Both nodded.
Francis scratched his top lip with the back of a long, curved thumbnail.
‘Cy — collect Mike and get everyone further up the hill with the gear, all right? As high as you can go.’
Cassidy nodded and lifted a container onto his shoulder.
‘Leila. For your own safety do as you’re told — for once,’ I said. She lifted her chin and looked away. ‘I mean it.’
Ryder, Rutherford, Francis, and I ran down through the forest, stopping to check that the road was still clear. It was. The engines of both vehicles continued to run, clouds of oily diesel smoke coughing from their exhaust pipes. Francis and I went for the first Dong — the one that had come up behind us, the one facing the wrong way.
The bench seat was covered in glass crystals clotted with blood and brain matter. I brushed them into the floorboards before climbing in. Francis removed a mound of bloody, glass-studded goop from the dashboard in front of him and nervously glanced sideways at me.
‘I’m much nicer to my friends,’ I reassured him.
A diagram of the gearbox was helpfully etched in the gearstick knob beside my hand. Depressing the clutch, I selected reverse and found the handbrake. With some gas, the Dong leaped off the mark, going backward. I spun the steering wheel and brought the ass end of the truck around. Now heading in the right direction, I selected second gear, stomped on the gas pedal, and we accelerated away, the wind and rain blast coming through the space formerly occupied by the windshield competing with the roar of the engine.
‘How far?’ I yelled
‘Drive for one minute,’ Francis shouted back.
I kept my foot on the gas, changing down for the corners but keeping our speed up in case we met another truck mid-corner. If that happened, I intended to run it off the road if I could, or crash into it if I couldn’t. The sun was yet to rise over the hills and the road remained clear of traffic. Maybe folks were doing us a favor and having a sleep in. We took the corners on the limit, the trucks sliding around on the mud. The road started to climb, slowing us, the forest encroaching on all sides. A minute had passed. Where was that hiding place?
‘We are here,’ Francis yelled, squinting, wiping the rainwater off his face.
‘And where’s that?’ I yelled back. At this point, the forest was overhanging the road. I couldn’t see anywhere to go except straight ahead.
‘Turn here.’ He pointed at the greenery trying to push its way through my window.
‘Here?’
‘Oui. Turn! Turn now!’
I pulled the wheel hard over and finched, but the wall of foliage wasn’t as solid as it appeared to be and we barreled through elephant grass and immature palms. There were no seatbelts in this crate and I braced for the inevitable meeting with a tree that would pitch me through the open window.
‘Too fast! Stop!’ Francis yelled.
I slammed on the anchors, pushing the pedal almost to the firewall, and the vehicle skidded and slid sideways, coming to a stop, palm leaves crowding in through the hole in the door by my shoulder. I finched as the vehicle Duke was driving bashed through the plant life beside us, several tons of Chinese steel hurtling past, its wheels locked up solid. It came to a stop a couple of meters in front on our right-side fender, festooned with broken fronds and branches.
I breathed deep. Jesus, that was too close.
Francis opened his door and jumped down.
Cutting the motor, I opened the door. This wasn’t forest. The palms were adolescent and uniformly planted in lines. Francis appeared around the front of the truck, machete in hand.
‘What is this place?’ I asked him, climbing out of the cabin.
‘Plantation.’
‘Where’s the owner?’
‘Dead since many years, I think.’
‘Our tracks will be seen leaving the road,’ I said.
‘The rain will hide them.’
I hoped he was right. Rutherford and Ryder joined us.
‘Sorry about that, sir,’ said Ryder.
‘Yeah, we lost you in the bush, skipper,’ Rutherford added. ‘And then that big-ass truck of yours was stopped right in front of us. Gave me a bloody heart attack, that did.’
‘I show you why it is good that you stop,’ said Francis, walking away.
He cut a path through the dense but lightweight foliage, which suddenly gave way to a deep gorge and a fast-running watercourse at the bottom of it.
Rutherford peered over the edge. ‘Shite!’
Reload
We double-timed it on foot through the old plantation and into the forest, heading for the lower ground of the valley and the irrigation channel, back to the scene of our earlier dirty work. Along the way, I caught glimpses of the road through the greenery. Two trucks coming from the direction of the mine drove past, and one came from the village. There didn’t seem to be much urgency.
‘Boss…’ West waved to us, crouched behind a shrub a dozen meters up the hill.
I gave him a thumbs up and he led the way through a warren of bamboo stands to a hardwood tree high on the hill shrouded in liana. Leila, Ayesha and Boink appeared from around the tree and came to meet us.
Ayesha went straight to Ryder and embraced him.
‘Any trouble?’ Boink asked.
I shook my head. ‘No. How about you?’
‘We’re good, yo.’
‘Sir!’
It was Cassidy.
‘Over here.’ He held up his hand.
‘Duke, Mike — take the watch,’ I told them. The last thing we needed now was to be taken by surprise.
Cassidy was sitting on one of the larger trunk-sized containers. Rutherford produced the keys and handed them to me.
‘It’s like opening Christmas presents,’ he said as I crouched in front of the other especially large case.
‘Let’s hope it’s not socks,’ I said.
I pulled up the padlock and examined it quickly. There were no numbers or markings on it that corresponded with any of the keys, so I just tried them one by one. The catch sprang open with key number three. I flipped back the lid and took a peek. Hmm… disappointing. No socks, but plenty of old forest-green uniforms and backpacks. I moved to one of the other cases and jiggled the keys in the lock.
‘Now you’re talking,’ said Rutherford when I pulled the lock and lifted the lid.
Lying inside, barrel to stock between sheets of brown, grease paper, were M16A2s. The case smelled of clean oil and plastic, the way a new car smells under its hood. Rutherford and I pulled out a rifle each and checked them over.
The numbers were filed off the receiver. Rutherford showed me his; same deal. So White, the American, the guy whose presence I couldn’t place here, was arms dealing and who knew what else. The numbers missing on these weapons meant that they were either stolen or purchased illegally. White was confident around things that killed people, and that suggested he’d seen combat. But with what service and which conflict? And of course there was Lockhart, formerly US Special Forces and now Kornfak & Greene in these parts, making him a local big wig. He was using that position and infuence to line his own pockets in all kinds of ways. Facilitating the arms dealing and playing both sides of the field were only two of them. I couldn’t immediately pull up all the statutes he was breaking from the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but they started with kidnap and extortion and moved on to slavery and murder. This guy was a peach.
And where did Fu Manchu and the Chinese-made weapons fit into the picture?
‘Let’s get to the other cases,’ said Cassidy. ‘The suspense is killing me.’
I set the rifle down, took hold of a handle on the end of the container while Rutherford took the other, and hoisted it off the stack. The first key I tried worked. I flipped back the lid.