Which, as it turned out, was the best thing he could possibly have done.
‘Only on the hands and face?’
‘That’s right.’
‘OK, let’s be clear about this. None of you is missing skin from under their clothing? It’s just, like, faces, hands and legs?’
‘That’s right. Why so exact, Emily? You sound as though you know what’s happening.’
‘Maybe I do. Let me take it from here for a while, though. You just stop me if I’m wrong, OK?’
‘OK. Fire away.’
‘You’ve been sailing through a sandstorm, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Strong southerly wind, full of sand. Head on, unrelenting. No gusting.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘And the men who have been affected are all people who’ve been out in it for a while.’
‘Yes. They’ve all been doing deck work. Line watches, deck officers… Yes!’
‘And the people who are worst affected have been out in the most exposed sections.’
‘Yes. Yes! My God, you’re right! How did you know?’
‘Anyone down here would know. Anyone from Mau, Cameroon, any of the countries with a Saharan border. It’s the harmattan.’
‘That’s right. We’ve had a harmattan blowing! It blew for days!’
‘Then anyone who was out in it for any length of time must expect to lose a little skin. That’s what the harmattan does. It skins you. It’s a vicious wind.’
‘And that’s all? I mean, there are no other side effects?’
‘Never heard of any. I’ll check in the hospital if you like, there’ll be someone there who will know for sure.’
‘No, that’s all right, Emily. I’ll do it from here. You’ve done enough. Thank you. Thank you very much!’
He switched off his walkie-talkie and looked at his hand. Already the blisters looked less repulsive. He knew what had caused them. He knew that they were nothing to worry about. He raised the walkie-talkie again, but now there was a song in his heart and the unbounded cheeriness he had felt a couple of days ago which had only taken a bit of a knock from this affair returned tenfold.
Even as he asked for Directory Enquiries in Mawanga, he pulled himself to his feet, too excited to sit down any longer, too full of energy to try.
This was the last setback, it had to be. And it. had turned out to be nothing important at all.
They were only a few days out of Mawanga harbour and he suddenly felt certain that everything was going to go smoothly to plan. They would get Manhattan there and save most of her melt-water on the way. In spite of Colin Ross’s figures, the berg would remain stable. The area of radioactive contamination seemed to be relatively limited after all, if the readings collected on the day they found LeFever’s corpse were correct. Once the ice island was safe in harbour it could be inspected in more detail and the contaminated sections cut off and disposed of. His company, in actual fact, were expert in the transport of such waste and it suddenly seemed entirely possible that even the existence of radioactive debris in the ice could work out, like everything else so far, to the advantage of Heritage Mariner. He closed his eyes and thought as hard as he could, but in his euphoric state he simply could not imagine anything going awry which they had not allowed for, which they could not handle easily.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Valerii Gogol had brought eight Hind-D attack helicopters with him to support the division of tanks he was engaged in selling to the power-hungry government of Congo Libre. The Congo Librens were on the point of agreeing the purchase of the whole package, but a certain amount of jealousy and infighting had slowed things down. Which had allowed him to join the men across the border fomenting trouble in Mau, preparing to place Nimrod Chala in undisputed control of the country — which would then become a docile satellite of Congo Libre and a guaranteed soul-mate of Russia. He had also found the atrocities of the vicious little bush war very much to his taste and, for the first time in many years, he had found he was actually enjoying himself.
Which is what he had been doing when the game warden, the UN man and the American reporter had stumbled across him and his putative N’Kuru Lion commando. He had been fortunate that the delay had continued long enough to allow him to hunt them down to death. He had been over the grasslands upcountry with a fine-tooth comb and had seen detailed reports from Nimrod Chala’s ubiquitous paramilitary police patrols. He had no doubt that they were all dead. It was a pity, though, that he had seen only one of them die.
The delay also allowed him time to take five of his Hind-Ds, arm the big helicopters with all the air-to-surface rocketry he could lay his hands on, and go, as General Bovary had ordered, to destroy this iceberg called Manhattan.
The five Hinds came over the Blood River and past the lake on the late Harry Parkinson’s game reserve at zero feet, tearing the tops off the last green trees between here and the coast as they went. Then there was just the endless red dust bowl which had once been the great rolling grasslands of Mau. Gogol looked down on the dead land, smiling slightly. He knew it well; he had been flying over it regularly for more than a month now, usually in one of Nimrod Chala’s police helicopters. The Russian’s cold eyes swept from side to side as he considered Chala’s helicopters. They were going to be a problem sooner or later and the question was, should he destroy them on the way in or on the way back out?
He had omitted to inform Chala of his current plans — the General of Police had made no secret of the fact that he very much wanted the iceberg to arrive. Chala didn’t mind fomenting a small civil war and assisting several million people to starve to death, but he had no intention of becoming the political leader of a permanent economic ruin. And now that the United Nations had declared its intention of delivering a great deal of aid to support the good work begun by the water which the iceberg represented, the possibilities of infinite power had been gilded by the possibilities of infinite pilferage. Oh yes, Nimrod Chala desperately wanted to see Manhattan come safely to Mau. Once he knew what Gogol and his helicopters were up to, he would use any power at his command to stop them — or destroy them in revenge.
‘What kind of resistance can we expect when we register on their radar?’ asked Captain Illych Kizel anxiously.
Gogol regarded him. He was young for a squadron commander. He worried too much. He was a genius with helicopters, an inspired pilot and an excellent, decisive leader with his peers and juniors but he was too easily over-awed and he worried too much. ‘There will be no resistance worth worrying about, Illych,’ grated the general. ‘Either in the air or on the ground.’ He winced as he talked, hating the pain it cost him to utter sound and hating the ugliness of the sound. Once upon a time, he had been the proud possessor of a fine bass voice. When he sang — and he sang often in the days before Chernobyl — people who knew about music had compared him to the great Fyodor Chaliapin.
He sang no more and spoke as little as possible. He reached into the breast pocket of his blouson and pulled out another painkiller. He had learned to function with massive dosages of morphine in his system. It was the only way he could function at all, nowadays.
But he wanted Captain Kizel calm, at least until Manhattan came into view, so he enlarged. “They have no air force, Illych. Their army has no airborne wing worth the name. The paramilitary police have five secondhand Sikorsky Black Hawks. They’re all fifteen years old, basically equipped and badly maintained. They’re there to make a jumped-up little policeman called Nimrod Chala look good. They’re no match for us. But they will, of course, be bringing us a nice present, one way or another.’