Ghost Watch (27 page)

West handed me the sniper rifle. ‘This one’s headed for recycling,’ he said.

‘What happened?’

He broke it down quickly and handed me the barrel.

‘It’s bent. Hit a rock on the way down.’

I held it up to catch the meager moonlight and sighted down the rifing. Sure enough, there was the slightest of bends, which turned it into scrap metal.

I handed the barrel back and he swung it underarm toward the lake and waited till I heard the splash.

‘Vin,’ Ryder called out in a hoarse whisper. ‘Jesus, sir – guys . . . come here.’

I managed to haul myself up to the standing position, every muscle in my body threatening to desert. I could dimly make out Ryder’s outline. He was motioning us over with some urgency.

‘Look,’ he said, when I got close enough, pointing at something on the ground. It was Leila. Ayesha was kneeling beside her and holding her hand, which was shaking. And then something lying across one of her legs shifted, a completely unnatural movement. I thought perhaps it was a fold of the poncho. It moved again. Shit, this was hardcore. My mind had trouble coming to grips with the picture sent from my eyes. A big motherfucker of a snake had eaten Leila’s boot with her foot still inside it, and had thrown its coils up around her calf and thigh and was trying to squeeze the living shit out of it. One of the coils slid inside another, tightening, causing Leila to gasp.

‘What up, yo?’ asked Boink with a groan, waking, rolling onto his back beside Leila and slapping at something on his arm.

LeDuc was still asleep.

‘What are we gonna do?’ Ryder asked.

‘Get it off me,’ Leila shouted suddenly, providing a suggestion. ‘Get it off!’

LeDuc woke with a start.

Of all people, why Leila? Why couldn’t this have happened to – well, yeah, Ryder, for example?

‘An African Rock Python,’ said West, crouching beside me as I examined it, not overly concerned. ‘I remember these guys from jungle training school. Adults grow to thirty feet. This one’s a teenager, probably only around ten feet.’

‘Only,’ I said.

‘Just get it fucking off!’ said Leila, hysterical.

‘This is going to make a nice handbag,’ he told her as he pulled his Ka-bar and chopped the blade down on the snake’s spine just behind its head with precisely enough force to sever it. The coils loosened immediately. The sergeant ran his knife blade around the snake’s head in one fluid motion, then, using both hands, pulled its thick body back, and the star’s boot was disgorged from the reptile’s gullet with a sucking sound. Next, the sergeant slit its mouth at the hinges of its jaw and peeled the head away from her calf, her skin and muscle shielded from the needle-sharp teeth by the leather of her high-cut boot. West passed the bloody head to me. It was heavy, meaty, and bigger than my hand.

‘Might need some help here,’ he told me.

I tossed the head over my shoulder into the elephant grass as West uncoiled its body from around Leila’s leg, and heaved the coils into my arms. The thing weighed a ton and its skin was dry and gave off a musky, gamey smell.

When the last coil was pulled free of her leg, Leila scrambled backward on her hands and feet into the unflattened elephant grass. Something big slithered in the grass behind her, which caused her to cry out and clamber forward onto one of the ponchos. She stopped there on her hands and knees, breathing heavily, and whispered, ‘Holy Mother of God . . .’

‘You’re okay, honey,’ said Ayesha, kneeling in front of her and cradling her face between her hands. ‘Everything’s all right.’

‘Can you feel your leg, ma’am?’ West asked.

‘It . . . it was numb,’ Leila said. ‘N . . . now I got pins and needles.’

‘Good. No permanent damage.’ West turned to me and said, ‘Let’s straighten this sucker out.’

The python turned out to be around thirteen feet in length.

‘She’s lucky we caught this thing when we did, before it got her all coiled up with its full length,’ West said as he slit its underside. ‘Gotta do this fast to stop the meat going off. There’ll be worms and bacteria in its gut,’ he explained as he cut. ‘So, you know what snake tastes like?’

‘Like ham and cheese, I heard,’ I said.

‘Since when?’ Cassidy asked.

‘Don’t spoil it for me.’

After he’d pulled out the viscera, West skinned the reptile before trimming a dozen large steaks off its flanks and throwing the remains of the carcass in the lake.

‘We can’t eat this raw,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to make us a fire.’

‘Risky,’ I said. A fire would telegraph our whereabouts to anyone within a quarter-mile radius.

‘Not here.’ West reassured me. ‘Later.’

‘How we gonna do that? Rub sticks together?’ asked Boink, who’d been standing behind West and observing him as he worked.

‘The easy way.’ West pulled a disposable cigarette lighter out of his pocket, cupped it, rolled his thumb over the wheel and sparked up a small flame. ‘Found this in one of the African’s packs. We’re gonna need fire to boil water, fill up the camelbacks.’

‘Cooper!’

It was Rutherford.

‘Look what just washed up.’

I went down to the water’s edge in time to see the Englishman dragging a body up onto the mud. It was Marcel’s. Rutherford flipped the corpse onto its back. The eyelids were half closed. As LeDuc suggested, he might have drowned, though the more likely cause of death was the hole bashed in the top of his skull through which his brains were falling out.

LEILA, AYESHA AND BOINK kept to themselves and said little as we moved away from the lake in the thin pre-dawn light, a surly lethargy in the way they dragged their feet, heads down.

The main source feeding into the lake appeared to be an angry tumble of water hugging the base of the cliff. Keeping to its flank, we picked our way over smooth black and gray granite rocks, the forest occasionally overhanging in places.

We pulled up after half an hour’s walk when a bend in the watercourse took us out of the shadows and into sunlight. Overwatch was delegated to Ryder and Rutherford, who went to find good vantage points. The principals sat on rocks on the edge of the forest and passed around the last of the jerky while West worked on a fire. We were going to be leaning heavily on the sergeant’s survival skills here. Like most everyone, I’d done a jungle course once upon a time, but it was basic and general in nature. Almost all of my combat and survival experience had been gained in higher latitudes. From what I remembered of the files on my team, it was the same for Rutherford. Cassidy was a counter-insurgency expert. And Ryder’s instincts were restricted to surviving concrete jungles.

Having a cigarette lighter was a piece of luck, as there weren’t any dry sticks around, let alone Boy Scouts to rub them together. West overcame the problem of wet fuel by locating a variety of palm that had a high concentration of oil in its pith that caught fire easily and burned with a strong flame. Over this, he placed kindling shaved from the frond stems of another variety of palm. More substantial dry fuel was sourced from inside rotted trees that had recently toppled. Within forty minutes we had a fire going, python steaks grilling, the sun on our backs, and Aye-sha and Leila taking their clothes off to bathe. The day was looking up.

While the steaks cooked, I pulled LeDuc aside and got a few things off my chest. ‘The guy we had a chat with back at the ambush after we came down.’

‘The boy your principal killed?’

‘That’s the one. He told us that his patrol was looking for us, right?’

‘
Oui
. . .’

‘How did they know there was an “us” to look for?’

LeDuc frowned and then an answer appeared to dawn on him.

‘You are police, yes?’

‘So?’

‘Maybe you are looking for something that isn’t there, yes?’

‘Captain, coincidences are like little green men from Planet Nine – I don’t believe in either. You said the DRC was the size of Western Europe, right? So, coming down where we did, right in the middle of a battle . . . I’m thinking the chances of that would be like hitting a hole-in-one, blindfolded.’

‘You are saying that you believe our flight was sabotaged?’ said LeDuc, horrified. ‘That we crashed here because of some plan?’

Putting it together like that without any window dressing did make the notion sound implausible but, yeah, that’s what I was saying. ‘Yeah, maybe.’

He gave me a blank stare.

I wanted to go back over things. ‘You said there was a problem with the fuel. You also said that you checked it before we took off.’

‘
Oui
. It was checked.’

‘By you personally?’

‘
Non
. By Henri.’

‘Fournier.’

‘
Oui
. It was also his job to monitor our fuel load during flight. He switched the fuel from the exterior sponsons so that our main tanks were full and he did this just before the engine failures. Henri also made the Mayday call.’

‘The Mayday call that you got no response from?’

‘
Oui
.’

The Frenchman’s face under the dirt and blackened kerosene was suddenly haggard.

‘
Baise-moi
. . .’ he said under his breath.

‘Meaning?’

‘Fuck me.’

‘You’re not my type.’

‘I do not want to incriminate anyone without evidence.’

‘And I want to know why we’re up to our necks in elephant grass rather than heading home with a bunch of crumby posters autographed by our celebrities.’

‘It is possible that Fournier did not make the transmission at all,’ said LeDuc.

Shit. My bad feeling was baking into a real who, what and how scenario. ‘I heard something while I was half snoozing, just before the chopper’s engines failed. It woke me up. Someone said, “What was that?” ’

‘I am sorry?’ said LeDuc, puzzled.

‘“What was that?” I heard someone say that just before your engines failed.’

‘Perhaps it was said just at that moment.’

‘I’m pretty sure I heard it a handful of seconds
before
everything went into the toilet bowl. I think the voice I heard was Colonel Travis’s.’

‘I do not know why this is important.’

‘And I’d like to know why he said it. If everything was okay, why say, “What was that?” What made him say it?’

LeDuc peeled off one of his shrugs.

This was leading nowhere, so I let it go. Maybe I just had my timings mixed up. What it looked like, though, was that Fournier wanted us on the ground, and that the spot he’d chosen was pre-planned. He’d caused the Puma to crash, switching to tanks with contaminated fuel that would bring us down. The FARDC patrol had specifically come looking for us. How did they know there was an ‘us’ to look for? Had some arrangement been made with the DRC force before we took off from Cyangugu to capture us? And if I needed a motive for all this, one was close by. I glanced around until I saw it – Leila. She and Ayesha were now down to bras and panties – Leila’s, red lace; Ayesha’s, pink cotton. Ayesha was washing their clothes in the ravine while Leila stretched out on a boulder, the droplets of water on her honey-colored skin sparkling in the morning light. Her head was back as she drank in the warmth of the sun. She looked a million bucks – or, rather, many millions of bucks – and perhaps Fournier wanted a few of them channeled into his bank account. Add Twenny Fo’s net worth to the picture and there was plenty of motive – kidnapping and ransom. Crash landing a chopper was a hell of a risky strategy. Perhaps the lieutenant put in some extra hours of practice on the simulator before this mission to get it right.

‘Where are the fuel tanks in a Puma?’ I asked.

‘Why do you wish to know?’ LeDuc asked.

‘In case it comes up in Trivial Pursuit. Humor me.’

‘There are four main tanks. They are under the cargo floor. The spon-sons are exterior, located on the sides of the fuselage.’

I sucked some water from my camelback tube.

‘What do you want to do?’ LeDuc inquired. ‘Will you tell the others about this?’

‘I think so.’

‘When?’

‘After I’ve had a toasted ham and cheese sandwich,’ I said.

Right on cue, West called out in a hoarse whisper, ‘Come and get it!’

There was enough python to feed twice our number. Leila ate without complaint, which threw me a little. Ayesha and Boink likewise tucked into it as if they hadn’t eaten anything substantial for a couple of days, which, of course, they hadn’t.

I took a seat on a rock beside Boink.

‘You okay?’ I asked him.

He glanced at me sideways. ‘You hep me down the cliff. Thanks, man.’

‘All part of the service.’

He stuffed half a pound of snake in his mouth.

‘Where’d you get a name like Boink?’ I asked him.

‘From my folks. They look at me when I come into the world and said, “Fuck”, but they couldn’t put that on the birth certifcate, yo.’

He looked at me angrily. But then he grinned. ‘Messin’ wit choo, man. Got the name ’cause I bin known to fuck people so bad they don’ get up, you know what I’m saying?’