Ghost Watch

Release

We rolled out five minutes behind schedule, maneuvering toward the road at a crawl. Boink stepped out from behind a bamboo stand and approached the passenger-side front door. I leaned out the opening in the door.

‘Anything?’ I asked him.

‘You’re good to go, man.’

‘See you in around half an hour,’ I said. At least, we would if we weren’t all full of holes. I gestured at Francis. He rolled us forward at a creep, then left the cover of the forest and turned onto the road, heading up the incline. Around a hundred and fifty meters downhill, the trucks blasted by the Claymores were still nosed into the greenery. A trail of black smoke rose from the vehicles and climbed toward the lowering cloud base. Someone would turn up to investigate that.

Francis accelerated up the hill, grinding through the gears, the wind roar as it blasted through the non-existent windshield building steadily. We drove through a swarm of unidentifed bugs that burst wetly against us like we were being spat on. The morning was steamy and my clothes were sticking to my skin, especially where the blood from my shoulder wound had dried. Clouds were building up for something extra-specially impressive. A heavy rumbling echo of thunder rolled down through overhanging trees, confirming that a big one was on the way.

I started listing the variables in our immediate future, but soon ran out of fingers and toes. There were way too many and most of them were armed to the teeth. If there was the glimmer of a bright side, it was that the enemy’s intelligence was even thinner than ours. Obviously, FARDC knew something was up, but didn’t know where, when, how or who. Rolling up to the mine, we’d appear innocent, just another truck like any of the others, at least until the absent windshield was noticed, along with the bodywork shot up like an Alabama road sign.

There was the stained FARDC beret on the seat. I passed it across to Francis. It was sticky with blood and smelled of iron. ‘Put it on,’ I told him.

He looked at the thing with distaste for a moment before placing it on his head. We were by now about a mile and a half from the mine. There were no signs of danger. The thunderstorm was moving in, lightning forking the clouds, flicking on and off like an old fuorescent light on its last legs. Thunder rumbled distantly. It was time for Rutherford and me to make ourselves scarce. I slid down off the seat and onto the floorboards, Rutherford doing likewise. Francis glanced at us briefly but said nothing. I watched Rutherford go through his umpteenth weapons check, which prompted me to do the same.

‘Checkpoint ahead,’ said Francis. ‘Many men. Two are coming forward. They are waving at me to stop.’

‘Do not stop,’ I told him. ‘How many men?’

‘Perhaps eight or ten.’

Shit — that was a lot of guns. And this was just a roadblock.

‘Can you drive through? Anything across the road? Like a truck?’

‘No — just armed men!’ he said through gritted teeth and took his foot off the gas.

‘Don’t slow down!’ Rutherford snapped at him, then reached over and pushed the gas pedal to the floor with the stock of his rifle. The Dong bucked forward and Francis panicked a little, swerving off the road briefly.

‘Take it easy,’ I told Francis. ‘And for Christ’s sake don’t use the horn — not yet!’

‘They are pointing their guns at me,’ said Francis.

‘Tell them something!’ I yelled at him. ‘Tell them the mine is being attacked.’

Just for Christ’s sake don’t tell them it’s being attacked by us, I thought.

Francis stuck his head out the window and shouted, ‘Gare! Gare! Regardez en arriere! Ils arrivent! Les fantômes! Les fantômes!’

I heard random terrified shouting coming from the men at the roadblock.

Rutherford’s face widened into a grin.

‘What’d he say?’ I asked.

‘“Look out, the ghosts are coming! They’re right behind us.” Sounds like they’re all shitting themselves out there.’ He pulled his rifle off the pedal.

The men’s shouts faded behind us. No gunfire, suggesting that we’d managed to pierce the outer defenses without alerting the main body of troops within.

‘Francis — how much further to the mine?’ I asked him.

‘Not far. Soon.’

‘You can slow down now. Tell me what you see.’

The Dong freewheeled, slowing gradually. Francis gave the steering wheel more than half a turn. From memory, this almost-ninety-degree right-hander was the last corner before a hundred-meter straight section of road that ended in the parking lot.

‘I see many men,’ Francis said, his voice agitated.

‘How many?’ I asked.

‘Too many to count. More than sixty.’

Sixty! ‘Are they looking at us?’

‘Non.’

‘What are they doing?’

‘They are making walls with sandbags.’

Fortifcations. ‘Can you see our hostages?’

‘Non.’

‘Shit,’ said Rutherford, beating me to it.

‘Wait… Oui, I see them,’ he said a few seconds later. ‘They are chained to old machinery away from the huts. There are guards with them — ten or twelve.’

‘Are there any civilians in the area?’

‘Non.’

‘Can you see a black male with shiny hair that looks like it’s come straight from the seventies?’ I asked.

‘I do not understand.’

What I meant was, could he see Lockhart. ‘Can you see any foreigners?’

‘Non,’ he said.

‘Drive toward the main body of men,’ I said. ‘Head to a spot where you can’t see the hostages. Drive slow.’

Francis waved out the window a couple of times and said, ‘Bonjour, bonjour.’

‘That means “good jour”, right?’ I whispered to Rutherford.

The Brit grinned. It was a tight grin, and was mostly for my benefit. He had things on his mind, and so did I. I didn’t like what we were about to do but, as I saw it, we didn’t have a lot of choice. I heard a barrage of French directed at Francis from someone close by. Francis answered, then told us, ‘They want to know why we are so damaged. We have been told that we cannot go further.’

‘Just tell him you need to turn around,’ I said. ‘Make sure you smile when you tell him.’

Francis told him, and told him nice. He then pulled the wheel a couple of turns before straightening out.

‘Can you see our people?’

‘No, they are behind the two buildings.’

If he couldn’t see them, they weren’t going to get hurt. ‘Stop here,’ I said.

The brakes bit with a squeal and we stopped. Francis pulled the handbrake, the ratchet sounding like a burst of machine-gun fire.

Outside, I could hear men shouting at us. Wherever it was that we’d stopped, we weren’t supposed to. Any moment, people were going to get pushy.

‘Do it,’ said Rutherford.

‘On the count of three,’ I said, eyeballing Francis, who he gave me a nod. ‘Three, two, one…’

I reached up past him, found the horn on the steering wheel, pressed it, and the Dong’s pathetic horn blew its motor scooter meeeep. According to the plan, I had five seconds. I pulled Francis from behind the wheel and dragged him down into the footwell, over Rutherford. As I threw myself over both of them, the entire world suddenly came apart in a burst of heat, light and noise that lifted the truck off the ground and filled the cabin with a swirling metal storm of hot steel pellets. Needlepoints of pain fared across the exposed skin of my face, neck and free arm. Jesus, I was burning. I lifted my head and slapped my face and neck, and small, hot steel balls dropped into the footwell, rattling as they fell. I wiped my arm next and saw that it was now pocked with small burns no bigger than nail heads, and more steel pellets dropped and bounced around the truck’s metal flooring. The smell of burned truck and scorched human caused me to gag. I pushed myself up to the seating position, and pulled Francis and Rutherford up after me.

‘Come on,’ I said, half-dazed, to Rutherford, opened the door and kicked it wide. We had to hit the enemy while they were dazed, before they had a chance to regroup and realize that their attackers were just a few half-starved stragglers and not an invading company.

Men lay dying and wounded all around the truck. I took a few uneasy steps, my balance affected by the shock wave of the multiple explosions, willing myself not to stumble. It wasn’t easy. I steadied myself against the side of the truck and saw that our khaki-green tarpaulin had been reduced to remnants while the metal frame that held it in place was twisted like liquorice. The rest of the Dong hadn’t come off much better, now just scrap metal on torn tires.

‘Ryder!’ I shouted.

Nothing.

‘Ryder!’

A hand came up and waved above the mud-filled steel cans. Ryder’s head followed it.

‘You all right?’ I called out.

He nodded and pointed to his ears and gave a thumbs up sign. We’d used plugs of mud to save his eardrums. He threw across to me the two sets of body armor Rutherford and I had given him for added protection. I put mine on and passed the other set to Rutherford. The defenses had worked. And so had the Claymores we’d placed around the edge of the Dong’s load tray, three on each side and two at the back — eight in all. The firing clackers had been taped together in a row and set up inside one of the smaller containers so that all Ryder had to do to fire off all eight in unison was close the lid on the box. The signal to fire was a long blast on the horn.

Rutherford jogged twenty meters to take up a firing position around the front of the two huts, both of which had been severely damaged by the multiple Claymore blast. I looked around, but tried to be selective about what I saw. The scene in the immediate area of the truck was just plain frightful; bodies everywhere — more than ten — many limbless and headless. Some sick puppy had put a lot of careful thought into the Claymore’s physics. The sudden shocking assault had driven the FARDC soldiers to dive for cover and wait to see where all this was going. Their reluctance to engage wouldn’t last long. I figured we had a two-minute window, maybe less. Once the enemy figured we’d blown our load, the tables would turn.

Rutherford signaled that he had visual contact. Weapon up, I went over to where he was kneeling, behind a stack of rusted oil drums and pipes.

Holes punched the drums beside me — gunfire. Christ, that window was less than I’d thought, down to a minute. A round smacked into the ceramic plate in the back of my body armor and the force of the hit pushed me face first into the drums.

I groaned as Rutherford turned and fired. A number of men were sniping at us from behind another pile of rusting pipes and old gas cylinders fifty meters away and they were getting bolder by the second. Rutherford ran twenty meters to his left into open space to get a better angle on the Congolese pinning us down. I watched him fire three bursts on the run, taking down two men. The rest of them stood up and sprinted in the opposite direction.

The sergeant returned as I struggled to my feet.

‘Twenny and Peanut,’ he said, breathing hard. ‘Over there, eighty meters.’ He gave me the direction with his hand.

I had to take his word for it — I couldn’t see past the metal scrap. Rounds were pinging off the junk all around us, their passage marked by small puffs of rust. A round nicked my left upper arm — it felt like I’d been whacked there with a tire iron. Rutherford and I were pretty much outflanked. Time to move. We both changed mags as a rain squall marched in a straight line across the open mine, nice and orderly. A burst of thunder arrived simultaneously with a blinding flash of lightning.

I slapped Rutherford on the shoulder, got up and started walking at a fast crouch, hunched over, the metal butt of the M4 reassuringly hard against my cheek. I came around the trash heap looking for targets, and saw Twenny and Peanut. They were hooded and chained to what looked like an old boiler, their chains hooked through a bend in a pipe. At least a dozen men were arrayed around them. Four guards were in the firing position, standing side on, feet apart, lining us up. Two others thought better of it and, as Rutherford and I approached, got up and ran into the forest. Rutherford fired and one of the shooters took a bullet in the cheek. His buddies started firing on full auto and I heard the rounds pass overhead. I dropped a second guy, who spun like a revolving door before landing face down in a puddle, his arm at a crazy angle. And, like that, the resistance melted. The remainder of the guards dropped their weapons and fed helter- skelter. Maybe they thought Bruce Willis was in the house. Yippee ki-yay, motherfuckers…

Rutherford and I kept moving in the crouch position toward our captured principals, sweeping left and right, looking for threats but not finding any — not in front of us, anyway.

‘Twenny! Peanut!’ I called out.

I got no reaction from either of them. I grabbed Twenny by the shoulder.

‘What’s going on?’ he yelled, spinning right and then left, unaware of my presence until there was physical contact.

I pulled the black hood off his head. He squinted and blinked at the light like some kind of night creature, even though the heavy cloud cover and the rain made it seem like early evening.

‘Who is it?’ he said. ‘Get away from me… Who is it?’

He clearly didn’t recognize me.

‘It’s Cooper and Rutherford. We’re getting you out of here.’

‘Cooper’s a cracker. You’re black. Who the fuck are you?’

‘It’s Cooper, your bodyguard. You wanna hear a bad joke?’

‘Oh, shit. It is Cooper. Oh, man. Oh, shit. It’s you. Oh my god. Fuck. Fuck! How’s Peanut? Oh, Jesus, Cooper. It is you, right?’

I steadied his face and looked into his eyes. The guy was on the edge. ‘Yes, it’s Cooper,’ I said. ‘We’re getting you out.’

‘That’s not the joke, right?’ he asked me, suddenly worried.

‘No, no…’ I cupped the back of his neck in my hand and squeezed it.

Rutherford was taking care of Peanut and dealing with their chains. It turned out that they weren’t locked — merely looped through the pipe and secured by a simple U-bolt.

The FARDC hadn’t taken particularly good care of their hostages. It looked like both men had been forced to defecate where they stood. It didn’t appear that they’d had much in the way of nourishment, either, and the cuts and bruises on their faces suggested a little recreational beating.

The chains removed, Twenny started cleaning his ears, reaming them with his index finger.

‘Fucking candle wax,’ he said. ‘I wanna shoot these fuckers.’

With the hood over his head and his ears plugged, Twenny Fo had been in a kind of solitary confinement for a week and the guy was understandably pissed. But there was no time to talk about it. We had to get out of here. Our spectacular entrance had caught the enemy with his pants down, but they weren’t going to stay around his ankles much longer.

I felt arms around me, hugging me. It was Peanut.

‘Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you,’ he said over and over.

‘Cooper…’

Rutherford’s voice. There was urgency in it.

I turned around. Oh, shit… Around forty armed Congolese men and boys were arrayed in a loose semicircle fifty meters behind us. In the centre of the formation was Ryder and Francis, and both had pistols jammed against their heads.

One of the Africans stepped forward and called out, ‘Your weapons. Throw them down or we will kill your people.’

Would giving up our weapons save Francis and Ryder? I doubted it. There’d be no prisoners taken here today.

‘I will not ask again,’ he said, flicking the rain off his forehead with a finger.

‘Where’s Lockhart?’ I called out.

‘You have no bargaining power.’

‘I can take his head off from this distance,’ Rutherford said out of the corner of his mouth, sighting down the barrel.

And afterwards? We’d been dealt our hand and the guy across the table — which, in this instance, was fifty meters of mud and weed — thought we had a pair of twos.

‘My friend here says he can shoot you in the head from this distance,’ I said loud enough to be heard by everyone. ‘He’s good. He can do it. You don’t want to die. Release those two men and send them over. Then we’ll leave and you can go back to your gold.’

The African grinned. His teeth reminded me of piano keys — white and black where a couple were missing. ‘I do not need one lucky shot,’ he called back. ‘Drop your weapons now or you will die in a storm of lead. Your bodies will not be recognized by your mothers.’

I was trying to come up with something to say that would make the guy eat his words when I heard a boom of thunder. Deep in a place where I was in tune to these things, I wondered why it wasn’t accompanied by lightning. And, suddenly, the wood huts barely ten meters from where the FARDC men were holding Ryder and Francis blew apart in a huge explosion, and splinters the size of spears fired in all directions as if a giant porcupine had stepped on a land mine. I had just enough time to turn away and drop to the ground as these spears came down with the rain all around us. When I looked back, at least a dozen Congolese had fallen where they stood. Others were staggering away, leaning on each other. One man limped off with a piece of wood the size of a fence paling sticking up out of his back like some kind of weather vane.

I wondered what in Christ’s name had just happened. That was one hell of a powerful, timely lightning strike. Without lightning. ‘Stay with them,’ I shouted at Rutherford, and got up and ran to the spot where I’d seen Ryder and Francis. I found Ryder immediately. He was laid out flat on his back. His eyes were open and he was dazed but otherwise unhurt.

‘You okay?’ I asked him.

He nodded. I looked around but couldn’t see Francis. There was a lot of blood on the ground. Most of the men I’d thought were dead were just wounded. They started to groan. One with a chunk of wood protruding from an eye socket began to howl. I watched as a dead man missing an arm and a large piece out of his torso impossibly raised himself up and fell to the side, and Francis was revealed as the person beneath him doing the pushing. I pulled Ryder to his feet, then went to Francis and did the same. The African’s eyes were wide and he was shaking violently.

The sound of a racing engine caused me to look up. A Dong was barreling toward us in a hurry. It clipped the back of our old wrecked truck and bunted it to one side. What the fuck now? I took aim at the driver, just as the vehicle’s horn started meep-meeping like an anxious moped in a Beijing traffic jam. A man popped out through the space where the windshield had been, and waved at us with both arms as though he were having a seizure. It took me a moment to recognize him. Jesus, I knew that guy. It was Mike, Mike West! There was a short barrel protruding from the cabin, lying flat along the vehicle’s hood. The damn truck — they’d turned it into a tank using the tube of the M224 as a cannon. The boom I’d heard had been the mortar round being fired, and it wasn’t lightning but a round of 60mm HE that had blown the huts to kindling.

The Dong drove over the remains of the wooden huts. As it turned toward us, I signaled West to keep going and pick up Twenny, Peanut and Rutherford first.

I yelled at Ryder. ‘Can you walk?’

He signaled that he was okay.

‘I have a problem,’ said Francis, looking down.

Yeah, he did — a leg wound to add to the damage to his forearm, his thigh slick with blood; the rain sluicing through it, washing it off his boot into a pale pink puddle on the ground. Using the Ka-bar, I cut his pants away from the damaged area and found a piece of wood twice the length of a pack of cigarettes embedded in the muscle. From the way his leg hung and moved around as if disconnected, his femur was fractured. Soon, once the shock wore off, Francis was going to need more help than we could give him.

‘I’m going to carry you,’ I told him and didn’t wait for permission. I took his wrist, bent down a little and hoisted him across my shoulders. He grunted as I stood up and the air was forced out of his lungs. The guy was a lightweight, maybe a couple of sacks of cement worth, but no more than that. I jogged the fifty meters to the truck, Francis grunting with every step, and arrived as West and Rutherford were helping Twenny and Peanut up into the load area. Leila, Boink and Ayesha swooped on them, and hugged it out and had a good cry and said ‘Oh my God,’ between them a dozen times or so. Meanwhile, with Rutherford’s assistance, I laid Francis out on the metal floor. The guy was in a bad way.

‘My people. My wife…’ he said, his eyes rolling around in his head. ‘You must get them. You must help, you must…’

From the tone of his voice I figured he thought I was going to welsh on my part of the deal — just another broken promise from a white guy with a First World passport.

Ryder climbed into the truck, straight into Ayesha’s arms.

Leila hugged Twenny, but then she pushed him away and smacked him hard across the face, and then pulled him close and kissed him equally hard on the lips before slapping him again.

Showbiz people.

Just for an instant I forgot where we were, but a couple of helpful supersonic cracks close enough to pull the air out of my eardrums reminded me that folks were shooting at us.

Ryder dragged Francis further into the back of the truck, and the African cried out in pain as the agent propped him up against a stack of shot-up sandbag uniforms.

‘Boink, Duke,’ I called out. ‘Lock and load! Get everyone organized.’ I turned to West. ‘I’m riding up front.’ We jumped down and ran to the front cabin. ‘Drive!’ I yelled at Cassidy as I wrestled open the door.

‘Where to?’ he replied.

‘The fuck outta here!’

Cassidy jammed the stick into gear, gave it a boot full of gas, and West and I were thrown back in the seat. The sergeant raced quickly through the gears, careless of what was going on behind us in the load area. People were going to be tossed around back there.

‘Take it easy,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got a casualty.’

‘Who?’ he yelled over the engine roar.

‘Francis. What took you so long?’

‘Those booby traps at the base of the hill?’ said Cassidy. ‘Had to detour and dismantle them. Couldn’t leave ’em lying around.’

He was right. That village was too close. I didn’t want innocent people being turned into human kebabs on my conscience.

‘What did you do back there?’ Cassidy asked. ‘A lot of dead and wounded.’

‘Shock and awe,’ I said, preferring to skip the details. We’d left a lot of widows and weeping mothers in our wake. And none of it would have happened if Lockhart hadn’t made a deal with LeDuc to make some extra cash out of our principals. I was going to make that Kornfak & Greene asshole pay. To my surprise, the asshole himself suddenly appeared behind a group of men armed with rifles and machetes surging up out of the mine ahead of us. Cassidy had three choices to avoid hitting the human roadblock: swerve into trees, drive off the road and take a lethal drop into the mine pit of around a hundred feet, or hope the men waving their blades around got the hell out of the way. He chose option three, and two men who moved too slow wore the radiator grille before sliding off and disappearing under the front axle and briefly making the road extra bumpy.

As we drove by, Lockhart and I stared at each other for what seemed an age. He was either smiling or snarling, I couldn’t tell which. I thought of all the misery he’d brought to this place with his double-dealing, weapons trading, slavery, murder, extortion and hair gel. A lot of people were dead because of this guy. I pulled up my M4 with the intention of shooting him dead right there, but before I could act on the impulse the DoD contractor was gone, slipping behind us as we sped along the road. The fuckhead would have to wait. I just hoped I’d get to him before karma beat me to it because, no doubt, there was a steaming pile of it headed his way.

The road curved around to the left and then forked.

‘Go right,’ I yelled, pointing.

Cassidy braked hard to make the two hundred and seventy degree turn, wound the steering to the stops and then let it unwind as the Dong swung around.

‘Why?’ he yelled.

Because I had a deal with Francis. We’d been lucky so far. Could we push that luck just a little further? We’d have been dead in the water without him. Say I welshed on the deal… Could I do that and ever get dreamless sleep again? ‘We have to make a pickup — civilians,’ I added before he could ask me what kind.

Occupying the front seat between Cassidy and West was the mortar tube.

‘Whose handiwork is this?’ I asked, tapping it.

Cassidy turned to me with that gummy, milk-tooth grin of his, taking ownership.

I wasn’t that familiar with the 224. It had a trigger mechanism, which was unusual on a mortar barrel. With mortars it was conventionally the weight of the round dropping onto the firing pin that ignited the propellant and sent the package on its way.

‘Works well,’ West shouted. ‘You just set the trigger, which pulls the firing pin back, fuse the round to detonate on impact, drop it down the barrel and squeeze the trigger… The round has a pretty flat trajectory over a hundred meters but then it drops away quite fast. Targeting’s a bit random and you probably won’t hit the bullseye, but with this baby you don’t have to.’

‘How many rounds you bring with you?’

‘Got two left,’ he said, patting the rucksack on the seat beside him.

‘Up ahead,’ said Cassidy, ending the chitchat. He gestured at a roughly cleared area on the side of a gently sloping hill that was dotted with a hundred or so blue UN tents. ‘That where we’re going?’

Through the rain I could see maybe forty people in the camp gathered in a circle, preoccupied by what was going on in the center. Many of the folks gathered around were dancing and cheering — celebrating. It seemed an odd thing to be doing, given the circumstances we’d just come from. A number of people saw us approaching and word of our arrival spread quickly through the group. The dancers on the periphery stopped performing a jig, and ran away from the party like they’d been caught doing something they oughtn’t.

‘Do they think we’re FARDC?’ Cassidy wondered aloud.

Maybe. We were in a FARDC truck — stood to reason.

The crowd melted away but for several individuals at the core. It was hard to see through the rain exactly what was going on. A man kicked something on the ground and slipped over with the follow-through. His buddies, who’d seen us by now, hurriedly picked him up and half dragged him away as they all ran off like muggers caught mid-assault, checking behind them to see if we were giving chase.

‘Where to now?’ Cassidy yelled through the wind and the rain, and I gestured straight ahead. We came to a stop another thirty meters further on. I opened the door, climbed down onto the mud and jogged over to the area where the crowd had gathered. There was something on the ground and it wasn’t a soccer ball. In fact, there were quite a few objects and a lot of blood. It looked like a big patch of roadkill.

‘Jesus Christ,’ West muttered, standing beside me and looking down at the human remains scattered around. The crowd had literally torn some guards — three, from the leg count — limb from limb. The pieces, except for an arm here and a leg there, were still wearing most of their uniforms. A white-hot anger had been vented on these men. The people here had endured first-hand the cruelty of the FARDC and this was a little payback. Looking down at the mess on the ground, I felt nothing for the victims and realized that probably wasn’t a good sign. And right about then, I realized how much the Congo was getting under my skin.

I turned and scanned the blue tents. Some people here and there were staring at us. They knew we were different from their captors, but past experience informed them that we were more than likely not going to be any better than the devil they knew, which, understandably, made them wary.

‘We can’t take all these people with us,’ said Cassidy, walking over to me. ‘There’s well over a hundred.’

‘We made a promise to Francis. We’re taking the people from his village.’

‘And how many is that?’

‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Give me a moment.’

I ran to the truck, where Rutherford was leaning way out the back to see what was going on, holding onto the tarpaulin framework for support.

‘How’s Francis?’ I said as I approached.

‘Hanging in there.’

‘And everyone else?’

The Brit jumped down to meet me and, from the way he glanced back over his shoulder, he was doing so to put a little discreet space between himself and our principals.

‘You’re going to have problems with Leila down the track,’ he said.

‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘She’s telling Twenny that we could have gotten him out a week ago, but that you wouldn’t agree to it.’

I took my own advice and breathed deep. Then I jogged the few steps to the rear of the truck and pulled myself up into the back of the vehicle. I was immediately struck by the stink of human sweat and a funk I’ve always associated with fear. Peanut rushed toward me and again threw his arms around my waist. I gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder and sat him back down next to Twenny, who refused eye contact and stared at the floor, his dirt-ingrained face lined with tear tracks.

‘You see what you’ve done to him?’ Leila hissed, her eyes narrow and ferce, back to her old self. She was seated beside Twenny, perched on top of a couple of sandbags, one arm over his shoulder. She glared up at me like any moment she was going to spit venom at my face.

I looked at Ryder, who was sitting with Ayesha, his head back against the tarpaulin, legs drawn up and an M16 between them. The guy was clearly exhausted.

Boink stood in Twenny’s corner. No eye contact from him, either.

I didn’t respond to Leila. The fact that Twenny Fo was alive and no longer chained to a boiler with a hood over his head was all the defense I needed. Some people reacted irrationally to the stress of combat and maybe that was Leila’s excuse. Or maybe conflict was the way she exercised control. Or maybe she was just a bitch.

Twenny and I needed to talk, but it would have to wait. I was hoping he’d be my star witness in the trial that’d put Lockhart in Leavenworth for the rest of his life.

Francis groaned. I thrust Leila and her bullshit out of my mind for the time being. The African’s eyes were shut and his head, soaked with rain and sweat, lolled from side to side. He was fighting a losing battle against the pain. I felt his forehead, his temperature soaring.

‘Where’s the morphine?’ I asked Rutherford.

He shook his head. ‘Got none.’

‘Antibiotics?’

‘The kit’s empty,’ he said. ‘Blame LeDuc.’

In other words, the deadbeat had ransacked it before he split. I checked Francis’s wound. It had stopped bleeding but the skin surrounding the length of wood embedded in the muscle was already livid with infection. We had to get this guy to a hospital. And if we hurried, maybe all he’d lose was his leg. I’d been hoping that we could move him to the open end of the truck, stand him up and have him call his people over. But that wasn’t going to happen. And I realized I didn’t even know the name of his damn village.

‘Francis,’ I asked him. ‘Your village — what’s it called?’

He rolled his eyes around and sweated at me.

‘Francis, can you hear me? What’s the name of your village?’

There was a moment of lucidity and he mumbled something. I took fistfuls of his shirt and lifted him a little off the truck floor to bring him closer. The guy screamed and the wound in his leg leaked some blood. Not smart, Cooper. I lowered him gently back onto the floor and he started babbling.

Rutherford came in closer. After a few seconds he said, ‘I think he’s saying he lives in a place called Bayutu.’

‘Try and confirm it.’

‘Bayutu? Habitez-vous là?’ Rutherford asked him and Francis gave a good impression of a nod.

‘See if you can get his full name,’ I said, checking the view outside beyond the truck. I was getting edgy. Even taking their losses into account, there had to be more than a hundred FARDC troops in the area and most of them would be looking to even the score.

‘Francis, quel est ton nom de famille?’ said Rutherford.

‘Nbekee… Nbekee…’

‘Francis Nbekee?’ Rutherford asked.

‘Oui, oui, oui, oui…’

‘Okay,’ I said, standing up. We had something we could work with.

‘Where you going now?’ Leila demanded to know.

I ignored her and as I jumped down I heard her say, ‘Come back here!’

‘We still clear?’ I called out to West, leaving Leila and her inner cow behind.

He motioned toward the camp. More people had wandered to the edge of the settlement closest to the truck. Several men waved machetes at us in warning.

‘Call it out,’ I said to Rutherford, who jogged up beside me.

He made a funnel with his hands, yelled the name of Francis’s village across to the gathering and asked in French if anyone else lived there.

Nothing. No reaction.

‘Tell them we’re here with Francis Nbekee.’

Rutherford called this out to the crowd.

A woman suddenly began howling above the sound of the rain and the noise of the growing, restless gathering. It was a large woman in colorfully printed cotton clothes and she was bustling her way to the front of the crowd. She belted out something in French at us.

‘Oui,’ Rutherford replied. To me, he said, ‘I think that’s his old lady.’

‘Tell her that her husband’s wounded and he’s in the truck. Tell her we’re American and that we’ll take home everyone who lives in Bayutu.’

‘That’s getting beyond my command of French, but I’ll give it a go.’ He took a moment to work it out in his head and then called, ‘Il est blessé! Il est dans camion! Nous sommes Écossais! Chacun qui habite à Bayutu; nous vous guiderons chez-vous!’

‘Écossais. Did you just tell her we’re Scottish?’

Rutherford grinned.

The woman burst through the crowd and started running across the open ground toward us. Several of the men tried to stop her, but she palmed them off into the mud with the ease of a linebacker. The woman met us, blubbering a bunch of stuff that I had no chance of understanding, though the gist of it was probably that some days it just didn’t pay to get out of bed. We hustled the woman to the truck, while behind us, no doubt fearing a trick, several of the men with machetes waved them and advanced threateningly.

‘Boink,’ I called out into the truck. ‘Need some help here…’

The big man came out of the gloom, took the African woman’s hands and hauled her up into the truck without too much effort. She saw her husband an instant later, shrieked, then ran to him crying and babbling, kneeling beside him and smothering his face with kisses. I waited for her to hit him around the head a couple of times but it never happened. Leila’s behavior was altering my reality.

I heard a couple shots fired. Rutherford and I both went to investigate.

‘Company’s on the way,’ Cassidy called out, the stock of his M4 pressed against his cheek. I peered in the direction he was aiming, the general area of the mine, and saw a man in baggy green camos scuttling behind a mound of scrub-covered earth. I hurried back into the truck. Reinforcements would be on the scene in no time.

‘What’s happening?’ Leila wanted to know.

I ignored her, which I was starting to enjoy doing.

‘Tell Francis’s wife to call her people over,’ I said to Rutherford.

He passed this on to the woman and the brief conversation was punctuated by gunfire, which seemed to work as effectively as anything the Scot said. She motioned at Rutherford and me impatiently to help her get to her feet, which we did, and then brought her to the back of the truck. She started frantically waving at the Africans, most of whom were now hiding from the gunfire behind their plastic shelters, and called out to them in a shrill voice. The call was answered by cheering and waving, and around thirty people, mostly women and children, broke cover and began running for the truck, their meager possessions and crying infants under their arms. Jesus, we were going to get swamped. The horde ran through and around West and Cas-sidy, who were standing a little away from the truck, keeping their eyes on the scrubby patch of forest that separated the camp from the mine.

‘Jesus, Cooper — that’s too damn many,’ Cassidy yelled at me.

Who were we going to turn away?

The truck rocked and swayed as the human wave engulfed it. People threw themselves inside and then helped others aboard.

‘Let’s go!’ I yelled at Cassidy and West, as I jumped into the rear of the truck. ‘Move it!’

The two soldiers backed away from their positions, then lowered their rifles and ran for the front cabin.

At least forty people were squashed into the back of the truck, compressed like a month of fruit in the bottom of a school kid’s bag. There was almost no room to breathe and so much chatter that I couldn’t even hear Leila complaining. I felt the Dong’s engine rumble into life through the soles of my feet and everyone screamed as we lurched forward in first gear, and screamed again — though not so loudly — when second gear was selected. We went round a gentle bend in the road and the truck leaned at a frightening angle, lifting the outside rear wheels.

‘Sit, sit, everyone sit,’ I yelled, miming with my arms and hands as I spoke.

No one sat.

‘Rutherford. Get ’em all the fuck down on the floor before we tip over.’

He shouted instructions and people began to sit. The lack of space meant that they mostly did so on top of each other. The truck went round another corner a little less precariously and the camp disappeared behind a screen of forest.

‘Where are we taking them?’ Rutherford asked. ‘We don’t know where this Bayutu place is.’

‘See if you can’t get some idea from Francis’s wife. And maybe get her name while you’re at it.’ I wondered whether Bayutu was the best place to go. There was always Mukatano. At least we knew where that was — at the end of the road.

The forest appeared to close in tightly around the truck, cutting the road’s width in half. That figured. Beyond the mine, the road got almost no use at all. It was also getting bumpier, with deeper ruts, which pulled the truck left and right viciously as the tires tracked through them. I sensed Cassidy backing off the gas and felt the downshift, the conditions forcing him to take it slower. I scanned the human cargo crammed into this confined space. Mothers nursed young children, old men sat impassively when they weren’t attending to the women and kids, and none of the eyes that met mine gave away anything. All except Leila’s, who looked up at me crying with joy, a baby in her arms.

I turned back to watch the road unraveling behind us, just in time to see a rocket-propelled grenade streak toward us from the far end of the tunnel.