Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘Oh Jesus, oh shit, oh shit oh shit oh shit,’ she mumbled to herself, repeating the words over and over as she began to hyperventilate.

  It was then that the first shots rang out. From the far end of the village came a crackling burst of submachine gun fire, answered by a barrage of assault rifle fire from the UN troops. And then, from her side of the village, a machine gun started rattling out its baritone chatter of death. Something shrieked and hissed in an inhuman voice; a rocket-propelled-grenade streaking down from high ground. The explosion, as it struck one of the flimsy mud-and-wattle huts nearby, sent a shock wave rippling through the ground, and burst out an iridescent flash that for a split-second projected silhouettes of running soldiers and fleeing villagers against the canvas of the tent.

  This was it, this was a battle, and Margaret was caught in the thick of it.

  She had been briefed on what to do in a situation of combat, and had undergone training in how to react to firing and aggression, but now that she was actually in such a situation, everything she had learned simply flew out the window. All she could think of was to press herself flat against the ground, and to cover her now-ringing ears against the cannonade of gunfire that was exploding all around her. Her heart skipped a beat and she almost vomited when bullets smacked with dull thuds into the sandbags around the tent. Waves of feverish heat alternated with gusts of numbing cold in a hellish tempest that wracked her body and senses. Through a whirl of a million racing thoughts, she suddenly wondered what had happened to the two Ghanaian troops outside. It was then that she remembered that one of them had taken the satellite phone.

  ‘Oh shit!’ she cursed. ‘The phone, the goddamn phone!’

  She wanted to call out to the soldier, but she could not; fear held her voice at bay with a steel chain. Even if she had shouted out to them, she didn’t think they would have heard her cries over the deafening barrage of gunfire, screams and yells that thickened the soup of the humid air.

  Then, however, in the midst of the confusion, she heard another sound. This sound, or rather these sounds, were the very last things she had expected to hear in the heat of a gunfight: the trumpeting of an elephant, the snorting of rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses, the shrieking howls of mandrills and baboons, the bellowing of buffalos, the grunting and hooting of gorillas and chimpanzees, and the roars and barks of leopards and lions. It sounded, somehow, as if a zoo escape was in progress along with the battle.

  ‘What the hell is going on here, what the hell, what the hell?!’ she whimpered as tears streamed down her cheeks and panic reverberated its frenetic acid jazz dissonance through her mind.

  Screams of pain and shouts of aggression cut like clarinet blasts above the clamour of gunfire, which was becoming more sporadic and scattered. A smattering of submachine gun fire peppered the sandbags outside and ripped through the top third of the tent canvas. Someone just outside cried out; probably one of the Ghanaian soldiers, Margaret thought as a flurry of panic stirred her senses with dire urgency. A lion roared in alarmingly close proximity, and then something huge crashed through the nearest clump of trees.

  The tent door opened abruptly, and one of the Ghanaian troops stumbled in. His torso was a mess of bullet wounds where he had been sprayed with submachine gun fire, and blood was trickling from his lips. He stumbled towards her, trying to say something, but he did not manage to take two steps before he crashed to the floor, face-down, and stopped breathing.

  Margaret screamed like a terror-stricken toddler. Through the now-open flap of the tent door, she saw, through her hyperventilation and panic-induced tunnel-vision, the surreal sight of a mass of wild animals rampaging through the village.

  A UN soldier just outside the tent raised his assault rifle to his shoulder to fire at a lion that was mauling one of his comrades, but before he could squeeze the trigger a leopard sprang from the shadows and sent him reeling, clinging to his body with its sickle-claws as it sank its fangs into his throat. A massive white rhinoceros charged through the thick of the fray, running down panicked soldiers left and right, tossing them like ragdolls with slashes of its enormous horned head, and trampling them beneath its feet as it thundered along.

  An overwhelming sensation was now screaming its desperate message through Margaret’s brain, and the command that it issued, that overrode everything else, was to run. She scrambled through the open door, crawling on all fours, but when she tried to rise up she found that her knees were so weak that she immediately fell over.

  ‘Come on Margaret, come on, come on!’ she hissed through clenched teeth, trying to will herself on through the rising tide of fear and panic.

  A few feet away from her, the satellite phone was on the ground where the soldier had dropped it, and in a moment of clarity she grabbed it and stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans.

  ‘Into the trees, into the trees,’ she muttered to herself, and as soon as adrenalin pumped its new strength into her muscles she jumped up and started sprinting as fast as she could towards the cover of the jungle. An elephant came crashing through a mud hut just in front of her, and it trumpeted in brutal triumph as it demolished the flimsy structure entirely with its treelike limbs and anaconda trunk. From out of the ruins of the hut Sergeant Bouchard sprang, screaming in wordless terror. He raised his rifle, but the elephant was way too fast for him; it smashed the firearm from his hands with one blow of its trunk, and as he turned to flee that same appendage wrapped itself around the Frenchman’s body like a python. With an almost contemptuous flick of its gargantuan head the elephant then flung the soldier across the village. He howled as he soared through the air, but his piercing cry was cut abruptly short when he smashed into the ground.

  Margaret screamed again and again, howling in hoarse panic as she turned and ran. She plunged headlong into the darkness of the jungle, with thorns tearing at her bare arms and sharp limbs whipping across her face as she fled blindly through the morass of shadows. She could hardly breathe now, and her heart was thumping with terrible violence from the exertion and terror.

  It was then that the gorilla burst out from behind a tree. She shrieked and spun about on her heels to flee, but the creature was on her before she could take even one step. With a heavy arm it yanked her legs out from under her, and then the last thing she saw was the gorilla’s fist speeding toward her face before a blinding light and a flashing, percussive crash thundered through her skull and rocketed her into unconsciousness.

  ***

  ‘Rape’ was the first word that crossed her mind when she awoke. An incisive headache throbbed behind her eyes and a dull pain simmered in the marrow of her jaw, but aside from that she felt fine. However, she had seen enough of this war to know what would be coming; rape was used as a weapon here, as it had been throughout all wars in all nations, spanning the entirety of human history, and no female, whether prepubescent girl, toothless crone or anyone in between was safe from its scourge. Indeed, Margaret had lost count of how many rape-related injuries she had had to treat over the course of her three-month stint here.

  Despite the anxiety about it that lurked incessantly at the back of her mind, however, she had never really thought that it would happen to her; it was always something that happened to those people. Those alien beings who could not speak English, whose speech was a stuttering and unintelligible jabbering, whose lean, malnourished black bodies with their fear-and-trauma-wide eyes were a glaring contrast to the broad, doughy whiteness of her first-world form. These quiet, hushed beings who drank from and bathed in muddy streams, who subsisted on a bland diet of okra, maize meal, bananas, yams and chicken, who had never had sushi prepared by a master from Japan, had never experienced the gastronomic joy of North Atlantic cod cooked in white wine sauce, nor feasted on free-range, grass-fed lamb braised in—

  ‘Hey you, the General is coming to see you.’

  The barked command from the teenage soldier, who was all spindly limbs and bloodshot eyes, snapped Margaret out of her half-daze.

>   RAPE.

  The word flashed again across her vision, howling out its warning in blazing red neon against the blackness of the night. She was sitting propped up against a rough-barked tree in a clearing in the jungle, with her hands bound behind her back. She could remember vivid flashes of the hallucination-like, surreal battle from which she had fled before … before what? How had she arrived here? What was going on? She recalled things that could not possibly have happened. When she closed her eyes she saw scenes of wild animals of all shapes and sizes running amok, attacking and tearing apart the UN troops.

  A nightmare. It had to have been … it could only have been.

  She desperately wished she could check her pulse, check her pupil dilation, anything, anything to try to make sense of what had happened and what was going on. These soldiers must have drugged her; it was the only plausible explanation for the bizarreness of these visions that seemed so frighteningly real in her mind. Or perhaps the battle had been so traumatic that her brain had created these unsettling visuals in an attempt to cope with the overwhelmingness of the experience. Such things were not unheard of.

  She leaned back, trying to catch a glimpse of her arms to search for needle marks and bruising; these thugs would surely not have had the medical knowledge to correctly insert a hypodermic needle. There she would find the evidence of this drug-induced madness, there on this starkly pale skin.

  ‘Doctor, I bid you welcome to my camp.’

  Margaret looked up as this new, sonorous voice interrupted her thoughts. With her eyes wide and bright with panic, she looked up and saw, peering down at her a tall, wirily muscled and almost gaunt man, dressed in grimy camouflage fatigues. He sported a dense but well-groomed beard, and his head was entirely bald, with the patches of light that gleamed here and there on his smooth skin giving his skull the appearance of lovingly polished mahogany. Large, intense eyes burned in deep sockets beneath eyebrows that were straight and thick, set at an attractive distance apart upon his long, strong-featured face. For a while, his eyes held Margaret’s attention as forcefully as if those twin orbs had grown invisible arms and gripped her face with iron-strong fingers, preventing her from looking away. There was an undeniable wisdom in them, an intelligence that was almost savagely ferocious in its awesome magnitude; she felt as if she were looking into the eyes of some grandmaster chess prodigy, or a Leonardo da Vinci-type savant. Between his beguiling eyes a broad, flat nose sat low above his wide, down-turned mouth, with its full lips, which was nestled in an impressively strong jaw. A number of tribal scars marked the deep ebony skin of his cheeks, and a mouthful of impossibly white teeth glinted in the flickering firelight as he smiled warmly at her.

  ‘Doctor, I must apologise for having your hands and legs bound. It was a necessary precaution, but now that you’re conscious and compos mentis I think we can do away with it.’

  Standing tall and proud, with a ramrod-straight back, he gave a curt order in his language to one of the three armed teenagers who were standing at his sides, and immediately one youth whipped out a bowie knife and knelt down to sever the ropes that bound Margaret’s ankles and wrists.

  ‘Are you hurt, Doctor?’ the man asked as the youth sawed at the ropes.

  ‘I, um, no, no, I think I’m fine,’ she replied slowly, filtering and scanning every word in her head before allowing them to emerge from her lips. ‘You know that, that…’

  Mad, disjointed thoughts were racing through her mind, and she could not string anything coherent together. The word ‘rape’ kept on blazing its piercing glare across the scope of her vision, and her gaze was irresistibly drawn, by a magnetic force, it seemed, to the assault rifles and machetes that the teenage boys – and girls, for there were a few of them too – brandished so casually at their sides.

  ‘Excuse me Doctor?’ the man the soldier had called ‘General’ asked.

  ‘What are you planning to do with me, sir?’ she blurted out in an unexpected burst of brash confidence. ‘I’m, I’m with Medical Assistance for Positive Change. We’re not allied with any faction in this war, and we, we’re just here to help the people, sir. The non-combatant women and children, do you understand that? I’m of no value to you as a hostage—’ She bit her tongue the instant these words left her mouth. Searing heat flooded through her veins as she realised the immensity of the blunder she had just made.

  Jesus H. Christ, Margaret, if they don’t think you have any value, they’ll just rape you and kill you and throw your body in the river! Stupid stupid stupid stupid!

  ‘What I meant, uh, no, you see sir, in er, in political terms I’m of no value, but uh, ransom, yes, ransom money, if you promise not to harm me, and uh, to deliver me unharmed to—’

  The man smiled and laughed congenially before replying. There was no meanness in his chuckling; only gentle sympathy.

  ‘I have no interest in your ransom value, nor in your value as a hostage.’

  These words dripped liquid nitrogen down her spine and caused a debilitating numbness to shoot through her limbs … yet despite her current predicament, his tone and his disarming smile allowed a little room for hope.

  ‘Then … then … what do you want with me?’

  ‘Your medical skills.’

  A temporary gush of relief washed its calming balm through her system as the man said this. Still, she realised that she remained in an immensely precarious position. She needed more information before she could allow hope to pry its way through her creaky armour.

  ‘Who are you then? Are you M23? ADF? PARECO? Mai-Mai? Or LRA, maybe?’

  The General’s smile remained unwavering.

  ‘Were you referring to me personally, or to our organisation? No matter, I will speak for both. Once upon a time, a very long time ago, I was called N’Jalabenadou. But since that is probably too difficult for your Western tongue to pronounce correctly, you may simply call me by my nickname, which I have also had for a very long time: many simply call me “the General”. As for my organisation, we are not affiliated with any of those groups you just mentioned; they are our enemies as much as they are yours. Despite our power and influence though, I guarantee that you will not have heard of us. Indeed, almost nobody has … not yet, anyway. But they will. All the world will, soon enough.’

  ‘I, I’m afraid I don’t quite understand, sir. If you’re not part of any of the rebel groups, and you’re not government troops, then … who are you?’

  The General’s smile remained unfaltering.

  ‘We are called the Antidote,’ he declared, almost cheerfully.

  ‘The Antidote? I’m sorry, I have no idea—’

  ‘And nor do I expect you to.’

  Margaret had to admit that she was somewhat taken aback with this man’s charming, almost gentlemanly demeanour, and his fluent command of the English language. His manner of speech was very different from the dense Congolese accent she had grown used to hearing her language spoken in here; indeed, it actually sounded more like that of an Oxford professor.

  ‘I … I suppose I don’t have any choice in the matter, do I?’

  He smiled and shook his head, somewhat sadly.

  ‘I’m afraid not. No, not at this particular juncture, at least. I will, however, offer you your unconditional freedom in thirty days. Thirty days’ service to me is what I ask of you now. And in thirty days I promise you that I will give you the option of leaving us, no strings attached.’

  Hope crackled its bright firecracker sizzle across the dark skies of Margaret’s mind.

  ‘Do you really mean that? How can I trust you though? The UN will come looking for me, you know. I’m … look, there will be people coming for me. I’m a citizen of the United States of America, sir, and, and, my government does not, they will not negotiate with, with—’

  The General raised an eyebrow, and a dazzle of white showed through a cheekily parted gap in his dark, heavy lips.

  ‘With terrorists, my dear?’

  Margaret blushed deeply, but she wa
s both hot with embarrassment and cold with crushing terror, thinking that she may have unwittingly provoked this man’s ire.

  ‘I, no, no, I wasn’t accusing you of—’

  The General laughed warmly and placed a reassuring hand with gentle, unimposing weight on her shoulder.

  ‘No offence was taken. I assure you we are not terrorists, but in any case, neither do we harbour any intention of negotiating with your government. You have my word, on my honour as a free man, that should you wish to leave in thirty days, I will arrange for a helicopter to fly you directly to the United States embassy in Kinshasa.’

  ‘What if I want to leave before that?’

  The General smiled at her again, but this time she could clearly discern a threat simmering behind his eyes, a snarling gargoyle peeking out from the shadowy eaves of a gothic cathedral.

  ‘I’m afraid that leaving before then will simply be … out of the question. I apologise for this, but we are in desperate need of your skills. I strongly suspect, though, that after thirty days you will actually choose to stay on with us. You might not believe this now, but once you have received enlightenment, you may well be swayed to our cause.’

  ‘Enlightenment?’

  She did not like the sound of that. She knew what kind of ‘enlightenment’ these brutes preached and spread, and she certainly did not want any ‘enlightenment’ between her thighs.

  ‘You said that I wouldn’t be harmed, sir.’

  She was painfully aware of how shaky her voice sounded; how blatantly apparent the fright was, oozing from her every pore and tinted, apparently, with neon-coloured dye. The General, however, seemed to be sympathetic to her fears, and he replied in a calm, reassuring tone.