Ghost Watch

Attack

A familiar beep from my Seiko woke me at one-thirty am. ‘Vin?’ It was Ryder.

‘I’m awake,’ I said, searching my surroundings with my senses. Leila was no longer spooning. I propped myself up on one hand for a few seconds to get my bearings, then moved down on my butt bones to the back of the truck, where I could see Ryder’s shape illuminated by moonlight. The rain had stopped. The air was cool and smelled of banana. Even the ever-present mosquitoes appeared to be on a break. I felt refreshed after the best sleep I ’d had in a week.

‘All quiet?’ I asked him.

‘Nothing’s stirring, not even a frog.’

He was right. ‘When did they knock it off?’

‘Just before the rain stopped. I thought it was significant, like an early warning sign of visitors approaching, but…’

‘Maybe the orgy just ran its course,’ I suggested as I hopped down beside him.

Behind us, Boink stopped snoring momentarily to call out some gibberish in his sleep.

I looked over the sleeping bodies and conducted a subconscious body count. We were one short.

‘Where’s Rutherford?’ I asked.

‘In the cab, stretched out on the full-width seat.’

I wished I’d thought of that.

‘How much time have I got for a little shut-eye?’ Ryder asked.

‘Around two and a half hours.’

‘Well then,’ he said, laying his rifle on the floor of the truck and then hauling himself up with a grunt, ‘nighty-night.’

I strolled away from the trucks to take in the evening and realized that I was casting a shadow. The moon was full, almost directly overhead, and it blazed away like an LED, the effect quite eerie. Just our luck. A clear night sky and a goddamn searchlight hanging right in the middle of it. I prayed for rain. I wondered how West and Cassidy were doing, whether they had been able to sleep.

The one hundred and eighty minutes of my watch dragged by. The night was still and breathless with just the occasional distant clucking of some unknown animal to punctuate it. I went into the Alamo, counted and recounted the magazines; fddled with the barricade and watched the minutes tick past, one by one. I went for a stroll and collected bananas for breakfast and also came across a stand of sugar cane and cut a couple of lengths. That job done, I nosed around till I found an ant nest and reapplied the mosquito repellent, as the insects had finished their break.

With nothing else to do, I walked in slow circles around the trucks and wondered about Lockhart and his treachery, and about LeDuc and his perfdy. I wondered whether Twenny and Peanut were still alive in the FARDC’s camp, and made a deal with the universe that if they were still there when we arrived, I’d eat less meat and more vegetables. I wondered whether Lockhart intended cutting the PLA guy in on any ransom monies that might come his way. I wondered whether Biruta, Makenga and Lissouba might enjoy being tied into a sack with a couple of those cat-sized scorpions. I wondered whether my team would make it back to Rwanda in one piece, complete with the same number of principals we’d departed Cyangugu with. I wondered whether Masters, wherever she was, blamed me as much as I blamed myself for her death. In fact, I was surprised at just how much wondering could be achieved in a hundred and eighty minutes. And then, with the familiar note sounding from my Seiko, time was up. I woke Rutherford, Ryder and Francis at exactly 0401.

Handing out bananas and cane, I suggested that they gear up while they ate. Ten minutes later, they returned, webbing stuffed with spare mags and grenades. They took over the watch while I went into the Alamo and likewise raided the stores. When we were all set, I had Ryder wake our principals.

A couple of minutes later, they wearily vacated their sleeping quarters. I handed Boink a backpack full of our staple diet.

‘Breakfast,’ I whispered. ‘Eat more than you need and see if you can’t get the girls to do the same. This might be the only food you’ll get for the rest of the day.’

‘Yo,’ he replied.

I could’ve also said that this might be the last meal they had period, given that they were so all-fired keen to ride with us into the valley of death.

Boink hesitated, then said, ‘What’s my job today, soldier man?’

Francis interrupted. ‘We must go. It will soon be light.’

I looked at my Seiko and pinched the illumination function. Just past 0432. The schedule wasn’t running away from us quite yet.

‘Two minutes,’ I told him, then said to Boink, ‘Walk with me.’ I led him away from the trucks. ‘Today, for one day only, consider yourself a personal security officer.’

‘What I have t’ do?’

‘Follow a bunch of rules.’

‘And?’

‘Chew on a bullet for Leila and Ayesha if you have to.’

‘Oh…’ He had to think about it.

‘You have to stay with them at all times. On no account let them leave the truck. Use force if you have to, but set your phaser to stun.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Never mind.’

I handed him two spare mags for his Nazarian. ‘Use single shot only. Conserve your ammo — no full auto. Fire when you have a target, and don’t hesitate to pull the trigger.’

‘I got it, yo.’

We found ourselves back at the trucks.

At 0442, Leila and Ayesha climbed up into the back of the Alamo. They turned to give Boink a hand but the big man waved them away and climbed up under his own steam, his weight rocking the truck from side to side.

‘Couldn’t’a done that a week ago,’ he said, pleased with himself as he raised himself to his full height and looked down at Rutherford and me.

‘You’ll be swinging from the trees next,’ said Rutherford.

‘Throwing shit,’ I added.

Ryder climbed up into the truck and joined Ayesha, Leila and Boink. I locked eyes with the star. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, you could get behind those containers with Duke and stay there.’

‘I don’t do orders, remember?’

‘Then consider it a request. You’re a singer. You do those, right?’

I earned a frown but she did as I asked, Ryder appearing and directing them back behind the defenses. Then I gave them all just one simple life-preserving rule to follow: ‘Keep your heads down.’

I jumped out of the truck and trotted to the driver’s side door. Rutherford was sitting behind the steering wheel. I sprang up onto the running board, the adrenalin starting to do the rounds; my skin was cold and hot at the same time, and I had a constriction in my throat that made swallowing difficult. It was the feeling I always got before combat. It was like an old friend, one I wished would go find someone else to play with.

‘Been a pleasure working with you, guv’nor,’ said Rutherford, holding his hand out through the window opening. He wanted to shake. It looked suspiciously to me like the Brit expected this to be it. I hoped he wasn’t going to hand me a letter.

‘Likewise,’ I said, shaking. ‘Let’s move. Take it slow. There are Claymores out there and we don’t want to run them down. If I tell you to stop, hit the brakes.’

He punched the starter button, the diesel instantly coming to life and settling into a noisy thrum.

‘You ready for this?’ I asked Francis, who was sitting on the passenger side.

He nodded, but didn’t look too sure about it.

‘Okay,’ I told Rutherford. ‘Do a one-eighty. No headlights. I’ve done a recce — there’s nothing to hit.’

The Dong lurched forward, Rutherford winding on the steering wheel — that gorge was not too far in front of us. Palms and small trees went down under the Dong’s front grille as we left the support truck behind.

‘Okay, straighten her out,’ I told him.

Rutherford let the wheel slip through his hands. A palm tree slapped against me, nearly swatting me off the running board.

‘Stop in another dozen meters or so and kill the motor.’

After a few seconds, Rutherford gently applied the brakes and turned off the ignition.

I leaped down off the running board and probed forward on foot. After a few paces, the plantation came to an end and I crept out onto the road lit by the moonlight. There was no traffic. Holding my breath, I listened to the night, scanning it for engine noise and human voices, but nothing disturbed the silence except for a little tinnitus inside my head. I ran back through the palms to the truck but went to the passenger side this time. The door swung open and I jumped in beside Francis.

‘Hit it,’ I said to Rutherford.

The Brit fired up the Dong, ground the gears, and we moved off the mark with wheel spin, the tires fighting for traction in the mud. The truck’s nose pushed the fronds aside as we entered the road, and Rutherford hauled on the steering wheel, turning left so we faced downhill, and stamped on the accelerator pedal.

‘How are we doing for time?’ he asked over the gathering roar of the wind through the non-existent windshield.

‘Two minutes ahead of schedule,’ I told him.

He backed the speed off a little as the road flattened out and swept onto the flat plain of the valley shimmering in the moonlight; a silver-painted version of the scene I remembered from the day before. We motored past the area where we’d hijacked the trucks and hidden the bodies. With no rain, they’d quickly start to reek. Small carrion-eating animals would be turning up to contest the spoils with the columns of driver ants that were, no doubt, already on the scene. A sudden furry of movement in the bushes caused my heart rate to spike. Rutherford and I both went for our guns.

‘Vantour,’ Francis shouted over the wind noise. ‘Vulture!’

Large black shapes separated from the forest, flapped into the air and then settled again, marking the spot just inside the tree line where we’d stacked the dead. Come morning, the FARDC patrols would see the birds, investigate what the buzzards were feasting on, find the bullet-riddled corpses and know that its weapons had fallen into enemy hands rather than disappearing into a ravine hidden by the forest. Only, by that time, of course, the point of this discovery would be moot because we were about to inform the FARDC exactly who it was who had stolen those weapons, by turning the cache on them. I glanced at Rutherford and he returned the look as he shifted into a lower gear, the road climbing gently to the village.

‘Time?’ he asked.

‘We’re on it,’ I told him after checking the Seiko’s countdown function.

I pulled up the QCW, took it off safety as we passed the village, and made sure the selector was on three-shot burst. There was no motion in or around the huts. Nothing was moving that I could see. So far so good.

The road swept around the base of the hill on which the FARDC camp was situated.

‘What the fuck?’ said Rutherford.

He took the words right out of my mouth. Up ahead, instead of the makeshift bamboo pole boom operated by a couple of sleepy guards that we expected to see, there was a Dong parked across the road, completely blocking it. A dozen men milled around the vehicle and one of them waved a flashlight in our direction. We had no choice but to slow down and stop, at which point the light went out. We were prepared to fight, but this wasn’t part of the plan. This was about to get ugly, the enemy making moves we weren’t prepared for.

Rutherford had time to reach for his M4 before the shooting started.

‘Down!’ I yelled at Francis, pushing him hard into the floor as the Africans opened fire on us. We were hemmed in. No choice but to slug it out or die here and now.

I shot over the front of the hood. Lead traveling supersonic crackled past my left ear, giving that tinnitus of mine some competition. I leveled the QCW at a knot of FARDC soldiers standing too close together, who obliged me further by getting down on one knee to steady their aim. They all died right there before firing off a shot. Rutherford looked at me and shook his head. This was not how it was supposed to go. Having just learned a very quick and bloody lesson, the balance of the Africans rushed for cover behind their truck.

I had a moment to consider how to handle this when our cabin suddenly filled with light reflecting off the rear-view-door mirrors. Spotlights had been turned on us from behind. I cracked open the door, and banged off a couple of shots at the source of the beams before popping my head out to see what the hell was going on. A Dong had come up behind us. Shit — it might well have been parked in the village, hidden. Another four-letter word sprang to mind: trap.

I heard single shots being fired behind me from an M16. That had to be Ryder — Boink favored the Nazarian 97. I hoped that Leila and Ayesha were doing as I asked and keeping their heads down behind the barricade. One of those spotlights went out, followed by its partner. Then two explosions erupted behind the truck. Grenades. I heard a man scream an instant before the first explosion, the percussion wave ringing through my head. Men were running around, appearing from the shadows, shouting and firing at us. I fired back, around one out of three shots finding a moving target. Average shooting on my part. Rutherford was doing better.

A red tracer spat from my QCW and flew into a man’s chest, where it was extinguished. I fired twice at people shooting at me, ejected the magazine and jammed in a fresh one.

‘Out, out!’ Rutherford yelled as he fung open his door and jumped down into the night. He was right. Only ducks sat around waiting to be shot. Actually, not even ducks did that.

I hit the door with my shoulder and rolled out, landing on an African waiting there below the door with his rifle raised and ready to shoot. Unfortunately for him, he was not prepared for two-hundred-and-forty-odd pounds of falling ammunition and special agent. The combined weight knocked him to the ground, a cry strangling in his throat. When I got up on a knee, the guy was raising his weapon in my direction, so I tapped him on the head with the QCW’s stock a couple of times and his lights went out. Scooting under the Dong, I started shooting at feet, then at the screaming shapes that dropped to the ground on top of them.

I worked my way to the truck’s rear axle. The volley of gunfire spitting from the back of our Dong was now a serious horizontal rain of lead. The truck that had come up behind us was beginning to roll back down the hill, steam hissing from its smashed radiator and shattered engine, bullet holes punched all over the fenders. The truck slowly gathered speed, freewheeling backward. It quickly departed from the road, mowing down the forest. Several Africans ran with it, followed by a swarm of tracer; lethal fireflies zipping from the black hole under our tarpaulin chasing them.

The incoming fire that began as a fusillade was reduced to ragged individual shots, the enemy having lost its resolve in the face of the concentrated firepower unleashed on it. And, of course, it had also lost numbers. I rolled out from under the Dong and kept the roll going off the road and into the forest. I came up to a crouch and worked my way forward to flank the truck blocking our way into camp. Coming around from the side, I could see that two men were kneeling behind it, using the wheels as cover, hiding their ankles from me. I put the QCW down and swung the M4 — a more reliable weapon at this extended range, of around fifty meters — from my shoulder and took aim. But then Rutherford appeared from the forest shadows and shot the man nearest him from the side, so that the soldier’s pal kneeling beside him died a spit second later, his brainpan stopping the round that had killed the first man an instant before. Economical shooting. ‘Waste not, want not,’ I muttered.

Rutherford stepped fully into the moonlight and raised his fist in the sudden shocking silence, letting me know that the area was clear. I made my way down toward him warily, just in case there were any FARDC lying in wait among the elephant grass and shrubs, but there didn’t appear to be. I gave a low whistle as I approached, to avoid friendly fire.

‘It’s all right, mate,’ Rutherford called out, breathing heavily. ‘I gotcha.’

I ran the last twenty meters. Jesus, there were bodies everywhere, black shadowy lumps on the ground. No one wanted this. ‘Move that vehicle,’ I told him as I went to the back of ours. I couldn’t hear any sound coming from inside. ‘Everyone okay?’ I asked before arriving at the tailgate. Ryder stepped forward out of the darkness under the tarp.

‘The damn truck came outta nowhere,’ he said. ‘Drove up fast behind us, then hit the high beams. Freaked the shit out of us.’

‘I think you freaked ’em back.’

‘Yeah, Boink threw a couple of grenades straight through their windshield.’

‘I got a mean fast ball, yo,’ came his voice from the shadows. He stepped into the moonlight and looked down at me, grinning broadly.

‘Are we nearly done yet?’ Leila called out.

‘No, not nearly. Stay there and stay down.’ I asked Ryder, ‘How’re the defenses holding up?’

‘We took a lot of heat, but they look okay,’ said Ryder.

I heard the truck blocking our way fire up, followed by roaring engine noise and the crash of snapping trees and palms as it headed off the road, a weight on its accelerator pedal.

‘Top off your mags and get ready for round two,’ I said and headed back to the front cabin. Rutherford was already back behind the wheel. Blood was all over the seat. Francis was leaning forward, holding his forearm.

‘I think he took a round,’ said Rutherford, punching the starter button.

‘It is nothing,’ said Francis. ‘Allez! Go… let’s go!’

Rutherford didn’t need to be told a fourth time and the Dong leaped forward up the hill. I ripped part of my sleeve off and used it as a pressure bandage, wrapping it around Francis’s upper arm, staunching the blood flow. He’d taken a bullet splinter, which had peeled his forearm like a banana, a loose fap of skin revealing the muscle beneath. I ripped off another bit off my sleeve, tied it around the wound and told him to keep pressure on it. It was going to sting like fuck, but he’d live.

A flash of light burst on the ground somewhere ahead, just as we came up into the outer reaches of the area cleared by the logging company. The boom of the percussion wave reached us through the windowless cab a few seconds later and made my cheeks wobble.

‘It’s started,’ yelled Rutherford, the rough ground and the increasing speed of the vehicle causing us to bounce up and down on the seat like we were on a trampoline.

Francis threw up onto the floorboards.

The skirmish at the barrier had delayed us an extra two and a half minutes but Cassidy and West, up on the observation ridge with the mortar, couldn’t know that. This first round was the ranging shot. West would be spotting, rushing forward, once the mortar had been fired, to check the shell’s detonation point in the encampment, and relaying elevation and azimuth corrections to Cassidy. A second shell would verify these adjustments and, assuming the round was on the money, the barrage would start in earnest, another eighteen 60mm HE rounds in the first stick.

‘Get us the hell up there!’ I yelled.

‘Pedal’s pressed to the floor here, skip!’ Rutherford shouted back.

A couple of FARDC men scattered out of our way.

The second mortar round fell fifty meters away on our right, an orange and yellow flash swallowed quickly by its own smoke mixed with the earth blown into the air.

‘We’re on the wrong side of the encampment,’ I said.

‘That’s because we’re late,’ Rutherford shouted.

I knew that.

Cassidy and West would be dropping rounds on the FARDC HQ, using the blue UN tents as the bull’s eye. The plan was that they’d then march the bombardment back toward the clearing closest to the ridge where the Mi-8 was parked. All of which meant that if we didn’t get our asses out of this general area, pronto, a round could land close enough to kill our vehicle, and us.

A round hit a tree not far in front, exploded somewhere high, and snapped off a branch that came crashing to the ground. Rutherford couldn’t avoid it. The truck hit the obstacle hard, bounced up over it and launched the three of us at the ceiling.

I smacked my head hard and, an instant later, the truck’s rear wheels hopped over the tree, throwing me against the dash. I wondered how Ryder and our principals in back had fared. Francis was back in the foot well, heaving.

‘Count ’em off,’ Rutherford yelled.

‘Count what off?’ I asked him.

‘The mortars. Count ’em off so we know where we stand.’

Another mortar landed close — too close — exploding less than fifty meters away, and shrapnel rattled off the Dong’s metalwork. A tight ball of orange fury burst among five men running for cover and when the earth cleared, none of them was there.

‘That’s six!’ I yelled over the noise of the motor, the explosions and shouting men.

Soldiers were running everywhere. Some were shooting their rifles from the hip as they ran, but I had no idea at what; the dark, maybe, or their own shadows. Just as long as it wasn’t us they were shooting at. I glanced through the window opening by my shoulder and clearly saw Lissouba, alias Colonel Cravat, yelling at Colonel Makenga, both men waving their arms around like a couple of Frenchmen, Makenga brandishing that cane of his. Makenga was accompanied by two men — his PSOs. Lissouba had a much larger entourage, outnumbering Makenga’s three to one, and the two groups were separated by twenty meters of moonlit open ground. I could feel the tension from where I was. And then both groups charged at each other, grappling, wrestling. I saw a muzzle flash and one of the men fell to the ground — I couldn’t see who. Lissouba ran in and kicked the fallen man in the head like he wanted to boot it clean off his neck. Jesus, that was Makenga lying in the mud. He was dead for sure; if not from the bullet, then from the punt.

The two groups of soldiers, Makenga’s PSOs and Lissouba’s FARDC posse, started exchanging wild shots before closing with each other again for some serious hand-to-hand machete action. Makenga’s bodyguards were overwhelmed and cut down in seconds.

Perhaps Lissouba saw an opportunity to get rid of his enemy and took it. Or maybe he thought that, once again, Makenga’s men were shelling his troops. But that didn’t make sense. Why would Makenga have shells sent down on his own head? Whatever the reason, the CNDP colonel was now a long way from caring.

‘How many is that?’ Rutherford asked as he flicked the wheel from left to right to avoid hitting a man who had tripped and fallen in our path.

‘Fourteen. Six to go,’ I shouted.

Francis had pulled himself up off the floor and a string of puke hung from the corner of his mouth. He pointed at a gap between the trees.

‘There!’ I yelled at Rutherford. ‘Turn there.’

He reefed the wheel hard over. The tires bit into a rut and the Dong came up on two wheels, almost on the verge of tipping on its side. We came down again with a crash but Rutherford kept the gas pedal welded to the floor.

With the direction change, the mortars were now falling on our left side; the safe side. We’d somehow managed to come through the shower of high-explosive anti-personnel ordnance unscathed. The FARDC still registered the Dong as friendly, even though we were driving at speed through their midst. Our luck on that score had to end sooner or later.

The twentieth mortar round — the last — hit the upper branches of a tree and showered the area below it with splinters of wood and steel.

The plan said we now had two minutes and counting to get the job done and clear out before the second barrage began. I could see where we had to go. ‘Over there.’ I pointed out the area where a couple of the blue UN tents in the target zone had been wiped out. Around thirty meters beyond them, where the bush hadn’t been cleared to any great extent, I could make out half a dozen men dangling from trees.

‘Shit,’ I muttered. Maybe we’d found Twenny and Peanut. The men were hanging by their broken necks, hands tied behind their backs, just like the men strung up in the CNDP camp. The more I saw, the less difference there was between FARDC and their enemy. As we came closer, I could see that there was a difference — three of the corpses swinging from the trees were women. Human life was worth a buck fifty, maybe less, in this place. Twenny Fo and Peanut were nowhere to be seen, no longer tied up in the area we’d noted from the ridge. ‘Where the fuck are they?’ I said aloud. Rutherford didn’t have to ask who I meant.

The camp HQ appeared almost deserted.

‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘We need to check those tents.’ Rutherford stood on the brakes and we slid to a halt as I opened the door, the Brit busting his open a split second later. ‘Stay in the truck!’ I yelled at our principals through the tarpaulin as I ran past. I could see several holes and tears made by flying lead and steel in the green fabric. I could also see that the sky was lightening and the silvers of moonlight had given way to murky grays and greens. In the harsh light of day, the cat would well and truly be out of the bag and we’d be seen for what we were — enemies to be cut off, surrounded and killed.

‘Time!’ I shouted over my shoulder at Rutherford.

‘Sixty-five seconds.’

I reached the first of the tents that hadn’t been destroyed and ripped open the front. Empty. Rutherford continued past, heading for the next tent five meters further on, a big luxury four-manner, and pulled aside the fap. I saw him back up as a man came out into the open, holding a pistol leveled at Rutherford. I recognized him: Fu Manchu.

‘Stop!’ I yelled, the M4’s stock buried in my shoulder and the sight bobbing between the Chinaman’s eyeballs.

He saw me out of the corner of his eye and glanced around to see if assistance was handy. He was shit out of luck on that score. Rutherford’s M4 was on his hip, the muzzle less than six inches from his belly button, nice and discreet. Fu Manchu appeared to make some mental calculations and not like the number he came up with: his. He shrugged and lowered his gun. Rutherford snatched it from his hand.

‘Americans!’ the Chinaman demanded. ‘You are not welcome here.’

‘We’re not all Americans,’ said Rutherford. ‘One of us is Scottish and we’re welcome everywhere.’

‘You speak English,’ I said.

‘I speak many uncivilized languages,’ Fu Manchu replied, his face devoid of emotion. I was itching to have a go at changing that.

Rutherford frisked him one-handed, resting his M4’s muzzle on top of the man’s belt buckle. ‘He’s clean,’ he announced.

Realization dawned on the Chinaman. ‘It was you. You stole the weapons.’

‘Bad upbringing,’ I said. I wondered who they thought had hijacked them if it wasn’t us; at the same time, the obvious alternative dawned on me: Makenga. They believed the CNDP had pulled a double-cross. And maybe it was a CNDP posse that they were expecting to turn up at the roadblock. If so, that would explain the fight that ended in the death of the man with the golden chicken.

A voice in my head interrupted this thought and screamed, ‘Sixty seconds!’ I had half a dozen questions for this jerk, starting with where Lockhart and LeDuc had disappeared to. I wasted a few seconds considering whether the Chinaman was worth capturing and taking with us, but decided against it, the words International Incident flashing incandescent in my mind. Even as it stood, if we managed to get out of this alive I was sure that there’d be bullshit complaints from this guy, and that rounds of claims and counterclaims would ensue, concluding in some kind of official apology that I would somehow have to pay for down the line. But that didn’t mean I was going to give this fuck a free pass. I pictured Ayesha being dragged from his tent, naked and trussed, fruit stuffed in her open mouth, and I felt that she deserved compensation for what he’d done to her, and that it was the least I could do to collect some of it on her behalf.

‘You’ve got five seconds to tell us where our people are,’ I informed him. ‘And don’t say you don’t know who I mean — the people you and your friends took prisoner. If you don’t, my usually friendly Scottish buddy here shoots your nuts off.’

Rutherford gave the Chinaman a grin, took the M4 off safety, and lowered the angle on the weapon’s barrel. A vertical crease appeared between Fu Manchu’s eyes, and he was suddenly not so inscrutable.

‘Four,’ I said.

The encampment had begun to calm down. Folks had stopped running around.

‘Three.’

Rutherford poked the weapon an inch into the Chinaman’s pants and lifted his man-sack so that his balls straddled the flash suppressor.

‘Hey, I think he’s going commando here,’ Rutherford observed as the crease between the man’s eyes deepened and lengthened.

‘Two,’ I said.

‘They took them to the mine,’ the Chinaman blurted, sweat beaded across his forehead, a stain spreading down his left leg.

‘Who took them there?’ I asked.

‘Your countryman — Rockhart.’

Lockhart. ‘Was the Frenchman, LeDuc, with him?’

‘No. He go with other men in the chopper.’

My inner revenge said ‘Fuck’ and smashed a fist into the palm of its hand. I wanted that asshole’s head on a plate — with freedom fries.

‘With Pietersen and White?’ I asked.

‘Yes, them.’

‘What about Biruta?’

‘He go too.’

I wanted to ask him what the PLA was doing here, and whether his people knew about his involvement in rape, kidnap and extortion, or if he knew how the folks back home in the Forbidden City would react if they knew that he was lining his pockets with gold mined by slaves his buddies were torturing and killing. I also wanted to know about the American-made guns, the M16s, but the answer to that I could get from Lockhart and his buddy Charles White, if and when I caught up with them. Somewhere in the background, the sound of men shouting something penetrated my thoughts.

‘We got company,’ said Rutherford.

I glanced to the side and saw maybe a dozen men tentatively approaching us fifty meters away through an early morning haze of smoke, steam and airborne mud particles. They were pointing at us, gesturing. Colonel Cravat, easily identifed by the cream scarf tucked into the neck of his jungle-pattern shirt, was out front. As I thought, the arrival of daylight wasn’t doing us any favors.

Rutherford and I had to finish up with the Chinaman, but not before I delivered a small parting gift from Ayesha. I balled a fist and drove it into the side of his face. His lips went in the opposite direction to the rotation of his head, kissing my thumb, and a tooth shot out of his mouth. The force of the blow spun him around unconscious and he fell face first into the side of his tent, collapsing it.

A rifle cracked and I felt the shock wave from a round rip past the tip of my nose, close enough to ruffe my nostril hairs. Our guests had tired of our company. By my calculations, we had maybe thirty seconds up our sleeves before Cassidy and West went to work again on our hosts with the mortar. I ran to the truck, Rutherford half a step behind.

Diesel smoke coming from the end of the Dong’s exhaust pipe told me the motor was still running. I went for the passenger door and opened it as Rutherford leaped onto the running board I was standing on, dived in and crawled over Francis to get behind the wheel. I threw myself in after him and we were moving before I could close the door.

I glanced back at Lissouba, who was being passed a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, which he wasted no time hoisting onto his shoulder.

‘Oh fuck,’ I said. The tube jumped as he fired the weapon, and the warhead streaked toward us, ahead of a vapor trail scribed on the dense morning air.

‘Oh fuck,’ I said again, or maybe I just thought it, as I closed my eyes and waited for the explosion that would rip us all apart and incinerate the pieces. But the detonation came a second later than anticipated; the warhead blasting unexpectedly against a tree twenty meters on the other side of the truck. Not that I was complaining, but how the hell had Lissouba missed from point-blank range?

There was no time to launch an investigation. I heard a vague whoosh ing sound and the air was suddenly full of fire and noise and the rattle of shrapnel on the truck’s metalwork, as the first of more mortar rounds fell from the sky and slammed into the HQ, turning the area around us into a boiling sea of bursting orange high-explosive blisters that raised storms of flying earth and pebbles. Lissouba and his men were blotted from view. Cassidy and West had the range and were firing off the remaining forty rounds they’d carried to the top of the ridge, and this time their rate of fire was nudging the M224’s limit — a round every couple of seconds. A ball of orange hell swallowed Fu Manchu’s tent less than forty meters away, and clots of mud rained down on the Dong’s hood and showered us through the windshield opening, along with a man’s bloody forearm, hand attached, that landed in my lap. I threw it out the hole it came through and noticed blood on my shoulder, the fabric around my upper arm shredded. I couldn’t feel anything. I gave the wound a closer look. The blood seeped rather than squirted. Not serious, but nothing to laugh about either.

Francis’s mouth was open and he looked to be screaming through the deafening roar and the falling earth and the clatter of whirling metal fragments, but I couldn’t hear him. Rutherford’s jaws were clenched, his teeth streaked with the orange mud. I watched him wrestle with the steering wheel, trying to carve a path like a slalom skier between the explosions that filled our world and blotted everything out with a storm of fire and shrapnel and mud.

He changed direction and drove a route that took us around the circumference of the encampment, away from the deadly blasts. Cassidy and West were concentrating on the camp’s HQ, hoping to cut off the serpent’s head. I knew that’s what they were doing, because that was the plan we’d laid down. And this part was pretty much running like clockwork except for one pretty important fact — the folks we were risking life and limb to rescue weren’t here. The only good news was that it appeared I didn’t have to eat less meat and more veggies. Leila, of course, would give me hell about the fact that Twenny and Peanut weren’t in the camp, that I ’d put her life at risk for nothing, and I felt sure there was a big I-told-you-so moment in my immediate future.

A different kind of fireball erupted on the far side of the clearing and boiled into the sky, snapping me back to the reality of the moment. A deep boom rolled through the hills. The Mi-8 had taken a direct hit.

The continuing destruction caused by falling mortars was now pretty much confined to the area framed by the glassless opening beside me in the door. I could still see men running around screaming and diving for holes in the mud. We bounced over mud and bulldozed our way through the brush with no opposition, heading back to the scene of our first encounter of the morning, where the Dong had been parked across the road.

Silence arrived with the same suddenness as the explosions. It lengthened from a couple of seconds to a dozen of them. The last echoes of the exploding HE returned from the surrounding hills. The attack was over. Right about now, Cassidy and West would be spiking the mortar so that it couldn’t be used again.

Lissouba and his men had known that an attack was coming, even if they weren’t fully prepared for it. Why else have that welcoming committee waiting at the boom gate? And why move their hostages to another venue otherwise? One thing was certain, though: Lockhart would be waiting for Act II at the mine.

‘Can you hear that?’ Rutherford asked.

Now that he mentioned it, I could hear something. I could hear women screaming. And one of them, I was sure, was Leila.