‘Shit,’ I muttered.
‘What?’ asked Ryder.
‘Ever been to Salt Lake City?’
Using the backpacks, Leila, Ayesha, Boink, Francis, Ryder and I had returned to the trucks with most of the Claymores, the spare uniforms and a large helping of ammo and grenades. There was almost eighty pounds of M16 ammo alone. Strung between us, we’d also brought five of the seven Kevlar containers, most of which fitted one inside the other like a Russian babushka doll. We’d kept the QCWs, but left almost all of the Nazarians behind on the hill, minus their bolts, swapping the Chinese rifles for the new US-made M16s and burying the ordnance we couldn’t take. The loads we’d carried had been heavy, but featherweight compared to the one that Cassidy, West and Rutherford had had to lug between them back up onto the ridge overlooking the FARDC encampment.
I gave a soft whistle before approaching the trucks to avoid being shot at, not that I thought there was a snowball’s chance in hell that I’d get hit, given who was on guard duty.
‘Halt, who goes there?’ hissed Leila.
‘Duck Dodgers,’ I replied, ‘and his faithful sidekick, Porky Pig.’
‘Thanks a bunch,’ said Ryder.
‘Is that you, Cooper?’ she called out.
I could see Leila before she could see me, because she wasn’t looking in my direction.
‘Over here,’ I said, shaking a branch to give her fair warning. She jumped, nervous as a chihuahua. Francis and Boink stopped what they were doing, our return being a good excuse to take a break. They’d been using the utility trenching tools hooked onto the Dong’s chassis to fill the spare uniforms with mud, turning them into sandbags. The ammo cans, which were sitting up on the back of the truck’s load trays, had also been filled with mud.
‘How’s it going?’ I asked them as Ryder and I walked into view.
‘We’re done,’ said Boink. ‘Got me some motherfucker blisters, yo.’
He showed me his hands, the skin rubbed off the inside of his thumbs and his palms weeping blood.
Francis leaned on his shovel and smiled briefly. It wasn’t raining yet but both men’s clothes were soaked. The air steamed with the imminent afternoon downpour, the clouds in the sky piling up on top of each other like armfuls of cotton balls.
‘Good,’ I said, slapping the large can they’d been filling. The hollow-ness was gone, replaced by a gratifying bullet-stopping heaviness.
‘We’re calling it the Alamo, yo,’ said Boink, nodding with satisfaction.
‘We lost at the Alamo,’ I reminded him.
‘Whatever. We might just pull this shit off.’
We had a few surprises up our sleeves but we were still just five PSOs and a few civilians against a vastly superior force of combat-hardened killers. I wasn’t prepared to high-five anyone. The Alamo…
‘How we doing with those magazines?’ I asked. ‘Where’s Ayesha?’
She heard me and leaned out the back of the second truck. ‘Nearly done, five more to go. And I’ve got blisters, too,’ and she held up a fore-finger to show me whereabouts.
I climbed up to inspect her handiwork. There were fifty mags contained in the metal case, each holding thirty rounds. That meant a total of fifteen hundred bullets to be individually loaded into the spring-tensioned housings. It was tedious, repetitive work. Added to this store were another thirty magazines collected from our various interactions with the local population during our time on the ground, plus the mags we came in with. That gave a total of two thousand four hundred rounds that Ayesha had pushed into the magazines. The mags — eighty of them, if my calculations were accurate — were neatly stacked in five piles of sixteen, one stack each for Cassidy, Rutherford, West, Ryder and myself. The number seemed like overkill, but things were going to get ragged with the FARDC and we’d probably need every one of those mags and more.
‘How many rounds we got in reserve?’ I asked her.
‘Twelve to fifteen hundred,’ she replied.
Not much left to fight off a counterattack.
‘I need to eat something,’ said Leila, interrupting my thoughts. ‘And I don’t care what it is.’
The innuendo was too easy to hit out of the park so I left it alone. I swung the pack off my back. ‘There are Mopane trees over there and the worms on it look mouthwatering.’
She chewed the inside of her bottom lip at me, a hand on her hip.
‘Okay, okay,’ I said in mock surrender, and pulled bananas out of my pack. ‘If you’re still hungry, Duke will show you where there are more.’
Francis said, ‘There are fish in the water also. I can show you how to catch them.’
‘I’ll come back with my rod next time,’ I told him.
I ate a couple of bananas for a quick energy burst. Before moving ahead with the next phase of the plan, we had to consolidate our position. A far-off peel of thunder sounded like a heavy load dropped down a distant elevator shaft and a fat droplet of water landed on my forehead. I checked my watch, though I don’t know why I bothered. The rain was right on time: three-fifteen.
‘Let’s get these containers into position,’ I said to Boink and then called Ryder over to lend a hand.
The three of us wrestled them into place inside the Dong so that they formed a box, stacked the uniforms filled with mud around and on top of them and then, with rope and liana, lashed it all to the floor.
I jumped down out of the truck, Ryder and Boink following, and said, ‘We should test it.’ I nominated the QCW for the job because it was silenced. Ryder handed me the weapon. Selecting three-shot burst, I disengaged the safety, aimed and fired into the sandbags. The weapon leapt in my hand. We climbed back into the truck for the inspection and quickly found the holes in one of the makeshift sandbags. On further inspection, the rounds hadn’t penetrated to the Kevlar container behind it, the wet mud stopping them cold. But the defenses had a weakness. While we’d be covered by the cabin behind us and by the containers on three sides, one of those sides offered less protection than the other two, there being not enough of the larger Kevlar containers to complete the box. This side was of a lower height than the other two. I compensated for it with additional sandbags, stacking them higher on that side, but if massed incoming fire hit them, they’d get chewed up quickly, leaving those inside the box exposed. There was nothing I could do about it, except perhaps not to dampen the enthusiasm by drawing attention to the potential problem. So I left this flank untested and instead shifted everyone’s attention to getting a decent night’s sleep. This meant first transferring the ammo-filled magazines and the grenades to the assault truck, and then collecting palm fronds to use as bedding, laying them down inside the load area of our spare truck.
These jobs took some time and were completed while the thunderstorm was in full swing, the massive cloudbanks pelting us briefly with marble-sized balls of hail mixed into the rain. When we were done, Duke handed out dry uniforms. Leila and Ayesha slipped into them, using the assault truck as a changing room. With the fronds, dry clothes and weatherproof tarpaulin covering the Dong’s load’s space, it would be our driest, most comfortable sleeping quarters since departing Cyangugu.
‘Get your weapons load-out organized,’ I said to Ryder, making a final inspection of our mobile barricade in the last of the ambient light, rearranging a heavy pair of green pants filled with mud, the bottom of the legs tied in knots and the waist secured with loops of liana. ‘I’ll take the first watch.’
‘What time do we rock and roll?’ he asked.