The Secret Chamber

by Patrick Woodhead

  ‘You guys OK?’ came her voice, crackling slightly over the intercom.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Luca slowly, his hand still gripping on to the grab handle above the window. There was a pause before René’s voice suddenly boomed in over the mic.

  ‘Bloody terrified!’ he shouted. ‘Always hated flying, let alone being shot at while doing it.’ He then reached forward and lightly banged Bear’s shoulder. ‘But well done back there, girl. You were great.’

  ‘It was close. Way too close. I can’t believe they opened up on us like that.’

  ‘They’re bastards,’ René said, fumbling in his pockets and lighting a cigarette. A plume of smoke billowed out into the cockpit and his face glowed red in the embers, a smile curving through his thick black beard. ‘Just promise me you’ll never do a turn like that last one again,’ he added. ‘My stomach damn’ near went through my spine.’

  Bear looked at the cigarette and the cloud of smoke encircling René. She began to say something, then turned back to the controls, pulling the air vents open a little further. Taking out a map from the side of her seat, she shone a small pencil torch across its laminated surface, checking their heading against the directional compass. She then adjusted the trim a little further and leaned back in her seat. A few moments passed before she turned towards Luca.

  ‘So what’s your story?’ she said, finally breaking the silence. ‘Fabrice didn’t exactly say much about you.’

  Luca was staring out of the window towards the open expanse of Lake Edward, directly beneath them. The water was translucent silver in the moonlight, stretching mile after mile towards the horizon.

  ‘We’re looking for a friend who disappeared about six months ago.’

  ‘Six months? That’s quite some time to be missing in a place like the Congo. What makes you think he is still alive?’

  Luca shrugged.

  ‘So what’s your plan? Just to head into the Ituri and start looking?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘It’s a pretty big place and you don’t seem to have packed much stuff. You don’t think it’s going to take a bit more than a rucksack and a few bottles of Deet?’

  ‘We know where the truck was hit. That’s all we need, to start with.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  Luca nodded slowly.

  ‘But you guys have experience of a place like this, right? You’ve been in the jungle before.’

  ‘No. Not exactly.’

  Bear paused, then she looked back at him.

  ‘Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but have you got any idea how crazy it sounds, going off into LRA country looking for some guy who disappeared six months ago? You sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?’

  ‘Just give us the lift. After that, we’ll go our own way.’

  ‘Damn’ right you will! And you both need to understand one thing – the deal was to get you to Epulu. That’s it. I don’t give a shit what Fabrice told you because after we land out there, you guys are on your own.’

  She glanced across at Luca, her voice hardening.

  ‘And when things go bad, don’t expect to be turning to me every five minutes for help. Out there, you’re on your own.’

  Luca’s head snapped round and he stared at her, eyes shining with hostility. Bear returned his gaze, suddenly wondering what it was he was about to do. The change in him was immediate. She watched as his left hand reached down to the console and with a sharp tug yanked out the cables to his headset, killing the mic. He stared out into the night, the profile of his face lit by the dull glow of the cabin lights. She watched him a moment longer, recognising his anger and bitterness. She’d seen them both before, many years ago.

  ‘He’s not exactly talkative at the moment,’ came René’s voice over the intercom. ‘But don’t worry, he’ll lighten up when we’re on the ground. And, just for the record, we always knew it was only to Epulu. From then on, we’ll make our own way.’

  Bear nodded. ‘Is he always this touchy?’ she asked, knowing full well that without the headset she couldn’t be heard above the noise of the engine.

  ‘Luca?’ There was a crackle on the mic as René exhaled heavily. ‘No, he’d didn’t used to be like this at all. Believe it or not, he was actually one of the top climbers in the world, a real genius. The boy could climb up rock as smooth as glass. Then something happened a few years back out in the Himalayas and he’s never really got over it. Been eating away at him ever since.’

  ‘Something?’

  René paused, suddenly finding it hard to say the words.

  ‘You really want to know?’

  Bear didn’t answer, only waiting.

  ‘There was this big avalanche and then his best friend was murdered right in front of him. Shot between the eyes.’

  ‘Jesus,’ she muttered. There was silence again as she looked out towards the moon rising over the line of the water. It was already half up, drowning out the rest of the night sky. Bear stayed like that for some time, lost in her own thoughts, before glancing back towards René. Even in the dim light of the cockpit, he could see the intensity in her eyes.

  ‘You know, I’ve been around a lot of wars and they affect everyone differently. Some people can’t even speak when it’s all over, some just get on with life again, and then there are others that have this look – these blank, vacant eyes, with rage simmering just beneath. It’s like this uncontrollable animal that bursts out of them.’ She glanced back to the controls, her expression darkening. ‘I guess it comes from just having seen too much. And out here, bad shit happens every day.’

  ‘So what’s your point?’

  ‘The point is that these are damaged people, René. Really damaged. And people like that are dangerous to be around.’ Her eyes involuntarily darted towards Luca.

  René shook his head automatically.

  ‘Come on, Luca’s nothing like that. He’s just going through a bad patch, that’s all.’

  ‘You sure about that? How well do you really know him?’

  ‘From way back. Trust me, all he needs is a little more time to get over it. He’ll be all right, you’ll see.’

  ‘Your call.’

  René watched as Bear leaned forward in her seat and pulled the map on to her lap once again, systematically checking through each instrument and heading. He then pushed himself back against the uncomfortable rear seats of the plane and put out the last of the cigarette, wedging the butt into an old flip-down ashtray in the door.

  He wondered how much of what she had said was true of Luca. Was he really that damaged? Had Bill’s death broken him that much? There were these flashes, these brief moments, where the old Luca seemed to bubble through to the surface, but just as quickly, he seemed to become lost in a bitterness of his own making. That rage she’d spoken of was there. He had already seen it up in the mountains. But René couldn’t believe it was all there was left of Luca. There had to be something more.

  René went to light another cigarette then stopped, his throat too dry for him to smoke it. He rubbed his hands together distractedly, feeling his palms go clammy with prickles of sweat. In a couple of hours they would be landing in one of the most dangerous places on the planet and Luca would be the only person in the world he could rely on.

  Chapter 15

  RENÉ WOKE AS the plane lurched downwards in a thermal. Everything jolted, the loose coins scattering to new positions on the carpet as Luca’s rucksack slowly toppled sideways and on to his lap. René’s hands shot out as he tried to steady himself. There was a terrible pain in his head, while a stale line of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth and across the line of his beard.

  The morning sun streamed into the cockpit of the plane. The light was stark, with a fierce intensity to it that seemed to heighten the colours all around him, paining his eyes. He felt sickly hot and dehydrated, the cigarette he’d smoked a few hours ago still tainting his mouth.

  The plane jolted again, then swung round in a ste
ep banking turn that made René’s stomach instantly cramp in on itself. Acid vomit rose into his mouth and he groaned softly as he gulped it back down again. He looked around the clutter of the rear seat for a bottle of water, but gave up after a few seconds of searching. His head was too painful for him to bend forward. Instead, he scraped up the headset and gingerly angled the mic towards his mouth.

  ‘Where the hell are we?’

  Luca’s head snapped round. ‘We’ve started the descent to Epulu. You’ve been out for a few hours.’

  ‘Good,’ René replied, nodding his head.

  ‘How you feeling?’ Luca asked, seeing the obvious strain on his face.

  ‘Raring to go.’

  Pressing his head against the window, he peered out. The canopy of the Ituri Forest stretched away in every direction. Millions upon millions of trees were densely packed together in one of the last great wildernesses on the planet. The trees formed a gigantic block of brilliant green, radiating colour against the harsh sun, while clouds hanging motionless in the sky above cast shadows on to the surface, like patches of spilled ink.

  Meandering tributaries of brown water cut through the trees, heading towards some distant confluence with the main flow of the Congo River. They wound on for mile after mile, like tears across a seamless fabric.

  ‘Phenomenal,’ René breathed, forgetting the throbbing in his head for a moment.

  ‘Quite something, isn’t it?’ Bear said over her shoulder. She leaned forward in her seat again, forehead creased in concentration as she brought the plane round in another wide banking turn.

  ‘When Stanley crossed the width of Africa, this is what he called its “black heart”,’ René said, almost to himself. ‘Never thought I would get to see it.’

  Bear glanced back at him.

  ‘It’s the real thing out there, that’s for sure.’

  Glancing back at the map, she checked their heading once again. They should be over the landing site by now, but there was nothing but trees. Slowing the plane to seventy knots, she lowered the flaps and flipped the Cessna on its axis, staring down through Luca’s window as the ground seemed to spin round in a slow arc. Suddenly, she saw the dull grey of a thatched roof, then another. The village of Epulu was right below them, nestled in the shade of a group of wide bouma trees.

  ‘I see the village,’ Luca said, pressing his finger against the glass.

  ‘Yeah, got it.’

  Bear levelled out the wings and started prepping the plane for landing. As she ran through the checks, she spoke to them in the mic, her voice becoming matter-of-fact.

  ‘At the last report, the LRA were seen about 30 clicks north of this village. They torched one of the pygmy settlements somewhere out in the forest, but after that we’ve heard nothing more. They seem to have gone silent.’

  ‘Where’s their main base?’ René asked.

  ‘No one knows. They haven’t been able to pick them up with the satellites. They just seem to pop up anywhere from here to the Sudanese border, moving like goddamn’ ghosts.’

  Luca followed her gaze out to the horizon, understanding how easily an entire army could be concealed in such a vast expanse. Aside from a few settlements dotted close to the rivers, the Ituri was almost entirely unmapped, with only the major tributaries appearing on any of Bear’s aerial charts. Gradually, he focused on a series of rocky outcrops rising in vertical pillars through the forest canopy. Giant slabs of red rock lay stacked up on top of each other, most of them covered by a net of vines with stunted bushes clinging precariously to their sides. The pillars ran away from them in a near-symmetrical line, like the knotted spine of a dinosaur.

  ‘What are those?’

  Bear craned her neck to see what he was pointing at. ‘They call them inselbergs. They run from here all the way east to the rim of volcanoes on the Ugandan border. Right up to the Mountains of the Moon.’

  Luca’s gazed passed from one inselberg to the next, until out by the horizon he could just make out the ground bulging in a series of conical shapes. Traces of smoke hung lazily in the air above each one. These were the volcanoes, all of them active, with occasional spurts of lava spilling over the crater rims.

  ‘How far do you think they …’ Luca began, when just in front of the plane the air exploded. The noise was incredible, sending massive shock waves shuddering through the plane and splintering the windscreen in long vertical cracks. Luca’s door blew out, hanging limply by its lower hinge as air rushed into the cockpit. He could see the ground open up right beside him, blurred from the distance.

  He turned, trying to understand what had just happened. Everything went silent, muted by the intense ringing in his ears. The plane pitched upwards, then began to slow. Luca sat for several seconds, transfixed by how slowly they seemed to be moving, until a juddering motion rocked through the plane as the damaged air intakes of the engine began to starve the carburettors of oxygen. After a few muffled coughs the engine died, the propeller jerking to a halt just in front of him.

  A sharp, high-pitched whine filled the cockpit, getting louder and louder as the stall warning went off. The noise grew louder still, shrieking, as the plane gradually listed to one side and fell like a deadweight.

  Bear grabbed the controls as they dropped in a steep dive. She held the plane level with the rudder, desperately trying to keep them from spinning, while her eyes locked on the air-speed indicator. She watched the needle slowly creep up the dial as they gathered momentum and finally came out of the stall, but with each second that passed they had fallen five hundred feet closer to the ground, with the altimeter spinning full circle.

  The ground seemed to fill the entire windscreen, looming up at them as they passed under three hundred feet. Luca could clearly see soldiers running out into the open in front of them, clutching rifles and pointing them towards the sky. They heard the clatter of machine-gun fire, then saw the smoke trail of a rocket-propelled grenade shoot past their starboard wing before exploding somewhere in the air behind them.

  ‘Shit!’ Bear screamed, as the plane rocked forward from the explosion. ‘They’ve got RPGs.’

  ‘Get us out of here!’ Luca shouted as she heaved back on the control column, pulling the plane out of the dive. The wingtips became lost in a blur of green and treetops as they skimmed across the canopy, the positive G-force forcing them back in their seats.

  Just as they began to claw back some altitude, there was a sharp, metallic hammering against the portside wing. Bear turned to see the entire flap break off, twisting in the wind as it fell back towards the earth. Puncture marks from where the bullets had hit ran right across the underside of the wing in a long, curling trail.

  ‘The bloody wing just …’ René shouted, eyes fixed on the gaping holes. Bear felt the plane list violently to one side as the damaged wing dragged them round. She jammed on full opposite rudder, levelling out their course, but without the engine they were already starting to lose the speed they had gained in the dive.

  Grabbing Luca’s hands, Bear pulled them towards the control column.

  ‘Just hold this line,’ she said, her voice level over the mic. He looked across at her before reaching forward, his forearms flexing as he squeezed the controls as tight as he could.

  Bear grabbed the key with her left hand, checking one magneto, then the other. With her right hand, she pumped the throttle, desperately trying to kickstart the engine back to life. The engine ground round each time she slammed the key across in the ignition, but there was nothing.

  Their speed was draining off fast, passing 70, then 60 knots. Luca instinctively eased back on the controls, trying to pull them further away from the ground.

  ‘No, no,’ Bear said, reaching forward to steady his hands. ‘We’ll stall again. Angle towards the ground.’

  ‘But we’re right over the trees.’

  ‘Just do it.’

  Luca pushed forward a little, easing the nose down and trading altitude for speed, while Bear turned the key again a
nd again. There was still nothing from the engine. They could hear the sound of machine-gun fire once more, but it was distant now, almost irrelevant. In only a few seconds, they had flown far beyond the soldiers’ reach and out towards a small tributary of the main river. In the heat of the morning, the brown waters looked placid and heavy.

  The plane glided downwards, the speed dropping to 50 knots, then 40. Bear’s hand brushed against Luca’s on the steering column as she took control.

  ‘We’re going in,’ she whispered. ‘Tighten your belts.’

  There was a pause as both René and Luca stared at her, as if not quite understanding what she had said. Then, in a flurry of movement, they grabbed the straps of their seat belts, yanking the webbing as tight as it would go. Luca held on to the handle above the window and wedged his left arm against the dashboard in front.

  ‘We’ll make it. We’ll make it,’ he repeated. ‘Just land as close as you can to the riverbank.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ René breathed, his chest rising up and down as he stared past Bear’s shoulder through the cracks in the windscreen. The trees rose up to meet them, suddenly looking enormous.

  Bear reached forward, switching the transponder to 7800 and checking their position on the GPS.

  ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,’ she called, her voice flat as she went through the protocol. ‘This is Golf Hotel Juliet. 02.16.52 North 28.13.35 Easting. Engine failure. Three on board in a Cessna 206. Going down in a …’

  She broke off, raising her thumb from the comms switch.

  ‘What’s the use?’ she whispered to herself. ‘No one’s coming.’

  The plane silently glided under a massive branch overhanging the river. She watched it pass over the top of them, her head tilting up in disbelief. They were only twenty feet above the water now, the river so close it looked as if it would rise up and touch their wingtips.