‘There,’ the African said, pointing, suddenly agitated. ‘Look, she is there!’
He indicated a group of women slopping around on the edge of a puddle in the bottom of the hole, digging at it with their hands and dropping whatever they could pull up into the steel buckets. I wasn’t sure which of the women was his wife.
‘She is alive,’ he said, obviously relieved. ‘I know these women. And there is my brother and my uncle,’ he continued. He sat back on his haunches, his face split by a wide grin. He’d been expecting the worst, but this was obviously the best possible result.
A wall of rain, gray and leaning forward at an angle like it was in a hurry to get somewhere, thundered across the forest on the far side of the pit, coming our way. Its arrival didn’t send anyone scurrying for cover. It seemed to arrive daily at this time in the afternoon. I knew of train services less reliable. Overhead, someone threw a blanket over the sun.
At that instant, Lockhart and his two buddies walked out of one of the shacks and started jogging toward the parking lot. I lost sight of them at that point, but a Dongfeng moved off soon after, probably heading back to the FARDC encampment or to the village to cause a bunch more misery. I’d seen enough and pushed back from the lip of the mine.
‘Where are you going?’ the African wanted to know, anxious, grabbing at my sleeve.
It was time to put him straight — that I was not some kind of advance guard for Tommy Franks. ‘My unit and I made a forced landing in a helicopter and some of my people have been taken captive. We’re all in the same boat with you and your wife, and it’s got a big hole in the bottom.’
‘Then I will help you,’ he said.
‘You’re not Bruce Willis, either,’ I replied, maybe a little too quickly. He was a local. He’d know the area, which put him way ahead of Bruce. I gave him a test. ‘The road up there. It starts in the forest. Where does it go?’
‘To Mukatano, a city twenty kilometer this way.’ He gestured vaguely south. ‘The men who took the trees make the road. They are gone now.’
Twenty kilometers — twelve miles — a lot more achievable than hiking out to Goma or Rwanda. I doubted the city bit. It had to be a small town, too small to be noted on LeDuc’s map. ‘Is there a sawmill at Mukatano?’ I asked.
‘Non.’
‘Is Mukatano on a river?’
‘The Zaire? Non.’
‘Isn’t that what this place used to be called?’
‘It was named after the river.’
I scratched my cheek and an insect having a meal got caught under my fingernails. If the road ended at Mukatano and there were no sawmill there and no river, how’d those loggers get the logs processed? ‘Where’d the loggers put the lumber — in the river?’
‘There was a place for this, but it is gone. They had a dock, but even that is gone. People take it for cooking fres.’
‘The road goes there too, yes?’
‘Oui.’
‘How’d you escape?’ I asked. ‘Why aren’t you down in the pit with the people from your village?’
‘I was at another village when the soldiers came. It is near the road also. Médecins Sans Frontières is there. They have medicines. I went to get them and when I come back, everyone in my village was gone… or dead.’
The memories of what he’d seen came back to him and large tears welled in his eyes. They ran down his face, mixing with the rainwater. The village I’d just come from gave me a fair idea of the scenes he was recalling.
‘Where will these people sleep tonight?’ I asked. ‘What’ll they eat?’
The man wiped his face with his hands. ‘The soldiers will give them some food, but not much. Some will sleep in the mine; some are taken back to their villages. There is a camp nearby. My people will sleep there under plastic. There are some United Nations tents. But there is no clean water. Some have died from stomach sickness. It is bad.’
It didn’t sound good. The scale of this cruelty was difficult for me to get my head around. ‘So your people… they just work until they die?’
‘No, they work until this army gets frightened away by a bigger army, and then we will go back to our village.’
‘How many times has this happened?’
‘They found gold here two years ago. Since then, many armies come through: CNDP, Mai-Mai, PARECO, FDLR, LRA, FARDC… Each one is worse than the last. Sometimes they punish us for helping their enemies, but we have no choice. They loot and steal, kill and rape and they pass on the sickness — the sickness I go to the MSF to get the medicine for. My village was once large and rich, but now it is small and we starve.’
‘Where is the camp your people are taken to at night?’
‘It is near. You wish to see it also.’
‘Not now. What’s your name?’ I asked him.
‘Francis.’ He glanced at the nametag on my body armor. ‘Your name is Cooper. I can read, also.’
‘Francis. I’ll be honest with you — I don’t know what my men and I can do here. There are many more of them than there are of us.’
‘You will do something, I know it.’
Yeah, and right there could be the problem. Who’s to say that what we did wouldn’t turn around and bite all of us in the ass right back, Francis and his people included? I parted the foliage, took another look at the mine and the shacks, but there was nothing of interest going on other than a lot of ice-cold beer being guzzled. A couple of soldiers were leering and calling out to a group of women working a section of mud nearby. Mud, beer, women. I could see where it was heading and this was one time I didn’t want to be around when it arrived. I made a quick decision. ‘Come with me,’ I said to Francis, and backed away from the lip of the mine.
The Congolese hesitated a moment while he again located his wife down in the pit. Satisfied that she was in no immediate danger, he said, ‘Yes, thank you. I come with you.’ He turned for one last look over his shoulder before following me to where the trucks were parked. By the time we arrived there only three Dongfengs remained. At the edge of the cleared area, I gave Francis a quick briefing followed by a practical demonstration, scooting across open ground to the nearest truck and climbing up inside its wheel arches, and then waving him across.
We waited twenty minutes, squeezed into the truck’s sub frame, before its diesel thrummed into life. Half a dozen soldiers piled in the back and the vehicle finally pulled out of the lot and onto the road, heading in the right direction at least — back to the village I’d come from.
The return ride was a different kind of uncomfortable from the trip out. Instead of dust and grit, the wheels fung water, mud and the occasional stone at us while steam boiled into clouds off the exhaust pipe. I counted down the hills — two of them — and waited for the truck to pull over into the village. But then we swept around a corner, the driver back-shifted into the lower gears, and we started up a third hill.
‘Shit,’ I muttered to myself. We weren’t stopping in the village. The ride was taking us all the way into the FARDC camp. The truck came to a stop at a roadblock, a brief conversation ensued between the driver and the soldiers manning it, and then we were underway again. A few minutes later, the vehicle’s brakes wheezed as we came to a stop, the engine died and the soldiers climbed down. I motioned to Francis to stay put and keep quiet. It was after five and the light was fading. We were stuck here until the night gave us some cover, shivering with cold, caked with mud — my teeth grinding with it — the rain causing small waterfalls to run off the sides of the truck and into the growing lake on the ground beneath us.
We came out of hiding an hour and a half later, when the darkness was complete and the smells of kerosene fires and cooking drifted across the encampment, the men preoccupied with food. I unfolded my cramped arms, legs and neck, and dropped with a splash into the puddles beneath us. Francis did likewise. There was another Dongfeng parked in front of our hiding place. Fifty meters ahead, I could make out the hazy shape of the Mi-8 chopper. I had no idea about the placement of sentries but I had to assume that they were around. I was thinking about all this as the rain softened into a fog-like mist and the air came alive with the sound of mating frogs.