Ghost Watch

Retreat

We followed the ravine, successive foods having washed away some of the undergrowth along its flank, making it easier going than cutting a path through the forest, which was mostly impenetrable. The space between the trees was occupied by a malicious variety of elephant grass battling with entanglements of vegetation hung with brightly colored banded snakes that screamed ‘hazardous’. Occasionally, the forest swallowed the ravine and we had no choice but to hack our way through the tangles of liana and elephant grass. Overhead, birds screeched at each other like inmates in an asylum and animals darted away, unseen, through the compacted undergrowth nearby. None of these were going to be fuffy white rabbits, so I was fine with the darting-away thing.

And, just as I was thinking that, a nearby wall of bush trembled with something very big that departed in a hurry. We all froze.

‘LeDuc, didn’t you say we’d be lucky to see any wildlife?’ I asked him quietly.

‘Oui,’ he whispered, looking around. ‘Perhaps this valley is too remote for the bush meat hunters.’

‘What other predators live here besides lions?’

‘Every one you can think of, and many you cannot.’

There were no stragglers in our line after that. We stayed close and watched each other’s backs, and brushed away the spiders and insects that dropped or alighted on us, before stingers, jaws or fangs could get to work.

Up ahead, Ayesha screamed and broke into a kind of dance, jumping around, her hands whipping through her hair, jerking forward and backward. Leila began slapping at her, like they do at NASCAR races when someone in the pits gets engulfed in those invisible methanol flames. Rutherford called this ‘the spider dance’. We’d all done it; all of us except Cassidy, that is, who moved like a leopard through his surroundings — flowing from one space to another, disturbing nothing. Ryder caught up with Leila and Ayesha, to lend a hand. The guy was sure putting in some heavy spadework.

I watched Boink’s meaty shoulders roll from side to side as he walked. The guy had lost a dozen pounds at least. A week in this place and he’d need a new wardrobe. I was about to point this out to him when something wet landed on my shoulder. The stuff reeked. More of it smacked against the side of my head and, suddenly, the trees above us came alive with yelling, shrieking and chattering, and black shapes charged out of the bushes at us, running and scampering down our line, feinting in and out, teeth bared.

‘Hey! Aggro little hairy guys,’ said Rutherford, amused, shouldering his weapon.

‘Ne tirez pas! Don’t shoot, don’t shoot. Les chimpanzés, chimpanzés.’ LeDuc rushed forward and pulled down on the gun’s barrel.

‘Who’s going to shoot?’ Rutherford protested, offended.

I watched as one of the chimps crapped into his buddy’s hands and then threw it at Rutherford. The Brit ducked. I was too slow and the stuff slapped into my face.

‘Thanks,’ I said as I wiped away the warm, stinking mass.

‘Do not look at them in the eyes,’ LeDuc warned. ‘They will think you are challenging them.’

‘Poo at twenty paces?’ I asked.

‘Keep moving!’ Cassidy called out and we lifted the pace to clear the area.

We stuck to the ravine for the best part of two hours, taking advantage of the clean water and the sunlight and the relatively easy going. Eventually the forest closed in overhead again. We were back to slashing into the bush for every yard of forward movement, dodging reptiles and arachnids, and the elephant grass with its razor’s edge, all of which seemed intent on attacking exposed skin. But with every step bringing us nearer to the territory occupied by FARDC, taking to the cover of the forest was going to be a healthier option than being out in the open and easy targets for snipers, pickets and patrols.

A cluster of moss and liana-covered rocks pushed up through the leaf litter and away from the ants that seemed to cover every square inch of the forest floor no matter where we were; red fuckers with jaws like interlocking fish hooks that latched on and wouldn’t let go.

‘Can we rest for a while?’ I heard Leila ask Ryder.

Cassidy heard it too and called a halt. Both women collapsed against a boulder. Boink leaned against the face of the rock, sucking in oxygen, his sweaty face lined with exertion.

‘How much further, yo?’ he puffed.

Further till what? If he meant Cyangugu, he was looking at days. If he meant till we made contact with his buddies, Twenny and Peanut, his guess was as good as mine. So I told him what I thought he might want to hear. ‘Not far now, big guy.’

‘Good, ’cause I wanna shoot some motherfucker dead,’ he muttered.

‘Map,’ I said to Cassidy.

The sergeant extracted it from his webbing and flattened it against the rock.

‘We’re somewhere around here,’ he said, using his Ka-bar as a pointer.

The ridges and the lake at the bottom of the cliff tallied. It looked about right. We’d come further than I’d though.

West passed around some barbecued snake and everyone took the opportunity to rehydrate.

‘What now?’ Ryder asked, wiping snake grease off his mouth with his shoulder.

‘You and I are gonna scout forward,’ I said.

‘Oh… all right,’ he said with no enthusiasm for the idea.

‘And you might like to muddy yourself up a little,’ I suggested. Apart from a light growth on his cheeks, he looked like he was ready for Sunday school, his face and arms all scrubbed nice and pink. His 97 was propped against a rock beside LeDuc. I picked it up and handed it to him. ‘Get a couple of spare mags, a machete, and make sure of your water supply.’

‘What, now?’ he asked.

‘Got something else to do?’

No response.

‘Leila, Ayesha,’ I called up. They’d climbed the rocks and their heads appeared over the top ledge. ‘Where’s Boink…?’

‘Yo,’ said Twenny’s buddy, walking around from behind the wall, cupping some water from a bottle and splashing it on the back of his neck.

I made a general announcement. ‘Duke and I are going on ahead. We need to know how far the FARDC lines extend.’

‘Why?’ asked Boink.

‘So that we don’t just walk into them,’ said Cassidy.

‘Can I ask a question?’ said Leila.

Asking for anything was a pleasant change where she was concerned.

‘What’s on your mind?’

‘I can’t hear any shooting. How do you know we’re close to the enemy?’

‘This hill we’re on plateaus not far from here, ma’am,’ said Cassidy. ‘According to the map, the valley the FARDC occupied is down the other side, and around a mile and a half to the east. We’ve got a lot of rock between us and any gunshots. But you’re right, we should be able to hear something. Maybe when we get onto the ridge.’

‘And what if something happens to you?’ Leila asked me.

I figured that she included Ryder in that.

‘We’ll be back.’

‘But what if, yo?’ Boink said.

‘You’ll head due east to Lake Kivu.’

Neither he nor Ayesha seemed overly happy about this, but for different reasons. I was starting to think that maybe Leila looked on me as some kind of lucky charm — her own personal rabbit’s foot. And Boink wasn’t going anywhere without his boss, whether I was dead or alive. The big man cocked his head on an angle, a crevasse between his eyebrows — not happy.

To avoid a raft of unnecessary questions, I didn’t tell them that I intended to go back to the FARDC encampment to check on whether Twenny Fo and Peanut were still alive. ‘If we don’t make it back,’ I said, ‘the best hope Twenny, Peanut and Fournier have got rests on you getting word back to Colonel Firestone as quickly as possible.’

The silence was thick. No one liked the idea that more of us might get left behind. I had expected an argument from Leila because one seemed to follow every decision, but everyone knew the score — even her, for once.

‘Be careful, Vince,’ Leila said.

Her concern for my health took me by surprise. Her getting my name wrong didn’t. I checked over the M4 and wriggled the additional mags jammed into my webbing to make sure that they were secure.

‘Take this,’ said Rutherford, putting the telescopic sight from the sniper rifle into my pack. ‘Might come in handy.’

‘You’d better have this, too,’ said Cassidy, handing me the map.

‘No, keep it. I know where I’m going. If we don’t make it back, you’ll need it.’

‘You’ve got five hours of daylight left,’ said Cassidy. ‘Less under the canopy. You’ll want to be back well before that or you’ll walk right past us.’

‘Give us till the morning. If we’re not back by noon tomorrow, your next stop is Lake Kivu.’

Ryder glanced my way. Overnight?

Cassidy motioned at the rocks. ‘This is as good a place as any to hunker down for a while.’

‘We miss the deadline, you’re gone,’ I said.

‘My dad used to say, “He who was not there is wrong.”’

‘Cy, getting these folks back to Rwanda is not a suggestion.’

‘So it’s an order?’

‘It’s an order.’

The subtext of this was that if Ryder and I didn’t make it back and Cassidy left us behind, there’d be an inquiry into our disappearance. The sergeant just wanted my position as the team leader stated in front of witnesses. I’d officially told him the lives of the people around him were now in his hands.

‘Good luck,’ said Rutherford. He and West lifted their weapons in a gesture of ‘see you later’.

‘A bientôt,’ LeDuc said with a slight bow.

Ayesha waved. Leila and Boink glared. I noted the departure time as Ryder and I walked into the forest, heading a little west of south, according to the compass on my Seiko. A dozen paces beyond the rocks, and the forest behind closed in and cut us off from the main party. The machete was sharp and perfectly weighted. Letting it fall on the greenery in front was mostly all that was needed to slice a little more headway, as long as we stayed clear of the elephant grass and clumps of bamboo. We made good time and kept the angle of the incline steady underfoot so that we tracked a straight line, more or less.

‘What happened to Ayesha?’ Ryder asked after a while.

‘When?’ I answered, bunting the question away. I knew exactly what he was getting at.

‘When she was held captive. Something happened down there.’

‘She saw a man’s hands get cut off,’ I reminded him, sticking to the facts. The closest she’d come to something like that in her civilian life was maybe a broken nail. With the flat of the machete blade, I turned away the head of a mustard-colored viper dangling from an overhanging palm frond.

Ryder stepped beyond its reach. ‘You’re not giving me a straight answer.’

‘Look, Duke, I know you and Ayesha are friends, but if it’s any more than that, you’re not helping her — not in this place.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You’re in uniform, buddy, cowboy-up.’

‘I resent that,’ he said. ‘I volunteered to go on the mission that brought her back, remember?’

For some reason I thought of the blond in my alligator joke. Was I being unkind? ‘Look, this isn’t a challenge on some reality dating show, and Ayesha is not the only principal whose life is in danger. You want to be effective, then join the team and stop behaving like you’re her gimp.’

‘That’s offensive.’

I didn’t care what he thought it was. I hooked the machete into a wall of fronds. Ayesha mesmerized the guy. It was time he did his job and avoided the emotional involvement. Maybe then he wouldn’t end up feeling personally responsible for her safety; avoid the mistakes I’d made with Anna. Today’s Ayesha was a different person from the girl who stepped off the plane at Kigali.

‘No, “offensive” is you taking our principals on an excursion through my recent past,’ I said.

Ryder and I walked in silence. He kept his thoughts to himself. I tried to have no thoughts at all and concentrated on projecting my senses beyond what I could see, which wasn’t that far beyond my face. The rainforest was thick here — I’d be easy to cut our way into a clearing and find ourselves face to face with a hundred FARDC or CNDP troops or, worse, more shit-throwing chimps.

It took an hour of fending off vipers and spiders to reach the top of the hill, and still there were no sounds of battle. Something was up. We kept going west of south for another fifteen minutes. I hacked a hole into a screen of fronds and came out into a broad tunnel of broken vegetation; the trees, shrubs and bushes already cleared in front of us. I stood in the relatively open space as rain started to drip through the canopy. I took a closer look at the plant life. It had been cut, the still-green remnants lying trampled on the leaf litter. The tunnel had been cut recently. I crouched on my haunches. Some of the fronds had pressure marks on them that resembled the tread from boot soles. A lot of men had passed this way. Duke was about to say something; I put my finger to my lips and signaled him to follow. Creeping forward across the cleared area, I found that it was roughly twenty meters wide. I cut my way into the untouched bush and waited for Duke to come up behind me.

‘Could be FARDC, could be CNDP,’ I said.

‘Could be elephants,’ he suggested.

‘Wearing combat boots?’

‘Right,’ said Duke. ‘Still no gunfire.’

‘One of the parties has called it quits and pulled out. Be good to know which one.’

‘Why?’

‘’Cause I don’t like knowing that there’s stuff I don’t know,’ I told him as I took my Ka-bar and cut a notch in a tree trunk. ‘We’re going to stay off the track.’

I could tell that he wanted to ask me why, to discuss it and then give me a bunch of good reasons why we should turn back. So I didn’t give him the chance, moving off and staying low, heading roughly east according to my Seiko, tracking parallel to the pre-cut path. The rain was coming down heavily; it hadn’t rained for a while, so maybe it was making up for lost time. The sound of it eliminated all others as the fat drops slammed into leaves and fronds and trunks and rattled on my K-pot. Around a hundred meters from the notched tree, the forest road hooked to the south. It was heading back to the ground occupied by the FARDC, which seemed to settle my earlier question.

Then I saw movement. I stopped, crouched. Two men coming along the road cut into the forest, taking it slow and careful, watching each step like they were walking among rat traps. They were hunched over their rifles, wary. There were no blue patches on their shoulders — CNDP rather than FARDC. I dropped on my belly, keeping the movement slow and fluid. Ryder did likewise beside me. We lay there for several minutes, motionless, and they stepped past us no more than six feet away. Killing them served no purpose. I signaled Ryder that we were staying put for a while. Thirty meters down the road behind us, the two men stopped under an umbrella palm and lit up smokes. They felt secure enough to take five while on patrol and telegraph to any enemy downwind that they were prepared to risk lung cancer and/or a bullet between the eyes. Did their presence mean that the CNDP had come down from the heights and now owned this patch of turf? The men quickly finished their cigarettes, threw the butts on the ground and retraced their steps, sauntering past us with the barrels of their rifles pointing down, their body language now completely relaxed, like they were heading to a bar. The two were out of sight within minutes. I left it a while before coming up on one knee. Something bit me on the neck. And bit again. And again. I slapped at the bites. Ants. Shit, the fuckers must have been all over the ground I’d been lying on, and the way they were chewing on me suggested they resented it. I brushed myself down collecting another half dozen bites along the way.

Beside me, Ryder slapped at his arms and then fumbled with his rifle, dropping it. He picked it up and we crept along in the same direction as the CNDP duo, keeping off the cleared area. The FARDC company had broken off the engagement with the CNDP, and the two men we’d just seen had drawn the short straw to reconnoiter the enemy’s retreat. They hadn’t bothered finishing the job, which would have been to give their commander an indication of the enemy’s new position. Most probably they would find somewhere to lie low, waste another hour or so, then return to their unit with fabricated intel.

The men moved faster on the road than Ryder and I could maneuver in the bush, and we soon lost sight of them. That made me nervous, but there was no way around it. I stopped.

‘What?’ Ryder asked.

‘Hear that?’ I said.

He lifted his head and turned it from side to side, concentrating.

‘Still can’t hear any gunfire.’

‘No, rushing water. We’re close to a ravine.’ Maybe it was the ravine that ran alongside the FARDC encampment, the one that West and I had used to carry away the HQ guards we’d killed. We were coming up on the general area.

Ryder and I waited, staying still and quiet for a further ten minutes, to give the two CNDP guys time to cross whatever lay forty meters ahead in the forest. I stood up, ready to move.

‘What are we doing?’ Ryder asked, his voice low and quiet. ‘We know the FARDC has moved out. Shouldn’t we get back to the others before it gets dark?’

‘We don’t know dick, not for sure,’ I replied. ‘And if the people holding our principals are no longer holding their ground, I want to go have a look at what they left behind.’

‘Why?’

‘Remind me — which side of the Puma were you sitting on before we crashed?’

‘I was behind you, the right-hand side. Why?’

‘Just before the engines lost power — before we crashed — did you say anything, or hear anyone else say anything?’

He looked down, concentrating. ‘No. I was asleep. I guess I could have said something — I talk in my sleep.’

‘Just before we went down, I heard someone say, “What was that?”’

‘No, I don’t remember hearing anything.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s with the questions? Something going on I don’t know about?’

I wanted to tell him that his ass could be on fire and he wouldn’t know about it, but that sort of thing’s not helpful in the modern workplace. ‘I want to go back and have a look at the Puma,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we came down by accident. There’ll be an inquiry when we get back home and we’ll need a sample of the residue in the fuel tanks.’

‘Shit…’ He plucked an ant off his forearm. ‘Do you know this or is it just a theory?’

‘At the moment it’s just questions that don’t have answers.’

Ryder broke off the engagement and we patrolled in silence, and he was satisfied to leave it at that. I’d just told him that I thought our aircraft might have been sabotaged, but all he seemed to care about was hightailing it back to his love interest.

‘Can I ask you something?’ he said eventually.

I didn’t say yes, but that didn’t stop him.

‘Why don’t we just take Leila and Ayesha to Rwanda, then come back for Twenny, Peanut and the Frenchman? That’d make more sense, wouldn’t it?’

‘No, it wouldn’t.’ I said. ‘Aside from having no firm idea of how long it will actually take to walk back to Rwanda, I doubt that we’d be able to find the FARDC unit holding them again once we leave the area. And we can’t split our forces — have some of us go one way while the rest of us go another. There aren’t enough of us to provide effective security as it is.’ Having to explain this to Ryder was another reminder, if I needed one, that the guy was out of his depth.

He hardened his tone. ‘For when that board of inquiry is convened, I want it on the record that my recommendation was to return our remaining principals to Cyangugu, rather than risk more lives in what could be a reckless adventure.’

I stopped. There was something else going on here.

‘How much did Leila offer you to get her out now? She offered me a million bucks.’

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

From the way he squirmed, I could see that he knew exactly what I was talking about. I could also see from the look on his face that he’d been offered nowhere near seven figures.

‘We’re not going anywhere till we know what the situation is with our captured principals,’ I said. ‘But I’ve noted your point of view. In the meantime, you can tell Leila, no deal.’

Ryder looked at his feet and started to move.

The forest took us right to the edge of the groove cut in the side of the hill by the surging water but the cutting was narrower in the daylight than I remembered, which made me think that perhaps this wasn’t the watercourse I thought it was. We went downhill a little, using a natural bridge provided by logs and sticks caught up in a rock fall that had formed a natural dam, the rain coming down hard on our K-pots and shoulders, unimpeded by the canopy. No sign of the two soldiers up or downstream, so we crossed. Another half hour of slicing our way through the foliage and the sound of falling water again filtered through the greenery. We came out on the verge of a far more substantial ravine than the last one, spray from the raging water rising to meet the rain. We worked our way upstream, the incline steepening markedly, and eventually crossed over on another logjam. Once on the far side, we came back downstream, eventually finding what I was looking for.

‘Why are we stopping here?’ Ryder asked.

I pointed to several smaller trees on the edge of what appeared to be a large cleared patch of the bush. ‘Twenny and Peanut were roped up to those trees. This was the FARDC HQ.’

I turned around and recalled to mind Ayesha’s rescue, saw the trees West and I had hidden behind. I walked the area, much of which had been trampled; found the remainders of the fires and the tree stump used as a chopping block. There was no blood. Something metallic caught my eye. I bent down and picked up several brass 5.56mm casings. Had people been executed here? No blood on the ground, but with all the rain I didn’t expect to see any. All I could do was speculate. I went over to the trees that had kept my principals company and examined the ground. It was trampled, covered in broken leaves, squashed bushes and thin vines going brown in places, but I couldn’t find anything of interest.

‘Where to now?’ Ryder asked after he’d finished drinking straight from the sky.

‘This way.’

The FARDC had gone, probably during the night, which explained the lack of morning gunfire. Following the road they’d cut would lead us to them, so I could set that aside and come back to it. More urgently, it wouldn’t be long before Colonel Makenga and his golden cock came down off the hill to occupy the recently vacated ground. No doubt he’d be waiting on a report from his scouts. We knew that two of them were using their recon duties as an opportunity for some free time, but there might be other scouts around who were more committed.

I double-timed it across the clearing. Trampled ground lay everywhere. The going was easier here, but the lack of cover was dangerous. I had a reasonable fx on the whereabouts of the Puma’s wreckage, but we’d be lucky to find it — from memory, the bush was thick in that area. As the angle of the ground beneath our feet began to steepen, Ryder and I passed in and out of cleared areas that had been occupied by the men, strewn with trash that ranged from tins to plastic bottles, to used bandages, and to sodden wads of newspaper and banana leaves covered in human shit, rolls of Charmin being in short supply hereabouts. We crept into a small clearing.

‘What the hell is this?’ asked Ryder.

Good question. The smell of rotting flesh was in the air. Several small animals had been slaughtered here, their guts strung up with liana. Half a dozen skulls were also bound to the tree trunk, a vertical column of them. The ants were having a ball. It was some kind of ritual altar or offering.

‘Black magic, maybe,’ I said.

We left it behind and continued traversing the hill, heading east.

‘Look for holes torn in the canopy,’ I said.

Soon after, we came on an area where trees had pieces blown out of their trunks. White sap leaked from the wounds and their limbs lay strewn across the forest floor.

‘Hey,’ said Ryder. ‘Found this on the ground over there.’ He showed me the back section of a mortar casing, a couple of the flight fins still attached to one end. It was part of an M4A2 high-explosive round, the flavor fired by the CNDP boys up on the hill. A cloud of flies buzzed at the base of a tree trunk blackened by a mortar blast. The noise distracted me. I stepped over to the area and the smell warned me what to expect. I lifted a branch and the face of a kid of no more than twelve years of age stared with milky, dirt-encrusted eyes. The flies went crazy with the fresh opportunity I’d just provided them and descended on his nostrils, mouth and, of course, those eyes. Ryder lifted another branch, saw what lay beneath it, and turned away. The kid’s leg had been blown off at the groin. The body part shifted weirdly among the leaf litter as if it were somehow still alive. Driver ants, a hundred thousand of them, were attempting to drag it away. The look in the boy’s eyes reminded me of the one I’d seen in Anna’s, as if heavy doors had been welded shut behind them. A lump swelled in my throat. I broke off a nearby palm frond to sweep away the flies, then covered the kid’s face with it and replaced the tree branch over his lower remains. I shook my head. Here, in a split second of completely useless violence, a short miserable life had ended.

I turned and saw Ryder thirty meters further up the hill, pulling on a liana vine, moving it left and right, trying to dislodge something caught up in a tree. I made my way up to him.

‘What you got?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Spotted it while I was looking for that hole.’

There was a partially obscured cream-colored object lodged in a fork in the tree maybe fifty feet above us. Whatever it was, the object was man-made and perched on the vine that Ryder was tugging. He gave it an especially hard pull and the object flew out and dropped, hit a branch and then tumbled into a nearby bush.

‘Oh, man,’ Ryder said, plucking it from a low branch. ‘Am I gonna get lucky tonight.’

Well, maybe tomorrow night, and he was probably right. It was a case, either Leila’s or Ayesha’s. He turned it over. Settling the ownership question, a gold letter ‘L’ was embossed in the expensive tooled cream leather above the gold-plated lock. He pressed the mechanism and the latch flew open with an expensive thunk. Inside was a jumble of lipsticks, nail polishes, mascaras, eye shadows and various other bottles and tubes mostly all heavily branded with the double C of Chanel, tangled up in the leads of a curling wand and a hairdryer. He pulled out a lipstick.

‘Your color?’ I asked him.

I shifted my attention to the surrounding forest, searching it for movement other than that made by the rain smacking into the vegetation, which made it appear to shiver. A little like me. I saw nothing. Satisfied, I checked over the makeup case. It had come from the Puma — no doubt about that. The leather was uncharred and, except for a couple of scuff marks, in almost pristine condition. All of which suggested that it had fallen out of the chopper with the loadmaster before the aircraft hit the ground, and certainly before a few rockets were fired into it. I traversed the hillside, slicing through low bushes, and came out above a large old rotting log covered in moss. It looked familiar. I jumped behind it and leaned over the top, looking down the hill. Pulling the sniper scope from my pack, I rested it on the log and adjusted the focus, scanning the face of the forest. Yeah, this was the place — we took refuge behind this log while FARDC torched the chopper.

‘I remember this. We’ve been here before, right?’ Ryder asked, jumping in beside me.

I nodded, getting my bearings. The smell of burned kerosene was in the air.

‘Down there, I think.’ I lined up the sight on an area I thought might yield something, but saw nothing. I slid over the top of the log and cut my way down through elephant grass and scrub, the sweet smell of toasted aviation fuel growing stronger. A shard of Perspex from the aircraft’s windshield dangling in a bush caught my eye. We were close. I saw the wreckage a few steps later, part of a main rotor blade draped with liana, pointing skywards like a broken finger. I peered into the twisted metal, then looked up into the canopy. The hole our descent had ripped through the treetops was clearly visible, drops of rain wobbling through the opening on their way down.

The aircraft wreckage itself was covered in leaves, fronds and branches. Almost the only indication that something lay buried beneath was the fact that the dead vegetation was starting to wilt like a salad left too long in the bowl.

Ryder and I climbed down to the Puma and hauled away a few of the branches. An attempt had been made to hide the wreckage. The remains were charred and blackened. I started poking around among them.

‘What are you looking for?’ asked Ryder.

‘Not sure,’ I said.

I gestured for the case and he handed it over.

‘Find some high ground and keep watch,’ I told him.

He turned away while I rummaged around among the cosmetics, looking for anything suitable for the purpose I had in mind. There were lipsticks, lots of them — pinks, reds and bronzes. They would have to do. I took several, fully extended the sticks and then broke them off. I could already hear Leila squealing.

I stuffed the tubes into a thigh pocket, left the case on the ground, pulled away another couple of branches and hoisted myself up onto the blackened, twisted fuselage. The port-side external fuel sponson was broken, the back half of it hanging down. I ran a gloved finger across an interior wall and transferred the oily, sooty residue to one of the lipstick tubes. I then went to the front of the wreckage and climbed in through the cockpit. Rocket explosions and fires had left the twisted interior charred and the paintwork black and blistered. Entering the main cargo area, which had been fitted with seats, I could see at a glance that there wasn’t much left of the tanks. Internal explosions had ripped them up and there were gaping holes in the alloy floor. I crouched for a full minute in silence and took in the charred surroundings that included the remains of Travis and Shaquand. Sometimes a crime scene will speak to you. This one didn’t. Maybe the exercise was a waste of time and effort. But I was here now, and I’d never get this chance again. The jet-fuelled furnace that engulfed the wreckage probably also consumed any chemical evidence of sabotage. Was that why the remains of this aircraft had been rocketed — to destroy evidence? And, if so, on whose orders? I reached down deep into the jagged black holes in the floor, which still smelled of jet fuel, and scraped some of the carbon deposits off the sides of the tanks and tapped them into the remaining gold Chanel tubes. Job done, I climbed back into the flight deck and out through the front of the chopper and sucked in some clean forest air. The whole operation took less than five minutes. My gloves were filthy and badly worn. I wiped them on the wet vegetation.

A rifle shot cracked the silence. I ducked and spun around.

Two more shots. Dammit! Ryder’s M16.

A man screamed, a quick death scream, the type of scream that says a life has just been startled out of its body. My eyes went to the source of the noise. It was the two men we’d seen walking along the trail, reconnoitering. They’d wandered back across our path. However, one of them was now a lifeless body lying at the feet of the other. The man still standing had his hands in the air, and they were trembling like the leaves around him being slapped by the rain. He was starting to blubber. He was maybe sixteen, no older.

‘No more shooting,’ I calmly called out to Ryder, clamping down on the desire to yell it. ‘There are gonna be more of these guys nearby, for sure.’ And, as I said that, I knew there was only one possible outcome for this situation. ‘Jesus,’ I said to myself. And maybe the guy with his hands in the air came to the same conclusion, because he suddenly turned and ran.

‘Shit,’ I said, bolting after him.

He ran hard, thrashing through the bush. I followed, breathing hard, drawing the Ka-bar as I ran and hacking at the greenery, the machete left back at the crash site. Our presence in the area had to remain a secret. Nothing was more important. I thrashed at the leaves and the fronds, the palms and the lianas, leaped half-blind over logs, heading uphill, aware of the effort, the air starting to sear my lungs like flame. Fuck, he was getting away on those young legs. I heard a dull thud somewhere ahead and then — nothing. I came up on the guy a handful of seconds later. He was spreadeagled on the ground at the base of a tree trunk hidden by scrub, his eyes rolled back in his head and a concave depression in the skull over his left eye, a little moss and bark pressed into the grazed skin. Breathing hard, I put my fingers to his jugular and they confirmed that nothing warm was going to move through his veins ever again. I sucked in a few breaths and sheathed the Ka-bar. Hitting the tree at full throttle had done me a service; stopped me having to add another bad dream to my collection. I searched the kid’s pockets and found some kind of a charm made up of bones, a little snakeskin and animal teeth. If it were supposed to be a protective charm, I’d be making a complaint to the witch doctor who gave it to him. I wondered if it was connected to the altar we’d seen. There was nothing else in his pockets. I stood and listened to the forest for a full minute but the loudest noises were my own breathing, the pumping of my heart, the ever-present impact of raindrops on leaves and the high-strung whine of over-excited mosquitoes. I cut some fronds, lay them over the body, then retraced my steps back to the Puma.

I found Ryder down on his haunches, his rifle across his chest, nervously glancing left and right. My arrival startled him.

‘Where is he?’ he asked, standing up.

‘A tree jumped in front of him.’

‘What?’

‘Try not to shoot anything unless it shoots at you first.’

‘I had no choice,’ he said.

He was probably right about that.

‘They were coming toward us… I’ve never killed anyone before. He was a kid.’ Ryder’s voice was cracking, the center of his chin trembling. ‘No choice,’ he said.

‘You did your job, Duke,’ I told him. ‘If you hadn’t, maybe it’d be you covered in palm fronds waiting for the ants.’

I walked past him. There was nothing I could say that would make him feel better about taking someone’s life.

‘C’mon,’ I said. I was done with the Puma. I fastened the Velcro on my thigh pocket to make sure the lipsticks were secure and wrapped a hand around the rough wood grip of the machete propped against the twisted fuselage, and moved into the bush.

We were well into the hand-to-hand battle with palms, bushes, elephant grass and liana, approaching the first ravine before Ryder asked, ‘We heading back?’

I’d been asking myself the same question. I gave it some more consideration as I chopped around the answer, clearing away the indecision. ‘It’s after three. We’re at least couple of hours’ walk away from the others, which means the last half hour or so we’ll be walking in complete darkness.’

‘So what are we gonna do?’

I considered whether the people holding Twenny Fo, Peanut and Fournier bugging out lessened the chances of our principals’ survival, and came to the conclusion that the outcome could go either way. We hadn’t found their bodies at the FARDC HQ’s clearing, which was promising. I was leaning toward the conclusion — or maybe it was just the hope — that the officers holding our people captive were considering how to bargain with the US for their release in a way that wouldn’t bring a unit of Navy Seals down on them in the dead of night.

‘We still have to locate that FARDC company,’ I said. ‘We still don’t know where they’re holed up.’

Ryder took out his anxiety about this with his machete on the elephant grass.

Once across the second ravine, we picked up the road carved through the forest and found the passage we’d cut alongside it.

‘You don’t like me much, do you?’ Ryder remarked out of the blue.

‘What’s liking you got to do with anything?’

‘So I’m right.’

‘Duke, all I care about is that you do your job. And if you can tell a joke or two to lighten the load while you’re at it — and maybe even grumble with class — that’s icing on the cake.’

‘I talked my way onto this detail because I knew Ayesha. I know you know that. Maybe what you don’t know is that I’ve been trying to get off that damn desk for two years. This came along, I saw my chance and took it.’

‘And that desk is looking pretty good right about now, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘I’m not trained for this and we both know that. Just help me out a little. Show me what I need to do and I’ll get it done. Okay?’

A good speech. His hand was held out for us to shake on our newfound understanding. Duke was baggage. Frankly, I didn’t think he had it in him to turn his shit around, but I shook anyway, if only to end this impromptu performance review.

We got going again and moved across through the pre-cut slip road. I stopped when I saw a bunch of rocks ahead. I didn’t remember seeing them on the way out. And then the rocks did the strangest, most un-rocklike thing — they moved. A massive gray boulder lurched slowly from one side to the other, and then a tree trunk snapped with a crack like a grenade going off and it fell down with a crash, leaving a small hole ripped in the canopy. Another boulder moved and snorted and I realized what I was looking at — a couple of elephants enjoying the afternoon smorgasbord, grazing on the leaves higher in the trees. I was aware that Ryder and I were downwind of the beasts, because I smelled them and they smelled bad, like a platoon after a three-week bivouac in a dirty sock basket. Nevertheless, we took several slow steps backward and found some cover behind a tree too thick to be pushed aside, and stood there for twenty minutes, waiting for the animals to move off; not talking, not moving. They reminded me of Boink and of my childhood circus visit, and I had the fleeting, yet powerful, feeling that the threads of my life were coming together in a pattern that I should recognize but couldn’t.

When we could no longer see, hear or smell the animals, we came out from behind the tree and moved quickly through the area. Ten minutes later, I found the notch made in the tree trunk on our outbound journey. I checked the Seiko. Taking a course eighty degrees to the north of the one we’d been on would bring us eventually and approximately back to the rocks where, right about now, Cassidy, West and Rutherford would be securing the area for the night ahead. Ryder ran his fingers across the notch.

‘You make this?’ he asked.

‘Yep.’

The forest closed in solidly ahead, with no slashed fronds or bushes.

‘This where we turned left, isn’t it?’ Ryder asked, reading the signs.

‘Yep,’ I repeated. ‘Leave the makeup case here — hide it.’

He set it on the ground and covered it with foliage and liana. Satisfied that it couldn’t be found without a concerted inspection, I stepped past him toward the forest flattened by the FARDC on the move. The track was clear as far as I could see. I considered taking the road more trampled but it wasn’t worth the risk, so I turned back to the tree with the notch. We had two hours of daylight left in which to find the enemy’s bivouac.

I saw the tripwire at knee height, just in time to avoid breaking through it. I thrust my palm back and stopped Ryder before he walked past me and set off whatever was attached to it. I hit him a little too hard and he was about to object, so I put my hand over his mouth to muf-fe any sounds that might attract attention, and set him down on the ground. Once he stopped struggling, I nodded at him and he nodded back, so I took my hand away and signed that danger lay just ahead.

‘Jesus, Cooper!’ he whispered before I could gag him again.

I grabbed a fist full of his webbing, pulled him up to my face and put my finger against my lips. He nodded again, finally getting the picture and shutting the fuck up. Okay, so he was pissed at me for pushing him around, but it was better than being dead. I let him go, got down on all fours and crawled forward till my eyes again picked up the thin line strung through the bush. It took me a while to find it a second time. Seeing it in the first place had been pure luck. I happened to focus on it rather than on a leaf or a frond or just the ground. It was a little after four pm, and the light was disappearing like someone was turning down a dimmer switch, the undergrowth starting to lose its colors to the monochrome of twilight.

I found the line again. It was fine and green, the pressure of it against my hand. I was familiar with this type of tripwire; had set a few of my own over the years. I ran the line lightly through my fingers till they found the business end, an M18A1, otherwise known as a Claymore; the raised words ‘Front towards enemy’ clearly visible on the anti- personnel mine’s plastic, curved olive-drab face. Behind it was one and a half pounds of C4 embedded with the manufacturer’s warranted seven hundred steel balls designed to explode outward in an arc of sixty degrees. In open terrain, the thing was a killer within a radius of fifty meters, potentially lethal out to a hundred meters, and just plain bad news to anything with a heartbeat out to two hundred and fifty meters. It would’ve detonated six meters from Ryder and me had we strolled through that tripwire, though we wouldn’t have known about it till we were tuning our harps. I carefully felt around the mine, my fingertips finding some good news: a couple of cotter pins hanging from the corner of the mine on a piece of wire. Someone was going to come back and recover this device if it didn’t detonate and he’d need those pins.

So, the mine looked brand new. Its presence told me we’d arrived at the FARDC’s perimeter defenses. One hundred and eighty combat veterans were bivouacked somewhere close, probably scattered around the crown of the hill ahead. Convention said the company HQ would be sited on the highest ground. We had no choice but to infiltrate the enemy camp, only this time without West’s skills up front. And the Claymore’s message — the enemy was jumpy. Maybe the FARDC company leadership was aware that it had been infiltrated once before, or perhaps West, LeDuc and I just hadn’t come across the mines when we’d rescued Ayesha.

First things first. I replaced those pins before releasing the tension on the tripwire. Then, approaching the mine from the rear, I disconnected the tripwire and removed the blasting cap from the detonator well. The device could now be handled without suddenly turning Ryder and me into mousse. A Claymore would come in handy, so I stuffed it into the backpack, together with the tripwire and blasting cap, got down on my belly among the damn ants and hoped they’d frightened off the scorpions.

‘Stay close, move slow and, for Christ’s sake, stop when I stop,’ I told Ryder under my breath.

We’d collected another two Claymores with tripwires set up like the first before I smelled tobacco, indicating the presence of sentries ahead. We crawled forward and, in the last vestiges of light, watched a young guy in a poncho aimlessly throwing a knife into the ground at his feet, killing time, his rifle lying in the leaf litter behind him, the source of the second-hand smoke hanging from his lips. Ryder and I stayed put until darkness was complete. The rain started to fall again, heavy and determined, as we waited for the guard to light another cigarette. Eventually, a sudden flame fared in front of his face, destroying his night vision for a few minutes. Ryder and I used his temporary blindness to slide past.

The underbrush was thick and perfectly suited for our purposes, as was the fact that the army camped on the hill was far more focused on trying to stay dry and feed itself than it was on stopping unwelcome visitors at the door. Maybe it felt nice and safe behind its barricade of Claymores.

Ryder and I avoided any open ground and stayed low and slow. The vegetation around us was waterlogged, making it possible to move around without sounding like a couple of two-hundred-pound animals, there being no dry sticks to break underfoot and alert sentries to our presence. Occasionally, larger shadows hurried out of our way through the bush, and I chose not to think about what they might have been. As long as they weren’t carrying guns, I was happy to leave them alone.

We broke cover as the angle of the climb lessened and discovered that the ground was miraculously open. The smell of sawdust and fire smoke was in the air. The hill — it was more of a plateau — had recently been logged. Tents were clustered on one side of the area, marking the area as the company HQ. Over on the opposite side, around two hundred meters away from both Ryder and me and the HQ, the bush was being cleared away.

‘The scope,’ I whispered to Ryder, who pulled it from the pack on my back and handed it to me. It wasn’t of the light-enhancing type, but it had reasonable low light characteristics and there were several fires burning. I focused on all the activity. ‘Shit,’ I murmured.

‘What?’ Ryder asked.

‘Civilians. And a chopper.’

Women dressed in brightly colored clothing that reminded me of the Rwandan prime minister’s wife, were doing the clearing, overseen by soldiers. That meant there was some kind of settlement nearby. Parked in the middle of the cleared area the women were extending was an old Soviet Mi-8 of the sort I’d seen at the airport in Kigali and dismantled in the hangar at Cyangugu. I wondered who’d flown it here, and why. Its markings identifed it as Rwandan. What was a Rwandan chopper doing over the border in the DRC, parked in the FARDC unit’s bivouac?

I scanned the HQ, checking it over more closely. A couple of tents were still being pitched. Cooking fires were burning, providing helpful illumination. A slight wind shift brought the smells of meat sizzling on those fires, and glands pumped saliva into my mouth. I picked up our principals almost immediately.

‘They’re alive,’ I said involuntarily.

Twenny and Peanut were strung up to trees, just as they’d been at the last encampment, their hands secured behind their backs, hoods over their heads. A third man was beside them, wearing a tattered flight suit. ‘Fournier. He’s there,’ I said. I handed the scope to Ryder and showed him where to point it.

‘I see ’em,’ he whispered. ‘It’s Fournier, all right.’ He turned his head slowly, taking in the rest of the camp. ‘Did you see the helicopter there?’

‘Uh-huh.’

Ryder took the scope on a quick reconnoiter. ‘Hey, the Chinese guy, the one you told us about. That him? He just came out of one of the tents.’ He passed me the scope.

It took a moment to locate him. ‘Yeah,’ I said. A tall, slender black man wearing a tailored combat uniform with a cream cravat tucked into the top of his shirt accompanied him. This had to be the FARDC commanding officer. They were both talking to a third man, though that person had his back to me and he was in shadow.

‘I can’t see his face,’ I whispered, talking to myself. ‘Wait — they’re moving.’

The Chinese advisor put his hand on the unidentifed man’s shoulder and the three of them began to walk slowly over to Twenny Fo, Peanut and Fournier, collecting a couple of funkies with machine guns along the way. Fu Manchu and his buddies were deep in conversation when they arrived in the area where their hooded prisoners were tied up. The captives didn’t appear to react in any particular way to the arrival of the party within their midst. Fu Manchu stepped up to the guy in the flight suit and removed his hood. Damn — it was definitely Fournier. I noticed pretty much at this moment that the unidentifed man was holding a pistol in his right hand, down by his leg, the muzzle pointed toward the ground. He raised it to the back of the Frenchman’s head. I heard a muffled explosion and the front of Fournier’s face blew out. He toppled forward, his arms dislocating from his shoulders as he slumped to the ground, dead.

‘Shit, what just happened… what happened…?’ Ryder said, way too loud.

‘Shut up,’ I hissed.

Twenny Fo and Peanut were now shouting at the man, who handed the pistol back to the Chinese guy, turning toward me as he did so.

‘Christ,’ I whispered.

‘What?’ Ryder demanded.

Fournier’s killer. It was Beau Lockhart.