by Ryan, Chris
Fortunately, Raf had it covered. He drew a thin Maglite out of one of his pockets. Its beam cut cleanly through the darkness. ‘Have you still got that gaffer tape?’ he asked Zak.
Zak nodded and reached inside the survival pack for the roll of tape. He handed it over to Raf, then watched as he placed the Maglite on top of Gabs’s assault rifle and fixed it there with several loops of tape around the body of the weapon. He raised the rifle and embedded the butt into his shoulder. Then he shone it in the direction of the second aircraft that Zak had almost forgotten about, hidden at the end of the landing strip and half covered by the encroaching rainforest.
Cruz’s plane? It had to be.
‘Gabs,’ Raf said. ‘Keep an eye on Malcolm. Zak, come with me.’
They walked silently towards the aircraft. ‘What are we looking for?’ Zak asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Raf replied. ‘I’ll tell you when we find it.’
This aircraft was in a much better state than the Cessna. Zak reminded himself that it had probably landed before nightfall. The pilot hadn’t been flying blind. And yet there was something about it. An aura. Zak felt nervous just approaching.
‘The doors are still open,’ Raf breathed, pointing his torch at them. They were ten metres away and, with a sudden, sick feeling in his gut, Zak thought he could see, through a cabin window just behind the open door on the right, a figure still sitting at the instrument panel.
He grabbed Raf’s arm. ‘I see it.’
They approached carefully, with Raf keeping the assault rifle and Maglite firmly pointed straight ahead.
They reached the open door.
Zak looked in.
He caught his breath.
The pilot and co-pilot – Zak vaguely remembered their faces from the images Malcolm had accessed on his computer screen – were dead, but he’d half been expecting that.
He wasn’t, though, prepared for how gruesome they would look.
They’d both been shot in the back of the head. Each had a chunk of skull missing, and a hideous exit wound on their foreheads. Zak was aware of a buzzing sound, and realized that, even in the darkness, there were insects buzzing around the sticky, open wounds. He recoiled from that noise as much as from the sight.
But it was not the head wounds that made his blood turn to ice. It was the cuts on the corpses’ faces. Each man had a fresh slash reaching from the edge of their lips, across their cheeks and up to their ears.
Just like the boys who had abducted Zak that morning.
‘Looks like someone’s left a calling card,’ Raf breathed, before switching off the torch so they didn’t have to look at that gruesome sight a second longer.
PART TWO
7
SMILER
Dawn is noisy in the jungle.
Eighty kilometres, as the crow flies, from the landing strip, a group of twenty boys – none of them older than fifteen, some as young as nine – sat in a circle listening to the sound of the rainforest waking up. They were a strangely dressed bunch. Some wore black vests and baggy red trousers. Others had plain khaki shirts, or camouflage jackets, or sleeveless jackets with pouches along the front. Four or five wore long links of bullets around their necks, like scarves. One or two had green metal helmets. Rather more had red, black or blue bandanas wrapped round their foreheads.
All of them carried guns.
Every second, the screech of a different bird echoed from a different direction. The trees surrounding them shook as those birds, animals and reptiles that had taken shelter in their branches started to move. Behind it all was a white noise of buzzing as insects rose in great clouds to meet the morning.
And a young boy screamed so loudly that it almost drowned out all these other sounds.
He was kneeling by the fire in the centre of the circle, with his hands tied firmly behind his back. The fire itself was covered with green leaves and grasses. It was there not for heat or light, but to emit massive clouds of smoke to repel mosquitoes. It was only half successful. A pall of smoke certainly hung thickly around this small clearing, and all the boys blinked heavily to keep their smarting eyes moist and smoke-free. But the mosquitoes swarmed anyway – over their hands and feet. Also over their faces, though they seemed to avoid the scar tissue that led from the corner of each boy’s mouth, up across the cheek and to the earlobe.
Nobody seemed bothered by the mosquitoes, though. The boy in the centre was already too busy screaming and whimpering to pay them any mind. And those sitting in the circle were watching him closely with enjoyment.
There was an older man too, standing in front of the young boy. He had a viciously sharp, broad-bladed knife in his right hand.
‘Shush,’ he said loudly.
The boy stopped shouting, but he could not stop a series of sobs escaping his lips.
‘Shush, shush, shush,’ the man repeated, this time in a much quieter voice. ‘You should not be shouting. You should be thanking us. After all, you begged us for this opportunity.’
It was true. The young boy had begged these people to let him join them.
His name was Kofi, but for as long as he could remember, everyone had called him Smiler. When he was five years old, a young English woman had come to live in their village for two months. She had also taught Kofi English, and he knew he now spoke it far better than most of the other villagers; his parents had hoped speaking English well would lead to chances in life for him. And it was the English woman who had given him the name Smiler because he always seemed to have a grin on his face. She was now long forgotten, but the name had stuck, even though most of the villagers didn’t know what it meant.
Smiler had continued smiling until the day before his ninth birthday. That was the day he, his mother and father had woken to find a mamba in the small wooden hut they called home. It was coiled lazily by the entrance and Smiler’s father had tried to shoo it away with a long stick he used when walking through the jungle.
But the mamba didn’t want to be shooed away.
Smiler could still remember the moment it bit his dad. It had sunk its teeth into his calf muscle and hadn’t let go for a full five seconds. Then, roused and angry, it had turned its attention to Smiler himself. The mamba had been only a metre away from him when his mother grabbed it, one hand by its throat, the other by its tail. She had run with it out of the hut, screaming for help. But the snake was strong, and as it flailed its lithe body, it had managed to work itself free of her grasp. It bit her three times on the face in quick succession before more men arrived to kill it.
But by then it was too late.
Smiler’s mother was dead by sunset. His father was dead by dawn.
He celebrated his birthday as an orphan.
That had been two years ago. The villagers had done their best to look after him, but he was nobody’s child and their own families had to come first. Little by little, Smiler began to starve.
When two boys with scarred faces turned up at the village, everyone had kept their distance. Whispered rumours found their way to Smiler. They were from a bad crowd. They were what remained of the West Side Boys.
Over the next few days, from overheard snatches of conversation, Smiler learned just who the West Side Boys were.
They came from Sierra Leone, 500 miles south of Smiler’s native Senegal. It had been a war-torn country, filled with different groups of armed fighters. The West Side Boys were one of these groups. Many of them were just children, some of whom had been forced to torture and kill their own parents. This had turned them into brutal, desperate, cruel killers. They made it their job to murder foreign peacekeepers in their country.
But then, in the year 2000, some British soldiers had arrived to deal with them. The soldiers had been members of something called the SAS. Smiler had never heard of that – but he understood from the way everyone spoke that they were the best soldiers in the world. They had wiped out the West Side Boys. Killed them all.
Or so everybody thought.
From the conversations Smiler overheard, he learned that a few had survived. They had given themselves a new name – the East Side Boys. They had given themselves a distinctive marking on their faces. It showed who they were. And it showed they were tough.
And they had started recruiting, not just in Sierra Leone, but all over West Africa. Now there were hundreds of them.
When the two East Side Boys knocked on Smiler’s door, Smiler’s blood had run cold. He thought of running away, but for some reason that idea made him even more scared. And so, timidly, he’d opened his doors to them.
The boys were friendly. They’d brought food with them, and let Smiler eat as much as he wanted. They’d even let him have a few mouthfuls of palm wine. He had pretended to like it so that he could feel like part of their gang.
They came back the next day. And the next. All the time, they were nothing but friendly. Smiler had to admit that the scars on their faces were strange, but he decided that the rumours he’d heard about the wickedness of the East Side Boys were all wrong.
On the fourth day, they’d asked if he wanted to join them. It would mean leaving the village, of course. But their life was exciting, and he’d always have enough to eat.
Smiler had said yes.
In fact he’d done more than that. He’d begged them.
And even when he learned about this initiation rite, where the scars of the East Side Boys would be carved into his cheek with a sharp knife, he still wanted to join them.
Having lost one family, he was being offered a new one. It was not the sort of opportunity his parents would have wanted for him. But it was an opportunity he now desperately needed.
The head of this new family was the man now holding the glinting blade in front of Smiler’s face. Smiler didn’t know his real name. Everyone called him Boss. He was much older – older even than Smiler’s dad had been when he died. His dark hair, flecked with grey, was tied back in dreadlocks. Although he didn’t share the East Side Boys’ scars, his cheeks were deeply pitted and pockmarked. He had a bad smell about him.
Smiler tried to concentrate on Boss’s dirty fingernails – the colour of yellow wax – and not on the knife he was holding. He was beginning to have second thoughts about joining this new family.
One of the East Side Boys sitting in a circle around him had a portable CD player. He pressed PLAY and held it above his head. The speaker spat out a barrage of frenzied drum rhythms and somebody launched into aggressive-sounding rap over the top. Smiler spoke a little English, but he couldn’t understand the words at all. His new friends had told him it was somebody called Tupac Shakur, and that they would teach him the words after his initiation. But not before.
Initiation.
It was time.
There was no point screaming any more.
They’d tied his hands behind his back for his own good, they’d said. If he tried to stop Boss mid-slice, he could damage his face even more.
Now the man was grabbing Smiler’s hair with his left hand.
The boy trembled and sweated. His eyes were very wide as he watched the blade approach his right cheek.
It felt as cold as ice on his skin. Then it sliced very slowly down his cheek. His breath came in short, sharp gasps.
At first it didn’t hurt. All Smiler felt was blood oozing down the side of his face. The rap music grew louder as the man swiftly moved to his left cheek.
Slice.
Blood.
And then . . . pain.
Someone approached from behind and cut the rope binding his wrists. His hands flew to his cheeks, and blood oozed through the gaps between his fingers. He shrieked in agony.
Then he was flat out on the ground. Two boys were pinning his arms down, while a third placed two pieces of cloth against the bleeding wounds to stem the blood flow. He wriggled and kicked, but the boys were too strong. He wasn’t going anywhere.
‘Relax, my friend,’ said a voice. He didn’t know who it belonged to. ‘You’re one of us now.’
He screamed again.
‘Yes,’ said the voice. ‘You’re one of us. Smiler’s an East Side Boy.’
The scream turned to a pathetic whimper.
‘And when you’re an East Side Boy, you’re an East Side Boy until you die.’
He said the word ‘die’ with a rasp so unpleasant that for a moment it even made Smiler forget about the pain in his face.
They gave him palm wine to drink. It made his head woozy, but helped a little bit with the pain. One of the East Side Boys had given him bandages, and shown him how to wrap them round each of his fists so he could press them against his bleeding cheeks, and stop the blood.
He sat on the log and listened to the man talking.
‘You, you, you and you,’ he said, pointing to four of the East Side Boys in turn. ‘You have a job to do. It means going up the river to Banjul.’
Smiler blinked. Banjul was the capital of The Gambia, the small, thin country that Senegal surrounded completely. It was a small port town on the west coast of Africa. It must be at least a hundred miles away. Why would the man want to send his East Side Boys there?
‘There is a customs official,’ the man continued. ‘We have offered him a lot of money to let certain boxes pass into The Gambia unopened. He has refused our very generous offer.’ The man gave an unpleasant smile. ‘So I want you to kill him.’
If the East Side Boys were surprised by this offer, they didn’t look it. Smiler, though, felt sick.
‘The rest of us, we travel into the rainforest to meet with some of the others,’ the man announced.
‘Where are they, Boss?’ one of the East Side Boys asked.
Boss smiled. It wasn’t a nice look. ‘You’ll find out,’ he said. ‘We’re going to meet someone important. Someone very important.’ He raised his knife up to his eyes and examined the blade. It glinted in the sunlight and Smiler thought he could still see a smear of his own blood on it. ‘I’ve known his family for a very long time, and I want you to be on your best behaviour. Do you understand?’
He gave the East Side Boys an unpleasant leer. They leered back. Smiler didn’t know what Boss meant by ‘best behaviour’.
And he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He was beginning to realize he’d made a big mistake.
8
TINY TEARS
06.00HRS
Zak didn’t know what it was that woke him: the screeching sound from the rainforest, or the mosquitoes having breakfast on his skin.
But then, it wasn’t like he’d had a refreshing night’s sleep.
At Raf’s insistence, they’d pulled the corpses of Cruz’s flight team out of their aircraft, and dragged them a good thirty metres away to the edge of the rainforest. ‘It’s fresh meat,’ Raf had said bluntly. ‘We don’t want to stay too close to it.’
The four of them had then spent the remaining couple of hours of darkness in the protection of the aircraft’s cabin. Zak found himself in the pilot’s seat, and his skin recoiled from a patch of sticky wetness by the headrest. His few moments of sleep were haunted by images of overturning aircraft and African boys with scarred faces chasing him down jungle pathways. He woke feeling like he hadn’t slept at all.
Malcolm was still sleeping in the seat behind him. He was nursing his wounded elbow as he slept. The rag that bound the wound was soaked in blood and a couple of flies buzzed around it. Zak tried to shoo them away, but the flies ignored him.
Raf and Gabs were already up and about, so he slipped out of the cabin to join them in the clearing. He immediately noticed the hooded shapes of two vultures in the tree under which the corpses were lying. Cruz’s pilots weren’t rotten enough to be carrion yet, but in this heat they soon would be.
Zak shuddered, then hurried towards his Guardian Angels. They were standing at the edge of the runway, about halfway along the landing strip, looking into the rainforest. Their faces were thoughtful.
Gabs nodded at Zak as he approached. ‘Look at this, sweetie,’ she said.
‘Looks like someone was waiting for Cruz,’ Gabs continued.
‘And they left us a trail,’ said Zak. ‘It could lead us right to him.’ He peered along the path into the jungle. Something had caught his eye. He stepped five metres along the track, and bent down. From a patch of lush, damp, high grass he lifted out a child’s doll. It was in the shape of a naked baby, quite bald, and was made out of sturdy plastic. Its lips were puckered, waiting for a child to insert the teat of a toy milk bottle. The limbs were twisted and one of the eyes was missing.
He remembered an advert he’d seen on TV back in the days when he was just an ordinary kid. It was for a baby doll that cried by itself. ‘Tiny Tears,’ he muttered to himself.
‘What did you say?’ Raf called.
Zak didn’t reply. He weighed the doll in one hand – it was heavier than it looked. Stepping back towards the clearing, he handed the doll to Raf.
Raf took a knife from his pocket and plunged it deep into the doll’s plastic chest. He used the sharp blade to saw down the abdomen, then ripped the doll’s chest apart.
Zak was not surprised to see it filled with a fine white powder.
‘Cocaine?’ he asked.
Raf laid the doll on the ground, then pulled a lighter from his pocket. He held the flame to the inside of the doll for a few seconds and the powder spat and crackled, then suddenly ignited. Raf stepped back as smoke billowed from the doll’s chest, and nodded grimly. ‘Cocaine,’ he confirmed. ‘Nothing else burns quite like that. Looks like someone got careless, leaving it lying around like that.’
‘Either that,’ said Gabs, ‘or they’re doing a Hansel and Gretel on us.’
‘What do you mean?’ Zak asked.
‘You know, leaving a trail for us to follow.’
Raf shook his head. ‘I doubt it, Gabs. Cruz has no way of knowing we’re on to him.’