‘Making out okay?’ I asked him.
‘As good as you, soldier man,’ he said.
‘We need to rest,’ said Leila, walking in front of me. ‘Don’t we, Ayesha?’
Her friend and makeup artist turned and gave me a look that told me she might as well hammer a nail into her own forehead if she disagreed.
‘We took a break half an hour ago,’ I reminded the celebrity. ‘We’ve gotta keep going.’
‘Then you can keep going without me.’
‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘You stay here and we’ll come back for your corpse in a week or two.’
‘I don’t like you, Cooper.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Leila tried to ignore me and kept walking, spritzing her face with a can of aerosolized water recovered from her makeup case.
‘We’ll take a break when we get to where we’re going,’ I said.
‘And where’s that?’
‘I’m not sure. I’ll know when I see it. And there’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you.’
‘Yes?’
‘No one likes to think they can be bought cheap.’
‘What?’
‘Bribing my men could get you in a lot of trouble, especially if the person you’re trying to bribe knows that someone else you waved your money at was offered a lot more.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
She glanced around to check on whether Ryder was within earshot — she knew all right, but I didn’t push it.
‘One thing I don’t understand and I was thinking that maybe you could help me with it,’ I said.
‘No. Go make polite conversation with someone else,’ she said.
‘One minute you were desperate for us to head on in with guns blazing and rescue your ex,’ I said, ignoring her request, ‘the next, you’re ready to cut and run. How come the turnaround?’
‘I’m not cutting and running and I don’t have to explain myself to you,’ she said.
‘C’mon. Help me out.’
‘Go away.’
I wasn’t going anywhere.
When Leila realized this, she sighed heavily. ‘Look, Cooper, no one has ever tried to drag you away by the ankle to rape you, have they? Perhaps if they had, you might understand what I went through — what Ayesha and I are going through in this place.’
‘We’re all Twenny Fo and Peanut have got,’ I reminded her.
‘A ransom will get paid and they’ll come home.’
‘Not if Twenny knows his kidnapper’s identity. If Lockhart thinks he’s been made, Deryck’s as good as dead whether he pays for his freedom or not.’
‘But you keep saying there aren’t enough of you to rescue him. So what are we doing? Where are we going? You’re just tempting fate, keeping us all hanging around here. You have no right to put Ayesha and me at further risk.’
From a certain angle, she had a point, even if the angle was rooted in her own self-preservation. If we lost Twenny and Peanut’s trail, I was as sure as I could be that we would not be able to find them again — not in this rainforest. I was also as sure as I could be that no matter what happened in terms of any ransom being paid, the hostages would be killed. ‘We’ll assess the situation when we get to the other side of the hill,’ I said.
‘What do you expect to see?’
‘The other side of the hill.’
‘Like I said, Cooper, I don’t like you.’
‘Stand in line.’
She pursed her lips into a seam. ‘Look, I’m feeling faint. So can we stop for a little while? Will it help if I say please?’
I gave in and called a halt. If ten minutes of rest would buy some cooperation, it was worth it. Maybe Leila was just hungry. Our stores of python had run out and lack of food was now becoming a factor, though not a life-threatening one. My own survival training told me a person could go for a week on no food. It was a comfort issue more than anything — we were all conditioned to eating three meals a day and we’d barely snacked. My stomach was empty. Even the grumbling had echoes. Energy levels were low. Our principals leaned against trees, drank water and swatted mosquitoes while West, Rutherford, Cassidy, Ryder and I did our best to recall the lay of the land set out on LeDuc’s map — which we no longer had — in particular, our intended destination, a ridge adjacent to the hill now occupied by the FARDC.
It was a steep two-hour climb through liana, elephant grass and stinging nettles to reach the ridge’s spine. We came out from under the canopy a little after one o’clock in the afternoon, halfway up a gray basalt rock face that the forest hadn’t managed to conquer. The break in the trees provided us with a much-hoped-for unobstructed view to the FARDC encampment half a mile across the valley. Hanging threateningly overhead, massive thunderheads jostled against a clear blue sky ruled by the afternoon sun, the warmth of which sliced through the chill clinging to my skin. Leila and Ayesha sank back against the rock face, closed their eyes and turned their faces toward it.
‘Mmm, God, that’s good,’ Leila said with a moan. ‘Ayesha, honey, go get me some sunscreen from my case, will you?’
We could plainly see individuals moving around across the valley at the company HQ. Smoke from several fires curled skywards and drifted toward a thicker haze out to the west. I was right about the hill having been logged. Compared with the virgin forest, the area the HQ occupied appeared to have been stripped bare.
Swinging the pack off my shoulder, I rummaged around and pulled out the scope. I braced it against a tree trunk and adjusted the focus. Ryder stood on one side of me, while Rutherford, West and Cassidy lined up off my other shoulder and shielded their eyes from the sun with their hands.
‘Fuck me,’ said Rutherford. ‘Is that a truck down there?’
His eyes were good. I found it a second later, a deuce-and-a-half painted olive drab parked in the shadows at one end of the newly cleared scrub. The women were gone but the Mi-8 was still there.
‘And where there’s a truck, there’s a road,’ said West, the implication of the vehicle’s presence occurring to everyone in the PSO team at the same instant.
I scoured the HQ for our principals.
‘Found ’em,’ I said. Twenny and Peanut were standing by themselves in the cleared area where I’d seen them last night, behind the blue tents. They were still hooded and their hands tied behind their backs. No Chinese guy in sight, no Lockhart and no Colonel Cravat, either, but there were plenty of folks in greens going about their business. I passed the scope to Rutherford.
‘The high point of the hill. Look for the tents,’ I said.
‘Yep, there they are,’ he said and then passed the scope on.
‘What I wouldn’t give for a radio and an Apache gunship on the other end of it,’ muttered West as he adjusted the sight’s focus a little.
After Cassidy and Ryder had scanned the hill, I took the scope back and went on a more extended tour with it, hoping to pick up that road and see where it led. I found it, a pale orange ribbon of mud that curled around the back of the hill, disappearing from view. I readjusted the instrument and came across something else I wasn’t expecting to see.
‘What?’ Cassidy asked, sensing something.
‘There’s a village down there, to the west of the hill. You can just make out a couple of huts.’
Cassidy took the scope and trained it on the area. ‘Got it,’ he said. He was about to shift the view to another area when he took it back to the village. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘The fucks are setting fire to it…’
‘Which fucks?’ Ryder asked.
‘The fuckin’ FARDC,’ said Rutherford.