Ann’s hiss of surprise became a gasp as though she had been kicked in the belly hard. All at once she was scrabbling for her camera and pressing it to her eye. Even without the telescopic lens, she could see the white man clearly enough in the trembling viewfinder to recognise him as the man who had killed the soldier for firing too soon at Harry Parkinson last night. But there was more. In the brightness of daylight, that thin, hawk-like profile was familiar from another context. She had seen him before. She knew who this man was, if only she could remember.
The N’Kuru woman stood transfixed on the end of the pulpit with these three standing quietly opposite her. The young man asked another question. The woman’s answer was negative. Desperately, she looked around, her mahogany skin gleaming with the sweat of terror. The two senior officers, white and black, pulled pistols from their belts. The young man asked his last question and this time the woman stood in silence. She had said all there was to say.
The certainty of what was about to happen hit Ann like a blow in the face. She jerked in her breath to call out, to tell the terrifying men with their pistols that she was down here. That she would give herself up at once, betray Robert even, to save this woman’s life.
But she was too late. The pistols spat once, together. The woman, struck in the upper chest, staggered back with the impact, and those few faltering steps were enough to take her over the edge. The three men almost ran forward, avidly following the fall of the silent body with bright, excited eyes. Ann pushed the button, catching them in clear profile, then she pulled the camera down to show what they were looking at so fixedly. By the time she found it so far below, the body had already landed and the dull thud of its arrival was echoing upwards loudly enough to drown the repeated sound of her shutter clicking. She took enough pictures to show the slow spread of darkness around the shattered, ruptured frame.
By the time she pulled the viewfinder up again, the three men were walking back along the pulpit, the young gigolo still protesting in animated monologue that the woman must have known more than she would tell. Abruptly, the white man seemed to run out of patience with the native. He turned his death’s head profile towards the man and yelled at him with a broken, wheezing snarl. The young man stopped, his face a dark echo of the expression he had worn before pulling the flick knife. He opened his mouth to protest, but the white man’s fist moved with terrifying speed and the lethal accuracy of a snake striking. He punched the gigolo in the chest. That was all. One blow immediately in the middle of the sternum.
The gigolo stepped back, more surprised than hurt, only to find that there was no rock to step on behind him. Waving his arms as though he might fly, he turned balletically on one toe and toppled off the side of the pulpit.
Where the woman had fallen backwards and silently, the gigolo dived off head first with that wild, seagull scream. He plummeted through one lazy somersault before hitting the ground. It was all so sudden and so unexpected that Ann never even considered trying to take pictures.
Where the woman had been tightly wrapped in swathe after swathe of tribal costume, the gigolo was wearing only his open-necked shirt. Where she had landed flat on her back, he landed head first and face down. His head exploded on impact and his chest burst open immediately behind it. Great gouts of blood and soft matter splattered out in a vivid circle all round him, showering not only the deceptively restful corpse of the woman but also the widely strewn collection of bones nearby. And Ann realised that what she had fondly believed to be the remains of animals, strewn by long departed scavengers, were the bones of N’Kuru who had been made to fly away home by the Kyoga soldiers of Nimrod Chala’s paramilitary police force.
The sound of the train departing covered the noises she made as she sent her lunch to join the remains of the unfortunates below. Only Robert’s iron grip stopped her from going over herself.
‘Well,’ he gasped, as soon as he saw some kind of intelligence glint back into her desperate eyes, ‘what do you think of your first introduction to our revered conservator of the law of the land?’
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you recognise him? The officer in the blue uniform? You must have seen his picture on posters. That was him. General of Police Nimrod Chala himself.’
Ann was shaking her head, desperate to impart her own news. Truth to tell, she had hardly bothered to look at the black officer, so fascinated had she been by the white man in green. ‘The other one,’ she gasped. ‘I recognised the other one. The white. He was in charge of the ambush that killed Harry Parkinson!’
‘What? Son of a—’
‘But that’s not all. I know him, Robert. I know who he is!’
‘What? How …’
‘Years ago. When I was working for Greenpeace full time. They got tapes of the Chernobyl trials. Everyone involved in the Chernobyl fiasco was either tried or gave evidence afterwards. He was there. He gave evidence. He was in charge of the circle of tanks they had in place around the complex on the night of the fifth and sixth of May! That was General Valerii Gogol of the Soviet Army General Staff, one of the greatest tank commanders of his generation. The Patton of the Soviet empire. The Rommel of the Ukraine. The Russian Horrocks.’ She paused in her wild rush of information and her eyes, fully alive now, filled with almost limitless speculation as she asked the question which was burning at the forefront of both their minds.
‘What in hell’s name is General Valerii Gogol doing here?’
HEAT
HORSE LATITUDES AND DOLDRUMS
‘An uneasy throne is ice on summer seas’
Chapter Eighteen
The air above the globe circulates not only in great whirls round the points of the compass, wandering across the northern and southern hemispheres, but also in massive waves upwards and downwards between the ground and the troposphere which step north and south in unvarying series. Over the equator, hot air rises fiercely and continually, until it reaches the solid impenetrability of the upper reaches where its upward pressure is channelled northwards and southwards and, as it moves, is cooled and gains enough weight to fall again until it reaches surface level between 20 and 30 degrees north and south. Here, independently of the actual conditions on the ground, the air pressure is always high, for the cooled equatorial air is pressing downwards in untold, invisible masses. This is a system which not even the turning of the earth and the consequent power of the Coriolis force can seriously disturb, though circumstance and local conditions can undermine or intensify it from time to time.
Where the air presses down upon land masses between these latitudes, the result tends to be aridity, for the circulation of atmosphere required for regular rainfall is hampered by the weight of the pressure, and the frontal systems of the middle latitudes cannot break through the walls of air and the steady breezes which tend to blow at surface level north and south from their lower edges. In their hearts, under the massive weight of the air, there is a great stillness. Where this falls over the land, it is the cause of what the geographers have called the great hot deserts; where it falls over water it is the cause of what sailors have called the Doldrums.