I drank the kerosene-tasting water streaming down my face and wondered what would happen to us once this unit met up with the people who’d popped a rocket into the chopper. I was prepared to bet that at the bottom of the list would be a Napoleon brandy, a croissant and a ride back to Cyangugu. As I saw it, we didn’t have much of a window here. We had to act before too many more soldiers became involved, and the odds went from bad to zip-me-in. And, while I knew this with absolute certainty, I hesitated. The majority of organized attacks are successful; the bodyguards usually die; the bodyguards rarely fire their weapons effectively, if at all; the bodyguards almost never affect the outcome of the attack.
As I was thinking this, I saw the briefest futter of something black flying through the air. It alighted on the back of the head of one of the Africans accompanying the column. Was it a bat? I peered at it hard. No, Jesus, it was a black throwing knife, barely visible against the victim’s black hair. The blade was embedded in the man’s skull just above the juncture of the spinal column and the base of his brain. There was nothing accidental about the target area. Whoever threw it knew exactly where to put it. The man began stumbling like he was drunk. Then he collapsed right in front of me, tripping me up so that I fell forward, out of control. As I went down, I grabbed the first thing I saw — the barrel of a rifle beside my face and pulled it down. The stock at the other end swung around and smacked into the mouth of the soldier holding it. His finger, caught inside the trigger guard, caused the weapon to fire off a three-round burst, which shot the kneecap clean off the soldier walking ahead of me, and he went down with a scream.
The next four seconds were a blur.
Cassidy swung his arm into the head of the distracted soldier closest to him, crashing the point of his elbow with ruinous force into the soft temple area. The man crumpled to the ground like an old suit slipped off its hanger. West turned to the guard beside him and buried his forehead in the guy’s face, smashing his cheekbone with a crack that reminded me of the sound the Puma made when it hit the tree. Then Rutherford took on his guard with a shoulder charge, propelling him into a tree trunk. And when he bounced off it, the SAS sergeant completed the move with a palm thrust to the throat that crushed the man’s windpipe.
I turned around in time to watch Leila using her fingernails to rake the face of the African struggling to hold her. The man howled and let go of her and covered his face with his hands as he ran — unfortunately for him, straight into Boink. The man mountain lifted him into the air, one hand on the African’s back and the other on his head. He then twisted his head, instantly breaking the man’s neck, and threw the body aside like a bag of trash. It landed beside LeDuc, who was face down in the mud — either dead or out for the count, I couldn’t tell which — but the soldier accompanying him was nowhere to be seen.
‘Ayesha! No!’ Leila cried out and started running down the hill. A shadow picked itself up off the ground and tackled her before she’d taken more than half a dozen steps. It was Ryder. The two thrashed around, a tangle of arms and legs, Leila going for the agent’s eyes with those nails of hers until she understood who it was.
Movement down the hill caught my attention. I realized that the gun I’d grabbed was in my hands, and the Africans were running away. We couldn’t allow them to regroup, inform on us and bring reinforcements. So I found targets, fired once, twice, and two men dropped to the ground as if their shoelaces were suddenly tied together. Sighting the rifle left and right, I counted four more soldiers, including the officer — all of them backing away toward the exploded Puma. But these guys weren’t running, they were taking it slow. And I couldn’t shoot them, on account of they were holding Twenny Fo, Peanut, Fournier, and Ayesha in front of them, using them as human shields.
Hostage
‘We have to get them back!’ Leila demanded. ‘Twenny Fo, Ayesha, Peanut, the other pilot… You can’t leave them!’ ‘We have to get out of here now is what we have to do,’ I told her.
‘That’s bullshit, man,’ said Boink, his fat forefinger stabbing the front of my body armor. ‘Give me a gun and I’ll go down there and fuck their shit up.’
‘Ryder!’ I called over my shoulder.
‘Here,’ he said, right behind me.
I turned three-quarters and saw him rubbing a bloody wound on his head.
‘You okay?’ He’d received a rifle butt from the departing Africans that had knocked him out cold.
‘Yeah.’
‘Get the principals secured further up the hill, then sit down for a while,’ I told him.
‘What about Ayesha?’ Ryder asked, his voice cracking.
I faced him and said quietly, an inch from his face, ‘Duke, head ’em up the hill to that tree.’ I indicated the one I meant, a tree with a vast splay of roots, like a cage that seemed to drop from branches high above the forest floor.
‘People everywhere are gonna know what kind of man you are, Cooper,’ Leila hissed, her face disintegrating as she began to cry, the hopelessness of the situation getting its hooks into her. ‘Coward,’ she spat, and it was like the word itself landed in the mud at my feet.
Ryder hesitated and looked into my face before deciding further conversation probably wasn’t a good idea, and then herded Leila and Boink up the hill. Coward. I wasn’t going to let it get under my skin. Our survival chances were diminishing moment by moment. There was only unavoidable unpleasantness ahead.
‘LeDuc!’ The Frenchman materialized at my shoulder as I walked to the African whose kneecap had been shot off. ‘They speak French here, right?’
‘Oui,’ he said.
We walked several paces and I waited for the plea to rescue his co-pilot.
‘Do not worry about Fournier, he is a survivor,’ LeDuc said, surprising me.
‘I need you to translate,’ I told him.
Sergeant Cassidy was patting down one of the dead Africans. He was wearing the man’s green beret and held up my Ka-bar as we walked by.
‘Yours, I think,’ he said.
I took it and sheathed it.
‘And we’ve got our M4s back,’ he said as he turned the man’s head to one side. The metal haft of the anodized black throwing knife was sticking out of the corpse’s skull, covered in mud and streaked with blood and brains. Cassidy pulled his Ka-bar and gave the embedded blade a few taps left and right to loosen it before attempting to pull it out. He’d done this before, obviously. Jerking the blade free, he wiped it clean on his leg and then scraped the goop off his pants and flicked it onto the ground. He replaced the knife in a scabbard hidden in the top of his body armor, right where he’d submissively clasped his fingers before being asked to do so by our captors.
‘Insurance policy,’ he said, adjusting its position.
‘We move out in three minutes,’ I told him. ‘Pass it on.’
Rutherford and West were also checking the dead and wounded and stripping the corpses of anything useful.
LeDuc and I approached the African writhing slowly in the mud, making noises like a wounded animal, his bloody, mangled leg cramped rigid in front of him. The guy was small, in his late teens with a youthful beard, a front tooth missing and its partner brown with rot.
‘You told me there were six armies fighting in the Congo,’ I said to LeDuc. ‘Ask him which one’s his.’
‘I don’t need to ask him this. The blue patch on the shoulder of his uniform tells me that he is FARDC — Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo. These are DRC government troops.’
‘I thought you said the DRC army was on your side?’ I asked him.