‘Gee, LeDuc,’ I heard Rutherford say, as we were led away at gunpoint, ‘lucky for us they’re not Mai-Mai or Ugandan renegades. Then we’d really be in the shitter.’
The armed escort herded us through the encampment until we arrived at one of two circular corrals made from saplings sunk in the ground and lashed together. One of the guards shouted at us.
‘They want us to empty our pockets,’ said LeDuc, translating.
We were surrounded and heavily outnumbered by people armed with frowns and submachine guns. Like the man once said, resistance was futile. I turned my pockets out on the ground. The rebel soldiers moved through our group, cleaning us out of anything useful. Cassidy, LeDuc, West, Rutherford and Marcel and I were individually searched. Ayesha was individually groped, which seemed to improve the disposition of the gropers. Then it was Leila’s turn.
‘Hey. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she shouted at the man with his hand between her legs. She spun around and slapped him, and he slapped her right back hard so that she went down into the mud. Cassidy and I took a step forward and machine gun muzzles were jammed into our faces.
The rain began to fall. The corral stank of animal feces and urine. The soldiers disengaged, backing out through the door of our open prison, the door to which was then closed and bound shut. Cassidy and Ayesha helped Leila up and we all just stood and shivered for a time, with nowhere to go and battered by raindrops the size of hens’ eggs impregnated with ice chips. Thunder arrived simultaneously with the lightning as the storm front passed overhead.
‘That business about the US negotiating with criminals,’ said Cassidy, his teeth chattering. ‘It’ll never happen. We’re on our own.’
‘The colonel doesn’t know that.’
‘What are they going to do to us?’ Leila asked.
Ayesha could give her a couple of clues.
Marcel moaned and shook his head. He didn’t need to ask, either.
‘We shouldn’t have brought him,’ said Leila, pointing at Marcel. ‘That man has put all of us at risk. Those questions about the handcuffs and the empty magazine – the man with the cane knew what was up.’
I doubted it, but I let it go and no one else said anything. If Leila was determined to be a superbitch right to the end, who was I to stop her?
The star burst into tears and hugged Ayesha to her. I felt sorry for Ayesha.
Within half an hour, the thunder and lightning had ended, but the torrent was still coming down hard, falling, at times, more like an avalanche than like rain. The noise it made completely drowned out the sounds of battle drifting up from the valley below. West, Cassidy and I went on an inspection of our cage, a circular area maybe fifty feet across. We all very quickly came to the conclusion that we couldn’t go over, under or through it – not easily and not before we were spotted. The bars were green saplings over twelve feet in height, the ends of which were buried two to three feet in the mud, and the whole structure was lashed together with some kind of green vine. The rain only seemed to make it all bind together tighter. Sets of eyes peered at us through the gaps.
LeDuc came over. ‘These pens are common,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen bulls charge at walls such as these.’
‘They ever make it through?’ I asked, half an eye on Boink.
He shook his head. ‘Non.’
I pulled and pushed the wall here and there, testing its strength. Cas-sidy, West and Rutherford joined in. A pole suddenly speared through a gap between the saplings and slammed into the side of my head, knocking me down.
‘Hey!’ Rutherford yelled out, kicking the wall.
I was down on all fours, the ringing between my ears like that of a church belfry on Sunday morning. Hands under my arms lifted me onto my feet.
‘You okay, Cooper?’ Cassidy asked.
I opened and closed my jaw in an attempt to stop the clanging. ‘Now I know how a cue ball feels,’ I said.
‘They’re going to do us, skipper,’ said Rutherford. ‘No question.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed West.
There was a lump on my skull. Blood seeped from ruptured skin. I didn’t believe the bullshit about verifying our claims, either. Yeah, Makenga was going to have us whacked for sure. And if the asshole was anything like the psychos down in the valley, he wouldn’t be whacking us clean.
‘So what we gonna do about it?’ asked West.
‘They will come for the women first,’ said LeDuc.
I rubbed my face. We were completely on our own, locked in an empty enclosure with no hope of any outside assistance. The four men were looking at me, apparently waiting for me to reach behind and pull a rabbit out of my butt, given that I didn’t have a hat. ‘Well, I once saw this movie where some prisoners built an airplane and flew it out of the attic,’ I said. ‘ We could do something like that.’
They kept looking at me.
‘They’re gonna come for us,’ I said, repeating LeDuc’s take on the situation.
‘Yeah, that much we know,’ West said.
‘Then let’s work with that.’
WAITING FOR THE NIGHT, we sat in the mud on the high side of the enclosure and glommed together to conserve warmth. No one talked. Someone grabbed my hand and held on tight. It was Ayesha. I could only imagine what was going through her mind. No one said a word, not even Leila. When the darkness was complete, I put our one and only chance into action and slid away from the group, working through the mud on my belly to the far side of the enclosure. LeDuc believed word would get around about Ayesha and Leila. I was hoping order might be a little on the lax side among the CNDP rank and file and that some of the boys might drop in for a little Intercourse & Inebriation.
OUR WRISTWATCHES HAD BEEN confscated, but it would have been after 22:00 when the door to our pen was forced ajar. I could make out four – or maybe five – shapes coming through the gap, creeping quietly. Moments later, I heard a woman’s muffled scream. Dropping to the ground and keeping low, I moved in the night shadow that lived at the base of our prison wall, making my way around the circumference of the enclosure. Cassidy, West, Rutherford, LeDuc and Ryder were making things difficult for the Africans, but not too difficult. The soldiers had to think that we were soft targets.
Going down on my belly for the last twenty meters, I snaked through the mud, coming up behind the intruders. From the sound of the gruff commands and muffled shouts, the Africans – five of them – were fast realizing that they’d bitten off more than they could chew. One of them had had enough. He backed away from the entangled shadows on the ground and I heard him hoarsely whisper in French. He leveled his rifle, serious about taking what they wanted. Two of his buddies went forward and dragged a struggling body away from the others.
‘No! No! Help me!’ I recognized the voice – Leila’s.
Then a second body got hauled out by her foot: Ayesha.
I was getting closer, close enough to smell the intruders – a pungent, stale, unwashed animal funk mixed with cheap, coarse tobacco. The intruders hadn’t seen me, or conducted a head count to see if someone were missing. They didn’t know it but, rather than being their friend, the night worked against them. I came up behind the man holding the rifle. He sensed rather than heard my presence, but not before I kicked him between the legs hard enough to put his nuts over a goal post. He began to sink to his knees but I broke his neck with an elbow strike before he reached them. Attacked by a shadow, the Africans were momentarily disoriented and stood rooted to the spot while they processed what they thought they’d just seen happen to their buddy. A few seconds of uncertainty was all we needed. I took out a second African, sweeping his legs out from under him so that he landed on his back, the air rushing out of his lungs. I snapped his head to one side and the vertebrae in his neck cracked like dry walnuts. A furry of intense violence broke out. Cassidy leaped up and strangled the man standing over him. West and Ryder tackled their man, Ryder pounding in his skull with a rock the size of his fist. Rutherford got Mr Lucky Last, sen
ding him off to the land of nod with a sweet right cross to a glass jaw. I kept watch for more intruders, while the Brit sat on the man’s back and pushed his face in the mud, holding it there until he drowned, gurgling and shaking to the end.
Run
They died peacefully, if not in peace, alerting no one. Dragging the bodies to one side, we stripped them of their weapons, collecting knives, three H&K MP-5s and two M16s with spare mags for both.
‘Question is, were they Makenga’s messengers?’ I wondered aloud as we cleaned up. ‘Or were they out on their own initiative?’
Hard answers would’ve been handy. If the guards we just killed were on orders from Makenga, it meant we probably had more time to play with. If, however, they were just out for a little opportunistic gang rape, then the real hit squad could turn up at any minute. Assuming it was the latter, we couldn’t hang around.
‘Now what?’ Rutherford whispered as he checked a captured MP-5, making sure it would work as H&K intended, and that its magazine was full.
‘I’ve got half of an idea,’ I said, following the SAS sergeant’s lead, giving my weapon the once-over.
‘You beat me,’ said West.
‘Ditto,’ said Rutherford.
We hurried back to the civilians.
Leila was hyperventilating, Ayesha beside her. I could hear their teeth chattering.
‘Man, that was some evil shit, yo!’ said Boink in an excited whisper. ‘You fucked those motherfuckers in the ass.’
I hoped not, but I knew where he was coming from. I breathed hard. Adrenalin levels were high. We’d had the fight. Now came the flight.
‘Stick close to us,’ I told our civilians. ‘Be as quiet as you can and keep to the shadows.’
Leila let out a sob. If this was diva crap, it had to end. I considered slapping her but decided this was not the right time to make myself feel better, so instead I sat beside her. Convulsions racked her body. She was in shock, the realization of what she’d just managed to avoid knocking the Rodeo Drive out of her attitude. All that was left was a scared young woman struggling to deal with her current reality.
I put my arm around her. ‘You can do this, Leila,’ I said quietly, giving her a squeeze.
She shook her head. ‘N . . . no . . .’
‘Yes, you can.’ I took a deep breath and let it out, which always helps when you’re about to lie through your teeth. ‘We are going to walk right out of this place, one step at a time. You’ll see.’
‘They were going to r . . . rape us.’
‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘I’m sc . . . scared,’ she said.
‘We’re all scared, but it’s time to go.’
‘Yeah, Leila; c’mon, girl,’ Boink whispered.
‘I don’t want to d . . . die here.’
‘That’s not going to happen,’ I repeated. ‘They’d fire my ass for sure.’
Ryder crouched beside her and hooked a lock of her wet, muddy hair behind an ear.
‘You’ll be back in the recording studio next week and all this will just seem like a bad day in rehab,’ I said.
It took a moment for my words to penetrate. She half cried, half laughed.
‘Duke’s going to stay right beside you all the way, aren’t you, Duke?’
‘Right beside you,’ he repeated.
‘But you have to be as quiet as you can. I want you to breathe.’
She breathed.
‘Deeper.’
She breathed in and out several times and her shoulders gave a final shudder.
‘Better?’ I asked her.
She nodded.
‘Things get hard to handle, that’s what you do – breathe deep.’
Leila sucked in another breath.
‘One step at a time, okay?’
She nodded again.
‘Ayesha? How about you?’
‘I’m oh . . . okay.’
‘Good. Got your bags packed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll send someone up to collect them,’ I said, standing. ‘LeDuc – Marcel’s your buddy. He misbehaves, let me know. Better still, let Boink know.’
The African got the drift, if not the specifics, and his eyes were wide with fear, the whites showing in the almost complete darkness.
‘Oui,’ he said.
Rutherford and West rearranged the corpses so that they appeared to be sitting with their backs against the enclosure, mimicking our positions. We all then moved to the enclosure gate, pausing there to make sure the guys who had paid us a visit had no one keeping watch. Nothing moved. The loudest noise was my own heartbeat. I followed the advice I gave Leila and Ayesha, and dragged a couple of breaths down to my toes to get the nerves under control.
The downpour had become a misting of light rain, which neither helped nor hindered us. There was no moon, however, which sat on the asset side of the balance sheet. The rebel force had long since retired for the night and this being the very rear of their encampment, I was hoping for fewer rather than more guards on duty. Nevertheless, we took it slow and careful. Cassidy and I scouted forward, keeping to the foliage, which was patchier up on the ridgeline than it was down in the valley. It made moving around easier, but reduced the cover. West, Rutherford, Ryder, and LeDuc brought the principals forward only when we were sure that the coast was clear.
It wasn’t that late, maybe a little after ten thirty, but the place was quiet, the exhaustion of the day’s battle weighing heavily on the men. As hoped, security proved to be light. Cassidy and I found several large groups of men huddled under ponchos, tentless like their enemies, and we skirted around them easily. Along the way, we encountered three guards, all of whom were asleep at their posts, wrapped in ponchos and seated at the bases of trees, their weapons cradled in their laps.
We arrived at the HQ without incident, and stopped behind a rock outcrop to survey it. All lights were out. Frogs were everywhere, making a sound that reminded me of someone knocking on a door. There were hundreds of them. The overall effect was like a large team of salesmen let loose inside an apartment building. In the HQ spread out before us, the landscape was black on black, which made detail difficult to make out, but the layout of the area was in my head from our earlier welcome by Colonel Fucknuts, which helped. I let my eyes get used to the shapes and then waited for any movement to highlight potential threats.
Ryder nudged my arm and indicated something going on off to my left. I saw nothing, and then a red dot in the darkness expanded and briefly illuminated a face. A smoker. His weapon was slung on his shoulder, which suggested he wasn’t expecting any trouble. As we watched, another guard revealed himself, smoking, wandering around apparently randomly among the tents. So, two guards. We kept watching.
Correction, three guards.
Correction, five guards, including another smoker.
Shit. Our chances of success were diminishing.
We waited another few minutes, but the count stopped at five.
‘One of those suppressed QCWs would come in handy right about now,’ Rutherford whispered in my ear. After a few moments, he added, ‘With a night scope.’
I put my finger against my lips then drew it across my throat.
He nodded, and produced a US-made Ka-bar taken from the soldiers we killed back at the pen. The knife’s razor-sharp blade was a non-reflective dull black and perfect for the job at hand, as was the SAS sergeant wielding it.
I indicated that he should take West with him, and leave the smokers till last so that we could see when the threat was negated. Rutherford confirmed that he understood the orders, backed away from the rock in company with West, similarly armed, and I lost them just seconds later, their black silhouettes becoming one with the night shadows.
I waited, watching the smokers who were by now at opposite ends of the HQ. One of them dropped his butt and didn’t pick it up. Scratch one. At almost the same instant, on the opposite side of the HQ, the other smoker put the cigarette in his mouth but did
n’t get to inhale. Scratch two. Smoker number three took a few seconds longer for his habit to get him killed. I heard nothing. As the smokers were the last to go, I knew that the HQ was now clear and that we could move. I signaled Cassidy and Ryder to follow with the principals and we all rendezvoused with Rutherford and West, meeting up with them in front of the trestle tables.
I was surprised to see what appeared to be a large rifle cradled in West’s arms. I ran my hand down the long barrel. Yep, that’s what it was. He pulled back a canvas cover on one of the tables to show me where he’d found it and I saw the familiar black shapes of body armor and submachine guns – our guns – the ones the lieutenant and his unit had confscated. Shit, it seemed that our gear had simply been left here and forgotten about. We recovered what we needed: the backpacks containing the spare mags, tinned radishes and beef jerky, a couple of the QCWs, most of the Nazarians and M16s and, of course, the sniper rifle. The binoculars were missing, dammit.
This was where the half an idea I said I had was really going to get interesting. I led the way to the far corner of the HQ area, and picked up the trail that we’d followed in, frogs jumping out of our way. A couple of minutes later, we were standing at the spot I’d seen when we arrived here, the one that provided the view across to the east. Now, however, it was just a very large black void.
‘You’re fucking kidding me?’ said Cassidy, my half-a-plan suddenly becoming clear to him. From the way he said it, I was thinking maybe he thought I had half a brain.
‘No I’m not,’ I said. ‘This is the way out.’
Boink leaned forward for a closer look at the nothingness that yawned a few inches in front of his Adidas.
Marcel spoke rapidly and fearfully to LeDuc.
‘Cooper, he cannot swim,’ the pilot translated.
‘Me, neither,’ said Ayesha.
Ghost Watch Page 18
