Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  They left the harbour and turned northwards, parallel to the lakeshore. Daniel stood out on the foredeck and his good spirits returned swiftly. The water was a dark and lovely blue, sparkling in the sunlight. There was a single cloud on the northern horizon, as white as a seagull and not much larger. It was the spray column where the lake spilled over its rocky rim into a deep gorge and became the infant Nile.

  The ultimate source of the White Nile had been debated for two thousand years and had still not been entirely agreed upon. Was it those falls where the Victoria Nile out of Lake Victoria joined the Albert Nile in Lake Albert and spilled over at the beginning of the incredible journey down to Cairo and the Mediterranean Sea? Or was it higher still, as Herodotus had written long before the birth of Christ? Did it spring from a bottomless lake lying between the two mountains Crophi and Mophi and fed by their eternal snows?

  With the lake-spray in his face, Daniel turned to look westward, trying to make out the loom of the romantic mountain peaks in the distance, but today, as on most days, it was a diffuse blue cloud mass, blending with the blue of the African sky. Many of the earlier explorers had passed close by the Mountains of the Moon without ever dreaming of their existence.

  Even Henry Morton Stanley, that ruthless, driven, Americanised Welsh bastard, had lived for months in their shadow before the perpetual clouds had opened and astonished him with a vista of snowy peaks and shining glaciers. It gave Daniel a mystic feeling to sail upon these waters that were the lifeblood pumped from the heart mountains of this savage continent.

  He turned and glanced up at the open bridge of the gunboat. Bonny Mahon was filming. She had the Sony camera balanced on her shoulder and pointed towards the shore. He grimaced with reluctant approval. Whatever their personal problems, she was a true professional. At the end she’d probably get a good shot of the devil on her way through hell, and the thought made him grin and took the edge off his antagonism towards her.

  He went back to the chartroom below the bridge and spread the survey maps and architect’s drawings that BOSS had provided for him on the table. The site that had been chosen for the hotel and casino was seven miles up the coast from the port of Kahati. Daniel saw that it was a natural bay with an island garding the entrance. The Ubomo River, pouring down the escarpment of the Rift Valley from the great forests and snowy mountain ranges, debauched into the bay. On the map it looked an ideal site for the holiday complex that Tug Harrison hoped would make Ubomo one of the more desirable holiday destinations for tourists from southern Europe.

  To Daniel there seemed to be only one drawback. There was already a large fishing village sited on the bay. He wondered what Tug Harrison and Ning Cheng Gong planned to do about that. European sunbathers would not want to share the beach with native fishermen and their nets, while the odour of sundried fish on the racks would not encourage the appetite or add much to the romantic attractions of Fish Eagle Bay Lodge, as the project had already been named.

  The captain hailed Daniel from above. He left the chart-table and went out to the open deck, just as the gunboat rounded the headland and Fish Eagle Bay opened ahead of them. Daniel saw at once why the name had been chosen. The island at the mouth of the bay was heavily forested. Nourished by the lake’s sweet clear waters, the ficus and wild mahogany trees had grown into giants with branches spreading out high over the rocky shore and the surrounding lake waters. Hundreds of mating pairs of fish eagles had built their nests in the high branches. With russet and chestnut plumage and glistening white heads, these were the most spectacular of all the African raptors. The great birds sat on every prominent perch, while still others sailed overhead on wide pinions, throwing back their heads in flight to utter the wild yelping chant that is so much a part of the African pageant.

  The gunboat anchored and launched an inflatable Zodiac to take Daniel and Bonny to the island. For an hour they filmed the eagle colony. Captain Kajo threw dead fish off the rocky cliff and Bonny captured exciting sequences of rival eagles contending for the offerings and engaging in ritual aerial combat by hooking each other’s talons and spinning and swirting in flight.

  Daniel helped her lug the Sony camera up the smooth, massive trunk of a wild fig tree to film the eagle chicks in the nest. The parent birds attacked them both on the exposed branch, coming in on screaming power-dives with talons extended and curved yellow beaks agape, pulling away at the last possible moment so that the draught of the great wings buffeted them on their exposed perch.

  By the time Bonny and Daniel reached the ground, their personal antagonism had been shelved and they were operating as a professional film crew again.

  They returned to the Zodiac and ran out to the gunboat. As they came aboard, the captain weighed anchor and pushed on slowly into the bay. It was a spectacular site with volcanic rock cliffs climbing sheer out of the blue water and bright orange sand beaches in between the black rock.

  Once again they climbed into the Zodiac and landed on one of the beaches near the mouth of the Ubomo River. Leaving Captain Kajo and the two seamen on the beach with the boat, Daniel and Bonny climbed to the highest point on the cliffs and were rewarded with a panoramic view over the bay and the lake.

  They could look down on the large fishing village at the mouth of the Ubomo River. Twenty or so dhow-rigged boats were drawn up on the beach while as many more were dotted out upon the lake waters. On gull-winged sails the fleet was bearing in towards the bay, the night’s fishing over, coming in to land the catch. Along the head of the beach the fishing-nets were spread out in the sunlight to dry and the smell of fish carried up to them, even on the top of the cliff. Naked black children played upon the beach and splashed in the lake. Men worked on the dhows or sat cross-legged with needle and palm to repair the festooned nets.

  In the village the women moved gracefully in their long skirts as they pounded grain in the tall wooden mortars, swinging rhythmically to the rise and fall of the pestles in their hands, or squatted over the cooking-fires on which stood the black three-legged pots. Daniel pointed out the various features which he wanted filmed and Bonny followed his instructions and turned the camera lens to record it all.

  “What will happen to the villagers?” she asked, still peering into the viewfinder of the Sony.

  “They’re scheduled to start digging the foundations of the casino in three weeks… I expect they’ll move them to another site,” Daniel told her. In the new Africa people are moved about by their rulers like chess pieces He broke off and shaded his eyes, peering out along the road that led back along the lakeshore towards the capital.

  Red dust blew in a slow sullen cloud out across the blue lake waters, carried on the mountain breeze from up-country. “Let me have a look through your telephoto lens,” he asked Bonny, and she handed him the camera. Swiftly Daniel zoomed the lens to full power and picked up the approaching column of vehicles. “Army trucks, he told her. And transporters. I’d say those were bulldozers on the transporters.”

  He handed her back the camera, and Bonny studied the approaching column. “Some kind of army exercise?” she guessed. “Are we allowed to film it?”

  “Anywhere else in Africa I wouldn’t take the chance of pointing a camera at anything military, but here we’ve got President Taffari’s personal firman. Shoot away!”

  Quickly Bonny set up the light tripod she used only for longrange telephoto shots and zoomed in on the approaching military convoy. Meanwhile, Daniel moved to the edge of the cliff and looked down on the beach. Captain Kajo and the sailors from the gunboat were stretched out on the sand. Kajo was probably sleeping off the previous evening’s debauch. Where he lay he was out of sight of the village.

  Daniel strolled back to watch Bonny at work.

  The convoy was already approaching the outskirts of the village. A mob of children and stray dogs ran out to greet it. The children skipped along beside the trucks, laughing and waving, while the dogs yapped hysterically. The vehicles drew up in the open ground in the centre of the v
illage which was both soccer pitch and village square.

  Soldiers in camouflage uniform, armed with AK 47 rifles, jumped down and formed up into their platoons on the soccer ground. A Hita officer climbed on to the cab of the leading truck and began to harangue the villagers through a bull-horn. The sound of his electronically distorted voice carried intermittently to the crest of the cliff on which Daniel was standing. He lost the sense of some of the Swahili as the breeze rose and fell, but the gist of it was clear.

  The officer was accusing the villagers of harbouring political dissidents, obstructing the economic and agricultural reforms of the new government, and engaging in counter-revolutionary activities. While he was speaking, a squad of soldiers trotted down to the beach and rounded up the children and fishermen there. They herded them back to the village square.

  The villagers were becoming agitated. The children hid amongst the skirts of the women and the men were protesting and gesticulating at the officer on the cab of the truck. Now soldiers began moving through the village, ordering people out of the thatched huts. One old man tried to resist being dragged from his home, and a soldier clubbed him with the butt of an AK 47. He fell in a huddle on the dusty earth and they left him there and moved on, kicking open the doors of the huts and shouting at the occupants. On the beach another group of soldiers was meeting the incoming fishing fleet and prodding the fishermen ashore at bayonet point.

  Bonny never looked up from the viewfinder of her camera. “This is great stuff! God, this is the real thing. This is Emmy Award territory, I kid you not.”

  Daniel did not reply. Her gloating excitement should not have offended him as much as it did. He was a journalist himself. He understood the need to find fresh and provocative material to stir the jaded emotions of a television audience reared on a diet of turmoil and violence, but what they were witnessing here was as obscene as scenes of SS troopers clearing out the ghettoes of Europe.

  The soldiers were beginning to load the fisherfolk on to the waiting trucks, women were screaming and trying to find their own children in the throng. Some villagers had managed to collect a pathetic bundle of possessions, but most of them were empty-handed.

  The two yellow bulldozers rolled down off their low trailer beds with engines pulsing and blue diesel smoke blowing from the exhaust stacks. One of them swung in a tight circle with a track locked, and lowered the massive frontal blade. Gleaming in the afternoon sunlight the blade sliced into the wall of the nearest but and the thatched roof collapsed.

  “Beauty!” Bonny murmured. “I couldn’t have staged it better. That was an incredible shot!”

  The women were wailing and ululating, that peculiar chilling sound of African grief. One of the men broke away and ran towards the cover of the nearest field of sorghum. A soldier shouted a warning at him, but he put his head down and ran faster. A short burst of automatic rifle-fire popped like a string of fire-crackers and the man collapsed and rolled in the dust and lay still.

  A woman screamed and ran towards the fallen body carrying an infant strapped in a shawl on her back and an older child in her arms. A soldier barred her path with a bayoneted rifle and turned her back towards the truck.

  “I got it!” Bonny exulted. “The whole thing. The shooting and all. It’s in the can. Shit, this is great!”

  The soldiers were drilled and ruthless. It all went very quickly. Within half an hour the entire populace of the village had been rounded up, except for the fishermen still out on the lake. The first truck, fully loaded, pulled away, heading back the way it had come.

  The huts were collapsing one after the other as the two bulldozers moved down the rows. “God, I hope I don’t run out of film,” Bonny muttered anxiously. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance.”

  Daniel had not spoken since the operation had begun. He was part of Africa. He had seen other villages wiped out. He remembered the guerrilla camp in Mozambique. Since then he had seen Renamo rebels work over a village, and he had witnessed forced removals by the minions of apartheid in South Africa, but he had never grown hardened to the suffering of the African people. He was sick to his guts as he watched the rest of the little drama unfold.

  The remaining fishing-boats ran in unsuspectingly to the beach, where the soldiers were waiting to drag the crews ashore. The last truckload of villagers rolled away in a column of red dust, and as soon as it was out of sight, one of the yellow bulldozers waddled down on to the beach and swept the abandoned fishing-boats into a pile, like firewood kindling.

  Four soldiers brought the body of the old man and the one who had tried to escape, carrying them by ankles and wrists, dead heads lolling backwards. They tossed them on to the funeral pyre of shattered hulls and torn sails. One of the soldiers hurled a lighted torch of thatch on to the top of the pile. The flames took hold and burned so fiercely that the soldiers were driven backwards, holding up their hands to protect their faces.

  The bulldozers crawled back and forth over the remains of the huts, flattening them under the steel tracks. A whistle shrilled and the soldiers formed up quickly and re-embarked into the waiting troop-carriers. The yellow bulldozers crawled back on to their transporters, and the entire column wound away.

  After they had gone, the only sound was the hushed whisper of the evening breeze along the cliff face and the distant crackle of the flames.

  “Well,” Daniel tried to keep his tone neutral, “the site is clear for the new casino. Taffari’s investment in happiness for his people is secure…” his voice broke. He could not go on. “The bastard!” he whispered. “The murderous bloody bastard.” He found that he was shaking with anger and outrage. It required an immense effort of will to bring his emotions under control. He strode to the edge of the cliff overlooking the beach. The gunboat was still anchored out in the deeper water in the middle of the bay and the Zodiac was drawn up on the beach with one of the soldiers guarding it, but Captain Kajo and the other sailor were no longer asleep on the sand. it was obvious that they had been awakened by the sound of gunfire and activity in the destroyed village.

  Daniel looked around for Kajo and picked him out at last. He was climbing the cliff face half a mile away, and it was clear from his manner that he was agitated. He was searching for them, stopping every few minutes to shout through cupped hands and peer about him anxiously.

  Daniel ducked back out of sight and snapped at Bonny. “Nobody must know that we shot that footage. It’s dynamite.”

  “Gotcha!” she agreed.

  “Give me the tape. I’ll take care of it, in case they want to check what you’ve filmed.” Bonny ejected the tape from the camera and handed it over. He wrapped it in a jersey and stuffed it into the bottom of his rucksack. “All right, let’s get out of here before Kajo finds us. He must never guess that we saw what we saw.”

  Bonny gathered up her equipment swiftly and followed Daniel as he cut inland away from the remains of the village and the lakeshore. Within minutes they were into the tall grass and scrub of the savannah. Daniel circled back through the elephant grass and scrub until he reached the lakeshore again near the mouth of the bay, opposite Fish Eagle Island. They scrambled down the cliff to the beach and Daniel paused to let Bonny catch her breath.

  “I don’t understand how they let a film crew loose in the area on the very day they were going to wipe out the village,” she gasped.

  “Typical African screw-up,” Daniel told her. “Somebody forgot to tell somebody else. The last coup attempt they made in Zambia, one of the conspirators broke into the radio station and announced the revolution while all his co-conspirators were still in barracks eating breakfast. He had the wrong day. It was supposed to be the following Sunday. AWA. Are you ready to go on?”

  Bonny stood up. “AWA?” she asked.

  “Africa Wins Again,” Daniel smiled grimly. “Let’s go!”

  Assuming a casual manner they set off side by side along the firm damp sand at the edge of the water. They could see the beached Zodiac in the distance,
but the demolished village was still hidden by the bulge of the cliff face. They had not covered more than two hundred yards before Kajo hailed them from the cliff top. They stopped and looked up at him, waving as though they had only just noticed him for the first time.

  “He’s peeing in his pants,” Bonny murmured. “He doesn’t know if we witnessed the raid or not.”

  Kajo came pelting down the cliff path, slipping and sliding on the steep places. He was out of breath when he reached the beach and confronted them.

  “Where have you been?” he demanded.

  “Out at the point,” Daniel told him. “We filmed the casino site. Now we are going down to film the hotel site at the river mouth, where the fishing village is.”

  “No! No!” Kajo grabbed Daniel’s arm. “That is enough. No more filming. We must go back to the boat. it is finished for today.”

  Daniel shrugged off his hand and argued with him for a while. Then finally, with a show of reluctance, he allowed himself to be led towards the Zodiac and ferried aboard the gunboat. As soon as he reached the bridge, Kajo held a whispered discussion with the ship’s captain and they both looked to the head of the bay.

  There were still streamers of smoke from the burning fishing boats drifting out over the water. The ship’s captain looked worried and gave orders to get under way in unnecessarily loud and agitated tones.

  Before Daniel could prevent her, Bonny walked to the stern rail and aimed the Sony camera back towards the shore. Captain Kajo scrambled down the bridge Ladder and ran down the deck shouting. “No! Wait! You must not film that!”

  “Why not? It’s only a bush fire, isn’t it?”

  “No! Yes It’s a bush fire, but it’s classified material.”