Ghost Watch

by David Rollins

  ‘What?’ Ryder asked.

  ‘Civilians. And a chopper.’

  Women dressed in brightly colored clothing that reminded me of the Rwandan prime minister’s wife, were doing the clearing, overseen by soldiers. That meant there was some kind of settlement nearby. Parked in the middle of the cleared area the women were extending was an old Soviet Mi-8 of the sort I’d seen at the airport in Kigali and dismantled in the hangar at Cyangugu. I wondered who’d flown it here, and why. Its markings identifed it as Rwandan. What was a Rwandan chopper doing over the border in the DRC, parked in the FARDC unit’s bivouac?

  I scanned the HQ, checking it over more closely. A couple of tents were still being pitched. Cooking fires were burning, providing helpful illumination. A slight wind shift brought the smells of meat sizzling on those fires, and glands pumped saliva into my mouth. I picked up our principals almost immediately.

  ‘They’re alive,’ I said involuntarily.

  Twenny and Peanut were strung up to trees, just as they’d been at the last encampment, their hands secured behind their backs, hoods over their heads. A third man was beside them, wearing a tattered flight suit. ‘Fournier. He’s there,’ I said. I handed the scope to Ryder and showed him where to point it.

  ‘I see ’em,’ he whispered. ‘It’s Fournier, all right.’ He turned his head slowly, taking in the rest of the camp. ‘Did you see the helicopter there?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Ryder took the scope on a quick reconnoiter. ‘Hey, the Chinese guy, the one you told us about. That him? He just came out of one of the tents.’ He passed me the scope.

  It took a moment to locate him. ‘Yeah,’ I said. A tall, slender black man wearing a tailored combat uniform with a cream cravat tucked into the top of his shirt accompanied him. This had to be the FARDC commanding officer. They were both talking to a third man, though that person had his back to me and he was in shadow.

  ‘I can’t see his face,’ I whispered, talking to myself. ‘Wait – they’re moving.’

  The Chinese advisor put his hand on the unidentifed man’s shoulder and the three of them began to walk slowly over to Twenny Fo, Peanut and Fournier, collecting a couple of funkies with machine guns along the way. Fu Manchu and his buddies were deep in conversation when they arrived in the area where their hooded prisoners were tied up. The captives didn’t appear to react in any particular way to the arrival of the party within their midst. Fu Manchu stepped up to the guy in the flight suit and removed his hood. Damn – it was definitely Fournier. I noticed pretty much at this moment that the unidentifed man was holding a pistol in his right hand, down by his leg, the muzzle pointed toward the ground. He raised it to the back of the Frenchman’s head. I heard a muffled explosion and the front of Fournier’s face blew out. He toppled forward, his arms dislocating from his shoulders as he slumped to the ground, dead.

  ‘Shit, what just happened . . . what happened . . .?’ Ryder said, way too loud.

  ‘Shut up,’ I hissed.

  Twenny Fo and Peanut were now shouting at the man, who handed the pistol back to the Chinese guy, turning toward me as he did so.

  ‘Christ,’ I whispered.

  ‘What?’ Ryder demanded.

  Fournier’s killer. It was Beau Lockhart.

  Discovery

  I watched Lockhart and the Chinese guy stroll back to the tent, having a nice post-murder chat, and disappear inside it. Leaving aside the fact that Lockhart had just killed a man, why kill Fournier? That didn’t make sense. Wasn’t Fournier their guy? Perhaps it made perfect sense, only not to me. It didn’t fit my theory and that meant I had to throw the damn thing out and start again from scratch.

  I trained the scope back on Twenny and Peanut. The rapper was struggling and shouting something at the guards who’d moved in to recover the body, but I was too far away to hear what he might have been yelling. So, our principals were alive and Lockhart was involved in a whole bunch of crap up to his eyeballs, murder topping the list. He was with Kornfak & Greene, a DoD contractor. His business began and ended at the Cyangugu base, yet here he was in the enemy’s camp, capping a UN peacekeeper. His presence here, aiding and abetting the FARDC unit’s capture of Twenny Fo and Peanut, heavily suggested that I was right about the ransom and kidnap angle. Maybe this had been the plan from the beginning, rather than it being an opportunistic grab. And now I had suspects. I handed the scope to Ryder, who returned it to my pack, and then we wriggled backward deeper into the bush as the rain started coming down with its usual biblical intensity. Turning one-eighty for the crawl out, we again took it slow and careful. All went reasonably smoothly until, around fifty meters later, we shinnied into several Africans who were rigging hammocks across our path. We had nowhere to go, which meant we had no choice but to share the shadows for a bunch of time with countless biting critters, waiting for the men to fall asleep.

  The rainfall came to an abrupt end sometime after midnight. With water no longer finding its way through the folds of their ponchos, the men soon began snoring.

  Ryder and I crawled through the mud beneath them, scarcely breathing, my Ka-bar in one hand, ready to fillet any light sleepers who chose the wrong moment to visit the john. We eventually found cover, crawling into another island of scrub forty meters away. Retracing our steps, there were no Claymores to worry about, as we’d disarmed and appropriated all the surprises on the way in.

  It was a quarter past one in the morning before I felt confident enough to walk on my feet instead of my elbows. I stood and breathed the wet night air, my forearms swollen and throbbing with insect venom, a cloud of thirsty mosquitoes circling my head and humming for my blood. I went to the nearest anthill and reapplied the repellent.

  By this time, I’d had plenty of time to think about Fournier and how he fitted into my theory. I realized that I’d been maneuvered to a particular point of view. I’d been told that it had been Fournier who’d switched the tanks; that it was Fournier who’d made the Mayday call. And Fournier had, for a time, disappeared, which cast these assurances in a certain light. But now I’d seen Fournier tied up and murdered by people I believed he might have been in league with, people who included a US military contractor. If Fournier wasn’t Lockhart’s inside man, it meant the real rat was still among us.

  And his name was LeDuc.

  Perhaps that had been part of the reason for the patrol sent out to check the Puma for survivors – to recover LeDuc. But there’d been a mix-up when we’d gotten the upper hand and the wrong Frenchman had been taken away.

  LeDuc had accompanied West and me when we’d infiltrated the FARDC encampment and rescued Ayesha. There would have been moments when he could have escaped. Perhaps he hoped that we’d just conveniently get ourselves captured, allowing him to maintain his cover. When that didn’t happen, why hadn’t he just blown the whistle on us? Maybe he thought there’d be a lot of confusion and shooting, that it could potentially end up being bad for his health and therefore not worth the risk.

  I thought back through all the conversations I’d had with LeDuc, sifting for clues about his true intentions, clues I’d overlooked. He’d been our translator on several occasions. Had he relayed information without putting a skew on things? Looking back on it, when Marcel was captured, there’d been recognition in his face when he laid eyes on LeDuc. Looks like you remind him of someone. That’s what I’d told him. Perhaps LeDuc hadn’t reminded Marcel of someone at all. Perhaps Marcel had actually seen LeDuc on a prior occasion. Perhaps at the FARDC camp, making a delivery of fresh-baked croissants. Marcel had jumped off the cliff behind the CNDP’s position with the French pilot, but hadn’t survived the fall. The African’s skull was bashed in. LeDuc had suggested that Marcel had hit his head on a rock and drowned. Maybe LeDuc had been holding said rock at the time. Maybe he was worried that Rutherford, who spoke a little French, might find out something awkward from the African.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ Ryder said, breathing heavily as we double-timed it down th
e wide cleared path. ‘That was Lockhart you saw back there, the guy we met at Cyangugu – the DoD contractor?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Jesus. You thought Fournier set us up, put us down in the jungle.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘But they killed him. They wouldn’t have done that if he was working for them.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t think so.’

  ‘Then if Fournier didn’t put us down here, it had to have been LeDuc. And if LeDuc is involved, then he’s gonna be pretty nervous about what we might find out on this recon. Leaving him behind might have made him desperate.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s why we’re running,’ I puffed. Ryder had figured it out. Maybe there was more to the guy than I’d given him credit for.

  The notch I’d made in the tree wasn’t easy to find in the dark. I remembered that the cleared pathway cut to the south a hundred meters beyond my marker. We found the kink and worked backward, finally locating the tree with a handhold of wood hacked out of it at head height.

  ‘Get the case,’ I told Ryder.

  He hunted around and eventually found its hiding place. I checked the Seiko for the time and made the eighty-degree change in direction, slinking off across the open trampled path through the forest.

  We were soon heading down the valley, retracing our steps, taking us back to the rocks where Cassidy, West, Rutherford, Leila, Ayesha, Boink, and the rat, LeDuc, were waiting for our return. The canopy here was unbroken, and the darkness was complete. We soon found it impossible to move around without bumping into things. We had no choice but to find a little ground that was uncluttered by bushes, elephant grass, saplings, trees and undergrowth, and that was also clear of ants, on which to get some sleep. We couldn’t find any.

  RYDER AND I SLEPT back-to-back on a bed of tree roots and mud. We were both shivering with cold when I woke, my clothes and skin water-logged. It was maybe half an hour before dawn, the shapes of the world beneath the canopy barely discernible and still monochromatic. A large hairy caterpillar the size of my thumb hugged the stem of a plant inches from my face, probing carefully forward, trying to reach across the gap to my nose. I broke the stem and placed the bug on the ground beside me.

  ‘Rise and shine, Duke,’ I said, my throat thick with phlegm, giving him a nudge.

  I felt his weight shift behind me.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said under his breath.

  I stood up, using the M4 as a crutch, every joint in my body feeling cold and seized, and found a plant to water. Ryder did likewise. I was hungry, my stomach growling like there was a cat locked inside wanting out. I sucked the tube at my shoulder to settle it down a little.

  I motioned at Ryder to follow. He nodded and dragged his feet behind me. I stopped and signaled him to look sharp. Most accidents happen close to home, and we were in the accident zone. No point tempting fate. It had been twelve hours since we’d patrolled through this patch of turf. Bad guys might have moved in behind us.

  The forest dripped with water, only it wasn’t raining. The morning slowly crept up on us as we made our way down the hill, the greens gradually taking over the palate as the day came out of hiding, birds waking with the sunlight and giving the world a good shriek. Frogs hopped out of the way of our feet and occasionally animals shot like runaway bowling balls through the undergrowth. A gentle mist floated around us, wrapping round tree trunks like gossamer web, and the air was thick, clean and as sweet as snowmelt.

  ‘Take that step and you’re dead, Cooper,’ the tree beside me whispered.

  Then the tree moved and I saw that it was Sergeant Cassidy, Ka-bar in hand, leaves and bits of shrub sprouting from webbing, his face streaked with camouflage paint. He came around beside me and scraped some leaf litter off the ground beneath my boot, revealing a hole. Pushing the butt of his M4 into the hole made a length of bamboo pole with bamboo spears embedded in the end rise out of the earth and swing in an arc toward me. Had I taken that step, I’d have collected a row of spikes from upper thigh to gut. Out here, that would have been a death sentence.

  ‘Had some time on your hands?’ I asked him.

  He smiled. ‘You just missed walking into another fun activity back up the hill a ways.’

  We stepped around the trap and Cassidy fell in beside us. I took the pack off my shoulders and showed him the Claymores that Ryder and I had collected.

  ‘Hoo-ah,’ he beamed. ‘Where’d you get them?’

  ‘We took a stroll back to the Puma,’ I said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I noticed Leila was all out of foundation,’ I told him and Ryder held up Leila’s makeup case.

  ‘I was gonna ask you about that.’

  ‘Next stop was the FARDC camp. They’ve moved.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Well out of range of the CNDP’s mortars.’

  I reached down and felt my thigh pocket for the lipsticks containing what I hoped would be evidence of sabotage, and stopped in my tracks.

  ‘What?’ asked Cassidy.

  The pocket was gone, torn clean away by all the crawling around. God only knew where those damn lipsticks were. ‘Nothing,’ I told him and consoled myself with the doubt I’d had that chemical analysis would’ve revealed anything significant. ‘Anything happen while we’ve been gone?’ I asked.

  ‘We lost LeDuc.’

  ‘You lost him?’

  ‘He was with Rutherford. Went off to forage. Rutherford said he turned around and the Frenchman was gone. Could have been an animal. West found spoor from a big cat in the area. We searched, but found nothing. If a predator took him, West said his remains would be up some tree.’

  ‘Law of the jungle,’ Ryder said.

  I didn’t for a moment think that the Frenchman had been snatched by a cat. A more likely scenario was that he’d decided to rendezvous with his real friends, the ones we’d left up on the hill with our captive principals.

  ‘We saw Twenny Fo and Peanut,’ I said. ‘They’re alive.’

  ‘All right!’ Cassidy said, his mood-o-meter swinging to bright. ‘Good news. Can we get to them?’

  ‘There’s been a development. You remember Beau Lockhart?’

  ‘The Kornfak & Greene guy back at the camp?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s chummy with FARDC. We saw him in their HQ.’

  ‘Hoo-ah!’ Cassidy said, making a fist. ‘So we just head on up there, collect our principals and Lockhart gets us flown out.’

  ‘I witnessed Lockhart cap Fournier in cold blood.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A nine to the back of the head.’

  The face paint didn’t camouflage the sergeant’s anger and confusion. ‘Jesus! What the hell’s going on?’

  ‘I’m not a hundred percent sure, but LeDuc and Lockhart are involved. The only thing that makes sense is that the French pilot put us down in the middle of it intentionally.’

  ‘Aw, shit.’

  WE ARRIVED BACK AT the rocks.

  ‘Hey, look!’ said Ayesha when she glanced up and saw us, giving Leila’s shoulder a nudge.

  Leila’s eyes went straight to the makeup case in Ryder’s hand and lit up.

  ‘Oh, wow! You found it!’ she squealed, jumped off the rock she was sitting on, and ran over and gave Duke a big kiss on the cheek.

  ‘You’d think we’d found a case of Bud,’ I said.

  She wasted no time opening the catch and lifting the lid.

  Cassidy and Rutherford wandered over with Boink, who, I noticed, had been reacquainted with a Nazarian, and they gave Ryder and me a bunch of assorted ‘Hey’s and ‘Yo’s.

  A burst of automatic fire suddenly cut across the pleasantries. It was close; maybe five hundred meters up the hill. The unexpected sound was a jolt. I swung the M4 off my shoulder, pointed at Cassidy to lead off, and signaled at Ryder to organize the defense in our rear – leaving Ryder in charge worried me, but I wanted experience up front. Cassidy hopped forward into the bush; Rutherford, West and I close behind. Cassidy moved like he knew
the terrain, running fast at a crouch, choosing a path higher up the side of the valley than the one we’d taken back to the rocks, then looped around, doubling back down the hill. We soon came upon a soldier lying beneath one of Cassidy’s traps – a framework of stakes weighted with river stones that had dropped on top of him from the tree above. He’d walked through the tripwire – a length of plaited immature liana. One of the stakes had pierced his throat. The guy was as dead as yesterday. The lack of blue slashes on his battle uniform indicated that he was CNDP. Cassidy felt the barrel of the old AK-47 lying beside him.

  ‘Cold,’ he said.

  West checked the ground for tracks. ‘Looks like four, maybe five, others.’ He motioned up the hill. ‘They’re running away.’

  Cassidy immediately took off, jogging downhill back toward the rocks. We took off after him and, around fifty meters later, found a young boy of no more than fourteen who’d stepped on the trap that had almost claimed me. He was impaled on the row of spikes, one of which had torn through the femoral artery in his thigh. The kid was shaking with fear and cold as his blood drained away down his leg and into the hole in the ground. His eyes made contact with Cassidy before they went utterly blank, the lead doors welding shut behind them.

  ‘Fuck,’ said West, speaking for all of us.

  I kneeled and picked up the kid’s weapon, a new M16. Its barrel was warm, which suggested that the burst of fire we’d heard had come from this gun. Perhaps the boy had squeezed the trigger in shock when the stakes rose out of the earth and shanked him.

  ‘I got a nephew that kid’s age,’ Cassidy said, hands on his hips, looking up at the canopy.

  ‘THEY’RE GONNA MAKE A report,’ said West.

  I agreed. ‘Time to change neighborhoods.’

  ‘But we’re safe here,’ Leila protested, her hair brushed, her puckering lips now wearing a soft Chanel pink, and a long-legged spider crawling up onto her shoulder, which Ayesha flicked off before the singer became aware of it.