination. There was at the very least a clinic in the little riverside township where Celine’s condition could be assessed. Then it would be downriver to Granville Harbour, get some help, tool up and get back upstream to kick some serious butt. And, talking of butt . . .

  ‘Esan,’ called Anastasia. ‘Can somebody bring me my jeans? I want to give you a great big thank-you hug, but I’ll be damned if I’ll do it like this. You’ve earned quite a lot, boy, but there are limits.’

  Ado came in a moment later, her feet crunching on the shattered glass, and handed Anastasia her jeans. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Could you hold the wheel for a moment while I climb into these?’ As Ado did what she asked and Anastasia slid on her jeans, she asked, gently, ‘Are you OK, Ado?’

  ‘Thanks to you,’ said the young woman quietly. ‘Thanks to you and to Esan.’

  ‘Don’t do yourself down, girl,’ said Anastasia, buttoning her fly and tightening her belt. ‘You were doing a real good job yourself. Wasn’t it here or hereabouts they had an army of women warriors? Only women? Wiped the floor with the French for years. Amazons for real?’

  ‘I have never heard of such a thing,’ Ado answered.

  ‘Well I’m pretty sure I’m right. And I’ll bet some ancestor of yours was at least a sergeant in that army! Hell –’ she laughed, looking out into the velvety, tree-lined darkness of the south bank – ‘I bet she’s still out there, with the rest of your ancestors in the forest.’

  Ado smiled.

  ‘How’s Celine?’ asked Anasta
sia, taking back the wheel.

  ‘Nowhere near better yet.’

  ‘I’m planning to get her to the clinic in Malebo. I’d be happier if it was me that was wounded and Celine was doing the tending. She’s one hell of a doctor.’

  Ado said, ‘If you had been the one who was wounded and Celine had been the one who was well, then we’d all be dead now. Or still being raped in that place. Celine would never have done what you did. You saved us. It was not your ancestors who were warriors. It is you. You are a warrior.’ And she walked out.

  Anastasia was still crying like a baby when Esan came in five minutes later. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘Are you hurt? Is it shock?’

  ‘It’s just a girl thing,’ answered Anastasia. ‘Nothing a soldier-boy like you would understand. Climb up on the top of the wheelhouse and see if you can get the searchlight working, will you? I’ll need to see where I’m going if we’re ever to have any chance of making Malebo. And the moon’s just not up to the job tonight.’