How many more people was Lissouba intending to sacrifice? How many men and boys did he have left at his disposal? He’d tried the full frontal assault and then the decoy run. What next? My PSOs and I all sat in the darkness, listening to the night, and faced our own terrors. Mine was that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember Anna’s face. But, for some reason, I had no trouble remembering the hole in her chest and the way her heart rolled around beneath her shattered ribs, the way a fish founders when it’s dumped on the pier with a hook in its mouth. Maybe this faceless dying person without an identity was my subconscious providing me with a representation of everyone I’d been close to in recent times, almost all of whom were dead. Maybe Leila’s comment about me being a killer was right on the money. I kept sticking my hand in the fire until someone tried to pull it out and it always seemed to be that someone else who got burned instead of me. Like Anna.
‘Mr Cooper, are you there?’ called a voice through the night.
I snapped out of it. The accent was thick, with African and French overtones, ‘Cooper’ pronounced ‘Coopah’.
‘Mr Cooper. I am Colonel Lissouba. We can work something out, you and I, yes? We can make a deal.’
Colonel Lissouba. How about that? I was disinclined to give away my position by opening my mouth. And, of course, any deal from this shitbird wouldn’t be worth the blood it was written in. Folks would die — my folks.
‘You and I need to talk, Mr Cooper. You do not like to fight my boys, I know this, but the boys are all I have left. You will be killing children. Are you a child killer?’
There was a sudden burst of automatic fire and the screams of two men dying, way out past Cassidy on our far flank. The sergeant signaled that he would go check and that I should cover his position, which was reasonably close to mine. He also put his finger against his lips to let me know that talking wouldn’t be smart. He didn’t need to remind me.
‘You try my patience, Mr Cooper,’ Lissouba called out, angered when he realized that more of his people had just died anonymously, hung up on another of Cassidy’s tricks. They were the screams of men, not boys, but the fact that they’d at least made it past puberty didn’t make me feel any better. All of us had had more than enough of killing. I heard a choking, gurgling noise on the night air — Cassidy making sure of death with his Ka-bar.
‘You must have very little ammunition left,’ Lissouba continued after a lengthy pause. ‘When was the last time you ate real food? You have civilians with you. They need to be cared for. Come out now. End this.’
I returned the offer with a loud silence.
‘I know that you cannot retreat. I have heard on the radio that there is the blood fever in the village. Your only way out is to negotiate with me. I have food. I can get you back to your friends across the border. I would like to help you.’
No doubt about it, this sorry puke could play the game.
The luminescent hands on my watch told me that it was around an hour before sunrise. I couldn’t make up my mind whether the night had flown past or crept by. My stomach was cramping, I ached in every joint and muscle, and the skin on several parts of my body was rasped away by the mud and the grit embedded in the fabric of my clothes. Keeping my eyes open required force of will. Even allowing myself to blink slowly wasn’t worth the risk — the urge to leave them shut was almost overwhelming.
‘You must come out and talk. If you make me come and get you, you will all die.’
So much for Mr Helpful.
‘I will give you one hour to discuss this with your people, enough time to agree that this is your only option, but not enough time to set more traps for us. One hour.’
We had a truce till dawn, but then Lissouba’s troops would be more able to avoid the booby traps with a little light on the situation. I waited for the colonel to continue but he’d stopped yapping. The rain continued its rant, however, coming down heavy and unrelenting, the drops from the canopy overhead obese, Boink-sized. I ran my left hand, still sheathed in the remains of a shooter’s glove, down my face and dragged anthill grit over my skin. The rainforest around me appeared as a series of black shadows edged with silver lines and the air smelled heavy and loamy, with a hint of rotting leaves and gunpowder.
I looked between the lines of Lissouba’s offer. He wouldn’t be trying to make a deal unless he, too, was down to his last reserves. Most probably he had one final charge left in his people. We, on the other hand, had less than the resources required to stop it. But whichever way it went, we were going to be killing young boys, kids who’d been press-ganged into fighting, abducted from their villages. These kids, however, could shoot and the reality was that their bullets killed and maimed just as effectively as the rounds fired by grownups. Jesus, this was even more fucked up than usual. I heard a soft whistle and, a moment later, Cassidy materialized out of the shadows beside me.
‘What you got left, boss?’ he asked, nodding at my M4.
‘Four rounds, one grenade and real bad breath.’
A row of his small teeth flashed in the darkness. ‘Yeah, where’s a mint when you need one? I got five rounds. And there’s half a Claymore deployed in our rear, out on the left flank where the rainforest thins out a little. What about West and the others? What stores they got?’
‘A few rounds apiece.’
Neither of us said anything for a few seconds. We both had the same question and answer running through our minds.
‘We can’t surrender,’ said Cassidy. ‘We know what they’re gonna do.’
I nodded. We did.
‘We could pull back through the village,’ he suggested. ‘They won’t go through there.’
‘We could, but we won’t,’ I said. ‘You don’t want Ebola — trust me.’ It had been almost twelve hours since my brief exposure to the flies that might also have buzzed around the body Rutherford and I found in the village, and I still had no cold or fu symptoms. I had no control over my bowels though, which, when I thought about it, was probably every bit as unpleasant for anyone walking behind me as it was for me. Worse, maybe.
‘We got no choice then, have we?’ Cassidy dropped the mag from his M4 and checked its load. ‘Yeah, five rounds.’ He gazed up at the canopy. When his eyes came back down from the unbroken blackness, they were glistening. I noticed that around his neck hung a ju-ju bag of the type worn by nearly all of the Congolese we’d come across. ‘Jesus, Major. I don’t know… They’re just fucking kids, goddamn it,’ he said. ‘We got seven smoke canisters left. Maybe we could pop them, cause a diversion. We could slip through their line while it’s still dark, steal their boat.’
‘With our principals?’ I reminded him. Something like that might have been an option if it had just been us — the PSOs — on our own, but I couldn’t see Leila and her makeup case pulling it off… ‘But maybe… maybe we can bluff our way out,’ I said. And that was quite an interesting thing to say, especially as I had absolutely no idea what I meant by it. Bluff our way out? The statement had come from the part of my brain that was gathering threads, tying and retying them in different ways till it came up with an answer, only I couldn’t see it, not consciously. The threads seemed to be these: smoke canisters, ju-ju bag, Leila’s makeup case, kids. Bluff our way out? Then it suddenly crystallized into an image. And, damn, it was one helluva long shot.
Cassidy scratched a sore on his scalp. ‘What sort of bluff?’
‘We need to get West and the others and go ask Leila a question.’
‘And what are we gonna ask her?’