Catacombs (42 page)

In his hiding place, waiting intently for Kumenyere to come close enough so he could leap up and knock his brains out with the stone in his hand, Henry was unaware that the mud had begun to creep again. He felt it first as a clammy tentacle slopping over one bare leg and looked around in surprise, then horror. He pulled his leg free, but a wave-surge of mud into the hollow behind the groundsel tree buried him nearly waist deep. Terrified, he twisted and dragged himself free of the sucking mud and rolled downhill for a dozen yards. He hit his head on a rock, sat up dazed, staggered blindly to his feet precious seconds later. The river of mud, gaining impetus as it pushed downhill, caught him again and threw him against the silky nightmare of an ostrich-plume lobelia.

He screamed. This time he could barely claw his way out of danger. And by now his weight had doubled from the clinging mud, his steps were clumsy. The head of the long slide sucked and slobbered after him, lurching along the ground; the body followed with a massive fluid grace. Henry's enormous feet became entangled; he crashed down and was gobbled to the elbows as he struggled to stay upright. This time he was too weak to escape. He was pummeled and pushed along. With his arms free he was able to make frantic swimming motions, thrusting his head high.

The pressure of the deep mud threatened to cave in his chest. He screamed again, hopelessly, as the mass, spreading over an ever-widening area, came to a precarious standstill. But Henry was phasing into shock, and he had difficulty breathing. His skin was white, his lips blue. He made a final sorry effort to heave himself free, and fainted.

Robeson Kumenyere found Henry face up, three-quarters immersed in the thick motionless river. He aimed his rifle and clicked on the laser; the red spot appeared perfectly centered on Henry's closed right eye. The eyelid twitched, flickered, rose partway. Henry stared unseeingly at the muzzle of the rifle, and lapsed again into unconsciousness.

Kumenyere found he couldn't, needn't, pull the trigger. He gazed at the enormous tide of mud and rock poised at Henry's throat. In a matter of a few hours, depending on the rain, the flow would continue, instantly pulling Henry under. A new series of earth-shocks would certainly do the trick. And if for some reason the slide abated, in time he would still be picked clean to the white skull bones by the first passing animal or bird with a taste for human meat.

"Have an interesting death, Henry," Kumenyere said gently.

He put his rifle on his shoulder and walked back down the mountain.

R
aun Hardie felt her ears pop as the C-130 descended more steeply to eleven thousand feet above Lake Tanganyika. The starboard cargo door was open. She was about to make the third parachute jump of her life, and she couldn't see much of anything down there yet, although the dense gray mat of cloud just beneath them was thinning rapidly, to the consistency of heavy cigar smoke. She picked up a weak glitter of sunlight on water. Leaning forward, she thought she could see the pale-green slopes of the Makari headland, familiar from all those hundreds of photos. And the dun-colored, rounded summit of Kungwe.

The pilot was now altering course slightly. Too bad if something went wrong, she thought, and they wound up in the drink. It was the seventh-largest and second-deepest lake in the world. Almost a mile deep. Closer to shore it was shallower, but then, of course, you had the crocodiles to contend with.

Raun was first in line–she would go just after the cargo master and his crew unloaded the pallets. All of the parachutes should come down within a radius of three hundred yards, with split-second timing. That is, if everyone did his thing correctly.

Lem Meztizo tapped her shoulder, and Raun looked around. He held up four fingers. And counting. She tried to swallow, and chewed the wad of gum in her cheek more ferociously. Behind Lem, Matthew Jade was plugged into the flight deck, talking to the pilot. She couldn't hear anything above the whistle and roar of the big engines up ahead. She turned back, facing forward, flexing her knees. Something in the sky caught her attention, but it disappeared from view so quickly she didn't know if it had been another plane, a large bird, or just a shadow on the clouds–their shadow.

Nothing else to do but wait, and try not to count off the seconds.
 
Raun checked and rechecked the parachute harness, the static-line hookup, then watched the crew chief, who also was wearing headphones. The land was nearer, the surface of the lake rushing away beneath what had become a yellowish particulate haze. But the plane had slowed perceptibly.

It happened with the suddenness of being shot from a cannon. Green lights flashed, the cargo master and his team lunged synchronously, pallets tumbled one after another out the door. It was her turn. Raun took two running steps and leaped, doing a half twist away from the fuselage as she cleared the door space.

The slipstream blow, the quick surge of falling, then the great booming canopy overhead. Nothing to it. Raun got her breath back, shot a look at the receding Hercules, saw Lem's chute open, then Jade's. They were strung out like trinkets on a necklace about a quarter of a mile apart. But the two men were already maneuvering, closing the distance between them and the landing zone.

Raun looked down to orient herself, and was grateful for the excellent color photographs Jade had insisted she study. Despite the bothersome haze it was all very familiar: the rugged contours of the land she was drifting to meet; semiarid highlands and the jagged treeline below. Off to her left she had a glimpse of the shore. The wind was taking her north at almost ten knots. She pulled at the lift webs to alter the shape of the canopy and compensate for drift, glanced up again.

It was coming very fast, straight at her out of nowhere, and there was no sound. All the thunder of the Tumansky turbojet engine was well behind the MiG Fishbed fighter-interceptor. For three terrifying seconds she descended into its path, totally helpless, while the delta-wing jet closed from one mile away with a gradual sound of the sky tearing open. The jet had a black pencil-sharp nose and two Atoll AAM's mounted on wing pylons. She could clearly see the head of the pilot inside the canopy. He had to have seen Raun, no way to miss her. Therefore he intended to run her down.

But before this flash of thought and her mounting terror could crystallize into the certain knowledge of her imminent death, the Fishbed barrel rolled and flashed by over the lake almost too fast for her brain to register the image. Then she was buffeted by a severe shock wave that came close to collapsing the chute overhead. Her eardrums ached.

Adrenaline was still pumping madly as she hit the ground and tucked and rolled and was dragged thirty yards by an unexpectedly fierce gust of wind across the friable skin of the alpine plateau. When she had the sagging canopy under control and was out of harness, she stood trembling, her body streaming wet beneath the jump suit. She scanned the plateau and thought she saw someone else come down in a collapsing blossom of chute about two hundred yards over the crest of a ridge.

Raun was astonished to find that she barely had the strength to stroll a dozen feet to one of the pallets and sit on it. She took off her helmet and put her head between her knees and rested like that until she heard the unnerving scream of the jet coming back. Or was it a different one?

Now what? she thought, but she didn't trouble to look up.

"S
top here."

Michael Belov heard the sound of the helicopter's turbine engine in the yard of the Nyangoro Coffee Cooperative. They had approached the plantation circuitously from the west and were traveling along a muddy track between neat straight rows of coffee shrubs. When McVickers stopped the Land Cruiser, Belov got out and continued on foot until he could see the orange metal roofs of the buildings and the rotor blades of the Raven helicopter turning. They turned slowly and it was apparent that the pilot was not about to take off.

It had not rained for an hour. There were hot flashes of sun through the streaming low clouds. Belov found concealment behind a heap of irrigation pipe. The pilot cut his engine, climbed on top of the helicopter with his kit of wrenches, and made more adjustments on the rotor hub. The helicopter had the colors and markings of the Air Defense Wing. A radio was playing music but the pilot was, as far as Belov could tell, alone on the coop.

A tremor ran through the land, causing the pipes to rattle. Thinking the pile might collapse, Belov backed off a little way. After three or four minutes the tremor subsided.

He found it reasonable to believe that Kumenyere, after leaving his villa, had been driven to the nearest airport, where the copter had picked him up for the flight to Kilimanjaro. Here the copter had been grounded, probably for repairs. But Belov recalled that the Raven had an operational ceiling of only about ten thousand feet. Therefore, if Kumenyere was not here, undoubtedly he had pushed on up the mountain on foot, to an elevation of ten thousand feet or better, where the cloud cover was heavy. And he must have had a good idea beforehand where Henry Landreth could be found.

About twenty minutes later Robeson Kumenyere came walking down off the mountain. Alone. His boots were caked with mud. He carried the laser rifle in one hand. He went directly to the helicopter. A few feet away he suddenly raised his rifle over his head, a gesture of exultation. He did a little tribal dance to emphasize his triumph. The hunter home from the kill. It sent a cold shockwave through Belov's gut. Then Kumenyere wearily let down his pack and climbed into the helicopter beside the pilot; Belov couldn't see him clearly any longer.

Within a couple of minutes the engine started, the rotor blades achieved lift-off pitch, and the copter rose slowly. Belov crept back to the pile of rust-pitted pipe. He watched as the helicopter swung around above the trees and then flew southwest, in the general direction of Arusha.

He went back to the Land Cruiser. It was two thirty in the afternoon. He had McVickers follow the track where he'd first seen Kumenyere. It was not much to go on, but the ruts told of a big four-wheel drive vehicle that had passed that way during the last twenty-four hours.

Twenty minutes tortuous driving from the cooperative they came to the abandoned Land-Rover, which looked like the backplate in a target gallery. The holes were small enough to have been made by .22s, the caliber of Kumenyere's rifle. He had thrown enough lead to disable the Rover, but otherwise the ambush was a futile one. There was no blood anywhere inside.

If Landreth had been hit it wasn't serious, at least not right away. The key was in the ignition. The engine was dead cold, so the ambush hadn't happened recently. A spider spinning its web from steering wheel to dash panel suggested the vehicle had sat there at least overnight. There were crushed cigarette butts on the floorboards, a pack of them. Perhaps he had sat smoking nervously in the dark all night while Kumenyere enjoyed a restful snooze back at the coffee coop's lodge. Which might have given him a head start at dawn.

Belov tried the ignition but the engine wouldn't turn over. He and McVickers couldn't push the Land Rover far enough to one side to allow the Toyota to pass. The Russian put on his foul-weather mountain gear and shouldered his backpack, which weighed close to thirty-five pounds. McVickers backed slowly away with a wave of his hand, and Belov continued up the track.

After a few minutes rain set in, a blowing drizzle that seeped to his skin despite his weatherproof clothing and worsened the footing. He fell several times, and his progress at best was excruciatingly slow. The air was thinner, much colder; he could see his breath. When the track became steeper he used his alpine ax to keep from sliding backward. All along the way he could still make out two sets of slurred bootprints. Two going up, one returning. It would not have surprised him to come across Henry Landreth's body by the side of the track as he moved steadily higher. He thought he was somewhere around ten thousand feet. Visibility was poor. From time to time the earth was uneasy beneath his feet, not precisely shaking: It felt a little as if he were walking across the back of a living creature. He heard a low rumbling that prickled the hairs on the back of his neck.

Slowly the dense creeper, brier, and giant ferns began to thin and he had a glimpse of a moor half smothered in cloud. The forest trees became noticeably smaller, hung with Saint-John's-wort and orchids. They were more widely spaced, forming pleasant glades rather than dense impenetrable tracts.

He emerged onto a devastated landscape that was thick with mud as far as he could see; it was as if he were looking at the canted bottom of a lake violently and completely drained of its waters. The mud, called
lahar
, was piled up in places in a soft wall five or six feet high; it contained some awesome boulders and huge chunks of ice clear as diamonds, unimaginably ancient ice now being shed by the glacier somewhere above in blinding fog and cloud.

There seemed to be no way to get through the mudslide–he would have to feel his way around it. But he was tired now; he had to rest. His eyes settled on a raft of timbers that looked as if they had formed a roof of some kind, perhaps the roof of a climbers' hut. The timbers were about forty feet away in the morass. The mud had swallowed the rest.

Belov, cold and dispirited, poured a shot of brandy from a sterling flask, never taking his eyes off the glistening mud. He had the uneasy feeling that the entire mass might suddenly pour down, with a loud plopping sound, like catsup from an upended bottle.

He swallowed the fiery brandy, then suddenly and angrily put his hands to his mouth and shouted. "Hello! Henry Landreth! Can you hear me?"