‘No, it wouldn’t.’ I said. ‘Aside from having no firm idea of how long it will actually take to walk back to Rwanda, I doubt that we’d be able to find the FARDC unit holding them again once we leave the area. And we can’t split our forces — have some of us go one way while the rest of us go another. There aren’t enough of us to provide effective security as it is.’ Having to explain this to Ryder was another reminder, if I needed one, that the guy was out of his depth.
He hardened his tone. ‘For when that board of inquiry is convened, I want it on the record that my recommendation was to return our remaining principals to Cyangugu, rather than risk more lives in what could be a reckless adventure.’
I stopped. There was something else going on here.
‘How much did Leila offer you to get her out now? She offered me a million bucks.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
From the way he squirmed, I could see that he knew exactly what I was talking about. I could also see from the look on his face that he’d been offered nowhere near seven figures.
‘We’re not going anywhere till we know what the situation is with our captured principals,’ I said. ‘But I’ve noted your point of view. In the meantime, you can tell Leila, no deal.’
Ryder looked at his feet and started to move.
The forest took us right to the edge of the groove cut in the side of the hill by the surging water but the cutting was narrower in the daylight than I remembered, which made me think that perhaps this wasn’t the watercourse I thought it was. We went downhill a little, using a natural bridge provided by logs and sticks caught up in a rock fall that had formed a natural dam, the rain coming down hard on our K-pots and shoulders, unimpeded by the canopy. No sign of the two soldiers up or downstream, so we crossed. Another half hour of slicing our way through the foliage and the sound of falling water again filtered through the greenery. We came out on the verge of a far more substantial ravine than the last one, spray from the raging water rising to meet the rain. We worked our way upstream, the incline steepening markedly, and eventually crossed over on another logjam. Once on the far side, we came back downstream, eventually finding what I was looking for.
‘Why are we stopping here?’ Ryder asked.
I pointed to several smaller trees on the edge of what appeared to be a large cleared patch of the bush. ‘Twenny and Peanut were roped up to those trees. This was the FARDC HQ.’
I turned around and recalled to mind Ayesha’s rescue, saw the trees West and I had hidden behind. I walked the area, much of which had been trampled; found the remainders of the fires and the tree stump used as a chopping block. There was no blood. Something metallic caught my eye. I bent down and picked up several brass 5.56mm casings. Had people been executed here? No blood on the ground, but with all the rain I didn’t expect to see any. All I could do was speculate. I went over to the trees that had kept my principals company and examined the ground. It was trampled, covered in broken leaves, squashed bushes and thin vines going brown in places, but I couldn’t find anything of interest.
‘Where to now?’ Ryder asked after he’d finished drinking straight from the sky.
‘This way.’
The FARDC had gone, probably during the night, which explained the lack of morning gunfire. Following the road they’d cut would lead us to them, so I could set that aside and come back to it. More urgently, it wouldn’t be long before Colonel Makenga and his golden cock came down off the hill to occupy the recently vacated ground. No doubt he’d be waiting on a report from his scouts. We knew that two of them were using their recon duties as an opportunity for some free time, but there might be other scouts around who were more committed.
I double-timed it across the clearing. Trampled ground lay everywhere. The going was easier here, but the lack of cover was dangerous. I had a reasonable fx on the whereabouts of the Puma’s wreckage, but we’d be lucky to find it — from memory, the bush was thick in that area. As the angle of the ground beneath our feet began to steepen, Ryder and I passed in and out of cleared areas that had been occupied by the men, strewn with trash that ranged from tins to plastic bottles, to used bandages, and to sodden wads of newspaper and banana leaves covered in human shit, rolls of Charmin being in short supply hereabouts. We crept into a small clearing.
‘What the hell is this?’ asked Ryder.
Good question. The smell of rotting flesh was in the air. Several small animals had been slaughtered here, their guts strung up with liana. Half a dozen skulls were also bound to the tree trunk, a vertical column of them. The ants were having a ball. It was some kind of ritual altar or offering.
‘Black magic, maybe,’ I said.
We left it behind and continued traversing the hill, heading east.
‘Look for holes torn in the canopy,’ I said.
Soon after, we came on an area where trees had pieces blown out of their trunks. White sap leaked from the wounds and their limbs lay strewn across the forest floor.
‘Hey,’ said Ryder. ‘Found this on the ground over there.’ He showed me the back section of a mortar casing, a couple of the flight fins still attached to one end. It was part of an M4A2 high-explosive round, the flavor fired by the CNDP boys up on the hill. A cloud of flies buzzed at the base of a tree trunk blackened by a mortar blast. The noise distracted me. I stepped over to the area and the smell warned me what to expect. I lifted a branch and the face of a kid of no more than twelve years of age stared with milky, dirt-encrusted eyes. The flies went crazy with the fresh opportunity I’d just provided them and descended on his nostrils, mouth and, of course, those eyes. Ryder lifted another branch, saw what lay beneath it, and turned away. The kid’s leg had been blown off at the groin. The body part shifted weirdly among the leaf litter as if it were somehow still alive. Driver ants, a hundred thousand of them, were attempting to drag it away. The look in the boy’s eyes reminded me of the one I’d seen in Anna’s, as if heavy doors had been welded shut behind them. A lump swelled in my throat. I broke off a nearby palm frond to sweep away the flies, then covered the kid’s face with it and replaced the tree branch over his lower remains. I shook my head. Here, in a split second of completely useless violence, a short miserable life had ended.
I turned and saw Ryder thirty meters further up the hill, pulling on a liana vine, moving it left and right, trying to dislodge something caught up in a tree. I made my way up to him.
‘What you got?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Spotted it while I was looking for that hole.’
There was a partially obscured cream-colored object lodged in a fork in the tree maybe fifty feet above us. Whatever it was, the object was man-made and perched on the vine that Ryder was tugging. He gave it an especially hard pull and the object flew out and dropped, hit a branch and then tumbled into a nearby bush.
‘Oh, man,’ Ryder said, plucking it from a low branch. ‘Am I gonna get lucky tonight.’
Well, maybe tomorrow night, and he was probably right. It was a case, either Leila’s or Ayesha’s. He turned it over. Settling the ownership question, a gold letter ‘L’ was embossed in the expensive tooled cream leather above the gold-plated lock. He pressed the mechanism and the latch flew open with an expensive thunk. Inside was a jumble of lipsticks, nail polishes, mascaras, eye shadows and various other bottles and tubes mostly all heavily branded with the double C of Chanel, tangled up in the leads of a curling wand and a hairdryer. He pulled out a lipstick.
‘Your color?’ I asked him.
I shifted my attention to the surrounding forest, searching it for movement other than that made by the rain smacking into the vegetation, which made it appear to shiver. A little like me. I saw nothing. Satisfied, I checked over the makeup case. It had come from the Puma — no doubt about that. The leather was uncharred and, except for a couple of scuff marks, in almost pristine condition. All of which suggested that it had fallen out of the chopper with the loadmaster before the aircraft hit the ground, and certainly before a few rockets were fired into it. I traversed the hillside, slicing through low bushes, and came out above a large old rotting log covered in moss. It looked familiar. I jumped behind it and leaned over the top, looking down the hill. Pulling the sniper scope from my pack, I rested it on the log and adjusted the focus, scanning the face of the forest. Yeah, this was the place — we took refuge behind this log while FARDC torched the chopper.