‘Hold on, Josh,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Just hold on.’
JEAN-LUC SAT HUNCHED
over in his seat on the helicopter. His broad forearms were folded across his chest, resting on top of the webbing pouches, while he waited for the minutes to drag by. There was a look of grim determination in his eyes.
‘ETA sixteen minutes,’ came Laurent’s voice over the radio.
At this the gunner, Louis, standing just to the left of Jean-Luc, started fidgeting from one foot to the next, minutely adjusting the focus on his night-vision goggles. He then leaned forward, clipping open the belt feed of 7.62mm ammunition, realigning it slightly.
‘Have you checked it already?’ came Jean-Luc’s voice over the comms. Louis turned towards him and nodded. ‘Then leave it alone.’
Reaching up to his top pocket, Jean-Luc took out another cigarette and lit it, with his eyes fixed on Luca.
‘So what was Bear doing out here in the first place?’ he asked.
Luca’s arms were also folded across his chest. Without a
T-shirt
and half-covered in damp mud, the downdraft from the rotors was making him feel cold, but he was too proud to ask for anything to cover himself. He was also desperately thirsty and had been eyeing the water bottle on the side of the gunner’s belt since they had first got on the helicopter.
‘She was looking for this new mineral,’ he replied flatly. ‘This stuff called fire coltan.’
Jean-Luc didn’t react, but inwardly he felt his heart sink. If they had been on speaking terms, Bear would only have had to call him. He would have told her everything, even supplied her with some of the damn’ stuff if that was what she wanted. He knew now that he would have broken every professional code of conduct and handed over all his contacts, if only she had asked.
‘So that’s it,’ Jean-Luc said, his eyes darkening. ‘You two get in a Cessna and start buzzing around the skies looking for coltan. What kind of fucking idiots are you? I’ve done some reckless shit in my time,
mais putain, ça, c’est fou!
Do you even know who the LRA are?’
Luca’s eyes stayed fixed on his. ‘Yeah, I know exactly who they are. You’re the one who can’t tell who the hell he’s shooting at.’
‘
Peut-être
,’ perhaps, Jean-Luc conceded. ‘But that still doesn’t change the fact that you both went off into the Ituri like a couple of fucking tourists. The LRA is the most dangerous militia group in the whole of the DRC. They’ve thousands of soldiers. Thousands! And you thought …’ He paused, suddenly catching himself on the radio and realising that the other men would be listening to their conversation.
In the silence Luca turned away, attracting the attention of Louis standing over his machine gun. Luca pointed towards his water bottle. ‘I need some water.’
Louis looked back to Jean-Luc for approval before handing it over.
‘Listen,’ Luca said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, ‘we have sixteen minutes to talk about what is going to happen, not what’s happened. I saw the volcano from the southern side and reckon that if you fly up to the crater, the roof opening should be somewhere west of that.’
Jean-Luc forced himself to focus on the planning. ‘How far is the opening from the smoke?’
Luca shrugged slightly. ‘I’m not sure. I only saw it from the ground, but it’s got to be close.’
‘Well, if it’s too close, the ash will block our intakes. We’ll fall out of the sky like a stone.’
‘If it’s too close, then we think of something else. One way or another, I’m getting into that mine.’
Jean-Luc could see in Luca’s face the same hell-bent determination that he had once known, and suddenly felt a stirring of his own senses. It had been too long since he had felt anything but ambivalence and the desire to forget, one mission blurring into the next. In Luca, he could see something else. And as much as he hated to admit it, it felt like an elixir to him.
‘Major, we have an issue,’ a voice broke in.
Jean-Luc pulled himself round towards the pilots. ‘Go ahead.’
There was a pause while Laurent tried to articulate what
he
was seeing, his finger pressing down on the comms switch several times before he actually spoke.
‘I’m getting readings all over the forest, sir,’ he managed.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know, sir, but there are thousands of them. The whole console’s gone yellow with heat sources. It’s like the fucking forest has come alive.’
‘Reboot the system. Check it’s reading correctly.’
‘Sir, it’s not the system. I am telling you, there are thousands of people in the forest below us.’
Luca suddenly understood. ‘Tell your pilots to pull up!’ he shouted. ‘Mordecai said his army was marching on the MONUC compound before heading on to Kinshasa. That’s what the reading is.’
Jean-Luc stared at him for a moment before speaking low and fast into the mic. ‘Break formation. Climb to four thousand feet.’
Scouting out ahead, the Rooivalk was the first to react, climbing at an almost vertical pitch. The Oryx were flying in trail formation behind and, as one, they followed, engines straining from the speed of their ascent. Luca was thrown back against the side of the metal cabin, his arms flailing as he tried to get his balance, before he managed to grip on to some cargo netting and steady himself. The engines grew louder, sending reverberations through the entire hull of the helicopter as the pilots pushed them higher and higher.
Jean-Luc’s voice came over the radio. It was level and calm.
‘Anyone gets locked on by those SAMs, fire the magnesium in cluster bursts.’
Through the front window, Luca could see the Rooivalk still climbing, while behind them the two other Oryx helicopters had dropped out of sight. Over the radio they suddenly heard the warning siren of a radar spike, then a long, continuous tone. One of the other helicopters had been missile-locked.
There was the sound of the pilot shouting into the mic, but Luca couldn’t hear what was being said. Then from somewhere below them the sky lit up in a blaze of white. It fizzed in long, streaking arcs as bright as lightning, leaving thick trails of hanging smoke as the M-206 counter-measure flares went off in sequence.
A few seconds later they reached 4,000 feet, levelling off with a sickening lurch. Luca stayed exactly where he was, staring into Jean-Luc’s face while both of them listened for the sound of an explosion. But none came. For some reason, the LRA hadn’t fired their surface-to-air missiles.
One by one the helicopters pulled back into formation and the pilots began to ease up on the controls. In only a few seconds, they had passed over the LRA ground troops and were now out of range.
‘OK,’ Jean-Luc said. ‘Show’s over for now.’
‘Wait a second,’ Luca said. ‘If that was the LRA, then who the hell is left guarding the mine? That could mean that they’ve all gone.’
Jean-Luc didn’t bother to turn round. ‘Don’t get too excited,’ he said. ‘For all we know that could be just a couple of thousand of them and the rest are still in camp.’
Luca stared at him in disbelief. Just a couple of thousand! He knew nothing about weapons and guns, but how could
four
helicopters be a match for so many soldiers? Jean-Luc glanced back and caught the expression on his face.
‘Hey, don’t get me wrong,’ he said, a sly smile appearing on his lips. ‘A few thousand’s a good start.’
The Rooivalk led the attack. First one, then an entire stream of its MK4 rockets fired off towards the LRA base, leaving their yellow trails blistering across the sky. They impacted in a series of huge, mushrooming explosions that sent tremors all the way up the side of the volcano, like the aftershock of an earthquake.
Then they heard the 20mm cannon open up. It hammered through the trees and undergrowth in a blaze of white sparks. The Rooivalk’s pilot, Laurent, was targeting everything manually, flying in a series of low strafing runs, which followed the natural curve of the volcano. They watched as he twisted the helicopter from side to side, the engines screeching, obliterating everything in his path.
The burning trees lit the ground in a dull, orange glow, sending tall plumes of smoke into the air like chimneystacks. Amongst the wreckage of broken wood and charred bushes, Luca could see the dim silhouettes of figures running for cover. Until that moment he had believed that their attack was little more than suicide, but now it seemed as if nothing could stop the Rooivalk from tearing the LRA base apart.
There was the pop of small-arms fire from somewhere on the edge of the treeline as soldiers fired their AK-47s blindly into the air, but it was several minutes before they heard the first bursts of anti-aircraft fire. The noise was lower, a booming
thud
that sent the 25mm rounds ripping out into the night sky. The attack had obviously caught the LRA completely off-guard and men were scurrying in all directions, desperately trying to regroup and return fire.
The Rooivalk banked steeply, coming in low across the trees as it faced off a gun battery camouflaged deep into the side of the volcano. While the LRA soldiers frantically swivelled the twin muzzles of Type 87 battery, Laurent sent his last remaining MK4 rocket straight into them. It was a direct hit, the entire combination of men and machinery disintegrating in a ball of orange fire.
‘Out of rockets … running low on the 20mm,’ came Laurent’s voice over the radio.
‘Pull back, Captain. Save some,’ ordered Jean-Luc. ‘Bravo and Delta team, give suppressing fire to the north. We’re going up to the summit to try and winch into the mine.’
As the other two Oryx moved off into position, Jean-Luc’s banked round and began climbing the side of the volcano. The black rock beneath them stretched up in one long, continuous slope until finally, far above them, they could see the faint glow of the crater’s rim. As the helicopter powered upwards, Luca suddenly saw a small hut perched on a natural lip of rock. It was about a third of the way up and bristling with satellite dishes. Two men were standing by the door, watching as they roared overhead.
They flew higher, the gradient growing steeper with each moment that passed. Just under the summit, the sides of the volcano rose up into a vertical wall of rock, over one hundred metres high and scored with deep-set cracks. These ran down
from
the summit like claw marks, with the smoke and ash from the crater hanging in between.
The engines changed pitch as the pilots levelled off, unable to get any closer. The evening breeze had pushed the main column of smoke to the west, barring their way and covering any trace of the opening to the mine. There was silence. Everyone waited for Jean-Luc’s next order.
‘
Merde!
’ Shit! he roared, slamming his fist into the metal wall of the cabin. ‘
Putain de merde!
’
There was nothing more that could be done. They couldn’t get high enough to use their winches and their rockets wouldn’t be able to penetrate the side of the volcano. With the entrance tunnels collapsed, the only option left was to dig. But that would take weeks.
Jean-Luc’s entire frame seemed to radiate anger, the muscles on his right arm bulging as he gripped the strap above the door. He looked like a cornered animal, turning from one direction to the next as he desperately tried to think of a solution. He screwed his eyes shut and swore once again, unable to accept that there was nothing left to do.
Presently, he opened his eyes again, only to see Luca lying down on the floor with the entire top half of his body leaning out of the open door of the helicopter. He had his right hand wound into the cargo netting to steady himself, while his eyes scanned the side of the volcano, taking in every crack and gully.
Jean-Luc leaned forward and followed the direction of his gaze. The slope looked impassable, with solid slabs of rock reaching all the way up into the haze of volcanic smoke.
‘You’re fucking kidding,’ he whispered.
‘Just get me those ropes and a couple of abseiling harnesses,’ Luca replied without looking back. ‘And drop me at that hut we passed. I saw some kind of a route up from there.’
‘I am not going to waste my men or put my helicopters at risk …’
‘I didn’t ask for any help,’ Luca said, turning back to face him. ‘I climb alone.’
Jean-Luc didn’t answer for several seconds, just staring into his eyes.
‘Come on!’ Luca shouted. ‘What other option do you have? This is the only way we can get in.’
Jean-Luc knew that Luca was right. He wondered if such a climb was even possible at night, but the fact remained, this was the only way. Reaching out, he pulled Luca to his feet again.
‘We’ll set up a perimeter lower down the slope and stop the LRA from cutting you off.’
‘If they get even halfway up the slope, there’s going to be no way for us to get out of here.’
‘You let me worry about that,’ Jean-Luc said. ‘You concentrate on getting in there and getting Bear out.’
The helicopter seemed to drop out of the sky as the pilot brought them down in a steep-angled dive. When they reached the communications hut, the gunner opened up with an aiming burst, then followed with a long, ragged hail of gunfire that tore through the crooked walls of the hut, killing the men inside. The pilot then skilfully crabbed the
helicopter
in sideways, inching them on to the flat lip of rock as Jean-Luc jumped out.