Juggernaut

'It play dance music, long time only music. Sometimes nothing at all.' He decided that it was his turn to ask questions. 'You people. Where you from?'

'We've come from Kodowa.'

'A man said that Kodowa is not there no more. Is bombed, burnt. Is that true?'

'Yes, it's true. But Makara is all right. 'Was Fort Pirie bombed?'

Now we were trading information. 'No bombs there. No fighting, just many soldiers, the man he say. Where you go?'

'We are going to Fort Pirie, if it's safe there. We have more people waiting back there for us, men and women. We are not soldiers.'

'White women? Very bad for them here. They should stay in city, here is dangerous.' He seemed genuinely anxious.

'Believe me, my friend, they'd like nothing better. We are going to go back and get them, tell them it's safe here. When we come back we would like to buy gas, OK?'

'I not sell gas.'

'Sorry, I mean petrol. Petrol and other things if you have them to sell. Meantime, how many Cokes have you got in that ice box in there?'

'Many. Maybe twenty, twenty-four.'

'I'll buy the lot. Find a box and if you've got any more, put them in the cold right away. We'll buy them when we come back.'

He seemed bemused by this but was quite ready to deal with me, especially as I produced the cash at once. Kemp said, 'Do you have many people living here? Could we get food for our people, perhaps?'

The attendant thought about this. He was careful with his answers. 'Not so many people. Many of them go away when trouble comes, but I think maybe you can get food.'

Kemp had noticed the chickens, and caught a glimpse of a small field of corn out behind the cabin. Even his mind, running mainly to thoughts of fuel, road conditions and other such technicalities, could spare a moment to dwell on the emptiness of our stomachs. The station hand was back with us now with some twenty icy bottles in a cardboard box, for which he gravely accepted and counted my money and rung it into his little till. Zimmerman, who'd said nothing, watched with interest as he filled our tank with gas and rung up that sale as well. After we drove off he said, 'He runs a pretty tight ship. That's good to see. We're both on the same payroll, him and me. We've got to give him a square deal when we bring the convoy in.'

Zimmerman was a Lat-Am man and he regarded the station in a rather proprietorial manner.

'Don't worry, Harry,' I said to him, feeling unwarranted optimism rising inside me. 'We won't rip him off, I promise you.' I patted the box of Cokes. 'This is going to make them sit up, isn't it? Something tells me that it's going to be easy all the way from now on.'

It wasn't quite like that.

CHAPTER 23

There was some restrained rejoicing when we got back to camp with the news and the Cokes, which hadn't yet lost all their chill. Geoff Wingstead decided that unless we heard anything to the contrary from Sadiq within an hour, he'd move the rig on as far as the filling station, thus saving some valuable time. I suggested that he leave Kemp in charge of this phase of the operation and come on ahead again with me. I'd had a couple of ideas that I wanted to check out.

He agreed and we left taking Zimmerman with us and adding Ben Hammond to the Land Rover complement. Proctor was quite able to take Hammond's place for this easy run. This time I bypassed the gas station and we carried on for a little way, with the forest, which was still quite dense at the station, now thinning away until there was only a narrow screen between the road and the gleam of sunlight on water. When we had a clear view I pulled off and stopped. At this point Lake Pirie was about five miles wide, broadening out to our right. We were told that where the ferry crossed it was a couple of miles across, with the far bank visible, but I wasn't sure how far downwater that would be from where the road came out; local maps were not entirely accurate, as we had often discovered. Wingstead said, 'It doesn't look like a river.' It wouldn't, to an Englishman to whom the Thames was the Father of Waters, but I recalled the Mississippi and smiled. 'It's all part of the Katali,' I said. 'It would have been better if they hadn't put the word Lake into it at all. Think of it as the Pirie Stretch and you'll have a better mental picture.' It was a long stretch, being in fact about thirty miles from where it broadened out to where it abruptly narrowed again, a pond by African standards but still a sizeable body of water.

'It's a pity it isn't navigable, like most of the European rivers,' Kemp said, his mind as ever on transport of one sort or another.