* * *
• • •
I’D STOPPED TO eat and rest and sat with my back pressed to a cotton tree, picking through the remnants of the MRE I’d started at breakfast. Hedged in by close-knit vegetation, visibility was no more than six feet. So dense and repetitive was the savannah flora that it was hard at times even to focus on it. I chewed deliberately, surprised at how good the field rations were. I tilted my head and squeezed the last drop of processed cheese into my mouth and swallowed hard. I looked down again and blinked.
I was no longer looking into the tangled void of the jungle, but into the eyes of a child.
19
A girl. Maybe eight, nine years old. Skinny, dirty, with wild, woolly hair. Clothes in tatters. Feet bare. She stood still, just beyond reach, staring at me. Her eyes were bright, focused; her face was taut, scared. I startled and she recoiled but didn’t run.
Without breaking eye contact, I reached down and picked out the mini packet of M&M’s from the almost-empty MRE wrapper and held them out to her. She didn’t move. I opened the packet, showed her a candy-coated peanut, put it in my mouth and chewed and swallowed theatrically. I smiled and proffered them again on the palm of my hand, like offering a sugar cube to a pony. She reached forward, hesitantly. I rocked forward carefully onto my haunches. She took the packet and closed it tightly into her fist and stepped back.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Max. What’s your name?”
No response.
“Max,” I said, patting my chest with my now-empty right hand. I pointed at her, and tried again in the shaky Krio that Roberts had been teaching me. “Wetin na yu nem?” No response. “Ah gladi fo mit yu,” I stumbled on, unsure if I was getting the words right, or if she even understood Krio. “U sabi tok inglish?”
She moved her head from side to side almost imperceptibly.
“Where are your parents? Mama, Papa?” I looked around with both my palms turned up as if to say, Over there? Or there? Her eyes flicked away from mine, and she glanced upstream. I followed her gaze and pointed north. “Mama, Papa?” She nodded. I gave her a big smile and a double thumbs-up. “Mama, Papa OK?” She looked back at me, and then at the ground. She was still for a while and then shook her head.
I froze, hyperaware of my rifle and pistol. It was too late to conceal them, and she must have seen them. “How?” I asked. I spoke before I thought, but she didn’t understand. I wondered if she was from the village I’d passed earlier, if the guard I’d dropped into the river had been one of her parents’ killers.
“Watin apin?” I tried again. Still no response.
It was crass, and I hesitated, but I needed to know as much as I possibly could. I made a pistol with my fingers and thumb. “Bang, bang?” She shook her head again, then without warning leaped forward, mouth wide open, lips back, teeth bared, as if miming a silent lion biting the air. I flinched. She settled.
When I was sure she wouldn’t run, I repeated her story back to her without breaking eye contact.
“Mama, Papa . . .” I pretended to bite down on my arm.
She nodded.
“Lion?” I asked, though thanks to the guidebook I’d devoured on the plane, I knew there hadn’t been any recorded sightings in Sierra Leone for a decade or more. She looked blank. I tried in Limba—one of the few words of his grandfather’s language Roberts had managed to teach me. “Yandi?” She looked surprised and shook her head vigorously. “Soldiers?” I asked. No response. And then again in Krio. “Sojaman?”
She shook her head again, looking directly at me with an intensity that was unsettling, and drew a circle in the air around my face with her index finger.
“Dyinyinga,” she said. She held my gaze for a moment longer, then turned on her heels.
I lurched forward to catch her but stopped myself. She looked back once from the edge of the bush that had screened her approach, and then disappeared from view. I looked and listened hard—pulling aside the brush, scouring the shadows between the trees. But there was neither sight nor sound of her, and she was nowhere to be found.
Most operators worth their salt wouldn’t have let her leave the clearing alive—myself included, once upon a time. If she raised the alarm, my mission was over.
* * *
• • •
I KNELT BY the water’s edge and smeared first my hands and wrists and then my face and neck with dark green river slime. Roberts’s lucky lion bracelet stuck to me, caked in mud. My black fatigues—a spare uniform from Ezra’s supplies—were already filthy. I looked and smelled like the forest—which was to say both terrible and ignorable.
Dyinyinga. I had no idea what it meant. But I did know this: the cadavers in the village outside Kabala showed clear, unmistakable signs of human bite marks. She might have been a traumatized child, but that didn’t mean she was crazy. If her parents had died the way I thought they had, it was no wonder she was petrified. I took out the Thuraya satellite phone, shuffled to the edge of the canopy and dialed Roberts’s new number. He picked up immediately.
“Is that you, bruv?”
“Yup.”
“What’s up? All good?”
“Yeah, listen. I need a word translated.” I kept my voice to barely more than a whisper. “Don’t mention any names on the phone.”
“You’re calling me for a Krio lesson? Classic, bruv. Fuckin’ classic. Fire away.”
“It’s something like yin-yin-ger. Ring any bells?”
There was a long pause.
“Yin-yin-ger? Are you ’avin’ a laugh?” Roberts was actually laughing.
“No, as usual, I am not having a laugh.”
“It’s d-yinyinga.” He composed himself and stopped sniggering. “Oh, mate. Seriously. You vanish off the face of the earth and call me to ask about dyinyinga! What are you doing?”
“Never mind what I’m doing. What does it mean?”
“It means, bruv, that you’re a long way upriver. The dyinyinga are spirits. Like the djinn.”
“The djinn? Muslim djinn?”
“Yeah, sort of. Genies, bruv—they’re like genies. Fuck, man, who did you hear that from, for God’s sake?”
“I’ll tell you later. Second question: these, uh, genies. What color are they?”
“What color?” He laughed again. “M—” He caught himself before he said my name. “Mate, have you been out in the sun?”
“Concentrate. I’m serious. They’re sort of like people, right? So what color are they?” There was another pause. “The photo. Think of the photo. The men in uniform. What color are they?”
“Oh! Fuck! OK, yeah, I get it. They’re white. They look like white men.”
“Always?”
“Yeah, well. I haven’t seen one recently, you know? But you remember the story I told you, about people in the forest being scared of white men, because of the slave trade? That’s where it’s from. So, yeah, the dyinyinga, they take the form of white men.”
“And they’re bad, these dyinyinga genies?”
“Yeah, no—well, not always. It depends. My grandad used to say they could be vengeful if they helped you, if you didn’t pay the price. Very vengeful.”
“Price?”
“Yeah, your firstborn. The dyinyinga always demand the firstborn son. If you don’t pay, they fuck you up. That’s why they’re too hot to handle. Only the looking-ground man can control them.”
“A what?”
“A looking-ground man. A sorcerer. A magician.”
“O-K.” It was a lot to take in. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but did—does—your grandfather believe in them?”
“Ha, yeah, course he does. Fuck, mate, I believe in them. Every Limba does. You’d be mad not to.” He sounded absolutely serious. I decided not to press the point.
“Hey, man?”
“Yeah?”
> “Did I ever tell you that you remind me of my granny?”
“Why, is she gorgeous?”
“No. She left a saucer of milk out for the leprechauns till the day she died. I’ll be in touch. Remember, burn your SIM. And don’t call this number. Any problems, phone Grumpy Jock.”
“All right, take it easy. Good luck.”
“Hey, last thing. Your woman. She OK?”
“Bearing up. Our mutual friend says she’ll be fine. Mate . . .” He hesitated.
“Yeah?”
“Would you really have shot her, if she’d run?”
“Of course,” I replied. “But in a nice way.”
We said good-bye, and I killed the satellite phone.
* * *
• • •
THE SAVANNAH WAS still, and I felt alone and hemmed in, frustrated at my own ignorance of what was happening. I missed Roberts, too. That was the truth of it. Silly, mad bastard. But we’d clicked, and he was cool, and I didn’t feel that way often. Or ever. I let my mind wander for a second. An image flickered behind my eyes of Roberts raising a glass of beer and Juliet laughing. Then I saw Sonny Boy’s eyeball rolling on his cheek, and then I blinked and all there was to see was the endless dirty green echo of the bushes sprouting between the trees.
It was nearly one o’clock, still too early to move into position. I waited. Perspiration flowed freely down my back, under my arms. Little black sweat bees crawled across my fingers. In the shade of the trees, thirsty mosquitoes whined and pestered. Half an hour later it was time. I cleared the waypoint of any evidence I’d been there and struck out to the west, and Karabunda.
It takes an effort of will to focus in the bush. The mind wanders. Concentration lapses. It’s impossible to stay hyperalert continuously. Dips in awareness are dangerous, but they keep you fresh, too. The jolt back into the present when the daydream ends makes the nerves fizz with adrenaline, the gut tighten with expectation.
I crouched and listened, and the face of the little girl came back to me, and my mind drifted to her family and the empty village. I tried and failed to reconstruct her life in my head.
There was nothing like encountering a scared child to remind me how unfit I was to be a father, or, increasingly, an assassin. As far as conversation went, the best I’d managed was to ask her how her parents had been killed, and letting her go had put my own life at risk. What was it that I could teach a child, anyway? In my head I heard my father whistling “Jimmy Clay” as clear as the chapel bell on our estate. When you’re gone, mankind follows after you.
Except no one would be following me. At least, I hoped they weren’t.
There I was, creeping through the jungle as carefully as I could to make sure I had the best possible chance of killing someone I didn’t know, for reasons I’d probably never understand.
I wasn’t special; that much I did know. Jack Nazzar called every operator younger than him “son.” But he was solid. And whatever the reasons had been why he hadn’t told me more about the mission, they would have been good ones. I believed him when he said the job wasn’t what he’d expected, either. Nazzar wasn’t a concern. He was a comfort. It was Frank that worried me. Right from the beginning he’d been there with me, constantly. Frank was the beginning. And now, here, at the end—“your last job,” he’d said—Frank was almost invisible. I’d held on to his encouragement and praise for all my life, just as a son hangs on to every word of his father—or at least that’s how it was with me and mine. And, just like my father, Frank wasn’t there when I needed him most.
You did well.
No, Frank, you did well.
I had no one to do well for.
* * *
• • •
FIFTEEN HUNDRED.
I eased myself over a tree root and squatted down, listening. Nothing, except perhaps the faintest whine of an electrical circuit, far off. It was hard to be sure. Too many shots over a quarter of a century had left me with scarred eardrums and a permanent high-pitched whine of my own. I ran a weapons check, slung the rifle and drew the SIG, silencer on. The slow dance through the trees continued. The river had wound south through a valley cut between seemingly endless, undulating hills. It had been easy keeping cover. Now, heading across country, it was steeper, harder, but the approach to the base was itself a rough plateau, with hills rising up to six hundred meters around it. Large patches of open ground and rock hindered progress as I detoured to follow the tree line. At least since I’d left the river, the air had cooled and the mosquitoes had thinned. I scanned the horizon for observation posts, but there was no sign that anyone was there at all.
* * *
• • •
SIXTEEN HUNDRED.
It was a Tuesday. According to the time and date stamp on the photograph Sonny Boy had left me, he’d snapped the image at zero nine hundred on a Wednesday. The sun was on the white man’s face and chest, but raking over his shoulder slightly, toward the camera: he was facing southeast. So Sonny must have positioned himself to the southwest and have been facing northeast. To the southeast of the camp was an open stretch of ground shaped like an inverted teardrop a hundred and fifty meters deep and a hundred meters wide. I edged round it and headed southwest. Sonny had a clear view of the target—near impossible through three hundred meters of trees and scrub. Finding a secondary firing position would be out of the question. His line of sight of the camp must have been directly across one of these patches of open ground.
I say “camp.” The satellite photos showed a dirt track vanishing into the trees and emerging again on the other side; there was no evidence of any buildings, activity or men. All I had to go by were GPS coordinates from Captain Rhodes and a photograph from Sonny Boy. Two things were definite: Rhodes was not what she seemed, and Sonny Boy was not the man he’d once been.
I had no ghillie suit, but I needed to break up the black lines of my fatigues. Very few things in nature are black—except for coal, and, perhaps, the heart of a sniper. The river mud and the foliage that stuck to me were a start. I gathered handfuls of grass where I could find them, long, thin twigs and leaves and dried-out palm leaves. The palms I twisted into a headdress; the grass I wove into it. The long twigs and other foliage I poked into the loops and straps of my bag. It was an imperfect camouflage, but my head and shoulders were what counted most, and the outline of them would be softened by the grasses. It would do. It would have to do. I continued walking southwest, through good tree cover, parallel to a larger area of open ground that lay to the southwest of the camp.
* * *
• • •
SIXTEEN THIRTY.
The camp was four hundred meters due north. I turned northwest, walking up toward the most southwesterly point of the dead ground Sonny must have framed his shot across. I stepped from tree to tree. Slow. Careful. The wind shifted, picking up and blowing south. It was a relief. Late afternoon was the hottest part of the day. Even here in the hills, the atmosphere was still oppressive. With the wind came the chirping of birds and the throb of a generator. Muffled, faint, but unmistakable. It sounded far off—too far for where I had the camp pegged—like the mechanical pulse that emerges from a mine shaft.
* * *
• • •
SEVENTEEN HUNDRED.
On my stomach. One centimeter at a time. Elbows forward, elbows down: dragging myself by slow degrees to the edge of the clearing. As the sun dropped behind the hills to my left, the temperature fell with it. But where the sun had burned, now insects swarmed and bit. Underneath the boughs of a huge tropical hardwood, I lay prone, the tip of the rifle barrel a foot back from the edge of open ground. I lay my cheek on the stock, put my eye to the glass and zoomed the scope in to ten times magnification.
There was completely clear ground for around 250 meters. A slight rise and fall in the land. Then light savannah scrub began, which reached o
ut 50 meters or so farther into the trees beyond. And there, right there, stood two thatched huts beneath the trees with a square of beaten earth behind them. I lined up the mil-dots in the reticule against the height of the hut on the left—which from the ground to the lowest fringe of thatch I estimated at 2 meters. It was 6.5 mils; that gave me a range of 307 meters. Readjusting fractionally for the approximate height of the hut put me where Sonny Boy must have lain—the only place he could have lain to have a clear shot. I rechecked the range with the Leica: 300 meters exactly. I reset the elevation drum to zero and then dialed in eight clicks clockwise to set the range at 300 meters.
It dawned on me then. He’d been close enough to take a shot—but didn’t. He was more than good enough—so why not? No rifle? No orders? But both Nazzar and Micky said he’d gone rogue. From here, there was no way he could have taken the photograph with a camera without using a massive lens. He couldn’t have used a riflescope or a range finder, because the calibration markings would have been superimposed on the image. He must have used a simple monocular with a digital camera and estimated the distance—which would explain the vignette at the edge of the frame. To get this far, to have taken the photograph, he must have had his wits about him. Whatever happened to Sonny at the end of his trip was unknown. But what happened next was as clear as day: he went back to Freetown and left the photograph with Juliet for me.
The Break Line Page 17
