I whispered to Francis, ‘Follow me, stay close,’ and then, doubled over, I headed for the uncleared scrub that marked the edge of the forest. We made it without incident and stopped roughly midway between the trucks and the chopper.
‘Where are your men?’ Francis asked.
Good question, and I wished I had an equally good answer to go with it. When I last saw them, they were babysitting. I wondered what they’d been up to while I’d taken the detour. ‘Around,’ I said, keeping it ambiguous, but the truth of it was that I had not the faintest idea where my unit might be — still back at the nearby village, or back on the hill that provided overwatch, or back at Cyangugu with drinks in hand… who knew?
As I sat in the scrub, dragging my hand across the back of my neck, smearing the mosquitoes that settled on my bare skin and watching several fires haloed by the mist, it seemed to me that the war effort around here had tapered off somewhat. If I weren’t mistaken, the attitude of the men walking around was pretty relaxed; surprising, given that the CNDP force was somewhere nearby. I’d have thought that the proximity of its sworn enemy would have made these boys just a little nervous. I was considering all this, along with what my limited options might be, when I heard the familiar thump of a helicopter’s main rotor blades away in the distance. The sound drifted in and out as the air currents shifted, silencing the frogs as it grew louder with each second. The aircraft was clearly inbound. A party of men arrived at the edge of the cleared area. Several of them waved flashlights blithely about for the benefit of enemy snipers, but no shots rang out.
The chopper arrived from the east. It wasn’t a military aircraft. It was big and sleek and, as it flew overhead and pivoted almost a hundred and eighty degrees before settling on its retractable landing gear, its underbelly strobe light revealed a color scheme of gold with a white stripe running down the center. The pilots cut the engines and the whine of its turbines instantly dropped away. It looked like one of those big expensive choppers that ply between New York and Washington DC, carrying executive types overloaded with taxpayer-funded bail outs. A Sikorsky. I couldn’t see what was going on once it had landed because, aside from being dark, whoever got out of it exited on the side of the aircraft facing the camp and the rest of the helicopter got in the way. I tapped my African friend on the shoulder and we crawled through the forest to get a better angle on the proceedings. The view quickly improved. Portable electric lanterns were turned on and flashlights waved about, illuminating a bunch of very interesting faces. Lockhart was part of the welcoming committee, as was Colonel Cravat — Colonel Lissouba — and the Chinese PLA guy. They were shaking hands with the guy from Swedish American Gold and his African American buddy. Both of their names escaped me for the moment, but I remembered them — the two ex-pat autograph hunters Lockhart declined to introduce me to back at Cyan-gugu on the night of the concert.
Their presence here was surprising and intriguing, equally as surprising and intriguing as the presence of the CNDP’s Colonel Makenga, who’d probably been picked up from his ridgeline on the way through. And Makenga’s presence was not nearly as surprising and intriguing as that of Colonel Biruta’s, the CNDP officer commanding the brigade entertained by Twenny Fo and Leila at the Cyangugu training base; the officer with the nice symmetrical scar that divided his face into equal parts. Another guy stepped into the light. It was my ol’ buddy, LeDuc — his presence here not in the least surprising or intriguing.
‘Piers Pietersen and Charles White,’ I whispered, the names of the two expats coming back to me.
‘What?’ said Francis.
I waved away the question, along with the mosquito cloud. Explanations would have to wait. Lockhart, Lissouba, Fu Manchu, Makenga, Biruta, LeDuc, and a bigwig from a gold company. Or, another way to look at it — a US DoD contractor in cahoots with the PLA and FARDC, meeting the local CNDP commanding officer and his boss for a powwow with SAG. It read like a headline for a 60 Minutes exposé. And all within spitting distance of a gold mine producing nuggets of the stuff. That was no coincidence either. More than likely it was the catalyst. And the presence of Makenga, the enemy — he of the golden chicken — accounted for the unnatural calm that seemed to have descended on the FARDC encampment. Obviously, a convenient truce had been called between the two warring companies. The only man I couldn’t place in the get-together was Charles White, the African American accompanying Pietersen. I wondered how many of these people were involved in the scheme to abduct my principals.
The backslapping continued for a while as Francis and I watched on. Then half a dozen men from the camp came over and White accompanied them to the chopper. The fuselage of the aircraft obscured the proceedings for a few moments, but then I saw the men re-emerge, lugging heavy crates between them. They carried them to the back of the lead truck, placed them on the tailgate and went back to the chopper for more. Taking a flashlight, White led the group to the rear of the truck and opened one of the boxes with a jemmy that had been handed to him. He levered the lid off the crate, opened another box within it, took something out and held it up to show the party gathered nearby. He then strolled around the far side of the truck, the side nearest to Francis and me hiding in the scrub, placed the object on the ground and sauntered back to join the others. He held his right hand up high.
And, suddenly, a flash ripped through the darkness, accompanied by an ear-splitting explosion. Shrapnel raked the foliage inches above my head. Francis screamed, got up and ran.
I took off after him, expecting that, any second, gunfire would follow us. I tensed, waiting for the bark of M16s and the jacketed slugs that would drop us into the scrub, but they never came. I caught up with Francis eventually, after a sprint of two hundred meters through elephant grass that cut up my clothes, up toward the ridge that we’d used as an observation post earlier in the day. No one seemed to have followed us. I put that down to the explosion temporarily deafening White, Lockhart and the rest, and our moving shapes being black on black. Our enemies hadn’t even known we were there, or that they’d almost killed us.
‘Stop,’ I hissed at Francis, but he kept running, bolting up the hill. As I watched, a tree appeared to snatch him clean off his feet. He shot skywards upside down, a gurgling scream choking from him. And then a length of warm black steel materialized from out of the night and jerked my head to one side and I felt the edge of a knife press across my throat, breaking the skin.
‘Christ, Cooper,’ said a familiar voice in my ear as the warm black steel, which I realized was a forearm, released me. Cassidy. ‘How many fucking lives you got?’ he said. ‘Come three meters to the left and right about now you’d have a necklace of bamboo spears through your chest.’
My heart pounded like a tire with a bubble in the sidewall about to burst. I got down on a knee and sucked in some air to get the adrenalin under control.
‘And who’s that swinging by his ankles up there?’ Cassidy asked.
‘Name’s Francis,’ I puffed. ‘He’s friendly. Or was — wouldn’t count on it now.’
‘I’ll get him down.’
‘Good idea. What happened to the baby?’