‘I got it, yo.’
We found ourselves back at the trucks.
At 0442, Leila and Ayesha climbed up into the back of the Alamo. They turned to give Boink a hand but the big man waved them away and climbed up under his own steam, his weight rocking the truck from side to side.
‘Couldn’t’a done that a week ago,’ he said, pleased with himself as he raised himself to his full height and looked down at Rutherford and me.
‘You’ll be swinging from the trees next,’ said Rutherford.
‘Throwing shit,’ I added.
Ryder climbed up into the truck and joined Ayesha, Leila and Boink. I locked eyes with the star. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, you could get behind those containers with Duke and stay there.’
‘I don’t do orders, remember?’
‘Then consider it a request. You’re a singer. You do those, right?’
I earned a frown but she did as I asked, Ryder appearing and directing them back behind the defenses. Then I gave them all just one simple life-preserving rule to follow: ‘Keep your heads down.’
I jumped out of the truck and trotted to the driver’s side door. Rutherford was sitting behind the steering wheel. I sprang up onto the running board, the adrenalin starting to do the rounds; my skin was cold and hot at the same time, and I had a constriction in my throat that made swallowing difficult. It was the feeling I always got before combat. It was like an old friend, one I wished would go find someone else to play with.
‘Been a pleasure working with you, guv’nor,’ said Rutherford, holding his hand out through the window opening. He wanted to shake. It looked suspiciously to me like the Brit expected this to be it. I hoped he wasn’t going to hand me a letter.
‘Likewise,’ I said, shaking. ‘Let’s move. Take it slow. There are Claymores out there and we don’t want to run them down. If I tell you to stop, hit the brakes.’
He punched the starter button, the diesel instantly coming to life and settling into a noisy thrum.
‘You ready for this?’ I asked Francis, who was sitting on the passenger side.
He nodded, but didn’t look too sure about it.
‘Okay,’ I told Rutherford. ‘Do a one-eighty. No headlights. I’ve done a recce — there’s nothing to hit.’
The Dong lurched forward, Rutherford winding on the steering wheel — that gorge was not too far in front of us. Palms and small trees went down under the Dong’s front grille as we left the support truck behind.
‘Okay, straighten her out,’ I told him.
Rutherford let the wheel slip through his hands. A palm tree slapped against me, nearly swatting me off the running board.
‘Stop in another dozen meters or so and kill the motor.’
After a few seconds, Rutherford gently applied the brakes and turned off the ignition.
I leaped down off the running board and probed forward on foot. After a few paces, the plantation came to an end and I crept out onto the road lit by the moonlight. There was no traffic. Holding my breath, I listened to the night, scanning it for engine noise and human voices, but nothing disturbed the silence except for a little tinnitus inside my head. I ran back through the palms to the truck but went to the passenger side this time. The door swung open and I jumped in beside Francis.
‘Hit it,’ I said to Rutherford.
The Brit fired up the Dong, ground the gears, and we moved off the mark with wheel spin, the tires fighting for traction in the mud. The truck’s nose pushed the fronds aside as we entered the road, and Rutherford hauled on the steering wheel, turning left so we faced downhill, and stamped on the accelerator pedal.
‘How are we doing for time?’ he asked over the gathering roar of the wind through the non-existent windshield.
‘Two minutes ahead of schedule,’ I told him.
He backed the speed off a little as the road flattened out and swept onto the flat plain of the valley shimmering in the moonlight; a silver-painted version of the scene I remembered from the day before. We motored past the area where we’d hijacked the trucks and hidden the bodies. With no rain, they’d quickly start to reek. Small carrion-eating animals would be turning up to contest the spoils with the columns of driver ants that were, no doubt, already on the scene. A sudden furry of movement in the bushes caused my heart rate to spike. Rutherford and I both went for our guns.
‘Vantour,’ Francis shouted over the wind noise. ‘Vulture!’
Large black shapes separated from the forest, flapped into the air and then settled again, marking the spot just inside the tree line where we’d stacked the dead. Come morning, the FARDC patrols would see the birds, investigate what the buzzards were feasting on, find the bullet-riddled corpses and know that its weapons had fallen into enemy hands rather than disappearing into a ravine hidden by the forest. Only, by that time, of course, the point of this discovery would be moot because we were about to inform the FARDC exactly who it was who had stolen those weapons, by turning the cache on them. I glanced at Rutherford and he returned the look as he shifted into a lower gear, the road climbing gently to the village.
‘Time?’ he asked.
‘We’re on it,’ I told him after checking the Seiko’s countdown function.
I pulled up the QCW, took it off safety as we passed the village, and made sure the selector was on three-shot burst. There was no motion in or around the huts. Nothing was moving that I could see. So far so good.
The road swept around the base of the hill on which the FARDC camp was situated.
‘What the fuck?’ said Rutherford.
He took the words right out of my mouth. Up ahead, instead of the makeshift bamboo pole boom operated by a couple of sleepy guards that we expected to see, there was a Dong parked across the road, completely blocking it. A dozen men milled around the vehicle and one of them waved a flashlight in our direction. We had no choice but to slow down and stop, at which point the light went out. We were prepared to fight, but this wasn’t part of the plan. This was about to get ugly, the enemy making moves we weren’t prepared for.
Rutherford had time to reach for his M4 before the shooting started.
‘Down!’ I yelled at Francis, pushing him hard into the floor as the Africans opened fire on us. We were hemmed in. No choice but to slug it out or die here and now.
I shot over the front of the hood. Lead traveling supersonic crackled past my left ear, giving that tinnitus of mine some competition. I leveled the QCW at a knot of FARDC soldiers standing too close together, who obliged me further by getting down on one knee to steady their aim. They all died right there before firing off a shot. Rutherford looked at me and shook his head. This was not how it was supposed to go. Having just learned a very quick and bloody lesson, the balance of the Africans rushed for cover behind their truck.
I had a moment to consider how to handle this when our cabin suddenly filled with light reflecting off the rear-view-door mirrors. Spotlights had been turned on us from behind. I cracked open the door, and banged off a couple of shots at the source of the beams before popping my head out to see what the hell was going on. A Dong had come up behind us. Shit — it might well have been parked in the village, hidden. Another four-letter word sprang to mind: trap.
I heard single shots being fired behind me from an M16. That had to be Ryder — Boink favored the Nazarian 97. I hoped that Leila and Ayesha were doing as I asked and keeping their heads down behind the barricade. One of those spotlights went out, followed by its partner. Then two explosions erupted behind the truck. Grenades. I heard a man scream an instant before the first explosion, the percussion wave ringing through my head. Men were running around, appearing from the shadows, shouting and firing at us. I fired back, around one out of three shots finding a moving target. Average shooting on my part. Rutherford was doing better.