Ghost Watch

by David Rollins

  ‘There was a place for this, but it is gone. They had a dock, but even that is gone. People take it for cooking fres.’

  ‘The road goes there too, yes?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘How’d you escape?’ I asked. ‘Why aren’t you down in the pit with the people from your village?’

  ‘I was at another village when the soldiers came. It is near the road also. Médecins Sans Frontières is there. They have medicines. I went to get them and when I come back, everyone in my village was gone . . . or dead.’

  The memories of what he’d seen came back to him and large tears welled in his eyes. They ran down his face, mixing with the rainwater. The village I’d just come from gave me a fair idea of the scenes he was recalling.

  ‘Where will these people sleep tonight?’ I asked. ‘What’ll they eat?’

  The man wiped his face with his hands. ‘The soldiers will give them some food, but not much. Some will sleep in the mine; some are taken back to their villages. There is a camp nearby. My people will sleep there under plastic. There are some United Nations tents. But there is no clean water. Some have died from stomach sickness. It is bad.’

  It didn’t sound good. The scale of this cruelty was difficult for me to get my head around. ‘So your people . . . they just work until they die?’

  ‘No, they work until this army gets frightened away by a bigger army, and then we will go back to our village.’

  ‘How many times has this happened?’

  ‘They found gold here two years ago. Since then, many armies come through: CNDP, Mai-Mai, PARECO, FDLR, LRA, FARDC . . . Each one is worse than the last. Sometimes they punish us for helping their enemies, but we have no choice. They loot and steal, kill and rape and they pass on the sickness – the sickness I go to the MSF to get the medicine for. My village was once large and rich, but now it is small and we starve.’

  ‘Where is the camp your people are taken to at night?’

  ‘It is near. You wish to see it also.’

  ‘Not now. What’s your name?’ I asked him.

  ‘Francis.’ He glanced at the nametag on my body armor. ‘Your name is Cooper. I can read, also.’

  ‘Francis. I’ll be honest with you – I don’t know what my men and I can do here. There are many more of them than there are of us.’

  ‘You will do something, I know it.’

  Yeah, and right there could be the problem. Who’s to say that what we did wouldn’t turn around and bite all of us in the ass right back, Francis and his people included? I parted the foliage, took another look at the mine and the shacks, but there was nothing of interest going on other than a lot of ice-cold beer being guzzled. A couple of soldiers were leering and calling out to a group of women working a section of mud nearby. Mud, beer, women. I could see where it was heading and this was one time I didn’t want to be around when it arrived. I made a quick decision. ‘Come with me,’ I said to Francis, and backed away from the lip of the mine.

  The Congolese hesitated a moment while he again located his wife down in the pit. Satisfied that she was in no immediate danger, he said, ‘Yes, thank you. I come with you.’ He turned for one last look over his shoulder before following me to where the trucks were parked. By the time we arrived there only three Dongfengs remained. At the edge of the cleared area, I gave Francis a quick briefing followed by a practical demonstration, scooting across open ground to the nearest truck and climbing up inside its wheel arches, and then waving him across.

  We waited twenty minutes, squeezed into the truck’s sub frame, before its diesel thrummed into life. Half a dozen soldiers piled in the back and the vehicle finally pulled out of the lot and onto the road, heading in the right direction at least – back to the village I’d come from.

  The return ride was a different kind of uncomfortable from the trip out. Instead of dust and grit, the wheels fung water, mud and the occasional stone at us while steam boiled into clouds off the exhaust pipe. I counted down the hills – two of them – and waited for the truck to pull over into the village. But then we swept around a corner, the driver back-shifted into the lower gears, and we started up a third hill.

  ‘Shit,’ I muttered to myself. We weren’t stopping in the village. The ride was taking us all the way into the FARDC camp. The truck came to a stop at a roadblock, a brief conversation ensued between the driver and the soldiers manning it, and then we were underway again. A few minutes later, the vehicle’s brakes wheezed as we came to a stop, the engine died and the soldiers climbed down. I motioned to Francis to stay put and keep quiet. It was after five and the light was fading. We were stuck here until the night gave us some cover, shivering with cold, caked with mud – my teeth grinding with it – the rain causing small waterfalls to run off the sides of the truck and into the growing lake on the ground beneath us.

  We came out of hiding an hour and a half later, when the darkness was complete and the smells of kerosene fires and cooking drifted across the encampment, the men preoccupied with food. I unfolded my cramped arms, legs and neck, and dropped with a splash into the puddles beneath us. Francis did likewise. There was another Dongfeng parked in front of our hiding place. Fifty meters ahead, I could make out the hazy shape of the Mi-8 chopper. I had no idea about the placement of sentries but I had to assume that they were around. I was thinking about all this as the rain softened into a fog-like mist and the air came alive with the sound of mating frogs.

  I whispered to Francis, ‘Follow me, stay close,’ and then, doubled over, I headed for the uncleared scrub that marked the edge of the forest. We made it without incident and stopped roughly midway between the trucks and the chopper.

  ‘Where are your men?’ Francis asked.

  Good question, and I wished I had an equally good answer to go with it. When I last saw them, they were babysitting. I wondered what they’d been up to while I’d taken the detour. ‘Around,’ I said, keeping it ambiguous, but the truth of it was that I had not the faintest idea where my unit might be – still back at the nearby village, or back on the hill that provided overwatch, or back at Cyangugu with drinks in hand . . . who knew?

  As I sat in the scrub, dragging my hand across the back of my neck, smearing the mosquitoes that settled on my bare skin and watching several fires haloed by the mist, it seemed to me that the war effort around here had tapered off somewhat. If I weren’t mistaken, the attitude of the men walking around was pretty relaxed; surprising, given that the CNDP force was somewhere nearby. I’d have thought that the proximity of its sworn enemy would have made these boys just a little nervous. I was considering all this, along with what my limited options might be, when I heard the familiar thump of a helicopter’s main rotor blades away in the distance. The sound drifted in and out as the air currents shifted, silencing the frogs as it grew louder with each second. The aircraft was clearly inbound. A party of men arrived at the edge of the cleared area. Several of them waved flashlights blithely about for the benefit of enemy snipers, but no shots rang out.

  The chopper arrived from the east. It wasn’t a military aircraft. It was big and sleek and, as it flew overhead and pivoted almost a hundred and eighty degrees before settling on its retractable landing gear, its underbelly strobe light revealed a color scheme of gold with a white stripe running down the center. The pilots cut the engines and the whine of its turbines instantly dropped away. It looked like one of those big expensive choppers that ply between New York and Washington DC, carrying executive types overloaded with taxpayer-funded bail outs. A Sikorsky. I couldn’t see what was going on once it had landed because, aside from being dark, whoever got out of it exited on the side of the aircraft facing the camp and the rest of the helicopter got in the way. I tapped my African friend on the shoulder and we crawled through the forest to get a better angle on the proceedings. The view quickly improved. Portable electric lanterns were turned on and flashlights waved about, illuminating a bunch of very interesting faces. Lockhart was part of the welcoming committee, as was Col
onel Cravat – Colonel Lissouba – and the Chinese PLA guy. They were shaking hands with the guy from Swedish American Gold and his African American buddy. Both of their names escaped me for the moment, but I remembered them – the two ex-pat autograph hunters Lockhart declined to introduce me to back at Cyan-gugu on the night of the concert.

  Their presence here was surprising and intriguing, equally as surprising and intriguing as the presence of the CNDP’s Colonel Makenga, who’d probably been picked up from his ridgeline on the way through. And Makenga’s presence was not nearly as surprising and intriguing as that of Colonel Biruta’s, the CNDP officer commanding the brigade entertained by Twenny Fo and Leila at the Cyangugu training base; the officer with the nice symmetrical scar that divided his face into equal parts. Another guy stepped into the light. It was my ol’ buddy, LeDuc – his presence here not in the least surprising or intriguing.

  ‘Piers Pietersen and Charles White,’ I whispered, the names of the two expats coming back to me.

  ‘What?’ said Francis.

  I waved away the question, along with the mosquito cloud. Explanations would have to wait. Lockhart, Lissouba, Fu Manchu, Makenga, Biruta, LeDuc, and a bigwig from a gold company. Or, another way to look at it – a US DoD contractor in cahoots with the PLA and FARDC, meeting the local CNDP commanding officer and his boss for a powwow with SAG. It read like a headline for a 60 Minutes exposé. And all within spitting distance of a gold mine producing nuggets of the stuff. That was no coincidence either. More than likely it was the catalyst. And the presence of Makenga, the enemy – he of the golden chicken – accounted for the unnatural calm that seemed to have descended on the FARDC encampment. Obviously, a convenient truce had been called between the two warring companies. The only man I couldn’t place in the get-together was Charles White, the African American accompanying Pietersen. I wondered how many of these people were involved in the scheme to abduct my principals.

  The backslapping continued for a while as Francis and I watched on. Then half a dozen men from the camp came over and White accompanied them to the chopper. The fuselage of the aircraft obscured the proceedings for a few moments, but then I saw the men re-emerge, lugging heavy crates between them. They carried them to the back of the lead truck, placed them on the tailgate and went back to the chopper for more. Taking a flashlight, White led the group to the rear of the truck and opened one of the boxes with a jemmy that had been handed to him. He levered the lid off the crate, opened another box within it, took something out and held it up to show the party gathered nearby. He then strolled around the far side of the truck, the side nearest to Francis and me hiding in the scrub, placed the object on the ground and sauntered back to join the others. He held his right hand up high.

  And, suddenly, a flash ripped through the darkness, accompanied by an ear-splitting explosion. Shrapnel raked the foliage inches above my head. Francis screamed, got up and ran.

  I took off after him, expecting that, any second, gunfire would follow us. I tensed, waiting for the bark of M16s and the jacketed slugs that would drop us into the scrub, but they never came. I caught up with Francis eventually, after a sprint of two hundred meters through elephant grass that cut up my clothes, up toward the ridge that we’d used as an observation post earlier in the day. No one seemed to have followed us. I put that down to the explosion temporarily deafening White, Lockhart and the rest, and our moving shapes being black on black. Our enemies hadn’t even known we were there, or that they’d almost killed us.

  ‘Stop,’ I hissed at Francis, but he kept running, bolting up the hill. As I watched, a tree appeared to snatch him clean off his feet. He shot skywards upside down, a gurgling scream choking from him. And then a length of warm black steel materialized from out of the night and jerked my head to one side and I felt the edge of a knife press across my throat, breaking the skin.

  ‘Christ, Cooper,’ said a familiar voice in my ear as the warm black steel, which I realized was a forearm, released me. Cassidy. ‘How many fucking lives you got?’ he said. ‘Come three meters to the left and right about now you’d have a necklace of bamboo spears through your chest.’

  My heart pounded like a tire with a bubble in the sidewall about to burst. I got down on a knee and sucked in some air to get the adrenalin under control.

  ‘And who’s that swinging by his ankles up there?’ Cassidy asked.

  ‘Name’s Francis,’ I puffed. ‘He’s friendly. Or was – wouldn’t count on it now.’

  ‘I’ll get him down.’

  ‘Good idea. What happened to the baby?’

  ‘Leila wanted to keep it.’

  ‘You talked her out of it, I hope.’

  ‘No.’

  I climbed to my feet. ‘What? So we’ve still got it?’

  ‘No, I didn’t try and talk her out of anything. I just took it off her and put it on the edge of the forest and held my hand across her mouth until one of the women eventually came and took it away.’

  ‘So now you and Leila have a very special relationship too,’ I said.

  ‘Not as special as yours,’ he said, grinning. He found the liana taking Francis’s weight and sawed through it with his Ka-bar.

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Further up the hill. That explosion have anything to do with you?’ ‘No.’ I gazed up at Francis, who was spinning slowly, hanging by an

  ankle. ‘What’s with all the bushcraft?’

  ‘Didn’t want anyone sneaking in through our back door.’

  He grunted as he took the weight on the vine and lowered Francis into a bush.

  A LOW WHISTLE FLOATED through the scrub.

  Cassidy returned it.

  A shadow stepped out from behind a tree ten feet further up the hill.

  ‘Look what I found,’ Cassidy told it.

  ‘Hey, skipper, you’re back,’ said Rutherford’s familiar voice. ‘Duke was getting worried.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said Ryder, suddenly appearing from his hiding place behind us, a 97 cradled in the crook of an arm. Ryder was grinning, his teeth glowing pale blue in the darkness as he walked toward us. This was a different Ryder to the one who’d joined the PSO team because he was hoping to rub pink bits with an old school flame. Crawling through the bush and the insects the other night had done him some good. Ryder 2.0 was an upgrade.

  ‘Who’s your friend?’ he asked with a nod at Francis.

  While Francis shook their hands with enthusiasm, I explained that he’d volunteered to be our guide. ‘How’re the principals?’ I asked at the conclusion of the meet and greet.

  ‘Bedded down for the night,’ said Rutherford.

  Ryder went to resume his watch.

  ‘Duke,’ I said, ‘there are some things going on that we all need to talk about. The path’s clear behind us.’

  Rutherford led the way up the hill, stopping eventually at a stand of young saplings. There was a half moon blazing out from behind a roll of silvery cloud and, with little canopy to obscure the light, I could just make out Leila, Ayesha and Boink lying on woven liana hammocks strung between the young trees, which got our principals off the ground and out of reach of the ants. Boink was snoring loudly, Ayesha softly. Leila was dead to the world, the way I liked her best.

  ‘West?’ I asked.

  ‘Keeping an eye on things across the ditch,’ said Rutherford.

  The Brit took us up to the rock face, our earlier observation post.

  West lowered the sniper scope when he heard us coming up behind him.

  ‘Hey, boss. I couldn’t work out whether you were MIA or AWOL,’ he said with a smile when he saw me. ‘What happened?’

  I provided a brief account of my last six hours – the trip to the mine, the folks being used as slaves, meeting Francis, seeing Lockhart.

  Rutherford shook his head. ‘Shite. So this is all about gold?’

  ‘Gold doesn’t explain why our principals were kidnapped,’ said Cassidy.

  No, it didn’t. ‘Which reminds me,’ I
said. ‘Twenny and Peanut still in plain sight?’

  ‘Nope,’ said West. ‘Either they’ve been moved into one of the tents – out of sight of the guests who arrived in the chopper. Or they’ve been whacked and their bodies disposed of.’

  A positive thinker. ‘What’s your money on?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Cassidy?’

  ‘They were there, and then they were gone,’ he said.

  ‘From what you’ve just told us, boss,’ said Duke, ‘I’d say everyone down there’s a little too preoccupied with mining interests to send Twenny and Peanut down the road after Fournier.’

  ‘Maybe,’ West conceded.

  ‘We have to work with the assumption that they’re still alive,’ said Cassidy.

  There were murmurs of agreement.

  ‘Sir, what promises have been made to Francis about his wife in return for his guide duties?’ Cassidy asked.

  ‘Only that Bruce Willis and Tommy Franks will ride on in and rescue her.’

  ‘Yes, Bruce Willis,’ said Francis, doing a little jig on the spot.

  ‘I didn’t want to over-promise,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus,’ Cassidy muttered.

  I asked West, ‘What can you see down there at the moment?’

  He handed me the scope. ‘Take a look for yourself. There’s not enough light to get a good resolution, especially once they turned off all their flashlights. Were you down there on the ground when the chopper arrived?’

  ‘Yep.’ I rested the scope against the tree trunk and brought the executive helicopter into focus. The image was heavily ghosted and dark blue on black. I scanned the area. From the little I could make out, Lockhart and his entourage appeared to have vacated the clearing. ‘So you didn’t see who came in on it?’

  ‘No,’ said West.

  I kept talking while I scanned the HQ. ‘It’s a Swedish American Gold aircraft. The passenger list included Colonel Biruta, the CNDP commanding officer from Cyangugu; Colonel Makenga, the CNDP asshole who tried to do us up on the ridge. Piers Pietersen was on it – he’s possibly the pilot – and so was Charles White. We met those last two back at Cyangugu after the concert.’