‘Twenny! Peanut!’ I called out.
I got no reaction from either of them. I grabbed Twenny by the shoulder.
‘What’s going on?’ he yelled, spinning right and then left, unaware of my presence until there was physical contact.
I pulled the black hood off his head. He squinted and blinked at the light like some kind of night creature, even though the heavy cloud cover and the rain made it seem like early evening.
‘Who is it?’ he said. ‘Get away from me . . . Who is it?’
He clearly didn’t recognize me.
‘It’s Cooper and Rutherford. We’re getting you out of here.’
‘Cooper’s a cracker. You’re black. Who the fuck are you?’
‘It’s Cooper, your bodyguard. You wanna hear a bad joke?’
‘Oh, shit. It
is
Cooper. Oh, man. Oh, shit. It’s you. Oh my god. Fuck. Fuck! How’s Peanut? Oh, Jesus, Cooper. It
is
you, right?’
I steadied his face and looked into his eyes. The guy was on the edge. ‘Yes, it’s Cooper,’ I said. ‘We’re getting you out.’
‘That’s not the joke, right?’ he asked me, suddenly worried.
‘No, no . . .’ I cupped the back of his neck in my hand and squeezed it.
Rutherford was taking care of Peanut and dealing with their chains. It turned out that they weren’t locked – merely looped through the pipe and secured by a simple U-bolt.
The FARDC hadn’t taken particularly good care of their hostages. It looked like both men had been forced to defecate where they stood. It didn’t appear that they’d had much in the way of nourishment, either, and the cuts and bruises on their faces suggested a little recreational beating.
The chains removed, Twenny started cleaning his ears, reaming them with his index finger.
‘Fucking candle wax,’ he said. ‘I wanna shoot these fuckers.’
With the hood over his head and his ears plugged, Twenny Fo had been in a kind of solitary confinement for a week and the guy was understandably pissed. But there was no time to talk about it. We had to get out of here. Our spectacular entrance had caught the enemy with his pants down, but they weren’t going to stay around his ankles much longer.
I felt arms around me, hugging me. It was Peanut.
‘Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you,’ he said over and over.
‘Cooper . . .’
Rutherford’s voice. There was urgency in it.
I turned around.
Oh, shit . . .
Around forty armed Congolese men and boys were arrayed in a loose semicircle fifty meters behind us. In the centre of the formation was Ryder and Francis, and both had pistols jammed against their heads.
One of the Africans stepped forward and called out, ‘Your weapons. Throw them down or we will kill your people.’
Would giving up our weapons save Francis and Ryder? I doubted it. There’d be no prisoners taken here today.
‘I will not ask again,’ he said, flicking the rain off his forehead with a finger.
‘Where’s Lockhart?’ I called out.
‘You have no bargaining power.’
‘I can take his head off from this distance,’ Rutherford said out of the corner of his mouth, sighting down the barrel.
And afterwards? We’d been dealt our hand and the guy across the table – which, in this instance, was fifty meters of mud and weed – thought we had a pair of twos.
‘My friend here says he can shoot you in the head from this distance,’ I said loud enough to be heard by everyone. ‘He’s good. He can do it. You don’t want to die. Release those two men and send them over. Then we’ll leave and you can go back to your gold.’
The African grinned. His teeth reminded me of piano keys – white and black where a couple were missing. ‘I do not need one lucky shot,’ he called back. ‘Drop your weapons now or you will die in a storm of lead. Your bodies will not be recognized by your mothers.’
I was trying to come up with something to say that would make the guy eat his words when I heard a boom of thunder. Deep in a place where I was in tune to these things, I wondered why it wasn’t accompanied by lightning. And, suddenly, the wood huts barely ten meters from where the FARDC men were holding Ryder and Francis blew apart in a huge explosion, and splinters the size of spears fired in all directions as if a giant porcupine had stepped on a land mine. I had just enough time to turn away and drop to the ground as these spears came down with the rain all around us. When I looked back, at least a dozen Congolese had fallen where they stood. Others were staggering away, leaning on each other. One man limped off with a piece of wood the size of a fence paling sticking up out of his back like some kind of weather vane.
I wondered what in Christ’s name had just happened. That was one hell of a powerful, timely lightning strike. Without lightning. ‘Stay with them,’ I shouted at Rutherford, and got up and ran to the spot where I’d seen Ryder and Francis. I found Ryder immediately. He was laid out flat on his back. His eyes were open and he was dazed but otherwise unhurt.
‘You okay?’ I asked him.
He nodded. I looked around but couldn’t see Francis. There was a lot of blood on the ground. Most of the men I’d thought were dead were just wounded. They started to groan. One with a chunk of wood protruding from an eye socket began to howl. I watched as a dead man missing an arm and a large piece out of his torso impossibly raised himself up and fell to the side, and Francis was revealed as the person beneath him doing the pushing. I pulled Ryder to his feet, then went to Francis and did the same. The African’s eyes were wide and he was shaking violently.
The sound of a racing engine caused me to look up. A Dong was barreling toward us in a hurry. It clipped the back of our old wrecked truck and bunted it to one side.
What the fuck now?
I took aim at the driver, just as the vehicle’s horn started
meep
-
meeping
like an anxious moped in a Beijing traffic jam. A man popped out through the space where the windshield had been, and waved at us with both arms as though he were having a seizure. It took me a moment to recognize him. Jesus, I knew that guy. It was Mike, Mike West! There was a short barrel protruding from the cabin, lying flat along the vehicle’s hood. The damn truck – they’d turned it into a tank using the tube of the M224 as a cannon. The boom I’d heard had been the mortar round being fired, and it wasn’t lightning but a round of 60mm HE that had blown the huts to kindling.
The Dong drove over the remains of the wooden huts. As it turned toward us, I signaled West to keep going and pick up Twenny, Peanut and Rutherford first.
I yelled at Ryder. ‘Can you walk?’
He signaled that he was okay.
‘I have a problem,’ said Francis, looking down.
Yeah, he did – a leg wound to add to the damage to his forearm, his thigh slick with blood; the rain sluicing through it, washing it off his boot into a pale pink puddle on the ground. Using the Ka-bar, I cut his pants away from the damaged area and found a piece of wood twice the length of a pack of cigarettes embedded in the muscle. From the way his leg hung and moved around as if disconnected, his femur was fractured. Soon, once the shock wore off, Francis was going to need more help than we could give him.
‘I’m going to carry you,’ I told him and didn’t wait for permission. I took his wrist, bent down a little and hoisted him across my shoulders. He grunted as I stood up and the air was forced out of his lungs. The guy was a lightweight, maybe a couple of sacks of cement worth, but no more than that. I jogged the fifty meters to the truck, Francis grunting with every step, and arrived as West and Rutherford were helping Twenny and Peanut up into the load area. Leila, Boink and Ayesha swooped on them, and hugged it out and had a good cry and said ‘Oh my God,’ between them a dozen times or so. Meanwhile, with Rutherford’s assistance, I laid Francis out on the metal floor. The guy was in a bad way.
‘My people. My wife . . .’ he said, his eyes rolling around in his head. ‘You must get them. You must help, you must . . .’
From the tone of his voice I figured he thought I was going to welsh on my part of the deal – just another broken promise from a white guy with a First World passport.
Ryder climbed into the truck, straight into Ayesha’s arms.
Leila hugged Twenny, but then she pushed him away and smacked him hard across the face, and then pulled him close and kissed him equally hard on the lips before slapping him again.
Showbiz people.
Just for an instant I forgot where we were, but a couple of helpful supersonic cracks close enough to pull the air out of my eardrums reminded me that folks were shooting at us.
Ryder dragged Francis further into the back of the truck, and the African cried out in pain as the agent propped him up against a stack of shot-up sandbag uniforms.
‘Boink, Duke,’ I called out. ‘Lock and load! Get everyone organized.’ I turned to West. ‘I’m riding up front.’ We jumped down and ran to the front cabin. ‘Drive!’ I yelled at Cassidy as I wrestled open the door.
‘Where to?’ he replied.
‘The fuck outta here!’
Cassidy jammed the stick into gear, gave it a boot full of gas, and West and I were thrown back in the seat. The sergeant raced quickly through the gears, careless of what was going on behind us in the load area. People were going to be tossed around back there.
‘Take it easy,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got a casualty.’
‘Who?’ he yelled over the engine roar.
‘Francis. What took you so long?’
‘Those booby traps at the base of the hill?’ said Cassidy. ‘Had to detour and dismantle them. Couldn’t leave ’em lying around.’
He was right. That village was too close. I didn’t want innocent people being turned into human kebabs on my conscience.
‘What did you do back there?’ Cassidy asked. ‘A lot of dead and wounded.’
‘Shock and awe,’ I said, preferring to skip the details. We’d left a lot of widows and weeping mothers in our wake. And none of it would have happened if Lockhart hadn’t made a deal with LeDuc to make some extra cash out of our principals. I was going to make that Kornfak & Greene asshole pay. To my surprise, the asshole himself suddenly appeared behind a group of men armed with rifles and machetes surging up out of the mine ahead of us. Cassidy had three choices to avoid hitting the human roadblock: swerve into trees, drive off the road and take a lethal drop into the mine pit of around a hundred feet, or hope the men waving their blades around got the hell out of the way. He chose option three, and two men who moved too slow wore the radiator grille before sliding off and disappearing under the front axle and briefly making the road extra bumpy.
As we drove by, Lockhart and I stared at each other for what seemed an age. He was either smiling or snarling, I couldn’t tell which. I thought of all the misery he’d brought to this place with his double-dealing, weapons trading, slavery, murder, extortion and hair gel. A lot of people were dead because of this guy. I pulled up my M4 with the intention of shooting him dead right there, but before I could act on the impulse the DoD contractor was gone, slipping behind us as we sped along the road. The fuckhead would have to wait. I just hoped I’d get to him before karma beat me to it because, no doubt, there was a steaming pile of it headed his way.
The road curved around to the left and then forked.
‘Go right,’ I yelled, pointing.
Cassidy braked hard to make the two hundred and seventy degree turn, wound the steering to the stops and then let it unwind as the Dong swung around.
‘Why?’ he yelled.
Because I had a deal with Francis. We’d been lucky so far. Could we push that luck just a little further? We’d have been dead in the water without him. Say I welshed on the deal . . . Could I do that and ever get dreamless sleep again? ‘We have to make a pickup – civilians,’ I added before he could ask me what kind.
Occupying the front seat between Cassidy and West was the mortar tube.
‘Whose handiwork is this?’ I asked, tapping it.
Cassidy turned to me with that gummy, milk-tooth grin of his, taking ownership.
I wasn’t that familiar with the 224. It had a trigger mechanism, which was unusual on a mortar barrel. With mortars it was conventionally the weight of the round dropping onto the firing pin that ignited the propellant and sent the package on its way.
‘Works well,’ West shouted. ‘You just set the trigger, which pulls the firing pin back, fuse the round to detonate on impact, drop it down the barrel and squeeze the trigger . . . The round has a pretty flat trajectory over a hundred meters but then it drops away quite fast. Targeting’s a bit random and you probably won’t hit the bullseye, but with this baby you don’t have to.’
‘How many rounds you bring with you?’
‘Got two left,’ he said, patting the rucksack on the seat beside him.
‘Up ahead,’ said Cassidy, ending the chitchat. He gestured at a roughly cleared area on the side of a gently sloping hill that was dotted with a hundred or so blue UN tents. ‘That where we’re going?’
Through the rain I could see maybe forty people in the camp gathered in a circle, preoccupied by what was going on in the center. Many of the folks gathered around were dancing and cheering – celebrating. It seemed an odd thing to be doing, given the circumstances we’d just come from. A number of people saw us approaching and word of our arrival spread quickly through the group. The dancers on the periphery stopped performing a jig, and ran away from the party like they’d been caught doing something they oughtn’t.