Silence surged slowly back into the afternoon, and the movement of whatever was crawling over them suddenly resumed its importance as the danger presented by General Gogol and General of Police Nimrod Chala receded. Robert began to move, preparing to climb back up over the cliff edge and out of this nest of busy creatures at once. Ann beat against his back until he paused. ‘Be careful!’ she hissed. ‘They may have left a guard!’
He nodded, and began to move again, but this time with careful slowness, like a cat, pulling himself clear of the crack a centimetre at a time, and rising with absolute concentration to peer up over the edge of the rock. As his leg came level with Ann’s face, she was given a very unwelcome close-up of the cloth of his khaki bush trousers stretched tight across his thigh. Hanging on the cotton fabric was a fat black spider the size of her spread hand. Her whole body bucked as a picture of what owned the scurrying feet filled her mind and she had to crush the back of her hand against her already bruised lips to stop herself calling out.
‘There’s a guard post!’ hissed Robert. ‘Three guards and a hut beside the track.’
Ann could taste blood and she suddenly realised this was because her teeth were fastened in the skin on the back of her hand. The spider fell off Robert’s leg and was heavy enough to make a sound as it hit the rock surface by her ear. It scrambled onto its feet and scuttled away. ‘They’re keeping a careful watch, I think they’ve been ordered to search for us!’
He paused, probably waiting for an answer, but she didn’t dare take her hand away from her mouth. She hated spiders even when they were small. The one on her belly, crawling from hip to hip at the moment, seemed even larger than the one that had fallen off Robert. It was moving across the upper swell of her stomach above the line of her panties, pausing for a moment to push one leg exploratorily into her navel. She could feel each of its eight feet and every single hair on its heavy black coconut of an abdomen. This was a section from one of her worst nightmares. If only she had been wearing long trousers like Robert. The shorts, cut loose for coolness, gave her no protection at all. The only thing stopping it crawling upward to explore her chest was the precious camera bag resting on her ribs.
‘No, wait!’
A distant call echoed out over the railway track.
‘They’re going into the hut. All of them.’ He paused. There was nothing to hear but the moaning of the wind, the calls of distant birds, the scratching of spider claws on the rock nearby and the rhythmic hiss of Ann’s breath through constricted nostrils. ‘Right! Coast clear!’ He was in motion, scrabbling upwards, kicking spiders loose as he went. She lay rigid until his face was thrust out over the cliff face above her. ‘Quickly!’ he hissed. The word coincided with the final movement of the spider, scuttling across to tumble off her hip into the loose leg of her shorts. She was in motion at once, tearing her hand away from her mouth and rolling over onto her stomach. Then she was crawling along the ledge with the bag tucked clumsily under her left armpit and reaching up to grab his offered clasp.
On the cliff edge side of the ledge there was no cover at all so they were forced to scuttle across the tracks into the thin jungly scrub at the foot of the vertical cliff which reached up towards the high country above their heads. Here they both fell to their knees, irrespective of the danger, and tore at their clothing until they were certain that there were no spiders left anywhere near their supersensitive skin.
After a few minutes of frenetic activity, they stopped, crouched with their backs against the trunk of the one tree nearby broad enough to support them both, and began to think their position through. Every now and again, one or the other of them would shudder and scratch, as though the spiders were still in place.
‘We’ll have to go back the way we came on die train,’ hissed Robert. ‘We’ll never get past that guard hut.’
‘Do you think they’ll be looking for us?’ She asked the question like someone probing at a cavity in a suspect tooth.
‘They were looking for us on the train,’ he said.
She thought back to her earlier musings while she had been looking at Gogol and had to agree. It could not possibly be a coincidence that the two people they had seen killed were the two people who had talked to them on the train. No doubt Chala and Gogol had stopped the train for their own reasons, but whatever their original motive they had also been searching for the two of them.
Whoever set fire to the landing strip would almost certainly have checked in the little Cessna, so they would know that Robert Gardiner from the UN was involved in the situation and witness to the massacre in the N’Kuru village. Nimrod Chala or one of his underlings could all too easily have checked the flight plan and found that the best-selling writer and investigative journalist Ann Cable was registered as a passenger and in all probability trying to get the story of village massacres and Russian battle tanks out to the news-hungry world. Gogol himself had seen that they were involved with Harry Parkinson and it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to link them to the dead man’s Land Rover. Someone must have found Harry’s Land Rover outside the station in the township and the Kyoga officials behind the ticket counter and the barrier would both have remembered them quite clearly. That Land Rover would have been the key of course: whoever had been driving the T-80 main battle tank in the dry bed of the Blood River must have been able to see it clearly in the bright moonlight, and so would the gunner through his gunsights, number plate and all.
‘We’ve no chance at all if we stay up here,’ Ann said, urgently. ‘We’ve got to get down somehow.’
‘Depends on where we’re going…’ temporised Robert.
‘We’re going to Mawanga city! Where else?’ She was up and in motion at once, pushing on back along the path they had followed in the train. He followed, listening as she continued to whisper with vivid passion. ‘It’s the only place we’ve got a chance, though even there it’s a slim one. We’ve got to get down onto the plain first, then find some way of getting back.’
‘Try for a bush taxi?’
‘Possibly. Hire a boat if we have to and go down the river itself. But we can’t wait around up here. And I don’t think it would be wise to wait for the next train!’
He nodded. “The only reason for the train to slow down here is for a police inspection. If it doesn’t slow, we can’t get on. If it does slow, we’d be lucky not to get caught as the soldiers go through it again. And this is just the first of the inspection posts. There must be another half a dozen of them between here and the coast.’
‘What about the roads?’
‘Same number.’
‘What about the river?’
‘There was a patrol boat but I don’t think they use it any more. The river is dry to all intents and purposes. It’s a mere shadow of its former self all the way down towards the coast, and it doesn’t even make it to the sea any longer. It empties into a lake about ten kilometres upstream from the city limits and that’s it.’
‘It’s still the best way back, though, isn’t it?’
‘In terms of avoiding police patrols and checkpoints, yes, it is.’
‘Well, that’s what we want to do.’ She stopped and looked at him, her face drawn with desperation. Real, disabling panic welled up in her and threatened to incapacitate her. ‘We can’t let them catch us! There’s no telling what they’d do to us!’