The jungle section was the most sporadically patrolled, so it seemed the most obvious point of entry into the compound, even though there were the powerfully armed technicals nearby and patrols were keeping a regular eye on them. Behind the little cockleshell of a boat, three larger inflatables whispered through the water, also being rowed, filled with a carefully selected mixture of men from both the Shaldag and from Stalingrad herself. Men and one insistent young woman who refused to take ‘No’ for an answer. If Bonnie was going into the camp, she was not going in without support, and if Esan and Ado were going with her as Ngoboi’s companions to try and pull Celine and the others out of the firefight, then Anastasia was going to be there beside her friends no matter what. Unlike the others, she had not needed to change in order to put on non-reflective black clothing. And she had positively revelled in covering her face, arms and hands in thick black camouflage paint. The only things about the warlike Russian woman likely to catch the light, thought Richard, were the whites of her eyes, the barrel of her SIG SG 453, or the teeth she kept baring in a truly unnerving tiger-smile. Perhaps there had been something in her psychoanalyst’s Freudian diagnosis after all.
The three vessels eased under the ramshackle little jetty. The bow of Richard’s cockleshell hissed on to the mud of the bank and his passengers eased themselves ashore. A lone dark figure detached itself from the blackness of the nearby bush and beckoned. Sanda’s voice whispered in the earpieces of the headsets they were all now wearing. And even as it did so, the black inflatable bows of the other two vessels bumped ashore and black-dressed figures, armed to the teeth, started pouring silently on to the bank. As they whispered towards the treeline, the first glimpse of the rising moon shone downriver, reflecting weirdly off the bottoms of the roiling thunderclouds low overhead. It gave just enough light to define the vanishing commando. And to give Richard, as he eased the boat back into the stream, one last glimpse of Anastasia’s unsettling tiger-smile as she went to rescue the friend she loved and the children she had nurtured and guarded for so long.
But the instant that Anastasia vanished, a strange and truly terrifying roaring sound began to echo out of the heart of the darkness ashore. He thought of the vuvuzelas at the 2010 Football World Cup. The sounds were a timeless and chillingly sinister reincarnation of the African bullhorns. By the time the river took him, sweeping him back downstream towards the Shaldag and Stalingrad, his mouth was dry and his heart was pounding; his palms were sweating and the hair on the back of his neck all astir.
At the sound of the bullhorns, Celine looked up, her face drawn with horror. She, Dr Chukwu, the nurses and Sisters Hope and Charity were all wide awake — and had in fact been praying; as close to midnight mass as they could come without Father Antoine. Until the distant, terrible roaring began, the little hospital chapel had become an almost sacred place. Even with a pagan mass-murdering butcher as the principal patient and a blood-soiled sheet concealing the chopped remains of his dead captain beside him. Even with a watchkeeper up in the little bell-tower above them, armed with semi-automatic rifle and MANPADS missiles.
But Celine knew all too well that the roaring of the bullhorns meant that Ngoboi had been reincarnated out in some terrible corner of the jungle. In his last incarnation the appalling Poro god had taken hearts for the general to eat. Celine knew in her own heart that this incarnation would be worse still. She came up off her knees as though some invisible hand had lifted her, and staggered to the door. The compound was unsettlingly empty under the dull yellow glare of the lighting. The buildings and shelters along its edges apparently shut tightly against the awful supernatural invasion. Above the misty outlines of the jungle treetops, the eastern sky was eerily pale with the promise of the rising moon, but its light refracted strangely and restlessly off the cloud cover rolling away towards the distant heights of Mount Karisoke. The doctor arrived at her shoulder. His hand fell on her upper arm, gripping her with almost painful intensity. ‘Get back,’ he hissed. ‘It is death for a woman to look on Ngoboi!’
‘I’ve looked on him before and survived,’ grated Celine, ‘which is more than I can say for poor Father Antoine and the others. And, in any case, the chances are that Ngoboi is coming for me!’
‘More likely he’s coming for Moses Nlong,’ said the doctor, looking back at the general’s bed where the restless body was beginning to writhe awake. The soldier’s sharp-toothed face no longer looked so brutally powerful. It looked sick, agonized, terrified, almost childlike, as growing realization dragged him unwillingly up out of his coma, the louder the bullhorns brayed. ‘Then he’s still going to have to come through me,’ said Celine, though in her current condition, that wasn’t much of a threat.
Shadows flooded into the compound, as though the edges of the place were filling with the black water that had given birth to the pearls Ado had found on the riverbank. Flashes of yellow light gleamed, strange, inhuman reflections of eyes and teeth. A weird hissing became a whispering as the shadows became the boys of the army, all agog with excitement, high on adrenalin as they had once been on cocaine. But over the top of the rushing murmur, the trumpeting roar of the bullhorns gathered. And into the light at the far edge of the compound, the ghastly figure of Ngoboi whirled, with two attendants stroking and smoothing the fluttering wildness of his raffia costume. And, as soon as he appeared, over the top of the bullhorns themselves, the first distant peal of thunder came echoing out of the strange, cavernous sky. The misty brightness smeared across the eastern firmament began to die. There was nothing but the blackness beyond the security lighting, the glittering shadows and the wildly whirling figure of Ngoboi coming relentlessly towards the little chapel and the defenceless folk within it.
Celine shrugged off the doctor’s restraining hand. She stepped out through the door and staggered down the steps that were still stained with Father Antoine’s blood. The whispering that had run round the edges of the compound became a growl. She walked unsteadily towards the whirling dervish in raffia, head held high, face set, nostrils flared. As she neared the capering figure, she was able to see that, like the steps behind her, the front of the dancer’s costume was stained with blood. A bullet hole had been carefully mended but the dark spatter around it remained. Ngoboi’s two assistants danced threateningly close to her, their task of keeping his costume smooth doubling with the need to keep her far enough away to avoid desecration of their god. It was bad enough that she looked upon him. What might happen if she touched him was incalculable. But, short of knocking her down or pulling her back, they could do nothing to turn the determined woman aside. So that, at last, Celine and Ngoboi were standing face to face in the middle of the compound.
Ngoboi stopped his dance and drew himself up to his full, towering height. Behind him, a great bolt of lightning smashed down the eastern sky, seeming to shatter on the top of distant Mount Karisoke. The bellow of thunder was overwhelming and instantaneous. In the instant that it died, a matchet appeared in Ngoboi’s hand. Its disconcertingly hot blade stroked Celine’s left cheek from cheekbone to ear lobe and beyond, razor-sharp enough to be shaving the hairs on her neck, and only the steadiness of the god’s right hand kept her from disfigurement or death — for the moment. ‘I had meant to keep you alive and trade you with your father,’ said Ngoboi in Captain Odem’s voice, so softly that only Celine could hear him. ‘You would have been worth such a fortune…’ There seemed to be genuine regret in his tone. ‘But now I shall eat your heart instead.’