by Jack Du Brul
“Isn’t that what you would do?” Mercer asked innocently.
“Absolutely, but most civilians don’t think that way. Fact is, most civilians would be in Panama City right now waiting for a flight to Miami.”
There was an invitation in that statement to further explain his motivations. Mercer was about to tell her how it was he knew terrorist tactics probably better than she did when a single rifle shot cracked from the jungle where Ruben was collecting firewood.
Lauren Vanik’s reactions were like electricity, sharp and fast. She kicked at the fire, scattering the logs to create a curtain of dense smoke, then rolled away, her Beretta coming out of her holster. She racked the slide, fingered off the safety and had the area where the shot had originated covered in a prone, two-handed position. In the time it took her to do all that, Mercer had barely thrown himself flat. Ruben’s two men remained seated on the far side of the fire, their guns just now coming up when there was a crash of tree limbs followed by a high-pitched scream.
Twenty seconds ticked by before Ruben shouted from the bush and Lauren safed her weapon.
“What is it?” Mercer whispered, still marveling at how fluidly she moved.
Before she answered, Ruben stepped into the clearing holding a boy by the back of his T-shirt. His M-16 was on his shoulder. He spoke in quick Spanish and Lauren laughed.
“Says he caught the kid in your friend’s camp looking for food. The shot was over the kid’s head and he says he tried to bury his head in the dirt.”
The boy was about ten or twelve, rail thin and exhausted. His dark eyes dominated the smooth planes of his face. They were wide with shock and fear, like a caged animal’s. His hair was as long as a girl’s, dirty now, but so black it would probably shimmer after a proper bath. His eyelashes too were long and made his face a thing of delicate beauty. Once he spotted the can of spaghetti near where Mercer stood brushing sand off his clothes, he had attention for nothing else.
Lauren holstered her Beretta and got down on her haunches when Ruben dragged the boy closer. The mercenary went to the far side of the fire to rejoin his men. Lauren spoke in melodic Spanish, her Southern accent transmitting the care of a mother soothing her own child. The change from combat readiness to such tenderness was remarkable. Mercer wondered again if she had been a peacekeeper, a job that demanded equal measures of ferocity and sensitivity. That she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring didn’t mean she didn’t have a child of her own, either.
“I speak English,” the boy said after a moment’s conversation. “My name is Miguel.”
“I’m Lauren.” She shook the boy’s hand. “And this is . . . I’m sorry, I forgot your first name.”
“It’s Philip, but everyone calls me Mercer.” Getting down to the boy’s eye level, he also shook Miguel’s hand. “What are you doing out here?”
“Mi mama and papa, they work for Mr. Gary. They went to sleep two days ago and I couldn’t wake them.”
Mercer handed over his canned meal and a spoon. “Where were you when they went to sleep?”
From around a mouthful of food he said, “I was playing up the hill.” Miguel pointed to the top of the ridge flanking the valley. “I hear a big wind that tore up the jungle and when I come down everyone was asleep. And then . . . a day later . . .”
A shadow settled behind his eyes, dimming them.
“We know what happened,” Lauren said. “Men came, didn’t they?”
The boy nodded, his meal forgotten.
“They did bad things?” Another nod. “Do you know how many?”
He held up four grubby fingers.
“You were very smart to hide in the jungle when they came, Miguel. That was the bravest thing to do.” She intuitively knew he felt like he’d let his parents down by not preventing the desecration of their bodies. “Your mama and papa would have wanted you to stay away from the bad men.”
“I wanted to come out, but I saw guns. I’m not supposed to be near guns.” His gaze flicked to her pistol peeking out the back of its holster. “You are a soldier so it’s okay you have one.” He looked at Mercer. “Are you a soldier too?”
“No. I’m a friend of Mr. Gary’s.”
The name seemed to bring out the boy’s natural resilience and his voice brightened. “I like Mr. Gary. He is funny. Can you be funny?”
Mercer was at a loss, uncomfortable in the child’s presence. How can you entertain a boy who just lost his entire family, but desperately needed reassurance that all adults weren’t butchers who shoot up corpses? “I’m not funny,” he said, pulling his bandana from a pocket. “But I can make a rabbit poop chocolate.”
Miguel giggled. “No, you can’t.”
The Snickers bar was half melted from the heat and misshapen from being in Mercer’s pocket. He’d found it earlier in the camp. He palmed the candy bar before the boy saw it and tucked one side of the bandana in the creases between his three middle fingers. By pulling the cloth’s tails through his fingers he created long floppy ears, and when he wiggled his middle finger, it looked like a rabbit sniffing the air. Miguel’s wary expression became wonder at the transformation. Mercer blew a wet raspberry and let the candy fall from inside the rabbit to his other hand. Miguel screamed with delight.
“Told you so.” He gave the chocolate to Miguel.
The boy petted the rabbit before tearing open the wrapper. “Can he do it again?”
“He needs to eat first.”
“I’ll go find some leaves for him. I’d like another candy bar.”
“Not so fast, young man.” Lauren grabbed his arm before he could run off into the jungle. “I think you should stick with us.”
It was only fifteen minutes before the effects of warm food and human contact had the desired effect on Miguel. Some instinct pushed him more toward Mercer than Lauren, a need for the protection he thought only a man could offer. He curled up next to Mercer, his head resting on Mercer’s outstretched leg. Lauren touched Miguel’s smooth cheek as she covered him with a clean blanket from the destroyed camp. Mercer had reformed the rabbit puppet in the boy’s tiny hand, though it had wilted between his sleep-loosened fingers. Miguel hugged it to himself like a teddy bear.
“I think you’ve made a friend.” Lauren sat on Mercer’s other side. “You have children of your own?”
Reaching for the carryall he’d bought, trying not to disturb the lad, Mercer extracted a bottle of duty-free brandy. “I don’t even have nephews or nieces.”
“Well, you’re a natural.”
Mercer was surprised. He had always been uneasy around kids. He found the responsibility of forming a child into an adult to be unimaginable. He feared that saying or doing the wrong thing during even a casual meeting could somehow cause irreparable harm. Knowing that belief was irrational didn’t change the fact that he avoided children whenever he could. He’d heard kids were supposed to pick up on things like that so he was at a loss to explain Miguel’s quick attachment to him.
Then again maybe there was a bond after all.
The jungle had darkened so that the greens of the bush had merged into an impenetrable black deeper than the star-strewn sky overhead. A distant bird cried. The only other sound was the swish of the river and an occasional rustle of wind. How different was this night from one many years ago? The continents were separated by a thousand miles, but weren’t the jungle and the sounds so similar as to be indistinguishable? Wasn’t he about the same age as Miguel when he watched those he loved get wiped out?
Mercer was about to take a long pull from the brandy bottle as the memories overran him, but stopped his hand before he lifted it from the sand.
Driven by the same wanderlust that would infect his son a generation later, David Mercer had gone to central Africa in the early 1960s to hire out his geologic knowledge and mining expertise to various companies. Over the course of several years he built a solid reputation as a competent prospector who could also navigate through the tangled and often corrupt bureaucracies that f
ormed in the wake of independence. It was in the Congo that he met his wife, who had come to Africa from Brussels as an inexperienced fashion model. Caring little for her profession, she’d only come on the trip to get a free ticket to Africa in order to pursue her true passion, animal rights. Two weeks after their chance meeting during one of David’s rare trips to Leopoldville, they were married. Their only child, Philippe, named for Siobahn’s long-dead father, was born at a mining camp in the Katanga Province a couple years later.
Wherever his work took them, Siobahn established small conservation groups among the locals who serviced the mining sites. It was a vagabond existence in which young Philippe flourished, learning a trade from his father and an understanding of the natural world from his mother. Despite the ethnic strife that engulfed the region from time to time, they found a rare happiness among friends, white, Hutu or Tutsi.
Prospecting for alluvial gold in the highlands near Goma, Zaire, where dozens of streams fed Lake Kivu, one more in a long string of violent rampages flared up when Philippe was twelve. Like many before it, the cause dated back centuries, when the Tutsis first entered the pastoral lands held by the majority Hutu, and was flamed further by inept colonial rule. As he’d done before, David sent his wife and son to the house of a Belgian plantation owner the couple had befriended. The man, Gerard Bonneville, was an old Africa hand whose family had built generations of respect in the region. Also he had a private airstrip and a C-47 behind the rambling stone house he shared with his own wife and six children if things got too bad. For a week, Philippe and Siobahn waited anxiously as David worked to organize defenses for isolated villages from machete-wielding mobs. Then word reached the banana plantation that David had been wounded.
Knowing her son was safe, and that if she did nothing her husband would die either from the wound or infection, Siobahn borrowed a farm truck from Bonneville and went to bring him back. Mercer could recall her words as she left with dawn’s light filtering into the bedroom he shared with the four boys.
“Do you remember when you were six and went swimming in the Kasai River and the current pulled you toward the rapids below our camp?” Still fogged with sleep, Mercer nodded. “And I jumped in to grab you because none of the natives knew how to swim, even Nanny, who loves you as much as I?”
Philippe’s nanny was a Tutsi woman named Juma who had been with the family from the day he was born. From his father he’d learned to love the land, from his mother he’d learned to love animals, but it was Juma, with her round face and quick laugh, who’d taught him how to love people.
“I have to do the same for your father,” his mother continued. “No one is willing to go out to bring him home. I will be back soon and Mr. and Mrs. Bonneville will take care of you when I’m gone, but remember to obey them if they decide to fly out to the capital. Do you understand me, Philippe?”
“Yes, Mother.” The idea that she was leaving was more terrifying than his father being wounded, but he knew that she had to do this. “I will obey.”
She hugged him so fiercely that he felt his chest would collapse and he wanted only for her to hug him harder. Their tears mingled on his cheek.
Young Philippe spent the next day and a half on the second-story balcony that overlooked the rolling lawn and the rough dirt track that led toward Goma, his eyes straining into the humid air to see a feather of dust or a pair of headlights that meant his parents were returning. Nanny stayed with him, holding him to her warm body under a blanket during the long night. Neither slept.
At noon the second day, with rebel guns crackling in the jungle surrounding the long rows of banana trees, Gerard Bonneville decided it was time to get his family out. Except for the house staff of five, all his workers had fled into the bush and experience told him that this uprising wasn’t going to end any time soon. He’d heard nothing from Siobahn over the truck’s short-wave radio.
Yvette Bonneville came out onto the balcony, her normal skirts and blouses replaced with sturdy khaki. Though only a few years older than Siobahn, her skin was dried and darkened by the tropical sun to the color of tobacco. Stress had formed purple circles under her eyes. Her youngest child, a pigtailed girl of six, clung to her leg with her thumb plugged in her mouth. “Juma, Gerard is prepping the Dakota now. The other children are with him. We have to get to the airfield.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the African answered. “We’re ready.”
Yvette turned away, taking her daughter’s hand. In the other she carried her husband’s Holland and Holland twelve gauge with determination. Mercer remembered it was the only time he’d ever seen her show fear.
Bitter but obedient, he took one last look down the road before preparing himself to leave.
The exact sequence of events that followed was forever lost in Mercer’s memory. He didn’t know if he heard the horn from the farm truck grinding up the road before or after a massive explosion erupted behind the house. Either way, he knew his scream would forever echo in his head. Moments after the truck appeared, it jerked to a stop. White circles like spider webs appeared on the flat windscreen. One second he could see his mother’s dark hair, and in the next she vanished behind a cloud of red mist. Two armed men stepped from the jungle flanking the road. From inside the house came a crash of glass as a window was knocked in and then Yvette Bonneville’s shotgun roared like a cannon. Mercer saw dark figures in ragtag uniforms with blood-smeared pangas crab across the lawn to his left. A second sun bloomed from the airstrip as the C-47’s main fuel tanks exploded and the rising corona of fire climbed above the house’s tile roof.
“No!” he heard Mrs. Bonneville scream from downstairs. And then came a wet smack like a club striking rotted fruit. Silence.
Thinking back now, Mercer realized Juma must have been in her mid-fifties and he would have weighed eighty pounds or more. She lifted him as though he were a toddler and tossed him off the right side of the balcony. Landing in a bed of rhododendrons that Mrs. Bonneville kept trimmed flat and full, he had only a moment to recover before Nanny fell into the shrubs next to him.
“Say nothing,” she cautioned, peering into the first rows of bananas across twenty yards of lawn. Satisfied that there was no one lurking there, she took his hand and began running, her great breasts slapping against her belly with every frantic step.
Not breaking stride as they reached the towering wall of trees, Mercer managed to take one more look down the lawn to where his mother’s truck sat just beyond the metal culvert that diverted an irrigation stream under the drive. Two men with distinctively shaped AK-47s stood next to the vehicle. As he watched, they raked the cab and the bed of the pickup with bullets. Through the smoke puffing from each weapon, an arc of spent casings glittered in the sun. A hot round ignited the gasoline spilling from the punctured fuel tank. Flames engulfed the truck, forcing the men to scramble back.
Mercer staggered, falling slack at what he’d witnessed. Nanny yanked on his arm to get his attention and slapped him full across the face. “We mourn later.”
Having spent several summers with the Bonnevilles, Mercer knew their plantation even better than the farm’s Hutu overseer. Yet as they crashed from row to row of banana trees, he had no idea where he was. His mind had left him. He wanted nothing more than to collapse. Juma led them on, maintaining their bearings by watching the pillar of black smoke that rose from the Bonnevilles’ plane.
“Where next, Philippe?” she asked when they broke out of the first cultivated field. “We need to lose ourselves in the jungle. Which way is closest?” Across a fallow area thick with wild grass, more ranks of trees ran to the horizon. The prattle of machine-gun fire had faded in the distance.
The boy said nothing, the sting of the slap having nothing to do with the tears that greased his cheeks.
Juma lowered herself to her knees so that she was looking up into his face. “In my village, when a boy reaches a certain age, he goes through an initiation to become a man. It is a time of great joy for everyone as he leaves his
childhood behind. You have just left your childhood but there is no joy for either of us.” Her voice was steadying, solemn. “When the village boys take that first step into manhood, they also take a new name. It is the warrior name they will forever use in the tribe. After today, it is time that you take your warrior name too, even if your people don’t choose them like we do.
“To honor your father’s strength and your mother’s courage, you can no longer be Philippe.” She thought for a second. “You will be called Mercer from now on, do you hear me? This is the name you will use when you reach your tribe again. Your warrior name.” Her eyes bored into his, soft brown meeting frightened gray. “Tell me, Mercer, which way do we go to reach the jungle quickest?”
Without word or hesitation, he pointed to their right.
He had no idea how many days it took to reach Juma’s village on the Rwandan side of Lake Kivu. They lived off the land using her intimate knowledge of the jungle and took circuitous detours around the pockets of fighting. He stayed with her for almost six months before a Red Cross worker came to the village. It would be another three weeks until Mercer’s identity was verified and his grandfather in the United States alerted to come to the Rwandan capital of Kigali to collect the grandchild he’d never met. A mistake by a harried clerk at the U.S. Mission in Rwanda anglicized his first name to Philip, though he barely cared. He had become Mercer.
Mercer looked down at the sleeping Panamanian boy on his lap, his face glowing in the embers of the dying fire. Even if he hadn’t felt it, maybe the boy had sensed the commonality of their experience. Both were orphans, forced to live in the jungle and denied the time to grieve. He stroked Miguel’s hair.
“What happened to Juma?”
“What did you say?” he asked, startled.
“Your nanny?” Lauren prompted. “What happened to her?”
Mercer swallowed. He thought the memory had unfolded silently in his head, as he allowed it to do a few times each year, the details so vivid he could still smell the rhododendron blossoms from the hedge. Not even Harry knew the details of how he lost his parents and he’d just accidentally told the story to a complete stranger. Looking at how Lauren watched him, the vulnerability he feared failed to appear. He’d always thought his story would elicit pity, an emotion he detested, but in her voice he heard respect. The jackhammer blow to his heart he’d felt when she’d asked about Juma eased into a sort of warmth.