‘Follow me,’ I said, and then ran to the back of the truck carrying the cargo and jumped up into it. Rutherford was already inside, untying the straps that stopped the olive drab-painted Kevlar containers from sliding around.
‘We need to get these offoaded and taken up the hill,’ I said. ‘And it has to be done fast.’
‘What’s inside ’em?’ asked Boink.
‘Dunno,’ said Rutherford impatiently. ‘And right now, we don’t bloody well care. We just need to do what the man said and pull our fingers out.’
‘What language yo’ speaking?’ said Boink, grinning, taking no offense. ‘I ain’t never heard shit like that.’
‘The Queen’s English, mate.’
‘No queens I’ve met speak like that, yo.’
Rutherford and I lifted the first container off the smaller of the two stacks and threw it, skidding, across the cargo deck toward the tailgate. Boink hoisted it off single-handedly and set it down on the mud.
‘Next!’ he called out.
We worked quickly. Once all seven containers were offoaded onto the road, Rutherford and I leaped down, grabbed one of the largest and heaviest, each taking an end, and started hobbling with it toward the edge of the forest. Cassidy was ahead of us, a container on his shoulder, pushing up into the undergrowth.
‘Duke – head ’em up, move ’em out,’ I called behind me.
The containers were all soon secured behind the tree line and we were still more or less on schedule. I checked my Seiko. Only eleven minutes had passed since the first truck had pulled up behind the banana tree laid across the road.
‘The trucks – where can we hide them?’ I asked Francis.
‘I know good place,’ he replied.
‘Is it close?’
‘
Oui
. One-or-two-minute drive from here.’
‘Cooper, I saw what happened with that boy,’ Leila said, seeking some attention. ‘I think you did the right thing.’
‘You might change your mind if he comes back with his babysitters,’ I said.
Leila was standing above me on slightly higher ground, her weight on one leg, a 97 crossed under her breasts so that her cleavage was lifted up and out of her jacket. With her makeup oddly immaculate, she looked like some kind of hot action movie character. I shrugged off the thought and asked Francis, ‘Which way are we going?’
He pointed in the direction of the mine, away from the village.
Two trucks rather than one. I needed a driver and someone to ride shotgun on the following truck.
‘Francis, you and I have got the lead truck.’ I glanced at the faces around me. ‘Rutherford, Ryder. You’re in the second truck. We don’t stop for any reason. Understand?’
Both nodded.
Francis scratched his top lip with the back of a long, curved thumbnail.
‘Cy – collect Mike and get everyone further up the hill with the gear, all right? As high as you can go.’
Cassidy nodded and lifted a container onto his shoulder.
‘Leila. For your own safety do as you’re told – for once,’ I said. She lifted her chin and looked away. ‘I mean it.’
Ryder, Rutherford, Francis, and I ran down through the forest, stopping to check that the road was still clear. It was. The engines of both vehicles continued to run, clouds of oily diesel smoke coughing from their exhaust pipes. Francis and I went for the first Dong – the one that had come up behind us, the one facing the wrong way.
The bench seat was covered in glass crystals clotted with blood and brain matter. I brushed them into the floorboards before climbing in. Francis removed a mound of bloody, glass-studded goop from the dashboard in front of him and nervously glanced sideways at me.
‘I’m much nicer to my friends,’ I reassured him.
A diagram of the gearbox was helpfully etched in the gearstick knob beside my hand. Depressing the clutch, I selected reverse and found the handbrake. With some gas, the Dong leaped off the mark, going backward. I spun the steering wheel and brought the ass end of the truck around. Now heading in the right direction, I selected second gear, stomped on the gas pedal, and we accelerated away, the wind and rain blast coming through the space formerly occupied by the windshield competing with the roar of the engine.
‘How far?’ I yelled
‘Drive for one minute,’ Francis shouted back.
I kept my foot on the gas, changing down for the corners but keeping our speed up in case we met another truck mid-corner. If that happened, I intended to run it off the road if I could, or crash into it if I couldn’t. The sun was yet to rise over the hills and the road remained clear of traffic. Maybe folks were doing us a favor and having a sleep in. We took the corners on the limit, the trucks sliding around on the mud. The road started to climb, slowing us, the forest encroaching on all sides. A minute had passed. Where was that hiding place?
‘We are here,’ Francis yelled, squinting, wiping the rainwater off his face.
‘And where’s that?’ I yelled back. At this point, the forest was overhanging the road. I couldn’t see anywhere to go except straight ahead.
‘Turn here.’ He pointed at the greenery trying to push its way through my window.
‘Here?’
‘
Oui
. Turn! Turn now!’
I pulled the wheel hard over and finched, but the wall of foliage wasn’t as solid as it appeared to be and we barreled through elephant grass and immature palms. There were no seatbelts in this crate and I braced for the inevitable meeting with a tree that would pitch me through the open window.
‘Too fast! Stop!’ Francis yelled.
I slammed on the anchors, pushing the pedal almost to the firewall, and the vehicle skidded and slid sideways, coming to a stop, palm leaves crowding in through the hole in the door by my shoulder. I finched as the vehicle Duke was driving bashed through the plant life beside us, several tons of Chinese steel hurtling past, its wheels locked up solid. It came to a stop a couple of meters in front on our right-side fender, festooned with broken fronds and branches.
I breathed deep. Jesus, that was too close.
Francis opened his door and jumped down.
Cutting the motor, I opened the door. This wasn’t forest. The palms were adolescent and uniformly planted in lines. Francis appeared around the front of the truck, machete in hand.
‘What is this place?’ I asked him, climbing out of the cabin.
‘Plantation.’
‘Where’s the owner?’
‘Dead since many years, I think.’
‘Our tracks will be seen leaving the road,’ I said.
‘The rain will hide them.’
I hoped he was right. Rutherford and Ryder joined us.
‘Sorry about that, sir,’ said Ryder.
‘Yeah, we lost you in the bush, skipper,’ Rutherford added. ‘And then that big-ass truck of yours was stopped right in front of us. Gave me a bloody heart attack, that did.’
‘I show you why it is good that you stop,’ said Francis, walking away.
He cut a path through the dense but lightweight foliage, which suddenly gave way to a deep gorge and a fast-running watercourse at the bottom of it.
Rutherford peered over the edge. ‘Shite!’
W
e double-timed it on foot through the old plantation and into the forest, heading for the lower ground of the valley and the irrigation channel, back to the scene of our earlier dirty work. Along the way, I caught glimpses of the road through the greenery. Two trucks coming from the direction of the mine drove past, and one came from the village. There didn’t seem to be much urgency.
‘Boss . . .’ West waved to us, crouched behind a shrub a dozen meters up the hill.
I gave him a thumbs up and he led the way through a warren of bamboo stands to a hardwood tree high on the hill shrouded in liana. Leila, Ayesha and Boink appeared from around the tree and came to meet us.
Ayesha went straight to Ryder and embraced him.
‘Any trouble?’ Boink asked.
I shook my head. ‘No. How about you?’
‘We’re good, yo.’
‘Sir!’
It was Cassidy.
‘Over here.’ He held up his hand.
‘Duke, Mike – take the watch,’ I told them. The last thing we needed now was to be taken by surprise.
Cassidy was sitting on one of the larger trunk-sized containers. Rutherford produced the keys and handed them to me.
‘It’s like opening Christmas presents,’ he said as I crouched in front of the other especially large case.
‘Let’s hope it’s not socks,’ I said.
I pulled up the padlock and examined it quickly. There were no numbers or markings on it that corresponded with any of the keys, so I just tried them one by one. The catch sprang open with key number three. I flipped back the lid and took a peek. Hmm . . . disappointing. No socks, but plenty of old forest-green uniforms and backpacks. I moved to one of the other cases and jiggled the keys in the lock.
‘Now you’re talking,’ said Rutherford when I pulled the lock and lifted the lid.
Lying inside, barrel to stock between sheets of brown, grease paper, were M16A2s. The case smelled of clean oil and plastic, the way a new car smells under its hood. Rutherford and I pulled out a rifle each and checked them over.
The numbers were filed off the receiver. Rutherford showed me his; same deal. So White, the American, the guy whose presence I couldn’t place here, was arms dealing and who knew what else. The numbers missing on these weapons meant that they were either stolen or purchased illegally. White was confident around things that killed people, and that suggested he’d seen combat. But with what service and which conflict? And of course there was Lockhart, formerly US Special Forces and now Kornfak & Greene in these parts, making him a local big wig. He was using that position and infuence to line his own pockets in all kinds of ways. Facilitating the arms dealing and playing both sides of the field were only two of them. I couldn’t immediately pull up all the statutes he was breaking from the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but they started with kidnap and extortion and moved on to slavery and murder. This guy was a peach.
And where did Fu Manchu and the Chinese-made weapons fit into the picture?
‘Let’s get to the other cases,’ said Cassidy. ‘The suspense is killing me.’
I set the rifle down, took hold of a handle on the end of the container while Rutherford took the other, and hoisted it off the stack. The first key I tried worked. I flipped back the lid.
‘Nice,’ said Cassidy over my shoulder. ‘I can have some fun with those.’
Claymores. I picked out one of the devices. Unlike the mines we’d captured, these ones were equipped with clackers, electronic firing devices connected to the mine via a wire that allowed it to be fired remotely when the target was within range, rather than having to wait for a line to be tripped – although these could be rigged to fire that way, too. Handy. There were maybe thirty Claymores in the box. Rutherford and I set it beside the one containing the M16s.
Fumbling with the keys, I opened the fourth case.
‘Now we’re cookin’ with gas,’ Rutherford said, his eyes lighting up. Inside the container were two M2A1 ammo cans containing sixteen hundred and eighty rounds of ball ammo for the M16s, plus magazines. According to the stencils on the wooden crates packed within, there were also smoke grenades and M67 HE frag hand grenades, as used by the US Army. ‘We’ve got enough ammo here to start a war.’
‘And hopefully finish it,’ I added.
Cassidy nodded. ‘Amen.’
There was another container with the same dimensions. Opening it revealed more ammo, smoke and frag grenades, just in case we were in danger of running low.
We moved to the remaining cases, the ones Cassidy had been sitting on. I repeated the juggling act with the keys until the lock sprang open.
‘Oh shite,’ said Rutherford when I lifted the lid.
Oh shite, all right. Packed into the top of the case were six ammo cans, each holding six 60mm M49A4 HE rounds. I lifted one up. Below was the base plate for an M224, which gave a massive clue to what was in the last unopened container.
Sure enough, when I managed to find the right key, the box contained the tube and sight assembly as well as the bipod. We had us a brand-new, fully operational M224! This was the same light mortar system we’d seen Colonel Makenga’s forces using to chew up Lissouba’s men. Ol’ Colonel Cravat had obviously put in his order, and Charles White and Lockhart had obliged so that the two Africans could go for each other’s throats on a more even footing. Both men were currently in the FARDC’s HQ. I wondered how they were getting along. I also wondered how Colonel Biruta was enjoying being in the company of Makenga. Maybe the gold being pulled out of the ground smoothed over any past differences; at least until they could all get back to their people. Perhaps none of these men had any intention of going back at all and were taking their gold and heading for retirement in the south of France.
‘Man, we can get real fuckin’ loud with this stuff,’ said Cassidy gleefully.
‘On me,’ I signalled. Ryder and West both acknowledged and trotted up the hill.