‘Whether we can borrow her lipstick.’
Escape
The hour flew like minutes. Five forty-five am, but still not a glimmer of the morning light that was due to sneak up behind the mountains sitting black on black against the Congo sky. The heavy cloud saw to that. The rain had turned to drizzle, light and annoying like the insects, and I shivered with cold as I walked slowly through the banana trees toward the rainforest and the last of Lis-souba’s force. The mud in my clothing was removing whole swathes of skin from my thighs, crotch and under my arms, darkening those areas with my blood.
We came line-abreast through the last row of banana trees, out into the clear, ten meters between each of us. Cassidy was to my left, Ryder on my right, Rutherford and West out on the right flank. We knew we could be walking toward our deaths. I spat on the ground. Bring it fucking on. I was tired of this shit. So fucking tired. We all were. Time to roll the dice and put an end to it now, one way or another. My own anger surprised me. Two weeks ago in Afghanistan, I’d have cared about my own death about as much as I cared about slapping the life out of a mosquito. Something had moved on. Maybe it was just time. Perhaps if I ever managed to get comfortable again, I would go back to flipping off the Reaper.
Leila had been cooperative — more than I’d expected her to be. She’d not only given us everything we needed, but actually helped, rolling up her raggedy designer sleeves and taking direction from Ayesha. I finally put my finger on it. It wasn’t enough for Leila to be wanted — she had that from millions of fans and a legion of staff, business managers, attorneys and accountants. What she required was to feel needed. So, Leila had personal worth issues. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Maybe if I’d handled her differently — treated her as a person rather than as an object to protect — we’d have gotten on better. Or maybe not.
I glanced over my shoulder again to check the dawn. It had arrived, three minutes behind schedule, or maybe it was my Seiko that was behind the times. Cassidy had four smoke canisters and I had three. There was no breeze to speak of, but if the air was moving at all, it was coming from behind our left shoulders and drifting to the right. As the night slipped into its morning grays, around fifty meters from the edge of the plantation, I gave the signal to halt. I hoped this dumb-ass idea worked. If not, we were dead.
The stillness of the morning was breached by a high-pitched war cry coming from within the rainforest’s throat, a black open hole wrapped around the access road in the tangle of liana, palms and hardwoods directly ahead that as yet remained untouched by the dawn. I gave Cassidy the agreed signal. He cracked the first of the smoke canisters and tossed it half a dozen meters to his left, and pitched another one twenty meters further out in the same direction as the first. The cans hissed and green smoke poured out of them. I broke the seal on one of mine and dropped it behind me. Orange smoke swept between my legs, merged with the green and began to form a wall that climbed and spread out across our line. I popped the other cans and scattered them behind us. Cassidy did the same and then gave the signal to advance. We walked forward into the smoke, taking long strides, our rifles brandished one-handed and held high over our heads.
A scream of many voices rose from the rainforest ahead, a scream of boys — some high and squeaky, some breaking with adolescence. They were beginning their charge. It stopped at the edge of the rainforest and so did the noise, suddenly and eerily, echoes bouncing around the hills. And then the shooting started. Red tracer rounds whizzed around and above me, the air alive with them. I couldn’t see Cassidy and the others, but I guessed they were getting the same deal. The opposing force was firing blind into the smoke, unsure of what to make of it. I felt a round pass close to my wrist, dragging the smoke behind it. I kept walking. And then the swirling green and orange wall was behind me and I was striding toward the rainforest and the line of children armed with assault weapons, out in the open ground with no cover, through the light drizzle.
I glanced to my right and saw that Ryder, Rutherford and West had come through the smoke, their rifles held high. On my left, Cassidy waved his M4 and made a sound that was almost a snarl. I saw three boys charging toward me, firing from the hip, and when they saw me, they came to a sudden stop. Fear swept across their faces like a Congo storm front. I heard the words ‘Les fantômes! Les fantômes!’ They threw their guns down into the mud and ran back into the rainforest, a scream coming from their throats that was different from the one they charged forward with — terror in it. I saw movement out in front of West — four boys who wouldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, young even by the standards here — fleeing back into the trees, their hands up in the air, all desire to fight replaced by a panic to get away from the white zombie soldiers with heads that looked like living skulls, striding toward them out of their worst nightmare, coming to take them to hell.
‘The horror,’ I murmured.
The soft patter of rain was the only sound they left behind.
‘Shit, skipper,’ Rutherford called out, ‘you’re a fucking miracle worker, you are.’
West and Ryder began hooting.
There was a tingle between my shoulder blades that ran up to my mud-caked scalp and down the back of my legs. Had we really pulled this off?
‘Cooper!’
I knew that voice, and it wasn’t friendly. Coopah. It was Lissouba. I saw him, eighty meters or so away, over on our far left. Something was struggling in his grasp. It was one of his boy soldiers, the kid running in midair like a cartoon character, his feet off the ground.
‘You think you have won with this trick of yours, but you have not. I will regather my men and assure them that they have more to fear from me than from men painted to look like devil soldiers.’
He then raised his free hand, shot the boy in the head with a handgun, killing him instantly, and threw the body to the ground.
‘No!’ Cassidy yelled.
‘I will be back for you soon and you will all die!’
He turned, took two and a half steps into the rainforest and an explosion tore him into sausage filling.
A Claymore will do that — even half of one.
Cassidy and I scouted the trail and surrounding areas to the grassy knoll while Rutherford, Ryder and West went back to the razor wire to give our principals the news, and bring them forward to meet us.
The sergeant and I found nearly a dozen rifles, a mixture of Nazar-ians, Kalashnikovs and ‘scrubbed’ M16s. We took their bolts, without which they were useless. We also took the mags that had any ammunition compatible with our M4s. We saw no one along the way. At least, no one with a pulse. We found no dead child soldiers, aside from the boy Lissouba had murdered in front of us. We buried the kid, with a toy monkey made from clay that Leila found in the village workshop. Dreams with dead kids joining the scorpions I could do without. Lis-souba must have been holding his kindergarten back for some reason that we’ll never know. Cassidy said not a single word the entire time we were scouting and I just knew that the image of Lissouba blowing the boy’s brains out was on his mind. It was on mine. We came across the pig that had lost the use of its legs. It had bled to death, and was giving its ham to the flies and maggots, one tiny piece at a time.
When we got to the knoll, we found evidence of a hasty evacuation –
lots of discarded army greens, rifles and so forth. Maybe the boys had got word that their guardian was gone for good and that they could now go and do whatever. I hoped that meant they were heading back to their villages. We didn’t need to climb down the wall and scout the landing to know that the boat would be gone.