The matchet swooped upwards for the killing stroke.
But a second bellow of bullhorns made him hesitate. Over his monstrous shoulder, Celine’s disbelieving eyes saw a second incarnation of the god come dancing out of the jungle’s impenetrable shadows into the yellow security light. Also monstrously tall. Also swathed in restless raffia. Also attended by two dancing acolytes who kept the costume carefully in place. Also dancing the dance steps known only to the god himself. The man with the matchet swung round, his reed-straight victim forgotten for the moment. The roaring round the compound’s edges lost its rhythm and faltered into uncertainty. Lightning ripped across the sky again. Thunder exploded with disorientating power. Rain came pounding down like doom. Odem shouted something Celine couldn’t hear and threw the matchet aside. He tore the headdress off and reached into the raffia costume swathing him. Still shouting to his bemused followers, he tore out a handgun and ran towards the second figure. His shouts rising to screams of inarticulate rage, he began to shoot. The second Ngoboi staggered, blasted back as the bullets slammed into its chest. Staggered, stumbled and fell to the rain-washed mud of the compound.
Odem whirled back, levelling his gun at Celine, still close enough to be shooting almost at point-blank range. He would have killed her there and then — no matter what the damage to the prospective meal of her heart, had not several things happened to make him hesitate.
The army of his followers around the compound edge gave a collective gasp that was almost a groan of terror.
The second Ngoboi pulled itself up off the streaming mud and whirled into its dance again.
A rocket streaked in out of the jungle just behind the dancing figure to behead the chapel’s bell-tower with an axe of white fire.
And a second explosion punched a great hole in the palisade wall between the burning chapel and the river.
TWENTY-TWO
Heart
Richard learned to drive a T80 main battle tank some years earlier on a virtual tutor halfway between a flight simulator and a video game. On the rare occasions he got to handle the machines for real, he was surprised that the actual controls were heavier, and the whole experience both noisier and jerkier than the training sessions had been. Especially when the 125mm gun in the turret almost immediately above his head was firing high explosive shells scavenged from Otobo at the stockade wall he could see through the screen immediately in front of him. In old-fashioned tanks, the driver had looked through a letter-box opening in the armour. Nowadays it was all done with miniature cameras giving electronic enhancement and sighting systems. But even so, what he could see was still framed by the widening aperture of the Zubr’s gaping loading ramp, down which he was beginning to roll, even as the massive hovercraft shuddered to a standstill, rammed up hard against the shelving slope of streaming mudbank.
Like everyone else in a command or control situation, Richard was wearing one of the battlefield headsets attached to the system they scavenged from the second truck, and he was finding it hard to sort out the babble of overlapping reports from Bonnie, Sanda, Anastasia, Colonel Mako’s men in the field, and Captains Caleb and Zhukov. He had offered Mako a ride so that the colonel could control his men from the heart of the battlefield, but the soldier had preferred to stay aboard Stalingrad and oversee his battle plan from there.
‘Kudos to this UN body armour. Stopped half a clip of bullets at near point-blank. Stopped the bastard who fired them at me, too. I think he believes I’m the real deal. May have cracked a rib, though…’ Bonnie’s breathless voice echoed in Richard’s ear. Winded with impact, shock and pain.
‘Good shot.’ Sanda was saying to whoever had fired the MANPADS scavenged from the first truck. ‘The bell-tower’s gone. Now get the watchtower nearest the jetty…’
‘Bonnie!’ came Anastasia’s unmistakable accent. ‘If Ngoboi’s outside, where will my girls be?’
‘Locked away,’ came the strained reply.
‘First squad!’ Mako barked. ‘Wait for the watchtower to go then get up to the compound as fast as you can. There’s no one to protect the people inside yet…’
Except for Bonnie and Anastasia, thought Richard. ‘I’m going in now, Colonel Mako,’ he announced.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ rapped Robin suddenly, from her central position beside Stalingrad’s radio operator, in command of the whole system. ‘Idents as you speak, as we agreed, please.’
‘Sanda. This is Caleb. Have you a squad heading for the technicals?’
‘Yes. Squad One…’
‘Squad leader one here. Just getting there now…’ The soldier’s voice was lost beneath a rattle of automatic fire as battle proper was joined at last. Clearly someone else had got to the technicals with their heavy machine guns and their anti-aircraft missiles first.
‘Captain Mariner,’ the colonel rasped. ‘Can you support Squad One? Things will get complex if the enemy regain and deploy those technicals…’
‘On my way, Colonel…’ Then the gun detonated again and his hearing seemed to close down for an instant, as though his ears could blink.
Richard’s T80 was capable of seventy kph on a road. Even on the rain-slick bank of the great river it could reach the better part of fifty. It was doing that when Richard, still half deafened, smashed it through the blazing hole his gunner had opened in the palisade, with the accelerator hard down and the GTD 1250 gas turbine screaming at full power.
He flicked a switch convenient to his thumb and the display in front of him adapted itself to include the targeting system for the remote 7.6mm coaxial machine guns he could control. The tank shrugged off the last of the blazing logs and Richard hurled it left, just missing the rear of the decapitated chapel. The back wall snatched itself magically out of his enhanced but proscribed view. The compound replaced it, showing figures scattering wildly into the shadows, even though the two Ngobois still stood facing each other in the withering downpour, with the quick-thinking Celine staggering away behind them, heading back towards the chapel. It was incredible how little time had passed since the first strike. Five seconds? Ten? Richard zeroed the machine guns as close to the outlandish figures as he dared and blasted the parade ground open, scattering the pair of them, even as the second missile streaked out of the jungle and blew away the watchtower by the jetty. Fifteen seconds and counting.
Richard swung left again, flicking another switch, enhancing his view still further with infrared, seeking hot targets in the darkness. He got his first close-up of the Toyota Hilux technicals. A mixture of Mako’s and Caleb’s men were fighting their way in out of the jungle. Though it looked as though the patrols around the technicals were putting up some stiff resistance — and some of the other fleeing army men were slowing down, forming up and joining in. The rest of Mako’s men would now be following the path he had cleared up from the Zubr and into the compound. He ached to turn aside once more and try to protect the innocents caught unprotected in the middle. But he knew Mako was right, for they had discussed this in their battle plans. The T80 had to get to the technicals before the Army of Christ the Infant did, or there would be slaughter on a massive scale. Starting with Celine, Anastasia, the nuns, the nurses and the children they had come to save.