'A' for Argonaut (43 page)

Dos Sampas shook his head in sympathy.

The next morning, after a quick breakfast of grilled dried monkey and boiled manioc root, the men were on the river. Maran stowed the Ninja paraphernalia Ngoye had given him: crocodile hoodies with heads and skins.

Before long, the river narrowed. The lush banks closed in. Maran stood at the wheel next to dos Sampas. Tracha stood at his side. He peered into the vegetation along the riverbanks.

“Most beautiful river I’ve ever been on,” Maran said.

“Whole country’s beautiful. Congo! A cliché maybe, but deep, powerful, mysterious. Like its people,” Tracha observed.

“Take Jazz,” he added. “Thelonius, Bird, Miles, Mingus. Where would we be … jazz be … if it weren’t for African history?”

They moved into a large pool that Maran had seen on his maps. A herd of wildebeest crashed through the shallows at the far side, climbing over one another as they scrambled up a muddy path through the vegetation, up the embankment.

They approached the far end. A wide span of white water thundered over rapids; boulders jutted out of the river ahead. Tracha came out of the cabin of the boat juggling two sandwiches on a plate with two cups of coffee. Steam swirled off the cups. He stumbled. The plates and mugs crashed on the deck.

“Goddamn!” Tracha screamed. “What the bejeeziz?”

The craft veered to the left, arcing.

“The left propeller, Mack!” dos Sampas shouted. He pointed at the still blades of the propeller bolted on the left side of the boat’s tailgate. The blades on the right propeller continued to fly with a low whine, forcing the boat into a long, circular path.

Maran ran to investigate. He felt utterly insufficient for the task.

“What the hell do I look for?” he shouted.

“Check the battery connections and…Oh!”

Dos Sampas looked over Maran’s head out into the river behind them.

The camo-painted rebel patrol boat they had eluded the day before raged into the pool at a high boil.

Dos Sampas turned the wheel frantically and gunned the engines. Tracha passed Maran the weapon he had unpacked. Maran steadied the gun with its tripod on the after deck, adjusted its laser range finder to set the airburst detonations automatically for the right distance.

Before he could fire, the machine gun on the assaulting rebel boat swept their deck platform with cannon fire. Smashed glass fragments flew in every direction; pieces of metal and splinters of wood slashed the air. Dos Sampas unfurled an Uzi. Bounced by the rocking craft, he fired wildly at the oncoming patrol boat.

The howitzer on the enemy craft belched fire and smoke.

The shell hit the cockpit and exploded. Dos Sampas’ body flew into pieces. Maran rocketed into the air, landing in the river ten feet from shore. Miraculously, he still held on to the gun. He dragged himself up onto the crest of the riverbank and took stock, grateful to find that, other than a few additional bruises, he wasn’t seriously injured.

Dos Sampas was dead.

There may have been nothing Maran could have done to prevent this additional death. It didn’t matter. It happened on his mission, and it was harder and harder to reconcile the failures with his pledge of honor that was deeply intertwined with his belief in leadership responsibility. If screaming could have helped, he would have shaken the surrounding jungle.

He had no time to think about it.

Atop the riverbank, he dove for cover behind a concrete wall, part of an earlier fortress. He lifted the weapon and fired a 20mm explosive round at the rebel patrol boat. The missile zigged to the left as it neared its target and veered directly into the boat’s engine. The boat disappeared in a ball of fire and smoke. When the smoke lifted, there was nothing left floating but oil slick on the surface of the river and some debris. No bodies evident. No one could have survived.

One by one, Tracha and dos Sampas’ three soldiers climbed the bank to join Maran. It was then Maran noticed that his friend had a trailing line attached to his utility vest by D-hooks. Maran helped him drag the crates up the banks.

“Inflatable cargo packs,” Tracha grunted as his pack cleared the top of the embankment. “Still got the gun.”

The river and forest were quiet as a Sunday morning warehouse; the sound of the river hissed, white noise like steam from a radiator valve. Drenched, exhausted, the five men fell into the sun-seared grass, laid back, nursed their pains, watched the mist hang suspended over the rise and fall of the hissing river.

“Time may be running out,” Maran warned, rising. “Now we’ve got to trek it until we can grab a four-wheel drive.” He pointed out the location of Boyko’s operation on his map, gathered Tracha and dos Sampas’ three remaining men around him to go over his operational plan. Dos Sampas’ men were in now more than ever, eager to even the score.

“I know where we can go to get help,” their leader said.

Fifty-Seven

Mbuji-Mayi

F
our hours later, after trekking through forested trails, Maran and Tracha had smashed through the driver’s window, popped the ignition and stolen a pickup truck at a car park on the fringe of Bakua Bowa, the diamond trading post outside of Mbuji-Mayi. With Maran at the wheel and dos Sampas’ men fully on board, they drove into Marché Inga, a muddy market square in the heart of the town.

In spite of all the suffering he had witnessed in his Army career, Maran was still vulnerable when it came to kids. A group of children played Capture the Flag, running around a statue of Laurent Kabila, assassinated in 2001 after he led a coup to overthrow Mobuto. He almost broke down when he saw one kid, belly distended from hunger, burn scars on his arms and stomach from exorcism rites used by scamming revivalist pastors of crooked churches to fool gullible mothers that their children were bewitched sorcerers under an evil spell by the devil. He was stunned to learn that there were 2,000 children, mostly homeless and abandoned boys, who have been branded as possessed by Satan and in need of exorcism. It was hard for him to understand a society where mothers trying to make ends meet and live up to their responsibilities as parents are forced to pay up to $50 dollars of their $100 a year earnings to have their children put through cultish ceremonies that, not infrequently, end in death.

“Touri! Touri!”
the children yelled, running alongside the purloined truck. The Portuguese Angolan leader of dos Sampas’ team told Maran the word meant the children were frightened. They thought the white men had devil magic witchcraft powers and had been told that they ate black children. It was easy to see why they were so frightened. Several had the scars left from a life that few others in the world could imagine.

“That’s it. Pull up,” the leader of the dos Sampas group said to Maran, pointing to a storefront shack. A sign joked, “House of Osama. Diamonds. Bought & Sold.”

“Some joke,” Maran said.

He got out of the truck. The windows of the store were barred with steel. He pushed past an officer in the Zimbabwean Defense Force who stood outside the entrance, one of the half-dozen blue-helmeted U.N. soldiers from a platoon assigned to that part of Marché Inga to defend the stores in return for fifty-percent of the gross sales. Maran opened the door. He walked in with Tracha. A man sat at a dingy desk in the back of the store. Three dirty lounge chairs ringed the desk. He was Lebanese, calling himself Manuel da Silva to pass as Portuguese, politically correct. Nothing in this country was as it seemed.

Maran asked him why he shared his sales with the Zims.

“Are you shitting me?” Manuel said in perfect English. “Anyway, there are more sales now with all the new foreign military traffic. I’m getting mine any way I can while the getting’s good. People here get poorer. Thieves, grifters, and killers get richer.”

Maran threw a few stones on the table.

“What’s that for?” Manuel asked.

“Moise Ngoye said you would be a friend to work with. He said you could translate. That’s to convince you to close the store for the rest of the day.”

He explained their mission and asked for his help. He needed to enlist an insider. And he needed not only a name but an introduction. He knew that his soft approach needed some muscle behind it.

“Anything to stop that monster,” Manuel said.

Maran didn’t know whether he was talking about Boyko or Vangaler. He didn’t care. He wanted both. He explained as Tracha listened.

In order to mask Manuel’s participation, Maran needed bird dogs.

“We can get them,” Manuel agreed.

“Good. We also have to scare the village to death. Soften them up.”

“Why?”

“Insurance. We want to give them ample reason to join us. Their memories of history may not be enough.”

“How?”

“Bulletins.”

“Panama.” Tracha smiled, recognizing the strategy that had worked so well there.

They locked up the store. Manuel went into the back storeroom. He came back with a number of poster-sized sheets of light cardboard he used to promote sales. He handed Maran a black Magic Marker highlight stick. Maran wrote:

TO THE PEOPLE OF BAKUA BOWA: We are beginning a campaign to liberate the people of Mbuji-Mayi and its province. I intend to kill all those who resist the Ninja Crocodile Devil Movement with the most powerful Devil magic at my disposal. Only darkness and Hell await the foes of our battle of liberation. Block our path and it’ll be stained with your blood.

Anyone who tries to arrest or search the patriots of the liberation will be SHOT.

The Ninjas

Slang Vangaler

The Supreme Leader

“That should do it,” he said. Manuel took the poster into the back room. He translated it, made a dozen copies, and left to get his housekeeper to post them up and down the street.

Maran and his team left in the truck to set up camp.

They waited until after
dark, piled their weapons in the back of the pickup, covered them with a tarp, and drove back into town. The sky over the jungle was moonless. Noisy bars and merchandise stalls ringed the village square. Yellow mud swamped the streets of the floodlit market. The squalor, however, failed to dim the beauty of the fresh produce. The square was still busy. In stall after stall, booths were stacked with bananas, peanuts, beans, and a range of offerings exotic for the area: avocados, tomatoes, and multi-hued giant peppers. More impressive were the mounds of rough, yellowed diamonds that sat on burlap sacks next to the produce. Decades earlier, a simple rainfall would have exposed the stones under the surface dirt on the streets. Villagers picked them out of the dirt by the gross like pebbles and stuck them as decorations into the walls of their hovels. Portuguese opportunists used to buy the stones off the walls in exchange for new wine and cheap perfume. Now the walls were peppered with rusting bottle tops.

“Drive straight through the square,” Manuel directed Maran as they got in their vehicle. They drove through Petit Marché
,
the town’s mud-pocked market. Manuel pointed out several brothels. He took them to what he promised to be the wildest bar in the village. A banner sign above the front door proclaimed its name: Café Tabernacle.

The Tabernacle, with its odd sense of humor, was built from a small revamped Colonial-era French cathedral. A semi-circular bar mocked the original altar that stood in the center of the room. Three naked young women gyrated around brass poles on the stage running around a ring of men seated in front of them in a wide variety of dress: Moroccan djellabs, West African dashikis, jeans and ‘T’s, and military fatigues.

Maran and his men took a table against the rear wall.

Several pros worked the bar. One of them wore a Muslim robe. Maran questioned Tracha about it as she opened an uncustomary slit she had designed in the front and flashed two naked breasts, nipples bright with rouge. Averting his eyes, Maran dropped them to the hem at the bottom of the garment. She, like the others, was wearing high, spiked heels on three-inch platform shoes.

“I heard some of the girls even dress in burkas to pass as legitimate to throw off the police. Or maybe to attract some weirdos, like guys who want to screw prossies dressed as nuns,” Tracha said.

Maran thought to himself. Could they be our bird dogs?

One of them approached. She wore a bright red, skimpy, skin-tight skirt that stretched across her hips. It accentuated the V between her legs. She addressed Manuel.

“Hey, Big Boy.
Wena Matimpi?
Buy me a drink.”

“Shing-a-Ling?” he answered, with familiarity, to her Kikongo greeting: “How are you?’”

“Still like Dirty Bananas?” He was referring to a locally favored drink. She laughed. He ordered the drink, a banana-based cocktail blended with ice cream, sweet as a white chocolate martini. She slammed it down. Her friends joined the table, the one in the burka and another wearing severely short cutaway skin-tight jeans that hugged her crotch and a light half-halter that failed to conceal her painted nipples. Her hair was done up in a bleached-orange Afro piled up like a bright pumpkin.

Minutes later, the women were sitting on the laps of the Portuguese soldiers. The women all had one thing in common: they’d all been raped, whipped, and beaten mercilessly by soldiers from one faction or another. They talked about it. Maran watched the clock. Their bodies may have been for sale and their spirits beaten down, but their souls were still strong and their dignity intact.