Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘I know little about this mysterious group … which is why I need your assistance in discovering more about them, and their greater purpose. All I know is that they are called “the Huntsmen”.’

  PART FOUR

  15

  MARGARET

  3rd October 2020. Banamba Villlage, in the far east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo

  The cockroach sat nibbling on a crumb of maize meal on the floor of the tent, completely unaware of the long-legged rain spider preparing to pounce from a nearby shadow. Both creatures, however, had failed to see the hulking baboon spider who was waiting in a hairy crouch, behind a half-crushed soda can, with bared fangs, razor-honed focus and single-minded intent. Margaret could not take her eyes off of this scene of primordial horror, this tableau of violence distilled to its ancient essence: fight, kill, or be killed. This was the primal law of tooth and claw, written as plainly as it could be.

  An abrupt voice, thick with a French accent, yanked her from this hypnotic scene back to the oppressively humid present of this green hell.

  ‘Doc,’ Bouchard drawled as he poked his head in through the canvas door of the tent, ‘you got a spare minute to look at this itch I got between my legs? It’s getting worse every day, I swear it!’

  Dr Margaret Green simply shook her head and sighed. The Frenchman was relentless with his taunts and advances, and although his register was playful there was a hint of something else, something darker beneath it – a twisted shadow only barely concealed behind that boyish face, with its prominent hooked nose and big, sparkling blue eyes.

  ‘Don’t you ever get tired of it, Sergeant Bouchard? I’ve told you what you can do with that chauvinistic attitude of yours, and where you can shove it,’ she replied stiffly.

  Bouchard was not to be deterred.

  ‘I’d rather you shoved it there for me, Doc,’ he retorted with a wolfish grin. ‘You have such beautiful hands, I can only imagine how—’

  ‘Would you please send in the next patient, Sergeant?’

  ‘Aw, come on Doc, there are no more patients today, and it’s a real medical complaint! It’s your job to check out things like this, no? Hey, listen, you might even like what you see, don’t be so fast to—’

  Margaret’s wide-set brown eyes blazed with flared-up wrath, sizzling as they blasted focused heat through the air at the young soldier.

  ‘Sergeant, I’m forty-eight years old and I look ten years older than that. I’m old enough to be your mother, for Pete’s sake! Your attempts at flattery are as ridiculous as they are insincere, so I would appreciate it if you ceased this incessant sexual harassment and dealt with me in a more professional manner. If you don’t, I will be forced to speak to your commanding officer about this disgusting attitude of yours, got it? Have I made myself clear?’

  The Frenchman scowled at her.

  ‘You MAPC people are so damned boring,’ he muttered. ‘What’s wrong with a little fun? Christ, you should be flattered that I’d want some of what you’ve got to offer. Shit, what the hell else is there to do out here in the damn jungle anyway?’

  Margaret glared with indignation at the young man.

  ‘Sergeant Bouchard, may I remind you that we are in a war zone! And you of all people, as a UN peacekeeper, should be taking this as seriously as we in the Medical Assistance for Positive Change group are! Have the last few weeks here made not one iota of an impact on you?’

  In response to this the Frenchman rolled his eyes and crossed his arms across his chest with bristling aggression.

  ‘Look, I didn’t ask to be sent out here to deal with all these fucking savages, hacking each other up with machetes and shooting babies with AK-47s,’ he grumbled, his face darkening. ‘You volunteered for this shit, so maybe you’re enjoying it, but I didn’t ask for this, and man, I’m sick of it! These people are scared of us, they’re scared of the militias, they’re fucking scared of everything! And as for us, we just eat the same fucking porridge, fried bananas, yams and okra for every meal, or we get dry, stringy chicken once in a while if we’re lucky … and don’t even get me started on the mosquitoes and insects!’ He turned his head to the side and spat onto the ground before fixing her with a piercing, almost accusatory gaze. ‘Admit it Doc, you need a lay just as badly as any of us! If you would just get over yourself, maybe you could actually have a bit of fun, no?’

  Shards of jagged ice crystallised in Margaret’s eyes, and the words she spoke zipped out of her lips with the hissing fury of pressurised air escaping a punctured canister.

  ‘Get out of this tent now, Bouchard. This conversation will be reported to your superiors. I promise you that.’

  The young man snorted disdainfully and sneered at her.

  ‘All the boys say you’re a dyke, Doc. You know, I think I’m inclined to believe them.’

  ‘Out. Now.’

  The Frenchman mumbled something under his breath and then slunk away. Margaret, meanwhile, shook her head and then brushed a wisp of mousy brown hair out of her eyes before seeing to the emaciated, wide-eyed Congolese child who was lying on the stretcher in front of her. She peeled back the bandages that covered the stump where the girl’s arm had been severed – hacked off by machete-wielding soldiers – just below the elbow.

  ‘Mm, yes,’ she mumbled flatly, half to herself. ‘This is looking much better. We’re just going to change the dressings here, sugar, and then you can be on your way.’

  She completed the rest of her work in silence, and then sent the child out when the procedure was complete, watching with cool eyes as the insubstantial adolescent limped out of the tent on unsteady legs. Margaret had seen so much brutality and bloodshed since arriving here three months ago that she had become quite immune to feelings of horror, disgust and shock … and empathy.

  She had always regarded herself as a compassionate person, and had never refused anyone who had asked assistance of her. Back in California she had given generously to a number of charities, had held fundraisers for humanitarian causes, and had volunteered at a homeless shelter once a month, as well as spending countless hours on social media sharing articles about pertinent social issues, and arguing against right wingers and other conservative types. When the opportunity had arisen to take a six-month sabbatical from her teaching position at the University of California Davis Medical School she had jumped at the opportunity, after previously having been unable to commit to the minimum of a four-month term to volunteer abroad with the Medical Assistance for Positive Change program.

  Now that she had been in the heart of the Central African jungle for three months, though, she had started to rethink her entire perspective on life. The patients who streamed through the flaps of her medical tent now evoked little more emotional response in her than had the medical dummies she had used in her classes. She could speak a little French, but not enough to communicate easily with these rural Congolese, many of whom did not speak any language but their own native tongue anyway, a language of which she still didn’t understand more than two or three words. Bouchard, as obnoxious as he was, had been right about the monotony of the food, the awful insects and the omnipresent boredom.

  In addition, the humidity made everything sticky and endangered the integrity of many of the medical supplies, a large number of which had already been contaminated with mould and mildew. And the mosquitoes – she had never previously grasped, coming from her bubble of first-world convenience and twenty-first century civilisation in Sacramento, how malaria could possibly be as massive an issue in Africa as aid organisations made it out to be, but now that she was here she understood it only too well. The little bastards were enormous, often suicidally daring in their ravenous hunger for blood, and were absolutely everywhere. The mosquito net drives she had funded in previous years, without really understanding why, now made complete sense to her.

  Margaret did not fear the disease herself, for she was on a course of anti-malarial medication, but the myriad bites from the swathes of stinging inse
cts itched and hurt no less for that. She scratched at one of the many raised bumps on her plump, heavily freckled forearms and cursed under her breath. While the creatures whined their sleep-destroying symphony by the thousands in these hot jungle nights, during the day they seemed to adopt an entirely different strategy and instead attacked like soundless, invisible assassins. She counted seventeen fresh bites on her left arm, yet she could not see a single mosquito in the tent.

  She packed up her medical kit, as meticulously as she always did, and stepped out into the dusk. The sun was sinking behind the distant mountains, and the dark was draping itself over the jungle with an almost ravenous keenness. Blue-helmeted UN Peacekeeper soldiers patrolled the edges of the village, where the wild and threatening mass of trees and vines stood their own sentry at the man-hewn lines that divided civilisation from its nemesis: primeval oblivion and the murkiness of a prehistoric past.

  Two UN Peacekeepers stood guard outside Margaret’s tent; indeed, the main reason the troops were in this village at all was to protect the expensive medical supplies she carried with her; these items would prove an invaluable prize to the M23 anti-government militia soldiers who were camped out in depths of the jungle, and who were, according to the most recent reports, preparing to launch more attacks on the government forces and villages in this area. The threat of the rebel militias was a simmering constant, a hovering dragonfly whose metallic sheen gleamed in the copper casings of bullets and the too-white smiles of villagers and soldiers alike.

  Thankfully, the lecherous Frenchman was not one of the two troops guarding her supplies. Instead, the guards outside the door were a pair of Ghanaian UN soldiers who had been with Margaret since she had landed in the DRC three months ago. As she scanned the village through crinkled eyelids, each guard glanced at her and each gave her a polite nod, but neither of them said anything. That was how Margaret preferred interactions with these soldiers to be; she had no love for military personnel, and since her teenage years she had participated in a number of anti-war demonstrations, although the most recent had been over America’s invasion of Iraq well over a decade prior.

  Fright-hushed women and children hurried along the path that connected the village to the muddy stream inside the jungle, balancing yellow buckets and large clear plastic jugs on their heads, these grubby receptacles filled with water for the night. Older men sat outside their huts smoking hand-rolled cigarettes filled with cheap, strong tobacco, and a group of younger men returned from a nearby village, a few hours’ walk down the dirt track, carrying sacks of yams they had received in exchange for a few crops of bananas.

  Margaret peered up the road, and through the dusty twilight saw Sergeant Bouchard chatting up a teenage villager. The wiry Frenchman was leaning against the mud wall of a hut in a typically cocky pose, grinning with his Lothario’s smile. The girl was tall and thin and looked no older than fifteen or sixteen, and she seemed distinctly uncomfortable with the Frenchman’s hand, which was resting on the curve of her hip. Firm, pert breasts, unconstrained by a brassiere, pressed through the flimsy fabric of her tee-shirt, and Margaret noticed one of Bouchard’s hands creeping up the girl’s torso toward them. The sight of this blatant depredation made her nauseous, and she desperately wanted to shout something … but she lacked the will to make even that small effort.

  She looked away, feeling a profound sense of disgust at both herself and at the Frenchman, and then plopped her herself down in the camping chair outside her tent. For once it had not rained in the afternoon, and the sky above was clear and deep, the intense indigo punctured here and there by the bullet-hole lights of emerging stars as the dying day faded into night. All around the village the jungle was coming alive with the sounds of nocturnal creatures; birds, beasts and insects all contributed their idiosyncratic notes to the thrilling cacophony of life.

  Margaret sighed as she leaned over and turned on her gas cooker to boil some water for a cup of coffee, after which she pulled out her phone and switched it on. There was no reception of any sort out here in the jungle, but she had not turned the device on to make a call or connect to the internet. No, she was doing what she usually did at this time of day: she brought up the photo album “Ting”. Ting Chung, a Taiwanese-born, Arizona-raised professor of Women’s Studies, was Margaret’s lover and long-term partner, and upon Margaret’s return from Central Africa they planned to marry in California. What had drawn them together, almost fifteen years ago now, had been their mutual passion for activism, and for humanitarian and social issues.

  ‘What would you think if you saw me here now, Ting?’ she whispered to the luminescent picture of her lover on the screen in her hand. ‘Now that my principles have finally been tested by fire, I’ve found myself … lacking. Human, all too human, I’m afraid to say. I’m more selfish and cold than I ever thought possible. God, I miss you so much; you’re all I care about, all I can think about. It’s like a part of myself has been amputated without having you by my side.’

  Margaret watched with cool indifference as a Congolese woman hobbled past her tent, battling with the weight of a full twenty-litre water jug. She stared at the woman’s stick-thin legs and her low-drooping breasts that shifted and wobbled beneath a grimy pink tee shirt with every weary step. The garment was emblazoned with colourful, smile-beaming Disney princesses who were at complete odds with the woman’s waif-like appearance; her sunken cheeks, tight-drawn lips and yellow-tinged eyes had more in common with the macabre gloom of a Goya canvas than the saturated artificiality of American cartoon characters. Margaret found as she observed this scene that she was lacking almost entirely in empathy for the struggling, hunch-backed female, and an arctic shiver coursed abruptly down her spine.

  ‘I don’t know what this place is doing to me, Ting,’ she whispered, with hot tears stinging suddenly at the corners of her eyes, ‘but everything I thought I was, everything I thought I stood for, it was all … God, I can’t even say it, but I have to. It was all … lies. At least that’s what it feels like to me now. All I want is to leave this, this, this shithole, there, I said it out loud, this awful shithole and its poor people, and return to our house by the lake. I wanted to make a difference all my life, and now that I’m finally making one … I just want to get the hell away from it and climb into our king-sized bed with you and the puppies and share some red wine and chocolate. I feel so guilty for saying this, but I can’t keep it bottled up inside anymore.’

  She thought of using the satellite phone to call her lover, but realised that due to the time difference Ting would be asleep now. She sniffed and wiped a solitary tear from her cheek, forcing herself to swallow the sob that was inching its way up the inside of her throat.

  ‘I can’t do this anymore, I can’t Ting, I’m nowhere near as strong as I thought I was, and—’ Her hoarse whispering was interrupted by a noise that reverberated loudly across the hills and echoed in waves around the bowl of the jungle valley. ‘What on earth is that?’ she murmured. She sat bolt upright and stuffed her phone into her hip pocket. ‘Private, what is that sound?’ she repeated, speaking to the closer of the two Ghanaian soldiers.

  The man turned to her, and she saw both puzzlement and anxiety splayed across his broad, acne-scarred face.

  ‘I don’t know, Dr Green. It’s like … drums. But there are no other villages up there in the hills. I don’t like the sound of this.’

  His tone and the look in his eyes caused shivers of dread to scuttle in swarms across the length and breadth of Margaret’s skin. From all over the hills more drumming was starting to echo, growing steadily in tempo and volume. The soldiers glanced at each other, and the consternation etched across their faces was plain to see.

  ‘You better go inside the tent, Doc,’ the other Ghanaian soldier grunted, cocking his assault rifle.

  Margaret needed no further encouragement, so she shuffled back inside the tent, which offered protection from stray bullets due to the walls of thick sandbags around it. The drumming was growing in v
olume now, and it had become loud enough that the villagers had stopped what they were doing and were now looking around and muttering in frightened tones.

  One of the soldiers pulled open the tent door to speak to Margaret.

  ‘Stay in there until we know what’s going on, Doc. Also, I’m going to need to take the satellite phone to call headquarters and report this.’

  ‘The satellite phone? But—’

  ‘I don’t know why, but our radios have just gone dead, so the satellite phone is the only means of communication we have right now. Don’t worry, I’ll bring it right back. If you hear any firing, get under the cot and stay down until it’s over.’

  The soldier took the satellite phone and then stepped outside. He zipped the tent up behind him after he left, leaving Margaret in a bubble of dread-laden gloom. The drums were starting to beat at a frenzied pace now, and more drummers from all over the jungle were starting to join in the symphony of thunder that was pealing across the hills. The percussive sound felt as if it were shaking the foundations of the earth itself.

  ‘What the hell is going on here?’ Margaret whispered, her heart pounding in her ribcage.

  She dared not light up her gas lamp, not now. Panic descended, draping its paralysing cold over her like an icy morgue sheet over a corpse as the drummers quickened their tempo and maddened their rhythms. She had seen the aftermath of many battles and skirmishes as she had travelled east with the UN troops, but up until now she had never actually been in the middle of one – and the thought of experiencing this was blasting icy boosts of paralysing fear through her every vein and artery.

  The drummers were getting closer, ever closer, and closing in rapidly. A woman screamed somewhere at the opposite end of the village, and some of the UN troops started shouting to each other in French. The darkness in the tent began to take on a stifling feel, the air itself seeming to become thick and viscous, and Margaret began to feel a distinct sensation of breathlessness, of choking, of drowning in the almost-liquid blackness. The drumming sounded as if it was right at the edge of the trees now, and the crazed, galloping polyrhythms were so close and so intense that they seemed to be inside her skull, jackhammering with the fury of a caged demon trying to break free from its bone prison.