Ghost Watch (56 page)

Five men made it through and kept coming. I shot one, Rutherford got the other and I figured a third passed a little too close to Cassidy for his own good. Far over on my left, the remaining two tripped one of Cassidy’s surprises, a sapling onto which had been lashed some stools taken from the village workshop, their legs sharpened to points. The trap was positioned so that the sapling would swing through an arc of around ten feet and catch the unwary in the chest.

The Congolese were unwary.

The survivors from Cassidy’s hotpots retreated, dragging off their dead, but leaving behind the two men impaled on the stools. I crept left toward them, around and behind Cassidy, moving fast and, to avoid friendly fire, giving a cautionary whistle as I went. When I got close enough, I could see that one of the men was moving, his chin on his chest, three legs of a stool buried in his ribcage. His head moved languidly around in a circle. He hummed as if he had a gut ache and doing this somehow took away some of the pain. He died before he could get to the chorus. A grenade hung from his webbing. Both men had a spare mag tucked into the tops of their trousers. Their rifles were nowhere to be seen. I quickly hunted around for them but couldn’t find them. I figured they’d probably dropped them when the forest came to life and took theirs.

I fell back fifty meters, as we planned to do after the first attack. Rutherford, Cassidy, West and Ryder had already done so. I found Cas-sidy and handed over one of the spare mags. Neither of us said a word. I headed for a hole in our line that I thought needed to be plugged and took up a position against an old hardwood whose roots came down from above. I could see Rutherford, but only because I knew where to look. I couldn’t see Cassidy even though I knew where he was. I crept across to Rutherford, gave him the captured mag and then returned to my tree.

An hour and a half passed. I urinated where I stood. The liquid running down my leg was warm and comforting but then the cold quickly seeped in to take its place in my bladder and I began to shiver. It started to rain at around the same time, making a noise that sounded like a stampede of small animals as the squall line passed over the canopy. We’d been in this part of the world long enough now to know that sound would be used as cover.

Frag grenades suddenly detonated in and around our previous positions, the noise of the explosions booming around us, close and personal this time. I could hear fragmented metal tinkling like wind chimes in a hurricane as the metal storm lanced through the foliage, became embedded in tree trunks or fell steaming onto the soaked ground. The attacking force gave its whereabouts away moments later, charging along the forest trails once more, certain that we were half dead, or worse, shooting randomly, throwing ammunition around like rice at a wedding. Tracer, supersonic pencil lengths of red light, lanced through the trees all round us, but it was mostly high and all of it was wild. I guessed that the enemy was less than thirty feet from Ryder and West before they returned fire. The Congolese’s cries turned into screams, but still they kept coming. The shooting became point blank, desperate and anonymous, a rush of death in the darkness. And then silence. It hung between the trees, heavy and dark like blood-soaked cloth pegged out by the Reaper.

I looked toward the epicenter of the fight, over in Rutherford and Ryder’s direction, but couldn’t see anything, my night vision wrecked by the bright flashes of exploding ordnance. I turned back to scan the bush in front of me, just as the machete swung at my head out of nowhere. I lifted the M4, an instinctive reaction. The blade sparked as it glanced off the barrel and buried itself in the trunk of the hardwood. The man holding it wasted a precious second trying to work it free, during which time I swung the M4’s butt in an arc that caught the bottom of his chin. I heard his teeth splintering, a sound that reminded me of crunching ice. The force of the blow pushed his head up. He staggered back and I shot him through the hip, which was like hitting him with a five-pound sledgehammer. It blew him clean off his feet and landed him on his back. It was only when he fell that I saw that there was a boy accompanying him, and that he was close. The kid, shaking violently, was also pointing a large black rifle at me. The rifle discharged but the slug missed. The boy fdgeted with the selector mechanism, going for full auto I guessed, moving back and looking at the mechanism while he did so. I darted forward while he was preoccupied and kicked the gun out of his hands. He stood there, a small black shadow, slightly pigeon-toed, looking like any moment he was going to start bawling. I went to grab him but he shouted something, dropped to the ground and was gone, snatched by the shadows.

A short, sharp rustle in the bush to my left informed me that Cassidy had had his own visitors, but I couldn’t go to his aid without leaving a hole the enemy might penetrate and get in behind us. I had to leave him to it. Two gunshots and the situation there was resolved. Cassidy whistled a low note to let me know that it was resolved in his favor. I answered with a whistle. Time to fall back again.

We withdrew our line a hundred meters or so, mixing up the distance of each withdrawal as planned. When we were set, Rutherford whistled and approached.

‘Any more mags, Cooper?’ he asked, waving at his own personal cloud of bloodsuckers. ‘Duke and Mike are almost dry.’

‘No,’ I said. I did a mental count. ‘I got two rounds left in my Sig – nine, maybe ten in the M4.’

I popped the carbine’s mag and racked out the rounds with my thumb, counting ten as the spring released them into the palm of my hand. Ten rounds – better than nothing, but only by ten. I handed over six and fed four back into the slot. I also had the grenade the enemy had donated to our cause, which I kept. Rutherford said thanks and disappeared.

How many more people was Lissouba intending to sacrifice? How many men and boys did he have left at his disposal? He’d tried the full frontal assault and then the decoy run. What next? My PSOs and I all sat in the darkness, listening to the night, and faced our own terrors. Mine was that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember Anna’s face. But, for some reason, I had no trouble remembering the hole in her chest and the way her heart rolled around beneath her shattered ribs, the way a fish founders when it’s dumped on the pier with a hook in its mouth. Maybe this faceless dying person without an identity was my subconscious providing me with a representation of everyone I’d been close to in recent times, almost all of whom were dead. Maybe Leila’s comment about me being a killer was right on the money. I kept sticking my hand in the fire until someone tried to pull it out and it always seemed to be that someone else who got burned instead of me. Like Anna.

‘Mr Cooper, are you there?’ called a voice through the night.

I snapped out of it. The accent was thick, with African and French overtones, ‘Cooper’ pronounced ‘Coopah’.

‘Mr Cooper. I am Colonel Lissouba. We can work something out, you and I, yes? We can make a deal.’

Colonel Lissouba. How about that? I was disinclined to give away my position by opening my mouth. And, of course, any deal from this shitbird wouldn’t be worth the blood it was written in. Folks would die – my folks.

‘You and I need to talk, Mr Cooper. You do not like to fight my boys, I know this, but the boys are all I have left. You will be killing children. Are you a child killer?’

There was a sudden burst of automatic fire and the screams of two men dying, way out past Cassidy on our far flank. The sergeant signaled that he would go check and that I should cover his position, which was reasonably close to mine. He also put his finger against his lips to let me know that talking wouldn’t be smart. He didn’t need to remind me.

‘You try my patience, Mr Cooper,’ Lissouba called out, angered when he realized that more of his people had just died anonymously, hung up on another of Cassidy’s tricks. They were the screams of men, not boys, but the fact that they’d at least made it past puberty didn’t make me feel any better. All of us had had more than enough of killing. I heard a choking, gurgling noise on the night air – Cassidy making sure of death with his Ka-bar.

‘You must have very little ammunition left,’ Lissouba continued after a lengthy pause. ‘When was the last time you ate real food? You have civilians with you. They need to be cared for. Come out now. End this.’

I returned the offer with a loud silence.

‘I know that you cannot retreat. I have heard on the radio that there is the blood fever in the village. Your only way out is to negotiate with me. I have food. I can get you back to your friends across the border. I would like to help you.’

No doubt about it, this sorry puke could play the game.

The luminescent hands on my watch told me that it was around an hour before sunrise. I couldn’t make up my mind whether the night had flown past or crept by. My stomach was cramping, I ached in every joint and muscle, and the skin on several parts of my body was rasped away by the mud and the grit embedded in the fabric of my clothes. Keeping my eyes open required force of will. Even allowing myself to blink slowly wasn’t worth the risk – the urge to leave them shut was almost overwhelming.

‘You must come out and talk. If you make me come and get you, you will all die.’

So much for Mr Helpful.

‘I will give you one hour to discuss this with your people, enough time to agree that this is your only option, but not enough time to set more traps for us. One hour.’

We had a truce till dawn, but then Lissouba’s troops would be more able to avoid the booby traps with a little light on the situation. I waited for the colonel to continue but he’d stopped yapping. The rain continued its rant, however, coming down heavy and unrelenting, the drops from the canopy overhead obese, Boink-sized. I ran my left hand, still sheathed in the remains of a shooter’s glove, down my face and dragged anthill grit over my skin. The rainforest around me appeared as a series of black shadows edged with silver lines and the air smelled heavy and loamy, with a hint of rotting leaves and gunpowder.

I looked between the lines of Lissouba’s offer. He wouldn’t be trying to make a deal unless he, too, was down to his last reserves. Most probably he had one final charge left in his people. We, on the other hand, had less than the resources required to stop it. But whichever way it went, we were going to be killing young boys, kids who’d been press-ganged into fighting, abducted from their villages. These kids, however, could shoot and the reality was that their bullets killed and maimed just as effectively as the rounds fired by grownups. Jesus, this was even more fucked up than usual. I heard a soft whistle and, a moment later, Cassidy materialized out of the shadows beside me.

‘What you got left, boss?’ he asked, nodding at my M4.

‘Four rounds, one grenade and real bad breath.’

A row of his small teeth flashed in the darkness. ‘Yeah, where’s a mint when you need one? I got five rounds. And there’s half a Claymore deployed in our rear, out on the left flank where the rainforest thins out a little. What about West and the others? What stores they got?’

‘A few rounds apiece.’

Neither of us said anything for a few seconds. We both had the same question and answer running through our minds.

‘We can’t surrender,’ said Cassidy. ‘We know what they’re gonna do.’

I nodded. We did.

‘We could pull back through the village,’ he suggested. ‘They won’t go through there.’

‘We could, but we won’t,’ I said. ‘You don’t want Ebola – trust me.’ It had been almost twelve hours since my brief exposure to the flies that might also have buzzed around the body Rutherford and I found in the village, and I still had no cold or fu symptoms. I had no control over my bowels though, which, when I thought about it, was probably every bit as unpleasant for anyone walking behind me as it was for me. Worse, maybe.

‘We got no choice then, have we?’ Cassidy dropped the mag from his M4 and checked its load. ‘Yeah, five rounds.’ He gazed up at the canopy. When his eyes came back down from the unbroken blackness, they were glistening. I noticed that around his neck hung a ju-ju bag of the type worn by nearly all of the Congolese we’d come across. ‘Jesus, Major. I don’t know . . . They’re just fucking kids, goddamn it,’ he said. ‘We got seven smoke canisters left. Maybe we could pop them, cause a diversion. We could slip through their line while it’s still dark, steal their boat.’

‘With our principals?’ I reminded him. Something like that might have been an option if it had just been us – the PSOs – on our own, but I couldn’t see Leila and her makeup case pulling it off . . . ‘But maybe . . . maybe we can bluff our way out,’ I said. And that was quite an interesting thing to say, especially as I had absolutely no idea what I meant by it. Bluff our way out? The statement had come from the part of my brain that was gathering threads, tying and retying them in different ways till it came up with an answer, only I couldn’t see it, not consciously. The threads seemed to be these: smoke canisters, ju-ju bag, Leila’s makeup case, kids.
Bluff our way out?
Then it suddenly crystallized into an image. And, damn, it was one helluva long shot.

Cassidy scratched a sore on his scalp. ‘What sort of bluff?’

‘We need to get West and the others and go ask Leila a question.’

‘And what are we gonna ask her?’

‘Whether we can borrow her lipstick.’

T
he hour flew like minutes. Five forty-five am, but still not a glimmer of the morning light that was due to sneak up behind the mountains sitting black on black against the Congo sky. The heavy cloud saw to that. The rain had turned to drizzle, light and annoying like the insects, and I shivered with cold as I walked slowly through the banana trees toward the rainforest and the last of Lis-souba’s force. The mud in my clothing was removing whole swathes of skin from my thighs, crotch and under my arms, darkening those areas with my blood.