Black Pearl (31 page)

Ngama reached for a bottle of chilled Primus beer, one of a dozen or so recently unloaded from the fridge by an orderly. ‘So,' he said lazily, ‘let us return to business, Mr Asov.' As he spoke, Ngama gestured invitingly towards the bottles of Primus. Max would have preferred vodka. But, as the general said, this was business. And at the moment Max was in the business of staying alive. He reached for a beer. ‘What had you in mind, General?' he asked. ‘The world, after all, is your oyster.'

‘Now that's strange,' said a deep voice. ‘I have some people here who also want to discuss oysters. And pearls.' Ivan stepped out of the general's private quarters and the men who had followed him in through the slit in the tent's rear wall crowded thirstily round the table full of beer.

Five minutes later, General Ngama marched out of the front of his tent with Max Asov at one shoulder and Ivan Yagula at the other. A troop of half-a-dozen hangdog Russian workers followed behind, guarded by a smart squad of soldiers. They all marched towards a big Zodiac sixteen-seater RIB that was pulled up on the black mud bank. Had anyone in his command cared enough to look or to think, they might have been surprised to see their leader getting his exquisitely polished shoes covered with good honest mud for the first time since his arrival. But no one did. So they didn't notice the fact that the general had the point of a matchet pressed against the joint above his fifth lumbar vertebra, three centimetres above the start of his buttock cleft and three centimetres precisely from severing his spinal cord.

But as the group moved unobserved towards the Zodiac in its anchorage carefully isolated from the rest of the bustle on the western shore, they seemed to slow and stumble. The black mud through which they were walking appeared to boil briefly, bubbling and spitting ebony spicules up their legs as far as their knees. They staggered as though all of them had been caught in a sudden squall. Only Ivan's strength as a leader got them into the Zodiac. And once they were there, they sat, slumped in their seats as precious time slipped past unnoticed. But then, as the sun behind them set at last, the evening breeze swept down the mountain, and although it smelt faintly of sulphur, it cleared their heads. Ivan looked up suddenly, his mind reeling with shock, as though he were just awakening from a dream. He stared at his watch and his skin went cold. They had somehow lost nearly ten minutes. ‘Go!' he shouted to the man at the motor. ‘Go! Go! Go!' But he knew they were probably too late.

As the sun set and the sudden twilight swept across the mountain slopes, only the big Mil helicopters, still up in the sunshine, continued working. The last of the Russian prisoners were herded lethargically towards their gulag. And as they staggered wearily across the central compound past the listless figure of the crucified Mako, so the Army of Christ moved out of the jungle and gathered, watching through the razor wire. The evening breeze came whispering through the canopy overhead, spreading its restless sibilance down into the bushes, setting the ferns dancing as though some terrible life was in them. Ngoboi came whirling out of the shadows and into the compound behind the exhausted men. Two acolytes danced with him, keeping the raffia of his costume in place so that nothing of the man beneath the costume, of the face behind the mask, could be revealed. Led by Odem himself, the Army of Christ began to whistle and stamp in rhythm as Ngoboi leaped and capered, drawing out the performance, with his matchet whirling in the thickening shadows around him. The dark god whirled round Mako, the essence of primitive evil, embodying everything inhuman and unforgiving in the dark heart of the jungle.

At last, Ngoboi arrived at the climax of his dance. He froze, mid-caper, immediately in front of Mako, just at the point where the last of the light made it possible still for everyone to see what he was about to do. Odem held up his hands, the twilight's last gleaming reflected in his wraparound sunglasses. The silence rolled like thunder over the place. Ngoboi placed the flat of his matchet under Mako's chin and raised the colonel's face until their eyes could meet. Then the tall god turned his hideously masked face towards Mako's remaining left-hand finger and thumb. He raised his matchet and tensed for the blow.

But it never came, for there was suddenly half a metre of cold steel sticking out of the raffia costume covering Ngoboi's shoulder blades. He staggered back, and Mako stepped forward, the bonds falling away. His left hand joined his right hand on the grip of the matchet Richard had given him – and which was now rammed up under Ngoboi's sternum, through his heart and out of his back. The dead god sagged, held erect only by Mako's grip. His head lolled. The mask fell off. The face of a mere mortal was revealed, eyes bugged and mouth wide, frozen forever in the rictus of utter astonishment.

The acolytes sprang forward, screaming with outrage, matchets raised. The whip-crack of two rifle shots rang almost simultaneously out of the shadows and their heads jerked back in unison, spraying brain-matter. Odem howled something, snatching off his sunglasses to look around, his expression stunned. He looked at the guards up in the watch towers and started gesturing wildly. Even as he did so, two streaks of light soared out of the shadows behind him and the tops of the two skeletal towers exploded into flame. He ran round the end of the compound, waving his hands at the two attack helicopters whose cannons and rockets faced the prison compound in such naked threat. There was enough light to see movement in the cockpits as the pilots began to react.

But then, with an overwhelming rumble somewhere between a thunder crack and an avalanche, the dam blew up.

R
ichard had chosen to use the code word ‘Gibson' after the leader of RAF Bomber Command's 617 Squadron. On the 16 May 1943, three months before his twenty-fifth birthday, Squadron Leader Guy Penrose Gibson, VC, DSO, DFC, led his nineteen Lancaster bombers on the raid code-named
Chastise
that earned them the name
The Dambusters
. Half an hour before the explosion, Richard had allowed himself to be shoved down from the prison compound towards the dam by a couple of irate guards and an engineer wearing a Han Wuhan overall. No one on the bridge had given them a second look as they walked into the hut from where the demolition system was controlled. There was one other Han Wuhan operative there, completing the final installation of the controls designed to take the last wall down in careful sequence. At first, when he was addressed in a gentle rumble of Mandarin, the young engineer thought it must be the other Han Wuhan operative who was talking. But then, in a double surprise of almost disorientating power, he realized that it was the huge Russian. And he registered what he was saying. ‘My friends and I are taking control of this place. If you do what you are told then you might survive …'

The young man turned to the other Han Wuhan man and realized with a sickening lurch that the overall he was looking at belonged to the man he had last seen falling to his death over the edge of the dam. That, more than the giant's threats, utterly unnerved him. ‘What do you want me to do?' he asked.

‘Lock the door. Explain to anyone trying to gain entry that you cannot be disturbed. Then show me exactly how this system works.'

The explosive deaths of the watch towers was the signal for Oshodi to turn off the jammer. He had sent the coded message to Sergeant Tchaba over the one open channel while Richard was still getting his disguise battered into his face. The death of the jammer opened the channel for the battlefield headsets. ‘GIBSON!' bellowed Richard's voice. And the dam went up. The Chinese engineers had placed their explosives in a carefully calculated series which they hoped would bring the structure down in sequence, level by level by level, past the foot of the dam wall itself and into the natural rock barrier that had contained the lake in the first place. Emptying out all of the water, but under some kind of control. They had never considered using the destruction of the dam as a weapon, which Richard, of course, had. On the warning shout of ‘GIBSON!' therefore, the last of Dr Koizumi's containment barriers burst. And so did the basalt sill on which it had been built. What had been a wall became a waterfall with incredible rapidity, tearing a hole in the mountainside that was deeper than the bed of Lac Dudo, which proceeded to flow out as fast as the laws of physics allowed.

As planned, the two attack helicopters felt the results of Richard's explosive action first. The water beneath their floats began to thunder down into the black river's channel with incredible force, overtaking the tumbling blocks of rock and masonry in their eagerness to be free. Millions of gallons were suddenly fighting to get through the huge breach. From a standing start, currents leaped into being that raced towards the gaping fissure at incredible speed. The pilot of the WZ10 nearest the dam stopped worrying about the cannon and the rockets. He started the motor instead, hoping to lift off before his machine went over the rapidly-approaching edge. But the second chopper was sucked towards him too quickly. As the rotors began to spin, they became entangled and the pair of them went over the edge like a shooting star, wrapped together as their fuel exploded, setting off their armaments.

Ivan saw the WZ10s vanish into a cloud of fire that seemed to fall off the edge of the world. ‘Faster,' he bellowed down the length of the Zodiac. They were so nearly there. The shoreline looked almost close enough to touch, illuminated as it was by the brightly burning watch towers that had been the beacons to guide him across the lake. But the seeming closeness was an illusion. The promise of safety was little more than a bitterly ironic joke. Already he could feel the tug of the falling water, sense that the whole lake surface was sloping increasingly steeply down to his left. The twin beacons of the blazing towers were sliding to his right with mounting rapidity. And when he looked uphill to his right he could see a wall of water hyacinth coming down on him out of the shadows. His whole body went cold. ‘Richard!' he yelled into his headset. ‘We're in deep trouble here! Can anyone help?'

‘I see you!' called Richard, who was running back up from the dam towards the camp. ‘Esan! Plan B!'

What in heaven's name was Plan B?
wondered Ivan, looking around desperately. The last he had seen of Esan was when he and Ado had taken the VDV men back on to hyacinth duty. But then a great beam of light struck down from the sky, and the roaring suck of the water beneath him was compounded by a battering downdraught from above. And he understood. Richard had sent the VDV men on to hyacinth duty because he had some kind of a plan to get them up into the Mils. It had to be VDV men because they were all trained to fly. And the choppers were Russian Mils, the first of which was hovering above him now, lowering the hook that it had used to clear the lake. ‘Get the hook,' came Esan's voice over his headset. ‘We'll pull you ashore.'

‘How the hell did you get aboard?' he asked as he caught it.

‘Up the ropes,' answered Esan, as though it was obvious. ‘They weren't expecting it. They weren't paying much attention. And they weren't armed.'

The Mil eased backwards as the hook slid under the rope round the inflatable's side, jerking it out of the grip of the terrible current and over towards the red-lit shore. Ivan staggered, taking firmer hold. He risked a glance around. The men in the RIB behind him were all hanging on for dear life, Max and Bala Ngama seemingly hugging each other with terror. Then he looked left, and understood their fear, for the Zodiac seemed to be sitting on the edge of the world. The sides of the shattered dam stood high above his head. He looked to his right and shouted with fear himself. The hyacinth was rearing into the bright beam of the Mil's searchlight. It was going to hit them before they could come ashore. ‘
HANG ON!
' he bellowed, tearing his throat. Then the water hyacinth hit them. The Mil jerked upwards and for a wild moment the Zodiac seemed to take flight. Then it thumped on to the surface of the hyacinth, still skidding shorewards as the chopper pulled it relentlessly towards the burning watch towers. The propellers caught and the motor stalled. The solid keel of the Zodiac bumped across the heaving, sliding mat of vegetation. But the stalled propellers became tangled in the corded stems of the plant almost immediately. So that, just as the RIB reached the shore, the whole thing flipped over, spewing the passengers out into the mud.

Ivan scrambled through the lumpy slime, fighting to catch his breath in the face of the overwhelming stench of fish. It took him an instant to realize that he was plunging through Dr Koizumi's oyster beds. But then he was free and staggering up the black-mud slope to the prison compound. The Mil hovered overhead, its searchlight illuminating the crowd of Russians there grouped around the towering figure of Colonel Mako. He saw that Mako's command were drawn up into a defensive square, their guns facing out through the razor wire into the jungle. It was only when he managed to stagger up to the outer line that he realized there was no sign of Richard, Anastasia or her Amazons.

Richard and Anastasia were running side by side, with the Amazons grouped around them like a pack of hunting wolves. They had come out of the jungle now and were working their way along the lake shore, with the searchlights from the second Mil sweeping ahead of them and the guttering glow of the watch towers behind. They were in the cane forest and the tall spears of bamboo all around them were festooned with dripping clumps of water hyacinth that had been dropped here while the Mils were clearing the lake. Ngoboi might be dead. The Army of Christ the Infant might have melted into the jungle. But nothing was settled as far as Anastasia was concerned. Odem was still out there. He was, in fact, somewhere just in front of them, running for his life.

The moment the dam went up he was on the shore waving at the pilots of the two attack helicopters, trying to arrange a deluge of thirty-millimetre cannon fire to sweep through the Russian camp. In spite of the fact that he had been focused on destroying Ngoboi, Mako had seen him there. Had seen him freeze as Richard's explosion tore the dam and the rock sill beneath it apart. Mako had watched as the self-promoted colonel ran back towards his stunned soldiers, clearly yelling orders to open fire. But the snipers who had killed Ngoboi's acolytes and the soldiers who had launched the MANPAD missiles were already busy. A fusillade of rifle fire came in out of the jungle that the Army of Christ normally assumed was its own territory. Caught in a perfect killing field around the exposed razor wire, Odem's soldiers were in no position to listen to him – even had they felt any inclination to do so after the spectacular demise of his own private god.