‘Call it out,’ I said to Rutherford, who jogged up beside me.
He made a funnel with his hands, yelled the name of Francis’s village across to the gathering and asked in French if anyone else lived there.
Nothing. No reaction.
‘Tell them we’re here with Francis Nbekee.’
Rutherford called this out to the crowd.
A woman suddenly began howling above the sound of the rain and the noise of the growing, restless gathering. It was a large woman in colorfully printed cotton clothes and she was bustling her way to the front of the crowd. She belted out something in French at us.
‘Oui,’ Rutherford replied. To me, he said, ‘I think that’s his old lady.’
‘Tell her that her husband’s wounded and he’s in the truck. Tell her we’re American and that we’ll take home everyone who lives in Bayutu.’
‘That’s getting beyond my command of French, but I’ll give it a go.’ He took a moment to work it out in his head and then called, ‘Il est blessé! Il est dans camion! Nous sommes Écossais! Chacun qui habite à Bayutu; nous vous guiderons chez-vous!’
‘Écossais. Did you just tell her we’re Scottish?’
Rutherford grinned.
The woman burst through the crowd and started running across the open ground toward us. Several of the men tried to stop her, but she palmed them off into the mud with the ease of a linebacker. The woman met us, blubbering a bunch of stuff that I had no chance of understanding, though the gist of it was probably that some days it just didn’t pay to get out of bed. We hustled the woman to the truck, while behind us, no doubt fearing a trick, several of the men with machetes waved them and advanced threateningly.
‘Boink,’ I called out into the truck. ‘Need some help here…’
The big man came out of the gloom, took the African woman’s hands and hauled her up into the truck without too much effort. She saw her husband an instant later, shrieked, then ran to him crying and babbling, kneeling beside him and smothering his face with kisses. I waited for her to hit him around the head a couple of times but it never happened. Leila’s behavior was altering my reality.
I heard a couple shots fired. Rutherford and I both went to investigate.
‘Company’s on the way,’ Cassidy called out, the stock of his M4 pressed against his cheek. I peered in the direction he was aiming, the general area of the mine, and saw a man in baggy green camos scuttling behind a mound of scrub-covered earth. I hurried back into the truck. Reinforcements would be on the scene in no time.
‘What’s happening?’ Leila wanted to know.
I ignored her, which I was starting to enjoy doing.
‘Tell Francis’s wife to call her people over,’ I said to Rutherford.
He passed this on to the woman and the brief conversation was punctuated by gunfire, which seemed to work as effectively as anything the Scot said. She motioned at Rutherford and me impatiently to help her get to her feet, which we did, and then brought her to the back of the truck. She started frantically waving at the Africans, most of whom were now hiding from the gunfire behind their plastic shelters, and called out to them in a shrill voice. The call was answered by cheering and waving, and around thirty people, mostly women and children, broke cover and began running for the truck, their meager possessions and crying infants under their arms. Jesus, we were going to get swamped. The horde ran through and around West and Cas-sidy, who were standing a little away from the truck, keeping their eyes on the scrubby patch of forest that separated the camp from the mine.
‘Jesus, Cooper — that’s too damn many,’ Cassidy yelled at me.
Who were we going to turn away?
The truck rocked and swayed as the human wave engulfed it. People threw themselves inside and then helped others aboard.
‘Let’s go!’ I yelled at Cassidy and West, as I jumped into the rear of the truck. ‘Move it!’
The two soldiers backed away from their positions, then lowered their rifles and ran for the front cabin.
At least forty people were squashed into the back of the truck, compressed like a month of fruit in the bottom of a school kid’s bag. There was almost no room to breathe and so much chatter that I couldn’t even hear Leila complaining. I felt the Dong’s engine rumble into life through the soles of my feet and everyone screamed as we lurched forward in first gear, and screamed again — though not so loudly — when second gear was selected. We went round a gentle bend in the road and the truck leaned at a frightening angle, lifting the outside rear wheels.
‘Sit, sit, everyone sit,’ I yelled, miming with my arms and hands as I spoke.
No one sat.
‘Rutherford. Get ’em all the fuck down on the floor before we tip over.’
He shouted instructions and people began to sit. The lack of space meant that they mostly did so on top of each other. The truck went round another corner a little less precariously and the camp disappeared behind a screen of forest.
‘Where are we taking them?’ Rutherford asked. ‘We don’t know where this Bayutu place is.’
‘See if you can’t get some idea from Francis’s wife. And maybe get her name while you’re at it.’ I wondered whether Bayutu was the best place to go. There was always Mukatano. At least we knew where that was — at the end of the road.
The forest appeared to close in tightly around the truck, cutting the road’s width in half. That figured. Beyond the mine, the road got almost no use at all. It was also getting bumpier, with deeper ruts, which pulled the truck left and right viciously as the tires tracked through them. I sensed Cassidy backing off the gas and felt the downshift, the conditions forcing him to take it slower. I scanned the human cargo crammed into this confined space. Mothers nursed young children, old men sat impassively when they weren’t attending to the women and kids, and none of the eyes that met mine gave away anything. All except Leila’s, who looked up at me crying with joy, a baby in her arms.
I turned back to watch the road unraveling behind us, just in time to see a rocket-propelled grenade streak toward us from the far end of the tunnel.
Flee
The RPG round skipped off the road into the forest, angled away slightly by a rut, and detonated against a tree close by. Shrapnel tore through our tarpaulin at about head height and I heard a couple of pieces ping against our metalwork. That was too close. Women screamed and one of them started picking feverishly at her leg. I crawled back to her on my hands and knees, across the human carpet, but she managed to get hold of whatever the problem was before I reached her, and flicked it off her skin. It looked to have been a twisted chunk of the warhead’s green casing, and it smoked as it arced through the air and got caught with a metallic clink between the tarpaulin and the side of the truck.
A second warhead flew overhead and exploded harmlessly out of sight deep in the forest far ahead. It was Marcus who’d warned us that this Lissouba asshole was a persistent fuck. The fact that he wasn’t letting us leave without a fight was going to make things difficult. The truck in pursuit showed itself two hundred meters behind us and it was slowly gaining ground. Soon enough the range would become point blank. I was out of grenades. The M4 slung over my good shoulder was all I had. Rutherford was armed, as were Ryder and Boink. We could maybe pick off the driver, but we couldn’t afford an exchange of small arms fire with the enemy, especially when they had RPGs.
‘We need that mortar,’ Rutherford yelled. Good thinking, only there was a slight problem — the barrel was pointed the wrong way and doing a U-turn wasn’t possible. The long tunnel had come to an end and our truck began laboring up a steep incline, which included some tight corners.