The Consignment (25 page)

Locating the evacuation operations room wasn’t difficult. Three doors along, phones were pealing and voices were being raised. I went in and found a large African American lady at the front desk, she was clearly the one running the room. A map of the country was on the wall to her left. On her right, a map of Kinshasa. Behind her, a half dozen or more staffers were manning the phones, making and taking calls, jotting notes, and yelling at each other. I went up to the front desk. I told the woman I was looking for two U.S. citizens, Brad Rourke and Ivan Barchevsky. She leaned back and shouted the names to her colleagues behind. They consulted their lists. The names weren’t there.

“Nope,” she said, looking up. “Friends?”

“One’s my son.”

She pursed her lips in sympathy. “Lotta people lyin’ low. Could be he’s doin’ that,” she offered. “We’ve got embassy people we still ain’t heard from. There’s different ones callin’ in or showin’ up all the time.”

I asked if I could use her phone. She pushed it across the desk to me and I took out Barchevsky’s card and dialed his office. The line was dead. Then I dialed his apartment. That was dead too.

“Where is this place?” she said, and I read her the address on the card. She frowned and rose from her desk and went to the map of Kinshasa. She placed a plump finger on the major arterial road into the city from the east. “Out near the airport,” she declared. “We ain’t heard from anyone out there for a while.” I saw her exchange a glance with one of her colleagues. I raised a brow. “There was some heavy fightin’ out that way earlier,” she told me finally. “All those lines are down.”

I looked at the map. The arterial road came almost all the way to the embassy, which was marked in green. Barchevsky’s office, the place she’d pointed to on the map, was on a street corner just past a bridge. I asked her how far it was. Five or six miles, she said.

“You wouldn’t have a spare map?” I said. She regarded me curiously. “A small one. Like a street map of the city.”

“You plannin’ a tour?”

“Not exactly.”

“You a fool.”

“I’m a father.”

“Hmph,” she said, and went back to her desk and sat down. She moved some paper around the desk.

“He’s my only child.”

“You want a map.”

“Yes.”

“An’ that’s all.”

I nodded, aware that she was keeping her voice down now so that her colleagues couldn’t overhear. Finally she puffed out her cheeks and blew. She rummaged in her desk drawer, took out a pocket guide to the city, and slid it across her desk. I picked it up.

“You a fool,” she said again, and I nodded and walked out the door.

Out the door, and almost straight into Channon. He was standing just along the hall with a dapper, silver-haired guy in a suit. They had their backs to me, their heads together, conferring over some papers. I turned sharp left and went down the stairs to the rear porch. I hoisted a trash can full of shredded paper onto my shoulder and carried it outside to the incinerator and dropped it by the other trash cans and kept walking. A minute later, I was out front in the park. I walked on through the chalks of evacuees like I knew what I was doing, like I might be on embassy business, and no one stopped me. Channon’s Ford was still parked under the eucalyptus. I got in and flipped down the visor and the keys fell in my lap.

I checked the map, then I drove over to the razor-wire barrier on the eastern perimeter. A young Marine emerged from the machine-gun nest to see where I thought I was headed.

“Airport.” I sliced my hand purposefully forward.

“You got orders?”

“I’m with the embassy.”

“You still gotta have orders, sir.”

“Channon wants me out there.” The name didn’t register. I sensed the kid wavering, wondering if the easiest thing might be to turn me back. “Channon,” I said forcefully. “Charlie six. Now do I get through the goddamn wire, or do I go get your captain?”

He thought about it a second, then decided he really didn’t need the hassle. He pulled back the razor wire, waved me brusquely through, and I drove on past him, out into the city.

CHAPTER 32

I drove due east for half a mile, one eye on my map, then I turned south. I hit the arterial road almost immediately, then turned east again and stepped on the gas. After a few hundred yards I had to back off fast, two burned-out trucks lay abandoned in the middle of the road. I slowed to a crawl, got my pistol ready, and eased my way between the trucks, eyes peeled. I was almost through when someone darted out from behind the second truck. I swung my pistol, pointed it out my side window, my finger on the trigger. Then I saw. It was a woman. She had a basket resting on her hip, it was piled high with blackened bananas she’d scavenged from one of the abandoned trucks. She stopped when she saw the pistol leveled at her. We looked at each other. Then she simply raised the basket onto her head and turned her back on me and walked away.

Sweat trickled down my neck. I dropped the pistol on the seat beside me, and drove.

A few miles up ahead, there was a thick wall of black smoke, it wasn’t like the other plumes rising from the burned-out shops in the city. I checked the map again. Heavy fighting, that’s what the embassy woman had said. I figured the dense smoke was coming from the airport. Barchevsky’s office was well short of there, maybe a mile and a half.

After another minute I was nearing the wall of smoke and still hadn’t crossed the bridge. Off in the side streets there was sporadic gunfire, but the only guys with guns I saw were standing guard by a pile of looted TVs. They gave me the eye but didn’t shoot, maybe they thought I’d shoot back and damage their merchandise. Finally I saw the bridge. I peered into the smoky haze beyond it, searching for Barchevsky’s building, then a pothole appeared in front of me and I swerved too late and hit it hard.

There was an explosion, the Ford tipped violently left, balanced on two wheels for a few yards, then smashed down on its side. I held tight to the wheel, pressing my ass against the door as the vehicle slewed along the road on its side, metal screaming, the scoured tarmac skimming past my shoulder. It was over too fast to think. The Ford juddered to a stop and I got myself upright. Claymore, I thought. In the pothole, someone had planted a goddamn mine.

I found the pistol down by my feet, used the butt to smash a hole through the shattered windshield, then I kicked out the glass and scrambled through. I crouched a moment, got myself reoriented. I was fifty yards short of the bridge. There was a three-story building on a street corner on the far side. Barchevsky’s. I went around to the exposed underside of the Ford. The front right wheel had taken the mine’s full blast, the tire was shredded and the wheel was twisted at an angle to the axle.

I knew I couldn’t hang around. I turned and jogged toward the bridge.

It was a humpbacked thing, purely functional, spanning a river that was about twenty yards wide. From the high midpoint of the bridge, I could see out to the airport, the control tower and the hangars, and nearer than that, a refinery with thick black smoke pouring from one of its four huge storage tanks. As I jogged down the other side of the bridge, I noticed a body lying down by the water. It was a Congolese soldier in battle gear, he must have been taking cover when he was hit. I went down there, scrambled down the bank, and picked up his AK47 and a few magazines of ammo. There was shooting from the far side of the bridge, I clambered up the bank fast and took cover by a small pumping station.

They weren’t shooting at me. There was some shouting, then I saw six men come wandering up the road toward the wrecked Ford, they took shots at it as they neared. They spread out, half circled it, then approached cautiously. Maybe they were hoping to find themselves a prisoner, someone they could rob and then shoot. When they found nobody inside the cab, one of them crawled in and ripped out the cassette player. A couple of kids, maybe eight or nine years old, arrived on the scene, hefting jerry cans. The kids siphoned the gas out of the tank while the men stood around, smoking.

If I made a dash for the rear of Barchevsky’s building and they saw me, I was finished. It was their territory, not mine, and there’d be plenty more to arrive if any real shooting started. I’d seen that a dozen times in Mogadishu. We’d drop a platoon into an empty street, and next thing, the guys with guns would suddenly swarm.

So I stayed by the pumping station and waited. It was late afternoon, and hot, the cloud of smoke from the refinery hung like a stifling blanket over everything. I waited a long time. A soldier’s labor, that’s what Channon used to call it. Waiting. Sitting on your butt for hours, sometimes days, before you got the order to move. This time it wasn’t so bad. The kids finally got their jerry cans full, then the men torched the Ford, and they all wandered back west.

I checked the ammo in my pockets, and the pistol in the waistband at my back. Then I picked up the Kalashnikov, poked my head out, and rechecked. No one. I got up and ran, sprinting across the potholed road and into the colonnaded arcade of the building. It hadn’t been torched but it was badly shot up, there was broken glass everywhere. The concrete facade was pitted with holes the size of fists where bullets had come spraying in from the street.

There were nameplates by the main entrance, the ground floor was occupied by an airline company, and the floor above was Barchevsky Mining. The floor above that was designated simply
PRIVATE
.

I went into the lobby. There was more glass, and what looked like a dried slick of blood on the floor. As I crossed to the stairs, I stepped past the open doorway of the airline office, and a zip of hot air and a concussive pop flicked past my right ear. I spun around and dropped against the wall. Someone had almost killed me. I waited for the next shot, but when nothing came, I moved, creeping along the wall to the rear of the lobby. Another door back there led into the airline office, where the shot had come from. The door was ajar. I crouched, then carefully, quickly, put my head around the corner, snatched a look, then withdrew.

It was a girl. Some Congolese kid of seventeen or eighteen, dressed like an office worker, green skirt and white blouse. She was holding a pistol in both hands, aiming at the first door. I snatched another look. Not a rebel or a soldier, just a kid, maybe she worked in the place, I couldn’t just shoot her. But I couldn’t let her shoot me either. I pressed my back against the wall.

“You speak English?”

Two shots came—bap, bap—hitting the wall inside. Then a third shot splintered the door beside me. I fired a short burst from the Kalashnikov into the rear wall of the lobby. Silence followed.

“I’m going to count to three,” I called, “—
un, deux, trois
—and then I’m coming in there.” She didn’t answer. I fired another burst into the rear wall, then waited again. More silence.
“Un!”
I shouted.
“Deux!”

She ran. I heard movement and snatched a glimpse around the door. She bounced around a couple of desks, then exited through a side doorway out into the street. When I crossed the big open-plan office and looked out, she was gone.

Then I saw movement on the far side of the bridge. The gang that had torched the Ford were returning, stalking now, their weapons raised. They must have heard the shots, but they hadn’t seen the girl, they seemed to be checking out the bridge.

I retreated across the office to the lobby, pointed the Kalashnikov up the stairwell, and climbed warily. Files lay scattered on the landing, paperwork spilling out everywhere. There were more bullet holes in the landing wall. I went on up to where a door with the Barchevsky Mining nameplate hung askew, on one hinge. I listened. There was no sound from inside, so I darted a look around the door, then withdrew.

The place had been ransacked. PC monitors smashed, filing cabinets tipped over and trashed, windows broken. No one in there.

I edged past the hanging door. It was a big space, like the airline office downstairs, but it had once been divided into sections by a series of high plywood screens. A few of the screens remained standing, but most lay toppled and broken across the desks and on the floor. Up on the wall, geological maps had been torn and left hanging. Bullet holes peppered the ceiling.

I picked my way through the wreckage, cautiously.

Toward the rear of the office there was a door marked
PRIVATE
, and beside it an intercom that was smashed and left dangling from wires in the wall. The door lock had been shot up, but when I put my shoulder to the door and pushed hard, the lock held firm. I went across to the radio set on the table nearby. It was a big set, they must have used it to keep contact with the mines, but it was wrecked, pieces of metal and electronics hanging out from all sides. Then I saw a list taped to the table. It was a list of mines, and beside each name a frequency and a scheduled contact time. Dujanka was on the list. I tore the list off the table and shoved it in my pocket. I turned and headed for the stairs, and one of the divider screens moved beneath my feet. I jumped off it.

When I looked down, my heart stopped.

There was a body lying facedown beneath me. The upper torso, the arms and the head, were hidden under the screen, but the twisted legs in denim jeans, and the large white sneakers, were visible beneath the scattered papers.

Denim jeans, white sneakers.

Please God, I thought, no.

Crouching, I lifted the screen. It slid off the body, and there was blood everywhere, congealed and dark, I could hardly breathe. I turned my head away, but my eyes stayed on the body. I took hold of the shoulder and rolled it, then I stood straight up and swallowed air.

Barchevsky. He’d taken shots in the gut and throat, his beard was stained crimson, and his face was gray. He was dead. Shock. Relief. I stood there, breathing, then finally I dragged my eyes off him and picked my way back through the wreckage, checking now beneath the other toppled screens. I didn’t find anything. When I got out to the stairs, I went up, careful and slow.

The door to Barchevsky’s apartment was open. I listened, heard nothing, then went in. The place was trashed. A sofa and two armchairs had been upended, books were scattered across the living room floor. Stepping around the devastation, I looked in at the kitchen. Broken crockery. Open cupboards, and a refrigerator lying on its back on the floor. There were two bedrooms farther along, the mattresses in both rooms were slashed and tipped off the beds. Clothes lay everywhere. In the bathroom, the shards of a broken mirror had fallen on the tiles and into the bath. The busted sink hissed quietly.

Returning to the living room, I looked through the last open door. It was an internal staircase leading down to Barchevsky’s office. There were pieces blasted out of the concrete stairs and the floor below, as if someone had opened fire from where I was standing. I withdrew my head, turned and faced the apartment.

Barchevsky was dead. He was dead, and Brad might be anywhere, and I was stranded on foot, miles from the safety of the embassy and the Marines. A nightmare tactics lesson from West Point. Okay, Rourke. What now?

Then I heard a sound on the internal staircase. I didn’t move my feet, I simply let my shoulders fall back against the wall, then froze. The sink hissed. Half a minute went by. When no other sound came, I wondered if I’d imagined it the first time, but then I did hear another sound, one I hadn’t imagined. A click. Down on the internal staircase, someone had just cocked a gun.

I raised my left hand. With my right I cradled the AK47 across my stomach, the barrel sighted on the doorway. Then male voices came up from the lobby, African voices. The armed gang had arrived. I blinked the sweat out of my eyes. My heart pounded hard and high in my chest. Someone was definitely coming up the internal staircase, I heard tentative footsteps.

Down in the lobby, glass smashed and voices rose in anger, like the gang were arguing over some trophy.

The footsteps on the staircase quickened. I crouched and put down the Kalashnikov. I slipped my pistol from my belt. With the gang right there, I did not want to shoot.

Then a pair of legs suddenly appeared, I swung my left arm, hit the knees, and the legs buckled. A gun came up, I hit the hand with my pistol, the hand opened, the gun flew clear, and I leaped on the fallen body, grabbed a handful of hair, and pressed my pistol barrel against the white neck.

I bent and whispered, “Speak and you’re dead.”

The head turned, the terrified eyes rolled. Fiona. My wife.