‘Stay close, move slow and, for Christ’s sake, stop when I stop,’ I told Ryder under my breath.
We’d collected another two Claymores with tripwires set up like the first before I smelled tobacco, indicating the presence of sentries ahead. We crawled forward and, in the last vestiges of light, watched a young guy in a poncho aimlessly throwing a knife into the ground at his feet, killing time, his rifle lying in the leaf litter behind him, the source of the second-hand smoke hanging from his lips. Ryder and I stayed put until darkness was complete. The rain started to fall again, heavy and determined, as we waited for the guard to light another cigarette. Eventually, a sudden flame fared in front of his face, destroying his night vision for a few minutes. Ryder and I used his temporary blindness to slide past.
The underbrush was thick and perfectly suited for our purposes, as was the fact that the army camped on the hill was far more focused on trying to stay dry and feed itself than it was on stopping unwelcome visitors at the door. Maybe it felt nice and safe behind its barricade of Claymores.
Ryder and I avoided any open ground and stayed low and slow. The vegetation around us was waterlogged, making it possible to move around without sounding like a couple of two-hundred-pound animals, there being no dry sticks to break underfoot and alert sentries to our presence. Occasionally, larger shadows hurried out of our way through the bush, and I chose not to think about what they might have been. As long as they weren’t carrying guns, I was happy to leave them alone.
We broke cover as the angle of the climb lessened and discovered that the ground was miraculously open. The smell of sawdust and fire smoke was in the air. The hill — it was more of a plateau — had recently been logged. Tents were clustered on one side of the area, marking the area as the company HQ. Over on the opposite side, around two hundred meters away from both Ryder and me and the HQ, the bush was being cleared away.
‘The scope,’ I whispered to Ryder, who pulled it from the pack on my back and handed it to me. It wasn’t of the light-enhancing type, but it had reasonable low light characteristics and there were several fires burning. I focused on all the activity. ‘Shit,’ I murmured.
‘What?’ Ryder asked.
‘Civilians. And a chopper.’
Women dressed in brightly colored clothing that reminded me of the Rwandan prime minister’s wife, were doing the clearing, overseen by soldiers. That meant there was some kind of settlement nearby. Parked in the middle of the cleared area the women were extending was an old Soviet Mi-8 of the sort I’d seen at the airport in Kigali and dismantled in the hangar at Cyangugu. I wondered who’d flown it here, and why. Its markings identifed it as Rwandan. What was a Rwandan chopper doing over the border in the DRC, parked in the FARDC unit’s bivouac?
I scanned the HQ, checking it over more closely. A couple of tents were still being pitched. Cooking fires were burning, providing helpful illumination. A slight wind shift brought the smells of meat sizzling on those fires, and glands pumped saliva into my mouth. I picked up our principals almost immediately.
‘They’re alive,’ I said involuntarily.
Twenny and Peanut were strung up to trees, just as they’d been at the last encampment, their hands secured behind their backs, hoods over their heads. A third man was beside them, wearing a tattered flight suit. ‘Fournier. He’s there,’ I said. I handed the scope to Ryder and showed him where to point it.
‘I see ’em,’ he whispered. ‘It’s Fournier, all right.’ He turned his head slowly, taking in the rest of the camp. ‘Did you see the helicopter there?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Ryder took the scope on a quick reconnoiter. ‘Hey, the Chinese guy, the one you told us about. That him? He just came out of one of the tents.’ He passed me the scope.
It took a moment to locate him. ‘Yeah,’ I said. A tall, slender black man wearing a tailored combat uniform with a cream cravat tucked into the top of his shirt accompanied him. This had to be the FARDC commanding officer. They were both talking to a third man, though that person had his back to me and he was in shadow.
‘I can’t see his face,’ I whispered, talking to myself. ‘Wait — they’re moving.’
The Chinese advisor put his hand on the unidentifed man’s shoulder and the three of them began to walk slowly over to Twenny Fo, Peanut and Fournier, collecting a couple of funkies with machine guns along the way. Fu Manchu and his buddies were deep in conversation when they arrived in the area where their hooded prisoners were tied up. The captives didn’t appear to react in any particular way to the arrival of the party within their midst. Fu Manchu stepped up to the guy in the flight suit and removed his hood. Damn — it was definitely Fournier. I noticed pretty much at this moment that the unidentifed man was holding a pistol in his right hand, down by his leg, the muzzle pointed toward the ground. He raised it to the back of the Frenchman’s head. I heard a muffled explosion and the front of Fournier’s face blew out. He toppled forward, his arms dislocating from his shoulders as he slumped to the ground, dead.
‘Shit, what just happened… what happened…?’ Ryder said, way too loud.
‘Shut up,’ I hissed.
Twenny Fo and Peanut were now shouting at the man, who handed the pistol back to the Chinese guy, turning toward me as he did so.
‘Christ,’ I whispered.
‘What?’ Ryder demanded.
Fournier’s killer. It was Beau Lockhart.
Discovery
I watched Lockhart and the Chinese guy stroll back to the tent, having a nice post-murder chat, and disappear inside it. Leaving aside the fact that Lockhart had just killed a man, why kill Fournier? That didn’t make sense. Wasn’t Fournier their guy? Perhaps it made perfect sense, only not to me. It didn’t fit my theory and that meant I had to throw the damn thing out and start again from scratch.
I trained the scope back on Twenny and Peanut. The rapper was struggling and shouting something at the guards who’d moved in to recover the body, but I was too far away to hear what he might have been yelling. So, our principals were alive and Lockhart was involved in a whole bunch of crap up to his eyeballs, murder topping the list. He was with Kornfak & Greene, a DoD contractor. His business began and ended at the Cyangugu base, yet here he was in the enemy’s camp, capping a UN peacekeeper. His presence here, aiding and abetting the FARDC unit’s capture of Twenny Fo and Peanut, heavily suggested that I was right about the ransom and kidnap angle. Maybe this had been the plan from the beginning, rather than it being an opportunistic grab. And now I had suspects. I handed the scope to Ryder, who returned it to my pack, and then we wriggled backward deeper into the bush as the rain started coming down with its usual biblical intensity. Turning one-eighty for the crawl out, we again took it slow and careful. All went reasonably smoothly until, around fifty meters later, we shinnied into several Africans who were rigging hammocks across our path. We had nowhere to go, which meant we had no choice but to share the shadows for a bunch of time with countless biting critters, waiting for the men to fall asleep.
The rainfall came to an abrupt end sometime after midnight. With water no longer finding its way through the folds of their ponchos, the men soon began snoring.