She put her head above the water, but ducked back under again immediately, with only the beginning of a breath in her lungs, for the inferno she had just escaped was attaining its full fury now and the heat from the bank, worse even than the sun at midday had been, threatened to re-ignite her hair. But her body, coming out of its animal panic, imperiously demanded sustenance and although it had continued to function without food, it refused flatly to work a moment longer without air. Weary unto death, shaking with shock, she rolled onto her back and let her lips and nose break the surface so that they could gulp down great shuddering gulps of hot air. Half fainting, she allowed herself to drift like this as the sluggish current pulled her slowly along the curving shoreline towards the west. She did not think of Robert. She did not think of dangers — not even of crocodiles. She did not really think at all. She drifted slowly in the shallows, with the slick mud brushing along her back, the surface tickling her belly and thighs while the weight of the camera case sat on her chest like a drowning friend and the hot air filled her lungs, alive, and scarcely more.
When the current began to pull her southwards, she didn’t notice, nor did she register much when the bank gathered over her like a black wave breaking, fringed with fire. When she slid sleepily into the black mouth of the tunnel, something registered, and she opened her eyes. She sat up at once, shocked out of her torpor. This was not some natural runnel or bore created by an incoming stream. This was manmade — the precise curve of the opening told her that, and the wide steps cut into the wall which mutely invited her to climb them. She rolled onto her hands and knees and crawled across to the steps. Where she found the energy to come up onto her feet she would never know, but come erect she did. There were six square steps up to a walkway which led intriguingly down the tunnel into the cool darkness. What had she to lose? She followed it.
The walkway was at least a metre wide. Along the high curve of the wall on her right was a cool handrail and she used this to guide her, for all too soon her eyes could see nothing in the darkness. Just before this happened, when there was barely enough light for her to see what was ahead of her, she came across a low barrier beside a metal wire grille behind which was trapped a wild mess of detritus. There was a low gate here, with wire-edged holes in it about ten centimetres square.
It almost stopped her, for it was obvious that she would only be able to negotiate it if she climbed over it and she would only be able to do that if she took off her boots and her camera bag. But she could not — would not — stop here, so, wearily, she sat and began to unlace the boots. It took a long time to achieve this, for her hands were stiff and swollen, and her laces were wet and intransigent. But in the end she was able to pull off the sodden footware and place it carefully on the walkway by her side. She placed her camera bag beside it, then she climbed over the gate. It cost her some flesh from her upper chest and shoulders to squeeze past the top of the grille and she whimpered with a combination of discomfort and panic when, uncomfortably astride die top of the gate, she thought that she was stuck. But at last she forced herself through to the other side.
Then she realised that she had left everything precious to her back on the other side. She collapsed on the spot and sat for an unmeasured time, sobbing brokenly. But eventually the same determination which had brought her this far forced her on. She could not go back, therefore she would go forward. She pulled herself up and placed her feet carefully on the cold concrete ahead.
All along the floor of the tunnel she was following, water trickled and slopped, and had she hoped to be free of the agonising attentions of the massive river mosquitoes, she was unlucky. Only the thickness of the mud on her back gave her some measure of relief. At last, driven almost insane by the whining, burning biting on her face, she took the last piece of cloth she possessed — the wreckage of her underpants — and clutched the cotton over her nose and mouth. As she walked, her mind shrank away from the present. It fled into the past; into fantasy. For a while Robert walked by her side. Then Nico joined him and the two men had a fight. Her father came to have a chat with her and then she really began to be surprised because he had been dead for many years.
She was still talking to him when she walked over the end of the walkway and fell flat on her face into the bottom of an irrigation ditch two metres straight down.
And that was where she was when Nimrod Chala and Valerii Gogol found her. The two men who had been pursuing her for two days were there when she was discovered. She knew this because she heard them speaking. She did not open her eyes or speak herself, but she heard them.
A rough hand woke her by taking her by the left shoulder and rolling her onto her back against the slope of the ditch wall. A voice called something loud in impenetrably Kyoga dialect.
Feet arrived.
There was more conversation which she could not understand at all.
Had she been more alive, she would have been speechless with terror, for what was happening to her now was the most terrible thing she had ever imagined happening to her. As it was, she lay like a doll, loosely in their hands, and pretended to be dead.
‘Speak English! I cannot understand these Kyoga grunts and gibbers!’ She recognised the Russian accent and the sharp-edged tones all too well.
‘He says here is another one.’
‘I can see that, Comrade General. Pick her up. I want a closer look.’
She felt strong hands fasten on her limbs and she was hefted into the air. Without the warning of the words, she would have reacted to the casually intimate handling. As it was, she remained flaccid as a rag doll. She was so terrified she really felt that she was dying.
‘This is not the woman. This is some native. Can you not see? Look at her face! Her lips and eyes! Her hair. You stupid ape, can you not see that her skin is black? How can this be the right one?’
She was cast down again and fell with stunning force against the rock-solid wall.
‘Look at her! A naked, mud-covered savage, ugly as a baboon and probably full of disease. Leave her! She is as good as dead in any case. It isn’t even worth playing the game with her, we’d never get her to stand up for long enough! Leave her. We have better things to do!’
Footsteps retreated.
A hand groped speculatively between her legs. A distant voice rapped an order in angry Kyoga. The hand was taken away and the last set of footsteps retreated. A helicopter lifted off and thundered away.
Ann rolled over onto her side and was rackingly sick, then she rolled back onto her back and waited to die.
A long, long time later, the footsteps returned.
Thinking of the rough hand between her legs, she flinched. She knew it was death to do so, but she could not help herself. ‘She’s alive,’ called a voice. A new voice. A woman’s voice speaking in American English. The footsteps came up close and a shadow moved between Ann’s bloated, bitten face and the sun. There was a grinding of shoe leather on concrete as the shadow knelt by her side.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said the American voice, infinitely tenderly. ‘How do they come to this? How can we let them come to this?’
Ann tried to open her eyes, but they didn’t seem to be working. She tried to speak, but only succeeded in making her body twitch and jump. The soft voice said something soothing in dialect which Ann did not understand, and suddenly cleft by the terrifying realisation that this woman might simply take her to the nearest native village, she forced words into her swollen mouth. English words.