Ghost Watch (51 page)

‘Give Rutherford a hand getting Francis into the trees. Keep everyone off the road. Patrice – that’s Francis’s wife – she knows what’s going on. They’re going to need a field stretcher.’

‘Roger that. What are
you
gonna do?’

‘Ditch the truck. You take the right-hand trail – that’ll get you to the river. I’ll rendezvous with you there. Our African friends are headed elsewhere. We need to move it.’

‘Roger that, boss,’ he said and went off to hustle while I kneeled beside Francis.

‘Mercy bowcoop, Francis,’ I said, his face sweating beads of pain.

‘You have the worst accent in the whole of the Congo,’ he croaked. ‘It is I who thanks you. My people owe you their lives.’

‘I was going to say the same thing to you. Good luck.’

‘And to you,’ he said, finding my hand and squeezing it weakly. ‘Get to the Zaire.’

I gave Cassidy and Rutherford a nod and they lifted him off the back of the truck as Patrice rushed in, threw her arms around me and squeezed until I coughed. The woman was a cage fighter in drag.

‘
Merci, merci,
’ she said and kissed me wetly on the cheek before hurrying off to tend to her husband while he was being carried behind the tree line.

The rainforest quickly swallowed everyone and I found myself alone on the road, the Dong idling noisily behind me and the sound of approaching vehicles getting louder by the second. I ran to the driver’s door, jumped in and selected first from the snarling gearbox. The vehicle charged forward, far more willing in the acceleration department without all the weight on board. The road was almost completely overgrown. I was considering slowing down but changed my mind about that when a bullet shattered the rear-view mirror on my door and slivers of glass speared into my neck and cheek. The Dong burst through a wreath of liana obscuring the view forward. I had no idea where the road was going, so I took a guess and kept the wheels pointing straight ahead. I could hear small arms fire being shot off behind me. I was thinking how not much of it was finding its target when a single round punched through the passenger seat beside me and buried itself in the dashboard.

I was driving way too fast for the conditions. An RPG round exploded somewhere unseen but close and I swerved and cut a path through the trees. The road found me before I located it, and the tires slithered around on the muddy strip, hunting for traction. And then, suddenly, there was a log lying diagonally across my path, big and immovable. Swinging the wheel violently, I still struck the massive obstacle a glancing blow that smashed my face down into the steering wheel. The log bounced the truck into the forest and it began to crash through the scrub again, but beyond my control this time, rumbling down a steep hill with increasing speed. And then the world tilted on its side as the earth fell away and the truck tipped and I hung onto the steering wheel with plants and liana and mud swelling into the cabin, coming through the windshield area and welling up through the passenger window below my feet.

And then everything stopped moving.

I wasn’t unconscious – just stunned. The crash and the resulting detour had happened so fast, I needed a moment to catch up with it. Jesus, my face hurt, my eyes watering with the pain.

Get out, Cooper
, said the voice in my head but I couldn’t recall why. And then I remembered about the people with guns not far behind and that they would be coming for me. I found my M4, hitched it over my shoulders and pulled myself out onto the canted hood and slid into a thicket of elephant grass, bamboo and liana. The forest was so dense it was almost impossible to move through it. That was good. If it delayed me, it would have the same effect on the folks who would be coming to investigate the wreckage.

‘JESUS, BOSS, YOU’RE A mess,’ said West, examining my face after he gave me a pat on the shoulder.

‘It’s my party lifestyle,’ I said. I ’d tried to clear my blocked nose earlier, snorting out a couple of plugs of coagulated blood. The pain I felt when I pinched it told me it was broken. It had happened when I’d tried to turn the steering wheel with my face after hitting the roadblock.

The hike back to rejoin my merry band of travelers took two hours, a little longer than I expected. It was mid afternoon before I came across the road, followed it back to the fork, then doubled back to find everyone. Boink had the watch while West and Rutherford were building beds for everyone up off the ground, away from the ants and other biters.

‘How are our principals?’ I asked West when I found him binding saplings together with liana.

‘Subdued. I think they’re finally getting the message.’

‘Which message is that?’

‘ To shut the fuck up and let us do our job.’

I doubted it. ‘Where are they?’

By way of an answer, he pointed into the bush. Leila and Twenny were silhouetted sitting on a rotten log. They appeared to have reached some kind of amnesty, each sitting with an arm around the other. A couple of orange butterflies danced in the air above their heads. I could almost hear the violins. West having relieved him of the watch, Boink came and stood a few meters behind his employer and, bearlike, scratched his back against a tree.

‘How’s Ryder?’ I asked.

‘Milking it for all it’s worth . . . not that I blame him,’ said West. ‘Anyway, I think he’s on the mend.’

He indicated Ryder’s whereabouts with a thumb over his shoulder. The captain was lying on one of the cots, Ayesha in attendance.

‘Francis, Patrice and the rest – they get off okay?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. Patrice assured Rutherford that they knew where they were going. How about you? How’d you make out?’

‘I died,’ I said.

‘No, really, what happened?’

I gave him a quick rundown.

‘By the way,’ he said when I’d finished, ‘there were two trucks in pursuit of you. And both of them had a lot of men on board.’

I wondered how much time my little decoy run had bought us. Eventually those truckloads of armed men would backtrack and investigate this road. It started raining. ‘Must be three-fifteen,’ I said.

West checked his wristwatch and nodded.

‘Where’s Cassidy?’

‘Setting up a perimeter defense. Ryder was sitting on two Claymores we forgot about, the last of the ones with the trip wires you guys found in the FARDC camp.’

That was the best news I’d heard in a while.

‘What’s down at the river?’ I asked him, fanning uselessly at a cloud of mosquitoes attacking my face.

‘Mud, insects – not a lot else. Come take a look for yourself.’

West sheathed his Ka-bar and we headed for the river, detouring via an ant mound. We exited the forest into a semi-cleared patch of wet earth that, here and there, had sections of steel matting laid over it. Strangely, the mud here wasn’t orange, but white. The river itself was fifty or sixty meters wide, a tea-brown slick dented with raindrops that slid by at a fast walking pace between banks of mostly unbroken forest. A fish broke the water, no doubt chased by something hungry. Half a dozen heavy hardwood posts were driven vertically into the water just off the riverbank I was standing on, which was low and marshy. I could easily imagine that at one time there’d been a reasonable amount of infrastructure here to offoad the sawn logs that would get floated down the river to the mill, wherever that was. But now almost nothing remained aside from those pilings, a little rusting steel scrap and few old oil drums half submerged in the mud. There was one small troubling detail – as Francis said, the Zaire flowed the wrong way for our purposes, heading west
away
from Lake Kivu and Cyangugu.

‘Seen anything useful – like a riverboat with slots and a bar?’ I asked.

‘What do you think?’

I took a deep breath. When Lissouba’s men came down that road, we’d be trapped with our backs against the river. We could swim for it, but I didn’t like our chances against what the fuck else that might be lurking in that murky water chasing the fish.

‘They got crocs here?’ I asked.

‘Nope. Tigerfish.’

‘Great.’ I had no idea what they were, but they sounded unfriendly.

I scoped the area a second time and the shred of an option formed.

‘You guys make pretty good cots.’

‘It ain’t hard.’

‘Can you make me a cot around a few of those oil drums?’

‘So you want a raft?’

‘It’d make me sleep a whole lot better.’

ALL THE DRUMS WERE recovered from the mud, lined up and inspected. I stomped on the side of one of them and put my boot clean through it. Similar tests on the remaining five showed only one to be sound, with just a little superfcial rust. A second drum was also free of holes and corrosion, but had no lid. We could use it as long as we kept its brim above the waterline.

There were ten of us – a combined weight of around two thousand pounds. Buoyancy was critical. Six types of sapling were tested. West placed them all in the water and a clear winner emerged, floating higher than the others. It completed one spin in the eddy by the bank before the Zaire carried it away.

‘Okay, that’s settled,’ he said. ‘These are the guys we want.’ He held a second length of the winning sapling, about two inches in diameter and trimmed to a length of about twelve feet.

‘We’ll need six bundles of these, about the same length as this,’ he said. ‘And each bundle should be about two foot in diameter. That’s around thirteen saplings per bundle times six bundles. So seventy-eight saplings in total. We’ll use vine to lash the bundles together, with a drum fore and aft. Keep it nice and simple.’

‘Paddles?’ Rutherford asked.

‘No paddles. We’ll use the main current, pole off the banks.’

‘How long will this raft take to build?’ asked Leila.

West smiled. ‘As long as it takes you to cut the wood, then a bit longer after that.’

I could tell the answer didn’t please her, but, as West said, she was apparently learning to shut the fuck up.

‘We’ll assemble it in the marsh so we can just float it out.’

‘How much liana will you need?’ Ryder asked.

‘Fifty meters ought to do it. Make sure it’s green and young.’

‘And when it’s built?’ Leila wanted to know. ‘Then what?’

‘We float down river to a settlement with boats for hire, or a road out,’ I said. ‘With a little luck, we’ll reach Cyangugu by early afternoon tomorrow.’ Invoking luck probably wasn’t smart, but I was all out of smarts. ‘Work in pairs,’ I continued. ‘Stay within sight of your partner and at least one other pair. Boink, you work with Rutherford.’

Rutherford walked over to Twenny’s security chief and presented him with a machete.

‘Everyone know what to do?’ I asked.

‘Leila and me, we’ll take Peanut wit us,’ said Twenny and gestured at his friend, who was nearby, throwing sticks into the river.

West took me aside. ‘That river’s not going our way. It’ll take us to Kinshasa.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘I suppose not. Where there’s a river, there are towns.’

‘That’s what I was thinking.’

‘Till we get the raw materials, I’m going to help Cassidy out with the defenses, and maybe rustle us up some food.’

‘Toasted ham and cheese on rye, thanks,’ I said.

‘See what we can do,’ he said, and trotted out of the cleared area and disappeared into the bush in the direction of the road.

Ayesha and Ryder walked past.

‘You feeling all right?’ I asked him.

‘Hooah,’ he said under his breath without lifting his head.

We were all running on empty.

THE CHOSEN SAPLING DIDN’T grow in stands, but it was here and there and all over. I worked on my own, scouting for the right materials, cutting the saplings and liana where and when the opportunity presented. Apart from the odd fright from spiders and small vipers, and an occasional deep cough from what Rutherford believed was a big cat somewhere in the forest, there were no incidents. All up, we managed to collect fifty-eight saplings before the light failed completely. Not ideal, but as there was no moonrise for quite a few hours, we had to go with what we had.

Cassidy and West appeared from the shadows just as the last of the saplings and liana lengths were delivered to the riverbank, Cassidy carrying in front of him what appeared to be two large basketballs.

‘Chow time,’ West called out. ‘We got avocado, palm oil fruit, watermelon, sugarcane, and grasshoppers for protein.’ He opened his pack, found a patch of ground where the steel matting was a little above the mud, and emptied the contents onto it. Cassidy also placed those basketballs of his on the matting, two almost perfectly round watermelons, and pulled his Ka-bar. He sliced one of them up and handed around the wedges. Peanut was first in line; he took a piece, buried his face in it and seemed pretty happy about what was in his mouth.

‘This stuff is all over,’ said West. ‘You want some more, we’ll go get it.’

Ayesha and Leila were next in line, followed by Twenny and Boink, the hired help bringing up the rear.

‘After you,’ Rutherford said to Ryder.

‘Just leave me some of them grasshoppers,’ I said.