Ghost Watch (32 page)

I found the line again. It was fine and green, the pressure of it against my hand. I was familiar with this type of tripwire; had set a few of my own over the years. I ran the line lightly through my fingers till they found the business end, an M18A1, otherwise known as a Claymore; the raised words ‘Front towards enemy’ clearly visible on the anti- personnel mine’s plastic, curved olive-drab face. Behind it was one and a half pounds of C4 embedded with the manufacturer’s warranted seven hundred steel balls designed to explode outward in an arc of sixty degrees. In open terrain, the thing was a killer within a radius of fifty meters, potentially lethal out to a hundred meters, and just plain bad news to anything with a heartbeat out to two hundred and fifty meters. It would’ve detonated six meters from Ryder and me had we strolled through that tripwire, though we wouldn’t have known about it till we were tuning our harps. I carefully felt around the mine, my fingertips finding some good news: a couple of cotter pins hanging from the corner of the mine on a piece of wire. Someone was going to come back and recover this device if it didn’t detonate and he’d need those pins.

So, the mine looked brand new. Its presence told me we’d arrived at the FARDC’s perimeter defenses. One hundred and eighty combat veterans were bivouacked somewhere close, probably scattered around the crown of the hill ahead. Convention said the company HQ would be sited on the highest ground. We had no choice but to infiltrate the enemy camp, only this time without West’s skills up front. And the Claymore’s message – the enemy was jumpy. Maybe the FARDC company leadership was aware that it had been infiltrated once before, or perhaps West, LeDuc and I just hadn’t come across the mines when we’d rescued Ayesha.

First things first. I replaced those pins before releasing the tension on the tripwire. Then, approaching the mine from the rear, I disconnected the tripwire and removed the blasting cap from the detonator well. The device could now be handled without suddenly turning Ryder and me into mousse. A Claymore would come in handy, so I stuffed it into the backpack, together with the tripwire and blasting cap, got down on my belly among the damn ants and hoped they’d frightened off the scorpions.

‘Stay close, move slow and, for Christ’s sake, stop when I stop,’ I told Ryder under my breath.

WE’D COLLECTED ANOTHER TWO Claymores with tripwires set up like the first before I smelled tobacco, indicating the presence of sentries ahead. We crawled forward and, in the last vestiges of light, watched a young guy in a poncho aimlessly throwing a knife into the ground at his feet, killing time, his rifle lying in the leaf litter behind him, the source of the second-hand smoke hanging from his lips. Ryder and I stayed put until darkness was complete. The rain started to fall again, heavy and determined, as we waited for the guard to light another cigarette. Eventually, a sudden flame fared in front of his face, destroying his night vision for a few minutes. Ryder and I used his temporary blindness to slide past.

The underbrush was thick and perfectly suited for our purposes, as was the fact that the army camped on the hill was far more focused on trying to stay dry and feed itself than it was on stopping unwelcome visitors at the door. Maybe it felt nice and safe behind its barricade of Claymores.

Ryder and I avoided any open ground and stayed low and slow. The vegetation around us was waterlogged, making it possible to move around without sounding like a couple of two-hundred-pound animals, there being no dry sticks to break underfoot and alert sentries to our presence. Occasionally, larger shadows hurried out of our way through the bush, and I chose not to think about what they might have been. As long as they weren’t carrying guns, I was happy to leave them alone.

We broke cover as the angle of the climb lessened and discovered that the ground was miraculously open. The smell of sawdust and fire smoke was in the air. The hill – it was more of a plateau – had recently been logged. Tents were clustered on one side of the area, marking the area as the company HQ. Over on the opposite side, around two hundred meters away from both Ryder and me and the HQ, the bush was being cleared away.

‘The scope,’ I whispered to Ryder, who pulled it from the pack on my back and handed it to me. It wasn’t of the light-enhancing type, but it had reasonable low light characteristics and there were several fires burning. I focused on all the activity. ‘Shit,’ I murmured.

‘What?’ Ryder asked.

‘Civilians. And a chopper.’

Women dressed in brightly colored clothing that reminded me of the Rwandan prime minister’s wife, were doing the clearing, overseen by soldiers. That meant there was some kind of settlement nearby. Parked in the middle of the cleared area the women were extending was an old Soviet Mi-8 of the sort I’d seen at the airport in Kigali and dismantled in the hangar at Cyangugu. I wondered who’d flown it here, and why. Its markings identifed it as Rwandan. What was a Rwandan chopper doing over the border in the DRC, parked in the FARDC unit’s bivouac?

I scanned the HQ, checking it over more closely. A couple of tents were still being pitched. Cooking fires were burning, providing helpful illumination. A slight wind shift brought the smells of meat sizzling on those fires, and glands pumped saliva into my mouth. I picked up our principals almost immediately.

‘They’re alive,’ I said involuntarily.

Twenny and Peanut were strung up to trees, just as they’d been at the last encampment, their hands secured behind their backs, hoods over their heads. A third man was beside them, wearing a tattered flight suit. ‘Fournier. He’s there,’ I said. I handed the scope to Ryder and showed him where to point it.

‘I see ’em,’ he whispered. ‘It’s Fournier, all right.’ He turned his head slowly, taking in the rest of the camp. ‘Did you see the helicopter there?’

‘Uh-huh.’

Ryder took the scope on a quick reconnoiter. ‘Hey, the Chinese guy, the one you told us about. That him? He just came out of one of the tents.’ He passed me the scope.

It took a moment to locate him. ‘Yeah,’ I said. A tall, slender black man wearing a tailored combat uniform with a cream cravat tucked into the top of his shirt accompanied him. This had to be the FARDC commanding officer. They were both talking to a third man, though that person had his back to me and he was in shadow.

‘I can’t see his face,’ I whispered, talking to myself. ‘Wait – they’re moving.’

The Chinese advisor put his hand on the unidentifed man’s shoulder and the three of them began to walk slowly over to Twenny Fo, Peanut and Fournier, collecting a couple of funkies with machine guns along the way. Fu Manchu and his buddies were deep in conversation when they arrived in the area where their hooded prisoners were tied up. The captives didn’t appear to react in any particular way to the arrival of the party within their midst. Fu Manchu stepped up to the guy in the flight suit and removed his hood. Damn – it was definitely Fournier. I noticed pretty much at this moment that the unidentifed man was holding a pistol in his right hand, down by his leg, the muzzle pointed toward the ground. He raised it to the back of the Frenchman’s head. I heard a muffled explosion and the front of Fournier’s face blew out. He toppled forward, his arms dislocating from his shoulders as he slumped to the ground, dead.

‘Shit, what just happened . . . what happened . . .?’ Ryder said, way too loud.

‘Shut up,’ I hissed.

Twenny Fo and Peanut were now shouting at the man, who handed the pistol back to the Chinese guy, turning toward me as he did so.

‘Christ,’ I whispered.

‘What?’ Ryder demanded.

Fournier’s killer. It was Beau Lockhart.

I
watched Lockhart and the Chinese guy stroll back to the tent, having a nice post-murder chat, and disappear inside it. Leaving aside the fact that Lockhart had just killed a man, why kill Fournier? That didn’t make sense. Wasn’t Fournier their guy? Perhaps it made perfect sense, only not to me. It didn’t fit my theory and that meant I had to throw the damn thing out and start again from scratch.

I trained the scope back on Twenny and Peanut. The rapper was struggling and shouting something at the guards who’d moved in to recover the body, but I was too far away to hear what he might have been yelling. So, our principals were alive and Lockhart was involved in a whole bunch of crap up to his eyeballs, murder topping the list. He was with Kornfak & Greene, a DoD contractor. His business began and ended at the Cyangugu base, yet here he was in the enemy’s camp, capping a UN peacekeeper. His presence here, aiding and abetting the FARDC unit’s capture of Twenny Fo and Peanut, heavily suggested that I was right about the ransom and kidnap angle. Maybe this had been the plan from the beginning, rather than it being an opportunistic grab. And now I had suspects. I handed the scope to Ryder, who returned it to my pack, and then we wriggled backward deeper into the bush as the rain started coming down with its usual biblical intensity. Turning one-eighty for the crawl out, we again took it slow and careful. All went reasonably smoothly until, around fifty meters later, we shinnied into several Africans who were rigging hammocks across our path. We had nowhere to go, which meant we had no choice but to share the shadows for a bunch of time with countless biting critters, waiting for the men to fall asleep.

The rainfall came to an abrupt end sometime after midnight. With water no longer finding its way through the folds of their ponchos, the men soon began snoring.

Ryder and I crawled through the mud beneath them, scarcely breathing, my Ka-bar in one hand, ready to fillet any light sleepers who chose the wrong moment to visit the john. We eventually found cover, crawling into another island of scrub forty meters away. Retracing our steps, there were no Claymores to worry about, as we’d disarmed and appropriated all the surprises on the way in.

It was a quarter past one in the morning before I felt confident enough to walk on my feet instead of my elbows. I stood and breathed the wet night air, my forearms swollen and throbbing with insect venom, a cloud of thirsty mosquitoes circling my head and humming for my blood. I went to the nearest anthill and reapplied the repellent.

By this time, I’d had plenty of time to think about Fournier and how he fitted into my theory. I realized that I’d been maneuvered to a particular point of view. I’d been told that it had been Fournier who’d switched the tanks; that it was Fournier who’d made the Mayday call. And Fournier had, for a time, disappeared, which cast these assurances in a certain light. But now I’d seen Fournier tied up and murdered by people I believed he might have been in league with, people who included a US military contractor. If Fournier wasn’t Lockhart’s inside man, it meant the real rat was still among us.

And his name was LeDuc.

Perhaps that had been part of the reason for the patrol sent out to check the Puma for survivors – to recover LeDuc. But there’d been a mix-up when we’d gotten the upper hand and the wrong Frenchman had been taken away.

LeDuc had accompanied West and me when we’d infiltrated the FARDC encampment and rescued Ayesha. There would have been moments when he could have escaped. Perhaps he hoped that we’d just conveniently get ourselves captured, allowing him to maintain his cover. When that didn’t happen, why hadn’t he just blown the whistle on us? Maybe he thought there’d be a lot of confusion and shooting, that it could potentially end up being bad for his health and therefore not worth the risk.

I thought back through all the conversations I’d had with LeDuc, sifting for clues about his true intentions, clues I’d overlooked. He’d been our translator on several occasions. Had he relayed information without putting a skew on things? Looking back on it, when Marcel was captured, there’d been recognition in his face when he laid eyes on LeDuc.
Looks like you remind him of someone.
That’s what I’d told him. Perhaps LeDuc hadn’t
reminded
Marcel of someone at all. Perhaps Marcel had actually
seen
LeDuc on a prior occasion. Perhaps at the FARDC camp, making a delivery of fresh-baked croissants. Marcel had jumped off the cliff behind the CNDP’s position with the French pilot, but hadn’t survived the fall. The African’s skull was bashed in. LeDuc had suggested that Marcel had hit his head on a rock and drowned. Maybe LeDuc had been holding said rock at the time. Maybe he was worried that Rutherford, who spoke a little French, might find out something awkward from the African.

‘Let me get this straight,’ Ryder said, breathing heavily as we double-timed it down the wide cleared path. ‘That was Lockhart you saw back there, the guy we met at Cyangugu – the DoD contractor?’

‘Yep.’

‘Jesus. You thought Fournier set us up, put us down in the jungle.’

‘Yep.’

‘But they killed him. They wouldn’t have done that if he was working for them.’

‘No, you wouldn’t think so.’

‘Then if Fournier didn’t put us down here, it had to have been LeDuc. And if LeDuc is involved, then he’s gonna be pretty nervous about what we might find out on this recon. Leaving him behind might have made him desperate.’

‘Yeah, that’s why we’re running,’ I puffed. Ryder had figured it out. Maybe there was more to the guy than I’d given him credit for.

The notch I’d made in the tree wasn’t easy to find in the dark. I remembered that the cleared pathway cut to the south a hundred meters beyond my marker. We found the kink and worked backward, finally locating the tree with a handhold of wood hacked out of it at head height.