Over my panting breath, I heard West whistle again.
Rutherford glanced back over his shoulder toward the village as he changed mags.
Through the rain and the gloom I could see a truck coming down the road between the last of the huts. The odds were good that this was the vehicle we wanted. I climbed up into the truck’s cab. The interior was like a slaughterhouse, with blood spatter everywhere, especially across the windshield. Trying to wipe it off would just create a big smear and reduce visibility further.
‘I’ve got the cab. The passengers are yours again,’ I called out to Rutherford, slamming a fresh mag in place.
The Brit darted into the forest, gone in an instant.
I picked up a beret left behind by its previous owner and put it on to improve my profile and confuse the issue. Something warm and wet slid out of it, ran down the side of my face and plopped into my lap. I didn’t want to know what it was, instead keeping my eyes fxed on the approaching vehicle. Through the blood-speckled windscreen and the rain, I could see three men sitting abreast in the approaching cab. I had no idea how many were in back, under the tarpaulin cover stretched high over the load area. The Dongfeng came to a halt twenty meters away. The driver gave the horn some exercise, a lightweight toot better suited to a cheap Chinese motor scooter. I gave the driver a wave out the window and he waved back. The number of choices I had open to me had narrowed to one. The front passenger door opened and a man swung out of the cabin and impatiently motioned at me to get my vehicle off the road, out of the way.
I angled the barrel up and pulled the trigger and the windshield in front of me shattered into a screen reminiscent of crushed ice, before collapsing inwards. The next burst had the same effect on the windshield of the truck facing me. I sprayed the cabin as the glass exploded inwards, and made doubly sure with another burst that the occupants wouldn’t cause any trouble. And suddenly men were everywhere, jumping out the back of the truck like folks escaping a burning building, running in random directions, looking for safety but not knowing where to find it. I dropped out the QCW’s mag, jammed in a replacement, cocked the weapon and did what I had to do, hitting one guy on the run in the thorax. He fell down dead. Rutherford took down two men running around on the passenger side of the truck and they slammed into the road face first, the way the living never do. A man was creeping down the driver’s side of the vehicle, hidden from Rutherford’s view, his rifle up and looking for trouble. He found it. I took aim and fired and he slumped back on his ass in the mud like he’d decided to have a quick nap.
The remaining four soldiers running toward me figured pretty quickly that their present predicament had something to do with the truck stopped in front of theirs. They turned, the way schools of fish get the message all at once without any obvious communication, and started fleeing toward the village, shooting back over their shoulders. I raised my M4, aimed and fired. Their chances of making it to the village were zero.
Rutherford appeared from out of the bush, running onto the roadside as I changed mags and then jumped down out of the driver’s seat and onto the mud. I felt something slide off my thigh and land on the toe of my boot. I glanced down and saw an eyeball attached to a length of optic nerve. I flicked it off my toe into the bushes.
Among the bodies sprawled on the road and its verge, nothing moved.
‘We’ll put ’em all back inside the truck,’ I told him. ‘Take that guy’s hands. I’ve got his feet. Let’s do this quick.’
We picked up the nearest corpse and walked it to the rear of the truck. I set my end down on the ground and lifted up the fap of the tarpaulin, and a shower of bullets blasted past my head as the bark of full automatic fire spat from the shadows within. Rutherford and I dropped to the mud beneath the tailgate with the body as the rounds clanged off the Dong’s metalwork and my heart thundered in my chest. Shit! I swore at my own stupidity. I nearly walked straight into that. The stream of hot lead had been far too close.
On full automatic, the shooter’s magazine emptied itself within a few seconds. I was tempted to jump up and send a few rounds back, but there was going to be cargo in there that I didn’t want damaged. I heard the hollow clatter of a magazine being ejected, hitting the metal floor of the truck. My cue. I bobbed my head up, then ducked below the lip of the truck’s cargo tray. Stacked Kevlar cases, just as I’d hoped. There was also the movement of a soldier fumbling with his weapon, anxious to get it reloaded. I came up for a longer, more confident peek, submachine gun shouldered, and Rutherford was beside me, his QCW likewise trained on the moving shadow which was trying to hide in the twilight, tucked into a corner behind the cabin.
‘Jesus,’ said Rutherford.
The shooter was a boy of around eleven or twelve years of age. I could see the large whites of his eyes darting between Rutherford and me.
‘Drop it!’ the sergeant yelled at him.
The kid stuttered something at us in a high-pitched, prepubescent voice, but held onto his rifle.
‘Drop. Your. Weapon,’ Rutherford repeated.
The kid got the message second time round and threw down his rifle, an old AK-47, which clattered against the containers.
I gestured at him to come forward.
He didn’t move.
‘Come!’ I said, adding a little authority to the command.
He inched forward, frightened and confused, his eyes darting between us. We were obviously out-of-towners, but from which town? I could see that there was a lot going through the kid’s mind, overloading it. When he was close enough for me to grab his shirt, I lifted him one handed out of the truck. He was a lightweight, all skin and bone, his nervous brown eyes the biggest part of him. His weapon was on the truck’s metal floor, within reach. Rutherford leaned in and retrieved it. We glanced at each other, both knowing the score. There was a lot at stake and the boy was a problem.
The SAS sergeant checked that a round wasn’t left in the AK’s chamber. ‘I’m not killing kids, skipper,’ he said, in the event that his actions with the rifle appeared ambiguous.
‘Then how do you feel about standing him in the naughty-boy corner for around twenty-four hours?’ I asked.
The boy watched me carefully with a mixture of curiosity and fear, eyes shifting to the weapon in Rutherford’s hands. ‘How old are you, kid – twelve?’ I asked him.
No answer.
‘The only things you should be shooting live on XBox,’ I said.
The urchin had no idea what I was saying.
I gave the road a visual check – clear as far as I could see. Nothing from West to indicate otherwise.
Rutherford leaped up into the cargo space and inspected the goods. I heard something rattle.
‘Seven cases, a dirty great padlock on every one,’ he called out.
‘Officer?’ I asked the boy. ‘Officer. Which one? Him?’ I pointed to one of the men lying on the road. The kid looked at me like I was from outer space.
‘Qui est l’officier?’ said Rutherford, jumping down. ‘Qui est le boss?’ he asked, pointing to several of the dead in turn. ‘Lui? Lui? Lui?’
‘Lu . . . Lui,’ the Congolese stuttered, pointing to the nearest dead man, a cluster of nameless symbols on his epaulettes.
I went to the body and searched it, finding what I was looking for on a chain around his neck, along with a bag on a leather thong. I held up seven bloody bronze keys and rinsed them off in a puddle before tossing them up to Rutherford.
‘Nice one,’ he said. ‘What’s in the pouch?’
I’d noticed that most of the dead Africans had been wearing similar muslin or leather bags around their necks. The man who’d run into a tree back at the Puma also had one. I untied the leather fastener, opened the bag and found a collection of teeth, small bones, some seeds and feathers. ‘Magic,’ I said, returning it to the dead man’s pocket.
‘What about the kid?’ Rutherford inquired. ‘What are we gonna to do with him?’
‘Speak English?’ I asked the boy
, standing up and walking over to him.
He looked up at me slack-jawed and shook his head.
Dumb question. I noticed a bag of spells around his neck also. I reached out to inspect it and the boy finched and tried to draw back, terrified.
‘Ask him why everyone’s wearing these things. You know enough French for that?’
‘Give it a go,’ Rutherford said. ‘Tu portez ce: pourquoi?’ he asked the kid.
There was a nervous reply.
‘He says spirits have been coming into camp and stealing people’s souls, leaving them dead.’
‘Vous êtes Américains, vous n’êtes pas fantômes,’ the boy said, his eyes on the flag on my shoulder.
My turn to translate. ‘You’re American, not spirits.’
‘See, you do speak Frog,’ said Rutherford.
Setting the boy free worried me but, as Rutherford and I saw it, there was no alternative. We couldn’t keep him prisoner, carting him around with us. Pointing my finger at him and then down the road at the village, I said, ‘Go.’
He didn’t move.
‘Allez! Va t’er!’ said Rutherford. ‘In other words, sunshine, fuck off. On yer bike.’
Realization dawned on the boy. He seemed unable to believe that he’d been spared and released. But then he got it, said ‘merci’ a couple of times and broke into a sprint, running toward the village and taking our element of surprise with him.
Rutherford shook his head as he watched the boy getting smaller in the distance. ‘I was stealing my first kiss at his age. You?’
‘Cadillacs.’
‘Tough neighborhood?’
I didn’t answer. A New Jersey shithole rusting into its own gutters had been the backdrop to my upbringing, but compared with this place it was a country club.
‘Back to work,’ I said. There were the bodies sprawled around us on the ground, getting washed by the rain, and we had to do something about them. The intention had been to load them into the truck, crash the vehicle into a ravine after pilfering those cases, set fire to the lot and make the whole thing look like an accident. Only, the kid was going to give his superiors a report on what had happened to the truck, making that plan worthless.
‘Hey,’ said Rutherford. ‘Look . . .’ He motioned off in the direction of the village.
The boy had stopped running a hundred meters down the road. He was looking back at us, and then he started running again, making for the forest, heading west, away from the FARDC’s encampment on the hill. The kid was either deserting or reclaiming his freedom, depending on how you looked at it.
‘Run, Forrest, run,’ I said, a stupid smile on my face.
Cassidy jogged out from the tree line.
‘Came down to check on progress,’ he said. ‘Looked to me like you needed a hand.’
Good call. We decided to stick with plan B in case the kid changed his mind. After three trips each, the bodies were all out of sight in the bushes. Next, we collected the weapons strewn about – all old AK-47s – removed the bolts, and tossed the lot into the channel.
‘We need to stow the cargo before the road turns into a highway,’ I said.
No sign of movement from the village and no warning whistle from West.
A few moments later, Francis appeared at the edge of the road. He checked left and right before stepping out onto the mud strip. Then Leila, Ayesha, Boink and Ryder materialized behind him and they all ran through the rain toward us.
‘Great,’ I said under my breath.‘What do you think you’re doing down here?’ I asked Leila when she was close enough to hear. I glanced at Ryder and he shook his head, frowning, not happy.
‘I’m not staying up there with the ants and the mosquitoes any longer than I have to,’ she informed me.
‘Don’t you ever do as you’re told?’ I asked her.
‘No.’
Exposing our principals to direct danger down on the road was not part of the program, but then, not much that had happened so far this morning had been on the list worked out in the pre-dawn darkness. There was no time to argue.
‘Follow me,’ I said, and then ran to the back of the truck carrying the cargo and jumped up into it. Rutherford was already inside, untying the straps that stopped the olive drab-painted Kevlar containers from sliding around.
‘We need to get these offoaded and taken up the hill,’ I said. ‘And it has to be done fast.’
‘What’s inside ’em?’ asked Boink.
‘Dunno,’ said Rutherford impatiently. ‘And right now, we don’t bloody well care. We just need to do what the man said and pull our fingers out.’
‘What language yo’ speaking?’ said Boink, grinning, taking no offense. ‘I ain’t never heard shit like that.’
‘The Queen’s English, mate.’
‘No queens I’ve met speak like that, yo.’
Rutherford and I lifted the first container off the smaller of the two stacks and threw it, skidding, across the cargo deck toward the tailgate. Boink hoisted it off single-handedly and set it down on the mud.
‘Next!’ he called out.
We worked quickly. Once all seven containers were offoaded onto the road, Rutherford and I leaped down, grabbed one of the largest and heaviest, each taking an end, and started hobbling with it toward the edge of the forest. Cassidy was ahead of us, a container on his shoulder, pushing up into the undergrowth.
‘Duke – head ’em up, move ’em out,’ I called behind me.
The containers were all soon secured behind the tree line and we were still more or less on schedule. I checked my Seiko. Only eleven minutes had passed since the first truck had pulled up behind the banana tree laid across the road.
‘The trucks – where can we hide them?’ I asked Francis.
‘I know good place,’ he replied.
‘Is it close?’
‘Oui. One-or-two-minute drive from here.’
‘Cooper, I saw what happened with that boy,’ Leila said, seeking some attention. ‘I think you did the right thing.’
‘You might change your mind if he comes back with his babysitters,’ I said.
Leila was standing above me on slightly higher ground, her weight on one leg, a 97 crossed under her breasts so that her cleavage was lifted up and out of her jacket. With her makeup oddly immaculate, she looked like some kind of hot action movie character. I shrugged off the thought and asked Francis, ‘Which way are we going?’
He pointed in the direction of the mine, away from the village.
Two trucks rather than one. I needed a driver and someone to ride shotgun on the following truck.
‘Francis, you and I have got the lead truck.’ I glanced at the faces around me. ‘Rutherford, Ryder. You’re in the second truck. We don’t stop for any reason. Understand?’
Both nodded.
Francis scratched his top lip with the back of a long, curved thumbnail.
‘Cy – collect Mike and get everyone further up the hill with the gear, all right? As high as you can go.’
Cassidy nodded and lifted a container onto his shoulder.
‘Leila. For your own safety do as you’re told – for once,’ I said. She lifted her chin and looked away. ‘I mean it.’
Ryder, Rutherford, Francis, and I ran down through the forest, stopping to check that the road was still clear. It was. The engines of both vehicles continued to run, clouds of oily diesel smoke coughing from their exhaust pipes. Francis and I went for the first Dong – the one that had come up behind us, the one facing the wrong way.
The bench seat was covered in glass crystals clotted with blood and brain matter. I brushed them into the floorboards before climbing in. Francis removed a mound of bloody, glass-studded goop from the dashboard in front of him and nervously glanced sideways at me.
‘I’m much nicer to my friends,’ I reassured him.
A diagram of the gearbox was helpfully etched in the gearstick knob beside my hand. Depressing the clutch, I selected reverse and found the handbrake. With
some gas, the Dong leaped off the mark, going backward. I spun the steering wheel and brought the ass end of the truck around. Now heading in the right direction, I selected second gear, stomped on the gas pedal, and we accelerated away, the wind and rain blast coming through the space formerly occupied by the windshield competing with the roar of the engine.
‘How far?’ I yelled
‘Drive for one minute,’ Francis shouted back.
I kept my foot on the gas, changing down for the corners but keeping our speed up in case we met another truck mid-corner. If that happened, I intended to run it off the road if I could, or crash into it if I couldn’t. The sun was yet to rise over the hills and the road remained clear of traffic. Maybe folks were doing us a favor and having a sleep in. We took the corners on the limit, the trucks sliding around on the mud. The road started to climb, slowing us, the forest encroaching on all sides. A minute had passed. Where was that hiding place?
‘We are here,’ Francis yelled, squinting, wiping the rainwater off his face.
‘And where’s that?’ I yelled back. At this point, the forest was overhanging the road. I couldn’t see anywhere to go except straight ahead.
‘Turn here.’ He pointed at the greenery trying to push its way through my window.
‘Here?’
‘Oui. Turn! Turn now!’
I pulled the wheel hard over and finched, but the wall of foliage wasn’t as solid as it appeared to be and we barreled through elephant grass and immature palms. There were no seatbelts in this crate and I braced for the inevitable meeting with a tree that would pitch me through the open window.
Ghost Watch Page 29
