The four of them weren’t alone for long, however. The questing men returned. Richard found himself between two noiseless soldiers. One carried a length of vine that looked like a short fat snake. He held it up and made a pantomime of putting one end to his lips. Richard took it, did so, and found his mouth filled with sweet water. He sipped judiciously until he felt his body quicken and his mind clear. The second soldier passed him a small hand of tiny red bananas. Richard peeled the fruit and ate its slightly astringent flesh, keeping his sharpening attention on the others around him doing the same, noticing that they did not drop the skins. They eased across the track they were following and broke through to the river, just at a point where its roaring dwindled. Here there was a pool in the midst of the rapids with a low waterfall above it and a rushing sluice below. Abiye gestured and the banana skins went into the water, vanishing down the sluice so that they would continue to leave the minimum of signs behind them.
The river also allowed them to relieve themselves at last. Richard was surprised to see the corporal post the first of a series of guards, then unlace his boots and strip off his trousers before stepping into the water. The expression on his face told Richard what he was doing and he was only just able to contain the urgent need to do the same until his turn came. The water was icy cold, and aided the process he was standing waist-deep in it to perform. He reached down to dash a handful of cool liquid into his face, but a gesture from Abiye stopped him. The black mud that bedded the stream contained who knew what — besides the coltan they were all here to claim. He waded back out, grabbed his clothes and crossed to the edge of the forest, overtaken by modesty — born of the fact, he thought wryly, that he alone here possessed the lily-white ass from the well-known saying. He was leaning with his right shoulder against a convenient tree, trying to pull his pants up his still-wet legs as the rest of Abiye’s men courteously let him dress in something like privacy, when Anastasia started talking to him from the shadows on the far side of the trunk.
‘Tell Corporal Abiye I think it’s time we joined forces,’ she said so quietly no one else could hear — so quietly he wondered whether her words were something he was imagining. ‘We’ve been watching you and we don’t think you’ll get under foot too badly,’ Anastasia continued. ‘Fifteen of us and twelve of you will make a neat little unit. And we’ll be able to move fast because we’ve already checked ahead and know which paths are safe and which are not.’
Fall
The problem was that Abiye and his men were here specifically to look for Anastasia and her girls. It was the soldiers’ mission to bring them back safely now that they had found them, not to join forces and follow the Russians up the mountain and deeper into the jungle. Especially, Abiye observed, as the Russians had treated his men’s beliefs with arrogant disrespect. A point of view supported by the fact that the little unit’s radio operator was Corporal Oshodi, who had shot the Russian wearing Ngoboi’s costume in the first place.
On the other hand, Anastasia countered, she and her command were going after Max and Ivan no matter what Abiye and his men did. The only way the corporal stood any chance of fulfilling his orders was to help her. And, Richard observed calculatedly, the best method of avenging the late Pavel Zaytsev’s insult was to show his companions how much better the professional soldiers were at jungle warfare. Who better to do that than Corporals Abiye and Oshodi? That idea appealed to Abiye, but he still needed to check with base.
It was their entirely reasonable attempt to do this which established the fact that their communications were being jammed. This was not immediately obvious. At first, Corporal Oshodi simply thought his equipment was faulty. Richard pulled out his Benincom cell phone. There was no signal for that either.
‘There’s a cliff up ahead,’ said Anastasia. ‘My father’s men have left ropes in place so it’s easy to climb. And we’ve checked the place out — it’s safe. Perhaps you’ll be able to get a signal from the top of that.’
And so they took the first step almost in spite of themselves. Abiye led the way through the forest towards the cliff with Anastasia at one shoulder and Richard at the other. Oshodi and the others followed. Ado and Esan appeared and disappeared in the forest shadows, but there was no sign of any of Anastasia’s Amazons until the soldiers reached the foot of the cliff. It must be the better part of thirty metres sheer, thought Richard, and he could see why Max’s men had left ropes and equipment in place. No matter how easily they had managed to get up there, they would find it a considerable obstacle if they wanted to come back down at any speed. The first obstacle of many they would find facing them on their way up the black river to Lac Dudo.
But while he was standing there lost in thought, Ado shinned up the rope with impressive sinuous ease, then she and several others appeared at the crest, looking silently down, waiting for the men. Richard was fit and strong. The cliff face immediately in front of him was by no means as smooth as it had first appeared. He found it surprisingly easy to climb. The toes of his boots slipped securely into cracks and ledges. His shoulders and upper arms found no difficulty in hauling his lean torso aloft, while his thighs and calves powered him upwards from beneath like springs. He went hand over hand, his eyes fastened on the irregular cliff face immediately in front of him with its outcrops of vegetation, its little bushes and pendant creepers with a seeming nest of dry leaves at every sizeable juncture. He had gone about two-thirds of the way when he stopped and hung there, his mind racing. Immediately in front of his face there was a considerable bush, its leaves and branches a tangle of creepers packed with dry leaves. In this micro-jungle, there suddenly seemed to be more life than in the larger jungle all around it. A bright yellow-banded centipede the better part of thirty centimetres long suddenly erupted like a multi-legged snake. And, beside it, in the crack where the roots of the bush were lodged, a yellow scorpion scuttled into the light. Richard hung there, his mind racing, frozen — not with fear or disgust — with overwhelming memory.
His mind raced. Flies, mosquitoes. The leopard that had ironically saved them when Livitov disguised as Ngoboi had exploded in the drainage ditch. The crocodile which had taken Zubarov. It was as though he remembered seeing each one individually in Ngama’s zoo all that time ago when he had been shown around it with Robin, Max and the others. Alongside gorillas, baboons, chimps, panthers, leopards, even elephants; Nile crocodiles ten metres long, dwarf crocodiles half that length — but still more than long enough. Spiders, scorpions, centipedes. Snakes of every sort from spitting cobras to reticulated pythons. What if disgraced ex-minister Bala Ngama hadn’t just sold them off when he’d been removed from government, as people thought? What if he’d released them up here, still planning to open his private wildlife park and make a fortune after all? What if he was somehow repopulating this section of the jungle?
A hand fell on his shoulder and he jumped. Anastasia was hanging at his side. She raised her eyebrows: Is there a problem? He shook his head: Everything’s fine. He pulled himself easily on up to the top of the cliff where Anastasia and Ado pulled him up on to his feet. Even up here, the roar of the waterfall was too loud to allow speech at less than a bellow, so he kept his suspicions to himself, and his lips remained sealed for the time being.