From the looks of all the broken tree limbs and shredded foliage lying around, the trees, many well over a hundred feet, had cushioned our fall and saved our lives, gloving the Puma like a big green catcher’s mitt.
‘French helicopters never go down, huh?’ I said to LeDuc as I hoisted Fournier to his feet. Both pilots’ faces were black with burned kerosene. Mine was probably the same.
‘I think perhaps we took on dirty fuel,’ he replied and then, with a shrug, added, ‘Nothing we could do.’
‘You could’ve checked it.’
‘We did, of course.’
‘Injured?’ I asked Fournier, who was wincing.
‘Mon épaule,’ said the co-pilot. ‘My shoulder. C’est disloquée.’
‘Dislocated?’
‘Oui,’ said Fournier.
I checked the lieutenant’s arm. It wasn’t broken, but I could feel that the joint had sprung.
‘I can put it back in,’ I told him.
‘Do it,’ said Fournier with a nod, turning away.
I took hold of the forearm and put my thumb on the joint so that I could feel what was happening under the skin. He let out an extended grunt as I rotated his arm back and forth slowly and popped it back in.
‘Rest it,’ I told him. ‘Nothing’s broken. You should be able to use it again in a day or so.’
‘Merci, monsieur,’ he said, forcing a smile.
Picking our way up the hill, we came across the plastic medical case. The heat from the fire had distorted it on one side, but its contents were intact.
Further up the hill, Rutherford, Cassidy, and Ryder had gathered our principals together behind an ancient fallen moss-and-fungi-covered tree.
‘How’re we doing?’ I called out as we approached.
Ryder was about to provide an answer when I heard Leila scream, ‘I hate you!’ Then I saw her pummeling Twenny Fo in the chest with her fists. ‘This is your fault! Your fault! Shaquand would still be alive. I hate you!’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ the rapper responded, ‘She was good. I loved her like family. I’m sorry, yo.’ He wrapped his former lover in his arms, and Leila stopped hitting him and merely sobbed, her shoulders heaving, but then she wrenched herself free and slapped him across the face as hard as she could.
‘Ouch,’ said Rutherford.
‘I hate you,’ she repeated in case he hadn’t caught it the first two times, and then burst into tears and allowed herself to be embraced by Ayesha.
A little away from them, Peanut was standing and staring at the tree canopy. Beside him, Boink was rocking from side to side as if he’d lost his marbles. When I was a kid, I’d seen an elephant doing the same thing at the circus. The animal eventually broke its chain and sat on its handler, killing him. I hoped the big guy wasn’t planning on sitting on anyone.
I could see that Ayesha had a cut on her forearm and that Peanut had a minor cut and Boink a more serious one. I handed the medical kit to Ryder and said, ‘See what you can do with this, Duke.’
A couple of fat drops of rain landed on my face from above, the advance guard of a major assault from that quarter.
Great.
A peal of thunder rolled through the trees, and a downpour began to slant through the hole that our arrival had punched through the canopy. I heard a squeal from either Leila or Ayesha as they took cover in the lee of a tree trunk. This wasn’t rain. These were half cups of ice-cold water dropped from a thousand feet. It was an attack.
Cassidy, down at the far end of the log, beckoned me with a signal.
‘Listen,’ he said.
It took a few seconds for my hearing to adjust so that the familiar sound of small arms fire could be heard within the fusillade of rain. The gunfire was coming from somewhere in front of us, beyond the burning chopper, and it was coming closer. My gut felt like an eel had been released into it.
A sudden flash of lightning lit up the trees and, a split second later, thunder burst over us with the boom of an artillery shell.
‘LeDuc,’ I called out, motioning for him to come down.
The Frenchman trotted toward us with his co-pilot following, the man’s arm now in a sling.
‘Who the hell’s shooting at who?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, his voice full of concern. ‘There are at least six armies fighting each other in the DRC.’
‘How many of them are friendly toward the UN?’
‘Sometimes one, sometimes none.’
‘You got a map?’ I asked him. ‘I’d like to know where shit creek is relative to Cyangugu.
‘Oui,’ he said, opening his pack. He pulled out a tactical pilotage chart and rested it on the log. ‘We are here,’ he said, pointing to a spot on the chart along a line drawn with a grease pencil. Rainwater pooled in the map’s creases, and then ran off its plastic-coated surface.
‘You get a response from the Mayday call?’
‘Non,’ he said.
Conventional wisdom said to stay with the downed aircraft, but it appeared that we’d had the extra bad luck of coming down in the middle of an argument that was being settled with cordite and lead. Conventional wisdom didn’t take that fairly major detail into account.
LeDuc produced an emergency locator beacon, or ELB, from his pack.
That was good news.
Just then a sudden whoosh of a shell arced overhead, fired from somewhere behind us. Mortar fire. The round burst out of sight further down the hill.
And just like that, the good news ended.
‘Jesus, where the hell have you put us down?’ Rutherford shouted at LeDuc over the thunder, just so the Frenchman knew who was to blame.
Then a rocket-propelled grenade came out of nowhere, ripped through the air and exploded inside the Puma, sending a fireball into the treetops.
‘Shit,’ West exclaimed. ‘Where did that come from?’
Behind us, Leila and Ayesha were shrieking, their hands over their ears.
‘Quiet!’ I shouted at them. They ignored me.
I signaled Ryder and pulled my finger across my throat, telling him to silence them any way he had to. He pulled the women to the ground and put his arms around them. Twenny Fo, Boink, and Peanut dropped to their knees where they stood. Cassidy, Rutherford, and West had taken up firing positions, sighting their M4s on the forest downhill, covering any approach from that direction.
Men’s voices were calling out from the forest below the burning Puma. They were whooping and hollering. I couldn’t understand the language, but it was full of bloodlust.
‘Ammunition?’ I asked Cassidy.
‘Standard loadout,’ he said. ‘Same as the others. I already checked.’
That meant four magazines each for the M4s, two spares for the side-arms, Sigs for Ryder and me, Berettas for the Army guys. No frag, no smoke. Shit.
Our position was roughly forty feet up the hill from the blazing helicopter.