Ghost Watch

by David Rollins

  ‘Oh my lord,’ Leila whispered, her hands shaking, pressed against her face to shut out the world.

  The mother howled and the man tried to get up – I guessed, to run to the child – which was when the soldiers started chopping into him with their machetes. Jesus Christ . . . They kept chopping until his head rolled clear of his neck. The groups of women and men screamed and cried out, and beat the ground with their fists. The soldiers then dragged the mother away toward one of the huts, outside which several men and boys in uniform loitered, smoking and joking among themselves.

  Then the man I assumed was the commanding officer, the man I dubbed Colonel Cravat, swaggered out of the hut, adjusting his fly. The other soldiers stood back, giving him room. He stood over the headless corpse and addressed the villagers. I couldn’t hear specifics, but I guessed that he wanted them to do something in particular – cow them completely – or risk more bloodshed. No one moved, so he shouted an order at a couple of his men, who yanked another woman from the group. They pulled her infants away from her and hauled her across the ground by her hair as she kicked and shrieked and pleaded with them. My muscles twitched, wanting to get down there and do something – I wasn’t sure what. The men took her to an old truck tire leaning against a hut, kicked it over, pulled her arms down onto it and hacked one of them off. Just like that. Shit . . .

  The officer strolled across to a point directly beneath us, while taunting her, calling out so that everyone in the clearing could hear him.

  ‘What’d he say?’ I asked Rutherford.

  ‘He said, “Now, woman, let us see how easy it is for you to hold your bastard children.”’

  It was settled. I wanted to go down there and rip the guy’s heart, assuming he had one, out through his ribs. A second truck arrived and made a U-turn, mowing down the remains of a smoldering hut in a burst of cinders, its brakes squealing as it came to a stop in the open ground where atrocities were being inficted on the locals by the army that was supposed to be their own. The older children of the village were marched to the truck from out of one of the huts and threatened with being shot unless they climbed up in back.

  The men, who were seated on the ground, were pulled to their feet and pushed toward the vehicle. The front passenger window rolled down and revealed Beau Lockhart.

  I heard him call something out to Cravat, add a friendly ‘come here’ wave and open the door beside him.

  The colonel waved back, surveyed the devastation around him and, happy with what he saw, jogged over with a jaunty gait and climbed in beside his Kornfak & Greene buddy like they were off to play eighteen holes. The door pulled shut, hiding the men in the darkness of the enclosed cabin, and the truck started to roll.

  ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ I muttered to myself.

  A baby crying in the bushes near our hiding place distracted me. Jesus, it was the kid that had been thrown. The soldiers didn’t notice or care about one more infant exercising its lungs, so I got down on my belly and did the snake thing down and across to it. Minutes was all it took to reach the spot. I found the baby hanging upside down, its legs tangled up in the liana. A bush covered with vine had acted like a fire-man’s net, catching the kid, saving its life and holding its body secure. The baby – it was a girl – was crying because it had recovered from the shock of her first flight, and also because a driver ant had latched onto a toe. I killed the ant, untangled the baby girl’s legs from the vines, and wriggled on my belly back to our position higher up the hill, resting the wailing child across my forearms.

  Cassidy met me halfway. ‘I count eight of them,’ he said, the muscles in his jaw bunching like twisted steel cabling, motioning at the soldiers swaggering among the villagers. ‘I can do five of these fuckers. Can you do three?’

  ‘We’re not doing anyone,’ I said. ‘Not now.’

  I’d already weighed the odds. The suggestion was noble but dumb. Assuming that we managed to take these guys out, their hundred-and-seventy-or-so comrades would swoop in from their encampment, food the area, hunt us down and capture us. My team and I would then be chopped up, or whatever these folks did to people they didn’t like and couldn’t ransom.

  Another truck arrived and parked behind the one waiting, its engine idling with a steady diesel thrum.

  Cassidy stroked the infant’s head to calm it. ‘The villagers are being taken somewhere close by,’ he observed.

  He was right. The trucks appeared to be making round trips. The baby had stopped crying and was starting to gurgle. ‘I think she likes you. Go to Papa,’ I said as I bundled the kid into his arms.

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘Don’t know, which is why I’m going there.’

  ‘That’s not a good enough reason.’

  ‘Those trucks are headed someplace. I want to know where. It’s worth the risk finding out. As you said, they’re making round trips. Take our people further up the hill and if I don’t make it back by morning—’

  ‘I know, Lake Kivu.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I gave him a grin and slithered off down through the undergrowth toward the vehicle. Getting closer, I could read the label on its radiator grille. The manufacturer was Dongfeng – truck supplier to the PLA. This particular variant had off-road capability. Its bodywork sat high over the wheels with sheet steel flooring the load bed. A dull green canvas tarp over a high framework protected the load from the elements. My plan, insofar as I had one, was to stow away between the load bed and the chassis members. I sat at the edge of the bush, the truck parked only a couple of meters away, which was very considerate of the driver. The body of the vehicle obscured me from all but one set of unfriendly eyeballs up behind the steering wheel. I waited till they were preoccupied with something other than the vehicle’s rear-view mirrors, snuck over to the wheels and climbed up into the truck’s insides, between the tires and the bodywork. The chassis was crude but effective, no crumple zones here, only naked steel members, cross-braced – just what I’d been hoping for. I worked my way into the darker shadows at the rear of the vehicle, and waited. But not for long.

  Within a few minutes, I heard the grief-stricken crying of the women being pushed up to the back of the truck, the soldiers snapping at them. The vehicle swayed as they climbed in and the metal tray above me began to sag under the weight, pressing me down into the chassis and onto the exhaust pipe. The loading complete, the driver revved the engine, then selected first, the gears in the transmission snarling at each other like old dogs. The brakes hissed as the truck lurched forward with a jerk, and the women above gave a collective wail. The exhaust pipe got hot very quickly and the heat radiated though my trouser leg.

  The Dongfeng turned onto the road and gathered speed, the dust and grit picked up by the tires sandblasting my face. I couldn’t see anything other than the road rolling by beneath, which it continued to do for twenty minutes. Two hills and a dozen tight, steep switchbacks later, my transport finally pulled off the main road and then bounced along a narrow track, the forest pressing in on both sides, branches and leaves slapping against the vehicle. Looking straight down, the track we were on seemed no more than a sodden strip of mud deeply scored with ruts, which shunted the truck violently sideways left and right.

  Eventually the track widened and we came out of the gloom, but even before we stopped, men who were full of impatience were shouting and hammering on the vehicle with sticks. The women above me made noises of pure dread as they climbed off the tailgate onto the ground. I dropped my head so that I could see what was going on and saw a dozen soldiers milling about, waiting on the human cargo, smacking them with those sticks like they were cattle, herding them toward some kind of marshaling area. Another truck was parked beside my ride, pointing back the way we came in. I dropped onto the mud and scampered across beneath it. Beyond this second truck, on its far side, the forest beckoned with a thousand places to hide. I dived into a thick screen of elephant grass and worked my way clear of the parking lot.

  The forest he
re was mostly banana tree, some other kind of palm with fleshy leaves that grew close to the ground, and the usual elephant grass. I figured that it was probably an abandoned plantation because I could move through it reasonably easily. I made a wide circle and, as I worked my way around to what must have been the downwind side of whatever was going on here, the air brought with it the smell of unwashed bodies, exhumed earth and the murmur of a crowd of voices. What the hell was this place?

  I changed direction, got down on my stomach and wriggled forward through the scrub, taking it slowly, the smells and the sounds concentrating. And, suddenly, the earth fell away beneath my hands. I was on the edge of something. I separated the leaves in front of my face and dropping away more than a hundred feet was a pit of the damned. Several hundred souls caked in orange dust and mud, driven by soldiers with long sticks and rifles, passed buckets of the mud up a complex labyrinth of terraces, ramps and ladders, and they were then tipped onto bigger piles of mud being worked over by more human beings urged on by beatings. The captives here were slaves, no other word for it. As I watched the scene, which reminded me of one of those old church paintings depicting a vision of hell, a man slipped and dropped his bucket, and two of the guards thrashed him with their sticks while he cowered and eventually rolled himself into a ball. Unfortunately, he rolled a little too far and fell off the terrace, dropping ten feet to a lower level where he landed on his head. No one went to the man’s aid, though several soldiers rushed at him with their sticks and the beating started over. They didn’t seem to realize, much less care, that the guy wasn’t moving, not even to protect his head.

  I glanced over toward the area where the trucks were parked. Soldiers handed buckets to the women I had shared the truck with and then divided them into teams. Down in the pit, more women worked alongside the men. Some children were down there too, I noticed. The lethargy of the workforce was matched by most of the soldiers. But there were others in uniforms present who watched over the proceedings with more than a passing interest. These men occupied a couple of shanty-style buildings over by the parking lot that were set back from the edge of the pit. Unlike their uniformed counterparts down in the hole, these men were clean and dust-free. They loitered on the rickety, uneven verandas, waved away the flies and upended green beer bottles.

  Bushes thrashed about nearby, distracting me. Jesus, there was something large and determined coming through, heading straight for me. Whatever it was came close, and then stopped. I pulled my Ka-bar and held my breath. I didn’t want to think about what it might be, but thought sharp teeth and claws were probably in my immediate future. It moved again and suddenly a black face with wide yellow eyes burst through the foliage in front of me and stopped. We looked at each other, neither of us sure what to do. I saw his knife, an old rusty blade, and knew he’d figured it out. He stuck the thing into my ribs but the crude blade glanced off my body armor. The guy was small and determined and surprisingly strong. I grabbed his wrist, and managed to roll on top of him and pin his knife between our chests. He was a civilian, or maybe a soldier out of uniform. I held my Ka-bar across his throat and pushed the blade into his Adam’s apple, his breathing coming out short and sharp.

  ‘Américain?’ he gasped, eyes widening with surprise. ‘Vous-êtes Américain?’

  No point denying it, there being a low-viz brown and tan Stars and Stripes patch on my shoulder.

  ‘We,’ I told him, in the worst French accent I’d probably ever heard.

  The guy stopped struggling.

  ‘Then you help,’ he said in broken English.

  ‘Is that before or after you stick me?’

  ‘Oh, pardon, monsieur.’

  ‘You speak English.’ I said.

  ‘Oui, a little.’

  ‘Then let’s go with that.’

  I happened to glance up just as the Chinese guy, the one from the FARDC encampment, emerged from one of the shanty hovels. Colonel Cravat was with him, following a few paces behind. Then Lockhart made an appearance, stepping from out of the hut and trotting up behind the two men. The three of them met out in the open with a man covered in orange dust accompanied by a couple of soldiers. The uniformed guys on the verandas were all turned toward them, their body language expectant. Something was going on.

  One of the soldiers accompanying the man covered in orange dust held something toward Lockhart. He accepted it, examined it, and passed it on to Colonel Cravat, who then handed in to Fu Manchu. As all three examined the item, they became animated. Whatever it was obviously excited the crap out of them.

  Lockhart and Colonel Cravat spoke with the orange man and he pointed down into the pit, showing where he found whatever it was that was getting them all in a lather.

  Then Lockhart held the object up to the beer gallery and yelled, ‘Door!’ which was met by a rousing cheer, raised bottles and plenty of backslapping.

  ‘Door? What door?’ I muttered.

  ‘D’or,’ said the man lying beside me on the ground, also watching Lockhart and the others. ‘Gold.’

  Rendezvous

  The soldiers and the man who made the strike each received a bottle of beer. A nugget of gold in exchange for a beer. I licked my lips and thought, yeah, fair trade. All three of them then shuffed off back down into the pit. Lockhart, Fu Manchu and Colonel Cravat headed for the shacks and the men on the verandas crowded around to inspect the find.

  ‘Who is that man?’ I asked the Congolese beside me. ‘The officer – the one with the white scarf tucked into his shirt. You know his name?’

  ‘He is Colonel Innocent Lissouba. A very bad man.’

  I repeated the name to fx it in my memory.

  ‘He came to my village. His soldiers took all the women and all the men. They killed many. I want to kill him.’

  The man wriggled forward to get a better view of the pit.

  ‘My wife, she is down there,’ he said, trying to spot her.

  ‘Where’s your village?’ I asked. He gestured off in a direction away from the village I’d just witnessed being plundered for the able-bodied. There were many more laborers down in the pit than I’d seen transported here, which meant there were other villages nearby. For all I knew, Lockhart, Lissouba and his cohorts were out scouring the countryside, press-ganging anyone strong enough to lift a shovel.

  ‘You are American! You must help me free my wife, my people.’

  ‘Do I look like Bruce Willis?’ I said.

  ‘Bruce Willis, yes!’

  The guy was excited.

  ‘I’m not Bruce Willis. I’ve got hair.’

  He went back to scouring the pit.

  ‘There,’ the African said, pointing, suddenly agitated. ‘Look, she is there!’

  He indicated a group of women slopping around on the edge of a puddle in the bottom of the hole, digging at it with their hands and dropping whatever they could pull up into the steel buckets. I wasn’t sure which of the women was his wife.

  ‘She is alive,’ he said, obviously relieved. ‘I know these women. And there is my brother and my uncle,’ he continued. He sat back on his haunches, his face split by a wide grin. He’d been expecting the worst, but this was obviously the best possible result.

  A wall of rain, gray and leaning forward at an angle like it was in a hurry to get somewhere, thundered across the forest on the far side of the pit, coming our way. Its arrival didn’t send anyone scurrying for cover. It seemed to arrive daily at this time in the afternoon. I knew of train services less reliable. Overhead, someone threw a blanket over the sun.

  At that instant, Lockhart and his two buddies walked out of one of the shacks and started jogging toward the parking lot. I lost sight of them at that point, but a Dongfeng moved off soon after, probably heading back to the FARDC encampment or to the village to cause a bunch more misery. I’d seen enough and pushed back from the lip of the mine.

  ‘Where are you going?’ the African wanted to know, anxious, grabbing at my sleeve.

  It was time to put
him straight – that I was not some kind of advance guard for Tommy Franks. ‘My unit and I made a forced landing in a helicopter and some of my people have been taken captive. We’re all in the same boat with you and your wife, and it’s got a big hole in the bottom.’

  ‘Then I will help you,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not Bruce Willis, either,’ I replied, maybe a little too quickly. He was a local. He’d know the area, which put him way ahead of Bruce. I gave him a test. ‘The road up there. It starts in the forest. Where does it go?’

  ‘To Mukatano, a city twenty kilometer this way.’ He gestured vaguely south. ‘The men who took the trees make the road. They are gone now.’

  Twenty kilometers – twelve miles – a lot more achievable than hiking out to Goma or Rwanda. I doubted the city bit. It had to be a small town, too small to be noted on LeDuc’s map. ‘Is there a sawmill at Mukatano?’ I asked.

  ‘Non.’

  ‘Is Mukatano on a river?’

  ‘The Zaire? Non.’

  ‘Isn’t that what this place used to be called?’

  ‘It was named after the river.’

  I scratched my cheek and an insect having a meal got caught under my fingernails. If the road ended at Mukatano and there were no sawmill there and no river, how’d those loggers get the logs processed? ‘Where’d the loggers put the lumber – in the river?’