Ghost Watch

Evade

‘We have to give ourselves up,’ Leila insisted. ‘We all know that. They’re going to follow us until we do, right? They’re not going to give up.’

‘And then what?’ Cassidy asked.

Twenny put his arm around Leila, the ex who was now his present. ‘We can’t. That ain’t no option, you feel me? They’re killers.’

‘They held you and you’re still alive.’

‘They killers — trus’ me.’

‘Well, they’ve got theirs and we got ours,’ she said, glaring at me accusingly. ‘He’s just killing us all slowly. Death by incompetence.’

Go right ahead, I wanted to say. Be my guest and head on back down.

She pointed at me. ‘Our killer just leads us from one impossible situation to another.’ She looked angrily at Cassidy, then at West and Ryder. ‘Can’t someone else take charge here? Is no one man enough to take responsibility? He ain’t never gonna to get us home. Am I the only one who can see that?’ She went to Boink. ‘What about choo, Phillip?’

Phil found something interesting to stare at on the ground.

‘Duke? Got nothing to say?’

Ryder moved toward her to put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Leila, I think you should calm dow—’

Realizing that no one was going to join the mutiny, she parried his arm, turned away, sank to her knees and sobbed, beaten. Or acting, I couldn’t tell which. Twenny and Ayesha, like air filling a vacuum, rushed in to comfort her.

I turned away and tried to think the situation through. There was no dealing with Lissouba and his partner, Beau Lockhart — not now. We’d come too far and seen too much. Lockhart would have to believe I had enough evidence, even if it were just eyewitness accounts, to build a case against him. The fact that I didn’t; well, he wouldn’t know that, would he? He’d consider that his interests were best served if we never made it back. All of which meant that if we were captured, then, no question about it, we’d all end up in the FARDC’s downsizing program administered by machetes.

‘Forget that crap, boss,’ said West. ‘You got my vote.’

‘Who said it was a democracy,’ I answered.

‘The enemy force is between thirty and forty,’ Cassidy said, the sideshow over. The pressing business of what the hell we were going to do had to be dealt with and the PSOs, me included, were feeling the weight of it.

‘They picked up our raft downstream and this is probably the closest hamlet to where they found it,’ I surmised. ‘They’ll go over the area down there with a fine tooth comb.’

‘We cleaned up our landing pretty good, but you can bet your ass there’ll be a boot print in the mud that we missed, or something like that,’ said Cassidy. ‘We all bagged our shit but our principals weren’t so diligent. They’ll know we’re up here.’

‘We’ve given them a good mauling already. They’ll be cautious,’ said West. ‘They’ll send out a recon patrol first and get the lay of the land. They’ll find the village and come to the same conclusion you did about the risks, sir. They’ll figure they’ve got us bottled up.’

There was a murmur of general agreement.

The time was approaching four pm. We had an hour and a half of useful light left; less, if the cloud build-up continued.

‘That recon patrol should never get to make its report,’ Rutherford suggested.

He was right. It didn’t help us any for Lissouba to know that we couldn’t retreat. We had to fight our way out. ‘I’ve got two mags left, and only one of them is full,’ I said. ‘What’s everyone else got?’

Only Ryder had two full mags. Like me, the rest of us were down to the dregs: Rutherford had just two rounds; West one full mag; Cas-sidy half a mag. We also had that one frag grenade, one Claymore and twelve smoke canisters. Assuming one bullet, one kill, we had enough ammunition to get the job done, but we were kidding ourselves if we thought we could pull that off. These guys would come at us hard and they knew how to fight. We’d taken them on several occasions already, but we’d had the advantage of surprise, along with a hell of a lot of antipersonnel iron to throw around. Those days were now well and truly over. Rutherford chewed something off the inside of his cheek.

‘So how’re we going to pull this off?’ I asked. ‘Any thoughts?’

‘Use the night,’ Cassidy said.

West and I kept watch, hunkered down in a patch of the elephant grass bordering the grassy knoll. There was only one way up that we knew of, and that was via the steps cut into the limestone wall. First port of call for Lissouba’s scouts would be this relatively open ground, same as it was for Rutherford and me when we first arrived. Meanwhile, the rest of our band was heading to the thick rainforest bordering the plantation, where there was also plenty of bamboo for Cassidy’s purposes. Leila, I knew, would take one look at the berry-laden thorn bush coiled up there like razor wire that we wanted her and our other principals to hide in and refuse to take another step. But that was Rutherford’s problem, or Cassidy’s, or Ryder’s, or maybe even Twenny’s, if the guy were prepared to step up. I was happy to leave them to it. Hanging out in the long wet grass with insects, snakes and frogs, waiting for Lissouba and his killers, was a far more appealing option. It had been dusk for a while when West, whose angle on things encompassed a view of the limestone wall and was thus better than mine, raised a finger to inform me that the recon party had arrived. A dozen seconds later he displayed two fingers — two scouts. The first guy, skinny and crouched over almost double, came into my view; he was carrying an M16 but not a lot else. Traveling light. His slightly taller, but equally fyweight, buddy walked into my line of sight a few moments later. Though obviously on edge, given the way they gripped their guns — tightly, like they were handrails in a fast-moving train — both men moved well, their heads achieving an owl-like range of movement. They spent some minutes surveying the knoll, though they avoided coming into the elephant grass. Satisfied that the area was clear of threat, they found the trail into the rainforest and slunk into the darkness collected under the canopy. I shifted an arm, getting ready to stand, and West urgently held up a finger, followed thirty seconds later by a second. Two more men had arrived, uniformed twins of the first pair, and crouched in the middle of the knoll for several minutes before skulking off on the double along the path that led to the village of the damned.

We had no choice but to stay put and wait, just in case a third pair of scouts might pop up. This is, in fact, what happened, but with a variation. This time it was one guy on his own and he didn’t waste time checking out the knoll, probably fguring that the scouts preceding him had done it, but immediately made a beeline for the rainforest. Jesus, crafty bastards. The first pair of scouts was a decoy for the second pair, and all were decoys for Tailend Charlie here. This was a bad situation. The more recent arrivals meant that we would lose touch with the first pair of scouts, and the second pair would likewise get a good head start.

There was sudden movement beside me — West. He jumped up and threw his Ka-bar at Tailend. The blade shimmered through the twilight like a steel bird, impaled the guy’s left arm against his chest with a solid thud before he had time to react. West followed the knife, running at the man and hitting him with a flying tackle a split second later, taking him to ground. I ran at a crouch toward them from the elephant grass, grabbed the scout’s shirt collar and helped West drag him to the opposite side of the knoll and into the bush. West dropped the mag from the man’s rifle and stuffed it into his webbing.

‘And then there were four,’ he whispered, feeling for a pulse in the African’s neck and not finding one. He extracted his knife and wiped the blade on the man’s shirt. We wasted no time and ran to the section of rainforest that separated the knoll from the banana trees, where the other scouts had gone. We caught up with the second pair by the time they were a third of the way through the forest. The light was fading fast, like it does at the movies before the picture starts. The trees were alive with small monkeys, and the noise they made masked the fact that West and I were moving at a trot to get ahead of the second FARDC recon party.

We took a position either side of a bend in the path as it bisected a thicket of umbrella palms, and waited. The two Congolese crept by, so close I could see the sweat glistening on their skin and smell their body odor, a powerful unwashed smell that was sour and distinctly human, spiced with stale smoke from cheap tobacco. The men were moving slow, not talking, making a judgment call on each step, carefully placing their boots on the ground, expecting something was going to happen. They were right. One of the men was shaking, either from fever or nerves, I couldn’t tell. Maybe he was clairvoyant and could see his life coming to an end within the next few seconds.

And suddenly something moved in the bush close to where West was crouched and the men began firing into the shadows wrapped around the sergeant’s position. Their rifles spat death in the darkness, the Africans shouting over the rapid sound of their own gunfire cracking away on full auto. They sprayed away till their chambers came up empty. And then a pig broke cover and squealed in agony and fright as it ran down the path on its two front legs, its back bloody and broken, dragging its limp body behind. West leaped from a different set of shadows and jumped on the first shooter, taking him down like he was prey. My target stood his ground but shook like he’d spent the night in the freezer. I rushed him and kicked his legs out from under him so that he fell heavily onto his back, where he lay still with his eyes closed but mouth open.

‘Yours is still breathing,’ said West panting, standing over the African at his feet. The man’s neck had an odd kink in it.

I checked the pulse on my guy. He had one. I felt the back of his head. His hair was soaked with sweat and gritty with dirt and leaves, but there was no blood, no broken skin, no depression in the back of his skull. He’d hit his head on a gnarled tree root growing up through the compacted mud. ‘Out cold,’ I concluded. I checked him for ammo. Again, just the one mag. I knew what West would want me to do with him. ‘He’s going to be out for a while. We can do everything we need to do before he comes back.’

‘You the man, sir.’

I could tell he didn’t agree with the man’s decision.

We dragged both men off the path deep into the rainforest and covered them with palm leaves.

‘Look,’ said West, holding a bag made from recycled plastic sheeting tied around the African’s neck with a shoelace.

Mine had one too, though his was made of cotton cloth tied with sinew.

‘Superstitious bastards,’ West observed.

‘Yeah,’ I said, sucking in air, the adrenalin only just starting to ebb away.

‘Two to go.’

‘Where’d the pig come from?’ I asked.

‘Dunno. It was just there — turned up out of nowhere. I moved my foot and gave it a scare. Our shooters here were jumpy as hell.’

West was damn lucky and we both knew it. The broken back could just as easily have been his.

A familiar low whistle came from the direction of the path.

‘You expecting company?’ I asked West.

‘Nope.’

I looked hard but couldn’t see anyone. Then a familiar shape bobbed up and signaled, ‘on me.’ I couldn’t see a face in the dark but knew it was Cassidy. West and I, staying low and quiet, made our way over to him.

‘How many you accounted for?’ Cassidy asked, keeping his voice low.

‘Three,’ West replied.

‘I found two in the banana trees.’

‘Where are they now?’ I whispered.

‘Meeting their maker, whoever that is around here.’

‘Then that’s everyone accounted for,’ said West.

‘Five scouts?’

I nodded. ‘This Lissouba guy has been around. He staggered them. We didn’t expect to see you.’

‘The forest is the place to ambush the main force, where the trail splits. We hit them, fall back, hit them again. We can’t let them advance to the plantation. Once they reach those trees and the more open ground, with their numbers they’ll spread out and flank us. Boss, how much time we got, you reckon?’

‘It took us three hours to recon the area, travel time included,’ I said.

‘Then let’s give them the same amount of time,’ said Cassidy. ‘We can do a lot in three hours, especially with the stuff you told us about in the barn.’

‘Getting nervous doesn’t mean they’ll come out and fight,’ observed West. ‘Going on past experience, they seem to wait till dawn before they work up to it.’

‘I hope you’re wrong,’ said Cassidy, ‘’cause if you’re right, we might as well show those motherfuckers our jug’lars. We can only handle their numbers on our terms.’

That gave me a thought. ‘Come and get me two hours and forty-five minutes from now — I don’t want to be walking into any of your handiwork.’

‘Where you headed?’ West asked me.

‘Back to the knoll.’

‘Mind telling me what you’re going to do?’ Cassidy asked, checking his watch.

‘Poke Lissouba in the eye,’ I said. ‘See if I can’t provoke a reaction.’

Exactly two hours and forty-four minutes later — three hours after the first of the scouts appeared — I was looking over the edge of the wall toward the riverbank below. All was quiet, except for my constant companions, the mosquitoes. There were fires down there. A temporary shift in the air brought the smells of cooking up to my swollen nose and saliva filled my mouth the way seawater foods a torpedo tube. I spat onto the ground. I had company with me on the ledge: namely, the last scout Lissouba had sent up, the man West had killed with a knife throw. I had him standing on the edge of the limestone wall, balanced on a single leg. Rigor mortis had set in. I had him on one leg because its partner was bent out at an odd angle and locked in place by the rigor.

I took another look over the edge. A shift in the air took away the cooking smells and replaced them with the aroma of Tailend beside me. I switched to breathing through my mouth. The guy stank. Not his fault — death doesn’t wash — and at least the smell made him easy to find in the almost complete darkness. Once I found him, I brushed the ants off him, dragged him from the elephant grass to this spot and hoisted him to his feet. Correction, foot. The corpse’s arms were locked straight out some distance from the side of his torso. Come to think of it, given his body position, there was a pretty fair swan dive coming up. With a bit of luck, the body would land on someone important, maybe even Lissouba himself, and then the heart would go out of the Africans and everyone would just go on home. Wishful thinking.

‘Sorry for what I’m about to do, pal,’ I whispered. ‘But thanks for helping us out.’

I gave the corpse a shove in the back and over the edge he went, disappearing quickly into the void below. A moment later I heard Cassidy’s familiar dry whistle. He came and stood beside me and looked down.

‘That your poke in the eye?’ he asked. ‘Doing something like that — I wouldn’t have thought a guy like you would have it in you.’

‘What’s a guy like me?’

‘The righteous kind.’

Technically speaking, what I’d just done — desecrating the dead — would have had consequences if witnessed by unsympathetic eyes. The book said it was okay to maim and kill, but once dead, we were expected to leave the corpse in peace and not disturb the flies. But the Congo was like an acid bath that burned through civility. The only rule that seemed to count here was kill or be killed, the original law of the jungle.

‘Don’t worry me none, Cooper.’ Cassidy sucked something from between his teeth. ‘When in Rome, right?’

‘They do this kind of thing there too?’

I heard him grunt.

‘Where are our principals?’ I asked.

‘Where you left them. Nice and cozy, surrounded by bamboo, thorn bush and elephant grass. Boink has overwatch and we’ve armed Twenny for backup to release our guys.’

That meant we had a strike force of five: Cassidy, Rutherford, West, Ryder and me. The thick night air suddenly came alive with shouts and cries carried up to us from the darkness below. Gunshots barked among them. The rainfall was heavy in these parts, but a body coming down through the trees was just a touch heavier than usual. The folks below were mad. We needed them mad enough to make a very bad mistake.

‘We ready?’ I asked Cassidy.

‘I’ll let you know in the morning, if we’re still alive.’

Not the confident reply I’d hoped for, but we had little choice other than to force a showdown. Lissouba’s men could bottle us up, wear us down and sooner or later overwhelm us. Right now, we were as strong as we were going to be. We held the high ground, and we’d also recon-noitered it reasonably thoroughly. We didn’t have numbers but, for a short period of time, we held all the other cards worth holding. The only exit strategy left to us was to maul Lissouba so bad that leaving us alone was his best option. I again mentally went through the odds as we jogged back to the rainforest. Five against fifty, give or take. Only a lunatic would bet on us.

When they came within throwing distance, Lissouba’s men tossed grenades up and over the wall and onto the knoll, presumably to clear it. But there was nothing to clear, except maybe a path through the mosquitoes. The knoll was some way from our positions, lying in the mud, curled around tree roots in the rainforest, but we heard the explosions as dull thuds that punctured the night. And we waited.

Maybe it was the lack of resistance that emboldened them, but their first charge through the rainforest was all war cries and wild-ass shooting from the hip. A force of around twenty men swept along the trails, yelling and hooting across a front fifteen to twenty meters wide, straight through the area where Cassidy and West had hung clay pots in the trees over the trails. These pots had around three quarters of a pound of C4 and 350 steel balls distributed between them — about half the business end of our remaining Claymore — and were positioned to provide a short, violent interlocking field of fire. Detonators from the smoke grenades rigged to liana trip wires set them off. They exploded above the FARDC’s heads almost in unison and the hail of steel that beat down on them wounded more than half their number; a couple of them fatally, as far as I could see, from the way they fell.

Five men made it through and kept coming. I shot one, Rutherford got the other and I figured a third passed a little too close to Cassidy for his own good. Far over on my left, the remaining two tripped one of Cassidy’s surprises, a sapling onto which had been lashed some stools taken from the village workshop, their legs sharpened to points. The trap was positioned so that the sapling would swing through an arc of around ten feet and catch the unwary in the chest.

The Congolese were unwary.

The survivors from Cassidy’s hotpots retreated, dragging off their dead, but leaving behind the two men impaled on the stools. I crept left toward them, around and behind Cassidy, moving fast and, to avoid friendly fire, giving a cautionary whistle as I went. When I got close enough, I could see that one of the men was moving, his chin on his chest, three legs of a stool buried in his ribcage. His head moved languidly around in a circle. He hummed as if he had a gut ache and doing this somehow took away some of the pain. He died before he could get to the chorus. A grenade hung from his webbing. Both men had a spare mag tucked into the tops of their trousers. Their rifles were nowhere to be seen. I quickly hunted around for them but couldn’t find them. I figured they’d probably dropped them when the forest came to life and took theirs.

I fell back fifty meters, as we planned to do after the first attack. Rutherford, Cassidy, West and Ryder had already done so. I found Cas-sidy and handed over one of the spare mags. Neither of us said a word. I headed for a hole in our line that I thought needed to be plugged and took up a position against an old hardwood whose roots came down from above. I could see Rutherford, but only because I knew where to look. I couldn’t see Cassidy even though I knew where he was. I crept across to Rutherford, gave him the captured mag and then returned to my tree.

An hour and a half passed. I urinated where I stood. The liquid running down my leg was warm and comforting but then the cold quickly seeped in to take its place in my bladder and I began to shiver. It started to rain at around the same time, making a noise that sounded like a stampede of small animals as the squall line passed over the canopy. We’d been in this part of the world long enough now to know that sound would be used as cover.

Frag grenades suddenly detonated in and around our previous positions, the noise of the explosions booming around us, close and personal this time. I could hear fragmented metal tinkling like wind chimes in a hurricane as the metal storm lanced through the foliage, became embedded in tree trunks or fell steaming onto the soaked ground. The attacking force gave its whereabouts away moments later, charging along the forest trails once more, certain that we were half dead, or worse, shooting randomly, throwing ammunition around like rice at a wedding. Tracer, supersonic pencil lengths of red light, lanced through the trees all round us, but it was mostly high and all of it was wild. I guessed that the enemy was less than thirty feet from Ryder and West before they returned fire. The Congolese’s cries turned into screams, but still they kept coming. The shooting became point blank, desperate and anonymous, a rush of death in the darkness. And then silence. It hung between the trees, heavy and dark like blood-soaked cloth pegged out by the Reaper.

I looked toward the epicenter of the fight, over in Rutherford and Ryder’s direction, but couldn’t see anything, my night vision wrecked by the bright flashes of exploding ordnance. I turned back to scan the bush in front of me, just as the machete swung at my head out of nowhere. I lifted the M4, an instinctive reaction. The blade sparked as it glanced off the barrel and buried itself in the trunk of the hardwood. The man holding it wasted a precious second trying to work it free, during which time I swung the M4’s butt in an arc that caught the bottom of his chin. I heard his teeth splintering, a sound that reminded me of crunching ice. The force of the blow pushed his head up. He staggered back and I shot him through the hip, which was like hitting him with a five-pound sledgehammer. It blew him clean off his feet and landed him on his back. It was only when he fell that I saw that there was a boy accompanying him, and that he was close. The kid, shaking violently, was also pointing a large black rifle at me. The rifle discharged but the slug missed. The boy fdgeted with the selector mechanism, going for full auto I guessed, moving back and looking at the mechanism while he did so. I darted forward while he was preoccupied and kicked the gun out of his hands. He stood there, a small black shadow, slightly pigeon-toed, looking like any moment he was going to start bawling. I went to grab him but he shouted something, dropped to the ground and was gone, snatched by the shadows.

A short, sharp rustle in the bush to my left informed me that Cassidy had had his own visitors, but I couldn’t go to his aid without leaving a hole the enemy might penetrate and get in behind us. I had to leave him to it. Two gunshots and the situation there was resolved. Cassidy whistled a low note to let me know that it was resolved in his favor. I answered with a whistle. Time to fall back again.

We withdrew our line a hundred meters or so, mixing up the distance of each withdrawal as planned. When we were set, Rutherford whistled and approached.

‘Any more mags, Cooper?’ he asked, waving at his own personal cloud of bloodsuckers. ‘Duke and Mike are almost dry.’

‘No,’ I said. I did a mental count. ‘I got two rounds left in my Sig — nine, maybe ten in the M4.’

I popped the carbine’s mag and racked out the rounds with my thumb, counting ten as the spring released them into the palm of my hand. Ten rounds — better than nothing, but only by ten. I handed over six and fed four back into the slot. I also had the grenade the enemy had donated to our cause, which I kept. Rutherford said thanks and disappeared.

How many more people was Lissouba intending to sacrifice? How many men and boys did he have left at his disposal? He’d tried the full frontal assault and then the decoy run. What next? My PSOs and I all sat in the darkness, listening to the night, and faced our own terrors. Mine was that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember Anna’s face. But, for some reason, I had no trouble remembering the hole in her chest and the way her heart rolled around beneath her shattered ribs, the way a fish founders when it’s dumped on the pier with a hook in its mouth. Maybe this faceless dying person without an identity was my subconscious providing me with a representation of everyone I’d been close to in recent times, almost all of whom were dead. Maybe Leila’s comment about me being a killer was right on the money. I kept sticking my hand in the fire until someone tried to pull it out and it always seemed to be that someone else who got burned instead of me. Like Anna.

‘Mr Cooper, are you there?’ called a voice through the night.

I snapped out of it. The accent was thick, with African and French overtones, ‘Cooper’ pronounced ‘Coopah’.

‘Mr Cooper. I am Colonel Lissouba. We can work something out, you and I, yes? We can make a deal.’

Colonel Lissouba. How about that? I was disinclined to give away my position by opening my mouth. And, of course, any deal from this shitbird wouldn’t be worth the blood it was written in. Folks would die — my folks.

‘You and I need to talk, Mr Cooper. You do not like to fight my boys, I know this, but the boys are all I have left. You will be killing children. Are you a child killer?’

There was a sudden burst of automatic fire and the screams of two men dying, way out past Cassidy on our far flank. The sergeant signaled that he would go check and that I should cover his position, which was reasonably close to mine. He also put his finger against his lips to let me know that talking wouldn’t be smart. He didn’t need to remind me.

‘You try my patience, Mr Cooper,’ Lissouba called out, angered when he realized that more of his people had just died anonymously, hung up on another of Cassidy’s tricks. They were the screams of men, not boys, but the fact that they’d at least made it past puberty didn’t make me feel any better. All of us had had more than enough of killing. I heard a choking, gurgling noise on the night air — Cassidy making sure of death with his Ka-bar.

‘You must have very little ammunition left,’ Lissouba continued after a lengthy pause. ‘When was the last time you ate real food? You have civilians with you. They need to be cared for. Come out now. End this.’

I returned the offer with a loud silence.

‘I know that you cannot retreat. I have heard on the radio that there is the blood fever in the village. Your only way out is to negotiate with me. I have food. I can get you back to your friends across the border. I would like to help you.’

No doubt about it, this sorry puke could play the game.

The luminescent hands on my watch told me that it was around an hour before sunrise. I couldn’t make up my mind whether the night had flown past or crept by. My stomach was cramping, I ached in every joint and muscle, and the skin on several parts of my body was rasped away by the mud and the grit embedded in the fabric of my clothes. Keeping my eyes open required force of will. Even allowing myself to blink slowly wasn’t worth the risk — the urge to leave them shut was almost overwhelming.

‘You must come out and talk. If you make me come and get you, you will all die.’

So much for Mr Helpful.

‘I will give you one hour to discuss this with your people, enough time to agree that this is your only option, but not enough time to set more traps for us. One hour.’

We had a truce till dawn, but then Lissouba’s troops would be more able to avoid the booby traps with a little light on the situation. I waited for the colonel to continue but he’d stopped yapping. The rain continued its rant, however, coming down heavy and unrelenting, the drops from the canopy overhead obese, Boink-sized. I ran my left hand, still sheathed in the remains of a shooter’s glove, down my face and dragged anthill grit over my skin. The rainforest around me appeared as a series of black shadows edged with silver lines and the air smelled heavy and loamy, with a hint of rotting leaves and gunpowder.

I looked between the lines of Lissouba’s offer. He wouldn’t be trying to make a deal unless he, too, was down to his last reserves. Most probably he had one final charge left in his people. We, on the other hand, had less than the resources required to stop it. But whichever way it went, we were going to be killing young boys, kids who’d been press-ganged into fighting, abducted from their villages. These kids, however, could shoot and the reality was that their bullets killed and maimed just as effectively as the rounds fired by grownups. Jesus, this was even more fucked up than usual. I heard a soft whistle and, a moment later, Cassidy materialized out of the shadows beside me.

‘What you got left, boss?’ he asked, nodding at my M4.

‘Four rounds, one grenade and real bad breath.’

A row of his small teeth flashed in the darkness. ‘Yeah, where’s a mint when you need one? I got five rounds. And there’s half a Claymore deployed in our rear, out on the left flank where the rainforest thins out a little. What about West and the others? What stores they got?’

‘A few rounds apiece.’

Neither of us said anything for a few seconds. We both had the same question and answer running through our minds.

‘We can’t surrender,’ said Cassidy. ‘We know what they’re gonna do.’

I nodded. We did.

‘We could pull back through the village,’ he suggested. ‘They won’t go through there.’

‘We could, but we won’t,’ I said. ‘You don’t want Ebola — trust me.’ It had been almost twelve hours since my brief exposure to the flies that might also have buzzed around the body Rutherford and I found in the village, and I still had no cold or fu symptoms. I had no control over my bowels though, which, when I thought about it, was probably every bit as unpleasant for anyone walking behind me as it was for me. Worse, maybe.

‘We got no choice then, have we?’ Cassidy dropped the mag from his M4 and checked its load. ‘Yeah, five rounds.’ He gazed up at the canopy. When his eyes came back down from the unbroken blackness, they were glistening. I noticed that around his neck hung a ju-ju bag of the type worn by nearly all of the Congolese we’d come across. ‘Jesus, Major. I don’t know… They’re just fucking kids, goddamn it,’ he said. ‘We got seven smoke canisters left. Maybe we could pop them, cause a diversion. We could slip through their line while it’s still dark, steal their boat.’

‘With our principals?’ I reminded him. Something like that might have been an option if it had just been us — the PSOs — on our own, but I couldn’t see Leila and her makeup case pulling it off… ‘But maybe… maybe we can bluff our way out,’ I said. And that was quite an interesting thing to say, especially as I had absolutely no idea what I meant by it. Bluff our way out? The statement had come from the part of my brain that was gathering threads, tying and retying them in different ways till it came up with an answer, only I couldn’t see it, not consciously. The threads seemed to be these: smoke canisters, ju-ju bag, Leila’s makeup case, kids. Bluff our way out? Then it suddenly crystallized into an image. And, damn, it was one helluva long shot.

Cassidy scratched a sore on his scalp. ‘What sort of bluff?’

‘We need to get West and the others and go ask Leila a question.’

‘And what are we gonna ask her?’

‘Whether we can borrow her lipstick.’