‘We’re going down in the dark?’
‘It won’t be that dark; it’s coming up to full moon, remember. And anyway, we want to be out of here as soon as possible. Even if no one heard the shots, I still don’t fancy being caught halfway down that shaft if a chopper comes by in the morning.’
She nodded wearily; she had to agree. Death had become a part of her life. There was no sense worrying, she just had to accept it as a new fact of her strange existence. Even if Nimrod Chala and the terrifying General Gogol failed to catch up with them, they were dead in any case should even the slightest thing go wrong.
She had expected to lie wakeful and worrying but instead she plunged into a deep sleep in which she dreamed of Nico Niccolo, first officer in the Heritage Mariner organisation and her sometime lover aboard the leper ship Napoli in the wonderful safe old days when all she had had to worry about were cargoes of nuclear waste going critical all around her.
At first when Robert woke her, she thought he must have waited until morning after all. The winding shed was so bright that she felt she could easily have read a newspaper or a book. Only slowly did her groggy mind register the colourless quality of the light. Everything yellow and red had been bleached out of it and only whites and blues remained. And yet it was dazzlingly bright, as though the whole room was trapped eternally in the light from an exploding flash bulb. She blinked owlishly and he shook her once again. ‘Are you awake?’ His voice was loud, its normal, conversational tone sounding like a bellow to her super-sensitive ears. She had become, she realised, one of the hunted; as much a quarry as a fox pursued by hounds.
‘I’m awake.’ Her answer was couched in a whisper.
‘Good. It’s time.’
They pulled themselves to their feet and she realised that, although she had fallen asleep curled independently on the wooden floor, he had come close to her in the darkness and cradled her sleeping head in his lap.
She automatically began to tie the rope round her waist, preparing to wind metre after metre of it round her ribs, but his hand fell on hers. ‘Not so fast,’ he said. ‘I think you’d better find the Ladies before we go. There won’t be any rest stops halfway down the cliff.’
‘Great. But where?’
‘Anywhere. The neighbours won’t complain, believe me.’
‘The only practical places are the two offices, unless you want to go blundering around out there in the dark.’
‘That’s about what I thought. You take the one on the right, I’ll take the one on the left.’
And so she squatted and relieved herself like a native in the bush, except that this was in a rusty old wastepaper bin from beside a desk in the corner, under the ironic gaze of the massive black woman naked on the wall. For some reason best known to Ann, it was the freedom fighters who got used as toilet paper.
Ann went first, exploring and guiding, and he followed on the safe struts that she had tested in the knowledge that if she fell, the rope round their waists would keep her from falling. As long as Robert could hold on. And, oddly enough, she had not a moment’s worry on that score, even when the furnace breath of the evening wind tugged at her most powerfully. She did have some vivid worries, however, not about the strength of the wood or the security of the metal, but about the blood of the chimp she had murdered and the type of nocturnal creatures that might come out in the darkness to scuttle along the struts beneath her hands. Worries about scorpions, centipedes and spiders made her go slowly, and as soon as she gained confidence and started to speed up again, splinters slowed her down.
She was a fit woman, muscular and lithe. Her desert boots were thick-soled and took firm hold of whatever she stepped on. What she put her weight onto held up bravely, and remained firm under Robert’s greater weight when he followed her. Only her soft palms let her down and, in the absence of the nightmare creatures she feared, they did not begin to hurt until she was more than halfway down the crazy ladder they were steadily descending.
There was more than the pain in her hands to worry her by this stage, for as they descended they seemed to pass out of the hot boisterous air of the uplands into the hot, fetid, poisonous air of the dying lowlands. And, while the air was still, it was by no means as clear as the upper air had been. Nor as empty. Clouds of mosquitoes surged upwards, hungry for blood, and soon proved as intimately pervasive as the spiders had been. In fact, given the discomfort of their persistent bites and the literally maddening whine of them around her head, Ann would very gladly have carried a whole range of spiders on her burning skin if they had guaranteed to feast upon the crawling, biting insects moving there now. This was a thought which she held in her heart and treasured even before the word malaria occurred to her.
Ten metres up, the light of the lowering moon fell in behind the tops of the tallest trees which stood above what was left of the river. On the far bank the greenery stood half a kilometre distant, but on this side it crowded closer, overrunning the thin, intense bank which had been widened artificially into a landing stage. Higher up, looking down on a moonlit panorama, it had been possible to see that only the outermost reaches of the landing stage reached into the water now. But the wet, fetid air of the river still filled the valley sides even though the water hissed along quietly far out from either shore. The nature of the wood beneath her hands changed during the last few tens of metres. It became softer and spongier. The acutely unwelcome visions of centipedes returned, to be joined by fears of ticks and leeches. ‘This is truly foul,’ came the gasping rasp of Robert’s voice immediately above. ‘You believe what they say about malaria?’
‘What do they say?’ Her own voice was strained and breathless from the exertion. Perhaps the gallons of sweat she was oozing would wash the damned mosquitoes off and give her some relief. Except, of course, that the salt in the perspiration only made the bites itch more fiercely.
‘That if the bites don’t itch, then you’ve probably got it.’
Ann considered the burning acres of her skin and feelingly said, ‘I’ll buy that. I didn’t think it was possible to itch so much.’
‘Me neither. Little bastards’ve bit my dick.’
‘That’ll be hard to scratch,’ she said sympathetically.
‘And we’re fresh out of Waspeeze, too,’ he moaned.
At the very moment he said this, her feet stepped down onto solid ground.
The rest of her body refused to believe what the feet were telling it, so she continued to move down, collapsing into a heap in the deepening puddle of shadow. At first she thought the sparsely grassed, suspiciously soft ground had managed to retain the warmth of the day to an amazing extent. Then she realised she was sitting on the dead chimp. She jumped to her feet and collided painfully with Robert just as he stepped down beside her. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.
‘It’s the …’ She took a deep breath and choked on a mouthful of mosquitoes. By the time she had stopped coughing they were out from under their makeshift ladder and seated together on the dock itself while he tenderly untied the rope from round her chafed and itching waist. They were on a cool concrete area, blinded by shadows and all too aware that the setting moon had robbed them of any real chance of going further. Ahead of them, the concrete stretched out towards the river whose insistent voice now filled the air around them as persistently as the ravening mosquitoes. On either hand, the jungle gathered impenetrably as soon as the palely glimmering concrete ended. And the jungle was full of restless stirrings, slitherings, whirrings and whisperings. From the far bank, but close enough to make them jump, came the cough of a big cat immediately followed by a snarl, a howl and a scream. Large bodies battered about among light shrubbery and the screams choked off into a heart-rending whimper.