‘Hey, I think he’s going commando here,’ Rutherford observed as the crease between the man’s eyes deepened and lengthened.
‘Two,’ I said.
‘They took them to the mine,’ the Chinaman blurted, sweat beaded across his forehead, a stain spreading down his left leg.
‘Who took them there?’ I asked.
‘Your countryman — Rockhart.’
Lockhart. ‘Was the Frenchman, LeDuc, with him?’
‘No. He go with other men in the chopper.’
My inner revenge said ‘Fuck’ and smashed a fist into the palm of its hand. I wanted that asshole’s head on a plate — with freedom fries.
‘With Pietersen and White?’ I asked.
‘Yes, them.’
‘What about Biruta?’
‘He go too.’
I wanted to ask him what the PLA was doing here, and whether his people knew about his involvement in rape, kidnap and extortion, or if he knew how the folks back home in the Forbidden City would react if they knew that he was lining his pockets with gold mined by slaves his buddies were torturing and killing. I also wanted to know about the American-made guns, the M16s, but the answer to that I could get from Lockhart and his buddy Charles White, if and when I caught up with them. Somewhere in the background, the sound of men shouting something penetrated my thoughts.
‘We got company,’ said Rutherford.
I glanced to the side and saw maybe a dozen men tentatively approaching us fifty meters away through an early morning haze of smoke, steam and airborne mud particles. They were pointing at us, gesturing. Colonel Cravat, easily identifed by the cream scarf tucked into the neck of his jungle-pattern shirt, was out front. As I thought, the arrival of daylight wasn’t doing us any favors.
Rutherford and I had to finish up with the Chinaman, but not before I delivered a small parting gift from Ayesha. I balled a fist and drove it into the side of his face. His lips went in the opposite direction to the rotation of his head, kissing my thumb, and a tooth shot out of his mouth. The force of the blow spun him around unconscious and he fell face first into the side of his tent, collapsing it.
A rifle cracked and I felt the shock wave from a round rip past the tip of my nose, close enough to ruffe my nostril hairs. Our guests had tired of our company. By my calculations, we had maybe thirty seconds up our sleeves before Cassidy and West went to work again on our hosts with the mortar. I ran to the truck, Rutherford half a step behind.
Diesel smoke coming from the end of the Dong’s exhaust pipe told me the motor was still running. I went for the passenger door and opened it as Rutherford leaped onto the running board I was standing on, dived in and crawled over Francis to get behind the wheel. I threw myself in after him and we were moving before I could close the door.
I glanced back at Lissouba, who was being passed a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, which he wasted no time hoisting onto his shoulder.
‘Oh fuck,’ I said. The tube jumped as he fired the weapon, and the warhead streaked toward us, ahead of a vapor trail scribed on the dense morning air.
‘Oh fuck,’ I said again, or maybe I just thought it, as I closed my eyes and waited for the explosion that would rip us all apart and incinerate the pieces. But the detonation came a second later than anticipated; the warhead blasting unexpectedly against a tree twenty meters on the other side of the truck. Not that I was complaining, but how the hell had Lissouba missed from point-blank range?
There was no time to launch an investigation. I heard a vague whoosh ing sound and the air was suddenly full of fire and noise and the rattle of shrapnel on the truck’s metalwork, as the first of more mortar rounds fell from the sky and slammed into the HQ, turning the area around us into a boiling sea of bursting orange high-explosive blisters that raised storms of flying earth and pebbles. Lissouba and his men were blotted from view. Cassidy and West had the range and were firing off the remaining forty rounds they’d carried to the top of the ridge, and this time their rate of fire was nudging the M224’s limit — a round every couple of seconds. A ball of orange hell swallowed Fu Manchu’s tent less than forty meters away, and clots of mud rained down on the Dong’s hood and showered us through the windshield opening, along with a man’s bloody forearm, hand attached, that landed in my lap. I threw it out the hole it came through and noticed blood on my shoulder, the fabric around my upper arm shredded. I couldn’t feel anything. I gave the wound a closer look. The blood seeped rather than squirted. Not serious, but nothing to laugh about either.
Francis’s mouth was open and he looked to be screaming through the deafening roar and the falling earth and the clatter of whirling metal fragments, but I couldn’t hear him. Rutherford’s jaws were clenched, his teeth streaked with the orange mud. I watched him wrestle with the steering wheel, trying to carve a path like a slalom skier between the explosions that filled our world and blotted everything out with a storm of fire and shrapnel and mud.
He changed direction and drove a route that took us around the circumference of the encampment, away from the deadly blasts. Cassidy and West were concentrating on the camp’s HQ, hoping to cut off the serpent’s head. I knew that’s what they were doing, because that was the plan we’d laid down. And this part was pretty much running like clockwork except for one pretty important fact — the folks we were risking life and limb to rescue weren’t here. The only good news was that it appeared I didn’t have to eat less meat and more veggies. Leila, of course, would give me hell about the fact that Twenny and Peanut weren’t in the camp, that I ’d put her life at risk for nothing, and I felt sure there was a big I-told-you-so moment in my immediate future.
A different kind of fireball erupted on the far side of the clearing and boiled into the sky, snapping me back to the reality of the moment. A deep boom rolled through the hills. The Mi-8 had taken a direct hit.
The continuing destruction caused by falling mortars was now pretty much confined to the area framed by the glassless opening beside me in the door. I could still see men running around screaming and diving for holes in the mud. We bounced over mud and bulldozed our way through the brush with no opposition, heading back to the scene of our first encounter of the morning, where the Dong had been parked across the road.
Silence arrived with the same suddenness as the explosions. It lengthened from a couple of seconds to a dozen of them. The last echoes of the exploding HE returned from the surrounding hills. The attack was over. Right about now, Cassidy and West would be spiking the mortar so that it couldn’t be used again.
Lissouba and his men had known that an attack was coming, even if they weren’t fully prepared for it. Why else have that welcoming committee waiting at the boom gate? And why move their hostages to another venue otherwise? One thing was certain, though: Lockhart would be waiting for Act II at the mine.
‘Can you hear that?’ Rutherford asked.
Now that he mentioned it, I could hear something. I could hear women screaming. And one of them, I was sure, was Leila.
Rescue
Rutherford pulled up at the bottom of the hill, before the road swept past the village, the forest pressing in on the truck. Rutherford, Francis and I got out as a soft rain began to fall, the sky clouded over and leaden. Leila was making enough noise for two, giving her lungs a serious workout. Something was obviously troubling her. I examined the canvas tarpaulin as I jogged down the side of the truck, and saw more rents, tears, bullet and shrapnel holes. We’d attracted our fair share of attention — more than I realized.
‘Everything okay?’ I asked as I came around the back. Leila, her arms outstretched, was pushing Boink away, Ayesha leaned over Ryder, who was motionless on the floor.