Ghost Watch

by David Rollins

At 0442, Leila and Ayesha climbed up into the back of the Alamo. They turned to give Boink a hand but the big man waved them away and climbed up under his own steam, his weight rocking the truck from side to side.

  ‘Couldn’t’a done that a week ago,’ he said, pleased with himself as he raised himself to his full height and looked down at Rutherford and me.

  ‘You’ll be swinging from the trees next,’ said Rutherford.

  ‘Throwing shit,’ I added.

  Ryder climbed up into the truck and joined Ayesha, Leila and Boink. I locked eyes with the star. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, you could get behind those containers with Duke and stay there.’

  ‘I don’t do orders, remember?’

  ‘Then consider it a request. You’re a singer. You do those, right?’

  I earned a frown but she did as I asked, Ryder appearing and directing them back behind the defenses. Then I gave them all just one simple life-preserving rule to follow: ‘Keep your heads down.’

  I jumped out of the truck and trotted to the driver’s side door. Rutherford was sitting behind the steering wheel. I sprang up onto the running board, the adrenalin starting to do the rounds; my skin was cold and hot at the same time, and I had a constriction in my throat that made swallowing difficult. It was the feeling I always got before combat. It was like an old friend, one I wished would go find someone else to play with.

  ‘Been a pleasure working with you, guv’nor,’ said Rutherford, holding his hand out through the window opening. He wanted to shake. It looked suspiciously to me like the Brit expected this to be it. I hoped he wasn’t going to hand me a letter.

  ‘Likewise,’ I said, shaking. ‘Let’s move. Take it slow. There are Claymores out there and we don’t want to run them down. If I tell you to stop, hit the brakes.’

  He punched the starter button, the diesel instantly coming to life and settling into a noisy thrum.

  ‘You ready for this?’ I asked Francis, who was sitting on the passenger side.

  He nodded, but didn’t look too sure about it.

  ‘Okay,’ I told Rutherford. ‘Do a one-eighty. No headlights. I’ve done a recce – there’s nothing to hit.’

  The Dong lurched forward, Rutherford winding on the steering wheel – that gorge was not too far in front of us. Palms and small trees went down under the Dong’s front grille as we left the support truck behind.

  ‘Okay, straighten her out,’ I told him.

  Rutherford let the wheel slip through his hands. A palm tree slapped against me, nearly swatting me off the running board.

  ‘Stop in another dozen meters or so and kill the motor.’

  After a few seconds, Rutherford gently applied the brakes and turned off the ignition.

  I leaped down off the running board and probed forward on foot. After a few paces, the plantation came to an end and I crept out onto the road lit by the moonlight. There was no traffic. Holding my breath, I listened to the night, scanning it for engine noise and human voices, but nothing disturbed the silence except for a little tinnitus inside my head. I ran back through the palms to the truck but went to the passenger side this time. The door swung open and I jumped in beside Francis.

  ‘Hit it,’ I said to Rutherford.

  The Brit fired up the Dong, ground the gears, and we moved off the mark with wheel spin, the tires fighting for traction in the mud. The truck’s nose pushed the fronds aside as we entered the road, and Rutherford hauled on the steering wheel, turning left so we faced downhill, and stamped on the accelerator pedal.

  ‘How are we doing for time?’ he asked over the gathering roar of the wind through the non-existent windshield.

  ‘Two minutes ahead of schedule,’ I told him.

  He backed the speed off a little as the road flattened out and swept onto the flat plain of the valley shimmering in the moonlight; a silver-painted version of the scene I remembered from the day before. We motored past the area where we’d hijacked the trucks and hidden the bodies. With no rain, they’d quickly start to reek. Small carrion-eating animals would be turning up to contest the spoils with the columns of driver ants that were, no doubt, already on the scene. A sudden furry of movement in the bushes caused my heart rate to spike. Rutherford and I both went for our guns.

  ‘Vantour,’ Francis shouted over the wind noise. ‘Vulture!’

  Large black shapes separated from the forest, flapped into the air and then settled again, marking the spot just inside the tree line where we’d stacked the dead. Come morning, the FARDC patrols would see the birds, investigate what the buzzards were feasting on, find the bullet-riddled corpses and know that its weapons had fallen into enemy hands rather than disappearing into a ravine hidden by the forest. Only, by that time, of course, the point of this discovery would be moot because we were about to inform the FARDC exactly who it was who had stolen those weapons, by turning the cache on them. I glanced at Rutherford and he returned the look as he shifted into a lower gear, the road climbing gently to the village.

  ‘Time?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re on it,’ I told him after checking the Seiko’s countdown function.

  I pulled up the QCW, took it off safety as we passed the village, and made sure the selector was on three-shot burst. There was no motion in or around the huts. Nothing was moving that I could see. So far so good.

  The road swept around the base of the hill on which the FARDC camp was situated.

  ‘What the fuck?’ said Rutherford.

  He took the words right out of my mouth. Up ahead, instead of the makeshift bamboo pole boom operated by a couple of sleepy guards that we expected to see, there was a Dong parked across the road, completely blocking it. A dozen men milled around the vehicle and one of them waved a flashlight in our direction. We had no choice but to slow down and stop, at which point the light went out. We were prepared to fight, but this wasn’t part of the plan. This was about to get ugly, the enemy making moves we weren’t prepared for.

  Rutherford had time to reach for his M4 before the shooting started.

  ‘Down!’ I yelled at Francis, pushing him hard into the floor as the Africans opened fire on us. We were hemmed in. No choice but to slug it out or die here and now.

  I shot over the front of the hood. Lead traveling supersonic crackled past my left ear, giving that tinnitus of mine some competition. I leveled the QCW at a knot of FARDC soldiers standing too close together, who obliged me further by getting down on one knee to steady their aim. They all died right there before firing off a shot. Rutherford looked at me and shook his head. This was not how it was supposed to go. Having just learned a very quick and bloody lesson, the balance of the Africans rushed for cover behind their truck.

  I had a moment to consider how to handle this when our cabin suddenly filled with light reflecting off the rear-view-door mirrors. Spotlights had been turned on us from behind. I cracked open the door, and banged off a couple of shots at the source of the beams before popping my head out to see what the hell was going on. A Dong had come up behind us. Shit – it might well have been parked in the village, hidden. Another four-letter word sprang to mind: trap.

  I heard single shots being fired behind me from an M16. That had to be Ryder – Boink favored the Nazarian 97. I hoped that Leila and Ayesha were doing as I asked and keeping their heads down behind the barricade. One of those spotlights went out, followed by its partner. Then two explosions erupted behind the truck. Grenades. I heard a man scream an instant before the first explosion, the percussion wave ringing through my head. Men were running around, appearing from the shadows, shouting and firing at us. I fired back, around one out of three shots finding a moving target. Average shooting on my part. Rutherford was doing better.

  A red tracer spat from my QCW and flew into a man’s chest, where it was extinguished. I fired twice at people shooting at me, ejected the magazine and jammed in a fresh one.

  ‘Out, out!’ Rutherford yelled as he fung open his door and jumped down into the night. He was right. Only ducks
sat around waiting to be shot. Actually, not even ducks did that.

  I hit the door with my shoulder and rolled out, landing on an African waiting there below the door with his rifle raised and ready to shoot. Unfortunately for him, he was not prepared for two-hundred-and-forty-odd pounds of falling ammunition and special agent. The combined weight knocked him to the ground, a cry strangling in his throat. When I got up on a knee, the guy was raising his weapon in my direction, so I tapped him on the head with the QCW’s stock a couple of times and his lights went out. Scooting under the Dong, I started shooting at feet, then at the screaming shapes that dropped to the ground on top of them.

  I worked my way to the truck’s rear axle. The volley of gunfire spitting from the back of our Dong was now a serious horizontal rain of lead. The truck that had come up behind us was beginning to roll back down the hill, steam hissing from its smashed radiator and shattered engine, bullet holes punched all over the fenders. The truck slowly gathered speed, freewheeling backward. It quickly departed from the road, mowing down the forest. Several Africans ran with it, followed by a swarm of tracer; lethal fireflies zipping from the black hole under our tarpaulin chasing them.

  The incoming fire that began as a fusillade was reduced to ragged individual shots, the enemy having lost its resolve in the face of the concentrated firepower unleashed on it. And, of course, it had also lost numbers. I rolled out from under the Dong and kept the roll going off the road and into the forest. I came up to a crouch and worked my way forward to flank the truck blocking our way into camp. Coming around from the side, I could see that two men were kneeling behind it, using the wheels as cover, hiding their ankles from me. I put the QCW down and swung the M4 – a more reliable weapon at this extended range, of around fifty meters – from my shoulder and took aim. But then Rutherford appeared from the forest shadows and shot the man nearest him from the side, so that the soldier’s pal kneeling beside him died a spit second later, his brainpan stopping the round that had killed the first man an instant before. Economical shooting. ‘Waste not, want not,’ I muttered.

  Rutherford stepped fully into the moonlight and raised his fist in the sudden shocking silence, letting me know that the area was clear. I made my way down toward him warily, just in case there were any FARDC lying in wait among the elephant grass and shrubs, but there didn’t appear to be. I gave a low whistle as I approached, to avoid friendly fire.

  ‘It’s all right, mate,’ Rutherford called out, breathing heavily. ‘I gotcha.’

  I ran the last twenty meters. Jesus, there were bodies everywhere, black shadowy lumps on the ground. No one wanted this. ‘Move that vehicle,’ I told him as I went to the back of ours. I couldn’t hear any sound coming from inside. ‘Everyone okay?’ I asked before arriving at the tailgate. Ryder stepped forward out of the darkness under the tarp.

  ‘The damn truck came outta nowhere,’ he said. ‘Drove up fast behind us, then hit the high beams. Freaked the shit out of us.’

  ‘I think you freaked ’em back.’

  ‘Yeah, Boink threw a couple of grenades straight through their windshield.’

  ‘I got a mean fast ball, yo,’ came his voice from the shadows. He stepped into the moonlight and looked down at me, grinning broadly.

  ‘Are we nearly done yet?’ Leila called out.

  ‘No, not nearly. Stay there and stay down.’ I asked Ryder, ‘How’re the defenses holding up?’

  ‘We took a lot of heat, but they look okay,’ said Ryder.

  I heard the truck blocking our way fire up, followed by roaring engine noise and the crash of snapping trees and palms as it headed off the road, a weight on its accelerator pedal.

  ‘Top off your mags and get ready for round two,’ I said and headed back to the front cabin. Rutherford was already back behind the wheel. Blood was all over the seat. Francis was leaning forward, holding his forearm.

  ‘I think he took a round,’ said Rutherford, punching the starter button.

  ‘It is nothing,’ said Francis. ‘Allez! Go . . . let’s go!’

  Rutherford didn’t need to be told a fourth time and the Dong leaped forward up the hill. I ripped part of my sleeve off and used it as a pressure bandage, wrapping it around Francis’s upper arm, staunching the blood flow. He’d taken a bullet splinter, which had peeled his forearm like a banana, a loose fap of skin revealing the muscle beneath. I ripped off another bit off my sleeve, tied it around the wound and told him to keep pressure on it. It was going to sting like fuck, but he’d live.

  A flash of light burst on the ground somewhere ahead, just as we came up into the outer reaches of the area cleared by the logging company. The boom of the percussion wave reached us through the windowless cab a few seconds later and made my cheeks wobble.

  ‘It’s started,’ yelled Rutherford, the rough ground and the increasing speed of the vehicle causing us to bounce up and down on the seat like we were on a trampoline.

  Francis threw up onto the floorboards.

  The skirmish at the barrier had delayed us an extra two and a half minutes but Cassidy and West, up on the observation ridge with the mortar, couldn’t know that. This first round was the ranging shot. West would be spotting, rushing forward, once the mortar had been fired, to check the shell’s detonation point in the encampment, and relaying elevation and azimuth corrections to Cassidy. A second shell would verify these adjustments and, assuming the round was on the money, the barrage would start in earnest, another eighteen 60mm HE rounds in the first stick.

  ‘Get us the hell up there!’ I yelled.

  ‘Pedal’s pressed to the floor here, skip!’ Rutherford shouted back.

  A couple of FARDC men scattered out of our way.

  The second mortar round fell fifty meters away on our right, an orange and yellow flash swallowed quickly by its own smoke mixed with the earth blown into the air.

  ‘We’re on the wrong side of the encampment,’ I said.

  ‘That’s because we’re late,’ Rutherford shouted.

  I knew that.

  Cassidy and West would be dropping rounds on the FARDC HQ, using the blue UN tents as the bull’s eye. The plan was that they’d then march the bombardment back toward the clearing closest to the ridge where the Mi-8 was parked. All of which meant that if we didn’t get our asses out of this general area, pronto, a round could land close enough to kill our vehicle, and us.

  A round hit a tree not far in front, exploded somewhere high, and snapped off a branch that came crashing to the ground. Rutherford couldn’t avoid it. The truck hit the obstacle hard, bounced up over it and launched the three of us at the ceiling.

  I smacked my head hard and, an instant later, the truck’s rear wheels hopped over the tree, throwing me against the dash. I wondered how Ryder and our principals in back had fared. Francis was back in the foot well, heaving.

  ‘Count ’em off,’ Rutherford yelled.

  ‘Count what off?’ I asked him.

  ‘The mortars. Count ’em off so we know where we stand.’

  Another mortar landed close – too close – exploding less than fifty meters away, and shrapnel rattled off the Dong’s metalwork. A tight ball of orange fury burst among five men running for cover and when the earth cleared, none of them was there.

  ‘That’s six!’ I yelled over the noise of the motor, the explosions and shouting men.

  Soldiers were running everywhere. Some were shooting their rifles from the hip as they ran, but I had no idea at what; the dark, maybe, or their own shadows. Just as long as it wasn’t us they were shooting at. I glanced through the window opening by my shoulder and clearly saw Lissouba, alias Colonel Cravat, yelling at Colonel Makenga, both men waving their arms around like a couple of Frenchmen, Makenga brandishing that cane of his. Makenga was accompanied by two men – his PSOs. Lissouba had a much larger entourage, outnumbering Makenga’s three to one, and the two groups were separated by twenty meters of moonlit open ground. I could feel the tension from where I was. And then both groups charg
ed at each other, grappling, wrestling. I saw a muzzle flash and one of the men fell to the ground – I couldn’t see who. Lissouba ran in and kicked the fallen man in the head like he wanted to boot it clean off his neck. Jesus, that was Makenga lying in the mud. He was dead for sure; if not from the bullet, then from the punt.

  The two groups of soldiers, Makenga’s PSOs and Lissouba’s FARDC posse, started exchanging wild shots before closing with each other again for some serious hand-to-hand machete action. Makenga’s bodyguards were overwhelmed and cut down in seconds.

  Perhaps Lissouba saw an opportunity to get rid of his enemy and took it. Or maybe he thought that, once again, Makenga’s men were shelling his troops. But that didn’t make sense. Why would Makenga have shells sent down on his own head? Whatever the reason, the CNDP colonel was now a long way from caring.

  ‘How many is that?’ Rutherford asked as he flicked the wheel from left to right to avoid hitting a man who had tripped and fallen in our path.

  ‘Fourteen. Six to go,’ I shouted.

  Francis had pulled himself up off the floor and a string of puke hung from the corner of his mouth. He pointed at a gap between the trees.

  ‘There!’ I yelled at Rutherford. ‘Turn there.’

  He reefed the wheel hard over. The tires bit into a rut and the Dong came up on two wheels, almost on the verge of tipping on its side. We came down again with a crash but Rutherford kept the gas pedal welded to the floor.

  With the direction change, the mortars were now falling on our left side; the safe side. We’d somehow managed to come through the shower of high-explosive anti-personnel ordnance unscathed. The FARDC still registered the Dong as friendly, even though we were driving at speed through their midst. Our luck on that score had to end sooner or later.

  The twentieth mortar round – the last – hit the upper branches of a tree and showered the area below it with splinters of wood and steel.

  The plan said we now had two minutes and counting to get the job done and clear out before the second barrage began. I could see where we had to go. ‘Over there.’ I pointed out the area where a couple of the blue UN tents in the target zone had been wiped out. Around thirty meters beyond them, where the bush hadn’t been cleared to any great extent, I could make out half a dozen men dangling from trees.