Death in the Congo: Book 5 in the Dan Stone series

by David Nees

  “You’re looking chipper today,” Marcus said.

  “That’s me. Always chipper.”

  “Good night?” Marcus asked.

  “Very good night. I am in love.” He pointed his finger at Marcus. “Now don’t go trying to bring me down, old buddy. I’m too high on love for that.”

  “Oh my God,” Marcus said, putting his head in his hands. “He’s gone over the edge.”

  Dan noticed Santu beginning to get a worried look on his face. “It’s okay, Santu. They talk like that all the time.” He stood up. “Come on, gentlemen. I have some assignments for you.”

  They went back up to the suite.

  “Marcus and I are going out to find the plantation. It may take more than one day. Roland, you and Santu stake out Dieu Merci and find out where he lives, his travel route, anything that will help us if we need to get in touch with him.”

  “Why would you need him?” Santu asked.

  “Just being thorough,” Dan said.

  Roland leaned over to Santu. “Don’t question the boss, he gets grumpy. While we’re hanging out, I’ll tell you about the most wonderful girl in the world.”

  “Give Marcus and I two days. If we’re not back, call and check on us. Don’t bother before that.”

  “Got it, boss.”

  We’re going to take the Toyota. You two can use taxis. Keep your sidearm with you, but be covert.” Dan thought for a moment. “An adventure tourist and his fixer. That’s who you two are for the next two days. Got it?”

  Both Santu and Roland nodded.

  “We’re going to go through a couple of small villages on the way,” Marcus said as they were driving out of town.

  “I know.” Dan waited for a lonely stretch and pulled off the road. “Go in the back and pull out your Kalashnikov. Keep it in the front seat propped up when we drive through the villages. I want others to see we’re armed. I’m the executive, you’re the bodyguard.”

  “Even if you’re doing the driving?”

  “Someone has to man the weapons, right?”

  “It’ll have to do,” Marcus said with a sigh.

  “Just keep the carbine on the floor until you need to show it. We get stopped, we’re going to visit Zhang Jian, which is mostly true.”

  They followed the N2 west out of Goma. At a small town named Sake, they turned north on a narrow road which soon started snaking its way up and around the hills. This was still farmland. Villagers had cleared fields to plant their crops on the hillsides, only stopping where the terrain became too steep to work. The fields formed an irregular patchwork of differing hues according to what had been planted. The crops consisted mostly of manioc, corn, sorghum, and sugarcane, along with peanuts and some sweet potatoes.

  They drove on and when a village came in sight, Marcus put the butt of the AK on his seat so the barrel showed through the side window and windshield. Some people didn’t notice, others looked without expression. A few young men gave them unpleasant looks, but nothing more.

  “Someone took out his cell phone just as we passed,” Dan remarked as they exited the village.

  “Calling ahead?”

  “Maybe. How many mags do you have for that?”

  “One in, two spares in my jacket pocket.”

  “Ninety rounds. Hope to hell we don’t need any of them. You know the drill. We don’t give up the weapons. If shooting starts, you overwhelm them on full auto.”

  Ahead, they saw the pickup. It was sitting half in the road, half to the side. A man stood in the middle of the road and held up his hand. He had an AK draped across his chest. One man, hardly more than a kid, stood behind him. He had a beat-up shotgun slung across his chest. There were three more men in the back of the pickup. One had a dirty AK in his lap, the other two held guns of unknown caliber and origin.

  Two of the men had uniform shirts, old and frayed with insignias that couldn’t be read now. The others had various shirts. All of them looked shabby. They all had red beret caps on, signifying some unity in their dress.

  “Not a lot of firepower. You know who to take first,” Dan said.

  “Roger that.”

  Dan pulled to a stop just out of reach of the man in the road, forcing him to walk forward to the Toyota. Dan rolled down his window. His 9 mm was now out in his lap.

  “Where are you going?” the man asked in French.

  “We go to visit Zhang Jian on his plantation. You know of it?”

  The man ignored Dan’s question. “Passports?”

  Dan shook his head. “Only for Police Nationale Congolaise.” Before the man could object, Dan took out a document he had printed earlier. It was an introduction letter to Zhang from himself as a representative of his company.

  “My letter of introduction. We are here to talk about mining business.”

  Within the letter was two 50,000 Congolese Francs, about sixty US dollars. The man took them and stared back at Dan. After a moment, Dan reached in his pocket and pulled another 50,000 Franc note out. He held it up.

  “Bien?”

  The man finally nodded and Dan handed him the note as he handed the letter back to Dan. With an official gesture, he waved him forward.

  “Glad we could buy our way out of that,” Marcus said. “He actually held you up for another 50,000 francs. Pretty cheeky. What if he had wanted more?”

  Dan shrugged. “Probably have given it to him. Just had to make him think I had a limit. Beats a shootout.”

  They kept driving over the winding road, heading west. It became increasingly rough the farther they traveled. Two hours later, they turned off onto an even less-traveled dirt road, more like some of the primitive two-track they had experienced on their way to Goma.

  Marcus was navigating using a map that Warren had sent them. He had marked GPS coordinates at the turning points, which Marcus confirmed on his receiver. Finally, they made one last turn. The road was even narrower but showed evidence of having seen some use. It ended in a small village called Lukweti and Zhang’s plantation was two-thirds of the way to the village. It was essentially a dead end or long driveway.

  “They probably have men stationed along the road,” Dan said.

  “Yeah. It’ll be hard to explain ourselves to them…who goes to Lukweti?”

  “We get closer, maybe a mile or two out. I’ll pull off where we can conceal the SUV. We’ll have to go the rest of the way on foot.”

  “I want to go with you,” Marcus said. “I’m not interested in sitting in the truck for a day or more.”

  “Roger that. But sitting out in the bush ain’t going to be any better.”

  “We bring our ground cloths, bug repellant, some MREs to eat…cold style. We’ll manage.”

  “All good except for the bug repellant. Can’t risk the smell. We don’t know how good Zhang’s men are. We go in, find the place to shoot, get out. Leave no trace.”

  Chapter 24

  ___________________________________

  A fter another mile of lurching along the rough trail in low gear, Marcus told Dan to pull off the road. Dan found a spot where the ditch wasn’t too deep and pulled into the tall grass. He drove until he reached the tree line, about fifty yards from the road. The grass showed clear evidence of the vehicle’s passage. Marcus and Dan set about cutting some of the tall grasses and some branches from the forest. They put the cuttings on top of the Toyota to help conceal it from Zhang’s helicopter.

  “Next we need to work on the path we made,” Dan said.

  They walked back to the dirt road and retraced their steps, pulling the grasses back up, pushing them in different directions so the disturbance looked more random. The effect, they hoped, was to not draw the eye of anyone driving or walking past the area.

  “Most people will be watching the road,” Marcus said.

  “We have to hope for that.” Dan wiped his forehead, disturbing the sweat bees and flies flying around his face. “Can’t conceal it completely.”

  After finishing up at the Toyota,
they opened the rear hatch and took out their packs and filled with minimal camping gear and some rations. They each grabbed their AK carbines and stuffed extra magazines into their packs. Dan handed Marcus a suppressor.

  “Let’s put them on. If we have to use them, it will help keep the enemy confused,” Dan said.

  Marcus nodded and screwed the tube to the end of his barrel. Dan opened the map.

  The plantation was located on a hill halfway up from the river valley. Dan and Marcus were to the west, across the river from the main house.

  “We’ll work our way through the forest up the slope. At the top of the ridge, I can get a clear sightline to the house.”

  “How far do you think that is?”

  “Maybe 700 yards. I’ll check it with the range finder when we find a good spot.”

  They headed into the forest. As soon as it closed in around them, they had to use their compass to maintain a course heading. With the sun blotted out there were no clues to the direction they were traveling.

  “This is something. I know we come out of these woods in a half mile, but I still feel lost. Can you imagine being in the forest when it goes on for miles and miles?”

  Dan shook his head.

  Although higher in altitude than the lowland forests near the Congo River and its large tributaries, the dense forest was still wet. Mist hung in the air, shrouding the foliage in moisture. The ground was dry and firm, but it was hard not to get wet as one pushed through the dense brush.

  “Now I know why they use machetes to cut their way through,” Marcus said as he put his arm up to ward off branches rebounding towards him from Dan’s pushing through.

  “Keep an eye out for snakes. There are black mambas here. They’re deadly.”

  “I remember the lectures,” Marcus said. They had been given multiple lectures about the culture and the flora and fauna. Much of it focused on what could kill them or make them sick. “But how the hell are we supposed to see them? Hell, I can barely see my feet sometimes.”

  “Hopefully they’ll just move away when they sense were coming.”

  “Those lectures made it seem like everything in Africa could kill you or give you a wasting disease,” Marcus said as he slogged behind Dan.

  “Malaria, sleeping sickness, parasites that swim up your ass or prick, those worry me more than the larger animals.”

  “Not worried about leopards?”

  “I’d rather deal with a leopard than get bit by a tsetse fly and come down with sleeping sickness.”

  “I remember reading that where there were herds of cows, there was probably little sleeping sickness. Tsetse flies kill cows faster than humans,” Marcus said.

  “We saw some cows around Goma.”

  “Yeah. That made me feel better.”

  Dan chuckled. “Cows are the canary in the mine out here.”

  When they got to the edge of the woods, they looked out over a quarter mile of open field with chest-high grasses, bushes, and some scattered trees. To their right, they could make out the plantation across the river at about the same height as the field.

  Dan pointed ahead. “Let’s get into those woods farther up the slope. Should be able to find a good hide in there.”

  Marcus was looking through his binoculars at the compound. “Got armed men strolling about. Some near the house, some down by the water.”

  The coffee trees spread out behind the main compound and to each side, up from the river bottom. The ground was cleared in front of the house in order to not compromise the view. The clearing went down to, and across the river, to offer a grand view westward to the slopes Dan and Marcus were on. In the middle of the grounds was a flat, grass landing pad with the helicopter on it.

  “You see anyone on our side of the river?” Dan asked.

  “Negative. But I don’t have a full view of the terrain. There could be some beyond the bridge.”

  There was a stout bridge connecting the plantation with the primitive road that went past it. To one side of the main house was a garage with multiple vehicles parked around it. What looked like three guest houses were arranged to the rear of the big house.

  “You think we can walk across this open area?” Marcus asked. “I don’t relish crawling a quarter mile with a chance to meet a black mamba face to face.”

  Dan stood for a few minutes in thought.

  “That would be nasty for sure. A death sentence. Not much chance either of us could get the other back to Goma in time to get treated.” He paused. “But if we’re seen, the jigs up. We might get back to the SUV and out, but just seeing us would put Zhang’s security on high alert. We’d never get back up that road again.”

  “Yeah. They’d set road blocks a mile or more down the road. Only let villagers through.”

  “Yep. And if they were smart, they would set up a permanent patrol presence on this hillside.”

  “That mean what I think it means?”

  Dan nodded. “On our bellies.”

  “You go first, boss,” Marcus said. “You’re the leader and head sniper.”

  “Figured you’d say that.”

  He dropped to the ground and started forward. Crawling a quarter of a mile was not that unusual. The stalking exercise in his training had been harder. Recruits in sniper school were required to crawl through a grassy field from a thousand yards out to within a hundred and fifty yards of their instructors without being seen. There were two instructors, and the trainees were to take two “shots” using blanks without being seen.

  A half hour later they slipped into the next stand of forest and stood up. The stain of the reddish-brown dirt covered the front of both men. It was spread over their shirts and pants. Their elbows had the dirt ground deep into the sleeves.

  They moved forward. Little was said as Dan led them along the fringe of the forest, careful to not let them be seen through the trees. He stopped and look around at different times. He would signal to Marcus to wait while he quietly worked his way to the edge of the tree line.

  Finally, Dan came back and motioned to Marcus. They moved to the edge of the trees. Before the trees ended and the grasses began, there was a downed trunk laying on the ground. Dan sat down behind it and laid the AK across the trunk.

  “A shooting rest. I just need to trim some brush to get a clear view across to the house. We’re facing the entrance.” He reached out his hand. “Give me your range finder.”

  Marcus handed the instrument to Dan. He crept forward to the edge of the clearing. Moments later he came back.

  “Eight hundred-forty yards to the front steps.”

  “That’s well within the rifle’s range,” Marcus said. “Too far for a head shot?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Depends on the day, the wind, and how the target presents. But I’ll get a kill.”

  Dan spread some large leaves down in a bed, similar to that a gorilla would make to sleep on the forest floor.

  “We can go now,” he announced.

  “You gonna be able to find this place again?”

  “I think so. If not, I’ll make a new site. I’ll mark where we come out of the forest to give me a reference when I return.”

  They started back. When they reached the edge of the open grass area, they realized they were not where they had entered.

  “Harder than it looks to navigate,” Marcus said.

  “Yeah. And I don’t want to leave any obvious trail. I may be dodging a manhunt after taking my shot.”

  Marcus turned to Dan while they were still at the forest edge. “You want some backup? Roland and me can wait in the section of trees,” he gestured across the field. “Cover your retreat. If they get any men up here before you get out, we can pin them down.”

  Dan thought about it for a moment, then shook his head.

  “That’ll create an open firefight. They’ll have communications set up and would trap us on the road. This has to be done in full stealth mode. I may have to hike all the way out. But better they never find anyone. Leave �
�em with a mystery.”

  Marcus shrugged.

  “You go first this time,” Dan said. They started crawling across the field.

  Chapter 25

  ___________________________________

  D an and Marcus arrived back in Goma late that night. After getting some food, they went back to the hotel. Santu was there by himself.

  “Where’s Roland?” Dan asked.

  “He’s gone to see the woman, Yvette.”

  “Were you two successful?”

  Santu nodded. “We located Bakasa’s office in the government building. But we don’t know where he lives.”

  Santu gave Dan a nervous look.

  “Santu. You okay?” Dan asked.

  He nodded.

  “Something's bothering you, I can see it,” Dan said.

  Santu took a deep breath. “I’m uncomfortable that you want to find out where both of these people live. I still don’t understand why you won’t talk to them where they work?”

  Dan stared at him. Santu needed to be on board, even with reservations. He couldn’t afford the man to bolt and spill their plans.

  “As I told you before. Sometimes I can do better talking to someone outside of their work. They don’t put up the same defenses. With Bakasa, not being in his office takes away the visible trappings of his power. You said it yourself with that official we ran into in Kikwit. You made sure he knew you had status…power. I’m using that technique in reverse with Bakasa.”

  “And the Chinese man?”

  “That’s a different story, but also one of power. I need him away from his office as well. He’ll be more receptive to my arguments.”

  “Or more vulnerable.”

  “That too. Now I suggest you put aside your worries. Roland already told you that he’ll defend you. And I told you that I would protect you.”

  Dan got up and walked over to Santu and leaned down to his face.

  “It’s time for you to show you’re part of the team. Whether or not you think you signed up…you’re signed up. Now I expect you to do your part.”