‘Yours is still breathing,’ said West panting, standing over the African at his feet. The man’s neck had an odd kink in it.
I checked the pulse on my guy. He had one. I felt the back of his head. His hair was soaked with sweat and gritty with dirt and leaves, but there was no blood, no broken skin, no depression in the back of his skull. He’d hit his head on a gnarled tree root growing up through the compacted mud. ‘Out cold,’ I concluded. I checked him for ammo. Again, just the one mag. I knew what West would want me to do with him. ‘He’s going to be out for a while. We can do everything we need to do before he comes back.’
‘You the man, sir.’
I could tell he didn’t agree with the man’s decision.
We dragged both men off the path deep into the rainforest and covered them with palm leaves.
‘Look,’ said West, holding a bag made from recycled plastic sheeting tied around the African’s neck with a shoelace.
Mine had one too, though his was made of cotton cloth tied with sinew.
‘Superstitious bastards,’ West observed.
‘Yeah,’ I said, sucking in air, the adrenalin only just starting to ebb away.
‘Two to go.’
‘Where’d the pig come from?’ I asked.
‘Dunno. It was just there – turned up out of nowhere. I moved my foot and gave it a scare. Our shooters here were jumpy as hell.’
West was damn lucky and we both knew it. The broken back could just as easily have been his.
A familiar low whistle came from the direction of the path.
‘You expecting company?’ I asked West.
‘Nope.’
I looked hard but couldn’t see anyone. Then a familiar shape bobbed up and signaled, ‘on me.’ I couldn’t see a face in the dark but knew it was Cassidy. West and I, staying low and quiet, made our way over to him.
‘How many you accounted for?’ Cassidy asked, keeping his voice low.
‘Three,’ West replied.
‘I found two in the banana trees.’
‘Where are they now?’ I whispered.
‘Meeting their maker, whoever that is around here.’
‘Then that’s everyone accounted for,’ said West.
‘Five scouts?’
I nodded. ‘This Lissouba guy has been around. He staggered them. We didn’t expect to see you.’
‘The forest is the place to ambush the main force, where the trail splits. We hit them, fall back, hit them again. We can’t let them advance to the plantation. Once they reach those trees and the more open ground, with their numbers they’ll spread out and flank us. Boss, how much time we got, you reckon?’
‘It took us three hours to recon the area, travel time included,’ I said.
‘Then let’s give them the same amount of time,’ said Cassidy. ‘We can do a lot in three hours, especially with the stuff you told us about in the barn.’
‘Getting nervous doesn’t mean they’ll come out and fight,’ observed West. ‘Going on past experience, they seem to wait till dawn before they work up to it.’
‘I hope you’re wrong,’ said Cassidy, ‘’cause if you’re right, we might as well show those motherfuckers our jug’lars. We can only handle their numbers on our terms.’
That gave me a thought. ‘Come and get me two hours and forty-five minutes from now – I don’t want to be walking into any of your handiwork.’
‘Where you headed?’ West asked me.
‘Back to the knoll.’
‘Mind telling me what you’re going to do?’ Cassidy asked, checking his watch.
‘Poke Lissouba in the eye,’ I said. ‘See if I can’t provoke a reaction.’
EXACTLY TWO HOURS AND forty-four minutes later – three hours after the first of the scouts appeared – I was looking over the edge of the wall toward the riverbank below. All was quiet, except for my constant companions, the mosquitoes. There were fires down there. A temporary shift in the air brought the smells of cooking up to my swollen nose and saliva filled my mouth the way seawater foods a torpedo tube. I spat onto the ground. I had company with me on the ledge: namely, the last scout Lissouba had sent up, the man West had killed with a knife throw. I had him standing on the edge of the limestone wall, balanced on a single leg. Rigor mortis had set in. I had him on one leg because its partner was bent out at an odd angle and locked in place by the rigor.
I took another look over the edge. A shift in the air took away the cooking smells and replaced them with the aroma of Tailend beside me. I switched to breathing through my mouth. The guy stank. Not his fault – death doesn’t wash – and at least the smell made him easy to find in the almost complete darkness. Once I found him, I brushed the ants off him, dragged him from the elephant grass to this spot and hoisted him to his feet. Correction, foot. The corpse’s arms were locked straight out some distance from the side of his torso. Come to think of it, given his body position, there was a pretty fair swan dive coming up. With a bit of luck, the body would land on someone important, maybe even Lissouba himself, and then the heart would go out of the Africans and everyone would just go on home. Wishful thinking.
‘Sorry for what I’m about to do, pal,’ I whispered. ‘But thanks for helping us out.’
I gave the corpse a shove in the back and over the edge he went, disappearing quickly into the void below. A moment later I heard Cassidy’s familiar dry whistle. He came and stood beside me and looked down.
‘That your poke in the eye?’ he asked. ‘Doing something like that – I wouldn’t have thought a guy like you would have it in you.’
‘What’s a guy like me?’
‘The righteous kind.’
Technically speaking, what I’d just done – desecrating the dead – would have had consequences if witnessed by unsympathetic eyes. The book said it was okay to maim and kill, but once dead, we were expected to leave the corpse in peace and not disturb the flies. But the Congo was like an acid bath that burned through civility. The only rule that seemed to count here was kill or be killed, the original law of the jungle.
‘Don’t worry me none, Cooper.’ Cassidy sucked something from between his teeth. ‘When in Rome, right?’
‘They do this kind of thing there too?’
I heard him grunt.
‘Where are our principals?’ I asked.
‘Where you left them. Nice and cozy, surrounded by bamboo, thorn bush and elephant grass. Boink has overwatch and we’ve armed Twenny for backup to release our guys.’
That meant we had a strike force of five: Cassidy, Rutherford, West, Ryder and me. The thick night air suddenly came alive with shouts and cries carried up to us from the darkness below. Gunshots barked among them. The rainfall was heavy in these parts, but a body coming down through the trees was just a touch heavier than usual. The folks below were mad. We needed them mad enough to make a very bad mistake.
‘We ready?’ I asked Cassidy.
‘I’ll let you know in the morning, if we’re still alive.’
Not the confident reply I’d hoped for, but we had little choice other than to force a showdown. Lissouba’s men could bottle us up, wear us down and sooner or later overwhelm us. Right now, we were as strong as we were going to be. We held the high ground, and we’d also recon-noitered it reasonably thoroughly. We didn’t have numbers but, for a short period of time, we held all the other cards worth holding. The only exit strategy left to us was to maul Lissouba so bad that leaving us alone was his best option. I again mentally went through the odds as we jogged back to the rainforest. Five against fifty, give or take. Only a lunatic would bet on us.
WHEN THEY CAME WITHIN throwing distance, Lissouba’s men tossed grenades up and over the wall and onto the knoll, presumably to clear it. But there was nothing to clear, except maybe a path through the mosquitoes. The knoll was some way from our positions, lying in the mud, curled around tree roots in the rainforest, but we heard the explosions as dull thuds that punctured the night. And we waited.
Ma
ybe it was the lack of resistance that emboldened them, but their first charge through the rainforest was all war cries and wild-ass shooting from the hip. A force of around twenty men swept along the trails, yelling and hooting across a front fifteen to twenty meters wide, straight through the area where Cassidy and West had hung clay pots in the trees over the trails. These pots had around three quarters of a pound of C4 and 350 steel balls distributed between them – about half the business end of our remaining Claymore – and were positioned to provide a short, violent interlocking field of fire. Detonators from the smoke grenades rigged to liana trip wires set them off. They exploded above the FARDC’s heads almost in unison and the hail of steel that beat down on them wounded more than half their number; a couple of them fatally, as far as I could see, from the way they fell.
Five men made it through and kept coming. I shot one, Rutherford got the other and I figured a third passed a little too close to Cassidy for his own good. Far over on my left, the remaining two tripped one of Cassidy’s surprises, a sapling onto which had been lashed some stools taken from the village workshop, their legs sharpened to points. The trap was positioned so that the sapling would swing through an arc of around ten feet and catch the unwary in the chest.
The Congolese were unwary.
The survivors from Cassidy’s hotpots retreated, dragging off their dead, but leaving behind the two men impaled on the stools. I crept left toward them, around and behind Cassidy, moving fast and, to avoid friendly fire, giving a cautionary whistle as I went. When I got close enough, I could see that one of the men was moving, his chin on his chest, three legs of a stool buried in his ribcage. His head moved languidly around in a circle. He hummed as if he had a gut ache and doing this somehow took away some of the pain. He died before he could get to the chorus. A grenade hung from his webbing. Both men had a spare mag tucked into the tops of their trousers. Their rifles were nowhere to be seen. I quickly hunted around for them but couldn’t find them. I figured they’d probably dropped them when the forest came to life and took theirs.
I fell back fifty meters, as we planned to do after the first attack. Rutherford, Cassidy, West and Ryder had already done so. I found Cas-sidy and handed over one of the spare mags. Neither of us said a word. I headed for a hole in our line that I thought needed to be plugged and took up a position against an old hardwood whose roots came down from above. I could see Rutherford, but only because I knew where to look. I couldn’t see Cassidy even though I knew where he was. I crept across to Rutherford, gave him the captured mag and then returned to my tree.
An hour and a half passed. I urinated where I stood. The liquid running down my leg was warm and comforting but then the cold quickly seeped in to take its place in my bladder and I began to shiver. It started to rain at around the same time, making a noise that sounded like a stampede of small animals as the squall line passed over the canopy. We’d been in this part of the world long enough now to know that sound would be used as cover.
Frag grenades suddenly detonated in and around our previous positions, the noise of the explosions booming around us, close and personal this time. I could hear fragmented metal tinkling like wind chimes in a hurricane as the metal storm lanced through the foliage, became embedded in tree trunks or fell steaming onto the soaked ground. The attacking force gave its whereabouts away moments later, charging along the forest trails once more, certain that we were half dead, or worse, shooting randomly, throwing ammunition around like rice at a wedding. Tracer, supersonic pencil lengths of red light, lanced through the trees all round us, but it was mostly high and all of it was wild. I guessed that the enemy was less than thirty feet from Ryder and West before they returned fire. The Congolese’s cries turned into screams, but still they kept coming. The shooting became point blank, desperate and anonymous, a rush of death in the darkness. And then silence. It hung between the trees, heavy and dark like blood-soaked cloth pegged out by the Reaper.
I looked toward the epicenter of the fight, over in Rutherford and Ryder’s direction, but couldn’t see anything, my night vision wrecked by the bright flashes of exploding ordnance. I turned back to scan the bush in front of me, just as the machete swung at my head out of nowhere. I lifted the M4, an instinctive reaction. The blade sparked as it glanced off the barrel and buried itself in the trunk of the hardwood. The man holding it wasted a precious second trying to work it free, during which time I swung the M4’s butt in an arc that caught the bottom of his chin. I heard his teeth splintering, a sound that reminded me of crunching ice. The force of the blow pushed his head up. He staggered back and I shot him through the hip, which was like hitting him with a five-pound sledgehammer. It blew him clean off his feet and landed him on his back. It was only when he fell that I saw that there was a boy accompanying him, and that he was close. The kid, shaking violently, was also pointing a large black rifle at me. The rifle discharged but the slug missed. The boy fdgeted with the selector mechanism, going for full auto I guessed, moving back and looking at the mechanism while he did so. I darted forward while he was preoccupied and kicked the gun out of his hands. He stood there, a small black shadow, slightly pigeon-toed, looking like any moment he was going to start bawling. I went to grab him but he shouted something, dropped to the ground and was gone, snatched by the shadows.
A short, sharp rustle in the bush to my left informed me that Cassidy had had his own visitors, but I couldn’t go to his aid without leaving a hole the enemy might penetrate and get in behind us. I had to leave him to it. Two gunshots and the situation there was resolved. Cassidy whistled a low note to let me know that it was resolved in his favor. I answered with a whistle. Time to fall back again.
We withdrew our line a hundred meters or so, mixing up the distance of each withdrawal as planned. When we were set, Rutherford whistled and approached.
‘Any more mags, Cooper?’ he asked, waving at his own personal cloud of bloodsuckers. ‘Duke and Mike are almost dry.’
‘No,’ I said. I did a mental count. ‘I got two rounds left in my Sig – nine, maybe ten in the M4.’
I popped the carbine’s mag and racked out the rounds with my thumb, counting ten as the spring released them into the palm of my hand. Ten rounds – better than nothing, but only by ten. I handed over six and fed four back into the slot. I also had the grenade the enemy had donated to our cause, which I kept. Rutherford said thanks and disappeared.
How many more people was Lissouba intending to sacrifice? How many men and boys did he have left at his disposal? He’d tried the full frontal assault and then the decoy run. What next? My PSOs and I all sat in the darkness, listening to the night, and faced our own terrors. Mine was that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember Anna’s face. But, for some reason, I had no trouble remembering the hole in her chest and the way her heart rolled around beneath her shattered ribs, the way a fish founders when it’s dumped on the pier with a hook in its mouth. Maybe this faceless dying person without an identity was my subconscious providing me with a representation of everyone I’d been close to in recent times, almost all of whom were dead. Maybe Leila’s comment about me being a killer was right on the money. I kept sticking my hand in the fire until someone tried to pull it out and it always seemed to be that someone else who got burned instead of me. Like Anna.
‘Mr Cooper, are you there?’ called a voice through the night.
I snapped out of it. The accent was thick, with African and French overtones, ‘Cooper’ pronounced ‘Coopah’.
‘Mr Cooper. I am Colonel Lissouba. We can work something out, you and I, yes? We can make a deal.’
Colonel Lissouba. How about that? I was disinclined to give away my position by opening my mouth. And, of course, any deal from this shitbird wouldn’t be worth the blood it was written in. Folks would die – my folks.
‘You and I need to talk, Mr Cooper. You do not like to fight my boys, I know this, but the boys are all I have left. You will be killing children. Are you a child killer?’
‘You try my patience, Mr Cooper,’ Lissouba called out, angered when he realized that more of his people had just died anonymously, hung up on another of Cassidy’s tricks. They were the screams of men, not boys, but the fact that they’d at least made it past puberty didn’t make me feel any better. All of us had had more than enough of killing. I heard a choking, gurgling noise on the night air – Cassidy making sure of death with his Ka-bar.
‘You must have very little ammunition left,’ Lissouba continued after a lengthy pause. ‘When was the last time you ate real food? You have civilians with you. They need to be cared for. Come out now. End this.’
I returned the offer with a loud silence.
‘I know that you cannot retreat. I have heard on the radio that there is the blood fever in the village. Your only way out is to negotiate with me. I have food. I can get you back to your friends across the border. I would like to help you.’
No doubt about it, this sorry puke could play the game.
Ghost Watch Page 41