‘Just do what I’m gonna do — follow Mike’s lead.’ I turned to Cas-sidy. ‘Cy, give us four hours to recon the Congolese positions. If we don’t make it back within twelve hours, head due east. According to the map there’s a road around the shores of Lake Kivu. Once you hit it, take a ride south to Cyangugu.’
‘Good luck,’ he said.
We’d need it.
I glanced back over my shoulder at Leila as we left the trees. She was sitting with her back to me, her head in her hands.
West led the way, followed by LeDuc, followed by me. We walked toward the sound of corn popping. Along the way, West blackened his face and arms with charcoal from a tree long ago struck by lightning. Neither LeDuc nor I needed it; our faces and arms were still black from the burned jet fuel. We pulled the green berets down low over our foreheads so that they threw shadows over our eyes.
The blackness under the canopy was soon complete and the going was slow because of it. But at least the rain had mostly been reduced to occasional showers mixed with fat droplets running off the overhead leaves and branches. West stopped us every few minutes to listen. Aside from the sound of distant gunfire, which quickly died away with the last vestiges of light, running water and a howling frenzy of a million mosquitoes were the sounds that accompanied our careful footsteps.
‘Malaria. It’s a problem here,’ West whispered as he came past.
He was searching the floor of the rainforest like he’d lost his keys.
‘What are you doing?’ LeDuc asked.
‘Looking for an ant’s nest,’ he said. ‘Like this one.’ A mound of smooth gray dirt rose out of the leaf litter to about knee height.
‘Pourquoi?’
West kicked the top off it with the heel of his boot, grabbed a handful of the dirt mixed with crushed ant and wiped it over the exposed skin on his arms.
‘Formic acid,’ he said. ‘Nature’s insect repellent. These driver ants are full of it. It’ll stop the mosquitoes cold.’ He took a couple more hand-fuls of dirt, squeezed it in his hands to kill the ants and then rubbed it over his face and the back of his neck.
LeDuc and I followed his lead.
We walked stealthily for a little more than an hour, taking a course that would bring us lower down into the valley, away from the forward picket lines that were no doubt occupied by jumpy soldiers with itchy trigger fingers.
West stopped abruptly beneath a spread of palm fronds and signaled that a target lay dead ahead, ten meters away. I couldn’t see a damn thing. And then the shadow he was pointing at turned and moved slowly away from us. The barrel of a rifle caught some starlight coming through a rent in the canopy. We needed to find out how far apart the pickets were before trying to penetrate the FARDC positions.
We slid to the right, moving the way chameleons do, keeping our boots in midair before placing them carefully on the ground. Finding another picket fifty meters along, we retraced our steps twenty meters or so, then pushed forward between them. The sound of men’s voices soon reached us, a low hum with occasional shouts. Somewhere close by was a company of riflemen doing what men do after battle — eat, talk, dress wounds, die, clean weapons, shit, gamble, urinate, complain, doze, argue.
A sudden, violent thrash in the bushes ahead, lasting no more than a few seconds, cause LeDuc and I to drop to a crouch. I waited till I saw West’s hand signal before moving forward. I took half a dozen steps and saw a FARDC soldier flat on his back, staring up with pinpricks of light in his open eyes. There was not a mark on him that I could see. I cut a couple of palm fronds and laid them over him.
‘Walked into him,’ West whispered in my ear. ‘Had no choice.’ He put a finger to his lips and pointed.
Ahead, through a screen of palms, was a clearing of maybe five meters in diameter. In the center of the clearing, a solider was kneeling on the ground with a small flashlight producing a flickering yellow beam. The man had his pants down and was beating the meat over a deck of cards that I guessed featured naked women. Job done, he picked up one of the cards, wiped it with a wet leaf and put it in his top pocket. We left him to it and worked our way around the edge of the clearing. I spotted a satchel hanging from a tangle of vines and a rifle leaning up against a tree beside it. I stopped West and LeDuc and signaled my intentions. The guy who carried his girlfriend in his pocket was too busy getting his pants back on to notice me. I reached in and took the satchel. The rifle looked familiar. It was an M16. I took it, too, and retreated into the shadows. Checking the satchel, I saw I’d hit the jackpot. Inside were tins of food and a couple of spare mags for the rifle. I gave the weapon the once-over. It was brand-new and its serial numbers had been ground off the receiver, just like those M16s I’d found in Kabul. The same question struck me: why would the numbers be removed if they weren’t somehow significant? A tap on the shoulder refocused my attention. West wanted to keep moving.
Soon the murmur of many voices and the smell of jet fuel caused us to get down on our bellies and inch forward. Through the dense foliage at the edge of a larger clearing, we saw more than thirty men bivouacked under ponchos, screens of umbrella palms, cardboard packaging, blankets — whatever could be used to provide shelter. Tents were non-existent. Here and there, soldiers were cooking their dinners on small portable stoves, the type that utilized bricks of compressed kerosene, which accounted for that smell of jet fuel. A group of half a dozen kids wearing grossly oversized uniforms huddled together under a couple of ponchos with their rifles. Back in my world, kids just a few years younger than these hugged their teddy bears and watched Barney reruns.
West took us on a detour around the clearing. The HQ, our target, would be further in the rear. We found it eventually, ringed by trees with massive trunks and spreading root systems. The roar of fast-moving water told us that a ravine was close. The HQ itself was a collection of four large five-man tents and several smaller ones. Gas lanterns smoldered blue-green within the larger tents. The silhouettes of men moving around inside them played on the tent walls. A number of trestle tables had been set up. Several fires burned and smoked beneath small shelters thatched with wet umbrella palm fronds. More than a dozen soldiers armed with submachine guns patrolled the perimeter. I was worried that the tins in the satchel would clank together, so I left it, along with the M16, behind a tree and shaved a little bark off the trunk so that I could identify the hiding place on our way out. Slithering on our bellies, we kept to the shadows and worked our way around the edge of the clearing to reconnoiter it.
Then West motioned that he saw something up ahead. I came forward. It was Twenny Fo, his head beneath a black hood and his hands tied behind his back with a rope that looped over a tree branch above him. The rope was tight so that his arms were raised. He was leaning forward, balancing on his toes to take the pressure off his shoulders. I could see that if he lost his balance and fell, his weight would rip his clavicles clean out of their sockets. Peanut had been strung up to another tree; same deal. I could hear him sobbing beneath his hood. Fournier and Ayesha were nowhere to be seen. Around them, half a dozen armed men stood smoking and spitting on the ground.
Just then, a short Asian guy, an athletic type with pale skin and dressed in civilian clothes, strolled out of one of the bigger tents. He walked to a slit trench, scratched his ass, urinated, then went back undercover.
‘What’s a Chinese guy doing here?’ I whispered.
‘An advisor,’ LeDuc replied under his breath.
Suddenly, a movement in my peripheral vision distracted me. It was a man on his knees, in a begging position. I was as certain as I could be that it was the same DRC officer who’d captured us earlier. Standing over him were two soldiers, both young and gangly, wearing uniforms that were a size or two too small, as if they’d taken delivery of someone else’s laundry. One of them secured the officer’s forearms on top of a tree stump. The officer was wailing and speaking rapidly in a language I didn’t understand and that wasn’t French. Then the other man swung down several times with a machete, and the officer’s arms came up, without hands on the end of them, blood spurting from the stumps.