Ghost Watch

Merde’

‘Aren’t we supposed to be heading north-east?’ I said into the microphone, looking over LeDuc’s shoulder and checking our heading on the compass among the flight instruments.

The French pilot’s now-familiar voice came through my headset over the cacophony of the Puma’s whirling parts.

‘There is a front all the way from Lake Kivu to Kigali, but a narrow band of clear weather is on the DRC side of the border. This is the best choice,’ he said.

I’d been briefed that Goma was only a hundred klicks away and just inside the DRC, as Cyangugu was just inside Rwanda. The plan I agreed to was to fly parallel to the border heading generally nor’ north east, keeping the aircraft within the relative safety of Rwandan territory and ducking across into the DRC only when we were adjacent to the MONUC encampment. Instead we were flying northwest across the border with the vast expanse of Lake Kivu away on our right when it should have been stretched out beneath us. A thick band of black cloud sat low over the lake and, to the east of its shoreline, gray wisps of rain hung from the underside of the cloud base like veils of a spider web. Flashes of lightning rippled through mighty thunderheads. Above us, however, the sky was a friendly late afternoon blue, the color mothers dress baby boys in. I conceded defeat. The flight path was the Frenchman’s call, just as the security arrangements were mine. Supposedly.

‘We won’t arrive in twenty minutes’ flying time. It will be closer to fifty,’ said LeDuc.

At least Travis had listened to my request to cut the show down — an unplugged version of the one given at Cyangugu. So on this trip, there’d be no stagehands, no dancers, no pyrotechnics, and no Ryder stand-in. At first, Leila had put up a fight, but then Ryder had a word with Ayesha, who then fed it to Leila that she was the only entertainer the men really cared about seeing. Of course, the diva found this argument utterly convincing.

The retinue accompanying each star to Goma was now the problem. The person who seemed best able to handle Leila was Ayesha, which meant, as far as I was concerned, she got a golden ticket. Twenny Fo then insisted it was only fair that one of his entourage accompany him. He chose Boink, who, according to Leila, was really worth two people, given his size, which meant she could have Shaquand. The rapper then lobbied hard to bring Peanut; my take was that Fo wasn’t too keen on leaving Peanut with Snatch unsupervised. Maybe he was concerned that his hair would get all braided up. Whatever, I agreed to the settlement on the condition that everyone got along, because we were all flying together in the one chopper. I amused myself with the thought that I could always throw the troublemakers out if I had to.

I watched the rainforest slide by under the Puma’s front windshield, the mid-morning sun beating down through the break in the clouds. Below, the thick triple canopy reminded me of a lawn with lumps in it. I glanced at Travis, and he gave me a nod. Arlen had implied that Travis was the keeper of all information on this trip; in other words, he knew everything I didn’t. Given that I knew dick, that made him a regular Einstein by comparison. I flicked a switch on the comm panel to have a private word with him.

‘So, be honest, Colonel. When did you know about this Goma gig?’ I asked him.

‘It wasn’t a firm arrangement. I was only told that it might happen.’

‘And why were you told to say nothing about it?’

‘Because it looked like Leila might say no to the whole trip if she got wind of it.’

‘Which reminds me, the base at Cyangugu — that’s supposed to be a secret, right? Why were she and Twenny Fo permitted into the inner circle?’

‘They were approached by the Pentagon. I think the concert at Goma is what this gig was all about from the beginning. Promises had been made.’

‘To the French?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, a peace offering.’

‘I didn’t know we were at war with them.’

‘We’re not — at least not at the moment. But we weren’t on good terms here in Africa a little while back. Our Army shot at theirs during the Rwandan civil war and the French shot back.’

That was a new one on me. ‘What do you know about Cyangugu and the army we’re schooling there?’ I asked.

‘Not a lot. I’m PR, not foreign relations.’

‘You’ll know more than I do.’

‘They told you. They’re CNDP — National Congress for the Defense of the People.’

‘Yeah, but who are they?’

‘Ethnic Tutsi. Mostly drawn from tribesmen across the border in the Congo.’

‘We’re training Congolese soldiers in Rwanda who then go back across the border to fight in the DRC?’

‘Their enemy is the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, otherwise known as the FDLR, the ones who fed Rwanda after the civil war. They’re Hutus.’

‘Sounds messy.’

‘You don’t know the half of it.’

‘What about the civilians back there? Lockhart’s friends. The Swedish guy from the gold company and his simian buddy — White, I think his name was.’

‘Expat businessmen. Maybe they helped Lockhart get his job done down there.’

‘What can you tell me about Goma?’

‘The UN has twenty thousand peacekeepers in the DRC — it’s their biggest peacekeeping force anywhere in the world, but they’re largely ineffectual. The DRC’s as big as Western Europe, and the UN would need four times that number to do the job. Goma was besieged several years back by the CNDP and things got ugly. I’m told that there are several big refugee camps there.’

‘Besieged by the people we’re training?’

‘We weren’t training them back then.’

A clusterfuck if ever there was one.

‘Sorry about the obfuscation,’ he added.

‘Was OSI in on it?’ I asked.

‘No, not as far as I know. AFRICOM likes to keep everyone bumping into each other. They don’t call this the “dark continent” for nothing.’

At least Arlen was off the hook.

‘Well, if you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘I’m going to try to get some shut-eye. It has been a long night.’

‘Sleep tight,’ I told him. I reached up and switched the intercom back.

Travis closed his eyes and rested his head against the quilted vinyl that lined the aircraft’s insides.

‘So, Capitaine. What’s your base like?’ I leaned forward and asked LeDuc, fighting a yawn. ‘The facilities and so forth.’

‘Goma — she is the Paris of small, muddy African bases,’ he said, turning to grin at me.

‘How does it compare with Cyangugu?’

‘There is no comparison. Your camp is uncivilized. Where is the fresh bread? Where are the croissants? In the bakery department, I tell you, Americans do not know merde from clay.’

I twisted around and checked on the payload. Ayesha, Leila, and Shaquand were sitting shoulder to shoulder behind Travis. The singer and her girls were more sensibly dressed now, wearing US Army wet weather jackets and ball caps. Leila was asleep between Ayesha and Shaquand, her head resting against her make-up artist’s, wearing a Chanel eye mask and with yellow plugs in her ears. Across the aisle, Twenny Fo and Peanut were seated in one row with Boink behind them in a row to himself, lots of brand names and gold chains between them. Lined up across the back of the aircraft was the loadmaster whose name I couldn’t pronounce, Cassidy, Rutherford, West and Ryder. Including myself, our party numbered twelve. Almost everyone behind me was either asleep or dozing. The POS-to-principal ratio wasn’t ideal, but it was better than it might have been.

I took a deep breath, put my head back and closed my eyes.

‘What was that?’ said a voice in my headset. The statement woke me up. Almost immediately after I opened my eyes, I felt g-forces load up, pushing me down into the seat. The aircraft was in a tight turn. I opened my eyes and saw that LeDuc and Fournier were talking heatedly to each other. I checked my watch. The mood on the flight deck had done a one-eighty from relaxed and cheery sometime in the last ten minutes. I leaned into the space between the pilots and flicked the comms switch. ‘So how are we doing?’ I asked them.

LeDuc ignored the question and snapped at the co-pilot. Then both of them began attacking a multitude of switches on the central and overhead consoles. And was that a warning bell I was hearing? I wasn’t sure about the specifics, but a warning bell accompanied by a sea of red lights was a problem in any language, especially when it happened in a chopper at seven thousand feet.

The pilots worked fast, reading dials and throwing switches, trying to get on top of whatever the situation was. They got a massive hint when one of the engines suddenly flamed out.

Shit! ‘Harnesses!’ I shouted behind me. ‘Check your harnesses!’

Through the headset and over the engine and rotor noise, I heard screams and shouting.

The aircraft lurched to one side; then the second engine coughed and backfired. The Puma was dropping into a spiral. LeDuc and Fournier were now shouting at each other — swearing or running checklists, I couldn’t tell. The chopper tipped down into a spiral dive. Then the second turbine stopped completely. Now it was the loadmaster’s turn to yell. My rough translation was that we were all going to die.

‘Mayday Mayday Mayday,’ yelled one of the pilots. ‘MONUC flight zero six, MONUC flight zero six for Goma…’

Everyone in the chopper was screaming, but I switched off at that point and closed my eyes. Two chopper crashes I’d experienced in Afghanistan had prepared me for what would come next. At least I was strapped in this time. My head was pushed violently from side to side by the forces acting on the aircraft. The airflow shrieked. Correction — that was the girls.

I was suddenly jammed down into my seat. That meant the pilots had lift from the airflow rushing through the spinning main rotor; they still had some control. That was good news. We were slowing, the nose coming up. We were going to be okay.

And then we hit.

My head slammed forward into my chest. The harness compressed my ribcage in an instant and air blasted from my lungs. Through it all I heard crumpling sounds like a car in a compactor. All went quiet as the chopper dipped forward and back, rocking. Then something snapped and the helo plunged forward, nose down. A weight came crashing through the centre of the cabin — a person. Whoever it was smashed through the Perspex windscreen and vanished into the blackness below. The air filled with the smell of garden clippings as all manner of metal debris from the back of the aircraft hurtled past me. And then something—

I regained consciousness facing downhill. The air in the cabin was filled with the smell of shredded leaves and the sound of warning bells. A headache thumped behind my eyes. I could hear people groaning. And then our world lurched again and dropped several feet with a tortured, gouging, scraping whine of metal under intense strain.

An object slapped me hard in the side of my face. I turned as far as the harness would allow and saw that the branch of a tree had speared through the observation window behind me.

I was coming to the conclusion that the ride hadn’t quite finished when something else broke with a loud crack, and the Puma plunged, smashing through more branches, which obliterated most of what was left of the windshield. The nose of the aircraft hit something solid and immovable at an angle and the instant deceleration snapped my head forward again, the harness winding me a second time. And then, rolling slowly, the aircraft tipped lazily onto its side and came to rest like a large dead animal.

All motion ceased.

After a brief silence, people started groaning again.

I just sat, taking a moment to come to grips with what had happened. But then the smell of hot jet fuel permeated the shock and gave my brain a kick-start. Get out get out get out… I ripped off the headset and patted myself down, first mentally, then physically. All I found were bruises. Blood dripping on my shoulder caused me to look upward. I jumped up unsteadily. It was Travis, hanging out of the seat by his harness. A deep, ragged slice ran from his shoulder up the side of his head. Jesus… his skull was cracked open. I didn’t need to check his pulse, but I did anyway, confirming that I hadn’t needed to check his pulse.

Shaquand, Leila, and Ayesha were behind him, hanging down, also suspended by their harnesses. Ayesha and Leila had their hands over their mouths, screaming as the numbing effects of the wild ride they’d just survived wore off. I counted twelve PAX. The right number. So who’d gone through the windshield? I did a recount. Shit, of all people, it was the loadmaster. Either his harness hadn’t been fastened properly, or it had failed. If anyone was a candidate for a broken harness, I figured it would have been Boink, but the big man was still buckled in, slowly shaking his head from side to side with his eyes closed, no doubt hoping this was all a bad dream.

In the back of the cabin, Cassidy dropped out of his seat onto Rutherford below him.

‘Fuck,’ I heard Rutherford say.

‘Shaquand! Someone help her!’ Leila screamed.

Ayesha was sobbing hysterically. Shaquand, seated beside Leila, wasn’t moving. I stepped over to her, careful not to fall. The tree branch that had gone through the side of the Puma had impaled the woman through the collarbone and continued through the skin of the aircraft. Her eyes were open and placid. I closed them.

Blood had spattered over Leila’s jacket. I checked the singer; she was all in one piece. I hit the harness release and supported her weight, then helped her down and out of the seat and sat her on the floor.

I checked Ayesha next. She was shaking but nothing was punctured or broken. I hit the release and lifted her down, her body racked with sobs.

‘You’re okay,’ I told her. ‘You hear me?’ I rubbed her arms up and down. Her eyes looked into mine, and the sobbing ebbed. ‘You need to focus so that we can get you and Leila out of here. She’s going to depend on you, okay?’

Ayesha nodded.

I crouched in front of Leila.

‘You all right?’ I asked.

She gazed at me unresponsive, in shock.

LeDuc and Fournier fell out of the cockpit behind me. I turned briefly and saw LeDuc’s face smeared with blood from injuries to his nose and mouth. The aircrew was damn lucky to be alive as the Puma’s nose was flatter than a wristwatch, squashed from its impact with the ground.

‘Get them out — hurry,’ LeDuc gasped, breathless, coming up on all fours.

The smell of jet fuel was heavy in the air, overpowering. I scoped the situation. Getting out was easier said than done. At first glance, the Puma appeared to be a sealed coffn.

‘Le panneau,’ said LeDuc. ‘The hatch.’ He pointed at what was now the ceiling.

I left Leila with Ayesha, climbed up the floor, now a wall, then reached across and threw back the hatch’s locking mechanism. Swinging out, I kicked the handle, hoping the door would slide open, but the rails it was mounted on were bent out of alignment. The hatch was jammed shut.

‘Cassidy,’ I called out. He stood, shaky on his feet.

I made a gesture that could loosely be interpreted as get your shit together. He nodded, gave Rutherford a hand out of his seat, then checked West and Ryder before coming forward to see how Twenny Fo, Boink, and Peanut were doing.

The rapper and Boink were moving their heads and arms slowly, their movements oddly disconnected from the situation, as if they were in zero gravity. Peanut appeared to be unconscious. West gave him a shake and he opened his eyes.

‘C’mon,’ I yelled at my team. ‘Move it!’

The only exit possible was through the cockpit’s smashed front windshield.

‘There!’ I pointed forward.

Rutherford scrambled past me, climbed into the cockpit over the center floor console and kicked out the remaining Perspex.

‘Duke, you get the principals clear once they’re outside,’ I said, sending him through.

There was a lot of hot metal in those turbines. We didn’t have a lot of time before this crate blew.

Cassidy lifted Leila in his arms and passed her through the limited space into Rutherford’s waiting hands. Next was Ayesha. Twenny Fo pushed Peanut ahead and then jumped out after him. Boink climbed through the space on his hands and knees, but his gut became wedged between the pilot and co-pilot’s chairs. Cassidy and I put a shoulder to each butt cheek and shunted him free.

‘LeDuc, got a medical kit on board?’ I asked the Frenchman.

‘Down the back. I get it. You go. It is my ship. Henri and I are last off.’

Fournier agreed, grim-faced.

This was one argument I was happy to lose. I tapped Cassidy on the shoulder.

‘Go!’

The big sergeant didn’t need to be told twice. I had a last look at Shaquand and Travis. There was nothing we could do for them. I snatched off the colonel’s dog tags and leaped after Cassidy. Stumbling over the windshield frame, I came down heavily onto the ground, which was covered by torn tree branches and shredded leaf litter. Lying beside me was the loadmaster who’d shot out of the Puma to his death. I got to my feet and looked down at him. The man’s body was crumpled, his legs and arms splayed out at impossible angles. His eyes were open, and he’d bitten off the end of his tongue. I pulled his tags and stuffed them into my pocket.

Whump. Heat warmed the side of my face. A fire had burst into life on the far side of the chopper. Flames illuminated the metal around the main rotor housing. Hot kerosene fumes fooded my nostrils. The flames built quickly, searching for more fuel. Pretty soon they were going to find it.

‘LeDuc,’ I yelled into the chopper. ‘Get out!’

I saw two desperate shadows tangling together as they scrambled into the cockpit. LeDuc shouted something at Fournier.

A small explosion shuddered the Puma’s airframe and a cover blew off part of the fuselage. It spun through the air and smacked with a crumpling sound into a tree. A hand reached out of the cockpit. I grabbed hold of it and pulled, and Fournier tumbled clear, rolling some way down the hill.

The flames were rising ten feet into the air on the far side of the fuselage. The heat was now searing my skin. The tanks were going to blow any second.

‘LeDuc!’ I screamed into the chopper.

A white plastic case with a red cross on it flew through the opening, followed by a man. LeDuc. I grabbed him, took hold of his clothing and heaved him down the hill after Fournier. I took a running leap away from the wreckage at the instant the ground beneath my feet shifted. An explosion rent the air and a shockwave followed that lifted and hurled me down the hill into a screen of dense wet bush. Burning fuel fell around us along with chunks of metal. I covered my head beneath my arm and lay where I landed, waiting for the shower of metal and faming jet fuel to bury me. Then my nose picked up something other than kerosene burning. I lifted my head. It was LeDuc. He was only a handful of feet away and his legs were on fire.

LeDuc jack-knifed when he realized that he’d become a Roman candle. He rolled and slapped at the flames while I jumped up and doused them with handfuls of wet leaf litter and earth.

When the flames were extinguished, we both lay there in the bush, exhausted, the fire-retardant flight suit protecting the French pilot’s legs steaming and smoking along with my Nomex gloves. We caught our breath watching the chopper burn twenty meters up the hill, the heat from the inferno only just bearable.

I got to my feet eventually and held out a smoking hand to LeDuc.

‘Merci, mon ami,’ he said, hoisting himself up.

I handed him the tags taken from the dead loadmaster. LeDuc accepted them, unzipped a small backpack hanging off one shoulder and dropped them into it.

‘Claude was a good man,’ the Frenchman said. ‘Married to a local woman in Goma. One child.’

The hill we found ourselves on was reasonably steep, about a forty-degree incline. Here and there were outcrops of wet black volcanic rock. The ground was a tangle of tree roots, mud and fint.

I heard a whistle and scoped around for its source. It was Ryder. He waved at us from thirty meters up the hill. I could just make him out through a tossed salad of palm fronds and snaking vines. I could also see Cassidy and West, but not Boink or Leila. Aside from the dense greenery, the fact it was dusk wasn’t helping with the visibility. I looked up and a burnished sky twinkled like pale blue stars through the holes in the tree canopy. Technically, at least, it was still daytime up there. We’d come down on the side of a heavily wooded valley, more rainforest than jungle. Wet black tree trunks patched with lime-green moss mingled with various species of palms, or shrubs with broad, fleshy, boat-shaped leaves. Liana vines, the type Tarzan swung on, hung down everywhere, some with no apparent anchor point overhead. I took another look at the canopy. It was mostly a solid roof, except where a fallen tree had left an opening and the plant life had burst forth on the forest floor below it as if with a steroidal fury, each bush and shrub competing in a life and death struggle with its neighbor to claim the precious extra sunlight.

From the looks of all the broken tree limbs and shredded foliage lying around, the trees, many well over a hundred feet, had cushioned our fall and saved our lives, gloving the Puma like a big green catcher’s mitt.

‘French helicopters never go down, huh?’ I said to LeDuc as I hoisted Fournier to his feet. Both pilots’ faces were black with burned kerosene. Mine was probably the same.

‘I think perhaps we took on dirty fuel,’ he replied and then, with a shrug, added, ‘Nothing we could do.’

‘You could’ve checked it.’

‘We did, of course.’

‘Injured?’ I asked Fournier, who was wincing.

‘Mon épaule,’ said the co-pilot. ‘My shoulder. C’est disloquée.’

‘Dislocated?’

‘Oui,’ said Fournier.

I checked the lieutenant’s arm. It wasn’t broken, but I could feel that the joint had sprung.

‘I can put it back in,’ I told him.

‘Do it,’ said Fournier with a nod, turning away.

I took hold of the forearm and put my thumb on the joint so that I could feel what was happening under the skin. He let out an extended grunt as I rotated his arm back and forth slowly and popped it back in.

‘Rest it,’ I told him. ‘Nothing’s broken. You should be able to use it again in a day or so.’

‘Merci, monsieur,’ he said, forcing a smile.

Picking our way up the hill, we came across the plastic medical case. The heat from the fire had distorted it on one side, but its contents were intact.

Further up the hill, Rutherford, Cassidy, and Ryder had gathered our principals together behind an ancient fallen moss-and-fungi-covered tree.

‘How’re we doing?’ I called out as we approached.

Ryder was about to provide an answer when I heard Leila scream, ‘I hate you!’ Then I saw her pummeling Twenny Fo in the chest with her fists. ‘This is your fault! Your fault! Shaquand would still be alive. I hate you!’

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ the rapper responded, ‘She was good. I loved her like family. I’m sorry, yo.’ He wrapped his former lover in his arms, and Leila stopped hitting him and merely sobbed, her shoulders heaving, but then she wrenched herself free and slapped him across the face as hard as she could.

‘Ouch,’ said Rutherford.

‘I hate you,’ she repeated in case he hadn’t caught it the first two times, and then burst into tears and allowed herself to be embraced by Ayesha.

A little away from them, Peanut was standing and staring at the tree canopy. Beside him, Boink was rocking from side to side as if he’d lost his marbles. When I was a kid, I’d seen an elephant doing the same thing at the circus. The animal eventually broke its chain and sat on its handler, killing him. I hoped the big guy wasn’t planning on sitting on anyone.

I could see that Ayesha had a cut on her forearm and that Peanut had a minor cut and Boink a more serious one. I handed the medical kit to Ryder and said, ‘See what you can do with this, Duke.’

A couple of fat drops of rain landed on my face from above, the advance guard of a major assault from that quarter.

Great.

A peal of thunder rolled through the trees, and a downpour began to slant through the hole that our arrival had punched through the canopy. I heard a squeal from either Leila or Ayesha as they took cover in the lee of a tree trunk. This wasn’t rain. These were half cups of ice-cold water dropped from a thousand feet. It was an attack.

Cassidy, down at the far end of the log, beckoned me with a signal.

‘Listen,’ he said.

It took a few seconds for my hearing to adjust so that the familiar sound of small arms fire could be heard within the fusillade of rain. The gunfire was coming from somewhere in front of us, beyond the burning chopper, and it was coming closer. My gut felt like an eel had been released into it.

A sudden flash of lightning lit up the trees and, a split second later, thunder burst over us with the boom of an artillery shell.

‘LeDuc,’ I called out, motioning for him to come down.

The Frenchman trotted toward us with his co-pilot following, the man’s arm now in a sling.

‘Who the hell’s shooting at who?’ I asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, his voice full of concern. ‘There are at least six armies fighting each other in the DRC.’

‘How many of them are friendly toward the UN?’

‘Sometimes one, sometimes none.’

‘You got a map?’ I asked him. ‘I’d like to know where shit creek is relative to Cyangugu.

‘Oui,’ he said, opening his pack. He pulled out a tactical pilotage chart and rested it on the log. ‘We are here,’ he said, pointing to a spot on the chart along a line drawn with a grease pencil. Rainwater pooled in the map’s creases, and then ran off its plastic-coated surface.

‘You get a response from the Mayday call?’

‘Non,’ he said.

Conventional wisdom said to stay with the downed aircraft, but it appeared that we’d had the extra bad luck of coming down in the middle of an argument that was being settled with cordite and lead. Conventional wisdom didn’t take that fairly major detail into account.

LeDuc produced an emergency locator beacon, or ELB, from his pack.

That was good news.

Just then a sudden whoosh of a shell arced overhead, fired from somewhere behind us. Mortar fire. The round burst out of sight further down the hill.

And just like that, the good news ended.

‘Jesus, where the hell have you put us down?’ Rutherford shouted at LeDuc over the thunder, just so the Frenchman knew who was to blame.

Then a rocket-propelled grenade came out of nowhere, ripped through the air and exploded inside the Puma, sending a fireball into the treetops.

‘Shit,’ West exclaimed. ‘Where did that come from?’

Behind us, Leila and Ayesha were shrieking, their hands over their ears.

‘Quiet!’ I shouted at them. They ignored me.

I signaled Ryder and pulled my finger across my throat, telling him to silence them any way he had to. He pulled the women to the ground and put his arms around them. Twenny Fo, Boink, and Peanut dropped to their knees where they stood. Cassidy, Rutherford, and West had taken up firing positions, sighting their M4s on the forest downhill, covering any approach from that direction.

Men’s voices were calling out from the forest below the burning Puma. They were whooping and hollering. I couldn’t understand the language, but it was full of bloodlust.

‘Ammunition?’ I asked Cassidy.

‘Standard loadout,’ he said. ‘Same as the others. I already checked.’

That meant four magazines each for the M4s, two spares for the side-arms, Sigs for Ryder and me, Berettas for the Army guys. No frag, no smoke. Shit.

Our position was roughly forty feet up the hill from the blazing helicopter.

‘There’s a lot of lead being passed around. Could even be company strength down there — a hundred or so men,’ said Cassidy, assessing. ‘Assault rifles, light machine guns. RPGs we know about, grenades we don’t, but only because, so far, no one’s tossed one. At least, not at us.’

Men surged through the trees, firing wildly into the aircraft wreckage.

‘Who else flies Pumas in this part of the world?’ I asked LeDuc.

‘Only MONUC — the UN force.’

‘Looks like you’ve really built some bridges in these parts,’ I said.

More mortar rounds began dropping into the trees downrange, beyond the Puma’s remains.

‘And where’s that coming from?’ West wondered aloud.

‘The ridgeline, I ’d say,’ Cassidy reasoned. Several rounds hit the trees and airburst over their position. A whirling thrash of metal fragments stripped off the leaves and caused men to go down screaming.

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

‘Where to?’ Cassidy gave me a look that said he needed an answer before he’d do anything.

‘We can’t go down the hill and heading up’s probably not an option till we know who’s there. So do we slide left or right? We’ve got three right-handed shooters and one lefty — you. I say we head right so that the majority of us can shoot downhill across our bodies, if we have to, without having to turn before firing. We traverse till we make the ridge-line on our flank and rely on LeDuc’s ELB to get us a dust off.’

‘What if the threat comes from the high side?’ Cassidy said.

‘You’re the lefty,’ I said, keeping things light. ‘I’m counting on you.’ I nodded at his M4. ‘You can use that thing, right?’

‘Done much field work in your time, Major?’ he retaliated.

‘Some,’ I said.

‘The mission’s changed. No one’s gonna think any less of you if you hand off responsibility in this situation.’

‘You mean hand it off to you?’ I asked him.

He shrugged.

So here it comes, the macho SOCOM bullshit. And where was Ryder to keep him in line like Arlen had said he would?

‘We’ve got a couple of principals to deliver in one piece,’ I said. ‘I can’t see what’s changed.’

He shrugged again. ‘Okay, sir, your way. Just trying to help out.’

‘You think there’s a problem with the plan?’

‘I got no mind to change it.’

The small arms fire had tapered off somewhat, as had the mortar shelling. The thunderstorm, however, had only been warming up. There was lightning every second or less, and the rain had gone from heavy to blinding. I signaled Ryder to gather the principals and bring them down to us.

Thirty seconds later, we were huddled in a circle behind the log, Rutherford and West keeping watch.

‘Anyone got a cell phone?’ I asked. Mine was now a liquid somewhere inside the Puma.

Leila pulled out a personalized rose-gold iPhone from her jacket pocket. Ayesha, Boink, Ryder, Cassidy and Rutherford also produced cells.

‘Anyone raising a signal?’ I asked.

Six heads shook.

I moved on. ‘Who has serious injuries that need further attention?’

No one piped up. I saw that the gash on Ayesha’s arm now wore a bandage, as did a cut on Boink’s hairline. Both cuts seeped blood.

‘Your arm. You doin’ okay?’ I asked Fournier.

He nodded.

Ayesha’s chin quivered and Leila’s makeup needed emergency treatment. Boink seemed a little more present than he had been, but Peanut was still off on some other planet beyond our solar system. I envied him.

I came straight to the point. ‘We’re vacating this area immediately, walking in that direction,’ I said, indicating with a hand signal, ‘keeping the low side of the hill on our left. We appear to have landed in the middle of a disagreement. We have no intelligence on the forces below us or further up the hill. We have no radio either, so we can’t identify ourselves as friends or neutrals to the folks doing the shooting. But we have a map, and we know our position. Now all we have to do is get to a clearing where the electronic homing beacon can tell the MONUC rescue choppers where to find us. And I’m confident that by this time tomorrow we’ll be turning our noses up at snails in the French compound. Everyone clear?’

Leila and Ayesha looked at me, their eyes wide with terror. Twenny Fo had his arm around Peanut. Boink stared at me, frowning. I noticed for the first time that he’d somehow managed to hang onto that bowler hat of his, pulling it down so that it covered his bandage. Barely perceptible nods from all but Peanut made me think that maybe the principals had actually taken in what I’d said. I demonstrated a few simple hand signals and got everyone up on their feet. And that’s when I froze. Nervous young soldiers with full automatic weapons had surrounded us. The raging storm and small arms fire had concealed the sound of their encirclement, and their line of approach had been outside Rutherford and West’s line of sight. Leila and Ayesha started screaming. The Africans closed in, yelling. One of them slapped Leila backhand across the face, which stopped her screaming and also silenced Ayesha. I counted ten men.

LeDuc began plying them with French. I heard the word ‘MONUC’ mentioned several times, along with the word ‘allies’. He was telling them that we were supposed to be pals.

One of the Africans responded by giving him a friendly jab in the ribs with the stock of his AK-47, which doubled the Frenchman over in pain. Fournier went to help his capitaine and took a rifle butt to the head, which put him on his knees.

Cassidy took his hands off his M4 and raised them behind his head.

It wasn’t one of the signals I’d demonstrated to our civilians, but they got the message anyway and followed suit.

A soldier a little older in years than his comrades barked an order and our weapons were stripped from us. One of the others went around and checked that our fingers were interlocked behind our necks.

The soldier giving orders walked over to Cassidy, flicked with a broken fingernail at the Stars and Stripes patch on his shoulder, and said, ‘American.’ He said it with interest, as if Cassidy was from an intriguing species that would look good stuffed and mounted over a fireplace.

‘You speak English?’ I asked him.

‘Tais-toi!’ the African shouted.

‘That’s a no then,’ I said.

‘He wants you to shut up,’ LeDuc whispered.

The officer — at least, I assumed that’s what he was — hit LeDuc in the side of the head, knocking him down. The ELB fell out of his hand. The officer bent over and picked it up. He examined it, then threw it back on the ground and stomped on it a couple of times till the plastic casing disintegrated, revealing a smashed circuit board.

One of the soldiers pushed me in the back to get my feet going, then shoved me a second time. They were marching us down the hill in a loose column. At the head of the column I saw West lower one of his hands, testing the rules. A soldier kicked him hard in the leg. The African then aimed his weapon at West’s head, which had the effect of making the sergeant duck into a half crouch as if he were expecting a bullet.

The Africans laughed at him.

Yeah, hilarious.

A bolt of lightning lit up the area for the briefest instant, freezing the moment like a snapshot. Thunder rolled right on top of it, another bursting artillery round. The rain pelted the ground and broke into a mist that rose as if the earth itself were exhaling.

Sporadic fire was still coming from the area below the wreckage. I doubted the ELB would have been able to get its signal through the electrical storm anyway, which meant the MONUC air traffic controllers at Goma International Airport only had an approximation of our last position, the one the pilots would have given in the Mayday call, assuming we were high enough for them to have had it received.

I drank the kerosene-tasting water streaming down my face and wondered what would happen to us once this unit met up with the people who’d popped a rocket into the chopper. I was prepared to bet that at the bottom of the list would be a Napoleon brandy, a croissant and a ride back to Cyangugu. As I saw it, we didn’t have much of a window here. We had to act before too many more soldiers became involved, and the odds went from bad to zip-me-in. And, while I knew this with absolute certainty, I hesitated. The majority of organized attacks are successful; the bodyguards usually die; the bodyguards rarely fire their weapons effectively, if at all; the bodyguards almost never affect the outcome of the attack.

As I was thinking this, I saw the briefest futter of something black flying through the air. It alighted on the back of the head of one of the Africans accompanying the column. Was it a bat? I peered at it hard. No, Jesus, it was a black throwing knife, barely visible against the victim’s black hair. The blade was embedded in the man’s skull just above the juncture of the spinal column and the base of his brain. There was nothing accidental about the target area. Whoever threw it knew exactly where to put it. The man began stumbling like he was drunk. Then he collapsed right in front of me, tripping me up so that I fell forward, out of control. As I went down, I grabbed the first thing I saw — the barrel of a rifle beside my face and pulled it down. The stock at the other end swung around and smacked into the mouth of the soldier holding it. His finger, caught inside the trigger guard, caused the weapon to fire off a three-round burst, which shot the kneecap clean off the soldier walking ahead of me, and he went down with a scream.

The next four seconds were a blur.

Cassidy swung his arm into the head of the distracted soldier closest to him, crashing the point of his elbow with ruinous force into the soft temple area. The man crumpled to the ground like an old suit slipped off its hanger. West turned to the guard beside him and buried his forehead in the guy’s face, smashing his cheekbone with a crack that reminded me of the sound the Puma made when it hit the tree. Then Rutherford took on his guard with a shoulder charge, propelling him into a tree trunk. And when he bounced off it, the SAS sergeant completed the move with a palm thrust to the throat that crushed the man’s windpipe.

I turned around in time to watch Leila using her fingernails to rake the face of the African struggling to hold her. The man howled and let go of her and covered his face with his hands as he ran — unfortunately for him, straight into Boink. The man mountain lifted him into the air, one hand on the African’s back and the other on his head. He then twisted his head, instantly breaking the man’s neck, and threw the body aside like a bag of trash. It landed beside LeDuc, who was face down in the mud — either dead or out for the count, I couldn’t tell which — but the soldier accompanying him was nowhere to be seen.

‘Ayesha! No!’ Leila cried out and started running down the hill. A shadow picked itself up off the ground and tackled her before she’d taken more than half a dozen steps. It was Ryder. The two thrashed around, a tangle of arms and legs, Leila going for the agent’s eyes with those nails of hers until she understood who it was.

Movement down the hill caught my attention. I realized that the gun I’d grabbed was in my hands, and the Africans were running away. We couldn’t allow them to regroup, inform on us and bring reinforcements. So I found targets, fired once, twice, and two men dropped to the ground as if their shoelaces were suddenly tied together. Sighting the rifle left and right, I counted four more soldiers, including the officer — all of them backing away toward the exploded Puma. But these guys weren’t running, they were taking it slow. And I couldn’t shoot them, on account of they were holding Twenny Fo, Peanut, Fournier, and Ayesha in front of them, using them as human shields.