Solo (11 page)

As if in answer to his question, Kobus stood and ran briskly at a crouch across the road without pausing and disappeared into the vegetation on the other side. They waited another five minutes. Then he heard Kobus shout an order: ‘Femi! Dani! Bring the girl, chop-chop!’

Two of the soldiers stood up, one of them took Blessing’s arm and began to jog across the road.

The night erupted in gunfire.

Bond saw the tracer looping a split second before he heard the detonations. There was the usual sensory delay – the lazy flow of glowing light-flashes picking up speed – and then the road surface disintegrated under the impact of the heavy-calibre machine-gun bullets. Blessing screamed and fell to the ground. One of the soldiers seemed literally torn apart, shredded by the impact of a dozen rounds, while the other was spun around in a mad pirouette before Bond saw one of his arms flail off and go tumbling into the undergrowth end over end.

On hands and knees Blessing scrabbled back into cover and Bond grabbed her.

‘You all right?’ he shouted. The yammering noise of gunfire ripped through the night.

‘Yes,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m not hit.’

Kobus was screaming orders at his men, firing back up the road where the machine guns were. The other three soldiers had opened up with their AK-47s. Leaves and bits of branches were falling on them as the machine guns hosed the sides of the road, raking the forest verge.

This was their moment.

Bond took Blessing’s hand and drew her slowly back into the darkness. One yard, two, three. The soldiers were too intent taking cover or returning fire. Bond backed them off the path and deeper into the undergrowth. Ten seconds, twenty – they were completely hidden, out of sight. He heard Kobus shouting and then the noise of one soldier blundering down the path.

‘They gone, Boss!’

Bond drew Blessing still further into the leafy obscurity.

‘Where are we going?’ she said, panic in her voice.

‘Say nothing,’ Bond hissed at her.

Then enormous explosions sent shockwaves through the trees – mortar bombs – brief flashes of brilliant, scalding light. There was a scream from one of the soldiers. Bond grabbed Blessing’s hand more firmly and turned, moving as fast as he could, forcing a way through the bushes and the branches, running away from the road and the firefight.

Now there was more firing coming from another direction on their flank. A random spraying of the forest as another group of soldiers appeared to be coming up from the rear.

‘Lie down,’ Bond said, ‘they’ll never find us.’

He dragged Blessing off her feet and pressed her down into the dry leafy mulch of the forest floor.

‘Keep your eyes down, don’t look up.’

Someone would have to stand on them to discover them, Bond reasoned, listening to the chaos of the night, the shouts of men, the staccato rattle of machine guns. It was crazed firing, soldiers loosing off at shadows – staying still and prone was the only solution. Shots thunked into tree trunks near them, ripped through foliage overhead, and every now and then there was another brief flash of light washing through the forest as another mortar shell was lobbed in their general direction.

He could hear men thrashing through undergrowth not far from them. Kobus? Or was that the Zanza Force ambush?

Blessing gripped his arm, fiercely.

‘James – we’ve got to get out of here, now!’ she whispered harshly at him. ‘They’re going to find us.’

‘No! Don’t move – listen, they’re moving away.’

He felt her fist pounding on his restraining hand.

‘Let me go!’

‘Blessing – no – we’re safer here—’

She snatched her hand away.

‘I’m not going to die here!’ she screamed at him. She was uncontrollable, panicked out of her wits. She stood up and ran into the dense gloom of the surrounding trees.

‘Blessing!’ Bond shouted – and someone, hearing the noise, began to loose off quick bursts of fire in his direction. Bond fell to the ground and crawled away as fast as he could, rolling into a hollow and clawing dead leaves over him. Blessing had first lost her nerve, then lost her head and made a run for it. Fool! Bond thought. Then he heard her scream, shrill and terrified, and a long chatter of gunfire before she screamed again and it was choked off. Bond pressed his forehead into the earth, feeling sick, breathing shallowly and waiting. Slowly the spatter of gunfire diminished and grew more distant. A lot of shouting seemed to be coming from the direction of the road and then he heard a metallic rumble from the tracks of some kind of armoured vehicle approaching.

He lay there motionless, counting the seconds, the minutes. He saw the beam of torchlight through the trees and heard the excited voices of Zanzari soldiers – whoops and shouts. For a brief second he thought about surrendering himself to them but realised that any figure emerging from the trees would be cut down instantly. Best to stay put. Had they taken Kobus? he wondered. Maybe he was dead? He heard the vehicle start up again and move off.

The forest quietened, and then the insects and the animals began their interrupted squeaks and chatterings again. Bond sat up, slowly: he could smell smoke and cordite but there were no sounds of any human presence that he could distinguish. He pushed himself backwards in the darkness until he came up against the bole of a tree. He hugged his knees to him and closed his eyes, trying not to think about what had happened to Blessing. There was nothing more to do but wait for dawn.

At some stage in the night Bond had fallen asleep in his sitting position against the tree, his forehead resting on his knees, his arms locked around his shins. At first light he woke and, very slowly, stretched his legs out, massaging his thigh muscles back to life and taking his time to rise to his feet. He windmilled his arms and ran on the spot for a minute or two to get his circulation going. Then he pushed cautiously through the undergrowth until he found the pathway and advanced slowly up to the road. There was a crude confetti of shredded leaves everywhere, as if some violent storm had passed, but not a body to be seen, all casualties carted away. The road surface was scarred and torn with bullet strikes and there were two drying pools of blood, humming with flies, where the two soldiers had been hit by the first fusillade.

He cast around half-heartedly up and down the road, not expecting to find Blessing or any trace of her. Brass cartridges glinted everywhere on the ground and he found a bloodstained pack with a few rounds of ammunition in it. Otherwise there was little sign of the firefight and its victims.

He stood in the middle of the road feeling the heat of the rising sun on his face. What to do? Which direction to take? He turned northwards – that was where the Zanza Force fire had come from. If he walked up the road in that direction surely he’d reach the advancing columns of the main army . . . Bond forced himself to think about his options for a while, kicking at bits of the shattered road surface. He could, he supposed, realistically abort his mission, after what he’d been through. M would surely understand. But there was unfinished business and he felt an obscure sense of guilt over what had happened to Blessing. If he’d only held on to her more forcefully, even knocked her out . . . Was she dead? Was she safe in the hands of Zanza Force? Or perhaps Kobus and his men had recaptured her.

Bond looked around him. Kobus’s plan had been to cross this road and continue on the forest path they had been walking along. Perhaps that was the option to choose . . . he had no food, no water, no weapon. He could last a couple of days, he reckoned, perhaps longer if he could find something to eat or drink. Bond thought – Kobus knew exactly where this path was heading and that it was the route to follow. Bond made up his mind: he crossed the road and walked into the forest.

He walked for two hours, he calculated, then stopped and rested. It was hot and clammy and he had been bitten by many insects but at least the path was shaded by the tall trees it meandered through. Bond looked up at the high canopy of trees above him, the branches like twisted beams in some giant deformed attic. He set off again. The path remained surprisingly well trodden and occasionally he came across evidence of human passage – a bottle top, a shred of indigo material, a foil wrapper from a chocolate bar. At one stage he found a butt from a hand-rolled cigarette with some shreds of tobacco left – and he cursed the loss of his lighter. There was enough tobacco to provide a good couple of lungfuls of smoke. Bond was about to throw it away when he saw that it wasn’t tobacco in the cigarette at all. He sniffed – marijuana or some other kind of potent weed. Was this a hunters’ path, he wondered, some traditional route from village to village, from tribal land to tribal land, or, more likely, was it used by Kobus and his men to mount raids and incursions behind Zanzari lines?

He moved on, noting that there were fruits and berries of every hue and size on the plants and bushes that bordered the pathway, but he didn’t dare try one and, for such lush and green vegetation, there was no visible water source. He found a smooth round pebble and popped it in his mouth and sucked on it, coaxing some saliva flow to ease his increasingly parched throat.

He rested up again at midday, the sunbeams that penetrated the canopy now shining down directly on the path, and waited until the afternoon shade encroached. He thought he was heading vaguely south, though the path did take many illogical jinks and turns. He came across a gym shoe (left foot) with a flapping sole and a label-less tin with an inch of rainwater in it. He was about to swig it down when he saw that it was hotching with pale yellow larvae.

By dusk he was feeling tired and footsore and uncomfortably thirsty. He found a large ash-grey tree with great buttressing roots and settled down snugly between two of them. Darkness arrived with its usual tropic speed and, to distract himself from his cracked throat and his hollow stomach, he forced his mind to concentrate on matters far from the Zanza River Delta. He debated with himself over the respective merits of the Jensen FF and the Interceptor II, trying to calculate if he had enough ready cash to make the deposit required for an eventual purchase. Then he wondered if Doig and his team had finished redecorating his Chelsea flat. He had instructed Donalda to supervise the work in his absence and issue cheques as required. It would be a bonus to go home to an effectively transformed flat after this job was over, he thought, and he was particularly looking forward to his new shower – then he laughed at himself. He was lost in a tropical rainforest wandering along a path somewhere between two warring armies. The reality sank in and with it came the questions about Blessing and her fate. Blessing whose lithe slim naked body he could see in his mind’s eye, their night of intimacy so violently interrupted nearly forty-eight hours ago. He felt bitter and remorseful – but what more could he have done? He had his own survival to focus on now.

He turned up the collar of his safari jacket and thrust his hands in his pockets. He was not the repining kind – he felt absolutely sure tomorrow would prove better than today.

Some fluting bird-call woke him at dawn and he set off again without more ado, his throat swollen and sore, his tongue dry as a leather belt. After about half an hour he noticed the forest was starting to thin. There were clearings of blond grass, the giant trees diminished – lower, scrubbier varieties beginning to dominate. He also lost his shade and felt the sun start to burn. He took off his safari jacket and buttoned it over his head like an Arab kufiyya. Sweat began to drip from his nose and chin.

And then the path simply disappeared. The ground beneath his feet was cracked and arid with tufts of wiry grass – as if the path were a forest creature and this scrubby orchard-bush was not the sort of environment it liked.

Then he saw the pawpaw tree.

It was about ten feet tall and had a solitary ripe fruit on it. He grabbed its rough trunk and gave it a vigorous shake, then butted it with his shoulders, making it whip to and fro and, as the pawpaw was shaken free and fell, he caught it safely in both hands.

He sat in a patch of shade and dug his thumbnail into the yielding skin, breaking off a portion of the fruit. He flicked away the soft, swart seeds and sank his teeth into the warm orange flesh. It was moist and sweet and Bond felt his throat respond and ease as he swallowed avidly. He closed his eyes and suddenly he was transported to the terrace of the Blue Hills Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica, where it was his habit to eat two halves of a chilled pawpaw for breakfast, drizzled with freshly squeezed juice from a quartered lime. He would have happily killed for a cup of Blue Mountain coffee and a cigarette. His impromptu memories of those days and that life brought a thickening to his throat – then, cross with himself for this expression of emotion, he wolfed down the rest of the pawpaw with caveman hunger, eating the seeds as well and scraping the skin free of any lingering shred with his teeth.

It was extraordinary how good he felt having eaten something at last. The morning sun was still clearly in the east so he knew in what direction the south lay. He headed on with fresh purpose. Two hundred yards from the pawpaw tree he came across a rudimentary track for wheeled vehicles. He followed the track and it led him to a dirt road where there was an ancient bleached sign that read ‘Forêt de Lokani’, some forgotten legacy from the former French colonial days. But where there was a road sign, Bond realised, there must be some kind of traffic. His spirits lifted and he strode down the road with new enthusiasm.

He rounded a bend and saw the thatched conical roofs of a small village half a mile further on. He found a heavy stick to use as a makeshift weapon and advanced cautiously down the road towards the mud huts. There was no smoke rising from cooking fires; the cassava fields were withered and neglected. Bond walked into the village sticking close to the mud walls of the houses. There were about twenty dwellings clustered round a big shade tree. On some of the huts the thatch had been burnt away and one or two had demolished walls, as if hit with some kind of ordnance. As he stepped into the beaten-earth meeting area beneath the tree Bond saw three badly decomposed bodies – a woman and two men – a shifting miasma of flies humming above them. Bond skirted them, moving through the alleyways between the houses looking for water – some well or trough. There must be a stream or a river nearby, he reasoned, from where water could be easily carried – no African village was far from water.