Ghost Watch (43 page)

Handing out bananas and cane, I suggested that they gear up while they ate. Ten minutes later, they returned, webbing stuffed with spare mags and grenades. They took over the watch while I went into the Alamo and likewise raided the stores. When we were all set, I had Ryder wake our principals.

A couple of minutes later, they wearily vacated their sleeping quarters. I handed Boink a backpack full of our staple diet.

‘Breakfast,’ I whispered. ‘Eat more than you need and see if you can’t get the girls to do the same. This might be the only food you’ll get for the rest of the day.’

‘Yo,’ he replied.

I could’ve also said that this might be the last meal they had period, given that they were so all-fired keen to ride with us into the valley of death.

Boink hesitated, then said, ‘What’s my job today, soldier man?’

Francis interrupted. ‘We must go. It will soon be light.’

I looked at my Seiko and pinched the illumination function. Just past 0432. The schedule wasn’t running away from us quite yet.

‘Two minutes,’ I told him, then said to Boink, ‘Walk with me.’ I led him away from the trucks. ‘Today, for one day only, consider yourself a personal security officer.’

‘What I have t’ do?’

‘Follow a bunch of rules.’

‘And?’

‘Chew on a bullet for Leila and Ayesha if you have to.’

‘Oh . . .’ He had to think about it.

‘You have to stay with them at all times. On no account let them leave the truck. Use force if you have to, but set your phaser to stun.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Never mind.’

I handed him two spare mags for his Nazarian. ‘Use single shot only. Conserve your ammo – no full auto. Fire when you have a target, and don’t hesitate to pull the trigger.’

‘I got it, yo.’

We found ourselves back at the trucks.

At 0442, Leila and Ayesha climbed up into the back of the Alamo. They turned to give Boink a hand but the big man waved them away and climbed up under his own steam, his weight rocking the truck from side to side.

‘Couldn’t’a done that a week ago,’ he said, pleased with himself as he raised himself to his full height and looked down at Rutherford and me.

‘You’ll be swinging from the trees next,’ said Rutherford.

‘Throwing shit,’ I added.

Ryder climbed up into the truck and joined Ayesha, Leila and Boink. I locked eyes with the star. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, you could get behind those containers with Duke and stay there.’

‘I don’t do orders, remember?’

‘Then consider it a request. You’re a singer. You do those, right?’

I earned a frown but she did as I asked, Ryder appearing and directing them back behind the defenses. Then I gave them all just one simple life-preserving rule to follow: ‘Keep your heads down.’

I jumped out of the truck and trotted to the driver’s side door. Rutherford was sitting behind the steering wheel. I sprang up onto the running board, the adrenalin starting to do the rounds; my skin was cold and hot at the same time, and I had a constriction in my throat that made swallowing difficult. It was the feeling I always got before combat. It was like an old friend, one I wished would go find someone else to play with.

‘Been a pleasure working with you, guv’nor,’ said Rutherford, holding his hand out through the window opening. He wanted to shake. It looked suspiciously to me like the Brit expected this to be
it.
I hoped he wasn’t going to hand me a letter.

‘Likewise,’ I said, shaking. ‘Let’s move. Take it slow. There are Claymores out there and we don’t want to run them down. If I tell you to stop, hit the brakes.’

He punched the starter button, the diesel instantly coming to life and settling into a noisy thrum.

‘You ready for this?’ I asked Francis, who was sitting on the passenger side.

He nodded, but didn’t look too sure about it.

‘Okay,’ I told Rutherford. ‘Do a one-eighty. No headlights. I’ve done a recce – there’s nothing to hit.’

The Dong lurched forward, Rutherford winding on the steering wheel – that gorge was not too far in front of us. Palms and small trees went down under the Dong’s front grille as we left the support truck behind.

‘Okay, straighten her out,’ I told him.

Rutherford let the wheel slip through his hands. A palm tree slapped against me, nearly swatting me off the running board.

‘Stop in another dozen meters or so and kill the motor.’

After a few seconds, Rutherford gently applied the brakes and turned off the ignition.

I leaped down off the running board and probed forward on foot. After a few paces, the plantation came to an end and I crept out onto the road lit by the moonlight. There was no traffic. Holding my breath, I listened to the night, scanning it for engine noise and human voices, but nothing disturbed the silence except for a little tinnitus inside my head. I ran back through the palms to the truck but went to the passenger side this time. The door swung open and I jumped in beside Francis.

‘Hit it,’ I said to Rutherford.

The Brit fired up the Dong, ground the gears, and we moved off the mark with wheel spin, the tires fighting for traction in the mud. The truck’s nose pushed the fronds aside as we entered the road, and Rutherford hauled on the steering wheel, turning left so we faced downhill, and stamped on the accelerator pedal.

‘How are we doing for time?’ he asked over the gathering roar of the wind through the non-existent windshield.

‘Two minutes ahead of schedule,’ I told him.

He backed the speed off a little as the road flattened out and swept onto the flat plain of the valley shimmering in the moonlight; a silver-painted version of the scene I remembered from the day before. We motored past the area where we’d hijacked the trucks and hidden the bodies. With no rain, they’d quickly start to reek. Small carrion-eating animals would be turning up to contest the spoils with the columns of driver ants that were, no doubt, already on the scene. A sudden furry of movement in the bushes caused my heart rate to spike. Rutherford and I both went for our guns.

‘
Vantour
,’ Francis shouted over the wind noise. ‘Vulture!’

Large black shapes separated from the forest, flapped into the air and then settled again, marking the spot just inside the tree line where we’d stacked the dead. Come morning, the FARDC patrols would see the birds, investigate what the buzzards were feasting on, find the bullet-riddled corpses and know that its weapons had fallen into enemy hands rather than disappearing into a ravine hidden by the forest. Only, by that time, of course, the point of this discovery would be moot because we were about to inform the FARDC exactly who it was who had stolen those weapons, by turning the cache on them. I glanced at Rutherford and he returned the look as he shifted into a lower gear, the road climbing gently to the village.

‘Time?’ he asked.

‘We’re on it,’ I told him after checking the Seiko’s countdown function.

I pulled up the QCW, took it off safety as we passed the village, and made sure the selector was on three-shot burst. There was no motion in or around the huts. Nothing was moving that I could see. So far so good.

The road swept around the base of the hill on which the FARDC camp was situated.

‘What the fuck?’ said Rutherford.

He took the words right out of my mouth. Up ahead, instead of the makeshift bamboo pole boom operated by a couple of sleepy guards that we expected to see, there was a Dong parked across the road, completely blocking it. A dozen men milled around the vehicle and one of them waved a flashlight in our direction. We had no choice but to slow down and stop, at which point the light went out. We were prepared to fight, but this wasn’t part of the plan. This was about to get ugly, the enemy making moves we weren’t prepared for.

Rutherford had time to reach for his M4 before the shooting started.

‘Down!’ I yelled at Francis, pushing him hard into the floor as the Africans opened fire on us. We were hemmed in. No choice but to slug it out or die here and now.

I shot over the front of the hood. Lead traveling supersonic crackled past my left ear, giving that tinnitus of mine some competition. I leveled the QCW at a knot of FARDC soldiers standing too close together, who obliged me further by getting down on one knee to steady their aim. They all died right there before firing off a shot. Rutherford looked at me and shook his head. This was not how it was supposed to go. Having just learned a very quick and bloody lesson, the balance of the Africans rushed for cover behind their truck.

I had a moment to consider how to handle this when our cabin suddenly filled with light reflecting off the rear-view-door mirrors. Spotlights had been turned on us from behind. I cracked open the door, and banged off a couple of shots at the source of the beams before popping my head out to see what the hell was going on. A Dong had come up behind us. Shit – it might well have been parked in the village, hidden. Another four-letter word sprang to mind: trap.

I heard single shots being fired behind me from an M16. That had to be Ryder – Boink favored the Nazarian 97. I hoped that Leila and Ayesha were doing as I asked and keeping their heads down behind the barricade. One of those spotlights went out, followed by its partner. Then two explosions erupted behind the truck. Grenades. I heard a man scream an instant before the first explosion, the percussion wave ringing through my head. Men were running around, appearing from the shadows, shouting and firing at us. I fired back, around one out of three shots finding a moving target. Average shooting on my part. Rutherford was doing better.

A red tracer spat from my QCW and flew into a man’s chest, where it was extinguished. I fired twice at people shooting at me, ejected the magazine and jammed in a fresh one.

‘Out, out!’ Rutherford yelled as he fung open his door and jumped down into the night. He was right. Only ducks sat around waiting to be shot. Actually, not even ducks did that.

I hit the door with my shoulder and rolled out, landing on an African waiting there below the door with his rifle raised and ready to shoot. Unfortunately for him, he was not prepared for two-hundred-and-forty-odd pounds of falling ammunition and special agent. The combined weight knocked him to the ground, a cry strangling in his throat. When I got up on a knee, the guy was raising his weapon in my direction, so I tapped him on the head with the QCW’s stock a couple of times and his lights went out. Scooting under the Dong, I started shooting at feet, then at the screaming shapes that dropped to the ground on top of them.

I worked my way to the truck’s rear axle. The volley of gunfire spitting from the back of our Dong was now a serious horizontal rain of lead. The truck that had come up behind us was beginning to roll back down the hill, steam hissing from its smashed radiator and shattered engine, bullet holes punched all over the fenders. The truck slowly gathered speed, freewheeling backward. It quickly departed from the road, mowing down the forest. Several Africans ran with it, followed by a swarm of tracer; lethal fireflies zipping from the black hole under our tarpaulin chasing them.

The incoming fire that began as a fusillade was reduced to ragged individual shots, the enemy having lost its resolve in the face of the concentrated firepower unleashed on it. And, of course, it had also lost numbers. I rolled out from under the Dong and kept the roll going off the road and into the forest. I came up to a crouch and worked my way forward to flank the truck blocking our way into camp. Coming around from the side, I could see that two men were kneeling behind it, using the wheels as cover, hiding their ankles from me. I put the QCW down and swung the M4 – a more reliable weapon at this extended range, of around fifty meters – from my shoulder and took aim. But then Rutherford appeared from the forest shadows and shot the man nearest him from the side, so that the soldier’s pal kneeling beside him died a spit second later, his brainpan stopping the round that had killed the first man an instant before. Economical shooting. ‘Waste not, want not,’ I muttered.

Rutherford stepped fully into the moonlight and raised his fist in the sudden shocking silence, letting me know that the area was clear. I made my way down toward him warily, just in case there were any FARDC lying in wait among the elephant grass and shrubs, but there didn’t appear to be. I gave a low whistle as I approached, to avoid friendly fire.

‘It’s all right, mate,’ Rutherford called out, breathing heavily. ‘I gotcha.’

I ran the last twenty meters. Jesus, there were bodies everywhere, black shadowy lumps on the ground. No one wanted this. ‘Move that vehicle,’ I told him as I went to the back of ours. I couldn’t hear any sound coming from inside. ‘Everyone okay?’ I asked before arriving at the tailgate. Ryder stepped forward out of the darkness under the tarp.

‘The damn truck came outta nowhere,’ he said. ‘Drove up fast behind us, then hit the high beams. Freaked the shit out of us.’

‘I think you freaked ’em back.’

‘Yeah, Boink threw a couple of grenades straight through their windshield.’

‘I got a mean fast ball, yo,’ came his voice from the shadows. He stepped into the moonlight and looked down at me, grinning broadly.

‘Are we nearly done yet?’ Leila called out.