Ghost Watch (57 page)

We came line-abreast through the last row of banana trees, out into the clear, ten meters between each of us. Cassidy was to my left, Ryder on my right, Rutherford and West out on the right flank. We knew we could be walking toward our deaths. I spat on the ground. Bring it fucking on. I was tired of this shit. So fucking tired. We all were. Time to roll the dice and put an end to it now, one way or another. My own anger surprised me. Two weeks ago in Afghanistan, I’d have cared about my own death about as much as I cared about slapping the life out of a mosquito. Something had moved on. Maybe it was just time. Perhaps if I ever managed to get comfortable again, I would go back to flipping off the Reaper.

Leila had been cooperative – more than I’d expected her to be. She’d not only given us everything we needed, but actually
helped
, rolling up her raggedy designer sleeves and taking direction from Ayesha. I finally put my finger on it. It wasn’t enough for Leila to be wanted – she had that from millions of fans and a legion of staff, business managers, attorneys and accountants. What she required was to feel
needed
. So, Leila had personal worth issues. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Maybe if I’d handled her differently – treated her as a person rather than as an object to protect – we’d have gotten on better. Or maybe not.

I glanced over my shoulder again to check the dawn. It had arrived, three minutes behind schedule, or maybe it was my Seiko that was behind the times. Cassidy had four smoke canisters and I had three. There was no breeze to speak of, but if the air was moving at all, it was coming from behind our left shoulders and drifting to the right. As the night slipped into its morning grays, around fifty meters from the edge of the plantation, I gave the signal to halt. I hoped this dumb-ass idea worked. If not, we were dead.

The stillness of the morning was breached by a high-pitched war cry coming from within the rainforest’s throat, a black open hole wrapped around the access road in the tangle of liana, palms and hardwoods directly ahead that as yet remained untouched by the dawn. I gave Cassidy the agreed signal. He cracked the first of the smoke canisters and tossed it half a dozen meters to his left, and pitched another one twenty meters further out in the same direction as the first. The cans hissed and green smoke poured out of them. I broke the seal on one of mine and dropped it behind me. Orange smoke swept between my legs, merged with the green and began to form a wall that climbed and spread out across our line. I popped the other cans and scattered them behind us. Cassidy did the same and then gave the signal to advance. We walked forward into the smoke, taking long strides, our rifles brandished one-handed and held high over our heads.

A scream of many voices rose from the rainforest ahead, a scream of boys – some high and squeaky, some breaking with adolescence. They were beginning their charge. It stopped at the edge of the rainforest and so did the noise, suddenly and eerily, echoes bouncing around the hills. And then the shooting started. Red tracer rounds whizzed around and above me, the air alive with them. I couldn’t see Cassidy and the others, but I guessed they were getting the same deal. The opposing force was firing blind into the smoke, unsure of what to make of it. I felt a round pass close to my wrist, dragging the smoke behind it. I kept walking. And then the swirling green and orange wall was behind me and I was striding toward the rainforest and the line of children armed with assault weapons, out in the open ground with no cover, through the light drizzle.

I glanced to my right and saw that Ryder, Rutherford and West had come through the smoke, their rifles held high. On my left, Cassidy waved his M4 and made a sound that was almost a snarl. I saw three boys charging toward me, firing from the hip, and when they saw me, they came to a sudden stop. Fear swept across their faces like a Congo storm front. I heard the words ‘
Les fantômes! Les fantômes!
’ They threw their guns down into the mud and ran back into the rainforest, a scream coming from their throats that was different from the one they charged forward with – terror in it. I saw movement out in front of West – four boys who wouldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, young even by the standards here – fleeing back into the trees, their hands up in the air, all desire to fight replaced by a panic to get away from the white zombie soldiers with heads that looked like living skulls, striding toward them out of their worst nightmare, coming to take them to hell.

‘The horror,’ I murmured.

The soft patter of rain was the only sound they left behind.

‘Shit, skipper,’ Rutherford called out, ‘you’re a fucking miracle worker, you are.’

West and Ryder began hooting.

There was a tingle between my shoulder blades that ran up to my mud-caked scalp and down the back of my legs. Had we really pulled this off?

‘Cooper!’

I knew that voice, and it wasn’t friendly.
Coopah.
It was Lissouba. I saw him, eighty meters or so away, over on our far left. Something was struggling in his grasp. It was one of his boy soldiers, the kid running in midair like a cartoon character, his feet off the ground.

‘You think you have won with this trick of yours, but you have not. I will regather my men and assure them that they have more to fear from me than from men painted to look like devil soldiers.’

He then raised his free hand, shot the boy in the head with a handgun, killing him instantly, and threw the body to the ground.

‘No!’ Cassidy yelled.

‘I will be back for you soon and you will all die!’

He turned, took two and a half steps into the rainforest and an explosion tore him into sausage filling.

A Claymore will do that – even half of one.

CASSIDY AND I SCOUTED the trail and surrounding areas to the grassy knoll while Rutherford, Ryder and West went back to the razor wire to give our principals the news, and bring them forward to meet us.

The sergeant and I found nearly a dozen rifles, a mixture of Nazar-ians, Kalashnikovs and ‘scrubbed’ M16s. We took their bolts, without which they were useless. We also took the mags that had any ammunition compatible with our M4s. We saw no one along the way. At least, no one with a pulse. We found no dead child soldiers, aside from the boy Lissouba had murdered in front of us. We buried the kid, with a toy monkey made from clay that Leila found in the village workshop. Dreams with dead kids joining the scorpions I could do without. Lis-souba must have been holding his kindergarten back for some reason that we’ll never know. Cassidy said not a single word the entire time we were scouting and I just knew that the image of Lissouba blowing the boy’s brains out was on his mind. It was on mine. We came across the pig that had lost the use of its legs. It had bled to death, and was giving its ham to the flies and maggots, one tiny piece at a time.

When we got to the knoll, we found evidence of a hasty evacuation –

lots of discarded army greens, rifles and so forth. Maybe the boys had got word that their guardian was gone for good and that they could now go and do whatever. I hoped that meant they were heading back to their villages. We didn’t need to climb down the wall and scout the landing to know that the boat would be gone.

It wasn’t long before our principals arrived in company with the PSOs. Cassidy and I stood up for the reunion. Leila, Ayesha and Peanut ran forward and I soon found myself in a group hug with them, all crying. I wondered why Peanut was all tears. Did he know what had been going on? Maybe he was just channeling the vibe.

‘Vin, I . . .’ Leila stuttered, ‘I want to say sorry for everything.’

‘But let me guess – you can’t,’ I said.

She glared at me in that ferocious way of hers, then let it go.

‘Can’t you ever be serious?’

‘You wouldn’t like me nearly as much.’

‘Thank you, Vin. I mean that. I . . . I . . .’

I wondered what it was that she couldn’t get out. I’ve been a pain in the ass? I ’d settle for that.

Ayesha and Peanut stayed for a one on one.

‘I’ll never forget this, Vin. Never,’ Ayesha said. ‘You and your men – thank you.’ She kissed me on the cheek and then moved on to Cassidy. I figured West, Rutherford and Ryder had already received a little sugar from our principals.

‘You did it, ghost man . . . you motherfucking did it!’ said Twenny, slapping my wounded shoulder. ‘You need anything, you feel me,
anything . . .!
’

‘I had help,’ I reminded him.

Boink pointed at me and said, simply, ‘Yo.’

It was great that we were suddenly just one big happy family, but there was still one minor problem to contend with – namely, how the hell were we going to get out of here? I was setting up the watch, considering the wisdom of a signal fire or building another raft, when Ayesha, looking skywards, said, ‘You hear that?’

‘Hear what?’ I asked her.

I caught it a couple of seconds later – a chopper. The sound of its main rotor blades grew louder, thudding up and down the river valley.

‘There,’ said Ayesha, pointing.

It was no bigger than a bottle fly when it flew out of the distant low cloud at about five hundred feet, following the river bends, but it grew quickly in size and was headed our way. We hurriedly led our principals back into the rainforest. We had no idea whose chopper this was, but experience told us that it was likely to be someone unfriendly. And all I wanted to do was go to sleep. Hiding in the rainforest, we loaded fresh mags into our rifles. And, of course, I still had a grenade.

The chopper settled onto our knoll, nose toward the rainforest. It was a civilian job, a Bell Jet Ranger. The doors opened and three men and one woman jumped out, all wearing navy rain jackets and US Army BDU pants, the older-style jungle-pattern battle dress uniform. A couple of the guys were older, in their fifties, and chubby. The woman was somewhere in her forties, with a butt that reminded me of a couple of hot air balloons bumped together, and scraps of red hair escaping from beneath a navy ball cap with the initials CDC embroidered on its peak. She was the boss, pointing at this and that, setting the pace. There was nothing in the least military about any of them, aside from their jackets and pants. The two men got their act together and pulled a brown plastic trunk with the initials CDC stenciled in black on its side from the aircraft. The pilot kept the motors running – he wasn’t going to hang around. I went to stand up, but Cassidy held my arm.

‘It’s okay,’ I told him. ‘Take a look at those buns. They gotta be American.’

I grabbed a nearby palm frond spotted with water droplets and used it to rub the mud off my shoulder and reveal the Stars and Stripes. Looking at Cassidy, West, Ryder and Rutherford covered in white mud from head to toe, their eye sockets blacked out and vertical red stripes of Chanel Rouge Allure lipstick drawn down across their mouths, it was clear that we were going to make an interesting first impression. Maybe if they saw the flag they wouldn’t instantly jump into their chopper and fly away. I moved across to Leila to have a word with her.

‘I need you,’ I said, appealing to her inner demons.

‘You do?’ she answered.

‘I need you to come with me and talk to these people. You’re the only person among us who looks halfway presentable. Can you do that?’

‘Yes, I can do that.’

‘If anything goes off the rails, I’ve got you covered.’

‘Okay. I trust you,’ she said.

It’s about time, I nearly replied.

‘When I give the signal, bring everyone up,’ I told Cassidy.

I stood and moved to the trail, breaking cover, Leila behind me. We walked through the rainforest and into the open area of the knoll, now occupied by a small chunk of Western civilization.

The woman and her team had their backs to us, and the pilot, moments from departure, was involved with his instruments.

‘Morning, ma’am,’ I called out.

The woman turned and saw me and took a step back, her hand going to her chest in shock. The guys all dove in behind her, taking cover.

‘Who . . . who are you!?’

‘Major Cooper, United States Air Force. And this is Leila,’ I said, bringing the star forward. ‘Our chopper went down.’

The woman’s hand moved from her chest to her mouth when recognition dawned on her. ‘Oh my God. It’s you . . . You’re alive. They’ve been searching the lake for the wreckage – Lake Kivu.’

‘The Center for Disease Control,’ I said. ‘So you know about the village?’ I gestured behind me.

‘Yes, we’ve got a whole team about to arrive and . . .’ Her look of surprise and wonder shifted into the fear zone. ‘Wait, you haven’t been
into
that village, have you?’

‘No, ma’am,’ I said, telling a half-truth. ‘We surveyed the area from a distance. There were bodies out in the open. One of my men thought it might be Ebola.’

‘Several people fed the village, went down river. They became sick and we were called in. It’s not Ebola, not as contagious, but it’s still a level four biohazard – Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. A tick that lives on infected animals carries it. Probably bush meat in this instance. You sure you went nowhere near any infected persons?’

‘I’m sure, ma’am.’

I gave the signal to rejoin and the balance of Team Ghost Watch accompanied our principals out of the shadows.

‘Oh my God . . .’ the woman said when she saw the parade.