Ghost Watch (29 page)

Rutherford absently popped the mag in his M4 and checked it. ‘Sounds like one of your half plans is in the wind.’

‘Let’s move it,’ Cassidy suggested. ‘Our intel gets staler with every passing minute.’

Frankly, after two days it was growing mushrooms, but it seemed like we were emotionally committed at least to reconnoitering the FARDC positions to see whether there was anything left to rescue. For all we knew, by now it might all chopped up into handy-to-dispose-of lengths.

W
e followed the ravine, successive foods having washed away some of the undergrowth along its flank, making it easier going than cutting a path through the forest, which was mostly impenetrable. The space between the trees was occupied by a malicious variety of elephant grass battling with entanglements of vegetation hung with brightly colored banded snakes that screamed ‘hazardous’. Occasionally, the forest swallowed the ravine and we had no choice but to hack our way through the tangles of liana and elephant grass. Overhead, birds screeched at each other like inmates in an asylum and animals darted away, unseen, through the compacted undergrowth nearby. None of these were going to be fuffy white rabbits, so I was fine with the darting-away thing.

And, just as I was thinking that, a nearby wall of bush trembled with something very big that departed in a hurry. We all froze.

‘LeDuc, didn’t you say we’d be lucky to see any wildlife?’ I asked him quietly.

‘
Oui
,’ he whispered, looking around. ‘Perhaps this valley is too remote for the bush meat hunters.’

‘What other predators live here besides lions?’

‘Every one you can think of, and many you cannot.’

There were no stragglers in our line after that. We stayed close and watched each other’s backs, and brushed away the spiders and insects that dropped or alighted on us, before stingers, jaws or fangs could get to work.

Up ahead, Ayesha screamed and broke into a kind of dance, jumping around, her hands whipping through her hair, jerking forward and backward. Leila began slapping at her, like they do at NASCAR races when someone in the pits gets engulfed in those invisible methanol flames. Rutherford called this ‘the spider dance’. We’d all done it; all of us except Cassidy, that is, who moved like a leopard through his surroundings – flowing from one space to another, disturbing nothing. Ryder caught up with Leila and Ayesha, to lend a hand. The guy was sure putting in some heavy spadework.

I watched Boink’s meaty shoulders roll from side to side as he walked. The guy had lost a dozen pounds at least. A week in this place and he’d need a new wardrobe. I was about to point this out to him when something wet landed on my shoulder. The stuff reeked. More of it smacked against the side of my head and, suddenly, the trees above us came alive with yelling, shrieking and chattering, and black shapes charged out of the bushes at us, running and scampering down our line, feinting in and out, teeth bared.

‘Hey! Aggro little hairy guys,’ said Rutherford, amused, shouldering his weapon.

‘
Ne tirez pas!
Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.
Les chimpanzés, chimpanzés
.’ LeDuc rushed forward and pulled down on the gun’s barrel.

‘Who’s going to shoot?’ Rutherford protested, offended.

I watched as one of the chimps crapped into his buddy’s hands and then threw it at Rutherford. The Brit ducked. I was too slow and the stuff slapped into my face.

‘Thanks,’ I said as I wiped away the warm, stinking mass.

‘Do not look at them in the eyes,’ LeDuc warned. ‘They will think you are challenging them.’

‘Poo at twenty paces?’ I asked.

‘Keep moving!’ Cassidy called out and we lifted the pace to clear the area.

We stuck to the ravine for the best part of two hours, taking advantage of the clean water and the sunlight and the relatively easy going. Eventually the forest closed in overhead again. We were back to slashing into the bush for every yard of forward movement, dodging reptiles and arachnids, and the elephant grass with its razor’s edge, all of which seemed intent on attacking exposed skin. But with every step bringing us nearer to the territory occupied by FARDC, taking to the cover of the forest was going to be a healthier option than being out in the open and easy targets for snipers, pickets and patrols.

A cluster of moss and liana-covered rocks pushed up through the leaf litter and away from the ants that seemed to cover every square inch of the forest floor no matter where we were; red fuckers with jaws like interlocking fish hooks that latched on and wouldn’t let go.

‘Can we rest for a while?’ I heard Leila ask Ryder.

Cassidy heard it too and called a halt. Both women collapsed against a boulder. Boink leaned against the face of the rock, sucking in oxygen, his sweaty face lined with exertion.

‘How much further, yo?’ he puffed.

Further till what? If he meant Cyangugu, he was looking at days. If he meant till we made contact with his buddies, Twenny and Peanut, his guess was as good as mine. So I told him what I thought he might want to hear. ‘Not far now, big guy.’

‘Good, ’cause I wanna shoot some motherfucker dead,’ he muttered.

‘Map,’ I said to Cassidy.

The sergeant extracted it from his webbing and flattened it against the rock.

‘We’re somewhere around here,’ he said, using his Ka-bar as a pointer.

The ridges and the lake at the bottom of the cliff tallied. It looked about right. We’d come further than I’d though.

West passed around some barbecued snake and everyone took the opportunity to rehydrate.

‘What now?’ Ryder asked, wiping snake grease off his mouth with his shoulder.

‘You and I are gonna scout forward,’ I said.

‘Oh . . . all right,’ he said with no enthusiasm for the idea.

‘And you might like to muddy yourself up a little,’ I suggested. Apart from a light growth on his cheeks, he looked like he was ready for Sunday school, his face and arms all scrubbed nice and pink. His 97 was propped against a rock beside LeDuc. I picked it up and handed it to him. ‘Get a couple of spare mags, a machete, and make sure of your water supply.’

‘What, now?’ he asked.

‘Got something else to do?’

No response.

‘Leila, Ayesha,’ I called up. They’d climbed the rocks and their heads appeared over the top ledge. ‘Where’s Boink . . .?’

‘Yo,’ said Twenny’s buddy, walking around from behind the wall, cupping some water from a bottle and splashing it on the back of his neck.

I made a general announcement. ‘Duke and I are going on ahead. We need to know how far the FARDC lines extend.’

‘Why?’ asked Boink.

‘So that we don’t just walk into them,’ said Cassidy.

‘Can I ask a question?’ said Leila.

Asking
for anything was a pleasant change where she was concerned.

‘What’s on your mind?’

‘I can’t hear any shooting. How do you know we’re close to the enemy?’

‘This hill we’re on plateaus not far from here, ma’am,’ said Cassidy. ‘According to the map, the valley the FARDC occupied is down the other side, and around a mile and a half to the east. We’ve got a lot of rock between us and any gunshots. But you’re right, we should be able to hear
something
. Maybe when we get onto the ridge.’

‘And what if something happens to you?’ Leila asked me.

I figured that she included Ryder in that.

‘We’ll be back.’

‘But what if, yo?’ Boink said.

‘You’ll head due east to Lake Kivu.’

Neither he nor Ayesha seemed overly happy about this, but for different reasons. I was starting to think that maybe Leila looked on me as some kind of lucky charm – her own personal rabbit’s foot. And Boink wasn’t going anywhere without his boss, whether I was dead or alive. The big man cocked his head on an angle, a crevasse between his eyebrows – not happy.

To avoid a raft of unnecessary questions, I didn’t tell them that I intended to go back to the FARDC encampment to check on whether Twenny Fo and Peanut were still alive. ‘If we don’t make it back,’ I said, ‘the best hope Twenny, Peanut and Fournier have got rests on you getting word back to Colonel Firestone as quickly as possible.’

The silence was thick. No one liked the idea that more of us might get left behind. I had expected an argument from Leila because one seemed to follow every decision, but everyone knew the score – even her, for once.

‘Be careful, Vince,’ Leila said.

Her concern for my health took me by surprise. Her getting my name wrong didn’t. I checked over the M4 and wriggled the additional mags jammed into my webbing to make sure that they were secure.

‘Take this,’ said Rutherford, putting the telescopic sight from the sniper rifle into my pack. ‘Might come in handy.’

‘You’d better have this, too,’ said Cassidy, handing me the map.

‘No, keep it. I know where I’m going. If we don’t make it back, you’ll need it.’

‘You’ve got five hours of daylight left,’ said Cassidy. ‘Less under the canopy. You’ll want to be back well before that or you’ll walk right past us.’

‘Give us till the morning. If we’re not back by noon tomorrow, your next stop is Lake Kivu.’

Ryder glanced my way.
Overnight?

Cassidy motioned at the rocks. ‘This is as good a place as any to hunker down for a while.’

‘We miss the deadline, you’re gone,’ I said.

‘My dad used to say, “He who was not there is wrong.”’

‘Cy, getting these folks back to Rwanda is not a suggestion.’

‘So it’s an order?’

‘It’s an order.’

The subtext of this was that if Ryder and I didn’t make it back and Cassidy left us behind, there’d be an inquiry into our disappearance. The sergeant just wanted my position as the team leader stated in front of witnesses. I’d officially told him the lives of the people around him were now in his hands.

‘Good luck,’ said Rutherford. He and West lifted their weapons in a gesture of ‘see you later’.

‘
A bientôt
,’ LeDuc said with a slight bow.

Ayesha waved. Leila and Boink glared. I noted the departure time as Ryder and I walked into the forest, heading a little west of south, according to the compass on my Seiko. A dozen paces beyond the rocks, and the forest behind closed in and cut us off from the main party. The machete was sharp and perfectly weighted. Letting it fall on the greenery in front was mostly all that was needed to slice a little more headway, as long as we stayed clear of the elephant grass and clumps of bamboo. We made good time and kept the angle of the incline steady underfoot so that we tracked a straight line, more or less.

‘What happened to Ayesha?’ Ryder asked after a while.

‘When?’ I answered, bunting the question away. I knew exactly what he was getting at.

‘When she was held captive. Something happened down there.’

‘She saw a man’s hands get cut off,’ I reminded him, sticking to the facts. The closest she’d come to something like that in her civilian life was maybe a broken nail. With the flat of the machete blade, I turned away the head of a mustard-colored viper dangling from an overhanging palm frond.

Ryder stepped beyond its reach. ‘You’re not giving me a straight answer.’

‘Look, Duke, I know you and Ayesha are friends, but if it’s any more than that, you’re not helping her – not in this place.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You’re in uniform, buddy, cowboy-up.’

‘I resent that,’ he said. ‘I
volunteered
to go on the mission that brought her back, remember?’

For some reason I thought of the blond in my alligator joke. Was I being unkind? ‘Look, this isn’t a challenge on some reality dating show, and Ayesha is not the only principal whose life is in danger. You want to be effective, then join the team and stop behaving like you’re her gimp.’

‘That’s offensive.’

I didn’t care what he thought it was. I hooked the machete into a wall of fronds. Ayesha mesmerized the guy. It was time he did his job and avoided the emotional involvement. Maybe then he wouldn’t end up feeling personally responsible for her safety; avoid the mistakes I’d made with Anna. Today’s Ayesha was a different person from the girl who stepped off the plane at Kigali.

‘No, “offensive” is you taking our principals on an excursion through my recent past,’ I said.

Ryder and I walked in silence. He kept his thoughts to himself. I tried to have no thoughts at all and concentrated on projecting my senses beyond what I could see, which wasn’t that far beyond my face. The rainforest was thick here – I’d be easy to cut our way into a clearing and find ourselves face to face with a hundred FARDC or CNDP troops or, worse, more shit-throwing chimps.

It took an hour of fending off vipers and spiders to reach the top of the hill, and still there were no sounds of battle. Something was up. We kept going west of south for another fifteen minutes. I hacked a hole into a screen of fronds and came out into a broad tunnel of broken vegetation; the trees, shrubs and bushes already cleared in front of us. I stood in the relatively open space as rain started to drip through the canopy. I took a closer look at the plant life. It had been cut, the still-green remnants lying trampled on the leaf litter. The tunnel had been cut recently. I crouched on my haunches. Some of the fronds had pressure marks on them that resembled the tread from boot soles. A lot of men had passed this way. Duke was about to say something; I put my finger to my lips and signaled him to follow. Creeping forward across the cleared area, I found that it was roughly twenty meters wide. I cut my way into the untouched bush and waited for Duke to come up behind me.