‘So we do need to check upstream as well as down…’
‘Look,’ said Robin. ‘How about this? You get back to Malebo as fast as you can and drop off a commando of half a dozen or so. Get them to check the clinic and see if they can follow whatever trail they’ve left and report back to you at regular intervals. If I’m right and the army has taken the missing people, then you’ll have a direct line to wherever they are. And you’re getting closer to wherever Celine is into the bargain. Meanwhile, on the off chance that something catastrophic has happened to them, something bad enough to cripple them, you run up to the compound and see what there is to see up there.’
‘Now that,’ said Bonnie with unexpected forcefulness, ‘sounds like a plan.’
The run down to Malebo took an hour at full speed. With the river’s current behind them adding another couple of knots, the banks flashed by at a mile a minute. Caleb didn’t waste the time. He detailed Sanda to choose five more men and to prepare to go ashore and follow whatever trail was left behind by the clinic staff and the men who had kidnapped them. By the time they reached the jetty at Malebo, Sanda’s little commando was ready to go ashore and start their mission. The radio man carried a SINCGARS kit using 25 kHz channels in the VHF FM band, from 30 to 87.975 MHz, and was set to FPB004’s secure channel. The fighting men had an assortment of personal sidearms — Beretta M9, Glock, Sig. Sanda himself, Robin noticed, favoured a Heckler & Koch .45. But they all looked well supplied. As they did with clips for the Uzi each of the three had slung over his shoulder. All in all it was a wonder that there was room on their belts for the range of grenades that they also carried. Or for the lethal-looking unscabbarded matchet each man wore with its naked blade down his left thigh to the knee and beyond.
Sanda led them on to the jetty in the humid predawn greyness and they automatically went into full battle mode. Watching them jog into the early morning bustle of the town was unsettling to say the least. Inquisitive early-rising townsfolk fell back as if the soldiers were a group of plague carriers. The jetty itself emptied before them, and it was only when they vanished into the jungle like something out of Apocalypse Now that the citizens of Malebo seemed to regain their confidence, and tried to communicate with the patrol boat once again.
The surge of people coming towards the Shaldag was something neither Robin nor Caleb had counted on, but the quick-thinking young officer jumped up on to the end of the jetty and called, ‘I am Captain Caleb Maina. My command and I have been sent to assess your situation but we cannot evacuate anyone as we are headed upriver into the delta, not downriver to Granville Harbour. We know from your mayor that your communications have been sabotaged and that everyone from your clinic has vanished. The soldiers you have just seen are going to search for your missing people. Meanwhile, I have another emergency upstream to check on so, unless anyone here has more information to give me, I must ask you to go back to your usual routines until the authorities send more substantial help to you.’
The speech did the trick. It was less than twenty-four hours since the Nellie had passed through after all. At first it seemed that no one had any new information, and the fact that their mayor had alerted the authorities who were taking such swift action seemed to settle everyone down.
Caleb took the opportunity to top up the tanks with the spare fuel from the jerry cans they had brought along then — and invested an extra half hour in refilling those at the petrol station. Then he swung Shaldag FPB004 in a wide U-turn and headed back upriver into the dazzle of the rising sun, while yet another crew member tried his hand in the galley and the depleted contingent occupied the empty time by filling their stomachs first, then checking their arms and equipment.
The run upstream took two hours, not just because of the distance or because they were now sailing against the current, but because Caleb became increasingly cautious the further east they got. Sanda’s reports had something to do with this increasing caution. Every half hour — or sooner if he found something specific — he updated his commander on the little commando’s progress. His reports described a trail wide and clear enough to show that whoever made it was not worried about pursuit. Certainly, they — and whoever was up ahead of them — had no trouble in following it.
And, as if the casual nature of the signs they left behind was not enough, there were the bodies left scattered in their wake. There had been half a dozen patients in various states of disrepair when the clinic was emptied. Five of them appeared one after another at the side of the trail, their throats cut as their particular ailments slowed their kidnappers down. There was no identification on any of them, but Sanda — like everyone else in Benin la Bas — knew what the Angel of Granville Harbour looked like from the days when she had so famously stood against President Liye Banda and the torturers of his secret police. So he was able to confirm that, whoever the corpses might be, none of them was Celine Chaka.
But then Sanda’s men came to the side of a forest track wide enough to serve as a road. No more corpses — tyre tracks. Kidnappers, victims and equipment had all been loaded into two four-by-fours and a couple of heavier technicals according to the tracker. And they had taken off pretty quickly, heading east.
At last Caleb brought the Shaldag to an almost dead stop. The whispering engines just gave enough power for steerage way, holding them motionless against the bank, precisely balancing the counter-thrust of the river’s current. The vegetation dead ahead seemed to be an outgrowth of freshwater mangroves, variously festooned with detritus from the recent floods, hanging like crows’ nests in the upper branches. The mangroves hid the vessel from any casual upriver observer, but they also hid the hillock with its chapel, school and compound from Caleb, Robin and the rest. It was, Robin thought, accurately if unoriginally, the moment of truth. They were within a few hundred metres of the GPS coordinates that were their target.
Caleb couldn’t just sit and wait. He either had to take the Shaldag forward or try to get yet another little commando ashore to spy out the land. The first course of action would alert anyone at the compound that the authorities were nearby — a good thing if there were survivors awaiting rescue; a bad thing if General Nlong had left any of his army behind to keep an eye out for just such an eventuality. A particularly bad thing if the men who had kidnapped Celine belonged to his command; and who else could they be? The second course of action would allow them to make their final decision based on a clearer understanding of what was going on. But of course the downside of that was the fact that sending a spy ashore was in itself problematic — the mangroves were pretty widespread — they must stretch back for a kilometre or more — and although pretty matted, they did not look all that strong. A fact made relevant because Caleb had selected a range of the biggest, butchest — and, therefore, heaviest — men available to him. And during the last ninety minutes or so they had all been loading themselves with a range of kit and weaponry that must almost have doubled their weight. ‘Tell you what,’ Robin said to the cautiously calculating Caleb, ‘why don’t I climb up into those mangroves there and see what I can see? It’s been a while since my tomboy days but I reckon I should be able to find some kind of a secure vantage point up there and take a good squint at the compound.’
That gave Caleb something else to hesitate over, so Robin gave him the benefit of her assessment of the alternatives, and that helped him to make up his mind. Five minutes later, already beginning to regret her offer as sheer bloody madness, Robin was easing herself through a springy tangle of branches which took her straight back to childhood days creating secret dens in the huge rhododendron bushes in the garden of Cold Fell, her family home in the Scottish Borders. Eventually she found a kind of bed made out of a mat of water hyacinth that allowed her to look down past a fork in the branches where some kind of a flower lay crushed and dead. Her outlook was surprisingly good and she found herself speculating what a lethal field of fire she could lay down from here if she had any kind of automatic or semi-automatic weapon. But such thoughts were short-lived; crushed out of existence, like the flower at the branch junction, by simple, overwhelming surprise.