‘We ready?’ I asked Cassidy.
‘I’ll let you know in the morning, if we’re still alive.’
Not the confident reply I’d hoped for, but we had little choice other than to force a showdown. Lissouba’s men could bottle us up, wear us down and sooner or later overwhelm us. Right now, we were as strong as we were going to be. We held the high ground, and we’d also recon-noitered it reasonably thoroughly. We didn’t have numbers but, for a short period of time, we held all the other cards worth holding. The only exit strategy left to us was to maul Lissouba so bad that leaving us alone was his best option. I again mentally went through the odds as we jogged back to the rainforest. Five against fifty, give or take. Only a lunatic would bet on us.
When they came within throwing distance, Lissouba’s men tossed grenades up and over the wall and onto the knoll, presumably to clear it. But there was nothing to clear, except maybe a path through the mosquitoes. The knoll was some way from our positions, lying in the mud, curled around tree roots in the rainforest, but we heard the explosions as dull thuds that punctured the night. And we waited.
Maybe it was the lack of resistance that emboldened them, but their first charge through the rainforest was all war cries and wild-ass shooting from the hip. A force of around twenty men swept along the trails, yelling and hooting across a front fifteen to twenty meters wide, straight through the area where Cassidy and West had hung clay pots in the trees over the trails. These pots had around three quarters of a pound of C4 and 350 steel balls distributed between them — about half the business end of our remaining Claymore — and were positioned to provide a short, violent interlocking field of fire. Detonators from the smoke grenades rigged to liana trip wires set them off. They exploded above the FARDC’s heads almost in unison and the hail of steel that beat down on them wounded more than half their number; a couple of them fatally, as far as I could see, from the way they fell.
Five men made it through and kept coming. I shot one, Rutherford got the other and I figured a third passed a little too close to Cassidy for his own good. Far over on my left, the remaining two tripped one of Cassidy’s surprises, a sapling onto which had been lashed some stools taken from the village workshop, their legs sharpened to points. The trap was positioned so that the sapling would swing through an arc of around ten feet and catch the unwary in the chest.
The Congolese were unwary.
The survivors from Cassidy’s hotpots retreated, dragging off their dead, but leaving behind the two men impaled on the stools. I crept left toward them, around and behind Cassidy, moving fast and, to avoid friendly fire, giving a cautionary whistle as I went. When I got close enough, I could see that one of the men was moving, his chin on his chest, three legs of a stool buried in his ribcage. His head moved languidly around in a circle. He hummed as if he had a gut ache and doing this somehow took away some of the pain. He died before he could get to the chorus. A grenade hung from his webbing. Both men had a spare mag tucked into the tops of their trousers. Their rifles were nowhere to be seen. I quickly hunted around for them but couldn’t find them. I figured they’d probably dropped them when the forest came to life and took theirs.
I fell back fifty meters, as we planned to do after the first attack. Rutherford, Cassidy, West and Ryder had already done so. I found Cas-sidy and handed over one of the spare mags. Neither of us said a word. I headed for a hole in our line that I thought needed to be plugged and took up a position against an old hardwood whose roots came down from above. I could see Rutherford, but only because I knew where to look. I couldn’t see Cassidy even though I knew where he was. I crept across to Rutherford, gave him the captured mag and then returned to my tree.
An hour and a half passed. I urinated where I stood. The liquid running down my leg was warm and comforting but then the cold quickly seeped in to take its place in my bladder and I began to shiver. It started to rain at around the same time, making a noise that sounded like a stampede of small animals as the squall line passed over the canopy. We’d been in this part of the world long enough now to know that sound would be used as cover.
Frag grenades suddenly detonated in and around our previous positions, the noise of the explosions booming around us, close and personal this time. I could hear fragmented metal tinkling like wind chimes in a hurricane as the metal storm lanced through the foliage, became embedded in tree trunks or fell steaming onto the soaked ground. The attacking force gave its whereabouts away moments later, charging along the forest trails once more, certain that we were half dead, or worse, shooting randomly, throwing ammunition around like rice at a wedding. Tracer, supersonic pencil lengths of red light, lanced through the trees all round us, but it was mostly high and all of it was wild. I guessed that the enemy was less than thirty feet from Ryder and West before they returned fire. The Congolese’s cries turned into screams, but still they kept coming. The shooting became point blank, desperate and anonymous, a rush of death in the darkness. And then silence. It hung between the trees, heavy and dark like blood-soaked cloth pegged out by the Reaper.
I looked toward the epicenter of the fight, over in Rutherford and Ryder’s direction, but couldn’t see anything, my night vision wrecked by the bright flashes of exploding ordnance. I turned back to scan the bush in front of me, just as the machete swung at my head out of nowhere. I lifted the M4, an instinctive reaction. The blade sparked as it glanced off the barrel and buried itself in the trunk of the hardwood. The man holding it wasted a precious second trying to work it free, during which time I swung the M4’s butt in an arc that caught the bottom of his chin. I heard his teeth splintering, a sound that reminded me of crunching ice. The force of the blow pushed his head up. He staggered back and I shot him through the hip, which was like hitting him with a five-pound sledgehammer. It blew him clean off his feet and landed him on his back. It was only when he fell that I saw that there was a boy accompanying him, and that he was close. The kid, shaking violently, was also pointing a large black rifle at me. The rifle discharged but the slug missed. The boy fdgeted with the selector mechanism, going for full auto I guessed, moving back and looking at the mechanism while he did so. I darted forward while he was preoccupied and kicked the gun out of his hands. He stood there, a small black shadow, slightly pigeon-toed, looking like any moment he was going to start bawling. I went to grab him but he shouted something, dropped to the ground and was gone, snatched by the shadows.
A short, sharp rustle in the bush to my left informed me that Cassidy had had his own visitors, but I couldn’t go to his aid without leaving a hole the enemy might penetrate and get in behind us. I had to leave him to it. Two gunshots and the situation there was resolved. Cassidy whistled a low note to let me know that it was resolved in his favor. I answered with a whistle. Time to fall back again.
We withdrew our line a hundred meters or so, mixing up the distance of each withdrawal as planned. When we were set, Rutherford whistled and approached.
‘Any more mags, Cooper?’ he asked, waving at his own personal cloud of bloodsuckers. ‘Duke and Mike are almost dry.’
‘No,’ I said. I did a mental count. ‘I got two rounds left in my Sig — nine, maybe ten in the M4.’
I popped the carbine’s mag and racked out the rounds with my thumb, counting ten as the spring released them into the palm of my hand. Ten rounds — better than nothing, but only by ten. I handed over six and fed four back into the slot. I also had the grenade the enemy had donated to our cause, which I kept. Rutherford said thanks and disappeared.