A cluster of moss and liana-covered rocks pushed up through the leaf litter and away from the ants that seemed to cover every square inch of the forest floor no matter where we were; red fuckers with jaws like interlocking fish hooks that latched on and wouldn’t let go.
‘Can we rest for a while?’ I heard Leila ask Ryder.
Cassidy heard it too and called a halt. Both women collapsed against a boulder. Boink leaned against the face of the rock, sucking in oxygen, his sweaty face lined with exertion.
‘How much further, yo?’ he puffed.
Further till what? If he meant Cyangugu, he was looking at days. If he meant till we made contact with his buddies, Twenny and Peanut, his guess was as good as mine. So I told him what I thought he might want to hear. ‘Not far now, big guy.’
‘Good, ’cause I wanna shoot some motherfucker dead,’ he muttered.
‘Map,’ I said to Cassidy.
The sergeant extracted it from his webbing and flattened it against the rock.
‘We’re somewhere around here,’ he said, using his Ka-bar as a pointer.
The ridges and the lake at the bottom of the cliff tallied. It looked about right. We’d come further than I’d though.
West passed around some barbecued snake and everyone took the opportunity to rehydrate.
‘What now?’ Ryder asked, wiping snake grease off his mouth with his shoulder.
‘You and I are gonna scout forward,’ I said.
‘Oh… all right,’ he said with no enthusiasm for the idea.
‘And you might like to muddy yourself up a little,’ I suggested. Apart from a light growth on his cheeks, he looked like he was ready for Sunday school, his face and arms all scrubbed nice and pink. His 97 was propped against a rock beside LeDuc. I picked it up and handed it to him. ‘Get a couple of spare mags, a machete, and make sure of your water supply.’
‘What, now?’ he asked.
‘Got something else to do?’
No response.
‘Leila, Ayesha,’ I called up. They’d climbed the rocks and their heads appeared over the top ledge. ‘Where’s Boink…?’
‘Yo,’ said Twenny’s buddy, walking around from behind the wall, cupping some water from a bottle and splashing it on the back of his neck.
I made a general announcement. ‘Duke and I are going on ahead. We need to know how far the FARDC lines extend.’
‘Why?’ asked Boink.
‘So that we don’t just walk into them,’ said Cassidy.
‘Can I ask a question?’ said Leila.
Asking for anything was a pleasant change where she was concerned.
‘What’s on your mind?’
‘I can’t hear any shooting. How do you know we’re close to the enemy?’
‘This hill we’re on plateaus not far from here, ma’am,’ said Cassidy. ‘According to the map, the valley the FARDC occupied is down the other side, and around a mile and a half to the east. We’ve got a lot of rock between us and any gunshots. But you’re right, we should be able to hear something. Maybe when we get onto the ridge.’
‘And what if something happens to you?’ Leila asked me.
I figured that she included Ryder in that.
‘We’ll be back.’
‘But what if, yo?’ Boink said.
‘You’ll head due east to Lake Kivu.’
Neither he nor Ayesha seemed overly happy about this, but for different reasons. I was starting to think that maybe Leila looked on me as some kind of lucky charm — her own personal rabbit’s foot. And Boink wasn’t going anywhere without his boss, whether I was dead or alive. The big man cocked his head on an angle, a crevasse between his eyebrows — not happy.
To avoid a raft of unnecessary questions, I didn’t tell them that I intended to go back to the FARDC encampment to check on whether Twenny Fo and Peanut were still alive. ‘If we don’t make it back,’ I said, ‘the best hope Twenny, Peanut and Fournier have got rests on you getting word back to Colonel Firestone as quickly as possible.’
The silence was thick. No one liked the idea that more of us might get left behind. I had expected an argument from Leila because one seemed to follow every decision, but everyone knew the score — even her, for once.
‘Be careful, Vince,’ Leila said.
Her concern for my health took me by surprise. Her getting my name wrong didn’t. I checked over the M4 and wriggled the additional mags jammed into my webbing to make sure that they were secure.
‘Take this,’ said Rutherford, putting the telescopic sight from the sniper rifle into my pack. ‘Might come in handy.’
‘You’d better have this, too,’ said Cassidy, handing me the map.
‘No, keep it. I know where I’m going. If we don’t make it back, you’ll need it.’
‘You’ve got five hours of daylight left,’ said Cassidy. ‘Less under the canopy. You’ll want to be back well before that or you’ll walk right past us.’
‘Give us till the morning. If we’re not back by noon tomorrow, your next stop is Lake Kivu.’
Ryder glanced my way. Overnight?
Cassidy motioned at the rocks. ‘This is as good a place as any to hunker down for a while.’
‘We miss the deadline, you’re gone,’ I said.
‘My dad used to say, “He who was not there is wrong.”’
‘Cy, getting these folks back to Rwanda is not a suggestion.’
‘So it’s an order?’
‘It’s an order.’
The subtext of this was that if Ryder and I didn’t make it back and Cassidy left us behind, there’d be an inquiry into our disappearance. The sergeant just wanted my position as the team leader stated in front of witnesses. I’d officially told him the lives of the people around him were now in his hands.
‘Good luck,’ said Rutherford. He and West lifted their weapons in a gesture of ‘see you later’.
‘A bientôt,’ LeDuc said with a slight bow.
Ayesha waved. Leila and Boink glared. I noted the departure time as Ryder and I walked into the forest, heading a little west of south, according to the compass on my Seiko. A dozen paces beyond the rocks, and the forest behind closed in and cut us off from the main party. The machete was sharp and perfectly weighted. Letting it fall on the greenery in front was mostly all that was needed to slice a little more headway, as long as we stayed clear of the elephant grass and clumps of bamboo. We made good time and kept the angle of the incline steady underfoot so that we tracked a straight line, more or less.
‘What happened to Ayesha?’ Ryder asked after a while.
‘When?’ I answered, bunting the question away. I knew exactly what he was getting at.
‘When she was held captive. Something happened down there.’
‘She saw a man’s hands get cut off,’ I reminded him, sticking to the facts. The closest she’d come to something like that in her civilian life was maybe a broken nail. With the flat of the machete blade, I turned away the head of a mustard-colored viper dangling from an overhanging palm frond.
Ryder stepped beyond its reach. ‘You’re not giving me a straight answer.’
‘Look, Duke, I know you and Ayesha are friends, but if it’s any more than that, you’re not helping her — not in this place.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You’re in uniform, buddy, cowboy-up.’
‘I resent that,’ he said. ‘I volunteered to go on the mission that brought her back, remember?’
For some reason I thought of the blond in my alligator joke. Was I being unkind? ‘Look, this isn’t a challenge on some reality dating show, and Ayesha is not the only principal whose life is in danger. You want to be effective, then join the team and stop behaving like you’re her gimp.’