She pointed at me. ‘Our killer just leads us from one impossible situation to another.’ She looked angrily at Cassidy, then at West and Ryder. ‘Can’t someone else take charge here? Is no one man enough to take responsibility? He ain’t never gonna to get us home. Am I the only one who can see that?’ She went to Boink. ‘What about choo, Phillip?’
Phil found something interesting to stare at on the ground.
‘Duke? Got nothing to say?’
Ryder moved toward her to put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Leila, I think you should calm dow—’
Realizing that no one was going to join the mutiny, she parried his arm, turned away, sank to her knees and sobbed, beaten. Or acting, I couldn’t tell which. Twenny and Ayesha, like air filling a vacuum, rushed in to comfort her.
I turned away and tried to think the situation through. There was no dealing with Lissouba and his partner, Beau Lockhart — not now. We’d come too far and seen too much. Lockhart would have to believe I had enough evidence, even if it were just eyewitness accounts, to build a case against him. The fact that I didn’t; well, he wouldn’t know that, would he? He’d consider that his interests were best served if we never made it back. All of which meant that if we were captured, then, no question about it, we’d all end up in the FARDC’s downsizing program administered by machetes.
‘Forget that crap, boss,’ said West. ‘You got my vote.’
‘Who said it was a democracy,’ I answered.
‘The enemy force is between thirty and forty,’ Cassidy said, the sideshow over. The pressing business of what the hell we were going to do had to be dealt with and the PSOs, me included, were feeling the weight of it.
‘They picked up our raft downstream and this is probably the closest hamlet to where they found it,’ I surmised. ‘They’ll go over the area down there with a fine tooth comb.’
‘We cleaned up our landing pretty good, but you can bet your ass there’ll be a boot print in the mud that we missed, or something like that,’ said Cassidy. ‘We all bagged our shit but our principals weren’t so diligent. They’ll know we’re up here.’
‘We’ve given them a good mauling already. They’ll be cautious,’ said West. ‘They’ll send out a recon patrol first and get the lay of the land. They’ll find the village and come to the same conclusion you did about the risks, sir. They’ll figure they’ve got us bottled up.’
There was a murmur of general agreement.
The time was approaching four pm. We had an hour and a half of useful light left; less, if the cloud build-up continued.
‘That recon patrol should never get to make its report,’ Rutherford suggested.
He was right. It didn’t help us any for Lissouba to know that we couldn’t retreat. We had to fight our way out. ‘I’ve got two mags left, and only one of them is full,’ I said. ‘What’s everyone else got?’
Only Ryder had two full mags. Like me, the rest of us were down to the dregs: Rutherford had just two rounds; West one full mag; Cas-sidy half a mag. We also had that one frag grenade, one Claymore and twelve smoke canisters. Assuming one bullet, one kill, we had enough ammunition to get the job done, but we were kidding ourselves if we thought we could pull that off. These guys would come at us hard and they knew how to fight. We’d taken them on several occasions already, but we’d had the advantage of surprise, along with a hell of a lot of antipersonnel iron to throw around. Those days were now well and truly over. Rutherford chewed something off the inside of his cheek.
‘So how’re we going to pull this off?’ I asked. ‘Any thoughts?’
‘Use the night,’ Cassidy said.
West and I kept watch, hunkered down in a patch of the elephant grass bordering the grassy knoll. There was only one way up that we knew of, and that was via the steps cut into the limestone wall. First port of call for Lissouba’s scouts would be this relatively open ground, same as it was for Rutherford and me when we first arrived. Meanwhile, the rest of our band was heading to the thick rainforest bordering the plantation, where there was also plenty of bamboo for Cassidy’s purposes. Leila, I knew, would take one look at the berry-laden thorn bush coiled up there like razor wire that we wanted her and our other principals to hide in and refuse to take another step. But that was Rutherford’s problem, or Cassidy’s, or Ryder’s, or maybe even Twenny’s, if the guy were prepared to step up. I was happy to leave them to it. Hanging out in the long wet grass with insects, snakes and frogs, waiting for Lissouba and his killers, was a far more appealing option. It had been dusk for a while when West, whose angle on things encompassed a view of the limestone wall and was thus better than mine, raised a finger to inform me that the recon party had arrived. A dozen seconds later he displayed two fingers — two scouts. The first guy, skinny and crouched over almost double, came into my view; he was carrying an M16 but not a lot else. Traveling light. His slightly taller, but equally fyweight, buddy walked into my line of sight a few moments later. Though obviously on edge, given the way they gripped their guns — tightly, like they were handrails in a fast-moving train — both men moved well, their heads achieving an owl-like range of movement. They spent some minutes surveying the knoll, though they avoided coming into the elephant grass. Satisfied that the area was clear of threat, they found the trail into the rainforest and slunk into the darkness collected under the canopy. I shifted an arm, getting ready to stand, and West urgently held up a finger, followed thirty seconds later by a second. Two more men had arrived, uniformed twins of the first pair, and crouched in the middle of the knoll for several minutes before skulking off on the double along the path that led to the village of the damned.
We had no choice but to stay put and wait, just in case a third pair of scouts might pop up. This is, in fact, what happened, but with a variation. This time it was one guy on his own and he didn’t waste time checking out the knoll, probably fguring that the scouts preceding him had done it, but immediately made a beeline for the rainforest. Jesus, crafty bastards. The first pair of scouts was a decoy for the second pair, and all were decoys for Tailend Charlie here. This was a bad situation. The more recent arrivals meant that we would lose touch with the first pair of scouts, and the second pair would likewise get a good head start.
There was sudden movement beside me — West. He jumped up and threw his Ka-bar at Tailend. The blade shimmered through the twilight like a steel bird, impaled the guy’s left arm against his chest with a solid thud before he had time to react. West followed the knife, running at the man and hitting him with a flying tackle a split second later, taking him to ground. I ran at a crouch toward them from the elephant grass, grabbed the scout’s shirt collar and helped West drag him to the opposite side of the knoll and into the bush. West dropped the mag from the man’s rifle and stuffed it into his webbing.
‘And then there were four,’ he whispered, feeling for a pulse in the African’s neck and not finding one. He extracted his knife and wiped the blade on the man’s shirt. We wasted no time and ran to the section of rainforest that separated the knoll from the banana trees, where the other scouts had gone. We caught up with the second pair by the time they were a third of the way through the forest. The light was fading fast, like it does at the movies before the picture starts. The trees were alive with small monkeys, and the noise they made masked the fact that West and I were moving at a trot to get ahead of the second FARDC recon party.
We took a position either side of a bend in the path as it bisected a thicket of umbrella palms, and waited. The two Congolese crept by, so close I could see the sweat glistening on their skin and smell their body odor, a powerful unwashed smell that was sour and distinctly human, spiced with stale smoke from cheap tobacco. The men were moving slow, not talking, making a judgment call on each step, carefully placing their boots on the ground, expecting something was going to happen. They were right. One of the men was shaking, either from fever or nerves, I couldn’t tell. Maybe he was clairvoyant and could see his life coming to an end within the next few seconds.