‘Checkpoint ahead,’ said Francis. ‘Many men. Two are coming forward. They are waving at me to stop.’
‘Do not stop,’ I told him. ‘How many men?’
‘Perhaps eight or ten.’
Shit – that was a lot of guns. And this was just a roadblock.
‘Can you drive through? Anything across the road? Like a truck?’
‘No – just armed men!’ he said through gritted teeth and took his foot off the gas.
‘Don’t slow down!’ Rutherford snapped at him, then reached over and pushed the gas pedal to the floor with the stock of his rifle. The Dong bucked forward and Francis panicked a little, swerving off the road briefly.
‘Take it easy,’ I told Francis. ‘And for Christ’s sake don’t use the horn – not yet!’
‘They are pointing their guns at me,’ said Francis.
‘Tell them something!’ I yelled at him. ‘Tell them the mine is being attacked.’
Just for Christ’s sake don’t tell them it’s being attacked by us, I thought.
Francis stuck his head out the window and shouted, ‘Gare! Gare! Regardez en arriere! Ils arrivent! Les fantômes! Les fantômes!’
I heard random terrified shouting coming from the men at the roadblock.
Rutherford’s face widened into a grin.
‘What’d he say?’ I asked.
‘“Look out, the ghosts are coming! They’re right behind us.” Sounds like they’re all shitting themselves out there.’ He pulled his rifle off the pedal.
The men’s shouts faded behind us. No gunfire, suggesting that we’d managed to pierce the outer defenses without alerting the main body of troops within.
‘Francis – how much further to the mine?’ I asked him.
‘Not far. Soon.’
‘You can slow down now. Tell me what you see.’
The Dong freewheeled, slowing gradually. Francis gave the steering wheel more than half a turn. From memory, this almost-ninety-degree right-hander was the last corner before a hundred-meter straight section of road that ended in the parking lot.
‘I see many men,’ Francis said, his voice agitated.
‘How many?’ I asked.
‘Too many to count. More than sixty.’
Sixty! ‘Are they looking at us?’
‘Non.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘They are making walls with sandbags.’
Fortifcations. ‘Can you see our hostages?’
‘Non.’
‘Shit,’ said Rutherford, beating me to it.
‘Wait . . . Oui, I see them,’ he said a few seconds later. ‘They are chained to old machinery away from the huts. There are guards with them – ten or twelve.’
‘Are there any civilians in the area?’
‘Non.’
‘Can you see a black male with shiny hair that looks like it’s come straight from the seventies?’ I asked.
‘I do not understand.’
What I meant was, could he see Lockhart. ‘Can you see any foreigners?’
‘Non,’ he said.
‘Drive toward the main body of men,’ I said. ‘Head to a spot where you can’t see the hostages. Drive slow.’
Francis waved out the window a couple of times and said, ‘Bonjour, bonjour.’
‘That means “good jour”, right?’ I whispered to Rutherford.
The Brit grinned. It was a tight grin, and was mostly for my benefit. He had things on his mind, and so did I. I didn’t like what we were about to do but, as I saw it, we didn’t have a lot of choice. I heard a barrage of French directed at Francis from someone close by. Francis answered, then told us, ‘They want to know why we are so damaged. We have been told that we cannot go further.’
‘Just tell him you need to turn around,’ I said. ‘Make sure you smile when you tell him.’
Francis told him, and told him nice. He then pulled the wheel a couple of turns before straightening out.
‘Can you see our people?’
‘No, they are behind the two buildings.’
If he couldn’t see them, they weren’t going to get hurt. ‘Stop here,’ I said.
The brakes bit with a squeal and we stopped. Francis pulled the handbrake, the ratchet sounding like a burst of machine-gun fire.
Outside, I could hear men shouting at us. Wherever it was that we’d stopped, we weren’t supposed to. Any moment, people were going to get pushy.
‘Do it,’ said Rutherford.
‘On the count of three,’ I said, eyeballing Francis, who he gave me a nod. ‘Three, two, one . . .’
I reached up past him, found the horn on the steering wheel, pressed it, and the Dong’s pathetic horn blew its motor scooter meeeep. According to the plan, I had five seconds. I pulled Francis from behind the wheel and dragged him down into the footwell, over Rutherford. As I threw myself over both of them, the entire world suddenly came apart in a burst of heat, light and noise that lifted the truck off the ground and filled the cabin with a swirling metal storm of hot steel pellets. Needlepoints of pain fared across the exposed skin of my face, neck and free arm. Jesus, I was burning. I lifted my head and slapped my face and neck, and small, hot steel balls dropped into the footwell, rattling as they fell. I wiped my arm next and saw that it was now pocked with small burns no bigger than nail heads, and more steel pellets dropped and bounced around the truck’s metal flooring. The smell of burned truck and scorched human caused me to gag. I pushed myself up to the seating position, and pulled Francis and Rutherford up after me.
‘Come on,’ I said, half-dazed, to Rutherford, opened the door and kicked it wide. We had to hit the enemy while they were dazed, before they had a chance to regroup and realize that their attackers were just a few half-starved stragglers and not an invading company.
Men lay dying and wounded all around the truck. I took a few uneasy steps, my balance affected by the shock wave of the multiple explosions, willing myself not to stumble. It wasn’t easy. I steadied myself against the side of the truck and saw that our khaki-green tarpaulin had been reduced to remnants while the metal frame that held it in place was twisted like liquorice. The rest of the Dong hadn’t come off much better, now just scrap metal on torn tires.
‘Ryder!’ I shouted.
Nothing.
‘Ryder!’
A hand came up and waved above the mud-filled steel cans. Ryder’s head followed it.
‘You all right?’ I called out.
He nodded and pointed to his ears and gave a thumbs up sign. We’d used plugs of mud to save his eardrums. He threw across to me the two sets of body armor Rutherford and I had given him for added protection. I put mine on and passed the other set to Rutherford. The defenses had worked. And so had the Claymores we’d placed around the edge of the Dong’s load tray, three on each side and two at the back – eight in all. The firing clackers had been taped together in a row and set up inside one of the smaller containers so that all Ryder had to do to fire off all eight in unison was close the lid on the box. The signal to fire was a long blast on the horn.
Rutherford jogged twenty meters to take up a firing position around the front of the two huts, both of which had been severely damaged by the multiple Claymore blast. I looked around, but tried to be selective about what I saw. The scene in the immediate area of the truck was just plain frightful; bodies everywhere – more than ten – many limbless and headless. Some sick puppy had put a lot of careful thought into the Claymore’s physics. The sudden shocking assault had driven the FARDC soldiers to dive for cover and wait to see where all this was going. Their reluctance to engage wouldn’t last long. I figured we had a two-minute window, maybe less. Once the enemy figured we’d blown our load, the tables would turn.
Rutherford signaled that he had visual contact. Weapon up, I went over to where he was kneeling, behind a stack of rusted oil drums and pipes.
Holes punched the drums beside me – gunfire. Christ, that window was less than I’d thought, down to a minute.
A round smacked into the ceramic plate in the back of my body armor and the force of the hit pushed me face first into the drums.
I groaned as Rutherford turned and fired. A number of men were sniping at us from behind another pile of rusting pipes and old gas cylinders fifty meters away and they were getting bolder by the second. Rutherford ran twenty meters to his left into open space to get a better angle on the Congolese pinning us down. I watched him fire three bursts on the run, taking down two men. The rest of them stood up and sprinted in the opposite direction.
The sergeant returned as I struggled to my feet.
‘Twenny and Peanut,’ he said, breathing hard. ‘Over there, eighty meters.’ He gave me the direction with his hand.
I had to take his word for it – I couldn’t see past the metal scrap. Rounds were pinging off the junk all around us, their passage marked by small puffs of rust. A round nicked my left upper arm – it felt like I’d been whacked there with a tire iron. Rutherford and I were pretty much outflanked. Time to move. We both changed mags as a rain squall marched in a straight line across the open mine, nice and orderly. A burst of thunder arrived simultaneously with a blinding flash of lightning.
I slapped Rutherford on the shoulder, got up and started walking at a fast crouch, hunched over, the metal butt of the M4 reassuringly hard against my cheek. I came around the trash heap looking for targets, and saw Twenny and Peanut. They were hooded and chained to what looked like an old boiler, their chains hooked through a bend in a pipe. At least a dozen men were arrayed around them. Four guards were in the firing position, standing side on, feet apart, lining us up. Two others thought better of it and, as Rutherford and I approached, got up and ran into the forest. Rutherford fired and one of the shooters took a bullet in the cheek. His buddies started firing on full auto and I heard the rounds pass overhead. I dropped a second guy, who spun like a revolving door before landing face down in a puddle, his arm at a crazy angle. And, like that, the resistance melted. The remainder of the guards dropped their weapons and fed helter- skelter. Maybe they thought Bruce Willis was in the house. Yippee ki-yay, motherfuckers . . .
Rutherford and I kept moving in the crouch position toward our captured principals, sweeping left and right, looking for threats but not finding any – not in front of us, anyway.
‘Twenny! Peanut!’ I called out.
I got no reaction from either of them. I grabbed Twenny by the shoulder.
‘What’s going on?’ he yelled, spinning right and then left, unaware of my presence until there was physical contact.
I pulled the black hood off his head. He squinted and blinked at the light like some kind of night creature, even though the heavy cloud cover and the rain made it seem like early evening.
‘Who is it?’ he said. ‘Get away from me . . . Who is it?’
He clearly didn’t recognize me.
‘It’s Cooper and Rutherford. We’re getting you out of here.’
‘Cooper’s a cracker. You’re black. Who the fuck are you?’
‘It’s Cooper, your bodyguard. You wanna hear a bad joke?’
‘Oh, shit. It is Cooper. Oh, man. Oh, shit. It’s you. Oh my god. Fuck. Fuck! How’s Peanut? Oh, Jesus, Cooper. It is you, right?’
I steadied his face and looked into his eyes. The guy was on the edge. ‘Yes, it’s Cooper,’ I said. ‘We’re getting you out.’
‘That’s not the joke, right?’ he asked me, suddenly worried.
‘No, no . . .’ I cupped the back of his neck in my hand and squeezed it.
Rutherford was taking care of Peanut and dealing with their chains. It turned out that they weren’t locked – merely looped through the pipe and secured by a simple U-bolt.
The FARDC hadn’t taken particularly good care of their hostages. It looked like both men had been forced to defecate where they stood. It didn’t appear that they’d had much in the way of nourishment, either, and the cuts and bruises on their faces suggested a little recreational beating.
The chains removed, Twenny started cleaning his ears, reaming them with his index finger.
‘Fucking candle wax,’ he said. ‘I wanna shoot these fuckers.’
With the hood over his head and his ears plugged, Twenny Fo had been in a kind of solitary confinement for a week and the guy was understandably pissed. But there was no time to talk about it. We had to get out of here. Our spectacular entrance had caught the enemy with his pants down, but they weren’t going to stay around his ankles much longer.
I felt arms around me, hugging me. It was Peanut.
‘Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you,’ he said over and over.
‘Cooper . . .’
Rutherford’s voice. There was urgency in it.
I turned around. Oh, shit . . . Around forty armed Congolese men and boys were arrayed in a loose semicircle fifty meters behind us. In the centre of the formation was Ryder and Francis, and both had pistols jammed against their heads.
One of the Africans stepped forward and called out, ‘Your weapons. Throw them down or we will kill your people.’
Would giving up our weapons save Francis and Ryder? I doubted it. There’d be no prisoners taken here today.
‘I will not ask again,’ he said, flicking the rain off his forehead with a finger.
‘Where’s Lockhart?’ I called out.
‘You have no bargaining power.’
‘I can take his head off from this distance,’ Rutherford said out of the corner of his mouth, sighting down the barrel.
And afterwards? We’d been dealt our hand and the guy across the table – which, in this instance, was fifty meters of mud and weed – thought we had a pair of twos.
‘My friend here says he can shoot you in the head from this distance,’ I said loud enough to be heard by everyone. ‘He’s good. He can do it. You don’t want to die. Release those two men and send them over. Then we’ll leave and you can go back to your gold.’
The African grinned. His teeth reminded me of piano keys – white and black where a couple were missing. ‘I do not need one lucky shot,’ he called back. ‘Drop your weapons now or you will die in a storm of lead. Your bodies will not be recognized by your mothers.’
I was trying to come up with something to say that would make the guy eat his words when I heard a boom of thunder. Deep in a place where I was in tune to these things, I wondered why it wasn’t accompanied by lightning. And, suddenly, the wood huts barely ten meters from where the FARDC men were holding Ryder and Francis blew apart in a huge explosion, and splinters the size of spears fired in all directions as if a giant porcupine had stepped on a land mine. I had just enough time to turn away and drop to the ground as these spears came down with the rain all around us. When I looked back, at least a dozen Congolese had fallen where they stood. Others were staggering away, leaning on each other. One man limped off with a piece of wood the size of a fence paling sticking up out of his back like some kind of weather vane.
I wondered what in Christ’s name had just happened. That was one hell of a powerful, timely lightning strike. Without lightning. ‘Stay with them,’ I shouted at Rutherford, and got up and ran to the spot where I’d seen Ryder and Francis. I found Ryder immediately. He was laid out flat on his back. His eyes were open and he was dazed but otherwise unhurt.
‘You okay?’ I asked him.
He nodded. I looked around but couldn’t see Francis. There was a lot of blood on the ground. Most of the men I’d thought were dead were just wounded. They started to groan. One with a chunk of wood protruding from an eye socket began to howl. I watched as a dead man missing an arm and a large piece out of his torso impossibly raised himself up and fell to the side, and Francis was revealed as the person beneath him doing the pushing. I pulled Ryder to his feet, then went to Francis and did the same. The African’s eyes were wide and he was shaking violently.
The sound of a racing engine caused me to look up. A Dong was barreling toward us in a hurry. It clipped the back of our old wrec
ked truck and bunted it to one side. What the fuck now? I took aim at the driver, just as the vehicle’s horn started meep-meeping like an anxious moped in a Beijing traffic jam. A man popped out through the space where the windshield had been, and waved at us with both arms as though he were having a seizure. It took me a moment to recognize him. Jesus, I knew that guy. It was Mike, Mike West! There was a short barrel protruding from the cabin, lying flat along the vehicle’s hood. The damn truck – they’d turned it into a tank using the tube of the M224 as a cannon. The boom I’d heard had been the mortar round being fired, and it wasn’t lightning but a round of 60mm HE that had blown the huts to kindling.
The Dong drove over the remains of the wooden huts. As it turned toward us, I signaled West to keep going and pick up Twenny, Peanut and Rutherford first.
I yelled at Ryder. ‘Can you walk?’
He signaled that he was okay.
‘I have a problem,’ said Francis, looking down.
Yeah, he did – a leg wound to add to the damage to his forearm, his thigh slick with blood; the rain sluicing through it, washing it off his boot into a pale pink puddle on the ground. Using the Ka-bar, I cut his pants away from the damaged area and found a piece of wood twice the length of a pack of cigarettes embedded in the muscle. From the way his leg hung and moved around as if disconnected, his femur was fractured. Soon, once the shock wore off, Francis was going to need more help than we could give him.
‘I’m going to carry you,’ I told him and didn’t wait for permission. I took his wrist, bent down a little and hoisted him across my shoulders. He grunted as I stood up and the air was forced out of his lungs. The guy was a lightweight, maybe a couple of sacks of cement worth, but no more than that. I jogged the fifty meters to the truck, Francis grunting with every step, and arrived as West and Rutherford were helping Twenny and Peanut up into the load area. Leila, Boink and Ayesha swooped on them, and hugged it out and had a good cry and said ‘Oh my God,’ between them a dozen times or so. Meanwhile, with Rutherford’s assistance, I laid Francis out on the metal floor. The guy was in a bad way.
Ghost Watch Page 35
