Get out, Cooper, said the voice in my head but I couldn’t recall why. And then I remembered about the people with guns not far behind and that they would be coming for me. I found my M4, hitched it over my shoulders and pulled myself out onto the canted hood and slid into a thicket of elephant grass, bamboo and liana. The forest was so dense it was almost impossible to move through it. That was good. If it delayed me, it would have the same effect on the folks who would be coming to investigate the wreckage.
‘Jesus, boss, you’re a mess,’ said West, examining my face after he gave me a pat on the shoulder.
‘It’s my party lifestyle,’ I said. I ’d tried to clear my blocked nose earlier, snorting out a couple of plugs of coagulated blood. The pain I felt when I pinched it told me it was broken. It had happened when I’d tried to turn the steering wheel with my face after hitting the roadblock.
The hike back to rejoin my merry band of travelers took two hours, a little longer than I expected. It was mid afternoon before I came across the road, followed it back to the fork, then doubled back to find everyone. Boink had the watch while West and Rutherford were building beds for everyone up off the ground, away from the ants and other biters.
‘How are our principals?’ I asked West when I found him binding saplings together with liana.
‘Subdued. I think they’re finally getting the message.’
‘Which message is that?’
‘ To shut the fuck up and let us do our job.’
I doubted it. ‘Where are they?’
By way of an answer, he pointed into the bush. Leila and Twenny were silhouetted sitting on a rotten log. They appeared to have reached some kind of amnesty, each sitting with an arm around the other. A couple of orange butterflies danced in the air above their heads. I could almost hear the violins. West having relieved him of the watch, Boink came and stood a few meters behind his employer and, bearlike, scratched his back against a tree.
‘How’s Ryder?’ I asked.
‘Milking it for all it’s worth… not that I blame him,’ said West. ‘Anyway, I think he’s on the mend.’
He indicated Ryder’s whereabouts with a thumb over his shoulder. The captain was lying on one of the cots, Ayesha in attendance.
‘Francis, Patrice and the rest — they get off okay?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. Patrice assured Rutherford that they knew where they were going. How about you? How’d you make out?’
‘I died,’ I said.
‘No, really, what happened?’
I gave him a quick rundown.
‘By the way,’ he said when I’d finished, ‘there were two trucks in pursuit of you. And both of them had a lot of men on board.’
I wondered how much time my little decoy run had bought us. Eventually those truckloads of armed men would backtrack and investigate this road. It started raining. ‘Must be three-fifteen,’ I said.
West checked his wristwatch and nodded.
‘Where’s Cassidy?’
‘Setting up a perimeter defense. Ryder was sitting on two Claymores we forgot about, the last of the ones with the trip wires you guys found in the FARDC camp.’
That was the best news I’d heard in a while.
‘What’s down at the river?’ I asked him, fanning uselessly at a cloud of mosquitoes attacking my face.
‘Mud, insects — not a lot else. Come take a look for yourself.’
West sheathed his Ka-bar and we headed for the river, detouring via an ant mound. We exited the forest into a semi-cleared patch of wet earth that, here and there, had sections of steel matting laid over it. Strangely, the mud here wasn’t orange, but white. The river itself was fifty or sixty meters wide, a tea-brown slick dented with raindrops that slid by at a fast walking pace between banks of mostly unbroken forest. A fish broke the water, no doubt chased by something hungry. Half a dozen heavy hardwood posts were driven vertically into the water just off the riverbank I was standing on, which was low and marshy. I could easily imagine that at one time there’d been a reasonable amount of infrastructure here to offoad the sawn logs that would get floated down the river to the mill, wherever that was. But now almost nothing remained aside from those pilings, a little rusting steel scrap and few old oil drums half submerged in the mud. There was one small troubling detail — as Francis said, the Zaire flowed the wrong way for our purposes, heading west away from Lake Kivu and Cyangugu.
‘Seen anything useful — like a riverboat with slots and a bar?’ I asked.
‘What do you think?’
I took a deep breath. When Lissouba’s men came down that road, we’d be trapped with our backs against the river. We could swim for it, but I didn’t like our chances against what the fuck else that might be lurking in that murky water chasing the fish.
‘They got crocs here?’ I asked.
‘Nope. Tigerfish.’
‘Great.’ I had no idea what they were, but they sounded unfriendly.
I scoped the area a second time and the shred of an option formed.
‘You guys make pretty good cots.’
‘It ain’t hard.’
‘Can you make me a cot around a few of those oil drums?’
‘So you want a raft?’
‘It’d make me sleep a whole lot better.’
All the drums were recovered from the mud, lined up and inspected. I stomped on the side of one of them and put my boot clean through it. Similar tests on the remaining five showed only one to be sound, with just a little superfcial rust. A second drum was also free of holes and corrosion, but had no lid. We could use it as long as we kept its brim above the waterline.
There were ten of us — a combined weight of around two thousand pounds. Buoyancy was critical. Six types of sapling were tested. West placed them all in the water and a clear winner emerged, floating higher than the others. It completed one spin in the eddy by the bank before the Zaire carried it away.
‘Okay, that’s settled,’ he said. ‘These are the guys we want.’ He held a second length of the winning sapling, about two inches in diameter and trimmed to a length of about twelve feet.
‘We’ll need six bundles of these, about the same length as this,’ he said. ‘And each bundle should be about two foot in diameter. That’s around thirteen saplings per bundle times six bundles. So seventy-eight saplings in total. We’ll use vine to lash the bundles together, with a drum fore and aft. Keep it nice and simple.’
‘Paddles?’ Rutherford asked.
‘No paddles. We’ll use the main current, pole off the banks.’
‘How long will this raft take to build?’ asked Leila.
West smiled. ‘As long as it takes you to cut the wood, then a bit longer after that.’
I could tell the answer didn’t please her, but, as West said, she was apparently learning to shut the fuck up.
‘We’ll assemble it in the marsh so we can just float it out.’
‘How much liana will you need?’ Ryder asked.
‘Fifty meters ought to do it. Make sure it’s green and young.’
‘And when it’s built?’ Leila wanted to know. ‘Then what?’
‘We float down river to a settlement with boats for hire, or a road out,’ I said. ‘With a little luck, we’ll reach Cyangugu by early afternoon tomorrow.’ Invoking luck probably wasn’t smart, but I was all out of smarts. ‘Work in pairs,’ I continued. ‘Stay within sight of your partner and at least one other pair. Boink, you work with Rutherford.’
Rutherford walked over to Twenny’s security chief and presented him with a machete.
‘Everyone know what to do?’ I asked.
‘Leila and me, we’ll take Peanut wit us,’ said Twenny and gestured at his friend, who was nearby, throwing sticks into the river.