‘Their enemy is the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, otherwise known as the FDLR, the ones who fed Rwanda after the civil war. They’re Hutus.’
‘Sounds messy.’
‘You don’t know the half of it.’
‘What about the civilians back there? Lockhart’s friends. The Swedish guy from the gold company and his simian buddy — White, I think his name was.’
‘Expat businessmen. Maybe they helped Lockhart get his job done down there.’
‘What can you tell me about Goma?’
‘The UN has twenty thousand peacekeepers in the DRC — it’s their biggest peacekeeping force anywhere in the world, but they’re largely ineffectual. The DRC’s as big as Western Europe, and the UN would need four times that number to do the job. Goma was besieged several years back by the CNDP and things got ugly. I’m told that there are several big refugee camps there.’
‘Besieged by the people we’re training?’
‘We weren’t training them back then.’
A clusterfuck if ever there was one.
‘Sorry about the obfuscation,’ he added.
‘Was OSI in on it?’ I asked.
‘No, not as far as I know. AFRICOM likes to keep everyone bumping into each other. They don’t call this the “dark continent” for nothing.’
At least Arlen was off the hook.
‘Well, if you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘I’m going to try to get some shut-eye. It has been a long night.’
‘Sleep tight,’ I told him. I reached up and switched the intercom back.
Travis closed his eyes and rested his head against the quilted vinyl that lined the aircraft’s insides.
‘So, Capitaine. What’s your base like?’ I leaned forward and asked LeDuc, fighting a yawn. ‘The facilities and so forth.’
‘Goma — she is the Paris of small, muddy African bases,’ he said, turning to grin at me.
‘How does it compare with Cyangugu?’
‘There is no comparison. Your camp is uncivilized. Where is the fresh bread? Where are the croissants? In the bakery department, I tell you, Americans do not know merde from clay.’
I twisted around and checked on the payload. Ayesha, Leila, and Shaquand were sitting shoulder to shoulder behind Travis. The singer and her girls were more sensibly dressed now, wearing US Army wet weather jackets and ball caps. Leila was asleep between Ayesha and Shaquand, her head resting against her make-up artist’s, wearing a Chanel eye mask and with yellow plugs in her ears. Across the aisle, Twenny Fo and Peanut were seated in one row with Boink behind them in a row to himself, lots of brand names and gold chains between them. Lined up across the back of the aircraft was the loadmaster whose name I couldn’t pronounce, Cassidy, Rutherford, West and Ryder. Including myself, our party numbered twelve. Almost everyone behind me was either asleep or dozing. The POS-to-principal ratio wasn’t ideal, but it was better than it might have been.
I took a deep breath, put my head back and closed my eyes.
‘What was that?’ said a voice in my headset. The statement woke me up. Almost immediately after I opened my eyes, I felt g-forces load up, pushing me down into the seat. The aircraft was in a tight turn. I opened my eyes and saw that LeDuc and Fournier were talking heatedly to each other. I checked my watch. The mood on the flight deck had done a one-eighty from relaxed and cheery sometime in the last ten minutes. I leaned into the space between the pilots and flicked the comms switch. ‘So how are we doing?’ I asked them.
LeDuc ignored the question and snapped at the co-pilot. Then both of them began attacking a multitude of switches on the central and overhead consoles. And was that a warning bell I was hearing? I wasn’t sure about the specifics, but a warning bell accompanied by a sea of red lights was a problem in any language, especially when it happened in a chopper at seven thousand feet.
The pilots worked fast, reading dials and throwing switches, trying to get on top of whatever the situation was. They got a massive hint when one of the engines suddenly flamed out.
Shit! ‘Harnesses!’ I shouted behind me. ‘Check your harnesses!’
Through the headset and over the engine and rotor noise, I heard screams and shouting.
The aircraft lurched to one side; then the second engine coughed and backfired. The Puma was dropping into a spiral. LeDuc and Fournier were now shouting at each other — swearing or running checklists, I couldn’t tell. The chopper tipped down into a spiral dive. Then the second turbine stopped completely. Now it was the loadmaster’s turn to yell. My rough translation was that we were all going to die.
‘Mayday Mayday Mayday,’ yelled one of the pilots. ‘MONUC flight zero six, MONUC flight zero six for Goma…’
Everyone in the chopper was screaming, but I switched off at that point and closed my eyes. Two chopper crashes I’d experienced in Afghanistan had prepared me for what would come next. At least I was strapped in this time. My head was pushed violently from side to side by the forces acting on the aircraft. The airflow shrieked. Correction — that was the girls.
I was suddenly jammed down into my seat. That meant the pilots had lift from the airflow rushing through the spinning main rotor; they still had some control. That was good news. We were slowing, the nose coming up. We were going to be okay.
And then we hit.
My head slammed forward into my chest. The harness compressed my ribcage in an instant and air blasted from my lungs. Through it all I heard crumpling sounds like a car in a compactor. All went quiet as the chopper dipped forward and back, rocking. Then something snapped and the helo plunged forward, nose down. A weight came crashing through the centre of the cabin — a person. Whoever it was smashed through the Perspex windscreen and vanished into the blackness below. The air filled with the smell of garden clippings as all manner of metal debris from the back of the aircraft hurtled past me. And then something—
I regained consciousness facing downhill. The air in the cabin was filled with the smell of shredded leaves and the sound of warning bells. A headache thumped behind my eyes. I could hear people groaning. And then our world lurched again and dropped several feet with a tortured, gouging, scraping whine of metal under intense strain.
An object slapped me hard in the side of my face. I turned as far as the harness would allow and saw that the branch of a tree had speared through the observation window behind me.
I was coming to the conclusion that the ride hadn’t quite finished when something else broke with a loud crack, and the Puma plunged, smashing through more branches, which obliterated most of what was left of the windshield. The nose of the aircraft hit something solid and immovable at an angle and the instant deceleration snapped my head forward again, the harness winding me a second time. And then, rolling slowly, the aircraft tipped lazily onto its side and came to rest like a large dead animal.
All motion ceased.
After a brief silence, people started groaning again.
I just sat, taking a moment to come to grips with what had happened. But then the smell of hot jet fuel permeated the shock and gave my brain a kick-start. Get out get out get out… I ripped off the headset and patted myself down, first mentally, then physically. All I found were bruises. Blood dripping on my shoulder caused me to look upward. I jumped up unsteadily. It was Travis, hanging out of the seat by his harness. A deep, ragged slice ran from his shoulder up the side of his head. Jesus… his skull was cracked open. I didn’t need to check his pulse, but I did anyway, confirming that I hadn’t needed to check his pulse.
Shaquand, Leila, and Ayesha were behind him, hanging down, also suspended by their harnesses. Ayesha and Leila had their hands over their mouths, screaming as the numbing effects of the wild ride they’d just survived wore off. I counted twelve PAX. The right number. So who’d gone through the windshield? I did a recount. Shit, of all people, it was the loadmaster. Either his harness hadn’t been fastened properly, or it had failed. If anyone was a candidate for a broken harness, I figured it would have been Boink, but the big man was still buckled in, slowly shaking his head from side to side with his eyes closed, no doubt hoping this was all a bad dream.