by G M Eppers
Billings, Roxy, and the twins had joined Dinny, and Sylvia and Sir Haughty came around the rear of the plane as I emerged. “Sorry, nobody’s home,” I said. Billings was clenching his teeth. “What?”
The others were staring at me as if I’d turned green. “Hold still,” said Billings, stepping toward me slowly.
“What? Why?” I froze where I was as instructed, my heart thumping.
He reached one hand to the top of my head, very, very, slowly, then at the last moment his hand darted into my hair and the next thing I knew he had tossed something into the underbrush. There was some rustling as it scurried away.
“What was it?” I was thinking rat, or a lizard of some kind. Maybe a small snake trying to escape from the mongoose.
“Um . . . nothing,” said Billings, his jaw finally relaxing.
“A gray hair,” said Roxy, making it sound like a wild guess. “Just a gray hair. We know you don’t want them.”
Gray hairs didn’t go scurrying away into the jungle. I gulped, realizing that their reluctance pointed to it being a spider. A spider that made noise when you threw it at a pile of leaves. “Um, thanks.” I kept my cool as I walked around the plane toward Leotu, who stood like a statue with his feet wide apart and his arms crossed. I went behind him and spent a minute or two shaking out the heebie jeebies. I ducked my head and shook it out, slapping and rubbing my damp scalp to rid myself of spider cooties.
Once my skin stopped crawling I came out from behind our guide, who looked at me askance. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, sure,” I assured him. “Just, you know, things riding up.”
“Of course.” He faced forward again, dismissing the whole thing.
I have no doubt the others knew what I’d been doing, too, but they said nothing about it. Billings said, “Okay, so no one is here. I don’t get it.”
I licked my lips, though they were anything but dry. “They wouldn’t have tried to find their way back to Kinshasa, would they?”
“Maybe,” responded Dinny. “They could have packed up food and water supplies and headed east, following the rising sun, hoping to get back to the city. Or they could have headed west toward the shoreline where the open sky might get them a cell phone signal. But a mid-jungle rescue isn’t exactly a sure thing. Staying here might not have seemed like the best option at the time. Especially without cell phone service. Establishing communications would be top priority.”
Badger winced. “Now you tell us. Wait. They took food, water, and the guns, but left their personal items? And that doesn’t explain the body in the cabin.”
Dinny looked up toward the unseen open doorway. “I want to see the cockpit.”
“I can boost you up,” offered Billings as we abandoned the cargo hold and headed back to the access door. “Hold your breath.”
But before he could clasp his hands together, Nitro came out of the doorway and dropped to the ground. “What have you got, Nitro?” I asked.
He handed me a CURDS ID badge. There were a couple of blood smears on it, and the picture of a young man of Middle Eastern descent with a thin face, black hair, and a friendly smile. “Benjamin al Rubindi, Communications Officer.”
“Did he die in the crash?” I asked absent-mindedly.
I was expecting an affirmative answer, but Nitro shook his head grimly. “I don’t think he even died on the plane. Not enough blood.”
“What do you mean?”
Nitro lowered his head. “Cause of death is a gunshot wound to the back of the head. And a severe lack of the back of a head. Occipital and about half the parietal are missing. Virtually no brain matter left in the cavity.” Nitro has such a gift for too much detail. “But only a few isolated spots of blood here or there, no spray, no spatter, no pool.”
Now my jaw clenched. This rescue mission just got way more complicated. Everyone else unaccounted for and an execution. This was not at all what we had expected to find. It meant someone else was here in the jungle. Someone else who had a vastly different agenda.
While we spoke, Dinny tapped Billings on the shoulder and he obligingly clasped his hands together and gave Dinny a boost up to the doorway. She wasn’t quite as adept at climbing as the rest of us and hung onto the rim briefly, taking three tries to swing a leg up and climb inside. She faced outward, took a deep breath and held it, then turned and disappeared.
“His HEP belt is gone, but his badge was on the floor under a seat,” Nitro continued after Dinny’s successful entry.
“Ben? Damn.” Badger pursed his lips. He kicked the fuselage, and hopped on one foot for a while. “Damn it.”
“You knew him?” Avis asked. She and Agnes watched the doorway, ready to help Dinny get back down.
“Professionally. He was their communications guy. Awesome with African languages. He was in my class at the Academy. Wrote a thesis on the geographical evolution of Bantu languages in the fourteenth century.” He sat on the trunk of a tree felled by the plane and nursed his foot.
Roxy tapped her foot on an embedded rock, thinking. “If he didn’t die on the plane, who put him up there?”
Without much forethought, Badger said, “I suppose the team did, to avoid predation.” He didn’t look up, just sat there with his right foot on his left knee, fascinated by the sole of his shoe.
“Whoever shot him probably wouldn’t allow that. Billings said the arms locker is empty, right?” Billings nodded. “That’s a lot of weaponry to carry, and corral, what, with the flight crew nine or ten people?”
I decided to say it out loud, even though everyone already knew where this reasoning was going. “Someone else is here. A lot of someones. They put Ben back on the plane to make sure his body wouldn’t get dragged off, to make sure we would find him. A warning?”
“Maybe.” Badger’s attention to his footwear had me worried. He hadn’t kicked the plane that hard. No way was he seriously injured. Besides, if he thought it was bad he would have mentioned it to Nitro. Instead, he just sat there on the tree trunk, looking at the shoe. I stepped over and spoke to him in a low voice. “You okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry about Ben.”
“Thanks.”
“There’s more, isn’t there?”
He picked at some packed dirt in a tread. “Something doesn’t feel right. Like we’re missing something.” Finally, he put his right foot back on the ground. “I’m not sure. It’s just, I don’t know. Every time we turn around we find a dead body and we haven’t found any killers.”
“The Irish authorities will get Tevaughn Dunleavy. And we’ll get back there as soon as we can to clean up loose ends.”
“He’s not a killer and you know it.”
That stopped me cold. I did know it. He wasn’t innocent, but he wasn’t a killer, either. He had pushed Nitro off the wagon, true, but even the stampeding horses seemed designed to scare us, not kill us. The horses were not likely to blindly leap into that excavation site. Not even the girl in the trunk technically made him a killer. While disposing of a body took him out of running for the Paragon of Virtue award, it was far from murder. This interrupted case was irritating. We still had unanswered questions in Ireland, but here we were in the Congo with even more unanswered questions. Rescue mission. In and out. Yeah, right. “Whatever we’re missing,” I told Badger, “we’ll find it eventually. We always do.” I tried to sound more confident than I felt.
There were some clunking noises and Agnes and Avis both reached up to help Dinny back to the ground. With four hands beneath her, she made it to the ground easily. “We might have company,” they explained to her.
I expected some kind of reaction, perhaps trepidation if not outright fear, but she seemed to ignore them and walked down the side of the plane, examining the outside of the fuselage. She ducked under the sheared off remnants of a wing. We followed her, hanging back to give her room. “Anyone got a screwdriver?”
“Phillips or flat?” Badger was reaching into one of the
pockets of his HEP belt. It might have been the first time he’d actually needed it, but he pulled out a modular screwdriver, installing a Phillips head bit from the storage inside the handle when Dinny specified it. He handed it over.
As she worked on the screws holding an access panel in place, Dinny said, “The fuel gauge in the cockpit shows full fuel tanks. Pop quiz, ladies and gentlemen. What happens to a plane that crashes with full tanks?”
“It explodes,” replied Billings, stepping back as if it were going to blow up in our faces.
She was halfway through the mounting screws. “There are fuel tanks in the wings.” With the screwdriver, she pointed briefly above and behind her. “If there was fuel in them, it could have spilled out when they were sheared off. But there’s also a tank under the seats between the wings. It should have been enough to ignite on impact, incinerating everything.” She let the last screw fall with the others onto the ground. She wasn’t going to have to bother with putting the plate back on and wouldn’t need them. Lifting off the plate and tossing it aside, she revealed a large screw on cap, which she used both hands to unscrew. Without being asked for it, I handed her my flashlight so she could see inside. “It wasn’t enough to burn through the tank wall. Nothing but fumes left. There was probably around 850 gallons of fuel when they left Kinshasa, and it would all burn up in take-off. I could check the wiring, but I’m not a plane tech. It’s possible it’s just an equipment failure, but I’m thinking they bypassed a sensor circuit that would have told the pilot he didn’t have enough fuel.”
I couldn’t decide if the gas fumes were better or worse than the smell coming from the main doorway. Both odors bothered me.
Sir Haughty, standing toward the rear of the group, put the pieces together. “Sabotage.”
Dinny touched her nose and pointed at Sir Haughty. “Now, why would someone go to the trouble of making a plane crash, but not let it explode?”
“The cargo,” I said immediately. The thought had occurred to me during her pop quiz. “But the hold is empty. I looked there for survivors.” After a pause, I put a few pieces together myself. “What were they carrying?”
“I can’t access the manifest unless we can get some computer power going. Badger, you think you can help me get it up?”
He pretended to be shy. “Sweetheart, you’re not my type.”
“Computer, Casanova.” Dinny took the joke good-naturedly. “Come on. We don’t know if we’re expecting company.” So she had heard what the twins said, after all.
Badger pulled out his stun gun and checked the charge. “Are you planning to stun her?” I asked.
“I’ll need a power source,” he responded. “This should do. It won’t have to run much, and not for very long.” Dinny and Badger headed back to the main door and Billings helped Alley Oop them into the plane one at a time. Draining the stun gun would leave him without a non-lethal defense, but there wasn’t much we could do about it.
While Dinny and Badger worked to access the manifest, I saw Sylvia walking around the area looking at the ground. Her left eye looked like a raw wound, though the socket and tissues were as healed as they would ever get. “Anything?” I asked her.
“No. I was trying to find the kill spot. But it’s been too long. We’d need chemical analysis or Luminol and a black light. And I don’t see which direction they left, either. It’s like the ground has been deliberately disturbed after they left. If they went west, we probably disturbed any evidence of that when we got here. But they wanted us to find the body. They didn’t want us to follow them. And another thing,” but she stopped talking there. I had to prompt her before she finished the thought. “What did Ben do to get himself shot?”
Sir Haughty had overheard and stepped closer. “Resist, I would imagine.”
“They made an example of him,” suggested Agnes, who then whispered something into her sister’s ear.
“Maybe,” Sylvia conceded. “Team C had more or less a full compliment, like us, right? If they’d left the plane, they would have armed themselves. That’s SOP. Why wouldn’t they all get shot?” Her gaze rose higher, as if she expected soldiers to come bursting out at us at any moment. “They brought down the plane for the cargo, why keep the people?”
“We don’t know if they wanted the cargo,” I said. “You’re speculating.”
Her brow furrowed, making her empty socket pop open a little further. “I get the feeling we’re missing something. Like we should know what this is about by now but we don’t.”
Odd, I thought. The same sentiment that Badger had confessed to me. “Perhaps the manifest will turn on some light bulbs.” There was no telling how long it would take Badger and Dinny to get the computer up and to access the manifest. How long could they handle working inside the plane with the smell of decay? It was nearly a hundred degrees. That body couldn’t be getting any fresher.
It was about fifteen more minutes before the two of them came out, waiting patiently for gentle hands to guide them back to the jungle floor. Badger tucked what was now a dead stun gun into his HEP belt and he and Dinny came to me. The rest gathered nearby to hear the update.
“The plane had about 300 kilos of accumulated Uber,” Dinny reported, “various cheeses collected from Zambia, Uganda, Burundi, and Chad. It had all been tested and stamped with the blue dye. There was also another 84 kilos of Caravane from Mauritania that shows on the manifest as suspect but not confirmed.”
Nitro said, “They ran out of catalyst.” Some of us knew what he meant, but it was a mystery to Dinny and Leotu, who were also listening. After a moment, he explained, “The liquid we use to mix with the cheese particles which identifies the use of Uber rennet. Chembassies usually supply it. Since there’s chembassies all over Europe, I never have a problem getting some. But Africa only has three chembassies on the entire continent, none in any of the countries they visited recently.” Africa used to be known for the triangle trade of slavery, but then the triangle was off the continent and Africa was only one corner. Now the Uber trade on the continent also formed a triangle, with chembassies in South Africa, Ethiopia and Benin, the latter affectionately known as NinComPoop. It was where they were headed to when they left Kinshasa. “Our mission hasn’t been interrupted at all. It just changed venues.”
Sir Haughty scratched an insect bite on his cheek. “You think this is about Cheese Club, then. Looking for a source of unidentified cheese.”
“It fits.” Plus, we didn’t like the idea of getting no definitive answers in Ireland. If we were still on the trail, it helped us feel more successful. The idea was encouraging and gave us purpose. “Remember, the cheese we found in The Smoky Flue was Caravane. Whoever took it from the CURDS3 could be the same people that supplied the Ireland branch of Cheese Club.”
“I don’t like it,” said Sir Haughty. “It sounds like NinComPoop is getting sloppy. Mauritania is their territory.”
“I suppose we’ll have to add a visit to NinComPoop to our To Do list,” I mused.
Sylvia repeated the question she had asked me. “Why take the people?”
Nitro didn’t have an answer to that. It would be too much to hope that they were reluctant to murder them, not after finding Ben’s remains. “And what do we do now? There’s no trail to follow. We have no idea which way they went.”
“Here!” Leotu’s voice boomed through the small clearing. We all hurried over to where he stood, near the nose of the plane, pointing at a tree trunk. It was bent at an angle, but still standing, the roots partly pulled out of the ground on one side. He was pointing at a curvy toadstool growing out near the base of the tree. Part of the far side of it was broken off. He moved to the next tree, looking for signs that humans had passed by. Sylvia followed close behind while most of us waited for confirmation. Other things moved through the jungle and it had been about three days since the crash. A broken toadstool didn’t necessarily mean people had broken it.
A flock of birds suddenly took flight, flapping noisily through the
leafy canopy, calling a warning. Sylvia stood up very straight, listening. “Gorillas,” she said. Her voice had that undertone of panic like when Chief Brody first sees the shark in Jaws.
Leotu sighed, not looking up from his visual inspection. “No. No gorillas here. They live north of the river.”
“Not gorillas,” she said, catching my eye. “Guerrillas.” I could hear the spelling change in her voice. That’s when I noticed the red dot, contrasting sharply on her black shirt. A second dot appeared. And a third. I looked down at myself and saw several gliding over my torso. In short order, everyone was hosting a family of red dots. They moved lazily around their targets, slowly, like bees looking for a landing spot in a field of flowers.
Billings ducked under the nose of the plane. The dots went with him. He moved to the other side, where the tilted fuselage provided more cover. Some dots left, but new ones came in. “Stop,” I told him, afraid too much movement would cause someone to fire. We stood very still, listening to the incessant buzzing of insects, random birdcalls, and howling monkeys. Listening for the sound of soldiers approaching through the jungle.
Dressed in black and dark green, a dozen men emerged silently, carrying assault weapons and strapped with sashes of large bullets. They all had dark skin, and several sported well-trimmed black beards. They were all large and muscular, like Leotu, who looked extremely angry, but for now said nothing. These were not the guns producing the red dots, because all of them remained on our torsos, occasionally floating up to pass over a face, hovering in Sir Haughty’s, Nitro’s, Badger’s and Billings’ two day growth of beard.
Taking the lead, I put my hands in the air. We were outgunned and outnumbered. Trying to fight back would have been suicidal. The rest of the team, even Leotu, followed my example and raised their hands. Some of the men circulated around, removing the fully loaded HEP belts, handing them to underlings to carry, some of whom appeared to be mere teenagers. They took the field kit from Nitro, who sent ineffectual daggers with his eyes. One man, curious, opened it, and the one who seemed to be the leader barked an order. The other closed it immediately and surrendered the kit to a lackey. I felt the weight come off my hips as a guerilla relieved me of my HEP belt and it seemed to take my heart and stomach with it. With us disarmed, and held immobile by roving laser lights, they spoke to each other. It wasn’t English. Badger’s head tilted as he tried to catch a familiar word, but he had very little background in African languages.