by Jeff Buick
“I suppose not,” she said, meeting his gaze. There they remained for a few moments. Untrusting and wary of each other, their eyes silently relaying messages of the suspicions they harbored. She interpreted his to mean, You’re in my country now, blond white bitch, and I’ll do as I wish with you. Her look was simple: Don’t underestimate me. She broke the eye contact and said, “I wish to meet my guides and porters, Colonel. Could you please introduce me?”
He nodded and motioned for her to follow him. Close to the line of military vehicles was a group of twelve men lounging on the thin strip of short grass that separated the road from the jungle. As they approached, the men stood. Mugumba spoke to them in a dialect Samantha had heard, but could not place. She picked up an occasional word, but for the most part was in the dark as to what the colonel was saying. One of the twelve appeared to be the leader, and it was this man Mugumba introduced to Samantha.
“This is Faustin Amba. He organized the group you see here.” Mugumba waved his hand in the general direction of the other eleven. “They came down from Butembo this morning to meet you at the border. If they are not acceptable, we will find other porters. The choice is yours, Ms. Carlson.”
“Hello, Faustin,” Sam said, extending her hand. The man reluctantly took it—his grip anemic, almost nonexistent. It belied his physical stature: broad shoulders with powerful forearms. His curly hair was closely cropped along his gently sloping forehead. His eyes were widely spaced, their whites tinged with yellow. His nose was smooth, not pug, and his lips full. His jawline was round and firm, his chin prominent. He wore a sweat-stained, long-sleeved white shirt and faded Levi jeans. She looked directly into his eyes, putting his height at almost six feet. “Do you speak English?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The language you and the colonel were just speaking, what is it?”
“Adamawa-Eastern, ma’am,” the man replied shyly.
“You are Bantu, with Sudanic heritage?”
He nodded and she continued, this time in French. “Il faut savoir comment se debrouiller?”
Faustin looked shocked for a moment, then smiled. “No, ma’am, I don’t need to steal. If I guide you into the Ruwenzori, I earn my money honestly. Servir, oui, se servir, non.”
She turned to a slightly puzzled Mugumba. “These porters will do, Colonel. Thank you for organizing them.”
Mugumba addressed the porters in the Adamawa-Eastern dialect and they picked up their meager personal belongings and shuffled toward the line of military trucks a few yards away. They split up and sat with the troops already occupying the transport carriers. McNeil and Sam returned to their Land Rover and he took the driver’s seat. Their escort from Kigali to the border had disappeared, his job done. Ramage took the wheel of the second Land Rover. They fell into a gap between the third and fourth truck as the convoy pulled out and headed north.
The road was in poor condition, rutted badly from the torrential rains that had fallen inside the last month. Once they cleared the treeless section near Goma, a result of the Rwandan refugees stripping the countryside bare for firewood, the jungle closed in on them and depleted the already waning sunlight. McNeil flipped on the headlights but they mostly illuminated the dust churned up from the preceding vehicle. He swore under his breath and eased off the gas, expanding the space between the trucks. He turned to Samantha.
“What do you think of Mugumba?”
“Don’t trust him in the least. How about you?”
“The same. And the son of a bitch knows exactly what armaments we brought with us. I don’t like it when people I don’t trust know too much.”
“Will the missiles still be usable without the guidance systems?” she asked, grasping the upper hand grip as the Land Rover hit a deep rut. Even holding on, she still smacked the side of her head on the window. She winced in pain.
“It’s going to cut down the useful range by quite a bit, but we can probably still use them,” he answered, trying to keep the truck on the smoothest part of the road. “If we miss what we’re aiming at, we’re screwed. The missile is totally blind. It won’t look for a heat source or a denser mass than the surrounding air. It’ll just keep going. It comes down to how accurate the shooter is.”
“How accurate are you?” she asked.
He grinned. “I suck. Troy’s the guy you want working the missiles. He’s done it before, in Lebanon.”
“Did he hit what he was aiming at?”
“No, but he came real close.” Travis glanced at her, amused by the concerned look on her face. “Relax; we still made it out.”
Samantha kept her grip on the truck to keep from being banged about as she looked out the side window. Dense jungle flashed by in the early evening light, broken by an occasional grouping of wattle-and-daub huts. Smoke curled into the night sky from small cooking fires that dotted the pockets of the most basic civilization on earth. Bantu natives huddled about the flames watched the procession of trucks with trepidation and fear. Samantha knew the local tribes had no use for the military, that they had suffered horrible injustices from the very men who were supposed to protect them. Rapes and beatings often accompanied a visit from the soldiers. Sometimes the machetes came out and then villagers died. No one wanted the trucks to stop at their village.
She lived in a world where the good guys were the cops, and they protected honest citizens from the element of society that would break the laws justly imposed by a functional judicial system. The lines that delineated good from bad were clear, easy to discern. But in the Congo, there were no such lines; nothing was black and white. Everything functioned in a zone of shimmering gray, convoluted by corruption at every level. The viewer was never allowed a clear picture. Just as the African sky was constantly mutated with heat waves rising from the scorched savannahs or the steaming jungles, so was the world between normalcy and horrendous atrocities ever blurred. One moment dinner stewed above the evening fire, the next a group of soldiers or rebels stopped at the small grouping of wattle-and-daub huts. The result was inevitably the same. Young women were raped, sometimes taken. Men who objected were hacked to death with rusting machetes. People died, people mourned, life went on. And there was no justice. There were no courts to punish the guilty, no jails to hold the perpetrators of atrocities so horrific they would sicken even the hardest European or American. It was the way things were. It was life as normal in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was unbelievable.
So the villagers watched in fear as the trucks motored past, hoping that death passed them by today. And for a moment, as part of the convoy, Sam felt the loathing aimed at her. She dropped her head to her chest and felt the tears start. Tears of sadness that the world could be such a brutal and uncaring place. As she sat in the Land Rover, a world away from the peasants who crouched at their nearby fires, she vowed to try to make a difference. Somehow. She had been brought back to Africa, and she began to wonder why. Was she here for more than locating a trove of diamonds? It had to be more. For her sanity.
SIX
The rising sun attacked the crisp morning air with an unrelenting vengeance, heating it wave by wave as its rays advanced over the rain-forest canopy. The equatorial heat pounded the gentle predawn breeze into submission and replaced it with stagnant humidity as the moisture was sucked from the exposed soil into the still air. A family of aardvarks retreated from open ground and found refuge under the prop roots of a nearby umbrella tree. A speckled tinkerbird hovered overhead for a few moments, then nestled into the relative safety of a prosperous breadfruit. Only an occasional duiker braved the intense heat to graze on some fresh shoots. It was still early, but nature’s furnace was already on full blast.
Samantha glanced about the small clearing where her military escort had camped for the night. Descending darkness had stopped the convoy from advancing any farther than the southern edge of Rutshunt, a crossroads village thirty-four miles north of Goma. A few tents were pitched, but most of the soldiers slept in their vehi
cles. The only activity that Sam could see so far was a group of four men hunched over a small fire at the far side of the clearing. Her men. Travis McNeil smiled as she approached.
“You’re up early,” he said cheerfully. “Sleep well?”
“As well as can be expected, given the amenities,” she replied, looking around.
“We’re just going over a few things,” Travis said. “I want this chance to talk before Mugumba’s men are awake. Sit down and listen in.” She nodded and joined them. Alain had boiled some water and he offered her coffee. She accepted and sat back, content to let her team do the talking.
“Including Mugumba, they number twenty-three. Each soldier is armed with an older style M-16, probably thanks to the military aid the U.S. government provided to Zaire prior to cutting off Mobutu’s aid in November of 1990. And they’ve got plenty of extra ammunition. One of the trucks has eleven crates of bullets tucked under the seats. If it comes down to a firefight, don’t expect these guys to be running out of ammo.”
“It’s what we can’t see that bothers me,” Alain Porter added. “The second truck from the rear is tarped over. They could have some pretty nasty stuff in there.”
Dan Nelson nodded his head. “Alain’s right. Everything else is out in the open, except what’s in the back of that truck. It worries me.”
“All right, let’s see if we can get a quick look at what’s inside. Keep on your toes, and if you see an opportunity, go for it. What really bothers me, though, is that these guys have had access to our supplies for the past couple of days. When we unload in Butembo, I want every piece of equipment checked and double-checked for any signs of tampering. Firing pins, mortar fuses, gun barrels, everything. Run diagnostics on the NAVPAC and the portable Panther units. I don’t want any problems with our communications. If they’ve sabotaged any of our gear I want to know now, not later.” McNeil quit talking as a member of Mugumba’s platoon walked across the clearing toward them. The soldier stopped a few feet short of the group and pointed back to the trucks.
“We go now,” he said, then turned and left.
“Quite the conversationalist,” Troy noted, rising to his feet and stretching. He watched as the tents collapsed and Mugumba’s men prepared to depart, then pointed out to the others that the level of efficiency in dismantling the camp was far greater than normal. “These are crack troops. I’ve been on enough African missions to know an elite platoon when I see one.”
“Mugumba probably hand-picked them,” McNeil agreed. “Let’s just hope they get us to Butembo and piss off. I think I’d feel a lot safer without them around.”
They pulled their Land Rovers in behind the lead vehicles as they left the clearing. A few turns later, they rolled into the center of Rutshunt, a village of two or three thousand that bordered a small tributary flowing south from Lac Rutanzige. The creek water was clear, unsullied by lowland silt or refuse from upstream encampments. They were now skirting the southern edge of the Virunga Mountains. Through breaks in the dense foliage that hemmed in the narrow dirt road, they caught occasional glimpses of the highlands. The tree line extended well past the mountain’s highest elevations, and the upper reaches were still cloaked in seemingly impenetrable rain forest.
They continued north, hugging the western flank of a rift valley that sliced through the upper plateau bordering the mountain range. Sixty miles out of Rutshunt they motored through the tiny village of Lubero. After the town the road went from bad to worse, tapering from a questionable two-lane dirt track to a winding goat path, barely passable by the four-wheel-drive vehicles. The army trucks had a wider wheelbase than the Land Rovers, and were struggling with some of the tighter bends. Within a hundred feet of a sign announcing they were sitting directly on top of the equator, a stream had washed out part of the road. Mugumba stepped from his truck to survey the situation, and McNeil joined him. The heavy rains had taken their toll as they coursed down the thirty-foot cliff on the uphill side of the road. The water had gushed over the edge and landed directly on the road, eroding it and cutting a six-foot incise across its breadth. To the left was a sheer drop of three hundred feet to the valley floor.
“The trucks won’t make it across that,” Mugumba said, eyeing the gash that lacerated the hard-packed dirt.
“Do your trucks have metal ramps for loading items with wheels? Sometimes they slide in under the cargo area.”
Mugumba turned to one of his men and spoke in a Bantu dialect. The man nodded, then walked back to the trucks and began sliding the metal ramps out from the hidden compartments. He yelled orders to a group of soldiers, and they hustled over to the trucks parked farther back and pulled those ramps out. A few minutes later, a pile of twelve lengths of high-tensile steel lay on the ground next to the washout. McNeil had one of Mugumba’s men retrieve a chain saw from a truck, and he busied himself cutting and stripping four trees to about ten inches in diameter. A roll of three-millimeter wire was brought up, and McNeil and Ramage set the ramps two deep and in groups of threes on top of the poles. They lashed the long steel pieces to the poles, spacing them to the approximate width of the army trucks’ wheels. Inside a half hour, the temporary bridgework was finished. They slid it into place over the gap in the road.
“The Land Rovers are the lightest,” McNeil said to Mugumba. “Let’s get them across first in case the heavier trucks are too much for the bridge.” Mugumba nodded, and Alain and Dan slipped the two four-wheel-drive vehicles past the lead military trucks and stopped at the bridge. “Empty the vehicles,” Travis said to Alain, the lead driver. “If the truck goes over, I don’t want to lose the equipment.”
“You’re worried about the equipment? What about me?” Alain protested.
“Leave the door open. And if the truck starts to tip, jump. It’s not rocket science.”
“Easy for you to say,” Alain shot back, gingerly edging the truck onto the steel ramps. Troy guided him from the forward side of the bridge, keeping the tires centered. The ramps, lashed two deep, were strong enough to handle the vehicle, and it took only a few seconds for Alain to maneuver across. Dan followed with no problems. They reloaded their gear as the larger and heavier army trucks lined up to cross. The increased weight was going to make it considerably more difficult, and McNeil insisted that Mugumba’s men unload the gear they had shipped from New York and carry it across manually. Box after box of munitions, arms and communications equipment came off the trucks and went across on the soldier’s backs. To a man, they looked pissed off.
The army vehicles began to ferry across, with one of Mugumba’s men directing them as Troy had done for the Land Rovers. The temporary bridge groaned under the weight, but held firm. Four of the trucks were across and being reloaded when the second-to-last vehicle pulled up, still covered with a tarpaulin—and still fully loaded. Everyone stopped and watched as the truck began the crossing. The cab was fine, slightly heavier but still well within the limits of the bridge. The rear axle was another story. As the tandem rear end moved onto the ramps, they began to bend. Slowly the rear of the truck slid toward the edge as the added weight overloaded the span. The driver felt the motion and gunned the truck engine, sending power to the rear wheels. The tires caught and jerked the truck forward quickly enough to hit the dirt on the far side before the ramps folded. Once across, the driver slammed on the brakes and jumped from the cab, swearing loudly in an obscure dialect.
Mugumba briefly inspected the bridge. The ramps were bent, but the structure was still intact. He motioned for the final truck to come across. The front wheels were not a problem, dropping slightly with the curve the previous truck had forced into the steel. The rear of the truck was not so simple. The tandem axle split the weight better than a single, but there was too much stress on the already weakened timbers that shored up the bridge. The first log shuddered for a moment, then snapped. The cracking sound was followed almost instantly by three more as the remaining logs split apart. The backbone of the bridge was compromised, and the metal ramp
s bent to the breaking point and then collapsed. The rear bumper smashed down onto the dirt, and for a moment the truck seemed stable, hung up on the dirt next to the washout. Then the edge caved in. The rear of the truck slid into the enlarged gap, and then pulled the cab with it as it careened over the cliff. The driver opened the door, but couldn’t jump quickly enough. His screams echoed up the canyon as the truck crashed down the incline, rolling end over end until it hit the bottom with a sickening thud. No one spoke for a few moments.
“Finish loading the trucks.” Mugumba finally broke the silence. “I want to make Butembo by nightfall.” He made no reference to the dead man, nor did any of his platoon. The reloading was accomplished and the convoy moving within a half hour. The road remained treacherous but passable. An hour before sundown they pulled into the bustling city of Butembo.
Samantha jumped from the Land Rover the moment McNeil pulled in front of the Queen Anne, Butembo’s premier hotel. She stretched her legs, gathered her hair off her shoulders and headed into the hotel. Reminiscent of the early Belgian influence on the country, the lobby was very European. High ceilings, ornate chandeliers and candelabra, overstuffed easy chairs with dark colonial woodwork, and smooth marble floors greeted her. She padded across the foyer to the reception desk and checked in. Her room was on the third floor and she spent no time getting stripped down and into the shower. Similar to Kigali, the water was ice-cold. By the time she finished washing the day’s dirt off her skin, she was shivering. She shut the water off and towel dried. She glanced out the window as she dressed for dinner, scanning the rooftops, then raising her gaze and letting it rest on the distant mountains.
She had a limited knowledge of this remote city. It was nestled between two national parks and stood as the last civilization for travelers venturing in any direction. To the southwest was the vast, mostly uncharted Congo River basin. Satellite imagery was responsible for humans’ understanding of this geography, not hands-on exploration. The major routes through the interior of the country were well known, but the river basin held more virgin land untouched by anyone but an occasional headhunter than the entire Amazon Basin in Brazil. On past expeditions she had marveled at the scope of the river system, the largest in Africa and second only to the Amazon in water flow. And flow it did, refusing to dry up in even the driest season, as it was fed from both sides of the equator.
