Black Pearl (11 page)

For an instant the nightmare threatened to return. What
thing
could the horrified nun possibly mean? Was she still spattered with Sister Faith's blood? Had Ngoboi scarred her in some way? Then Anastasia understood. ‘It's a tattoo,' she said. Her fingers explored her naked belly and found a strip of cloth mercifully across her loins. ‘A big cat. I've a gorilla on my back. Result of a misspent youth. Remind me to show you sometime.'

Sister Georginah turned and fled.
Mission accomplished,
thought Anastasia wryly. But she'd have to do some serious apologizing and fence-mending later. She pulled herself out of bed and unwrapped the sheet from round herself. It was wet. And her long, lean body was still running with moisture. She padded across to the window, towelling herself with the wet cotton. She stopped. Threw the sheet back on the wreckage of her bed. Stretched her stiff muscles, reached up and peeped out past the edge of the curtain. Her room faced due south across the river, and she could see that the moon was setting between the trees of the delta low in the west down towards Granville Harbour just as the sun was preparing to heave itself up over Mount Karisoke far away in the east.

On the far side of the river the wild jungle reared, huge and black-hearted. Timeless. Unvarying. Cold and terrifying. The exact, precise opposite of the waxing and waning lights on either side. The place where Ngoboi lived. With a shiver she looked back upriver towards the rising sun. It would soon be time to get up anyway, she decided.

She needed a shower. Some food. And yes, maybe some spiritual comfort. She might do a lot worse than spending a few minutes in the little chapel clearing the satanic figures of Ngoboi and Odem out of her mind. And the pictures of Sister Faith and Father Antoine, both of whom the Army of Christ had killed in front of her. The whole nightmare, she reckoned, had probably stemmed from her Skype contact with Robin last night, passing on what she understood of poor old Richard's concerns. Their anxiety for her was a burden she bore cheerfully enough, like any overprotected young adult treated as though they were still a child, though Robin was more like a big sister than a mother. And as for Richard! Well, that was another matter entirely … But still and all, she thought, it was better to have someone worry too much about you than to have nobody caring at all. What was it that had spooked Richard so badly, though? Nothing scared Richard, in her experience. Nothing. Ever. She had heard nothing on the grapevine. The jungle drums remained silent and, surely, if there was any real danger out there, an echo of it would have come out of the dark places, like a rumble of distant thunder. Wouldn't it? With her mind still full of questions, Anastasia crossed the room again, grabbed her robe and towel from the back of the door, kicked her sandals into the light, watching in case anything unpleasant scuttled out of them, stepped into them, carelessly treading down the heels, then shrugged the dressing-gown on and went off to have her shower.

As she slopped down the short corridor that took her out of the adult quarters and into the female showers, she tried to replace thoughts of the night with plans for the day – an enterprise she was helped with by the fact that the showers were walled with reeds rather than tile. And that the red-clay sluice, as usual, harboured a harmless grey house snake which she shooed away with a negligent toe before it got a nasty, soapy surprise. The shower was really just a bucket full of water that could be tilted by pulling a rope and whose outpouring was broken up by a rudimentary shower head so that it became a brief, tepid monsoon rather than a solid waterfall.

She emerged, refreshed. Her mind, like her body, cleansed of the night. With her robe tight at her slim waist and her towel round her surprisingly broad shoulders, she returned to her room, towelled the short shock of her black hair dry and began to dress. In indulgently expensive panties and a bra that was hardly needed, she crossed to her modest desk and checked the old-fashioned paper diary she kept there. Today looked fairly typical. Long on paperwork and short on appointments. So she pulled on a cotton blouse and tucked it into denim shorts before stepping back into her brokeback sandals and – as she was now officially dressed – pulling the backs erect again and buckling them up properly.

She finished her morning's work at 11.30 a.m. and had an early lunch with the other orphanage staff. She listened to the reports from the teachers, the maintenance staff and the sisters, noting that Sister Georginah kept her eyes shyly downcast when speaking to her; then, like everyone else in the place, she returned to her room between 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. This time she slept without nightmares and arose, vibrant and refreshed. And it was just as well. At 4 p.m. she met the senior girls in the largest classroom of the orphanage school. The girls were led by a tall young woman called Ado and a young man called Esan – the only male in the room. Both Ado and Esan were technically too old to be kept at the orphanage and both should really have been sent downriver with others of their age to the Ishmael Bible Seminary and then the Benin La Bas University in Granville Harbour to complete their education. But these young people were different. Esan – which meant ‘Nine' in Yoruba – was an ex-soldier in the Army of Christ. He had no knowledge of his actual name. General Moses Nlong had called him Esan because he had been nine years old when he was accepted into the army by killing and eating others of his family. The ritual was less brutally pointless than it seemed. Esan had, by that one terrible act, put himself forever outside his family, clan and tribe. Beyond the reach of any of his tribal deities or the jungle gods – except for Ngoboi, whom the army's brutal leader used to keep discipline and motivation high amongst his troops. Especially the young ones. Particularly when cocaine was in short supply. For all the boys had been introduced into the Poro secret jungle societies. They all believed in the powers of the jungle spirits.

But Esan had changed sides. Come back into the fold. Used his Poro jungle training to do good instead of evil. He and Ado, also trained in female Sande jungle lore as a child, had helped Anastasia and Celine survive their last confrontation with the marauding army and Anastasia was doing her best to make certain that they would help her and her charges survive in the future. Later on Ado and Esan would take the girls through elementary weapons training and jungle lore. Anastasia would join in. And they would have a five-mile jog through the safe secondary jungle and out on to the farmland on this side of the river before returning for dinner. It was a simple daily routine which – if nothing else – kept the girls fit and confident. And kept the boys – and the local farmers, farmhands, families and occasional passers-by – all highly amused.

But this afternoon's session began, as many of these did, with a simple history lesson. ‘Such armies as The Lord's Resistance Army, M23 and the Army of Christ the Infant will take the boys and keep them alive,' said Anastasia, not for the first time – driving home a message the girls dared never forget. ‘Their life in the army will be hard. But it will be life.' She looked around the room, meeting each pair of wide brown eyes there. ‘But they rape and kill the girls. I have seen it and I know. Like Ado. Like Esan. Should any girl along the river meet such men, they will be dead or a sex slave used by all, all the time … Until they are no more use. And then they will be dead.' She looked around the rows of wide-eyed girls – aged from ten to fifteen – sitting silently in front of her. ‘
But not you!
' she shouted. ‘You are not slaves and fodder for animals like the Army of Christ the Infant!
Here is who you are
,' said Anastasia.

And Esan pulled a slide up on to the laptop which shone up on to the whiteboard. It showed an old photograph of a line of soldiers. All armed. All black. All women. Beneath the photograph there was writing in English, which Anastasia translated into Matadi for them: ‘
“There they are, 4,000 warriors, the 4,000 black virgins of Dahomey, the monarch's bodyguard, motionless in their war garments, with gun and knife in hand, ready to leap forward at the master's signal. Old or young, ugly or beautiful, they are wonderful to look at. They are as well built as the male warriors and their attitude is just as disciplined and correct, lined up as though against a rope.”
That was written by a man called Chauduin, who was held captive by them and lived to tell the tale in a book about his life.'

She gestured. Esan pulled up another picture. A detailed, water-coloured drawing. This time of a single woman. Tall. In full uniform. Well armed, with a matchet at her waist, a musket in her right hand and the severed head of an enemy still dripping in her left. ‘Her name was Seh-Dong. She was a leader of the Dahomey Amazons,' Anastasia explained. ‘The writing beneath comes from another book, this time by a man called Djivo. It says the Dahomey Amazons believed that,
“We are men, not women. Those coming back from war without having conquered must die. If we beat a retreat our life is at the king's mercy. Whatever town is to be attacked we must overcome it or we bury ourselves in its ruins. Our chief is the king of kings. As long as he lives we have nothing to fear. Our chief has given birth to us again. We are his wives, his daughters, his soldiers. War is our sport and pastime, it clothes and feeds us”
.'

She looked down at the girls sitting, enraptured, in front of her. ‘Remember,' she said gently. ‘You are not victims. You are not slaves. You are not food for any men in any army.' She gestured at the picture of Seh-Dong on the whiteboard, with her musket, her matchet and the severed head in her hand. ‘
This
is who you are.'

‘This is who we are,' chanted the girls in unison. ‘
This is who we are
.'

I
t took the rest of the week and several more trips to Granville Harbour International airport before Max and Felix's contingent were ready for the off. Even though all of the experts in mining, engineering, chemicals and civilian transport were already there, together with the Kamov chopper and everything else that had gone into the first, abortive expedition to Lac Dudo. A lot more large Russians arrived, but none was quite as huge as Ivan. And none proved as difficult to get through customs. After a while, they blurred into one big, bald, muscular mass for Richard. But, like Ivan, they were all impressively special ops. Like Ivan, in fact, all were Spetsnaz.

Ivan took Richard and Robin under his wing when they were in the Zubr
Volgograd
, which so swiftly became his territory even though Caleb Maina was its captain. He did this for reasons that were not immediately obvious to either of them – though they, too, adopted the overpoweringly cheery young man. For Ivan knew his special forces. And he knew the men who were slowly filling up the soldier spaces on Caleb's Zubr
Volgograd
, by reputation if not in person. But they all, oddly enough, seemed to know him and he became their natural leader long before Richard worked out that this had little to do with his rank as senior lieutenant –
Stárshiy Leytenánt
,
as Kebila had called him – and more to do with his right to wear a
Krapoviy
or red beret.

So that, one morning late in the second week, Ivan took Richard and Robin down to
Volgograd
's main area, which was every bit as large as
Stalingrad
's. While the morning was still cool, all the men who had come through the airport during the last ten days were engaged in fearsome exercises. Silent, apart from the odd grunt of effort. Focused. Honing themselves to a level Richard – who understood only too well that he was not special in quite their way – had never dreamed of attaining. Preparing themselves for eventualities he hoped with all his heart to avoid. He exchanged glances with Robin who shrugged, mouthed, ‘
Boys!
' and rolled her eyes.

But Ivan clearly had a purpose in mind. A point to prove. And the little talk he gave his two guests as the three of them walked through the echoing enormity of the place was his way of proving it. ‘You see those six there,' Ivan began. ‘Army types. Military intelligence GRU regulars. Steady as rocks. Like those ones over there, the VDV
airborne. They're elite soldiers, like the Paras and the Green Berets. There's a good solid squad of a dozen army men in all. They've been to Chechnya – right across the Caucasus, North and South Ossetia, and lived to tell the tale. That's taken some doing, I can tell you. If the going gets tough and you can't find me, you stick by them. They'll never let you down.' No sooner had he finished speaking than the men he was talking about stopped their individual routines, split into pairs and started practising dazzlingly quick fight moves.

Ivan seemed hardly to notice. ‘But that little squad over there,' he continued, directing Robin's attention with a huge hand on her shoulder as light as a feather, as irresistible as gravity. ‘Different kettle of fish. FSB. Anti-terrorists – Alpha group and Vympel. They've been to Chechnya too, but more likely with intelligence rather than on the front line – though they work both sides, like your SAS. They're here because they're expert on how units like the Army of Christ are structured. How they arm and feed themselves. Where they get their financing, drugs, bullets. And how to go about stopping them. In the field. In their supply lines. In their heartlands. Eradicating them. Dead. Buried. It was Vympel and
Alpha group, you may remember, who closed down the siege in the Beslan School back in 2004, though none of these guys were directly involved in that. Some of their fathers may have been involved in the storming of the Supreme Soviet building back in 1993, though. This is the new breed, however. And don't believe all you read about how the special forces started falling to pieces after perestroika.'

Robin could believe him. While the regular army men were still working one-on-one, these guys had started three-on-one and nobody appeared to be pulling any punches.