‘That’s offensive.’
I didn’t care what he thought it was. I hooked the machete into a wall of fronds. Ayesha mesmerized the guy. It was time he did his job and avoided the emotional involvement. Maybe then he wouldn’t end up feeling personally responsible for her safety; avoid the mistakes I’d made with Anna. Today’s Ayesha was a different person from the girl who stepped off the plane at Kigali.
‘No, “offensive” is you taking our principals on an excursion through my recent past,’ I said.
Ryder and I walked in silence. He kept his thoughts to himself. I tried to have no thoughts at all and concentrated on projecting my senses beyond what I could see, which wasn’t that far beyond my face. The rainforest was thick here — I’d be easy to cut our way into a clearing and find ourselves face to face with a hundred FARDC or CNDP troops or, worse, more shit-throwing chimps.
It took an hour of fending off vipers and spiders to reach the top of the hill, and still there were no sounds of battle. Something was up. We kept going west of south for another fifteen minutes. I hacked a hole into a screen of fronds and came out into a broad tunnel of broken vegetation; the trees, shrubs and bushes already cleared in front of us. I stood in the relatively open space as rain started to drip through the canopy. I took a closer look at the plant life. It had been cut, the still-green remnants lying trampled on the leaf litter. The tunnel had been cut recently. I crouched on my haunches. Some of the fronds had pressure marks on them that resembled the tread from boot soles. A lot of men had passed this way. Duke was about to say something; I put my finger to my lips and signaled him to follow. Creeping forward across the cleared area, I found that it was roughly twenty meters wide. I cut my way into the untouched bush and waited for Duke to come up behind me.
‘Could be FARDC, could be CNDP,’ I said.
‘Could be elephants,’ he suggested.
‘Wearing combat boots?’
‘Right,’ said Duke. ‘Still no gunfire.’
‘One of the parties has called it quits and pulled out. Be good to know which one.’
‘Why?’
‘’Cause I don’t like knowing that there’s stuff I don’t know,’ I told him as I took my Ka-bar and cut a notch in a tree trunk. ‘We’re going to stay off the track.’
I could tell that he wanted to ask me why, to discuss it and then give me a bunch of good reasons why we should turn back. So I didn’t give him the chance, moving off and staying low, heading roughly east according to my Seiko, tracking parallel to the pre-cut path. The rain was coming down heavily; it hadn’t rained for a while, so maybe it was making up for lost time. The sound of it eliminated all others as the fat drops slammed into leaves and fronds and trunks and rattled on my K-pot. Around a hundred meters from the notched tree, the forest road hooked to the south. It was heading back to the ground occupied by the FARDC, which seemed to settle my earlier question.
Then I saw movement. I stopped, crouched. Two men coming along the road cut into the forest, taking it slow and careful, watching each step like they were walking among rat traps. They were hunched over their rifles, wary. There were no blue patches on their shoulders — CNDP rather than FARDC. I dropped on my belly, keeping the movement slow and fluid. Ryder did likewise beside me. We lay there for several minutes, motionless, and they stepped past us no more than six feet away. Killing them served no purpose. I signaled Ryder that we were staying put for a while. Thirty meters down the road behind us, the two men stopped under an umbrella palm and lit up smokes. They felt secure enough to take five while on patrol and telegraph to any enemy downwind that they were prepared to risk lung cancer and/or a bullet between the eyes. Did their presence mean that the CNDP had come down from the heights and now owned this patch of turf? The men quickly finished their cigarettes, threw the butts on the ground and retraced their steps, sauntering past us with the barrels of their rifles pointing down, their body language now completely relaxed, like they were heading to a bar. The two were out of sight within minutes. I left it a while before coming up on one knee. Something bit me on the neck. And bit again. And again. I slapped at the bites. Ants. Shit, the fuckers must have been all over the ground I’d been lying on, and the way they were chewing on me suggested they resented it. I brushed myself down collecting another half dozen bites along the way.
Beside me, Ryder slapped at his arms and then fumbled with his rifle, dropping it. He picked it up and we crept along in the same direction as the CNDP duo, keeping off the cleared area. The FARDC company had broken off the engagement with the CNDP, and the two men we’d just seen had drawn the short straw to reconnoiter the enemy’s retreat. They hadn’t bothered finishing the job, which would have been to give their commander an indication of the enemy’s new position. Most probably they would find somewhere to lie low, waste another hour or so, then return to their unit with fabricated intel.
The men moved faster on the road than Ryder and I could maneuver in the bush, and we soon lost sight of them. That made me nervous, but there was no way around it. I stopped.
‘What?’ Ryder asked.
‘Hear that?’ I said.
He lifted his head and turned it from side to side, concentrating.
‘Still can’t hear any gunfire.’
‘No, rushing water. We’re close to a ravine.’ Maybe it was the ravine that ran alongside the FARDC encampment, the one that West and I had used to carry away the HQ guards we’d killed. We were coming up on the general area.
Ryder and I waited, staying still and quiet for a further ten minutes, to give the two CNDP guys time to cross whatever lay forty meters ahead in the forest. I stood up, ready to move.
‘What are we doing?’ Ryder asked, his voice low and quiet. ‘We know the FARDC has moved out. Shouldn’t we get back to the others before it gets dark?’
‘We don’t know dick, not for sure,’ I replied. ‘And if the people holding our principals are no longer holding their ground, I want to go have a look at what they left behind.’
‘Why?’
‘Remind me — which side of the Puma were you sitting on before we crashed?’
‘I was behind you, the right-hand side. Why?’
‘Just before the engines lost power — before we crashed — did you say anything, or hear anyone else say anything?’
He looked down, concentrating. ‘No. I was asleep. I guess I could have said something — I talk in my sleep.’
‘Just before we went down, I heard someone say, “What was that?”’
‘No, I don’t remember hearing anything.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s with the questions? Something going on I don’t know about?’
I wanted to tell him that his ass could be on fire and he wouldn’t know about it, but that sort of thing’s not helpful in the modern workplace. ‘I want to go back and have a look at the Puma,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we came down by accident. There’ll be an inquiry when we get back home and we’ll need a sample of the residue in the fuel tanks.’
‘Shit…’ He plucked an ant off his forearm. ‘Do you know this or is it just a theory?’
‘At the moment it’s just questions that don’t have answers.’
Ryder broke off the engagement and we patrolled in silence, and he was satisfied to leave it at that. I’d just told him that I thought our aircraft might have been sabotaged, but all he seemed to care about was hightailing it back to his love interest.
‘Can I ask you something?’ he said eventually.
I didn’t say yes, but that didn’t stop him.
‘Why don’t we just take Leila and Ayesha to Rwanda, then come back for Twenny, Peanut and the Frenchman? That’d make more sense, wouldn’t it?’