Ghost Watch

Discovery

I watched Lockhart and the Chinese guy stroll back to the tent, having a nice post-murder chat, and disappear inside it. Leaving aside the fact that Lockhart had just killed a man, why kill Fournier? That didn’t make sense. Wasn’t Fournier their guy? Perhaps it made perfect sense, only not to me. It didn’t fit my theory and that meant I had to throw the damn thing out and start again from scratch.

I trained the scope back on Twenny and Peanut. The rapper was struggling and shouting something at the guards who’d moved in to recover the body, but I was too far away to hear what he might have been yelling. So, our principals were alive and Lockhart was involved in a whole bunch of crap up to his eyeballs, murder topping the list. He was with Kornfak & Greene, a DoD contractor. His business began and ended at the Cyangugu base, yet here he was in the enemy’s camp, capping a UN peacekeeper. His presence here, aiding and abetting the FARDC unit’s capture of Twenny Fo and Peanut, heavily suggested that I was right about the ransom and kidnap angle. Maybe this had been the plan from the beginning, rather than it being an opportunistic grab. And now I had suspects. I handed the scope to Ryder, who returned it to my pack, and then we wriggled backward deeper into the bush as the rain started coming down with its usual biblical intensity. Turning one-eighty for the crawl out, we again took it slow and careful. All went reasonably smoothly until, around fifty meters later, we shinnied into several Africans who were rigging hammocks across our path. We had nowhere to go, which meant we had no choice but to share the shadows for a bunch of time with countless biting critters, waiting for the men to fall asleep.

The rainfall came to an abrupt end sometime after midnight. With water no longer finding its way through the folds of their ponchos, the men soon began snoring.

Ryder and I crawled through the mud beneath them, scarcely breathing, my Ka-bar in one hand, ready to fillet any light sleepers who chose the wrong moment to visit the john. We eventually found cover, crawling into another island of scrub forty meters away. Retracing our steps, there were no Claymores to worry about, as we’d disarmed and appropriated all the surprises on the way in.

It was a quarter past one in the morning before I felt confident enough to walk on my feet instead of my elbows. I stood and breathed the wet night air, my forearms swollen and throbbing with insect venom, a cloud of thirsty mosquitoes circling my head and humming for my blood. I went to the nearest anthill and reapplied the repellent.

By this time, I’d had plenty of time to think about Fournier and how he fitted into my theory. I realized that I’d been maneuvered to a particular point of view. I’d been told that it had been Fournier who’d switched the tanks; that it was Fournier who’d made the Mayday call. And Fournier had, for a time, disappeared, which cast these assurances in a certain light. But now I’d seen Fournier tied up and murdered by people I believed he might have been in league with, people who included a US military contractor. If Fournier wasn’t Lockhart’s inside man, it meant the real rat was still among us.

And his name was LeDuc.

Perhaps that had been part of the reason for the patrol sent out to check the Puma for survivors — to recover LeDuc. But there’d been a mix-up when we’d gotten the upper hand and the wrong Frenchman had been taken away.

LeDuc had accompanied West and me when we’d infiltrated the FARDC encampment and rescued Ayesha. There would have been moments when he could have escaped. Perhaps he hoped that we’d just conveniently get ourselves captured, allowing him to maintain his cover. When that didn’t happen, why hadn’t he just blown the whistle on us? Maybe he thought there’d be a lot of confusion and shooting, that it could potentially end up being bad for his health and therefore not worth the risk.

I thought back through all the conversations I’d had with LeDuc, sifting for clues about his true intentions, clues I’d overlooked. He’d been our translator on several occasions. Had he relayed information without putting a skew on things? Looking back on it, when Marcel was captured, there’d been recognition in his face when he laid eyes on LeDuc. Looks like you remind him of someone. That’s what I’d told him. Perhaps LeDuc hadn’t reminded Marcel of someone at all. Perhaps Marcel had actually seen LeDuc on a prior occasion. Perhaps at the FARDC camp, making a delivery of fresh-baked croissants. Marcel had jumped off the cliff behind the CNDP’s position with the French pilot, but hadn’t survived the fall. The African’s skull was bashed in. LeDuc had suggested that Marcel had hit his head on a rock and drowned. Maybe LeDuc had been holding said rock at the time. Maybe he was worried that Rutherford, who spoke a little French, might find out something awkward from the African.

‘Let me get this straight,’ Ryder said, breathing heavily as we double-timed it down the wide cleared path. ‘That was Lockhart you saw back there, the guy we met at Cyangugu — the DoD contractor?’

‘Yep.’

‘Jesus. You thought Fournier set us up, put us down in the jungle.’

‘Yep.’

‘But they killed him. They wouldn’t have done that if he was working for them.’

‘No, you wouldn’t think so.’

‘Then if Fournier didn’t put us down here, it had to have been LeDuc. And if LeDuc is involved, then he’s gonna be pretty nervous about what we might find out on this recon. Leaving him behind might have made him desperate.’

‘Yeah, that’s why we’re running,’ I puffed. Ryder had figured it out. Maybe there was more to the guy than I’d given him credit for.

The notch I’d made in the tree wasn’t easy to find in the dark. I remembered that the cleared pathway cut to the south a hundred meters beyond my marker. We found the kink and worked backward, finally locating the tree with a handhold of wood hacked out of it at head height.

‘Get the case,’ I told Ryder.

He hunted around and eventually found its hiding place. I checked the Seiko for the time and made the eighty-degree change in direction, slinking off across the open trampled path through the forest.

We were soon heading down the valley, retracing our steps, taking us back to the rocks where Cassidy, West, Rutherford, Leila, Ayesha, Boink, and the rat, LeDuc, were waiting for our return. The canopy here was unbroken, and the darkness was complete. We soon found it impossible to move around without bumping into things. We had no choice but to find a little ground that was uncluttered by bushes, elephant grass, saplings, trees and undergrowth, and that was also clear of ants, on which to get some sleep. We couldn’t find any.

Ryder and I slept back-to-back on a bed of tree roots and mud. We were both shivering with cold when I woke, my clothes and skin water-logged. It was maybe half an hour before dawn, the shapes of the world beneath the canopy barely discernible and still monochromatic. A large hairy caterpillar the size of my thumb hugged the stem of a plant inches from my face, probing carefully forward, trying to reach across the gap to my nose. I broke the stem and placed the bug on the ground beside me.

‘Rise and shine, Duke,’ I said, my throat thick with phlegm, giving him a nudge.

I felt his weight shift behind me.

‘Fuck,’ he said under his breath.

I stood up, using the M4 as a crutch, every joint in my body feeling cold and seized, and found a plant to water. Ryder did likewise. I was hungry, my stomach growling like there was a cat locked inside wanting out. I sucked the tube at my shoulder to settle it down a little.

I motioned at Ryder to follow. He nodded and dragged his feet behind me. I stopped and signaled him to look sharp. Most accidents happen close to home, and we were in the accident zone. No point tempting fate. It had been twelve hours since we’d patrolled through this patch of turf. Bad guys might have moved in behind us.

The forest dripped with water, only it wasn’t raining. The morning slowly crept up on us as we made our way down the hill, the greens gradually taking over the palate as the day came out of hiding, birds waking with the sunlight and giving the world a good shriek. Frogs hopped out of the way of our feet and occasionally animals shot like runaway bowling balls through the undergrowth. A gentle mist floated around us, wrapping round tree trunks like gossamer web, and the air was thick, clean and as sweet as snowmelt.

‘Take that step and you’re dead, Cooper,’ the tree beside me whispered.

Then the tree moved and I saw that it was Sergeant Cassidy, Ka-bar in hand, leaves and bits of shrub sprouting from webbing, his face streaked with camouflage paint. He came around beside me and scraped some leaf litter off the ground beneath my boot, revealing a hole. Pushing the butt of his M4 into the hole made a length of bamboo pole with bamboo spears embedded in the end rise out of the earth and swing in an arc toward me. Had I taken that step, I’d have collected a row of spikes from upper thigh to gut. Out here, that would have been a death sentence.

‘Had some time on your hands?’ I asked him.

He smiled. ‘You just missed walking into another fun activity back up the hill a ways.’

We stepped around the trap and Cassidy fell in beside us. I took the pack off my shoulders and showed him the Claymores that Ryder and I had collected.

‘Hoo-ah,’ he beamed. ‘Where’d you get them?’

‘We took a stroll back to the Puma,’ I said.

‘What for?’

‘I noticed Leila was all out of foundation,’ I told him and Ryder held up Leila’s makeup case.

‘I was gonna ask you about that.’

‘Next stop was the FARDC camp. They’ve moved.’

‘Where to?’

‘Well out of range of the CNDP’s mortars.’

I reached down and felt my thigh pocket for the lipsticks containing what I hoped would be evidence of sabotage, and stopped in my tracks.

‘What?’ asked Cassidy.

The pocket was gone, torn clean away by all the crawling around. God only knew where those damn lipsticks were. ‘Nothing,’ I told him and consoled myself with the doubt I’d had that chemical analysis would’ve revealed anything significant. ‘Anything happen while we’ve been gone?’ I asked.

‘We lost LeDuc.’

‘You lost him?’

‘He was with Rutherford. Went off to forage. Rutherford said he turned around and the Frenchman was gone. Could have been an animal. West found spoor from a big cat in the area. We searched, but found nothing. If a predator took him, West said his remains would be up some tree.’

‘Law of the jungle,’ Ryder said.

I didn’t for a moment think that the Frenchman had been snatched by a cat. A more likely scenario was that he’d decided to rendezvous with his real friends, the ones we’d left up on the hill with our captive principals.

‘We saw Twenny Fo and Peanut,’ I said. ‘They’re alive.’

‘All right!’ Cassidy said, his mood-o-meter swinging to bright. ‘Good news. Can we get to them?’

‘There’s been a development. You remember Beau Lockhart?’

‘The Kornfak & Greene guy back at the camp?’

‘Yeah. He’s chummy with FARDC. We saw him in their HQ.’

‘Hoo-ah!’ Cassidy said, making a fist. ‘So we just head on up there, collect our principals and Lockhart gets us flown out.’

‘I witnessed Lockhart cap Fournier in cold blood.’

‘What?’

‘A nine to the back of the head.’

The face paint didn’t camouflage the sergeant’s anger and confusion. ‘Jesus! What the hell’s going on?’

‘I’m not a hundred percent sure, but LeDuc and Lockhart are involved. The only thing that makes sense is that the French pilot put us down in the middle of it intentionally.’

‘Aw, shit.’

We arrived back at the rocks.

‘Hey, look!’ said Ayesha when she glanced up and saw us, giving Leila’s shoulder a nudge.

Leila’s eyes went straight to the makeup case in Ryder’s hand and lit up.

‘Oh, wow! You found it!’ she squealed, jumped off the rock she was sitting on, and ran over and gave Duke a big kiss on the cheek.

‘You’d think we’d found a case of Bud,’ I said.

She wasted no time opening the catch and lifting the lid.

Cassidy and Rutherford wandered over with Boink, who, I noticed, had been reacquainted with a Nazarian, and they gave Ryder and me a bunch of assorted ‘Hey’s and ‘Yo’s.

A burst of automatic fire suddenly cut across the pleasantries. It was close; maybe five hundred meters up the hill. The unexpected sound was a jolt. I swung the M4 off my shoulder, pointed at Cassidy to lead off, and signaled at Ryder to organize the defense in our rear — leaving Ryder in charge worried me, but I wanted experience up front. Cassidy hopped forward into the bush; Rutherford, West and I close behind. Cassidy moved like he knew the terrain, running fast at a crouch, choosing a path higher up the side of the valley than the one we’d taken back to the rocks, then looped around, doubling back down the hill. We soon came upon a soldier lying beneath one of Cassidy’s traps — a framework of stakes weighted with river stones that had dropped on top of him from the tree above. He’d walked through the tripwire — a length of plaited immature liana. One of the stakes had pierced his throat. The guy was as dead as yesterday. The lack of blue slashes on his battle uniform indicated that he was CNDP. Cassidy felt the barrel of the old AK-47 lying beside him.

‘Cold,’ he said.

West checked the ground for tracks. ‘Looks like four, maybe five, others.’ He motioned up the hill. ‘They’re running away.’

Cassidy immediately took off, jogging downhill back toward the rocks. We took off after him and, around fifty meters later, found a young boy of no more than fourteen who’d stepped on the trap that had almost claimed me. He was impaled on the row of spikes, one of which had torn through the femoral artery in his thigh. The kid was shaking with fear and cold as his blood drained away down his leg and into the hole in the ground. His eyes made contact with Cassidy before they went utterly blank, the lead doors welding shut behind them.

‘Fuck,’ said West, speaking for all of us.

I kneeled and picked up the kid’s weapon, a new M16. Its barrel was warm, which suggested that the burst of fire we’d heard had come from this gun. Perhaps the boy had squeezed the trigger in shock when the stakes rose out of the earth and shanked him.

‘I got a nephew that kid’s age,’ Cassidy said, hands on his hips, looking up at the canopy.

‘They’re gonna make a report,’ said West.

I agreed. ‘Time to change neighborhoods.’

‘But we’re safe here,’ Leila protested, her hair brushed, her puckering lips now wearing a soft Chanel pink, and a long-legged spider crawling up onto her shoulder, which Ayesha flicked off before the singer became aware of it.

‘Not for much longer,’ I told her. ‘Our best chance of survival lies out there.’ I gave the forest a sweep of my hand.

‘Cooper and Ryder found Twenny Fo, Peanut and Fournier,’ said Cassidy. ‘You want to fill everyone in?’

‘You saw them?’ Leila asked, her eyes open wide. ‘Alive?’

‘More or less,’ I said a little cryptically. I passed on everything we saw, including the murder of Fournier, and concluded with my theory about Lockhart and LeDuc.

‘Bullshiiiit,’ said Boink, turning away.

‘So the Frog crashed us into the forest on purpose?’ Rutherford whistled softly, then added, ‘Risky bloody strategy.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Leila dismissively.

‘Believe it,’ I said.

The singer looked to Ryder for confirmation. He gave her a nod.

‘Y’know, I saw something out the window,’ said Ayesha, ‘just before we went down. A bright green light, floating over the treetops.’

‘A signal fare. Shit, that settles it,’ said Cassidy. ‘We were damn well set up.’

I shrugged. ‘If it looks like LeDuc and walks like LeDuc…’

‘It’s a sodding fucking Frog bastard,’ Rutherford chipped in.

‘You didn’t, by any chance, happen to mention seeing that light at the time?’ I asked Ayesha.

‘I did, but no one said anything. I thought everyone was asleep.’

Okay, so the mystery question that came through my headset before we went down — What was that? — hadn’t come from Travis, but from Ayesha. Dammit, I might have gotten to LeDuc earlier if I’d quizzed everyone harder, done my job a little better. Ayesha was sitting on the right-hand side of the chopper, behind Travis and behind LeDuc. She saw the fare, and then the aircraft banked to the right, turning toward it. Seated on LeDuc’s left, Fournier wouldn’t have had the angle to spot the signal, which meant he was as much a passenger on the Puma as everyone else. It would have been LeDuc who’d then switched tanks, dumping contaminated fuel from the sponsons into the main tanks so that the engines flamed out. It was also, therefore, LeDuc and not Fournier who faked the Mayday call that wasn’t responded to. So, LeDuc, Lockhart and the FARDC commander, Colonel Cravat. Who else was hoping to get a cut of the ransom money?

‘C’mon, people, clock’s ticking,’ said Cassidy. ‘Shake it out.’

‘Why? What are we doing?’ Leila asked.

‘We’re gonna stick our hands in the fire,’ I said.

It wasn’t raining or particularly hot, but the air was heavy with humidity. I glanced over my shoulder to check on Boink. His shirt was soaked with perspiration but he wasn’t doing too badly, all things considered. The Congo Weightloss Program was agreeing with him, and his fitness was also improving.

‘Making out okay?’ I asked him.

‘As good as you, soldier man,’ he said.

‘We need to rest,’ said Leila, walking in front of me. ‘Don’t we, Ayesha?’

Her friend and makeup artist turned and gave me a look that told me she might as well hammer a nail into her own forehead if she disagreed.

‘We took a break half an hour ago,’ I reminded the celebrity. ‘We’ve gotta keep going.’

‘Then you can keep going without me.’

‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘You stay here and we’ll come back for your corpse in a week or two.’

‘I don’t like you, Cooper.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

Leila tried to ignore me and kept walking, spritzing her face with a can of aerosolized water recovered from her makeup case.

‘We’ll take a break when we get to where we’re going,’ I said.

‘And where’s that?’

‘I’m not sure. I’ll know when I see it. And there’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you.’

‘Yes?’

‘No one likes to think they can be bought cheap.’

‘What?’

‘Bribing my men could get you in a lot of trouble, especially if the person you’re trying to bribe knows that someone else you waved your money at was offered a lot more.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

She glanced around to check on whether Ryder was within earshot — she knew all right, but I didn’t push it.

‘One thing I don’t understand and I was thinking that maybe you could help me with it,’ I said.

‘No. Go make polite conversation with someone else,’ she said.

‘One minute you were desperate for us to head on in with guns blazing and rescue your ex,’ I said, ignoring her request, ‘the next, you’re ready to cut and run. How come the turnaround?’

‘I’m not cutting and running and I don’t have to explain myself to you,’ she said.

‘C’mon. Help me out.’

‘Go away.’

I wasn’t going anywhere.

When Leila realized this, she sighed heavily. ‘Look, Cooper, no one has ever tried to drag you away by the ankle to rape you, have they? Perhaps if they had, you might understand what I went through — what Ayesha and I are going through in this place.’

‘We’re all Twenny Fo and Peanut have got,’ I reminded her.

‘A ransom will get paid and they’ll come home.’

‘Not if Twenny knows his kidnapper’s identity. If Lockhart thinks he’s been made, Deryck’s as good as dead whether he pays for his freedom or not.’

‘But you keep saying there aren’t enough of you to rescue him. So what are we doing? Where are we going? You’re just tempting fate, keeping us all hanging around here. You have no right to put Ayesha and me at further risk.’

From a certain angle, she had a point, even if the angle was rooted in her own self-preservation. If we lost Twenny and Peanut’s trail, I was as sure as I could be that we would not be able to find them again — not in this rainforest. I was also as sure as I could be that no matter what happened in terms of any ransom being paid, the hostages would be killed. ‘We’ll assess the situation when we get to the other side of the hill,’ I said.

‘What do you expect to see?’

‘The other side of the hill.’

‘Like I said, Cooper, I don’t like you.’

‘Stand in line.’

She pursed her lips into a seam. ‘Look, I’m feeling faint. So can we stop for a little while? Will it help if I say please?’

I gave in and called a halt. If ten minutes of rest would buy some cooperation, it was worth it. Maybe Leila was just hungry. Our stores of python had run out and lack of food was now becoming a factor, though not a life-threatening one. My own survival training told me a person could go for a week on no food. It was a comfort issue more than anything — we were all conditioned to eating three meals a day and we’d barely snacked. My stomach was empty. Even the grumbling had echoes. Energy levels were low. Our principals leaned against trees, drank water and swatted mosquitoes while West, Rutherford, Cassidy, Ryder and I did our best to recall the lay of the land set out on LeDuc’s map — which we no longer had — in particular, our intended destination, a ridge adjacent to the hill now occupied by the FARDC.

It was a steep two-hour climb through liana, elephant grass and stinging nettles to reach the ridge’s spine. We came out from under the canopy a little after one o’clock in the afternoon, halfway up a gray basalt rock face that the forest hadn’t managed to conquer. The break in the trees provided us with a much-hoped-for unobstructed view to the FARDC encampment half a mile across the valley. Hanging threateningly overhead, massive thunderheads jostled against a clear blue sky ruled by the afternoon sun, the warmth of which sliced through the chill clinging to my skin. Leila and Ayesha sank back against the rock face, closed their eyes and turned their faces toward it.

‘Mmm, God, that’s good,’ Leila said with a moan. ‘Ayesha, honey, go get me some sunscreen from my case, will you?’

We could plainly see individuals moving around across the valley at the company HQ. Smoke from several fires curled skywards and drifted toward a thicker haze out to the west. I was right about the hill having been logged. Compared with the virgin forest, the area the HQ occupied appeared to have been stripped bare.

Swinging the pack off my shoulder, I rummaged around and pulled out the scope. I braced it against a tree trunk and adjusted the focus. Ryder stood on one side of me, while Rutherford, West and Cassidy lined up off my other shoulder and shielded their eyes from the sun with their hands.

‘Fuck me,’ said Rutherford. ‘Is that a truck down there?’

His eyes were good. I found it a second later, a deuce-and-a-half painted olive drab parked in the shadows at one end of the newly cleared scrub. The women were gone but the Mi-8 was still there.

‘And where there’s a truck, there’s a road,’ said West, the implication of the vehicle’s presence occurring to everyone in the PSO team at the same instant.

I scoured the HQ for our principals.

‘Found ’em,’ I said. Twenny and Peanut were standing by themselves in the cleared area where I’d seen them last night, behind the blue tents. They were still hooded and their hands tied behind their backs. No Chinese guy in sight, no Lockhart and no Colonel Cravat, either, but there were plenty of folks in greens going about their business. I passed the scope to Rutherford.

‘The high point of the hill. Look for the tents,’ I said.

‘Yep, there they are,’ he said and then passed the scope on.

‘What I wouldn’t give for a radio and an Apache gunship on the other end of it,’ muttered West as he adjusted the sight’s focus a little.

After Cassidy and Ryder had scanned the hill, I took the scope back and went on a more extended tour with it, hoping to pick up that road and see where it led. I found it, a pale orange ribbon of mud that curled around the back of the hill, disappearing from view. I readjusted the instrument and came across something else I wasn’t expecting to see.

‘What?’ Cassidy asked, sensing something.

‘There’s a village down there, to the west of the hill. You can just make out a couple of huts.’

Cassidy took the scope and trained it on the area. ‘Got it,’ he said. He was about to shift the view to another area when he took it back to the village. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘The fucks are setting fire to it…’

‘Which fucks?’ Ryder asked.

‘The fuckin’ FARDC,’ said Rutherford.

‘The fire explains the haze,’ said West.

Now that I thought about it, the air smelt vaguely of burnt trash.

‘Christ…’ Cassidy muttered.

‘What now?’ said Rutherford.

Grim faced, the sergeant handed him the scope. ‘Look.’

Rutherford trained it on the village. ‘Jesus, they’re hacking the poor sods to pieces.’

I took back the scope. I saw a man in civilian clothes run into view and then out of it, a soldier in pursuit with a raised machete poised for the strike. I saw another civilian — a woman — crawl out of the hut on her hands and knees. A soldier stood beside her and hit the back of her head with the flat of his blade, knocking her unconscious, or dead — I couldn’t tell which.

‘There’s movement at the HQ,’ said West.

I swung the scope back. The truck was rolling. It did a one-eighty, then stopped. A couple of men jogged toward it and one of them was Lockhart.

The passenger side door opened and Lockhart and his buddy jumped in beside the driver. The vehicle then accelerated off down the road toward the village.

I lowered the scope. ‘I’m going down there.’

‘Why?’ It was Leila. She was behind me, standing with a hand on one hip in that determined, argumentative stance of hers I first saw in the departure lounge at Kigali airport.

‘ To see if what we find there provides us with any opportunities.’

‘Then I’m going with you. And so is Ayesha; aren’t we?’ she continued.

Ayesha looked surprised.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Too dangerous.’

‘We all going, yo,’ said Boink, jutting his chin forward. I pictured a porch coming away from the wall.

‘Cooper, we’re going with you or I scream.’ The celebrity sucked in a breath, opened her mouth and closed her eyes.

What choice did I have?

I dropped back to have a word with West.

‘We need food,’ I told him.

‘Sure, it’s all over the place here.’ To prove the point he snatched a large cricket off the petals of a bright red wildflower and stuffed it in his mouth.

‘I’d prefer a toasted sandwich,’ I told him.

He shook his head. ‘Fire’s a no-no here.’

Further down the hill, the rainforest provided West with options more palatable for our principals. He took Cassidy and went off to gather it and they returned with a large bunch of wild bananas on Cassidy’s shoulder.

‘We also need protein,’ said West. He dug into his pockets and produced handfuls of fat white grubs which he passed around. Leila and Ayesha screwed up their faces.

‘You can’t be serious?’ the star said.

‘No,’ said Ayesha, waving her hand at the offer as if trying to push it away.

‘It’s just food… I’ll admit they’re better when they’re fried but a fire’s too risky,’ West informed them.

Somehow I didn’t think it would make a difference if they were lightly sautéed in a white wine sauce.

‘What are they?’ I asked.

‘Mopane worms — off mopane trees. Critters are all over here.’

‘How d’you eat ’em?’ Rutherford inquired, sniffng the four large worms in the palm of his hand.

‘Pinch their guts out, and pull out their backbone, which is prickly, so be careful.’ He demonstrated. ‘Then you do this with them.’ He opened his mouth, popped one in and chewed slowly and deliberately.

‘I’m going to throw up,’ Leila muttered.

I followed West’s demonstration — pinched out the guts, removed the spine and ate the thing. It tasted bitter, slimy and gritty. If I’d paid money, I’d be asking for a refund. But food was food, and we had to take what was on the menu to keep up our strength. I ate half a dozen.

‘You can also do what I do and eat the grasshoppers. They’re crunchy and taste of grass, and you have to eat a lot of them. The termites are also an option.’

Ayesha dry retched.

If it were possible for Leila to look gray, she did.

‘Oh, and I also picked up some dessert,’ said West, grabbing a long length of what at first glance appeared to be bamboo that he’d leaned against the rocks. He cut it into one-foot lengths. ‘This here is sugar cane. You chew it, and suck it.’

Leila and Ayesha took the cane but examined it with suspicion.

‘Tastes like sugar,’ he assured them. ‘Really…’

The banana was filling and the cane juice rich and sweet. Best of all it carried away the taste of Mopane grub. Cassidy took the lead heading down the hill. He moved fast and we all kept to his tracks. My intention had been to leave Rutherford, West and Ryder behind to provide the security for Boink, Ayesha, Leila, and Leila’s makeup case, but that’s not how it worked out.

I said to Leila, ‘Stay, go, stay, go… You always so decisive?’

‘I don’t like you, Cooper, because you—’

‘We’ve established that.’

‘Because, for one thing, you butt in. Look, even though I don’t like you, I do feel safe with you. And so does Ayesha.’

Ayesha glanced over her shoulder at me and produced a smile.

‘When you go off somewhere,’ Leila continued, ‘it’s like we’re all just hanging around waiting for something to go wrong.’

‘Stick with me and there’s no waiting,’ I told her.

‘That’s a reference to your former partner, isn’t it, the one you think you killed?’

It was, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of admitting it.

‘Duke told me that she almost died when you first met her — in a car crash, right? Did you ever think that maybe she was meant to die in that crash, that her time was up? It could be that dying in that crash was her fate but, for some unnatural reason, she avoided it, cheated death. Perhaps she died in that room on your last case because fate had to settle the score.’

I was thinking that I still had a score to settle with Ryder and his blabbermouth. Aside from that, I also wondered which nutbag guru was doing the rounds of celebrity life counseling in LA at the moment. I dropped back a little to put some forest between the two of us, and fell in behind Boink.

The sound of women and children crying reached us long before we caught sight of the village. It was the same for the smell of blood, a metallic tang carried on the breeze that stuck to the roof of the mouth and triggered the gag refex. It took a lot of blood to produce a smell like that out in the open. An hour and a half after leaving the ridge, we climbed a heavily wooded hill behind the village. It was spread out a hundred feet below us, laid out across an open cleared area, twenty-three grass and animal-skin huts arranged around a larger central hut. Half a dozen of these smaller huts — homes, I figured — were no more than smoking piles of gray and black ash.

We wrapped the shadows of the forest around us and watched, stunned. Ayesha and Leila covered their mouths with their hands as they did so.

The inhabitants of the village, around a hundred men and women, were sitting on the ground — women and children in one group, men in another. Most of the women carried babies. The men, all roughly between twenty and forty years of age, were sitting cross-legged with their hands on their heads. FARDC soldiers stood over both groups with machetes, the blades black and slick with coagulating blood. Some of the older members of the village had already been butchered, and flies clouded around crimson corpses tangled together in a separate group. People everywhere were yelling and screaming and begging for mercy, which seemed in real short supply.

The soldiers had separated a man from the group and were shouting at him. He wasn’t doing what they wanted so they started beating him with the flats of their blades. He eventually got the message — to sit up on his knees with his fingers interlocked behind his neck — and the beating stopped. Two soldiers then pulled a woman from the female group and dragged her into the center with the man. She was carrying a newborn baby, which was screaming its lungs out. The two villagers risked touching each other’s faces, both sobbing, the woman hysterically. One of the soldiers strode in and ripped the infant the woman was carrying from her arms, holding it upside down by one of its ankles. Unbelievably, he then swung it around his head twice and let go of it. The baby flew high and long, and landed with a crash in the bushes not fifteen meters down the hill from where we were hiding. Its crying ceased when it landed.

‘Oh my lord,’ Leila whispered, her hands shaking, pressed against her face to shut out the world.

The mother howled and the man tried to get up — I guessed, to run to the child — which was when the soldiers started chopping into him with their machetes. Jesus Christ… They kept chopping until his head rolled clear of his neck. The groups of women and men screamed and cried out, and beat the ground with their fists. The soldiers then dragged the mother away toward one of the huts, outside which several men and boys in uniform loitered, smoking and joking among themselves.

Then the man I assumed was the commanding officer, the man I dubbed Colonel Cravat, swaggered out of the hut, adjusting his fly. The other soldiers stood back, giving him room. He stood over the headless corpse and addressed the villagers. I couldn’t hear specifics, but I guessed that he wanted them to do something in particular — cow them completely — or risk more bloodshed. No one moved, so he shouted an order at a couple of his men, who yanked another woman from the group. They pulled her infants away from her and hauled her across the ground by her hair as she kicked and shrieked and pleaded with them. My muscles twitched, wanting to get down there and do something — I wasn’t sure what. The men took her to an old truck tire leaning against a hut, kicked it over, pulled her arms down onto it and hacked one of them off. Just like that. Shit…

The officer strolled across to a point directly beneath us, while taunting her, calling out so that everyone in the clearing could hear him.

‘What’d he say?’ I asked Rutherford.

‘He said, “Now, woman, let us see how easy it is for you to hold your bastard children.”’

It was settled. I wanted to go down there and rip the guy’s heart, assuming he had one, out through his ribs. A second truck arrived and made a U-turn, mowing down the remains of a smoldering hut in a burst of cinders, its brakes squealing as it came to a stop in the open ground where atrocities were being inficted on the locals by the army that was supposed to be their own. The older children of the village were marched to the truck from out of one of the huts and threatened with being shot unless they climbed up in back.

The men, who were seated on the ground, were pulled to their feet and pushed toward the vehicle. The front passenger window rolled down and revealed Beau Lockhart.

I heard him call something out to Cravat, add a friendly ‘come here’ wave and open the door beside him.

The colonel waved back, surveyed the devastation around him and, happy with what he saw, jogged over with a jaunty gait and climbed in beside his Kornfak & Greene buddy like they were off to play eighteen holes. The door pulled shut, hiding the men in the darkness of the enclosed cabin, and the truck started to roll.

‘What the fuck is going on here?’ I muttered to myself.

A baby crying in the bushes near our hiding place distracted me. Jesus, it was the kid that had been thrown. The soldiers didn’t notice or care about one more infant exercising its lungs, so I got down on my belly and did the snake thing down and across to it. Minutes was all it took to reach the spot. I found the baby hanging upside down, its legs tangled up in the liana. A bush covered with vine had acted like a fire-man’s net, catching the kid, saving its life and holding its body secure. The baby — it was a girl — was crying because it had recovered from the shock of her first flight, and also because a driver ant had latched onto a toe. I killed the ant, untangled the baby girl’s legs from the vines, and wriggled on my belly back to our position higher up the hill, resting the wailing child across my forearms.

Cassidy met me halfway. ‘I count eight of them,’ he said, the muscles in his jaw bunching like twisted steel cabling, motioning at the soldiers swaggering among the villagers. ‘I can do five of these fuckers. Can you do three?’

‘We’re not doing anyone,’ I said. ‘Not now.’

I’d already weighed the odds. The suggestion was noble but dumb. Assuming that we managed to take these guys out, their hundred-and-seventy-or-so comrades would swoop in from their encampment, food the area, hunt us down and capture us. My team and I would then be chopped up, or whatever these folks did to people they didn’t like and couldn’t ransom.

Another truck arrived and parked behind the one waiting, its engine idling with a steady diesel thrum.

Cassidy stroked the infant’s head to calm it. ‘The villagers are being taken somewhere close by,’ he observed.

He was right. The trucks appeared to be making round trips. The baby had stopped crying and was starting to gurgle. ‘I think she likes you. Go to Papa,’ I said as I bundled the kid into his arms.

‘Where you going?’

‘Don’t know, which is why I’m going there.’

‘That’s not a good enough reason.’

‘Those trucks are headed someplace. I want to know where. It’s worth the risk finding out. As you said, they’re making round trips. Take our people further up the hill and if I don’t make it back by morning—’

‘I know, Lake Kivu.’

‘Yeah.’ I gave him a grin and slithered off down through the undergrowth toward the vehicle. Getting closer, I could read the label on its radiator grille. The manufacturer was Dongfeng — truck supplier to the PLA. This particular variant had off-road capability. Its bodywork sat high over the wheels with sheet steel flooring the load bed. A dull green canvas tarp over a high framework protected the load from the elements. My plan, insofar as I had one, was to stow away between the load bed and the chassis members. I sat at the edge of the bush, the truck parked only a couple of meters away, which was very considerate of the driver. The body of the vehicle obscured me from all but one set of unfriendly eyeballs up behind the steering wheel. I waited till they were preoccupied with something other than the vehicle’s rear-view mirrors, snuck over to the wheels and climbed up into the truck’s insides, between the tires and the bodywork. The chassis was crude but effective, no crumple zones here, only naked steel members, cross-braced — just what I’d been hoping for. I worked my way into the darker shadows at the rear of the vehicle, and waited. But not for long.

Within a few minutes, I heard the grief-stricken crying of the women being pushed up to the back of the truck, the soldiers snapping at them. The vehicle swayed as they climbed in and the metal tray above me began to sag under the weight, pressing me down into the chassis and onto the exhaust pipe. The loading complete, the driver revved the engine, then selected first, the gears in the transmission snarling at each other like old dogs. The brakes hissed as the truck lurched forward with a jerk, and the women above gave a collective wail. The exhaust pipe got hot very quickly and the heat radiated though my trouser leg.

The Dongfeng turned onto the road and gathered speed, the dust and grit picked up by the tires sandblasting my face. I couldn’t see anything other than the road rolling by beneath, which it continued to do for twenty minutes. Two hills and a dozen tight, steep switchbacks later, my transport finally pulled off the main road and then bounced along a narrow track, the forest pressing in on both sides, branches and leaves slapping against the vehicle. Looking straight down, the track we were on seemed no more than a sodden strip of mud deeply scored with ruts, which shunted the truck violently sideways left and right.

Eventually the track widened and we came out of the gloom, but even before we stopped, men who were full of impatience were shouting and hammering on the vehicle with sticks. The women above me made noises of pure dread as they climbed off the tailgate onto the ground. I dropped my head so that I could see what was going on and saw a dozen soldiers milling about, waiting on the human cargo, smacking them with those sticks like they were cattle, herding them toward some kind of marshaling area. Another truck was parked beside my ride, pointing back the way we came in. I dropped onto the mud and scampered across beneath it. Beyond this second truck, on its far side, the forest beckoned with a thousand places to hide. I dived into a thick screen of elephant grass and worked my way clear of the parking lot.

The forest here was mostly banana tree, some other kind of palm with fleshy leaves that grew close to the ground, and the usual elephant grass. I figured that it was probably an abandoned plantation because I could move through it reasonably easily. I made a wide circle and, as I worked my way around to what must have been the downwind side of whatever was going on here, the air brought with it the smell of unwashed bodies, exhumed earth and the murmur of a crowd of voices. What the hell was this place?

I changed direction, got down on my stomach and wriggled forward through the scrub, taking it slowly, the smells and the sounds concentrating. And, suddenly, the earth fell away beneath my hands. I was on the edge of something. I separated the leaves in front of my face and dropping away more than a hundred feet was a pit of the damned. Several hundred souls caked in orange dust and mud, driven by soldiers with long sticks and rifles, passed buckets of the mud up a complex labyrinth of terraces, ramps and ladders, and they were then tipped onto bigger piles of mud being worked over by more human beings urged on by beatings. The captives here were slaves, no other word for it. As I watched the scene, which reminded me of one of those old church paintings depicting a vision of hell, a man slipped and dropped his bucket, and two of the guards thrashed him with their sticks while he cowered and eventually rolled himself into a ball. Unfortunately, he rolled a little too far and fell off the terrace, dropping ten feet to a lower level where he landed on his head. No one went to the man’s aid, though several soldiers rushed at him with their sticks and the beating started over. They didn’t seem to realize, much less care, that the guy wasn’t moving, not even to protect his head.

I glanced over toward the area where the trucks were parked. Soldiers handed buckets to the women I had shared the truck with and then divided them into teams. Down in the pit, more women worked alongside the men. Some children were down there too, I noticed. The lethargy of the workforce was matched by most of the soldiers. But there were others in uniforms present who watched over the proceedings with more than a passing interest. These men occupied a couple of shanty-style buildings over by the parking lot that were set back from the edge of the pit. Unlike their uniformed counterparts down in the hole, these men were clean and dust-free. They loitered on the rickety, uneven verandas, waved away the flies and upended green beer bottles.

Bushes thrashed about nearby, distracting me. Jesus, there was something large and determined coming through, heading straight for me. Whatever it was came close, and then stopped. I pulled my Ka-bar and held my breath. I didn’t want to think about what it might be, but thought sharp teeth and claws were probably in my immediate future. It moved again and suddenly a black face with wide yellow eyes burst through the foliage in front of me and stopped. We looked at each other, neither of us sure what to do. I saw his knife, an old rusty blade, and knew he’d figured it out. He stuck the thing into my ribs but the crude blade glanced off my body armor. The guy was small and determined and surprisingly strong. I grabbed his wrist, and managed to roll on top of him and pin his knife between our chests. He was a civilian, or maybe a soldier out of uniform. I held my Ka-bar across his throat and pushed the blade into his Adam’s apple, his breathing coming out short and sharp.

‘Américain?’ he gasped, eyes widening with surprise. ‘Vous-êtes Américain?’

No point denying it, there being a low-viz brown and tan Stars and Stripes patch on my shoulder.

‘We,’ I told him, in the worst French accent I’d probably ever heard.

The guy stopped struggling.

‘Then you help,’ he said in broken English.

‘Is that before or after you stick me?’

‘Oh, pardon, monsieur.’

‘You speak English.’ I said.

‘Oui, a little.’

‘Then let’s go with that.’

I happened to glance up just as the Chinese guy, the one from the FARDC encampment, emerged from one of the shanty hovels. Colonel Cravat was with him, following a few paces behind. Then Lockhart made an appearance, stepping from out of the hut and trotting up behind the two men. The three of them met out in the open with a man covered in orange dust accompanied by a couple of soldiers. The uniformed guys on the verandas were all turned toward them, their body language expectant. Something was going on.

One of the soldiers accompanying the man covered in orange dust held something toward Lockhart. He accepted it, examined it, and passed it on to Colonel Cravat, who then handed in to Fu Manchu. As all three examined the item, they became animated. Whatever it was obviously excited the crap out of them.

Lockhart and Colonel Cravat spoke with the orange man and he pointed down into the pit, showing where he found whatever it was that was getting them all in a lather.

Then Lockhart held the object up to the beer gallery and yelled, ‘Door!’ which was met by a rousing cheer, raised bottles and plenty of backslapping.

‘Door? What door?’ I muttered.

‘D’or,’ said the man lying beside me on the ground, also watching Lockhart and the others. ‘Gold.’