We were well into the hand-to-hand battle with palms, bushes, elephant grass and liana, approaching the first ravine before Ryder asked, ‘We heading back?’
I’d been asking myself the same question. I gave it some more consideration as I chopped around the answer, clearing away the indecision. ‘It’s after three. We’re at least couple of hours’ walk away from the others, which means the last half hour or so we’ll be walking in complete darkness.’
‘So what are we gonna do?’
I considered whether the people holding Twenny Fo, Peanut and Fournier bugging out lessened the chances of our principals’ survival, and came to the conclusion that the outcome could go either way. We hadn’t found their bodies at the FARDC HQ’s clearing, which was promising. I was leaning toward the conclusion — or maybe it was just the hope — that the officers holding our people captive were considering how to bargain with the US for their release in a way that wouldn’t bring a unit of Navy Seals down on them in the dead of night.
‘We still have to locate that FARDC company,’ I said. ‘We still don’t know where they’re holed up.’
Ryder took out his anxiety about this with his machete on the elephant grass.
Once across the second ravine, we picked up the road carved through the forest and found the passage we’d cut alongside it.
‘You don’t like me much, do you?’ Ryder remarked out of the blue.
‘What’s liking you got to do with anything?’
‘So I’m right.’
‘Duke, all I care about is that you do your job. And if you can tell a joke or two to lighten the load while you’re at it — and maybe even grumble with class — that’s icing on the cake.’
‘I talked my way onto this detail because I knew Ayesha. I know you know that. Maybe what you don’t know is that I’ve been trying to get off that damn desk for two years. This came along, I saw my chance and took it.’
‘And that desk is looking pretty good right about now, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘I’m not trained for this and we both know that. Just help me out a little. Show me what I need to do and I’ll get it done. Okay?’
A good speech. His hand was held out for us to shake on our newfound understanding. Duke was baggage. Frankly, I didn’t think he had it in him to turn his shit around, but I shook anyway, if only to end this impromptu performance review.
We got going again and moved across through the pre-cut slip road. I stopped when I saw a bunch of rocks ahead. I didn’t remember seeing them on the way out. And then the rocks did the strangest, most un-rocklike thing — they moved. A massive gray boulder lurched slowly from one side to the other, and then a tree trunk snapped with a crack like a grenade going off and it fell down with a crash, leaving a small hole ripped in the canopy. Another boulder moved and snorted and I realized what I was looking at — a couple of elephants enjoying the afternoon smorgasbord, grazing on the leaves higher in the trees. I was aware that Ryder and I were downwind of the beasts, because I smelled them and they smelled bad, like a platoon after a three-week bivouac in a dirty sock basket. Nevertheless, we took several slow steps backward and found some cover behind a tree too thick to be pushed aside, and stood there for twenty minutes, waiting for the animals to move off; not talking, not moving. They reminded me of Boink and of my childhood circus visit, and I had the fleeting, yet powerful, feeling that the threads of my life were coming together in a pattern that I should recognize but couldn’t.
When we could no longer see, hear or smell the animals, we came out from behind the tree and moved quickly through the area. Ten minutes later, I found the notch made in the tree trunk on our outbound journey. I checked the Seiko. Taking a course eighty degrees to the north of the one we’d been on would bring us eventually and approximately back to the rocks where, right about now, Cassidy, West and Rutherford would be securing the area for the night ahead. Ryder ran his fingers across the notch.
‘You make this?’ he asked.
‘Yep.’
The forest closed in solidly ahead, with no slashed fronds or bushes.
‘This where we turned left, isn’t it?’ Ryder asked, reading the signs.
‘Yep,’ I repeated. ‘Leave the makeup case here — hide it.’
He set it on the ground and covered it with foliage and liana. Satisfied that it couldn’t be found without a concerted inspection, I stepped past him toward the forest flattened by the FARDC on the move. The track was clear as far as I could see. I considered taking the road more trampled but it wasn’t worth the risk, so I turned back to the tree with the notch. We had two hours of daylight left in which to find the enemy’s bivouac.
I saw the tripwire at knee height, just in time to avoid breaking through it. I thrust my palm back and stopped Ryder before he walked past me and set off whatever was attached to it. I hit him a little too hard and he was about to object, so I put my hand over his mouth to muf-fe any sounds that might attract attention, and set him down on the ground. Once he stopped struggling, I nodded at him and he nodded back, so I took my hand away and signed that danger lay just ahead.
‘Jesus, Cooper!’ he whispered before I could gag him again.
I grabbed a fist full of his webbing, pulled him up to my face and put my finger against my lips. He nodded again, finally getting the picture and shutting the fuck up. Okay, so he was pissed at me for pushing him around, but it was better than being dead. I let him go, got down on all fours and crawled forward till my eyes again picked up the thin line strung through the bush. It took me a while to find it a second time. Seeing it in the first place had been pure luck. I happened to focus on it rather than on a leaf or a frond or just the ground. It was a little after four pm, and the light was disappearing like someone was turning down a dimmer switch, the undergrowth starting to lose its colors to the monochrome of twilight.
I found the line again. It was fine and green, the pressure of it against my hand. I was familiar with this type of tripwire; had set a few of my own over the years. I ran the line lightly through my fingers till they found the business end, an M18A1, otherwise known as a Claymore; the raised words ‘Front towards enemy’ clearly visible on the anti- personnel mine’s plastic, curved olive-drab face. Behind it was one and a half pounds of C4 embedded with the manufacturer’s warranted seven hundred steel balls designed to explode outward in an arc of sixty degrees. In open terrain, the thing was a killer within a radius of fifty meters, potentially lethal out to a hundred meters, and just plain bad news to anything with a heartbeat out to two hundred and fifty meters. It would’ve detonated six meters from Ryder and me had we strolled through that tripwire, though we wouldn’t have known about it till we were tuning our harps. I carefully felt around the mine, my fingertips finding some good news: a couple of cotter pins hanging from the corner of the mine on a piece of wire. Someone was going to come back and recover this device if it didn’t detonate and he’d need those pins.
So, the mine looked brand new. Its presence told me we’d arrived at the FARDC’s perimeter defenses. One hundred and eighty combat veterans were bivouacked somewhere close, probably scattered around the crown of the hill ahead. Convention said the company HQ would be sited on the highest ground. We had no choice but to infiltrate the enemy camp, only this time without West’s skills up front. And the Claymore’s message — the enemy was jumpy. Maybe the FARDC company leadership was aware that it had been infiltrated once before, or perhaps West, LeDuc and I just hadn’t come across the mines when we’d rescued Ayesha.
First things first. I replaced those pins before releasing the tension on the tripwire. Then, approaching the mine from the rear, I disconnected the tripwire and removed the blasting cap from the detonator well. The device could now be handled without suddenly turning Ryder and me into mousse. A Claymore would come in handy, so I stuffed it into the backpack, together with the tripwire and blasting cap, got down on my belly among the damn ants and hoped they’d frightened off the scorpions.