It wasn’t long before our principals arrived in company with the PSOs. Cassidy and I stood up for the reunion. Leila, Ayesha and Peanut ran forward and I soon found myself in a group hug with them, all crying. I wondered why Peanut was all tears. Did he know what had been going on? Maybe he was just channeling the vibe.
‘Vin, I…’ Leila stuttered, ‘I want to say sorry for everything.’
‘But let me guess — you can’t,’ I said.
She glared at me in that ferocious way of hers, then let it go.
‘Can’t you ever be serious?’
‘You wouldn’t like me nearly as much.’
‘Thank you, Vin. I mean that. I… I…’
I wondered what it was that she couldn’t get out. I’ve been a pain in the ass? I ’d settle for that.
Ayesha and Peanut stayed for a one on one.
‘I’ll never forget this, Vin. Never,’ Ayesha said. ‘You and your men — thank you.’ She kissed me on the cheek and then moved on to Cassidy. I figured West, Rutherford and Ryder had already received a little sugar from our principals.
‘You did it, ghost man… you motherfucking did it!’ said Twenny, slapping my wounded shoulder. ‘You need anything, you feel me, anything…!’
‘I had help,’ I reminded him.
Boink pointed at me and said, simply, ‘Yo.’
It was great that we were suddenly just one big happy family, but there was still one minor problem to contend with — namely, how the hell were we going to get out of here? I was setting up the watch, considering the wisdom of a signal fire or building another raft, when Ayesha, looking skywards, said, ‘You hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ I asked her.
I caught it a couple of seconds later — a chopper. The sound of its main rotor blades grew louder, thudding up and down the river valley.
‘There,’ said Ayesha, pointing.
It was no bigger than a bottle fly when it flew out of the distant low cloud at about five hundred feet, following the river bends, but it grew quickly in size and was headed our way. We hurriedly led our principals back into the rainforest. We had no idea whose chopper this was, but experience told us that it was likely to be someone unfriendly. And all I wanted to do was go to sleep. Hiding in the rainforest, we loaded fresh mags into our rifles. And, of course, I still had a grenade.
The chopper settled onto our knoll, nose toward the rainforest. It was a civilian job, a Bell Jet Ranger. The doors opened and three men and one woman jumped out, all wearing navy rain jackets and US Army BDU pants, the older-style jungle-pattern battle dress uniform. A couple of the guys were older, in their fifties, and chubby. The woman was somewhere in her forties, with a butt that reminded me of a couple of hot air balloons bumped together, and scraps of red hair escaping from beneath a navy ball cap with the initials CDC embroidered on its peak. She was the boss, pointing at this and that, setting the pace. There was nothing in the least military about any of them, aside from their jackets and pants. The two men got their act together and pulled a brown plastic trunk with the initials CDC stenciled in black on its side from the aircraft. The pilot kept the motors running — he wasn’t going to hang around. I went to stand up, but Cassidy held my arm.
‘It’s okay,’ I told him. ‘Take a look at those buns. They gotta be American.’
I grabbed a nearby palm frond spotted with water droplets and used it to rub the mud off my shoulder and reveal the Stars and Stripes. Looking at Cassidy, West, Ryder and Rutherford covered in white mud from head to toe, their eye sockets blacked out and vertical red stripes of Chanel Rouge Allure lipstick drawn down across their mouths, it was clear that we were going to make an interesting first impression. Maybe if they saw the flag they wouldn’t instantly jump into their chopper and fly away. I moved across to Leila to have a word with her.
‘I need you,’ I said, appealing to her inner demons.
‘You do?’ she answered.
‘I need you to come with me and talk to these people. You’re the only person among us who looks halfway presentable. Can you do that?’
‘Yes, I can do that.’
‘If anything goes off the rails, I’ve got you covered.’
‘Okay. I trust you,’ she said.
It’s about time, I nearly replied.
‘When I give the signal, bring everyone up,’ I told Cassidy.
I stood and moved to the trail, breaking cover, Leila behind me. We walked through the rainforest and into the open area of the knoll, now occupied by a small chunk of Western civilization.
The woman and her team had their backs to us, and the pilot, moments from departure, was involved with his instruments.
‘Morning, ma’am,’ I called out.
The woman turned and saw me and took a step back, her hand going to her chest in shock. The guys all dove in behind her, taking cover.
‘Who… who are you!?’
‘Major Cooper, United States Air Force. And this is Leila,’ I said, bringing the star forward. ‘Our chopper went down.’
The woman’s hand moved from her chest to her mouth when recognition dawned on her. ‘Oh my God. It’s you… You’re alive. They’ve been searching the lake for the wreckage — Lake Kivu.’
‘The Center for Disease Control,’ I said. ‘So you know about the village?’ I gestured behind me.
‘Yes, we’ve got a whole team about to arrive and…’ Her look of surprise and wonder shifted into the fear zone. ‘Wait, you haven’t been into that village, have you?’
‘No, ma’am,’ I said, telling a half-truth. ‘We surveyed the area from a distance. There were bodies out in the open. One of my men thought it might be Ebola.’
‘Several people fed the village, went down river. They became sick and we were called in. It’s not Ebola, not as contagious, but it’s still a level four biohazard — Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. A tick that lives on infected animals carries it. Probably bush meat in this instance. You sure you went nowhere near any infected persons?’
‘I’m sure, ma’am.’
I gave the signal to rejoin and the balance of Team Ghost Watch accompanied our principals out of the shadows.
‘Oh my God…’ the woman said when she saw the parade.
‘You mind giving us a ride?’ I asked her.
The Jet Ranger departed and a MONUC Puma, identical to the one LeDuc and Fournier piloted, arrived half an hour later, stuffed with the equipment and personnel required to set up a makeshift hospital, lab and decontamination facilities. People stared at us, even though the woman, whose name was Andrea, gave us what we needed to clean up a little. We rode the chopper to a place called Dutu, a small town on the shores of Lake Kivu. From there, we hired a boat and motored fifty miles south to Bukavu, on the DRC side of the border, directly opposite Cyangugu. I’d told Andrea to stay off the radio and keep our status of being among the living to herself for twelve hours at least. She didn’t ask me why, which was fortunate because I was sure she wouldn’t take the answer in her stride — that I didn’t want a certain Kornfak & Greene contractor knowing that I was on my way to kill him.
We crossed the DRC/Rwandan border in a bus full of chickens, paying the guards with various trinkets, and did the last two miles on foot, arriving at Camp Fuck You, Cyangugu, eight days after our departure, at three-fifteen. I’m certain of the time because it started raining.
Verdict
It was six-fifteen am before I jogged past the main gate, having run five miles by then, my head no clearer than it was when I climbed out of bed, a headache throbbing in my left temple and keeping time with every footfall. I had a late night with Macri and Cheung to thank for that, though maybe it was the midnight visit from my old buddy Jack that did the real damage. Out beyond the gate, the daily demonstration in support of moi was ramping up. I went in for a closer look and caught sight of a few of the placards. ‘Free Cooper!’ said one. Another said, ‘America needs heroes!’ Yet another proclaimed, ‘#12? Cooper deserves better!’ That last one threw me — what was that all about? The rest, and there were quite a few, were variations on those themes, except for the ‘We love Leila!’ placards and one that said, ‘Twenny — feel me!’