‘The boy your principal killed?’
‘That’s the one. He told us that his patrol was looking for us, right?’
‘Oui…’
‘How did they know there was an “us” to look for?’
LeDuc frowned and then an answer appeared to dawn on him.
‘You are police, yes?’
‘So?’
‘Maybe you are looking for something that isn’t there, yes?’
‘Captain, coincidences are like little green men from Planet Nine — I don’t believe in either. You said the DRC was the size of Western Europe, right? So, coming down where we did, right in the middle of a battle… I’m thinking the chances of that would be like hitting a hole-in-one, blindfolded.’
‘You are saying that you believe our flight was sabotaged?’ said LeDuc, horrified. ‘That we crashed here because of some plan?’
Putting it together like that without any window dressing did make the notion sound implausible but, yeah, that’s what I was saying. ‘Yeah, maybe.’
He gave me a blank stare.
I wanted to go back over things. ‘You said there was a problem with the fuel. You also said that you checked it before we took off.’
‘Oui. It was checked.’
‘By you personally?’
‘Non. By Henri.’
‘Fournier.’
‘Oui. It was also his job to monitor our fuel load during flight. He switched the fuel from the exterior sponsons so that our main tanks were full and he did this just before the engine failures. Henri also made the Mayday call.’
‘The Mayday call that you got no response from?’
‘Oui.’
The Frenchman’s face under the dirt and blackened kerosene was suddenly haggard.
‘Baise-moi…’ he said under his breath.
‘Meaning?’
‘Fuck me.’
‘You’re not my type.’
‘I do not want to incriminate anyone without evidence.’
‘And I want to know why we’re up to our necks in elephant grass rather than heading home with a bunch of crumby posters autographed by our celebrities.’
‘It is possible that Fournier did not make the transmission at all,’ said LeDuc.
Shit. My bad feeling was baking into a real who, what and how scenario. ‘I heard something while I was half snoozing, just before the chopper’s engines failed. It woke me up. Someone said, “What was that?” ’
‘I am sorry?’ said LeDuc, puzzled.
‘“What was that?” I heard someone say that just before your engines failed.’
‘Perhaps it was said just at that moment.’
‘I’m pretty sure I heard it a handful of seconds before everything went into the toilet bowl. I think the voice I heard was Colonel Travis’s.’
‘I do not know why this is important.’
‘And I’d like to know why he said it. If everything was okay, why say, “What was that?” What made him say it?’
LeDuc peeled off one of his shrugs.
This was leading nowhere, so I let it go. Maybe I just had my timings mixed up. What it looked like, though, was that Fournier wanted us on the ground, and that the spot he’d chosen was pre-planned. He’d caused the Puma to crash, switching to tanks with contaminated fuel that would bring us down. The FARDC patrol had specifically come looking for us. How did they know there was an ‘us’ to look for? Had some arrangement been made with the DRC force before we took off from Cyangugu to capture us? And if I needed a motive for all this, one was close by. I glanced around until I saw it — Leila. She and Ayesha were now down to bras and panties — Leila’s, red lace; Ayesha’s, pink cotton. Ayesha was washing their clothes in the ravine while Leila stretched out on a boulder, the droplets of water on her honey-colored skin sparkling in the morning light. Her head was back as she drank in the warmth of the sun. She looked a million bucks — or, rather, many millions of bucks — and perhaps Fournier wanted a few of them channeled into his bank account. Add Twenny Fo’s net worth to the picture and there was plenty of motive — kidnapping and ransom. Crash landing a chopper was a hell of a risky strategy. Perhaps the lieutenant put in some extra hours of practice on the simulator before this mission to get it right.
‘Where are the fuel tanks in a Puma?’ I asked.
‘Why do you wish to know?’ LeDuc asked.
‘In case it comes up in Trivial Pursuit. Humor me.’
‘There are four main tanks. They are under the cargo floor. The spon-sons are exterior, located on the sides of the fuselage.’
I sucked some water from my camelback tube.
‘What do you want to do?’ LeDuc inquired. ‘Will you tell the others about this?’
‘I think so.’
‘When?’
‘After I’ve had a toasted ham and cheese sandwich,’ I said.
Right on cue, West called out in a hoarse whisper, ‘Come and get it!’
There was enough python to feed twice our number. Leila ate without complaint, which threw me a little. Ayesha and Boink likewise tucked into it as if they hadn’t eaten anything substantial for a couple of days, which, of course, they hadn’t.
I took a seat on a rock beside Boink.
‘You okay?’ I asked him.
He glanced at me sideways. ‘You hep me down the cliff. Thanks, man.’
‘All part of the service.’
He stuffed half a pound of snake in his mouth.
‘Where’d you get a name like Boink?’ I asked him.
‘From my folks. They look at me when I come into the world and said, “Fuck”, but they couldn’t put that on the birth certifcate, yo.’
He looked at me angrily. But then he grinned. ‘Messin’ wit choo, man. Got the name ’cause I bin known to fuck people so bad they don’ get up, you know what I’m saying?’
I’d seen the guy kill twice — with a pistol and with his bare hands, breaking a man’s neck, giving his head a twist like he was taking the lid off a jar of peanut butter. Yeah, I knew what he was saying. ‘Where’d you and Twenny meet?’
‘We wuz neighbors. His ol’ man worked corners selling drugs wit my ol’ man. But we didn’ like each other back then. Deryck, he wuz small and sick all the time with a real smart mout’, you know what I’m sayin’? So, his ol’ man pay me to protect him.’
‘You were his bodyguard when you were kids?’
‘That’s right.’
‘How’d he get to be…’ I wasn’t sure what Twenny was — icon, rock star, rapper, idealist, jerk. ‘How’d he get to be who he is?’
‘He won a competition at the mall when he wuz fifteen. A music exec was a judge. He gave Deryck a contract, and Deryck called hisself Twenny Fo, ’cause he love all the ghetto chic bullshit. Me, I stayed in the projects. Then, one day, Twenny, he got some death threats from a punk rival and a Hummer wit’ driver and half a dozen bitches turned up at my home. The driver, he tol’ me that the car and the girls were mine if I cared to sign on as Twenny’s head security man. I was nineteen, workin’ as some psycho drug boss’s lieutenant. Now I’m thirty. I own a block of apartments in Chicago, a cleaning bidness in San Francisco and a couple of bars in Miami.’ He turned to look at me again. ‘So, workin’ for Th’ Man like you do — what choo got?’
‘Job satisfaction,’ I said.
Boink shook his head with pity, put a snake rib in his mouth and sucked the meat off the bone.
‘There’s a story about Twenny braining his girlfriend with a Grammy,’ I said. ‘That true?’
The big man snorted. ‘The only thing I ever seen the boss hit is the bottle once or twice. That was some bitch who wanted her own music career. And Deryck’s manager and record company went along wit it ’cause they wanted him to be badass. The bitch got a record and Twenny got his reputation. Everyone got what they wanted.’