Ghost Watch

Friends

‘How long have I been out?’ I asked Ayesha, who was sitting beside me. The sun was higher in the sky than I remembered it. A gentle breeze moved the tops of the trees in small circles. I was actually warm and mostly dry.

‘Less than an hour,’ she said.

I pushed myself up into a sitting position and felt my cheek. It wasn’t nearly as swollen or hot, and there was a plaster strip covering the puncture. I also had a sense that my face had been cleaned and, with the exception of several minor cuts, my hands and forearms had also regained their former coloring.

‘The stinger broke off under your skin. Did you know that?’ she said.

I didn’t.

‘You had an anaphylactic reaction to the poison. It could have been worse. You seen what nuts can do to some people?’

I had the feeling that both of us were drifting along, floating in a semi-reality, like maybe we’d pulled off the river onto the bank and were having a nice picnic on a blanket. She was still in shock. I wondered what I was in.

‘I cleaned you up, in case you were wondering,’ she said.

I thanked her and looked into her face. Those blue contact lenses were gone, but she was still striking.

‘Can you see without them?’ I asked.

‘I only wear them for effect.’

I was surprised that she knew what I was talking about, but that was the bubble we were floating in.

‘There’s quite a bit of useful medicine in the captain’s first aid kit,’ she informed me. ‘I did two years of nursing school before I went into makeup.’

‘Why’d you quit?’

‘There are only certain bodily fluids I want anything to do with. A nurse can’t be choosey.’

‘I guess not,’ I said.

‘Like blood. I see it, I pass out. Well, I did when I was younger.’

I could see how that might be a problem for a nurse.

Neither of us spoke.

Eventually I asked, ‘They hurt you?’

She looked up at the sky and then down the hill and said, ‘I don’t remember.’

I watched the treetops scribing the circles against the blue far overhead.

Eventually, breaking what I can only describe as an ethereal silence, Ayesha said, ‘Thank you, Vin.’ She gave my hand a brief squeeze, which seemed to transfer a lot that had been left unspoken, then stood and walked off before I could spoil it by opening my mouth.

I became aware of the staccato snap, crackle and pop of distant small arms fire, which brought me back to a damp hillside in the middle of a battlefield in a country I knew absolutely nothing about.

‘They’re at it again,’ Cassidy said as he came over, glancing off in the direction of the fighting. ‘We’re packed and ready to move out,’ he said.

‘Where to?’ I stood up, making the sounds old men make when they stand. My head felt light, my joints creaked and my muscles ached like they were pumping the stuff that runs through refrigerators.

‘ To wherever you say,’ he replied.

‘Now there’s an interesting development,’ I said, forcing a grin.

He shrugged. ‘So far so good, Mr Air Force.’

I glanced around to get my bearings. Ayesha, Leila and Boink were seated on a log, LeDuc chatting to them about something. West and Ryder were keeping watch, one up the hill, one down. Our prisoner was seated by himself, fexcuffed to a branch, staring at the ground. Nearby, keeping an eye on him, Rutherford was checking over the spare, newly captured Nazarians and QCWs.

‘Saved you some breakfast,’ Cassidy said, handing me a tin and his Leatherman to open it with.

‘Lemme guess,’ I said, ‘radishes?’

Cassidy gave me a smile — a first — showing more gum than the Wrig ley display at a 7-Eleven. I could see why he might not want to make a habit of it.

‘Red Cross.’ Cassidy replied as if that explained everything, and handed me a packet with a couple of strips of beef jerky in it.

‘We don’t know how much time Twenny Fo and Peanut have got,’ I said, opening the can. ‘We need to make a few hasty decisions.’

Cassidy agreed.

I drank the juice out of the tin and then ate the contents. The taste was hot and also bland.

Standing wearily, I made the ‘on me’ hand signal. Our band huddled up as I walked to Leila, Ayesha and Boink. Rutherford kept one eye on the African secured to the tree, while West and Ryder abandoned their watch.

Keeping it brief, I said, ‘After yesterday’s skirmish, both sides will try to outflank each other today. We’ll get caught in a pincer.’ Pincer. I shuddered, the word making me think of the scorpion.

There were nods from the other SOCOM guys.

‘Man, this is bullshit,’ said Boink. ‘What ’bout Twenny Fo and Peanut? What’s gonna happen to them?’

I turned to Cassidy, West, Rutherford. ‘What do you guys think?’ I asked them

‘We got more weapons and ammo,’ said West. ‘Maybe we can cause a diversion, you know…’

I knew where he was going because I’d wrestled with the same thought. ‘Aside from our M4s, we’ve got some 97s, a few submachine guns and the sniper rifle,’ I said. ‘Do we really think that launching ourselves into what’s down there in the valley would achieve anything other than getting all of us killed?’

‘We’d need a plan,’ West said.

‘I’m listening if anyone’s got one,’ I told them.

Silence.

‘Cassidy?’

The big man said nothing.

‘Look, we can handle a patrol or two, possibly even a platoon,’ I said, ‘but a whole reinforced rifle company? Maybe our best chance of getting them back alive is up there, sitting on the ridgeline. The rebels are supposedly our friends and allies…’ I looked directly at LeDuc, who reminded me with a hand motion that maybe they were and maybe they weren’t. ‘So then let’s go hang out with our friends,’ I said, ignoring the equivocation. I didn’t see that we had much choice but to throw ourselves on the benevolence of the folks who held the high ground. ‘If nothing else, perhaps up there we can get access to communications, and organize evacuation for Leila, Ayesha and Boink while we negotiate the safe return of the others. Has anyone talked with our prisoner to see if he knows what we can expect up there?’

‘Oui,’ said LeDuc. ‘He expects death.’

‘Aside from the general dying thing, are there any specifics — numbers, for example?’

‘No, he does not know.’

‘Whoever’s up there sure is throwing down a lot of iron,’ said West.

‘We’ll need a white flag, Cooper,’ said Cassidy. ‘Coming from the valley, we might be mistaken for targets.’

Good point. ‘Anyone got anything white?’

No one stepped forward.

‘Nothing?’ I asked.

Everyone looked at each other.

‘Not even a hanky?’

Boink got up and lumbered up to where our possessions were packed and disappeared from view behind a tree. As the discussion had moved on from his buddy’s rescue, I guessed he’d had enough.

‘Okay, let’s get ready to move,’ I said. We’d have to take our chances without a flag of truce.

‘You can’t take Marcel into the rebel positions wearing a FARDC uniform,’ said LeDuc. ‘They will kill him. You should also change.’

Those blue slashes on my shoulders. The Frenchman was right, but it presented a problem. I had my battle dress uniform, but what was our prisoner going to slip into? ‘Anyone got any spare clothes?’ I asked.

Ryder reached into a small daypack he’d scrounged from the MONUC chopper before it blew and pulled out a clean, pressed ACU, complete with Office of Special Investigations badges and ‘Special Agent Ryder’ nametag. ‘This do?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, playing down the surprise. I mean, a clean uniform? I took the clothes, dropped them on the round and stomped on them half a dozen times so that it wouldn’t seem like Marcus had walked straight out of the Clothing Sales.

West shook his head. ‘I dunno. Two Ryders? Could be too much of a good thing, Duke.’

‘You should give him Ryder’s dog tags as well,’ said Rutherford, ‘in case he gets checked a little more thoroughly.’

Made sense to me.

Louder booms of exploding mortar shells peppered the sound of distant small arms fire. Boink reappeared from behind the tree, carrying a white flag, and a couple of minutes later, loaded up with our gear, we were heading slowly up the hill, picking through the thick foliage, walking behind a stick on which the biggest pair of white undershorts I’d ever seen hung like a wet sail. West took point. Ryder had the rear. As we walked, LeDuc and I schooled OSI’s newest special agent and briefed him with an overview of our intentions. The guy listened, sweating bullets.

The first indication that we were getting close to the rebels’ forward positions came after we’d walked for about an hour, and was a fragment of conversation carried on the breeze down the hill. The second was the crack of a rifle shot that carved a large splinter off a tree inches from Boink’s face, showering him with moss and wood dust and making him jump. If he’d still been wearing that white flag we were following, there’d have been a big brown smudge in the bottom of it.

We stopped and LeDuc called out a phrase in French that we’d agreed on previously to use in this eventuality: ‘Nous sommes Améric-ains. Nous sommes avec vous. Nous portons le drapeau blanc’, which, loosely translated, meant, ‘We’re Americans — white flag. We surrender.’

Cassidy cut the fexcuffs off and handed Marcel one of the Nazarians with an empty magazine. He then showed him that the safety on his own weapon was in the off position, in case the African should decide to make a run for it. Marcel nodded understanding, his forehead slick with sweat and dark, wet patches under his armpits.

At that moment, a four-man squad — or, more correctly, three men and a baby of no more than ten years of age — raced down the hill toward us. They were nervous as hell and carrying semi-automatic rifles. Those of us with weapons put them slowly on the ground in front of us and we all put our hands up.

‘Nous sommes Américains, Américains.’ LeDuc and I took turns saying it. I noticed that the Africans had their fingers resting on triggers, and had no doubt that their safeties were off. I hoped none of them was prone to sneezing. Two more soldiers strode down between the trees, one of them with his hand resting on the side-arm belted to his hip. He snapped orders at the detail, which then stepped back but kept their weapons trained on us.

‘Nous sommes Américains. Nous sommes avec vous. Nous portons le drapeau blanc,’ LeDuc repeated.

‘Mais vous êtês Français?’ the man asked LeDuc.

‘Oui, je suis Français,’ LeDuc answered. ‘MONUC.’

An exchange between the two men followed as the African inspected Leila and Ayesha. He seemed to like what he saw. He then moved up and down the line, not so happy to see the US Army and the USAF.

The kid from the squad, accompanied by someone probably not much older than him, stepped forward, picked up our weapons and ejected the magazines before placing them back on the ground. Junior snatched the backpack from Ryder and stuffed the mags into it.

‘He accepts that we are not their enemy,’ LeDuc told us, ‘but he is still nervous. He is only a junior lieutenant and I think he is not sure what he should do.’

The officer nodded as LeDuc spoke, as if he understood English, but he plainly didn’t. He approached me and said, ‘Vous êtes Américain, hein? Ou en êtes-vous en Amérique?’

‘What did he say?’ I asked LeDuc.

‘He asked whereabouts in America you come from.’

‘Tell him Shitsville, New Jersey.’

Whether the lieutenant understood or not, he nodded, moved up the line and stopped at Marcel. ‘Parlez-vous Français?’ he asked, looking the man up and down.

Sweat leaked from every pore on Marcel’s body. He shook his head, maybe a little too vehemently. ‘N-no, no speak French,’ he managed to get past his lips.

The lieutenant nodded and something caught his attention on the ground, sticking out from under Cassidy’s boot. He bent down, tapped Cassidy’s leg to get him to shift his weight, then picked the object up. Jesus — the fexcuffs removed from Marcel’s wrists. He twirled them in front of his eyes and looked at Cassidy and then at Marcel. Did he understand their signifcance? The lieutenant’s squad passed a couple of quiet, nervous comments between themselves.

The officer didn’t say anything, but kept looking at the cuffs and then back at us.

‘Nous sommes amis,’ LeDuc reassured him — we’re friends.

‘Oui… oui,’ the officer said, puzzled by something. But then he seemed to come to some agreement with himself and said, ‘Amis.’ Friends. He motioned to the kid to pass him the pack containing the magazines. He opened it, pulled one of them out, inspected it briefly and then tossed it back in. From the hollow sound it made, I knew it was the empty one, the mag from Marcel’s weapon. He extracted another mag from the bag and gave it the once-over, dropped it back in, frowned and zipped up the bag. I didn’t like any of this.

‘Les armes de Chine,’ he said, motioning at the guns at our feet.

He’d observed that we had some Chinese weapons — that much French I could take a stab at understanding.

‘Oui,’ LeDuc spoke up. ‘Nous avons pris vos adversaires.’

‘Avez-vous les tuer?’

‘Oui.’

‘What was that about?’ I asked LeDuc, his exchange with the officer having lost me pretty much out of the starting gate.

‘I told him that we killed his enemies and took their weapons.’

The lieutenant and his unit seemed to have relaxed somewhat, their beaming smiles being a big clue. Apparently, we’d done the right thing here at least.

‘Tell him that we are survivors from a helicopter crash and that several of our party have been captured by his enemies,’ I said.

LeDuc told him and the man nodded, taking it in.

He walked past Leila and Ayesha and grinned like an idiot as he looked them up and down. I had no doubt about what was on his mind. Two minutes alone with Leila and I knew he’d change it.

‘Can you tell this clown to stop leering at me?’ said Leila, flicking her eyes at me.

‘LeDuc, tell the officer the women in our company have HIV,’ I told him.

‘What?’ Leila spat.

‘I’m just giving him a good reason to stop thinking about what he’s thinking about.’

LeDuc passed on the news about the unfortunate condition of our women and the officer shook his head, saddened, and took a couple of paces back, as if Leila and Ayesha were contagious.

‘See?’ I said. ‘Worked.’

Leila’s eyes flashed dangerously, like some kind of poisonous sea creature changing color.

The lieutenant moved on to Boink, and looked him over like he couldn’t quite believe humans grew that big. And, mostly, he was right.

‘Wass this motherfucker want?’ Twenny’s lieutenant asked.

‘Don’t know,’ said West calmly. ‘Just smile and be cool, Gigantor.’

The African said something to Boink.

‘Wad he say?’ Boink asked.

LeDuc informed him. ‘He said you must be very rich to be as big as you are.’

‘Motherfuck,’ Boink muttered.

The officer said something in rapid-fire French to his patrol, and then addressed LeDuc.

‘He wants us to follow him,’ said the Frenchman.

‘Do we know for sure which outfit these men belong to?’ I asked.

‘Oui. They are NCDP — your allies.’

‘All right!’ said Ryder. ‘Friends and allies.’

‘The jury’s still out on both points,’ I reminded him, doing an impression of a smile, my face still a little swollen.

The unit part-led, part-escorted us diagonally up the hill, toward the extremity of their lines, LeDuc chatting to the officer as we climbed. Once on the crest, we turned roughly northwest and followed the ridgeline, the sound of small arms fire getting closer and crackling like squeezed bubble wrap. Eventually, we came across soldiers guarding the flanks of the rebel’s line. The men stopped what they were doing and stared at us, many standing as we walked by. Some gave Leila and Ayesha predatorial grins.

‘So what’s the verdict?’ Rutherford asked. ‘Are they friendly?’

‘Have they shot us?’ LeDuc answered. ‘We are lucky they are not Mai-Mai or Ugandan renegades.’

‘If you say so,’ I told him, not convinced.

In attitude, age, numbers and disposition, these men seemed identical to the FARDC force opposing them. The only differences I could see were in the uniforms they wore — superseded US Army jungle pattern BDUs. They carried mostly M16s and some AK-47s. I saw a couple of M16s propped against a log and went close enough to see that both had their numbers intact, which told me that they were meant to have them. Friends and allies.

We came out of the rainforest on the crest of the ridgeline, and an unobstructed view across to the eastern horizon opened out. The trail took us close to the edge of empty space. I looked over a precipice and the rock face quickly fell away to a sheer cliff — a drop of close to a hundred and fifty feet. At the base of the cliff was a lake of milky blue water. I’d been wondering why the FARDC company hadn’t just retreated to another, more tactically favorable, position, which suggested that maybe it was the rebels who were pinned down up here on this hill, forced into a corner of sorts with the cliff at their backs and nowhere to retreat to. But even if that were the situation, it was a hell of a position to have to assault. A little down the hill, in the dappled light streaming through the treetops, I could see a mortar crew working up a sweat, the explosions hammering the FARDC positions in the valley below, the sound muffled by eight hundred meters or so of rainforest.

This HQ was roughly the same size as the FARDC’s one that West and I had scoped, though the rebel HQ was better appointed, with half a dozen US Army tents similar to the ones our forces used in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several uniformed men were standing behind a trestle table, in discussion over a map, surrounded by a cohort of men armed with newish MP-5 machine guns. West nudged my elbow and motioned off to the opposite side of the area, where four corpses with black, swollen tongues and broken necks were hanging motionless from the bough of a tree, entertaining a black swarm of flies. A bird perched on one of the heads, leaned over and nonchalantly pecked at an eye socket. A blue patch on the corpse’s shoulder told me that these were DRC men. I glanced at Marcel, who appeared to be shaking, on the edge either of falling to the ground in a blubbering heap or breaking into a run, neither of which would be healthy for him, or us, right at the moment.

Even though the men at the trestle tables were maybe only in their late twenties, or early thirties, they were obviously the commanders. The lieutenant escorting us waited till one of the men looked up and motioned him over, which happened eventually. The lieutenant marched to the desk and saluted a short, fat guy in his early thirties, who wore a thick leopard-skin headband, Ray-Ban ‘Aviator’ sunglasses and held a black walking stick with gold handle. A brief conversation ensued between them and then Tubby with the fancy headdress came over to us, accompanied by the lieutenant and three of the men with the Heckler & Koch rattles.

‘Good morning,’ he said in a deep French-accented voice. ‘We are Colonel Makenga.’

Given the use of the plural ‘we’ here, I wondered whether one of the folks accompanying him shared his name and rank. Or maybe English was not his first language and he’d simply gotten it wrong. Or — third option — the guy was an asshole, prone to using the royal ‘we’ on account of his ego was selling tickets on itself.

‘Which one of you is in command?’ he continued.

‘Me,’ I said. ‘Major Cooper, United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations.’

‘We are pleased to meet you, Major.’

Hmm… option three.

‘And what are you and your people doing in our quiet little corner of the world?’ He glanced at Leila and Ayesha and gave them the slightest of bows, creating another couple of chins that butted up against all the others and pushed out beads of greasy sweat along the crease lines.

The colonel’s lieutenant hadn’t had the opportunity to pass on our story in any detail, so I gave him the headlines about us being on our way to the MONUC compound at Goma, where two of our party were to give a concert for the UN contingent, before our French-made helicopter decided to fall out of the sky.

He stroked his chins while I talked, appearing to be in thinking mode.

‘We came down close to your enemy’s line,’ I continued, ‘and several of our party were captured and taken prisoner.’

‘Hmm, that is not good news,’ he said. ‘So… how can we possibly be of assistance?’

‘We need to contact our people at Cyangugu, let them know what’s happened. So, if you’ve got a satellite phone…’

He gave a big sigh and then shook his head like he was deeply sorry. ‘We agree that this could be a course of action; however, your country has seen fit not to provide us with such luxuries as satellite phones. Our communications here are extremely limited.’

‘Is there any way we can get word out?’

‘We could send a runner, perhaps, but not in our current predicament. We’re afraid you will have to stay with us.’

He admired the handle on his walking stick — a solid gold rooster. Chunky gold-link bracelets manacled his wrists, and a nugget of gold the size of a pork knuckle swung from his thick neck on a gold chain. Even aside from the fact that he wore more bling than a Reno pimp, there was something off-putting about this guy. Maybe it was the affected speech patterns together with the disconcerting fact that, snake-like, he didn’t appear to blink. Or perhaps it was the violence that seemed to sit, suppressed, just below the civility. I could imagine this guy petting a puppy one minute and then dashing its brains out with that cane of his the next. And, of course, the four hanging ornaments looking at their toes on the edge of the compound helped this allusion along nicely. The bird perched on one of those ornaments squawked and flew off.

‘Oh,’ Makenga said, raising a finger as if he’d just had an afterthought. ‘Your Chinese weapons. Our lieutenant informs us that you claim to have taken them from our enemies down in the valley.’

Claim? ‘That’s correct,’ I said.

‘Along with the weapons you were captured with, there was a sniper rifle and high-power binoculars.’

I saw that all our weapons, backpacks and camelbacks were collected on one of the trestle tables.

Captured? ‘Yeah,’ I said, wondering where this was going.

‘How do we know you weren’t sent to kill us?’

What?! Even though the use of the words ‘claim’ and ‘captured’ were ringing alarm bells, the question was so left of field that I found myself wondering whether this guy’s ham and cheese on rye was missing something important, like the ham and cheese. I noticed again that there were a lot of guys standing around with MP-5s. I also noticed that they were now glaring at us and, from the expressions on their faces, all of them appeared to have eaten something that hadn’t agreed with them.

‘Pardon me?’ I said, trying to think fast. I felt a little like I was back in LeDuc’s chopper when things were spinning out of control.

‘How can we be sure that you and your party are not mercenaries?’

I blinked. Jesus… This was a possibility none of us had considered, but with Kornfak & Greene’s fingers in the pie around here, I could see how someone who spent their life dodging bullets at every turn might jump to that conclusion. Moreover, if this guy believed it was possible that American contract killers might go on a mission in the African rainforest with two women and a shoe-in for The Biggest Loser along for the ride, then he probably wouldn’t accept their presence as proof of our innocence. Nevertheless, I didn’t have much else to work with.

‘We are a joint US Army and United States Air Force personal security detail,’ I said, hardening my tone. ‘These are three of our principals.’ I motioned at Leila, Ayesha and Boink. ‘If you had a satellite phone, you could verify it.’

‘And here we are, back at the start without one,’ Colonel Makenga said with his hands apart. He gestured at the lieutenant holding one of our backpacks — it was Ryder’s. The lieutenant handed over the pack and the two men held a quick conference while they rifled through its contents.

Makenga produced one of the magazines — the empty one. ‘When you were intercepted on your way here trying to infiltrate our flanks, you were disarmed. One of your people carried a weapon with an empty magazine. If you are all together, why would one of you be carrying an unloaded weapon? Why would that be?’

He then pulled out Ryder’s nylon bracelets. ‘Wrist restraints were also found. Would you care to explain these inconsistencies to us?’

I couldn’t — not without ending Marcus’s life as surely as putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. This was a bad situation. I avoided specifics and reached for straws. ‘The American people are allies with the CNDP,’ I said. ‘I’m not a mercenary and nor are any of my men here. I told you that we departed the CNDP training camp at Cyangugu two days ago, after our principals put on a concert for your soldiers and the US advisors there. If you have any doubts, contact your own Colonel Biruta, who’s in camp there.’

A nerve in Makenga’s face twitched, indenting the skin and muscle of his cheek. ‘Perhaps there is enough in your assertion to prevent the immediate summary execution of you and your people.’ The colonel pushed out his lips and rolled his tongue across his front teeth. ‘You will remain here as our guests until your claims can be verified, or until we decide what to do with you.’

I could feel Cassidy and the others tensing for a fight. I said, ‘We have other principals who are being held, captured by the FARDC below. We need to do something about negotiating their release.’

A sly grin slid across his face. ‘We were of the belief that you Americans never negotiate with hostage takers.’

‘We don’t negotiate with terrorists — the rules get rubbery for straight criminals.’

‘I see. Interesting. Nevertheless…’ he said, opening out his hands again to show me that there was nothing, such as options, in them.

The daylight suddenly faded as if the sun had blown a fuse. I looked up. Gangrenous thunderheads were boiling into the sky overhead, their undersides gray-green and tending to black in places. The storms in this place lined up like barges in a busy canal.

‘Well,’ Makenga continued, ‘we would be delighted to extend our hospitality to you and your party.’

There was a spike in the noise level of the battle still going on down the hill, indicating a wind shift. A breeze arrived and freshened quickly into wind, heralding the arrival of the storm front.

The colonel raised his gold cock several inches, an apparent signal to those unhappy guards with their machine guns, who stepped in, surrounded us, and marshaled us out of the HQ and off toward a little hospitality, CNDP style. Somehow I didn’t see us getting any Napoleon brandy from these folks, either.

‘Gee, LeDuc,’ I heard Rutherford say, as we were led away at gunpoint, ‘lucky for us they’re not Mai-Mai or Ugandan renegades. Then we’d really be in the shitter.’

The armed escort herded us through the encampment until we arrived at one of two circular corrals made from saplings sunk in the ground and lashed together. One of the guards shouted at us.

‘They want us to empty our pockets,’ said LeDuc, translating.

We were surrounded and heavily outnumbered by people armed with frowns and submachine guns. Like the man once said, resistance was futile. I turned my pockets out on the ground. The rebel soldiers moved through our group, cleaning us out of anything useful. Cassidy, LeDuc, West, Rutherford and Marcel and I were individually searched. Ayesha was individually groped, which seemed to improve the disposition of the gropers. Then it was Leila’s turn.

‘Hey. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she shouted at the man with his hand between her legs. She spun around and slapped him, and he slapped her right back hard so that she went down into the mud. Cassidy and I took a step forward and machine gun muzzles were jammed into our faces.

The rain began to fall. The corral stank of animal feces and urine. The soldiers disengaged, backing out through the door of our open prison, the door to which was then closed and bound shut. Cassidy and Ayesha helped Leila up and we all just stood and shivered for a time, with nowhere to go and battered by raindrops the size of hens’ eggs impregnated with ice chips. Thunder arrived simultaneously with the lightning as the storm front passed overhead.

‘That business about the US negotiating with criminals,’ said Cassidy, his teeth chattering. ‘It’ll never happen. We’re on our own.’

‘The colonel doesn’t know that.’

‘What are they going to do to us?’ Leila asked.

Ayesha could give her a couple of clues.

Marcel moaned and shook his head. He didn’t need to ask, either.

‘We shouldn’t have brought him,’ said Leila, pointing at Marcel. ‘That man has put all of us at risk. Those questions about the handcuffs and the empty magazine — the man with the cane knew what was up.’

I doubted it, but I let it go and no one else said anything. If Leila was determined to be a superbitch right to the end, who was I to stop her?

The star burst into tears and hugged Ayesha to her. I felt sorry for Ayesha.

Within half an hour, the thunder and lightning had ended, but the torrent was still coming down hard, falling, at times, more like an avalanche than like rain. The noise it made completely drowned out the sounds of battle drifting up from the valley below. West, Cassidy and I went on an inspection of our cage, a circular area maybe fifty feet across. We all very quickly came to the conclusion that we couldn’t go over, under or through it — not easily and not before we were spotted. The bars were green saplings over twelve feet in height, the ends of which were buried two to three feet in the mud, and the whole structure was lashed together with some kind of green vine. The rain only seemed to make it all bind together tighter. Sets of eyes peered at us through the gaps.

LeDuc came over. ‘These pens are common,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen bulls charge at walls such as these.’

‘They ever make it through?’ I asked, half an eye on Boink.

He shook his head. ‘Non.’

I pulled and pushed the wall here and there, testing its strength. Cas-sidy, West and Rutherford joined in. A pole suddenly speared through a gap between the saplings and slammed into the side of my head, knocking me down.

‘Hey!’ Rutherford yelled out, kicking the wall.

I was down on all fours, the ringing between my ears like that of a church belfry on Sunday morning. Hands under my arms lifted me onto my feet.

‘You okay, Cooper?’ Cassidy asked.

I opened and closed my jaw in an attempt to stop the clanging. ‘Now I know how a cue ball feels,’ I said.

‘They’re going to do us, skipper,’ said Rutherford. ‘No question.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed West.

There was a lump on my skull. Blood seeped from ruptured skin. I didn’t believe the bullshit about verifying our claims, either. Yeah, Makenga was going to have us whacked for sure. And if the asshole was anything like the psychos down in the valley, he wouldn’t be whacking us clean.

‘So what we gonna do about it?’ asked West.

‘They will come for the women first,’ said LeDuc.

I rubbed my face. We were completely on our own, locked in an empty enclosure with no hope of any outside assistance. The four men were looking at me, apparently waiting for me to reach behind and pull a rabbit out of my butt, given that I didn’t have a hat. ‘Well, I once saw this movie where some prisoners built an airplane and flew it out of the attic,’ I said. ‘ We could do something like that.’

They kept looking at me.

‘They’re gonna come for us,’ I said, repeating LeDuc’s take on the situation.

‘Yeah, that much we know,’ West said.

‘Then let’s work with that.’

Waiting for the night, we sat in the mud on the high side of the enclosure and glommed together to conserve warmth. No one talked. Someone grabbed my hand and held on tight. It was Ayesha. I could only imagine what was going through her mind. No one said a word, not even Leila. When the darkness was complete, I put our one and only chance into action and slid away from the group, working through the mud on my belly to the far side of the enclosure. LeDuc believed word would get around about Ayesha and Leila. I was hoping order might be a little on the lax side among the CNDP rank and file and that some of the boys might drop in for a little Intercourse & Inebriation.

Our wristwatches had been confscated, but it would have been after 22:00 when the door to our pen was forced ajar. I could make out four — or maybe five — shapes coming through the gap, creeping quietly. Moments later, I heard a woman’s muffled scream. Dropping to the ground and keeping low, I moved in the night shadow that lived at the base of our prison wall, making my way around the circumference of the enclosure. Cassidy, West, Rutherford, LeDuc and Ryder were making things difficult for the Africans, but not too difficult. The soldiers had to think that we were soft targets.

Going down on my belly for the last twenty meters, I snaked through the mud, coming up behind the intruders. From the sound of the gruff commands and muffled shouts, the Africans — five of them — were fast realizing that they’d bitten off more than they could chew. One of them had had enough. He backed away from the entangled shadows on the ground and I heard him hoarsely whisper in French. He leveled his rifle, serious about taking what they wanted. Two of his buddies went forward and dragged a struggling body away from the others.

‘No! No! Help me!’ I recognized the voice — Leila’s.

Then a second body got hauled out by her foot: Ayesha.

I was getting closer, close enough to smell the intruders — a pungent, stale, unwashed animal funk mixed with cheap, coarse tobacco. The intruders hadn’t seen me, or conducted a head count to see if someone were missing. They didn’t know it but, rather than being their friend, the night worked against them. I came up behind the man holding the rifle. He sensed rather than heard my presence, but not before I kicked him between the legs hard enough to put his nuts over a goal post. He began to sink to his knees but I broke his neck with an elbow strike before he reached them. Attacked by a shadow, the Africans were momentarily disoriented and stood rooted to the spot while they processed what they thought they’d just seen happen to their buddy. A few seconds of uncertainty was all we needed. I took out a second African, sweeping his legs out from under him so that he landed on his back, the air rushing out of his lungs. I snapped his head to one side and the vertebrae in his neck cracked like dry walnuts. A furry of intense violence broke out. Cassidy leaped up and strangled the man standing over him. West and Ryder tackled their man, Ryder pounding in his skull with a rock the size of his fist. Rutherford got Mr Lucky Last, sending him off to the land of nod with a sweet right cross to a glass jaw. I kept watch for more intruders, while the Brit sat on the man’s back and pushed his face in the mud, holding it there until he drowned, gurgling and shaking to the end.