Thunderbolt by Wilbur Smith (reading strategies book .txt) 📕

And after we’d ripped the bush out and lugged it away, we broke up the remaining soil, cleared it of as many weeds and stones as possible, and levelled it off.

I hadn’t been working more than an hour before the first blister rose across my palm. Changing tools with Xander stopped it from getting immediately worse, but before long the mattock was rubbing at the base of my thumb, and when I swapped, the crowbar made it worse.

By lunchtime, when General Sir reappeared, dogs in tow again, my hands were a mess, I was filthy, everything else ached, the flies were maddening, and I was boiling up inside and out. I know Amelia and Xander were in a similar state.

None of us had admitted it out loud though. That was the deal: we were stronger together if none of us cracked. But I’d spotted Amelia wincing as she worked and Xander’s grunts of effort now had a pained edge to them. Only Mo appeared genuinely unconcerned.

Between us we’d cleared a patch of earth roughly half the size of a tennis court. General Sir took it in with a glance. I was annoyed to find that I genuinely cared whether we’d met his expectations, and not just because I feared what Mo’s ‘or else’ might entail. Somehow the man’s approval mattered to me.

‘Good work,’ he said, and the sense of relief I felt disgusted me. ‘But hard, yes. You look tired. Come!’

And with that he led us back to the camp. This time he took us straight to his shack, however. I heard engine noise as we approached but there was no vehicle in sight. It took me a moment to realise the sound was coming from a generator. That’s what was powering the little fridge in the corner of the single room into which General Sir had ushered us.

The room was as neat as its occupant. No flea-ridden dogs were allowed in here. There was a cot bed with a blanket, the corners of which were tucked in, next to a little table and a single wooden chair. On the table stood a laptop computer, plugged into an extension cord and connected to a mobile phone. The laptop’s screen was up.

With the air of a host at Christmas, General Sir took four cans of what turned out to be orangeade from his fridge and handed them round. In my entire life I have never appreciated a cold drink more, and the gratitude I felt towards the General sickened me further.

I edged closer to the little table as I drank, just a step, but enough to glance at what was on the laptop screen. What I glimpsed made no sense at all. Had the orangeade gone to my head?

Half a step closer I dared to take a longer look. I knew that face because I’d seen it on a screen before. Then, it had been on Mum’s laptop, in the swanky resort, a world away from here. But this was the same photograph, I was sure, of a man with a fighter’s square chin and wide-spaced, watchful eyes set beneath a determined brow.

The face was as familiar to me as it was foreign. I had no idea who he was, but he was the same guy Mum had been in touch with, definitely. It was him.

33.

General Sir gave us the rest of the day off. He acted as if he was being kind to us because we were ‘new’, but immediately undercut that by saying, ‘You’ll soon get used to things,’ making it clear he intended to put us to work again before long. As soon as we were alone again outside, I brought up the photograph with Amelia and Xander.

‘Whose face was it?’ Amelia asked.

‘That’s the thing. I don’t know.’

‘Well, if it was on General Sir’s screen as well as your mum’s, whoever it is must be famous,’ said Xander. ‘They were probably on news sites. Whoever it is must be an actor or a politician.’

‘Or a sportsman,’ added Amelia helpfully. ‘Was he swinging a golf club or anything?’

‘No!’ I said. ‘And it wasn’t a newspaper site. The guy is in Mum’s contacts. She was messaging him.’

‘Yeah, but your mum knows some pretty influential people,’ reasoned Xander.

‘So does General Sir,’ added Mo quietly.

‘Really,’ I snapped. ‘Mum and General Sir. A humanitarian from Surrey and a child-slave-trafficking warlord from Southern Somalia. I bet they have loads of friends in common.’

‘Either way the coincidence isn’t Mo’s fault,’ said Amelia. ‘And unless you have a better hypothesis it seems the most likely solution to the mystery.’

Xander could see I was rattled by this suggestion. ‘Yeah, but perhaps the most likely explanation,’ he suggested, ‘is that you’ve made a mistake. You could have seen two similar faces and jumped to the wrong conclusion. My head’s definitely been fried today by the heat and the flies and the back-breaking –’

‘No!’ I cut him off more loudly than I’d intended. Lowering my voice, I went on. ‘It’s the same guy, I’m sure of it.’

‘If you say so,’ said Amelia, making no attempt to sound convinced.

Whatever the truth, I could do little about it for now. If – no, when – I made it back to Mum, well, I could ask her then. I was mulling over this unsatisfactory conclusion when General Sir reappeared from the shack. ‘Another treat for you all!’ he said, and slung a tattered kit bag into the centre of our dusty circle.

‘What’s in it?’ Amelia asked.

‘Home!’ he said, and waved at the bag with his baton, as if about to do a magic trick.

By ‘home’ he meant a moth-eaten tent. I could have punched him for the insult in this, but again the meagre good news that we wouldn’t have to spend another night out in the open did in fact come as a relief. Having revealed his generous gift General Sir sauntered off, leaving us to erect it.

This was easier said than done, mostly because the tent