I signaled Rutherford that I was going in for a closer look. He nodded, rubbing the stock on his M4 like he was hoping a genie might spring forth.
The body was that of an African male somewhere in his twenties. He was wearing dark green shorts and a loose dark blue shirt. Blood had seeped from his nostrils, eyes and ear holes. His shorts were also stiff with dried black blood. The man had bled out. His palms and kneecaps were white, the color of the mud in the area, which suggested that he’d probably crawled here to die.
‘Could that be Ebola?’ Rutherford asked, taking several steps backward just in case. I did likewise for the same reason.
This should have been a bustling village, but the place was a ghost town and the animals were running amok. All the buildings that we could see were intact. Something like Ebola, the hemorrhagic fever found in these parts, could explain what we’d found. If it was the virus, and depending on how long ago the first villager started displaying symptoms, it might already have killed almost everyone here, burned through the place the way fire moves through dry grass. Ebola was extremely contagious and had a mortality rate that made bubonic plague look like a head cold. It was so lethal that some countries had considered using it as a weapon of mass destruction, which was why I knew a little about it. There would be a radio somewhere in the village, but we wouldn’t be able to get to it. Shit. It might as well have been on the moon.
I wondered if the guy on the ground was still hot with virus, and whether any of the flies that had landed on me when I was in the vicinity of the body had virus on its fly feet. I sneezed involuntarily.
‘Christ, skipper,’ said Rutherford, taking a step away from me. ‘You got pretty close to that poor sod.’
‘I don’t think the bug works that fast.’ I hope.
‘You sure?’
‘Yep.’ Nope.
He relaxed a little and we retraced our steps ten meters or so. I scoped the village with the sight and counted four more bodies lying out in the open. One of them moved an arm. Ebola turned internal organs to rotting mush. If that’s what we had here, I pitied the survivors still in that village. Depending on a range of factors, including the size of the village’s population, there’d probably be several, but going in to help was way too risky. And there wasn’t much we could do anyway, unless the cure involved a makeover, courtesy of Leila’s little white case.
‘There’s gotta to be a road out,’ said Rutherford.
I wasn’t so sure. The village appeared to be nestled within the crook of three imposing mountain-like hills behind it. Perhaps the only way in and out was by boat. Could be those survivors I wondered about had taken the village’s boats and headed downstream, which would explain why there weren’t any craft pulled up on the riverbank.
We cut through the banana plantation to where the rainforest began. After two hours of battling through a virtually impassable blockade of bamboo, liana, elephant grass and a variety of difficult prickly bush with red and orange berries on it that seemed to be everywhere and left us no room to swing a machete, we admitted defeat. We tried to cut a path through on the other side of the village, but we ended up in the same place – nowhere.
‘We’re just going to have to wait for a boat to come along,’ Rutherford said as the sun appeared overhead and the bush came alive with the sound of happy insects.
I sweated and sucked some water from the camelback as we walked up onto the grassy knoll. A vicious cramp clenched my stomach. A bout of diarrhea was coming down the pipe, thanks to all the river water I’d taken in. Rutherford brushed something off my back, an action I no longer gave any thought to. Looking down at the river, I stopped and dropped to a knee. Half a mile away, a boat, a type of ferry, was heading down the brown water, another small open boat in its wake. I took the scope and trained it on the vessels.
‘Fuck,’ I said under my voice. Armed soldiers were bursting from the ferry’s seams, like stuffng from an old cushion. The craft under tow behind it was a lighter. Crammed onto it were maybe fifteen men bristling with RPGs. I went down on my belly. I kept the scope on the boats and willed them past our landing point as they came nearer. I imagined that Cassidy would have posted a lookout, seen the convoy before it was upon them, and had everyone squirreled away out of sight. I could make out that there was a man on the forward deck of the ferry. Jesus Christ – it was Lissouba! This bastard put the asshole in persistent, that was for damn sure. He had binoculars, which he was training on the rainforest either side of the boat, looking left and right. The boat drew abreast of our landing point. I held my breath. Foliage overhanging the river obscured the boat from view. We waited for it to reappear in the gaps between the greenery, the tension growing with every second.
‘I’ve lost it,’ said Rutherford.
‘Wait,’ I whispered. ‘There . . .’
The boat’s dirty white bow appeared in one of the gaps and its exhaust pipe chugged a perfect smoke ring into the air, which rolled out over the water. The two boats slid past the landing without altering course or engine speed. They hadn’t seen us.
‘Shit,’ I said, turning onto my back, breathing again, closing my eyes, the powerful but rare sunshine like needles on my face. I suddenly felt exhausted. The thought of keeping my eyes closed and drifting off to sleep was incredibly seductive, but not possible. I got to my feet and gave Rutherford a hand up.
‘IT’S COOPER, YO,’ I heard Boink say as Rutherford and I came down the back stairs. Twenny’s head of security was standing guard, a Nazar-ian looking like a half-size toy in his arms. Everyone stopped what they were doing and gathered round. There was no opportunity to give Cassidy, West and Ryder a separate briefing.
‘We can’t go that way,’ I said with a lift of my head, meaning the rock wall.
‘Why not?’ Leila asked immediately.
‘There’s a village up there, but they’ve had a few problems. An epidemic of some kind. Almost the whole place has been wiped out.’
‘We think it could be Ebola,’ said Rutherford, jumping right in.
‘What’s that?’ Twenny asked.
‘It’s like the worst fu you ever had,’ said Ryder.
‘Doesn’t sound too bad.’
‘It’s a fu that makes yo’ insides melt and run out your asshole, yo,’ said Boink. Twenny, surprised and disbelieving, looked at him. ‘Discovery Channel,’ the big man said with a shrug.
Cassidy took half a step back from Rutherford.
‘If could be any number of things,’ I said. ‘But it’s not worth taking the risk walking through it. If it is Ebola, I’d rather take my chances with the FARDC.’
‘You were up there. If it’s as contagious as you say, how do you know you ain’t caught it already?’ asked Twenny.
‘Because I didn’t get near enough anyone to catch it,’ I said, though I was wondering about those flies and their dirty feet. ‘But best not to swap bodily fluids with me for a while.’
‘So what do we do?’ asked Ayesha.
‘You saw the boats?’ West inquired.
‘It’s Lissouba,’ I said.
The SOCOM boys all nodded.
‘We can’t stay here,’ I continued. ‘If they come back to take a closer look, we can’t defend the riverbank and we’ll be trapped against the hill. We have to move up there.’ I gestured with my thumb over my shoulder. ‘Hold the high ground.’
‘But you just said we couldn’t,’ Leila pointed out.
‘I said we couldn’t get through the village. But it’s set back more than half a mile from the top of the hill. There’s plenty of room to retreat.’ I could tell from Cassidy and West’s body language that they agreed with me, if reluctantly.
‘And now for the good news: there’s food up there,’ Rutherford added.
‘What kind of food?’ asked Leila, unimpressed. ‘More worms and bananas?’
‘Sure, but if you’d rather, there’s also roast pork with crackling,’ I said. I explained about the pigs. The prospect of meat that didn’t slit
her or crawl was as good a bribe as any, and ten minutes later Rutherford was leading the way up through the lower bush to the steps cut into the limestone face.
The climb was no easier the second time around and soon my shirt and the V at the back of my pants were black with sweat, the increasing mid-afternoon cloud cover raising the humidity to the point where the air was thick enough to swim in. All of us except Cassidy and West collapsed when we arrived at the grassy knoll on top of the ledge, and so Rutherford called a rest.
‘This a good vantage point,’ said Cassidy, taking in the view. ‘We got the box seat up here.’
‘Shit,’ West muttered under his breath as both men sank into a crouch. ‘Look at this . . .’
There was a problem. I opened my eyes and rolled over. Oh, fuck . . . Lissouba and his men were coming back up the river. This time there was a third boat in tow, if our raft could be called a boat. The throb from the ferry’s engines died as its bow turned toward the riverbank and the craft disappeared under the canopy almost directly beneath us, the towed litter and our raft following.
‘Brilliant,’ said Rutherford, though I knew he meant ‘fucking shit fuck’.
Evade
‘We have to give ourselves up,’ Leila insisted. ‘We all know that. They’re going to follow us until we do, right? They’re not going to give up.’
‘And then what?’ Cassidy asked.
Twenny put his arm around Leila, the ex who was now his present. ‘We can’t. That ain’t no option, you feel me? They’re killers.’
‘They held you and you’re still alive.’
‘They killers – trus’ me.’
‘Well, they’ve got theirs and we got ours,’ she said, glaring at me accusingly. ‘He’s just killing us all slowly. Death by incompetence.’
Go right ahead, I wanted to say. Be my guest and head on back down.
She pointed at me. ‘Our killer just leads us from one impossible situation to another.’ She looked angrily at Cassidy, then at West and Ryder. ‘Can’t someone else take charge here? Is no one man enough to take responsibility? He ain’t never gonna to get us home. Am I the only one who can see that?’ She went to Boink. ‘What about choo, Phillip?’
Phil found something interesting to stare at on the ground.
‘Duke? Got nothing to say?’
Ryder moved toward her to put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Leila, I think you should calm dow—’
Realizing that no one was going to join the mutiny, she parried his arm, turned away, sank to her knees and sobbed, beaten. Or acting, I couldn’t tell which. Twenny and Ayesha, like air filling a vacuum, rushed in to comfort her.
I turned away and tried to think the situation through. There was no dealing with Lissouba and his partner, Beau Lockhart – not now. We’d come too far and seen too much. Lockhart would have to believe I had enough evidence, even if it were just eyewitness accounts, to build a case against him. The fact that I didn’t; well, he wouldn’t know that, would he? He’d consider that his interests were best served if we never made it back. All of which meant that if we were captured, then, no question about it, we’d all end up in the FARDC’s downsizing program administered by machetes.
‘Forget that crap, boss,’ said West. ‘You got my vote.’
‘Who said it was a democracy,’ I answered.
‘The enemy force is between thirty and forty,’ Cassidy said, the sideshow over. The pressing business of what the hell we were going to do had to be dealt with and the PSOs, me included, were feeling the weight of it.
‘They picked up our raft downstream and this is probably the closest hamlet to where they found it,’ I surmised. ‘They’ll go over the area down there with a fine tooth comb.’
‘We cleaned up our landing pretty good, but you can bet your ass there’ll be a boot print in the mud that we missed, or something like that,’ said Cassidy. ‘We all bagged our shit but our principals weren’t so diligent. They’ll know we’re up here.’
‘We’ve given them a good mauling already. They’ll be cautious,’ said West. ‘They’ll send out a recon patrol first and get the lay of the land. They’ll find the village and come to the same conclusion you did about the risks, sir. They’ll figure they’ve got us bottled up.’
There was a murmur of general agreement.
The time was approaching four pm. We had an hour and a half of useful light left; less, if the cloud build-up continued.
‘That recon patrol should never get to make its report,’ Rutherford suggested.
He was right. It didn’t help us any for Lissouba to know that we couldn’t retreat. We had to fight our way out. ‘I’ve got two mags left, and only one of them is full,’ I said. ‘What’s everyone else got?’
Only Ryder had two full mags. Like me, the rest of us were down to the dregs: Rutherford had just two rounds; West one full mag; Cas-sidy half a mag. We also had that one frag grenade, one Claymore and twelve smoke canisters. Assuming one bullet, one kill, we had enough ammunition to get the job done, but we were kidding ourselves if we thought we could pull that off. These guys would come at us hard and they knew how to fight. We’d taken them on several occasions already, but we’d had the advantage of surprise, along with a hell of a lot of antipersonnel iron to throw around. Those days were now well and truly over. Rutherford chewed something off the inside of his cheek.
‘So how’re we going to pull this off?’ I asked. ‘Any thoughts?’
‘Use the night,’ Cassidy said.
WEST AND I KEPT watch, hunkered down in a patch of the elephant grass bordering the grassy knoll. There was only one way up that we knew of, and that was via the steps cut into the limestone wall. First port of call for Lissouba’s scouts would be this relatively open ground, same as it was for Rutherford and me when we first arrived. Meanwhile, the rest of our band was heading to the thick rainforest bordering the plantation, where there was also plenty of bamboo for Cassidy’s purposes. Leila, I knew, would take one look at the berry-laden thorn bush coiled up there like razor wire that we wanted her and our other principals to hide in and refuse to take another step. But that was Rutherford’s problem, or Cassidy’s, or Ryder’s, or maybe even Twenny’s, if the guy were prepared to step up. I was happy to leave them to it. Hanging out in the long wet grass with insects, snakes and frogs, waiting for Lissouba and his killers, was a far more appealing option. It had been dusk for a while when West, whose angle on things encompassed a view of the limestone wall and was thus better than mine, raised a finger to inform me that the recon party had arrived. A dozen seconds later he displayed two fingers – two scouts. The first guy, skinny and crouched over almost double, came into my view; he was carrying an M16 but not a lot else. Traveling light. His slightly taller, but equally fyweight, buddy walked into my line of sight a few moments later. Though obviously on edge, given the way they gripped their guns – tightly, like they were handrails in a fast-moving train – both men moved well, their heads achieving an owl-like range of movement. They spent some minutes surveying the knoll, though they avoided coming into the elephant grass. Satisfied that the area was clear of threat, they found the trail into the rainforest and slunk into the darkness collected under the canopy. I shifted an arm, getting ready to stand, and West urgently held up a finger, followed thirty seconds later by a second. Two more men had arrived, uniformed twins of the first pair, and crouched in the middle of the knoll for several minutes before skulking off on the double along the path that led to the village of the damned.
We had no choice but to stay put and wait, just in case a third pair of scouts might pop up. This is, in fact, what happened, but with a variation. This time it was one guy on his own and he didn’t waste time checking out the knoll, probably fguring that the scouts preceding him had done it, but immediately made a beeline for the rainforest. Jesus, crafty bastards. The first pair of scouts was a decoy for the second pair, and all were decoys for Tailend Charlie here. This was a bad situation. The more recent arrivals meant that we wo
uld lose touch with the first pair of scouts, and the second pair would likewise get a good head start.
There was sudden movement beside me – West. He jumped up and threw his Ka-bar at Tailend. The blade shimmered through the twilight like a steel bird, impaled the guy’s left arm against his chest with a solid thud before he had time to react. West followed the knife, running at the man and hitting him with a flying tackle a split second later, taking him to ground. I ran at a crouch toward them from the elephant grass, grabbed the scout’s shirt collar and helped West drag him to the opposite side of the knoll and into the bush. West dropped the mag from the man’s rifle and stuffed it into his webbing.
‘And then there were four,’ he whispered, feeling for a pulse in the African’s neck and not finding one. He extracted his knife and wiped the blade on the man’s shirt. We wasted no time and ran to the section of rainforest that separated the knoll from the banana trees, where the other scouts had gone. We caught up with the second pair by the time they were a third of the way through the forest. The light was fading fast, like it does at the movies before the picture starts. The trees were alive with small monkeys, and the noise they made masked the fact that West and I were moving at a trot to get ahead of the second FARDC recon party.
We took a position either side of a bend in the path as it bisected a thicket of umbrella palms, and waited. The two Congolese crept by, so close I could see the sweat glistening on their skin and smell their body odor, a powerful unwashed smell that was sour and distinctly human, spiced with stale smoke from cheap tobacco. The men were moving slow, not talking, making a judgment call on each step, carefully placing their boots on the ground, expecting something was going to happen. They were right. One of the men was shaking, either from fever or nerves, I couldn’t tell. Maybe he was clairvoyant and could see his life coming to an end within the next few seconds.
And suddenly something moved in the bush close to where West was crouched and the men began firing into the shadows wrapped around the sergeant’s position. Their rifles spat death in the darkness, the Africans shouting over the rapid sound of their own gunfire cracking away on full auto. They sprayed away till their chambers came up empty. And then a pig broke cover and squealed in agony and fright as it ran down the path on its two front legs, its back bloody and broken, dragging its limp body behind. West leaped from a different set of shadows and jumped on the first shooter, taking him down like he was prey. My target stood his ground but shook like he’d spent the night in the freezer. I rushed him and kicked his legs out from under him so that he fell heavily onto his back, where he lay still with his eyes closed but mouth open.
Ghost Watch Page 40
