‘The fire explains the haze,’ said West.
Now that I thought about it, the air smelt vaguely of burnt trash.
‘Christ…’ Cassidy muttered.
‘What now?’ said Rutherford.
Grim faced, the sergeant handed him the scope. ‘Look.’
Rutherford trained it on the village. ‘Jesus, they’re hacking the poor sods to pieces.’
I took back the scope. I saw a man in civilian clothes run into view and then out of it, a soldier in pursuit with a raised machete poised for the strike. I saw another civilian — a woman — crawl out of the hut on her hands and knees. A soldier stood beside her and hit the back of her head with the flat of his blade, knocking her unconscious, or dead — I couldn’t tell which.
‘There’s movement at the HQ,’ said West.
I swung the scope back. The truck was rolling. It did a one-eighty, then stopped. A couple of men jogged toward it and one of them was Lockhart.
The passenger side door opened and Lockhart and his buddy jumped in beside the driver. The vehicle then accelerated off down the road toward the village.
I lowered the scope. ‘I’m going down there.’
‘Why?’ It was Leila. She was behind me, standing with a hand on one hip in that determined, argumentative stance of hers I first saw in the departure lounge at Kigali airport.
‘ To see if what we find there provides us with any opportunities.’
‘Then I’m going with you. And so is Ayesha; aren’t we?’ she continued.
Ayesha looked surprised.
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Too dangerous.’
‘We all going, yo,’ said Boink, jutting his chin forward. I pictured a porch coming away from the wall.
‘Cooper, we’re going with you or I scream.’ The celebrity sucked in a breath, opened her mouth and closed her eyes.
What choice did I have?
I dropped back to have a word with West.
‘We need food,’ I told him.
‘Sure, it’s all over the place here.’ To prove the point he snatched a large cricket off the petals of a bright red wildflower and stuffed it in his mouth.
‘I’d prefer a toasted sandwich,’ I told him.
He shook his head. ‘Fire’s a no-no here.’
Further down the hill, the rainforest provided West with options more palatable for our principals. He took Cassidy and went off to gather it and they returned with a large bunch of wild bananas on Cassidy’s shoulder.
‘We also need protein,’ said West. He dug into his pockets and produced handfuls of fat white grubs which he passed around. Leila and Ayesha screwed up their faces.
‘You can’t be serious?’ the star said.
‘No,’ said Ayesha, waving her hand at the offer as if trying to push it away.
‘It’s just food… I’ll admit they’re better when they’re fried but a fire’s too risky,’ West informed them.
Somehow I didn’t think it would make a difference if they were lightly sautéed in a white wine sauce.
‘What are they?’ I asked.
‘Mopane worms — off mopane trees. Critters are all over here.’
‘How d’you eat ’em?’ Rutherford inquired, sniffng the four large worms in the palm of his hand.
‘Pinch their guts out, and pull out their backbone, which is prickly, so be careful.’ He demonstrated. ‘Then you do this with them.’ He opened his mouth, popped one in and chewed slowly and deliberately.
‘I’m going to throw up,’ Leila muttered.
I followed West’s demonstration — pinched out the guts, removed the spine and ate the thing. It tasted bitter, slimy and gritty. If I’d paid money, I’d be asking for a refund. But food was food, and we had to take what was on the menu to keep up our strength. I ate half a dozen.
‘You can also do what I do and eat the grasshoppers. They’re crunchy and taste of grass, and you have to eat a lot of them. The termites are also an option.’
Ayesha dry retched.
If it were possible for Leila to look gray, she did.
‘Oh, and I also picked up some dessert,’ said West, grabbing a long length of what at first glance appeared to be bamboo that he’d leaned against the rocks. He cut it into one-foot lengths. ‘This here is sugar cane. You chew it, and suck it.’
Leila and Ayesha took the cane but examined it with suspicion.
‘Tastes like sugar,’ he assured them. ‘Really…’
The banana was filling and the cane juice rich and sweet. Best of all it carried away the taste of Mopane grub. Cassidy took the lead heading down the hill. He moved fast and we all kept to his tracks. My intention had been to leave Rutherford, West and Ryder behind to provide the security for Boink, Ayesha, Leila, and Leila’s makeup case, but that’s not how it worked out.
I said to Leila, ‘Stay, go, stay, go… You always so decisive?’
‘I don’t like you, Cooper, because you—’
‘We’ve established that.’
‘Because, for one thing, you butt in. Look, even though I don’t like you, I do feel safe with you. And so does Ayesha.’
Ayesha glanced over her shoulder at me and produced a smile.
‘When you go off somewhere,’ Leila continued, ‘it’s like we’re all just hanging around waiting for something to go wrong.’
‘Stick with me and there’s no waiting,’ I told her.
‘That’s a reference to your former partner, isn’t it, the one you think you killed?’
It was, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of admitting it.
‘Duke told me that she almost died when you first met her — in a car crash, right? Did you ever think that maybe she was meant to die in that crash, that her time was up? It could be that dying in that crash was her fate but, for some unnatural reason, she avoided it, cheated death. Perhaps she died in that room on your last case because fate had to settle the score.’
I was thinking that I still had a score to settle with Ryder and his blabbermouth. Aside from that, I also wondered which nutbag guru was doing the rounds of celebrity life counseling in LA at the moment. I dropped back a little to put some forest between the two of us, and fell in behind Boink.
The sound of women and children crying reached us long before we caught sight of the village. It was the same for the smell of blood, a metallic tang carried on the breeze that stuck to the roof of the mouth and triggered the gag refex. It took a lot of blood to produce a smell like that out in the open. An hour and a half after leaving the ridge, we climbed a heavily wooded hill behind the village. It was spread out a hundred feet below us, laid out across an open cleared area, twenty-three grass and animal-skin huts arranged around a larger central hut. Half a dozen of these smaller huts — homes, I figured — were no more than smoking piles of gray and black ash.
We wrapped the shadows of the forest around us and watched, stunned. Ayesha and Leila covered their mouths with their hands as they did so.
The inhabitants of the village, around a hundred men and women, were sitting on the ground — women and children in one group, men in another. Most of the women carried babies. The men, all roughly between twenty and forty years of age, were sitting cross-legged with their hands on their heads. FARDC soldiers stood over both groups with machetes, the blades black and slick with coagulating blood. Some of the older members of the village had already been butchered, and flies clouded around crimson corpses tangled together in a separate group. People everywhere were yelling and screaming and begging for mercy, which seemed in real short supply.
The soldiers had separated a man from the group and were shouting at him. He wasn’t doing what they wanted so they started beating him with the flats of their blades. He eventually got the message — to sit up on his knees with his fingers interlocked behind his neck — and the beating stopped. Two soldiers then pulled a woman from the female group and dragged her into the center with the man. She was carrying a newborn baby, which was screaming its lungs out. The two villagers risked touching each other’s faces, both sobbing, the woman hysterically. One of the soldiers strode in and ripped the infant the woman was carrying from her arms, holding it upside down by one of its ankles. Unbelievably, he then swung it around his head twice and let go of it. The baby flew high and long, and landed with a crash in the bushes not fifteen meters down the hill from where we were hiding. Its crying ceased when it landed.