Ghost Watch (44 page)

‘No, not nearly. Stay there and stay
down
.’ I asked Ryder, ‘How’re the defenses holding up?’

‘We took a lot of heat, but they look okay,’ said Ryder.

I heard the truck blocking our way fire up, followed by roaring engine noise and the crash of snapping trees and palms as it headed off the road, a weight on its accelerator pedal.

‘Top off your mags and get ready for round two,’ I said and headed back to the front cabin. Rutherford was already back behind the wheel. Blood was all over the seat. Francis was leaning forward, holding his forearm.

‘I think he took a round,’ said Rutherford, punching the starter button.

‘It is nothing,’ said Francis. ‘
Allez!
Go . . . let’s go!’

Rutherford didn’t need to be told a fourth time and the Dong leaped forward up the hill. I ripped part of my sleeve off and used it as a pressure bandage, wrapping it around Francis’s upper arm, staunching the blood flow. He’d taken a bullet splinter, which had peeled his forearm like a banana, a loose fap of skin revealing the muscle beneath. I ripped off another bit off my sleeve, tied it around the wound and told him to keep pressure on it. It was going to sting like fuck, but he’d live.

A flash of light burst on the ground somewhere ahead, just as we came up into the outer reaches of the area cleared by the logging company. The boom of the percussion wave reached us through the windowless cab a few seconds later and made my cheeks wobble.

‘It’s started,’ yelled Rutherford, the rough ground and the increasing speed of the vehicle causing us to bounce up and down on the seat like we were on a trampoline.

Francis threw up onto the floorboards.

The skirmish at the barrier had delayed us an extra two and a half minutes but Cassidy and West, up on the observation ridge with the mortar, couldn’t know that. This first round was the ranging shot. West would be spotting, rushing forward, once the mortar had been fired, to check the shell’s detonation point in the encampment, and relaying elevation and azimuth corrections to Cassidy. A second shell would verify these adjustments and, assuming the round was on the money, the barrage would start in earnest, another eighteen 60mm HE rounds in the first stick.

‘Get us the hell up there!’ I yelled.

‘Pedal’s pressed to the floor here, skip!’ Rutherford shouted back.

A couple of FARDC men scattered out of our way.

The second mortar round fell fifty meters away on our right, an orange and yellow flash swallowed quickly by its own smoke mixed with the earth blown into the air.

‘We’re on the wrong side of the encampment,’ I said.

‘That’s because we’re late,’ Rutherford shouted.

I knew that.

Cassidy and West would be dropping rounds on the FARDC HQ, using the blue UN tents as the bull’s eye. The plan was that they’d then march the bombardment back toward the clearing closest to the ridge where the Mi-8 was parked. All of which meant that if we didn’t get our asses out of this general area, pronto, a round could land close enough to kill our vehicle, and us.

A round hit a tree not far in front, exploded somewhere high, and snapped off a branch that came crashing to the ground. Rutherford couldn’t avoid it. The truck hit the obstacle hard, bounced up over it and launched the three of us at the ceiling.

I smacked my head hard and, an instant later, the truck’s rear wheels hopped over the tree, throwing me against the dash. I wondered how Ryder and our principals in back had fared. Francis was back in the foot well, heaving.

‘Count ’em off,’ Rutherford yelled.

‘Count what off?’ I asked him.

‘The mortars. Count ’em off so we know where we stand.’

Another mortar landed close – too close – exploding less than fifty meters away, and shrapnel rattled off the Dong’s metalwork. A tight ball of orange fury burst among five men running for cover and when the earth cleared, none of them was there.

‘That’s six!’ I yelled over the noise of the motor, the explosions and shouting men.

Soldiers were running everywhere. Some were shooting their rifles from the hip as they ran, but I had no idea at what; the dark, maybe, or their own shadows. Just as long as it wasn’t us they were shooting at. I glanced through the window opening by my shoulder and clearly saw Lissouba, alias Colonel Cravat, yelling at Colonel Makenga, both men waving their arms around like a couple of Frenchmen, Makenga brandishing that cane of his. Makenga was accompanied by two men – his PSOs. Lissouba had a much larger entourage, outnumbering Makenga’s three to one, and the two groups were separated by twenty meters of moonlit open ground. I could feel the tension from where I was. And then both groups charged at each other, grappling, wrestling. I saw a muzzle flash and one of the men fell to the ground – I couldn’t see who. Lissouba ran in and kicked the fallen man in the head like he wanted to boot it clean off his neck. Jesus, that was Makenga lying in the mud. He was dead for sure; if not from the bullet, then from the punt.

The two groups of soldiers, Makenga’s PSOs and Lissouba’s FARDC posse, started exchanging wild shots before closing with each other again for some serious hand-to-hand machete action. Makenga’s bodyguards were overwhelmed and cut down in seconds.

Perhaps Lissouba saw an opportunity to get rid of his enemy and took it. Or maybe he thought that, once again, Makenga’s men were shelling his troops. But that didn’t make sense. Why would Makenga have shells sent down on his own head? Whatever the reason, the CNDP colonel was now a long way from caring.

‘How many is that?’ Rutherford asked as he flicked the wheel from left to right to avoid hitting a man who had tripped and fallen in our path.

‘Fourteen. Six to go,’ I shouted.

Francis had pulled himself up off the floor and a string of puke hung from the corner of his mouth. He pointed at a gap between the trees.

‘There!’ I yelled at Rutherford. ‘Turn there.’

He reefed the wheel hard over. The tires bit into a rut and the Dong came up on two wheels, almost on the verge of tipping on its side. We came down again with a crash but Rutherford kept the gas pedal welded to the floor.

With the direction change, the mortars were now falling on our left side; the safe side. We’d somehow managed to come through the shower of high-explosive anti-personnel ordnance unscathed. The FARDC still registered the Dong as friendly, even though we were driving at speed through their midst. Our luck on that score had to end sooner or later.

The twentieth mortar round – the last – hit the upper branches of a tree and showered the area below it with splinters of wood and steel.

The plan said we now had two minutes and counting to get the job done and clear out before the second barrage began. I could see where we had to go. ‘Over there.’ I pointed out the area where a couple of the blue UN tents in the target zone had been wiped out. Around thirty meters beyond them, where the bush hadn’t been cleared to any great extent, I could make out half a dozen men dangling from trees.

‘Shit,’ I muttered. Maybe we’d found Twenny and Peanut. The men were hanging by their broken necks, hands tied behind their backs, just like the men strung up in the CNDP camp. The more I saw, the less difference there was between FARDC and their enemy. As we came closer, I could see that there
was
a difference – three of the corpses swinging from the trees were women. Human life was worth a buck fifty, maybe less, in this place. Twenny Fo and Peanut were nowhere to be seen, no longer tied up in the area we’d noted from the ridge. ‘Where the fuck are they?’ I said aloud. Rutherford didn’t have to ask who I meant.

The camp HQ appeared almost deserted.

‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘We need to check those tents.’ Rutherford stood on the brakes and we slid to a halt as I opened the door, the Brit busting his open a split second later. ‘Stay in the truck!’ I yelled at our principals through the tarpaulin as I ran past. I could see several holes and tears made by flying lead and steel in the green fabric. I could also see that the sky was lightening and the silvers of moonlight had given way to murky grays and greens. In the harsh light of day, the cat would well and truly be out of the bag and we’d be seen for what we were – enemies to be cut off, surrounded and killed.

‘Time!’ I shouted over my shoulder at Rutherford.

‘Sixty-five seconds.’

I reached the first of the tents that hadn’t been destroyed and ripped open the front. Empty. Rutherford continued past, heading for the next tent five meters further on, a big luxury four-manner, and pulled aside the fap. I saw him back up as a man came out into the open, holding a pistol leveled at Rutherford. I recognized him: Fu Manchu.

‘Stop!’ I yelled, the M4’s stock buried in my shoulder and the sight bobbing between the Chinaman’s eyeballs.

He saw me out of the corner of his eye and glanced around to see if assistance was handy. He was shit out of luck on that score. Rutherford’s M4 was on his hip, the muzzle less than six inches from his belly button, nice and discreet. Fu Manchu appeared to make some mental calculations and not like the number he came up with: his. He shrugged and lowered his gun. Rutherford snatched it from his hand.

‘Americans!’ the Chinaman demanded. ‘You are not welcome here.’

‘We’re not all Americans,’ said Rutherford. ‘One of us is Scottish and we’re welcome
everywhere
.’

‘You speak English,’ I said.

‘I speak many uncivilized languages,’ Fu Manchu replied, his face devoid of emotion. I was itching to have a go at changing that.

Rutherford frisked him one-handed, resting his M4’s muzzle on top of the man’s belt buckle. ‘He’s clean,’ he announced.

Realization dawned on the Chinaman. ‘It was you.
You
stole the weapons.’

‘Bad upbringing,’ I said. I wondered who they thought had hijacked them if it wasn’t us; at the same time, the obvious alternative dawned on me: Makenga. They believed the CNDP had pulled a double-cross. And maybe it was a CNDP posse that they were expecting to turn up at the roadblock. If so, that would explain the fight that ended in the death of the man with the golden chicken.

A voice in my head interrupted this thought and screamed, ‘Sixty seconds!’ I had half a dozen questions for this jerk, starting with where Lockhart and LeDuc had disappeared to. I wasted a few seconds considering whether the Chinaman was worth capturing and taking with us, but decided against it, the words
International Incident
flashing incandescent in my mind. Even as it stood, if we managed to get out of this alive I was sure that there’d be bullshit complaints from this guy, and that rounds of claims and counterclaims would ensue, concluding in some kind of official apology that I would somehow have to pay for down the line. But that didn’t mean I was going to give this fuck a free pass. I pictured Ayesha being dragged from his tent, naked and trussed, fruit stuffed in her open mouth, and I felt that she deserved compensation for what he’d done to her, and that it was the least I could do to collect some of it on her behalf.

‘You’ve got five seconds to tell us where our people are,’ I informed him. ‘And don’t say you don’t know who I mean – the people you and your friends took prisoner. If you don’t, my usually friendly Scottish buddy here shoots your nuts off.’

Rutherford gave the Chinaman a grin, took the M4 off safety, and lowered the angle on the weapon’s barrel. A vertical crease appeared between Fu Manchu’s eyes, and he was suddenly not so inscrutable.

‘Four,’ I said.

The encampment had begun to calm down. Folks had stopped running around.

‘Three.’

Rutherford poked the weapon an inch into the Chinaman’s pants and lifted his man-sack so that his balls straddled the flash suppressor.

‘Hey, I think he’s going commando here,’ Rutherford observed as the crease between the man’s eyes deepened and lengthened.

‘Two,’ I said.

‘They took them to the mine,’ the Chinaman blurted, sweat beaded across his forehead, a stain spreading down his left leg.

‘Who took them there?’ I asked.

‘Your countryman – Rockhart.’

Lockhart
. ‘Was the Frenchman, LeDuc, with him?’

‘No. He go with other men in the chopper.’

My inner revenge said ‘Fuck’ and smashed a fist into the palm of its hand. I wanted that asshole’s head on a plate – with freedom fries.

‘With Pietersen and White?’ I asked.

‘Yes, them.’

‘What about Biruta?’

‘He go too.’

I wanted to ask him what the PLA was doing here, and whether his people knew about his involvement in rape, kidnap and extortion, or if he knew how the folks back home in the Forbidden City would react if they knew that he was lining his pockets with gold mined by slaves his buddies were torturing and killing. I also wanted to know about the American-made guns, the M16s, but the answer to that I could get from Lockhart and his buddy Charles White, if and when I caught up with them. Somewhere in the background, the sound of men shouting something penetrated my thoughts.

‘We got company,’ said Rutherford.

I glanced to the side and saw maybe a dozen men tentatively approaching us fifty meters away through an early morning haze of smoke, steam and airborne mud particles. They were pointing at us, gesturing. Colonel Cravat, easily identifed by the cream scarf tucked into the neck of his jungle-pattern shirt, was out front. As I thought, the arrival of daylight wasn’t doing us any favors.