‘I think you’re lyin’ to me like you always do.’
The rapper shook his head. ‘C’mon, Leila. We’re in Africa, baby. You ever gonna come back here?’
‘I don’ know why I came here in the first place.’
‘We wuz asked. And we wanted to do some good. Just one more day.’
Leila shifted her weight to the other leg and placed a hand on her hip. ‘No.’
‘C’mon…’
‘No.’
‘Leila…’
The singer sighed heavily and looked up at the ceiling.
‘It’s only one more night,’ he reminded her.
Something about her stance suggested that she might be wavering. ‘One show. That’s it. But you owe me.’
‘All right!’ Twenny exclaimed and stepped forward to embrace her. Leila held up a hand to palm him off.
‘Don’t think this changes anything ’tween us,’ she warned him. ‘And you can be sure I will collect.’
I pictured a couple of pounds of flesh.
‘Sure, okay. But dis is right.’ Twenny stepped back and went into a huddle with Boink and Snatch.
I could smell something coming, the scent building in strength the way a siren increases in volume the closer it gets.
‘Excuse me, Colonel,’ said Lockhart to Travis. ‘There are some people I’d like you to meet. This is Piers Pietersen from Swedish American Gold. And this is Charles White.’
Pietersen was the tall guy with blond hair and blue eyes. White was black with a stocky Neanderthal physique and a heavy jaw that reminded me of Magilla Gorilla. Who were these guys? And who were their goons, a small posse of heavy-set knuckle-draggers of mixed genealogy who looked vaguely African but were probably from someplace else?
‘Gentlemen,’ Lockhart said, introducing the players and ignoring the hired help. ‘This is Lieutenant Colonel Travis. The colonel was responsible for organizing the show you saw this evening.’
Handshakes ensued.
Then Lockhart noticed me standing next to Travis. ‘Oh, and this is…’ his eyes dropped to the name tape on my pocket, ‘… Cooper, rank unknown.’ I saw his eyes snag briefly on my OSI patches before turning away. I didn’t rate a handshake. He turned to Travis. ‘If possible, Mr Pietersen and Mr White would like a word with Leila.’
‘Leila would be delighted,’ Travis said.
I wasn’t so sure. Delight was not something I’d seen her do. But the special agent side of me was intrigued. Why was a guy from Swedish American Gold hanging around a US Army training base? Who was Mr White? And why were they buddies with Mr Kornfak & Greene? I followed them over to where Leila was standing, and Travis handled the introductions. The meeting was short. Leila claimed fatigue and a headache, delight eluding her, and Travis had a second concert to organize before he hit the sack. Tomorrow was going to be a big, bad day in a country I knew nothing about, except for the one comment Arlen had made about the Democratic Republic of Congo across the border being the problem child these days.
Merde’
‘Aren’t we supposed to be heading north-east?’ I said into the microphone, looking over LeDuc’s shoulder and checking our heading on the compass among the flight instruments.
The French pilot’s now-familiar voice came through my headset over the cacophony of the Puma’s whirling parts.
‘There is a front all the way from Lake Kivu to Kigali, but a narrow band of clear weather is on the DRC side of the border. This is the best choice,’ he said.
I’d been briefed that Goma was only a hundred klicks away and just inside the DRC, as Cyangugu was just inside Rwanda. The plan I agreed to was to fly parallel to the border heading generally nor’ north east, keeping the aircraft within the relative safety of Rwandan territory and ducking across into the DRC only when we were adjacent to the MONUC encampment. Instead we were flying northwest across the border with the vast expanse of Lake Kivu away on our right when it should have been stretched out beneath us. A thick band of black cloud sat low over the lake and, to the east of its shoreline, gray wisps of rain hung from the underside of the cloud base like veils of a spider web. Flashes of lightning rippled through mighty thunderheads. Above us, however, the sky was a friendly late afternoon blue, the color mothers dress baby boys in. I conceded defeat. The flight path was the Frenchman’s call, just as the security arrangements were mine. Supposedly.
‘We won’t arrive in twenty minutes’ flying time. It will be closer to fifty,’ said LeDuc.
At least Travis had listened to my request to cut the show down — an unplugged version of the one given at Cyangugu. So on this trip, there’d be no stagehands, no dancers, no pyrotechnics, and no Ryder stand-in. At first, Leila had put up a fight, but then Ryder had a word with Ayesha, who then fed it to Leila that she was the only entertainer the men really cared about seeing. Of course, the diva found this argument utterly convincing.
The retinue accompanying each star to Goma was now the problem. The person who seemed best able to handle Leila was Ayesha, which meant, as far as I was concerned, she got a golden ticket. Twenny Fo then insisted it was only fair that one of his entourage accompany him. He chose Boink, who, according to Leila, was really worth two people, given his size, which meant she could have Shaquand. The rapper then lobbied hard to bring Peanut; my take was that Fo wasn’t too keen on leaving Peanut with Snatch unsupervised. Maybe he was concerned that his hair would get all braided up. Whatever, I agreed to the settlement on the condition that everyone got along, because we were all flying together in the one chopper. I amused myself with the thought that I could always throw the troublemakers out if I had to.
I watched the rainforest slide by under the Puma’s front windshield, the mid-morning sun beating down through the break in the clouds. Below, the thick triple canopy reminded me of a lawn with lumps in it. I glanced at Travis, and he gave me a nod. Arlen had implied that Travis was the keeper of all information on this trip; in other words, he knew everything I didn’t. Given that I knew dick, that made him a regular Einstein by comparison. I flicked a switch on the comm panel to have a private word with him.
‘So, be honest, Colonel. When did you know about this Goma gig?’ I asked him.
‘It wasn’t a firm arrangement. I was only told that it might happen.’
‘And why were you told to say nothing about it?’
‘Because it looked like Leila might say no to the whole trip if she got wind of it.’
‘Which reminds me, the base at Cyangugu — that’s supposed to be a secret, right? Why were she and Twenny Fo permitted into the inner circle?’
‘They were approached by the Pentagon. I think the concert at Goma is what this gig was all about from the beginning. Promises had been made.’
‘To the French?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, a peace offering.’
‘I didn’t know we were at war with them.’
‘We’re not — at least not at the moment. But we weren’t on good terms here in Africa a little while back. Our Army shot at theirs during the Rwandan civil war and the French shot back.’
That was a new one on me. ‘What do you know about Cyangugu and the army we’re schooling there?’ I asked.
‘Not a lot. I’m PR, not foreign relations.’
‘You’ll know more than I do.’
‘They told you. They’re CNDP — National Congress for the Defense of the People.’
‘Yeah, but who are they?’
‘Ethnic Tutsi. Mostly drawn from tribesmen across the border in the Congo.’
‘We’re training Congolese soldiers in Rwanda who then go back across the border to fight in the DRC?’