Vicious Circle (48 page)

The first cargo that the Condor flew into Kazundu comprised the massive diesel generator to power the castle and the satellite antenna and the full array of electronic communications apparatus that Carl needed to keep in instantaneous contact with the financial markets around the world. On the same flight came a team of seven highly paid experts who installed and operated all this equipment.

There was also a doctor on board the Antonov. He was taking up full-time employment with the new government of Kazundu to be instantly on hand to deal with the low-grade hypochondria with which Carl was afflicted.

From the same Bulgarian dealer who supplied the Condor, Carl had also procured a fleet of two Russian ex-naval landing craft. He had them fitted with new engines and delivered by freighter from the Bulgarian port of Varna on the Black Sea to Dar es Salaam, the chief port of Tanzania. The Condor flew down to the coast and flew them back to Kazundu, one at a time. They were capable of crossing the lake to Kigoma in a little over two hours and delivering fifty tons of cement or other building material on site with each crossing.

While this heavy labour was in progress Johnny Congo picked out all his deceased uncle’s former militiamen from amongst his subjects. The chosen men were amazed by his ability to identify them so readily. Johnny earned the reputation of possessing supernatural powers, which contributed largely to the awe in which he was regarded by his subjects. None of them tumbled to the simple fact that they were the best nourished segment of the entire Kazundian population and stood out belly and buttocks from the herd.

Johnny handed these conscripts over to Sam Ngewenyama to be fully trained as soldiers and enforcers to keep the rest of their tribal brothers and sisters hard at work. Breaking heads and kicking backsides was their employment of choice. They went to work with gusto in the service of King John and his white prime minister, His Excellency Carl Peter Bannock.

*

Once the infrastructure of the new Kazundian government was in place and running smoothly, Johnny assembled a band of his new bodyguard, thirty men strong and heavily armed. He sent envoys ahead of him to announce to the local Congolese warlords his imminent arrival in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and then, accompanied by Sam Ngewenyama and his bodyguard, he marched across the border. Carl decided against joining the expedition on the grounds of being unsuited to the job by his inability to speak any of the native languages and the importance of him staying in close contact with the movements of the global financial markets. For once Johnny did not brush his excuses aside and he left him with a lingering kiss on the mouth.

Johnny’s tour of the eastern Congolese provinces was a triumph. Every province was run by a local warlord and his own private army. They listened in barely suppressed glee as Johnny explained that he would pay in good American dollars for every ounce of coltan concentrates, every gram of gold, every carat of diamonds and every hundred-weight of cassiterite or wolframite delivered to him at the Kazundian border, where Johnny had his own accredited assayer waiting to test the purity of the ore and minerals.

As Johnny pointed out to the warlords, there was no risk to them. They would not lose sight of their goods until the money was safely in their hands.

It was only a few weeks after Johnny returned from this visit that long columns of porters began to arrive at the border crossing. They were shepherded and urged along by the shouts, kicks and whips of the armed men who accompanied them. These porters were mainly women, reeling along under sacks of raw minerals which they balanced on their heads. The men and the children were more usefully employed back in the underground workings of the primitive mines.

The weight of each porter’s burden was carefully matched to her individual strength and endurance. When one of them fell she was whipped to her feet and urged onwards. When she was finally unable to rise, her burden was shared out amongst the others in the column, who were already nearing their breaking points.

Then she was shot and her body left beside the track as an example and a warning to those who followed. The road to Kazundu through the forested hills soon became clearly defined not only by the passage of thousands of feet but also by the stench of the decaying corpses that lined the verges.

Very soon the first full load of coltan ore was ready for the Antonov Condor to carry to Hong Kong. On the return journey the Condor was ordered to stop over in Thailand to refuel and take on board a number of young Thai prostitutes, both male and female. Both Johnny and Carl found the Thai faces and petite bodies particularly pleasing. Johnny and Carl were particularly enamoured of the Thai ladyboys who pandered so perfectly to Johnny and Carl’s penchant for either or both sexes.

Johnny and Carl had assiduously shunned physical contact with the local Kazundians, who were, in contrast to the carefully screened Thai prostitutes, walking skeletons riddled with venereal disease.

After the first two years of King John’s rule, when the profits of the trade in the conflict minerals and Carl’s financial genius were reluctantly quadrupled by the trustees of the Henry Bannock Family Trust, Carl and Johnny turned their combined energies and vast fortune to transforming the castle on the hilltop from a pestilential ruin into a bright jewel mounted in the stupendous setting of lake, mountains and verdant jungle.

Over the next four years they flew in architects, landscape designers, hydro-engineers, master builders and others with specialized skills to help them to realize this vision. They shipped in high-quality building materials across the lake. They collected rare and beautiful artefacts, various types of exotic timber, paintings, silks and ceramics and other works of art and decorations from around the globe. They pumped up the lake waters to irrigate their hanging gardens on the hilltop, and to flow through subterranean caverns and pools, and then to tumble down artfully contrived cascades and waterfalls back into the mighty lake from which they had arisen.

To assist them in the realization of this masterpiece Carl Bannock selected the celebrated award-winning American architect Andrew Moorcroft of Moorcroft and Haye, who had designed the mansion on Forest Drive that Henry Bannock built for his family.

It gave Carl malignant pleasure to employ the man originally selected by his adoptive father and benefactor who he had destroyed, and whose family he had decimated.

*

Carl had carefully transferred to DVD several copies of the documentary movie that he had commissioned Amaranthus, the Mexican pornographic film maker, to shoot for him. Carl and Johnny never tired of watching it. Every few weeks they would sit entranced for a whole evening running and re-running the video. They always laughed delightedly at Bryoni’s final struggles in the mud and filth of the hog pen with the great black boar Hannibal.

Then at the end they joined in unison to mimic her death cry to her father; the cry that had killed Henry Bannock.

‘Daddy!’

It was Johnny who made the momentous suggestion. ‘Why don’t we build our own death pen?’

Carl seized upon the idea with glee. ‘Blackbird, you are a genius. It’s a brilliant idea. We could have our own live show whenever we wanted it.’

‘It would also be great for the discipline around here. Anybody who pisses us off, we just feed him to the pigs and make the others watch it.’ Johnny expanded the proposal, and Carl giggled like a teenage girl and hugged himself at the thought.

‘We could build an amphitheatre like the Colosseum in Rome; you know, where the ancient Roman emperors made the gladiators fight each other to the death and where they fed beautiful women to the lions and good stuff like that.’

‘I never heard about these guys before, but I like what you tell me about them. They must be real hectic dudes. We should go and see them sometime.’

‘We’re about two thousand years too late for that,’ Carl told him. ‘But we are just as cool as any spic with a bunch of leaves on his head. Like the man said, we can have anything we want because we are mega rich and super cool.’

‘You think pigs are that super cool, white boy?’ Johnny scoffed. ‘Surely we can do better than a bunch of pigs. How about a few lions, man? This is Africa, for Chrissake! Lions are cooler than pigs any day of the week.’

Carl thought about the suggestion for a moment and his expression sobered. ‘I don’t like lions.’ He shook his head. ‘They are dangerous, man.’

‘What’s so dangerous about a bunch of lions in a cage?’ Johnny demanded.

‘They run faster than pigs, if they escape from their cage. What if one got out of the cage? What about that, man? I don’t want to be there when that happens.’

‘Okay, what runs slow but eats people,’ Johnny pondered his own question.

‘How fast does a crocodile run, Johnny? Do you have any idea?’

‘I seen pictures of them crocodiles, man. They got short legs. I guess they don’t run so fast as no lions.’

‘Where would we get a couple of big man-eating crocodiles, Johnny?’

‘If you turn your head real slow and look behind you, man, you’ll see the biggest goddam lake in the world.’

Carl did as he suggested and swivelled around in his chair. They were sitting out on the castle battlements and the view across the water was stupendous. Nevertheless Carl corrected him primly. ‘That is not the biggest; it’s only the second biggest lake in the world.’

‘Looks like the biggest to me.’ Johnny brushed aside his protest. ‘I bet there are some monster crocodiles in there, white boy.’

‘I’ll go online and find out.’ Carl stood up and went into the throne room, which he had converted into his communications centre. He came back onto the battlements a few minutes later with a smug expression. ‘Pour me another Tusker beer, Blackbird,’ he said as he sat down opposite Johnny. ‘Give yourself one as well. You deserve it. You were right on both counts. Crocodiles can’t run as fast as a man, and anyway they would never run after you. They are stealth killers, not chasers. You just never see them coming, especially if you are near water. That’s score one to you.’ Carl took a pull at the beer can and belched. ‘Score two to you is that Lake Tanganyika and its tributary rivers…’ he indicated the inland sea with a sweep of his arm ‘… is the absolute homeland of
Crocodylus niloticus.
’

‘What the shit is that?’

‘That is the Nile crocodile, Johnny boy. There is one in that lake there that they say is twenty-five feet long. They call him Gustave. They say he could swallow even a big sucker like you without chewing.’

‘Just let one of those scaly bastards try that on me,’ said Johnny belligerently, then he threw back his head and let out a bellow. ‘Sam! Samuel! Get your lazy black ass out here!’

Sam came sauntering out onto the terrace, totally unperturbed by the wording of King Johnny’s summons. Johnny had only started referring to him in truly pejorative language after they had become true and trusted comrades in arms. Sam had signed on as Johnny’s second in command after the capture of Kazundu, when all the other Zimbabwean troops had been repatriated. Johnny had promoted him immediately to the rank of colonel. His scale of pay was several times greater than he had received in the Zimbabwean army. Among his other side benefits and perks he was granted third shot at any of the visiting oriental ladies or ladyboys after Carl and Johnny moved on down the line. Samuel Ngewenyama was a happy man.

‘Hello, Mr King. Did you call me?’

‘You know I did, you black bastard.’ Johnny handed him a can of Tusker beer. ‘We need some crocodiles, Sam.’

‘How many, boss?’

‘I don’t know, for sure. Let’s say two for a start, but make sure they are really big suckers, and make sure they are alive and hungry.’

‘I’ll put the word around, but it might take some time. Not a lot of people around here are happy to mess with crocodiles.’

‘That’s okay, Sam. We have still got to build a croc pen.’

Over the next few months they spent a great deal of time and energy planning and building the crocodile arena. The forced-labour gangs laboriously excavated the circular pit halfway down the front slope of the newly named Castle Hill. It did not have to be spacious, but Carl insisted that it was deep enough to prevent any of the inmates escaping and engaging him in a speed trial.

The walls of the arena were lined with stone blocks and flared inwards to make them unscalable. One of the artificial waterfalls was diverted so that the stream fell into the large pond that took up almost half the total area of the arena. The dry ground was strewn thickly with the golden brown beach sands of the lake. This would provide a basking ground on which the cold-blooded reptiles could sun themselves, and a wallowing basin in which to cool down again. On the stone coping that surrounded the top of the pit was seating for a hundred spectators and a special royal box for King John and his prime minister, which gave them an unimpeded overview of everything that happened on the floor of the amphitheatre. There was also a camera platform from which the action could be filmed.

There was a subterranean tunnel through which the floor of the pit could be reached via a sturdy croc-proof iron gate. In the stone lintel above this gate was chiselled the stern admonition: A
BANDON
A
LL
H
OPE
, Y
E
W
HO
E
NTER
H
ERE
.

When Johnny read it for the first time he demanded, ‘Who the hell is Ye?’

‘Ye is anybody who goes through the gate,’ Carl explained patiently.

‘Did you think up that shit yourself?’

‘What a silly question, Blackbird. Of course I did,’ Carl assured him, and Johnny shook his head in admiration.

‘You pretty smart for a white boy; you know that, Carl baby?’

*

They heard the drums and the ululation in the harbour area, even from high up on the castle battlements.

‘We better go down and see what the hell is going on down there!’ Johnny suggested. The climbed into the brand-new white Range Rover that Carl had recently imported as Johnny’s birthday gift. Johnny took the wheel and they hurtled down the hill to the port, and parked on the wharf. The crowd had been driven back by the rifle butts of the Royal Bodyguards to leave them space.