William Meikle
OPERATION: CONGO
- 1 -
At eight in the morning, it was already hot enough to raise a sweat while sitting still. Even under a canvas canopy, the heat came in waves off the river as if an oven door had been left open in an already warm room. The S-Squad sat together in the shade while their guide at the outboard at the rear sang raucous songs in a language none of them understood. Banks suspected they were being laughed at. It didn’t surprise him. They were a sodden, sweat-soaked, sorry excuse for a crack team. Coupled with the fact that they’d now come into a dead zone for the sat phone and there was no way to phone home and complain, things weren’t off to a very good start.
And it’s only going to get worse the deeper in we get.
As usual, Wiggins was doing the most complaining.
“Golden sands, big cocktails, and long-legged lassies with easy smiles and loose knickers. That was your promise, wasn’t it, Cap?”
John Banks managed the energy for a laugh.
“Stop your whining, Wiggo. There’s water, and it’s hot, isn’t it? At least we’re not freezing our balls off this time ’round.”
Wiggins swatted a buzzing cloud of black flies from in front of his nose.
“My bollocks haven’t seen much use recently,” he replied. “They could drop off and I’d never notice they were missing.”
“You couldnae find them with both hands anyway,” Hynd added.
“No worries on that score, Sarge. I’ve got your missus for that job.”
Hynd reached over to try to slap Wiggins on the head. The corporal leaned away and set the boat to swaying below them.
“Stow it, lads,” Banks said softly. “Let’s at least act as if we ken what we’re doing on this trip?”
Banks had been called in to the colonel’s office at lunchtime the day before. He knew another assignment was probable and was looking forward to some action, for they’d been rattling around the base for weeks now and there was only so many hands of three-card brag, so many games of pool or darts that the squad could play before going stir crazy. He knew as soon as he saw the look on his superior’s face that it was serious.
“This could be a bad one, John,” the colonel said. “Tough terrain, little in the way of back up if it goes south, and a lot of unknowns.”
“Right up our alley then, sir,” Banks replied, trying for some levity, but it fell flat.
“Listen up. This is going to have to be a short briefing. There’s a plane waiting on the tarmac, and I want you kitted up and on it within the hour. Time’s a factor here.”
Banks shut up and listened while the colonel talked of a medical emergency in the Congo, a possible plague that needed to be nipped in the bud, and of a WHO team gone missing in thick jungle out of phone range.
“Get in, find them, and get them out. We can get you in less than fifty miles from where they were last seen and get you a boat into the Congo tributaries where they went. After that, you’ll be on your own until you get out to where the phones work and call for extraction. You’ll find more detail in your inbox; once you get to that, you’ll have as much gen as I’ve got and enough time to peruse it on the flight. Get your men to kit up for hot, wet jungle. Now move, Captain—you and yours have got a plane to catch.”
He’d moved, first wrangling Hynd and Wiggins out of the mess, rounding up Davies and Wilkins in the gym, then kitting up before heading out onto the tarmac to their flight. The colonel hadn’t been wrong about the urgency— the plane took off while they were still getting settled down. Then they were into the waiting part of their ‘hurry up and wait.’ The rest of the squad spent the trip playing brag, with the sarge winning big from everyone else; Banks knew better than to get into a game when Hynd’s luck was running hot. He stayed in his seat going over the material the colonel’s secretary had dropped in his mail. He didn’t learn much more than he’d already heard but one passage in particular got his attention. It was an email between one of the field medics and his superior at the WHO.
I’m quickly coming ’round to the view that this isn’t a disease at all. It has all the symptoms of a highly systemic poison and given that it has only so far shown up in this one community on the river, we might be better served in searching for an environmental source. It may be that there is something in the water? Or maybe something new in their diet? That’s how I’m thinking now at least. I’ll keep you posted.
Banks had searched for a follow-up but that was the last item of correspondence from the medical team, dated more than twenty-four hours previously. Since then, numerous attempts had been made to establish contact, all of them to no avail. Which was why the squad was now, under complaint, making their way up a tributary of the eastern Congo on this slow boat to nowhere.
“Why us, Cap?” Wiggins said as he lit up a cigarette, an attempt to keep the flies at bay. It wasn’t working. “Do we have signs on our backs? Give us all the shite jobs, please?”
Banks couldn’t really begrudge Wiggins the moan. The corporal was right in that they were on a run of missions that had all gone south one way or another. First, they’d lost McCally in the disaster at Loch Ness, then on through the loss of another man in Syria, the clusterfuck in Norway, and lastly losing the man they’d been sent to save in Mongolia.
Nobody dies this time out. Not on my watch.
Their boat guide had told them it would be a three-hour trip and dead on time they rounded a bend in the river and saw a settlement on the bank ahead of them. It only took seconds to spot there was something wrong. It was a small village, half a dozen mud and straw huts, and what had been three large tents, obviously the medical team’s quarters, to one side. One of the tents had burned, its embers still smoking. Another had a splash of red across one side that Banks knew from experience wasn’t paint. Two long canoes, paddles in their bellies, sat beached on the shore. There was no sign of life.
He didn’t have to give an order. The pack of cards got stowed away fast, cigarettes were extinguished, and every man had a weapon in reach as the guide brought the boat up to a rickety wooden jetty. Banks led them out of the boat, up and across to the riverbank.
“Sarge, you, Davies, and Wilkins take the huts. Wiggo and I will check the tents. No heroics and no shooting unless it’s real trouble. Keep in sight of another man at all times and be back here in five. If you find anybody, shout out.”
Without waiting for a reply, he led Wiggins away to the right towards the smoke rising from the burnt-out tent.
There was no sign of life. They found blood on the ground outside both the surviving tents and the charred remains of two bodies in the burned area, but the only thing they found inside the tents was a tumbled, broken array of medical equipment and computers.
“Bloody hell, Cap,” Wiggins said. “It looks like a bomb hit it. What happened here?”
Banks had no answer. He only knew that they were looking for twelve WHO people and there were only two bodies. The job had suddenly got a lot more complicated.
- 2 -
Frank Hynd felt the old familiar tension rise up in him as he led the two privates towards the mud and straw huts. No matter how much action a man saw, no matter over how many years, he still felt the ball-tightening pressure, still had to fight to maintain focus and relaxation. The place felt dead and quiet but he’d seen men killed who’d taken situations exactly like this one for granted. And the two lads he had with him, although good men both, were still young in many ways. He owed it to them to give his full attention.