I hoped not, but I knew where he was coming from. I breathed hard. Adrenalin levels were high. We’d had the fight. Now came the flight.
‘Stick close to us,’ I told our civilians. ‘Be as quiet as you can and keep to the shadows.’
Leila let out a sob. If this was diva crap, it had to end. I considered slapping her but decided this was not the right time to make myself feel better, so instead I sat beside her. Convulsions racked her body. She was in shock, the realization of what she’d just managed to avoid knocking the Rodeo Drive out of her attitude. All that was left was a scared young woman struggling to deal with her current reality.
I put my arm around her. ‘You can do this, Leila,’ I said quietly, giving her a squeeze.
She shook her head. ‘N . . . no . . .’
‘Yes, you can.’ I took a deep breath and let it out, which always helps when you’re about to lie through your teeth. ‘We are going to walk right out of this place, one step at a time. You’ll see.’
‘They were going to r . . . rape us.’
‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘I’m sc . . . scared,’ she said.
‘We’re all scared, but it’s time to go.’
‘Yeah, Leila; c’mon, girl,’ Boink whispered.
‘I don’t want to d . . . die here.’
‘That’s not going to happen,’ I repeated. ‘They’d fire my ass for sure.’
Ryder crouched beside her and hooked a lock of her wet, muddy hair behind an ear.
‘You’ll be back in the recording studio next week and all this will just seem like a bad day in rehab,’ I said.
It took a moment for my words to penetrate. She half cried, half laughed.
‘Duke’s going to stay right beside you all the way, aren’t you, Duke?’
‘Right beside you,’ he repeated.
‘But you have to be as quiet as you can. I want you to breathe.’
She breathed.
‘Deeper.’
She breathed in and out several times and her shoulders gave a final shudder.
‘Better?’ I asked her.
She nodded.
‘Things get hard to handle, that’s what you do – breathe deep.’
Leila sucked in another breath.
‘One step at a time, okay?’
She nodded again.
‘Ayesha? How about you?’
‘I’m oh . . . okay.’
‘Good. Got your bags packed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll send someone up to collect them,’ I said, standing. ‘LeDuc – Marcel’s your buddy. He misbehaves, let me know. Better still, let Boink know.’
The African got the drift, if not the specifics, and his eyes were wide with fear, the whites showing in the almost complete darkness.
‘
Oui
,’ he said.
Rutherford and West rearranged the corpses so that they appeared to be sitting with their backs against the enclosure, mimicking our positions. We all then moved to the enclosure gate, pausing there to make sure the guys who had paid us a visit had no one keeping watch. Nothing moved. The loudest noise was my own heartbeat. I followed the advice I gave Leila and Ayesha, and dragged a couple of breaths down to my toes to get the nerves under control.
The downpour had become a misting of light rain, which neither helped nor hindered us. There was no moon, however, which sat on the asset side of the balance sheet. The rebel force had long since retired for the night and this being the very rear of their encampment, I was hoping for fewer rather than more guards on duty. Nevertheless, we took it slow and careful. Cassidy and I scouted forward, keeping to the foliage, which was patchier up on the ridgeline than it was down in the valley. It made moving around easier, but reduced the cover. West, Rutherford, Ryder, and LeDuc brought the principals forward only when we were sure that the coast was clear.
It wasn’t that late, maybe a little after ten thirty, but the place was quiet, the exhaustion of the day’s battle weighing heavily on the men. As hoped, security proved to be light. Cassidy and I found several large groups of men huddled under ponchos, tentless like their enemies, and we skirted around them easily. Along the way, we encountered three guards, all of whom were asleep at their posts, wrapped in ponchos and seated at the bases of trees, their weapons cradled in their laps.
We arrived at the HQ without incident, and stopped behind a rock outcrop to survey it. All lights were out. Frogs were everywhere, making a sound that reminded me of someone knocking on a door. There were hundreds of them. The overall effect was like a large team of salesmen let loose inside an apartment building. In the HQ spread out before us, the landscape was black on black, which made detail difficult to make out, but the layout of the area was in my head from our earlier welcome by Colonel Fucknuts, which helped. I let my eyes get used to the shapes and then waited for any movement to highlight potential threats.
Ryder nudged my arm and indicated something going on off to my left. I saw nothing, and then a red dot in the darkness expanded and briefly illuminated a face. A smoker. His weapon was slung on his shoulder, which suggested he wasn’t expecting any trouble. As we watched, another guard revealed himself, smoking, wandering around apparently randomly among the tents. So, two guards. We kept watching.
Correction, three guards.
Correction, five guards, including another smoker.
Shit. Our chances of success were diminishing.
We waited another few minutes, but the count stopped at five.
‘One of those suppressed QCWs would come in handy right about now,’ Rutherford whispered in my ear. After a few moments, he added, ‘With a night scope.’
I put my finger against my lips then drew it across my throat.
He nodded, and produced a US-made Ka-bar taken from the soldiers we killed back at the pen. The knife’s razor-sharp blade was a non-reflective dull black and perfect for the job at hand, as was the SAS sergeant wielding it.
I indicated that he should take West with him, and leave the smokers till last so that we could see when the threat was negated. Rutherford confirmed that he understood the orders, backed away from the rock in company with West, similarly armed, and I lost them just seconds later, their black silhouettes becoming one with the night shadows.
I waited, watching the smokers who were by now at opposite ends of the HQ. One of them dropped his butt and didn’t pick it up. Scratch one. At almost the same instant, on the opposite side of the HQ, the other smoker put the cigarette in his mouth but didn’t get to inhale. Scratch two. Smoker number three took a few seconds longer for his habit to get him killed. I heard nothing. As the smokers were the last to go, I knew that the HQ was now clear and that we could move. I signaled Cassidy and Ryder to follow with the principals and we all rendezvoused with Rutherford and West, meeting up with them in front of the trestle tables.
I was surprised to see what appeared to be a large rifle cradled in West’s arms. I ran my hand down the long barrel. Yep, that’s what it was. He pulled back a canvas cover on one of the tables to show me where he’d found it and I saw the familiar black shapes of body armor and submachine guns – our guns – the ones the lieutenant and his unit had confscated. Shit, it seemed that our gear had simply been left here and forgotten about. We recovered what we needed: the backpacks containing the spare mags, tinned radishes and beef jerky, a couple of the QCWs, most of the Nazarians and M16s and, of course, the sniper rifle. The binoculars were missing, dammit.
This was where the half an idea I said I had was really going to get interesting. I led the way to the far corner of the HQ area, and picked up the trail that we’d followed in, frogs jumping out of our way. A couple of minutes later, we were standing at the spot I’d seen when we arrived here, the one that provided the view across to the east. Now, however, it was just a very large black void.
‘You’re fucking kidding me?’ said Cassidy, my half-a-plan suddenly becoming clear to him. From the way he said it, I was thinking maybe he thought I had half a brain.
‘No I’m not,’ I said. ‘This is the way out.’
Boink leaned forward for a closer look at the nothingness that yawned a few inches in front of his Adidas.
Marcel spoke rapidly and fearfully to LeDuc.
‘Cooper, he cannot swim,’ the pilot translated.
‘Me, neither,’ said Ayesha.
‘I got a problem with heights,’ I said. I didn’t, but I told everyone that to make them feel better. It didn’t appear to.
‘Swimming’s not the immediate problem,’ said Rutherford. ‘How exactly we gonna get the big man down there?’
‘And how do we know the water’s deep enough for us to jump into?’ asked Ryder.
My answers weren’t nearly as good as the questions, but I gave them anyway. ‘I had a look when we came in. A couple of ravines empty into it, but the pool down there is pretty still, which means it’s probably got some depth.’ No one appeared particularly convinced. ‘Look,’ I whispered, failing to keep a lid on my impatience, ‘if anyone’s got an alternative, now’s a good time to put it on the table. But we’ve left a trail of dead people behind us, like Hansel and Gretel left bread crumbs, so whatever we do we’ll have to do it quick.’
‘A jump gets bad for your health at six storys,’ Rutherford said.
I could have told them about the time I fell out of a plane without a parachute and survived a fall of around twenty thousand feet. But I knew no one would believe it – hell, I still didn’t believe it – so I kept that to myself.
‘A hundred feet is about the limit,’ said Cassidy. ‘Land the right way and you should be okay.’
‘What’s the wrong way?’ Ryder asked.
‘On your head,’ the master sergeant replied.
‘Get me the hell down to where I have to jump an’ I’ll do the rest, yo,’ said Boink, sucking it up.
I realized that, being as large as he was, Boink probably hadn’t seen his feet in quite a while. We’d have to rope him down to the jump point. We had no rope, but I knew where to get some. To Cassidy, I said, ‘Find some cover. If we’re not back inside ten minutes, get everyone down as best you can. Mike, follow me.’
Keeping to the shadows, West and I skulked back to the HQ, where everything was as quiet as any mortuary invaded by frogs would be. I tripped on a dead smoker.
‘Watch your feet, boss,’ West whispered in my ear.
‘Next time, clean up your mess,’ I told him.
The DRC men hanging in the trees hadn’t gone anywhere.
‘What are your climbing skills like?’ I asked.
‘Average,’ he replied.
‘Then they’re better than mine. Up you go and cut three of them down. Wait till you feel me take the weight of the body before you cut. Don’t drop the rope ends. Bring ’em all down with you.’
‘Roger that,’ he said.
We moved one of the trestle tables, positioning it under the bodies. West chose one of the dead guys on the end of the row, jumped and grabbed the rope above his head, and then shinnied up. The rope was tied around a bough maybe twenty feet off the ground. Three lengths of it would give us enough to do the job. When I felt West had stopped climbing, I took the weight of the corpse, and lifted it. A disgusting ooze with a putrid, unspeakable stench leaked out of its nostrils, trickled onto my ear and ran down my neck. A second later, I felt the rope cut. I lowered the body onto the table, then onto the ground. We repeated this a couple of times while I concentrated on stopping the gag refex. West brought down the ends of the cords and we slipped the nooses off the cold, broken necks.
A movement on the other side of the HQ distracted West. He pointed at two men walking slowly along the path. Perhaps the watch was about to change, in which case our time here was up. We gathered the ropes together and retreated, putting the hangman’s tree between us and the newcomers. Our people were off the track behind a screen of bushes. Cassidy, Rutherford and Ryder were busy transferring the spare weapons to the backpacks that contained drysacks, which would make them buoyant and easier to handle in the water.
‘Jesus, Vin,’ Rutherford whispered. ‘Is that you? What stinks?’
‘Been a while since I fossed,’ I said. Moving on quickly, if only to distract myself from the ghastly smell, I added, ‘We’ve got around sixty feet of rope.’ I looked Cassidy up and down. He had maybe twenty pounds on me, and in other circumstances would have been the natural choice to help someone like Boink rope down, but as this was my plan – and, as plans went, it wasn’t one of my better ones – I felt I should be the one who anchored the big lug.
West had almost finished tying the rope ends together. When he was done, I took an end of the rope, wound it around my thigh and then looped it around one shoulder. I got the other end and looped it twice around Boink’s midriff and tied it off.
‘I’ll go first and scout a path down,’ said Rutherford.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but keep one eye on us.’ If Boink lost his footing and I couldn’t hold him, I didn’t want the guy’s subsequent roll down the hill cleaning up the Brit. ‘Who’s going after us?’
‘I’ll take care of everyone else,’ said Cassidy. ‘You’ve got enough on your plate.’
A distant cry of alarm silenced the frogs, and the night stillness came alive with urgent distant voices. I doubted Colonel Makenga’s men would look for us where we were temporarily hunkered down; not straight away, at least. But time was running out.