Ghost Watch

Trapped

It rained most of the night. Used to this by now, I scarcely noticed and shivered my way through it without too much swearing. I grabbed what sleep I could on one of West’s cots, out of reach of the driver ants, under the shelter of several broad umbrella palm fronds. I liked that arrangement better than sharing a poncho, which just caused me to sweat. I took the second-to-last watch, relieving Rutherford, who had nothing to report other than that there were plenty of frogs.

I checked on the raft’s progress at the start of my watch at three-thirty. The job was done and West was snoring under a poncho on the raft, which was long and narrow. Only one of the fifty-five-gallon drums had been used in its construction, up at what would have been the bow. The SS Sapling was ready to go, sitting in a pool of shallow brackish water among the reeds.

My watch was uneventful. When it was over, I passed it to Ryder, who said he was feeling human again, which probably had a lot to do with him feeling Ayesha. Boink had been given the night off. He’d done his fair share. Peanut snored the night away, oblivious to everything except the mosquitoes, which he slapped and waved at as much as anyone. Twenny and Leila shared a cot and covered themselves with a poncho. Twenny talked in his sleep, yelled occasionally, dreams beginning to stalk him too.

I went back to the cot and before I knew it, I was asleep, having a nightmare about eating a steak that tasted of grasshopper. But this was cut short by the distinctive and unpleasant crash of an exploding Claymore, which sounded like a thousand ball bearings hurled explosively against a glass floor. I sat up instantly.

In the moonlight, a shadow ran past that I recognized as Ryder. He stopped at Ayesha’s cot. ‘Get up!’ he shouted.

‘What’s goin’ on?’ Twenny asked no one in particular, bewildered, half asleep.

‘Get to the raft,’ I hissed. ‘Look after Peanut. Go now.’

I raced to Boink’s cot and shook him.

‘What!’ he said, snapping awake.

‘Get up,’ I said and spun around and woke Leila.

‘Don’t,’ she said, still asleep.

‘Hey!’ I kept shaking her until her eyes popped open.

Cassidy arrived and, with a hand under her armpit, roughly lifted the celebrity to her feet and then started dragging her toward the raft.

‘Stop!’ she yelled.

Cassidy let her go and she turned and stumbled back to snatch the makeup case hanging off one of the saplings supporting her cot.

‘Leave it,’ I told her, but she reached it and clutched it closer to her chest.

A moment later, we were all on the move and splashing through the reeds, sprinting toward the raft.

‘Push,’ West yelled when we arrived. He was trying to heave it out of the shallows and into the river single-handedly, his feet slipping in the mud.

The first gunshots from the FARDC were unaimed and inaccurate, but the bright moonlight wasn’t doing us any favors. A Dong burst through the bushes into the area at the rear of the cleared land and the first RPG of the day streaked through the air, over our heads and lit up the trees on the opposite bank with an almighty clap of percussion.

West and Boink got the fuel drum at the bow of the raft into the river.

‘Push!’ yelled Cassidy.

Twenny, Leila, Ayesha, Ryder, Rutherford, Cassidy and I heaved and grunted and slipped around and the heavy main body of the raft began to slide over the reeds. A burst of automatic fire chewed into the bundle of saplings between Cassidy and me, sending blinding clouds of powdered wood into my eyes.

‘Get on!’ Cassidy and I shouted at our principals.

Searchlights on the truck suddenly blazed and lit up the reed beds and the air was alive with tracer, deadly supersonic red fireflies.

Ryder and Ayesha leaped onto the bundled saplings. I lifted Leila and threw her onto the raft after them. Twenny jumped on, followed by Boink. The tail of the raft slipped off the reeds into the deeper water and started to drift away with the current, leaving Cassidy and me behind in the reeds.

Cassidy jumped off the bank and got his hand on one of the saplings. I sprang after him, managed to grab a handful of his webbing and trailed behind him underwater. I coughed and gagged when I pulled myself above the water, but the weight of my gear dragged me under again. I felt myself hauled to the surface. I looked up and saw Rutherford, his hand clenched around my collar. Boink was pulling Cassidy onto the saplings. West came to Rutherford’s aid, grabbed my hand and pulled me up onto the raft as I hacked up a cupful of river slime.

Ayesha and Ryder were poling us along, glancing behind them as they dug into the mud. I looked back toward the clearing. The beams from the FARDC searchlights were dancing around, illuminating the spot in the otherwise unbroken darkness of the riverbank, and I saw that we were already a hundred meters down river. I caught a muzzle flash from an RPG and the grenade streaked toward us. It rocketed just over our heads and into the darkness of the forest and exploded in a bright orange display a hundred and fifty meters away, the delayed boom reaching us over a second later.

‘We got a problem here,’ said West over his shoulder.

‘Oh, really?’ I said under my breath. I moved unsteadily toward him and saw that the raft had split in two. The long burst of automatic fire had torn through the liana that held the front and back of our craft together.

‘There are a dozen big holes in that drum up front, too,’ he said. ‘It’s filling fast and it’s going to sink.’

The raft spun lazily around its bow where the drum was located, our makeshift vessel coming apart, turning into driftwood.

Me and my black hat.

‘Everyone move to the rear section,’ West yelled as he cut through the last of the liana with his Ka-bar.

All of us were now sitting on just two of the bundles of saplings, which, carrying all our weight, were barely above the level of the water. As the wood became waterlogged, the raft would sink.

‘Are we gonna to be okay?’ I heard Leila ask.

‘We’re gonna be just fine,’ I heard Twenny say.

Fine. Yeah, that about summed it up.

Rutherford poled us around a couple of bends as the dawn turned into a dull morning, the sky low and heavy with rain clouds that looked like they’d gotten out of bed on the wrong side. Mist clung to the trees and hung over the water. Occasional howls and screeches from the rainforest knifed through the early morning quiet.

‘We got maybe another hour before we go under,’ West told me quietly.

‘We go as far as we can,’ I said. ‘Start looking for a place to step off. Let Rutherford know. I’ll tell Cassidy and Ryder to keep their eyes open.’

There was three inches of water lapping over the raft before, an hour and ten minutes later, we found another break in the heavy dark green greenery crowding the riverbank. The landing was well hidden by overhanging branches, but rows of thin poles were sunk into the mud a dozen meters into the main current, giving away its presence.

‘There’s going to be a village nearby,’ said West, gesturing at the poles. ‘They string nets to catch fish between them. And where there are nets, there are pirogues.’

I must have given him a look.

‘Pirogues — boats, dugouts,’ he said.

There was no sign of any village — just a solid wall of green that rose quickly to the base of a near-vertical wall of limestone around three hundred feet high, hung with ferns and vines.

Rutherford and Ryder took us over to the riverbank and we clambered onto white mud and then the raised ground behind it. All around was evidence of human activity hidden from the water: a table made from hardwood; and trash, lots of trash — old tins, plastic bags and drink containers, old lengths of rotted bamboo, tangled fishnet, plastic water bottles used as floats and watermelon rinds. A quick search of the surrounding brush didn’t turn up any boats, but there were steps cut into the damp earth in the hill behind the clearing, reinforced with worn hardwood logs.

West returned to the raft. Carrying no weight, it was floating a couple of inches above the surface of the water. He pushed it off the bank and using a pole shoved it out toward the main current. He was thinking the same thing I was: Lissouba wouldn’t stop. He’d come looking for us. Best not to hang out a sign that said ‘look here’.

‘If there is a village nearby, you’d think they’d come and see who just turned up on their front doorstep, wouldn’t you?’ Cassidy whispered to me out of our principals’ earshot.

Strangers in this place seemed to want to cut things, like appendages, off folks. Perhaps they were just plain wary. Whatever the reason, Cassidy was right. This place was quiet — like they say in the classics, too quiet.

‘I’m going to take Rutherford and scout around,’ I said. ‘What have we got left in the way of discouragement?’

‘A little frag, one Claymore, lots of smoke and whatever mags we’re carrying.’

In short, throwing spitballs was becoming an option. Also, the river continuing its course west rather than east, we were further away from Goma, Cyangugu and Mukatano. But, at least for now, no one was shooting at us, which made a pleasant change.

‘Keep a watch on the river,’ I said.

If there was one person I didn’t have to remind to stay sharp, it was Cassidy, but he nodded anyway.

Rutherford glanced in my direction. I sucked some water from my camelback to get the taste of the river out of my mouth and gestured at him to come over.

‘We’re going to have a snoop around,’ I told him. ‘Find out where every one’s hiding.’ Prior experience told me that I had to hold a conference and announce my intentions so that they could be approved. I went over to Leila and Twenny.

‘Where are we?’ Leila asked.

‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘Rutherford and I are just going to take a quick walk up the hill and ask someone that very question. We’ll be back soon.’

‘What do you want Leila and me to do?’ Twenny asked.

I could think of a few things where Leila was concerned.

‘Stay out of sight until we return.’

‘We can do that, right?’ Twenny said to Leila. She gave him a hesitant nod.

Good luck with that, I thought. I repeated our intentions to Boink, Ayesha and Ryder and then asked the captain if he was up to taking the watch with Cassidy. He said he was. I didn’t want to disturb Peanut with details. He was making like a frog, hopping around, chasing a couple of them across the ground and into the trash heap.

‘Take the scope,’ said West, handing it over. ‘You might be able to see something useful when you get to higher ground.’

Rutherford and I went to the steps behind the hardwood table and started climbing through thick, wet palm fronds and elephant grass. Ten minutes later we were still climbing and the earth became a chalky limestone wall. Still no sign of human life. The wall had steps cut into it, which zigzagged ever higher. After a climb of over a hundred meters, we came to the lip, and a knoll covered in a close-cropped variety of grass opened out, surrounded by scrub. The presence of a manicured area the size of a couple of basketball courts somehow made the stillness all the more eerie. Folks had to manage this patch of turf — a kind of assembly area, I figured — keep it maintained. I looked back down at the river below, our landing hidden by the tree canopy. It was possible that no one saw us arrive, but I doubted that. The river, a dark brown snake coiling through the green of the rainforest, could be seen for some distance in both directions and I was relieved to find that it was clear of boats filled with soldiers, a point I further confirmed with the scope.

I heard an animal sound — a grunt. It came from the rainforest, which began where the grass ended. An adolescent pig appeared out of the darkness beneath the canopy, at the boundary line with the grass. Its arrival was a surprise, at least to us. The pig, however, looked our way as if we were expected. It then turned and waddled back in the direction it had come from, stopped, glanced back over its shoulder and eyeballed us as if to say, ‘You coming, or what?’ and moved off at a canter.

‘Hmm, ham,’ I said. ‘With luck, we’ll find cheese.’

We followed the pig. The path split into quite a few tributaries that threaded the rainforest dripping with rainwater, the dense canopy snuffng out much of the ambient light. Eventually, the trail thickened up, the tributaries rejoining, and exited the forest at the edge of a large banana plantation that opened out on either side of what was now a small road. The trees were hung with drooping purple sacks pregnant with flowers. More pigs wandered among the ordered rows and our guide trotted off to join them. I counted a dozen chickens scratching at the earth here and there. Rutherford and I stuck to the road and pushed on. Next came two large fields where rows of vegetables grew, bisected by the road. I could identify immature tomatoes, but the other plants were a mystery. Pigs were here too, digging up and eating whatever was interesting them. They were like kids causing mischief while the grown-ups were out. This was obviously a well-organized village with a sizeable population doing a good job of feeding itself. But where was this sizeable population? If an armed force had come through here and taken the villagers, they’d have pilfered the animals. I was mentally basting a couple of those chickens myself. No, something else was going on around here and I didn’t like whatever it was.

Rutherford nudged me in the arm and gestured ahead. A roof thatched with dry grass beckoned through a gap in the trees. We headed for it along the path, looking for people but seeing no one. A monkey of some variety sat on a low bough and ate a snack between its hands, took a few fdgeting steps in our direction, stopped, nibbled some more, squealed and scampered up into the higher boughs. The thatched roof belonged to a large single hut. I heard flies buzzing and birds calling but still no human sounds.

The hut was open, the door wide. The M4 in my arms was on safety with a full mag loaded. I put my head around the corner. There was no porridge on the table, but I went in anyway. Rows of well-used shovels, rakes and other implements were neatly stacked against one wall. It was some kind of work barn. Most of the space was given over to furniture making. Half a dozen chairs were under construction, along with a few tables and beds. Benches were equipped with various woodworking tools, all of them manually rather than electrically powered — saws, drills, chisels and so forth. Checking down the far end of the barn, we found a potter’s wheel, a lump of white clay sitting on the wheel, too dry to be made into anything. On the wall behind the wheel were tiers of shelves lined with jugs, cups and bowls, all made from the white clay. There was a regular industry going on here. The village probably traded furniture and pots with other villages on the river. Interesting, but not as interesting as knowing where the hell everyone had gone off to.

Rutherford waited for me at the doorway. ‘This place is creeping me out.’

‘Keep an eye peeled for bears, Goldilocks,’ I said.

I took a couple of steps and stopped. I’d just caught a whiff of something familiar and unpleasant. Another few paces and I became enveloped by it: the smell of blood and feces and death. It hung between the bushes as if from a rope. My palms started sweating. The road curved around behind a small stand of banana trees and I saw a couple of dark brown feet lying on the trail. Opening out the angle, I saw that they were attached to a body curled in the fetal position, turned away from me.

I signaled Rutherford that I was going in for a closer look. He nodded, rubbing the stock on his M4 like he was hoping a genie might spring forth.

The body was that of an African male somewhere in his twenties. He was wearing dark green shorts and a loose dark blue shirt. Blood had seeped from his nostrils, eyes and ear holes. His shorts were also stiff with dried black blood. The man had bled out. His palms and kneecaps were white, the color of the mud in the area, which suggested that he’d probably crawled here to die.

‘Could that be Ebola?’ Rutherford asked, taking several steps backward just in case. I did likewise for the same reason.

This should have been a bustling village, but the place was a ghost town and the animals were running amok. All the buildings that we could see were intact. Something like Ebola, the hemorrhagic fever found in these parts, could explain what we’d found. If it was the virus, and depending on how long ago the first villager started displaying symptoms, it might already have killed almost everyone here, burned through the place the way fire moves through dry grass. Ebola was extremely contagious and had a mortality rate that made bubonic plague look like a head cold. It was so lethal that some countries had considered using it as a weapon of mass destruction, which was why I knew a little about it. There would be a radio somewhere in the village, but we wouldn’t be able to get to it. Shit. It might as well have been on the moon.

I wondered if the guy on the ground was still hot with virus, and whether any of the flies that had landed on me when I was in the vicinity of the body had virus on its fly feet. I sneezed involuntarily.

‘Christ, skipper,’ said Rutherford, taking a step away from me. ‘You got pretty close to that poor sod.’

‘I don’t think the bug works that fast.’ I hope.

‘You sure?’

‘Yep.’ Nope.

He relaxed a little and we retraced our steps ten meters or so. I scoped the village with the sight and counted four more bodies lying out in the open. One of them moved an arm. Ebola turned internal organs to rotting mush. If that’s what we had here, I pitied the survivors still in that village. Depending on a range of factors, including the size of the village’s population, there’d probably be several, but going in to help was way too risky. And there wasn’t much we could do anyway, unless the cure involved a makeover, courtesy of Leila’s little white case.

‘There’s gotta to be a road out,’ said Rutherford.

I wasn’t so sure. The village appeared to be nestled within the crook of three imposing mountain-like hills behind it. Perhaps the only way in and out was by boat. Could be those survivors I wondered about had taken the village’s boats and headed downstream, which would explain why there weren’t any craft pulled up on the riverbank.

We cut through the banana plantation to where the rainforest began. After two hours of battling through a virtually impassable blockade of bamboo, liana, elephant grass and a variety of difficult prickly bush with red and orange berries on it that seemed to be everywhere and left us no room to swing a machete, we admitted defeat. We tried to cut a path through on the other side of the village, but we ended up in the same place — nowhere.

‘We’re just going to have to wait for a boat to come along,’ Rutherford said as the sun appeared overhead and the bush came alive with the sound of happy insects.

I sweated and sucked some water from the camelback as we walked up onto the grassy knoll. A vicious cramp clenched my stomach. A bout of diarrhea was coming down the pipe, thanks to all the river water I’d taken in. Rutherford brushed something off my back, an action I no longer gave any thought to. Looking down at the river, I stopped and dropped to a knee. Half a mile away, a boat, a type of ferry, was heading down the brown water, another small open boat in its wake. I took the scope and trained it on the vessels.

‘Fuck,’ I said under my voice. Armed soldiers were bursting from the ferry’s seams, like stuffng from an old cushion. The craft under tow behind it was a lighter. Crammed onto it were maybe fifteen men bristling with RPGs. I went down on my belly. I kept the scope on the boats and willed them past our landing point as they came nearer. I imagined that Cassidy would have posted a lookout, seen the convoy before it was upon them, and had everyone squirreled away out of sight. I could make out that there was a man on the forward deck of the ferry. Jesus Christ — it was Lissouba! This bastard put the asshole in persistent, that was for damn sure. He had binoculars, which he was training on the rainforest either side of the boat, looking left and right. The boat drew abreast of our landing point. I held my breath. Foliage overhanging the river obscured the boat from view. We waited for it to reappear in the gaps between the greenery, the tension growing with every second.

‘I’ve lost it,’ said Rutherford.

‘Wait,’ I whispered. ‘There…’

The boat’s dirty white bow appeared in one of the gaps and its exhaust pipe chugged a perfect smoke ring into the air, which rolled out over the water. The two boats slid past the landing without altering course or engine speed. They hadn’t seen us.

‘Shit,’ I said, turning onto my back, breathing again, closing my eyes, the powerful but rare sunshine like needles on my face. I suddenly felt exhausted. The thought of keeping my eyes closed and drifting off to sleep was incredibly seductive, but not possible. I got to my feet and gave Rutherford a hand up.

‘It’s Cooper, yo,’ I heard Boink say as Rutherford and I came down the back stairs. Twenny’s head of security was standing guard, a Nazar-ian looking like a half-size toy in his arms. Everyone stopped what they were doing and gathered round. There was no opportunity to give Cassidy, West and Ryder a separate briefing.

‘We can’t go that way,’ I said with a lift of my head, meaning the rock wall.

‘Why not?’ Leila asked immediately.

‘There’s a village up there, but they’ve had a few problems. An epidemic of some kind. Almost the whole place has been wiped out.’

‘We think it could be Ebola,’ said Rutherford, jumping right in.

‘What’s that?’ Twenny asked.

‘It’s like the worst fu you ever had,’ said Ryder.

‘Doesn’t sound too bad.’

‘It’s a fu that makes yo’ insides melt and run out your asshole, yo,’ said Boink. Twenny, surprised and disbelieving, looked at him. ‘Discovery Channel,’ the big man said with a shrug.

Cassidy took half a step back from Rutherford.

‘If could be any number of things,’ I said. ‘But it’s not worth taking the risk walking through it. If it is Ebola, I’d rather take my chances with the FARDC.’

‘You were up there. If it’s as contagious as you say, how do you know you ain’t caught it already?’ asked Twenny.

‘Because I didn’t get near enough anyone to catch it,’ I said, though I was wondering about those flies and their dirty feet. ‘But best not to swap bodily fluids with me for a while.’

‘So what do we do?’ asked Ayesha.

‘You saw the boats?’ West inquired.

‘It’s Lissouba,’ I said.

The SOCOM boys all nodded.

‘We can’t stay here,’ I continued. ‘If they come back to take a closer look, we can’t defend the riverbank and we’ll be trapped against the hill. We have to move up there.’ I gestured with my thumb over my shoulder. ‘Hold the high ground.’

‘But you just said we couldn’t,’ Leila pointed out.

‘I said we couldn’t get through the village. But it’s set back more than half a mile from the top of the hill. There’s plenty of room to retreat.’ I could tell from Cassidy and West’s body language that they agreed with me, if reluctantly.

‘And now for the good news: there’s food up there,’ Rutherford added.

‘What kind of food?’ asked Leila, unimpressed. ‘More worms and bananas?’

‘Sure, but if you’d rather, there’s also roast pork with crackling,’ I said. I explained about the pigs. The prospect of meat that didn’t slither or crawl was as good a bribe as any, and ten minutes later Rutherford was leading the way up through the lower bush to the steps cut into the limestone face.

The climb was no easier the second time around and soon my shirt and the V at the back of my pants were black with sweat, the increasing mid-afternoon cloud cover raising the humidity to the point where the air was thick enough to swim in. All of us except Cassidy and West collapsed when we arrived at the grassy knoll on top of the ledge, and so Rutherford called a rest.

‘This a good vantage point,’ said Cassidy, taking in the view. ‘We got the box seat up here.’

‘Shit,’ West muttered under his breath as both men sank into a crouch. ‘Look at this…’

There was a problem. I opened my eyes and rolled over. Oh, fuck… Lissouba and his men were coming back up the river. This time there was a third boat in tow, if our raft could be called a boat. The throb from the ferry’s engines died as its bow turned toward the riverbank and the craft disappeared under the canopy almost directly beneath us, the towed litter and our raft following.

‘Brilliant,’ said Rutherford, though I knew he meant ‘fucking shit fuck’.