Ghost Watch (13 page)

I was starting to wonder about Twenny Fo. Just maybe all the bad boy crap was record company marketing and there was more to Fo than he was prepared to admit in public. And then there was Peanut – the guy standing behind Twenny, chewing on a Mars Bar, barely engaged with the situation. The kid was plainly a float short of a raft, yet the rapper had taken him in and was looking after him.

Leila eyed her ex-boyfriend. ‘Maybe if you hadn’t got with that bitch from Electric Skank, or whatever they called, we’d have had us a different story here,’ she said.

Shaquand said, ‘Uh-huh.’

Ayesha said, ‘You know it.’

‘I didn’t get with no one,’ Twenny said, palms face up. ‘You’re talkin’ about photos in a motherfuckin’ magazine. They made somethin’ innocent into somethin’ else, you feel me? You know what they like.’

‘I think you’re lyin’ to me like you always do.’

The rapper shook his head. ‘C’mon, Leila. We’re in Africa, baby. You ever gonna come back here?’

‘I don’ know why I came here in the first place.’

‘We wuz asked. And we wanted to do some good. Just one more day.’

Leila shifted her weight to the other leg and placed a hand on her hip. ‘No.’

‘C’mon . . .’

‘No.’

‘Leila . . .’

The singer sighed heavily and looked up at the ceiling.

‘It’s only one more night,’ he reminded her.

Something about her stance suggested that she might be wavering. ‘One show. That’s it. But you
owe
me.’

‘All right!’ Twenny exclaimed and stepped forward to embrace her. Leila held up a hand to palm him off.

‘Don’t think this changes anything ’tween us,’ she warned him. ‘And you can be sure I
will
collect.’

I pictured a couple of pounds of flesh.

‘Sure, okay. But dis is
right
.’ Twenny stepped back and went into a huddle with Boink and Snatch.

I could smell something coming, the scent building in strength the way a siren increases in volume the closer it gets.

‘Excuse me, Colonel,’ said Lockhart to Travis. ‘There are some people I’d like you to meet. This is Piers Pietersen from Swedish American Gold. And this is Charles White.’

Pietersen was the tall guy with blond hair and blue eyes. White was black with a stocky Neanderthal physique and a heavy jaw that reminded me of Magilla Gorilla. Who were these guys? And who were their goons, a small posse of heavy-set knuckle-draggers of mixed genealogy who looked vaguely African but were probably from someplace else?

‘Gentlemen,’ Lockhart said, introducing the players and ignoring the hired help. ‘This is Lieutenant Colonel Travis. The colonel was responsible for organizing the show you saw this evening.’

Handshakes ensued.

Then Lockhart noticed me standing next to Travis. ‘Oh, and this is . . .’ his eyes dropped to the name tape on my pocket, ‘. . . Cooper, rank unknown.’ I saw his eyes snag briefly on my OSI patches before turning away. I didn’t rate a handshake. He turned to Travis. ‘If possible, Mr Pietersen and Mr White would like a word with Leila.’

‘Leila would be delighted,’ Travis said.

I wasn’t so sure. Delight was not something I’d seen her do. But the special agent side of me was intrigued. Why was a guy from Swedish American Gold hanging around a US Army training base? Who was Mr White? And why were they buddies with Mr Kornfak & Greene? I followed them over to where Leila was standing, and Travis handled the introductions. The meeting was short. Leila claimed fatigue and a headache, delight eluding her, and Travis had a second concert to organize before he hit the sack. Tomorrow was going to be a big, bad day in a country I knew nothing about, except for the one comment Arlen had made about the Democratic Republic of Congo across the border being the problem child these days.

‘A
ren’t we supposed to be heading north-east?’ I said into the microphone, looking over LeDuc’s shoulder and checking our heading on the compass among the flight instruments.

The French pilot’s now-familiar voice came through my headset over the cacophony of the Puma’s whirling parts.

‘There is a front all the way from Lake Kivu to Kigali, but a narrow band of clear weather is on the DRC side of the border. This is the best choice,’ he said.

I’d been briefed that Goma was only a hundred klicks away and just inside the DRC, as Cyangugu was just inside Rwanda. The plan I agreed to was to fly parallel to the border heading generally nor’ north east, keeping the aircraft within the relative safety of Rwandan territory and ducking across into the DRC only when we were adjacent to the MONUC encampment. Instead we were flying northwest across the border with the vast expanse of Lake Kivu away on our right when it should have been stretched out beneath us. A thick band of black cloud sat low over the lake and, to the east of its shoreline, gray wisps of rain hung from the underside of the cloud base like veils of a spider web. Flashes of lightning rippled through mighty thunderheads. Above us, however, the sky was a friendly late afternoon blue, the color mothers dress baby boys in. I conceded defeat. The flight path was the Frenchman’s call, just as the security arrangements were mine. Supposedly.

‘We won’t arrive in twenty minutes’ flying time. It will be closer to fifty,’ said LeDuc.

At least Travis had listened to my request to cut the show down – an unplugged version of the one given at Cyangugu. So on this trip, there’d be no stagehands, no dancers, no pyrotechnics, and no Ryder stand-in. At first, Leila had put up a fight, but then Ryder had a word with Ayesha, who then fed it to Leila that she was the only entertainer the men really cared about seeing. Of course, the diva found this argument utterly convincing.

The retinue accompanying each star to Goma was now the problem. The person who seemed best able to handle Leila was Ayesha, which meant, as far as I was concerned, she got a golden ticket. Twenny Fo then insisted it was only fair that one of his entourage accompany him. He chose Boink, who, according to Leila, was really worth two people, given his size, which meant she could have Shaquand. The rapper then lobbied hard to bring Peanut; my take was that Fo wasn’t too keen on leaving Peanut with Snatch unsupervised. Maybe he was concerned that his hair would get all braided up. Whatever, I agreed to the settlement on the condition that everyone got along, because we were all flying together in the one chopper. I amused myself with the thought that I could always throw the troublemakers out if I had to.

I watched the rainforest slide by under the Puma’s front windshield, the mid-morning sun beating down through the break in the clouds. Below, the thick triple canopy reminded me of a lawn with lumps in it. I glanced at Travis, and he gave me a nod. Arlen had implied that Travis was the keeper of all information on this trip; in other words, he knew everything I didn’t. Given that I knew dick, that made him a regular Einstein by comparison. I flicked a switch on the comm panel to have a private word with him.

‘So, be honest, Colonel. When did you know about this Goma gig?’ I asked him.

‘It wasn’t a firm arrangement. I was only told that it
might
happen.’

‘And why were you told to say nothing about it?’

‘Because it looked like Leila might say no to the whole trip if she got wind of it.’

‘Which reminds me, the base at Cyangugu – that’s supposed to be a secret, right? Why were she and Twenny Fo permitted into the inner circle?’

‘They were approached by the Pentagon. I think the concert at Goma is what this gig was all about from the beginning. Promises had been made.’

‘To the French?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, a peace offering.’

‘I didn’t know we were at war with them.’

‘We’re not – at least not at the moment. But we weren’t on good terms here in Africa a little while back. Our Army shot at theirs during the Rwandan civil war and the French shot back.’

That was a new one on me. ‘What do you know about Cyangugu and the army we’re schooling there?’ I asked.

‘Not a lot. I’m PR, not foreign relations.’

‘You’ll know more than I do.’

‘They told you. They’re CNDP – National Congress for the Defense of the People.’

‘Yeah, but
who
are they?’

‘Ethnic Tutsi. Mostly drawn from tribesmen across the border in the Congo.’

‘We’re training Congolese soldiers in Rwanda who then go back across the border to fight in the DRC?’

‘Their enemy is the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, otherwise known as the FDLR, the ones who fed Rwanda after the civil war. They’re Hutus.’

‘Sounds messy.’

‘You don’t know the half of it.’

‘What about the civilians back there? Lockhart’s friends. The Swedish guy from the gold company and his simian buddy – White, I think his name was.’

‘Expat businessmen. Maybe they helped Lockhart get his job done down there.’

‘What can you tell me about Goma?’

‘The UN has twenty thousand peacekeepers in the DRC – it’s their biggest peacekeeping force anywhere in the world, but they’re largely ineffectual. The DRC’s as big as Western Europe, and the UN would need four times that number to do the job. Goma was besieged several years back by the CNDP and things got ugly. I’m told that there are several big refugee camps there.’

‘Besieged by the people we’re training?’

‘We weren’t training them back then.’

A clusterfuck if ever there was one.

‘Sorry about the obfuscation,’ he added.

‘Was OSI in on it?’ I asked.

‘No, not as far as I know. AFRICOM likes to keep everyone bumping into each other. They don’t call this the “dark continent” for nothing.’

At least Arlen was off the hook.

‘Well, if you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘I’m going to try to get some shut-eye. It has been a long night.’

‘Sleep tight,’ I told him. I reached up and switched the intercom back.

Travis closed his eyes and rested his head against the quilted vinyl that lined the aircraft’s insides.

‘So,
Capitaine
. What’s your base like?’ I leaned forward and asked LeDuc, fighting a yawn. ‘The facilities and so forth.’

‘Goma – she is the Paris of small, muddy African bases,’ he said, turning to grin at me.

‘How does it compare with Cyangugu?’

‘There is no comparison. Your camp is uncivilized. Where is the fresh bread? Where are the croissants? In the bakery department, I tell you, Americans do not know
merde
from clay.’

I twisted around and checked on the payload. Ayesha, Leila, and Shaquand were sitting shoulder to shoulder behind Travis. The singer and her girls were more sensibly dressed now, wearing US Army wet weather jackets and ball caps. Leila was asleep between Ayesha and Shaquand, her head resting against her make-up artist’s, wearing a Chanel eye mask and with yellow plugs in her ears. Across the aisle, Twenny Fo and Peanut were seated in one row with Boink behind them in a row to himself, lots of brand names and gold chains between them. Lined up across the back of the aircraft was the loadmaster whose name I couldn’t pronounce, Cassidy, Rutherford, West and Ryder. Including myself, our party numbered twelve. Almost everyone behind me was either asleep or dozing. The POS-to-principal ratio wasn’t ideal, but it was better than it might have been.

I took a deep breath, put my head back and closed my eyes.

‘WHAT WAS THAT?’ SAID a voice in my headset. The statement woke me up. Almost immediately after I opened my eyes, I felt g-forces load up, pushing me down into the seat. The aircraft was in a tight turn. I opened my eyes and saw that LeDuc and Fournier were talking heatedly to each other. I checked my watch. The mood on the flight deck had done a one-eighty from relaxed and cheery sometime in the last ten minutes. I leaned into the space between the pilots and flicked the comms switch. ‘So how are we doing?’ I asked them.

LeDuc ignored the question and snapped at the co-pilot. Then both of them began attacking a multitude of switches on the central and overhead consoles. And was that a warning bell I was hearing? I wasn’t sure about the specifics, but a warning bell accompanied by a sea of red lights was a problem in any language, especially when it happened in a chopper at seven thousand feet.

The pilots worked fast, reading dials and throwing switches, trying to get on top of whatever the situation was. They got a massive hint when one of the engines suddenly flamed out.

Shit! ‘Harnesses!’ I shouted behind me. ‘Check your harnesses!’

Through the headset and over the engine and rotor noise, I heard screams and shouting.

The aircraft lurched to one side; then the second engine coughed and backfired. The Puma was dropping into a spiral. LeDuc and Fournier were now shouting at each other – swearing or running checklists, I couldn’t tell. The chopper tipped down into a spiral dive. Then the second turbine stopped completely. Now it was the loadmaster’s turn to yell. My rough translation was that we were all going to die.

‘Mayday Mayday Mayday,’ yelled one of the pilots. ‘MONUC flight zero six, MONUC flight zero six for Goma . . .’