‘Your color?’ I asked him.
I shifted my attention to the surrounding forest, searching it for movement other than that made by the rain smacking into the vegetation, which made it appear to shiver. A little like me. I saw nothing. Satisfied, I checked over the makeup case. It had come from the Puma – no doubt about that. The leather was uncharred and, except for a couple of scuff marks, in almost pristine condition. All of which suggested that it had fallen out of the chopper with the loadmaster before the aircraft hit the ground, and certainly before a few rockets were fired into it. I traversed the hillside, slicing through low bushes, and came out above a large old rotting log covered in moss. It looked familiar. I jumped behind it and leaned over the top, looking down the hill. Pulling the sniper scope from my pack, I rested it on the log and adjusted the focus, scanning the face of the forest. Yeah, this was the place – we took refuge behind this log while FARDC torched the chopper.
‘I remember this. We’ve been here before, right?’ Ryder asked, jumping in beside me.
I nodded, getting my bearings. The smell of burned kerosene was in the air.
‘Down there, I think.’ I lined up the sight on an area I thought might yield something, but saw nothing. I slid over the top of the log and cut my way down through elephant grass and scrub, the sweet smell of toasted aviation fuel growing stronger. A shard of Perspex from the aircraft’s windshield dangling in a bush caught my eye. We were close. I saw the wreckage a few steps later, part of a main rotor blade draped with liana, pointing skywards like a broken finger. I peered into the twisted metal, then looked up into the canopy. The hole our descent had ripped through the treetops was clearly visible, drops of rain wobbling through the opening on their way down.
The aircraft wreckage itself was covered in leaves, fronds and branches. Almost the only indication that something lay buried beneath was the fact that the dead vegetation was starting to wilt like a salad left too long in the bowl.
Ryder and I climbed down to the Puma and hauled away a few of the branches. An attempt had been made to hide the wreckage. The remains were charred and blackened. I started poking around among them.
‘What are you looking for?’ asked Ryder.
‘Not sure,’ I said.
I gestured for the case and he handed it over.
‘Find some high ground and keep watch,’ I told him.
He turned away while I rummaged around among the cosmetics, looking for anything suitable for the purpose I had in mind. There were lipsticks, lots of them – pinks, reds and bronzes. They would have to do. I took several, fully extended the sticks and then broke them off. I could already hear Leila squealing.
I stuffed the tubes into a thigh pocket, left the case on the ground, pulled away another couple of branches and hoisted myself up onto the blackened, twisted fuselage. The port-side external fuel sponson was broken, the back half of it hanging down. I ran a gloved finger across an interior wall and transferred the oily, sooty residue to one of the lipstick tubes. I then went to the front of the wreckage and climbed in through the cockpit. Rocket explosions and fires had left the twisted interior charred and the paintwork black and blistered. Entering the main cargo area, which had been fitted with seats, I could see at a glance that there wasn’t much left of the tanks. Internal explosions had ripped them up and there were gaping holes in the alloy floor. I crouched for a full minute in silence and took in the charred surroundings that included the remains of Travis and Shaquand. Sometimes a crime scene will speak to you. This one didn’t. Maybe the exercise was a waste of time and effort. But I was here now, and I’d never get this chance again. The jet-fuelled furnace that engulfed the wreckage probably also consumed any chemical evidence of sabotage. Was that why the remains of this aircraft had been rocketed – to destroy evidence? And, if so, on whose orders? I reached down deep into the jagged black holes in the floor, which still smelled of jet fuel, and scraped some of the carbon deposits off the sides of the tanks and tapped them into the remaining gold Chanel tubes. Job done, I climbed back into the flight deck and out through the front of the chopper and sucked in some clean forest air. The whole operation took less than five minutes. My gloves were filthy and badly worn. I wiped them on the wet vegetation.
A rifle shot cracked the silence. I ducked and spun around.
Two more shots. Dammit! Ryder’s M16.
A man screamed, a quick death scream, the type of scream that says a life has just been startled out of its body. My eyes went to the source of the noise. It was the two men we’d seen walking along the trail, reconnoitering. They’d wandered back across our path. However, one of them was now a lifeless body lying at the feet of the other. The man still standing had his hands in the air, and they were trembling like the leaves around him being slapped by the rain. He was starting to blubber. He was maybe sixteen, no older.
‘No more shooting,’ I calmly called out to Ryder, clamping down on the desire to yell it. ‘There are gonna be more of these guys nearby, for sure.’ And, as I said that, I knew there was only one possible outcome for this situation. ‘Jesus,’ I said to myself. And maybe the guy with his hands in the air came to the same conclusion, because he suddenly turned and ran.
‘Shit,’ I said, bolting after him.
He ran hard, thrashing through the bush. I followed, breathing hard, drawing the Ka-bar as I ran and hacking at the greenery, the machete left back at the crash site. Our presence in the area had to remain a secret. Nothing was more important. I thrashed at the leaves and the fronds, the palms and the lianas, leaped half-blind over logs, heading uphill, aware of the effort, the air starting to sear my lungs like flame. Fuck, he was getting away on those young legs. I heard a dull thud somewhere ahead and then – nothing. I came up on the guy a handful of seconds later. He was spreadeagled on the ground at the base of a tree trunk hidden by scrub, his eyes rolled back in his head and a concave depression in the skull over his left eye, a little moss and bark pressed into the grazed skin. Breathing hard, I put my fingers to his jugular and they confirmed that nothing warm was going to move through his veins ever again. I sucked in a few breaths and sheathed the Ka-bar. Hitting the tree at full throttle had done me a service; stopped me having to add another bad dream to my collection. I searched the kid’s pockets and found some kind of a charm made up of bones, a little snakeskin and animal teeth. If it were supposed to be a protective charm, I’d be making a complaint to the witch doctor who gave it to him. I wondered if it was connected to the altar we’d seen. There was nothing else in his pockets. I stood and listened to the forest for a full minute but the loudest noises were my own breathing, the pumping of my heart, the ever-present impact of raindrops on leaves and the high-strung whine of over-excited mosquitoes. I cut some fronds, lay them over the body, then retraced my steps back to the Puma.
I found Ryder down on his haunches, his rifle across his chest, nervously glancing left and right. My arrival startled him.
‘Where is he?’ he asked, standing up.
‘A tree jumped in front of him.’
‘What?’
‘Try not to shoot anything unless it shoots at you first.’
‘I had no choice,’ he said.
He was probably right about that.
‘They were coming toward us . . . I’ve never killed anyone before. He was a kid.’ Ryder’s voice was cracking, the center of his chin trembling. ‘No choice,’ he said.
‘You did your job, Duke,’ I told him. ‘If you hadn’t, maybe it’d be you covered in palm fronds waiting for the ants.’
I walked past him. There was nothing I could say that would make him feel better about taking someone’s life.
‘C’mon,’ I said. I was done with the Puma. I fastened the Velcro on my thigh pocket to make sure the lipsticks were secure and wrapped a hand around the rough wood grip of the machete propped against the twisted fuselage, and moved into the bush.
We were well into the hand-to-hand battle with palms, bushes, elephant grass and liana, approaching the first ravine before Ryder asked, ‘We heading back?’
I’d been asking myself the same question. I gave it some more consideration as I chopped around the answer, clearing away the indecision. ‘It’s after three. We’re at least couple of hours’ walk away from the others, which means the last half hour or so we’ll be walking in complete darkness.’
‘So what are we gonna do?’
I considered whether the people holding Twenny Fo, Peanut and Fournier bugging out lessened the chances of our principals’ survival, and came to the conclusion that the outcome could go either way. We hadn’t found their bodies at the FARDC HQ’s clearing, which was promising. I was leaning toward the conclusion – or maybe it was just the hope – that the officers holding our people captive were considering how to bargain with the US for their release in a way that wouldn’t bring a unit of Navy Seals down on them in the dead of night.
‘We still have to locate that FARDC company,’ I said. ‘We still don’t know where they’re holed up.’
Ryder took out his anxiety about this with his machete on the elephant grass.
Once across the second ravine, we picked up the road carved through the forest and found the passage we’d cut alongside it.
‘You don’t like me much, do you?’ Ryder remarked out of the blue.
‘What’s
liking
you got to do with anything?’
‘So I’m right.’
‘Duke, all I care about is that you do your job. And if you can tell a joke or two to lighten the load while you’re at it – and maybe even grumble with class – that’s icing on the cake.’
‘I talked my way onto this detail because I knew Ayesha. I know you know that. Maybe what you don’t know is that I’ve been trying to get off that damn desk for two years. This came along, I saw my chance and took it.’
‘And that desk is looking pretty good right about now, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘I’m not trained for this and we both know that. Just help me out a little. Show me what I need to do and I’ll get it done. Okay?’
A good speech. His hand was held out for us to shake on our newfound understanding. Duke was baggage. Frankly, I didn’t think he had it in him to turn his shit around, but I shook anyway, if only to end this impromptu performance review.
We got going again and moved across through the pre-cut slip road. I stopped when I saw a bunch of rocks ahead. I didn’t remember seeing them on the way out. And then the rocks did the strangest, most un-rocklike thing – they moved. A massive gray boulder lurched slowly from one side to the other, and then a tree trunk snapped with a crack like a grenade going off and it fell down with a crash, leaving a small hole ripped in the canopy. Another boulder moved and snorted and I realized what I was looking at – a couple of elephants enjoying the afternoon smorgasbord, grazing on the leaves higher in the trees. I was aware that Ryder and I were downwind of the beasts, because I smelled them and they smelled bad, like a platoon after a three-week bivouac in a dirty sock basket. Nevertheless, we took several slow steps backward and found some cover behind a tree too thick to be pushed aside, and stood there for twenty minutes, waiting for the animals to move off; not talking, not moving. They reminded me of Boink and of my childhood circus visit, and I had the fleeting, yet powerful, feeling that the threads of my life were coming together in a pattern that I should recognize but couldn’t.
When we could no longer see, hear or smell the animals, we came out from behind the tree and moved quickly through the area. Ten minutes later, I found the notch made in the tree trunk on our outbound journey. I checked the Seiko. Taking a course eighty degrees to the north of the one we’d been on would bring us eventually and approximately back to the rocks where, right about now, Cassidy, West and Rutherford would be securing the area for the night ahead. Ryder ran his fingers across the notch.
‘You make this?’ he asked.
‘Yep.’
The forest closed in solidly ahead, with no slashed fronds or bushes.
‘This where we turned left, isn’t it?’ Ryder asked, reading the signs.
‘Yep,’ I repeated. ‘Leave the makeup case here – hide it.’
He set it on the ground and covered it with foliage and liana. Satisfied that it couldn’t be found without a concerted inspection, I stepped past him toward the forest flattened by the FARDC on the move. The track was clear as far as I could see. I considered taking the road more trampled but it wasn’t worth the risk, so I turned back to the tree with the notch. We had two hours of daylight left in which to find the enemy’s bivouac.
I SAW THE TRIPWIRE at knee height, just in time to avoid breaking through it. I thrust my palm back and stopped Ryder before he walked past me and set off whatever was attached to it. I hit him a little too hard and he was about to object, so I put my hand over his mouth to muf-fe any sounds that might attract attention, and set him down on the ground. Once he stopped struggling, I nodded at him and he nodded back, so I took my hand away and signed that danger lay just ahead.
‘Jesus, Cooper!’ he whispered before I could gag him again.
I grabbed a fist full of his webbing, pulled him up to my face and put my finger against my lips. He nodded again, finally getting the picture and shutting the fuck up. Okay, so he was pissed at me for pushing him around, but it was better than being dead. I let him go, got down on all fours and crawled forward till my eyes again picked up the thin line strung through the bush. It took me a while to find it a second time. Seeing it in the first place had been pure luck. I happened to focus on it rather than on a leaf or a frond or just the ground. It was a little after four pm, and the light was disappearing like someone was turning down a dimmer switch, the undergrowth starting to lose its colors to the monochrome of twilight.