‘Get the case,’ I told Ryder.
He hunted around and eventually found its hiding place. I checked the Seiko for the time and made the eighty-degree change in direction, slinking off across the open trampled path through the forest.
We were soon heading down the valley, retracing our steps, taking us back to the rocks where Cassidy, West, Rutherford, Leila, Ayesha, Boink, and the rat, LeDuc, were waiting for our return. The canopy here was unbroken, and the darkness was complete. We soon found it impossible to move around without bumping into things. We had no choice but to find a little ground that was uncluttered by bushes, elephant grass, saplings, trees and undergrowth, and that was also clear of ants, on which to get some sleep. We couldn’t find any.
RYDER AND I SLEPT back-to-back on a bed of tree roots and mud. We were both shivering with cold when I woke, my clothes and skin water-logged. It was maybe half an hour before dawn, the shapes of the world beneath the canopy barely discernible and still monochromatic. A large hairy caterpillar the size of my thumb hugged the stem of a plant inches from my face, probing carefully forward, trying to reach across the gap to my nose. I broke the stem and placed the bug on the ground beside me.
‘Rise and shine, Duke,’ I said, my throat thick with phlegm, giving him a nudge.
I felt his weight shift behind me.
‘Fuck,’ he said under his breath.
I stood up, using the M4 as a crutch, every joint in my body feeling cold and seized, and found a plant to water. Ryder did likewise. I was hungry, my stomach growling like there was a cat locked inside wanting out. I sucked the tube at my shoulder to settle it down a little.
I motioned at Ryder to follow. He nodded and dragged his feet behind me. I stopped and signaled him to look sharp. Most accidents happen close to home, and we were in the accident zone. No point tempting fate. It had been twelve hours since we’d patrolled through this patch of turf. Bad guys might have moved in behind us.
The forest dripped with water, only it wasn’t raining. The morning slowly crept up on us as we made our way down the hill, the greens gradually taking over the palate as the day came out of hiding, birds waking with the sunlight and giving the world a good shriek. Frogs hopped out of the way of our feet and occasionally animals shot like runaway bowling balls through the undergrowth. A gentle mist floated around us, wrapping round tree trunks like gossamer web, and the air was thick, clean and as sweet as snowmelt.
‘Take that step and you’re dead, Cooper,’ the tree beside me whispered.
Then the tree moved and I saw that it was Sergeant Cassidy, Ka-bar in hand, leaves and bits of shrub sprouting from webbing, his face streaked with camouflage paint. He came around beside me and scraped some leaf litter off the ground beneath my boot, revealing a hole. Pushing the butt of his M4 into the hole made a length of bamboo pole with bamboo spears embedded in the end rise out of the earth and swing in an arc toward me. Had I taken that step, I’d have collected a row of spikes from upper thigh to gut. Out here, that would have been a death sentence.
‘Had some time on your hands?’ I asked him.
He smiled. ‘You just missed walking into another fun activity back up the hill a ways.’
We stepped around the trap and Cassidy fell in beside us. I took the pack off my shoulders and showed him the Claymores that Ryder and I had collected.
‘Hoo-ah,’ he beamed. ‘Where’d you get them?’
‘We took a stroll back to the Puma,’ I said.
‘What for?’
‘I noticed Leila was all out of foundation,’ I told him and Ryder held up Leila’s makeup case.
‘I was gonna ask you about that.’
‘Next stop was the FARDC camp. They’ve moved.’
‘Where to?’
‘Well out of range of the CNDP’s mortars.’
I reached down and felt my thigh pocket for the lipsticks containing what I hoped would be evidence of sabotage, and stopped in my tracks.
‘What?’ asked Cassidy.
The pocket was gone, torn clean away by all the crawling around. God only knew where those damn lipsticks were. ‘Nothing,’ I told him and consoled myself with the doubt I’d had that chemical analysis would’ve revealed anything significant. ‘Anything happen while we’ve been gone?’ I asked.
‘We lost LeDuc.’
‘You
lost
him?’
‘He was with Rutherford. Went off to forage. Rutherford said he turned around and the Frenchman was gone. Could have been an animal. West found spoor from a big cat in the area. We searched, but found nothing. If a predator took him, West said his remains would be up some tree.’
‘Law of the jungle,’ Ryder said.
I didn’t for a moment think that the Frenchman had been snatched by a cat. A more likely scenario was that he’d decided to rendezvous with his
real
friends, the ones we’d left up on the hill with our captive principals.
‘We saw Twenny Fo and Peanut,’ I said. ‘They’re alive.’
‘All right!’ Cassidy said, his mood-o-meter swinging to bright. ‘Good news. Can we get to them?’
‘There’s been a development. You remember Beau Lockhart?’
‘The Kornfak & Greene guy back at the camp?’
‘Yeah. He’s chummy with FARDC. We saw him in their HQ.’
‘Hoo-ah!’ Cassidy said, making a fist. ‘So we just head on up there, collect our principals and Lockhart gets us flown out.’
‘I witnessed Lockhart cap Fournier in cold blood.’
‘What?’
‘A nine to the back of the head.’
The face paint didn’t camouflage the sergeant’s anger and confusion. ‘Jesus! What the hell’s going on?’
‘I’m not a hundred percent sure, but LeDuc and Lockhart are involved. The only thing that makes sense is that the French pilot put us down in the middle of it intentionally.’
‘Aw, shit.’
WE ARRIVED BACK AT the rocks.
‘Hey, look!’ said Ayesha when she glanced up and saw us, giving Leila’s shoulder a nudge.
Leila’s eyes went straight to the makeup case in Ryder’s hand and lit up.
‘Oh, wow! You found it!’ she squealed, jumped off the rock she was sitting on, and ran over and gave Duke a big kiss on the cheek.
‘You’d think we’d found a case of Bud,’ I said.
She wasted no time opening the catch and lifting the lid.
Cassidy and Rutherford wandered over with Boink, who, I noticed, had been reacquainted with a Nazarian, and they gave Ryder and me a bunch of assorted ‘Hey’s and ‘Yo’s.
A burst of automatic fire suddenly cut across the pleasantries. It was close; maybe five hundred meters up the hill. The unexpected sound was a jolt. I swung the M4 off my shoulder, pointed at Cassidy to lead off, and signaled at Ryder to organize the defense in our rear – leaving Ryder in charge worried me, but I wanted experience up front. Cassidy hopped forward into the bush; Rutherford, West and I close behind. Cassidy moved like he knew the terrain, running fast at a crouch, choosing a path higher up the side of the valley than the one we’d taken back to the rocks, then looped around, doubling back down the hill. We soon came upon a soldier lying beneath one of Cassidy’s traps – a framework of stakes weighted with river stones that had dropped on top of him from the tree above. He’d walked through the tripwire – a length of plaited immature liana. One of the stakes had pierced his throat. The guy was as dead as yesterday. The lack of blue slashes on his battle uniform indicated that he was CNDP. Cassidy felt the barrel of the old AK-47 lying beside him.
‘Cold,’ he said.
West checked the ground for tracks. ‘Looks like four, maybe five, others.’ He motioned up the hill. ‘They’re running away.’
Cassidy immediately took off, jogging downhill back toward the rocks. We took off after him and, around fifty meters later, found a young boy of no more than fourteen who’d stepped on the trap that had almost claimed me. He was impaled on the row of spikes, one of which had torn through the femoral artery in his thigh. The kid was shaking with fear and cold as his blood drained away down his leg and into the hole in the ground. His eyes made contact with Cassidy before they went utterly blank, the lead doors welding shut behind them.
‘Fuck,’ said West, speaking for all of us.
I kneeled and picked up the kid’s weapon, a new M16. Its barrel was warm, which suggested that the burst of fire we’d heard had come from this gun. Perhaps the boy had squeezed the trigger in shock when the stakes rose out of the earth and shanked him.
‘I got a nephew that kid’s age,’ Cassidy said, hands on his hips, looking up at the canopy.
‘THEY’RE GONNA MAKE A report,’ said West.
I agreed. ‘Time to change neighborhoods.’
‘But we’re safe here,’ Leila protested, her hair brushed, her puckering lips now wearing a soft Chanel pink, and a long-legged spider crawling up onto her shoulder, which Ayesha flicked off before the singer became aware of it.
‘Not for much longer,’ I told her. ‘Our best chance of survival lies out there.’ I gave the forest a sweep of my hand.
‘Cooper and Ryder found Twenny Fo, Peanut and Fournier,’ said Cassidy. ‘You want to fill everyone in?’
‘You
saw
them?’ Leila asked, her eyes open wide. ‘Alive?’
‘More or less,’ I said a little cryptically. I passed on everything we saw, including the murder of Fournier, and concluded with my theory about Lockhart and LeDuc.
‘Bullshiiiit,’ said Boink, turning away.
‘So the Frog crashed us into the forest on purpose?’ Rutherford whistled softly, then added, ‘Risky bloody strategy.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Leila dismissively.
‘Believe it,’ I said.
The singer looked to Ryder for confirmation. He gave her a nod.
‘Y’know, I saw something out the window,’ said Ayesha, ‘just before we went down. A bright green light, floating over the treetops.’
‘A signal fare. Shit, that settles it,’ said Cassidy. ‘We were damn well set up.’
I shrugged. ‘If it looks like LeDuc and walks like LeDuc . . .’
‘It’s a sodding fucking Frog bastard,’ Rutherford chipped in.
‘You didn’t, by any chance, happen to mention seeing that light at the time?’ I asked Ayesha.
‘I did, but no one said anything. I thought everyone was asleep.’
Okay, so the mystery question that came through my headset before we went down –
What was that?
– hadn’t come from Travis, but from Ayesha. Dammit, I might have gotten to LeDuc earlier if I’d quizzed everyone harder, done my job a little better. Ayesha was sitting on the right-hand side of the chopper, behind Travis and behind LeDuc. She saw the fare, and then the aircraft banked to the right, turning toward it. Seated on LeDuc’s left, Fournier wouldn’t have had the angle to spot the signal, which meant he was as much a passenger on the Puma as everyone else. It would have been LeDuc who’d then switched tanks, dumping contaminated fuel from the sponsons into the main tanks so that the engines flamed out. It was also, therefore, LeDuc and not Fournier who faked the Mayday call that wasn’t responded to. So, LeDuc, Lockhart and the FARDC commander, Colonel Cravat. Who else was hoping to get a cut of the ransom money?
‘C’mon, people, clock’s ticking,’ said Cassidy. ‘Shake it out.’
‘Why? What are we doing?’ Leila asked.
‘We’re gonna stick our hands in the fire,’ I said.
IT WASN’T RAINING OR particularly hot, but the air was heavy with humidity. I glanced over my shoulder to check on Boink. His shirt was soaked with perspiration but he wasn’t doing too badly, all things considered. The Congo Weightloss Program was agreeing with him, and his fitness was also improving.
‘Making out okay?’ I asked him.
‘As good as you, soldier man,’ he said.
‘We need to rest,’ said Leila, walking in front of me. ‘Don’t we, Ayesha?’
Her friend and makeup artist turned and gave me a look that told me she might as well hammer a nail into her own forehead if she disagreed.
‘We took a break half an hour ago,’ I reminded the celebrity. ‘We’ve gotta keep going.’
‘Then you can keep going without me.’
‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘You stay here and we’ll come back for your corpse in a week or two.’
‘I don’t like you, Cooper.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Leila tried to ignore me and kept walking, spritzing her face with a can of aerosolized water recovered from her makeup case.
‘We’ll take a break when we get to where we’re going,’ I said.
‘And where’s that?’
‘I’m not sure. I’ll know when I see it. And there’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you.’
‘Yes?’
‘No one likes to think they can be bought cheap.’
‘What?’
‘Bribing my men could get you in a lot of trouble, especially if the person you’re trying to bribe knows that someone else you waved your money at was offered a lot more.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
She glanced around to check on whether Ryder was within earshot – she knew all right, but I didn’t push it.