Ghost Watch

Rendezvous

The soldiers and the man who made the strike each received a bottle of beer. A nugget of gold in exchange for a beer. I licked my lips and thought, yeah, fair trade. All three of them then shuffed off back down into the pit. Lockhart, Fu Manchu and Colonel Cravat headed for the shacks and the men on the verandas crowded around to inspect the find.

‘Who is that man?’ I asked the Congolese beside me. ‘The officer — the one with the white scarf tucked into his shirt. You know his name?’

‘He is Colonel Innocent Lissouba. A very bad man.’

I repeated the name to fx it in my memory.

‘He came to my village. His soldiers took all the women and all the men. They killed many. I want to kill him.’

The man wriggled forward to get a better view of the pit.

‘My wife, she is down there,’ he said, trying to spot her.

‘Where’s your village?’ I asked. He gestured off in a direction away from the village I’d just witnessed being plundered for the able-bodied. There were many more laborers down in the pit than I’d seen transported here, which meant there were other villages nearby. For all I knew, Lockhart, Lissouba and his cohorts were out scouring the countryside, press-ganging anyone strong enough to lift a shovel.

‘You are American! You must help me free my wife, my people.’

‘Do I look like Bruce Willis?’ I said.

‘Bruce Willis, yes!’

The guy was excited.

‘I’m not Bruce Willis. I’ve got hair.’

He went back to scouring the pit.

‘There,’ the African said, pointing, suddenly agitated. ‘Look, she is there!’

He indicated a group of women slopping around on the edge of a puddle in the bottom of the hole, digging at it with their hands and dropping whatever they could pull up into the steel buckets. I wasn’t sure which of the women was his wife.

‘She is alive,’ he said, obviously relieved. ‘I know these women. And there is my brother and my uncle,’ he continued. He sat back on his haunches, his face split by a wide grin. He’d been expecting the worst, but this was obviously the best possible result.

A wall of rain, gray and leaning forward at an angle like it was in a hurry to get somewhere, thundered across the forest on the far side of the pit, coming our way. Its arrival didn’t send anyone scurrying for cover. It seemed to arrive daily at this time in the afternoon. I knew of train services less reliable. Overhead, someone threw a blanket over the sun.

At that instant, Lockhart and his two buddies walked out of one of the shacks and started jogging toward the parking lot. I lost sight of them at that point, but a Dongfeng moved off soon after, probably heading back to the FARDC encampment or to the village to cause a bunch more misery. I’d seen enough and pushed back from the lip of the mine.

‘Where are you going?’ the African wanted to know, anxious, grabbing at my sleeve.

It was time to put him straight — that I was not some kind of advance guard for Tommy Franks. ‘My unit and I made a forced landing in a helicopter and some of my people have been taken captive. We’re all in the same boat with you and your wife, and it’s got a big hole in the bottom.’

‘Then I will help you,’ he said.

‘You’re not Bruce Willis, either,’ I replied, maybe a little too quickly. He was a local. He’d know the area, which put him way ahead of Bruce. I gave him a test. ‘The road up there. It starts in the forest. Where does it go?’

‘To Mukatano, a city twenty kilometer this way.’ He gestured vaguely south. ‘The men who took the trees make the road. They are gone now.’

Twenty kilometers — twelve miles — a lot more achievable than hiking out to Goma or Rwanda. I doubted the city bit. It had to be a small town, too small to be noted on LeDuc’s map. ‘Is there a sawmill at Mukatano?’ I asked.

‘Non.’

‘Is Mukatano on a river?’

‘The Zaire? Non.’

‘Isn’t that what this place used to be called?’

‘It was named after the river.’

I scratched my cheek and an insect having a meal got caught under my fingernails. If the road ended at Mukatano and there were no sawmill there and no river, how’d those loggers get the logs processed? ‘Where’d the loggers put the lumber — in the river?’

‘There was a place for this, but it is gone. They had a dock, but even that is gone. People take it for cooking fres.’

‘The road goes there too, yes?’

‘Oui.’

‘How’d you escape?’ I asked. ‘Why aren’t you down in the pit with the people from your village?’

‘I was at another village when the soldiers came. It is near the road also. Médecins Sans Frontières is there. They have medicines. I went to get them and when I come back, everyone in my village was gone… or dead.’

The memories of what he’d seen came back to him and large tears welled in his eyes. They ran down his face, mixing with the rainwater. The village I’d just come from gave me a fair idea of the scenes he was recalling.

‘Where will these people sleep tonight?’ I asked. ‘What’ll they eat?’

The man wiped his face with his hands. ‘The soldiers will give them some food, but not much. Some will sleep in the mine; some are taken back to their villages. There is a camp nearby. My people will sleep there under plastic. There are some United Nations tents. But there is no clean water. Some have died from stomach sickness. It is bad.’

It didn’t sound good. The scale of this cruelty was difficult for me to get my head around. ‘So your people… they just work until they die?’

‘No, they work until this army gets frightened away by a bigger army, and then we will go back to our village.’

‘How many times has this happened?’

‘They found gold here two years ago. Since then, many armies come through: CNDP, Mai-Mai, PARECO, FDLR, LRA, FARDC… Each one is worse than the last. Sometimes they punish us for helping their enemies, but we have no choice. They loot and steal, kill and rape and they pass on the sickness — the sickness I go to the MSF to get the medicine for. My village was once large and rich, but now it is small and we starve.’

‘Where is the camp your people are taken to at night?’

‘It is near. You wish to see it also.’

‘Not now. What’s your name?’ I asked him.

‘Francis.’ He glanced at the nametag on my body armor. ‘Your name is Cooper. I can read, also.’

‘Francis. I’ll be honest with you — I don’t know what my men and I can do here. There are many more of them than there are of us.’

‘You will do something, I know it.’

Yeah, and right there could be the problem. Who’s to say that what we did wouldn’t turn around and bite all of us in the ass right back, Francis and his people included? I parted the foliage, took another look at the mine and the shacks, but there was nothing of interest going on other than a lot of ice-cold beer being guzzled. A couple of soldiers were leering and calling out to a group of women working a section of mud nearby. Mud, beer, women. I could see where it was heading and this was one time I didn’t want to be around when it arrived. I made a quick decision. ‘Come with me,’ I said to Francis, and backed away from the lip of the mine.

The Congolese hesitated a moment while he again located his wife down in the pit. Satisfied that she was in no immediate danger, he said, ‘Yes, thank you. I come with you.’ He turned for one last look over his shoulder before following me to where the trucks were parked. By the time we arrived there only three Dongfengs remained. At the edge of the cleared area, I gave Francis a quick briefing followed by a practical demonstration, scooting across open ground to the nearest truck and climbing up inside its wheel arches, and then waving him across.

We waited twenty minutes, squeezed into the truck’s sub frame, before its diesel thrummed into life. Half a dozen soldiers piled in the back and the vehicle finally pulled out of the lot and onto the road, heading in the right direction at least — back to the village I’d come from.

The return ride was a different kind of uncomfortable from the trip out. Instead of dust and grit, the wheels fung water, mud and the occasional stone at us while steam boiled into clouds off the exhaust pipe. I counted down the hills — two of them — and waited for the truck to pull over into the village. But then we swept around a corner, the driver back-shifted into the lower gears, and we started up a third hill.

‘Shit,’ I muttered to myself. We weren’t stopping in the village. The ride was taking us all the way into the FARDC camp. The truck came to a stop at a roadblock, a brief conversation ensued between the driver and the soldiers manning it, and then we were underway again. A few minutes later, the vehicle’s brakes wheezed as we came to a stop, the engine died and the soldiers climbed down. I motioned to Francis to stay put and keep quiet. It was after five and the light was fading. We were stuck here until the night gave us some cover, shivering with cold, caked with mud — my teeth grinding with it — the rain causing small waterfalls to run off the sides of the truck and into the growing lake on the ground beneath us.

We came out of hiding an hour and a half later, when the darkness was complete and the smells of kerosene fires and cooking drifted across the encampment, the men preoccupied with food. I unfolded my cramped arms, legs and neck, and dropped with a splash into the puddles beneath us. Francis did likewise. There was another Dongfeng parked in front of our hiding place. Fifty meters ahead, I could make out the hazy shape of the Mi-8 chopper. I had no idea about the placement of sentries but I had to assume that they were around. I was thinking about all this as the rain softened into a fog-like mist and the air came alive with the sound of mating frogs.

I whispered to Francis, ‘Follow me, stay close,’ and then, doubled over, I headed for the uncleared scrub that marked the edge of the forest. We made it without incident and stopped roughly midway between the trucks and the chopper.

‘Where are your men?’ Francis asked.

Good question, and I wished I had an equally good answer to go with it. When I last saw them, they were babysitting. I wondered what they’d been up to while I’d taken the detour. ‘Around,’ I said, keeping it ambiguous, but the truth of it was that I had not the faintest idea where my unit might be — still back at the nearby village, or back on the hill that provided overwatch, or back at Cyangugu with drinks in hand… who knew?

As I sat in the scrub, dragging my hand across the back of my neck, smearing the mosquitoes that settled on my bare skin and watching several fires haloed by the mist, it seemed to me that the war effort around here had tapered off somewhat. If I weren’t mistaken, the attitude of the men walking around was pretty relaxed; surprising, given that the CNDP force was somewhere nearby. I’d have thought that the proximity of its sworn enemy would have made these boys just a little nervous. I was considering all this, along with what my limited options might be, when I heard the familiar thump of a helicopter’s main rotor blades away in the distance. The sound drifted in and out as the air currents shifted, silencing the frogs as it grew louder with each second. The aircraft was clearly inbound. A party of men arrived at the edge of the cleared area. Several of them waved flashlights blithely about for the benefit of enemy snipers, but no shots rang out.

The chopper arrived from the east. It wasn’t a military aircraft. It was big and sleek and, as it flew overhead and pivoted almost a hundred and eighty degrees before settling on its retractable landing gear, its underbelly strobe light revealed a color scheme of gold with a white stripe running down the center. The pilots cut the engines and the whine of its turbines instantly dropped away. It looked like one of those big expensive choppers that ply between New York and Washington DC, carrying executive types overloaded with taxpayer-funded bail outs. A Sikorsky. I couldn’t see what was going on once it had landed because, aside from being dark, whoever got out of it exited on the side of the aircraft facing the camp and the rest of the helicopter got in the way. I tapped my African friend on the shoulder and we crawled through the forest to get a better angle on the proceedings. The view quickly improved. Portable electric lanterns were turned on and flashlights waved about, illuminating a bunch of very interesting faces. Lockhart was part of the welcoming committee, as was Colonel Cravat — Colonel Lissouba — and the Chinese PLA guy. They were shaking hands with the guy from Swedish American Gold and his African American buddy. Both of their names escaped me for the moment, but I remembered them — the two ex-pat autograph hunters Lockhart declined to introduce me to back at Cyan-gugu on the night of the concert.

Their presence here was surprising and intriguing, equally as surprising and intriguing as the presence of the CNDP’s Colonel Makenga, who’d probably been picked up from his ridgeline on the way through. And Makenga’s presence was not nearly as surprising and intriguing as that of Colonel Biruta’s, the CNDP officer commanding the brigade entertained by Twenny Fo and Leila at the Cyangugu training base; the officer with the nice symmetrical scar that divided his face into equal parts. Another guy stepped into the light. It was my ol’ buddy, LeDuc — his presence here not in the least surprising or intriguing.

‘Piers Pietersen and Charles White,’ I whispered, the names of the two expats coming back to me.

‘What?’ said Francis.

I waved away the question, along with the mosquito cloud. Explanations would have to wait. Lockhart, Lissouba, Fu Manchu, Makenga, Biruta, LeDuc, and a bigwig from a gold company. Or, another way to look at it — a US DoD contractor in cahoots with the PLA and FARDC, meeting the local CNDP commanding officer and his boss for a powwow with SAG. It read like a headline for a 60 Minutes exposé. And all within spitting distance of a gold mine producing nuggets of the stuff. That was no coincidence either. More than likely it was the catalyst. And the presence of Makenga, the enemy — he of the golden chicken — accounted for the unnatural calm that seemed to have descended on the FARDC encampment. Obviously, a convenient truce had been called between the two warring companies. The only man I couldn’t place in the get-together was Charles White, the African American accompanying Pietersen. I wondered how many of these people were involved in the scheme to abduct my principals.

The backslapping continued for a while as Francis and I watched on. Then half a dozen men from the camp came over and White accompanied them to the chopper. The fuselage of the aircraft obscured the proceedings for a few moments, but then I saw the men re-emerge, lugging heavy crates between them. They carried them to the back of the lead truck, placed them on the tailgate and went back to the chopper for more. Taking a flashlight, White led the group to the rear of the truck and opened one of the boxes with a jemmy that had been handed to him. He levered the lid off the crate, opened another box within it, took something out and held it up to show the party gathered nearby. He then strolled around the far side of the truck, the side nearest to Francis and me hiding in the scrub, placed the object on the ground and sauntered back to join the others. He held his right hand up high.

And, suddenly, a flash ripped through the darkness, accompanied by an ear-splitting explosion. Shrapnel raked the foliage inches above my head. Francis screamed, got up and ran.

I took off after him, expecting that, any second, gunfire would follow us. I tensed, waiting for the bark of M16s and the jacketed slugs that would drop us into the scrub, but they never came. I caught up with Francis eventually, after a sprint of two hundred meters through elephant grass that cut up my clothes, up toward the ridge that we’d used as an observation post earlier in the day. No one seemed to have followed us. I put that down to the explosion temporarily deafening White, Lockhart and the rest, and our moving shapes being black on black. Our enemies hadn’t even known we were there, or that they’d almost killed us.

‘Stop,’ I hissed at Francis, but he kept running, bolting up the hill. As I watched, a tree appeared to snatch him clean off his feet. He shot skywards upside down, a gurgling scream choking from him. And then a length of warm black steel materialized from out of the night and jerked my head to one side and I felt the edge of a knife press across my throat, breaking the skin.

‘Christ, Cooper,’ said a familiar voice in my ear as the warm black steel, which I realized was a forearm, released me. Cassidy. ‘How many fucking lives you got?’ he said. ‘Come three meters to the left and right about now you’d have a necklace of bamboo spears through your chest.’

My heart pounded like a tire with a bubble in the sidewall about to burst. I got down on a knee and sucked in some air to get the adrenalin under control.

‘And who’s that swinging by his ankles up there?’ Cassidy asked.

‘Name’s Francis,’ I puffed. ‘He’s friendly. Or was — wouldn’t count on it now.’

‘I’ll get him down.’

‘Good idea. What happened to the baby?’

‘Leila wanted to keep it.’

‘You talked her out of it, I hope.’

‘No.’

I climbed to my feet. ‘What? So we’ve still got it?’

‘No, I didn’t try and talk her out of anything. I just took it off her and put it on the edge of the forest and held my hand across her mouth until one of the women eventually came and took it away.’

‘So now you and Leila have a very special relationship too,’ I said.

‘Not as special as yours,’ he said, grinning. He found the liana taking Francis’s weight and sawed through it with his Ka-bar.

‘Where are the others?’

‘Further up the hill. That explosion have anything to do with you?’ ‘No.’ I gazed up at Francis, who was spinning slowly, hanging by an

ankle. ‘What’s with all the bushcraft?’

‘Didn’t want anyone sneaking in through our back door.’

He grunted as he took the weight on the vine and lowered Francis into a bush.

A low whistle floated through the scrub.

Cassidy returned it.

A shadow stepped out from behind a tree ten feet further up the hill.

‘Look what I found,’ Cassidy told it.

‘Hey, skipper, you’re back,’ said Rutherford’s familiar voice. ‘Duke was getting worried.’

‘Fuck off,’ said Ryder, suddenly appearing from his hiding place behind us, a 97 cradled in the crook of an arm. Ryder was grinning, his teeth glowing pale blue in the darkness as he walked toward us. This was a different Ryder to the one who’d joined the PSO team because he was hoping to rub pink bits with an old school flame. Crawling through the bush and the insects the other night had done him some good. Ryder 2.0 was an upgrade.

‘Who’s your friend?’ he asked with a nod at Francis.

While Francis shook their hands with enthusiasm, I explained that he’d volunteered to be our guide. ‘How’re the principals?’ I asked at the conclusion of the meet and greet.

‘Bedded down for the night,’ said Rutherford.

Ryder went to resume his watch.

‘Duke,’ I said, ‘there are some things going on that we all need to talk about. The path’s clear behind us.’

Rutherford led the way up the hill, stopping eventually at a stand of young saplings. There was a half moon blazing out from behind a roll of silvery cloud and, with little canopy to obscure the light, I could just make out Leila, Ayesha and Boink lying on woven liana hammocks strung between the young trees, which got our principals off the ground and out of reach of the ants. Boink was snoring loudly, Ayesha softly. Leila was dead to the world, the way I liked her best.

‘West?’ I asked.

‘Keeping an eye on things across the ditch,’ said Rutherford.

The Brit took us up to the rock face, our earlier observation post.

West lowered the sniper scope when he heard us coming up behind him.

‘Hey, boss. I couldn’t work out whether you were MIA or AWOL,’ he said with a smile when he saw me. ‘What happened?’

I provided a brief account of my last six hours — the trip to the mine, the folks being used as slaves, meeting Francis, seeing Lockhart.

Rutherford shook his head. ‘Shite. So this is all about gold?’

‘Gold doesn’t explain why our principals were kidnapped,’ said Cassidy.

No, it didn’t. ‘Which reminds me,’ I said. ‘Twenny and Peanut still in plain sight?’

‘Nope,’ said West. ‘Either they’ve been moved into one of the tents — out of sight of the guests who arrived in the chopper. Or they’ve been whacked and their bodies disposed of.’

A positive thinker. ‘What’s your money on?’ I asked him.

He shrugged.

‘Cassidy?’

‘They were there, and then they were gone,’ he said.

‘From what you’ve just told us, boss,’ said Duke, ‘I’d say everyone down there’s a little too preoccupied with mining interests to send Twenny and Peanut down the road after Fournier.’

‘Maybe,’ West conceded.

‘We have to work with the assumption that they’re still alive,’ said Cassidy.

There were murmurs of agreement.

‘Sir, what promises have been made to Francis about his wife in return for his guide duties?’ Cassidy asked.

‘Only that Bruce Willis and Tommy Franks will ride on in and rescue her.’

‘Yes, Bruce Willis,’ said Francis, doing a little jig on the spot.

‘I didn’t want to over-promise,’ I said.

‘Jesus,’ Cassidy muttered.

I asked West, ‘What can you see down there at the moment?’

He handed me the scope. ‘Take a look for yourself. There’s not enough light to get a good resolution, especially once they turned off all their flashlights. Were you down there on the ground when the chopper arrived?’

‘Yep.’ I rested the scope against the tree trunk and brought the executive helicopter into focus. The image was heavily ghosted and dark blue on black. I scanned the area. From the little I could make out, Lockhart and his entourage appeared to have vacated the clearing. ‘So you didn’t see who came in on it?’

‘No,’ said West.

I kept talking while I scanned the HQ. ‘It’s a Swedish American Gold aircraft. The passenger list included Colonel Biruta, the CNDP commanding officer from Cyangugu; Colonel Makenga, the CNDP asshole who tried to do us up on the ridge. Piers Pietersen was on it — he’s possibly the pilot — and so was Charles White. We met those last two back at Cyangugu after the concert.’

‘I remember them,’ said Ryder. ‘The autograph hunters, right?’

‘That’s them,’ said Rutherford, West nodding.

‘Pietersen and White brought in a cargo of weapons,’ I continued. ‘Claymores, we know about. White set one off.’

‘We heard,’ said West.

‘They put them all in that truck.’ Thinking on the run, I added, ‘Maybe they’re going to pull the C4 out of ’em and use it to open up the mine.’ The realization gave me an idea.

‘Was that the explosion I heard? A Claymore?’ West asked.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘White giving a demonstration. Lockhart, the PLA guy and the FARDC commanding officer were the official welcoming party, by the way. And LeDuc was with them.’

‘I’m going to adopt the local custom and throw a big handful of shit at LeDuc when I see him next,’ said Rutherford.

‘So FARDC and CNDP are now hopping into bed together only a couple of days after they were trying to kill each other?’ Ryder asked. ‘Is that likely?’

‘Maybe — if there’s a fortune in gold greasing the wheels,’ Cassidy suggested.

‘That’s what they might have been fighting about — control of the mine,’ I said. ‘Could be that both parties decided the fight was a stalemate and a better course of action was to split the spoils instead and live to fight another day.’

‘Rich and alive beats dead poor and proud any day,’ observed Rutherford.

‘I want to bring in Lockhart,’ said Ryder.

I admired his ambition.

‘You and whose army?’ the Brit asked.

‘We’re still no closer to releasing our principals,’ Cassidy reminded us.

‘I think we’re plenty closer,’ I said.

West scratched his chin. ‘How?’

‘It’s sitting in the back of that truck.’

It was still dark when Ayesha woke and wandered up to the rock face. ‘Vin! My God, you’re safe!’ she said, surprised to see me back in the fold. ‘We were so worried about you, weren’t we?’

‘I had kittens,’ said Rutherford, grinning.

‘Where’d you end up?’ Ayesha continued.

I gave her a brief rundown.

‘Oh, man, those poor people down there,’ said Ayesha. ‘I had no idea. This country — it’s like totally—’

‘Fucked in the head,’ West said.

‘So who’s this?’ Ayesha asked, nodding warily at Francis.

I went through a round of introductions.

‘Yo, Cooper! That you?’ Boink asked as he pulled himself up the last step onto the shelf. ‘What up, dog?’

Twenny’s head security guy walked over and held out his fist so that we could bump knuckles, the male air kiss.

‘I never seen nothin’ like what happen’ down in that village, yo. When you stowed away on that truck after what we seen?’ he shook his head. ‘That was brave, fucked-up shit. I thought you was a goner.’

‘Who’s a goner?’ It was Leila. She reached behind her head, wrangling her hair into a ponytail as she came up the step. ‘Cooper… When did you get back?’ She caught sight of Francis and said, ‘What’s going on?’

‘Got movement down there,’ said West, interrupting, holding up the scope for me to come take a look.

‘Excuse me,’ I said to Leila.

‘No, you’re not excused,’ she replied.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Cooper, you’re not going nowhere till I know what’s going on. We went with you yesterday. I hoped it might keep your eyes on the prize — getting us back to Cyangugu. But instead, off you went. You put us all at risk again. And we’re still no closer to getting out of here.’

‘I thought we were in agreement about rescuing Twenny,’ I said, keeping the annoyance out of my face and tone.

‘Which agreement was that?’ she said.

‘I’ve made it plain to you that it’s our responsibility to protect all our principals, not just your Hollywood ass.’

A hand went to her hip. She didn’t like that, a suggestion that the universe might not revolve around her ass.

‘I’m sure if you asked Deryck, he’d want me to be safe.’

‘As far as I can see, you are,’ I said. ‘You’re not tied to a tree with a hood over your face, not knowing whether you’re going to live or die from one moment to the next.’

‘There mightn’t be a hood on my head, Cooper, but what’s the difference between Deryck’s situation and ours? We don’t know whether we’re going to survive either.’ She looked to Ayesha for backup. Her friend and makeup artist gave a reluctant nod. ‘Y’know, I don’t think this is about getting us out of here. It’s not about getting us to safety,’ Leila continued, stabbing a finger in my direction. ‘Maybe that’s where you started out, but it’s not what’s happening now. You think you’ve uncovered a crime. You’re a cop, so you want to arrest someone. This has become a case, hasn’t it? And you’re going to solve it or die trying. Which is fine by me — go ahead and die, if that’s what you’re determined to do. Just don’t take the rest of us with you.’

‘Shut the fuck up, woman,’ said Boink. ‘Pulling Twenny out and getting your sorry ass back over the border — they’re both the same deal. You still think we can just walk in an’ ask for him and Peanut back? Damn you, woman. If we want them back, we have to go an’ convince the motherfuckers that we want ’em more than they want ’em.’

Maybe I’d underestimated Boink. The guy summed up like a math professor.

Leila dismissed him with a flick of her hand. ‘I don’t care what you think, Phillip, ’cause you never do any damned thinking for yo’se’f.’

Phillip? I tried mentally to pin the name on Boink and had a lot of difficulty making it stick.

‘This guy, Cooper?’ she said, pointing at me. ‘He’s damaged goods. He killed his fancée and now he wants to die to make amends for it. He doesn’t care what happens to you, or me, or any of us.’ She turned to me again, her face… ugly. ‘That’s what this is all about, right? You’re in pain and you want out of your misery. You have a death wish.’

Maybe she was right. Maybe that’s exactly what I had. And maybe she was right about Death having a score to settle with me, just like the one she figured it had settled with Anna.

‘Well, Cooper?’ The singer’s arms were folded, her weight on one slender long leg, a study in self-righteous impatience.

‘Lockhart and his friends cooked up a scheme to capture you and your ex and extort money for your release,’ I said. ‘And that’s just part of what they’re into. Your ex is still down there — the man you said you still loved — and we’re hoping he’s still alive. Also down there are trucks and a road going somewhere. You get that? So, the plan is simple — we snatch Deryck and Peanut and take the trucks. And we make a lot of noise doing it. The alternative is a fifteen-mile hike through the forest to the nearest town. In this terrain, the way we move, I figure that will take us three more days — three more days without enough food, three more days of battling the elements, three more days of mosquitoes and snakes, three more days of you and me rubbing up against each other like nitro and glycerin. Walk if you like, but I ’d rather roll outta here.’

‘So, what? Now we just hang around and wait to see what you do?’

‘No. I’m hoping that you can make yourself useful and learn how to shoot one of these,’ I said, lifting my M4.

She clenched her fists in frustration. Hmm… Leila somewhere behind me with loaded assault rifle. What was wrong with that picture?

‘Sir…’ West called out again, impatient.

‘Can I go now, ma’am?’ I asked the star.

She ignored me and turned on Cassidy as she stormed off. ‘As for you, we could have rescued that baby girl and you know it.’

Boink sidled over like he had something illegal to sell. ‘Cooper,’ he said under his breath. ‘That name you heard from her. It stays right here in the jungle, yo.’

‘What name?’ I said as I retreated in West’s direction. The sergeant handed me the scope and I braced it against the tree. There was some movement on the hill. The camp was beginning to stir.

‘We’ve got maybe an hour and a half of useful darkness before dawn,’ I said to myself.

‘Boss, if you’re cooking up one of those half-plans of yours,’ said West, ‘right about now might be a good time to share.’