Ghost Watch (36 page)

Lockhart and Colonel Cravat spoke with the orange man and he pointed down into the pit, showing where he found whatever it was that was getting them all in a lather.

Then Lockhart held the object up to the beer gallery and yelled, ‘Door!’ which was met by a rousing cheer, raised bottles and plenty of backslapping.

‘Door? What door?’ I muttered.

‘
D’or
,’ said the man lying beside me on the ground, also watching Lockhart and the others. ‘Gold.’

T
he soldiers and the man who made the strike each received a bottle of beer. A nugget of gold in exchange for a beer. I licked my lips and thought, yeah, fair trade. All three of them then shuffed off back down into the pit. Lockhart, Fu Manchu and Colonel Cravat headed for the shacks and the men on the verandas crowded around to inspect the find.

‘Who is that man?’ I asked the Congolese beside me. ‘The officer – the one with the white scarf tucked into his shirt. You know his name?’

‘He is Colonel Innocent Lissouba. A very bad man.’

I repeated the name to fx it in my memory.

‘He came to my village. His soldiers took all the women and all the men. They killed many. I want to kill him.’

The man wriggled forward to get a better view of the pit.

‘My wife, she is down there,’ he said, trying to spot her.

‘Where’s your village?’ I asked. He gestured off in a direction away from the village I’d just witnessed being plundered for the able-bodied. There were many more laborers down in the pit than I’d seen transported here, which meant there were other villages nearby. For all I knew, Lockhart, Lissouba and his cohorts were out scouring the countryside, press-ganging anyone strong enough to lift a shovel.

‘You are American! You must help me free my wife, my people.’

‘Do I look like Bruce Willis?’ I said.

‘Bruce Willis, yes!’

The guy was excited.

‘I’m not Bruce Willis. I’ve got hair.’

He went back to scouring the pit.

‘There,’ the African said, pointing, suddenly agitated. ‘Look, she is there!’

He indicated a group of women slopping around on the edge of a puddle in the bottom of the hole, digging at it with their hands and dropping whatever they could pull up into the steel buckets. I wasn’t sure which of the women was his wife.

‘She is alive,’ he said, obviously relieved. ‘I know these women. And there is my brother and my uncle,’ he continued. He sat back on his haunches, his face split by a wide grin. He’d been expecting the worst, but this was obviously the best possible result.

A wall of rain, gray and leaning forward at an angle like it was in a hurry to get somewhere, thundered across the forest on the far side of the pit, coming our way. Its arrival didn’t send anyone scurrying for cover. It seemed to arrive daily at this time in the afternoon. I knew of train services less reliable. Overhead, someone threw a blanket over the sun.

At that instant, Lockhart and his two buddies walked out of one of the shacks and started jogging toward the parking lot. I lost sight of them at that point, but a Dongfeng moved off soon after, probably heading back to the FARDC encampment or to the village to cause a bunch more misery. I’d seen enough and pushed back from the lip of the mine.

‘Where are you going?’ the African wanted to know, anxious, grabbing at my sleeve.

It was time to put him straight – that I was not some kind of advance guard for Tommy Franks. ‘My unit and I made a forced landing in a helicopter and some of my people have been taken captive. We’re all in the same boat with you and your wife, and it’s got a big hole in the bottom.’

‘Then
I
will help
you
,’ he said.

‘You’re not Bruce Willis, either,’ I replied, maybe a little too quickly. He was a local. He’d know the area, which put him way ahead of Bruce. I gave him a test. ‘The road up there. It starts in the forest. Where does it go?’

‘To Mukatano, a city twenty kilometer this way.’ He gestured vaguely south. ‘The men who took the trees make the road. They are gone now.’

Twenty kilometers – twelve miles – a lot more achievable than hiking out to Goma or Rwanda. I doubted the city bit. It had to be a small town, too small to be noted on LeDuc’s map. ‘Is there a sawmill at Mukatano?’ I asked.

‘
Non
.’

‘Is Mukatano on a river?’

‘The Zaire?
Non.
’

‘Isn’t that what this place used to be called?’

‘It was named after the river.’

I scratched my cheek and an insect having a meal got caught under my fingernails. If the road ended at Mukatano and there were no sawmill there and no river, how’d those loggers get the logs processed? ‘Where’d the loggers put the lumber – in the river?’

‘There was a place for this, but it is gone. They had a dock, but even that is gone. People take it for cooking fres.’

‘The road goes there too, yes?’

‘
Oui
.’

‘How’d you escape?’ I asked. ‘Why aren’t you down in the pit with the people from your village?’

‘I was at another village when the soldiers came. It is near the road also.
Médecins Sans Frontières
is there. They have medicines. I went to get them and when I come back, everyone in my village was gone . . . or dead.’

The memories of what he’d seen came back to him and large tears welled in his eyes. They ran down his face, mixing with the rainwater. The village I’d just come from gave me a fair idea of the scenes he was recalling.

‘Where will these people sleep tonight?’ I asked. ‘What’ll they eat?’

The man wiped his face with his hands. ‘The soldiers will give them some food, but not much. Some will sleep in the mine; some are taken back to their villages. There is a camp nearby. My people will sleep there under plastic. There are some United Nations tents. But there is no clean water. Some have died from stomach sickness. It is bad.’

It didn’t sound good. The scale of this cruelty was difficult for me to get my head around. ‘So your people . . . they just work until they die?’

‘No, they work until this army gets frightened away by a bigger army, and then we will go back to our village.’

‘How many times has this happened?’

‘They found gold here two years ago. Since then, many armies come through: CNDP, Mai-Mai, PARECO, FDLR, LRA, FARDC . . . Each one is worse than the last. Sometimes they punish us for helping their enemies, but we have no choice. They loot and steal, kill and rape and they pass on the sickness – the sickness I go to the MSF to get the medicine for. My village was once large and rich, but now it is small and we starve.’

‘Where is the camp your people are taken to at night?’

‘It is near. You wish to see it also.’

‘Not now. What’s your name?’ I asked him.

‘Francis.’ He glanced at the nametag on my body armor. ‘Your name is Cooper. I can read, also.’

‘Francis. I’ll be honest with you – I don’t know what my men and I can do here. There are many more of them than there are of us.’

‘You will do something, I know it.’

Yeah, and right there could be the problem. Who’s to say that what we did wouldn’t turn around and bite all of us in the ass right back, Francis and his people included? I parted the foliage, took another look at the mine and the shacks, but there was nothing of interest going on other than a lot of ice-cold beer being guzzled. A couple of soldiers were leering and calling out to a group of women working a section of mud nearby. Mud, beer, women. I could see where it was heading and this was one time I didn’t want to be around when it arrived. I made a quick decision. ‘Come with me,’ I said to Francis, and backed away from the lip of the mine.

The Congolese hesitated a moment while he again located his wife down in the pit. Satisfied that she was in no immediate danger, he said, ‘Yes, thank you. I come with you.’ He turned for one last look over his shoulder before following me to where the trucks were parked. By the time we arrived there only three Dongfengs remained. At the edge of the cleared area, I gave Francis a quick briefing followed by a practical demonstration, scooting across open ground to the nearest truck and climbing up inside its wheel arches, and then waving him across.

We waited twenty minutes, squeezed into the truck’s sub frame, before its diesel thrummed into life. Half a dozen soldiers piled in the back and the vehicle finally pulled out of the lot and onto the road, heading in the right direction at least – back to the village I’d come from.

The return ride was a different kind of uncomfortable from the trip out. Instead of dust and grit, the wheels fung water, mud and the occasional stone at us while steam boiled into clouds off the exhaust pipe. I counted down the hills – two of them – and waited for the truck to pull over into the village. But then we swept around a corner, the driver back-shifted into the lower gears, and we started up a third hill.

‘Shit,’ I muttered to myself. We weren’t stopping in the village. The ride was taking us all the way into the FARDC camp. The truck came to a stop at a roadblock, a brief conversation ensued between the driver and the soldiers manning it, and then we were underway again. A few minutes later, the vehicle’s brakes wheezed as we came to a stop, the engine died and the soldiers climbed down. I motioned to Francis to stay put and keep quiet. It was after five and the light was fading. We were stuck here until the night gave us some cover, shivering with cold, caked with mud – my teeth grinding with it – the rain causing small waterfalls to run off the sides of the truck and into the growing lake on the ground beneath us.

We came out of hiding an hour and a half later, when the darkness was complete and the smells of kerosene fires and cooking drifted across the encampment, the men preoccupied with food. I unfolded my cramped arms, legs and neck, and dropped with a splash into the puddles beneath us. Francis did likewise. There was another Dongfeng parked in front of our hiding place. Fifty meters ahead, I could make out the hazy shape of the Mi-8 chopper. I had no idea about the placement of sentries but I had to assume that they were around. I was thinking about all this as the rain softened into a fog-like mist and the air came alive with the sound of mating frogs.

I whispered to Francis, ‘Follow me, stay close,’ and then, doubled over, I headed for the uncleared scrub that marked the edge of the forest. We made it without incident and stopped roughly midway between the trucks and the chopper.

‘Where are your men?’ Francis asked.

Good question, and I wished I had an equally good answer to go with it. When I last saw them, they were babysitting. I wondered what they’d been up to while I’d taken the detour. ‘Around,’ I said, keeping it ambiguous, but the truth of it was that I had not the faintest idea where my unit might be – still back at the nearby village, or back on the hill that provided overwatch, or back at Cyangugu with drinks in hand . . . who knew?

As I sat in the scrub, dragging my hand across the back of my neck, smearing the mosquitoes that settled on my bare skin and watching several fires haloed by the mist, it seemed to me that the war effort around here had tapered off somewhat. If I weren’t mistaken, the attitude of the men walking around was pretty relaxed; surprising, given that the CNDP force was somewhere nearby. I’d have thought that the proximity of its sworn enemy would have made these boys just a little nervous. I was considering all this, along with what my limited options might be, when I heard the familiar thump of a helicopter’s main rotor blades away in the distance. The sound drifted in and out as the air currents shifted, silencing the frogs as it grew louder with each second. The aircraft was clearly inbound. A party of men arrived at the edge of the cleared area. Several of them waved flashlights blithely about for the benefit of enemy snipers, but no shots rang out.

The chopper arrived from the east. It wasn’t a military aircraft. It was big and sleek and, as it flew overhead and pivoted almost a hundred and eighty degrees before settling on its retractable landing gear, its underbelly strobe light revealed a color scheme of gold with a white stripe running down the center. The pilots cut the engines and the whine of its turbines instantly dropped away. It looked like one of those big expensive choppers that ply between New York and Washington DC, carrying executive types overloaded with taxpayer-funded bail outs. A Sikorsky. I couldn’t see what was going on once it had landed because, aside from being dark, whoever got out of it exited on the side of the aircraft facing the camp and the rest of the helicopter got in the way. I tapped my African friend on the shoulder and we crawled through the forest to get a better angle on the proceedings. The view quickly improved. Portable electric lanterns were turned on and flashlights waved about, illuminating a bunch of very interesting faces. Lockhart was part of the welcoming committee, as was Colonel Cravat – Colonel Lissouba – and the Chinese PLA guy. They were shaking hands with the guy from Swedish American Gold and his African American buddy. Both of their names escaped me for the moment, but I remembered them – the two ex-pat autograph hunters Lockhart declined to introduce me to back at Cyan-gugu on the night of the concert.

Their presence here was surprising and intriguing, equally as surprising and intriguing as the presence of the CNDP’s Colonel Makenga, who’d probably been picked up from his ridgeline on the way through. And Makenga’s presence was not nearly as surprising and intriguing as that of Colonel Biruta’s, the CNDP officer commanding the brigade entertained by Twenny Fo and Leila at the Cyangugu training base; the officer with the nice symmetrical scar that divided his face into equal parts. Another guy stepped into the light. It was my ol’ buddy, LeDuc – his presence here not in the least surprising or intriguing.