by Tony Park
‘All right,’ Chuck announced. ‘We’ll give you fifteen minutes’ head start, then we’re coming after you. Colonel Gizenga, sir, please remind your men that they are here as the cordon – to stop our fugitives from running too far off to the flanks – and that either myself, Fletcher, Eddy or Anthony should be given first shot when one of the targets comes into view.’
‘Of course,’ Gizenga said. ‘It is not the first time we have played this game.’
‘Ready, everyone?’ Chuck asked.
‘Wait,’ Anthony said. He moved close to where Shane and Michelle stood, under Patrice’s watchful guard. ‘Whoever gets Shane in his sights – kill him, but leave the broad alive. Me and her have some unfinished business.’
‘Bastard,’ Shane hissed. Michelle spat at him, but the spittle missed its mark, and Anthony just laughed.
‘I’m going to fuck her while your body’s still chained to her,’ he whispered to Shane. ‘I hope you’re still alive to watch.’
Chuck aimed his rifle at the sky. ‘On your marks! Get set!’ He pulled the trigger.
Both Michelle and Caesar were taken off guard by the sharp tug on their wrists as Shane and Geezer lurched forward, into the knee-deep waters of the stream, literally dragging them behind. Chuck and Anthony laughed out loud at the stumbling antics of the panicked white woman and the wounded black man.
‘Fifteen minutes,’ Geezer called, his pistoning boots sending geysers of water as high as his chest.
‘Let’s make the most of it,’ Shane yelled back.
The stream rounded a bend. As soon as they were out of sight of the hunters, Shane and Geezer pulled their partners to a stop. Confused, Michelle asked, ‘Shane, why have we stopped?’
‘Caesar, jump on,’ Shane said, without explanation, as he and Geezer linked left and right hands respectively, making an awkward yet functional seat for the injured man, whose left hand was now wedged under his buttocks.
‘I can make it on my own,’ Caesar said weakly.
‘Shut up,’ Geezer barked back at him. ‘Keep an eye on your watch, man.’
‘Let’s move!’ Shane ordered. Michelle splashed alongside him, on his right side, manacled as she was to that hand. Even though Shane and Geezer were burdened with Caesar, Michelle was hard-pressed keeping up with them.
‘Breathe slow and deep,’ Shane told her, seeing the panic in her reddened cheeks. ‘We can do this. We can beat these bastards.’
Behind them they heard shouting and gunshots. Shane guessed Gizenga’s men were getting fired up for the hunt by loosing a few shots in the air.
‘Time?’ Geezer asked Caesar as they slogged through a stretch of water that was now up to their knees.
‘Eleven minutes,’ Caesar said. Blood dripped steadily from his wound, the tendrils of red overtaking them in the flowing water, underscoring how slowly they were moving.
‘What’s that?’ Michelle asked.
Shane kept moving, but she pulled him to a halt, causing Geezer to nearly drop Caesar. ‘For fuck’s sake, keep moving,’ the Englishman protested.
‘Shut up!’ she hissed. ‘Listen, voices?’
Shane nodded and dragged them all towards an undercut bank of the stream. On the left-hand side of the gully they could hear men speaking French with African accents. He threw an arm protectively around Michelle, pulling her close to him and pushing her into the muddy bank at the same time. Caesar whimpered in pain and Geezer clasped a hand over his mouth. They heard footsteps tramping through the grass above them as the men moved along the edge of the stream.
They waited, hardly daring to breathe, pushing their faces into the dank mud, trying to melt from sight. If any of the men had looked down they would have seen the fugitives. If it were an army patrol, Shane thought, they might shoot them on sight if they had heard Fletcher’s bulletin over the radio. When the noise of voices and footsteps receded, Shane peered over the edge of the bank. ‘They’re gone.’
‘They must have been Rwandan,’ Michelle said. ‘They were trying to work out which way the army patrols would be moving.’
‘It is fifteen minutes now since we left,’ Caesar said.
They splashed back into the river as the first gunshots sounded upstream.
*
‘I don’t care about your silly game,’ Colonel Gizenga fumed.
‘But you must stay with us,’ Chuck Hamley insisted.
Gizenga ignored him and spoke rapidly in French into his radio. When he had finished issuing another order he said to the white men, ‘Enough. I must go. My men are in contact with Rwandan Hutus. You are on your own. Me, I have a war to fight.’
‘We should clear out,’ Eddy said.
Chuck rounded on him. ‘Those people are witnesses. They know what we’ve been up to. How would you like them going to the FBI and telling them you paid to kill foreign nationals for sport?’
‘Hey, let it go, Chuck. You’re the dumb fuck who let ’em wander off down the river. We coulda killed them and buried them by now!’ Anthony said.
‘Enough!’ Fletcher commanded, regaining something of his lost authority. ‘The fact is that there are four of them, unarmed, and four of us – plus Patrice – all armed. Also, our fugitives think Gizenga’s men are still guarding the flanks. You call yourselves hunters? Instead of making me sick with your pathetic squabbling, why don’t you get on with the first real hunt of your lives!’
‘Arrêt!’ the man ordered as he leapt from around the trunk of a tree on the bank beside them.
He was African and elderly, by the look of it, though the ghastly mask of bruises and suppurating, pus-filled lacerations that covered the right side of his face and stank from a dozen paces away made it impossible to gauge his age. His one good eye was wild with fear and fever. He carried an AK 47 and pointed it at Geezer’s chest. They stopped.
‘The fool’s got no magazine on that rifle,’ Geezer muttered.
The man barked an order in French. ‘He says, shut up,’ Michelle translated. ‘And hands up.’
‘Bollocks,’ Geezer whispered out of the side of his mouth. ‘Reckon he’s got a bullet up the spout?’
‘No way,’ Shane whispered. ‘On three. One, two . . .’
Shane and Geezer lunged forward, towards the man with the gun, carrying Caesar, who screwed his eyes tight waiting for the gunshot, and dragging Michelle, who screamed. The foursome collided with the injured man, who crumpled like a dead leaf under their combined weight. When they were able to stand again, Shane was holding the AK 47, shaking the water from it.
‘How . . . how did you know it wasn’t loaded?’ Michelle gasped.
Shane quickly explained that he recognised the wounded man as one of the bush meat poachers he had tracked, and that his injuries were caused by Shane blocking the man’s rifle with mud so that it backfired. He had been held prisoner by Colonel Gizenga since then, and released as the day’s ‘target’, armed only with an unloaded rifle and destined to be cut down by the American hunters.
The man whimpered, kneeling in the river, clutching his freshly aggravated wounds and distraught that his ruse had failed. ‘Tell him to head that way,’ Shane said to Michelle, pointing west, into the jungle. The man limped off without another word.
‘Great, so now we’ve got a rifle with no ammunition – I feel much better,’ Geezer said.
Shane smiled and reached into the side pocket of his sodden fatigue trousers. In his palm, their glittering copper casings more precious than solid gold, were five AK 47 bullets.
Patrice stalked ahead of the white hunters, his AK 47 at the ready, every sense alert. He moved quickly, but with deliberate care, scanning the mud on either side of the stream for footprints, the rocks for signs where a boot might have scuffed away the moss or river slime.
He was not afraid of the unarmed white people, nor particularly concerned that the others made sure he was up front, where danger was most likely. He had detested Castle since his arrival in the Congo. The man acted as though he knew every
thing about the bush, and he had refused to afford Patrice the respect he was due. It would be a pleasure to kill him. He would do so, at the first opportunity, and later tell Monsieur Reynolds that he believed the man had somehow armed himself, which was why he had fired first.
He saw tracks leading to the west. Bold footprints, but even though he was still twenty metres away, he could see it was only one man’s spoor. Had the fugitives somehow managed to break their handcuffs and split up? Further down the stream, all looked quiet. A large tree had fallen across the river, forming a natural bridge. Again, even from this distance, he could see the uniform coating of furry green moss had not been disturbed.
With his undeniable skills as the premier tracker in these mountains, Patrice knew there was no human or animal that could elude his —
‘What the fuck!’ Anthony said as the bullet, which had entered Patrice’s mouth and exploded out the back of his skull, whizzed past his ear. He dropped into the stream, crawling through the water, his knees fighting through the ooze on the bottom, desperate to find some sort of cover.
‘Patrice is down!’ Fletcher yelled, sprinting through the shallows and up the right-hand bank. He threw himself behind a tangle of exposed tree roots and peered forward.
Chuck had broken left, his body pressed into a recess in the side of the riverbank. ‘Was that them?’
‘How the hell should I know,’ Fletcher called back.
‘Eddy, get some cover, man!’ Anthony yelled. His comrade was standing in the middle of the stream, looking left and right, as if unsure of which way to head.
It was an awkward operation. With no magazine, Shane had to yank back the cocking handle of the AK 47, which was on the right-hand side of the rifle, and feed a single bullet into the breech, then let the handle fly forward to chamber the round. Michelle’s left hand was cuffed to his right, making the whole action even more cumbersome. In her right hand she held the precious stock of bullets – the same ones that had fallen from his broken magazine while he was cleaning it the night before.
Michelle ducked her head in anticipation of the next shot. The ejected hot cartridge of the bullet that had felled Patrice had shot out of the rifle’s breech and hit her on the cheek, cutting and bruising her.
Geezer spotted for him, while Caesar lay limp against the cool wet bark of the fallen log. ‘One man in the river, still standing, stupid prick. Take him, Shane.’
Shane saw Eddy, the quietest of the gangsters, looking as dazed as a hare trapped in a spotlight. He lined up the sights on his torso and squeezed. Eddy left a splash as he disappeared from Shane’s view.
‘Behind the fallen tree!’ they heard Fletcher yell. ‘Get some bloody fire down on them!’
Shane ducked as the first bullets, heavy slugs designed to take down a buffalo or an elephant, thudded into the natural barricade in front of them.
‘Sorry, sorry!’ Michelle wailed as a bullet slipped from her hand and disappeared beneath the water’s surface with a plonk.
Shane took the time to lift his right hand and stroke her cheek. ‘It’s okay, Michelle. We’ll be fine.’ She winced as another bullet cracked a branch from the dead trunk, scattering woodchips over them. ‘Take your time and find the bullet.’
Shane realised they had probably used up more than their share of luck already. It would take all his skill, concentration and training to tip the balance back in their favour now. It was dumb luck that he had the bullets at all.
‘Reynolds will be the next to move,’ Geezer predicted. ‘He’s the one with the balls.’
Shane nodded agreement and shifted his aim to the last spot where he had seen the hunter go to ground. Geezer, Shane would have been the first to admit, was a better shot than he. It had been he who had kept Fletcher and the gangsters so effectively pinned down the day before, with his silenced hunting rifle, as they had hidden on the edge of the grassy mountain clearing and given enough covering fire for the Congolese captive to get away. Shane had done the spotting, firing away with Caesar’s AK 47 to add to the confusion.
‘I found it!’ Michelle exclaimed.
Shane looked over at her, proudly holding up the missing round, glistening with water. ‘Good girl. Dry it off for me, please.’
She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
‘I love you,’ Shane said as he watched the riverbank intently. They now had three bullets. And three targets.
‘You do?’
‘He’s up!’ Geezer exclaimed.
Shane saw the movement in the grass and fired. ‘Shit. I think I missed him.’
‘I saw it. My fault, mate,’ Geezer admitted. ‘I called it too soon. He probably just raised his bloody hat on a stick or something. Can’t believe I fell for the oldest cowboy trick in the book.’
Michelle passed Shane another round. He yanked back the cocking handle and slid the bullet into the open chamber.
‘He’s moving!’
‘On your feet!’ Fletcher screamed. ‘He’s only firing single shots! Chuck, give covering fire. Anthony, with me!’
Shane swore as he saw Anthony lumber to his feet, obediently, instinctively following Fletcher, who was in his element as a warrior at war, issuing life and death commands through the smoke of battle.
‘Chuck’s not a bad shot,’ Geezer observed casually as a ricocheting round forced him to lower his head.
‘Down!’ Fletcher barked. ‘Behind those rocks. Anthony, prepare to give covering fire with me for Chuck.’
Shane had loaded the fresh bullet, but hadn’t had time to draw a bead on either Anthony or Fletcher, who had now halved the distance between them, down to a mere thirty metres.
‘We’ve got two bullets for three men,’ Shane said.
Three more bullets smacked into the log, and Shane heard a hollow ringing after the second shot.
Michelle stared down at the water flowing around her. Her khaki shorts were running pink from someone’s blood, either Patrice’s or Eddy’s. ‘Some of us have to die,’ she said.
‘That log’s falling apart, Shane!’ Fletcher taunted them from upstream. He had noted, with satisfaction, that each successive round he pumped into the fallen tree dislodged a larger chunk of waterlogged, termite-infested wood. Their barricade looked sturdy, but it was more air than solid timber.
Chuck, who was lying alongside Fletcher now, on the opposite bank of the stream to Anthony, fired four shots in rapid succession. ‘I see it too.’
‘Give yourselves up and we’ll finish it quickly!’ Fletcher called.
‘Why ain’t they shooting back?’ Anthony wondered out loud.
All three of the hunters ducked instinctively as a round went off.
‘That didn’t sound right,’ Fletcher said.
‘I didn’t hear the crack-thump. Did that bullet come towards you, Anthony?’ Chuck asked.
‘Nope. Maybe one of them capped himself?’
Fletcher doubted it. He suspected a trap. He kept firing into the tree, another seven shots, until he started to become concerned about his ammunition. ‘How many rounds do you have left?’ he asked Chuck.
‘Only five. I can’t keep blasting away at that log.’
Fletcher looked across at Anthony, holding up a bullet, then putting a finger to his lips. The gangster looked confused for a couple of seconds, then grasped his meaning. He checked the bandolier around his waist and held up five fingers.
‘Hey, I can see daylight through that log now,’ Anthony called. ‘You think maybe we got ’em all?’
Fletcher heard a low thwap-thwap-thwap noise, like the wings of some giant prehistoric jungle bird beating in slow time. The three of them looked up as the shadow of a white helicopter with black UN markings passed over them. As if in accompaniment, they heard a light machine-gun resume its chatter to their east, though closer than before.
‘We can’t sit here all day, just waiting them out. The peacekeepers are getting closer,’ Chuck said.
‘You want to go first?’ Fletcher asked.
‘There’s only one way, isn’t there?’ Chuck said.
‘You said to me on our first safari that you regretted being too young for Vietnam and too old for Iraq.’
Chuck nodded. ‘We’ve come a long way since then, haven’t we, buddy?’
‘Yes,’ Fletcher said. And all of it downhill. To this, the lowest ebb of his life, where he would have to move forward and make sure a woman he might have married, and a man he would have been proud to serve alongside in combat, were dead. He looked across at Anthony and signalled they would all move together. ‘On three,’ he mouthed silently, holding up three fingers.
‘Fletcher, before we go . . .’ Chuck began.
He was mildly irritated. ‘Yes?’
‘You have made my life complete.’
Fletcher wondered, for an instant, if he killed Chuck and Anthony, would Shane and his friend, and Michelle, let him walk away, or, if they were all dead, would their ghosts forgive him?
He shook his head and said, ‘One, two, three . . .’
Michelle lay with her eyes closed, her face covered with her own blood, which had run profusely from the wound at her forehead.
Shane’s body was underneath hers, holding her up out of the water, though he was face-down.
Caesar floated on his back, his khaki shirt stained dark with blood. The material of the Englishman’s tailored safari jacket was just visible beside him, under the log.
Fletcher stood panting, on the other side of the log, his rifle pointing down at Michelle’s face. He saw the blood, how it flowed from her hairline over her face. You can’t fake blood, he told himself. He glanced across at the black man, and watched Shane for any sign of movement.
Anthony lumbered up to Fletcher and Chuck. Fletcher suspected the gangster had deliberately hung back as they had charged the barricade.
‘Hey, where’s the limey?’ Anthony asked.
‘I can’t see the body,’ Chuck said as he straddled the log, his rifle held in one hand.
The Honourable William Delancy, Geezer to his friends, lay three-quarters submerged in a hastily dug pit in the muddy bank of the stream.