‘I think so. What do you need?’
I wasn’t a hundred percent sure. We had a loaves and fishes situation: too many tasks and not enough people to tackle them. But at least as far as my principals were concerned, their immediate safety was not something I had to worry about, even though I was breaking the number one rule in the book, which was to never, under any circumstance, leave your principals without PSO protection. So, in a nutshell, if this leg of our little adventure turned into a cluster fuck, I’d be court-martialed. There’d be a guilty verdict and a dishonorable discharge would follow. Assuming, of course, that I managed to survive said cluster fuck. A cold uncertainty about what lay ahead in the next hour blossomed in the pit of my stomach and the roots grew into my scrotum. ‘Francis, can you shoot a rifle?’
‘Oui,’ he said. ‘We go now to free my wife, my people, yes?’
No, we weren’t, not in as many words, but it would most likely happen by default if we also managed to bust out our principals.
‘Can you drive?’ I asked him.
‘Oui, but not so well. I have shot more than I have driven.’
‘Can you shoot and drive at the same time?’ I asked, pushing my luck.
Francis was looking increasingly uncertain. ‘Oui.’
‘But you can drive one of those?’ I gestured over my shoulder at the Dongs.
‘Oui.’
I told Rutherford to take the watch. Then, with my boot, I scraped away the leaf litter on the ground until I had a square of earth to work with. ‘Gather ’round. Francis, if I get the layout wrong, let me know. Boink, Leila, Ayesha — when Cassidy and West get here, you’ll need to debrief them.’
‘What should we tell them?’ Leila asked.
Using my Ka-bar, I drew a map of the mine and described the approaches as I remembered them. Francis pulled me up twice. The distances from the wooden beer huts, the mine’s administrative center, to the open pit were underestimated; the distance to the camp, where Francis’s people and many others spent the night under patches of plastic sheeting, was overestimated.
‘The only buildings at the mine are two huts made of wood,’ I said, scratching a cross in the mud with the point of my knife. ‘I’d say that’s where Twenny and Peanut are being held — somewhere close to these.’
‘Busting them out,’ said Rutherford, glancing back over his shoulder at the map. ‘How we gonna do that?’
I wish I knew. I was still trying to figure out what we’d be facing when we got there. It was around five miles from the encampment to the mine, or a little over four miles from our current position. Unless the FARDC used radio, which I hadn’t seen, my guess was that the left hand still didn’t know the right hand had been smacked. If the soldiers at the mine had heard anything — the mortar bombardment — they might have put it down to a localized thunderstorm, something that happened often enough around here.
I turned to Francis, hoping for a little information on the communications front. ‘Do the government troops use radio?’
He shook his head. ‘I have not seen this. When they can, they use the cell phone, but they do not work here.’
‘How many men usually guard the mine?’
‘Not many. Perhaps ten.’
‘What about the trucks? How many do they have?’
‘I do not know,’ he said.
Hmm… Lockhart and Lissouba had moved their hostages because they suspected an attack was looming, which meant there was a better- than-even chance that the mine was garrisoned to protect their hostages. And there seemed to be significantly fewer than a hundred and something armed men at the main encampment on the hill.
‘Leila and Ayesha, I need you to refill our magazines,’ I said. ‘We’re heading out in ten minutes.’ I handed over my empties. Rutherford came over and added his to the stack. I expected a complaint from Leila, but didn’t get one. Still in zombie mode, I figured. Boink tag-teamed with Rutherford, taking over the watch.
‘If you see any traffic,’ I told Boink, ‘let us know. Stay out of sight, okay?’
‘Yo,’ he said simply, and went off.
I watched him go and decided that a fart in a crowded elevator had more chance of hiding than a human being the size of Boink. But there were deep shadows in the forest and, after more than a week on the run, he knew the drill.
‘On the trucks front, we’ve accounted for four of them,’ said Rutherford. ‘And one was destroyed at the checkpoint. That’s a total of five.’
I counted six at the mine when I arrived there yesterday. Including the one I stowed away on and the one back at the village, that made eight trucks that we knew of.
‘There are at least four more trucks running around,’ I said. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘You can carry around a lot of men in four trucks.’
A picture was being painted that I didn’t like the look of.
‘Vin,’ said Ayesha, interrupting my thoughts. ‘What do you want us to do with these?’
She was holding up a couple of Claymores, one in each hand.
‘How many we got?’
‘These two and six more.’
The Claymore. It was both a defensive and offensive weapon, or so we were told in basic, the operation of which was only limited by the user’s imagination. Mine kicked into overdrive.
‘I’ve seen that look before,’ said Rutherford. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘You sure you’re okay?’ I asked Ryder. One of his eyes was blood red.
‘Lemme at ’em,’ he said.
Duke Ryder — a real surprise package. ‘Follow me. Got a job for you.’
Release
We rolled out five minutes behind schedule, maneuvering toward the road at a crawl. Boink stepped out from behind a bamboo stand and approached the passenger-side front door. I leaned out the opening in the door.
‘Anything?’ I asked him.
‘You’re good to go, man.’
‘See you in around half an hour,’ I said. At least, we would if we weren’t all full of holes. I gestured at Francis. He rolled us forward at a creep, then left the cover of the forest and turned onto the road, heading up the incline. Around a hundred and fifty meters downhill, the trucks blasted by the Claymores were still nosed into the greenery. A trail of black smoke rose from the vehicles and climbed toward the lowering cloud base. Someone would turn up to investigate that.
Francis accelerated up the hill, grinding through the gears, the wind roar as it blasted through the non-existent windshield building steadily. We drove through a swarm of unidentifed bugs that burst wetly against us like we were being spat on. The morning was steamy and my clothes were sticking to my skin, especially where the blood from my shoulder wound had dried. Clouds were building up for something extra-specially impressive. A heavy rumbling echo of thunder rolled down through overhanging trees, confirming that a big one was on the way.
I started listing the variables in our immediate future, but soon ran out of fingers and toes. There were way too many and most of them were armed to the teeth. If there was the glimmer of a bright side, it was that the enemy’s intelligence was even thinner than ours. Obviously, FARDC knew something was up, but didn’t know where, when, how or who. Rolling up to the mine, we’d appear innocent, just another truck like any of the others, at least until the absent windshield was noticed, along with the bodywork shot up like an Alabama road sign.
There was the stained FARDC beret on the seat. I passed it across to Francis. It was sticky with blood and smelled of iron. ‘Put it on,’ I told him.
He looked at the thing with distaste for a moment before placing it on his head. We were by now about a mile and a half from the mine. There were no signs of danger. The thunderstorm was moving in, lightning forking the clouds, flicking on and off like an old fuorescent light on its last legs. Thunder rumbled distantly. It was time for Rutherford and me to make ourselves scarce. I slid down off the seat and onto the floorboards, Rutherford doing likewise. Francis glanced at us briefly but said nothing. I watched Rutherford go through his umpteenth weapons check, which prompted me to do the same.