Dark Heart (30 page)

‘I've looked on him before and survived,' grated Celine, ‘which is more than I can say for poor Father Antoine and the others. And, in any case, the chances are that Ngoboi is coming for me!'

‘More likely he's coming for Moses Nlong,' said the doctor, looking back at the general's bed where the restless body was beginning to writhe awake. The soldier's sharp-toothed face no longer looked so brutally powerful. It looked sick, agonized, terrified, almost childlike, as growing realization dragged him unwillingly up out of his coma, the louder the bullhorns brayed. ‘Then he's still going to have to come through me,' said Celine, though in her current condition, that wasn't much of a threat.

Shadows flooded into the compound, as though the edges of the place were filling with the black water that had given birth to the pearls Ado had found on the riverbank. Flashes of yellow light gleamed, strange, inhuman reflections of eyes and teeth. A weird hissing became a whispering as the shadows became the boys of the army, all agog with excitement, high on adrenalin as they had once been on cocaine. But over the top of the rushing murmur, the trumpeting roar of the bullhorns gathered. And into the light at the far edge of the compound, the ghastly figure of Ngoboi whirled, with two attendants stroking and smoothing the fluttering wildness of his raffia costume. And, as soon as he appeared, over the top of the bullhorns themselves, the first distant peal of thunder came echoing out of the strange, cavernous sky. The misty brightness smeared across the eastern firmament began to die. There was nothing but the blackness beyond the security lighting, the glittering shadows and the wildly whirling figure of Ngoboi coming relentlessly towards the little chapel and the defenceless folk within it.

Celine shrugged off the doctor's restraining hand. She stepped out through the door and staggered down the steps that were still stained with Father Antoine's blood. The whispering that had run round the edges of the compound became a growl. She walked unsteadily towards the whirling dervish in raffia, head held high, face set, nostrils flared. As she neared the capering figure, she was able to see that, like the steps behind her, the front of the dancer's costume was stained with blood. A bullet hole had been carefully mended but the dark spatter around it remained. Ngoboi's two assistants danced threateningly close to her, their task of keeping his costume smooth doubling with the need to keep her far enough away to avoid desecration of their god. It was bad enough that she looked upon him. What might happen if she touched him was incalculable. But, short of knocking her down or pulling her back, they could do nothing to turn the determined woman aside. So that, at last, Celine and Ngoboi were standing face to face in the middle of the compound.

Ngoboi stopped his dance and drew himself up to his full, towering height. Behind him, a great bolt of lightning smashed down the eastern sky, seeming to shatter on the top of distant Mount Karisoke. The bellow of thunder was overwhelming and instantaneous. In the instant that it died, a matchet appeared in Ngoboi's hand. Its disconcertingly hot blade stroked Celine's left cheek from cheekbone to ear lobe and beyond, razor-sharp enough to be shaving the hairs on her neck, and only the steadiness of the god's right hand kept her from disfigurement or death – for the moment. ‘I had meant to keep you alive and trade you with your father,' said Ngoboi in Captain Odem's voice, so softly that only Celine could hear him. ‘You would have been worth such a
fortune
. . .' There seemed to be genuine regret in his tone. ‘But now I shall eat your heart instead.'

The matchet swooped upwards for the killing stroke.

But a second bellow of bullhorns made him hesitate. Over his monstrous shoulder, Celine's disbelieving eyes saw a second incarnation of the god come dancing out of the jungle's impenetrable shadows into the yellow security light. Also monstrously tall. Also swathed in restless raffia. Also attended by two dancing acolytes who kept the costume carefully in place. Also dancing the dance steps known only to the god himself. The man with the matchet swung round, his reed-straight victim forgotten for the moment. The roaring round the compound's edges lost its rhythm and faltered into uncertainty. Lightning ripped across the sky again. Thunder exploded with disorientating power. Rain came pounding down like doom. Odem shouted something Celine couldn't hear and threw the matchet aside. He tore the headdress off and reached into the raffia costume swathing him. Still shouting to his bemused followers, he tore out a handgun and ran towards the second figure. His shouts rising to screams of inarticulate rage, he began to shoot. The second Ngoboi staggered, blasted back as the bullets slammed into its chest. Staggered, stumbled and fell to the rain-washed mud of the compound.

Odem whirled back, levelling his gun at Celine, still close enough to be shooting almost at point-blank range. He would have killed her there and then – no matter what the damage to the prospective meal of her heart, had not several things happened to make him hesitate.

The army of his followers around the compound edge gave a collective gasp that was almost a groan of terror.

The second Ngoboi pulled itself up off the streaming mud and whirled into its dance again.

A rocket streaked in out of the jungle just behind the dancing figure to behead the chapel's bell-tower with an axe of white fire.

And a second explosion punched a great hole in the palisade wall between the burning chapel and the river.

R
ichard learned to drive a T80 main battle tank some years earlier on a virtual tutor halfway between a flight simulator and a video game. On the rare occasions he got to handle the machines for real, he was surprised that the actual controls were heavier, and the whole experience both noisier and jerkier than the training sessions had been. Especially when the 125mm gun in the turret almost immediately above his head was firing high explosive shells scavenged from
Otobo
at the stockade wall he could see through the screen immediately in front of him. In old-fashioned tanks, the driver had looked through a letter-box opening in the armour. Nowadays it was all done with miniature cameras giving electronic enhancement and sighting systems. But even so, what he could see was still framed by the widening aperture of the Zubr's gaping loading ramp, down which he was beginning to roll, even as the massive hovercraft shuddered to a standstill, rammed up hard against the shelving slope of streaming mudbank.

Like everyone else in a command or control situation, Richard was wearing one of the battlefield headsets attached to the system they scavenged from the second truck, and he was finding it hard to sort out the babble of overlapping reports from Bonnie, Sanda, Anastasia, Colonel Mako's men in the field, and Captains Caleb and Zhukov. He had offered Mako a ride so that the colonel could control his men from the heart of the battlefield, but the soldier had preferred to stay aboard
Stalingrad
and oversee his battle plan from there.

‘Kudos to this UN body armour. Stopped half a clip of bullets at near point-blank. Stopped the bastard who fired them at me, too. I think he believes I'm the real deal. May have cracked a rib, though . . .' Bonnie's breathless voice echoed in Richard's ear. Winded with impact, shock and pain.

‘Good shot.' Sanda was saying to whoever had fired the MANPADS scavenged from the first truck. ‘The bell-tower's gone. Now get the watchtower nearest the jetty . . .'

‘Bonnie!' came Anastasia's unmistakable accent. ‘If Ngoboi's outside, where will my girls be?'

‘Locked away,' came the strained reply.

‘First squad!' Mako barked. ‘Wait for the watchtower to go then get up to the compound as fast as you can. There's no one to protect the people inside yet . . .'

Except for Bonnie and Anastasia, thought Richard. ‘I'm going in now, Colonel Mako,' he announced.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,' rapped Robin suddenly, from her central position beside
Stalingrad
's radio operator, in command of the whole system. ‘Idents as you speak, as we agreed, please.'

‘Sanda. This is Caleb. Have you a squad heading for the technicals?'

‘Yes. Squad One . . .'

‘Squad leader one here. Just getting there now . . .' The soldier's voice was lost beneath a rattle of automatic fire as battle proper was joined at last. Clearly someone else had got to the technicals with their heavy machine guns and their anti-aircraft missiles first.

‘Captain Mariner,' the colonel rasped. ‘Can you support Squad One? Things will get complex if the enemy regain and deploy those technicals . . .'

‘On my way, Colonel . . .' Then the gun detonated again and his hearing seemed to close down for an instant, as though his ears could blink.

Richard's T80 was capable of seventy kph on a road. Even on the rain-slick bank of the great river it could reach the better part of fifty. It was doing that when Richard, still half deafened, smashed it through the blazing hole his gunner had opened in the palisade, with the accelerator hard down and the GTD 1250 gas turbine screaming at full power.

He flicked a switch convenient to his thumb and the display in front of him adapted itself to include the targeting system for the remote 7.6mm coaxial machine guns he could control. The tank shrugged off the last of the blazing logs and Richard hurled it left, just missing the rear of the decapitated chapel. The back wall snatched itself magically out of his enhanced but proscribed view. The compound replaced it, showing figures scattering wildly into the shadows, even though the two Ngobois still stood facing each other in the withering downpour, with the quick-thinking Celine staggering away behind them, heading back towards the chapel. It was incredible how little time had passed since the first strike. Five seconds? Ten? Richard zeroed the machine guns as close to the outlandish figures as he dared and blasted the parade ground open, scattering the pair of them, even as the second missile streaked out of the jungle and blew away the watchtower by the jetty. Fifteen seconds and counting.

Richard swung left again, flicking another switch, enhancing his view still further with infrared, seeking hot targets in the darkness. He got his first close-up of the Toyota Hilux technicals. A mixture of Mako's and Caleb's men were fighting their way in out of the jungle. Though it looked as though the patrols around the technicals were putting up some stiff resistance – and some of the other fleeing army men were slowing down, forming up and joining in. The rest of Mako's men would now be following the path he had cleared up from the Zubr and into the compound. He ached to turn aside once more and try to protect the innocents caught unprotected in the middle. But he knew Mako was right, for they had discussed this in their battle plans. The T80 had to get to the technicals before the Army of Christ the Infant did, or there would be slaughter on a massive scale. Starting with Celine, Anastasia, the nuns, the nurses and the children they had come to save.

But even as the thought came to him, a missile sped out of the parking area where the army's technicals were and smeared itself across the front of the T80 with such power that only the reactive armour saved the tank and those inside it. That, and the fact that the missile had been hastily aimed and had hit at an extreme angle. Even so, this was no time to give whoever was out there leisure for a second try. He focussed on what lay dead ahead and forgot about the people in the buildings around the compound. ‘Gunner!' he called in his rough Matadi. ‘Fire as soon as you have a lock on where that came from!'

Anastasia hit the back door of the biggest hut and the flimsy wood yielded as easily as she had known it would. She had helped Brother Jacob hang the thing in the first place, seemingly aeons ago. She rolled into the hut, spraying warm rain all over the floor, her head filled immediately with shrieks of terror and shouts of rage. She pulled herself on to her knees, with the long SIG like a crutch beneath one arm, and looked around. In the dim light she saw the younger, smaller girls, huddled in terror against the back wall. And, in front of them, armed with bits of wood, chair legs, knives, forks, anything they could grab, a wall of older girls, Ado's friends, ready to do battle. ‘It's me!' shouted Anastasia, just in time to stop them coming at her. Her voice halted them the instant they recognized it, she realized. But only her voice. For her clothes and blacked-up face would hardly be familiar – and she was certainly not the first person they had been expecting to see.

The plan had made no allowance for a potential squad of young women ready to fight. But the best plans were the ones that adapted most quickly to changing circumstances, she thought, as she pushed herself to her feet, then eased between them to the front door and opened it. The moment her feet started moving, so did her lips. ‘Robin. Anastasia. I have the girls,' she said into her headset. ‘We're in the longest of the huts by the brick-built generator house. Do we have back-up?'

‘Sanda? Squad One? Robin here. Can you spare anyone?'

‘Yes,' answered Sanda. ‘We have to fall back from the vehicle compound anyway because some maniac in a burning tank has just charged over here at the better part of seventy kph, and opened fire at point-blank range . . .'

‘Very funny,' snapped Richard. ‘I'll cease fire and let you mop it all up if you like. From where I'm sitting it looks as though the Army of Christ the Infant was coming at you mob-handed . . .'

‘So you say. Maybe they were simply running for cover . . .'

‘Enough!' snapped Robin. ‘Sanda, leave Squad One to sort out things there. Get your men to Anastasia's location. That'll be target four on your battlefield GPS.'

‘Sanda. Anastasia here,' said the Russian as she eased the door open a crack to get a good look across the compound towards the chapel with its blasted bell-tower and roof still well ablaze now in spite of the rain. ‘Bring guns as well as men. We have some people here who want to get actively involved. It's starting to look like payback time . . .'